RadixJournal - Confidence Men

00:00:00.000 QAnon arises as a kind of justification for Trump. It coincided with basically Charlottesville 0.83

00:00:09.540 happening and kind of, you know, diminishing severely the brand of the alt-right and so on,

00:00:17.480 because there was talk of, you know, Ted Cruz going on saying these are terrorists and blah,

00:00:22.120 blah, blah. And it also came about at a time when I was criticizing Trump pretty heavily. And there

00:00:31.480 was a lot of kind of, okay, Trump, you need to put up or shut up. Like you are in charge. You've got

00:00:38.460 Congress, you've got the presidency. And what are you doing? You're doing Paul Ryan's agenda. And

00:00:43.260 then you're signing on this omnibus, which he supported and then decided to, you know,

00:00:50.060 renege his support later and very similar to what was going on this past week. So it occurred as

00:00:56.920 this kind of conspiracy theory of like, trust the plan. Like don't criticize him on the basis of

00:01:03.760 objective reality. You know, don't read the news. The news is all fake. There's a kernel of truth to

00:01:09.780 that, of course, but the news is all fake. It's all the theater and he's secretly operating behind

00:01:15.800 the scenes. And it increasingly became more and more religious for lack of a better word. It developed

00:01:23.500 a kind of theology of what Trump is about. And it created a network of people who are, as we say,

00:01:33.400 like there are, what is it? One in 30 people you meet as a sociopath, maybe. But like one in 30 people

00:01:41.360 you meet might be kind of like a nice person, but it's actually a kind of unhinged lunatic.

00:01:47.500 And I mentioned this to the group before you got involved, Charles, but, you know, I met this woman

00:01:54.720 just on the streets of Whitefish. Very nice. I liked her. Attractive woman in her 30s. 1.00

00:02:02.380 And she handed me this book that she had handwritten book, a little pink notebook. And it is

00:02:11.860 unhinged to say the least. It is this weird Catholic Trumpist theology that she is, like, 0.89

00:02:22.340 these normal people you meet don't want to scare anyone. But like, when you go sit in a bar or a

00:02:29.000 coffee shop, one of these people right next to you believes that Trump is the son of God.

00:02:36.680 It's incredible.

00:02:37.380 I have to hear what you're saying, right? Like, I like...

00:02:40.200 And let me finish it. This is the cherry on top. So they created this constellation of people.

00:02:46.080 And whatever the motives might have been in like 2018, they can ship. You create the network,

00:02:52.060 and then you can use it in other ways. And January 6th, similar to Charlottesville, you know,

00:02:58.760 greatly diminished the brand of MAGA. But it still is there. It can still be used and actualized in a

00:03:09.680 certain circumstance. And you can spend a year feeding these people new propaganda and new kind

00:03:15.420 drops and theology and use them in another way. I mean, even to go back to the alt-right thing. So

00:03:22.320 the alt-right kind of got busted. I signed off. I was just like, look, I'm not doing this.

00:03:29.460 This is not doing... This is not what I care about, et cetera. But like, the alt-right network still

00:03:35.720 existed. And so like, just to hit the Russian angle a little bit, I mean, Charles Bousman is a long

00:03:42.940 time, at the very least, pro-Kremlin journalist. He was at January 6th. TRS, which is probably the

00:03:53.820 best example. I mean, with me, it was just like, I'm Richard Spencer, that it's all about me. With TRS,

00:04:02.720 that is a real network of hundreds, kind of thousands, you know, kind of concentric circles of

00:04:09.360 activism and enthusiasm. Charles Bousman is some kind of Kremlin asset or someone who wants to be a

00:04:20.300 Kremlin asset. Hold on real quick. I think it's pretty clear that he... He utilized the alt-right

00:04:25.820 network. Yes. And he absolutely... And look, this is a guy who days after January 6th was writing these

00:04:37.280 apology pieces on his website about how I'm not actually racist. I just happen to be best friends

00:04:45.620 with Mike Enoch and I'm getting... I'm using them throughout 2020 on Trump's behalf. He was also

00:04:52.260 writing how the American people have woken up at last. They understand that Russian Christians are 0.99

00:04:59.380 their friends. We need to, you know, all engage in this attack on the satanic liberals and so on. 0.75

00:05:06.720 He fled the country immediately after J6. This was also a guy who was at the 2016 NBI conference. I

00:05:16.120 was hobnobbing with him. He wanted to get involved with me. He asked me about donors. I found that

00:05:23.180 extremely suspicious and I kind of cut him off. But he's just... You have these... So you have a network

00:05:30.780 network and the network is still in place. Like, even if you have a shit show like Charlottesville or 1.00

00:05:36.680 January 6th, the network is still there and you can kind of rebuild it, kind of change it, add 0.99

00:05:43.440 different propaganda and use it again. You know, to go back to the J6 thing, Liz Cheney is both like 1.00

00:05:51.680 attacking vehemently Donald Trump for good reason to a large extent. But she's also kind of

00:05:58.240 whitewashing everything around it. And all of that stuff around it can still be used in different

00:06:06.120 ways. And so, like, I don't think there's going to be another J6 in the sense that I don't think 0.97

00:06:12.120 there's going to be another attempt to, like, rehearse what they did. Because what they did

00:06:16.340 clearly fail. But, like, there's going to be another actualization or operationalization of

00:06:24.800 the network, which is absolutely still intact and absolutely just as unhinged and drug addled as it

00:06:33.800 ever was. I don't disagree with anything you've just said. I mean, I would raise the question,

00:06:38.660 though, of, you know, I sometimes wonder, like, how many, how often social movements

00:06:44.720 are themselves useful or sort of cultivated or created by foreign actors or by foreign compromised

00:06:55.520 people. Yeah. Right. And I sometimes, you know, we have this sort of idea that there's these sort of

00:07:02.160 spontaneous protests. Right. And yet, you know, you notice, like, a lot of the rioting during,

00:07:07.580 like, the Black Lives Matter summer, that some of the people rioting were, you know, you look at

00:07:13.200 them closely and you see they have tattoos from this black gang called God's Disciples. Right. Which 1.00

00:07:20.120 moves a lot of fentanyl on behalf of China and on behalf of others. Right. And so one wonders if,

00:07:26.480 like, a lot of these things that we understand are not themselves, like, created or shepherded in

00:07:34.640 different ways. And, you know, I'll note that, like, so, so, you know, Emmanuel Macron tweeted right

00:07:41.100 before the commencement of the January 6th hearings, which I wouldn't say that they're quite a show

00:07:45.920 trial. I would say they're more a stage play. Right. Or a fake because is the phrase that I like to use.

00:07:51.600 Right. They're a pretext for giving the public some window on what was really going on. Right.

00:07:59.060 Didn't quite work, in my view, in part because, you know, Liz Cheney, whose family made millions of 1.00

00:08:04.840 dollars off of the Chinese buying the stock of of Halliburton. Right. I mean, she's she's very much 0.51

00:08:13.240 complicit in a lot of these things. And Adam Kinzinger, who is Mr. Tea Party. I mean, there's a lot of weird

00:08:18.760 stuff around a lot of these characters. And one wonders if maybe perhaps they were sort of like

00:08:24.940 told to be on this committee. Right. You'll note that, like, none of them are in more powerful

00:08:30.260 positions. Right. After the committee. Right. Liz Cheney's career is effectively over. Kinzinger's 1.00

00:08:35.460 career is effectively over. You know, Adam Schiff, who was supposed to be, you know, who was hoping to

00:08:41.060 be leader of the Democrats was bested by Hakeem Jeffries. Right. So there's there's these sort of

00:08:47.200 like larger questions here. And many of the people who are on the committee have have retired.

00:08:52.880 And so my sense is, yes, it was a fake because. But what I think what we're going to see is we're

00:09:01.040 going to see by necessity an increase in the surveillance state. And I think whereas I might

00:09:10.720 have thought like 10 years ago or 20 years ago, even that that was a terrible imposition,

00:09:15.560 I actually kind of think that, like, it's a necessity now because of these crazy people around

00:09:21.940 us, many of whom need proper help so that they don't end up homeless on the street. Right. Or they

00:09:28.540 don't end up like drug addled and dead. Right. From fentanyl. And so I think what we're going to see

00:09:35.320 is we're going to see the state wanting to peer much more deeply into the psyches of some of these

00:09:40.700 people. And I think that's probably a good thing. You know, I think, you know, you look at like the

00:09:47.220 suicide numbers. Right. And how they've been on the on the upswing. Right. During the gen, you know,

00:09:52.780 basically during covid. Right. When people were locked down and going crazy on their phones all the

00:09:56.620 time. And so you see a lot of suicides from that. You see a lot of people just like losing their grip

00:10:03.700 on reality. And I think, you know, since since 2020, since Trump is out, you've seen Biden go after

00:10:10.040 the tech companies, which are psyoping everyone. I mean, his FTC is attacking Activision, the largest

00:10:16.020 game game provider in the country, which is itself backed by Steve Wynn. Right. That the sort of

00:10:22.040 mobster with Chinese ties. He's going hard against Facebook. Right. He's now going hard against Elon.

00:10:28.020 And like, I mean, this Biden fellow doesn't fuck around, you know. Right. And who can blame him? 0.99

00:10:34.560 Like a lot of these tech billionaires who are, you know, they're foreigners. Right. They're they're

00:10:39.780 literally alien to our system. Right. And they don't really have a loyalty to our civic discourse

00:10:47.760 or to our society. Right. They they require slaves to feed their their, you know, imperial 0.97

00:10:55.360 and commercial objectives. And you can see that with like the low wages they pay their workers

00:11:01.840 or how they pay people in equity to to the child slaves that that Elon, you know, you know,

00:11:08.580 benefits from and the Democratic Republic of Congo. So to my mind, this is not the least bit surprising.

00:11:16.600 Right. What what what's surprising to me is that I mean, it's I hate to say this, like it's surprising to

00:11:21.680 me that people are surprised. Right. And I think it's because as Americans and I think, you know,

00:11:28.320 she calls her book Confidence Man. Right. Haberman. But really, it's like we have a generation of

00:11:34.840 confidence men and women. Right. Who the fake until you make it, the sort of hustler, you know,

00:11:40.960 culture. Yeah. The the sort of like technologies that aren't really real, like in the form of

00:11:47.680 cryptocurrency. Yeah. You know, we have fake artificial intelligence. Yeah. Well, artificial

00:11:55.280 intelligence, which is which is real to some extent. I'm not a full on denier. But well, it's interesting.

00:12:01.540 Right. How on the on the on the A.I. front, they don't want to expand A.I. to facial recognition

00:12:07.460 or to genetics. Right. Which are two areas in which the Chinese are possibly ahead of us. 0.99

00:12:13.340 So it's interesting, like the way the debate in the United States is very much shaped by these

00:12:17.540 forces or like, why is Sam Altman like the head of OpenAI? Why is OpenAI worth 20 billion dollars?

00:12:24.520 What is it really doing? Right. With all of its Microsoft ties. And Microsoft has its own tie ins with

00:12:30.980 the Russians and with with the Chinese and with the Israelis. Right. Through the Maxwell kind of 0.52

00:12:36.280 connections. You know, so anyway, my my larger point, if I had to like really some, you know,

00:12:42.800 explain it is like we need a counterintelligence operation for our crazies and for our billionaires 0.85

00:12:49.260 and for our crazy billionaires. Yeah. And if we don't get that, like we are basically importing 0.98

00:12:56.320 an oligarchy on the one hand and a madhouse on the other. And that is very disturbing to me.

00:13:04.020 Like it's and it's it's certainly something that like, you know, you know, we have to take some

00:13:11.620 extent, those of us who are like sons and daughters of the American Revolution or who are like, you know,

00:13:16.760 good Americans that that, you know, I think you could be an immigrant. It's harder to be Americanized.

00:13:21.960 So I don't necessarily want to say that. But but you do. It does take a lot of work to assimilate into our culture

00:13:27.980 and our way of life. And I think we have an obligation to like push back against these people in a very serious

00:13:33.800 way and to be very alert to how they operate and how they go about things.

00:13:38.280 And if we don't do that, like we might as well just give up the country now.

00:13:43.260 Right. And that is a very depressing notion. But I'll say, you know, I think we've talked about Biden before.

00:13:51.580 But my God, what a difference it's made, like with him as president, just I mean,

00:13:58.520 the Republicans have no arguments against him, really, other than like he's old. Right.

00:14:02.580 OK. Like they don't they don't have a competing vision of the world that they want to impose. Right. Or promote.

00:14:09.640 Absolutely not. And so there's really like there's no content there.

00:14:14.660 And that this sort of like the capture of the Republican Party by foreign connected. 0.78

00:14:23.240 I mean, Tucker Carlson, I don't know if you've ever met Tucker, but I've known him a long time and he's clearly gone insane.

00:14:31.000 Like, I don't mean that in a malicious way. I mean, his mother, his mother literally left his left the family for being a you know,

00:14:38.260 she was a she was a crazy woman. She literally abandoned the family, abandoned her duties. 1.00

00:14:41.980 And like that stuff is heritable. Right. Like it's it's a I mean, it's a reason there's a reason they ask you about your family's mental health issues when you apply for a clearance.

00:14:51.120 Right. And here he is interviewing this libs of tick tock woman as if she's just some sort of like innocent, naive, innocent, naive woman who's just a mom or whatever. 0.88

00:15:04.380 She's just a real estate. She just works in real estate as if that wouldn't be foreign connector mobbed up. Right. 1.00

00:15:09.560 How does she have all this time to do all this libs of tick tock stuff? 1.00

00:15:12.440 Like, who's paying her? Who owns the libs of tick tock, you know, branding? 0.99

00:15:16.560 And then you discover, oh, it's the Babylon Bee that owns it. Right.

00:15:21.860 And the Babylon Bee, of course, is the thing that ostensibly was the reason it's banning was ostensibly the reason Elon Musk bought Twitter.

00:15:29.820 Right. And so you start to see this pattern emerge of this sort of nexus of anti-American figures all united on Twitter trying to cause chaos.

00:15:40.320 I mean, Kim.com, right, is literally facing charges for being involved in organized crime and the mass theft of intellectual property of the United States.

00:15:50.660 And he's fighting his extradition from New Zealand. You have this Ian Miles Chong character.

00:15:55.860 God knows what the hell his deal is. And so you see all these people and they are basically having a field day on Twitter.

00:16:04.600 And what's interesting is, like, I don't think they're totally wrong on the degree to which Twitter was itself compromised and screwed up by these foreign actors. 1.00

00:16:13.600 But they make the focus entirely on the FBI, which gives you everything you need to know.

00:16:19.200 I mean, Barry Weiss is not an objective reporter. Right.

00:16:22.520 You know, so anyway, it's just it's really quite maddening that, like, very few people, like, really want to, like, sit down and actually explain this to people.

00:16:32.280 But maybe that's that's something that we can do, you know, or that we should do.

00:16:35.460 Yes, that is our charge.

00:16:38.920 I mean, it's sort of I do feel a bit like I have to take out the garbage perennially.

00:16:42.940 You know what I mean? It's like a Sisyphean task to, like, constantly take out the garbage.

00:16:47.120 Yeah, but it does it does make me wonder.

RadixJournal - December 28, 2022

Confidence Men

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