In the wake of recent dreadful events, Daniel decided to talk to Jack about the ideology of mass shootings, especially with reference to the 'Might is Right' tract cited by one of the killers. Content warnings. *** Show Notes: "Might is Right" at RationalWiki: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Might_is_Right "Might Is Right" full text at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/cu31924029107907/page/n3 "Gilroy Garlic Festival Shooting," at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilroy_Garlic_Festival_shooting Santino William Legan: Gilroy Garlic Festival Shooter's Instagram Page: "https://heavy.com/news/2019/07/santino-william-legan-gilroy-shooters-instagram/" "“Read ‘Might Is Right’ by Ragnar Redbeard,” Legan wrote. His caption further asked rhetorically, “Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats?”" * From Might Is Right, Chapter Three: "You have only to look at some men, to know that they belong to an inferior breed. Take the Negro for example. His narrow cranial developittent, his prognathous jaw, his projecting lips, his wide nasal aperture, his simian disposition, his want of forethought, originality, and mental capacity: are all peculiarities strictly inferior. Similar language may be applied to the Chinaman, the Coolie, the Kanaka, the Jew, and to the rotten-boned city degenerates of Anglo- Saxondom: rich and poor. Vile indeed are the inhabitants of those noxious cattle kraals: London, Liverpool, New York, Chicago, New Orleans: and yet, in those places is heaped up, the golden plunder of the world. [...] "No one can study the laborers on a farm, the 'hands' in a big foundry or factory, the seamen in a large seaport, the nomadic hirelings on a railroad construction gang: or the clerks and salesmen in a city warehouse, without perceiving at a glance, that the vast majority of them are extremely poor specimens of humanity. The ideal type of manhood or womanhood, (that is to say, 'Ye Thoroughbred") is not to be found among these captive hordes — for captives they really are. Their heads are, to a large extent unsymeterical- their features distorted, ape-like, unintelligent. Their bodies are out of all proportion, dwarfed, stunted, diseased, malformed, cretinous. Their movements are contracted, artificial, ungainly, and their minds (outside of routine) are utter vacuums." * "What We Know About the Gilroy Garlic Festival Shooting Suspect." https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-07-29/what-we-know-about-gilroy-garlic-festival-shooting-suspect-santino-william-legan "No clarity yet on motive behind Gilroy gunman's attack, investigators say," https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/30/gilroy-garlic-festival-shooting-california-white-supremacy-links "The FBI is continuing to investigate if the alleged shooter “was in line with any particular ideology”, Craig Fair, a deputy special agent in charge with the FBI in San Francisco, said on Tuesday, including by reviewing social media accounts, digital media, conducting interviews and investigating what thoughts and ideas the shooter may have shared with others. He also did not confirm whether the widely-publicized Instagram account was linked to the shooter." "'Erroneous reporting' on Garlic Festival shooting suspect's ideology: FBI" https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/erroneous-reporting-garlic-festival-shooting-suspects-ideology-fbi/story?id=64706955 ""I can tell you there has been no determination on ideology. There's reports out there has been information found and books referenced on that, we are not in a position at this stage of the investigation to make a call on ideology," John Bennett told reporters on Wednesday. "The information that's out there, it's being reported that there's white nationalism or any type of those ideologies," Special Agent John Bennett, said. "That has not been determined and I wanted to knock that down." Bennett said that through the course of the investigation they are finding literature from "left to right" and said they can't put the suspect, 19-year-old Santio Legan, in an ideological "box." He wouldn't characterize the literature as extreme, either." * "Radical: The Story of Arthur Desmond" (article and podcast): https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/black-sheep/story/201859191/radical-the-story-of-arthur-desmond "However, he alienated the settler community with his support for the former Māori guerrilla leader and founder of the Ringatu church, Te Kooti. When public meetings were held to protest a planned trip by Te Kooti to Gisborne, Desmond was the only Pākehā who raised his voice in support. “It was a very brave thing to do,” says Mark Derby. “He was bodily thrown out of the meetings and even beaten up, but it didn’t stop him from taking this stance.” However, Derby doesn’t think Desmond’s support for Te Kooti was rooted in heartfelt sympathy for the plight of Māori. Instead, he says it was linked to Te Kooti’s violent past as a guerrilla leader. “He liked Te Kooti’s style. He admired the idea of a very strong and even ruthless leader who was prepared to go to any lengths, including extreme violence. [Desmond’s] whole career and all his political writings were based on an admiration and exultation of such figures.” [...] "On war he wrote: “The natural world is a world of war; the natural man is a warrior; the natural law is tooth and claw. All else is error.” On Jesus Christ: “... the prophet of unreason — the preacher of rabble-rabies. All that is enervating and destructive of manhood, he glorifies, — all that is self-reliant and heroic, he denounces.” On the American Declaration of Independence: “Its ethical and most of its political conclusions are shams, deceptions, and cold-blooded dishonesties — incandescent Lies.” On women: “Women and children BELONG to man; who must hunt for them as well as for himself. He is their lord and master, in theory and in fact.” On race: “The African, Mongolian, Semite, or Negro breeds are all fundamentally different in formation, constituents, and character; from men of Aryan descent. … Some men ARE born better, born nobler, born braver than others.”" * Robert Evans, "The EL Paso Shooting and the Gamification of Terror" https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2019/08/04/the-el-paso-shooting-and-the-gamification-of-terror/ "This poster and several others lambasted the shooter for his “shitty” and “0 effort manifesto”. There is nothing new in this killer’s ramblings. He expresses fears of the same “replacement” of white people that motivated the Christchurch shooter, and notes that he was deeply motivated by that shooter’s manifesto. In the article I wrote after the Poway Synagogue shooting I noted that 8channers had dedicated a great deal of time to spreading that manifesto, in an effort to inspire more shooters. The El Paso shooting is further proof that this strategy works. [...] "What we see here is evidence of the only real innovation 8chan has brought to global terrorism: the gamification of mass violence. We see this not just in the references to “high scores”, but in the very way the Christchurch shooting was carried out. Brenton Tarrant livestreamed his massacre from a helmet cam in a way that made the shooting look almost exactly like a First Person Shooter video game. This was a conscious choice, as was his decision to pick a sound-track for the spree that would entertain and inspire his viewers. [...] "In the wake of the Christchurch shooting I published my first Bellingcat article about 8chan. I was interviewed by numerous media agencies about the website, and I warned all of them that additional attacks would follow – every month or two – until something was done. This prediction has proven accurate. Until law enforcement, and the media, treat these shooters as part of a terrorist movement no less organized, or deadly, than ISIS or Al Qaeda, the violence will continue. There will be more killers, more gleeful celebration of body counts on 8chan, and more bloody attempts to beat the last killer’s “high score”." ContraPoints: "Incels." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0
Hello and welcome to episode 26 of I Don't Speak German, the podcast in which I, Jack Graham, returning after a couple of weeks off, talk to my friend Daniel Harper about what he learned from three years now of listening to the online far-right Nazis, white supremacists, people like that, talk to each other in their online safe spaces, their YouTube videos, their podcasts, etc.
The Waffle SS, I call them.
Hi Daniel, how are you doing?
Well, I'm doing all right, personally, although, you know, it would be really nice if White Nationalists would stop shooting people.
It would be just convenient for me if that would stop happening.
Yeah, because it creates a bit of a backlog.
Which is the only reason for them to stop, ultimately.
Absolutely.
Because we never get to do the episodes we mean to do.
You know, we just do episodes talking about them.
It's great.
That's right.
It throws off our schedule, which is, of course, the worst thing about it.
So, yeah, this week we're going to be talking about That phenomenon, the phenomenon of the mass shooting, aren't we?
Because we're recording this on the 4th of August, just after a double event and hard on the heels of another one before that as well.
Yeah, the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter was last weekend.
And then yesterday, as we're recording this, there was a mass shooting, a major mass shooting in El Paso, Texas.
And then middle of the night last night there was a shooting in Dayton which may or may not be connected There's some conflict reports And so I'm pretty much gonna ignore that one for now because there we're just not quite sure what's going on there It doesn't seem to be white nationalist related But I'd rather not try to try to discuss it without getting a little bit more information Oh, I see.
It wasn't a white nationalist in that case, so you just want to ignore it and pretend it didn't happen.
I see.
Very convenient, Daniel.
Well, exactly, exactly.
You know, it's really just, it makes it convenient for me that the guy probably was not trying to genocide people and using his ideology.
That means I don't have to discuss it.
I don't have to care about it ultimately, is kind of what's going on with that.
That's right.
We don't care about it if it wasn't done by one of the people we've just arbitrarily decided to hate for no reason.
I made I've made a few, we are actually going to come back to this when when we have more information.
And I've made a few jokes and so on.
So far, I want to make it clear, we're going to be talking about, we're going to be talking about murders in this episode.
And we don't think that's funny.
Well, you know what, our tone should not be construed as making light of anything like that.
And, you know, it's, it's, it's kind of You feel almost mechanical saying it, but it's true.
Our hearts go out to the victims of these atrocities.
I mean, ultimately, I think a lot of what my work in doing this is is try to make there be fewer of these victims.
And so, of course, I feel the most intense kind of empathy for them.
It's just it's horrible.
And if we sometimes treat this slightly lightly, it's because that's pretty much the kind of emotional coping mechanism you have to in order to kind of get through this stuff.
And so we do.
Reach out to the to the victims and we do and care for them and for for all the victims past and present of this of this Mass violence and please don't take the the slightly dark jocular tone as in any way disrespectful So firstly we want to talk about the the shooting at the Gilroy garlic festival that happened on me the 28th of July don't we?
Yeah, we're going to start there.
This is an incident.
Three people died, two of them children.
I believe one was about three years old and one was about 12 years old, and then an adult.
So I'm thinking they're either 20s or 30s.
I don't have the, sorry, 25.
I do have the information in front of me.
And then there were about 12 people injured in the attack.
You know, I said when we covered the Christchurch massacre that we were going to see a lot more of these this summer.
And honestly, after the Poe shooter, after John Elliott, after that kind of fizzled, like he only killed one person, which sounds like a terrible thing to say, but it's true, it did feel like the fire had kind of gone out of young men deciding to do this.
Uh, that said, um, you know, I, I definitely had some anxiety.
I was definitely like, I was literally talking to a buddy of mine and saying like, I kind of feel like something is brewing.
And then the next day, uh, El Paso happened.
So, uh, yay for me, I feel great about that.
But, um, you know, we had planned to do another episode.
Um, we had planned to do some, some other topics and, uh, this guy, um, his name is, um,
Santino Willem Leggen, and he's the Gilroy shooter, he posted, he didn't do a full manifesto, but he posted on his Instagram page, which only had like three entries, you know, he says, you know, read Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard, Leggen wrote, his caption further asked rhetorically, why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats?
And Might Is Right is a book that I had not read until then, and even now I'm going to admit that I mostly skimmed big chunks of this.
It's only about 100 pages long, but it's incredibly repetitive, and you kind of get the gist.
I'm going to read a few segments from it so you can kind of get an idea here, but I really hadn't had a lot of exposure to it directly.
And it isn't one that gets mentioned a ton, like it isn't one like Minecon for the bell curve that people kind of talk about regularly, but it's something you see around occasionally and in particularly some of the kind of nastiest corners of the internet with this stuff.
And so I thought when I saw that it was worth kind of taking the time to do an episode that's sort of about Not just the book or the kind of the guy who wrote the book, but the this ideology of might makes right and Mike is right within this world because it's absolutely pervasive.
And it's one of these kinds of bits of psychology that I see from, you know, Nazis email me at this point.
Nazis are in my DMs.
They are in my responses.
They interact with me on the internet because I'm openly talking about them.
And when you do kind of talk to them, they often bring up these kinds of ideas that ultimately, you know, the strong should survive and the weak should perish, you know.
And I think it's important to talk a little bit philosophically about what that means.
And hopefully those kids who are listening to my voice, hopefully we can try to reach them in some way through this.
So, this book was written originally in 1890.
It is credited to a guy named Ragnar Redbeard.
That's not his real name.
That is a pseudonym.
Almost certainly the actual person who I wrote the book is going to Arthur Desmond.
He's a character.
He was definitely a character born in New Zealand, kind of leftist socialist organizer.
We'll get to him in a minute.
I really, if Robert Evans is listening to this, he would be an ideal person for behind the bastards.
Assuming he wants to do it.
There is a very nice article Written in New Zealand a kind of a blog post and a podcast that I've linked to in the show notes And I do recommend both the article in the podcast and we'll get back to that in a minute I don't really want to talk too much about author Desmond at this point.
I'd rather discuss You know the book might as right and the sort of Some of the details of this of the shooting of the of the Gilroy shooting.
So again, just from this is from Ligon's post, you know, it's like one of his very few Instagram posts.
He says, you know, why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats.
And, you know, earlier he had posted something to the effect of, you know, The Gallic Festival which was apparently like down the street from where he lived like he lived area It's like his family home was in Gilroy.
And so this was something that he was just kind of aware of that was familiar to him Almost certainly, you know, he comes from kind of an upper upper middle class, you know white family.
He's actually half Iranian Which you know every Nazi is now gonna say like well He wasn't really white because he's Iranian.
He's Persian and like I would like to remind them where the word Aryan comes from and First of all and be like that doesn't mean he can't be a white nationalist and also that Right and and certainly this is you know the another reason not to really bother too much with might is right is that it is a Deeply incoherent work.
I mean, it's, well, let's just read a little segment here that sort of matches up with that Instagram post.
And this is from Midas Right Chapter 3.
This is a bit of a long, I've actually kind of taken kind of three little bits from a couple of pages, and I'm going to read them all together.
And it'll give you a sense of kind of what this book is like.
I mean, open this book to pretty much any page, and you're going to get something that looks a lot like this.
So apologies for the extended reading here, but I think it's worth kind of getting the sense of the voice.
You have only to look at some men to know that they belong to an inferior breed.
Take the Negro, for example.
His narrow cranial development, his prothagonist jaw, his projecting lips, his wide nasal aperture, his simian disposition, his want for forethought, originality, and mental capacity are all peculiarities strictly inferior.
Similar language may be applied to the Chinaman, the Cooley, the Kanaka, the Jew, and to the rotten-boned city degenerates of Anglo-Saxondom, rich and poor, vile indeed are the inhabitants of those noxious cattle crawls, London, Liverpool, New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and yet, in those places is heaped up the golden plunder of the world.
No one can study the laborers on a farm, the hands in a big foundry or factory, the seamen in a large seaport, the nomadic hirelings on a railroad construction gang, or the clerks and salesmen in a city warehouse without perceiving at a glance that the vast majority of them are extremely poor specimens of humanity.
The ideal type of manhood or womanhood, that is to say, ye thoroughbred, is not to be found among these captive hordes, for captives they really are.
Their heads are, to a large extent, unsymmetrical, their features distorted, ape-like, unintelligent, their bodies are all out of proportion, dwarfed, stunted, diseased, malformed, cretinous.
Their movements are contracted, artificial, ungainly, and their minds, outside of routine, are utter vacuums.
So this is our champion of the working class there.
Nice left-wing socialist figure from the 19th century.
Go ahead, go ahead.
I was just going to say, it has to be said that the history of socialism is far from devoid of attitudes like that.
I mean, there have been a great number of people who called themselves socialists who had You know, who subscribed to the racist attitudes of their time.
Very, very folly.
So it's not inherently a contradiction on the level of practice.
I would argue that it's a contradiction on the level of the ideas.
But you have to admit that, you know, the socialist movement has not been devoid of those sorts of attitudes.
Oh, certainly not.
And certainly today, I mean, you get certain segments of the people who call themselves socialists or leftists who would certainly agree with the great bulk of that.
You know, where I would land on it is, you know, A, again, that's that's sort of a representative sample of, you know, just kind of how this guy feels about stuff.
Again, here in a minute, we'll read some segments from the from the essay in New Zealand that will kind of give us a little bit of a broader sense.
But I'd like to note that, like, so, like, A, there's the, you know, the sort of inherent racism that's just kind of pretty openly there, but also a detesting of working people, sort of the ordinary hoi polloi.
And, yeah, let's just skip ahead here, and let's go ahead and read from this piece.
It's called Radical!
The Story of Arthur Desmond, and again, I would recommend both the article and the podcast.
Here, we're going to read a little segment from that.
And this is speaking of Arthur Desmond, who, so some people, there was kind of a thing for a while that this book Might Is Right was actually written by Jack London, which seems to be an attempt to give the text a connection to fame that it didn't actually deserve.
Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan, discovered this book in 1957.
If you buy the Kindle e-book edition, you'll get the introduction by LaVey, and it's worth 99 cents.
Let's put it that way.
But again, there is a link to this.
You can get it for free on the internet and a bunch of places.
I put a link to the internet archive.
It's a really good source for it.
From this piece, Radical The Story of Arthur Desmond, it says, However, he alienated the settler community with his support for the former Maori guerrilla leader and founder of the Ringatu Church, Te Kuti.
When public meetings were held to protest a planned trip by Takuti to Gisborne, Desmond was the only Pakeha who raised his voice in support.
It was a very brave thing to do, said Mark Derby.
He's the guy who literally wrote the book on Desmond and Midas Wright, which I would have bought, but it was about, I think, $30 or $40 on Amazon.
He was bodily thrown out of meetings and even beaten up, but it didn't stop him from taking his stance.
However, Derby doesn't think Desmond's support for Dacuti was rooted in a heartfelt sympathy for the plight of the Maori, and says it was linked to Dacuti's violent past as a guerrilla leader.
He liked Dacuti's style.
He admired the idea of a very strong and even ruthless leader who was prepared to go to any lengths, including extreme violence.
Desmond's whole career and all his political writings were based on an admiration and exaltation of such figures.
And then here we've got some segments from the book.
On war, he wrote, the natural world is a world of war.
The natural man is a warrior.
The natural law is tooth and claw.
All else is error.
On Jesus Christ, the prophet of unreason, the preacher of rabble rabies, all that is innervating and destructive of manhood, he glorifies.
All that is self-reliant and heroic, he denounces.
On the American Declaration of Independence, its ethical and most of its political conclusions are shams, deceptions, and cold-blooded dishonesties, incandescent lies.
On women, this is a great one.
Women and children belong to man who must hunt for them as well as for himself.
He is their lord and master in theory and in fact.
And on race, of course.
The African, Mongolian, Semite, or Negro breeds are all fundamentally different in formation, constituents, and character for men of Aryan descent.
Some men are born better, born nobler, born braver than others.
So, obviously, it's uncontroversially true that there have been socialist organizers and socialist activists and socialist theoreticians who held incredibly bigoted, awful Views about the world.
Um, this guy leans a lot more towards the literal conanism that we mentioned in the Andrew Anglin episode where Anglin kind of respected the man who savagely beat his girlfriend For believing that people should just be allowed to murder He definitely leans a lot more in that direction.
You get it.
You get a very clear picture of you know the laws of
And civil society are meant to constrain the strong man and to put him at the service of the weak, and that the structures of civil society, the structures of polite society, are ultimately figments that the proper man, the truly strong man, should be able to just overcome them, and that that is just sort of the natural law.
In many places, he says things like, You know, it's worthless to feed the poor.
It's worthless because if they were strong, if they were worth living, they would be able to feed themselves.
This is a very strong social Darwinist text, almost to self-parody.
In fact, there are people who believe this is a work that's intended in parody, although people who know Desmond's life think that that's kind of nonsense.
He says this kind of thing kind of over and over again in a lot of different places, although this is sort of the compendium where he kind of puts it all together.
And I think what's interesting about this is that if you listen to these guys as long as I do, they don't necessarily say this that directly, but they say this kind of stuff all the time.
This is a pretty overt direct connection.
I have people in my Twitter feed who are overt colonialists and who will say, well, A, it's fine, white men should have come in and civilized the black people and the brown people, etc.
But also like well ultimately, you know, we what are they lost and that's just sort of the way it went That's just so you know in that that's it's just natural.
It's just it's such a thing and it does seem to animate the psychology of this kind of this sort of philosophical system that is National Socialism and you know because National Socialism is so much built on we're just You know, it pretends to be a sort of a rational working out of using the strictures of government, of using the strictures of the state to replicate and enforce the reality of just the natural world.
It's, you know, they pretend it's just sort of like science made government, essentially.
And A, there's nothing further from the truth and B, it's built on this idea of kind of fundamental individualistic brutality as just sort of the nature of existence.
And again, reading this book, it just very much struck me as like, yeah, I hear this stuff all the time.
It seems like utterly ordinary and just kind of in that kind of bizarre way.
And previously on this show, we've talked a lot about the, or at least to some degree, about the movementarians or the mainstreamers versus the vanguardists.
The difference being that the mainstreamers broadly want to use some kind of political action in order to create a white ethnostate, whereas the vanguardists or the siege pillars Are people who want to essentially spark off a race war and build a better world out of the ashes of the old because, you know, we're strong and they're weak and we'll survive and they won't, etc, etc.
And essentially what we're seeing with these mass shooter events, and this is something a little bit more kind of my perspective, although I've talked to other people who seem to kind of broadly agree, this is qualitative, not quantitative.
But essentially when when things are going good for them in government when Trump is doing what they want them to do what they want him to do They're very happy to kind of like act as mainstreamers.
I just kind of let the the system kind of do their dirty work for them when they feel like They're not getting what they want through Ordinary state politics and ordinary kind of bourgeois politics, some percentage of them decide to start picking up rifles.
And I think that's really what we're seeing right now, ultimately.
Yeah.
Wow.
So much there.
I mean, first of all... Sorry, I just kind of plowed through a whole bunch of stuff there, please.
I apologize.
I need a little moment to take a sip of water anyway.
That's fine.
I mean, there's so much there I want to pick up on.
You mentioned Jack London mooted as a possible author of it.
I mean, Jack London's a perfect example of a socialist figure who was also a racist.
And there's lots of them.
I mean, HG Wells.
He was also something like 12 years old when the thing was published or something.
So I mean, you know, it's kind of nonsense.
Anyway, please continue.
No, I mean, it's not well enough written to be by Jack London.
But Jack London also obsessed with sort of the idea of, you know, the struggle in the natural world.
HG Wells identified as a socialist.
He was also a racist and a eugenicist.
This was the prevailing attitude of the time.
So even socialist ideas in Western culture are growing up within a pervading attitude, which is shaped by the fact that these are imperialist cultures.
And a lot of what I heard and what you read was fairly bog-standard 19th century race science, to be honest.
It can be found And early 20th century.
It can be found right the way across the entire intellectual and artistic culture of, you know, of that period from, you know, as I say, from Jack London and HG Wells to Lovecraft and it's the guy who wrote the 39 steps, John Buchan, you know, it's, it's everywhere.
And it's in, it's, It's, as I say, it's in the science of the 19th century as well, because science grows up in the context of this imperial culture as well.
You find it in Darwin, it's in Thomas Huxley, it's literally everywhere.
The entire culture is soaked in it.
It's been completely debunked.
19th century race science has been completely debunked.
Yeah, no, we'll get into the debunking of that sort of stuff and how that gets used, I think, in a later episode.
Absolutely, I agree that the perspective of the way that the race science is used, or the racial characteristics, It's pretty bog standard for the era.
My impression is that Desmond is taking it to it even further.
He's using it in combination with this sort of like Nietzsche and Superman vision of the world and admittedly it's been about 20 years since I've read any Nietzsche.
He would have he was a contemporary of Nietzsche and so it's interesting that you know to see those ideas kind of kind of used In that era and he's using this sort of combination of this horrifying race science with this sort of vision of the ubermensch as a way of justifying
This completely individualized sense of, you know, kind of personal superiority of, you know, that victory is its own justification, ultimately.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's dog roll second-hand, Nietzsche, as so much stuff is.
Although, you know, I always say Nietzsche is a horribly misrepresented thinker.
But when you go to the source, it's pretty nasty stuff.
You know, Nietzsche was a thoroughgoing, he was an anti-Semite and a misogynist and stuff like this.
I've lost my place now.
Yeah, it strikes me as very much, I mean you mentioned Conanism, it strikes me as very much rooted in this kind of aggressive, masculine warrior Ethic, you know, which is, you know, cult of violence, cult of masculine violence, cult of dominance, which is linked again to the very conventional 19th century sort of social Darwinism that you were talking about.
And I think it really, it always bears repeating, you know, these things have common lineages.
You know, Herbert Spencer was the progenitor of, you know, what we would nowadays call libertarianism, which is one of the foundations of modern, you know, reactionary politics.
And he's also one of the progenitors of social Darwinism.
No, absolutely.
And, you know, it's again, I'm kind of coming at this a little bit qualitatively.
I'm coming at this a little bit, you know, just sort of just sort of kind of feeling out the thoughts.
And it's not again, it's not, you know.
What strikes me in reading Redbeard's work is, or you know, Might Is Right, what gets me on that is less, you know, I think normies kind of read those segments or people kind of, you know, kind of not exposed to it, do sort of get the like, oh, wow, this is really awful and racist.
And again, to me, it feels very, you know, this feels very ordinary.
There are groups who, I mean, people who don't consider themselves part of a major group, people who do just kind of go, yeah, we'll just let the system crash.
They call it black-pilled.
As you're black-pilled, you're just kind of like you've taken the poison pill.
You don't think there's any saving this world.
And so you just sort of move on with the idea that we should just kind of dance in the ashes when it burns.
And, you know, if we just kind of build up our own arsenals far enough, then, you know, I'll survive and my family will survive.
And ultimately, that's what matters.
And, you know, again, the survival is its own justification.
And of course, this is, you know, complete nonsense in terms of any kind of real application of biology.
Even in 1890, there were better biologists than that, although obviously eugenics was Absolutely mainstream within within this, you know, kind of, you know, bourgeois scientists of the era.
Yeah, I mean, it's just it's kind of like it's difficult to to put into words, I guess, the degree to which, you know, what's happening, it seems, with with someone like the Gilroy Shooter.
And I'll back off from this slightly.
I mean, there there is, you know, one of the issues that we kind of run into is that With these kinds of incidents is that there is no clear, more information comes out as time goes on.
And so we don't always get sort of a clear answer to kind of what's happening.
And it's really difficult to cover these things in any kind of big picture way without, you know, having a fuller set of details.
For instance, there's, you know, the FBI here, we'll again, just kind of read from another segment.
You know, no clarity yet on motive behind Gilroy Gunman's attack, investigators say, and this is from The Guardian.
The FBI has continued to investigate if the alleged shooter was in line with any particular ideology.
Craig Ferrer, deputy special agent in charge of the FBI in San Francisco, said on Tuesday, including by reviewing social media accounts, digital media, conducting interviews and investigating what thoughts and ideas the shooter may have shared with others.
He also did not confirm whether the widely publicized Instagram account was linked to the shooter.
I can tell you there has been no determination on ideology.
There's reports out there that has been information found and books referenced on that.
We are not in a position at this stage of the investigation to make a call on ideology, John Bennett told reporters on Wednesday.
The information is out there.
It's being reported that there's white nationalism or any type of those ideologies, Special Agent John Bennett said.
That has not been determined, and I wanted to knock that down.
Bennett said that through the course of the investigation, they are finding literature from left to right and said they couldn't put the suspect, 19-year-old Centino Ligon, in an ideological box.
We wouldn't characterize the literature as extreme either.
Which is just – I mean it's hard to know exactly what else is on there, but if that Instagram post is actually accurate, which it appears to be, and he's saying go read, might as right – Any flipping around any random page.
We don't consider this particularly extreme says the FBI Yeah, let's let's Let's maybe not take the FBI's word like completely legitimately on that But I'm probably I'm probably willing to admit that this kid.
He's 19 years old.
He's got a mixed-up ideology He's got a bunch of books.
It is You know, he's got a he's reading a lot of stuff.
He's watching a lot of videos.
Who knows what the what the reality of it is I But the fact that the last thing he does before he goes shooting is go read this particular really racist book about how we need literal conanism in our politics.
That tells you more than some random book that's sitting on his bookshelf.
And I hope we do learn more about what else you might have been reading, but I think it's fair to at least make the educated guess that there's some connection to a white nationalist ideology here.
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, you'll find right-wing books on my shelves.
There's no doubt we're eyestone.
Their presence doesn't confuse the issue.
I hesitate to think if I was charged with some crime, what the authorities will think of my social media feed.
I think the fact that someone takes it upon themselves to go out and mow people down with a gun, In itself, I think that tells us a great deal about, you know, about their attitude, really.
Well, I mean, you could see like, like a sort of a shooter who is like this kind of mass shooter who was, you know, motivated by a leftist ideology.
Yeah, I mean, I hate to talk like this, you know, but like going and shooting random people is not the is not the thing, you know, it's, you know, going after billionaires, for instance, would be something that we would expect, you know, and if there was a rash of, you know, people who are listening to this podcast or who were like retweeting me or whatever, and who were, you know, putting their their boss at Burger King through through a guillotine,
I would definitely have great reservations about the way I do the work that I do, quite frankly.
But we're not seeing that.
The quote-unquote violence that we're seeing from the left is on the order of throwing milkshakes on people and maybe giving a black eye.
There are a handful of people who are being more aggressive, but we're not seeing mass shooting events.
We're not seeing that kind of violence being done.
Right-wingers are pointing at the man, I don't have his name in front of me, Willem van Spronsen, who was the 69-year-old man who tried to destroy the transportation depot at an ICE facility, and harmed no one, who tried to lay an incendiary device against property, against the mechanism of state, against the mechanism of child torture, ultimately.
And, you know, the only person harmed in that incident was himself, he was killed trying to do this.
And, you know, we can feel whether that was effective or not, or whether that was, you know, you can feel however you want about that.
But that incident is still not anywhere on the scale of what's happening on the far right, even, even taking that as sort of the even taking that as its least charitable example.
Furthermore, Willem van Fronsen's manifesto, which is available, I can put that in the show notes.
I wasn't planning on talking about that.
It is a deeply, deeply moving work.
I was honestly touched by that manifesto.
He talks about many of the things that we would talk about on this show, quite honestly.
Yeah.
I think lone terrorism against the public simply doesn't flow from left-wing ideas.
It's a contradiction.
Exactly.
I mean, you know, you know, leftist leftist organizing is all about building solidarity across, you know, across races, across, you know, some degree, you know, as members of the working class or Well, this gets into sort of sectarian issues we tend not to deal with on this podcast, but you know, it's about a sort of universalism.
It's about a sense of, you know, all people having inherent dignity.
And it's exactly this kind of work.
Again, Midas Wright goes on and on about the failures of quote-unquote universalism.
I mean, it criticizes Christianity for being a universalist religion that that Jesus as this is essentially this like soy boy cock right who is usurping, you know proper masculine virtue from You know the the the true kind of older gods and the sort of sort of the yes It's kind of imagery of like Nordic superiority and then Vikings, etc, etc Um, I'm trying to think about how to cover religion on the far right.
I mean, it's kind of a difficult thing because it's, you know, I don't, I'm not a religious scholar.
Um, but, uh, you know, you do see a lot of these guys and we got into this a little bit with the, the last conversation with CV in the last episode.
Um, A lot of these ideas kind of flow into each other, but, you know, the idea that, you know, there are segments of this movement who see, like, the last 2,000 years, you know, that Christianity was ultimately something that was meant to kind of subvert the kind of proper way that the white race was supposed to be, and it was meant to, you know, sort of make the strong weak.
And a lot of them do reach out to the sort of older, quote-unquote older, pagan religions, which is, Ultimately, there's some pseudo-science and pseudo-history and pseudo-stuff kind of going on there as well, as to whether it's actually older or whether it's kind of a newer, reinvented thing.
But, you know, there are these kind of versions of what they call Astaru and some other stuff that they kind of reach to as a more accurate representation of the true Aryan, you know, spirit, et cetera, et cetera.
Christianity became the official ideology of the Roman Empire and extirpated all those pagan religions, and might is right, so what are you complaining about?
Right, exactly.
Well, and here's what's interesting to me about this, you know.
You know, I get these, you know, again, I get these guys and I don't like to sort of like talk about them in identifiable ways, but I do have enough, you know, Nazis in my DMs that I do try to communicate here and there where, you know, where I have time and, you know, and I do try to reach out to them because I think a lot of them are just kind of confused.
Some of them are just trying to waste my time and they did not get any of my time.
But I do try to give the ones who approach me in good faith at least some degree of effort.
And I will have people say to me things to the effect of, you know, there is no moral sanction on violence, for instance.
That, you know, anything that's been done to the white race, anything that's been done against me, that, you know, any injury is worth, you know, that I am justified in doing whatever is necessary to prevent that from happening or to retaliate for it.
And, you know, taken to its logical extreme, I mean, like, legal systems are built on ideas of, like, proportionality and about proportional response, right?
You know, But, taken to its logical stream, taken to what these guys seem to believe, it's, okay, if you stub my toe, I can sell you and your family into slavery and perpetuity in response.
And, you know, ultimately, the answer is then, like, well, if you're strong enough to do so, then maybe that's what this book and that's what this ideology seems to be saying, ultimately.
And this is kind of the thing of like, you know, at that point, you're not worth debating anymore, because ultimately, you just believe in force, you just believe in whoever, whoever's stronger should win.
And if you're advocating that, then I mean, you know, the only thing that you're ultimately saying is, well, I am completely justified in shooting you in the head then.
Not that I am encouraging that to happen!
Why are you talking if that's your ideology?
I have no need to talk to you.
Once you start saying that to me, you are saying I am not convincible.
Ultimately, I am going to use force.
That is the thing that I am going to do.
If it comes down to it, all of you have to die.
Okay, if it's us or them, You know, there are a lot more of us than there are of them.
Yeah, it totally flows from that position.
I, again, like you, I don't advocate going out and shooting people in the head.
But, you know, that would, by their own standpoint, that would be a perfectly reasonable response, wouldn't it?
You know, if I kill you before you can kill me, then, you know, I'm in the right, by definition.
And you've announced to me that that's your position.
So you've made it clear to me, not only is that allowed by your standpoint, but it's actually necessary from my point of view, because if I don't do that, you're going to get me first.
That actually flows logically from their position.
And yet, of course, might is right when they're winning, and it's wrong when they're on the receiving end.
You know, might is right when it's them, you know, hurting you.
Might is suddenly just Awful when it's somebody they like or one of them getting hit with a milkshake the the utter hypocrisy of it But of course that's baked into it or getting banned from Twitter or YouTube, you know Taking away my free speech might is right.
You've taken my free speech exactly.
I Responded to a Ben Shapiro tweet earlier today where he's he's saying.
Oh god.
I can't it was something incredibly fatuous like Oh, everybody hates white supremacism, you know.
Ben Shapiro saying something fatuous?
I have no, like, context for that.
I know.
Anyway, he said something and I criticized him.
Sorry, go ahead.
And I got a response from somebody, I don't know who it was, who says, oh, I see, so he's not allowed to speak because you disagree with him.
I didn't respond, but I was thinking, God, you people are so fucking desperate to be the victim, aren't you?
You just, and, you know, you think, You know, Ben Shapiro can just incite as much violence as he likes.
I'm not calling Ben Shapiro a fascist.
But he can just incite as much fascist violence as he likes.
And he does.
And, you know, the minute anybody criticizes him, he becomes a martyr on the altar of free speech.
But this hypocrisy is baked into these ideas because they're drawing on ideas that were developed specifically to justify empire.
All of this, it stems from, you know, it's right for us to invade your country and colonize it and suppress you and, you know, institute an apartheid system and make you our slaves, essentially, and our coolies and etc.
Because the fact that we were able to do it proves that we're superior.
Whether you want to phrase it in terms of our racial superiority or our cultural advancement or both, the two things being, you know, aspects of the same thing.
That's the idea.
We conquered you, ergo we have the right to rule you.
That's where this entire discourse comes from.
And they're still drawing their inspiration from it now.
Because it's a reactionary movement against the fact that those old structures of ruthless hierarchy and dominance, you know, they're still there.
We still live in a white supremacist culture, I'm afraid, sadly.
But it's not as automatic or as easy or as untroubled or as uncriticized as it used to be.
And they hate that, so they're going right back to this original imperialist doctrine of, we won, ergo we deserve to win.
Right.
And, and there are real, you know, sort of, sort of the, you know, like, again, the sort of the Gilroy Garlic Festival, which sounds like sort of a, you know, it's, it's a, it's kind of a bougie, like, food festival thing.
You know, it's a bunch of, like, wealthy white people, largely, you know, majority white people, I would assume, kind of going and enjoying garlic dishes and, you know.
You know, it sounds, you know, it's a it's a bougie thing.
It seems fairly harmless to me.
It probably is kind of a decent time.
But I can also understand how if you're a young man and you're Being fed some of these ideas, but also you see your sort of material prospects and you see the, your future, and maybe you're not doing as well as your parents were.
And you don't feel like you have, uh, the opportunities to, uh, to really get ahead.
And you're, you're worried about like paying for your student loans and, you know, your health insurance.
I mean, it's hard to say, I mean, the kid's like, like 19 or 20 years old.
So it's kind of hard to like justify that, but you know, there is a very, uh, real, at least a, a felt, if not material precarity there.
And that's something that we should absolutely that's something that that's what socialism is meant to Handle, that's what we're here for ultimately, right?
But because they've been fed this ideology built on like the mud people are coming to take your stuff you know suddenly the the presence of Brown people the presence of people eating tacos next door and speaking a language that you might not understand is that becomes the same thing as boot-on-the-neck authoritarian colonialism.
And the fundamental failure of some of these guys is like, yeah, you've got a sort of reasonable point about the nature of consumer capitalism.
I agree with you.
I mean, look, I like the Marvel movies, but I like them as popcorn entertainment, and if they didn't exist, it would be perfectly fine with me.
I don't build an ideology around them the way people think that we just build our ideologies around popcorn entertainment.
But looking at that and being critical of that and saying this is billions of dollars being spent on useless nonsense and thinking that that's ultimately the reason that's happening is because stupid brown people, etc., Or, you know, like mischievous Jews on the other side.
It is it is you've identified an issue, but you're you're you're failing.
You've been deliberately misled about what the real problem is.
And That's, you know, I get I get people, fans of the show who, you know, both people kind of on the left and people, you know, kind of kind of fellow Nazis who, you know, criticize me for not taking more seriously the the alt right, the far right, the dissident rights, critiques of capitalism and kind of kind of kind of striking it off.
But ultimately, their critiques of capitalism are almost entirely this incredibly vulgar Nonsense that's demuncable in a single sentence like there's not there's not a reason to really dig into that I mean we are gonna do an episode on it, but I just I don't find it intellectually compelling enough to to to justify it to some degree and Again, I don't know.
I'm kind of babbling a little bit here, but It does it does strike me that this that this kid who you know and we don't know all the details but but based on sort of what we know is The ideology tells them to blame this certain subaltering class, this certain racial group, instead of, as a way of kind of getting them to not pay attention to the real systemic issues and the real bad actors.
And it's just disgusting.
And it's ultimately, I mean, again, I've said this time and time again, you know, I'm not justifying these shooters' actions, and I'm not justifying, but to a large degree, they are victims the way everyone else is of this system.
And it's just, it's deeply, deeply saddening to me.
Yeah, absolutely.
The thing is, if your worries about getting a job and getting a good standard of living and, you know, not being able to afford college and, you know, Etc, etc.
All of which are real concerns and very deep and pressing and terrible concerns for millions of people in the developed world.
It's true.
I mean, decades of neoliberalism have brought us to the pitch where people don't have secure futures.
They don't have secure jobs.
They don't have health care.
They don't have, they have to worry.
They have to live from hand to mouth.
Even people that, you know, that we would call the middle class, a lot of them live to some extent from hand to mouth.
There's huge amounts of debt.
People don't have Security in the future.
It's such, you know, these are, these are real pressing concerns for millions of people in the developed world.
And they, they're absolutely valid and they should, they should, and the need to be dealt with.
The trouble is if, if you're one of those people and you, you think my troubles of that kind entitled me to violently suppress other people because they, they, they happen to have come from a different, you know, Part of the political map, then you have to say...
If you're entitled to do that because of your economic anxieties, to use the cliched phrase, economic anxieties, then, you know, why aren't these people equally entitled to do whatever they have to do, including getting across a border to somewhere where they can have a marginally better life, to get away from the infinitely, not infinitely, but hugely worse conditions they face in places in the global south, etc.
Very often, by the way, places who have these intense problems Because they've been relentlessly fucked over and continue to be relentlessly fucked over by Western, not only historically military imperialism, but now economic imperialism.
If it's okay for you to do that, why isn't it okay for them to come?
And the only way to square that circle is to come up with these elaborate ideological justifications about You know, separate communities that need to be kept apart, and then you have to justify that with this.
It's kind of ineluctable.
You end up with this sentient, social Darwinist idea of these impermeable, discrete groups of humans, whether they're national or racial or whatever, and you know, they're always going to be in struggle.
You have to posit it, and it just leads automatically to this idea of the racial struggle, doesn't it?
That's the only logic By which you can make sense of that contradiction.
Well, they start to talk about, you know, in-group and out-group, you know.
Yeah, exactly.
Your first affinity is to my group and it's a war for resources and it's a war for, you know, there's not enough for all of us to go around.
And so ultimately it's either us or them and I pick us.
And that just becomes the ultimate justification.
And again, you know.
It's so frustrating because in a way they've got a better grasp of politics than sort of Liberal mainstream centrism, which constantly pretends that politics is about, you know, working out problems in this sort of utopian technocratic way where you just get clever people and there's a problem and they work it out.
Politics is not about that at all.
Politics is a ruthless competition for power and resources.
And in a way, these people are right about that.
It's just that they get the groups wrong.
You know, they think it's about racial groups and national groups competing against each other en masse, whereas it's actually about the mass of the human race competing against this minuscule number of completely parasitic oligarchs.
And I'm not talking about Jews, by the way.
That's how they square that circle.
That's how they score that one, right?
Yeah, it's always, you know, the Jewish parasites as opposed to the capitalist parasites.
It's just amazing how often, I mean, we could kind of go into this over and over again.
I do want to move on slightly and talk a little bit about the El Paso shooter, if you don't mind, because we are kind of getting to an hour here.
I kind of think what we've been talking about leads very well into the El Paso Shooter's Manifesto, actually, which I read earlier today.
Right, no, absolutely.
So this happened yesterday, pardon me, on August 3rd, about 12.30 local El Paso time.
Again, this is very, very new information.
There's a very good piece on Bellingcat by Robert Evans.
About the Gamification of Terror, and I was going to read kind of a chunk of this, but I put it in the show notes.
I think you should just go read it.
It's really very, very good, and it describes the ideology in the manifesto and sort of what's going on on ATN very well.
I know, Jack, you had read the manifesto, as have I. I've got it open in front of me.
We will not be sharing this manifesto.
If you go to the Bellingcat piece, there are screenshots.
You can kind of read it there, but there is sort of an attempt to not spread these things too widely.
But I know you had mentioned wanting to just kind of talk a bit about the manifesto, like you had some questions about it, and I think that might be a way to kind of come down from the slightly more heady philosophical stuff we've been kind of dealing with.
Until now.
I found it a fascinating document.
I mean, the line that immediately jumped out.
First of all, it's only four pages.
It's only four pages for one thing.
And you know, it is, you know, I was following 8chan like pretty, I actually followed the shooting in real time, which is always an exciting thing.
And the consensus is that A, it's not real.
They don't, they never believe it's real.
But B, they, They point out that it feels fairly generic compared to the Christchurch Massacre, Britain Tarrant.
Tarrant was a much longer manifesto.
It had a lot more memes.
It was a lot funnier in this kind of weird 8chan-ish kind of weird humor.
This is a lot more straightforward and to the point.
A lot of people thought it was just kind of something that was thrown together after the shooting, but it was timestamped in advance of the shooting, so it's almost certainly real.
Although there are still questions about it.
Sorry, go ahead.
I just wanted to give that little bit of a preface to explain what this thing is.
No, it's quite different to the Christchurch Shooter's Manifesto in that, as you say, it's quite serious in tone.
I mean, the ideas aren't serious, they're trivial.
But the way it's written, it's written fairly well, actually, on a sentence-to-sentence level.
It's not coherently structured, because he sort of breaks off right in the middle of making his quote unquote argument to suddenly start talking about the exact specifications of the guns he's going to be using.
And then he kind of drops that and goes back to his argument.
So it's really weird.
It's a bit stream of consciousness in that sense.
But and yet, as I say, on a sentence to sentence level, it's quite coherent and coherently written anyway.
But I, yeah, it's much more so than Midas Wright, honestly.
Yeah, yeah.
This is obviously not a stupid person writing this.
This is a person of, you know, a certain degree of intelligence whose, sadly, just their thinking has just gone completely wrong.
And it's kind of, I mean, I don't want to sound like I have any sympathy for him, but there is kind of, there's a melancholy in reading it because I'm thinking, you know, you've kind of almost got all the pieces and you've just, you've put them together in the wrong way.
You know, and it makes me feel it makes me feel very sad, really, because I think this I was reading and I was thinking, yeah, this is what happens in the absence of a of a systemic left critique of capitalism and class that's accessible to large numbers of people.
And that's you know, that that's kind of on the left, because we have we have lots of you know, the the the The sort of the side of the left that's going to make systemic critiques of economics and class is very bad at doing that and very bad at popularizing it and would rather engage a lot of the time in, you know, sort of crude class reductionism and squabbles with the identity politics people.
And then, you know, on the other side, you have some problems with identity politics, The way it's phrased, I don't really want to get into this, but some of the way it's phrased and put out there is not very helpful.
But it's not all on the left.
It's also that we have, you know, as I said before, we're decades into neoliberalism now.
And neoliberalism is, you know, aside from being an economic counterrevolution against social democracy, is a cultural counterrevolution.
Part of that was crushing the left, not only in terms of, you know, crushing unions, but crushing the left's influence.
It's so ironic that we have this hegemonic idea The left has this dominance in terms of ideas, you know, the left dominates the media and the left dominates the universities, etc, etc.
Whereas in fact the left has barely any presence, you know, in the idea space of people in our Western cultures now.
If we did, if we had anything, if the left had anything like the level of ability to put its message across that it had like 40 years ago or whatever, there would have been There would have been a coherent, accessible, widely known, left-wing critique of capitalism and of class inequality available to this guy.
And it's starting to come back.
Things are better now than they've been for a long time, but it's not there.
And I was just reading and I was thinking, yeah, this is what happens to people who have, to an extent, been left behind.
By neoliberalism and the way it's squeezed everybody, the way it's relentlessly redistributed wealth up from not only the bottom, but the middle upwards to the not just the top, but the pinnacle.
You know, we were talking earlier about the real problems people have even in the developed world.
And so much of the potential for people like that to realize, you know, with sober senses, the truth of their of their position in society, it's just been It's just been destroyed.
And this is what you end up with in that disorientated space with no left alternative.
Because this guy, he makes quite a lot of arguments that are sort of lefty sounding.
You know, he's concerned about the replacement of jobs with automation.
Yeah, that's something capitalism does.
It renders people useless because it wants to optimize the He wants to optimize profitability, so it replaces workers with machines.
That's absolutely right.
And he talks about the environment.
This guy's aware of the fact that the environment's going to shit.
And he talked about corporations.
He talks about how there's a huge problem with corporate influence.
I mean, a lot of the actual meat and drink of what he says is very thin gruel.
You know, he doesn't really know.
At one point, he says kind of fascinatingly, Oh, I could fill pages and pages with the problems with corporations.
And I was thinking, Could you, though?
I mean, really?
You know, you're glossing over that.
You know corporations are bad.
You don't really know why, do you?
You know?
And yet, these concerns are- Well, basically, he could list- I guarantee you he would list things like the Gillette ad that thought trans people were fine.
That would be the sorts of things he would use.
Or importing people from Indian Pakistan to fill tech worker jobs.
It's that sort of thing.
He could give you many, many examples of this, but you would immediately lose a lot of the modicum of respect that you have.
The real story there is, of course, that Western developed capitalism has sent loads of jobs to the global South and to poor countries and so on.
It has, in a sense, and I want to be very careful that people don't think I'm agreeing with him because I absolutely reject his position, but You know, capitalism has replaced the jobs, the traditional jobs of many people in the developed world.
With jobs that they've outsourced to poorer countries.
And the thing is, it's done that in the relentless search for profit.
And it's done that because it can exploit those people more ruthlessly, because they're more vulnerable, because their countries are poorer, because generally, because they were devastated by Western imperialism in the early period of Western capitalism's expansion.
And you know, capitalism just, it's fucked over you, because you've lost your job in the developed world.
And it's fucking over the guy that got your job in the Global South.
That's the real story here.
But of course, that's the bit they don't get.
That's the place they don't get to.
But yeah, he's making criticisms of corporations.
He is talking about capitalism's effect on the environment.
But again, he's not actually getting there.
What he's getting is to this bizarro world where like, I mean, the bit that jumped out to me immediately when I was reading it was, He says that he thinks the Democratic Party is entirely controlled by corporations, which is true enough.
But he thinks there's a line where he says, oh, there are factions within the Republican Party who are pro-corporate.
I have the line here.
I have the line here if you want to... Yeah, go on.
You know, so he's talking about losing Texas and like Texas turning blue in terms of Democrats will take it in presidential contest because it's getting close and another few cycles based on demographic trends.
Texas is going to turn blue.
So, you know.
The heavy Hispanic population in Texas will make us a Democratic stronghold.
Losing Texas and a few other states with heavy Hispanic populations of Democrats is all it would take for them to win nearly every presidential election.
Although the Republican Party is also terrible.
Many factions within the Republican Party are pro-corporation.
Pro-corporation equals pro-immigration.
But some factions within the Republican Party don't prioritize corporations over our future.
So the Democrats are nearly unanimous with their support of immigration, while the Republicans are divided over it.
At least with Republicans, the process of mass immigration and citizenship can be greatly reduced.
And so he's equating a quote-unquote pro-immigration position as a pro-corporate position.
Which is definitely not like, you know, like, you can, you know, I don't I don't feel that that the United States should be vastly more generous with allowing people to cross our borders and have access to our wealth, to the wealth that we have stolen from them, because I think it's good for GE.
I feel that way because I believe in like, you know, every human being is worthy of dignity and respect.
But GE just wants to exploit these people.
In fact, I would prefer that they be allowed to come here and then GE not exploit them.
That's sort of the goal here.
But that's just too sophisticated for this kind of, you know, like that version of this never, you know, it's always like, and this is where they start to claim like Antifa is the, are the foot soldiers of the neoliberal corporate agenda, because like, it's all about like bringing in immigrants.
And like, if you're not against immigration, then you're ultimately just in favor of, you know, the system, quote unquote.
And it's deeply confused.
And it is because there is no real And it's, it's inherently conspiratorial, isn't it?
Because there's this kind of, there's this crude mechanistic one-to-one relationship that he sees as how politics works.
Like, you know, corporations like immigrants because immigrants take up low skilled, low paid work.
It's absolutely true that there are sectors of capital that like immigration because they can exploit immigrants as low-paid workers.
That's absolutely true.
But like the idea that that means corporations equal pro-immigration and that there's a straight line there, like sort of like a puppet string from that to the Democratic Party.
That's why they want to let loads of immigrants in.
The whole reality of big agribusinesses, what they want ultimately is for immigration to be difficult, but possible, so that you bring in a subaltering class.
You bring in a class that you can then oppress because they are in the country illegally.
And they will not agitate for their rights.
They won't, you know, they have no say.
And so they're much, much easier to exploit.
And so ultimately, you know, the border enforcement system is designed to be strict enough to be scary, but porous, ultimately.
They want what capitalist governments always want on behalf of capitalist classes, which is to control, you know, the flow of immigrants.
So you need some, you let some in.
And you don't need any.
You keep them out.
That's what capitalist regimes always want.
They want, well, we need some easily exploitable, easily tyrannized, low-paid, low-skilled workers, so let some in.
That sounds a bit mechanistic itself.
It's not.
It's not quite that, you know, one-to-one relationship.
Yeah, it's not a one-to-one.
But that's essentially how it works.
I mean, suppose they did.
Suppose these guys got their way.
Suppose these guys got their way and they got rid of, you know, 40 million brown people in this country and, you know, 30 billion African-Americans and, you know, suddenly they just weren't in the North American continent any longer.
Suddenly, it's impoverished people in Appalachia, and then the Rust Belt.
It's people in Gary, Indiana, who are going to be working in those slaughterhouses.
And, you know, like, the exploitation remains, and they'll just find some other way of enforcing that.
I mean, just Google labor history in the 19th century.
Like, Google the Pinkertons.
And again, the fact that this history is just not taught in schools that I learned it in my late 20s and early 30s quite I mean, actually more like my 30s was when I really kind of got interested in kind of understanding even the basics of this kind of labor history.
It's simply not taught in our schools.
And so it's invisible to people.
And why isn't it being taught?
Because we live in a fundamentally capitalist system that is built on the exploitation of like everyone who is not a gentry landowner, effectively.
Yeah, and the educational system, you know, its worldview, its priorities, its agenda, like everything else in the capitalist system, stems from fundamentally the economic basis of the society, which is capitalist.
But yeah, another thing to go back to something you said before, like he's aware of the fact that demographic changes are making things difficult for the Republican Party.
Now, that's a real thing.
That's why the Republican Party is pouring so much energy into gerrymandering and election rigging these days and various other countermeasures.
They know that the demographics are going to make it difficult for them in the future.
What's fascinating to me is the way people kind of think that's inherently legitimate, like the Republican Party is kind of entitled To have lots of votes.
If a party doesn't get enough votes to get into power because there aren't enough people to vote for them, to get them into power, that's just called democracy.
It's like the fact that society is changing in such a way that there are now not enough people who want to vote Republican to give Republicans the power base they used to have That's just the political system responding to the population.
Obviously I have very little truck with capitalist democracy, but to an extent you could say that's just the system working the way it's supposed to.
But the underlying assumption there is that the party that represents the relatively prosperous white man is just entitled to have a monopoly on power.
And anything, even if it's a natural process that erodes that, is inherently legitimate.
And of course, it can't just be a natural process.
It has to be some sort of conspiracy, doesn't it?
Yeah, it has to be a conspiracy to bring brown people in.
I mean, ultimately, they rely on this.
There was a piece written in the 90s, I believe, called The Emerging Democratic Majority.
And this was a...
Basically, you notice that African Americans vote 90% for Democrats, and you notice that Hispanic people vote, except for within, like Cuban immigrants tend to vote heavily Republican, but people from Mexico, or people kind of descended from Mexico, vote overwhelmingly, like 70% or something like that, in favor of Democrats.
You know, it just, and so there was this piece published, I think it was like a book-length monograph, and the idea is essentially that democratic strategists no longer have to really concern themselves with getting a majority of the white vote, that in a couple of decades, effectively, you can build an electoral coalition out of the majority of the non-white people in the country.
And then a minority of white voters.
And that's sort of been the way that things have gone.
And, you know, the reality is, you know, that, uh, you know, Republican, you know, kind of, kind of more mainstream Republicans kind of see this as, you know, they're, they're trying to reach out to brand and black voters without actually doing anything to affect their material positions.
And so they put people like, uh, Candace Owens, uh, you know, in kind of in front of their organizations and be like, you know, no, you can be black and conservative and, um, Then, you know, white racists notice this and go, gee, if you're a black person in Republican politics, you get a free ride because you get to be in the front of the room and everybody pays attention to you.
And it's like, this is a very cynical move by deeply, deeply racist mainstream Republicans who are just not being quite as overt about it.
But even within these sort of mainstream circles, they don't actually do anything to materially affect.
And then the Democrats just sort of rely on the reality that, well, the Republicans are always worse, and so brown and black people are just going to keep voting for us.
And then ultimately, Neither side in this duopoly actually does anything to materially affect the lives of brown and black people, and yet the rhetorical element of electoral politics kind of surrounds these issues, but then we can't actually talk about the real things going on.
And this is absolutely kind of one of those things that is that, you know, it's, it's just endemic this conversation among these kind of far right people who see this kind of surface level conversation, who see this kind of surface level, the way that the, uh, the parties, uh, manipulate these issues and think that that's like the real thing that's going on as opposed to just the, uh, kind of the, the, the smoke and mirrors that, that, um, is, uh, being deployed as a way of distracting from the,
The real material politics it's like that feels slightly off, but I mean that's it's just baked into this guy's manifesto It's like literally in the first paragraph of this manifesto Assumes all of this to be true and that's not something I think that you know certainly non-us listeners or people who have not been following us electoral politics the way I have for for as long as I have may not Quite get get that subtlety to it as well.
So apologies for the extended rant about American electoral politics That is not what you come here for.
No, that's that's really I think that's very clarifying Another thing I I think I noticed anyway about the manifesto Maybe you can put me right on this because I want your opinion on this is that it feels to me like he's kind of making an effort Certainly in the early part to sound very respectable You know, and then kind of the masks.
I mean, this is a, for these people, this is a relatively thoughtful sort of guy in the sense that he anticipates, on a couple of occasions, he anticipates objections that he might get from a left or mainstream reader and kind of tries to head, like it opens with him acknowledging the fact that, you know, the thing he's worried about happening to the white race in America, Was kind of already done by the white race to the native americans.
He acknowledges that in in the in the very first part of it And that becomes part of that.
Of course, they actually call this an Go on.
They actually call this an in before you you in before the thing So like, you know the criticism that you're going to get from sort of the normie, uh mainstream democrat, you know Basically the people who are going to criticize you on twitter.
It's like well, you know, you did it to the native americans So whatever which is not like a real like there's a there's a You know, ultimately, that's a vulgarization of a real argument as well.
I'm not like making that, but they call it an in before, you know, and so so whenever you try to anticipate your your opponent's argument and like make it ahead of time, it's just a thing that it's sort of a more and more common thing.
It's certainly among those segments.
And of course, being what he is, you know, a fascist seething with toxic entitlement and anger at what he perceives as his own You know, unjust treatment.
He doesn't draw from that fact, that indisputable fact that Western settler colonialism in the foundation of America involved ethnic cleansing and genocide against the native peoples.
He doesn't draw from that the fact that America is a white supremacist system and you know he doesn't draw anything about imperialism from that he just turns it into a well you know well he turns it into that social darwinism we were talking about before doesn't he turns it actually he turns the objection into a strength because he says well that proves my point you see you need to you know if you're the race that's under if you're the race that's being invaded then you need to fight the invaders
Yeah, it becomes, it's bad to be a minority in a country because of these, you know, kind of like inbuilt racial biases in which there's a complex pseudo-intellectual history behind.
You know, it's bad to be a minority and we just shouldn't be a minority.
And it is just becomes again the war of all against all.
It becomes this, this nature red tooth and claw, which again goes right back to that might is right.
I mean, you know, like, look, we're winning.
We want to keep winning.
Any amount of reparations, any amount of welfare spending that isn't going to us, anything at all that is against us as white people is quote-unquote anti-white.
And this overt system of anti-whiteness is something that we have to fight against with whatever degree of violence is necessary to oppose it.
And so, you know, I pay a higher tax rate to majority African American people for like food stamps.
Genocide is justified.
And I hate to say it that bluntly, but that's kind of what they believe.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's justified.
And, you know, because he objects in so many words, he objects several times during the manifesto to the idea that he's animated by hate.
He rejects that idea.
He claims he's not.
And the way they square that circle is to make it into this sort of neutral, detached, pseudo-scientific description of just the Darwinian struggle between discrete races.
You know, it happened to the Native Americans, and now it's happening to us, and they fought against it, but they lost.
We have to fight against it as well.
You know, it's not about hatred, it's just a fact.
And that sort of social Darwinism is inherent to fascism.
It was inherent to Nazi ideology, as you said earlier.
But he's, yeah, it's like, what I was saying was that He tries for a respectable, fairly neutral tone and all the way through he tries to present himself as not animated by hatred.
And as it goes on, I see the tells coming out, you know, suddenly it's like it creeps into it.
He starts talking about patriotism and founding fathers.
And then you're into birth rates, you're into the, the quote unquote, Hispanics and the immigrants and their high birth rates.
And then slowly but surely, it sort of slips into talking about race mixing.
And, you know, all the identity problems arising from race mixing and how people are traitors because they're inveterate race mixers.
etc.
etc.
And before you know it, you're into, basically, he's talking about ethnic cleansing and ethnostates.
He doesn't use the term, of course, and I'm sure, you know, if you could ask him, you know, he'd say, oh, no, I'm in favor of peaceful ethnic cleansing, as if there could ever be any such thing.
But he gets into this, his idea of America... Yeah, there is no such thing.
No.
He gets into this ideal, postulated America is, which is a confederate, confederacy of basically ethnostates, which is, I mean, firstly, it's so ridiculously Illiterate.
Your prosperity is based upon white supremacy.
You can't have an ethno state where it's just white people and retain your supremacy.
You know, but it's right.
Yeah, these are like the standard talking points.
I feel like we've kind of been over this on this podcast many times, not that like we expect, you know, we'll get new listeners on all the time.
So like it's fine, but it is, it does feel like we do tend to, you know, the reason we repeat some of these talking points is just because they, they keep making the same stupid arguments.
And so if we're going to talk about them, we have to kind of come just, you've got the same response because they haven't bothered to respond to that at all.
So, you know, it's just a thing.
I just wanted to ask, did you get the sense of pretense, you know, slipping, the mask slipping as it went on?
Because that was definitely the sense I got from it.
I mean, I feel like he's he's kind of taking us down a certain a certain like rhetorical and intellectual path, right?
Is that as he a first of all, you can read this and you could take this.
And I've seen even things online where people have kind of taken this and like highlighted it.
And you can you can find the same wording used all over the not even the alt right, not even the far right, like Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk and like those kind of figures will use like a lot of the same kind of language.
And you know they do kind of even like interracial unions like he says, you know the Hispanics form interracial unions at much higher rates than average and like that's bad because You know, you can even see that kind of stuff.
They'll just frame it as more cultural as opposed to you know, that kind of baseline genetic biological essentialism stuff and You know, it's you know, it is it is You know, the thing that's unique about this document is that this guy went out and killed 20 people and, you know, injured 50 more with it in a Walmart and a fucking Walmart, you know, uh, this needs is particularly extreme.
Like this, this is becoming like the mainstream ideology of, um, a big chunk of the, uh, you know, American populace.
This is, this is because, you know, like young white men on the internet just sort of believe this stuff.
And...
This podcast is meant to sound that alarm like that's the thing we're trying to do here And again, the unique thing is that he went out and he got anybody who regularly Watches Tucker Carlson is gonna believe stuff.
I mean, this isn't even as far as Tucker Carlson, honestly I mean you get much most of this from like Sean Hannity Yeah, I mean, you know Bill O'Reilly was talking about this, you know, just a few years again just in slightly different language He's not quite as overt about it.
Um, I did want to highlight But the objective circumstances have changed.
And the sort of the paleo-conservative wing has started to sort of take over that sort of American right-leaning movement, political movement, based on basically the failure of the Iraq War and sort of the neoconservative dream for the Middle East.
And that's a much more complicated thing that we're going to get into here.
But what I really wanted your take on What I really wanted your take on is how much is being hidden here because it seems like quite a calculated piece, like he goes out of his way to give Trump an alibi as well.
He never actually comes out as a Trump supporter but he does that thing where he says, oh I felt this way long before Trump come along so don't blame him and if you do it's fake news.
You know, and I just wanted your take on it.
When he talks about the corporations and corporate America, is he actually talking about Jews?
How hardcore is this guy?
How much of an effort is he putting into trying to rephrase it in as neutral a way as he possibly can?
I mean, that's a hard question to answer, ultimately, because we don't really have anything.
I always hope that we get a better sense that the law enforcement or whatever will release more details so we can get a better sense of this stuff.
Usually that stuff comes out at trial, if at all, or after a trial.
You know, and it's kind of hard to know.
The one thing about this manifesto, which is also true of the Christchurch manifesto, is that it really doesn't mention the Jews.
And that's kind of one of those things that you expect to see in all of this stuff, is kind of blaming the Jews for stuff.
And it also becomes a sort of meaning that You know, basically the 8-shanners will say this is like an FBI plant, or this is some guy who's been mind-controlled, or whatever, because he's not naming the Jew, and anybody who wrote this manifesto would.
But ultimately, it's also the rhetorical game, and so I wouldn't like to kind of...
lend my, you know, put my credibility on the line of saying like, oh, he definitely believes, he definitely believes the Holocaust didn't happen or whatever.
But it's, it's highly likely that he's been kind of exposed to that, those kinds of ideas.
And I would, I would suspect he's ultimately just not letting a mask drop on that.
So, you know, but it's, it's hard to say for sure.
Yeah.
Cause we didn't know, we didn't know that James Alex Fields had swastikas and portraits of Adolf Hitler up in his room until after the trial did Right.
No, it was after the trial.
And then you get like the photos of his bedroom with like the giant portrait of Hitler.
It's like, oh, that would have been definitely prejudicial.
Yeah, yeah.
I'd be interested in hearing where the, you know, the people that thought he was just an innocent kid texting with his mom and had a car accident.
I'd be interested to know where they went with that, if they went anywhere with it.
Well, and also like his mom just kind of being like, I was really worried about my son.
He had like a giant portrait of Adolf Hitler, right?
You know?
That's just it is like one of those things of like like how clueless I mean but the reality is they're they're they're getting all this stuff online it's just like oh he's just kind of a weird kid hanging out and doing this online and he put up a portrait of Hitler and like he said it was just a joke or whatever and I don't know what that means but I mean, I feel like it's one of those 50s movies, you know, like I was a teenage zombie or whatever.
My teenager, my kid is into Hitler.
What do I do?
I want to do like 50s informational videos or whatever that look like that.
Yeah, you could do one of those.
It's your teenager texting about things with the Nazi acronyms and stuff.
I know you want to wrap up and go on to something else, but I want to ask another question.
In the manifesto he goes on about how he can't bring himself to kill his fellow Americans, by which he of course means white people.
And he goes into this big sort of martyrdom thing where he says, Oh, I'm probably going to die, you know, because I'll be killed by the police or one of the invaders.
What?
Who did he kill?
And is he dead?
He was brought in alive.
The garlic festival shooter.
Information came out there that he actually.
Like it was originally reported that the the cops shot him, but apparently the corridor report says that he Blew out blew it.
You know, he shot himself.
Yeah, and he basically blew his head off by it through his mouth sorry for the the graphic detail there, but and the the Dayton shooter who we still don't have him I've been trying to kind of follow this in real time, but There's still like really conflicting stuff on that.
So we will we will probably cover that in the in the near future, but No, the El Paso shooter this guy Patrick Crucious.
He was brought in alive.
So we get to maybe get a little bit more information from him.
I hope that we hear what he's been reading and stuff.
I hope we get a sense of his YouTube and social media and stuff, but it does seem like he didn't have much of an online presence except for possibly on the Chan boards, which get wiped and they're all anonymous and stuff, so it'd be really difficult to pick that out unless it came out in the trial or something.
Yeah, he survived, because it's not like he was a black guy selling cigarettes or anything.
He did travel from Dallas to El Paso.
El Paso was about 82% Hispanic.
And then he went into a Walmart and in a mall, a shopping mall.
He starts at a Walmart and then moves on to the shopping mall.
And, you know, I still, again, the details are still kind of fuzzy about like kind of where everybody was, but it does appear that most of his victims were Hispanic.
That would be my guess anyway.
So they wouldn't qualify as his fellow Americans, or even his fellow humans, I'm thinking, in his head.
Right, pretty much.
Ultimately, I'm very resistant to psychologistic explanations, but I think that there's a very great extent to which this is just rooted in, despite his protestations, it's just rooted in a desire to hurt people that he hates, I think.
As much as it's rooted in In that desire for violence and dominance that's central to a lot of this, as we've talked about.
It's also just rigid in this desire to lash out and kill people that he just hates.
Or fears, anyway.
I would usually frame it more as a fear than hate, if we're going to go the psychological route.
Well, often the same thing, aren't they?
Yeah.
I mean, it's ultimately kind of two sides of the same coin.
In, again, in the Christchurch episode, we, uh, I described that shooting in some detail because there was video and it was, um, I think worthwhile to, to talk about kind of the contents of that.
Uh, and in that shooting, I, I said, you know, this guy, uh, bragged about, you know, I'll see you in Valhalla kind of, uh, kind of posturing.
And ultimately, he turned himself into the first person who could shoot back.
And this manifesto, one of the things that he makes very, very clear is that he was inspired by the Christchurch shooter.
The very first line of this is, sorry, I've got it in front of me here.
In general, I support the Christchurch shooter in his manifesto.
And then later on he says, you know Actually, the Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great Replacement The Great Replacement is the Christchurch shooters manifesto this guy decided to do this He said about a month ago, but like literally since March it was when he you know was was got turned on to this idea and he has thoughts about about this and he says I
Remember, it is not cowardly to pick low-hanging fruit, aka don't attack heavily guarded areas to fill your super soldier COD that's Call of Duty fantasy.
Attack low security targets.
Even though you might outgun a security guard or policeman, they likely beat you in armor, training, and numbers.
Do not throw away your life on an unnecessarily dangerous target.
If a target seems too hot, live to fight another day.
In other words, he's actively encouraging people to go to the places where no one's likely to shoot back, because that's the better way to kill more people.
And he even explicitly says in the manifesto that the goal is to make brown people think twice about coming here if they think they're gonna be killed.
I mean, this is meant to increase racial tension.
And that kind of punishment, that kind of like, you know, de-incentivizing brown people being in the United States is exactly the justification for Child's Day.
Children in concentration camps.
It's exactly the justification for the child separation policies.
It's exactly the justification for keeping those camps as miserable as possible and for making them drink out of toilets and doing, you know, standing room only kinds of environment.
I mean, you know, it's the exact justification.
It's just that the U.S.
imperial state can do it on a much larger budget and on a much larger scale, whereas this guy just had to kind of walk into a Walmart with a rifle.
Yeah.
That's, that's where it is.
It's all part of the same fucking system.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Similar psychology too.
I mean, obviously when the state does it, it's a, it's a complex response to, to huge economic and social and political factors.
But you know, when Donald Trump tweets, well, if you don't want to stay in one of our detention centers, if you don't want to be separated from your children, just don't come here to this country.
Just stay away.
Psychologically, it's exactly the same cowardly sadism as is abundantly on display in this manifesto, where he rationalizes attacking unarmed civilians and openly says that his goal is to terrorize migrants into running away home.
That's it?
Yeah, I feel like, I mean, unless you've got something else, I mean, you know, we could keep talking forever, but I feel like that's enough for today.
You know, again, plenty more details here.
I'm sure there will be more shooters to talk about.
And again, I just want to highlight, we obviously feel terribly for the victims and for the families of the victims.
You know, it is for those people and for the people who are otherwise going to be targeted.
That's certainly why I do this.
It matters to me.
I care about this and I put a lot of work into this.
And if there's one thing that upsets me about this, even beyond just the sort of the violence and the bigotry and the evil that kind of goes into it, it's the sense of powerlessness, the sense that everybody who's been following this kind of material knows that this kind of thing is happening, and there seems to be no willingness institutionally to do anything in particular about it.
And that is deeply, deeply frustrating.
Yeah, so do we have any... I mean, maybe we shouldn't announce our plans ahead of time because we always seem to have to change them.
Do we have any idea what we're doing next time?
I'm supposedly getting a... You've got guests next time.
I've got at least one if not two guests next time to talk about a topic that people have been wanting me to talk about.
We'll just kind of keep it vague from there.
The reality is that I'm kind of always prepping three or four different episodes and so they just kind of pop up when they pop up.
It's just sort of like the way I'm planning these at this point.
So I do want to do the Kevin Macdonald culture critique episode that one just takes a it's just taking a ton of work in terms of trying to track down a lot of the resources in the and everything and it is it is three long and dense very stupid books to to try to Get a handle on as opposed to this which is you know, like a 96 page pamphlet which repeats itself 50 times.
So So that's kind of the challenge there.
I do want to do that one soon and we'll probably do a a nazbol the uh the the not the national bolshevism the uh to to sort of uh fill in all the eric striker nonsense um i do just want to say i meant to kind of i thought i might put this at the beginning but i will just kind of highlight this here
um eric striker was kind of like uh fucking around with me on twitter on tuesday night the night before the last episode was released but we recorded that like four days before them and we had uh like discussed doing that for for i think two or three It may have seemed like it was purely coincidental that Eric Stryker decided to come.
decided to come into my mentions and then quote tweet me and such um at that particular moment um it's just kind of one of those weird things but i did just want to highlight that so um yeah that's where we are just serendipity yeah you know nazis just worked on my time frame for once it was great yeah thanks for being so cooperative guys okay so that was episode 26 of i don't speak german There should be another episode next week, hopefully.
Thanks for listening, as always.
You can find me at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore on Twitter.
You can find Daniel, who's far more important, at Daniel E Harper.
And no pass around.
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