00:00:13.260the institute for responsible statecraft or something yes i'm familiar with it the first
00:00:23.500i heard of it was when if you recall um if you recall dr anel she line she was a biden state
00:00:32.800department official who resigned in protest over gaza and she went to work for the quincy institute
00:00:38.600that was interesting spot um so it's sort of an anti-neocon thing so uh i wrote this i'll just
00:00:48.680read this um if i'm honest i probably would have danced on lindsey graves lindsey graham's grave
00:00:56.68020 years ago when i defined myself as anti-war but today i have a measured respect for him i now
00:01:03.380understand that neoconservatism is one of the handful of ideologies capable of maintaining
00:01:08.200the world order and taking responsibility for america's power yeah totally i've come to appreciate
00:01:15.260this, not so much through Trump's actions as president, as through critically examining all
00:01:19.840those anti-war geopolitical ideologies that formed on the right and among America's enemies, which I
00:01:25.720might have been sympathetic to years ago. You're a two cheers for Lindsey. You were on the wrong0.79
00:01:31.020side of things so often, but on the right side when it mattered for Europe. You were a man.
00:01:37.020And then Hanania, it's funny about Hanania when he writes it, it's almost like he's being sarcastic.
00:01:43.060he's not i don't know it's like your maturity and growth are inspiration i think his tongue
00:01:50.300i think his tongue is in his cheek but i also think he agrees with me uh so i wrote that and
00:01:57.800i don't maybe i do have a contrarian instinct but just uh i i didn't like the dancing on lindsey's
00:02:04.880grave um so this is a guy somewhat associated with these the quincy institute and the skull
00:02:12.360measuring guys have reached the logical conclusion of their worldview neoconservatism and i just1.00
00:02:20.160half jokingly said thank you i guess then he said truly get lost and get fucked you nazi loser freak1.00
00:02:27.420uh oh he can't take a little banter i don't it seems like an overreaction1.00
00:02:36.580um i i just remember all these groups uh from back in the day when i was involved with these
00:02:45.820paleo cons and i i guess i was out of sorts with them on some fundamental level and that i was
00:02:54.020a nominalist i i i half joking on that i i think that the nominalism realism in a very different
00:03:03.380sense of the word or natural law a very different sense of the word nature uh was the sort of
00:03:09.840differentiation um i i i don't know i i didn't agree with them in fundamental ways yet i sort
00:03:19.400of agreed with them on superficial ways like the war is bad but i didn't share their worldview and
00:03:28.140uh now i guess i i just have a different perspective even on superficial issues
00:03:34.560but because because you would criticize lindsey graham for like the amnesty stuff
00:03:40.380now that makes you like a nazi freak yeah exactly that's actually a very good point
00:03:46.460i'm sure that's why they're that's where the critique comes from right yeah like the institute
00:03:52.320would be in favor of the amnesty stuff that lindsey partook in i would imagine there's
00:03:59.340actually a lot here that we can go into um yeah he exactly they agree with lindsey on domestic
00:04:07.400at least on one critical domestic policy and they but he's a you know evil warmonger because we
00:04:15.420could live in peace this is how i would sum it up is that i can remember the ron paul years
00:04:22.900and i was though on the margins of the ron paul movement i was in the ron paul movement
00:04:31.060at least as an attendee and you guys have probably seen those things where i set up a meeting with
00:04:36.740or a event with ron paul that was actually uh wildly successful it was a free event
00:04:42.480in 2007 i believe wasn't quite 2008 but it was just like wildly sold out and crazy and stuff
00:04:51.320like this and um you know it's you know bring them home bring the troops home now in the wars
00:05:00.840okay and look i don't also want to dunk on ron paul because i think he's a genuine guy um now
00:05:08.020There are a lot of people surrounding Ron Paul that are Russian agents, in my opinion.
00:05:12.580But Ron Paul is maybe too old to be like that.
00:05:16.800I think it gets to a sort of worldview.
00:05:20.800And if you want to call my worldview Hobbesian, you can.
00:05:24.360Maybe that's a good heuristic to understand it.
00:05:26.780But Ron Paul genuinely believed that if we would have peace, peace is sort of the natural state of affairs.
00:05:37.220and if we removed military bases from abroad and we were no longer threatening people you know with
00:05:45.160like military men and nukes and shit and we would just start to trade with one another and we would
00:05:53.060probably create a sort of multi-polarity uh a little a lot like in fact the multi-polarity0.75
00:06:01.200promoted by Alexander Dugan, that you'd have your place, we'd have ours. We do things a little bit
00:06:07.880differently than you do, but we can trade for commerce and trade of ideas and just the world
00:06:14.380would be at peace. That's sort of the de facto state of things. And I think it might even get
00:06:23.640down to some libertarian fantasy that man is good you know like on his basic level man wants to
00:06:37.080freely trade there are a few bad apples out there but they don't spoil the bunch in fact
00:06:45.440man is good and this is something that you really see with tucker hassan i've noticed
00:06:53.060Hassan is also calling Lindsey Graham a demon in the sense of he's like irrationally, sadistically evil.0.98
00:07:02.380He wants to bomb Palestinian children for the sake of killing them or just some like radical evil.0.96
00:07:10.940I don't believe any of these things.0.98
00:07:12.800i think man is bad and that the state of nature is a war of all against all that
00:07:22.200i mean i i also think we naturally cooperate into groups but that just means that once we're in
00:07:30.900groups we get to kill the other group so cooperation has a dark side let me say that
00:07:38.300i mean isn't ron paul a devout christian he is yes i mean doesn't that wouldn't you say that
00:07:44.340probably informs yes and no because you know there's one aspect of christianity which is sort
00:07:52.940of you're inherently bad due to eve's curse in effect like due to the fall that's sort of the
00:08:02.020schmidian catholicism but i agree it's sort of it's complicated because obviously there is
00:08:09.960something jesus-like in treating everyone as good even the centers especially the centers
00:08:16.300we're all sort of good and we all miss the mark but we can all love one another and cooperate i
00:08:24.860think there's sort of a duality whereas there's a kind of schmidian or even catholicism of like
00:08:31.240man is totally bad and that's why we need to censor and control things and a little bit of
00:08:37.500both i agree the overwhelming message of the gospels is that man is good um but
00:08:46.460yes i think man is bad um we cooperate we naturally cooperate and in that to that extent
00:08:58.380the good guys do finish first sometimes in the sense that groups that naturally cooperate
00:09:06.260are able to kill other groups and thus take their women and dominate society or dominate land space
00:09:14.600i use this when i was talking about uh is morality subjective or objective
00:09:20.420um i was talking about this in terms of the piranha in this weird way piranha are moral
00:09:28.560a piranha would never even consider eating another piranha they have a non-aggression
00:09:36.360principle so to speak among themselves but uh if you're a wounded animal wading into the stream
00:09:45.340they are going to eat you alive in fact they are so vicious uh utterly ruthless0.93
00:09:54.080so it's kind of like the japanese where you know like when they're in their own domestic sphere1.00
00:10:01.620at least you know for for decades upon decades they're they're almost boring a little too
00:10:07.960efficient and lifeless and so on but then uh when they go to war they do so with a vehemence that's
00:10:16.820unsurpassed and they they go into china and start engaging in bizarre human experimentation and
00:10:24.080new methods of torture kind of like that it's the in group group dynamic but this is what i would
00:10:32.500say in terms of Lindsey Graham, neoconservatism, etc. Ron Paul assumes that the essence of the
00:10:43.900world is peace and free trade and cooperation. There's some bad apples, but they don't spoil
00:10:50.260the bunch. That's how I would sum up what he believes. I would state that man is bad.
00:10:57.500They're all rotten apples. But you can create a system through politics. You can create an economic system of free trade. So politics come first and economics, commerce, freedom of ideas, exchange that comes second. And it's built upon politics.0.98
00:11:20.400So basically, the post-war order of globalism, liberalism, et cetera, is built on the bones of those societies that were defeated in the Second World War.
00:11:36.060And it really can't be otherwise. And also, if the United States were to throw away the empire share power or whatever they multipolarist say or something like that, we would quickly devolve into a state of anarchy and there would be pushes by other competing powers to become the hegemon and take up more and more space.
00:12:06.060So, thus, neoconservatism, whatever faults it has, and however much we want to criticize it rightly, is a method of maintaining this global order.
00:12:24.920And neoconservatism here, I mean, it has an interesting history.
00:12:30.500And this is the stuff that I would say like 15 or 20 years ago.
00:12:34.480They're a bunch of Marxists. They're a bunch of Trotskyists. They were in alcove A while the Stalinists were in alcove B at the City College of New York, and they're arguing with each other. And the Stalinists sort of became irrelevant and the Trotskyists, or maybe joined the DSA, and then the Trotskyists became Reaganites and conservatism.
00:12:56.080But they maintained that notion of a global revolution, not socialism in one country, national socialism, Nazism, in effect, but a continued revolution around the world.
00:13:10.000that's a critical view and it's geneal genealogically correct
00:13:18.560irving crystal norman potterets etc they were coming from a sort of marxian left
00:13:27.200although not necessarily pro-soviet left
00:13:32.760and i think that is important to remember but the only thing i would say for neoconservatism
00:13:42.540is that it is a way of calling upon ideals within america's founding which are authentic
00:13:53.680the Declaration of Independence, et cetera.
00:14:16.980to maintain Pax Americana around the globe.
00:14:20.400So there's an idea system, and then there's the hard power system of maintaining this.
00:14:27.980So we might need to tip over some apple carts. We might need to grab a country and shake it and throw it up against the wall on occasion. We might need to directly expand liberalism, parliamentary democracy and capitalism in order to make sure we don't have some competing block against us or some really bad apple that might spoil the bunch, Saddam Hussein.
00:14:57.980And again, I still think that the Iraq war was a bad idea.0.86
00:15:04.900I would not have gone into Iran more recently, et cetera, et cetera.
00:15:09.120The only thing I would say is that neoconservatism is a way of maintaining the global order.
00:15:18.840It's a way of taking responsibility for America's power, which is a gift from the gods in many ways.
00:15:26.340It's due to our natural resources, our geographic isolation, our waterways all over the place, the outcome of the Second World War.
00:15:35.260We lucked out in this just immense way.
00:15:39.820And we have to sort of take responsibility for that.
00:15:44.780We became the big kahuna in many ways due to luck, if we're honest.
00:16:13.900All of these people, I don't even know enough about the Quincy Institute.
00:16:18.000But if they're promoting Trita Parsi and people like that, they are apologizing for Russia.
00:16:25.840They're talking about NATO encroachment and how we're to blame for the Ukraine war or whatever.
00:16:33.200My guess is that at best, they're simply wrong.
00:16:37.320And at worst, they are operating on behalf of competing world powers who want to take up more space and want the American zone, which is largely planetary, to fall away.
00:16:51.900and maybe that's natural to some extent i mean crowd hammer uh i would have to go back and look
00:17:02.140at this but a crowd hammer believe that a unipolar moment could maybe last a generation 25 to 30
00:17:08.260years it's go there's going to be some competing force at some point and at that point you might
00:17:15.300have to become more of a hard power than a soft power can be a soft power after victory is one
00:17:20.200You need to become a harder power. And maybe the American public is just so kind of decadent and zonked out of their mind that we're not up to the task of enforcing this world.
00:17:33.380But those realities don't, in my mind, discount the coherence of neoconservatism and the coherence of the views of Lindsey Graham as this unlikely southerner who went along with this largely Jewish neoconservative project.
00:18:03.380because it's not just all about Israel neoconservatism if it were just this like
00:18:11.720conspiracy to attack the enemies of Israel now I agree it sort of conveniently ends up like that
00:18:19.320to some degree to an important degree but if it were simply a Jewish plot it wouldn't have0.93
00:18:28.260been as coherent as it was, and it wouldn't have been
00:18:52.220If Al Gore had been elected president,
00:18:54.980I imagine we could have had a wiser and a little bit more cagey and restrained foreign policy, but I think we would have had much the same foreign policy.0.86
00:19:09.060Neoconservatism was a paradigm that could rationally and properly address this crisis or opportunity of the end of that older, big, bad, competing global power that is the USSR.0.58
00:19:28.600are so even if i disagree with lindsey graham on many things i am not going to0.84
00:19:40.140just like cheaply attack him as oh he was secretly gay and thus the jews had compromise on him and0.90
00:19:53.280forced him to be their shill for israel and the american empire is gay as well the global american0.90
00:20:03.720empire it's all about supporting jews and spreading the rainbow flag i think that kind of stuff is just0.96
00:20:11.320dumb and i didn't say those things exactly but i thought in that way for a period of time in my
00:20:21.94020s and I got over it and I see people many of whom are older than I am now kind of adopt this0.97
00:20:34.160retroactive in many ways outmoded criticism of the neocons at the point when the neocons are
00:20:44.260in a way no longer a threat I mean there's Lindsay there are very few like true neocon
00:20:50.960ideologue intellectuals in power they might they might be in some conservative institutions still
00:20:57.880or in some like never trump media outlets like bill crystal irving sun etc etc they're not
00:21:04.360really on the horse trump's on the horse you have a front porch republic trad cath in the white house
00:21:13.740in the, in the, in the, under the guise of JD Vance. And so attacking neoconservatism
00:21:22.740is ridiculous at this point. And you need to be, you need to start thinking in terms of why0.60
00:21:29.100is Trump jeopardizing the American empire through his mishandled tariffs, through the Iranian
00:21:37.520campaign etc why is he sort of why is he doing these things because he did these things
00:21:44.260staffed by his own people the neoconservatives are dead or working at the bulwark webzine
00:21:53.160or whatever he did this yet you always want to attack the neoconservatism