The Auron MacIntyre Show - Assimilation and Its Discontents ｜ Guest： Andrew Beck

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00:00:30.500 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:32.040 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.620 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

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00:01:20.580 All right, guys, as I'm sure you have noticed, the discussion around what is America, what is an American, is heating up.

00:01:30.280 We've talked about the need for deporting illegal immigrants.

00:01:33.660 Most people are on board with that at this point, but that opens up a far more important discussion about legal immigration.

00:01:41.220 Who is supposed to be here?

00:01:42.680 Are they integrating into society?

00:01:45.080 Can we keep a cohesive identity in the way, in the manner in which we are bringing people into the country, or do we need to rethink how we're doing this?

00:01:53.700 Joining me today to discuss this topic is one of the fellows over at Beck and Stone.

00:01:59.040 Andrew Beck, thank you so much for coming on, man.

00:02:00.700 I'm happy to be here, Oren.

00:02:04.360 Absolutely.

00:02:04.900 You wrote a great article over in the American Mind, and I'm very happy to dive into the subject with you.

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00:03:04.400 So, Andrew, I think a lot of people, like I said, have heard from the Republican Party that the problem is not immigration.

00:03:11.460 It's illegal immigration.

00:03:12.920 And as soon as we can just make everyone go through the process legally, then we've solved all of our problems.

00:03:18.420 We don't have to worry about this anymore.

00:03:20.540 And that's a very safe answer, right?

00:03:22.500 Because it just turns the issue of who is an American into a process thing, right?

00:03:27.360 It's paperwork Americans.

00:03:28.980 That's really what matters.

00:03:30.060 As long as you got the paperwork done, you filed it correctly, you've gone through the procedure.

00:03:34.220 See, we're all about rules.

00:03:35.280 We're all about law and order.

00:03:36.340 And we don't have to discuss any of the more complex and perhaps thornier issues around cultural assimilation.

00:03:44.160 You wrote a great piece about why current people entering into our country may not be assimilating in the same way as previous waves.

00:03:52.940 And we'll get into the details.

00:03:54.420 But could you give a 5,000-foot overview of kind of what you were talking about in this piece?

00:04:00.020 Sure, yeah.

00:04:00.780 The bottom line here is that if you're going to have this one people out of many, right?

00:04:07.400 E pluriburus unum.

00:04:08.600 I think we have the pluriburus down.

00:04:10.980 I think everybody realizes that we have a whole bunch of people here.

00:04:14.240 But what is the unum?

00:04:16.260 What is the American people?

00:04:19.780 And who should we be?

00:04:22.720 How do you identify as an American?

00:04:25.160 If you identify as something completely different than someone else, you're going to have a hard time being unified.

00:04:32.160 If you don't have things like the same, I call it a shared moral grammar.

00:04:37.700 But it basically means having some type of values that are shared with your neighbor and with people elsewhere.

00:04:44.920 You're going to have a hard time conducting even a democratic government where everyone has a right to speak, where everyone has a right to vote and to participate if we don't speak the same language.

00:04:59.600 And this, of course, is now encompassing literally not speaking the same language, let alone not having the same values.

00:05:08.520 You're going to have a hard time self-governing.

00:05:12.800 The American system was made as a republic so that we could govern ourselves, so that the people could be empowered, so that we could rule and not be ruled over.

00:05:23.960 But that requires us to be one.

00:05:26.780 It requires us to have very similar priorities, and we can compete when it comes to local priorities versus national.

00:05:35.260 And then, of course, at this point, it's even international priorities that we have to think of as this empire that we have become.

00:05:42.460 But the bottom line is that the homeland needs to be secured in itself.

00:05:48.760 We must have difficult conversations where we decide what is a citizen, what is required of you if you are to be a citizen, whether you're born here or whether you're going to come here.

00:06:00.700 Now, if you say the only thing that is required to become a citizen is to go through the paperwork, is to produce for us economically in some way, that's not good enough.

00:06:13.900 That's not what the founders intended.

00:06:16.820 It's certainly not what Americans 100 years ago, which is partially why I bring up the example of Germans in Texas in my essay.

00:06:26.800 Even 100 years ago, Americans understood that you could not have large populations of unassimilated people speaking completely different languages, rejecting the identity of the majority, or else you open yourself up to risk.

00:06:45.200 Like chaos and confusion and sometimes outright disorder and this sort of sectarian violence begins to break out.

00:06:54.720 And I'm not encouraging this.

00:06:57.080 I'm trying to avoid this.

00:06:58.820 And the best way to do it is if you raise the bar, if citizens raise our expectations of we want people who come to the United States to be committed to becoming Americans and to forsaking.

00:07:15.200 All others, right?

00:07:16.200 This is kind of like a marriage.

00:07:17.860 When you become a citizen, you say, I forsake my prior nation, all my allegiances, all of my loyalties.

00:07:26.160 And yes, even the social mores and the identity that I had before, I now make that identity secondary to the American identity.

00:07:38.440 I will not be a hyphenated American.

00:07:40.680 I will be an American and I will act in such a way that matches the America that I have come to.

00:07:49.980 Now, if someone doesn't want to do that, and if we don't have reasonable cause to believe that they are either capable or willing to make that commitment, they should not be permitted it.

00:08:03.900 And certainly not be permitted in large numbers where they can not feel the pressure to assimilate because they can, for the most part, keep to themselves and remain themselves.

00:08:16.480 Yeah, there's a lot there to break into, but let's start at the beginning.

00:08:22.920 You point out the nature of a republic.

00:08:25.220 And a lot of people, I'm famously not a huge fan of mass democracy, but I recognize the republic as the founding structure of our government.

00:08:35.520 And as you say, when it was founded, it was understood that the reason you could have a republic is that everyone spoke the same language.

00:08:43.320 Even if they didn't come from exactly the same place, they had a roughly Anglo or Scots-Irish background.

00:08:49.600 They shared a similar tradition and faith.

00:08:53.260 There were a lot of things binding them together.

00:08:55.300 There were some differences, but there was more holding them together than tearing them apart.

00:08:59.920 And we should be honest here.

00:09:02.320 We often say multiculturalism doesn't work.

00:09:04.620 There are multicultural societies don't work.

00:09:06.320 Well, that's not exactly true.

00:09:07.740 They do exist.

00:09:08.820 There are workable examples.

00:09:10.660 You can think of something like the Ottoman Empire previously, or you could think of something in Singapore today.

00:09:17.220 But the key is these are not republics, right?

00:09:19.900 These are autocracies most of the time.

00:09:22.560 That is what's required to make that multicultural coalition work is you need a strong hand that can kind of cut through all of those things.

00:09:32.180 If you would prefer a government where the people have more agency and more freedom, you're going to need them to share far more in common.

00:09:40.380 So when we're looking at trying to possibly revive or at least explore the validity of republican government in the common day, the first thing we have to do is return to the conditions that make republican government possible.

00:09:55.260 And so I think it's really critical as we evaluate this to grasp what those elements are.

00:10:00.720 And you already talked a little bit about that shared moral grammar, which I think is a mixture of religion, which is critical.

00:10:08.520 And I think we both agree on the Christian religion being a core founding of the United States.

00:10:13.000 But also you need a shared tradition that, of course, incorporates that, but is also cultural, right?

00:10:19.560 And so the core tradition, as I see it, and I think many others like Samuel Huntington have pointed out, is the Anglo-Protestant tradition,

00:10:29.280 which doesn't mean that every person walking into America has to be Anglo or immediately becomes Protestant, though I highly recommend it.

00:10:36.160 But if you are someone who is doing that, you must recognize that this is the majority culture.

00:10:42.720 And if you are joining it, this is what you are aspiring to.

00:10:46.420 As you point out, we have people with dual citizenship.

00:10:49.620 We have people who basically just come here for the benefits and immediately go back to whatever country they came from to vacation.

00:10:55.300 Yeah, they'll get refugee status from a place like Haiti and then go visit it for the summer.

00:11:00.220 These are not people who are committing to becoming the closest thing they can to an Anglo-Protestant in the United States.

00:11:09.260 No, and you're absolutely right.

00:11:11.740 And this is why some of these equivocations that people make between, well, people came from Europe before,

00:11:17.340 or people did this and did that, or look at how well certain immigrant groups have assimilated.

00:11:26.400 This, to me, proves the point rather than denies it.

00:11:34.120 It's people, when they look at something and they say,

00:11:38.180 okay, if I want to partake in that, if I want to live here, if I want to benefit from this system,

00:11:44.660 if I want access to this market,

00:11:47.280 I acknowledge that there is a specific identity that I'm going to have to,

00:11:54.400 I mean, submit sounds bad, but that's essentially what it is,

00:12:01.260 that I'm going to have to submit to,

00:12:02.740 and that I'm going to have to respect what currently is this.

00:12:06.340 Because what is there, if I change,

00:12:10.600 it's no longer going to be something that is of a benefit to me.

00:12:15.740 The reason why people want to come to the United States,

00:12:19.760 and we can have folks,

00:12:21.980 again, this is like from some of these Obama folks,

00:12:28.960 a few other people that sort of have been tisking J.D. Vance for the speech that he gave at the Claremont Institute,

00:12:37.700 which I refer to in my essay,

00:12:40.560 about what it means to be an American.

00:12:44.000 Isn't that you have a heritage here, or whatever, that you love America,

00:12:47.740 it's that you just subscribe to the rights.

00:12:51.240 It's just about the rights.

00:12:52.740 And acknowledging, notice how now, in these people's vocabulary,

00:12:58.160 they don't talk about the rights of a citizen.

00:13:00.480 They don't talk about the rights of an American.

00:13:03.000 They talk about human rights.

00:13:05.180 Which means the only condition that you have to be considered an American,

00:13:10.000 even just to benefit from the American system,

00:13:12.400 is to believe in this nebulous concept of human rights.

00:13:15.800 Which, by the way, is always changing.

00:13:17.400 And you can shape it to be what you need to get done in that particular day.

00:13:24.560 Whereas the rights of an American,

00:13:26.300 first of all, they come from the rights of an Englishman.

00:13:28.980 And this has a long tradition going back for many generations.

00:13:33.480 It's what the founders defined as our Bill of Rights.

00:13:38.400 It comes from England.

00:13:39.820 It comes from Rome.

00:13:40.500 It comes from ancient Greece.

00:13:41.620 It stretches back thousands of years.

00:13:43.900 This is the Western tradition.

00:13:45.760 It's written down.

00:13:47.880 It's already defined.

00:13:49.880 If you try to redefine that, you will lose the benefits of it.

00:13:54.680 And this is where any successful immigrant group,

00:13:59.640 and again, we can talk about them very specifically,

00:14:04.320 but one that comes from a place that already is in that tradition,

00:14:10.260 who already sees themselves,

00:14:11.700 who already comprehends some of these concepts.

00:14:14.720 Like, okay, the right to private property.

00:14:17.960 This is not a global right.

00:14:20.860 This is not a human right.

00:14:22.400 Not because on some level it isn't morally right or wrong.

00:14:26.600 It's because the people don't see it as such.

00:14:29.500 People believe in America they have a right to a firearm.

00:14:33.900 They believe that they have a right to deadly weapons.

00:14:36.560 Why?

00:14:37.180 Is it because it's a human right?

00:14:38.600 It's a human right.

00:14:39.580 No, it's because it was defined by our forefathers,

00:14:43.020 by the founders of this country for a specific purpose.

00:14:45.820 And if you believe that you have that right,

00:14:48.220 if it is written down and you say this is the law,

00:14:50.800 and you are willing to hold that law,

00:14:53.860 you have that right.

00:14:55.400 And so this is where we need to be very careful about how we set these definitions.

00:15:02.500 We're not talking in abstract terms.

00:15:04.720 We're not talking in flexible terms.

00:15:06.860 We're talking very specifically.

00:15:09.660 Whoever comes to the United States and wants to be a citizen is not a global citizen.

00:15:15.940 They should want to be an American citizen, an unhyphenated American citizen,

00:15:22.040 and not receive human rights, but receive the rights that are reserved exclusively for

00:15:29.420 American citizens.

00:15:30.840 And then if they are willing to do that and they are acting in good faith and they are in

00:15:35.280 small numbers that they can be easily integrated, God bless them.

00:15:38.840 I welcome them here.

00:15:39.700 Well, I think a lot of people will look at what you're pointing out here in the particularity

00:15:46.620 and they think, oh, well, well, these are human rights because it says in the declaration

00:15:50.840 that, you know, all men are created equal.

00:15:53.620 I think that's what a lot of people go to immediately to justify the propositional nation.

00:15:57.740 Well, these are the truths of the world that our founders discovered.

00:16:02.340 And therefore, anybody who assents to these rights, these universal truths,

00:16:07.000 because they say all men are created equal.

00:16:09.340 Therefore, they are all basically just, you know, potential Americans.

00:16:13.600 Everyone in the world is a potential American just waiting to discover these rights, agree

00:16:17.300 with them.

00:16:17.760 And then therefore, the proposition makes them an American.

00:16:20.540 But what you're saying is actually something much more important, that these are actually

00:16:25.380 particular values tied to a particular people and tradition.

00:16:29.520 And yes, these truths were self-evident to the Americans because they were part of their

00:16:35.460 tradition.

00:16:36.020 The rights of an Englishman are not self-evident to an Indian.

00:16:40.060 They are not self-evident to somebody in Russia.

00:16:43.020 They are not self-evident to somebody in Zimbabwe.

00:16:46.880 These things are not something that every culture celebrates or accepts or finds self-evident.

00:16:54.480 The self-evidence, the reason that this was something that they could all adopt is they already

00:16:59.840 had that moral hygiene you were talking about.

00:17:01.820 They already had that combination of religion and tradition and heritage and all these things

00:17:06.620 come together.

00:17:07.200 And while other people can learn this way of life over generations, the values themselves

00:17:13.860 are not disembodied things.

00:17:15.700 They are things attached to particular peoples and particular ways of being.

00:17:19.740 And so you can't just step in and say, well, I'm from India or I'm from Pakistan or I'm from

00:17:25.800 Japan and I crossed into the magic soil of the United States and now I see all of these

00:17:31.220 rights and I suddenly accept this.

00:17:33.100 That's just not how it works.

00:17:35.080 And so it's, I think, critical for people to grasp that, yes, all men are created equal

00:17:41.160 with self-evident to the people who drafted the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,

00:17:47.060 but not because they had discovered something that every single human being on the planet would

00:17:52.120 eventually assent to, but because they were rooted in something very particular.

00:17:55.940 And that is what you must ultimately assimilate to if you're going to be an American.

00:18:00.380 And if you suddenly bring hundreds of thousands, if not millions, I mean, we've crossed the

00:18:07.660 line of absurdity even, even if on some foundational level, the things that you're talking about

00:18:14.560 and the premises of, oh, it's a propositional nature or whatever, might have been true at

00:18:19.000 some point.

00:18:19.580 If you have a few hundred, a couple thousand people coming over who are highly vetted, who

00:18:24.980 are already of the mind that I wish to be a part of this propositional nation and that

00:18:34.080 I will now be subsumed by it and I will be assimilated into its people, if suddenly you

00:18:41.200 increase those numbers to be hundreds of thousands and millions of people and you say these things

00:18:49.380 these things don't actually make somebody an American, all that you have to do is go through

00:18:57.860 the motions and pay your taxes and do it the right way and suddenly you become an American.

00:19:04.180 And then what ends up happening?

00:19:05.400 It's like the, I mentioned this in the essay, somebody's recently naturalized from South America.

00:19:12.660 Say, okay, well, great.

00:19:13.660 Wait, do you consider yourself an American?

00:19:17.380 No, I'm a Colombian.

00:19:20.640 And it's like, well, then why would you become a citizen?

00:19:23.980 It's because I just need my papers because I don't want to get thrown out.

00:19:27.620 You want to keep living in a nice place, living in a nice place.

00:19:33.400 Isn't the reason why this country was founded just to have a nicer place to live.

00:19:38.060 We wanted to live in a very particular way.

00:19:41.540 And if you want to change the stipulations for being here, living here, receiving all

00:19:50.900 the rights and benefits and the responsibilities of being a citizen, people will take the benefits,

00:19:57.020 but they will neglect the responsibilities.

00:19:59.720 And this is, I think, what we're seeing.

00:20:02.620 And we've seen so many great examples of this recently, right?

00:20:05.520 There's so many object lessons around us.

00:20:07.740 So we just had the LA immigration riots in which people are waving Mexican flags.

00:20:14.060 The Mexican president refers to the protesters as her people.

00:20:19.100 She doesn't even hesitate to say, oh, well, these are Americans who might share some kind

00:20:24.060 of ancestry with Mexico or some kind of interest.

00:20:26.220 No, these are my agents, my people in your country.

00:20:30.040 And I expect them to lobby on behalf of my country.

00:20:33.860 We see this with people like Zora Mamdani or all of these Somalians running in the Midwest

00:20:41.020 right now.

00:20:41.740 They're coming up and saying, yeah, I may be a first-generation American.

00:20:46.020 In some cases, I might be a direct immigrant myself.

00:20:48.840 But it's now my job to tell you what is and isn't American.

00:20:52.540 And actually, I think I should be changing your system.

00:20:55.240 And actually, in many cases, I will just shamelessly say I'm fighting for Somalia and the interest

00:21:00.460 of greater Somalia inside the United States.

00:21:03.500 So at this point, it's not even a game, right?

00:21:05.540 And to be clear, I think we need an immigration moratorium.

00:21:08.800 I think we need 15, 20 years of zero immigration so we can figure out what is going on.

00:21:14.660 But obviously, the system we have right now is so ridiculous that the people who are entering

00:21:20.800 the country don't even pretend that they actually care about our values or our culture, that

00:21:26.480 they have any value in America beyond it being an economic zone.

00:21:30.020 And unless we break American politicians of this obsession with GDP and the idea that America

00:21:37.520 is just a place for all these just interchangeable widgets to get dumped into and make money,

00:21:43.320 then we are going to be ruled by foreigners who literally tell us explicitly, I am doing

00:21:48.740 this on behalf of the country I left.

00:21:50.760 You do not matter to me.

00:21:52.920 And then the United States will not be the United States anymore.

00:21:57.140 We will have balkanization.

00:22:00.040 We will have fracturing.

00:22:01.740 What we might call federalism, where you can...

00:22:06.020 Be part of a local governing structure and you have these concentric rings of power that

00:22:30.400 stretch all the way to Washington.

00:22:32.000 Washington, you're going to have people start to simply just ignore the outside rings.

00:22:37.760 National cohesion, national unity will just become a thing of the past.

00:22:42.060 It will be only on paper.

00:22:43.700 All that will matter to people is the people that live right next to them and it will become

00:22:48.520 much more ethnocentric.

00:22:50.160 It will become much more hostile.

00:22:52.800 It will become much more difficult to conduct commerce and trade, even just within the American

00:22:58.120 continent.

00:22:58.620 I don't think for the people who want this mass immigration on economic grounds, they need

00:23:08.180 to see that social cohesion and cultural assimilation is better conducted when there is a trade is

00:23:19.720 better conducted when you have those things.

00:23:21.820 Commerce is easier.

00:23:22.780 You can have people who do business with each other with greater trust.

00:23:29.220 Ask anybody what it's like to do business with communist China and they don't respect your copyrights and your

00:23:39.120 patents and your trademarks.

00:23:40.500 They will steal it.

00:23:41.400 So its IP theft is huge.

00:23:42.940 They will not just manufacture it for you.

00:23:46.920 They will take your designs and begin to manufacture competing products on their own.

00:23:53.900 They will sell your information to the government and oftentimes they will flat out try to change

00:24:00.600 the terms of the contracts right before you sign.

00:24:03.920 There's plenty of stories like this because it's a different type of culture.

00:24:08.800 It's a haggle culture.

00:24:10.060 It's a scamming in the Western tradition is highly frowned upon.

00:24:17.420 It's and this is this is not something that we take lightly theft and fraud and not being

00:24:26.500 authentic and not keeping your word and not abiding by contracts is considered to be

00:24:32.500 a Ichabod in in the, you know, Western tradition, whereas in many other cultures, if you get scammed, then that's on you.

00:24:46.060 And the person who did the scamming should be congratulated for being such a wise and shrewd and daring merchant.

00:24:52.400 How do you expect trade to happen like this?

00:24:56.060 Well, how do you expect to to walk down the street?

00:24:58.380 Right.

00:24:58.520 Like, how do you expect it to live in the neighborhood?

00:25:01.240 How do you expect to leave your door open or unlocked?

00:25:04.400 You know, just just the basics in, you know, any level of social interaction requires the shared understanding.

00:25:11.180 And it's a great point about the scamming because, you know, we have to hear from people like Vivek

00:25:16.180 Braswamy about how, no, we, you know, we should just import as many Indians as we can because

00:25:21.000 they just have such a better culture and they work so much harder than Americans.

00:25:24.280 And it's like, look, man, India is famous for scamming old people.

00:25:31.460 Like, it's literally a meme at this point that, you know, you get called up and your

00:25:35.940 grandma hands all of her credit card information to some guy on the phone from India who claims

00:25:40.400 to be working for, you know, the AARP or something.

00:25:43.320 And that doesn't disappear the minute that an Indian person comes into the United States.

00:25:48.500 Like that cultural expectation doesn't magically disappear because they touch the magic dirt.

00:25:53.080 Now, don't get me wrong.

00:25:54.180 There are Indian people who are honest.

00:25:56.300 There are Indian people who run good businesses, but there's a reputation for a reason because

00:26:01.740 this is a cultural problem.

00:26:03.500 When you look at India and you look at China and you look at the rates of cheating on tests

00:26:07.540 and how willing they are to cheat on tests, it's astronomical.

00:26:11.500 It's well over 70% are more than willing than that they feel compelled.

00:26:16.100 Of course, you cheat on tests to get advantages.

00:26:18.980 So when you tell me that people from these cultures are so much more hardworking and so

00:26:23.060 better and more innovative than Americans, it's like on what level?

00:26:27.460 Because obviously, are their credentials real?

00:26:30.220 Are they telling the truth when they apply to things?

00:26:32.600 Are they doing real business in the United States or are they getting advantages?

00:26:36.660 And in some cases they are, but in many cases they aren't.

00:26:39.860 And because we don't have that shared culture, we don't know when that's the case and when

00:26:44.140 it's not.

00:26:44.680 And you, in the piece, actually highlight the difference between the Indian diaspora, especially

00:26:52.960 in Texas, and their building cloistered communities and having giant monkey statues of foreign

00:27:00.540 gods in the public square, as opposed to, for instance, German immigration.

00:27:05.340 And in some cases, coerced German integration into the United States when they were part of

00:27:12.080 of the immigrant culture coming in.

00:27:14.640 And so I want to get to that story because I think it's really important.

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00:28:37.040 All right.

00:28:37.860 So, Andrew, I think a lot of us are aware that, again, the different waves of immigration

00:28:44.060 that have come in have come in in different times, right?

00:28:46.080 I think initially we had that very settler culture when it came to the United States.

00:28:51.160 There were not people who were coming into the United States because there was a civilization

00:28:55.120 and I'm going to get all these benefits and think of the cool college I'm going to go

00:28:58.560 to or all the money I'm going to make.

00:28:59.900 It was people who were moving into the wilderness who were building something great, who were

00:29:04.920 forging a new civilization.

00:29:07.980 And subsequent waves of immigration came.

00:29:10.900 And they weren't maybe on that tip of the sphere when it came to the settler culture,

00:29:15.020 but they were still expanding westward.

00:29:17.540 They were building great cities.

00:29:19.400 It was still a time of rapid growth.

00:29:21.160 And you had to put a lot of effort into building and maintaining that society.

00:29:25.100 Now, in those moments when different cultures came over, they did have some level of ethnic

00:29:31.080 enclaves, right?

00:29:31.740 We all know that there are German neighborhoods or an Italian street, you know, in different

00:29:36.900 parts of different cities.

00:29:38.220 It was well known that people who tended to come over in ways often clustered together to

00:29:43.600 some level.

00:29:44.380 However, one of the big differences that you point out in the piece is actually that Christian

00:29:49.600 foundation that forged everything.

00:29:51.840 Because even if you might have slight, you know, different Protestant sects, or in some

00:29:55.680 case, even the very alien Catholic sect, which we had to, you know, work in slowly over time

00:30:00.160 and, you know, to people not be worried about the potpourri that could dominate the United

00:30:05.120 States.

00:30:05.920 Ultimately, the Christian foundation was enough to allow people to assimilate together.

00:30:11.240 However, when you have people from very distant cultures, right, it changes the way that

00:30:17.180 assimilation works.

00:30:18.100 If you're someone who's Western European, you're probably going to have an easier time

00:30:22.000 assimilating the United States because you just already speak the language or you already

00:30:26.100 have some of the tradition, or at the very least, you have some Christian civilizational

00:30:30.740 understanding bedrock there.

00:30:32.940 Eastern Europe, it gets a little harder, but you're still at least Christian most of the

00:30:36.140 time.

00:30:36.660 And so, you know, there's a little more language, a little more, but you can mostly work it

00:30:41.180 out.

00:30:41.540 Once we start getting to entirely different religions, when we get Hindus coming in, when we

00:30:45.820 get Muslims coming in, they need a fundamentally different society, right?

00:30:50.760 It's not just small tweaks on Christianity anymore.

00:30:53.420 It's, I'm going to build monuments to my God.

00:30:55.560 I need an entirely different dietary regimen.

00:30:58.160 I need you to change the way schools are taught.

00:31:00.440 I need everything to change so that I can function inside this society.

00:31:04.180 And that is just a radically different way to come into the United States.

00:31:08.660 And the question becomes, can people from these backgrounds even truly assimilate while keeping

00:31:15.640 that aspect of their culture?

00:31:19.820 The part of this piece that dealt with Indians specifically, I think was the hardest for me

00:31:28.960 because I have seen such excellent examples of Indians who have assimilated quite well.

00:31:36.280 And I think someone like Vivek Ramaswamy, yeah, he has had some bad ideas.

00:31:43.300 And I think to some degree, he needs to understand Americans better.

00:31:50.440 But he himself, I think, is a good example of kind of just knowing how Americans sort of behave.

00:31:59.340 He isn't like eating with his hands anymore and whatnot.

00:32:02.120 Like we saw with some people where it's almost their explicit point is to prove how un-American

00:32:08.600 they are, how un-assimilated they are.

00:32:13.820 And like this is different from somebody who is doing their best to try to understand the

00:32:21.400 place that they have come to or that their parents have come to.

00:32:24.560 Or in some extreme cases, their great-grandparents have come to.

00:32:28.600 And it's just taking them time to kind of grow into that.

00:32:33.420 And I want to be sympathetic to those people.

00:32:38.940 But if you bring people over in large numbers, they don't feel the pressure anymore.

00:32:44.760 They don't feel that the push from others to blend in, to learn the language, to eat with

00:32:56.340 a fork, to kind of pick up on the little cues that make somebody part of a, I mean, we could

00:33:09.700 call it an ethnos.

00:33:10.920 I mean, but that's kind of what it is.

00:33:12.700 I mean, yes, you might be a different race, but you, you just share certain, what we could

00:33:17.340 call ethnic qualities.

00:33:18.620 You know, these, these like small little social cues and cultural habits.

00:33:25.020 When it comes to Hinduism, and this is from Indians, they say the reason why you have such

00:33:34.460 strong Hindus here is because they are actively resisting assimilation because they see the

00:33:41.380 Hindu religion as what it means to be Indian.

00:33:44.180 And if you are a Christian, I mean, there's, there's millions of, uh, Christians who are

00:33:50.920 in India that doesn't automatically make them, you know, good potential Americans, but it

00:33:56.280 makes them closer than those who are Hindu because they, they, they see Christianity as being

00:34:02.340 better than what maybe they were inherited.

00:34:06.980 What the majority opinion, uh, is of their native homeland.

00:34:11.940 Therefore, if they come to the United States, there's just an, an easier, uh, you know, lower

00:34:18.340 bar that they can reach because they're assenting.

00:34:21.700 This is good.

00:34:22.980 This is better.

00:34:23.780 What, what, what I have here is better than what I have over there.

00:34:27.480 And it's not purely material benefits.

00:34:30.060 It's the way in which these folks live is better.

00:34:34.060 And so I am going to embrace that.

00:34:36.320 And for however long it takes for however hard it is, for whatever difficulty I might

00:34:41.680 have, I am going to adopt these ways that is extremely different than people who are actively

00:34:49.220 resisting and, and in, in some cases trying to attack and destroy the identity of, uh, of

00:34:57.700 the, uh, land in which they, they have come to no European immigrant ever thought that

00:35:06.220 we like, we were going that they were going to somehow change the, the United States.

00:35:10.280 Uh, and then those who at least wanted to keep to themselves faced immense pressure to conform

00:35:16.560 to the overall ethnos of, of, of American.

00:35:22.080 So one of the stories you tell, uh, in the piece is about German Americans and their assimilation

00:35:27.640 story.

00:35:28.140 And in some cases, the fact that they had to be more coerced than some groups, you know,

00:35:32.820 a lot of people think, well, they're, they're European.

00:35:34.780 So obviously we just assimilated and it was fine, but that's not actually the case.

00:35:39.520 I am actually in an area where there's a large German population.

00:35:43.320 There's an Oktoberfest that still goes on, uh, you know, every year that's, that's quite

00:35:47.500 well attended.

00:35:48.660 Uh, but you know, there, there were large swaths of America that were speaking German that,

00:35:54.280 that were maintaining, you know, not, not just, uh, we still make the schnitzel or whatever,

00:35:58.860 but we're, you know, we're, we're talking deep German customs, uh, on a regular basis.

00:36:03.240 Can you talk a little bit of that process and how, in some cases they needed to be forced

00:36:08.100 towards assimilation?

00:36:09.280 Yeah.

00:36:10.280 And, and look, this is not pleasant stories.

00:36:13.160 Part of why I bring up this example is to demonstrate if you reach a level, I just, in,

00:36:19.720 in terms of raw numbers of people who feel no pressure, who, uh, those around them place

00:36:27.780 no expectations upon them to conform and to assimilate.

00:36:32.600 It becomes much more difficult to have a society where you can live in peace one with another.

00:36:38.620 You, you will start to have, uh, flare ups and, you know, of course we always have folks

00:36:44.140 who are talking about, what should, what should the government do?

00:36:45.780 You're talking about the government.

00:36:47.280 It's like, well, sometimes the government actually needs to step in or that the government needs

00:36:51.800 to foresee these dangers coming and say, we're going to take steps so that we don't have,

00:36:58.280 uh, the, the, uh, type of like.

00:37:01.680 Like drama that comes from having all these kinds of, you know, multicultural, uh, you

00:37:08.080 know, multi-ethnic, multi, I mean, just, just a, a, a, a, a, uh, a, a, a, a, like zoo

00:37:15.820 of, of, of all different people who now, if there's any type of interaction, they begin

00:37:20.440 to fight.

00:37:21.140 And this is what we were seeing in the, uh, early 20th century, Germans might have been

00:37:28.760 able to live, uh, in, in, in a good majority of the 19th century, like the late 19th century

00:37:35.400 is, is when they came to Texas and when they were able to, uh, you know, build their own

00:37:39.800 towns or be able to move into certain areas.

00:37:41.880 And yes, they maintain their own customs.

00:37:46.200 They spoke German to each other.

00:37:49.120 They, uh, taught German in their schools.

00:37:53.420 Children were not learning English.

00:37:55.120 They had church services where it was spoken exclusively in German and they were mostly

00:38:01.820 also doing trade one with another and they were marrying each, each other because, okay,

00:38:05.840 well, that's, that's who you're most comfortable with.

00:38:07.900 People who are like you, especially along the lines of language.

00:38:11.660 If you can't understand somebody, how can you live next to them?

00:38:15.260 This is, this is why I bring up the example of Babel, uh, in, in, in the piece because

00:38:20.240 language is a, is a key unifier.

00:38:22.880 And if you cannot communicate one with each one with another, you are going to fight with

00:38:27.940 each other first, and then you will eventually separate.

00:38:31.220 In Texas, you had instances where the Ku Klux Klan was applying this type of pressure to

00:38:41.640 the German population, speak in German, uh, speak in English or go home.

00:38:46.500 And you would have brawls, sometimes murderous gunfights between Germans, German Americans and

00:38:55.540 like Ku Klux Klan members, uh, in Texas, because it was a, it was a source of your, you are un-American

00:39:04.020 and you pose a risk because there is a, a, a foreign nation, a foreign superpower who we

00:39:11.940 are not on good terms with.

00:39:13.540 And if you're, if you feel a greater loyalty to that nation than to ours, you are a risk

00:39:21.380 to us, you are a danger to us.

00:39:23.220 And that, that line of reasoning is really what made the local Texas government.

00:39:28.700 And I mean, this is really, you know, start to go all the way up to, um, you know, oftentimes

00:39:33.340 on like a federal level, when we, uh, look at, um, what, what kind of went on, uh, in World

00:39:39.820 War II, where you have the internment of Japanese Americans and German Americans, because it's,

00:39:47.900 we, we cannot trust you because you have not assimilated.

00:39:52.300 You are not one of us yet.

00:39:53.900 And therefore we, we, if we're going to conduct this, this grand war, this total war, we, we

00:40:00.520 cannot have people who are within our midst, who are going to potentially jeopardize our

00:40:05.620 security.

00:40:06.220 And so, you know, this was painful, I think for the Germans, I myself, on my, um, on my

00:40:13.180 dad's side, uh, um, I'm German.

00:40:15.620 And we went from speaking nothing but German when it came to my great grandfather to not

00:40:20.420 speaking a lick of it now.

00:40:21.900 And we changed our names as in my grandfather changed his name from Otto.

00:40:27.140 I guess his name was Otto Adolf Beck.

00:40:29.220 He became Jim Beck because why?

00:40:31.620 Because it's, I'm an American.

00:40:32.780 I'm going to choose to be an American.

00:40:34.420 And some of my relatives that even some that were here, they moved out here in the 19th

00:40:40.800 century, uh, on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war and on the unification, uh, the, the unification

00:40:47.800 of Germany, they went back and they fought two straight world wars for Germany.

00:40:53.680 And he's like, is that bad or is that good?

00:40:55.560 No, I think that's good.

00:40:56.580 I actually think that it's like, if, if you want to be a part, if you feel more kinship

00:41:02.160 and if you feel more loyalty towards a foreign country, please go there.

00:41:05.880 But we want people who love here.

00:41:09.060 They're grateful for here.

00:41:10.620 This is what JD talked about.

00:41:12.360 You, you, you, you need to see the goodness of what we have here in America and say, I want

00:41:17.060 to be a part of it.

00:41:17.840 I'm grateful that these people have built this and not, I am now going to impose whether

00:41:23.280 it's German or whether it's Hindu or whether it's Somalian or Spanish or whatever, I'm not

00:41:27.960 going to impose, uh, my, myself and this, this sort of foreign, um, agent, uh, onto the

00:41:37.020 American people, the American way of life, the American ethnos.

00:41:40.920 I'm actually going to, to, to forsake that old one and I'm going to pick up the new one

00:41:47.020 and, and to their credit, the vast majority of Germans did.

00:41:50.760 They said, okay, we get it.

00:41:53.500 But it, it took a concentrated effort, both from some unpleasant cultural forces that were

00:41:59.120 extra governmental.

00:42:00.780 I was certainly, you know, not approve of, of, uh, you know, shooting each other in, in

00:42:05.760 the, in the streets and, you know, harassing one another.

00:42:08.500 Uh, but it also took the government taking it seriously.

00:42:13.140 You know, the, the example of German internment, I think is a really good one because most people

00:42:18.240 today think things that be the, this is one of the problems of diversity, right?

00:42:22.300 We've become so diverse that we have unified this idea of whiteness as, you know, like the,

00:42:28.480 the, the reification of, uh, of identity of European descent.

00:42:32.980 But of course, just a hundred years ago, Germans were so foreign that they weren't part of,

00:42:38.500 of that ethnos, right?

00:42:39.440 That they weren't that, that they were foreign enough to be considered a threat that had

00:42:42.960 to be localized and contained because if you're going to go to war with this country that

00:42:47.680 they share some ancestry with, you need to be aware of the fact that they might, you

00:42:51.440 know, turn on you.

00:42:51.980 People can have different opinions on the necessity of that.

00:42:54.880 The point is that was the outlook, right?

00:42:56.300 That that's how people saw Germans at that time to some extent.

00:43:00.740 And of course, you know, a lot of people will bring up movies like gangs of New York,

00:43:04.520 right?

00:43:04.780 Which of course is stylized and a little over the top, but it does hit at a core problem

00:43:09.820 that, you know, obviously large amounts of Irish immigration in some cases were sought

00:43:14.580 as mercenary armies brought in to fight the South, right?

00:43:17.960 And, and this, you know, Lincoln's importing these foreigners to come in and fight, you know,

00:43:22.220 that that's one of the reasons that Irish immigration along with its Catholicism was considered

00:43:26.740 to be, uh, so strange as same with Italians, you know?

00:43:30.240 And so you have these many groups that have eventually been folded into the white race as

00:43:36.740 people will identify it, but who were seen as, you know, not a different race, but very

00:43:41.180 different cultures.

00:43:42.120 So culturally distant that you might need to inter them should you run into some kind of

00:43:47.260 conflict.

00:43:47.740 And so, uh, you know, the, the idea that this was all just very easy, even when these cultures

00:43:53.360 are closer together, right?

00:43:54.640 You know, if you look today, you would identify probably an Italian or a German as much, much closer

00:43:59.920 to you culturally than say someone from Haiti or someone from Pakistan, but even those groups

00:44:07.100 were still difficult and it took many generations.

00:44:09.880 And I think generations is the key that we're going to probably settle on here, right?

00:44:14.600 If you and I wanted to move to Japan, we would not be Japanese.

00:44:19.520 Even if we spoke the language, even if we picked up, you know, Shintoism or whatever,

00:44:23.880 we would not be Japanese.

00:44:26.180 You would never be Japanese.

00:44:27.760 Never.

00:44:28.020 And we would never expect to be Japanese.

00:44:30.500 We wouldn't expect to change Japan, dictate them what Japan was.

00:44:34.140 None of that would work.

00:44:35.160 However, if we married, you know, into a Japanese family, our children would still not be quite

00:44:42.080 Japanese, but a generation, a couple of generations down, you know, they've only ever been in Japan.

00:44:49.480 They're mostly ethnically Japanese.

00:44:51.280 They have the language, everything else, the religion.

00:44:55.000 Eventually, after many generations, our descendants would blend into the Japanese, but it would

00:45:00.680 take many, many generations, right?

00:45:03.200 And there would still be a stigma of adaptation at every one of those generations.

00:45:07.680 And that's how pretty much every other culture sees themselves, right?

00:45:11.760 It's not that, you know, there has usually been some level of assimilation that has been available

00:45:16.920 in most cultures throughout history, but it always involved a deep amount of generational

00:45:21.820 adaptation.

00:45:22.460 And the American experience has been a little different because we've had so many larger

00:45:27.020 waves come in.

00:45:28.880 But even those waves have not been as significant as the ones we are facing.

00:45:32.040 And that's why volume, as you talked about, is a critical aspect, a unified and, you know,

00:45:37.280 kind of the proximity of your culture to the one you are assimilating to, perhaps a German

00:45:42.240 culture, while a little alien is far less alien than a Pakistani culture, right?

00:45:46.920 These factors all matter when you're working through how assimilation works.

00:45:51.920 And we should, as Americans, have a level of control over our own identity and enough

00:45:57.320 say, as people who are supposed to be self-governing, to decide we would like groups that are more

00:46:02.660 culturally similar to come in, if anyone's going to come in at all.

00:46:05.400 And everyone, you know, not having people come in at all is an option.

00:46:09.060 But if we are going to have immigration, we should be able to be extremely selective about

00:46:14.720 who and from where.

00:46:16.200 And we should be able to do that without shame.

00:46:18.120 We should be able to do that without any kind of stigma, because this is our home.

00:46:22.420 This is where we live.

00:46:23.580 And we get to decide who's going to come in and who will be culturally compatible.

00:46:27.660 And that means that we're going to say no to an awful lot of people.

00:46:30.700 And there's nothing wrong with that.

00:46:33.100 I want to pick up on one thing that you mentioned in that we're just dealing in America with something

00:46:37.320 that is sort of different and sort of unparalleled throughout history, because you did have

00:46:42.580 all these different groups that were very different from one another.

00:46:45.720 They were, in a sense, compatible, not right away, for sure.

00:46:51.800 But we didn't just have the benefit of this kind of like volume, right?

00:46:57.160 Of like people being able to sort of come over.

00:46:59.260 And then you had people that were like actual colonizers who are not settlers who were able

00:47:07.560 to just settle the land and just build civilization.

00:47:09.640 We had a ton, we still do have a ton of just raw land where, you know, we were able to really

00:47:18.940 stretch our legs out.

00:47:20.340 People were able to live separate one from another without having to step on each other's

00:47:25.240 toes.

00:47:26.420 I grew up in New York City.

00:47:28.440 It's very different there.

00:47:29.760 There's not a lot of room.

00:47:30.880 And you bring up games of New York.

00:47:32.320 It was more keenly felt because when you already have something there, when you have a big city,

00:47:36.800 when you have limited resources, when you are living in close proximity one to another,

00:47:41.880 smaller and smaller differences mean more and more.

00:47:45.560 And if there are people who suddenly come in this big wave of immigration and they're receiving

00:47:50.800 additional support, they're receiving benefits that appear to be disenfranchising those who are

00:48:00.560 already there and who feel like I have been the caretaker of this, I have been civilizing this land, I have

00:48:08.420 been building upon it, you will get resentment from them.

00:48:12.680 You are disrupting an ecosystem.

00:48:16.100 It doesn't matter if it's 100% perfect or the way in which you think this is why this guy Mamdani is just so

00:48:25.100 outrageous, calling it this sort of unfinished, oh, it's imperfect, this contradiction, America, we're still

00:48:33.580 working on it.

00:48:35.180 And it is saying that basically the work that people did before wasn't good enough.

00:48:41.180 And he needs to come in and fix it for us and kind of make it the way that it really should be.

00:48:47.200 And you expect that nobody is going to resent that?

00:48:50.140 No, people are not going to appreciate that.

00:48:53.520 And so now when we have a civilization here now, we've been building upon it, things already exist.

00:49:00.880 You can't just drop people somewhere.

00:49:03.460 You can't just drop several hundred thousand people in a place in America and they're going to just not be noticed.

00:49:11.800 We saw this happen in Springfield, Ohio with the Haitians.

00:49:15.280 It is going to disrupt.

00:49:17.120 And the older the civilization is, the more complex it is, the more developed it is, and the less space

00:49:24.400 and resources there are, the higher the disruption and the greater the wrongs that are going to occur

00:49:30.900 as we are now seeing in Europe.

00:49:33.100 Yeah, Europe is trying to embrace American-style growth.

00:49:37.480 And it's by doing what?

00:49:38.940 Not by importing other people who can settle the land.

00:49:43.860 No, it's by dropping people who are refugees and migrants from completely foreign cultures,

00:49:50.740 many of them who are uncivilized, onto very old and very delicate ecosystems that are now being completely disrupted.

00:50:00.540 Do we want that for America?

00:50:02.860 America, I think that we should take these lessons very seriously and have these difficult conversations

00:50:08.200 so that, not so that we can all hate each other, but so that we can actually continue in this kind of spirit of brotherly love

00:50:16.420 because we trust that we're living next to our brothers.

00:50:20.280 Yeah, again, it's so critical that we have these conversations now because if we don't, as you say,

00:50:25.520 things are going to spin out of control very rapidly, they already are.

00:50:29.200 We can all already feel it.

00:50:30.920 The time for this conversation was 20 years ago anyway.

00:50:34.140 But if we don't do it now, then it's simply not going to work.

00:50:36.940 And as you say, there are a lot of people right now who are clutching their pearls about J.D. Vance's speeches,

00:50:42.420 even people on the right, a lot of people who are so-called conservatives,

00:50:46.240 saying, oh, how could he speak about this?

00:50:48.660 How could he say it's not a propositional nation?

00:50:50.380 How could he say that America is a people and a place and not just a set of ideas?

00:50:53.700 But I think it's absolutely critical because if we continue down this road,

00:50:58.140 there's just not much left for the United States.

00:51:00.940 And it's amazing.

00:51:01.920 It's funny that you mentioned Springfield, Ohio, because there are so many people

00:51:06.700 who have difficulty grasping the cultural difference.

00:51:11.020 They're just like, well, they're people like us and everybody's more or less the same.

00:51:14.300 And it's things like Springfield that really open people's eyes.

00:51:18.660 Because, for instance, I know people who are animal lovers.

00:51:20.980 Yeah, they love birds.

00:51:22.400 They love geese.

00:51:23.200 And they saw that some immigrants were eating these geese that they're just finding.

00:51:28.140 Because in their culture, that's just food.

00:51:30.120 It's right there.

00:51:31.280 You can easily catch it.

00:51:32.700 Why wouldn't you just pluck a goose out of a pond in a neighborhood?

00:51:36.580 That's perfectly, totally acceptable in their culture.

00:51:39.500 In the United States, radically different.

00:51:41.860 And just seeing that, I think, awakened a lot of very normal people who otherwise are like,

00:51:47.620 well, no, everybody's the same.

00:51:48.740 We all watch TV or whatever.

00:51:50.320 We all shop at Walmart.

00:51:51.240 It's fine.

00:51:51.800 It's like, oh, no.

00:51:52.800 If you care about animal well-being, well, guess what?

00:51:56.520 That's not universal.

00:51:57.640 That's not self-evident to a lot of cultures.

00:52:00.220 And so just little things like that might seem stupid.

00:52:03.340 They might seem obvious to some people who are watching this.

00:52:06.140 But stuff like that can actually make quite a big difference.

00:52:09.100 And so I'm glad that you wrote this piece.

00:52:10.920 And I think if people want to check it out, they can head over to The American Mind.

00:52:14.760 We have some questions from the people here.

00:52:17.840 But before we go to those, along with the article, can you tell people where to find your work,

00:52:23.040 follow you if they want to?

00:52:24.820 Yeah.

00:52:25.140 So I'm a vice president of communications at the Claremont Institute.

00:52:29.340 They've been a longtime client of my firm.

00:52:32.580 It's a consultancy called Beckenstone.

00:52:34.600 We are sometimes called the McKinsey of the right.

00:52:37.400 And that's either a diss or a compliment.

00:52:40.940 And we've worked with various folks across our circles, whether they are intellectually,

00:52:48.680 politically, culturally.

00:52:51.320 Yeah.

00:52:51.540 So you can find me on X at Andrew Beck USA.

00:52:58.640 And yeah.

00:52:59.520 Or you can go to the Claremont Institute and check out all the different things that we're

00:53:05.440 doing at Claremont.org.

00:53:07.820 Yeah, certainly plenty of great minds riding over at Claremont.

00:53:11.180 So a great place to be involved with.

00:53:13.720 All right.

00:53:13.960 Let's go to the questions of the people here real quick.

00:53:16.360 We have The Metal Mystic who says,

00:53:18.920 The empire wants to accrete a cognitive elite.

00:53:23.060 No incentive to invest in us.

00:53:25.100 Why bother when you can just import China and India to defeat Asia?

00:53:28.820 It is a perverse, immoral, and a crime against Americans.

00:53:31.980 Yeah, we touched on this briefly.

00:53:33.300 But the fact that America has developed an empire, a lot of people don't want to admit

00:53:37.080 that, but it's just obviously true.

00:53:39.620 So the fact that we have developed this imperial kind of mindset without actually formally acknowledging

00:53:48.320 it means that, as our commenter here is pointing out, our elites get to go around and cultivate

00:53:53.900 an elite.

00:53:54.540 They get to take in workers and minds from different places and say, oh, well, ultimately, it doesn't

00:54:00.000 matter if it's Americans who are taking this job or this position or accruing this power

00:54:04.200 because everybody's an American.

00:54:06.040 Anybody who's in any part of the empire can come here and they can be an American.

00:54:09.460 And therefore, you know, we don't need to put actual, you know, heritage Americans born

00:54:14.040 in the United States who have traditions, who have ties to this land.

00:54:16.820 We don't have to put them in positions of power because everyone is American.

00:54:20.500 And as long as we're an empire, then it's fine to outsource people from the provinces and

00:54:24.660 bring them in to fill these roles.

00:54:27.780 Yeah.

00:54:28.280 And look, we need to learn from the examples of other great empires, whether that was Britain

00:54:34.080 or whether that was Rome.

00:54:35.340 And that's kind of our progression here in that you need a homeland, you need the imperial

00:54:41.120 city, you need somewhere where the folks who are responsible for the management of this

00:54:46.340 large empire can feel enfranchised, can feel secure, can actually feel the material benefits

00:54:52.120 of the empire.

00:54:53.280 If we receive no benefits, and this is, I think, why you have this rise of, this is sort of like

00:55:01.940 very like vehement isolationism that has sort of come on the United States is because people

00:55:07.540 aren't seeing any benefit from having an empire, whereas there should be quite a lot of very

00:55:14.160 nice benefits.

00:55:14.900 You should be able to travel.

00:55:17.100 You should be able to conduct trade and commerce.

00:55:20.400 But if everything is one sided, if it happens like it's happened to Britain, where you invade

00:55:25.980 the world and then invite the world back home, and then they then take what is ultimately

00:55:31.120 the heritage and the inheritance of the people who have fought for and bled for and died for

00:55:40.860 the empire, why should they continue to do it?

00:55:45.580 Yeah.

00:55:45.840 And I think that's exactly how a lot of people are feeling about the United States and its

00:55:48.880 overseas involvements right now.

00:55:51.660 Philosophical Thirstworm says,

00:55:52.740 What do you think of the possibility of conflict as an assimilating factor?

00:56:09.760 I think that was probably true many years ago, but at this point, the American military force

00:56:15.040 is so isolated and professional.

00:56:17.300 We don't really have this idea of a mass levy, which, you know, in many cases is great.

00:56:23.000 I don't think a lot of people want to get drafted, especially for the wars we're fighting

00:56:25.800 now.

00:56:26.440 But it also means that you never have this one unifying experience that I think kind

00:56:31.360 of used to bring people very quickly into the fold.

00:56:35.320 OK, well, I don't know if I got along with my Irish neighbor, but when we're both in a

00:56:39.600 foxhole and we're both killing the same guy and we're both defending the same land, you

00:56:43.820 know what, we're going to work it out because ultimately we have entered in the same side.

00:56:48.340 And that's just not a dynamic that we see anymore.

00:56:51.300 Yeah, this is this is very difficult.

00:56:53.140 And this is part of why I am trying to have these conversations, because you don't want

00:56:57.480 to have the cataclysmic event.

00:56:59.740 No, you don't want the small, tragic events like, you know, gangs of white hooded guys

00:57:05.480 running around, you know, shooting people for speaking German or whatever, you know.

00:57:09.320 But but you also don't want to be be forced to to to go to extreme lengths.

00:57:19.020 You don't want to have these global wars and conflicts.

00:57:23.360 You would much rather have people see small things like you were talking about, Oren.

00:57:30.020 Wait a minute.

00:57:30.920 They don't like respect public property.

00:57:33.260 This is like a huge thing, actually, right now where there's there is no perception of

00:57:37.160 public beauty and beautification and public property.

00:57:40.060 And like this, this is something for for everybody.

00:57:42.200 And so I shouldn't treat it like my own.

00:57:44.740 It it's no, it it it becomes something that they just see and that they just take.

00:57:51.140 But it also goes down to things like the treatment of women, where, you know, the the Western

00:57:57.160 man and it is mainly through the Christian religion and these sort of social mores.

00:58:02.400 There is a inherent respect for women, specifically the bodies of women.

00:58:07.860 You don't you don't just get access to anyone just because you are a man.

00:58:13.040 They aren't property.

00:58:14.740 They also don't rule over us.

00:58:16.620 But they're also not our property.

00:58:18.580 And this is simply just not held by the vast majority of the rest of the world.

00:58:23.640 And so these these small tragedies that we're starting to see, just, you know, the number

00:58:28.800 of rapes in Sweden, for instance, or the harassment that that that we see in Germany or the grooming

00:58:35.660 gangs in England, if we don't want to see this stuff happen in the United States, which

00:58:41.200 again, these are these are these are relatively smaller tragedies when when we are looking at

00:58:47.820 it relative to a global conflict.

00:58:49.740 We we we need to take them seriously.

00:58:52.820 You need to take the small fire seriously so that it doesn't blow up into these larger

00:58:57.660 civilizational conflagrations where you stand to lose.

00:59:01.740 And that is my fear.

00:59:03.280 If we are say in order for us to be truly unified, we need to pick an enemy and that enemy is going

00:59:10.280 to be Russia.

00:59:11.080 It's going to be China.

00:59:12.680 It's going to or a combination of them.

00:59:15.580 We are not a united nation that is prepared to fight in the same way that perhaps they

00:59:23.700 are.

00:59:24.560 And China, I think, is a bit of a paper tiger.

00:59:28.480 But Russia is not.

00:59:29.560 I think Russia is proving that they are they are willing to fight and they're willing to

00:59:33.660 die.

00:59:34.460 And they have this multi ethnic, multi religious professional army.

00:59:39.940 Yes.

00:59:40.900 And they also have a ton of militia that they can pull from who will fight to the death

00:59:46.040 for Russia.

00:59:49.820 I'm not sure if if we have that here in the United States unless somebody actually invaded.

00:59:56.200 And even then, we have instances where now in Germany or many places in Europe, people

01:00:02.540 are asked, would you stand and fight for your country, even if it was invaded?

01:00:06.020 It's in the single digits, people saying, no, I wouldn't.

01:00:08.980 I would actually rather be conquered or I would rather leave.

01:00:12.640 So, again, I would much rather take the examples from Europe and say, let's avoid this and let's

01:00:20.380 gain our strength.

01:00:21.620 Let's unify.

01:00:23.480 And part of that means accepting and being able to be specific about who is part of that

01:00:33.460 union and who is not.

01:00:34.720 Yeah, I think if you were to attempt to call upon the Somalian and Haitian boroughs of the

01:00:42.000 United States because China is about to go to war with us, I think the response would

01:00:46.240 probably be suboptimal in many cases.

01:00:49.040 It would not create the binding coalition you're talking about.

01:00:51.680 And so it's very important for us to get a handle on that now because, you know, I don't

01:00:55.600 think honestly that Russia or China are a serious military threat at the moment.

01:00:59.400 But, you know, America is not going to be on top forever.

01:01:01.560 It's not going to be unchallenged forever.

01:01:03.240 And if you just sit around waiting for your society to fracture while your enemies grow

01:01:07.140 in strength, then it's only a matter of time before that stress test is placed on your

01:01:11.180 society and many pieces come apart.

01:01:13.320 The tiny stupid demon says, but my female lib friend tried to assume, assure me that if

01:01:20.380 the immigrants would just attend a series of TED Talks on making good life decisions, then

01:01:25.780 everything would be fine.

01:01:27.080 The rest of the conversation went poorly.

01:01:29.960 Yeah.

01:01:30.160 What yet again, we see this assumption.

01:01:32.620 You know, this is just the classic lib, like just be a hecking good person.

01:01:35.920 Of course, everybody knows what we are and who we are and how we should treat each other.

01:01:40.220 And that's just not true at all.

01:01:41.500 As you rightly pointed out, you know, it's not just the treatment of women in, you know,

01:01:46.220 for instance, a Muslim society.

01:01:47.480 It's the fact that, for instance, Pakistani rape gangs don't see British women as people.

01:01:52.720 They are other.

01:01:53.700 They are outside.

01:01:54.660 Right.

01:01:54.800 They might owe something to Pakistani women as Pakistanis, but they know they owe nothing

01:02:00.280 to British women because they are not inside.

01:02:03.160 Right.

01:02:03.300 They are outside the culture.

01:02:04.840 And so that's one of the things that you have to grasp, you know, ultimately this idea

01:02:09.780 that every other country is just going to understand this kind of cross-cultural universal value.

01:02:14.800 It simply doesn't exist.

01:02:16.380 And if we continue to delude ourselves about that, we're going to destroy our country.

01:02:20.500 We've already been in the process because of that delusion.

01:02:22.560 Yeah, and this is where, like, religion matters because religion is deep.

01:02:30.500 When you have religious values, you don't need top-down enforcement.

01:02:34.940 You have bottom-up conformity.

01:02:37.860 You don't have to tell somebody, like, hey, if you, like, touch that woman inappropriately,

01:02:43.840 you're going to go to jail.

01:02:45.520 You have it in your religious code.

01:02:48.660 Do not touch women inappropriately or you're going to go to hell.

01:02:52.800 And that's a much better way.

01:02:55.460 And also, very importantly, you have a bunch of men around you who all have that expectation

01:03:00.080 and will beat the living crap out of you if you transgress it, right?

01:03:03.620 It's huge.

01:03:03.920 That's one of our problems.

01:03:05.920 One of our hyper-diverse racialized societies with all this tension means we can't have

01:03:10.440 the basic cultural norms enforced by average people because we lose that willingness to

01:03:15.220 turn to our neighbor and say, no, you don't do that.

01:03:17.700 And I don't need the police to come and force you to stop because all of us are going to

01:03:22.040 stop you immediately if you take action.

01:03:24.160 But when you have this Daniel Penny-type scenario where stepping in could make you the most racist,

01:03:29.520 evil person in the world, well, then you lose that natural social cohesion that keeps the

01:03:34.820 state from having to be the final arbiter in every interaction.

01:03:37.780 And for men, it completely changes when it is, oh, just someone's wigging out in front

01:03:44.340 of the bros versus when there's women and children or elderly people, people who can't defend

01:03:48.420 themselves.

01:03:48.880 There's something radicalizing about that.

01:03:51.060 It's natural for men to want to protect those who cannot protect themselves primarily from

01:03:57.200 other men.

01:03:58.360 We have a great example of what you're talking about, kinship, in one of the Grimm's fairy

01:04:05.300 tales where this wizard kidnaps a girl or a pair of sisters and one of the sisters escapes

01:04:13.380 and runs back home.

01:04:15.820 And her kinsmen come and rescue her and burn down the wizard's house.

01:04:20.880 And it's like, that should be something like people should feel like I am surrounded by

01:04:26.420 men who will protect me and who will respect me.

01:04:29.560 And it is primarily from other men.

01:04:33.340 And if we discourage that, if we say all they need is, yeah, just like a TED talk, what we

01:04:38.680 end up doing is we end up making men say, why should I?

01:04:42.700 Why should I stick up for somebody who is helpless?

01:04:45.580 Why should I stick up for somebody who, who I feel absolutely no, uh, bond, uh, uh, to?

01:04:52.880 Right.

01:04:54.560 Uh, Fyad, uh, I'm not sure how to say that.

01:04:57.500 Sininga says how, I'm sorry.

01:05:01.360 Oh, yeah.

01:05:03.600 Okay.

01:05:04.080 Uh, how important, I think, I think it's got something to do with Latin.

01:05:06.920 I think that was explained to me at one point, but I, I've, I've forgotten the correct pronunciation.

01:05:10.760 How important is blood connection to the history of the U S it doesn't make someone automatically

01:05:15.100 more patriotic, but if you haven't been brainwashed, it's obvious your view of the country is

01:05:19.280 different.

01:05:19.700 Yeah.

01:05:19.880 So this, this, so this is always a tricky conversation, but it's one we're going to have

01:05:23.440 to have.

01:05:23.940 And it's, it's very important.

01:05:25.280 So for instance, a lot of people will point out correctly that, uh, you know, there, there

01:05:30.040 are plenty of white Americans whose family have been here for several generations, uh,

01:05:35.360 who are just like, you know, rabid leftist socialists, uh, as compared to like a very conservative

01:05:41.100 Nigerian who comes in the United States.

01:05:42.860 And it's a fair point.

01:05:43.680 There are other people who will say, no, uh, you know, the, the heritage matters and

01:05:48.540 it, you actually do.

01:05:49.900 Yes, you can be like this terrible white liberal, but there is something to the fact that your

01:05:55.860 family has been in the United States for many generations, which makes the adoption of American

01:06:00.120 culture, American values far easier and far more natural.

01:06:03.420 And I think the key is really, uh, understanding, you know, a lot of people, the, the thing about

01:06:08.280 the word blood is it starts gathering this, like, you know, Nazi propaganda, understanding

01:06:13.140 this hyper genetic, hyper scientific understanding of identity or race or ethnos.

01:06:18.860 And the thing I want people to remember is that previously, uh, you know, you can just look

01:06:23.480 at a guy like Oswald Spangler, who's by no means some like bleeding heart liberal, but you

01:06:27.980 know, he actually decried the scientific, uh, application to race.

01:06:33.120 He did not like the idea of turning that into a scientific understanding.

01:06:36.740 He said that, you know, this is something that is far more metaphysical, something that

01:06:40.100 is far more mystical.

01:06:41.380 Heritage is a critical part of it, but it's far from the only part of it.

01:06:46.120 Religion, values, tradition, you know, all of these shared experiences.

01:06:50.480 This is, this is what matters.

01:06:51.900 And this is where I think the generational understanding is key.

01:06:55.460 It's not that blood or heritage does not matter.

01:06:58.740 Sorry.

01:06:59.040 It is a part of this, but it is not the only part of this.

01:07:02.220 And again, most cultures had some way in which people outside could eventually become part

01:07:08.620 of the tribe, but it took many, many generations and an extreme willingness, as Andrew's pointed

01:07:13.360 out many times to adopt the culture and ways of being of the people.

01:07:17.320 Again, people, people, what people want is like a, a bullet point.

01:07:21.740 Okay.

01:07:22.000 You've met, you've met this checkpoint and this checkpoint and this checkpoint, and now

01:07:24.900 you're either an American or you're not.

01:07:26.380 But the truth is this is a far more workier thing than we'd like to, uh, maybe acknowledge

01:07:32.240 in our very modern scientific category in mind.

01:07:35.680 It's really important to allow yourself to have, I think a little bit of more traditional

01:07:40.000 flexibility with these categories rather than trying to like one drop rule people into one

01:07:46.340 category or the other.

01:07:47.980 Yeah.

01:07:48.460 There's, there's a speech that I gave in El Salvador in like 2023 or something.

01:07:53.500 And it was, it was called man and myth.

01:07:55.680 And it was, it was on the topic of the brand of the state, right?

01:07:58.800 Like how should the state brand itself?

01:08:01.120 And I, I pushed back on this idea that, uh, like, like what Lincoln said is that, well,

01:08:06.280 if there's a government for the people of the people, by the people, it should then look

01:08:09.900 exactly like the people.

01:08:11.280 And it's not quite right.

01:08:14.240 The government should be holding up the, the, the national identity should be, should

01:08:18.120 be holding up the ideal, not the exact.

01:08:20.900 And sometimes the ideal is this, uh, and it usually is this mythical father figure, the

01:08:27.280 patra patria.

01:08:28.240 And if you, uh, uh, believe the myth, right?

01:08:34.000 America is not an idea.

01:08:35.200 No nation is purely an idea, but it does require an idea to bind the people together.

01:08:40.120 And like, cause like, look, we, we oftentimes don't know exactly where we came from, what

01:08:46.500 they were like, how did they do it?

01:08:47.840 We're, of course, all obsessed now with our 23 and me results and our family trees.

01:08:51.560 And I've, I've learned so much interesting stuff about my family by doing this, but all

01:08:56.800 that it does is help me reinforce the myth that I have, that I am an American, that I have

01:09:04.160 a duty, uh, not just to, uh, my, my, my wife and my six, almost, almost seven children now,

01:09:10.900 uh, and the rest of my family that lives close to me out here in Texas, but also to, uh, those

01:09:17.380 that came before me that I want to continue what they started.

01:09:20.800 And that I also have a responsibility to this country, uh, where we, where we came my, my

01:09:26.660 mom's family, very early as settlers, my dad's family, very later as immigrants, I have

01:09:32.000 a responsibility then to this country that, that isn't something that comes just by, it's

01:09:37.320 just like in you somehow.

01:09:38.440 And it's like, Oh, okay.

01:09:39.440 Well like blood, that's what, that's what makes me more patriotic, but it reinforces the

01:09:43.880 myth that I have in my mind that I, I want to be like my father's every good son wants

01:09:51.120 to be like his father.

01:09:52.520 And if you have been given a good father, like we have in George Washington, frankly,

01:09:57.180 and in a lot of great Americans, and, and, and sometimes it's even just the Americans

01:10:02.280 that helped settle our States that founded our towns, were they perfect?

01:10:06.200 No, obviously not.

01:10:07.420 No father is, but they are our fathers.

01:10:10.380 And if we respect, if we honor our fathers and, and, and, and we hold them up as the ideal,

01:10:17.440 many people are going to be able to say, yes, I can see that.

01:10:21.840 And I will also become like your father.

01:10:26.560 Yeah.

01:10:27.140 We're Romulus and Remus exactly like the fable where they even historical figures.

01:10:31.900 Does it matter?

01:10:32.980 No, they are realer than the average Roman peasant, right?

01:10:36.140 Because their archetype, their identity, their story, their narrative bound those people together

01:10:41.660 in the realist way possible.

01:10:43.240 So the, the, the factual, can you draw your exact bloodline to the biological, uh, you

01:10:50.260 know, uh, person of Romulus or Remus is far less important than is your civilization and

01:10:57.140 embodiment of that connection, that story, that narrative that's tied together in many

01:11:01.900 ways that is just as important though.

01:11:04.020 Again, it's not like heritage is nothing.

01:11:05.880 I think ultimately a nation is a collection of families, but it is a, but, but it is also

01:11:11.340 more than that.

01:11:12.200 It, I think it's really important for people to understand national identity as truly supernatural.

01:11:17.900 I think that's something we need to recapture.

01:11:21.820 Uh, shoot here for XP says, uh, Catholicism is not a foreign religion to the Anglos.

01:11:28.060 It is their ancient patrimony and you'll need, uh, need her altars and sacraments to hold

01:11:33.640 back demons.

01:11:34.480 Again, uh, I, I understand what you're saying here, but I'm sorry.

01:11:38.100 Uh, this is just not true about Americans, right?

01:11:41.620 Yes.

01:11:41.860 At some point, obviously the Catholic church is, uh, the, the only church in Europe.

01:11:46.400 And I think Europeans are tied to the Catholic church in a way that Americans are not.

01:11:50.620 Uh, but that was not true of England for a while.

01:11:53.040 And it certainly wasn't true of America.

01:11:55.380 Uh, I know there were Catholics here.

01:11:57.480 Obviously we had a state dedicated, uh, to Catholics, uh, but you can't look at the immigration

01:12:02.800 of, again, peoples from Ireland or Italy or Eastern Europe, which were all heavily Catholic

01:12:08.660 and all seen as far more alien in second and third waves of immigration.

01:12:12.920 You can't look at that story and tell me that that is not a foreign religion.

01:12:16.880 I'm sorry.

01:12:17.280 It is now it's Christian, which is great.

01:12:19.880 It's much better than any other religion.

01:12:22.080 These are still my Christian brothers.

01:12:23.520 However, when we're talking about what America is, sorry, America is Protestant.

01:12:28.500 Yeah.

01:12:28.940 I know there's a lot of Catholics looking for the, the, you know, the conquest of America,

01:12:32.960 but so this is how you get guys, you know, like, uh, Cyril Abamari talking about, yeah,

01:12:38.000 bring in all the illegals.

01:12:39.120 It's fine.

01:12:39.540 As long as they're Catholic.

01:12:40.360 No, sorry.

01:12:41.060 This that's, that's, that's a no go for me, man.

01:12:43.200 And, and, and, uh, I would, would just point out here that my family came to Maryland in 1600

01:12:49.700 from, from England.

01:12:51.460 And if you know, Maryland, Maryland was founded as a Catholic colony.

01:12:54.300 My family went there and, uh, soon after we, we engaged in the one religious war that

01:13:01.240 happened in the United States, or this is, you know, pre, pre, pre-colonial America where

01:13:06.900 the Catholics were defeated and Maryland didn't want to accept it.

01:13:10.220 They didn't want to ratify the constitution because they were like, the Catholics are going

01:13:14.380 to now get religious freedom and they're going to just go back to Rome.

01:13:17.880 They're, they're, they're not going to want to be part of the United States.

01:13:20.440 And there is always this feeling, and this is partially inherited from, from England,

01:13:26.700 uh, that, you know, this, that, that, that, that Catholicism is a continental religion,

01:13:33.320 that it is something from the old world.

01:13:35.720 And we have something here now that is distinct and that is different, whether it's the Scepter

01:13:40.120 of Isles, uh, which, which I, I do agree that, you know, at this point, many, uh, Britons

01:13:46.800 would be better off returning to Roman Catholicism because Anglicanism, uh, is in complete shambles.

01:13:53.060 And, and, and, and, and, and so, um, but, but then yes, us in America have something that

01:13:59.260 is different and that is distinct.

01:14:01.000 This is why I actually tell people that like, you know, I don't want us to be a, you know,

01:14:06.360 a very like hyper-specific, you know, creedal Christian nation where you have this, this,

01:14:11.120 like we know exactly the type because that's, that's never how we've been.

01:14:15.320 We, we, we, we have this American Christianity, which is a civil religion.

01:14:19.920 It's the one that we all kind of generally agree with on some basic tenets and can agree

01:14:26.340 to live in peace and sort of work towards these like civic goals and these like national

01:14:31.320 goals, uh, uh, with each other, even though we dissent and we disagree with each other on

01:14:37.580 these very like small, um, uh, matters, Roman Catholicism just simply doesn't afford you

01:14:43.640 that to, to some degree, but, but like, this is where it works better in much smaller settings.

01:14:50.140 It works better in more homogenous settings.

01:14:52.700 It works better in, uh, uh, a much older, uh, civilized environs, which is why I, I, I think,

01:14:59.780 yeah, Europe full steam ahead with Roman Catholicism, God bless them.

01:15:03.380 But I, I, I think that the United States needs to, um, remember its true heritage, which is

01:15:10.700 this more pan-Christian, but, uh, very specifically pan-Protestant, um, country.

01:15:18.120 Yep.

01:15:19.420 Uh, philosophical thirst room says Ottomans were ruled by Armenian and Greek viziers, sultans,

01:15:25.460 because they thought the importance, uh, because they thought the importation of foreign elites

01:15:30.100 was critical to imperial maintenance.

01:15:33.220 Uh, again, uh, we can see, uh, very similarly in the Roman empire, the deployment of Greeks

01:15:40.380 in critical roles on a regular basis.

01:15:42.560 Right.

01:15:43.260 Um, and so there, there, uh, again, there are multi-ethnic empires in which different peoples

01:15:48.800 play different roles.

01:15:49.820 That's, that's a viable structure, but is that the structure we want?

01:15:54.280 Do you guys, you know, do we want an emperor who is going to handle the different factions?

01:15:59.720 And keep them separate and allow them to have their own like millet system, like the, the

01:16:04.400 Ottomans.

01:16:05.080 Yep.

01:16:05.260 That's a model, right?

01:16:06.760 That is a successful model, but we have to decide if that's what we want to, to see.

01:16:11.500 And I think for most people, the answer is no, especially because the classic formation

01:16:15.980 of the American government is a rep, a Republic.

01:16:19.660 Now I think there's, I've given a number of speeches I've written on, you know, what a Republic

01:16:23.940 is and why we can't maintain one at the moment.

01:16:26.080 And I think we would need vast changes to return to Republican government, government

01:16:30.060 in the United States.

01:16:30.860 But I think the one thing that most people are probably not looking for is that multi-ethnic

01:16:35.220 hard division, uh, under a, a high, a very high authority type, uh, structure, but who

01:16:41.580 knows?

01:16:41.780 We might end up there at the end of the day.

01:16:43.440 Uh, but I don't think that's the optimal thing that most people are looking for.

01:16:47.100 Yeah, just, just, just really, really quick here.

01:16:50.680 There is a, there's an essay that I wrote in a place called Law and Liberty called American

01:16:55.980 Aristocracy that touches on the nature of aristocracy and how America, I mean, it doesn't,

01:17:03.300 doesn't have a distinct aristocracy, but had, but has had maybe still does to a degree have

01:17:08.880 this element of the landed gentry from Britain, which was, you know, really came from, from

01:17:14.380 the, uh, Roman model of, of these, uh, bony or good men who were able to maintain the Republic

01:17:20.440 because they represented these more local, uh, constituencies.

01:17:24.820 They were, they were men of means.

01:17:26.820 They were men of honor, uh, often men of military renown who then represented the people of the

01:17:32.820 provinces in Rome.

01:17:35.780 Rome began to collapse.

01:17:38.080 Rome began to erode when you no longer had this strong core of, of leaders who were

01:17:44.080 invested in the homeland, who were interested, who were only purely interested in the maintenance

01:17:49.080 of the empire.

01:17:50.380 That's not good enough.

01:17:51.460 I think if we want to have a Republic and just like Benjamin Franklin said, it's Republic

01:17:57.220 if we can keep it.

01:17:58.360 And many of us want to keep this, but this, this, uh, home of ours as a Republic, then we're

01:18:04.380 going to have to look into these factors more and, and to say, we are actually going to encourage

01:18:10.320 men to take responsibility for this homeland.

01:18:14.280 Yeah.

01:18:14.800 Republics are always built on the virtue of their citizens.

01:18:20.240 This is always Aristotle says, this is what Machiavelli says.

01:18:23.100 Uh, this is what John Adams says.

01:18:24.820 Uh, this is a core part of the Republican tradition.

01:18:27.220 And if you're cultivating, uh, local leadership and aristocracy in the true sense, uh, the

01:18:32.280 gentlemen, as it were, uh, then you will not have a Republic.

01:18:36.300 It's simply impossible to function that way.

01:18:38.360 Uh, friendly friendly says there is an intangible American spirit that can be sensed by all

01:18:42.540 who have it.

01:18:43.020 This is the kind, uh, kind of that Sam meant when he said, yeah, yeah.

01:18:46.720 I love that from Sam Hyde.

01:18:48.120 We all know what American is, right?

01:18:50.160 I almost included that quote in the essay, but I was like, ah, but, but it's perfect.

01:18:55.660 And it's, it cuts to the core.

01:18:57.220 Everybody knows what American is.

01:18:58.940 We all do.

01:18:59.620 When we look at someone, we know whether they're American or not, right?

01:19:02.900 We not, we can't always explain it.

01:19:04.660 We can't always nail down every aspect of it.

01:19:06.960 And that's why I'm saying we need a more spiritual, a more metaphysical understanding

01:19:10.940 of national identity again, rather than just being like, well, it's X number of things

01:19:15.920 in your gene, uh, you know, your genetic test, or it's X number of, uh, things that you ascribe

01:19:21.660 to and some abstract principle.

01:19:23.400 No, there's papers that you, that you filled out.

01:19:26.400 Yeah.

01:19:26.700 Right.

01:19:27.220 Yeah.

01:19:27.380 This is a nexus.

01:19:28.900 Identity is a nexus of factors.

01:19:30.840 It is an, it's a nesting doll.

01:19:32.560 It's a stack.

01:19:33.320 It's not just this, well, you know, here are three quick cheats to figure out if you're

01:19:37.460 an American or not.

01:19:38.160 That that's not how it works.

01:19:39.380 And I'm sorry.

01:19:40.200 I know we live in a highly rationalistic scientific society that wants everything to fit neatly

01:19:44.340 into boxes and categories, but this is just not going to work if you actually want to

01:19:48.260 solve this problem.

01:19:50.080 Amen.

01:19:51.240 And Caleb says, orthodoxy was the Western right in the, uh, I'm not sure how to say, uh,

01:19:57.140 diocese.

01:19:57.600 Oh, okay.

01:19:59.100 Uh, and, uh, and some abbreviation, I don't know.

01:20:02.400 Uh, this is, uh, close directly tied to Anglican liturgy.

01:20:05.760 Uh, again, that might be true.

01:20:07.160 Sorry.

01:20:07.440 I just don't have enough background, obviously.

01:20:09.620 Uh, me to immediately confirm that, but thank you for letting us know.

01:20:13.380 All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.

01:20:15.840 Of course, you should go read the original piece over at the American mind and check out

01:20:19.820 Mr. Beck's great work.

01:20:21.620 And of course, if it's your first time on this channel, you need to go ahead and subscribe

01:20:24.600 on YouTube, click the bell notifications, all that stuff.

01:20:27.780 So, you know, when we're going live, if you want to get these broadcasts as podcasts, you

01:20:31.220 need to subscribe to the Oren McIntyre show on your favorite podcast platform.

01:20:34.960 Thank you everybody for watching.

01:20:35.980 And as always, we'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - August 01, 2025

Assimilation and Its Discontents ｜ Guest： Andrew Beck ｜ 8⧸1⧸25

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