Kevin Dolan joins me to talk about Joe Biden's State of the Union, and why he thinks we should all be worried about what's happening in America right now. (1:00) Why is Joe Biden so dangerous? (2:30) Why does he think we should be worried? (3:20) What does it mean that we need to go through an entire reconstruction or denazification process in order to crush our enemies?
00:00:33.180I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:37.680So, a lot of people noticed during Biden's State of the Union that, well, he kind of made it through.
00:00:43.740He managed not to pass out or fall down or completely blank for the most part.
00:00:48.240Though he did have that cough that sounded like he should be in some kind of tuberculosis camp.
00:00:53.200However, the big moment everyone took away from that was probably the Lake and Riley moment
00:00:58.720moment where he forgot the name and everything.
00:01:01.780And that was kind of the story coming out of it.
00:01:04.540But I think another big point that people didn't pay as much attention to is that Biden actually declared war a couple times during that discussion.
00:01:14.080Not enough people actually, I think, picked up that point.
00:01:17.800But one of my favorite commentators did.
00:01:43.420Well, yeah, I mean, he was a little subterranean about it, but he was essentially declaring war on his domestic political opponents.
00:01:54.240And he was likening our current moment to both 1861 and 1941.
00:02:02.820And the implicit message of both of those things is that war is inevitable and appeasement is impossible and morally wrongheaded.
00:02:18.020And therefore, like all you can do with your enemies, if you're sort of placing yourself as the protagonist of 1861 or 1945, is to crush them, destroy them.
00:02:30.120And, you know, that's – at the same time, he's arguing that political violence has no place in American politics, which I took that to mean essentially that we're going to extirpate and immiserate these people by legal procedural means.
00:02:53.660And we would very much like it if they went along with that as quietly and orderly as possible.
00:03:01.940Yeah, it really did seem strange that more people didn't grasp the language there.
00:03:07.140When you invoke, as you said, 1861 and the 1940s, it's very clear you're talking about the need to go through an entire reconstruction or denazification process, right?
00:03:20.700That's the illusion. That's the kind of power you're saying you need in both of those situations.
00:03:25.840I need to be able to not only defeat my enemy, but it's important that I go through and be able to completely purge them, change their way of life, alter them in a very substantial way so that we can once again rule over them in their entirety.
00:03:40.600And I think that a lot of people just kind of blew past that rhetoric as if it's not important.
00:03:45.860In the piece you wrote, you explain a couple of different ways that you think that's going to happen or is already happening.
00:03:51.600And you also explain some ways that people might protect against that.
00:03:54.860So I want to dive into all that, guys.
00:03:56.800But before we do, let me tell you really quickly about ISI.
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00:05:25.040So, at the beginning of this piece, you kind of predicate a lot of what you say in this piece upon the fact that you think the United States is kind of facing a pretty impending financial collapse.
00:05:37.540Because last week, we had a bunch of conservative commentators be like, you know, Social Security, that's the end of the Republic.
00:05:46.180That's the thing that's going to take it down.
00:05:48.040Obviously, Social Security is essentially a Ponzi scheme.
00:05:51.160It will collapse your financial system eventually, just due to the math involved, especially if you're not having children, which is something else you talk a lot about we might get into.
00:05:59.940But you identify some other problems, that this might be a little closer than just the Social Security fund going bankrupt.
00:06:09.380Why do you think America is in the position where it's got an impending financial collapse?
00:06:13.800Well, essentially, all of the methods of expropriating and redistributing wealth that are dilutive, like inflation, like mass migration,
00:06:32.840and basically ways of sort of reducing the individual citizen's stake in the country or their stake in their own wealth.
00:06:41.760Those methods are, they've been exhausted, essentially.
00:06:47.520And so what you're looking at is we've got a deficit that there's nothing, there's no real political will to arrest that deficit or even the growth of that deficit.
00:06:58.880And if you do the math, the national debt will equal the total market cap of all U.S. stocks by 2035.
00:07:13.400And so it's like, they're going, and Balaji Srinivasan put this in a really interesting way.
00:07:19.340And he said, they're burning $10 billion a day, which means that the U.S. government is eating the value of a billion-dollar tech unicorn every couple hours,
00:07:31.260which is like, and I think that's for his audience, which is composed of guys who like know how hard it is to make a billion dollars.
00:07:41.900It's like, I don't know how many of your listeners are familiar with Warhammer, but the god emperor on his throne commanding the sacrifice of 10,000 every day to sustain his unnatural life.
00:07:57.260And so, yeah, basically, they're not able to use the sort of monetary policy and the shell games to fleece people anymore.
00:08:14.600And the spending, there was nothing to arrest the spending.
00:08:17.240And now it's reaching a point where in order to maintain the loyalty of their clients, which is, I mean, it's, you know, maybe partly ideological, but it's overwhelmingly just a matter of interest, right?
00:08:31.380It's like, who's going to give me the free cheese?
00:08:37.180And to maintain the loyalty of those clients, they're going to have to go get some real assets, which means they're going to have to take them.
00:08:45.240And I enumerated a couple of ways that might happen, which credit topology on that as well.
00:08:55.600He's talked a lot about sort of the ways that wealth is being expropriated.
00:09:00.360So I can't, I can't take credit for the whole, for sort of what I put forward there, but it's selective seizures in civil and criminal cases, like you saw with Elon or with Trump or with Alex Jones.
00:09:17.040It's selective targeting for like IRS audits.
00:09:23.800It's, it's even things like from, from like an anarcho tyranny perspective, it's things like allowing your sort of client class to squat in other people's property and refuse to evict them, which is, it's a de facto transfer of that asset.
00:09:43.500Um, which is, it's, it's sort of a, maybe not effortless, but like very low effort way to take something from somebody you don't like and give it to somebody who's in your pocket.
00:09:56.600So it's things like that, that I think are coming down the pike and that are already sort of, uh, uh, emerging on the fringes.
00:10:04.380Yeah. I want to talk about that transition real quick, because I, you know, we're big believers on elite theory on this podcast.
00:10:12.320Everyone here who's, who's been listening for a while is familiar with the notion that elites are the ones that run society for the most part.
00:10:20.260They're the ones that are going to influence your decisions or culture, these things.
00:10:22.840And so in a, in a very political realist set of terms, the, the government really is, this is the one thing the libertarians are, my buddy Charlewayne said this, I'm just going to steal it out.
00:10:33.720Right. The one thing libertarians are right about is that the government really is just a gang that's here to steal your money.
00:10:39.520What they don't understand is you want to be the gang. Um, but, but there, there is this transition between, uh, you know, we, we have these, like you said, those dilutive mess methods.
00:10:52.080We understand that at some level, the government is always taking money from the populace and redistributing it to their clients.
00:10:59.440That's always going on at some level, but there are levels of that, that are, that are long-term sustainable at some level, actually even healthy for the nation.
00:11:09.520And that actually grows its stability and, and its ability to reliably create complex systems and these kinds of things.
00:11:17.220And what we're seeing now, which is really just the, the, the copper being stripped out of the walls at this point.
00:11:22.720And so I want to talk about that transition because what are the big shifts, the big things we see when the government goes away from just its normal job of kind of taking your money and giving it to its friends and full out saying, oh no, we're just,
00:11:39.400we're going to go through these wild methods of, you know, we're, we're not even doing this through a complex systems of bureaucratic manipulation.
00:11:46.200We're just literally going to let someone squat in your home and make sure you don't do anything about it.
00:11:51.100Yeah. And I think when I hear libertarians talk about the role that the state performs, I think there's a very direct analogy to be drawn to the way that communists talk about management.
00:12:07.980They, they, they, they view it as like completely parasitic, like it's not a service that's being provided.
00:12:13.940And I actually disagree. I think governance is a service.
00:12:16.660I think that, uh, that, that, that providing a, uh, a bubble of stability and security, uh, and, and, and maintaining a predictable and reasonable level of, uh, you know, the, the fact that the fact that the government gets to decide what you're, uh, what they're going to charge you, uh, for that service is, is, is, you know, that, that sort of complicates the analogy a little bit.
00:12:43.120But, um, it's, it's, it's, it's one of these services that has to be provided as a monopoly.
00:12:48.780And so it's just sort of, that's, that's the nature of the beast, but, but these, these, these institutions, uh, exist everywhere and they, it's sort of a necessary, uh, component of the ecosystem and, and what you are seeing now.
00:13:02.460And I think, I think ultimately government, uh, is it's most functional when the people in charge of it feel a sense of kinship and a sense of stake in the body politic as a whole.
00:13:14.440And, and, and, and one of, uh, you know, one, one of the things that Yarvin has said on that subject is that like with his formulation of like hereditary monarchy, it's like, uh, this, uh, this, this family has this long run investment in the state, because in a sense, in a sense they own the state.
00:13:35.400And so they are incentivized to, uh, to, to, to invest in its long-term flourishing and, uh, and, and also they, they feel like a, a personal, uh, stake in its beauty.
00:13:49.620It's not, it's not a commons, whereas in a, in a democracy where the pendulum swings every four or eight years, uh, it, it absolutely is a commons.
00:13:59.780And anything you don't eat is going to be eaten by your enemies as soon as they're in power.
00:14:06.240Um, and so there's this inevitable gravity towards short-term thinking and toward being, uh, rapacious and, uh, I mean, frankly, just kleptocratic.
00:14:20.300And, uh, and, and so even, you know, even, uh, conservatives when there are, you know, whatever you want to, however useful you think that term is, uh, conservatives.
00:14:30.520Will take power and, you know, they'll, they'll, they'll bark about the deficit until they're in charge and they'll do nothing about it.
00:14:35.200And it's just a deficit will go to defense spending instead of to welfare spending.
00:14:39.860And, and there's a, you know, you can, you can, uh, accuse people of moral turpitude over that.
00:14:47.440But when absolutely everybody is doing the same thing over the course of generations, I tend to think, ah, there's something systemic here.
00:14:54.840There's something that's, there's, there's, there's an incentive gradient that is driving people toward this and sort of fulminating about how, like how they're such bad people and they're such crooks.
00:15:05.460Uh, it's, it's the actual structure, uh, of, of our system of government that's causing this problem.
00:15:11.160Um, and we're, yeah, we're basically at the point where, uh, those contradictions are beginning to come to a head.
00:15:19.140And, uh, you can see that in the stakes for this presidential election where both sides have, I think, a reasonable expectation that if they don't win this election, they will be at minimum, uh, shut out of the, shut out of the systems of power.
00:15:44.160And shut out of their, their sort of personal career, uh, for a long time, if, if they don't actually go to prison.
00:15:52.180And so their incentive is to do literally whatever it takes to either get in power or stay in power.
00:16:00.140Uh, and I, I've pointed this out several times, but like many of the people running the, these sort of, uh, the blob these days are literally the same people who ran like the Clinton admin in the nineties.
00:16:18.160Uh, you know, they, they may have still sort of been the same kind of people, but they weren't acting like this.
00:16:23.200And I think it's, it's, it's, it's this, this accelerating process of, uh, of the stakes being raised on them and on the system as it kind of comes to a head, comes to a crisis.
00:16:37.260It feels like you said a lot, a lot of people would look at the Clinton era and say, okay, maybe some things were out of whack.
00:16:44.380Maybe there are some signs that eventually we would end up in the worst scenario, but it didn't feel like people were, you know, like preparing to eat each other.
00:16:52.340You know, in the sense that you're, you're talking about and part of that is the ideological acceleration.
00:16:59.280It feels like it's become more and more important to signal your complete distinction from, uh, the deplorables, right.
00:17:08.160In every way, it doesn't matter what Donald Trump says.
00:17:11.820It doesn't matter what someone on the right says.
00:17:13.940The key thing for you is to be on the opposite side of it, no matter how radical it is.
00:17:18.420It doesn't matter if you're shoving puberty blockers down the throat of an eight year old.
00:17:21.300Like that, that's not what the people in the red States do.