QAnon and the end of the American Century: QAnon's conspiracy theory, the fall from grace of the Trump administration, and the rise of a new religion. Plus, a look at how the chaos of the pro-Black Lives Matter riot is a potent symbol of increasing chaos.
00:08:34.300Let me add one thing before we move on.
00:08:38.200There's an interesting aspect where every revolution cloaks itself in the past in some way.
00:08:47.480So the French Revolution obviously, you know, eventuated in terror and radical social leveling and so on.
00:08:54.600But it also would cloak itself in the garb of the Roman Republic and so on.
00:09:01.320You can see that a lot actually in the founding fathers who were evoking –
00:09:04.680Thomas Jefferson evoking classical Greece and building his academical village where I was a student some 20 years ago.
00:09:16.280There – you cloak in the past – you kind of look towards the future.
00:09:20.960There's this weird way with these people.
00:09:23.480Now, granted, they were treading their muddy boots onto holy ground in the mind of the establishment, unquestionably.
00:09:31.580But the way that they understood their revolution was also kind of fulfilling 1776.
00:09:38.220I mean, Alex Jones said 1776 will commence.
00:09:42.020And all of his followers were echoing that.
00:09:45.520They were also talking about – you could hear in like average people out there.
00:09:49.280I think it was actually the guy who had constructed the gallows where they were going to hang Mike Pence, which is something so unimaginable even like two weeks ago.
00:10:17.600I don't think we're going to have a civil war at least anytime soon where there's just, you know, people going door to door and blood in the streets and so on.
00:10:26.040But we are kind of in a civil war already in the sense that you have two competing forces battling for control of the symbol of America.
00:10:36.640Because those people who raided the capital by no means thought of themselves as anti-American.
00:10:42.200This wasn't like, I don't know, Red Dawn where the Chinese come in and make everyone speak Chinese and we're celebrating their Lunar New Year or something.
00:10:52.520I mean, I'm being a little bit facetious here.
00:10:55.500But these were people who thought of themselves as the ultimate Americans and they will be prosecuted by an establishment that thinks of themselves as the ultimate Americans.
00:11:07.460And so it is a civil war that we're watching.
00:11:10.520It's going to be different than previous civil wars because we're living in 2021 now.
00:11:14.740But it is a civil war symbolically and ideologically.
00:11:20.420And as you say, it was the symbolism that was so important.
00:11:25.520It's like 9-11 and these very tall buildings, the two tallest buildings in America where they're coming down.
00:11:30.800The symbol, the Freudian symbolism of that was so, was what made it so, you know, obviously it was appalling, but it's what made it so stick in the mind.
00:11:42.560The symbolism of them doing it is so important because it's such an assertion of their power, such an assertion of their feelings and such an assertion of the weakness and feebleness, ultimately, of these legislators, that they're ultimately just people.
00:11:56.880And there they were worse, I felt, was them cowering, cowering down.
00:13:27.400They might have overreached in shooting Ashley Babbitt.
00:13:31.940It was like a Black Lives Matter situation where they thought, look, let's just let them do this and hopefully they'll shut up and go away.
00:13:39.900So you see some people that try to use this to say that, oh, it was an inside job.
00:13:43.220But you see some police officers obviously think to themselves, look, they're not armed.
00:14:34.120And, yeah, they came across as just cowards who were frightened by this mob.
00:14:40.020So I don't think it's – a lot of people are black-pilled about this, so it's going to result in greater tyranny on the Internet or in law.
00:14:47.680Yes, it probably is, but there will be a counterreaction to it, and it's just a growing – it's just a marker of an increasing slide down as I think America just falls apart.
00:15:00.440I agree that – look, I think that we might see the end of the American empire in my lifetime.
00:15:07.020That's the level of, I guess you could say, pessimism.
00:15:10.220Now, I think there are huge problems with the American empire.
00:15:13.400I think we need to move beyond that anyway, so I'm not quite pessimistic about it.
00:15:17.380I am not black-pilled by what I saw on January 6th, and particularly in relation to people like you and me and what we're doing.
00:15:30.600We had absolutely nothing to do with this.
00:15:34.420I was ignorant that this was happening.
00:15:37.120I would have told people not to go if I had the chance, but I didn't meet anyone who wanted to go.
00:15:42.660And also, the types of people who are going to pay a very hard price for this are the types of people who are basically alt-light e-grifters.
00:15:55.400And they kicked off all the people – I'm still on Twitter, or I'm off YouTube – they kind of did this purge of the far-right ideologues over the past year and a half.
00:16:07.980I think they recognize now that they should have – that we are not the ones bringing in hundreds of thousands, or if you look at the whole Stop the Steal movement, millions of dollars to doing this.
00:16:22.900We are not the ones who are actually planning a kind of insurrection.
00:16:27.680And they were planning a kind of insurrection.
00:16:30.200They wanted to stop the vote with a mob.
00:16:35.500And I think there's going to be a major crackdown on these kind of alt-light conservative grifters and people who are engaging in just idea and information pollution.
00:16:47.540I would note that people like you and me and others that they talk about as being whatever alt-right, a lot of us – I'm perfectly happy to say that, as far as I'm concerned, the evidence that Trump won that election is not there, clearly.
00:17:03.680And it's people that – and others that I know – we agree on this.
00:17:10.120No, it's the grifters, as you call them, are the ones that go on and on and on about how the vote was fraudulent and the election was stolen and whatever.
00:17:17.060So they're the ones that encouraged – which clearly it wasn't.
00:17:19.940But they're the ones – and they're the ones that encouraged this, this attitude that the election was stolen, which it clearly wasn't.
00:17:28.400And, you know, there was a fight and you lost.
00:17:34.500And, I mean, on the other hand, you could argue in terms of winning the fight, it is a positive to have this religion, this ersatz religion, because that's what the left have in BLM and whatever.
00:17:50.640And so the right needs something like that that's a force of unity.
00:17:53.200And that this is kind of what's inspired this, this religious service.
00:17:58.340It has to be positive, but I'm not going to be – I'm not the one.
00:18:49.180It's hard to imagine the kind of churn in voting that we saw, where someone from Nebraska might split his ticket, vote Democrat, vote for a Republican president, and then vote all Republican the next year and then all Democrat the next year because he likes the guy or whatever.
00:19:05.960That was a very common occurrence throughout the 20th century.
00:19:27.100But if you looked at the parties in 1994, a third of the Democrats were to the right of your average Republican.
00:19:38.740So just to, you know, on just some key issues, a third of Democrats were more conservative than your average Republican.
00:19:47.000Now there's no – the entire party, the Republican Party, is to the right of the Democrats, and the Democrats are far to the left of average Republicans or indeed the whole grouping.
00:19:59.440So, again, these kinds of analyses are limited.
00:20:03.62020 years ago, I remember watching on TV, you still had – they're dead now – that you still had some Southern Democrats that would vote Democrat because you can't vote Republican because they're evil.
00:20:14.020Yeah, because – that's still 20 – very, very right-wing conservative people, they would vote Democrat because that's just what you do because you're a Southern.
00:20:40.440I don't – maybe that had a lot to do with it.
00:20:42.160But, yeah, she was – she didn't want to tell people that they were Republicans at school because it's kind of like telling – you know, living in the South now and saying, oh, yeah, my whole family is Democrat.
00:20:54.640You know, they would look at you funny and not trust you.
00:21:01.860Once that kind of divide happens, once there's no floating voter, once there's no middle ground, then you just have polarized – total polarization.
00:21:10.540You oddly have stability as well, which is one of the ironies, which is that nothing really changes and gets done because everyone hates each other and won't work together.
00:21:33.080Well, in terms of policy, there's a weird policy stability in the sense that in the mid-20th century, you had major paradigm-changing legislative events.
00:21:45.740Like the Civil Rights Act, the Heart Seller Immigration Act, the creation of the Great Society, you know, Social Security and Medicare a little bit earlier, but, you know, Medicaid, all of this stuff.
00:22:00.860I can't really name major domestic policy paradigm shifts over the past 25 years.
00:22:11.960I mean, there's maybe Obamacare, which he got through immediately, but that was, you know, a Republican policy anyway.
00:22:18.560But it's because they are at loggerheads.
00:22:23.260They're unwilling to work together, and it becomes this just clashing, you know, that leads to nothing.
00:22:30.400I mean, Obama, in his second term, Obama was just basically kind of sitting around doing some executive orders.
00:22:36.840I mean, nothing big seems possible anymore.
00:22:41.280That might change, but it's a weird kind of irony of it that it's stable.
00:22:46.200But I guess what I would say is that, you know, everyone agrees that we're polarized.
00:22:53.840Every journalist in every paper agrees that we're hyper-polarized, and every American does, more or less.
00:23:00.400And you see these same things happening in Britain with Brexit and so on.
00:24:15.760But also, it, like religions previously, can motivate people to take actions in the real world that they otherwise would not have taken.
00:24:26.160And, you know, there's this famous quote that I remember Christopher Hitchens would always cite, which is that, you know, religious people now say that religion can make a bad person good, you know, by reading the Bible or accepting Jesus.
00:24:45.180But the question is, only through, or the issue is, only through religion can you make a good person do bad things.
00:24:52.620And that is, only through religion can you give him the force of belief to, you know, torture and kill a heretic, to invade the Capitol building, to starve himself to death or whip him.
00:25:09.180But I think, coming out of the mouth of a liberal who's basically a last man who thinks, you know, only about life being pleasant and comfortable, they take that as a criticism of religion.
00:25:23.460I take it as a deep understanding of religion, that in order to get society to unify and to engage in collective action that can be violent and domineering, you need a religious impulse.
00:25:39.400We can't, we're not going to be able to accomplish this through kind of secular, you know, rationality.
00:25:46.300If you make big sacrifices like that, you need to have a sense that your actions have eternal importance and that there is something greater than you and that you're acting for the greater good of your group or whatever it is that they have.
00:26:00.040Or God himself, some sort of eternal importance, monumentalist values, either couched in religious terms or couched in what might be called implicitly religious terms.
00:26:10.440So, okay, the people on the far left don't actually believe in religion, but if you would trace back the kind of things they say, it's as though they have some sort of belief in fate or something like that.
00:26:21.060But it's the actual belief in eternity that seems to really, really motivate people to do things if they can be put under the psychological circumstances required for that to be induced.
00:26:33.200And the things that predict it are low IQ, people that have low IQ seem to be more susceptible to religiosity, high levels of stress, and feeling that you're under attack, feeling that you're marginalised.
00:26:48.200And those things are the key environmental factors that seem to make more partly environmental in terms, which make people religious.
00:26:56.460And so what the QAnon thing does is it's developed a sort of a new, as we've discussed on here before, a developed new religion that has clear religious aspects.
00:27:06.740You could argue it's almost like Gnosticism.
00:27:08.580It's like an aspect of Christianity, Christian-based in some way.
00:27:13.160And then brings in these issues that have become of concern of late paedophilia and the New World Order and all of this to create this mega conspiracy theory where you have this gnosis.
00:27:25.660If you join it, you really, it's like Gnosticism.
00:27:27.880You have this, the real, true understanding of the world.
00:27:38.180And this is what you, this is what you have.
00:27:42.880And so these marginalised people feel that they are superior, they are superior even to those in power, who, by the way, are evil and of the devil.
00:27:56.180And I think it's been building for a long time as well with the belief in conspiracy theories, 9-11, an inside job, Corona as well only helps us even more.
00:28:05.440And you can't trust people on any, I mean, the thing is that the levels of trust are now so low in society due to various factors, gender diversity, immigration, collapsing, religiousness, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:28:20.360You kind of feel you can't trust anybody.
00:28:22.060I mean, I even find myself watching things that are from a right-wing perspective and thinking, well, I'll watch something out from a left-wing perspective because probably the people on the right are making something up, particularly with regard to this election fraud or whatever.
00:28:33.320And so it's, yeah, what you end up with is a coming apart.
00:28:42.900And that's what I suspect is going to happen.
00:29:48.920There are a couple of things that I wanted to add that, that weren't quite in your article, because I, I was, I'm actually rereading a genealogy of morality by Nietzsche for, for another thing I'm doing.
00:30:01.200And this, when I think about Q, and again, are we, let's take Q seriously as a religion.
00:30:07.980Let's not just treat it as a bunch of crazy people, because that, that's not actually scientific.
00:30:12.260If something is this powerful and widespread and, and motivates people in this way, you have to take it seriously.
00:30:19.320It is a resentment religion on a very basic level.
00:30:25.260And it, and it actually adheres to Nietzsche's description of the resentment religion that eventuated into Judaism and Christianity.
00:30:36.760So the, first off, it is a resentment religion in the sense that all of the people on top, the people who think they're good, the people who are running society, they are not what they seem.
00:30:50.100They, they aren't, they aren't liberals.
00:30:53.320They're in fact, Satanist and they're blood suckers.
00:31:02.560Everything you see coming out of a mainstream source is not just liberal, but wrong and fake.
00:31:09.560And the only authentic voices you can find are in your Facebook group and citizen journalists and things like this.
00:31:15.280Now we, we might have some sympathies, uh, with the idea of the mainstream liberal is kind of fake, but they obviously take that in a, in a direction that's utterly bizarre.
00:31:26.160Um, but it's, it's a resentment like religion on, on a different level.
00:31:31.360First off, it is resenting people who are in charge.
00:31:33.660They, they assume that they're not in charge.
00:31:35.520They have a few allies in the NSA, according to Q, but they are not the ones who are in charge.
00:31:40.640They have Trump as their kind of Messiah figure, but they, but even that is now lost.
00:31:46.120Trump is going to be crucified perhaps.
00:31:48.840And the, the religion will expand even further.
00:31:50.760Um, but it's a resentment religion in the sense that it imagines a different world.
00:31:55.540And what, you know, Nietzsche was saying in, in the genealogy is that if you are on top, if you're the badass, if you're the blonde beast, you don't need to imagine a world.
00:32:08.620You might a different world other than the one we live in.
00:32:10.840You might very well want to, um, uh, coat it in gold and tell fairy tales about your awesomeness.
00:32:19.460Uh, but you're not going to imagine a different realm, but there's this origin of both Judaism and Christianity and kind of Platonism in this resentment of imagining a pure world.
00:32:32.600That's not this one, that you are failing in this world, you are losing control.
00:32:38.620And I think there is a background, there's a racial background to this or a demographic background to this, that white Americans feel like we're, we're, we're not in control.
00:33:22.900And to a certain extent, BLM, uh, uh, attracts, uh, similar, those kinds, those kinds of, uh, ideas among, uh, among non white people.
00:33:31.560And also I think among white people that are a bit excluded because it's a way of being unexcluded.
00:33:36.460So, um, these people that they, they imagine that the world it's, it's, it's, it's, it's the traditional ruling class type white gentry, uh, who are actually in charge and evil.
00:33:48.880And it's, and it's a way of getting more power, a way of climbing up the hierarchy to imagine that probably wrong thing.
00:33:54.700Cause actually they are highly influential, but to, but to imagine that they're not.
00:33:58.220And therefore to push even further in a woke direction, um, is a way for them to attain status, uh, um, and, uh, in, in that system, um, against what they see as all these evil racists that are behind every tree that are actually running.
00:34:11.980And literally with them, the other way around, it's really, it's like Christianity.
00:34:17.680The world has been taken over by our faults.
00:34:20.260It's not anything intrinsically wrong with us that we're like, we are, it's because we are good that we don't do these evil things that you have to do to get into power because Satan gives you power.
00:34:28.820Um, and, uh, and, and so we're going to, um, uh, we're going to, we're going to rise to the top and create a godly world.
00:34:36.200And that's what they've got on their side.
00:34:39.160And if you are a lot of these people in the news, because of not, we're not just polarized in terms of politics, but polarized in terms of social class, as Charles Murray set out in coming apart.
00:34:50.120People don't have that much to do with people of different social classes now as all the clever people leave the towns and villages and rural states and whatever, and they all go to New York or Washington DC or whatever.
00:35:00.100They have nothing to do with, they don't have conversations with people in diners in rural Virginia.
00:35:05.420They have no idea how these people think.
00:35:09.820Um, um, uh, they would never speak to them ever.