In this episode, I chat with Lafayette Lee, a contributing editor at IM1776, about the border crisis, whether it's a new crisis, or part of a larger struggle, and whether this is even a crisis at all.
00:30:28.020Um, and that the constitution slowly starts to lose its, its grip.
00:30:33.020There's not really a constitutional order to uphold.
00:30:36.020It's more that the, the administrative state now has the unlimited power that it needs as, as a sovereign entity to be able to serve the people in any way that they see fit.
00:30:46.020And where eventually as the new deal is established and later through the war, um, we come out of that and we emerge into the 1960s where a lot of conservatives will identify, well, this is the source of our problems.
00:30:58.020You know, they'll identify the moral decadence that came from that.
00:31:01.020I would argue that every kind of revolution has a moral revolution, a component at its core.
00:31:06.020So every time you see massive changes in something like this, a transformation, there is a moral collapse that happens too.
00:31:12.020And the seeds of that really are also, I'd argue in the 1930s.
00:31:15.020And, uh, what, what happens in the sixties is, uh, Johnson and his great society, and this is a longstanding democratic project from that really has its seeds in the new deal.
00:31:26.020This is kind of the full culmination of that new deal regime.
00:31:30.020So you can't really look at one without the other.
00:31:33.020I kind of look at the great society and the new deal as one and the same, just a long process.
00:31:39.020Similarly, how we should look at world war one and world war two is really an ongoing singular conflict.
00:31:44.020And so that is where I do my jumping off point into this piece by trying to explain that the constitution and the constitutional order was, was really usurped by this administrative state.
00:31:58.020And that matters of politics, uh, were, were now taken outside of, of the people's hands and that they were, they were given to administrators and to an administrative government.
00:32:09.020And so when we make constitutional arguments, when we get frustrated and say, well, why doesn't the constitution stop such and such?
00:32:16.020We're really not understanding that the administrative state has power and authority and the constitution no longer has the authority that it used to.
00:32:28.020And, and I think it's really critical to understand, uh, the, the value of legitimacy.
00:32:35.020I'll come back to that in just one second.
00:32:37.020Someone, uh, asked, is this in this timeline, where was the cathedral established there?
00:32:42.020They're, they're referencing Curtis Yarvin's concept of the cathedral.
00:32:45.020And I think that's important to understand what Lafayette Lee is explaining is the, the establishment of the cathedral.
00:32:52.020It is the assembly of the different parts of the cathedral.
00:32:55.020You know, we can go back to Woodrow Wilson, perhaps to talk about the universities becoming, you know, the, the new, the new man, the professor becoming the bureaucrat, as you said, Lafayette.
00:33:05.020But the FDR really established this as a total framework in a way that it, you know, it started under Wilson, but really it gained its, its true power under FDR.
00:33:17.020Along with the massive bureaucracies that would be implemented the way that you're talking about.
00:33:22.020And it's also important, as you noted to say that this is something that's happening all over the world.
00:33:27.020It's not just happening in the United States.
00:33:30.020It's one of Yarvin's favorite things to do.
00:33:32.020I was at an event where he was talking and one of his favorite things to do is read out FDR's inauguration speech without telling you who it is and have people guess.
00:33:46.020No, it's the president of the United States.
00:33:49.020Because the way he's talking, it sounds like someone who's definitely planning a revolution to remake his country and, and ascend it to some kind of, uh, kind of, uh, new, uh, you know, imperial majesty.
00:34:01.020And this is the managerial revolution that I've talked a lot about and that you were hitting on in your piece.
00:34:07.020And this is something that all states underwent after industrialization and the ability to centralize power, particularly when mass media allows for mass propaganda.
00:34:18.020This is something that fundamentally shifts the way that governments are run.
00:34:23.020And we could probably get in a little bit into that shift because, uh, you know, as you said, the idea of the United States is that the people would always be sovereign.
00:34:34.020No, no, no people can be sovereign over themselves in the sense that, that most people think about it today.
00:34:40.020And that might be a reason that it was so easy for the administrative state to, to ascend.
00:34:45.020But no matter how you kind of pick a pick that apart, the point is that the way the government, uh, the way that the United States was governed fundamentally shifted away from regional power, away from a regional understanding of, uh, kind of community and, uh, and bonds there.
00:35:03.020And instead it was made clear that these, you know, these new experts should be able to move into any part of the country and remake it in their image.
00:35:12.020And that allowed for this argument we're having today because so much of the power of the government that was supposed to be created through checks and balances to handle different branches of the government has all been dissolved because everything is handed over to experts.
00:35:26.020Everything's handed over, over to bureaucrats in the executive branch.
00:35:30.020And so the legislative branch doesn't actually in, you know, create any real law.
00:35:35.020They simply create more, uh, more experts, more, more bureaus that can apply more studies and statistics and things.
00:35:43.020And those things then dictate to the American people what the actual legislation is going to be, which is why it feels like the legislature can't actually check the power of any of these people because it can't like who's running.
00:35:55.020Like who's running the government during, uh, COVID is it, is it the Congress?
00:36:09.020Uh, something that I, I do, I, I agree with Yarvin on that.
00:36:12.020I think maybe people that would look at the cathedral as simply like media and press need to remember that during this revolution, it created, you know, this was the, this was the beginnings of a rational state.
00:36:23.020Like you said, across the world, this was, this was a trend, right?
00:36:27.020So like even, even, uh, Soviet Bolshevism, um, in the, in, you know, over in Russia, this was, you know, there was the establishment eventually with the USSR of, of, of really the rational state.
00:36:39.020Right. And we saw the same thing here that we have a rational state.
00:36:42.020Now, what that means is, is that now you have the primacy of knowledge elites.
00:36:47.020So, you know, now we have new dealers that are, you know, these are not these many of them.
00:37:16.020And what that means is, is that that separation between power and between the, the knowledge economy, it becomes one in the same.
00:37:25.020So it makes a lot of sense to look at this, maybe as Yarvin would with the cathedral is that you have something like journalists have a lot more in common with a bureaucrat in Washington.
00:37:34.020They, uh, they swim in the same waters than they would like a farmer down in Iowa, right.
00:37:40.020And this is really important that I think people need to remember that, that this not knowledge elite, this rational state, uh, this is a new create.
00:37:49.020This is a new thing, uh, that had, that had really come up and really swept the world.
00:37:54.020And so there's a reason why people feel this gulf between, as I am a citizen of a state and I live in my community and I grew up hearing about the constitution and the bill on the hill and, and so on and so forth.
00:38:08.020And then when you actually see what Washington is and how it, what it does, and you recognize that there is a separation.
00:38:15.020And that separation is something that, um, I see as a major point of tension between millions of Americans, especially in red States, uh, Republican voting, red blooded, conservative type Americans see themselves as citizens within a constitutional Republic.
00:38:31.020And, um, I would say blue state America for the most part.
00:38:34.020And, um, I would say blue state America for the most part.
00:38:36.020And then Washington as its locust doesn't see it that way at all.
00:38:38.020It's post, you know, they, they view this as the supreme authority is the administrative state.
00:38:43.020And they're actually correct because that is where power and authority reside.
00:38:46.020Uh, the one thing that red state America, they're the constitutional, uh, maybe those who subscribe to constitutionalism still is they actually have, they have a one winning argument and that is that they have legitimacy on their side.
00:39:04.020And the tension I would argue between governor Abbott and between the white house is really, uh, it's really the same struggle between these two things.
00:39:11.020It's, it's really a fight between power and authority versus legitimacy.
00:39:16.020And I really liked that framing because you're exactly correct.
00:39:19.020The one thing that probably the States and those opposing the total state right now have on their side is that the federal government still pretends to follow the constitution less and less every day, but they still make their justifications in the language of the constitution.
00:39:39.020They still follow the forms of the constitution, even if they, they actually act their power out in, in a different way.
00:39:46.020And that means that the story that's being told to people about why the people in charge are legitimate is the constitutional story, uh, as where, uh, you know, the, the truth is their power is wielded from that expertise from that administrative.
00:40:03.020So they, they're right now their exercise of power and the story of their legitimacy don't work together.
00:40:12.020And this is something that is really important dynamic for people to understand because eventually they're going to try to jettison the constitutional story.
00:40:21.020Uh, Yarvin describes this as going from the two story state to the one story state.
00:40:25.020Right now we have two stories about legitimacy in the United States.
00:40:28.020We have the constitutional story and then we have, uh, kind of the civil rights revolution, religious narrative paired with the administrative state.
00:40:39.020Uh, I saw someone say is though, does this mean it's a technocracy?
00:40:42.020And I would say no, only because of this, you need to remember that there are two parts to, you know, we have our constitutional story.
00:40:50.020The one that, that Lafayette has been talking about that gives legitimacy, but the other side of what that the one that the, our current, uh, regime is operating under.
00:41:02.020One is the, is the authority of the administrative state due to experts, which we've talked about here.
00:41:07.020The other one is the spiritual or moral revolution that Lafayette mentioned.
00:41:12.020And that one is the civil rights revolution that that is the, the woke revolution that we live under.
00:41:20.020And so the moral component is the woke civil rights revolution.
00:41:24.020And the, uh, kind of, uh, more, uh, the more power component is the authority.
00:41:30.020The rational component is the authority given by the administrative state.
00:41:35.020And it's easy to see how these two interact.
00:41:38.020So for instance, uh, when BLM is happening, that is a flex of the state of exception on the woke revolution side of this divide.
00:41:49.020So all of a sudden Antifa can light your city on fire.
00:41:53.020Uh, that, you know, the BLM can break through your target and, and, and rampage it.
00:41:58.020Guys, remember the sacking of the target is important because who cares about target in the sense of it's a multinational corporation that hates you.
00:42:05.020It's important because it's happening in your town.
00:42:07.020It's disrupting the, the, the order of your town and your city and the safety therein.
00:42:12.020But, um, but that's the suspension of the law, the, the exercise of, uh, uh, of the state of exception on the woke religious side of these things.
00:42:24.020So the way that it's exercised under the administrative state is again, a great example is Anthony Fauci.
00:42:31.020So this, this is where formalism is very helpful.
00:42:34.020So in the Roman Republic, there was a formal office of dictator.
00:42:39.020You had two guys called consuls who are elected as presidents every year.
00:42:45.020And they were the ones that basically, you know, the ran the country and they, you know, new ones were elected every year.
00:42:51.020There's a certain number of times you could, you could serve.
00:42:53.020You had to have a certain amount of space between when you'd be consul, but the, but that's the normal way that government operated.
00:43:01.020However, in a state of emergency, when Rome was really in trouble and they had to solve a problem right now, they would, uh, invoke, they would create a dictator.
00:43:11.020The dictator was not so, you know, we use it today as a, as a pejorative, but under the Roman government, this was just a real office that they knew that they needed.
00:43:19.020Because when the crisis happened, you didn't want these two guys arguing with each other and them arguing in the Senate.
00:43:25.020No, we need to save the country right now.
00:43:27.020And so we need all the authority vested into this dictator for a period of six months.
00:43:32.020And his, his job is to solve one problem.
00:43:35.020And if he doesn't solve that problem in six months, it doesn't matter.
00:43:38.020He's still, he loses his authority as dictator.
00:43:41.020And so, uh, in this moment, you, the dictator has that state of exception.
00:43:47.020The, the constitution of Rome is more or less suspended in those moments.
00:43:52.020And, and, and, and, you know, it's still operates for the average citizen, but he has the authority to work, to solve that particular problem.
00:43:59.020Any Roman would have looked at Anthony Fauci during the pandemic and said, oh, that's a dictator because it's exactly what we did.
00:44:07.020We see that all of the normal processes, all the normal authority over to Fauci in dictatorial fashion.
00:44:19.020All we do is hand that normal constitutional legislative and executive authority over to a rotating, uh, you know, uh, uh, oligarchy of dictators that each one of them, there's a, sometimes it depends on the situation, but each one of them rules with this state of exception in those moments.
00:44:39.020And so we can see on two parts of this divide, you know, the two parts of this, uh, of this story on the left of this to where they get their legitimacy.
00:44:48.020Sometimes it's a civil rights revolution.
00:44:50.020Sometimes it's the rational authority of the administrative state.
00:44:54.020And that's what, uh, Lafayette is pointing out here is the battle we're seeing now is the right is trying to assert normal constitutional order.
00:45:02.020The left is saying, no, the administrative state is correct.
00:45:06.020We have the state of exception on our side at all times, and there's never a legitimate reason for you to question that the constitutional order just doesn't apply here anymore.
00:45:36.020This is also very unique in our history is, you know, we have these, we have people that supposedly represent us in Congress.
00:45:44.020We have a president, but it, I think more and more we're seeing like, they're not actually in charge of anything.
00:45:50.020There's a lot of ceremonial duties to that, but they're not, they're not the power.
00:45:54.020They have authority, but they don't have the power.
00:45:56.020And over time, I think what's happening and why I would say that the state, the administrative state or the total state is acting so incoherently and desperately is because they recognize that lack of legitimacy is being,
00:46:11.020is being widely seen by millions and millions of people, like an idea, like something like immigration.
00:46:24.020Um, but he's facilitating an invasion of millions of people into this country.
00:46:28.020Um, you don't even have to go and argue whether that's good or bad.
00:46:32.020It just comes to the question of why would the president do this?
00:46:36.020Like, why would he not fulfill his constitutional duties?
00:46:39.020That's a great place just to start and focus on the argument.
00:46:42.020And it's, it more and more people are recognizing that there's, that this is an illegitimate thing that even if they can't, you know, distinguish between the different branches of government, even if they struggle to articulate what legitimacy means, they see a lack of legitimacy there.
00:47:01.020And I, I think it's no, it's no, you know, it's no wonder why this fight really started between a state governor and between the president of the United States between Washington, because that's where the Gulf is widest.
00:47:16.020We know that like a state is going to protect their people.
00:47:19.020That's its most basic thing that it needs to do.
00:47:23.020They've been there since the beginning.
00:47:25.020So it's almost insane to think that a state governor wouldn't have the ability to protect his own citizens, that he wouldn't be able to protect his borders against an invasion or against people that are not supposed to be there.
00:47:37.020And so, obviously, if any commonsensical person would say, well, then the authority should fall on the, on the governor to be able to enforce the law that's not being done because of a derelict president.
00:47:49.020And for the president to oppose that, that's where we're seeing this real fight between power and authority and legitimacy.
00:47:56.020And so I think that is really important.
00:47:58.020I'm glad that it's becoming more and more visible to people.
00:48:02.020I would argue that most of the things that we, we talk about online and that the, the, the drive a lot of the controversies really start at this, this, this place at this division between those two things, because somehow the total state is going to have to find a way to become more legitimate.
00:48:20.020And I agree with you, I think it's eventually going to be that they're going to have to jettison the Constitution in some way, where it might not be so obvious, but they have to do that.
00:48:30.020Because if they don't do that, they're going to continue to, to struggle, they're going to, if they don't have that legitimacy, they're going to continue to have to deal with an unruly difficult population.
00:48:41.020And perhaps that's why immigration is what it is today.
00:48:45.020You know, it's very possible that that is the solution.
00:48:48.020I think that's exactly what the solution is, is if, if your current population won't support the regime in a democracy, you just get a new one.
00:48:57.020And I think that that's, that's exactly the plan.
00:49:01.020And I think not only is it the plan, I think that the left has announced it as their plan on a pretty, pretty regular basis in between saying, oh no, how could you, how could you notice?
00:49:12.020They cheer on, of course, you know, whenever it's actually happening, the thing that isn't happening, it's, you know, it's not happening, but it's good that it is.
00:49:21.020And that, that's always their approach to it.
00:49:58.020So author T says, doesn't getting to this point of brinksmanship seem to be an inevitable result of strike down almost every reasonable policy law passed by the American people to restrict immigration in the last 50 years?
00:50:12.020Like I said, it's very clear that both the Republican and the Democratic Party have no interest in ending mass immigration in the United States, both illegal and legal.
00:50:23.020It's just something that both sides have no interest in doing.
00:50:27.020That's why Donald Trump, even though he was incredibly flawed in many ways, became popular is this is one of actually I'll just just break in right here.
00:50:38.020This is what this was my original red pill.
00:50:40.020Like this was my original understanding of where we are now, because I had always been a talk radio conservative.
00:50:46.020I was on kind of this neocon, you know, wavelength.
00:50:49.020And then I started I saw the immigration crisis in Europe and I saw the response to Donald Trump, who I was not a big fan of when he first came onto the scene.
00:50:59.020And I was like, why are people reacting this way?
00:51:03.020You know, I've been told my whole life that this and then I looked into the data and found that actually both sides, even even most of the left until just about a decade ago, really were against illegal immigration and large scale immigration in general.
00:51:19.020And I was like, OK, if everyone is against this, even most of the left up until a little, you know, the propaganda really kicked in the last decade or two.
00:51:28.020Why has this been the ongoing policy of both parties?
00:51:32.020And it became very clear, like something is wrong here.
00:51:36.020You know, if a democracy is supposed to be a reflection of the will of the people and nobody wants to do the thing that everybody in Congress is saying we have to do, then there's a major disconnect here.
00:51:48.020And the reason they hated Trump is he said what people wanted to hear.
00:51:52.020Now, they we might have disagreements on how effective he was or if he could even have been effective in that environment.
00:51:58.020But I think it's very clear that, yeah, the reason we've arrived here is that, you know, is that there is no other option for people.
00:52:05.020They recognize that all of their normal recourses in what should be a constitutional order don't work.
00:52:11.020And that's why I thought Lafayette's, you know, peace was so good because it pointed out exactly that battle between what people believe is the constitutional order and the actual order of the administrative state that is is implementing the policies we're seeing now.
00:52:24.020We've got creeper weirdo says monoparty seating in silence.
00:52:32.020The you can really see the monoparty working here as the Republicans attempt to swoop in and save Joe Biden from the worst political crisis.
00:52:42.020If you want to understand the monoparty, there is no better picture than watching Republicans attempt to rush to the rescue of a man who is drowning in a constitutional crisis.
00:52:52.020If they were an actual opposition party, they would see this as a moment of opportunity.
00:53:25.020Maybe he applies everything he could, but he's probably limiting himself to that particular past for a reason.
00:53:30.020Remember, they're playing a game of brinksmanship with the law here and their ability to prove that they have sovereignty over that particular area is probably key before they attempt to spread things out.
00:53:42.020Again, my point is not you want to play the man, not the ball.
00:53:46.020I understand that the goal is to shut down all illegal immigration.
00:53:50.020But right now, that's not the key point.
00:53:53.020The key point is to show the fault line, because look, even if you shut down all of Texas, yeah, they can just get illegal immigrants in other ways.
00:54:00.020Like Texas isn't the only place illegal immigrants come in.
00:54:04.020But by showing that this system is broken and showing that a governor could exert authority, that's the key.
00:54:09.020I know a lot of people oppose the busing strategy.
00:55:15.020And then the other thing, too, is it shows it shows people directly that when you send somebody to Washington, a congressperson, for example, that you might believe and hope has your best interests at heart, that Washington operates for itself.
00:55:28.020And that includes Republicans and Democrats in Washington.
00:55:34.020I mean, parties don't exert the kind of control over people's lives that the administrative state does.
00:55:40.020Congress has very much become a defender and a guardian of the administrative state, part of it.
00:55:46.020You can't really look at it as a separate entity.
00:55:48.020And so this shows that breakdown of of power and authority between a state governor and between Washington.
00:55:55.020Washington. And you'll notice that even representatives of his own party from from his own state or from neighboring states are against him.
00:56:03.020Absolutely. And Thuggo says public health officials supported BLM protests during the Floyd riots since racism hurts public health, spiritual and administrative support each other.
00:56:15.020That's absolutely right. In fact, if you'll remember, and this might have been my favorite, most ridiculous part of of the pandemic.
00:56:22.020Remember, you had to stay six feet away from each other.
00:56:26.020Everybody needed to be masked, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:56:28.020And then when the riots occurred and all of these people were running around on top of each other, crawling on top of each other to secure their freedom televisions and that kind of things, their televisions of social justice.
00:56:39.760If you remember, there were there were groups of scientists who came out and said and physicians who came in and said that actually the writing was good for the pandemic.
00:56:49.660It actually stopped the flood or the flow of the coronavirus. So so that's how deeply the administrative state is willing to debase itself in order to help the spiritual side.
00:57:02.940So that's a great point. There are many examples we could point to, but those are just a few of them.
00:57:07.700I think you're right to point that out.
00:57:11.740All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.
00:57:14.780But I once again want to thank Lafayette for coming in. Always a great time to talk to you, man.
00:57:20.420Yeah, thank you so much. It was my honor.
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