The Auron MacIntyre Show - Curtis Yarvin Invades Harvard Yard ｜ Guest： Curtis Yarvin ｜ 5⧸23⧸25

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

00:00:31.560 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.020 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:37.060 Curtis Yarvin has invaded Harvard Yard, finally.

00:00:40.280 And I wanted to talk to him about that appearance today,

00:00:42.340 along with the New York Times and how the Trump administration is doing.

00:00:45.920 So, Curtis, thank you so much for coming on.

00:00:48.780 Orin, thank you for having me.

00:00:50.760 Absolutely.

00:00:51.380 We're going to dive into how your debate went.

00:00:53.840 You kind of opening up to, I think, a wider world of elites

00:00:57.560 and what the Trump administration has been doing in its first hundred days.

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00:01:53.720 This isn't like a gay Brookback Mountain thing, right? 0.99

00:01:56.460 This is not.

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00:02:00.640 So you were recently in a debate at Harvard,

00:02:04.180 which is a little strange for some of us who have been, you know,

00:02:07.280 watching your clandestine activities on the internet for a very long time.

00:02:11.160 You've talked about the importance of institutions like The New York Times and Harvard,

00:02:15.500 and now you are appearing there.

00:02:17.360 What's that been like?

00:02:18.560 Do you think there's any traction being gained there?

00:02:21.140 How do you feel about the debate itself?

00:02:23.880 I don't know.

00:02:24.540 It was a fun time.

00:02:27.640 You know, it's a, you know, Harvard, in case you don't know,

00:02:31.540 it's a beautiful campus up in Boston.

00:02:34.340 They have some great old buildings, old statues and stuff.

00:02:38.120 We were in the faculty club, actually.

00:02:40.300 Of course, it was not officially sponsored.

00:02:43.000 It was not officially a Harvard event.

00:02:44.740 So we had to sort of disclose this, despite being in the Harvard faculty club.

00:02:51.880 But, yeah, I mean, I think that it was a lot of fun.

00:02:56.860 I don't know that, you know, these sort of debates basically resolve to sort of, you know,

00:03:03.720 just short alternating lectures, really.

00:03:05.900 And so we were getting sort of short alternating lectures from me and Danielle Allen,

00:03:13.580 who I guess is a, you know, high-ranking, you know, Harvard University professor.

00:03:19.420 I think the university professors are like, they're like, you know,

00:03:23.540 Sauron's black riders, except there's like 20 of them instead of only nine.

00:03:27.540 So, you know, I expected more of them to kind of come out of the air to support her,

00:03:32.260 maybe on their flying horses.

00:03:33.360 But that didn't happen.

00:03:36.520 There were a few protesters that was with, you know, clearly,

00:03:40.200 who clearly put a lot of thought, you know, into the matter.

00:03:43.300 They had hand-lettered signs.

00:03:45.460 You know, you know you're really big when the protesters show up with the pre-printed signs.

00:03:49.040 But there was no such thing, so I guess it don't really matter at that level.

00:03:55.560 But, yeah, it was fun.

00:03:57.680 And, you know, it's fun sort of being there and relating to, I mean, sort of, you know,

00:04:02.440 in any of these institutions, whatever their official ideologies are,

00:04:08.940 they still have, you know, various semblances of what we call, you know,

00:04:15.180 the very cumbersome word meritocracy.

00:04:17.580 And so there are always kind of good kids there.

00:04:21.040 There's something sort of a semi-secret society at Harvard called the John Adams Society.

00:04:28.040 You know, they wear tuxedos and drink and sing silly songs, basically.

00:04:33.940 And so, you know, there's sort of a lot of, you know,

00:04:38.740 anywhere you go in these institutions, there's kind of, you know, a 1%, a 2%, maybe even a 3%.

00:04:47.960 You know, I don't know if you know, you know, the origin of the term fifth column.

00:04:52.920 But the, you know, I'll use the term fifth column, but we forget the source, which is, I think,

00:05:00.420 he was a franchista general, General Mola.

00:05:04.420 And, you know, there was a city they were taking.

00:05:07.760 And he was like, well, I have four columns of troops, you know, about to take this city.

00:05:13.120 But inside the city, there's a fifth column, you know.

00:05:17.640 And, you know, that, I think that kind of summarizes my approach to these institutions,

00:05:28.380 which is a little different from the Trump administration's approach, I would say,

00:05:33.460 where, you know, I just, like, the administration seems to want to kind of bash them over the head

00:05:40.100 with a hammer as hard as possible, which I think excites the base.

00:05:44.720 But the question of whether it is, you know, sort of works is questionable.

00:05:49.020 Whereas I'm like, basically, no, you kind of need to besiege these institutions

00:05:54.280 and let the fifth column do the work.

00:05:56.120 Because the thing is, the fifth column isn't just the sort of enthusiastic kids.

00:06:00.760 Really, also, your fifth column consists of a lot of older people who believe kind of in the values

00:06:07.240 of the institution and often have lost a lot of faith in its current ability to live up to that mission.

00:06:18.180 And when you look at those numbers, they're sort of considerably greater.

00:06:23.320 And I think that actually, sort of, you know, although she didn't really show it in the debate,

00:06:28.640 you know, Professor Allen, for example, people are like, why did she do this?

00:06:32.880 I don't know.

00:06:33.280 I could sort of, sort of, I didn't speak to her directly in any way.

00:06:37.720 But I sort of was obviously looking at her while she was talking.

00:06:41.880 And I'm not telepathic, but I seem to be getting the same.

00:06:48.160 She seemed to be maybe asking the same question, you know, like, why did I do this, right?

00:06:55.120 And the answer is an interesting and relevant answer.

00:06:59.820 Number one, she's, you know, clearly one of these people at Harvard who is somewhat heterodox. 0.63

00:07:08.340 She actually disowned, you know, race-based affirmative action in admissions during the talk. 0.97

00:07:17.220 Of course, they do this thing where they sort of, you know, give with one hand and take away with the other hand.

00:07:23.120 And so, you know, it's like whenever they, you know, disown race communism, really what they mean is we need to go back to good old economic communism.

00:07:32.740 But, you know, okay, sure.

00:07:36.060 She said to be friendly with the John Adams Society.

00:07:39.780 Her father was a noted black conservative, you know.

00:07:44.740 And I got the feeling when debating Professor Allen that we could have an interesting conversation, you know, alone with beers, maybe a lot of beers, you know, and no cameras.

00:07:59.180 But that was obviously not the situation.

00:08:01.480 And someone like that is an academic politician.

00:08:04.140 She's run for, you know, governor of Massachusetts or something. 0.98

00:08:08.080 So, when you're a sort of political person, everything you do is kind of political.

00:08:14.960 And I guess she's sort of positioning herself as the, you know, the open-minded Harvard person.

00:08:21.220 I don't know.

00:08:22.700 But, yeah, it was a fun time.

00:08:25.380 It's a beautiful campus.

00:08:27.600 You know, I just got up on stage and said what I thought.

00:08:30.960 I don't know.

00:08:31.780 Well, I was going to say the interesting thing, like you said, the debate was more or less back and forth lectures,

00:08:37.120 which is kind of what it is expected at this point.

00:08:40.320 However, the interesting thing in both of that appearance and the New York Times appearance was that,

00:08:45.200 while, yes, there were a few protesters and there was some hemming and hawing about them ultimately giving you some kind of microphone,

00:08:51.540 it was much less than you would expect.

00:08:53.240 It feels like we're pretty far away from the energy that, like, chased Charles Murray off a campus while he was being assaulted.

00:08:59.380 And so, even though these people are still obviously somewhat hostile, it does feel like the left's energy has died down.

00:09:05.440 They don't have the ability at least to push back and demonize you the way that you'd expect.

00:09:09.840 And there are probably a lot more people listening than you would have thought previously just a few years ago.

00:09:15.620 Yeah.

00:09:16.160 I mean, you know, it's complicated.

00:09:17.640 There was certainly, you know, there was a, you know, the Harvard Police Department is not, you know, they're cops, right?

00:09:24.720 So, and there was a, even in the room, there were a couple of plainclothes people.

00:09:30.000 And one of these plainclothes people, you really have to see this individual to believe him.

00:09:34.300 He's like sort of a creature from the 1930s.

00:09:37.520 He's like, imagine this, like, 60-year-old man who looks like a sort of an oil barrel, you know, like a large oil barrel.

00:09:45.260 I'm like, yeah, you know, so, so, you know, there are always crazy people, you know, a crazy person shot some Israeli embassy people the other day. 0.94

00:10:00.120 You know, it only takes one crazy people, crazy person to cause a problem.

00:10:06.700 But, you know, the reality is that, you know, it's sort of interesting to think about where that energy has gone.

00:10:17.340 Because it's not gone into turning these people into Trump supporters by any means.

00:10:22.580 I think it's basically a loss of what we, you know, in the Dissident Bride, who are all readers of Plato and shit, call themos, or sometimes thumos, which I will use an incorrect transliteration, but fine.

00:10:35.940 You know, the, and, and, and there's definitely a loss of that.

00:10:45.360 And I try, I also try really hard not to generate that in my enemies, because I think that's really an own goal.

00:10:53.160 I think actually one of the sort of perverse impacts of the way the administration is kind of handling this conflict is they're basically handling it in a way that sort of makes it clear that their mission is actually to sort of generate, you know, engagement,

00:11:13.180 or even themos in their own supporters, but it also generates engagement in the other side.

00:11:19.860 I heard someone say it, say at a party, I don't know if this was accurate.

00:11:23.740 I don't know who I was talking to, but like, sort of the thinking behind the Harvard confrontation was like, you know, let's give them the proposal they have to say no to.

00:11:33.100 And I was, you know, I'm just like, is this the, is this the art of the deal, right?

00:11:38.760 Like, actually, like, the art of the deal is basically, you know, you actually want them to bend the knee.

00:11:45.960 And they have a certain eagerness to bend the knee because they don't actually, like, believe in themselves that much.

00:11:53.300 This is why, you know, one of my descriptions of the reason this event happened was I think there's, there's in any, in anything that loses faith in itself, you sort of get this kind of a little bit of a death wish.

00:12:07.040 You get this a little bit of a, like, they sort of seem to have lost their kind of driving life force.

00:12:13.560 Of course, you see this in the, in the late Soviet Union.

00:12:16.240 And in the 50s, early 60s, the USSR still believes in itself. 0.83

00:12:21.600 And by the 80s, it doesn't.

00:12:23.460 And so really nothing could have toppled the USSR. 0.76

00:12:27.500 But, like, it just sort of feels the need to, like, topple itself.

00:12:30.960 Like, why?

00:12:31.800 Like, Gorbachev didn't intend to do this, right?

00:12:34.140 He didn't intend to do it.

00:12:35.580 But, like, you know, he, he had that death wish.

00:12:39.300 He was basically, like, he's actually trying to fix the system.

00:12:42.580 And, of course, by trying to fix it, he just, like, freaking broke it.

00:12:47.880 But, you know, still here, it's really important to note that a lot of why we're getting this effect is that a lot of things happen to a lot of people within these institutions that cause them to really, like, doubt their faith.

00:13:05.480 And, you know, and so the response that you got in 2020 with these people that, like, passionately believed in themselves is hard to find.

00:13:17.000 Because all kinds of people had all kinds of subtle, different individual, not really red-pilling moments.

00:13:24.840 You know, they haven't come out and become, like, you know, Trump supporters.

00:13:29.060 They're just more, like, they're, they're just more disillusioned.

00:13:34.100 And that means that especially if you talk to them and you give them, you know, a certain amount of sympathy.

00:13:41.940 Like, you know, like, I was talking to a journalist the other day and she was, like, you know, since we're doing this piece, like, you know, is there anything that, you know, journalists usually get wrong about you that we can try to get right?

00:14:00.940 And I'm like, wow, that's a weird question, you know, and so, like, basically they, they, you know, they're weak.

00:14:12.660 But the thing is, if you basically hit them in the wrong way, they'll just kind of firm up again.

00:14:17.640 They'll just get solid.

00:14:18.720 And you sort of have to give them, like, you have to give them a sort of golden bridge to walk across.

00:14:27.500 They want to retreat.

00:14:28.740 They want to surrender.

00:14:30.400 All these universities would actually love, you know what I think they would actually love? 0.98

00:14:34.600 I think they would actually love to have the Trump administration force them to get back to meritocracy because it would be an excuse to basically throw away this shit, which they kind of don't believe in in some ways. 0.91

00:14:48.840 But when you basically clobber them on the head and are just like, I'm going to give you something that you just can't say yes to or just, like, weird demands that you can't say yes to under any, you know, circumstance, then they're going to be like, all right, well, I guess we got to, like, you know, fire up the old, you know, resistance bagpipes and, you know, like, you get no choice. 0.96

00:15:17.060 Isn't that like a weird form of acceleration, though, right?

00:15:19.920 Like, ultimately, you see Trump looking around and he's running people off of campuses for doing the wrong kind of protests.

00:15:28.000 Harvard just lost its ability to sponsor visas.

00:15:30.400 They announced that today.

00:15:32.420 So obviously there's a lot of people on the right who like this because ultimately these are people who hate us and we don't want them in our country.

00:15:38.180 But at the same time, it's kind of obvious that it's in service to the current Israel-Palestine conflict that, you know, these campuses have been talking about.

00:15:46.720 Hating white people for decades and no one cared.

00:15:48.840 But all of a sudden they're very animated and we're able to take these steps.

00:15:52.160 Chris Rufo has been talking about using the Civil Rights Act to leverage these people and ultimately force them to drop their policies and return to meritocracy.

00:15:59.960 But if they did reform in that way, ultimately they'd just kind of be consolidating their position, right?

00:16:05.000 So is it better that they get forced to that absurdity or do you think it'd be better if they did actually get to perform back to meritocracy?

00:16:11.260 I just, I don't know, man.

00:16:12.760 I just want to win, you know.

00:16:14.200 I'm a simple person, you know.

00:16:16.660 And the, but I want to win and not like pretend to win, right?

00:16:22.180 Like pretending is like really bad.

00:16:25.080 And there's still, there's a lot of playing pretend here.

00:16:27.880 So like, for example, you know, the like pretense that the whole, you know, Israel-Palestine thing is like, you know, anti-Semitism. 0.94

00:16:40.600 It's retarded. 1.00

00:16:41.460 It's anti-colonialism, right? 1.00

00:16:42.860 You know, and it's like actually the, you know, half the fucking people in these fucking Gaza protests are like, you know, Jews, you know, in Palestinian drag, right? 0.99

00:16:54.060 You know, like, like it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. 0.99

00:16:58.460 It has, you know, it's obviously the same treatment that was meted out to South Africa, right?

00:17:04.880 You know, and, you know, you look at what is October 7th, you know, October 7th is literally just farm murders, but on a kibbutz, right? 0.83

00:17:15.660 You know, and it's farm murders, but on a kibbutz, right? 0.97

00:17:19.360 It's the same freaking thing. 0.61

00:17:20.860 It's the same movement. 0.50

00:17:21.980 It's the same, you know, the Palestinians in the ANC are like buddy-buddy. 0.77

00:17:27.080 Like, come on, man.

00:17:28.420 You know, and so the thing is when you basically characterize your objection to this force as an objection to, you know, something that it's not,

00:17:46.440 and basically when you're pretending that you're going after anti-Semitism, you're actually sort of LARPing a left-wing crusade against the right.

00:17:56.180 And, like, you're just, you're tying yourself into sort of these knots, and you're adopting these disingenuous perspectives that are clearly disingenuous.

00:18:06.720 And the thing is, you know, it's just much easier to force the truth down people's throats than to force lies down people's throats.

00:18:14.020 You actually are one of the reasons, you know, like the right should just not, does not have the strength to use the big lie as a weapon.

00:18:25.520 It's not going to work.

00:18:27.500 It is just not going to work.

00:18:29.560 And the, and even if it does work, it sort of leads you into a relatively, like, bad place.

00:18:38.200 You know, whereas basically if you go to Harvard and kind of, you know, shove the truth down its throat, it will sort of gag a little bit, you know,

00:18:49.140 and then it will swallow and you can even, you can be happy.

00:18:53.600 And it will be like, thank you for giving me the truth.

00:18:55.720 You can actually do that, you know. 0.99

00:18:59.080 And, but, like, you can't really do it with something that's, like, BS or stupid or nonsense. 0.97

00:19:06.520 And, like, then you're actually trying to get it to kind of, you know, really, you're helping it, right? 0.98

00:19:17.440 And you're basically feeding your enemies.

00:19:20.900 And the last thing you want to do in any conflict is feeding their enemies because you're basically giving them a righteous reason to feel self-righteous.

00:19:30.600 And so it winds up acting, the thing that a lot of, the thing that you sort of need to be really, like, careful about when you're kind of waking up and sort of discovering,

00:19:45.120 hey, wow, we can actually do things.

00:19:47.180 Yeah, you can actually do things, but there's two kinds of things.

00:19:50.780 There's alpha things and there's beta things.

00:19:53.540 Did you see, you know, yesterday's viral internet video of, like, the dog, the alpha dog?

00:19:59.520 No, I didn't see it.

00:20:01.020 This is really, this is a classic internet dog video.

00:20:04.440 So there's some kind of dog pound or dog enclosure or whatever.

00:20:08.320 And you're, like, watching this and here's this video with this alpha dog.

00:20:13.100 And you see the alpha dog and he's, like, running around bullying other dogs, biting them, like, chasing them around, whatever. 1.00

00:20:20.760 You're just like, oh, yeah, that's asshole alpha dog behavior. 0.99

00:20:23.780 And then you basically, there's some barking and you realize that this is not actually the alpha dog. 0.99

00:20:31.820 Because the alpha dog comes running over from, like, wherever.

00:20:36.200 The alpha dog is, like, there's a problem.

00:20:38.040 And you see the alpha dog.

00:20:39.200 Not even a particularly large dog.

00:20:41.380 You know, a somewhat fluffy dog.

00:20:43.080 And the alpha dog just runs up to this, like, bully dog and just, like, looks at him.

00:20:48.560 And the bully dog immediately rolls over.

00:20:50.920 And the alpha just, like, puts his paws on the other dog's neck.

00:20:55.420 And just, like, looks at him for a moment.

00:20:57.220 He's just, like, you know.

00:20:58.640 And just, like, the other dog is just, like, don't hurt me.

00:21:02.600 Don't hurt me.

00:21:03.080 Like, and there's, like, no moment of, like, violence or anything like that.

00:21:07.640 They're just, like, this alpha dog knows that he's in charge.

00:21:12.240 And the thing is, he knows how these dogs should behave.

00:21:15.300 I don't think the people who are coming up, who are doing this stuff with, in, you know, whatever, sending these letters to Harvard, essentially.

00:21:26.300 I don't think they really have a very clear vision of, like, what Harvard should be.

00:21:33.360 They just want to, like, snap it and bully it and bite it a little bit.

00:21:37.980 And, like, yeah, sure, man.

00:21:40.920 It deserves all of that.

00:21:42.260 It deserves all of that and more. 0.99

00:21:43.900 I have, like, no sympathy for some fucking grad student who writes some boilerplate communist essay about Israeli colonialist oppressors or whatever. 0.99

00:21:53.300 No sympathy whatsoever. 0.99

00:21:56.800 I'm just, like, actually, no, you've got to win, right?

00:21:59.860 And, like, basically, when you take these people and you sort of make them feel vindicated, you're taking the kind of the one force that you have in your favor where they, like, don't really feel vindicated.

00:22:14.300 And you're basically restoring, you know, you're giving them hit points.

00:22:18.180 You want to take away their hit points.

00:22:20.360 That's how you win.

00:22:21.780 Take away the hit points, right?

00:22:23.300 You know, but you're actually giving them, like, a potion of extra healing, you know.

00:22:27.900 And you shouldn't – and you're sort of doing that because you're still locked in this – when you think about power, you're still thinking about this sort of performative thing that excites your supporters.

00:22:43.660 And I'm, like, okay, yeah, at a certain level, yes, your supporters are, like, naive about power and, like, you know, think that running around biting the other dogs is still the way to behave like an alpha.

00:22:55.340 That's all right.

00:22:56.220 That's all right.

00:22:57.220 That's all right.

00:22:57.260 That's all right.

00:22:58.260 That's all right.

00:22:59.260 Actually, you need to be leading your followers, not following your followers.

00:23:02.340 That's a huge error of the right, at least.

00:23:04.860 That's all right.

00:23:05.800 They actually are going to prefer to be led than to be followed.

00:23:10.460 And, you know, that's, I think, part of the understated, the underrecognized magic of Trump is that Trump actually generally leads rather than follow it.

00:23:24.400 And, like, you know, Republicans are so used to a leader that, like, tries to follow them, you know, that they're just, like, when they see a leader who's actually leading, suddenly all of their, like, bullshit about is he morally fit, you know, does he have sex with women, you know, all of these things, like, fall away immediately because they sort of see that there's actually a kind of leadership energy there.

00:23:52.740 And, like, you know, the idea that basically, you know, the way a Republican voter should think, say, about tariffs is to basically think, well, I support Trump.

00:24:06.820 If Trump wants tariffs, I guess we should have tariffs.

00:24:09.400 If Trump wants free trade, I guess we should have free trade.

00:24:11.980 And when you're doing that, you know, basically sort of in the kind of democratic bestiary or the, like, you know, the textbook of democracy, you're like, wow, you're not being a strong voter who stands up for what he believes in.

00:24:28.100 No, actually, you're being a very strong voter because you're transmitting as much of your power as possible to your leader.

00:24:34.500 You were not saying, I am the chief, you were saying, I am the Indian, you know, I support you, whatever you do.

00:24:41.340 And that basically delegates much, much more support to your leadership and enables them actually to fight and win.

00:24:48.820 So, again, we see flashes of that in this administration, but it hasn't really come together in a way that really congeals yet, I think.

00:25:00.180 But, you know, the administration isn't even 10% over it.

00:25:04.080 Let's look on the right side.

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00:25:36.000 Well, I want to follow up on Chris Ruffo's civil rights judo to see if you think that's going to work.

00:25:42.220 But before we do, let's hear from today's sponsor.

00:25:44.940 This episode of The Oren McIntyre Show is proudly sponsored by Consumers Research.

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00:26:37.720 So, Curtis, one of the things that the Trump administration has talked about,

00:26:42.720 especially with Harmy Dillon coming in to run the Civil Rights Division,

00:26:45.640 is basically reversing the machinery, right,

00:26:48.540 instead of chasing down a bunch of anti-Black discrimination, these kind of things,

00:26:53.000 saying that this stuff is everywhere.

00:26:54.340 We have to, you know, destroy it at every turn.

00:26:56.620 They expect to do it the other direction, get rid of anti-white or anti-Asian discrimination.

00:27:02.360 Chris Ruffo has said that he's going to judo flip this thing,

00:27:05.880 and he's going to use the Civil Rights Act to force all these universities to finally comply with this stuff.

00:27:12.180 Oh, and I should remind people, sorry, this isn't live,

00:27:14.380 so if you are doing super chats, please just know that we won't be able to read them today.

00:27:17.720 But I was wondering, do you think ultimately that those tactics will have any, you know, success,

00:27:23.600 or do you think that's just a failed endeavor?

00:27:28.760 It's hard to say.

00:27:29.960 It's like, it's not, I mean, I think that, you know, Harmy Dillon obviously has a lot of energy.

00:27:43.560 And staff put something like that 50%, 60%.

00:27:47.520 Obviously, you know, they're there to do, you know, race communism and not to do race anti-communism.

00:27:56.960 It's like that, you know, it's sort of, it's a little bit of a case of a, you know,

00:28:06.360 negligible force against an insubstantial object.

00:28:09.180 Because I think I've been a little bit surprised or, you know,

00:28:13.600 I'm a sort of cynical person about those strategies.

00:28:20.160 They are capable, however, of, like, the people that they're sort of meant to scare are, like, very easily scared. 0.86

00:28:35.460 And so it's basically like, when you say these things, you're basically talking to a bunch of people who are sort of bullies and cowards at the same time.

00:28:53.940 And, you know, the cowardice sort of comes out when you're basically very firm with them.

00:29:13.080 And so it's actually relatively easy to get these institutions to say, oh, well, we're canceling our DAI program.

00:29:23.340 You know, on the other hand, when you basically look at the, when you look at the impact of,

00:29:33.540 when you, when you sort of look at the, you know, for example, California did this thing where they, of course,

00:29:43.520 we passed these laws saying you can't, you know, initiatives, we have direct democracy in California,

00:29:50.160 as you may know, passed these initiatives saying you can't do this.

00:29:54.840 And you sort of see this interesting response.

00:29:57.620 And you'll see this same kind of response to the Supreme Court Harvard decision, where, you know, some, some people are a little more cowardly than others.

00:30:07.700 You see kind of a lot of variation between institutions, which is relatively unusual in the cathedral world,

00:30:14.140 but reminds you that these are all separate institutions.

00:30:17.400 They make different choices.

00:30:19.040 And I think after a while, you basically realize that kind of in order for these things to like really work,

00:30:29.760 what happens is you go a little way down.

00:30:32.600 The civil rights division will actually like file lawsuits, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:30:38.940 That will like annoy and scare people.

00:30:41.220 And I think ultimately you will go back to the fact that the judiciary as a whole, either, first of all,

00:30:52.500 leftist judges will immediately spike these things. 0.98

00:30:55.740 They will just kill them. 1.00

00:30:56.640 They will not care. 1.00

00:30:57.900 They will just be like, this is ridiculous. 0.96

00:30:59.940 Like they will just throw it out.

00:31:01.440 And then the moderate federalist society, you know, Amy Coney Barrett style judges will sort of basically kind of give it a little bit of lip service

00:31:15.300 and basically be like, oh, yeah, you should definitely stop doing this, but won't like hit hard particularly.

00:31:22.540 And so, you know, what you saw with these rules basically applied from the left is that there's sort of part of this, you know,

00:31:33.500 the rule itself is just, okay, you know, here's an excuse to basically hit people we don't like.

00:31:41.760 And the real feeling of like we're going to destroy everything, everyone and everything we don't like is really what is like paramount and central there.

00:31:54.180 And so I like don't think that it's just like you got to do what you're good at and what you sort of have the tools for.

00:32:05.320 And the thing is, when you basically kind of start doing this, you sort of get into this kind of trench warfare where you maybe will get what in the opposite direction would sort of be an exemplary result that scared everyone.

00:32:20.600 But when you do it on our side and you get this example, somehow it always turns out to be the exception that proves the rule.

00:32:27.840 And so you'll sort of win these like little victories, you know, somewhere where everything lines up, you sort of get the right judge or whatever.

00:32:37.980 But the fact that everything lines up and you get the right judge makes people realize, oh, actually, we don't really have to worry about this.

00:32:46.020 And so the kind of stimulus wears off, people hunker down and basically you get the same good old result, which is, as we say, nothing ever happens.

00:32:57.840 And so I'm basically like, you know, this attempt to get things to happen is interesting.

00:33:04.580 I'm not entirely sure what the results will be.

00:33:08.060 It will definitely create some symbolic victories.

00:33:11.800 It will like cause serious, it's already caused serious irritation and disruption to sort of many people.

00:33:20.620 But it also doesn't really feel exactly like winning to me.

00:33:26.180 And like when you really like, you know, it's funny because like.

00:33:32.660 If you really talked about, you know, doing judo and like flipping the tables, you know, you'd be like, all right, you know, imagine a world where instead of a DEI office in every, you know, university company, preschool, you know, everything, everywhere.

00:33:55.600 All of these DEI offices are replaced by MAGA offices and basically, you know, every time you consider a candidate for any position, you have to think, is this candidate going to make America great again?

00:34:10.940 Well, you know, for example, is he a Christian or if he's a Christian, he's probably going to make America great again.

00:34:16.440 So, you know, clearly, you know, if you've got two equally qualified candidates and only one of them is a Christian, you know, and you choose the one who's not a Christian, are you making America great again?

00:34:28.260 And clearly not, you know, that should be something you could be sued over, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:34:33.700 So, you know, it's like the idea that of like, it's sort of nice to think about taking, you know, sort of all the laws that establish the Stasi and, you know, saying we'll have a reverse Stasi.

00:34:46.160 And, you know, the reverse Stasi will basically do the opposite thing and get rid of communism just as efficiently as the real Stasi got rid of fascism.

00:34:56.340 And I'm like, you know, everybody is forgetting Joseph de Maistre here and his dictum that the counter-revolution is not revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of revolution.

00:35:10.560 And here we're dealing with a permanent institutional revolution, a very old revolution.

00:35:15.380 Maistre, of course, was dealing with a very young revolution.

00:35:18.720 And still, I would say that the counter-revolution is not revolution in the opposite direction.

00:35:25.600 It's the opposite of revolution.

00:35:27.700 And I would not, you know, do things in the same way.

00:35:32.820 But these are clearly, you know, sincere people.

00:35:35.180 They're fighting very hard, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:35:37.920 I wish them luck.

00:35:38.800 I wish them donations.

00:35:40.660 You know, of course, like our institutional fabric for doing this stuff is like, you know, the three guys and the, you know, 2009 Nissan, you know.

00:35:52.500 So let's, let's, I shouldn't expect, I mean, the Manhattan Institute is not the Tides Foundation.

00:35:58.880 It's the Manhattan Institute is three guys at a 2009 Nissan, right?

00:36:02.860 Well, and a guy pretending to be a lady. 0.97

00:36:04.380 But yeah.

00:36:04.860 So I wanted.

00:36:07.360 Yes.

00:36:07.760 I wanted to ask you, you wrote it in 2009 Nissan.

00:36:11.420 Yes, go on.

00:36:12.680 I wanted to ask you, because you wrote an interesting essay, kind of talk about your surprise with the Trump administration, the pleasant surprise about the, I think your, your illustration was like, they basically like found an old engine and are trying to restart it and force it to work.

00:36:26.280 And they're doing the absolute best to test if that's even possible.

00:36:30.040 And the interesting thing is that, you know, Sam Francis in his essay, nationalism, old and new said, basically like the current American nationalism destroyed any hope of the American Republic as we understand it.

00:36:41.520 And so the only thing to do is basically dismantle the parts of the administration state that are like explicitly against Americanism and turn the institutions that survive explicitly in favor of something like MAGA, like you were talking about there.

00:36:53.860 We've seen the dismantling of things like the USAID.

00:36:59.600 We've seen the kind of the half dismantling of the Department of Education.

00:37:03.460 These are both different places that Sam Francis specifically mentioned.

00:37:07.180 Do you think there's any success in those areas?

00:37:09.320 Do you think Francis's point is possible?

00:37:10.880 Do you think Trump administration is following that to some degree?

00:37:13.420 I think that basically the sort of, you know, what the, it's again, a case of the exception that proves the rule thing, because it's very clear in DC that even, for example, the dismantling of USAID was like something that could not happen again.

00:37:32.780 It's basically like, you know, you know, in a situation like the early Trump administration, the power of the new administration decreases very sharply with time.

00:37:48.040 And so, you know, the sort of the levels of like shock and awe that were being used at the start of the administration was sort of a pleasant surprise.

00:37:58.560 And as I said to someone the other day, like, you know, certainly without any exaggeration, they did 10 times as much.

00:38:11.080 I might even go 100 times as much substantively as the first Trump administration.

00:38:17.260 And by doing 100 times as much as the first Trump administration, they demonstrated that in order for something to, you know, to be real, they would have to scale it up by another factor of 100, which really shows you that, like, you know, in terms of, I mean, we are all, you know, neither of us Orin was born yesterday.

00:38:39.000 We remember people talking about George W. Bush, you know, that way.

00:38:43.380 You know, remember Bush, Bush, the chimp, Bush, chimp, Hitler, George W. Bush, right?

00:38:47.980 Oh, man, I can see it close as you think.

00:38:50.340 Were you a believer?

00:38:51.080 Did you believe at that time?

00:38:52.520 I mean, I was like 16, 17.

00:38:54.900 So to the extent that one is plugged into politics, yes.

00:38:58.060 Yes.

00:38:58.780 And, and, and like, actually, the people who are like afraid of like Bush, Hitler, were like, you know, 100, six orders of magnitude off the mark five, six, seven, I don't know, you know, like, really, like,

00:39:12.840 really imagining an ant as an elephant, right?

00:39:15.940 And, and today we've gotten to the point where, all right, you know, it's not an ant anymore.

00:39:21.060 It's not a grasshopper.

00:39:22.400 Now everybody's looking at a mouse and calling it an elephant.

00:39:26.280 And, you know, and, and both sides still be a rock higher axe.

00:39:30.220 Maybe it's actually related to the elephant, but it's actually the size of a rabbit, right?

00:39:34.840 You know, and, and it sort of serves the needs, you know, we're still the, the, the, the sort of the public square is moving away from being a kabuki thing, but it's still really a kabuki thing.

00:39:47.740 And so it sort of suits both sides to call the rock high racks an elephant, you know, and the rock high racks itself wants to believe it's an elephant because, you know, as, as, as one does.

00:39:58.980 And the, the, like, you know, I think it's really important for, you know, apolitical intellectuals such as myself to basically be like, no, that is a small rabbit-like animal.

00:40:21.280 You know, you know, be careful picking it up.

00:40:24.160 It might, you know, bite you, but I will not stomp you to death.

00:40:28.100 Right.

00:40:28.640 And so I'm, I'm just like, yeah, I'm like, really, it's sort of, I think it's a necessary stage to go through where you basically try these kinds of, you know, not really half measures, but like 1% measures and then see, wow, that really does not work.

00:40:47.660 And, you know, you're seeing like, I don't know, does anyone talk about new college anymore?

00:40:55.160 Remember that was Rufo's last project.

00:40:57.640 Right, if there was a heterodox university. 0.89

00:41:00.840 Well, that's a different, that's a different thing entirely, but they managed to turn, you know, a shitty hippie college in Florida into a shitty baseball college in Florida, basically by importing like baseball players. 0.89

00:41:13.000 Like, I mean, like just a real waste of a, of an accreditation, right.

00:41:17.140 You know, but like, again, you know, they sort of tried to, I mean, you know, I mean, really give me just like one accredited college and enough money to do fun stuff with it.

00:41:30.080 And we would have a good old time, but like the good old time would not, you know, be like, let's admit a bunch of baseball players with like 1100 SATs.

00:41:39.080 Right, you know, and nothing wrong with baseball, you know, but, but like, you know, it sort of shows when you basically, you know, sort of do anything with a kind of spirit of like smallness, it turns into its own reward. 0.97

00:41:58.200 And it really, I really will insist that actually it is often better to sort of bide your time and build your strength rather than doing something, you know, small and stupid. 0.77

00:42:10.120 But as some, you know, readers of your show may recall, you know, I basically, you know, the vision of like Biden winning this election and then just slowly, I mean, he was just decaying while the cancer thing would kill him anyway. 0.79

00:42:27.540 So that would kind of ruin it, but like watching him just decay into dementia slop, you know, over the course of now till 2028 and watching this sort of like the denials of this get would just have gotten funnier and funnier and funnier.

00:42:44.020 Like as he like melted into, I mean, he's already a shell of man, but like, they would just not give up on the auto pen, you know, fake Biden regime until he actually died.

00:42:55.340 And, and, and that would have been, that would have been epic, right?

00:42:59.360 You know, you can already see in your mind how epic that is.

00:43:02.540 So is that more epic or is Harmeet Dillon in the civil rights office filing, you know, lawsuits against, I mean, of course, all of this, like, you know, thing with these civil rights laws that say you don't discriminate.

00:43:17.760 And then we're just going to read them as, and read them as if they were like, basically you have to discriminate in favor of black people is of course, one of the kind of deeply comical things about this deeply unserious country that we live in.

00:43:34.520 And, and so, you know, the idea of, all right, we're going to take these laws seriously.

00:43:38.160 And, you know, it's like the guy in, in Casablanca, you know, he's like shocked, shocked that there's anti-white discrimination going on here.

00:43:46.660 Like, you know, like, like they were, they're immediately going to like rectify that.

00:43:51.740 And it's like, you know, you're, I mean, I, I just, I don't really see a theory for how that works exactly because the forces, like the law of 1965 is not the reason these things are happening.

00:44:09.660 The reason these things are happening is the structure of power.

00:44:12.820 The law allows that structure of power to operate, but like basically, you know, race, communism,

00:44:21.740 is still the official religion of the United States.

00:44:26.600 And like, you can basically let the barbarians into the temple and the barbarians can screech and run around the temple and sacrifice a goat on the whole eye altar and say that, you know, race, communism is over, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 0.85

00:44:42.940 But like 1960s, new left race, communism is still the fundamental ideology of the United States.

00:44:50.980 And like the, anything that involves sort of truly changing it is like, as I always say, like when you see a real regime change, everybody's life changes.

00:45:04.180 And like, until you're basically have the level of like self-confidence in leadership where you're just like, no, everybody's life needs to change.

00:45:16.420 I mean, if you're in East Germany, 1985, 1995, your life is totally different.

00:45:21.420 Right.

00:45:22.220 Right.

00:45:22.820 And until you're basically willing to say, hey, like the level of change that's needed here is not, we're going to cut waste, fraud, and abuse at the State Department.

00:45:35.580 The level of change here is like, no, everything needs to change.

00:45:40.200 Everybody's life needs to change.

00:45:41.980 Like, you can't really make progress with that.

00:45:46.560 And of course, Trump really did not have a mandate for that.

00:45:50.240 And yet, it's actually true.

00:45:52.600 Like, everybody's life needs to change.

00:45:54.640 I mean, maybe my life, your life doesn't need to change.

00:45:57.140 But, you know, actually, it does need to change because what are we?

00:46:00.540 We are basically feeding off of this machine, you know, ourselves.

00:46:04.920 We are basically kind of, you know, after 1990 in East Germany, is there a role for a dissident, a critic of communism?

00:46:14.240 Sure.

00:46:14.560 Well, you're done.

00:46:15.720 You're done.

00:46:16.480 You know, so your life, too, has to change, right?

00:46:18.640 You know, and who knows what it's going to be, but it's going to be something else.

00:46:23.160 And a lot of the people who were former dissidents in the 80s in the Eastern Bloc countries were, like, very disappointed that they won.

00:46:30.940 And now they needed to make new lives for themselves, and they weren't necessarily important in these new lives, right?

00:46:36.580 You know, and they kind of had their 15 minutes.

00:46:39.460 So I'm like, yeah, I would be very, very content with that outcome.

00:46:43.040 Yeah, I'd be happy to go back to teaching the new-based high school curriculum if that's the direction.

00:46:48.680 Yeah, sure, sure, sure, exactly, right?

00:46:50.640 You know, and the, you know, like, let me return to my, you know, farm.

00:46:58.620 Let me go and write some code.

00:47:00.580 I don't know.

00:47:02.580 And so I don't really think that basically the Rufos or the Harmeet Dillons, these are people with a lot of energy.

00:47:15.620 They can get things done.

00:47:17.280 They are excitable.

00:47:19.500 They can raise money.

00:47:20.440 They can do sort of all of these things.

00:47:23.640 But it's, like, still ultimately you're, you know, it's sort of interesting to see how this, like, Harvard visa thing will go because it's sort of like you look at it and you're just like, yeah, that's just, they're just not going to let you do that.

00:47:41.580 Some judge will, hasn't some judge already struck it down or something like that?

00:47:44.840 I mean, usually within 10 minutes, but, yeah, that's the real question is if something can force me this.

00:47:49.780 Yeah, right, right, right, right, exactly.

00:47:51.100 And so you're basically, ultimately, you're doing something, like, when you think about this action, it is not really a purposeful action toward a new and stable state of affairs.

00:48:05.880 It is basically a pretext for, I want to hit this thing on the head.

00:48:13.300 And the thing is, actually, like, okay, there's a world where you know that any pretext will survive. 0.93

00:48:23.760 Your pretext doesn't even matter because you're like, I have the power to hit this thing on the head.

00:48:28.820 The thing is, I actually don't think you have the power to hit this thing on the head because you basically have only two Supreme Court justices thanks to your, thanks to the Federalist Society.

00:48:41.680 Thank you, Federalist Society.

00:48:43.760 Nice work.

00:48:44.720 Wow.

00:48:44.980 If we had two of you, we'd really be going somewhere.

00:48:47.280 And the, like, you know, so you're actually, it's this actually somewhat ineffectual gesture because basically sort of like the 150% tariffs on China.

00:49:06.240 You're just like, you know what, actually, you're in a very fragile position where you have a little bit of power and you have a screwdriver.

00:49:17.260 And if you get the right screwdriver into the right screw, there are ways of using that power to really, you know, in a kind of, you know, real judo sense to use, you know,

00:49:32.480 to use this thing's death wish to help it commit suicide. 0.64

00:49:37.940 But instead, they're basically trying to use a screwdriver as a hammer to, like, hit it over the head. 0.52

00:49:44.640 And I'm just like, yes, okay, nothing could survive being hit over the head with a sledgehammer, you know, enough.

00:49:53.140 But you don't have a sledgehammer.

00:49:55.080 You have a screwdriver.

00:49:56.660 You're not even stabbing with a screwdriver. 0.99

00:49:58.720 You're, like, turning it around and hitting people with the butt and you're just going to piss them off, you know. 0.98

00:50:05.680 And, like, and actually, like, you know, just pissing off your enemies is sort of when you're in the conservative grifter loop. 0.99

00:50:16.740 You're like, I piss off my enemies.

00:50:19.160 I raise more money.

00:50:20.100 I piss off my enemies more.

00:50:21.680 And it's just like, you know, you are driven, you are not breaking the logic of the system.

00:50:28.860 You are being driven by the logic of the system.

00:50:32.140 Well, speaking about energy and the death drive of the left, one of the things that has been apparent, I think, is that after Trump's victory, there was quite a bit of loss of energy on the left.

00:50:42.300 They didn't have the violent riots.

00:50:44.140 They didn't have the 2020 blow up.

00:50:46.420 They didn't have a lot of the stuff that people expected when Trump ended up winning.

00:50:50.380 It was very clear that after his victory, there was kind of a shock and awe response for a bit where Trump was just kind of running over them.

00:50:56.080 There was always one thing or another.

00:50:57.760 So much of the narrative was being driven by the Trump administration initially that it seemed like the left was pretty out of sorts.

00:51:05.000 They've been complaining a lot about young men and Joe Rogan.

00:51:07.960 Joe Rogan has completely destroyed their ability to get the young white men.

00:51:11.440 And they've been vilifying for years to vote for them or something along that tact.

00:51:15.300 And so it seems like the left is in a bit of disarray.

00:51:17.620 They've talked about head faking towards Bernie Sanders and returning to economic communism, as you were pointing out.

00:51:23.640 But that seems to be failing.

00:51:25.000 And people like Jasmine Crockett and AOC seem to be having more momentum than anything else.

00:51:30.440 Do you think that the left is going to find its footing here?

00:51:33.400 Ultimately, do you think they have the ability to put the woke away as academic agent puts it?

00:51:37.540 Or do you think ultimately they're going to have to return back to that religion?

00:51:40.720 And as you said, it's still pretty much underlying most of what they do.

00:51:43.580 But they seem to have some awareness that it's toxic at some level.

00:51:47.660 It's still our national religion.

00:51:49.400 And the thing is that it's like, sure, it's like toxic the way, you know, communism was in Hungary in 1980.

00:51:57.880 Well, 1970.

00:51:59.420 You know, there's still a lot of true believers out there.

00:52:02.300 There's a very solid, but you can go on Blue Sky and see all the true believers, you know, if they're sort of in one place.

00:52:10.980 And ultimately, I think some of the people, if you look at like sort of the Prague Spring or whatever in the 60s, people just kind of thought at the time, oh, once everyone stops believing in this, it will just go away.

00:52:35.900 It actually will not just go away.

00:52:38.360 And it just simply doesn't work that way.

00:52:41.340 And it gets sort of more, the passion decreases and the things you can do with the passion decrease.

00:52:51.260 And because leftists are, you know, never take the leftist disarray seriously because leftists care seriously about power.

00:52:59.540 So when they lose a very small fraction of it, when they get down to 99.8% power, they become very, very concerned.

00:53:07.860 And when rightists who are fundamentally amateurs and not serious get up to 0.2% of power, they're like, we won, we won, we won.

00:53:15.660 Right, you know, and both of these things are sort of indicative of, like, there's no easier way to beat someone than to convince them that he's won when he hasn't actually won.

00:53:25.360 The two best ways to beat someone are, number one, convince them that he's won when he hasn't actually won or isn't even close to winning.

00:53:33.640 Number two, accuse them of the things that he's not doing but should be doing if he wants to win.

00:53:39.320 Then he'll deny them and then he's cooked.

00:53:41.640 You know, either of those things will cook you instantly and I see the right just falling for them all over the place and I'm just like, it's sad.

00:53:52.040 You know, and don't like, and so actually, no, you kind of, you know, the loss of two things.

00:54:04.240 One is the loss of energy is, you know, a deeper thing that predates Trump that is not caused by Trump.

00:54:13.820 You know, former years of Biden would have produced just a spectacular loss of energy.

00:54:19.120 Oh, my God, it would have been so good, right?

00:54:21.440 You know, but four years of Biden already created a really nice loss of energy.

00:54:26.360 But even four years of Harris kind of stumbling around, you know, informed sources seem to disagree whether with Harris's alcohol or pills, maybe both.

00:54:36.040 But she has this wonderful, flighty, drunken, drunken manner, right? 1.00

00:54:40.840 Which is so great to see on TV, right?

00:54:42.860 You know, like that would have been, that would have been, I think, really positive for the public's fear.

00:54:47.360 It didn't happen for better, for worse, right?

00:54:51.720 So, so instead you have this thing where basically they're finally getting it up, back up a little bit.

00:55:00.420 It's pretty hard to get it up for Kilmar, you know, something, something, you know.

00:55:05.840 And you're sort of giving them as much energy as they possibly can have under this situation.

00:55:12.640 But there's another phenomenon there about the shock and awe, which is that basically, actually, when the sort of political appointees come and when Trump actually starts trying to run the government using the normal systems of the top-down hierarchy of, like, these are executive branch agencies, the sort of, you know, they came in at first.

00:55:34.600 They had this kind of shock and awe program.

00:55:36.840 They shot a lot of people in the face as much as possible.

00:55:39.960 They basically, like, you know, scared a lot of people straight into basically saying, okay, we'll, like, pretend that, like, fine, we'll, like, work for you.

00:55:53.220 I guess we do work for you.

00:55:55.160 And the result is, you know, sort of the political people in D.C. are like, all right, they actually seem to work for us.

00:56:02.220 But the thing is, a lot of that came from a few weeks of shooting people in the face.

00:56:09.060 And if you stop shooting people in the face, they will eventually get off the defensive and they'll get back to the offensive.

00:56:16.880 And you'll see some way that DOJ will figure out to be investigating the Trump administration in, like, six months ago.

00:56:23.540 You know, because, of course, you know, they didn't do any shock and awe stuff at the start of the first Trump administration.

00:56:30.060 And, you know, the government immediately weaponized itself against the president.

00:56:34.540 And I think that that's still something that could happen.

00:56:38.820 I mean, they've barely touched the intelligence community.

00:56:41.300 They've, like, barely, like, you know, and I think there's, you know, yeah, actually, the fundamental situation of every Republican administration, certainly this one, is that you're Duke Leto and Arrakis.

00:56:57.120 And, you know, this is really still a Harkonnen planner. 0.94

00:56:59.600 And, like, you know, yeah, like, you know, this idea, which is, and then you basically come in, and, yeah, there are these things that you're doing, like the Harmeet Dillon kinds of things, which are energetic.

00:57:15.320 But you're still basically putting most of your effort into trying to run the government and do good government things and, like, public policy things.

00:57:23.100 And that is just an utter distraction from the long-term project of regime change.

00:57:30.000 Actually, governing the country well is not, or making the right decisions, you know, and, you know, handling the Iran threat, you know, or what about the China threat?

00:57:40.140 You know, we've got to handle the China threat, right? 0.99

00:57:42.520 Totally irrelevant.

00:57:43.720 Like, Xi Jinping means nothing.

00:57:46.200 Your real enemy is not Xi Jinping.

00:57:47.960 It's Norm Eisen.

00:57:50.280 What do you think about the chances of mass deportations? 0.92

00:57:53.820 I know that democracy is already fake and gay, but if you're letting in seven, eight million illegal immigrants, 1.00

00:57:59.000 every Democrat administration and giving them all voting rights, it gets pretty hard to continue to pretend like we're doing anything approaching the will of the people.

00:58:08.420 Do you think there's any chance that they'll actually be able to pull off even a couple million deportations in the Trump presidency?

00:58:15.980 No, if you were serious about this, and there's some attempt to, like, use the IRS there.

00:58:22.760 If you were really serious about this, look, we have a system of tax enforcement.

00:58:27.180 Like, you know, it's very, very simple to say, hey, like, not only do we have a system of tax enforcement, you know what an I-10 is, right?

00:58:35.560 You know, it's like, oh, you're illegal, but you want to work, so we'll give you a fake Social Security number, right?

00:58:42.240 You know, actually, like, the only way to do mass deportations seriously is not, again, having a big show with ICE, you know, people all dressed up in SWAT gear.

00:58:55.340 It's to simply say, look, you can't employ illegals anymore, and in fact, the current law and nothing at all has been done about this, naturally, because, of course, a lot of this stuff, you know, depends on Congress to act, and Congress is completely fake.

00:59:09.520 You know, like, actually, as you know, as you may know, when you employ someone and he gives you a fake Social Security card or anything, actually, you can get in trouble for questioning his obviously fake documents.

00:59:28.180 You know, fundamentally, we still live in a country that does not even have a list of its own citizens.

00:59:33.300 Tell me how you're going to do mass deportations without a list of citizens.

00:59:37.220 The government does not even know how many, we don't even have a census, we have models.

00:59:42.540 This government does not know to within 10 or 20 million how many people are even in the country, right?

00:59:49.400 So, yeah, I'm just like, you know, if you actually have sort of a kind of independent historical understanding of the task of statesmanship

01:00:00.760 and what it means to run a country, which is something that basically never changes throughout history, you can basically be like, you know, are they serious or are they doing serious things?

01:00:13.460 Or are they basically just grandstanding?

01:00:17.880 And, you know, they certainly have shut the border reasonably efficiently.

01:00:23.920 You know, that is serious.

01:00:25.820 In terms of basically pissing off the, like, Chamber of Commerce slave labor lobby, you know, no, I don't see it.

01:00:35.540 You know, the Department of Agriculture slave labor lobby.

01:00:39.360 I mean, you know, this is a slave nation. 0.98

01:00:42.900 America has always been a slave country. 0.81

01:00:45.940 We have always, you know, depended on importing manual labor.

01:00:52.060 The terms of that importation sort of vary across time.

01:00:56.740 But this country has always had a helot class. 1.00

01:01:00.540 And with occasional historical exceptions, you know, it's just we just rerouted the Middle Passage to Darien Gap, right?

01:01:09.220 And so I'm just like, yeah, again, you know, the actual change of basically saying, because you would basically have to say in order to maintain anything like normalcy, you have this tremendous problem of returning, you know, this slave class to its native, you know, habitat. 0.89

01:01:31.880 And then you have the equally tremendous task of taking 50 million Americans who don't work and basically being like, no, actually, in the Bible, it says, if you're going to eat, you're going to work. 0.61

01:01:47.440 And like, yeah, actually, you're going to be about a third as efficient at picking strawberries as the strawberry pickers we sent home.

01:01:56.640 Strawberries are going to cost 10 bucks a basket.

01:01:58.800 But you know what?

01:02:00.360 If you don't eat, you don't work.

01:02:01.880 And if you don't have 10 bucks, you don't get strawberries.

01:02:04.620 I just don't see the national will to do anything like that.

01:02:07.500 I see a bunch of posers.

01:02:09.440 Yeah, fair enough.

01:02:11.460 We could obviously do this all day, but I know you've got limited time.

01:02:14.280 So I want to ask you one more question before we go.

01:02:17.180 Trump gave a speech here recently about foreign policy decrying neoconservatism, saying that it's no longer the United States job to impose democracy on the rest of the world and dictate to them how they're going to run their business.

01:02:29.980 We also see whispers about Trump kind of stepping away from the Israeli government, not being as close with Netanyahu, not wanting to be as involved.

01:02:38.980 Do you think that the foreign policy of the United States is correcting itself?

01:02:42.400 Do you think they have a better vision, a better understanding of the situation and how they should be operating?

01:02:46.720 Yeah, I think that, you know, good ideas or better ideas are certainly circulating in that space.

01:02:56.180 But the thing is, you know, if this isn't like there's 60,000 people or whatever who work for the State Department, if this isn't what it's for, what is it for?

01:03:08.420 Right. You know, what are those people doing? Why does that exist? Right.

01:03:13.160 You know, and and if this isn't for what is it for? You know, and nobody has an answer to that question. Right.

01:03:18.940 And so actually you can basically say, you know, hey, wow, we have this machine that does this.

01:03:29.640 It shouldn't be doing this. Maybe it should be doing something else.

01:03:32.440 Maybe I question what the machine is doing, but the machine is still there.

01:03:36.760 You're not turning off the machine. You're not turning off the power to the machine.

01:03:40.180 You're not turning off the fuel of the machine. You know, the machine still sort of wants to do what it's doing.

01:03:46.160 And so to some extent, you can kind of sabotage these, you know, little things.

01:03:51.140 And, you know, what's funny is that actually, you know, it's like I think Vance came out and said very boldly that we did not really have a dog in the fight between India and Pakistan, 0.99

01:04:01.260 which I think was a very productive thing to say, even on conventional terms, because I think that it made it actually much, much easier for us to basically do the alpha dog with thing without India and Pakistan and just be like, just cut the fuck out. 1.00

01:04:15.820 Right. We don't even care. Right. You know, it's like, you know, your your your children are fighting. 0.99

01:04:20.660 You know, do you care who wins? No. Right. You know.

01:04:23.000 And so actually, it's a better vibe. It's a better attitude introducing that vibe into sort of the conventional process of foreign policy, I think, is relatively productive in some sense, because you can even at least sort of pretend you don't care.

01:04:39.740 And I think that helps, you know, people kind of have maybe come to Jesus moments about settling their own problems.

01:04:45.780 But fundamentally, you still have a machine that is there whose purpose is to do this.

01:04:51.560 The purpose of the State Department is to basically harmonize the world around the American political system.

01:04:57.280 It's just like Soviet foreign policy. You know, they had the Brezhnev Doctrine.

01:05:01.700 We have the sort of global Monroe Doctrine that once you, you know, the Brezhnev Doctrine was like once you go communist, you never go back.

01:05:09.680 Similarly, we say once you go democratic, you never go back for whatever that the word democratic means. 0.98

01:05:15.780 You know, cue us, you know, like, kicking the winning candidate out in Romania or whatever the fuck. 0.98

01:05:24.740 Right. 0.98

01:05:25.600 And the, you know, it's just like the ideas are sort of not enough.

01:05:35.400 Like, it's actually like you just have a huge structural monster and maybe ideas helped create and help design the structural monster.

01:05:46.460 But fundamentally, it is what it is.

01:05:49.780 And like, it's not really changing what it is.

01:05:53.480 It's not really becoming something different.

01:05:55.760 It is what it is.

01:05:57.860 And actually, like, asking it to be something different, like, politely is just like, you know, or sort of trying to kind of reverse the polarity and use the civil rights division to, like, sue a bunch of people.

01:06:14.160 Especially when you're basically saying, okay, our judo is actually kabuki judo because we want the answer.

01:06:24.180 We want to have an, you know, a WWF fight.

01:06:27.900 You know, we want you to say no so that we can fight you to get more, you know, contributions from our base and, you know, sort of, you know, keep the grift going.

01:06:37.760 And actually, you would be behaving, you would already be behaving very, very differently if you actually cared about winning and not about fighting.

01:06:50.240 It's like, actually, you know, when Trump raised his fist after that assassination attempt and said, fight, I'm just like, no, that is actually all wrong.

01:07:01.220 Fighting is a thing that you do that is theatrical.

01:07:03.660 You know, if you'd raised his hand in the air and said, win, that would have been something very, very different.

01:07:10.860 Because when you're trying to win, of course, the question is not how you fight more, but how you fight less.

01:07:17.180 And I still basically don't see a concept of winning.

01:07:21.840 I don't see a telos of winning.

01:07:24.000 I don't see a plan for winning.

01:07:26.540 I don't see a direction for winning.

01:07:28.260 And when you don't have any of these things, you know, what's going to happen is, like, you're not going to win.

01:07:37.980 And it's really hard for me to say, oh, here's a bandwagon.

01:07:41.980 It's going to lose.

01:07:42.920 Go jump on the bandwagon.

01:07:44.180 I certainly am not going to jump on a losing bandwagon.

01:07:46.620 And so, you know, I really, as I said, you know, shortly after the election, I think it's really, really important and really good in a sort of historical sense that they're basically, like, fighting.

01:08:01.580 I think it is a very useful, natural experiment.

01:08:04.880 It shows many things about the system.

01:08:06.880 It reveals things that work and things that don't.

01:08:10.100 It trains a lot of personnel.

01:08:11.700 It's, like, basically, it advances sort of the clock of history in some ways, but it really just does not have anything to do with winning.

01:08:22.180 Gotcha.

01:08:22.720 All right.

01:08:22.940 Well, we're going to wrap it up here.

01:08:24.180 It's always a pleasure speaking with you.

01:08:25.820 I know you have the new book out and you have the Graymare blog.

01:08:28.780 Is there anything you want to direct people towards?

01:08:31.600 Yes.

01:08:32.140 Well, you should buy my book from Passage Press.

01:08:36.020 That's passage.press.

01:08:37.440 And you should visit and subscribe to my Substack.

01:08:41.760 That's graymirror.substack.com.

01:08:44.480 Gray with an A, the American way. 0.78

01:08:46.580 And you can also follow me on Twitter at Curtis underscore Yarvin.

01:08:53.280 And if anyone out there is, like, involved in the fight between Twitter and Substack, please stop.

01:09:02.620 All right.

01:09:03.300 Well, yeah, it's been great.

01:09:04.280 Thank you so much for having me on.

01:09:06.240 Absolutely.

01:09:06.680 It's been great to have you on Twitter, too.

01:09:08.140 It's been a lot of fun seeing you out there.

01:09:09.600 All right, guys.

01:09:10.140 If it's your first time on this channel, make sure you subscribe on YouTube.

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01:09:36.960 Thank you, everybody, for watching.

01:09:38.500 And definitely go see that Angel Studios film, that cowboy film, which is not...

01:09:42.100 That's right.

01:09:42.600 That's right.

01:09:43.420 Thanks for watching, guys.

01:09:44.340 As always.

01:09:44.780 Thanks so much.

01:09:45.160 I'll talk to you next time.

01:09:45.920 Bye.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - May 23, 2025

Curtis Yarvin Invades Harvard Yard ｜ Guest： Curtis Yarvin ｜ 5⧸23⧸25

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