The Auron MacIntyre Show - A Nation of Settlers ｜ Guest： Jeremy Carl ｜ 1⧸19⧸23

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00:00:30.000 Hey guys, how's it going?

00:00:31.360 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:32.880 I've got a great stream with a guest I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:38.000 Now, Jeremy Carl wrote a really interesting article a few months ago.

00:00:42.640 I think it was actually based on a speech he gave.

00:00:44.640 But I've been thinking about it a good bit since I read it.

00:00:48.100 And I want to have him on to talk about it a little bit.

00:00:50.840 Jeremy has worked in the Trump administration.

00:00:53.760 He's a senior fellow over with the Claremont Institute.

00:00:56.760 Jeremy, thanks for coming on.

00:00:58.080 Thanks so much for having me, Aaron.

00:01:00.000 Absolutely.

00:01:01.160 So the article you have was titled,

00:01:04.220 A Nation of Settlers, Not Immigrants. 0.99

00:01:07.840 Right?

00:01:08.080 It's about kind of this misnomer, or maybe not a misnomer,

00:01:12.380 maybe a purposeful reinterpretation of kind of the American founding

00:01:16.600 and the American identity.

00:01:18.480 You hit a lot of different points in it,

00:01:20.540 and we're going to go through a lot of those.

00:01:22.960 But before we get started with that,

00:01:24.560 can you explain a little bit for people who aren't familiar,

00:01:26.760 your background, how you got involved in politics,

00:01:28.820 what you're doing now?

00:01:30.380 Sure.

00:01:30.960 Well, that actually goes back.

00:01:32.120 I've had a sort of circuitous career.

00:01:34.020 I was very involved in campus politics as an undergrad at Yale more years ago

00:01:39.640 than I will care to admit, perhaps, on this podcast.

00:01:43.400 But then I got involved as,

00:01:46.240 got into sort of the Internet 1.0 business way back in the earliest days of the web.

00:01:52.240 And I did that for a while and then sort of semi-retired from doing that.

00:01:56.420 And through a sort of circuitous series of steps, got back into public policy,

00:02:02.460 particularly kind of environment and resource policy,

00:02:05.100 which is actually my academic training in graduate school.

00:02:09.760 And in fact, what I did in the Trump administration.

00:02:12.420 So not really directly related to this, but sort of over that time,

00:02:17.240 and I'd sort of been a centrist in college, sort of maybe tending towards center left,

00:02:21.840 my politics had kind of moved further and further rightward.

00:02:25.400 And I wound up at the Hoover Institution over at Stanford,

00:02:29.560 which is a public policy think tank that probably some of your viewers are aware of.

00:02:34.900 And, you know, from there kind of wound up in the Trump administration

00:02:38.480 and ended up relocating to Montana because while Hoover was a great place,

00:02:43.540 I just couldn't deal with California anymore.

00:02:45.640 And wound up here with the Claremont Institute working remotely.

00:02:49.220 And Claremont is a wonderful group for those of your viewers who don't know it.

00:02:54.760 And a think tank that just really lines up very well with kind of my views of the founding and America.

00:03:00.400 And certainly encourage folks to check out what we're doing.

00:03:04.000 Yeah, I'm talking to so many people who have just fled California and New York here recently.

00:03:08.360 You know, I'm sure you guys are great, but make sure the rest of your cohorts stay back in the states of their origin. 1.00

00:03:15.640 Okay, don't let anyone else out of there.

00:03:17.420 I fully appreciate it.

00:03:19.220 I hate to say, and this is actually important in Montana.

00:03:22.680 Well, A, I was a pre-COVID person who fled California.

00:03:26.080 Secondly, I'm not a Californian.

00:03:27.260 I grew up in North Carolina.

00:03:28.980 Oh, okay.

00:03:29.580 All right.

00:03:29.960 I'd only been most recently in California for work.

00:03:33.000 But yes, it's actually encouraging the number of political refugees that I have met during my few years in Montana now.

00:03:40.580 So those folks are allowed to come and the liberals can stay right back where they belong in California. 0.63

00:03:46.500 Yeah, okay.

00:03:47.180 Good to know you weren't born of, you know, iniquity.

00:03:50.940 I have no hereditary blood guilt.

00:03:53.320 Okay, excellent.

00:03:54.220 Excellent.

00:03:54.860 So let's talk a little bit about your piece here.

00:03:58.420 So the first thing, I think that a lot of people, I know when I was listening to conservative talk radio and stuff, you know, and was younger and everything, I always heard we're a nation of immigrants, right?

00:04:09.980 This isn't a left-wing position, right?

00:04:12.620 This is something that we regularly hear on right-wing conservative radio and programs as well.

00:04:19.440 So are we a nation of immigrants?

00:04:21.660 And if not, so why?

00:04:23.580 What's up with that?

00:04:24.940 Well, we're not.

00:04:25.740 But I actually do mention later in the piece that there's a reason why perhaps you do hear this, although increasingly maybe less frequently on true conservative talk radio or somewhere else, but that there is something appealing about it.

00:04:38.420 I mean, it's a noble thought if we don't take it too far.

00:04:42.940 I mean, it's the idea that when you become a citizen, at least, that you have to be just as invested in the American prospect, even if you just, you know, got off the plane from Burkina Faso as if your family landed on Plymouth Rock.

00:04:59.100 And I think, you know, that kind of meta-ideology is something that we would like to encourage in folks that we have here.

00:05:06.320 But in deciding who should be here, that's not necessarily the case.

00:05:10.780 It's not historically the case that we were a nation of immigrants.

00:05:13.740 We were really a nation of settlers historically.

00:05:17.340 And, you know, immigration has been a part of that and increasingly a part of that, but it's not innate to the American project.

00:05:23.800 And that's really what my piece was about.

00:05:25.220 So what would be the difference between an immigrant and a settler, right? 0.64

00:05:30.020 They both come here, right?

00:05:31.180 They're both moving from one place to another.

00:05:34.300 Why is this such an important difference when it comes to kind of the identity and understanding of kind of what America is?

00:05:39.960 Sure.

00:05:40.300 Well, you know, the basic distinction is that an immigrant is somebody who's coming to join an existing society.

00:05:46.960 And a settler is somebody who's coming to build a new society.

00:05:51.700 And if you look at folks like the pilgrims and even people who came for decades, if not hundreds of years, in many cases, after them, they were not there to join the society of Native Americans.

00:06:03.160 Again, for better or for worse.

00:06:04.900 And it's not, of course, that they weren't interacting with the Native American society.

00:06:08.160 And you can actually read a lot if you read about the Jamestown colony, for example.

00:06:12.200 I mean, there was a lot of the justification for doing that.

00:06:15.800 And the people who funded it were there to Christianize Native Americans, which, you know, today would be sort of considered very un-PC. 0.68

00:06:22.960 But back then was kind of considered a very sort of noble pursuit.

00:06:26.620 But again, there was always a distinction between the European society that they were trying to build and the Native society that had been there.

00:06:35.120 And so we really did build this settler society.

00:06:38.360 And this is something I actually agree with a number of leftist historians on who kind of make this same point.

00:06:44.380 And then at some point, we got built out enough that we became, depending on where the immigrant was coming or where the settler was coming, we become a mix of settlers and immigrants at some point.

00:06:56.080 But it really wasn't until the frontier closes in 1890, and that was an official declaration from the Census Bureau, that's after 200, almost 300 years, honestly, of European settlement in the Americas, that we really can begin to talk about it, at least in some sense, as a nation of immigrants.

00:07:14.640 Although I would argue, still, we weren't fully a nation of immigrants.

00:07:17.820 We just might not have been, you know, fully a nation of settlers anymore.

00:07:21.000 Is part of this problem the unease with maybe the idea of conquest, right?

00:07:29.160 Like, that's something that's really icky for people today, even though it's just the reality of humans throughout history.

00:07:35.540 It used to be something people sang songs about and held deep pride about in their ancestors.

00:07:42.060 And because kind of our current understanding of, you know, kind of the soft power is the only way that people can control an area that now we can't have this identity because it's, it's, you know, passe.

00:07:55.560 I think that's a really important and incisive point.

00:08:00.120 I think that is a lot of what's going on, that we're very uncomfortable with the notion of settlement, with the notion of conquest, with the notion that one people might, in some sense, replace another people.

00:08:11.660 Although, of course, we see that happening right now with a lot of white Americans, I'd argue, in our current immigration policy.

00:08:18.400 But in fact, historically, as you point out, I mean, this wasn't a view.

00:08:22.020 And actually, it's sort of amusing because I envy those of you who have not been present when a land acknowledgement is given.

00:08:30.120 This is something that just unhappily appeared on my radar in the last couple of years.

00:08:35.640 And I have only had once to participate in it over my objections.

00:08:40.820 But it's this notion that, you know, particularly in Montana, we actually have a lot of Native Americans and a lot of Native history.

00:08:48.940 But that, you know, you begin your public meeting by acknowledging that you're on the tribal territory of and then you kind of name the various groups.

00:08:57.320 But, of course, the historical reality, if we're not just engaging in propaganda, is that those groups just stole the property from somebody else or they took it by conquest.

00:09:06.420 Right. And that is the nature of history, certainly pre-modernity.

00:09:11.260 And so, you know, that's, again, I think it's just a reality that does make a lot of people uncomfortable.

00:09:16.860 Well, it's because you're too close to Canada.

00:09:18.860 That's why I ended up with the land acknowledgement.

00:09:21.080 But, yeah, it's really hard for people, I think, to, you know, property is not musical chairs.

00:09:29.060 You know, the ownership of territory is not, you know, just whoever ends at the end, you know, standing there at the end of the song gets to control it.

00:09:36.380 It has always been, you know, part of the human condition is that it must be, you know, won or defended through violence.

00:09:44.460 And this is just how every nation ever exists.

00:09:48.300 I think also part of this comes from maybe a lot of the idea of freedom, right?

00:09:56.580 Freedom is the central concept of the United States.

00:09:59.160 When I talk to older conservatives, they often have a difficult time with the idea of America as an empire, right?

00:10:05.380 Like we're different.

00:10:06.840 We're a nation of freedom.

00:10:08.560 We just spread freedom to everyone.

00:10:10.720 And that's why they listen to us.

00:10:12.160 And so it's a hard thing for them to square the idea that, like, no, people came here and they wanted to live here.

00:10:19.460 And so they controlled the area the way people controlled land and time and memoriam.

00:10:24.080 Right.

00:10:24.540 And liberty wasn't the key thing when it came to making sure that you had it, defending the territory from those who wanted to take it from you was.

00:10:32.420 No, that's right.

00:10:33.420 I mean, I'd say, which is not to say, I mean, there were people, certainly if you read the founders and the folks who influenced the founders, they had real and genuine ideas about liberty.

00:10:41.500 And I think it informed their viewpoint for better or for worse at times.

00:10:46.120 But it is also absolutely true that before you could have all those happy discussions about liberty, there had to be a lot of, you know, killing and territorial conquest and everything else.

00:10:56.500 Or at least, and this is why the Second Amendment is so important, the ability to defend one's liberty by force of arms, ultimately.

00:11:05.020 Right.

00:11:05.400 And again, you know, these are things that make particularly a lot of establishment thinkers today, you know, uncomfortable.

00:11:12.600 But maybe the notion that the globalist American empire is, in fact, a little bit older than some of the critiques might suggest it is.

00:11:21.420 Yeah, and I think it also leads, again, many, many conservatives of a different generation to think, like, all of America's prosperity or all of America's success came simply from, like, force of argument, right?

00:11:36.200 Like, like having a superior lifestyle, having a superior way of life, which, of course, I think in many ways is true.

00:11:41.220 But that in and of itself was enough to spread across less.

00:11:44.760 When we say expanding westward, what we mean is marching westward and making sure that we control the land, right?

00:11:50.660 That is understood.

00:11:52.260 Yeah, absolutely.

00:11:53.160 And there were, you know, there were, it was not terra nullis.

00:11:55.760 There were, of course, people here.

00:11:58.040 They were not necessarily, depending on where the territory was, thickly populated.

00:12:02.000 But in some cases, they were.

00:12:03.740 In some cases, we, like any, you know, other group of people, made alliances with some groups of them against other groups of them.

00:12:10.340 And, you know, we ultimately happened to, at the end of the day, have superior arms in technology and, you know, arguably as well, you know, some culture and economy that went with that.

00:12:21.680 And so we were able to control the territory.

00:12:24.120 And that was kind of the nature of the settlement process.

00:12:27.880 And that really went on almost to a living memory.

00:12:31.340 And certainly, you know, I see this very acutely in Montana, where even today, I mean, I'm 10 hours from the closest city of 250,000 plus.

00:12:39.940 And, you know, you don't have to drive that far outside of my house, but where you sort of feel like you're back on the frontier.

00:12:48.080 So I think this is, it's still a very live concept in the American psyche.

00:12:53.080 So one of the things that you talk about your piece also, I think, is the concept of maybe that due to the idea of a nation of immigrants, many people have the idea that America was always a highly multiracial society.

00:13:11.560 But you kind of point out that actually it was much more, much more homogeneous than most people think of as kind of a historical fact.

00:13:20.160 No, that's correct.

00:13:21.620 And of the free population of the United States and independence, those best scholars have been able to determine it was something like 85 percent white British.

00:13:30.660 And, you know, there was some Germans and some Dutch, I think, you know, coming in.

00:13:36.340 And of course, the Germans, you could find sort of famously in people on both sides of the immigration argument tend to point this out.

00:13:42.640 You know, Benjamin Franklin invading against his concerns about the Germanization of American culture, if we let too many of these guys in. 0.99

00:13:50.120 But I do think it's important to understand, even just for American history, that the colonists saw themselves up until the very end as British and were kind of demanding their liberties as free British people.

00:14:02.920 And certainly, you know, over time, they began to see themselves perhaps more and more as Americans or at least as representatives of their particular colony.

00:14:12.180 But they definitely did not see themselves as a multicultural melting pot of any type.

00:14:17.860 I mean, that is a a late 19th century, early 20th century invention, at least ideologically, of course.

00:14:26.600 And one thing I've seen people kind of bring up, which I thought was always a very interesting point, was actually that the, you know, obviously your your largest minority at that time would have, of course, been African Americans.

00:14:38.840 Unfortunately, many, you know, held as slaves.

00:14:40.840 But what has happened over time is the disillusion of the idea that, you know, in thinking that maybe this was always a multiracial society, is that many African Americans kind of lose their special relationship to having kind of that voice, having that that large percentage being the other making up the other majority or the largest minority in the area.

00:15:04.900 And no longer really having that as kind of that admixture changes over the years.

00:15:09.860 Sure. No. And that's interesting.

00:15:11.360 And, you know, I don't even know.

00:15:13.340 I mean, certainly when I was a kid, we learned all about Christmas addicts.

00:15:16.820 I mean, he was like a guy and he was, of course, a free African American who was one of the people killed in the Boston Massacre.

00:15:23.220 And it was sort of a way, you know, sort of in an early version of Multiculturalism 1.0 to say correctly in some cases that, you know, African Americans, even politically, in addition to obviously the labor that they contributed, were part of the American project from the first.

00:15:40.980 And that, you know, they arguably should feel a special kinship to the American project, notwithstanding, obviously, the horrific way that many of their ancestors were treated in the slavery regime, but that they still are deeply rooted in this country and its history.

00:15:57.680 And I think, you know, when you get away from African American academics, you know, kind of spouting the same sorts of nonsense that liberal white or liberal Asian or whoever academics spout, I think you would actually find a fair bit of that current in their thought of feeling extremely American and feeling that they, you know, have a history in this country from time immemorial almost.

00:16:22.880 But it's not the latest intellectual fashion to be true.

00:16:25.680 So you spoke about the shift that eventually kind of came with this, right?

00:16:31.840 We start seeing the increase of immigration and kind of efforts to refocus the story about this.

00:16:41.240 Can you talk a little bit about how and why we saw the big increase in immigration?

00:16:46.320 Sure.

00:16:46.920 Well, let me talk first about kind of some of the actual history of immigration, because I think we should be a little more explicit.

00:16:52.100 So you had this clear settlement period, and it's actually fascinating.

00:16:56.240 Something I would recommend to anybody is just pick up some of the even modern accounts of Jamestown or the pilgrims or anything in 17th century America, certainly.

00:17:06.300 And you realize just, I mean, they were in enormous risk, taking enormous fatalities.

00:17:10.740 I mean, this could not have been more of a settlement project with incredibly high danger.

00:17:16.560 And this persisted well into the 19th century in some parts of America.

00:17:21.520 Certainly where I lived, that would have been true.

00:17:23.500 I mean, we weren't even really settled until the gold strikes of the 1860s.

00:17:28.360 They had the first thin settlement on the ground in Montana.

00:17:31.940 But, you know, then at some point in the 19th century, arguably, things begin to get a little bit more settled in some places.

00:17:41.420 But interestingly, when you look at de Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America, kind of a standard text almost of the American project, he doesn't mention immigrants or immigration at all in his book.

00:17:53.960 And as I pointed out, it's not because there weren't immigrants.

00:17:56.700 Of course, there were immigrants back then.

00:17:58.540 But de Tocqueville, who's writing in the 1830s, he's really, and this is 200, we're closer to de Tocqueville in time right now than de Tocqueville was to the original American settlement project.

00:18:09.720 So just with reference to that, we hadn't had at that time the first real mass immigration of sort of non-British origin people to the United States.

00:18:20.140 That happened in the 1840s, particularly with the failures of the Revolution of 1848 and the Irish Potato Famine.

00:18:28.520 And then you begin to get, as we push westward, this more mixed society, a society that has some people really immigrating into places that are really well settled and a culture that's well defined.

00:18:41.280 And then some people going out into the frontier, which has a very rich kind of history in the American mind.

00:18:49.660 And it was really only at 1890 that the frontier closes and we begin to have this different kind of conception of who we are.

00:18:58.960 And the people who come here begin to really become more immigrants than settlers.

00:19:03.360 Does kind of Lincoln's effort to kind of mass draft Irish into the Civil War, you think, have a particular impact on some of that?

00:19:15.100 Well, yeah, I mean, this is one thing.

00:19:17.200 You can also see things with German immigrants.

00:19:19.260 I think one of the fascinating things, and I'm not a Civil War historian, won't pretend to be,

00:19:23.300 but I think one fascinating thing that you can absolutely observe, predominantly on the Union side, but not exclusively,

00:19:29.340 is that you'll get people who immigrate here and like four years later, they're fighting for the Union or they're fighting for the Confederacy.

00:19:37.220 And when we think of kind of the ideologizing, I think, of the Civil War as, you know, being about slavery and these long held things.

00:19:47.140 And I think, I mean, really, ultimately, slavery really was the first primary cause of the Civil War, although you can read other interpretations.

00:19:54.240 But I think it's interesting that immigrants, you know, kind of jump in and immediately kind of join one side or the other, depending on where they happen to immigrate.

00:20:04.960 Sure. So once we kind of see this big shift, a lot more people coming in.

00:20:11.300 We also see, I think, like you said, you mentioned the Statue of Liberty and how many people, you know, really tie that so directly to immigration.

00:20:24.100 But actually, that's not really the origin of it and was kind of post hoc added to it.

00:20:29.600 And even though now it's the thing that has become kind of the central icon of it.

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00:21:00.380 Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver.

00:21:03.400 No, absolutely.

00:21:04.580 And I do talk about this in my piece.

00:21:06.680 So, you know, right around the time that we have the frontier being closed, a few years before in 1886, I think, the Statue of Liberty is put up.

00:21:16.400 It is a monument to several things.

00:21:18.760 It's to Franco-American friendships, since, of course, the French had helped us out a lot in the Revolution.

00:21:23.900 It's a monument to democracy.

00:21:26.740 It's a monument to emancipation of slaves.

00:21:29.780 A few things.

00:21:30.420 But what it was not was a monument to immigration.

00:21:33.180 And the way it became a monument to immigration was kind of fascinating, because what you ultimately had was there was a woman, Emma Lazarus, who wrote a poem.

00:21:42.960 She was a very established woman in New York society.

00:21:45.080 And she writes this poem, The New Colossus, which is what is now engraved on the base of the statue.

00:21:52.600 And it was one of many items that was kind of done to raise money for the building of the statue, for which it required a lot of money.

00:22:00.860 And it was done, and it was kind of forgotten about, you know, they did this testimonial dinner, I think, where the poem was read, and then everybody kind of went home and forgot about it.

00:22:09.660 And then at some point, a few years later, she dies, and she's childless.

00:22:13.020 And she has a close friend, Schuyler, or the last name, and she's of the Schuyler sisters family.

00:22:21.180 For those of you who've seen Hamilton, is actually the great-granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton and one of the Schuylers. 0.76

00:22:27.020 And she decides that she wants to memorialize her friend, Emma Lazarus.

00:22:34.820 And she's a person with a lot of connections in New York society.

00:22:37.480 And so she manages to do this whole campaign, this activist campaign that successfully gets the words to Lazarus's poem, which had been totally forgotten by this point.

00:22:46.740 I don't even know how she chose it.

00:22:48.620 And she puts that on the Statue of Liberty's base.

00:22:52.040 And at the time, of course, you had a huge mass wave of immigrants coming into first Castle Garden and then Ellis Island, and they're passing this statue.

00:23:03.360 And it begins to take on this myth of this new kind of way of, you know, the Statue of Liberty is about immigration.

00:23:12.660 At a similar time, you have folks like Israel Zdankville, who's, I believe, British, actually, but he wrote a play called The Melting Pot.

00:23:20.820 And again, for those of you, at least of my generation, this is how we learned to think about American identity as a melting pot.

00:23:28.080 And he specifically talks about it being a place where the races of Europe, as he put it, are melting and reforming.

00:23:35.400 And so this kind of broader ideology is kind of in the air at that time.

00:23:40.240 And it causes a kind of redefinition of the Statue of Liberty in the public mind.

00:23:45.560 Now, interestingly, you made the kind of almost the joke in the piece, which I thought was pretty funny, about these women being kind of proto-awfuls, right? 0.99

00:23:56.800 Like affluent white women, right? 1.00

00:23:58.820 Yeah.

00:23:58.980 And how this was part of kind of the origin of this fundraising effort and this interest in kind of the increase of immigration in many ways.

00:24:09.520 Yeah.

00:24:09.940 No, absolutely.

00:24:10.960 And awfuls, for those of your viewers who don't know, stands for affluent white female liberal. 1.00

00:24:15.980 It's a really wonderful term of a group that seems to cause a lot of trouble these days, I'm sad to say.

00:24:21.360 But essentially, so Lazarus was, so she was Jewish, and that sort of played some role in her thinking about the whole statue project, because she was very acutely aware of what was going on in Tsarist Russia.

00:24:38.600 And so had been paying attention to that.

00:24:41.100 But as I point out in the piece, she really had a very different, she was not what we would associate as like a New York Jew today, who, you know, was like fresh off the boat from, 0.94

00:24:50.740 from Russia or Eastern Europe.

00:24:53.440 She was, in fact, the Jewish equivalent of a Mayflower descendant.

00:24:56.440 Her family had come over in 1654 with the first boatload of Jewish immigrants to what became the United States that landed in New York.

00:25:05.460 Her family was a wealthy and established, successful family that mixed at the highest levels of New York society.

00:25:13.580 And that was how she knew the Skylar, you know, they were, they were sort of in the same social class, the same social milieu.

00:25:20.740 I touched on Skylar's family history a little bit.

00:25:23.280 Similarly, also unmarried, also, you know, no children.

00:25:28.360 And maybe she's looking at these poor, tired, huddled masses and feeling some sort of maternal instinct for that.

00:25:34.960 And I, you know, I think we see this, unfortunately, as a trend today in the sentimentalizing of modern immigration policy.

00:25:41.700 But these really were kind of prototype offals, unfortunately.

00:25:45.740 And, you know, I think that ended up having some consequences for future American immigration policy.

00:25:51.340 Well, and speaking about kind of future immigration policy, you also make a very interesting point in the piece about kind of why the immigration policy, why we saw in the 1965 Act, Hartzeller, like why we see this push.

00:26:07.880 And you say that you believe kind of Kennedy and his book is a big part of that.

00:26:14.140 And you actually kind of say that there's almost a Ellis Island coalition of those who kind of wanted immigration to be seen favorably.

00:26:23.360 No, that's absolutely right. I mean, you have a combination of Jewish and Catholic ethnic interests.

00:26:29.040 And I sort of document. And again, you know, this is not to to cast dispersions on anybody.

00:26:34.260 And in fact, I make the point in the piece that there are all sorts of extremely rational reasons why these groups thought in the way they did, whether it was the Kennedys who, even though they were they were so-called Lace Curtain Irish. 0.61

00:26:46.640 So, you know, they were from the upper crush of Boston Irish society. But if you're familiar with the sort of history of Boston, there was a whole level above them.

00:26:56.280 The Boston Brahmins who were kind of the old pilgrim stock who would want nothing to do with, you know, an R of East family like the Kennedys, no matter how much money they had. 1.00

00:27:07.260 Or even if in the case of Rose Kennedy, his wife, the father had been mayor of Boston and Kennedy's father had been ambassador to the UK.

00:27:17.540 So a very established family, but still not kind of meeting the social mark in Boston society.

00:27:24.340 So you understand that feeling on the Catholic side and on the Jewish side, you had an understandable fear of things had not gone very well for them in unified ethnic countries in Europe.

00:27:36.280 And that had obviously culminated with the Holocaust in Europe. 0.71

00:27:41.480 And so that was very fresh in folks mind. But you have this this kind of combination of essentially and Italians are a big piece of this to kind of the book, A Nation of Immigrants, which nominally was written by Kennedy,

00:27:56.540 but was really written by a Jewish aid of Kennedy's was pushed quite overtly by the Anti-Defamation League, the major Jewish civil rights organization, and then reissued after Kennedy's assassination to even more publicity in the context of the debate over Hart Seller,

00:28:13.540 which is basically what gave us our modern immigration policy and Hart himself, Senator Philip Hart from Michigan was the grandson of Irish Catholic immigrants and Emmanuel Seller.

00:28:26.540 Another grandson of Jewish immigrants from New York and a guy had been in Congress for 40 years at that point, more than that, actually, I think, and had been part of the only congressman objecting to our original more restrictionist 1924 Immigration Act at a time.

00:28:45.460 And so he'd been just this had been a personal issue for him for decades.

00:28:49.440 So for those who are unfamiliar, what changed with the Hart Seller Act?

00:28:52.880 Like, what was the big change as opposed to the immigration policy in the United States before that act?

00:28:59.400 Well, there were a number of changes, but I'd say the most fundamental change was an emphasis on family reunification.

00:29:05.700 And actually, if you go back and read the Hart Seller debate, which I, again, I would encourage folks to do who are really interested in understanding the immigration debate more deeply,

00:29:14.240 You know, it's fascinating how the proponents, through some combination of just lying through their teeth, or I think genuinely getting some things wrong in an innocent fashion.

00:29:25.520 Everything the liberals said that was not going to happen with Hart Seller happened with Hart Seller.

00:29:31.120 We had a massive change demographically in who immigrated here.

00:29:36.420 And the real kind of linchpin of that was ultimately that there was a focus on family reunification.

00:29:43.120 And there had been a feeling, and before this, we'd sort of had, frankly, ethnic quotas, you know, or at least quasi-ethnic quotas that had to do with the percentage of the population you were at the 1910 census, I think, determined kind of, you know, what your country quota was.

00:30:00.540 And again, you know, today, you're a very bad person for suggesting that there could be anything reasonable or legitimate about this.

00:30:07.120 But at the time, this seemed a very reasonable thing to do.

00:30:09.680 And I would actually argue it's a totally legitimate thing to do for people who said this is, you know, what we're doing is for ourselves and our posterity in their founding document to say,

00:30:19.940 Hey, you know, we actually are doing this for ourselves and our posterity and not folks from different parts of Europe, let alone folks from different parts of the world.

00:30:27.880 So anyway, they'd had this sort of thing.

00:30:31.800 But what ended up happening was, for a variety of reasons, it ended up not maybe helping as much the Poles and the Italians and other groups that they thought it would.

00:30:40.660 But you began first to have real mass immigration from Latin America, from Mexico, which, of course, we'd always had.

00:30:48.960 And, of course, some parts of the U.S. prior to the Mexican-American War had been parts of Mexico or the border crossed them, as some of the activists like to say.

00:30:57.900 But this was a three and a half percent of the population and 80 percent of them before Hartzeller were U.S. born.

00:31:04.980 So, in fact, you know, many of these guys in New Mexico and Arizona, folks who grew up with my mom there back in the 1940s, you know, very long established in the United States at that point or really had a sense of themselves as American.

00:31:17.500 But we had this big change. And then also because of how family reunification was put into law, we opened up chain migration, which essentially means that, you know, you become a citizen and then all sorts of other people with various relationships to you become citizens or at least become eligible to become citizens.

00:31:37.060 And that's what's really led to the mass change in who we've been bringing over since Hartzeller.

00:31:44.420 And I'd say that's the fundamental change in immigration law.

00:31:47.480 So let's go ahead and bring this up to the current day now that we're familiar with all the background.

00:31:53.600 One of the questions you ask at the beginning of the piece is, you know, how does this benefit the regime?

00:32:00.220 Right. Why do people want this to be the narrative?

00:32:03.320 Why do they want this to be a nation of immigrants and not a nation of settlers?

00:32:09.000 And so I guess the question is, how does it benefit the current regime?

00:32:13.360 What interests is it forwarding for them?

00:32:16.000 Sure. Well, I think one thing, and I'll actually say the more provocative thing first, which is I think it ultimately sets the stage.

00:32:24.520 It does two things. Maybe I'll say the less provocative thing first.

00:32:26.620 The less provocative thing is to say, if we're a nation of immigrants, it's fundamentally immoral and illegitimate that we would attempt to restrict immigration in some way.

00:32:40.020 And of course, again, I point out in my piece, we have not always had a mass immigration culture.

00:32:46.400 I mean, between when we passed this law in 1924 and Hart Seller, we had very little immigration.

00:32:52.240 And I don't think it's a coincidence that we almost had a unifying of American ethnic identity at this point, as all of these different European groups began to see themselves as more American during during that time.

00:33:06.760 And so, you know, immigration went up and down. The census right before my birth was 4.7 percent immigrants, and most of these folks were older people from Europe at that point.

00:33:17.940 So we really, at this point, were not an immigrant society, although clearly immigration played a much larger role if you were to go back to 1900 or 1910, the kind of heyday of Ellis Island immigration.

00:33:30.780 So I think that's one point, and that's maybe the less provocative point. I'd say the more provocative point is to say it really sets the stage to kind of, and there's a little bit of a two-step involved here, but to ultimately justify expropriating whites over time. 0.90

00:33:48.180 I mean, I think that is the justification, and I'm actually writing a book right now for Regnery on the rise of anti-white discrimination and racism.

00:33:56.280 And so I'm thinking a lot about immigration. I have a chapter or two on immigration in the book, thinking about that.

00:34:03.940 But essentially, you begin to tell this story of, A, we're a nation of immigrants, B, kind of the whole story, the whole American story was really just, you know, us stealing from other people. 0.64

00:34:16.860 And then, oh, by the way, you guys are really bad guys. And, you know, 300 years ago or 200 years ago, you were mistreating African Americans, and you were mistreating Hispanics.

00:34:29.440 And so now all these assets that you have, we're going to come to them. And I think to varying levels of overtness, that is the second piece of the agenda.

00:34:40.700 But of course, to do that, you have to kind of fundamentally transform, to use Obama's term, you have to fundamentally transform American demographics.

00:34:47.640 And I think that they have done a really good job of that. And I think the realistic challenge for the right at this point, in attempting to counter that wave, I mean, there are folks on the furthest reaches of the right who, you know, maybe have some more nefarious ideas that I would not subscribe to for how you might counter this.

00:35:08.180 But what I would say is we need to go back to a more unified American ethnic identity. And I think the way that we kind of do this over time is the same way we did it from 1924 to 1965, which is you get immigration pretty close to net zero on a basis. 0.87

00:35:26.860 And then when you do that, you begin to have, you know, more intermarriage and more people thinking of themselves as Americans and not having, you know, as deep ties to some other country.

00:35:37.440 And I think from there, we have a basis to go forward. Now, I think that's a really challenging task for the right. I mean, it's hard. I don't kid myself that this is going to be something that's doable.

00:35:51.520 But I think really at this point, this is the only way forward for us if we don't want to become, you know, kind of in the words of Roosevelt, you know, kind of this Theodore Roosevelt, you know, this kind of squabbling group of nationalities sort of fighting over this fixed pie and seeing who can take what from whom and who can expropriate what from whom.

00:36:11.680 And I'm worried that in a society that ultimately views itself as multi-ethnic, we have a lot of history that suggests not specific to America, but just in the world, that that's exactly what will happen. 0.98

00:36:22.900 Yeah, if you're going to get some kind of identity or ethnogenesis, you kind of can't let every single person in, right?

00:36:28.920 At some point, you have to let the people here can, you know, actually work together and create an identity together rather than constantly shift with each wave.

00:36:37.080 Right. And, you know, there needs to be like also we need to stop taking statues down.

00:36:43.880 We need to be very aggressive about defending the founders.

00:36:47.400 We need to say, look, for everybody, again, whether you got off the boat from wherever you did or whether your family's been here for 400 years.

00:36:54.580 You know, we need to look at the founders. We need to look at Lincoln. We need to look at these guys as, you know, people we should be proud of.

00:37:01.880 And this is not to say that we are going to some sort of naive Parson Weems, you know, biography of George Washington version of history or even a late 19th century version of history where we can't be critical of the things that were not done well, the things that were done wrong, the crimes that were committed.

00:37:19.520 I mean, all those things were there. All those things were part of our history. We can talk about that.

00:37:24.660 But really, the the net product is a rather remarkable country. And that's why people have wanted to come here.

00:37:32.640 I mean, that's why so many people want to come here. And we need to be simultaneous to to really protecting our borders.

00:37:40.280 We need to be unapologetic about our heroes. And, you know, that's that's in balance who I think those guys were.

00:37:47.460 So I think, like you said, this is a huge task for the right. And I think it's very obvious from the fervor around Trump, his ability to store him in and and really wrestle the base completely away from the establishment for the time he was in the spotlight, that there is a deep desire for this.

00:38:09.800 There's a large appetite for this kind of movement among the GOP base, but that doesn't translate at all to almost any of the GOP politicians and even much of the conservative punditry.

00:38:22.660 So how does this move? How do we get this from the average base into action by people who are supposed to be representing the base?

00:38:30.980 Yeah, well, I mean, I'm blackpilled, but I'm not that blackpilled, I would say, I mean, as somebody who's worked on this issue, you know, has been writing about immigration for 15 years, 20 years, maybe I don't know, I'd have to go back and look when I wrote my first piece and certainly been following it longer than that.

00:38:45.980 I would say, I mean, the space to talk in a serious way about immigration and the national interests, on the right, at least, has just blown up dramatically.

00:38:56.560 And Trump definitely gets some credit for that. I mean, part of it was just him being a political and ideological entrepreneur and having a sense of, you know, kind of where the base was in a way that the Mitt Romneys of the world and certainly the John McCain's of the world did not.

00:39:10.660 But part of it was even before Trump, I mean, there were more ability to sort of talk about these things.

00:39:19.600 And so I do think there's more of an appetite. I think there is a more serious constituency within the party that wants to do this.

00:39:27.600 I think also as we've become a less corporate party and there are problems with us being so disassociated with the business community because we do need a kind of group of the elite that is on our side.

00:39:39.540 I think this is a part of power. That's something I've written about separately.

00:39:42.880 But as we're less tied to the business community, I think that faction is strengthened.

00:39:47.940 But it's definitely not every Republican. And maybe it's not even if you put a gun to their head and made them tell you the truth.

00:39:54.220 Most Republican officeholders, at least, although I do think it's most Republican voters.

00:39:59.940 But I think there's more opportunities and I think that that story gets better for us.

00:40:04.500 And unfortunately, it gets better for us as the facts on the ground get less, as you have, at worst, as you have Biden, like, I mean, frankly, and I'll say it, you know, Secret Service can come after me, but openly, treasonously, in my view, like intentionally not enforcing the border.

00:40:19.840 And that's what he's doing. He knows that these asylum claims are virtually all legitimate and he's just choosing to to let the border be open.

00:40:27.620 And, you know, he's finally pushing back on that a little bit because through, you know, us shipping folks off to New York City and other blue states, there's beginning to get some political pressure even within his coalition.

00:40:40.700 But I'd say, you know, I think the other kind of piece of good news here is even in groups that, you know, in a lot of ways would not be seen as the historic American core, there is a desire to identify themselves as Americans and with Americanness, not among the activist elite there, but just among the common people.

00:41:00.060 And I see you see you see this really acutely in a place like South Texas, where the Republicans have now become very competitive.

00:41:07.440 I mean, for those of you who spent time down in the RGV, the Rio Grande Valley, these are 97 percent Hispanic communities and in many cases, you know, Spanish speaking first communities right across the border from Mexico.

00:41:21.860 But there's a real feeling of not just cultural traditionalism, but in many cases and increasingly, a sense of identifying with America and the American project and wanting to think of themselves as American.

00:41:35.860 And so I think that that is encouraging. And if we do certain things with the law, for example, stop making it legally advantageous to identify as Hispanic, because you get a bunch of jobs and whatever, but you instead kind of put everybody on equal footing.

00:41:52.820 You may see over time, as we've seen with other ethnic groups that maybe, you know, we're not seen as fully American in the the kind of establishment public mind when they showed up, these guys may begin to identify with the American majority over time.

00:42:11.060 And that, you know, is kind of creating that American ethnicity.

00:42:15.060 And that's not a perfect solution for a variety of reasons that are kind of beyond the scope of what we can get into in one podcast, but it's a heck of a lot better than where we are today.

00:42:24.060 And I think it offers, you know, a reasonable path forward.

00:42:28.060 It's I'm sort of reminded of the the farmer who, you know, some guy gets very lost on a rural road and he finally pulls over and asked the farmer how he's going to get to New York City.

00:42:37.060 And the farmer thinks for a little while and he says, well, I wouldn't start from here, you know, I wouldn't start from here either.

00:42:43.060 But given that, hey, we're here, I think there are with a lot of work and some luck and some courage.

00:42:52.060 You know, there are viable pathways forward as long as we realize the ideology behind what's really motivating our opponents and what really their goals are.

00:43:01.060 Yeah, I've got a whole bunch of questions out of that. So I'm trying to think of where to start.

00:43:07.060 So I guess my first one would be we do know that, like, actually, like Sheila Jackson Lee is actively trying to make it illegal to discuss this problem. 0.94

00:43:15.060 Right. So so this is something that while you do see more and more, I think, people willing to engage with it.

00:43:21.060 Obviously, the left isn't going to make this easy on anybody, but but it is actively more difficult to have this discussion public and, you know, on purpose. Right.

00:43:31.060 Right. Right. Oh, no, absolutely. And you more and more kind of folks in the conservative movement will need to fully disassociate themselves from the institutions of the left to kind of make to create a space where we're more comfortable in talking about this at an elite or semi elite level.

00:43:51.060 I mean, for me, you know, when I was at Stanford, when I was at Harvard, I just, you know, I could do this, but it was, you know, it was the turd in the punch bowl. Right. It just it wasn't acceptable.

00:44:03.060 So, I mean, part of this is consolidating and that means consolidating geographically, but I think just as much it means consolidating professionally, culturally, taking over certain institutions in a way that that folks like Chris Rufo are trying to do so that we we have our our places where we have our space.

00:44:23.060 But you touched on Sheila Jackson Lee and I did tweet about her a little bit. I mean, and she's a great example in that she she is. I mean, she's trying to forbid and in particular white people from talking about a lot of the issues around this. 0.92

00:44:36.900 And this is not some I mean, she's a horrible person for lots of reasons that even have nothing to do with her views. 1.00

00:44:43.320 But as well documented, even by people who I don't agree with. But I think the point is, there's a tendency to say, oh, well, you know, she's just some marginal, unsophisticated, you know, inner city politician, whatever.

00:44:56.820 No, I mean, she has a degree from Yale and another degree from UVA law, which is an outstanding law school.

00:45:02.060 This is a person who, in many ways, has imbibed a lot of elite thinking on these issues and is parroting it out more aggressively and obnoxiously than some.

00:45:14.160 But but I don't necessarily know that there's that much distinction between what Sheila Jackson Lee is saying and what a lot of other people on the left are thinking.

00:45:22.440 So the second part of that I wanted to get to was you mentioned Biden and his actions and them being intentional.

00:45:30.900 Do you really think Biden is making those decisions?

00:45:34.420 Like who is, you know, his advisers, Barack Obama, putting this thing like what?

00:45:41.680 Well, I'm not actually talking about Tucker or some of my friends who I love.

00:45:46.320 I mean, I love Tucker, to be clear. He's a godsend.

00:45:48.860 But look, anybody who's watched Joe Biden, I mean, even from my own youth, I remember Joe Biden.

00:45:55.560 He's been around politics forever. But even go back 20, 30 years and you watch Joe Biden and you watch Joe Biden today and he's clearly diminished dramatically.

00:46:05.320 OK, but I also don't think he's, you know, other than our fun and saying so rhetorically, he's not drooling into his ice cream at this point.

00:46:12.440 OK, he is he's aware of what's going on. He knows darn well what his immigration policy is for the most part.

00:46:20.940 And I think, you know, the deep state is always in control of the government at some fact, even when there are people a lot more capable than Biden who are nominally running it.

00:46:32.000 And I'm sure the deep state is running the government even more under Biden.

00:46:37.000 But at the same time, if Biden wanted to stop this, if he really cared at all, he would stop it.

00:46:42.300 And it would. You know, you you put back the remain in Mexico policy under Trump and you just start deporting people.

00:46:48.000 And his own base might scream or at least some of them.

00:46:50.640 Everybody on the right would find a strange new respect for Joe Biden and we'd go forward.

00:46:56.480 And, you know, this is not above Joe Biden's limited intelligence quotient or, you know, capabilities right now.

00:47:06.140 He understands that. Now, I'm sure that there are people even further down the chain who are further, you know, just happy to thwart whatever instincts Biden might have to do anything reasonable here.

00:47:17.700 But ultimately, he's the president. He understands what's going on and he's he's choosing things to be this way.

00:47:23.880 Fair enough. We might disagree on that one, but but a reasonable opinion, to be sure.

00:47:29.980 And the final thing I wanted to pick out of the kind of the things you had said there, you talked about the relationship with the right in corporate America.

00:47:36.360 And of course, you know, this is famously cozy for a very long time, I think very unhealthily so, as corporate America is, I think, pretty clearly more than fine with kind of eviscerating the country.

00:47:47.100 Yeah. In fact, it might be a key to their extended profit margin.

00:47:52.240 But you say at the same time, you know, you do need kind of friends in these elite institutions.

00:47:58.420 A lot of people have said that basically, well, Americans, they're not having kids anymore.

00:48:03.420 So if you don't have this mass immigration, then the economy just collapses, the social structures collapse.

00:48:08.880 And, you know, we just have a horrible problem in our hands.

00:48:12.540 If you have business interests and you have kind of this economic interest entirely tied up in the free flow of immigration into the United States,

00:48:20.840 but you also need business interests to be on your side in order to do anything about the immigration, feels like we're kind of in a bind here, huh?

00:48:28.380 Right. Well, I mean, look, I have five kids, so I have a personal investment and view in this particular issue.

00:48:36.660 You know, I think we're not going to rebuild America with somebody else's kid. 0.98

00:48:40.360 That doesn't mean that nobody else's kids who are not American in 2022 or 2023, excuse me, could ever, you know, come over here and be part of the American story,

00:48:51.000 no matter what talents and skills they bring.

00:48:53.100 I'm not suggesting that.

00:48:54.160 But I am suggesting that kind of using mass immigration as an excuse for, well, we've got a civilizational death wish and we've moved away from wanting to have kids ourselves.

00:49:06.560 So let's just import a bunch of people from other countries who will do our dirty work and maybe have kids is not a really winning strategy. 1.00

00:49:16.840 And you can talk to the ancient Romans about how that went for them.

00:49:20.820 And they're certainly not the only group for whom that becomes an issue.

00:49:26.380 So I think there are all sorts of things I actually just was tweeting about this today that we could be doing to encourage Americans to have bigger families than we're doing as far as material things that they will not totally solve the problem,

00:49:40.500 but they would certainly help address the problem.

00:49:44.340 So I think that's thing one.

00:49:46.600 And thing two, it just becomes very destabilizing.

00:49:49.380 These businesses come in, they bring in these people, you know, they're happy to undercut American wages.

00:49:58.020 And again, that in itself becomes a cause of ethnic friction of various types.

00:50:04.700 And, you know, it's just we have to we have to take on corporate America.

00:50:08.360 And I think we also have to be realistic.

00:50:10.360 I wrote an article toward a Republican counter elite in the American Conservative that for some of you who are interested in some of my writing beyond this,

00:50:18.680 kind of touches on some of these issues.

00:50:22.100 But I think sort of more broadly, what we need to be thinking about is being at absolute war with business is probably not a totally viable going forward proposition for the Republican Party,

00:50:36.560 because for a variety of reasons, I think that is likely to be to some degree a natural constituency for us versus any left leaning party.

00:50:45.780 But what so what you have to do is we can't let them do what they're doing now.

00:50:50.140 So you have to manipulate the legal and cultural environment, particularly the legal environment,

00:50:54.520 so that you create a different set of incentives for businesses where they are incentivized to raise wages, you know, where that is viable and makes sense.

00:51:07.540 You know, do things in America, do all sorts of things to reorient corporations toward behaving in a patriotic fashion.

00:51:15.480 And again, I don't think that it's this is some sort of impossible, weird, utopian pipe dream.

00:51:22.340 There are some very practical things folks like Josh Hawley have suggested we do that can can address these issues.

00:51:30.040 So, again, I think it's it's challenging, but by no means impossible that we could really make progress on something like that.

00:51:37.560 Not exactly related, but kind of related just because what you said there had me thinking about it a bit is is the this the massification of the corporations like the real problem,

00:51:53.440 like the fact that you've proletarianized the middle class and that they they can't things are so de-regionalized and so centralized means that these corporations are motivated to kind of plug into these global networks.

00:52:08.680 Like, is there any way to is that a solvable problem or is that an inevitable thing will scale always win out in this?

00:52:16.040 Yeah, I mean, I don't think mass globalization in the way that we've done it is inevitable.

00:52:21.420 And I think in many ways, Trump was trying to push back against that.

00:52:25.480 You know, by the way, I'm not suggesting that we go back to autarky again either.

00:52:29.900 I mean, there are there's a fine balance to be drawn.

00:52:33.840 There are benefits that we get, including peace benefits from interacting in general cooperatively with businesses in other countries and other countries generally with trade.

00:52:45.740 I'm I'm generally maybe I'm enough of an old fashioned Republican or old fashioned conservative that I don't view those things as inherently inimical to what we might want to do here.

00:52:58.720 But that's a far difference than I had a colleague at Hoover, a guy named Michael Boskin, actually a personally very nice guy.

00:53:06.460 But he he kind of infamously said at one point he'd been Bush one's head of his Council of Economic Advisors, that it doesn't really matter whether the U.S. makes computer chips or potato chips.

00:53:17.740 And I would argue, well, no, yeah, it does matter.

00:53:21.480 And I think that we're beginning to think about, OK, maybe we shouldn't have offshored all of our manufacturing to China.

00:53:28.700 And maybe for a lot of these key things, this sort of stuff needs to live in, if not just the U.S., but in the U.S. and other friendly countries.

00:53:40.300 And that reshoring opportunity, which, by the way, is a great opportunity for a new business constituency, is also something that could be tremendously useful for the American middle class, American folks who were involved in manufacturing and other people who were decimated as we hollowed out the middle class in the era of peak globalization.

00:54:02.040 So, again, I think not trying to go back to zero, not trying to go pretend that there are other countries that we can't trade with them, but just really moderating our path, you know, dialing back some of the stuff we've done with China could dramatically change the incentives for businesses in terms of the sorts of things they did.

00:54:20.940 Like maybe we should make some antibiotics here just in case China doesn't want to ship them all over when we need them.

00:54:26.280 Absolutely. And computer chips.

00:54:27.800 So, again, unfortunately, we're seeing computer chips, you know, there's a long lead time associated with that, but it's great.

00:54:35.460 You know, anything that's a key commodity, even ag commodities to some degree, you know, if we think about having them here, then all of a sudden there are new business opportunities and new business elites that will emerge from our having done that.

00:54:48.800 And they will tend to have more patriotic incentives than the current globalist business elites do.

00:54:55.360 So, again, I think that without trying to completely undo the last 50 years or whatever, which is not realistic, but if we if we undo the worst half of it, we would change a lot of incentive structures.

00:55:09.920 Well, you know, if you if you keep the graphics cards flowing, you'll have the gamers on your side and that's really all you need at the end there.

00:55:17.960 Yeah, absolutely.

00:55:19.640 All right, guys. Well, we've got through most of what we're going to talk about here.

00:55:23.520 So we're going to turn to the Super Chats in just a second.

00:55:26.140 I see we've got a few stacking up.

00:55:28.020 But before we do, Jeremy, obviously, this piece was over at the American Mind, but I know your stuff has kind of appeared all over the place.

00:55:34.940 Is there anything people should look for?

00:55:36.960 Do you got something coming up?

00:55:37.800 I know you said you're writing a book, but anything else that people should be looking out for?

00:55:42.000 Yeah, well, when my book comes out, which is a while from now, it's still got a ways to go.

00:55:45.120 But but absolutely buy that.

00:55:47.540 Not just because you should buy books, but because it encourages publishers to publish these sorts of controversial books.

00:55:52.920 But my my work you can find at the American Mind, American Greatness, Newsweek, the American Conservative, Claremont Review of Books.

00:56:03.140 I'm sure I am 1776.

00:56:05.960 I'm sure I'm forgetting a number of other Federalist other publications.

00:56:11.400 I apologize in advance to those publications.

00:56:13.860 Be assured that you are fully loved by me.

00:56:16.160 But, you know, I do publish I try to get in front of a variety of of audiences on the right so that we're not just talking in our fun, maybe dissident or semi-dissident milieu, but that we're kind of reaching the great unwashed masses, you know, or the folks who don't necessarily because they have actual lives outside of politics.

00:56:38.180 They're not sitting here worrying about or thinking about these these issues all the time.

00:56:42.180 And I want to to be able to reach them.

00:56:43.920 And, you know, I appreciate you having me on to to reach the Blaze audience and folks like that.

00:56:50.100 You know, hopefully some of them will will find this interesting message or discussion as well.

00:56:56.220 Absolutely.

00:56:56.940 So we've got Phil here for ten dollars and he says, is there any hope for a future for us of the old stock population? 1.00

00:57:04.340 Or are we just condemned and waiting for the executioner's axe?

00:57:08.260 I feel like Jeremy talked about this a decent amount, but do you want to address that a little bit?

00:57:12.400 Sure.

00:57:12.860 I mean, I think if I felt like I was just waiting for the executioner's axe, I've had five kids.

00:57:19.520 I mean, that's I don't know how to have more of a bet on the future ultimately than having a family.

00:57:24.980 And maybe one could argue that the collapse in fertility to some degree is related to people, some people thinking like Phil.

00:57:34.640 About where we are.

00:57:36.300 And it's understandable.

00:57:37.300 I'm not suggesting that Phil is crazy to think that.

00:57:40.700 So, you know, I talked about kind of reconstituting this American identity.

00:57:44.760 I think that's that's one hope.

00:57:46.520 I think aggressively asserting our rights are legitimate.

00:57:50.600 You know, my right as a white guy to not be discriminated against in a variety of ways by the current regime.

00:57:57.640 That's a legitimate right.

00:57:58.980 Now, Sheila Jackson Lee does not want me asserting that right. 0.98

00:58:01.720 But I think that that right is out there.

00:58:06.640 And there's a little bit of the worst, the better, to quote a 19th century Russian revolutionary who influenced Lenin.

00:58:13.020 And that the worst things sort of get for the old stock population of the US. 1.00

00:58:17.200 We've sort of become minoritized.

00:58:18.920 I mean, literally, we are minoritized in states like California.

00:58:21.820 But even in other senses, we may feel increasingly culturally minoritized.

00:58:25.620 We may begin to kind of view ourselves as a discrete view, a group that has rights like other groups.

00:58:32.040 And will I think it's as much as the kind of folks in charge don't want us asserting our legitimate rights.

00:58:39.220 I think they're going to ultimately fail in that.

00:58:41.720 I think just the dynamics of society, precisely because they're getting worse, are going to lead to a sort of ethnic organizing and assertion that is going to put a stop to some of the worst abuses.

00:58:55.340 And then we can, I think, work in alliance with new stock populations who are kind of interested in an old fashioned version of the American ideal and American patriotism to hopefully have a winning and viable political coalition. 0.80

00:59:09.340 That would be my hope at least.

00:59:10.380 And yes, Phil, thank you for your donation.

00:59:13.820 Appreciate that.

00:59:14.860 Creeper Weirdo here for $10.

00:59:16.520 Thank you very much, sir.

00:59:18.340 Lincoln has a lot of criticism surrounding his actions during his presidency in the Civil War.

00:59:22.960 I understand being unapologetic about Washington or Jefferson, but Lincoln has a lot of baggage.

00:59:28.160 And yeah, I didn't want to sidetrack the podcast when you name dropped him there.

00:59:31.460 But do you want to stand for Lincoln here?

00:59:33.640 I have to be very careful.

00:59:35.420 Claremont has a particular, where I work, has a long association with Lincoln.

00:59:39.060 And it gets beyond the whole thing of this podcast.

00:59:44.700 I certainly understand Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and the other complaints that people have about Lincoln.

00:59:53.140 And some of those complaints are fair and reasonable.

00:59:57.780 What I would say is that, again, you don't need to raise up any founding father or critical American person in history who you don't want to.

01:00:08.640 I mean, that's your right as an American to say, no, actually, I don't think that Lincoln should be the model.

01:00:19.440 But I would actually argue that, and this is what kind of our founder, Harry Jaffa, wrote in his famous book, The Crisis of the House Divided, about Lincoln, that Lincoln was actually, in general, an example of great prudential statesmanship as opposed to Douglas.

01:00:39.340 And that, in fact, he was not, and this is a praise, sort of excessively attached to abstract principle.

01:00:45.900 But that he was very, always cognizant of reality on the ground, and that beyond that, if you look at some of the things he did, and this is maybe, even if you really don't like a lot of the things Lincoln did, I think this can be a thing of inspiration for the right.

01:01:05.080 He was not afraid to run roughshod over his political opposition when he perceived that they fundamentally endangered the American experiment.

01:01:14.120 That's one way you could say it, yeah.

01:01:15.920 Yeah, he defied the Supreme Court, right?

01:01:18.340 Like, I would love, I mean, now we have a pretty good Supreme Court, but one of the core things I think the right should be doing right now is, in clever legal ways, or presumptively legal ways, defying the left-wing judiciary, right?

01:01:33.000 And Lincoln had the courage to do that when he perceived fundamental interests at stake.

01:01:38.260 And so, again, whether or not you agree with those particular interests, I think Lincoln's ability to exercise power in the system, especially in the system that is now as far gone as the American system is from where it started, I think is a, you know, it's an admirable kind of show of statesmanship,

01:01:57.960 and something that we can actually look at and appreciate, regardless of our, you know, other ideological views.

01:02:03.800 The imperial presidency is a American tradition, to be sure.

01:02:07.360 Yeah, yeah.

01:02:08.800 All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead and wrap it up.

01:02:10.940 Thank you so much for coming by.

01:02:12.320 Great questions.

01:02:13.500 Really appreciate the audience.

01:02:14.640 And, of course, I appreciate Jeremy for coming on.

01:02:16.640 It's a really interesting piece.

01:02:18.060 He had a lot of very interesting approaches to this subject, and I really appreciate him coming by.

01:02:23.520 Thanks so much for having me.

01:02:25.180 Absolutely.

01:02:25.740 All right, guys.

01:02:26.340 So, if this is your first time here, of course, please make sure, first, you're checking out Jeremy's stuff and that you're subscribing to this channel.

01:02:33.500 Also, please, if you have not been listening on podcast and you want to go ahead and listen to this as a podcast, working out, mowing the lawn, you know, whatever you're doing, certainly not playing video games.

01:02:44.100 But if you happen to be and you want to listen to this, by all means, go ahead and check out those podcast platforms.

01:02:50.120 It's on all the major ones, Apple, Spotify, everything like that.

01:02:52.780 And if you do, go ahead and make sure that you give it a rating and a review.

01:02:56.200 It really helps now that we're kind of getting all this off the ground.

01:02:59.640 Also, thanks to The Blaze, I have also made everything over at my Substack, the total state, free for everybody.

01:03:06.980 That includes the rough draft chapters of the total state book that have been coming out there.

01:03:11.080 So, if you're always someone who wanted to read those chapters, but you never got around to, you know, becoming a paid member or something, those are now free to everybody.

01:03:18.440 So, you can go ahead and check that out.

01:03:19.740 The link for that is down in the description under this video.

01:03:23.620 But thanks for coming by, guys.

01:03:25.300 And as always, I'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - January 19, 2023

A Nation of Settlers ｜ Guest： Jeremy Carl ｜ 1⧸19⧸23

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