In this week's episode, we discuss a recent interview with a former member of Identity Europa, a group that is now part of the American Identity Movement, and the possibility that she may have been a sleeper agent for the group.
00:00:00.000So the other big story in the news, maybe not national level significance, but certainly for our little corner of the Internet, was an interview on ABC News with a woman by the name of Samantha, who was a former member of the organization that was once known as Identity Europa is now known as the American Identity Movement.
00:00:24.460And, of course, Richard, you have a kind of close and personal history with Identity Europa.
00:00:31.920I'm going to read a few excerpts of this first and then just certainly closer than the rest of us.
00:00:37.220But I'm going to read a few excerpts here and we'll just kind of look at this because it is interesting in terms of kind of exposing the underbelly of some of the movements that were kind of adjacent to two.
00:00:51.400Some interesting quotes. I never thought of myself as a racist person, but I was.
00:00:57.160When you're in there, you think that you just know the truth, the truth that white people are more intellectually capable than other people.
00:01:04.000White people were the best. I started to believe that there's some sort of white genocide happening.
00:01:09.020I started to use the phrasing and the language that there is an overwhelming majority of Jewish people in media and banking.
00:01:15.800And you start to ask yourself, are Jewish people white?
00:01:19.060White. The piece goes on to say, have something hateful about identifying with with Evropian heritage.
00:01:30.560But the I was muted, but that is high comedy.
00:01:35.380Maybe she maybe Samantha is actually like the ultimate sleeper agent.
00:01:45.140Like she's going using the mass media against itself by dropping all these truth bombs and being like, it's almost like you start thinking there's a Jewish agenda in media.
00:01:58.860Returning back to the story of Samantha, actually, the reason this is even in the news is because her story is part of New Yorker writer Andrew Morantz's new book titled Antisocial Online Extremists, Techno Utopians and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.
00:02:16.860And in her interview, she simply Samantha talks about awakening to to to a white identity, questions about Jewish influence in the media and elsewhere, concerns about a global white genocide agenda.
00:02:34.460Morantz is quoted as saying, Samantha was someone who wanted to tell me her story about how she had gotten in and more specifically how she had gotten out.
00:02:41.820Samantha was one of the few people who was not in propaganda mode when she talked to me.
00:02:46.620So I felt like rather than getting spin or what the movement wanted me to hear, I was just getting an actual human's story.
00:02:54.880Morantz also said that these movements are mostly made up of men.
00:02:58.900Most of the women that were there that were in there were tied to someone who was already there.
00:03:04.760Morantz goes on to say they went to great lengths to make her feel important, that she was important because they needed someone to be the female.
00:03:13.840Samantha said she became very active in online chat rooms under a pseudonym, although she didn't specifically recall posting hateful messages.
00:03:21.480She's quoted as saying, I probably did.
00:03:29.380So I think there's a lot there to chew on.
00:03:31.580Richard will give you the first swing at this.
00:03:33.540What interests me, and maybe this is where you can lead off, is the kind of notion that these are male-dominated spaces, that there's a particular treatment of women in the movement.
00:03:46.720I don't know if there's something there that you want to tackle before we...
00:03:50.060Well, I think there's a lot here, actually, and that's why we're talking about it.
00:03:54.520I agree that this is a tempest in a teapot, and no one's going to be talking about this, maybe even in 48 hours.
00:04:06.660I remember in 2017 and 2018 saying this very often that basically you could call it radicalization, but in a good way, is a one-way street.
00:04:18.920And there is the instacion alt-right, basically, that I've met many former libertarians who are alt-right.
00:04:27.380I've even met former Marxists and environmental activists who are alt-right.
00:04:31.380But I've never met a former alt-right libertarian, in the sense that you just kind of can't go back once you take that red pill.
00:04:40.100And I do think that that is true to a very large extent.
00:04:43.300And I actually don't think Samantha has changed my mind about that.
00:04:48.460Indeed, I don't even quite know how genuine she's being in these interviews.
00:04:54.380I definitely did know her, and she was a very ambitious girl, and I think she's been blackpilled like 99% of the movement, and she now doesn't want to be associated with the stuff.
00:05:09.900She's probably afraid of being doxxed and yet another server drop on Identity Europa or the American identity movement.
00:05:17.700And so she wants to kind of preemptively quit before she's fired, so to speak.
00:05:22.560But yeah, what we've seen over the past six to nine months is this new trend of de-radicalization.
00:05:29.920And someone like Christian Picciolini has made a life out of this and a career where he's a former skinhead record producer.
00:05:42.920I mean, granted, we're different ages, and I have a cursory knowledge of skinhead history and literature and culture, but I don't even know if his story is true, to be honest.
00:05:59.080It might very well be, but it might also not be.
00:06:02.500Or I wouldn't be surprised if he got involved in some organization in some fashion and then just kind of pulled out much like Samantha did because he wanted a different career and life, although he has more of a story to tell.
00:06:17.180I actually listened to Christian Picciolini speak live one time.
00:06:21.180He was in Whitefish while I was in Whitefish in 2017.
00:06:53.040Picciolini is currently being sued by his former colleagues.
00:06:57.680I, again, I won't pass judgment on a lawsuit.
00:07:01.980I can imagine there's a lot of drama there, probably a lot of sinning on all sides.
00:07:07.460And, but yeah, there is an industry to do this that is symbiotic with the alt-right, where as the alt-right rises, you have this new industry of, you know,
00:07:17.060big, burly, tattooed, former skinheads who give bear hugs, and so on.
00:07:22.020And there's certainly more and more people treading into Christian Picciolini's territory.
00:07:27.660And I think, generally speaking, post-Charlottesville, we're going to see a lot more of this.
00:07:33.940And I don't think this is the last one, and I don't think this is probably the most dramatic one either.
00:07:40.460Charlottesville was a major turning point.
00:07:43.540I didn't think it would be right at the beginning.
00:07:45.980I was kind of ready for Charlottesville to be done with while we were leading up to it, because there was so much difficulty involved.
00:07:54.340There were, there were so many attacks.
00:07:56.500Obviously, the Charlottesville, the moment itself was quite traumatic, basically feeling oppressed by the police and the state.
00:08:04.720And just wanting to, I just wanted it to be over, but it kind of would never end.
00:08:10.460And the movement was absolutely demoralized.
00:08:13.280We, the day before Charlottesville, we felt that we were winning and that we were, we were pushing ideas forward.
00:08:21.160We kind of were on the Trump bandwagon, or he was silently supporting us and, and so on.
00:08:26.040Post-Charlottesville, it was, it got real quick.
00:08:28.740The doxing, the lawsuits, the arrest of people who were quite obviously gauged in, in self-defense.
00:08:37.480The, the James Fields incident, which, you know, was ambiguous, but unambiguously awful and, and, and, you know, and, and preventable.
00:08:48.860Um, and the alt-right became, it wasn't this fun movement.
00:08:54.400It was being associated with, oh, they're terrorists and they're killing people in the streets and so on.
00:09:01.080And the movement certainly has not been the same.
00:09:03.480And I don't think it will be the same.
00:09:04.640And I don't think that it will ever go back.
00:09:08.000Um, and so there is this, it's not like people are, to, to go back to the metaphor that I used before about people, you know, you, you get more radical as you start thinking through these things.
00:09:18.800And you might start out as an edgy Republican and then you're a libertarian and then you're alt-right.
00:09:23.460Uh, I don't think that dynamic has really shifted, but there is going to be a growing industry of people so-called de-radicalizing and basically telling their story.
00:09:34.800Katie McHugh was, uh, the most famous of this.
00:09:38.260I mean, Samantha is a kind of, I don't know, like B-side Katie McHugh, basically.
00:09:44.120Uh, it, it, it's, it's a lot less interesting.
00:09:46.200Uh, but there are some people, like Katie McHugh was an absolute bandwagon jumper.
00:09:50.940And much like, uh, Samantha, she was very ambitious when she got in the movement and wanted to meet people and date them and, and so on.
00:09:59.660Um, and, uh, then the movement doesn't become fun anymore and they get really depressed and angry and frustrated and they feel betrayed and they want to lash out and demoralize the movement even, even further.
00:10:13.440And I don't think this is the end of it.
00:10:15.760Uh, so while this, this incident in itself isn't particularly interesting or significant, um, I do think it's a trend.
00:10:23.340Uh, and, uh, we just simply have to deal with that fact.
00:10:27.580Well, a question for Mark, uh, and, uh, a little bit of pretext first there, as you point out, Richard, there isn't kind of an industry for de-radicalization, but it seems to be a meme that is being pushed, uh, in the media and the establishment to give the impression that there is a true diminishing of kind of illiberal thought or white consciousness, um, rather than the opposite.
00:10:48.320Eric Stryker on his website, national justice, I think published an article not too long ago saying the, actually the opposite is true that occidental dissent and some of these other websites are seeing their traffic explode.
00:10:59.680Um, so, so the idea of a de-radicalization meme is something that is artificially being put forward, um, to, as Richard is saying, demoralize, uh, the community to, to give people second thoughts about this kind of thing.
00:11:13.700One more time to hit Stryker, he published an article about, uh, Picciolini as well, who's involved in a lawsuit, uh, life after hate, uh, is suing him for basically appropriating funds for himself.
00:11:27.400So, Mark, I'm curious to know, what do you think about this de-radicalization meme as kind of a psychological operation?
00:11:35.820Yeah, no, I think it's definitely the case.
00:11:37.560I mean, I, I think that, uh, polarization is going to continue apace.
00:11:41.440I mean, I think that we're, there's one direction to this train and I don't see it actually slowing down.
00:11:47.340Um, I do see, uh, you know, the, the, the state to a certain extent, but certainly corporations we've seen, uh, in terms of censorship, I see, um, these, I, I see basically the forces arrayed against us becoming more oppressive effectively as the only kind of method of, of dealing with this.
00:12:05.940But I do, I think that these people that are, um, that are trying to backpedal out of the alt-right, um, to sort of save themselves as it were.
00:12:16.340Um, I don't think that anything psychologically has changed though, in terms of the people, the people that are aware of these ideas are still very much in the alt-right.
00:12:24.440Now, this girl may be a person who's trying to kind of save her own skin as it were, uh, and she is a woman, right?
00:12:31.640So there is a kind of different psychology involved there.
00:12:34.760And that's, you know, I mean, that's not to criticize women in general, but they're not, you know, they are, uh, they're, they're kind of, uh, constituted in a different way.
00:12:43.540So, uh, and they are more apt to kind of just, you know, uh, going along with the flow as it were, that's kind of an evolutionary trait of women.
00:12:52.900Um, so she can't even really be sort of blamed for her relative cowardice in this incident, uh, in this instance.
00:13:00.280Um, but, uh, yeah, I, so I, I don't, I think that the train is going to go forward.
00:13:04.900And I mean, I, I think, uh, and actually a good example of what I'm talking about right now.
00:13:08.520It's going to be silent for a long time.
00:13:10.620I think the train, the train was going full bore for a while and people were, you know, overtly jumping on, uh, people willing to go to Charlottesville and stand up and risk doxing.
00:13:25.620I don't think people quite expected what would happen eventually, but they certainly knew that risk were involved in the sense of being doxed and they were willing to do it because it was so exciting.
00:13:36.780You felt like you're part of this big thing.
00:13:38.360I don't think the alt-right is going to be in that mode anytime soon.
00:13:43.360Um, and, uh, but yeah, there's no question that for everyone, Samantha, there's like, you know, a hundred or a thousand other people learning about, you know, dissident ideas, good and bad ones, to be honest.
00:13:59.120Uh, but dissident ideas, uh, on the internet.
00:14:04.080Well, on a question then for Tyler, just to kind of move from the, the whammon question, um, Hunter Wallace wrote about this for the Occidental dissent or dissident.
00:14:15.120Uh, and the thing that was interesting to me, uh, straw man, a cod who is kind of an audience member of a lot of these shows, um, left several comments in, in the, in the, the bottom of the article talking about how, um, one of the reasons he left the alt-right or the white nationalist movement was that there, there was just a preoccupation with degeneracy.
00:14:40.120Degeneracy on the part of men who would then turn around and try to have sex with his wife, have sex with the wives of other people involved.
00:14:49.120And so there's this preoccupation with degeneracy at the same time, uh, a willful engagement in that degeneracy.
00:14:55.500Uh, it seems like you read that article as well.
00:14:57.660What are your thoughts on that, Tyler?
00:15:01.240I found his comments pretty revealing and also honestly, uh, pretty relatable to what, what I saw back in 2016 and 2017 and up to 18, right?
00:15:09.620Like, it reminded me a lot of us, I guess, some of the weak foundations from a lot of people that came into this at the time.
00:15:15.620So when I noticed, cause he basically said, you know, you know, he said a lot of these men were kind of behaving like typical degenerates, you know, they're, they were losers or lashing out, they're full of resentment.
00:15:25.940But at the same time in hitting on this guy's girlfriend, they were making essentially a checklist of all the things she should be trad about.
00:15:34.760So it's like they, they, what it indicated to me anyways, is that this was basically the behavior of people who are, or, you know, they're basically losers.
00:15:44.880Um, and you know, to some extent they're feel justified, right?
00:15:47.560They should feel justified in that, but they, they weren't taking, you know, they weren't taking the effort to construct something new or something, you know, out of this.
00:15:56.700They were people that felt resentment and then the Trump campaign comes along and this was their very first experience with, you know, what we would call dissonant politics, but I don't think they thought of it as dissonant back then.
00:16:07.700You know, this is why they got very surprised all of a sudden, you know, post Charlottesville is because they realized that, Hey, we're actually dissidents, right?
00:16:16.680You know, they learned that for the very first time.
00:16:19.880And so you're, and so I remember back at these local kind of groups here, I saw this all the time, you know, women would come around and then all the men, whether it'd be like one or two women and these men would get very infatuated with her and they'd be like, Oh yeah, she's so trad and right wing.
00:16:35.520And the whole time I found it very pathetic, but like it spoke to like this need that this was all coming from a place of, you know, you know, justifiably, you know,
00:16:46.680of course that you're, you're, you're becoming, uh, you're losing your place in society, losing your role.
00:17:22.380And then goes on to list all these groups that were not the one she was in, which was his own.
00:17:27.840So, and then, and then they went, okay, well, okay, well, we need to focus on, you know, optics, whatever, basically reviving that optics argument.
00:17:36.040And then what you get on the other side, where you get these people that think, okay, well, there's something called movementarianism.
00:17:40.900And it's all hopeless and it's going to collapse.
00:17:42.860So you just run to the tree, run, run to the rural areas, make like a cell of like three or four people and just like wait for the system collapse, which is, you know, completely ridiculous.
00:17:52.780Like even, even if that scenario was possible, regardless, you'd still have to actually engage in the world.
00:17:59.420Those institutions change over time and create these conditions in the first place.
00:18:02.620You simply can't pose this dialectically, though, this dichotomy between good optics and engaging in, you know, your GOP and, you know, putting up this idea that if you just behave like friendly white people, then everyone will all of a sudden be, okay, these guys aren't so bad.
00:18:17.440Let's give them their own space or the other option, which is become the worst possible thing you could think of.
00:18:26.600Yeah, I agree with a lot of what you said.
00:18:29.420I'll disagree here slightly, but yeah, I think all of these reactions to Charlottesville are kind of all the flip side, the same side, the second, the other side of the same coin, so to speak.
00:18:43.540Although this is a coin with many sides.
00:18:46.680There's the, oh, we can just be Republicans and Trump is so base that he's going to like create a, you know, fascist revolution or whatever.
00:18:54.920Or we need to read siege and go kill people and blow up our local, you know, electrical outlet or whatever, you know, and then also, oh, I'm going to go and live in the country and everything will collapse and then I'll win by doing nothing.
00:19:09.840Or, you know, oh, we actually need to like trick people by waving flags and then they're going to allow us into the GOP.
00:19:18.260All of these things are kind of wrong and they're all kind of weirdly similar.
00:19:22.340They're all about avoiding responsibility and basically they're all about avoiding becoming a real independent movement, which the alt-right, despite its myriad of faults, was kind of sort of fledgingly becoming in 2017.
00:19:42.760And it failed, but it was kind of sort of doing that.
00:19:48.860And every reaction to it and every criticism is given in bad faith in the sense that it's given by people who just don't want to take responsibility.
00:19:57.820And so they get into these arguments that are ultimately meaningless.
00:20:01.500What is the point of the optics debate?
00:20:03.700Like if you Google the American identity movement or Identity Europa and you look at the newsfeed, I actually did this a few days ago, and you look at just Google newsfeed, literally every headline will include neo-Nazi, white supremacist, white nationalist, fascist, maybe alt-right here and there, although that's becoming less common.
00:20:24.920So you can't like, what is the optics debate about if no one's listening?
00:20:29.400All you're doing is getting in these vicious internecine feuds between a bunch of people who don't want to take ultimate responsibility for things.
00:20:40.540And I just, again, it's like, I'm willing to say this, I'm willing to admit it.
00:20:45.340But yeah, I mean, Casey, it's like, you know, the guy is endlessly in the friend zone with Samantha.
00:20:51.760He's been in the friend zone for three years and he's still there.
00:20:55.100And he even says it himself, like, she's my friend.
00:20:58.320And then he goes on, like, I saw this, I'm blocked by Patrick Casey, by the way, but someone sent me a screenshot of the thing.
00:21:07.680And you basically see this kind of thing.
00:21:10.080It's like, but I agree, like all of these other, all of these other groups that she did not join really are terrible.
00:21:17.700It's like, dude, at some level, you got to take responsibility for this stuff.
00:21:23.300And, you know, the other one that I found amusing from him was he was like, you low IQ wignats or whatever.
00:21:31.780And he was like, you're blaming me for being on Discord, but we're not on Discord.
00:21:46.980The whole Discord critique was kind of secondary, you know.
00:21:50.720But anyway, yeah, it's just a complete joke.
00:21:55.700And it's, again, all of these guys are just a bunch of ways of saying we shouldn't actually be an independent movement that is dissident, that is going to get lashed out at, that is going to be suppressed by the state to a degree, that is going to rub a lot of people the wrong way.
00:22:13.320Because we are in a similar position to dissident movements in the past.
00:22:19.900And we can ultimately accept that and own it and move forward.
00:22:23.700Or we can play these endless, meaningless games that people outside of the movement don't pay attention to.
00:22:30.640So, but I would say this, though, as just a marginal rejoinder to Thamster on the whole kind of degeneracy question and whatever.
00:22:45.780Let's also just be real about human nature.
00:22:48.780Now, are there a bunch of incels in the alt-right?
00:22:58.020Is there just a lot of resentment and a kind of false puritanism in the sense that, you know, you can't really criticize something you can't possess?
00:23:06.880You know, like, if you can't get laid, then you can't be lecturing anyone on, like, the virtues of abstinence.
00:23:14.800You know, you have to actually abstain and not, you know, be such a loser that you can't get any.
00:23:21.680Like, let's just be, you know, these are real chat hours here.
00:23:36.160And, yeah, and if you can't appreciate, like, having a beer with the guys once in a while or, you know, enjoying a cocktail with, you know, with your girlfriend or something, if you can't actually experience that, then don't start lecturing everyone about alcoholism or whatever, which is another thing that I hear.
00:23:57.920But, yeah, but what I was saying is that, look, there was a lot of energy in that movement.
00:24:05.000And, you know, yeah, young people get together and guys get jealous and they're all hitting on girls and people sleep with each other.
00:24:13.300And so I don't want to kind of Puritan post here in the sense of, like, there's going to be a movement that is the only way we're successful is if we're either like this Christian moral movement.
00:24:58.100The fact that, you know, a young man thinks, a young man who has good instincts and isn't resentful and thinks, oh, I could actually join something and maybe meet a girl.
00:25:34.060And I think it's just kind of natural.
00:25:36.600You know, I think that's the least of the problems of this whole situation.
00:25:39.860Two thoughts and we'll turn it over to Tyler because I know Tyler has something he wants to say.
00:25:44.420I don't know about you guys, but I really didn't like the cringy Reagan Christian morality that seeped its way through the 80s into the 90s.
00:25:56.900And I know, at least for my generation, it's why a lot of us became progressives, leftists, kind of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez styled socialists, because we were tired of this grandma, old grandma hectoring about stuff that was essentially harmless.
00:26:13.160But you missed the point, Josh, because it was all utter hypocrisy.
00:26:16.360The ultimate way to get laid is to go to CPAC and, you know, wear a flag like that.
00:26:23.260That's the ultimate joke is that it's, you know, Reaganites in the streets and, you know, orgies in the sheets or whatever.
00:26:36.220And again, and I'm not saying that it's all some big, you know, satanic catastrophe.
00:26:41.240But yeah, I mean, look, that's a movement that obviously sucks and we hate and has been totally destructive, but they feel like they're going somewhere.
00:26:52.440They feel like tomorrow is going to be brighter than yesterday.
00:26:56.460And yeah, they want to have sex because they're 20 years old, you know.
00:27:01.520The other thing, just a slight disagreement, I've been guilty of this too.
00:27:06.900And when people are quick to say that the alt-right failed, I don't think that the history book has been closed.
00:27:13.360That chapter is closed on what the alt-right was or still is.
00:27:16.940And I do think very much it still is a process of becoming.
00:27:20.960And all of these, taking Augustus into consideration, the grifter question from last week,
00:27:27.060the topics we've discussed tonight, these are all part of the evolution of what the alt-right can still become.
00:28:01.060I just wanted to say what might sound like, I guess a bit of like an obvious point at first,
00:28:05.180but does play into this is one of the things which might be a slight retort to what I said earlier.
00:28:09.580But I see this a lot, like when it comes to the whole like group dynamics and political movements,
00:28:14.600like the whole sleeping around thing, a bunch of drama going around.
00:28:17.740And on one hand, I explain it as like a, you know, part of this resentment.
00:28:21.980But on the other hand, and this is something people understand, like me, I used to be a lot in the music scene and everything was when you're an adult and you're in any scene, whether it be a music scene or some kind of hobby, all of these kind of sexual group dynamics.
00:28:36.620And this drama dynamics happens in every single group.
00:28:39.920And so when often these kinds of complaints come up, like, oh, this movement's full of drama and this, any group, because think about it.
00:28:47.620Most of the time when you're older, your friend group thins.
00:29:00.640So the one thing I guess I agree with Hunter's take on, which might not be the Lutheranism angle specifically, but was the idea that if you're trying to form a new movement that isn't purely resentment, but actually offers a positive vision, then at least within the groups that you're in, you should at least be able to live up to a certain code that kind of projects what kind of society you want to have in the future.
00:29:23.180So that would be the takeaway message I agree with.
00:29:26.620But on the other hand, I would like to say those group dynamics are present in all these things.
00:29:31.020So you have to be eternally vigorous with this.
00:29:33.440You have to monitor how exactly these dynamics play out.
00:29:38.580If you're serious about building something new, that has to be in every area that you're in, not just the theoretical realm, but when you're engaging with others in that group, you should be a part of building that.
00:29:52.200I mean, I have not really been to a movement group in over a year now.
00:29:58.920But I would say this, and one of the last things that I went to was this basically private meeting in Indianapolis, and it led to friendships ending.
00:30:13.380It led to – sometimes when you've got a lot of young people and you're just giving them beer, basically not much good can happen.
00:30:26.200And, yeah, that was certainly an example of it.
00:30:33.740Whenever there's any movement gathering and it gets into a drinking fest, it just – it's not going to end well.
00:30:41.680And I also think this is a problem, even though it kind of is – let's also be honest here – a problem in every movement or every scene and kind of derives from youth and human nature itself.
00:30:58.060Yeah, trying to pin this as a unique feature of the alt-right or conservatism or whatever I think is a little bit misguided.
00:31:10.460But before we are accused of defending degeneracy, I think maybe we can close out this program by agreeing the news of the day is absolutely mortifying.
00:31:21.500And the story – this is from the New York Post.
00:31:23.860The Texas jury rules against divorced dad trying to stop seven-year-old son's gender transition.
00:31:31.220The Dallas panel denied Jeffrey Younger's petition for sole custody of sons Jude and James, which came as the boy's mom is pushing for James to begin hormone replacement therapy.
00:31:42.960The mom, pediatrician Ann Georgioulis – we lost you?
00:31:47.700No, I think – no, I'm just – every time I hear this story, I just want to puke, basically.
00:32:27.920But at stake potentially is not just James' identity in the here and now, but his health down the line.
00:32:32.800I think we're all kind of cognizant of the consequences of giving prepubescent boys hormone blockers, putting them through hormone replacement therapy.
00:32:42.520Richard, this is a real kind of a – puts a tear in the eye of any sober person.
00:32:52.680You know, we – before we went on air, we were thinking of not even talking about this because, you know, this isn't just low-hanging fruit.
00:33:00.180This is fruit that's just lying on the ground asking to be picked up.
00:33:03.680And, you know, just simply expressing outrage is kind of easy because any normal person looks at this, and not to mention anyone vaguely on the right looks at this and is just absolutely disgusted.
00:33:18.660Although maybe that's changing with post-2016 and MAGA and all this, you know, weird pro-gay tranny stuff coming into the conservative movement.
00:33:28.820But, yeah, I mean, it's just beyond insane.
00:33:34.800You know, young people are kind of inherently confused.
00:33:40.900They don't know who they are by the just very nature of maturation.
00:33:45.700The ability of young people to be manipulated and told that, oh, no, actually, these completely natural questions that you're engaging in express some secret identity that you've always had.
00:34:02.020And then to engage through modern medicine in castration, mutilation, and desecration of the human body.
00:34:11.720It's just beyond anything that I could ever imagine.
00:34:15.700You know, I have to say, I thought that we reached a kind of end of the gay culture wars in 2013.
00:34:28.040By that point, the president of the United States had, even though he didn't when he ran, he came out in favor of gay marriage.
00:34:35.340Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, you know, one of the most beloved, also kind of one of the most hated, but one of the most beloved companies and a kind of, you know, cool capitalism company, came out as gay.
00:34:47.620I actually did kind of think, all right, we've kind of tabled these questions.
00:35:34.060And we like to, you know, kind of poo-poo the paleos and point out their limitations and so on.
00:35:42.300But when Pat Buchanan used that term, culture war, it actually meant something.
00:35:47.800And far worse than anything he ever imagined when he gave that speech in 1992 at the Republican National Convention, it has now been normalized in a way where some, you know, beady-eyed librarian running for president can talk to a nine-year-old transgendered person and be like, oh, that's great.
00:36:10.380We have just, yeah, we live in this society.
00:36:14.560We can't run away from it, and our society is profoundly sick.
00:36:20.020I think even talking about degeneracy is, I don't know.
00:36:24.100I think a lot of people haven't, you know, when they use that word, they're almost referring to, like, I don't know, getting drunk or, you know, screwing around with some chick or whatever.
00:36:35.380I think we almost need to reformulate that.
00:36:40.120That kind of stuff is all too human and maybe forgivable at some level.
00:36:45.620What we're seeing now is weirdly not that type of behavior.
00:36:49.700It's a bizarre, sick, and kind of weirdly puritanical type of motive on the part of these people.
00:37:03.380And I cannot put into words the level of hatred I have, not towards the young people who are clearly victims, but towards the adults that includes physicians, people I would usually defend.
00:37:21.280My father's a physician, but certainly includes these activists.
00:37:24.740It is just beyond sick, and it's not just about free love and sex.
00:37:32.740It is about the radical transformation of human nature, and that is just profoundly disgusting.
00:37:46.140My thought, and maybe we can get Tyler's impressions on this as well.
00:37:52.220It speaks to, I think, the deep ideological possession that the average American man and woman is under, that they look at their child and they think, oh, little Johnny must be little Janie.
00:38:20.820Well, let's remove age from it, but like the mentality that, well, as long as this person is happy, if this will make them happy, if this will bring them fulfillment.
00:38:29.300It's almost in a certain sense like people recognize the world is kind of hopelessly perverted and evil and going in the wrong direction, and people want to steal joy wherever they can find it.
00:38:43.360And so, Tyler, I'm going to get your thoughts on this.
00:38:45.900Taking the age out of it, I apologize.
00:38:47.580We love our boomers, but the kind of like a very American, almost like 60s, new age humanist psychiatrist movement of like happiness, happiness, happiness, fulfillment, that seems to me to be at the core of this as well.
00:39:05.620Yeah, I think degeneracy isn't a strong enough word for this.
00:39:10.260And I think when you connect boomers and then this kind of new age hippie mentality and then this, you know, this activist mentality, I think there is, you know, a family lineage here with this line of thought in the sense that liberalism in its inception has always been essentially the liberation of human nature from biology with the power of technology.
00:39:33.180It's liberating us from our biological pretense into this kind of realm of human freedom in which the individual becomes realized, right?
00:39:41.920And what ends up happening with this is this kind of defacement of human nature, which, you know, human nature itself, what makes someone what they are, is formed from this kind of bodily engagement with the world, through the environment, you know, through the mind of other people around you, your culture and yourself.
00:39:58.640And this literally develops into who you are.
00:40:01.500This is how, you know, this is how you become who you are.
00:40:03.960This is how people become who you are.
00:40:05.960And when you try to liberate us from those kind of roots, you essentially create the situation in which this kind of horizon of meaning is stripped away.
00:40:14.020And all you have is this kind of individual projection in which you're looking for meaning, but you're not going to find it.
00:40:19.400And so you get caught up in your own anxieties and your desires and there's nowhere to situate it.
00:40:24.680There's yourself towards something higher.
00:40:54.680You know, mental disfigurement that you can't situate anywhere in some kind of meaningful way.
00:41:01.060So what happens with this, this is where you get this shared lineage between Americanism and this kind of liberal idea of freedom that was there in the very beginning of America's founding.
00:41:14.180And that's where it led us to where we are today.
00:41:16.200Let me follow up question, because some members of the audience have challenged this idea that, you know, wow, we're anti-liberal, we're anti-freedom, we're anti-liberty.
00:41:28.960What do you think with regards to the idea that the kind of American or enlightenment conception of freedom was a high freedom?
00:41:37.160And it was something that that when we say freedom, it wasn't this base freedom from responsibility or freedom from biological condition, but freedom from the freedom to to do in a willful way, but also like in an intentional kind of deeply meaningful way to exercise freedom.
00:41:56.260The freedom that we are all talking about today in this broadcast is probably not the same kind of freedom that was meant 200 years ago, 300 years ago.
00:42:05.840Do you see a distinction there at all, Tyler?
00:42:08.020Well, you know, I mean, certainly when you read the Enlightenment philosophers, we're not all thinking of the situations that we have now, right?
00:42:16.740I mean, like you can even read someone as lame as Locke, and then you get it.
00:42:20.180But he still had this notion of natural law, and he's still connected to the divine and God.
00:42:25.400But, you know, there's a certain sense in which ideas on their own, and when you take away power and how that they're actually put out into the world by a community of minds,
00:42:34.500it helps build up and constitute them over time, in the sense that everything you do and you think and how you live in the world comes out of these kinds of conceptions that are, you know, before you and they're after you,
00:42:45.140and they, you know, in a certain way kind of designate where you're going to go in thought and where you're going to go as a people.
00:42:51.320That you can't necessarily, you can't constrain these things just by saying, okay, well, our notion of freedom was not this kind of degenerative freedom that they have now in the West.
00:43:00.240Well, you know, sure. But in a sense, when you're trying to essentially create a project in which the universe and the human is all quantitative, you know,
00:43:09.300and it's all the matter of the technology liberating us from our human nature that we inherit from the world and from our biology and from people, others around us.
00:43:19.360Well, you're going to end up with the same kind of problem. There's no way around it.
00:43:22.760And it's the same reason that Marxism was not a good answer either, because in the same sense,
00:43:26.860it kind of created this scientific materialist understanding of which the end of history would be realized in the matter that there'd be this absolute freedom that we would progress that way from some kind of perfect understanding of how,
00:43:40.060you know, the economic realm played out, how these, you know, this means of production, this class warfare would lead us to this ideal state.
00:43:47.520It's the same. It comes out of the same ideology that you could somehow reconfigure human nature and you could ignore these very primordial elements of what makes us who we are.
00:43:56.420And you're going to end up at the same point. And I think any kind of genuine philosophy for the future,
00:44:01.520something that we would need to take up would require understanding at least a kind of sense of who we are as a people.
00:44:07.300And that would be the only real challenge. And I don't mean just us as white people, but, you know, humanity in general,
00:44:13.520what exactly that means to be human. And that in itself would be a bulwark against the idea that the liberation of humanity from human,
00:44:22.820from our kind of inherited nature through technology.
00:44:27.640You know, that would be something good and inevitably good, and that would benefit everybody.
00:44:34.080Yeah, real quick, I, we, no, unquestionably people in the 1950s, the 1850s, the 1750s did not think that what they were doing was leading up to Caitlyn Jenner and this very depressing case in Texas.
00:44:51.400But you can understand their, the beginnings and origins of their ideas by ultimately viewing their outcome.
00:44:59.500I mean, we do live in their wake and we can understand the foundations of America by looking at where it is now and not just merely being a reactionary and saying it was better 50 years ago.
00:45:11.100Yeah, it was better 50 years ago. It was also kind of worse 50 years ago in, in, in many ways as well.
00:45:16.020And that, that's just a very limp response to this problem as, as opposed to saying, no, actually America was wrong from the very beginning.
00:45:23.880There is something profoundly wicked in its origins that led here.
00:45:30.480And that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of redeemable things about America's past, but to just try to wish it away and think that we can just turn back the clock, you know, a few decades or maybe a century or maybe a few centuries is, is again, it's, it's that kind of mirror reaction that we, we absolutely need to get away from.
00:45:51.540It is also interesting in the future. I, I do think that we will simply need to assert things that, and, and assert them differently as opposed to asserting things like natural law or God-given rights or things like that.
00:46:08.800Uh, I, I think we actually will have to, uh, uh, force people to be free in the sense that we will assert a certain, uh, certain aspects of human nature that won't be questioned and that these questions will have been answered and we will not discuss this anymore.
00:46:28.060We are not going to have another debate about whether an eight-year-old is a transsexual, um, and we will assert that using the power of the state and the power of law.
00:46:37.760And we will just simply have to do that. And, you know, you can say, oh gosh, how fascist and whatever. But again, that, that fascist term is just a way it's liberal blackmail. It's just a way for them to, uh, avoid actually answering these questions. Um, and, uh, there, yeah, there, there's no question that politics in the future, it's going to be a kind of culture war. It's going to be a philosophical war, uh, not in the way that that term is used by Charlie Kirk, but, um, we will,
00:47:07.720absolutely have to answer certain questions about the nature of man for us to move forward.
00:47:15.660Very well said. Since you mentioned Charlie Kirk, uh, I think this is probably a good opportunity to discuss a series of videos that have been floating around Twitter and elsewhere on the internet, which, um, I, I think before the call started, before the show started, uh, Richard, you referred to them as Chad Catholics or something like that.
00:47:33.740I don't know who these young men are, but there's a group of these young guys and they are going to these culture war broadcasts or, or, um, um, college lectures, whatever they are.
00:47:44.140And they're, and they're antagonizing with Charlie Kirk about the relationship that we have with Israel, paying them $3.8 billion a year, bringing up the USS Liberty.
00:47:53.240Um, one video in one video, a guy pretty, pretty said something pretty hardcore.
00:47:58.880It's like, we're giving them money to blow up children.
00:48:02.160I don't think I'm taking, putting words in his mouth.
00:48:03.960I mean, very, very, almost like Ed's Lord Twitter type of comments, but in this very open public forum.
00:48:09.860And, uh, Charlie Kirk responded in the very predictable way.
00:48:13.980Um, what was your impression of this, Richard?
00:48:33.360I don't know if anyone had heard of him before, say 2014.
00:48:36.540And then he's sitting on this, you know, multimillion dollar 501 C3P, uh, 501 C3, which is, you know, the envy of all these other conservative organizations that have trying to be, gain traction.
00:48:53.180I think he might've attended a semester of college or something, which I've always found rather funny, but kind of, I don't know, perfect in a way.
00:49:02.680And, and what I mean by that is that, um, you know, the normal stories of rock bands, you know, is that they, they get together, they're friends and they don't even know how to play instruments.
00:49:13.820And they, you know, play pubs for four years and they put out their first album and then by album, like three or four, they're actually good.
00:49:20.880Um, and with a boy band, it is basically producers, you know, they, they retro engineer a group.
00:49:28.620And so they, they have an idea of what they want in the sense of this poppy, you know, bubble gum appeal to teenage girls type thing.
00:49:35.940And then they go out and they find the talent and they just create this band, new kids on the block in sync, et cetera.
00:49:42.440I'm sure there are many more that I don't know about, um, uh, the spice girls, uh, all that kind of stuff.
00:49:49.420Uh, and, um, he kind of is this in the sense that he is perfectly retro engineered for this time.
00:49:57.000He is evoking MAGA populism, uh, to some degree.
00:50:01.480He is a fierce defender of the president.
00:50:03.300I think he actually will probably defend him, Donald Trump to the end.
00:50:07.020Uh, but then at the same time, he kind of takes, he, he knows where he has to be right now as a conservative.
00:50:14.120And so he's doing this culture war college tour and, uh, he's going up there, um, you know, evoking Pat Buchanan, evoking Pat's most famous or notorious speech from 1992.
00:50:28.480Um, and it, while Pat was talking about, you know, we shouldn't allow gays on TV and the police should justifiably crack down on the LA rioters.
00:50:40.800That's what he was actually talking about in that speech.
00:50:43.120Now it's, we need to confront, uh, Iran because they throw gays off buildings and don't allow transsexuals.
00:50:51.840So that, that's literally where we've come.
00:50:54.540It's a culture, the culture war almost means the exact opposite of what it used to mean.
00:51:17.620Uh, I would say this when I was 20 years old in college in, you know, 1999 or, or whatever, uh, I did not know what the USS Liberty was.
00:51:29.000Um, and I, I certainly was reading, you know, radical philosophy or something, but I did not have edgy opinions because the, the web was just in a infant state at that point.
00:51:40.900Uh, now these 20 year old kids know about this stuff.
00:51:54.040I mean, there, there are some good things to say about this.
00:51:56.360Uh, but in terms of limitations of it, there, there are limitations as well.
00:52:00.000I mean, first off, we, we kind of have done this before that you saw a lot of this with the Milo college tour.
00:52:05.400And I don't want to make this all about my personal pleading, but it's kind of like we, at one point had our own college tour in which it wasn't, we didn't have to go in the comment section and troll the comment section.
00:52:19.440We actually had our people putting forth radical ideas and, you know, uh, a lot of the alt-right was at the end of it, rejecting it and calling it cringe or whatever.
00:52:29.980Uh, that was a lot more powerful than this.
00:52:33.520So we've kind of stepped back to be Frank and I'm not against it.
00:52:39.420So I don't, I don't want everyone to think, Oh, I'm counter signaling these kids.
00:53:10.300Um, the, the use of this term culture war, I'm, I'm teeing you up for a big one here, Mark.
00:53:15.360It's very Caducean, uh, in the sense that we're, we're commandeering this concept and then using it to ultimately, um, put forth the exact same land project.
00:53:26.660Um, what do you, what do you see in this Charlie Kirk phenomenon, Mark?
00:53:32.240Uh, yeah, good use of the word Caducean.
00:53:34.780Uh, I actually, I don't, I mean, yeah, I think it's, uh, um, it's, uh, exactly what Richard said.
00:53:43.760I mean, I, I don't have many points to disagree.
00:53:46.020I mean, he's a kind of, um, it is a kind of shadow of the alt-right, right?
00:53:51.100It is, it's the alt-light and the alt-light has become more robust in a lot of ways than it was previously.
00:53:57.360So I think that they realize, um, this false opposition, as it were, realizes that this has to be, the alt-light has to grow into a kind of robust movement.
00:54:06.700Um, so it's a fascinating thing to watch.
00:54:08.780Whereas, um, you know, uh, six years ago or seven years ago, they wouldn't want a robust alt-light, right?
00:54:16.300So I guess that is a sort of positive development in the sense that the Overton, Overton, uh, window has moved.
00:54:23.220Um, you know, things increasingly are becoming polarized as, as I was talking about earlier.
00:54:27.360Um, you know, one thing that we didn't mention, for example, is, um, these Proud Boys got arrested and they were put in jail for four years.
00:54:35.920That's, that's a kind of remarkable thing that's happened.
00:54:39.260Um, because if you watch the video, it was basically a melee between two parties.
00:54:43.560Now, granted, uh, the Proud Boys probably outweighed each one by a hundred pounds each, but it doesn't matter.
00:54:51.560There was, it was a melee between two parties that were both involved in a, in a, in a fight.
00:54:56.900And, uh, this, I think the story is that the, um, Antifa kind of characteristically started the melee.
00:55:06.300So now they, they, these guys should not have gone to jail, let alone for four years.
00:55:12.380I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a kind of insane miscarriage of, uh, justice in my mind.
00:55:18.600Um, because it was a fight, uh, that was not started by them.
00:55:22.940They were basically defending themselves.
00:55:24.760They might, they might've been a little excessive in their reaction.
00:55:27.620Maybe a slap on the wrist could have been warranted, but, uh, going to jail for four years.
00:55:33.980Uh, now the judge in that case was saying, um, that, you know, he, he sort of evoked the, uh, uh, the pre-Hitler period of the 1930s.
00:55:43.340And that, like, if we, if we allow these sort of street battles to take place, then next thing you'll know, next thing you'll know, a fascism will have taken hold in the United States.
00:55:51.740Now, they, I mean, the truth is actually that this is actually the worst thing.
00:55:56.980This is actually a kind of worse reaction because now everyone, you know, in now kind of relatively mainstream Republicans are reacting to this and saying, Hey, that's a miscarriage of justice.
00:56:10.280It allowed this kind of like, kind of a relatively innocuous street battle to occur that most people would not have been aware of otherwise.
00:56:19.160Then people just would not have been aware of it.
00:56:22.460But now there are these kinds of mainstream Republicans rallying to the problems.
00:56:27.340So, I mean, there were errors being made now.
00:56:29.780It's not like, it's not like the judge is necessarily some act judge.
00:56:34.940I don't know that he was, I haven't looked at the case very closely and he probably was, he could have just been sort of a kind of mainstream sort of increased polarization.
00:56:49.060I mean, it's exactly, he, he heightened the sort of salience of the case by putting these guys in jail for four years and he, and he made them a kind of sympathetic case to the broader, you know, sort of Republican or conservative movement.
00:57:02.240Um, so it was a good thing also, I mean, for, you know, this sort of the, the accelerating pluralization, it was obviously a terrible and tragic thing for these young men who have to go to jail for four years.
00:57:13.560But, you know, I mean, things, so things will continue apace, but, um, I, as Richard was saying earlier, I, I think that there is going to be a relative silence because they are actively suppressing voices on the right now.
00:57:34.200And, you know, because the, the, the kind of, uh, uh, the chains have been, uh, sort of, we've been sort of unshackled.
00:57:40.480I mean, we've kind of been psychologically unshackled in this country and there's no going back.
00:57:45.020So the, uh, a confrontation that lies, uh, so what we can predict and people in the movement have been predicting this for a very long time is that, um, this kind of corporate and even state, uh, suppression will increase.
00:58:40.880And now we know this is all kind of bullshit.
00:58:44.220Um, and we can react accordingly, you know?
00:58:47.440So I, I think that these things, uh, you know, what's the kind of old, uh, sort of, uh, hackneyed, uh, aphorism, you know, when the tough, when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
00:58:57.540And so I think that there is going to be a kind of, uh, a distilling and purifying of people that are involved in this movement.
00:59:03.720And we kind of had this conversation, uh, last time that there is, uh, yeah, a kind of middle class sort of disappeared from the movement.
00:59:13.120There was a kind of norm, normie sort of middle class in the movement, including some of the guys that were holding torches at, uh, Charlottesville.
00:59:20.720Like it, it had become sort of mainstream and it had become a kind of middle class movement to one extent or another, at least among sort of young men.
00:59:29.520Uh, but that kind of evaporated after Charlottesville to one extent or another.
00:59:33.220Uh, what remained were people who were highly intelligent and just not pussies basically.
00:59:40.020And then another element remained as well that we talked about on the last, uh, uh, podcast, uh, some elements that, uh, Augustus is probably dealing with right now, but who are just not good people.
00:59:52.760Who are just kind of like trashy people and are doing this because it's a kind of heretical movement and they're not going to win in life in any case.
01:00:02.800So they may as well kind of lose in a sort of dramatic fashion while telling people to fuck off in the process.
01:00:11.760So in that you can kind of respect, um, it's the guy at the football game who runs out onto the field naked, like from the stands, you know, basically.
01:00:47.680Like they want to walk, they want to kind of demoralize us in a sort of subtle and gradual enough manner that we're just not like, Hey, you know what?
01:00:55.240Trannies like that shit, that shit happened overnight.
01:00:58.400It was like five years ago where there was, we didn't have this sort of phenomenon known as trannies as a mainstream thing that happened overnight.
01:01:06.860And so they may have like, they may have hit the accelerator a little too aggressively on some of these things.
01:01:13.760Now people are bunkered down to one extent or another, but they're also getting more intelligent.
01:01:18.580They're also thinking of ways to get around this block, right?
01:01:22.040So we're, we're going to be forced to become more intelligent and we are becoming more intelligent.
01:01:26.800The people that I encounter in this movement are more intelligent than the people that I encountered previously in the movement.
01:01:32.940I mean, it's just, there has been a kind of like a kind of incremental up, you know, IQ upgrade, um, in the movement among, you know, admittedly a sort of small population in the movement.
01:01:45.520Uh, but you know, you only need a small population, right?
01:01:55.500We're seeing a kind of evolution at work.
01:01:58.140We're seeing a nature, you know, firsthand and, um, we're getting smarter and we're getting leaner and stronger in some ways.
01:02:06.660The, the move, one thing that I wanted to mention that I didn't say before is, uh, this girl, um, Samantha that was in the movement.
01:02:14.040And she tells a story that I think is probably a true story that she, um, was dating a guy and that's how she got into the movement.
01:02:21.940She'd been dating a guy that she, she said that she'd fallen in love with a guy.
01:02:25.080And he was talking about, uh, uh, Turner's Turner diaries, you know, real, like 1.0 stuff.
01:02:34.080And like, there's going to be a day of the rope, right?
01:02:36.600He's telling that, you know, and this chick just happened to be, you know, unfortunate enough to like fall in love with this fucking weirdo, right?
01:02:42.920So, and he's saying, you know, there's going to be a day where they're going to be hanging people.
01:02:47.940And I actually think that that's probably like, I don't think that I'm, I don't think that she's just sort of like selecting the most extreme thing that she heard in the movement.
01:02:56.040Maybe she's doing that, but I think it sounded credible to me that the first person that she encountered and she was dating was this guy that was into Turner's, Turner's diary and was talking about day of the rope.
01:03:07.040That's an, that's an immature fucking movement.
01:03:10.260Those idiots, we, we don't need those idiots.
01:03:13.240That's the kind of like, they, they, they sort of failed a kind of evolutionary test by being that idiot.
01:03:19.000The guy failed an evolutionary test that, that, so now, you know, so those were some of the elements and I don't, and I think that obviously there were, there were many elements.
01:03:29.080And I talked about a kind of middle-class element that was in the enormity middle-class element that was in the movement.
01:03:33.220So that guy was kind of an outlier within the movement, but there was, there, there were these sort of remnant.