March 16, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:18
4030 The Rise and Fall of Western Culture | Paul Joseph Watson and Stefan Molyneux
The degradation of art, architecture, comedy, philosophy and beauty in western society is often explained away with musings about different tastes or personal preference, but more disturbing forces are at work. Paul Joseph Watson joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the impact of postmodern thought on western culture, the negative impact it has on society and the increasing push for online censorship.Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large at Infowars.YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/PrisonPlanetLiveTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/PrisonPlanetFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/PaulJosephWatsonYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms
Hi everybody, back with a good friend Paul Joseph Watson.
He is the editor at large at Infowars and you should really check out his youtube.com forward slash prison planet live twitter.com forward slash prison planet and facebook.com forward slash Paul Joseph Watson.
Paul, thanks for taking your time today.
How are you doing? It's good to be back Stefan.
It's been a while. So I want to talk about art.
It's a great passion of yours, a great passion of mine, something that kind of gets stuck by the wayside sometimes in our pursuit of politics and current events and so on.
And it struck me in thinking about this call, Paul, that In order to value your culture, your culture has to be something beautiful.
It has to be something inspiring.
It has to be something wonderful.
And there is a terribly devious way to undermine people's respect in their own history and their own culture, which is to replace the beauty of the past with the brutality of the present.
And that just gives you less of a warm and fuzzy desire to protect the way of life that ancestors built up for you.
And I know you've done some videos on that.
Where do you see this sort of brutalism, this eye-gouging horror of modern art and modern architecture and so on?
Does it hurt your soul?
Does it hurt your mind when you walk around and see this kind of stuff?
Well, yeah, you're talking about architecture or art.
I mean, I live in an area of London which has got both beautiful traditional old buildings and also these brutalist tower blocks.
Anecdotally, you know, people say, oh, it's all subjective.
There's no objective beauty.
That's complete nonsense. Anecdotally for a start.
The people who walk around the area in which I live, they look up at the beautiful Victorian mansions.
They look at the 20th century bakery, again, traditionalist style.
It's been turned into apartment buildings, doesn't matter.
They gaze longingly at these buildings.
They don't gaze longingly at the brutalist tower block, eight of them in a row, which is what I have to look out of my view from my kitchen every day.
So anecdotally, people prefer beauty.
They have objective beauty standards.
You can look at poles.
Where people are asked, do they prefer to live in these tower blocks or do they prefer to live in more traditional style buildings?
They always choose the traditional style buildings.
And they did back in the 60s when this all started in the United Kingdom with the building of these brutalist tower blocks.
You ask them, you can look at art gallery attendance.
Modern art gallery attendance is way down.
It has been for years on end.
Most modern art galleries, unless it's like the main one in a major city like Tate London or whatever, They're always empty.
There's nobody in them.
It's kind of a relaxing experience if you want to get away from the hustle and bustle, because they're always empty, because nobody cares.
Then you look at the polls again, and people prefer traditional art galleries.
So the entire argument that it's subjective, that there's no objective beauty, complete nonsense, both from an anecdotal level and a statistical level.
There's a A video which I think is on Vimeo by Roger Scruton called Why Beauty Matters.
And that was one of the main inspirations for these videos that I made, both about architecture and art.
And he makes the point that, you know, beauty is implicit in the profound and the remarkable.
It's implicit. And it's, as he said, it's aspirational.
It, you know, inflates the human spirit.
It wants us to aspire to something better.
It fills us with pride.
If you're talking about architecture, municipal pride, people Take care of their environment.
What you put in your environment, the buildings that you build, speak to the community and they take care of it.
They have the argument with the tower blocks, for example, which were built As a form of social engineering, as you probably know, which we can get onto.
But even with the wide spaces that surround them, people don't take care of them because there's no sense of ownership.
So what do you get? You get degradation, you get crime, but we'll get onto that.
But it's the whole point is, yes, there are objective beauty standards.
A piece of trash in a gallery literally That gets thrown away by the janitors, by the workers.
That has no implicit meaning or beauty.
There's no subjective argument here.
Beauty is a universal human need.
It elevates the human spirit.
We used to see that in art.
Now we don't. And surprise, surprise, we have a culture that's based on nihilism, meaninglessness, and unhappiness.
So it is reflected in our surroundings and in the art that we love.
And there is this opposition to all that came before.
It sort of strikes me as a sort of petulant and resentful tween who just takes a brick to everything because they can't create because you have art which destroys art.
You have... Standards of beauty that destroy beauty.
It seems almost that we have science these days that destroys science in so far as very little of it is replicable or even useful.
And we have this weird undertow for everything that was built in the past that is trying to undermine it like termites at the foundation of a cathedral.
And it is very insidious, because bit by bit, it wearies people, and it turns them away from joy.
It turns them away from love.
And to be surrounded by ugliness is to be degraded in your spirit, and it drains away so much of our capacity for happiness.
When you see something beautiful, it makes you happy.
If you're, I guess, a reasonably decent and productive person, I guess if you're resentful, it makes you angry.
But this replacement of everything that was wonderful with everything that is crappy is really horrifying.
And you know, I grew up poor just as you did, and you know what it's like being around those poor neighborhoods.
I mean, trying to find a shred of beauty in these council houses can be really, really tough.
We really need that in our hearts and in our minds to have something to get up and skip through the day to.
Exactly. Roger Scruton said, and I quote, art once made a cult of beauty, now we have a cult of ugliness instead.
This has made art into an elaborate joke, one which by now has ceased to be funny.
But as he said, it was a revolution against the past.
It was the same with architecture.
These modern architects thought that they needed to rebel as a form of resentment against the colonialism, the racism, the slavery, the exploitation that they saw in traditional styles of art, which is kind of ironic.
I'll get onto it in a minute, but if you look into the past of Le Corbusier, it's quite ironic his political history.
But in terms of art itself, It's all filtered.
It has to be filtered through the lens of social justice and identity politics.
So this is like a prerequisite for a piece of art to get in an art gallery now, that it has to implicitly communicate some far-left political dogma.
So of course, If that's the only prerequisite, which it is in most cases, it doesn't have to be objectively beautiful.
And in the video that I put out, or I put out a series of videos, I give examples.
There's a performance art piece where this big black woman in a leotard performs a twerk for every black man shot by police in the United States.
And then the white audience has to count every single one.
And they do a poll at the end and ask them if they counted them correctly.
I'm talking about things like Used sanitary towels, hung up, dried and hung up to challenge the shaming of female menstruation.
So they made them filter everything through the lens of social justice and identity politics.
for it to be accepted in the gallery.
So of course that completely disincentivizes anyone from trying to produce modern art.
And there is still some good modern art simply for the fact that it's beautiful, objectively beautiful, that it takes talent and skill to create.
So if you set the parameters where it's like, if you fulfill this, you will be rewarded.
And some of these things go for, there was a piece of aluminium stuck to like a plywood board with some graffiti scrawled into it.
It sold for $250,000.
Now, how they get away with that is through what's called obscurantism.
And there's an excellent book which your viewers can check out by Sourabh Amari called The New Philistines.
He gets into this, and it's about how because the art has absolutely no value, beauty, or meaning, they ascribe meaning to it via this flowery, often opaque language, which is always pretentious, and it has the sole purpose of confusing and shaming the individual into believing that ugliness is in fact beauty.
You know, like when you walk into a modern art gallery, everything's objectively hideous.
You think, why isn't everyone laughing?
I walk into Tate Modern and it's just piles of wood and bits of metal and tarps on the floor and paper clips stuck to a frame up on the wall.
This is hilarious.
Why is everyone not laughing? Well, it's because if they were laughing, if they saw that the emperor had no clothes, they would be seen as You know, unsophisticated and crass.
So they go along with it and then they use this obscurantist language to fill it with meaning which is not there.
And the example I talked about, the bit of aluminium stuck to a wooden board.
It's in my video. People can look it up.
It's called Untitled.
All these things are called Untitled.
They put as much effort into naming them as creating them by Rudolf Stingell.
So it's a bit of aluminium stuck to a wooden board.
This is how they describe it.
The majesty of hieroglyphs are suffused with a sense of greater substance than the sum of their parts.
It continues. The resulting panels of stark bright silver were transformed through a collaboration with the audience in a series of uncontrolled impulsive marks.
So on and on and on.
They're talking about this suffusive thing that's greater than the sum of its parts.
It's a bit of aluminium stuck to a wooden board, and a few people have come along and just scrawled their name into it and stuff.
That's what I'm talking about when I talk about obscurantism.
So as long as they surround it in this pretentious flowery language, and then socially shame people as uncultured and ignorant who don't jive with it and resonate with it, even though they're lying to themselves when they do that, That's how they get away with it in the modern art world.
It's a complete scam based on elitism.
And here's the funny thing.
When I was younger and I first heard about and saw some of this modern art, I sort of grew up more with the classics.
But when I saw this modern art, there was this one in Canada that sold for millions of dollars called Voice of Fire, which is like red and blue stripes vertical.
Or when you see the spatter paintings that look like an elephant farted a coat of paint or something like that.
And it is almost like this Emperor's New Clothes situation.
And I thought, well, it can't be that simple.
It can't be that simple that you're just supposed to, as you point out, laugh at it.
And then everybody seems to be so serious about it and seems to think it has some sort of deep and powerful meaning.
It drives me crazy because it just seems to me like a kind of test.
Do you have some basic integrity?
Can you look at something and say, that's crap?
And this idea that somehow it's a meaningful statement about something or other...
It just seems like a kind of scam.
I'm sure I have this vision of the modern artist going backstage and just laughing and counting their money.
Can you believe that we got away with it?
We never had to study human anatomy.
We never had to practice.
We can just spatter stuff.
And it's magic.
No, I mean, you talk about the paint splattering, and I think some of them are actually in on the joke.
I mean, they must be at this point in on it.
But again, it's this idea of attributing yourself sophistication that you kind of self-delude into thinking that things have meaning just to elevate yourself over the common schlub who sees a piece of trash for a piece of trash.
But if you can elevate yourself and see the deeper meaning in that, then that must mean you're more sophisticated, you're more cultured, you're more intelligent than them.
So it's a kind of elitism.
There's an artist, an artist called Cy Twombly, Who they described in The Guardian as the most intelligent and emotionally eloquent artist of our age.
He did exactly what you just described.
He just got a big canvas, got a brush, some red paint, and just did a few lines up and down, called it Untitled again, and it sold for $46 million.
That was a few months ago with the Leonardo da Vinci painting.
That was on the same auction, but it was $46 million.
He did another one.
Which looked like he just tested a biro pen on a piece of paper, also called Untitled.
And again, that sold for a ton of money as well.
So, I mean, some of them must be in on the joke.
But as long as they can ascribe meaning to it through the pretentious language, they get away with it.
Also, you know, there's a huge financial element where they evade tax by buying art as charitable donations.
They store wealth, basically launder money in art.
A lot of people do that.
So there's the financial motive.
But also, it's this sense of elitism, and it's obscurantism.
This is the point that Saurabh Amari makes over and over.
Another example I'll give you.
There's a woman who breastfed her dogs and filmed it.
She was like in a Big Brother-style studio, if you know the TV show Big Brother.
She filmed it, breastfed her dogs.
It was described as, quote, an observation of zeitgeist through the so-called thanatopolitical dimension of contemporary biopolitical practices.
I can barely even say it.
That was how they described a woman who breastfed her dogs.
So again, it has no objective meaning or beauty.
They have to rely on obscurantism to dress it up in meaning.
They do it every single time.
You go on Tate Modern's website or you go on MoMA's website, it's a piece of trash or it's some bits of wood covered by a tarp.
The description is like three pages long about how full of meaning and sophistication it is.
So as long as they can do that, they can get away with it.
I mean, it really struck home to me when I First visited a modern art museum in Lucerne, Switzerland in, I think it was like 2008, it would have been 10 years ago now.
And it was a video playing on a small old television of a blob, like dripping into another blob from above to below.
And there were some chairs where you could sit down and watch this amazing enthralling performance, like wicker chairs painted orange.
So we sat down on these chairs within about 10 seconds were approached by people working in the gallery who said, what are you doing?
You're sitting on a piece of art.
It was just a cheap orange wicker chair.
It's like it wasn't even old or anything.
So that's when it really was brought home to me.
So you have the obscurantism, but you also have Stefan, this politicization of art, which, by the way, is happening with everything now throughout culture.
You now have ideological purity tests for movies.
For example, there was a new Bruce Willis movie, which came out recently, which was panned by the critics, but loved by the general public.
So if you go on Rotten Tomatoes, it gets about 14% from the critics and 84% from the general public.
The critics Gave it bad reviews because they filtered it through their ideological purity test and it didn't match up with the gun control narrative that they think should be being pushed by Hollywood at this time.
So you get that with art as well.
If it doesn't pass that test, it doesn't get in the gallery.
And in fact, there was one quite prominent individual who pointed this out called Ivan Massow.
He was the chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Art.
He said the art establishment had, quote, disappeared up its own arse and that most conceptual art was pretentious, self-indulgent, craftless tat that I wouldn't accept as a gift.
Now, he said that as the chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Art, he was fired within days.
So the people who point out that it's a big scam, that it's a complete self-delusion on behalf of these people who instill meaning into it, the people who point that out are dispensed with Quite quickly.
So again, it's all about incentivizing believing in that the emperor has clothes and disincentivizing people who speak out against that.
So it's a very closed society that they've got set up in the art world right now.
And that's how they police the boundaries of it.
Yeah. No, and I remember when I first went to the National Theatre School for a couple of years for acting and playwriting.
And I remember at the very beginning, there was all of this focus not on creating beauty, but on, like, they were really into, like, you can create a performance piece from found language.
And I didn't know what that meant, right?
And it's like, well, can I just write a play?
No! That would be cross and bourgeois.
So you have to do found language.
And what that is, is you go around town and you look for graffiti.
And then you try to create your play and your story and your performance piece out of graffiti.
And I'm like, just like Shakespeare did.
You know, just like Milton did.
And this, to me, was kind of astounding.
And I sort of struggled gamely along, and I thought, okay, well, we'll give it a try.
Maybe it's creative, and maybe it's going to uncork some things.
And I remember then I ended up, I was cast in a play where I had to play a fisherman who was trying to get his abusive wife not to leave him.
And it was just gross.
And it's like, if I met these people, I wouldn't want to spend any time with them.
Why on earth would I spend all this time and energy trying to recreate these horrible people on stage?
It's like, it's all villains, but there's no such thing as villains, and there are no heroes left at all.
And I just, I very clearly remember at one point when that whole pile of crap fell away from me, and I'm like, this is a terrible use of my time and skills and abilities to try to recreate authentically The petty ugliness of an unhappy married couple.
You know, and this is after coming out of a pinter play, of being in a pinter play and all that.
And when you finally get to the oasis of Shakespeare, and I played Macbeth, it's like, oh, oh, here we are back in joyful language.
Here we are back in power and depth and grandeur and meaning and connection and away from all this kitchen sink dysfunctional crap.
And this elevation of the mediocre to the pinnacle of achievement, it's not designed to elevate the mediocre, which you can't do.
It's simply designed to pull down the pinnacle.
You don't destroy Shakespeare by opposing Shakespeare.
You don't destroy Ingres by opposing Ingres.
You simply elevate crap to the top, and it happens of its own accord.
Yeah, I mean, it truly is the revenge of mediocrity.
I mean, on the subject of Shakespeare, Saurabh Bomori talks about this in his book as well.
They're actually hiring directors of theatres in London that put on all the Shakespeare plays To change the dress of the actors, to change some of the language, to change some of the themes, to fit in with modern politically correct narratives.
So they're butchering the very text, the very source document of Shakespeare, again to filter it through this lens of social justice.
So it goes beyond just things being crap and trash.
It's your choice whether to see them or not.
If you go to a Shakespeare play, You expect Shakespeare.
You expect that authentic original experience.
Now they're changing everything.
I mean, they're even doing it for like Oscar Wilde plays and dressing people up in like t-shirts and trainers just to, you know, give it that little twist.
No, people don't go to see Oscar Wilde or Shakespeare because they want a modern hip twist.
They want authentic originality.
So you have that going on.
You also have now Several examples in art galleries, I've put some in my video, where trolls go and they leave pineapples or they leave a pair of spectacles on the floor.
And the visitors to the gallery immediately start taking photographs of them, believing that it's art.
Because again, it's in an art gallery, right?
So it must be art. No.
The Stuckists said, this was a group that rails against modern art in London, specifically over the past two decades, art that has to be in a gallery to be art.
Art isn't art.
For me, art has not only to have beauty, but talent and skill.
Yes, there's taste. You can have variations of taste, but obviously it should require skill, talent.
Now, what are you time put into making it, to producing it, to be considered art?
You can't put a pineapple in a glass box or some dried noodles, as happened in another case, and call it art.
You can't leave a pair of spectacles on the floor and call it art just because of the environment in which it's in.
There was another one. They took baseball shirts and replica football jerseys and hung them up.
Didn't do anything to them, just hung them up in an art gallery.
Oh, it's art. No, it's not art.
It's apparel. It's clothing.
What are you talking about? So this idea that if you move something from one physical location to another, that makes it art.
Again, it's part of this pretentious obscurantism that people like Saurabh Amari rail against in his book.
And, you know, Stefan, people just aren't buying it.
I mean, you look at the stats.
Attendances to art galleries are down.
People are rejecting this in larger numbers.
And it's the same with architecture, if you want to move on to that, that people are just rejecting it for what it is, which is hideous and ugly.
Well, and I remember having a fierce debate in my art school days with a guy who said, okay, here's what you do.
You get a brick wall, see?
And what you do is you buy an empty frame and you put it on the brick wall.
And now you've divided the brick wall.
You know where this is going from. You divide the brick wall into two areas, you see.
They're the bricks inside the frame.
They're now art. And the stuff that's outside the frame, well, that's just a plain old wall.
And I'm like, this is...
It actually is a kind of insanity.
It is epistemological madness.
And it's sort of like... All of these gray areas that people try and widen to destroy everything.
You know, well, there are certain areas where logic can be really tricky.
Therefore, there's no such thing as logic.
Well, there's gray areas in morality.
Therefore, there's no such thing as morality.
And sure, there are gray areas where you can be creative and push the boundaries of art.
But that does not mean that bricks magically become artistic because you wrap them in a frame.
This is a kind of insanity.
It takes things to their extreme, and because people aren't particularly comfortable with some of the gray areas, they then throw out the whole damn thing.
Here's a bowl of poison.
Here's a bowl of soup.
Well, you can't really tell the difference between the two, and there may be a tiny bit of bad stuff in the soup, and there might be good soup in the poison, therefore it doesn't matter which one you drink from.
And this, to me, is the institutionalization of Of a kind of daring insanity.
Like, I'm gonna be insane.
I'm gonna see if you're gonna fall for it.
It's a virus that's gonna spread through my art, and if you could pay me real well for it, that makes the whole damn thing profitable.
Well, it goes back to this whole thing about busting taboos.
It's like the Turner Prize a couple of years ago gave the first prize to a giant ass because it busted a taboo.
It gets to a point Where the avant-garde is no longer the avant-garde, it becomes the establishment.
If you do the same thing over and over again, you're busting taboos.
Oh, you just busted another taboo.
I'm shocked. Oh my God. That's not avant-garde anymore.
If everyone else is doing it, that becomes the establishment.
Also, you know, it's okay to bust the taboo of creating piss Christ.
Which was like this figure on the crucifix, you know, submerged in urine.
That's okay. You can bust that taboo.
But if you create some artwork where it's like little Sylvanian family dolls dressed up in Uh, jihadist gear with ISIS flags and machine guns, as was the case in this one exhibit in London that got banned because it might offend somebody.
So you can't bust that taboo because it might offend people because it's politically incorrect, but you can bust this one because offending Christians is fine.
You know, that's, that's not a problem.
So again, the, the, the, at the root of it is complete hypocrisy.
You can only offend It's acceptable groups who the left has now deemed it's okay to offend.
So again, it's all filtered through this.
It's filtered through the lens of social justice.
And it kind of harkens back in a way, Stefan, to socialist realism, which was the Art in the communist era that exalted, you know, Stalin and Lenin, etc.
That was incentivized because if anyone tried to produce anything else, they wouldn't get rewarded.
In some cases they get put in jail.
So it's a throwback to totalitarianism in that you have to create art that reflects The modern, politically correct, acceptable way of thinking, if you deviate from that, you will be punished.
You may not be thrown in prison for the time being, but your art won't get allowed in the gallery.
And in the case of the Sylvanian family's ISIS production, it got banned.
It got shut down. Because again, who's it going to offend?
ISIS? Is it going to offend terrorists?
I mean, who's going to get offended by that?
But again, it shows that you have to adhere to certain orthodoxies to pass their ideological purity test, while they still claim to be avant-garde.
No, you haven't been avant-garde for decades.
It's like when I say conservatism is the new counterculture.
It is, because you can't be the dominant culture and the counterculture at the same time, which is what we have now with the Institutions of media, academia, and the art world, you can't be both.
You have to give up one.
So it's the same thing in the art world.
They're not the avant-garde anymore, but they still cling to it by trying to make things even more bizarre, even more asinine, opaque, and obscure, and shocking.
But again, if you try to bust certain taboos, you'll be excommunicated immediately.
It's partly why, to me, movies have become so dull and predictable.
Because movies are now, they go through all of these committees and these marketing groups and these focus groups and these feedback groups to say, is there anything in here that's going to be a tripwire for a particular social justice group?
And if there is, of course, it has to be scrubbed, it has to be taken out, which is why you get this boring repetition of Nazis as the only bad guys, right?
And this, to me, has become so dull.
You know, oh, there's a single mom in the movie.
Well, she's going to be heroic, and she's going to be wonderful, and it's all going to be the man's fault as to why the family didn't work out, and...
If there's going to be a guy in the movie, a family guy in the movie, he's going to be kind of goofy and he's going to be kind of silly and the woman's going to be in charge and all that because, you know, heaven forbid that they do anything that might challenge or trigger any of the social justice groups.
And this paint-by-numbers, reactionary, committee-ruled-by-fear approach to art as a whole, it happens in TV, it happens...
If there's going to be a group that's made fun of, it's almost always going to be white Christians or a male and so on.
And this... Incredible predictability.
It's like watching a train go down a track, wondering where it's going to end up.
It's this awesome, staggering lack of surprise that occurs in movies.
And I think this is one of the reasons why, of course, movies are dying on the vine, why attendance goes down, why Oscar interest goes down.
It's getting weirder and weirder, but entirely unpredictable.
And the last time I went to a movie and was really surprised by something that came up in it, honestly, Fight Club?
I mean, it's been a long time.
No, exactly. And that's why, what is it, 15 years since they had, it was like a 15-year low of cinema attendance for Hollywood, the summer just gone.
Even though populations increased, People are turning off.
They do polls of NFL viewers who specifically say, look, this is making us turn off.
We don't want politics inserted into absolutely everything.
Same thing with the Oscars, same thing with the Emmys, record low ratings, because people anticipate, given that it happens every single time, everyone's going to get up on stage and insert their own narrative into things, which is particularly rich with Hollywood, of course, because Harvey Weinstein, that entire scandal was born of the same Hollywood stars who now get up and virtue signal about it, from them ignoring it and in some cases covering it up for him in the first place.
So it's just the rampant hypocrisy, but Americans are turning away from it.
You now get certain movies, I think there was one called Kingsman 2, which I think was a British production, where again the director said, He was pressured to put certain social justice identity politics narratives It wasn't even political,
but it's just the fact that he refused to insert these certain dogmas and narratives into the script, that he was rejected by that whole crowd.
But again, the overarching thing is that it disincentivizes people just making movies for the script For the dialogue, for the actors, for the characters, that's what makes a good movie.
But again, movies are getting worse and people are turning away because it's being more based around this, you have to insert this social justice narrative or that one.
And now from what I've researched from a couple of other videos I did, there are at least some directors, producers, writers who are turning away from that and still finding an audience.
So there is Some hope with that, which is the same with architecture, whereby a lot of the neo-traditional architects are trying to bring it back.
Having been rejected by the modern art world because they were symbolic of colonialism and racism or whatever, it's now getting more currency and they're bringing it back and we're starting to see at least some new buildings designed in that classicist neo-traditional style.
So there is a kind of resurgence going on across the board in terms of the reassertion It's still very small, but at least people are talking about it.
I mean, with the architecture angle, I made a video about that, and immediately, within about two weeks, the Boston Globe and other publications came out and said, one headline was, why is the alt-right so angry about architecture?
Right. Number one, I'm not alt-right.
I can tell people that until I'm blue in the face.
If you know what the real alt-right is, then you know I'm not alt-right.
You know, Stefan Molyneux is not alt-right.
People know that, but they just throw this label in, obviously.
But again, The video was a rant against Le Corbusier, this French Swiss architect in the 20th century, who was a collaborator with the Nazis.
He was part of the Vichy regime in France that collaborated with the Nazis.
So he would have been all right.
The whole video was railing against him.
He was a fascist collaborator.
But again, I'm alt-right because I criticize giant carbuncle, brutalist, horrific tower blocks because I say they're ugly.
And they create crime, stress, and despair, but that makes me alt-right.
So now there's this whole narrative after that one video.
And I think Dana Lash, who you obviously heard of, she worked with the NRA, she put out a video, I think it was with the NRA or another conservative group, where she just mentioned Like a resurgence of traditional architecture, a rejection of ugliness.
And they said that she was part of the alt-right conspiracy against modern architecture.
So again, it just feeds into their absolute hysteria that everything has to be politicized.
This wasn't even really a political argument from me, although you can...
Bring it back to social engineering through architecture, which I talked about in the video.
But it's mainly just about an aesthetic thing.
It's about objective beauty standards and appreciating true objective beauty.
But the fact that they tried to drag it back to politics yet again shows how nervous they are about this kind of wider cultural resurgence that we're trying to You know, push through, especially to young people.
And because it is resonating, I mean, those modern art videos that I made, everybody who meets me for the first time, oh, I loved your video about modern art.
I'm like, well, I made three. Didn't you watch the other two?
But it's every single time.
It's the modern art video.
That's what people resonate with most because very few other people are saying that it's ugly.
Very few people, especially on YouTube.
I think there's one like Prager University video, which has been popular for a long time.
It's got a couple of million views.
But apart from that, apart from a few other people, nobody's really talking about this, but it is enjoying a kind of resurgence.
And I get a lot of people who resonate with these videos.
The people who I meet for the first time often come up to me and say, that was how I came across your work was the modern art video.
So it's reaching new people.
It's resonating with people.
And that's why we need to talk about it.
It's important. It is.
And the fact that the left focuses so much on degrading beauty, well, the left is pretty good at what they do.
They are a worthy adversary because they know what they're doing.
And if this is something they're focusing on, they're focusing on it for a particular reason.
And the same thing is happening.
I used to love going to see stand-up comedy.
Because I liked to be shocked.
I got new ideas, new inspirations, and I really enjoyed the wordsmith assembly of a really great joke, or a really great bit.
And I just... Oh, Paul, I mean, I just got weary of it.
I just... Like, you know what's going to come out.
You know the perspectives that are going to be there.
It's kind of grindingly repetitive, and the butt of the jokes is always the same groups, and always the other same groups are elevated, and...
I mean, I guess comedians, they thirst for edginess, and they're about as edgy as a wave.
And that has sort of...
I've sort of run out of enthusiasm, with a few exceptions.
You know, I've got some people on my show who I think are great comedians, Owen Benjamin and others.
But it's just...
Kind of dull. And I think when people get bored, they start looking for new things, which is where people like you and I come in with something different to offer.
But there is a great yawning boredom that comes from overexposure to ugliness that doesn't seem to happen when you're overexposed to beauty.
Yeah, and I think a lot of that is related to the left and leftists in general.
They hate themselves. I mean, every time I've looked into the background of somebody who's viciously attacked me on Twitter over and over again...
They always almost brag about the fact that they've got problems with depression, which is horrible, obviously.
But they're very depressed.
They're very self-loathing people.
So they kind of resonate more with ugliness than beauty.
Now, obviously, they're very vicious, too.
So it's kind of a vicious cycle.
But yeah, those people are attracted to that kind of ugliness.
So it is a very personal thing with them, I think, whereas conservatives tend to be You know, more self-loving, more loving of other people in my experience, so they're attracted to more beauty.
But going back to the comedy thing, I mean, British comedy in the early to mid-90s used to be the most edgy stuff imaginable.
It was great. It was probably the best comedy on earth.
There was one comedian, I think he's called, Lawrence is his surname, he was like excommunicated from the comedy world because he made like one joke about immigration.
It's completely policed, completely patrolled.
In America, it wasn't so bad.
But over the past few years, it's got a little bit worse.
Of course, you have Amy Schumer, who is the most unfunny individual on planet Earth.
Her Netflix special gets terrible, dreadful reviews.
And she comes out and says it's like an alt-right conspiracy.
No, it's because for an hour and a half, you're up there on stage talking about how your vagina smells.
For the first time, maybe a chuckle, but after you've said it 20 times, it's no longer funny.
Get some new material.
Now, of course, she stole a bunch of material from other comedians, but it's that kind of strident, vicious, third-wave feminist stuff where she's castigating the crowd.
She's viciously ripping into hecklers.
She's not in a In a charming, in an intellectual way, taking hecklers on and turning it around on them and winning the argument and making a joke out of it.
She's just like pointing, shaming people, getting them kicked out of the audience.
It's vicious. It's ugly.
And she's not funny.
But then she gets up and says it's a big conspiracy that she gets like two out of five stars on Netflix.
No, it's because you're not funny.
And as he said, it's because comedians now take fewer and fewer risks because they're Petrified.
Same with musicians.
Same with actors.
Absolutely petrified of saying anything outside the boundaries of prescribed political correctness.
I'm old enough to remember in the late 80s when artists, when musicians, Used to come out occasionally and say edgy things, and it would be in the newspaper for a couple of days, it'd die down.
They were generally more interesting people, way more interesting people, especially musicians.
Now, of course, with the witch on Twitter, everybody's absolutely petrified.
Their careers will get destroyed overnight.
So nobody says anything interesting because it might taint their careers forever.
They're making everything so boring.
This is the point I make over and over again.
Social justice warriors want to make the world boring.
It's not just about political control.
It's about ruining joy and fun to the point now where the only artists or musicians who come out and say edgy stuff or populist stuff All the ones who have already had their success decades ago.
So it's people like, you know, Noel Gallagher will come out and slam Islamic terrorism and mass immigration.
Morrissey will come out in support of Brexit.
He'll say, look, people voted for it.
Let's just do it. It doesn't even support Brexit.
You know, Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols will come out and say the people voted for Brexit.
Let's get on with it. So the only people now with the nerve to come out and say anything slightly controversial are the people who have already had their success decades ago and don't need to rely on it and don't have that much of their career left.
So they're making everything boring.
They're making everything joyless.
They've done it with architecture.
They've done it with art.
And this is why we need to take them on, because we want to live in actual, diverse, interesting societies where people can create things that are inspirational and aspirational.
And I mean, it's just not happening anymore.
No, this is the weird thing where they say diversity is a strength, but if you disagree with me, I will destroy you.
And well, you kind of got to pick one from column A or one from column B. I don't think you get both together.
And this leads us, I guess, to the topic of censorship, which we've talked about, of course, in the art world.
That's more ostracism.
It's not outright censorship, but although online certainly more so.
But there really does seem to be a push.
It obviously escalated post-Trump and it escalated post-Brexit because I think the left realized how much alternative media had an influence on those two particular events, which are the two black eyes that they feel smarting from the most.
But it also seems to be escalating, Maybe it's a gear up to the midterms in America.
Maybe it's something else. But it does seem to be gearing up at the moment where the steps that are taken to encircle and hopefully, you know, wet finger out the candle of thought that is flickering in alternative media outlets really does seem to be on the march right now.
Well, I mean, the past few months, it's intensified massively.
I mean, we're talking about on an almost weekly basis, like Infowars gets hit with a new lawsuit every single week at this point.
They do financial sabotage.
They try and take out Breitbart sponsors.
They do social media censorship.
They hit you with the bans.
It is really a purge.
It's not just a purge in terms of censorship on Twitter or YouTube or whatever.
It's a purge in terms of It's undermining people's financial basis, undermining their careers, especially with lawsuits.
Like, we're being sued by the creator of Pepe the Frog, even though in a 2015 interview he said, everyone can profit off of Pepe the Frog.
So if somebody designs a poster with a little Pepe in the background, we didn't even design the poster, we sell it, now we're getting sued.
It's all frivolous.
We're going to win all of them.
But again, it keeps you on the ropes.
It keeps you on the back foot.
Every day, if you get up and think, oh, I'm going to have to appeal this video being censored, or I'm going to have to appeal being suspended from Twitter.
You know, Crowder just got suspended for seven days.
It keeps you on the back foot.
It keeps you from getting on the front foot with your narrative and the subjects that you want to talk about.
And again, it's just boring.
It's boring to whine about, oh, I'm being censored once again.
People get jaded with it.
So again, It comes back, Stefan, to if we have a level playing field, right, if the game is not rigged in terms of social media traction, we win, they lose.
Because they have no strong argument because they haven't flexed their muscles in terms of debate and argument for years and years.
I mean, this is why Trump won.
Niall Ferguson, noted British historian, came out a few days ago and said, look, Trump would not have won without Facebook.
He would not have won because they used Facebook so well to geolocate and target certain voters.
Trump has lost 45% of his Facebook traffic in terms of engagement since Facebook made this algorithm change in early February.
We've experienced the same thing.
There was a study by Western Journalism.
They found that since this algorithm change in early February, Liberal sites are plus 2% in terms of engagement.
Conservative sites are minus 14%.
Now, if you take out Fox News, which benefited for whatever reason, they got like plus 34% since February, you take out Fox News, you look at the top 12 conservative sites and how they're performing on Facebook in terms of engagement, it's minus 32%.
So conservative websites have basically lost A third of their traction on Facebook in a little over one month alone.
Trump's lost almost half of his engagement.
So this really is an info war.
I mean, there have been studies, there was one by a psychologist called Robert Epstein, Who found that Google altering their algorithm for rankings for search results, for example, for two different political candidates, he said, quote, could determine the outcome of upwards of 25% of all national elections.
So simply by putting positive news stories about one candidate above the negative ones and vice versa for the other candidate, they could change the outcome of national elections in 25% of cases.
And they've probably got it fine tuned even better Since that study happened, which I think was over a year ago.
So the power of Silicon Valley to control not only reality, but the outcome of national elections has never been more prominent, more of a concern, which is why even like Niall Ferguson, who is a pretty mainstream historian, he's a conservative, but Even now he's warning about it, saying that, you know, if we do nothing, you can forget about 2018, you can forget about 2020.
So, I mean, we can go on to solutions, but it really is the battleground, the intensification of this battle has really come to the fore in the past couple of months, not just through censorship, but also through this kind of financial sabotage, lawsuits, boycotting people's sponsors.
They're really going hell for leather, and everyone's feeling it right now.
Yeah, and of course, none of these things are arguments.
If what people say is so ridiculous, is so anti-rational, is so unsupported by data, then that should be pretty easy to point out.
You know, like if there's a singing competition and you've got a cheat, the cheat is only going to yodel for the best singer.
Like, interfere with their singing, interfere with what they're doing, because they're reckoned.
So whoever they're interfering with have the best arguments.
Otherwise, they wouldn't bother interfering with them, and certainly they wouldn't interfere in this underhanded, sneaky way.
So let's talk a little bit about solutions, because the one other thing I think is that interesting, you know, back in the day, you know, the phone company couldn't say, we don't like your politics, you don't get a phone number.
And the post office generally couldn't say, we don't like your politics, we're not going to deliver your mail.
There is certain protections under the law for being common carriers, protections from liability and so on.
But it seems to me once you start putting your fingers on the scale and saying, well, we like these politics, these politics are bad, you're starting to interfere, and it seems to me that you would lose some of the protections under the law as a common carrier the moment that you start putting your finger on the scale.
And I don't think that these social justice warriors are in there.
And then they're in there to modify, to change, to advance their interests.
But in the long run, they're going to destroy these companies.
If there's any vestige of the free market left, these companies are going to be destroyed because people don't like to be controlled and manipulated.
And once they understand how much these companies are manipulating what they see, they're going to go to free market alternatives, to uncensored alternatives where the butcher doesn't have His finger on the scale.
But that transition, there can be a lot of damage done between those two points.
Yeah, and there's the difficulty between, yeah, we could all mass migrate to all these different platforms.
We could quit YouTube and go to BitChute.
We could quit Twitter and all go to Gab.
And it'd be a big symbolic thing if we did it, but we're no longer on the battlefield.
You have to ride it until the wheels fall off.
That's my attitude. So I think they're going to end up banning most of us eventually on whatever different platforms.
I mean, they've already got to the point where Steven Crowder, who is hardly an alt-right extremist, is banned for seven days because of a video In which he used the word, I'm not even going to say it because this video will probably get banned, F-A-G-G-O-T. By the way, you can't use that word on Facebook.
You'll get an instant 30-day ban.
So, you know, he blurred out people's faces in the video.
There were no privacy violations.
So they're at the point where they're banning Steven Crowder, like a Fox News-style guy, like a national talk show host for seven days because of a video.
I mean, it's only going to get more constricted.
They banned Britain first off of Facebook.
People say, oh, who cares? They were extremists, whatever.
They locked them up. Well, Newsflash, you're next.
You're next. I mean, they're on the fringes.
They took the heat. Now they're coming for everyone else.
But in terms of solutions, there's a big part of this, I think, is the Communications Decency Act.
Now, this was brought up by Ted Cruz in a hearing last month, and they do have hearings with Twitter executives, YouTube executives.
The one, obviously, that made a few headlines was they had a A Twitter executive up there who was being grilled by a Democratic lawmaker, and he was saying to him after the New York attack where the guy run over like 10, 11, 12 people, killed a bunch of people back in October.
It was Halloween, that attack.
He said, why is this Infowars link at the top of Twitter when you click on the hashtag New York terror attack or whatever it was?
And the article It was about an Imam, the Imam of Peace, you probably heard about him on Twitter, who warned Mayor de Blasio about radicalization of terrorists in New York.
That was all the article was about, completely factual.
He posted the letter where he warned de Blasio on Twitter.
I wrote an article about it.
You cannot argue whether this was factual.
Whether you think it wasn't that important, fair enough.
But an Imam did warn Mayor de Blasio about radicalization in mosques in New York last year.
But he got up there, this Democratic congressman, and he was absolutely perplexed at how this got to the top of Twitter's algorithm.
And they immediately said, oh, don't worry.
We took care of that before lunchtime.
It was gone. So they are listening to lawmakers.
It's just the Democratic ones are far more aggressive in holding them to task.
In terms of stuff that they want censored, we need Republican lawmakers to step up to the plate and do the same thing.
I was talking to Alan Bakari of Breitbart, the Breitbart tech editor, about this.
And he says it's because the lawmakers just aren't hearing it from the constituents that this is an issue that they care about.
So they need to hear about it.
Ted Cruz did bring it up last month.
There's the Communications Decency Act, Section 2030, which says that These social media companies have to remain politically neutral, otherwise they lose their legal immunity for user content.
So if somebody gets on YouTube and starts posting death threats, YouTube could be legally responsible for those threats.
Currently they're not, but only if they remain politically neutral, which if they're being staffed by thousands of If we have SPLC-instructor-trained individuals who think that Tim Pool is an alt-right extremist when he's like some polite liberal filmmaker, then we're going to have problems.
And that's not being politically neutral.
So I think there's an avenue with that.
But again, it's just about bringing it to the attention of lawmakers.
We can't just whine about it on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube.
We need to put it in front of them.
A big march on Silicon Valley.
I suggested, oh, why don't we have a march in DC? And it's like, well, everyone has a march in DC every Saturday.
It wouldn't stand out. I don't think from my memory, I mean, it's probably happened, but not on any great scale, that there's been a significant protest march in Silicon Valley on the headquarters of Facebook or Google or whoever.
So I think just symbolically, that would be a good move.
Also, You know, an Internet Bill of Rights, just a basic Bill of Rights that's in accordance with the First Amendment of the Constitution is a way to go.
There was the SOPA protest back a few years ago, which was massively successful.
So maybe something modeled along those lines.
But I think mainly it's about getting these concerns in front of lawmakers so they can strike a little bit of fear into these Twitter and YouTube executives in terms of, watch out, we're watching you.
If you don't remain politically neutral, we're going to come after you.
We're going to come after you with legislation, with teeth.
So it's about making lawmakers aware of it and getting it in front of them so then they can grill these social media executives like the Democrats are in calling for censorship.
Yeah, and people don't understand, I think, I mean, I served on a board of a company that I co-founded, and you have a strong fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders.
In other words, if you follow a political agenda that harms the value of the shares, either through existing legislation that's put into place or even the threat of legislation, Well, you are no longer fulfilling your mandate, which is to maximize the value of the shareholders' investment by all legal and productive means at your disposal.
And so you can, even if this starts to become an issue, companies may change simply because the board, the executives are going to face liability if they pursue a radical political agenda that harms the value of the shareholders' holdings.
There's a lot that can happen even prior to The law coming in and but you do need to have the government start to circle these people in order to have this kind of repercussion happen and there's a lot that can be done and it needs to be focused on and yeah just you're right just complaining about it is only going to do so much.
But there do need to be some activism.
There does need to be activism. There do need to be boots on the ground where lawmakers can see them so that this issue becomes more front and center because this death by a thousand paper cuts, this death by endless clouds of mosquitoes, it slowly saps people's energy.
As you say, it puts you on your back foot.
It slowly saps people's energy.
It saps their spontaneity.
It saps their willingness to approach the landmines of controversial topics.
And if we start to self-censor, we've lost the battle already.
Exactly. And it's also about deflating the contrived moral panics that they've set up to, you know, justify some of this censorship, like the whole Russian bots thing.
They had a purge of Russian bots on Twitter a few weeks ago.
I lost like 2000 followers.
They all came back.
Because people had to verify their identity, so I didn't lose any followers in the end.
So again, that proved that that was completely contrived moral panic.
There aren't vast numbers of Russian bots controlling everything on Twitter, because all these followers came back after proving their IDs.
How can bots prove their IDs?
They were real people.
So it's about deflating that.
It's about deflating the fake news thing.
They're now talking about on YouTube, putting up little boxes with Wikipedia pages on conspiracy videos.
Facebook tried that.
Doesn't work.
Just doesn't work. Makes people more likely to believe what's in the video.
I mean, they've done studies on And this is why a lot of big mainstream websites removed comment sections in articles, because the studies found that people would judge the validity, the credibility of the article based on the comments, not the content of the actual article.
So then they just removed the comment sections altogether.
In many cases, vice media being prime amongst them.
So that's not going to work.
The big threat is algorithm based.
It's shadow banning. It's when you can't really prove or tell that it's happening.
So they've done it on Google.
I will search for a headline.
If I write an article, I want to flashback to an article I wrote about a similar subject before, get some information out of that.
I type in the headline, type in Infowars, type in my name, And it's like Salon.com and Snopes on the first page every time about a completely unrelated subject.
But just because I put my name and Infowars into the Google search, it throws it up on the first page.
And as I was talking about earlier, you know, the big study proved that they can swing elections by this.
So it's the algorithm changes that are going to be the big thing, which is what they did with demonetization.
People have made a case quite eloquently that Demonetized videos are lower ranked in the algorithm, so they don't get suggested as much on YouTube.
So you can never really prove that, but it's a way that they can do it in the background.
I think that is going to be the biggest threat, the algorithm changes, rather than just banning people outright, because that's too obvious.
And that's what Niall Ferguson warned about in a talk that he did a few days ago.
So we have to concentrate on the algorithm changes above anything else.
Yeah, and it's going to keep new voices from emerging.
People like yourself and myself, who have a fairly established following, we can ride these storms, but I think for a lot of people, they do a great video, they try to get it out there, and it just never gains much traction, so maybe they never end up quitting their day job or whatever.
Doing it more full-time.
There's a prevention of entrants who have, I'm sure, enormous talent into the public discourse.
And these are all soft ways of undermining things rather than outright banning things.
But it is like an undertow.
Like if you have a swum against a current, you can get there, but you're really exhausted by the time you do.
And maybe some people won't get there at all.
Fighting that kind of undertow.
This vague suppression.
You're not showing up in suggested videos.
Maybe view cancer down.
I mean, these are all... You can't prove them.
They're very subtle. I think some of us have the willpower and following to muscle through, but I think a lot of people may feel like, oh, well, I guess my message isn't really resonating.
I guess I'll stop doing videos when, you know, not as recently as a couple of years ago, they might have had a clear path to success.
Yeah, and I think on the positive side with that, now that people are basically making no money off of YouTube anymore, Steemit and DTube, they financially reward creators for their video.
And it's not an inconsequential amount of money from what I've seen.
If you can build a successful platform on those platforms, It's worth it financially.
So in terms of incentivizing it, that will be an encouragement to people on those platforms.
BitChute, I've noticed, has grown quite a bit over the past few weeks, few months.
So I think that's definitely an avenue to go down.
So we do need to support alt tech.
Bearing in mind that we can't just evacuate these platforms entirely, the big tech platforms, because we need to be on the field.
We need to be out on the battleground, as I said, until the wheels fall off.
I mean, that's what I'm going to do. I literally don't know how to do anything else.
So the only way they're going to shut me up is to lock me up in a cage at this point.
So, I mean, forget about it.
I'm never going to stop. And that's the attitude that we should all have.
All right. Well, I really, really appreciate your time today, Paul.
A great pleasure, as always, just to remind everyone, youtube.com forward slash prisonplanetlive, twitter.com forward slash prisonplanet, and facebook.com forward slash Paul Joseph Watson.
The links are all below.
Thanks, my friend. Always a great and enjoyable chat.
