RadixJournal - Goats and Lambs

00:00:00.000 We talk a lot about scapegoating, and that is this ancient term that is as relevant today as it was 2,000 or 3,000 years ago.

00:00:13.740 We all know what is meant by that.

00:00:17.600 And, you know, I think you could say with a lot of accuracy that currently conservatives are scapegoating drag queens or transgendered people or gay public school teachers or whatever, in the sense – and not that there aren't real issues with all of those things.

00:00:44.800 I think there unquestionably are, but there seems to be an overemphasis on these people and a demonization of them and a way of kind of putting all of our problems onto the back of a gay teacher in Florida who is destroying the world or something, the libs of TikTok effect, as it were.

00:01:14.800 And so it's clear that conservatives are kind of engaging in a certain type of scapegoating.

00:01:23.680 And I think that there's also a certain type of scapegoating with someone like George Floyd or Neely.

00:01:34.820 But I think it's a very complicated one.

00:01:39.620 So a lot of times conservatives will react like, why is the left – why are they lionizing George Floyd or Neely?

00:01:50.900 George Floyd was a drug addict.

00:01:53.640 There's at least a possibility that he died due to drug use or that affected his death.

00:01:59.440 And he reportedly held a gun to a pregnant woman or something.

00:02:05.180 I mean, he was a bad guy.

00:02:08.860 Neely as well might not have been quite as bad, but he was terrorizing people on the subway.

00:02:16.220 I mean, he wasn't just out there dancing, doing the moonwalk and entertaining everyone for cash.

00:02:24.000 He was terrorizing them and claiming he didn't care if he goes to jail and he'd been to jail 40 times.

00:02:30.660 You know the stories.

00:02:33.120 These are weird people to choose as heroes.

00:02:38.580 But I think that's missing the point in many ways.

00:02:43.340 I think they are a kind of scapegoat because they're bad people.

00:02:50.040 And what they're trying to do is demand that you see the humanity in the scapegoat.

00:02:59.180 And I've been influenced by Girard on this, who I had not read until fairly recently.

00:03:06.340 But what he was saying is, so with Christ on the cross, you have the greatest sacrifice of all time in order to end all sacrifice.

00:03:22.560 So at this point, certainly sacrificing human, but even sacrificing an animal is seen as uncivilized and barbaric and unnecessary, at the very least, and grotesque, etc.

00:03:35.400 But we can kind of see Christianity as almost like ending that sacrificial tradition that was much longer than the Christian tradition.

00:03:49.020 But at the same time, it was the ultimate blood sacrifice.

00:03:53.240 I mean, God sacrificed his son, or in a way himself, to cleanse us of sins.

00:04:02.460 The blood cleanses us.

00:04:04.200 We are relieved of original sin as well.

00:04:07.940 But what Girard was saying is like, it was also a kind of way of, he was the ultimate scapegoat in the sense that he was kind of the reverse of a scapegoat.

00:04:17.180 So the classic scapegoat is a blameless goat, literally, that we project our sins on and then mistreat.

00:04:28.960 We kill, we cast out, etc., in order to kind of cleanse ourselves of the guilt that we feel.

00:04:37.060 So it served a social function in that way.

00:04:39.860 And what Jesus, who is a sacrificial lamb, as he's described, but he asked you to kind of see the humanity in the scapegoat.

00:04:52.260 And so he is being killed. 0.97

00:04:54.480 And from a Christian standpoint, he must be killed, in fact. 0.99

00:04:57.740 But then at the same time, he was a kind of perfect person. 0.95

00:05:01.820 And I think someone like Neely is in that tradition in the sense that, as I often say, his bad behavior is a kind of feature and not a bug.

00:05:18.920 Like, the liberals and the left, they're demanding that you see the humanity in this sacrificial victim.

00:05:28.740 Like, you need to care about George Floyd.

00:05:31.660 And in a way, George Floyd was a martyr, not in spite of the fact that he was this drug user and bad dude, but almost because of it.

00:05:43.300 Like, you're challenged to not just see the scapegoat and kind of with a sociopathic glee in your eye, like, sacrifice the goat and say,

00:05:53.240 ah, I'm cleansed of my sin, you're supposed to look the goat in the eye and kind of see its innocence or see its humanity.

00:06:02.120 And the Jewish quality to the Holocaust was, it wasn't that the Jews were bad, but they were kind of innocent.

00:06:10.620 And so the Holocaust is a kind of grand sacrifice, but it's demanded of you that you sympathize with the thing being Holocausted. 0.98

00:06:23.260 I mean, Holocaust means burnt offering, literally.

00:06:26.220 It's demanded of you to see them as innocent, maybe even see Jews as Christ. 1.00

00:06:32.420 You know, kind of reiteration of this myth in a modern context.

00:06:40.040 And I think in a way, like, you know, we're all agreed on this, how the world's kind of moving beyond the Holocaust.

00:06:46.760 And I think we are moving towards a kind of post-Jewish period in the sense that we tend to see an African-American as Christ or as the lamb that we're actually meant not just to sacrifice, but we might need to sacrifice, but as innocent. 0.70

00:07:09.940 And you can kind of see this, I mean, Nancy Pelosi was criticized for this, but I thought she was, in a way, kind of laying bare the dynamic of this when she went up and she said, we're, you know, to George Floyd, we are so glad that you sacrificed yourself.

00:07:26.660 She was, you know, and she is a Catholic.

00:07:29.720 She's just laying bare the religious quality to all of this.

00:07:34.880 This isn't just a crime where we want to talk about police misconduct.

00:07:38.820 And, you know, we can talk about police misconduct.

00:07:42.020 Are the police out of control in some situations?

00:07:44.640 That's a fair perspective to have.

00:07:47.800 But it wasn't about that, ultimately.

00:07:51.300 It wasn't about police reform or defunding the police.

00:07:55.220 It was ultimately about sympathizing with the victim.

00:07:59.680 And I think in many ways, like, the world, all of that has a Jewish character, has a Christian character. 0.61

00:08:07.320 Christianity is Jewish. 0.99

00:08:08.820 And I think in some ways, we're kind of post-Jewish in the way that we look at these things, where we've moved beyond the Holocaust as a central moral icon of life.

00:08:26.520 And we've kind of moved in a new direction.

00:08:29.880 And so I think we're going to talk less about Holocaust victims from 1943 or something.

00:08:37.140 And I think we're going to talk more about, you know, black victims of 2023.

00:08:44.460 It's that turn.

00:08:46.500 And this can be, you know, put in contrast to something that Mark has written about, and it's a central aspect of the book, the first one, that is the pharmacoy.

00:08:56.560 So there's a tradition of, in a way, scapegoating the ugly and sick and gross and maybe you could even say Semitic or criminal of a society. 0.97

00:09:11.480 That there's a tradition of just beating them, casting them out, maybe even killing them. 0.99

00:09:20.180 And that was an earlier Greek ritual. 0.96

00:09:24.380 And in many ways, like the Christ, the act of sacrificing Christ was a kind of reversal of that.

00:09:35.660 So anyway, these are just some thoughts.

00:09:38.640 You can tell I'm still kind of putting the pieces together with this one.

00:09:42.860 But I guess what I would say is that we're both, we are post-Jewish in our collective thinking. 0.86

00:09:49.960 But post-Jewish does not mean anti-Jewish or a-Jewish.

00:09:53.900 It means post-Jewish. 0.99

00:09:54.820 We've almost moved on from the Holocaust while we've maintained the ultimate sacrificial dynamic that the Holocaust was a part of. 0.96

00:10:10.320 Yeah, I would agree.

00:10:11.540 I mean, I just don't think that they can, I mean, to put it cynically, I just don't think they can make hay with the Holocaust anymore. 0.82

00:10:20.600 You know what I mean?

00:10:21.000 Because it just becomes absurd at some point where they're the most successful ethnic group in the world, right? 1.00

00:10:29.440 And we're still upset about this event that happened during World 2.

00:10:37.240 Meanwhile, everyone else is already mourned their dead and is not bringing forth their dead from World 2 and asking for reparations from Germany or whoever.

00:10:51.000 Right.

00:10:53.060 So I think at some point it's untenable.

00:10:56.260 And can we, can we, yeah, I agree.

00:11:00.040 Can we revise the Pharmacore?

00:11:04.180 I mean, one thing that we've all criticized in this group is the kind of, I guess you could say passive aggressive, but victimization that white nationalists have.

00:11:17.860 And, you know, look, I don't dispute the fact that whites get the short end of the stick in the affirmative action regime. 0.83

00:11:28.600 You know, I, of course, agree with that.

00:11:30.720 I also don't dispute, even though these things are kind of anecdotal, I don't dispute that there are, you know, there are anti-white hate crimes in effect where someone will be attacked.

00:11:42.900 Because he is white by some out of control black and that these don't get nearly the publicity that the reverse situation would get. 0.97

00:11:54.720 I mean, I, I get it.

00:11:56.900 I agree, et cetera.

00:11:58.240 But I think the ultimate criticism of that is kind of this, like, you're, you're playing the victim.

00:12:06.360 You're, you're never going to be really be treated as a victim.

00:12:08.720 But also, do you, do you really want to be the victim? 0.99

00:12:11.400 Like, do, do we want to, there's something inherently demoralizing about imagining white people as these just, like, innocent fools, basically, out there being attacked by Jews and blacks at every corner. 0.99

00:12:26.060 You know, there, there's just something so kind of. 0.99

00:12:28.520 Could I chime in?

00:12:30.020 Yeah, sure.

00:12:30.960 Yeah, that's a valid point. 0.97

00:12:32.000 But imagine being in the inner city and one of your loved ones is, like, beat to death by a group of feral blacks. 1.00

00:12:38.820 Yeah, I get it, I get it. 0.93

00:12:39.940 You can't even get justice in, like, anything approaching an equitable fashion.

00:12:45.540 You know, I mean, sometimes these people, they'll even be let out on bond, for Christ's sake.

00:12:50.140 So.

00:12:50.640 I totally get it.

00:12:52.000 And, and, and it's a legitimate complaint.

00:12:54.160 But making that the center of your, like, movement writ large, I, I think is fundamentally demoralizing.

00:13:05.140 You know, it's, it's a kind of, to put it in Trumpian language, it's like,

00:13:08.600 we want to be winners, not losers.

00:13:10.480 We want to be heroes and not victims.

00:13:12.560 But I think it's, it's worth questioning, at least, you know, like, are we, have we moved to a point where you, you can scapegoat someone in that pharmacoy or old fashioned way? 0.65

00:13:33.820 Like, can you look at someone who's weak and sick and ugly and crush him for being weak and sick and ugly?

00:13:48.540 Like, are we, are we maybe, like, as advanced or, or as retrograde, depending on your perspective, to, to think in that way? 0.81

00:14:01.740 I mean, that, or, or, or should we kind of be moving towards, like, another vision for, for how scapegoating will be?

00:14:14.480 I don't, if you understand what I'm saying.

00:14:16.980 Because there's always going to be that dynamic in society, like, the libertarian fantasy of everyone just being just and, you know, we prosecute criminals, but, you know, it's not going to be like that.

00:14:30.000 We live in a religious society where you have to engage in this.

00:14:32.860 There's, there's, there's going to be a scapegoat, a scapegoating dynamic to any society and, um, how that is.

00:14:44.780 I mean, I, I think on some, I mean, Nietzsche was kind of, of two minds of this.

00:14:49.880 On one level, Nietzsche clearly sympathized with the blonde beast and it's just kind of like, yeah, the blonde beast, they were badass. 0.68

00:15:01.300 They won and they saw victory is good.

00:15:04.820 Losing is bad. 1.00

00:15:06.160 If you're ugly and weak, I'm, I'm going to squeeze your throat until you suffocate. 1.00

00:15:12.120 Like you, you just, you, you're not deserving to live, but there is something, as you can tell, like obviously kind of sadistic. 1.00

00:15:19.880 Or inherently brutal about that kind of mentality.

00:15:26.480 And Nietzsche didn't think we could just go back to the blonde beast. 0.95

00:15:30.440 I mean, he, he thought that we, we had to, you know, in a way the Jewish revolution in morality made us deeper.

00:15:38.700 It made us, it, it, it added depth to our personality and consciousness.

00:15:45.620 And I, you know, Nietzsche certainly didn't think we could just go back and be, you know, Aryan warlords, you know, crushing all other races beneath our heels or something. 0.70

00:16:00.420 I mean, he, he wasn't that kind of, you know, bald or brutal or something.

00:16:07.660 Um, he, he, he, he needed to pass through the Christian era in order to get to something else. 0.99

00:16:13.780 Go ahead, Mark.

00:16:14.520 All right.

00:16:15.200 Well, so, and what people in, in this is probably related at least to, um, you know, the aspect that you're criticizing of the DR.

00:16:24.920 And I share your criticism, which the, uh, the victim mentality, they believe themselves to be victims.

00:16:29.820 Um, you know, on some level, of course, we can say that, uh, the white man has been scapegoated, uh, to a large extent in, uh, liberal, um, you know, kind of liberal view of the world, whether in academia, in history or in cinema.

00:16:48.680 He's been, you know, uh, they've, they've made a kind of effigy of the white man as a kind of reoccurring villain, for example, in cinema, um, or, you know, to the extent that a white man is interested in his own, you know, genetic interests, for example, is a white nationalist, essentially.

00:17:07.600 He's the devil, of course, in, in cinema or in culture.

00:17:10.920 Right. 0.96

00:17:11.400 Um, so they have succeeded in kind of making a scapegoat of the white man.

00:17:17.860 Now, so I think that that's true.

00:17:21.600 And I think that people, you know, people in the DR would say, okay, that is the case.

00:17:26.020 And that's why we, you know, so they've essentially adopted that kind of effigy or that model, which is really kind of one of the points of art is it creates, you know, people imitated, right?

00:17:38.880 People, it's, it's imitative ultimately.

00:17:40.760 Um, and they identify with that scapegoated, um, white man or that villainous white man, um, and, and understand themselves, start to understand themselves also as villains, as it were.

00:17:55.420 Um, you know, so they're imbibing that propaganda.

00:17:59.820 Now, I, I share your, um, sense that they shouldn't be thinking of themselves as victims, of course, right?

00:18:05.980 It's absurd. 0.97

00:18:06.720 It's ridiculous. 0.91

00:18:07.520 But part of it is a reaction to this propaganda, right? 0.70

00:18:11.340 And an irritation with the fact that, well, you know, why are we the villains in these films and this sort of thing?

00:18:16.660 Why, why are we, um, why is our history treated in an unfair way in academia and these multicultural universities and so forth?

00:18:25.180 Right.

00:18:25.420 So it's a reaction to that.

00:18:27.640 Um, now, of course, the better reaction would be to, well, to find a solution and, and to not complain, right?

00:18:34.760 And find it effective and good solutions and not ineffective solutions.

00:18:40.120 Um, so that's what I would say to that.

00:18:42.020 I mean, I, I think that that, I think that that can be fairly said.

00:18:44.940 Now, I don't think that we, anyone should feel sorry for themselves or white should feel sorry for themselves, obviously.

00:18:52.380 Uh, in fact, it's contrary to what I've just said, of course.

00:18:55.180 Um, but yeah, I mean, what would you say to that as a kind of commentary to what you were saying?

00:19:03.080 Not necessarily.

00:19:03.420 Well, yeah, no, I, I, we're, we're in agreement.

00:19:05.740 I mean, I'm, I'm just asking like how you get out of this because we, you have to first understand the dominant religious dynamic of society.

00:19:17.540 And, you know, like, like people, you know, Candace Owens, I mean, there are a couple of things here.

00:19:24.840 First off over the past three or four years.

00:19:28.040 And I, and I think this is coming from Trump.

00:19:30.320 You have the entrance of white victimhood into the mainstream conservative narrative. 0.74

00:19:36.220 Now you didn't have that previously.

00:19:38.000 The, the Southern strategy beforehand was why, you know, it was, it was, it was basically like Jared Taylor, though, more subtle.

00:19:46.720 You know, it was like whites, uh, we never commit crime. 0.74

00:19:50.240 We're good. 0.93

00:19:50.820 And the blacks bad, you know, that was basically what the Southern strategy was. 0.99

00:19:56.480 It's a pretty good imitation of his voice. 0.98

00:19:58.040 Yeah, you don't want to, you don't want your kids, uh, go, you know, being in school with those blacks. 1.00

00:20:06.700 So you go to a private school or whatever. 0.96

00:20:09.040 And, uh, you know, they're obviously, I don't even want to go into it, but they're, they're just kind of problems and self-serving qualities to this.

00:20:16.700 Um, one of the interesting aspects of, of, uh, of like Tucker or Trump is you have this white victimization where it's, you know, they, they hate you. 0.98

00:20:30.400 They want to kill you. 0.98

00:20:32.540 They've destroyed your, your society. 1.00

00:20:34.940 They, they're bringing in Hispanics in order for the Republican party never to win again. 1.00

00:20:41.160 And a great replacement kind of this stuff.

00:20:43.800 And that is entered into the scene where it's actually kind of everywhere.

00:20:49.820 Like you, you see that in the daily wire, you saw, certainly saw it on Tucker.

00:20:53.580 You see it on conservative Twitter where they'll just say things, you know, and these are not like major figures.

00:21:00.020 They might even be anonymous, but they're just like the anti white, you know, Biden administration and, and stuff like this.

00:21:05.660 So it's, it's kind of seeped in there and they're, they're playing the victim.

00:21:10.360 And, um, and, you know, again, to be fair here with there's justification, et cetera, et cetera.

00:21:19.860 But so you have to understand that dynamic.

00:21:22.800 You also have to understand the religious dynamic of why half of the country will, will inherently sympathize with Neely.

00:21:32.860 They, they will look at this figure as a, a lamb and Candace Owens can go around and be like, oh, well, look, I, he, he was arrested 40 times.

00:21:42.660 And, and he threatened people on the, all that's true, but you're, you're just kind of nitpicking.

00:21:47.000 You're, you're, you're making these technical critiques.

00:21:50.400 None of that ultimately matters.

00:21:52.320 Feelings don't care about your facts at the end of the day, as we know, like the, the, the whole point of it is that he is a sacrificial lamb.

00:21:59.740 In this Christian or post-Christian manner. 0.68

00:22:04.380 And so I guess I, I'm just kind of like asking, you know, how you get past this because it's, you know, on, on maybe on some level.

00:22:17.800 Conservatives and, and myself to be brutally honest here.

00:22:23.100 I mean, you look at someone like Neely and you're just like, who cares? 0.97

00:22:27.100 Like he's, he's just some, he, he, he, he's just some criminal thug. 0.92

00:22:32.260 And why are we, why are we wringing our hands over this?

00:22:37.800 Um, but you know, I, I, I think I, Nietzsche would, his rejoinder to that would, would probably be to agree with you, agree with us on one level.

00:22:49.880 But his ultimate rejoinder is like you, you, there's no way out, but through like you, you, you, you're, you're, you're kind of brutal perspective on this matter is going to lose at the end of the day to the overwhelming Christian religious impulse in your society. 0.86

00:23:09.460 And so where do we go?

00:23:13.540 Like, what, how do we change the dynamic?

00:23:18.660 Like, do you, do you just play along?

00:23:20.440 Do you be like, oh no, but whites are the real victim. 1.00

00:23:22.820 It's just not going to work.

00:23:24.520 I do think it will resonate with certain communities, but it's, it's deeply unsatisfying.

00:23:30.120 I think we all feel that.

00:23:31.880 Thank you.

RadixJournal - June 07, 2023

Goats and Lambs

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript