The New York Times' Opinions Editor Curtis Yarvin joins me to talk about his recent appearance in Harvard Yard, the Trump administration, and much, much more. Plus, the movie The Last Rodeo hits theaters today.
00:06:33.280I could sort of, sort of, I didn't speak to her directly in any way.
00:06:37.720But I sort of was obviously looking at her while she was talking.
00:06:41.880And I'm not telepathic, but I seem to be getting the same.
00:06:48.160She seemed to be maybe asking the same question, you know, like, why did I do this, right?
00:06:55.120And the answer is an interesting and relevant answer.
00:06:59.820Number one, she's, you know, clearly one of these people at Harvard who is somewhat heterodox.
00:07:08.340She actually disowned, you know, race-based affirmative action in admissions during the talk.
00:07:17.220Of course, they do this thing where they sort of, you know, give with one hand and take away with the other hand.
00:07:23.120And 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.
00:07:36.060She said to be friendly with the John Adams Society.
00:07:39.780Her father was a noted black conservative, you know.
00:07:44.740And 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.
00:07:59.180But that was obviously not the situation.
00:08:01.480And someone like that is an academic politician.
00:08:04.140She's run for, you know, governor of Massachusetts or something.
00:08:08.080So, when you're a sort of political person, everything you do is kind of political.
00:08:14.960And I guess she's sort of positioning herself as the, you know, the open-minded Harvard person.
00:09:17.640There was certainly, you know, there was a, you know, the Harvard Police Department is not, you know, they're cops, right?
00:09:24.720So, and there was a, even in the room, there were a couple of plainclothes people.
00:09:30.000And one of these plainclothes people, you really have to see this individual to believe him.
00:09:34.300He's like sort of a creature from the 1930s.
00:09:37.520He'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.
00:09:45.260I'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.
00:10:00.120You know, it only takes one crazy people, crazy person to cause a problem.
00:10:06.700But, you know, the reality is that, you know, it's sort of interesting to think about where that energy has gone.
00:10:17.340Because it's not gone into turning these people into Trump supporters by any means.
00:10:22.580I 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.
00:10:35.940You know, the, and, and, and there's definitely a loss of that.
00:10:45.360And I try, I also try really hard not to generate that in my enemies, because I think that's really an own goal.
00:10:53.160I 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,
00:11:13.180or even themos in their own supporters, but it also generates engagement in the other side.
00:11:19.860I heard someone say it, say at a party, I don't know if this was accurate.
00:11:23.740I 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.
00:11:33.100And I was, you know, I'm just like, is this the, is this the art of the deal, right?
00:11:38.760Like, actually, like, the art of the deal is basically, you know, you actually want them to bend the knee.
00:11:45.960And they have a certain eagerness to bend the knee because they don't actually, like, believe in themselves that much.
00:11:53.300This 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.
00:12:07.040You get this a little bit of a, like, they sort of seem to have lost their kind of driving life force.
00:12:13.560Of course, you see this in the, in the late Soviet Union.
00:12:16.240And in the 50s, early 60s, the USSR still believes in itself.
00:12:35.580But, like, you know, he, he had that death wish.
00:12:39.300He was basically, like, he's actually trying to fix the system.
00:12:42.580And, of course, by trying to fix it, he just, like, freaking broke it.
00:12:47.880But, 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.
00:13:05.480And, you know, and so the response that you got in 2020 with these people that, like, passionately believed in themselves is hard to find.
00:13:17.000Because all kinds of people had all kinds of subtle, different individual, not really red-pilling moments.
00:13:24.840You know, they haven't come out and become, like, you know, Trump supporters.
00:13:29.060They're just more, like, they're, they're just more disillusioned.
00:13:34.100And that means that especially if you talk to them and you give them, you know, a certain amount of sympathy.
00:13:41.940Like, 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?
00:14:00.940And I'm like, wow, that's a weird question, you know, and so, like, basically they, they, you know, they're weak.
00:14:12.660But the thing is, if you basically hit them in the wrong way, they'll just kind of firm up again.
00:14:30.400All these universities would actually love, you know what I think they would actually love?
00:14:34.600I 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.
00:14:48.840But 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.
00:15:17.060Isn't that like a weird form of acceleration, though, right?
00:15:19.920Like, ultimately, you see Trump looking around and he's running people off of campuses for doing the wrong kind of protests.
00:15:28.000Harvard just lost its ability to sponsor visas.
00:15:32.420So 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.
00:15:38.180But 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.
00:15:46.720Hating white people for decades and no one cared.
00:15:48.840But all of a sudden they're very animated and we're able to take these steps.
00:15:52.160Chris 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.
00:15:59.960But if they did reform in that way, ultimately they'd just kind of be consolidating their position, right?
00:16:05.000So 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?
00:16:42.860You 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?
00:16:54.060You know, like, like it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
00:16:58.460It has, you know, it's obviously the same treatment that was meted out to South Africa, right?
00:17:04.880You 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?
00:17:15.660You know, and it's farm murders, but on a kibbutz, right?
00:17:28.420You 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,
00:17:46.440and 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.
00:17:56.180And, like, you're just, you're tying yourself into sort of these knots, and you're adopting these disingenuous perspectives that are clearly disingenuous.
00:18:06.720And 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.
00:18:14.020You 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.
00:18:29.560And the, and even if it does work, it sort of leads you into a relatively, like, bad place.
00:18:38.200You 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,
00:18:49.140and then it will swallow and you can even, you can be happy.
00:18:53.600And it will be like, thank you for giving me the truth.
00:18:59.080And, but, like, you can't really do it with something that's, like, BS or stupid or nonsense.
00:19:06.520And, like, then you're actually trying to get it to kind of, you know, really, you're helping it, right?
00:19:17.440And you're basically feeding your enemies.
00:19:20.900And 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.
00:19:30.600And 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,
00:21:03.080Like, and there's, like, no moment of, like, violence or anything like that.
00:21:07.640They're just, like, this alpha dog knows that he's in charge.
00:21:12.240And the thing is, he knows how these dogs should behave.
00:21:15.300I 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.
00:21:26.300I don't think they really have a very clear vision of, like, what Harvard should be.
00:21:33.360They just want to, like, snap it and bully it and bite it a little bit.
00:21:43.900I have, like, no sympathy for some fucking grad student who writes some boilerplate communist essay about Israeli colonialist oppressors or whatever.
00:21:56.800I'm just, like, actually, no, you've got to win, right?
00:21:59.860And, 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.
00:22:14.300And you're basically restoring, you know, you're giving them hit points.
00:22:18.180You want to take away their hit points.
00:22:23.300You know, but you're actually giving them, like, a potion of extra healing, you know.
00:22:27.900And 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.
00:22:43.660And 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.
00:23:05.800They actually are going to prefer to be led than to be followed.
00:23:10.460And, 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.
00:23:24.400And, 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.
00:23:52.740And, 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.
00:24:06.820If Trump wants tariffs, I guess we should have tariffs.
00:24:09.400If Trump wants free trade, I guess we should have free trade.
00:24:11.980And 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.
00:24:28.100No, actually, you're being a very strong voter because you're transmitting as much of your power as possible to your leader.
00:24:34.500You were not saying, I am the chief, you were saying, I am the Indian, you know, I support you, whatever you do.
00:24:41.340And that basically delegates much, much more support to your leadership and enables them actually to fight and win.
00:24:48.820So, 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.
00:25:00.180But, you know, the administration isn't even 10% over it.
00:27:29.960It's like, it's not, I mean, I think that, you know, Harmy Dillon obviously has a lot of energy.
00:27:43.560And staff put something like that 50%, 60%.
00:27:47.520Obviously, you know, they're there to do, you know, race communism and not to do race anti-communism.
00:27:56.960It's like that, you know, it's sort of, it's a little bit of a case of a, you know,
00:28:06.360negligible force against an insubstantial object.
00:28:09.180Because I think I've been a little bit surprised or, you know,
00:28:13.600I'm a sort of cynical person about those strategies.
00:28:20.160They are capable, however, of, like, the people that they're sort of meant to scare are, like, very easily scared.
00:28:35.460And 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.
00:28:53.940And, you know, the cowardice sort of comes out when you're basically very firm with them.
00:29:13.080And so it's actually relatively easy to get these institutions to say, oh, well, we're canceling our DAI program.
00:29:23.340You know, on the other hand, when you basically look at the, when you look at the impact of,
00:29:33.540when you, when you sort of look at the, you know, for example, California did this thing where they, of course,
00:29:43.520we passed these laws saying you can't, you know, initiatives, we have direct democracy in California,
00:29:50.160as you may know, passed these initiatives saying you can't do this.
00:29:54.840And you sort of see this interesting response.
00:29:57.620And 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.
00:30:07.700You see kind of a lot of variation between institutions, which is relatively unusual in the cathedral world,
00:30:14.140but reminds you that these are all separate institutions.
00:31:01.440And 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
00:31:15.300and basically be like, oh, yeah, you should definitely stop doing this, but won't like hit hard particularly.
00:31:22.540And 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,
00:31:33.500the rule itself is just, okay, you know, here's an excuse to basically hit people we don't like.
00:31:41.760And 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.
00:31:54.180And 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.
00:32:05.320And 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.
00:32:20.600But 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.
00:32:27.840And 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.
00:32:37.980But 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.
00:32:46.020And 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.
00:32:57.840And so I'm basically like, you know, this attempt to get things to happen is interesting.
00:33:04.580I'm not entirely sure what the results will be.
00:33:08.060It will definitely create some symbolic victories.
00:33:11.800It will like cause serious, it's already caused serious irritation and disruption to sort of many people.
00:33:20.620But it also doesn't really feel exactly like winning to me.
00:33:26.180And like when you really like, you know, it's funny because like.
00:33:32.660If 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.
00:33:55.600All 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?
00:34:10.940Well, you know, for example, is he a Christian or if he's a Christian, he's probably going to make America great again.
00:34:16.440So, 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?
00:34:28.260And clearly not, you know, that should be something you could be sued over, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
00:34:33.700So, 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.
00:34:46.160And, 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.
00:34:56.340And 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.
00:35:10.560And here we're dealing with a permanent institutional revolution, a very old revolution.
00:35:15.380Maistre, of course, was dealing with a very young revolution.
00:35:18.720And still, I would say that the counter-revolution is not revolution in the opposite direction.
00:35:40.660You 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.
00:35:52.500So let's, let's, I shouldn't expect, I mean, the Manhattan Institute is not the Tides Foundation.
00:35:58.880It's the Manhattan Institute is three guys at a 2009 Nissan, right?
00:36:02.860Well, and a guy pretending to be a lady.
00:36:12.680I 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.
00:36:26.280And they're doing the absolute best to test if that's even possible.
00:36:30.040And 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.
00:36:41.520And 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.
00:36:53.860We've seen the dismantling of things like the USAID.
00:36:59.600We've seen the kind of the half dismantling of the Department of Education.
00:37:03.460These are both different places that Sam Francis specifically mentioned.
00:37:07.180Do you think there's any success in those areas?
00:37:09.320Do you think Francis's point is possible?
00:37:10.880Do you think Trump administration is following that to some degree?
00:37:13.420I 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.
00:37:32.780It'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.
00:37:48.040And 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.
00:37:58.560And as I said to someone the other day, like, you know, certainly without any exaggeration, they did 10 times as much.
00:38:11.080I might even go 100 times as much substantively as the first Trump administration.
00:38:17.260And 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.
00:38:39.000We remember people talking about George W. Bush, you know, that way.
00:38:43.380You know, remember Bush, Bush, the chimp, Bush, chimp, Hitler, George W. Bush, right?
00:38:47.980Oh, man, I can see it close as you think.
00:38:58.780And, 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,
00:39:12.840really imagining an ant as an elephant, right?
00:39:15.940And, and today we've gotten to the point where, all right, you know, it's not an ant anymore.
00:39:22.400Now everybody's looking at a mouse and calling it an elephant.
00:39:26.280And, you know, and, and both sides still be a rock higher axe.
00:39:30.220Maybe it's actually related to the elephant, but it's actually the size of a rabbit, right?
00:39:34.840You 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.
00:39:47.740And 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.
00:39:58.980And 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.
00:40:21.280You know, you know, be careful picking it up.
00:40:24.160It might, you know, bite you, but I will not stomp you to death.
00:40:28.640And 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.
00:40:47.660And, you know, you're seeing like, I don't know, does anyone talk about new college anymore?
00:40:55.160Remember that was Rufo's last project.
00:40:57.640Right, if there was a heterodox university.
00:41:00.840Well, 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.
00:41:13.000Like, I mean, like just a real waste of a, of an accreditation, right.
00:41:17.140You 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.
00:41:30.080And 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.
00:41:39.080Right, 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.
00:41:58.200And 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.
00:42:10.120But 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.
00:42:27.540So 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.
00:42:44.020Like 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.
00:42:55.340And, and, and that would have been, that would have been epic, right?
00:42:59.360You know, you can already see in your mind how epic that is.
00:43:02.540So 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.
00:43:17.760And 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.
00:43:34.520And, and so, you know, the idea of, all right, we're going to take these laws seriously.
00:43:38.160And, 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.
00:43:46.660Like, you know, like, like they were, they're immediately going to like rectify that.
00:43:51.740And 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.
00:44:09.660The reason these things are happening is the structure of power.
00:44:12.820The law allows that structure of power to operate, but like basically, you know, race, communism,
00:44:21.740is still the official religion of the United States.
00:44:26.600And 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.
00:44:42.940But like 1960s, new left race, communism is still the fundamental ideology of the United States.
00:44:50.980And 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.
00:45:04.180And 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.
00:45:16.420I mean, if you're in East Germany, 1985, 1995, your life is totally different.
00:45:22.820And 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.
00:45:35.580The level of change here is like, no, everything needs to change.
00:47:20.440They can do sort of all of these things.
00:47:23.640But 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.
00:47:41.580Some judge will, hasn't some judge already struck it down or something like that?
00:47:44.840I mean, usually within 10 minutes, but, yeah, that's the real question is if something can force me this.
00:47:51.100And 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.
00:48:05.880It is basically a pretext for, I want to hit this thing on the head.
00:48:13.300And the thing is, actually, like, okay, there's a world where you know that any pretext will survive.
00:48:23.760Your pretext doesn't even matter because you're like, I have the power to hit this thing on the head.
00:48:28.820The 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.
00:48:44.980If we had two of you, we'd really be going somewhere.
00:48:47.280And 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.
00:49:06.240You'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.
00:49:17.260And 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,
00:49:32.480to use this thing's death wish to help it commit suicide.
00:49:37.940But instead, they're basically trying to use a screwdriver as a hammer to, like, hit it over the head.
00:49:44.640And I'm just like, yes, okay, nothing could survive being hit over the head with a sledgehammer, you know, enough.
00:50:21.680And it's just like, you know, you are driven, you are not breaking the logic of the system.
00:50:28.860You are being driven by the logic of the system.
00:50:32.140Well, 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.
00:50:46.420They didn't have a lot of the stuff that people expected when Trump ended up winning.
00:50:50.380It 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.
00:50:56.080There was always one thing or another.
00:50:57.760So much of the narrative was being driven by the Trump administration initially that it seemed like the left was pretty out of sorts.
00:51:05.000They've been complaining a lot about young men and Joe Rogan.
00:51:07.960Joe Rogan has completely destroyed their ability to get the young white men.
00:51:11.440And they've been vilifying for years to vote for them or something along that tact.
00:51:15.300And so it seems like the left is in a bit of disarray.
00:51:17.620They've talked about head faking towards Bernie Sanders and returning to economic communism, as you were pointing out.
00:51:59.420You know, there's still a lot of true believers out there.
00:52:02.300There'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.
00:52:10.980And 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.
00:52:38.360And it just simply doesn't work that way.
00:52:41.340And it gets sort of more, the passion decreases and the things you can do with the passion decrease.
00:52:51.260And because leftists are, you know, never take the leftist disarray seriously because leftists care seriously about power.
00:52:59.540So when they lose a very small fraction of it, when they get down to 99.8% power, they become very, very concerned.
00:53:07.860And 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.
00:53:15.660Right, 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.
00:53:25.360The 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.
00:53:33.640Number two, accuse them of the things that he's not doing but should be doing if he wants to win.
00:53:39.320Then he'll deny them and then he's cooked.
00:53:41.640You 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.
00:53:52.040You know, and don't like, and so actually, no, you kind of, you know, the loss of two things.
00:54:04.240One is the loss of energy is, you know, a deeper thing that predates Trump that is not caused by Trump.
00:54:13.820You know, former years of Biden would have produced just a spectacular loss of energy.
00:54:19.120Oh, my God, it would have been so good, right?
00:54:21.440You know, but four years of Biden already created a really nice loss of energy.
00:54:26.360But 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.
00:54:36.040But she has this wonderful, flighty, drunken, drunken manner, right?
00:54:40.840Which is so great to see on TV, right?
00:54:42.860You know, like that would have been, that would have been, I think, really positive for the public's fear.
00:54:47.360It didn't happen for better, for worse, right?
00:54:51.720So, so instead you have this thing where basically they're finally getting it up, back up a little bit.
00:55:00.420It's pretty hard to get it up for Kilmar, you know, something, something, you know.
00:55:05.840And you're sort of giving them as much energy as they possibly can have under this situation.
00:55:12.640But 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.
00:55:34.600They had this kind of shock and awe program.
00:55:36.840They shot a lot of people in the face as much as possible.
00:55:39.960They 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.
00:55:55.160And the result is, you know, sort of the political people in D.C. are like, all right, they actually seem to work for us.
00:56:02.220But the thing is, a lot of that came from a few weeks of shooting people in the face.
00:56:09.060And if you stop shooting people in the face, they will eventually get off the defensive and they'll get back to the offensive.
00:56:16.880And you'll see some way that DOJ will figure out to be investigating the Trump administration in, like, six months ago.
00:56:23.540You know, because, of course, you know, they didn't do any shock and awe stuff at the start of the first Trump administration.
00:56:30.060And, you know, the government immediately weaponized itself against the president.
00:56:34.540And I think that that's still something that could happen.
00:56:38.820I mean, they've barely touched the intelligence community.
00:56:41.300They'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.
00:56:57.120And, you know, this is really still a Harkonnen planner.
00:56:59.600And, 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.
00:57:15.320But 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.
00:57:23.100And that is just an utter distraction from the long-term project of regime change.
00:57:30.000Actually, 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?
00:57:40.140You know, we've got to handle the China threat, right?
00:57:50.280What do you think about the chances of mass deportations?
00:57:53.820I know that democracy is already fake and gay, but if you're letting in seven, eight million illegal immigrants,
00:57:59.000every 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.
00:58:08.420Do you think there's any chance that they'll actually be able to pull off even a couple million deportations in the Trump presidency?
00:58:15.980No, if you were serious about this, and there's some attempt to, like, use the IRS there.
00:58:22.760If you were really serious about this, look, we have a system of tax enforcement.
00:58:27.180Like, 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?
00:58:35.560You know, it's like, oh, you're illegal, but you want to work, so we'll give you a fake Social Security number, right?
00:58:42.240You 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.
00:58:55.340It'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.
00:59:09.520You 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.
00:59:28.180You know, fundamentally, we still live in a country that does not even have a list of its own citizens.
00:59:33.300Tell me how you're going to do mass deportations without a list of citizens.
00:59:37.220The government does not even know how many, we don't even have a census, we have models.
00:59:42.540This government does not know to within 10 or 20 million how many people are even in the country, right?
00:59:49.400So, yeah, I'm just like, you know, if you actually have sort of a kind of independent historical understanding of the task of statesmanship
01:00:00.760and 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?
01:00:13.460Or are they basically just grandstanding?
01:00:17.880And, you know, they certainly have shut the border reasonably efficiently.
01:00:25.820In terms of basically pissing off the, like, Chamber of Commerce slave labor lobby, you know, no, I don't see it.
01:00:35.540You know, the Department of Agriculture slave labor lobby.
01:00:39.360I mean, you know, this is a slave nation.
01:00:42.900America has always been a slave country.
01:00:45.940We have always, you know, depended on importing manual labor.
01:00:52.060The terms of that importation sort of vary across time.
01:00:56.740But this country has always had a helot class.
01:01:00.540And with occasional historical exceptions, you know, it's just we just rerouted the Middle Passage to Darien Gap, right?
01:01:09.220And 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.
01:01:31.880And 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.
01:01:47.440And like, yeah, actually, you're going to be about a third as efficient at picking strawberries as the strawberry pickers we sent home.
01:01:56.640Strawberries are going to cost 10 bucks a basket.
01:02:11.460We could obviously do this all day, but I know you've got limited time.
01:02:14.280So I want to ask you one more question before we go.
01:02:17.180Trump 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.
01:02:29.980We 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.
01:02:38.980Do you think that the foreign policy of the United States is correcting itself?
01:02:42.400Do you think they have a better vision, a better understanding of the situation and how they should be operating?
01:02:46.720Yeah, I think that, you know, good ideas or better ideas are certainly circulating in that space.
01:02:56.180But 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?
01:03:08.420Right. You know, what are those people doing? Why does that exist? Right.
01:03:13.160You know, and and if this isn't for what is it for? You know, and nobody has an answer to that question. Right.
01:03:18.940And so actually you can basically say, you know, hey, wow, we have this machine that does this.
01:03:29.640It shouldn't be doing this. Maybe it should be doing something else.
01:03:32.440Maybe I question what the machine is doing, but the machine is still there.
01:03:36.760You're not turning off the machine. You're not turning off the power to the machine.
01:03:40.180You're not turning off the fuel of the machine. You know, the machine still sort of wants to do what it's doing.
01:03:46.160And so to some extent, you can kind of sabotage these, you know, little things.
01:03:51.140And, 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,
01:04:01.260which 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.
01:04:15.820Right. We don't even care. Right. You know, it's like, you know, your your your children are fighting.
01:04:20.660You know, do you care who wins? No. Right. You know.
01:04:23.000And 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.
01:04:39.740And I think that helps, you know, people kind of have maybe come to Jesus moments about settling their own problems.
01:04:45.780But fundamentally, you still have a machine that is there whose purpose is to do this.
01:04:51.560The purpose of the State Department is to basically harmonize the world around the American political system.
01:04:57.280It's just like Soviet foreign policy. You know, they had the Brezhnev Doctrine.
01:05:01.700We 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.
01:05:09.680Similarly, we say once you go democratic, you never go back for whatever that the word democratic means.
01:05:15.780You know, cue us, you know, like, kicking the winning candidate out in Romania or whatever the fuck.
01:05:57.860And 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.
01:06:14.160Especially when you're basically saying, okay, our judo is actually kabuki judo because we want the answer.
01:06:24.180We want to have an, you know, a WWF fight.
01:06:27.900You 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.
01:06:37.760And actually, you would be behaving, you would already be behaving very, very differently if you actually cared about winning and not about fighting.
01:06:50.240It'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.
01:07:01.220Fighting is a thing that you do that is theatrical.
01:07:03.660You know, if you'd raised his hand in the air and said, win, that would have been something very, very different.
01:07:10.860Because when you're trying to win, of course, the question is not how you fight more, but how you fight less.
01:07:17.180And I still basically don't see a concept of winning.
01:07:44.180I certainly am not going to jump on a losing bandwagon.
01:07:46.620And 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.
01:08:01.580I think it is a very useful, natural experiment.
01:08:04.880It shows many things about the system.
01:08:06.880It reveals things that work and things that don't.
01:08:11.700It'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.