RadixJournal - March 08, 2023


Trump Era Redux

Topics
QAnon dynamic Christian nationalism
Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Donald Trump Jr. Ron Paul Michael Knowles Nick Fuentes Hillary Clinton Chris Christie Ron DeSantis Ted Cruz Kimberly Guilfoyle Herschel Walker Mitch McConnell Jordan Peterson Matt Schlapp Blade Runner Marco Rubio Ben Shapiro David Duke Rich Lowry Glenn Beck Kanye West and 12 more
The Florida Reptile The Troll Storm

Episode Stats


Length

35 minutes

Words per minute

146.36

Word count

5,234

Sentence count

263

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

10

sentences flagged

Hate speech

12

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

CPAC is a conservative conference in which conservative activists come together to discuss the latest in politics, including the scandal surrounding Matt Schlapp and the Trump administration, and the potential for a 2020 primary challenge from Ron DeSantis. This episode is hosted by Alex Blumberg.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So CPAC was held this past weekend, and there was a black cloud hanging over CPAC that involved Matt Schlapp, who's this typical and typically gross conservative organizer who was credibly accused of, quote, pummeling the junk of a male staffer of the Herschel Walker campaign.
00:00:27.760 And I really don't know what to say about that. I think that definitely kept some people away or just made the whole event seem icky. But I also think there was, and the crowds were way down. And I've seen this myself. I mean, I used to go to CPAC back in the day before it was held at the aptly named Gaylord Hotel.
00:00:57.760 When it was in D.C. And these things were smaller. They were also a little more kind of marginal in a way. It was like hardcore conservative activists and not necessarily this big, you know, Trump cult or anything like that.
00:01:18.680 Although some major figures would speak there. It just had a smaller feel and more of a kind of marginal feel. CPAC was, you know, selling out. CPAC has expanded. They're going to Hungary. They're going all over the place.
00:01:32.200 It's become a major event. It's become a major event. It was way down this year. There were sparsely attended events and things like that, almost embarrassingly.
00:01:44.200 So there was an image of Donald Trump Jr.'s wife or girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, kind of yelling into the crowd about America first. And they showed an image of the crowd and it was like half full at most. Pretty embarrassing stuff.
00:02:00.440 But I think Trump is in an interesting position at the moment.
00:02:08.760 So Trump issued a policy statement of sorts a few days before CPAC. And then at CPAC, he made a lot of promises, many of which we've heard before.
00:02:21.800 But I think the dynamic is interesting. And the dynamic is very similar to what we saw in 2015 and 2016. So Trump issued this statement that I saw on Twitter. I imagine he issued it first on True Social. And it was a short video.
00:02:39.180 And, you know, a lot of it is easy to kind of debunk it and call it bullshit. Or we've heard this before. Why didn't you do this earlier? But at the same time, I kind of applaud him for at least offering a sort of vision. 0.97
00:02:56.420 I mean, he literally promised flying cars, which is bizarre on some level and I think is a totally unworkable idea, even if a certain kind of, you know, vertical takeoff and landing, you know, vehicle of some kind might very well have like military application.
00:03:17.780 And the idea of people engaged in flying cars, I mean, just I don't even need to go into all of the just immense problems that such a thing is going to create.
00:03:29.960 And whether this is actually better than what we have now is also questionable. Although I guess it has a Blade Runner feel. And that's cool.
00:03:38.140 He also talked about using federal land to create new cities. And there was a kind of Chinese feel to this idea of basically the government creating these new cities. Again, I don't know where these would be federal land.
00:03:58.260 I don't know, I don't know, in the Midwest or something. And then kind of sponsoring Americans, you know, to buy heavily subsidized homes and kind of doing a kind of Chinese solution on the American dream. 0.66
00:04:13.120 But but but also a kind of new version of the frontier of, you know, you go out there, you're a sooner, you can get your land and build your future.
00:04:25.020 It's very interesting, even if it's something that isn't quite workable, or maybe is not desirable in many ways. But it is a grand vision, this kind of MAGA communism, if you will.
00:04:39.020 And he also promised massive deportations at his CPAC speech. We have, of course, have heard this kind of thing before. This was what a lot of us got excited about in 2015 and 2016, where he was talking really boldly like this.
00:04:58.940 You know, I think he's, you know, he's grasping at a certain kind of vision, and it is a grand vision and one that he probably won't implement and one that he's probably too incompetent to implement, but a grand vision, nonetheless, very different to Ron DeSantis is kind of precise, targeted attacks on things.
00:05:23.720 Trump, to his credit is, is offering a big, bold, you know, future off in the distance.
00:05:32.720 And as easy as these things are to debunk, and as kind of bullshitty as these things are, I still would applaud him on some level for doing that for thinking big.
00:05:48.000 But what I find most interesting is this dynamic that has arisen in which Trump is, once again, just directly opposed to the Republican establishment.
00:06:03.680 And a lot of this is coming out of the midterms. It's not necessarily even coming out of the Mar-a-Lago issue or the other indictments or civil lawsuits that he's facing.
00:06:18.320 It seems to come directly out of the fact that Trump can be plausibly blamed for the midterm loss.
00:06:25.460 There's this stink in the air. We need to move on from Trump and his candidates that are bad.
00:06:32.060 You know, he created a shibboleth in the primaries about Stop the Steal, and that empowered some very bad candidates who did not do very well.
00:06:41.340 And so it's kind of easy to blame him for losses.
00:06:46.620 And I think Trump is kind of back where he was in 2015 and 2016.
00:06:54.640 But I also think Trump is, you know, back where he was, where he's directly reaching his supporters and making an end run around the Republican establishment that has been a kind of gatekeeper or kingmaker.
00:07:12.920 And so Fox News didn't cover his trip to East Palestine, but everyone heard about it, and he reached people directly, and they were passing around these social media memes.
00:07:26.600 When Trump goes after, say, Mitch McConnell by name at CPAC, that's an applause line, and that's something that kind of activates his people directly.
00:07:38.540 So Trump's genius, and it's not something he created, I think it's a kind of wave that he rode, was twofold in 2015 and 2016, where he was able to speak directly to his people via Facebook and not bother with any kind of institution, even Fox News.
00:08:01.200 So Fox News was not pro-Trump at the beginning.
00:08:04.740 There's no doubt that it became a kind of Trump TV, in effect, for four years there.
00:08:11.980 But at the beginning, it wasn't pro-Trump.
00:08:15.980 In fact, the Megyn Kelly debate that she hosted, where Trump kind of infamously said she was bleeding out of her you-know-what, whatever he said, apparently a reference demonstration, although who knows,
00:08:30.540 that was meant as a kind of dunk on Trump, a trap door that he was going to fall into, and he survived it.
00:08:40.320 Fox News was much more comfortable with Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or even Chris Christie, as they are now much more comfortable with Ron DeSantis.
00:08:49.660 And Trump, you know, he didn't need those institutions.
00:08:55.020 He could, you know, if Trump were endorsed by, you know, the mayor of, excuse me, if Trump's opponents were endorsed by the mayor of Des Moines, Trump could, his people and voters and potential voters didn't hear that from the mainstream media or from Fox.
00:09:13.180 They learned about it on Facebook from Trump, and he would basically say, you know, like, another swamp creature endorses the establishment rhino candidate.
00:09:24.020 So they would hear it directly from him, and so he was able to kind of do an end run around the institutions.
00:09:31.560 And this, you know, by 2016, this whole dynamic was going into absurd territory with the whole fake news idea, where actual fake news stories were trending on Facebook at greater numbers than real news stories from establishment sources.
00:09:54.780 So notions of Hillary Clinton is a member of ISIS, or the Pope has endorsed Trump, those type of obviously fake stories, although maybe ones that carried a kernel of truth to a certain degree, they were outperforming, you know, a basic horse race, you know, story on USA Today or the New York Times or San Francisco Chronicle.
00:10:19.520 So we'd kind of pass through the looking glass in many ways, and that was the secret to Trump's success.
00:10:26.940 And, you know, as I was talking last night, this, Trump's kind of like negative identity, his insurgency vis-a-vis the Republican Party was what I and I think many other people found most appealing about him.
00:10:47.440 I mean, he would go on stage and just murder Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, et cetera.
00:10:59.680 He would just blow them away on stage.
00:11:02.500 And that was, in a way, what we wanted.
00:11:06.640 That was what we were treated for years as, in a way, kind of like a part of the Republican Party, but not of it, or if that's the right way of expressing it.
00:11:19.300 It was like, yeah, there are things like, you know, alternative right.com or Radix or the, you know, this, the alt-right concept or Richard Spencer or all these people.
00:11:32.340 But we kind of hate them.
00:11:35.140 They're marginal. 0.99
00:11:36.800 Screw them.
00:11:37.940 I was involved with the Ron Paul movement in 2008, and the exact dynamic was at place.
00:11:45.160 It was kind of like, oh, yeah, we sort of like Ron Paul, but, you know, he's a leftist.
00:11:50.960 He's anti-war.
00:11:52.320 He wants to leave soldiers out in the field to die.
00:11:55.500 He wants to, you know, end America's military empire, et cetera. 0.56
00:12:00.060 He was part of the right, but a kind of ugly stepchild or something like that.
00:12:07.720 And the amazing dynamic of Trump in 2015 and 2016 was that he was directly assaulting all of these people who had mistreated us for so long and winning.
00:12:21.420 So it wasn't even like the Ron Paul campaign where Ron Paul would get, you know, five, maybe 10 percent of primary votes, which is remarkable in its way.
00:12:32.400 But he had no chance of actually winning, but he would assault them in his way.
00:12:37.860 You know, he would just call them warmongers and neocons or whatever.
00:12:40.920 But there was no real punch to it.
00:12:42.880 With Trump, you had this direct assault on the conservative establishment, and he was successful in doing it.
00:12:50.580 And it just seemed to open up a new world in which the Republican establishment was totally unnecessary, dispensable, even something, even a liability that you just had to get rid of.
00:13:05.760 And Trump saw the alt-right, which he catered to, to a degree, without being explicit about it, as his media apparatus, his unpaid social media managers, effectively.
00:13:21.860 And I don't think Trump ever could have won without the alt-right, particularly in that early period.
00:13:29.680 And I think he also explicitly catered to us with, you know, retweeting Mussolini quotes, the sheriff's star incident with Hillary Clinton, the claiming to not know who David Duke is, or I can't hear you.
00:13:48.440 I don't know who he is, when he obviously knew who he is, who he was, and kind of catering to us, retweeting some accounts here and there that were pretty outrageous, certainly not denouncing us, and recognizing that that whole movement, you know, from top to bottom was ultimately supporting him.
00:14:11.240 And was ultimately a kind of, you know, again, unpaid propagandist, who were quite successful, in fact.
00:14:19.140 And the establishment was firing back at Trump.
00:14:22.620 So, I mean, if you go back to, I think it might have been 2015 or maybe early 2016, where National Review, you know, the bastion of conservatism and neoconservatism to a very strong degree, was publishing these articles against Trump.
00:14:39.820 You know, the entire editorial staff was there, Rich Lowry and Ramesh Panuru, and then also Glenn Beck got involved.
00:14:46.660 It was like everything that I despised about the right was attacking Trump and losing.
00:14:55.660 And it was just an amazing feeling in that sense.
00:15:00.200 And so much of the alt-right, we forget, was directly opposed to conservatism.
00:15:06.800 I mean, the cuck meme, however it might be used now, it was not directed against, you know, Brooklyn hipsters or liberals or something like that. 0.99
00:15:19.800 Oh, yeah, you're the type of pervert who likes to watch his wife get screwed. 0.99
00:15:24.120 It wasn't actually about that. 1.00
00:15:25.680 It was directed explicitly at conservatives who were, you know, figuratively and maybe literally getting cucked all the time.
00:15:35.960 It was directed at Trump's enemies who, again, were in the GOP establishment.
00:15:41.760 So there was this kind of amazing dynamic at play and one that was really intoxicating and that one that also eventually ended.
00:15:53.120 So during the transition and during, ironically, during the ascension of Bannon, who had claimed that, you know, Breitbart was the platform for the alt-right and all this kind of stuff, there was this marrying of Trumpism and the GOP establishment and conservative voters.
00:16:16.080 And Trump was also moving away from the alt-right, even in 2016, where he was, he got the endorsement of Scalia's son or grandson at one point.
00:16:28.820 He went to Liberty University and he's like, you might not like me, you might hate me even.
00:16:33.180 I'm a vulgar, secular figure who's had a million sex scandals, but you've got to vote for me. 1.00
00:16:40.480 You know you do.
00:16:40.980 It's about the judges, the judges.
00:16:42.500 He said he made a direct transactional appeal to the religious right.
00:16:48.000 And I think there was a tendency among those of us who lived through this to kind of overlook these things or just to say, well, it's okay, we can keep on winning, you've got to bring in people to the big tent, etc.
00:17:01.300 But at the end of the day, that dynamic that was so intoxicating early on was ending.
00:17:08.740 And in many ways, the alt-right was being dispensed with, for better and for worse.
00:17:16.800 You know, rightly or wrongly, it was being dispensed with.
00:17:20.740 Now, Trump wouldn't ever really denounce the alt-right and infamously at Charlottesville, he made the both sides comment and he went after Antifa harder than he went after the alt-right, etc.
00:17:34.340 So he kind of had an instinct for these things and he maintained it.
00:17:38.280 But he was ultimately replacing it with a new type of movement that was going to be much bigger and that wouldn't have that original dynamic.
00:17:53.020 And I think this thing that replaced him was the religious right to a pre-existing body of people.
00:18:01.380 But it was also what could be called just QAnon, what could just go under that label.
00:18:08.940 So QAnon started emerging in 2017 and particularly around the, at least when I first heard of it, was around the omnibus package that Trump, he both signed it and then he denounced it and then he supported it again and then he signed it.
00:18:25.340 It was just a weird, he was conflicted about signing this big bill in which there wasn't wall funding and there was a big expansion of government and all this kind of stuff.
00:18:34.360 And it was basically trust the plan.
00:18:36.720 Like, you don't know what's behind all of this stuff.
00:18:39.500 You don't know all the details of this matter.
00:18:41.300 But in fact, Trump is isolating the demonic perverts in the CIA and FBI and the good white hats of the NSA are on board.
00:18:52.680 So we had to do this to get military control.
00:18:55.480 I forgot all the arguments, but it was something like that. 0.91
00:18:58.340 And it was obviously completely ridiculous.
00:19:03.160 So, but it was this trust the plan idea and a total demonization of Democrats and not the conservative establishment.
00:19:12.420 So the dynamic had really, had weirdly shift shifted and there was this combination of alt-right kind of talking points and memes that were increasingly being put into the mouths of the conservative establishment.
00:19:31.240 And you can see this dynamic, even at CPAC, where one of the more infamous things to come out of this past weekend was this figure, Michael Knowles, who is, I think, a former actor or comedian of some kind who's working with Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire.
00:19:50.340 They're, you know, selling non-woke chocolate and razor blades and having Jordan Peterson videos available on demand, etc.
00:20:00.760 But he said something that was actually pretty dramatic, to be honest.
00:20:09.340 It was, you know, we don't need to just protect the children. 0.87
00:20:14.800 We need to eradicate transgenderism from the entire country. 1.00
00:20:19.580 If it's true for kids, if you can't become a man because you want to or a woman because you want to for kids, it's also true for adults and vice versa.
00:20:28.500 We need to get rid of the whole thing.
00:20:31.500 And, you know, liberals, I guess, have a point when they say things like, you know, if someone said, I want to, I don't want to attack Jews, but I want to eradicate Judaism. 0.83
00:20:45.000 Well, that's one way of putting it, I guess.
00:20:50.480 But I think a lot of Jews would quite plausibly feel like you were engaging in a genocidal campaign. 0.84
00:20:57.560 When you use terms like eradication and, oh, it's not about you personally, we just want to eradicate your identity. 0.94
00:21:06.040 Well, you know, I can kind of understand when people see that as genocidal or at the very least extremely tough talk.
00:21:15.780 And, you know, so there's this kind of weird irony of what's going on.
00:21:21.320 So Nick Fuentes went to CPAC, he got kicked out again, he did a kind of wild speech, I just saw images of it, a few taglines, where he was just saying all this bold stuff, you know, Judaism has no place in our society. 0.81
00:21:34.320 And, you know, we're Christian nationalists, and there's this, you know, he's almost becoming Kanye West in this kind of weird way, he's wearing sunglasses, and there's weird, like, Matrix-y background going on.
00:21:48.760 And, but, you know, it was pretty wild.
00:21:52.260 But additionally, like, there's a way where Nick Fuentes is kind of getting cucked by the people in CPAC.
00:22:02.000 I mean, there's no doubt that Nick Fuentes is more radical or bold or whatever than Michael Knowles, but it seems to be a matter of degree and not kind.
00:22:16.260 You know, the concept of the alt-right really was a total rejection of conservatism and a totally new starting point.
00:22:25.480 And, you know, we're just, we're casting out the Buckley movement, a whole cloth.
00:22:32.880 We're starting over from a different standpoint.
00:22:35.060 That was at least my conception of the alt-right.
00:22:37.300 And I think even though a lot of the alt-right online activity in 2016 and 2015 was pretty, you know, salacious and superficial, it still had that aspect to it.
00:22:49.860 It wasn't libertarian.
00:22:51.800 It wasn't about free markets.
00:22:53.040 It wasn't about ending health care.
00:22:54.580 It wasn't about all these things that conservatives care about.
00:22:59.120 It was anti-war.
00:23:00.320 Trump was anti-war.
00:23:01.280 Trump denounced the Bush family on stage in South Carolina.
00:23:04.240 It was, it was a kind of alternative in the sense of a new starting point.
00:23:10.260 Fast forward to 2023.
00:23:14.040 And, you know, how are you going to really like, again, how are you going to outperform or out bold or, you know, out radical Michael Knowles when he is effectively calling for genocide on stage in getting huge applause as a result?
00:23:34.860 So that dynamic has kind of gone away.
00:23:40.560 Now, I do think that the GOP establishment attacking Trump and yet Trump continuing to win, I do think that dynamic has returned to a degree.
00:23:51.920 And I kind of like it, to be honest.
00:23:53.440 It makes me sympathetic towards Trump of all of these people against him.
00:23:58.220 Notably, even the Claremont Institute, which, you know, made its name as the kind of intellectual rationalizers of Trumpism, has also gone heavy into DeSantis.
00:24:11.340 They have gone all in with him and they're directly attacking Trump.
00:24:15.740 So Trump is kind of back where he was in 2015 and 2016.
00:24:20.540 And I don't know, I feel more sympathy towards him because the exact same people who weren't destroyed by Trump's rise in 2016,
00:24:33.460 absorbed Trump by 2017, absorbed Trump by 2017 on, gained much from Trump, like the ending of Obamacare, the tax cuts, etc.
00:24:45.100 are kind of back at it, being attacked by him.
00:24:50.580 And I generally do think the same thing will happen again, but I don't know.
00:24:59.700 Maybe you could argue there's something just so radical or just even so toxic about Trump that he actually will end up destroying these people.
00:25:12.680 Um, I could imagine, I definitely think Trump is going to win the GOP primary, which is a little bit less than a year away now.
00:25:23.340 And I think that's going to be pretty clear even by the fall and winter of this year.
00:25:29.160 But if he doesn't, I could easily imagine him running third party and just saying like, I can't in good conscience support all these cucks and rhinos who want to take away social security and start more neocon wars or whatever he's going to say. 0.89
00:25:47.600 I could easily see him doing that. And I could easily see him kind of finishing the job against the GOP establishment that he wasn't able to do at that time.
00:26:00.420 I'm not a liberal and I think that they're generally wrong and, um, and I am opposed to them.
00:26:05.520 They just, they're just kind of a less appealing, um, antagonist or opponent for whatever reason.
00:26:12.000 Uh, whereas, uh, the Christian nationalists are kind of more openly sort of, uh, belligerent and obnoxious.
00:26:20.380 Um, so it's, I, I mean, I, I like, I'm glad that I'm glad to actually have both adversaries, but to be able to define myself against Christian nationalists. 0.64
00:26:30.900 Um, so I think it's a good contrast for us.
00:26:33.900 Yeah.
00:26:34.480 Um, so I'm grateful for it. And I think it, I think it actually ultimately helps us.
00:26:38.840 Um, you know, and I, you know, and I, so I think that, uh, however things play out and I think that they're kind of playing out in a certain direction in a certain trajectory and things are becoming more Christian, Christian nationalists.
00:26:50.660 Um, I think it actually ultimately favors us.
00:26:53.700 Um, and it gives us a good, again, a kind of like opponent or contrast.
00:26:58.580 Um, and, you know, this is something that Nietzsche talked about as well is that, uh, for his ideas or for his perspective to succeed, it would actually benefit, uh, uh, it would actually benefit the Nietzschean perspective if Christianity became more powerful.
00:27:15.720 Right. Um, so I think that that's true. So, I mean, it's, you know, in a, in a way we're defined by our enemies, um, and we're only, you know, and so we take our worth to some extent from our enemies.
00:27:29.340 So if we don't have good or formidable or powerful enemies, uh, then we, in some, on some level are unable to become sort of powerful or formidable ourselves.
00:27:40.480 Um, so I, I like that.
00:27:43.640 I like the kind of direction, even though I'm against it, if that makes sense to you.
00:27:49.280 Isn't it also just kind of honest in a way that we're, we're going to boil down conservatism to its essential ingredients, you know, like it don't, let's stop pretending that you're actually going to like limit government or something like that.
00:28:10.600 Like this is an identity movement of middle American Christians and, and they're kind of, they're, they're, they're also kind of post-Christians in a way.
00:28:21.200 And I don't, I don't mean that they are necessarily unchurched or, well, although many of them are, and I, and I don't mean that they're anti-Christian or a Christian or whatever.
00:28:33.000 I, they're, they're kind of post-Christians in the sense that like the structure, they don't know a lot about their own religion.
00:28:40.220 They don't know a lot about the Bible and they haven't thought seriously about these things, but the kind of structure of Christianity is maintained in their ideology, which is, but they would probably more likely call each other patriots than they would call each other fellow Christians.
00:28:59.880 And they are both kind of like against Rome or the Pharisees or something in government, but then kind of hyper patriotic at the same time.
00:29:13.600 And they kind of have a notion of a, of saving America or something.
00:29:20.800 I mean, and I think a lot of this is like really empty on some level, you know, like one, one thing that Charles has said, which I, I definitely think is accurate is that there's this, there's this motive on the right to have a kind of like empty yet violent revolt against your enemies.
00:29:41.100 So it's like the flight 93 election, you know, we've got to just run and seize the cockpit from the terrorist.
00:29:48.780 And, and that isn't that just leading directly to, and, and, and, and kind of prophesying and causing on some level, uh, J6, where it's this, you know, like mad dash to get to the Capitol and yell about Trump and hang Mike Pence and all this kind of stuff.
00:30:09.740 But at the end of the day, it's just kind of fundamentally empty, you know, it's like, what are you going to do?
00:30:15.660 Where are you going to fly this plane?
00:30:17.240 If you get control of it, what are you going to, what do you, why do you want Donald Trump to be your president for another four years?
00:30:24.120 What are you going to actually do with this?
00:30:25.820 There's just, just like fundamental emptiness to what they're doing.
00:30:29.920 But then there's this like class and, and quasi race hatred of liberals and, and, and literal demonization of them.
00:30:40.960 But, but at the end of the day, it's just, it's like this empty thing, you know, like, and, and you could see that like they, they, J6ers kind of won in a way. 1.00
00:30:49.800 They disrupted the votes and they're wandering around the Capitol with these kind of like dazed looks in their eyes and not, not having any clue of what they've just done or what they will do in the future.
00:31:03.500 Yeah, no, I think you're, I think you're exactly right.
00:31:05.480 I mean, that, that's something I was thinking about today is that, um, you know, Jan six obviously was not a political coup in the sense that they, you know, they took over the Capitol and then, and now they're our government.
00:31:17.940 Right. Which, which, you know, in, in, obviously it was never intended as that.
00:31:22.760 It was a political protest that, um, you know, ended up getting out of control ultimately, uh, but they occupied the Capitol illegally and it was a kind of very striking moment.
00:31:33.920 Uh, but symbolically, I mean, basically it led to a kind of victory on, on, like, in other, in other words, it was effectively a kind of symbolic coup that was successful, right?
00:31:46.180 Because now we have, uh, Taylor green in there.
00:31:49.240 We have, uh, um, Lauren, uh, Boebert, you know, all these guys who were, um, were formerly kind of marginal figures in American politics, but are now, um, you know, they're, they're part of, they're legitimately part of the political landscape in DC.
00:32:04.280 Uh, these, uh, these, uh, these new representatives and they are essentially the kind of, uh, the fruit of Jan six.
00:32:11.060 So it, the coup did succeed.
00:32:13.500 It, uh, it was a symbolic coup, but it, it did ultimately succeed.
00:32:17.500 So they were in the white house. 0.61
00:32:19.500 Um, so yeah, I mean, I, I don't know.
00:32:22.380 I mean, and, and I think also too, it's not like, it's easy for me to say, and I think it's mostly true.
00:32:28.460 I, I have, I view, um, the Christian nationalists in a kind of, um, in an oppositional way, I view them as ultimately adversaries, but I do think that they also kind of in their, I don't know, sort of incoherent and kind of clumsy way. 0.58
00:32:45.700 They're also kind of like destroying some taboos, uh, that are useful to be destroyed.
00:32:51.980 Uh, so in, in, especially kind of on, uh, the, the sort of race and ethnic questions, but they're doing it in a kind of, uh, savage and unsophisticated way that ultimately is not, uh, terribly useful in the future.
00:33:06.300 But I think that they're, they're kind of, uh, rudely like breaking through these doors.
00:33:11.220 Um, but those doors should be broken.
00:33:13.460 Some of those doors should be broken.
00:33:14.780 And in, in, in a lot of ways, it makes it easier for us, uh, to kind of like, um, you know, arrive with a sort of more sophisticated, uh, view or analysis of the situation and to, you know, apply a kind of gentler hand or seem like the, the more reasonable or gentle, gentle voice.
00:33:35.680 Uh, but yeah, some of these taboos needed to go and, and Christian nationalism, I mean, Christianity by itself.
00:33:41.920 I mean, obviously the subtext, there's a kind of racial or ethnic subtext here, um, that's part of the, this kind of alchemy, uh, though it is ultimately also a Christian movement.
00:33:52.360 But it, it, that movement needs this sort of racial and ethnic subtext.
00:33:57.700 And I think that some of the, uh, you know, the taboos or the, the cats that are coming out of the bag, so to speak, um, this is all good ultimately.
00:34:07.380 And, um, and their sort of rougher, rude or vulgar treatment of these topics, uh, benefits us in the long run is my view.
00:34:17.160 Um, because, uh, we'll have a kind of more sophisticated view of it.
00:34:21.100 And, um, you know, I think that we'll find not, you know, I mean, I think, I don't think that we'll immediately find friends across the board, but I think that people will look at us and be like, okay, well, this is, this is a more sophisticated group that we, that is not completely irrational.
00:34:36.560 It's not a group about to commit, uh, you know, pogroms or something like this, but is looking for like reasonable or realistic long-term solutions, uh, that can ultimately help solve these, these very difficult, uh, you know, racial and ethnic problems, um, in a sophisticated and peaceful way, you know, with, with kind of long-term view.
00:34:57.600 Uh, so I think it's good, um, so I think that they, in, they are kind of these sort of berserker shock troops that ultimately, like, on one, on, on one hand, there are enemies, but on another, there are kind of these, these, uh, berserker shock troops who are kind of like opening these doors in a kind of haphazard and clumsy way, uh, that need to be opened.
00:35:19.160 They need to, like, we need a new, we need to kind of like break some of these taboos on, on race and ethnicity, uh, for us to start to develop a kind of vision or path forward.
00:35:30.080 So, I mean, so I can't, you know, so I guess it's, I guess my view is somewhat ambivalent, even though I call them ultimately adversaries and I'm happy to call them adversaries.
00:35:38.700 Uh, my view of them is ultimately ambivalent in terms of what they're doing in a kind of unconscious or unwitting way.