America 2100 Executive Director Nate Hockman joins me on the show to talk about the growing problem of left-wing NGO funding by the U.S. government, and why it's not just a problem at home, it's a global problem.
00:01:43.520We're working our way through the 12 steps.
00:01:44.940So, yeah, I guess we'll start at the beginning here.
00:01:50.540We don't have to rehash the whole thing because I talked a little bit about USAID yesterday in my piece for The Blaze.
00:01:56.720But, you know, obviously, we both know that a massive amount of what constitutes the left-wing patronage network is really the U.S. government.
00:02:08.080That the U.S. government is funding this stuff, grants all kinds of different programs through many different executive agencies and other parts of the government.
00:02:17.140This money is being funneled through all these different organizations, both abroad and at home.
00:02:21.960And that is much of what perpetuates the left-wing worldview.
00:02:25.700Yes, I think these people actually believe in a lot of this, but ultimately, they're getting paid.
00:02:30.540And when you're getting paid, your passion to spread this kind of stuff goes up through the roof.
00:02:35.500And that's why we've seen so much of it throughout America.
00:02:39.900Now, Elon Musk obviously has turned the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, on to USAID, which was the foreign aid arm of the United States government, or one of them, and was responsible for a large amount of funding throughout the globe.
00:02:57.440And much of it was propping up left-wing journalism, pushing left-wing values, you know, funding operas and comic books for transgender rights in different South American countries.
00:03:09.100We don't have to break down every bit of that, but what was your reaction to the way in which this kind of exploded into the news this week?
00:03:15.940Yeah, you know, critics of the move on both the kind of squishy right and the sort of legacy left point out that the USAID budget is only a couple percentage points max of the overall federal budget.
00:03:26.900But that's only because the overall federal budget is like the largest government budget in the history of the human race, right?
00:03:33.840Like we spend so much, such an unbelievable, almost, you know, uncountable amount of money just on entitlements that hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars a year is like a drop in the bucket relative to that.
00:03:46.020But it's still hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And what it's spent on is an extraordinarily powerful propaganda subversion, you know, political agitation empire, which touches not just the ends of Western civilization, but the entire world.
00:04:02.480Look, I'm an American nationalist. I'm an America firster. I think that the fundamental and singular purpose of American government is to serve and advance the interests of the American nation and the American people.
00:04:13.360With that being said, I do feel a common cause with people in the West. We share a civilization, we share a common heritage.
00:04:23.800And the West is the civilization that gave birth to my country, right? We are tied not just by shared sort of heritage and ancestry, but all kinds of different, you know, civilizational bonds.
00:04:35.460And also, you know, right wing nationalists in Western countries across the Western world, we do have material shared interests we should be advancing together.
00:04:45.260So all of that being said, like my government was funding the subversion, not just of my country, but of every single country effectively in the entire Western world.
00:04:55.760And as an American, you know, it outrages me first and foremost because of what it's doing to my country.
00:05:00.900But what is happening right now in a really sort of world historical revolutionary sense is for the first time in well over half a century, the yoke is being lifted off of the backs of patriots and nationalists in Western countries, pretty much in every single nation in our civilization.
00:05:18.240And it's difficult to overstate how significant that is.
00:05:22.000Yeah, you know that ultimately you're working against an overwhelming force and you think, well, that's because they must have all the talent or it's because they must have all the skill or maybe maybe they really are on the right side of history.
00:05:34.880And no, it turns out that actually there is an 800 pound gorilla on the scale.
00:05:39.220And that's, you know, like you said, oh, it's just a rounding error in the federal budget.
00:05:43.360Well, the rounding error in the federal budget is worth the GDP of several countries.
00:05:47.240So it turns out if you turn loose the GDP of several countries into propaganda, even if it doesn't add up to the totality of social security, it's still a pretty big deal.
00:05:57.340And actually, you can you can actually buy the opinions of several countries by just wielding that amount of money.
00:06:04.700And I think a lot of people were shocked that media outlets like the BBC, its media action arm had to basically shut down operations because we're their second largest contributor.
00:06:17.240You know, Politico was not able to make payroll because it turns out that like a large percentage of their subscription service is tied to the U.S. federal government's budget.
00:06:27.680But, you know, it was a lot of people probably guessed that we were, you know, paying for the queering of dolphins somewhere in Zimbabwe.
00:06:35.180But but I think they were shocked to find that even major first world media outlets were highly dependent on aid coming from a program that is theoretically out there to like ship AIDS medication to Africa or something.
00:06:48.600No, totally. I mean, the word regime is sort of overused in our circle these days, but it does illustrate how much every single left wing institution, not just in the U.S., but global left liberal institutions and those sort of local arms and appendages of them across the Western world are connected to one another.
00:07:07.020And one of the fundamental ways they're connected to each other other than these sort of transnational bureaucracies, which are themselves kind of extensions of the American government, is this gigantic, unending, perpetual tax dollar gravy train, which is just a redistribution of wealth from the American middle class to, you know, queer left wing activists in southern Germany or whatever, you know, pick your thing.
00:07:29.640So I think most of us who sort of pay attention to these things had known for a while that this was going on.
00:07:35.600We understood the sort of basic contours of the system.
00:07:38.360You can dig through USAID grants and find out like X program that we're funding, X outrageous, like transgender orchestra in like, you know, Romania or whatever.
00:07:49.340Right. Like you can kind of find that stuff. And on a case by case basis, you can point out that we're funding it and everyone gets mad for a couple of days and then they move on.
00:07:56.000But you can't fully understand the extent to which like this was an entire system that was propped up this way until all of a sudden, to your point, they cut the spigot off.
00:08:07.360And all of these major legacy dominant institutions are just like, we're broke. We have to lay off half our workforce.
00:08:12.340This was 80 percent of our budget. Like that was a thing they're talking about in Ukraine.
00:08:16.360Something like four or five out of five of the independent media outlets there were funded.
00:08:21.000Eighty percent of their budget was USAID.
00:08:22.780Yeah, that's how we do color revolutions, baby.
00:08:27.480So the, you know, the entire Ukrainian independent media was just the USAID.
00:08:33.120It was just the U.S. government, which, again, isn't totally shocking.
00:08:36.160But I even even to me, the extent and the scope of it was breathtaking.
00:08:40.660Yeah. And again, it's not like these guys were just stealing. It's not just graft, right, which would be bad enough.
00:08:48.620Like there are people who can't afford houses. There are people who can't feed their families.
00:08:52.700There are people who can't get an education, can't send their kids to a good school.
00:08:56.860And you're just taking that money from them like that. That would be evil enough if you were just stuffing it into your mattress somewhere.
00:09:03.400But it's not even that. It's yes, you're you're you're hiring leftists in these artificial jobs.
00:09:09.760But like you said, we're specifically have a mandate to do things like USAID had a specific mandate to increase L, increase LGBTQI plus rainbow ABC coalition inclusion in these countries.
00:09:24.560So we are specifically paying to to queer the children. We are specifically paying to groom the children of foreign nations.
00:09:33.420We also had different programs that were designed to encourage and pay off organizations that lobbied for restrictions on social media in relation to U.S. companies.
00:09:45.080So we were so the U.S. government was paying foreign nations to try to impose regulations on U.S.-based social media in order to encourage censorship.
00:09:54.220They were paying NGOs across the across the globe to try to put pressure in their countries on our country to censor our own companies and our own speech.
00:10:04.760Again, you know, it's bad. You know, that that that government is going to siphon off a certain amount of money, that there's going to be waste and fraud and abuse.
00:10:13.480And that's what I think most people thought of when they saw Doge at first.
00:10:16.660Like, oh, great. Another Ron Paul. Let's cut, you know, 10 percent out of the budget by looking at the waste.
00:10:22.760No, this is, you know, the real Ron Paul plan, right?
00:10:27.100Like, no, let's get let's get after it. You know, somewhere someone's screaming the Fed next, the Fed next.
00:10:31.920But you know what I'm saying? Like the fact that this wasn't just graft, it wasn't just theft, but it was active harm, active evil done in the name of the U.S. people is just horrible.
00:10:42.180Absolutely. You know, I'm most certainly not a libertarian, but something that I have come to understand and appreciate more over the last couple of years.
00:10:52.520And this is something that both like the paleo libertarians and the paleo conservatives were talking about decades ago.
00:10:57.520So it's not an original insight. If anything, it's worse now, is the extent to which all of the cultural institutions that we hate, all of the sort of subversive actors and activist groups and gigantic NGOs and advocacy lefty, you know, XYZ groups, both in the United States, in all of these respective Western nations,
00:11:17.440and on the sort of international bureaucratic stage are essentially extensions of the American federal government to one extent or another.
00:11:24.560Even if it's not a one to one where it's like the American government is directly paying their salary, they're funding some gigantic foundation, which is handing out grants.
00:11:34.600You know, you go down the line and you can find upstream the American taxpayers funding it to a substantial extent.
00:11:42.220And to your point, you know, it's not just that it's happening because it's an international system.
00:11:48.220It's not just that it's happening here and in other countries.
00:11:51.860We're funding these international bureaucracies, which are turned into weapons and then aimed right back at the American people. Right.
00:11:58.180So the American government for some time has been outsourcing the things that are so egregious that it can't quite get away with it because of sort of the the remaining sort of constitutional protections that still exist.
00:12:11.640There's still some limits on what they can do directly. So they outsource censorship to big tech.
00:12:16.180They outsource, you know, the promotion of degeneracy to, you know, all these sort of international NGOs.
00:12:21.500But it's still fundamentally the U.S. government that is at the heart of this entire system.
00:12:26.660And this is why Doge is not just the sort of kind of libertarian cost cutting efficiency and budget hawkishness project.
00:12:35.280It's actually a gigantic and again, world historical cultural victory that that is being waged and is being won.
00:12:42.340Yeah, I know that this is my my moderate and centrist position.
00:12:48.040I know I'm very squishy on this, but I think a lot of people need to go to jail for the rest of their lives.
00:12:52.920Again, I know that's like the moderate thing to say about this.
00:12:56.380But the fact that the U.S. government on both ends, like we know this for a fact now, this isn't some conspiracy theory.
00:13:02.260This isn't me donning my Alex Jones, though Alex is right as often as he is wrong.
00:13:07.020Like, you know, this isn't me donning my tinfoil hat here.
00:13:09.820We know for a fact that both ends, the U.S. government was actively pressuring corporations and hiring their employees and inserting government operatives into those corporations in order to censor people in the United States and bribing foreign entities to pressure their governments to censor United States citizens.
00:13:30.480That is a violation of the First Amendment at every level.
00:13:34.700That is a betrayal of the United States government.
00:13:37.160That is a betrayal of the United States people.
00:13:44.300These are treasonous people who specifically conspired with foreign governments and foreign entities to censor and violate the Constitution of the United States and censor the people of the United States.
00:13:56.300They should be in jail for the rest of their life because I'm a bleeding heart liberal like that.
00:14:14.380Well, and with USAID, they really shot themselves in the foot.
00:14:18.980Speaking of the moderate centrist option, this was something that Rubio was talking about in an interview where he's getting pressed by, I can't remember, some lib journalist about taking over USAID.
00:14:28.400And he said, originally, we just wanted to do an audit of what they were funding.
00:14:33.320And they refused to cooperate and then sued us, you know, because they have been used to being this totally unaccountable insulated entity for so long that does not conceive of itself and functionally does not have any democratic accountability or even any oversight from other bureaucrats, from political appointees that is completely insulated from anything that could be recognizably described as democracy or self-government or republicanism or whatever.
00:14:58.860And they've been used to winning for so long because for generations, they have had no effective oversight.
00:15:05.580And when anyone tried to do any modicum of oversight or at all, they kind of kicked into gear and defeated those efforts that they thought they could get away with it.
00:15:19.820We're going to cut, you know, 90 percent of the people who work here and the secretary of state is going to be running this bureaucracy now.
00:15:25.860So it's, you know, it's insane from top to bottom.
00:15:28.980And to your point about treason and people going to jail, it's true of censorship.
00:15:57.240That's what their day-to-day activities are directed towards.
00:16:00.260And that is the fundamental purpose of those organizations.
00:16:05.560And their budgets are largely comprised of U.S. tax dollars, primarily, though not exclusively, from the U.S. State Department.
00:16:12.180So the federal government is funding groups to undermine the laws it's supposed to be enforcing, right?
00:16:17.720You know, it's funding groups like HIAS, for example, which Mayorkas was on the board of before he served as DHS secretary, to literally run an end-to-end mass migration network where they have way stations all down through South America and Central America and humanitarian transportation vans ferrying people up to the U.S.-Mexico border.
00:16:39.880And then have an army of lawyers waiting at the border there to tell them how to subvert U.S. immigration laws.
00:16:45.960And then they've got vans waiting there and cash and envelopes, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, waiting to ferry them into the interior.
00:16:53.620So that organization gets billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars from us every single year.
00:17:00.480You know, that, if you want to talk about treason, I think that's pretty much a textbook definition of it.
00:17:04.980Yeah, absolutely. Again, that was our original discussion we were going to have, right, is you did great work finding out that, you know, Springfield, Ohio, was not the only town that had had the kind of mass immigration directed specifically by the government that we saw there that sparked so much of this immigration debate.
00:17:23.020And so, you know, that was going to be our original topic.
00:17:26.300But obviously, like you said, immigration now is just one node, one aspect of this giant network.
00:17:33.660And the importance of this network can't be overstated.
00:17:37.560Because as you and I have talked about before, and as the good old boys, you know, Bogbeef and Merrick are famous for pointing out, patronage is the lifeblood of politics.
00:17:48.420I'm going to say this over and over again. I'm going to beat the GOP to almost unconsciousness with this point until they get it, because they still have not got it at all.
00:17:59.320And it's very clear from the behavior. The left is not winning because they won the argument.
00:18:05.000The left is not winning because they have the moral superiority.
00:18:08.680The left is winning because they pay their activists.
00:18:12.960They pay their activists. One more time for the people in the back.
00:18:32.140They eventually, I think, actually believe it because it's hard for people to both act on a ideological system and profit from it and not eventually absorb some of its tenants.
00:18:42.620But ultimately, people are like, oh, how can all these leftist media outlets go woke and have no viewers, but they don't go broke?
00:19:46.280And this is something that, you know, James Burnham and then and then Sam Francis wrote about pretty extensively.
00:19:51.500It's it's structurally laced into the nature of the political system of the regime, which is to say, as you were alluding to.
00:20:00.120So. All of these ostensibly independent institutions, media, big tech, the federal bureaucracy, the academia, et cetera, the NGO industrial complex are not independent, really, in any meaningful sense of the word at all.
00:20:15.820They're the the sort of walls of separation between the two are fictional.
00:20:37.500They're reading from the same book, et cetera.
00:20:39.600And and in many cases, they know each other or they know people who know people who know each other.
00:20:44.480And that's only been even more true in the sort of digital interconnected age.
00:20:48.980So you've got these power centers, Silicon Valley, New York, D.C., et cetera, where a lot of these institutions are centered.
00:20:56.460And these institutions are not independent from one another at all.
00:21:00.300It completely makes the sort of public private distinction anachronistic that doesn't exist in any meaningful sense anymore.
00:21:07.660So you saw, you know, big tech in the Biden administration, for example, when Biden staffed up, his transition team was stacked with big tech people.
00:21:17.960And all of those big tech people were alumnus of the Obama administration.
00:21:21.160So they had gone into the Obama administration.
00:21:23.740When Trump came into power, they left and took cushy C-suite jobs out in Silicon Valley or sort of Silicon Valley adjacent NGOs.
00:21:30.540And then when their guys got back into power, they came right back into the federal bureaucracy.
00:21:34.280Guess where they went when Biden left office?
00:22:00.960But more importantly, and this is what makes this moment unique.
00:22:03.680We have people in power who understand what that power is and how to use it.
00:22:08.680This is the moment not just to burn down the old patronage networks, although that does have to be the first order of business, but to start establishing new ones.
00:22:28.960But the answer is as rapidly as possible.
00:22:31.680We're seeing the importance of just rapid action, right?
00:22:35.600Moving so quickly, you have no idea where Trump is going to go next.
00:22:40.020And you can see this, you know, the flurry of executive orders.
00:22:43.020The left was already reeling when it came to Trump's election, and they did not expect him to have the mandate.
00:22:48.520They did not expect him to kind of have the overwhelming majority that he had.
00:22:53.600They also did not expect him to come out of the gate acting as quickly as he did.
00:22:57.960And the fact that he has moved from one thing to another so quickly means the left has not had a narrative that they can grab onto.
00:23:04.800And then with this one, the USAID one, they thought that they had the big one, right?
00:23:08.720Like, we're going to show all these starving, poor people in foreign countries and, you know, the people, everyone's going to recognize what a big, mean, old billionaire Trump and Elon are.
00:23:17.600And we're going to be so angry at them.
00:23:44.280But speaking of impressive steps by the regime, the new regime, the better regime, speaking of new steps from Trump and company, the fact that there's this guy, Marco Els, and he's one, I probably said that wrong, but he's one of the staffers working with Musk on Doge, right?
00:24:07.140He's over at SpaceX, and he joined him.
00:24:10.440He got brought over to, like, be one of these guys who's auditing everything.
00:24:13.360And so I guess the Wall Street Journal, like, figured out that this guy had an Anon account, and he had said stuff that, I mean, they're like, oh, he said things like the Civil Rights Act should be abolished.
00:24:28.040But, yeah, he said something about, like, he wouldn't want to marry outside of his ethnicity, which, again, is like, okay, I think pretty sure he's allowed to decide who he wants to date.
00:24:36.840But, like, they said, you know, they brought this stuff up, and all of a sudden he resigned, right, which we know was not the case.
00:24:45.380And everyone said, hey, what are we doing here, right?
00:24:49.400Like, the response from especially the online, right, was I thought we were done with cancel culture.
00:24:54.380I thought we rejected this at the ballot box.
00:24:56.360I thought leftist cancellations, especially journalists digging around in someone's Twitter history.
00:25:02.000Like, I thought we had moved beyond that.
00:25:04.500And, you know, the fact is that if you start off the administration, if you look at the first Trump administration, right, he had a number of people he wanted to bring in who were on his side, who believed in his mission.
00:26:24.400Imagine any Republican, any Republican at all, but especially like Mike Pence doing something like that, standing up for the Anons, like standing up for the Anon posters and saying, you know what?
00:26:54.400Like this, I don't know what the status is as of now, but I've got to imagine with Elon and J.D. Vance both saying, hey, should we hire this guy back?
00:27:05.840Look, who knows what's going to happen, but the sort of momentum right now, it follows a sort of a path that we have seen many times over the last 12 months where the conversation that starts online gets endorsed by sort of heavy power players.
00:27:20.940And then, you know, the thing that people were talking about online eventually becomes a political reality.
00:27:26.920As an aside, this is what we were talking about offline before we went live.
00:27:31.300It's a self-serving narrative, but it happens to be completely true.
00:27:35.280The online right now is a major faction in the conservative movement infrastructure.
00:27:40.940Even people who hate everything about the online right and hate what they stand for, they have to admit this begrudgingly.
00:27:48.080Because the online right now is where all of these major new power players in the administration and the kind of right wing more broadly are.
00:27:57.060They're either a part of it or they're directly influenced by it.
00:28:00.020And what that means is you have something like this happen, which, to your point, during the first Trump administration or any time before that, you know, the Wall Street Journal writes this hit piece.
00:28:35.780You cannot give journalists a veto over your staffing decisions.
00:28:40.040That's what they've effectively had for my whole lifetime, much, much longer than that, probably, where essentially, if they think if they get to decide the Overton window of your administration, your enemies get to decide the ideological limits of your administration.
00:28:54.140If they just don't like somebody and they write a big hit piece and, you know, dig up something that they said online or something like that, you go, okay, yes, sir.
00:29:03.220You know, they ask, they jump, you ask how high.
00:29:05.760That, again, just structurally cannot be permitted to continue if the right actually wants to be a real political opposition force in America.
00:29:14.880And the fact that you're seeing those arguments made now by the vice president of the United States just goes to show how far we've come.
00:29:23.640Yeah, there has forever been this imbalance, right?
00:29:28.140You've had this scenario where the left basically had veto on every right-wing decision.
00:29:34.480The minute that they found anything in someone's past, anything that they might have misstepped on, missaid, even an association, they went to the wrong meeting at some point.
00:29:44.400The minute they have that, it's over for that person, right?
00:29:47.520And so if they ever say anything, if they ever do anything in office, if they rub the wrong people the wrong way, even though they're Republicans, they immediately get canceled by the left.
00:29:57.040And the right will just entirely abandon them, if not pile on to them, right?
00:30:19.300Like, somehow, like, being, you know, the David French, you know, being the strange new respect guy for the left was so important to so many people on the right.
00:30:28.560And that's because so many conservatives were just echoing a bunch of left-wing beliefs, but slower, right?
00:30:33.840And now you're at this point where the right is actually gaining some momentum.
00:31:07.060You're going to have a professor job tomorrow.
00:31:09.100But if you said you love mid-century German guys, and you shouldn't, but if you say that, you're completely employable for the rest of your life.
00:31:16.740That is just an asymmetry that is insane, right?
00:31:20.020Like, you shouldn't be doing either of these things, but the fact that the left can do them all day long, and the right can, if they just, you know, signal in a direction one time that they may agree with something someone said, and that's cancelable for the rest of their life.
00:31:34.020You just can't allow that to continue to exist.
00:31:36.660And so the fact that, you know, J.D. Vance is willing to get up there and say, no, that's not what we're doing anymore.
00:32:13.420That completely changes the game, especially for young people who are trying to get involved in this, but had to constantly be worried that somewhere online, there was some post that was going to completely destroy their lives.
00:32:24.400And now the vice president says, guess what?
00:32:33.200And one of the fundamental problems with the right dating back decades and decades when it came to this dynamic is partially it's exactly what you said, which is that you have all of these sort of legacy conservatives who are eager to prove how non-racist and how neutered they are to the left, to prove to them that essentially they're the loyal, controlled opposition.
00:32:55.260They wouldn't put it in those terms, but that is fundamentally what these people's orientation is.
00:32:59.320The other problem is that every time a left-wing hit piece on some right-wing or kind of hit the mat, conservatives who were part of sort of different internecine factions would see it as an opportunity to enact their own internecine grievances on enemy factions within the right, right?
00:33:18.840And this was especially true of the sort of hegemonic conservatives because I've been canceled multiple times, but part of what also informs my experience of this thing is like,
00:33:29.020I worked at National Review out of college, right?
00:33:31.980Which is kind of like the legacy conservative publication par excellence.
00:33:36.580And I have to say, like, one of the things that really struck me as this young conservative is still kind of figuring out ideologically what he believed was these guys hated people to their right way more than they hated people to their left.
00:33:50.320Like, they really, a lot of these people got out of bed every day, you know, and the first thought they had was like how much they hated people to their right, and they went to bed every night, and the last thought they had before they went to sleep was how much they hated people to their right.
00:34:02.060So when you have that mentality in dominating those sort of legacy conservative institutions, where you hate people to your right, with a much more bitter passion than you hate people to your left, when the left wing hit pieces comes on against someone to your right, like you're gonna, you are going to boost it, you're going to endorse it, you're going to celebrate it, because those are your real enemies.
00:34:22.320That's who you see as your real enemy, the people to your right, not the people to your left.
00:34:26.020And that dynamic has been totally inverted as well, because that sort of gatekeeping institutional function on the old right is essentially, has been completely taken out.
00:34:37.940It doesn't rule the right, it doesn't govern the right anymore.
00:34:41.100Those people themselves have been marginalized, and they've been deprived of their political power.
00:34:46.320So the result is, the people who are in power now, when they receive a hit piece from the left, everyone circles the wagons.
00:34:53.180And in some ways, I have a degree of sort of marginal survivor's guilt, because I came of age, I got canceled at least twice, probably more than that.
00:35:03.180And I came of age as a young guy, right as the right's disposition towards these things was totally fundamentally transforming.
00:35:11.080And I look back at young guys who got canceled for sort of similar transgressions, even a couple years before me, who got totally nuked from orbit.
00:35:19.580And there isn't like a grandfather clause, you know, you don't get to sort of get back when you were when you were nuked.
00:35:24.160And a lot of them ended up doing fine for themselves.
00:35:27.180But the kids coming of age now, who are going to make stupid decisions and get a hit piece, which they will, because that's what young men on the right do very well.
00:35:34.600They have a support system and a kind of instinctive circling the wagons impulse that just did not exist a decade ago.
00:35:42.640And it's going to serve them and us, the entire institutional right, very well.
00:35:46.400Yeah, and I think it's really important to focus on what you're saying there about the, you know, you have the dynamic where these established institutions like National Review, all they want to do is punch right.
00:36:20.480But on top of that, it's the young versus the old, right?
00:36:24.000As you said, the young right wing guys tend to be much more to the right, just like the young left wing activists tend to be much more to the left.
00:36:31.860And while the left, you know, entertains and elevates and incorporates those more left wing elements into their movement with their vanguard, the right actively attacks them.
00:36:41.480So they're not just attacking people to the right.
00:36:42.980They're attacking all their young activists.
00:36:44.600They're destroying all their young talent.
00:36:46.660And that's why for so long the right just had this complete dearth of young talent coming up because who wanted to be a part of this movement?
00:36:53.860Like if you're on the left, you know, you're cool.
00:37:08.740If you're a young person on the right, it's like, well, if you move to the right of Paul Ryan, you're going to get fired and be completely unhirable for the rest of your life.
00:37:21.860So this not only shifts the political dynamic, but also the age and talent dynamic.
00:37:27.420So young right wing guys who are talented, they want to get involved now because there's a future there.
00:37:33.200There's a promise of really being able to say what you believe, fight for it, and have a future.
00:37:39.740You're not just going to get completely destroyed.
00:37:41.440You're not going to just step on a landmine and explode the minute you say anything that might have made Bill Clinton uncomfortable at some point.
00:37:50.300And so I think that's a huge deal because it's a generational win for the right.
00:37:54.520It really changes the dynamic inside its institutions and just across the political map.
00:38:01.480I think the other dynamic that has infused the right with a kind of youthful vigor, even as the left becomes kind of enervated, is that for the first time, again, at least in my lifetime, like the right is the cool side.
00:38:14.320I hate the phrase conservatism is the new punk rock.
00:38:21.180But it is true to an extent that like not only is the right transgressive now, whereas the left, you know, in the 90s, the left was the sort of challenging the social order and the right was the kind of fuddy-duddy religious right moral Puritans.
00:38:34.860They happen to be right about all of those moral issues, but that was kind of the perception that you're this young person.
00:38:39.900Young people have a kind of desire to self-actualize, to challenge the existing norms and social order, et cetera.
00:38:46.820They are predisposed, especially young men, towards a kind of transgression and a not just a good society, but a good political movement channels that impulse towards productive things.
00:38:59.420The left used that impulse to basically create militant foot soldiers to challenge the existing social order.
00:39:05.820Now that the left is the social order and people who came of age in my generation as Zoomers, we came of age by the time that was already stale and cliche.
00:39:16.200I think one of the big differences between us and millennials, no offense to the base millennials who are out there, is-
00:39:23.680Some of us might be interviewing you right now.
00:39:29.540Is when millennials came of age, the sort of proto-wokeness was just taking shape and emerging.
00:39:35.180And it was kind of like the hip new thing, all the language and the new norms and everything about it was widely adopted because it was very much enmeshed in youth culture.
00:39:45.920By the time we came of age, it was already the butt of a joke, right?
00:39:49.620It was already cliche and stale and played out and cringeworthy and something that like these dorky HR bureaucrat kind of like janitors yelled at you on college campuses.
00:39:59.840So it engendered this counter-reaction and simultaneously on the right, especially the sort of young online right, there was an entire universe of not just transgressive but funny and compelling sort of communities, political communities that was available to people.
00:40:18.640So the right is funnier than the left.
00:40:21.620They have all the sort of appealing transgressive elements that make them appealing to young people.
00:40:27.020And, you know, especially on the online right, they make better arguments.
00:40:30.360Like this is the thing is the left has not had to make real political arguments for decades precisely because of the political system that we were just talking about.
00:40:36.940And they have no idea how to respond to the actual arguments being made by the young sort of ascendant right, like the young ascendant right.
00:40:45.140They're not just cool and they're not just making good arguments.
00:40:47.840There is a sort of memetic power to everything they do that is just stunning to the left, which is why the left is is fighting a rear guard action right now.
00:40:56.980Yeah, I feel like for the very first time in a long time, because the right was trained on Arrakis, you know, we can we can fight in ways that they just can't.
00:41:07.980Right. Like for the first time in a long time, we figured out the new mode of mode of communication, the new way that technology was going to work before the left did.
00:41:17.120And they were just not ready for that. They had been so dominant for so long.
00:41:20.740They had locked down everything, you know, music, movies, television, like news media, books.
00:41:27.500Like it was all theirs and they owned all in the end, every bit of the process.
00:41:32.340And they knew it, you know, at most, you know, conservatives could could knock out some Christian movie that played in like 10 theaters somewhere with an actor who hadn't worked in 20 years.
00:41:43.020Like that that was the extent of right wing media and its ability to communicate with the culture.
00:41:48.340And because for so long, what was building under the surface was well, building under the surface, the left was able to.
00:41:56.420Well, we can censor it. We can throw the algorithm at it. You know, we can we can bury it on YouTube or Twitter or whatever.
00:42:02.140And ultimately, yeah, maybe these guys kind of dunk on us whenever they get the opportunity.
00:42:07.220But we've got control of this. Right. Like we know how to manipulate the market.
00:42:11.660But because we got so good, you know, that, you know, Arrakis was made to train the faithful, baby.
00:42:16.980And like we got good at moving around this, manipulating, you know, evading the censorship, evading the algorithms, finding different ways to to assess and attack from different positions.
00:42:28.860And they just couldn't handle it. They just didn't know what to do.
00:42:31.240And the fact that that has just been bootstrapped into the administration itself is pretty surreal.
00:42:36.520But here we are. You know, it's especially in moments like this one, which, you know, only come along.
00:42:44.020It may be once every few centuries. We're very privileged to live in a moment like this.
00:42:49.760You know, most of the time people can't fully understand the character of the moment until much later.
00:42:56.680Right. Historians look back and they analyze all of these different things that led to this happening.
00:43:00.800It is remarkable how many things had to converge perfectly to be in this kind of revolutionary moment.
00:43:07.860You had to have a senile, highly unpopular president who ousted, who couped the prior president and then immediately set the country and the world on fire.
00:43:18.280You had to have him replaced with an extraordinarily unpopular vice president who in many ways embodied all of the modern pathologies of the left.
00:43:26.140You had to have censorship lifted on Twitter. You had to have this sort of decade of bubbling under the surface, like molten kind of online right beginning to take shape.
00:43:36.560And then you had to have Trump win. All of these things happening at once converged.
00:43:40.480Lifting of censorship online, Trump victory, this kind of new hip digital native online cadre with arguments and a kind of mimetic power that the left just wasn't expecting.
00:43:51.340All converged at once. And even for me, it's shocking at what that the moment we're in now.
00:43:58.020It feels like people said 2016 was the death of an old world and the birth of a new one.
00:44:03.040In many ways, it increasingly feels like 2016 to 2024 was the sort of transitional period where the old world was dying and the new world was struggling to be born.
00:44:10.820And now finally we have entered the new world. I have no idea what's going to happen, but it does feel like all of the old rules of politics are gone and and everything is possible.
00:44:21.500Well, and like we were saying, you know, this is just the beginning.
00:44:25.780You know, it's only a few weeks in USAID.
00:44:28.500While it has a budget that is noticeable, as we pointed out, you can easily buy and sell a few countries with it.
00:44:34.800It is not itself. It's only the beginning.
00:44:37.520You know, the Department of Education, the Department of Defense, like so there's so much corruption, so much graft.
00:44:43.780And most importantly, so many specifically political jobs that still need to be ferreted out.
00:44:52.100You know, the name of the episode is defunding the total state.
00:44:56.520And, you know, we've seen what the beginning of that looks like.
00:44:59.220But the conclusion of it is way more severe.
00:45:02.060Right. Like you need we already saw Marco Rubio say we're cutting the staff down to like, what, 20 people or something.
00:45:08.120Right. Like they're like they're literally I made the joke.
00:45:11.160And this this is one of the tweets that went really wide that I had, you know, when when Elon first took over Twitter and cut like 80 percent of the employees.
00:45:19.360And, you know, it still basically ran the same as like, imagine if Elon could do that with the federal government.
00:45:25.080And here we are like we are actually in that timeline.
00:45:29.740And so so to to defund the total state, as you pointed out, is not just these government agencies.
00:45:35.920It's not just, you know, the foreign aid, but it's this vast network of NGOs, of educational institutions, universities, everything else that needs to be pulled out.
00:45:50.520You can't if you you know, I said this in my piece, you know, the Machiavelli quote, you know, if you're going to do an injury to your enemy, make sure it's so severe that you do not have to worry about reprisal.
00:46:00.860So that's got to happen here. If you just wound these agencies, then they will come back and destroy you.
00:46:07.140Right. Like they've got to be inoperable by the time you are done.
00:46:11.400If you don't do that, if you if you do half a revolution, you'll be digging your own grave.
00:46:15.980Right. And that that that's what the right needs to grasp.
00:46:18.360Now, they have struck at the core of the enemy.
00:46:21.220They're not just, oh, we're going to adjust the budget a little bit, might get another one of those, you know, vetoes.
00:46:29.780But no, we are talking about, you know, there's a reason the left is just absolutely losing their mind right now, because they know you are really attacking the base of their power.
00:46:39.440And you can't do that and then just walk away.
00:46:42.100You either finish it off or it will finish you off.
00:46:44.480Yeah, I was thinking about the Elon example this morning, actually, because it is a perfect example.
00:46:49.600He cut something like 80 percent of Twitter's workforce at the time, Twitter.
00:46:55.540And rather than collapsing, there were marginal technical difficulties.
00:47:01.260Right. Like that was the effect of cutting 80 percent of the employees is that there were glitches.
00:47:06.520It went down every once in a while and it was up within a few hours.
00:47:09.960You know, there were like minor display problems like that's what cutting 80 percent of the workforce did to Twitter.
00:47:16.460What people have to understand, and this is where the right sort of storytelling power really needs to kick into gear.
00:47:23.560And we have plenty of material, but we have to like puncture through kind of legacy media narratives is all of these institutions are fake.
00:47:30.740I mean, they're very real in terms of the political power they exercise.
00:47:35.200But in terms of their actual function relative to their sort of the stated story they tell about themselves, the story they tell about what they do, totally unrelated.
00:47:44.920They they do very little of what they claim to do.
00:47:47.700And their actual function is political activism, subversion, supporting this gigantic lefty activist NGO industrial complex.
00:47:55.320You know, I've got dear liberal family members who I love very dearly, but, you know, are politically wrong about everything and read The New York Times and think it's true, who there's a full court press happening in legacy media outlets like The New York Times right now to portray the poor plight of the federal bureaucrats as this like new agree victim class.
00:48:14.280And there's all these hilarious. I'm surprised it hasn't caught on a right wing Twitter more.
00:48:18.160There's all these hilarious stories of these like dramatic photos of federal bureaucrats posing outside their walk up in Capitol Hill.
00:48:24.820And they had to move it to move neighborhoods because because because they got, you know, their their cushy hundred and fifty K dollars a year salary cut a little bit or something.
00:48:34.320You know, what people what the American people have to understand, because you do as regardless of how much you think any of this is related to the Democratic will, like you do need a degree of sort of of political support to continue carrying this out, because politicians do care about their poll numbers.
00:48:53.760They care about getting reelected and they do get skittish if you do something that's super, super unpopular.
00:48:58.320What has to be communicated to Americans is that all of these institutions are fake.
00:49:04.080They're not doing the things that they're telling you that they're doing.
00:49:07.060They're not doing the things the media is telling you that they're doing.
00:49:09.920And just like in Twitter, like 80 percent of the workforce is not necessary for the functions that people think they perform at Twitter.
00:49:17.800Right. When you want Twitter to work, cutting 80 percent of the workforce isn't going to deprive you of that.
00:49:23.560Right. Those people are, again, basically this gigantic bureaucratic system of lefty sinecures.
00:49:29.480As we go, I think you'll see more and more and more of that.
00:49:33.200And you'll see exposed just how fake so many of these jobs are.
00:49:36.780But the right needs to continue hammering that because that's how you maintain political support for this stuff.
00:49:41.120Yeah. The third level of diversity consultant, they're not going to prevent the government from shooting a bad guy or turning on the power if they get fired.
00:49:52.980Like it doesn't matter. They can just be fired. And the only thing that happens is the government gets more efficient.
00:49:57.680That's actually all that happens. But yeah, so we've got a stack of super chats here that we should probably get to.
00:50:03.860But before we do, Nate, where can people find your great work?
00:50:07.700They can follow me on X at NJHochman, N-J-H-O-C-H-M-A-N. I post all my stuff there.
00:50:15.760Excellent. Make sure that you are, of course, checking out Nate's work.
00:50:19.940Jonathan Dinan says 1400 USAID employees, 200 will remain, says Marco Anthony Rubio.
00:50:29.460So rage is being implemented. This is Bloom. This is World. We simply live in it.
00:50:36.780Yeah, it is pretty wild that like they actually did do a version of rage.
00:50:41.960And I think it was something like like 40 or 50,000 government employees took it.
00:50:49.140So like just right there, like off the bat, you know, Trump was able to fire 40 or 50,000 government employees by just being like,
00:50:56.160yeah, here's your severance pay for a few months. Get out of here. Like it's just just a beautiful thing.
00:51:02.920Matt Grader says, do we know yet whether all the money that's going to Politico was in innocently for Politico Pro subscriptions?
00:51:13.940I have a hard time believing it costs nine million for a few dozen Politico subscriptions.
00:51:18.500Yeah. So again, I think Politico has put out a statement on this.
00:51:21.800The blaze actually has a article digging into this because, you know, the left is like, oh, this is a conspiracy theory.
00:51:28.100It's a conspiracy theory that, you know, that the U.S. government is funding Politico.
00:51:32.440Well, it turns out actually they're buying a large amount of these subscriptions.
00:51:35.700So, yeah, not all of the eight or nine million or whatever came from USAID.
00:51:40.400But it was true that a large amount of the Politico's income, like no small amount,
00:51:46.060was coming off of U.S. taxpayer funded subscriptions to their service.
00:51:52.140And so I don't know if ultimately you want to say that each one of those was like overpriced or if there was some kind of deal.
00:52:00.060Like it's very clear that the federal government and I think the blaze article said like in totality,
00:52:06.140like almost 30 million dollars going to Politico through this.
00:52:09.500I kind of doubt that it was all just because the quality Politico reporting is just so high that it was government could not do their job without sending them 30 million dollars.
00:52:19.480So, yeah, I feel pretty confident saying that this was a quid pro quo and wasn't just them collecting their benign subscriptions to this very critical political magazine.
00:52:29.040The other thing really quick is that and this is where government funding and spending is directly connected to political power is by cutting off Politico.
00:52:37.480You are fundamentally depriving them of the political power they had.
00:52:41.020Right. When you're funding Politico subscriptions, you're funding a set number of subscriptions from a set number of outlets for all government employees.
00:52:48.060That's a legitimating function. It's saying like these are the sort of formal magazines that if you work in the government,
00:52:54.200like these are the ones you should be reading. These are what people who work in the government read,
00:52:57.540which gives journalists at places like Politico a direct line to the most powerful institution in the history of human politics.
00:53:04.780When you deprive them of that, you're depriving them of their legitimacy, not just the money.
00:53:08.900What if you turn that around and said, let's just buy a bunch of Frontier magazine subscriptions.
00:53:13.880Everybody gets a subscription to the blaze. Now that's what the White House staffers are watching.
00:53:18.880That's what all the federal government employees are watching instead of Politico.
00:53:22.500What does that do? How does that change the dynamic? You're exactly right.
00:53:25.820It's not just the money. It's legitimization. It's the fact that this is where the news comes from.
00:53:30.800The government says this is what I should be reading. It's what they pay for.
00:53:33.460So this is where my information comes from. And these are the people I'm going to give access to.
00:53:37.040That's as important as the funds themselves flowing in.
00:53:40.100We need to be funding right wing sub stacks. Those are going to be the new Politico.
00:53:43.560That's right. That's right. I want all my friends sub stacks blown up by Doge.
00:53:47.740I want to see it. Will McDuffie here with just a super chat. Thank you very much for your support, sir.
00:53:53.760Really appreciate it. Florida Henry says, can we get Doge on the local level?
00:53:57.880Police and fire is a minimum 30 percent waste.
00:54:01.140Yeah. I mean, obviously there hopefully there's a snowball effect from this.
00:54:05.720Right. You see what happens, the reform that happens at the top.
00:54:08.440And all of a sudden governors start saying, hey, why aren't we doing this with our states?
00:54:12.500Local and municipalities are saying, hey, why aren't we doing this?
00:54:15.620Why don't we have a Doge? Why isn't there someone like this for our our governments keeping them accountable?
00:54:21.180So hopefully you do get that right there. There is a snowball effect.
00:54:27.320Jonathan Dinan says, did you see the Wall Street Journal Journal that got the Doge employee fired?
00:54:33.280Who is being rehired? Thanks to Elon, Vance and Trump was a USA employee.
00:54:38.280Yes, I meant to bring that up. I say that the Wall Street Journal has their access to the White House strip.
00:54:43.800Yeah. So apparently this journalist, I didn't want to I wasn't sure because I have I still want to verify.
00:54:49.120But I was seeing tweets going around that she was she at one point was a USA employee that she was also had been in Vox and these other leftist outlets as well.
00:54:57.720So, yeah, this is this is a leftist journalist who may or may not have been directly employed by the very agency that she is trying to defend by doxing this guy.
00:55:08.480And like I said, yeah, it's so important that Vance stood up and said, we do not give these people a win.
00:55:14.040They do not get a scalp like that is so critical.
00:55:16.620And I cannot be happier that that was actually the response.
00:55:19.360I will say just really quickly to the last question about police and firemen, I'm all for cutting waste, but police and firemen are basically the only appendage of the patronage system.
00:55:29.440That's like a right wing patronage system.
00:55:48.400Which, yes, we are all throwing the Bane meme back at them now.
00:55:53.780Michael Robertson says, J.D. Vance explicitly and directly supported the return of the racist Doge employee.
00:55:59.600This should end any and all debate about whether J.D. is our guy.
00:56:03.220Yeah, I think it's really that simple.
00:56:05.460I have been a J.D. Vance fan for a while, not just because he's followed me for a very long time, but also because I think that he is an excellent heir for Trump.
00:56:18.000Like, I think that handing the movement off to him would be incredibly important.
00:56:21.720Some people have told me, oh, well, he's a creature of Peter Thiel or he's owned by whatever.
01:04:36.200To be clear, a moment of victory doesn't address the structural problem of leftism.
01:04:44.120That doesn't mean that you should say, oh, well, the right can never win.
01:04:47.960That was never the point of saying Cthulhu always swims left.
01:04:50.640The point was to explain why there's a structural drift to the left when it comes to especially power and intellectual spaces and large bureaucratic organizations.
01:05:01.220And so that that saying never meant that the right can't win and you shouldn't try to win.
01:05:06.480That's the misunderstanding of that phrase.
01:05:09.100It was talking about the way in which the left kind of seeks to operate on a principle of entropy.
01:05:15.140And so, you know, understanding that theory is important and I think it's still true, but don't, don't meme-ify that into the idea that like, oh, well, the right can't win.
01:05:24.820So if the right does win, the theory is wrong.
01:06:01.760I know we're using populist energy here, but the first rule of elite theory is don't, don't ever think that the populist cannot be led to believe something.
01:06:10.140If the left snaps back and recovers all the institutional power and starts pushing all its propaganda again, they can forget all of this.
01:06:39.960The right will be fighting rear guard actions on certain things.
01:06:43.520The left will have cultural victories.
01:06:45.400These are still extraordinarily powerful institutions and actors that we're up against, and their power is not going to go away overnight, right?
01:06:52.880Like they still, it takes a generation to undo the kind of entrenched power that we're talking about.
01:06:58.100So people shouldn't assume that because we're winning now, we're going to keep winning forever.
01:07:02.360We are going to lose battles, but if we keep pressing at this pace, I think, you know, we will win the war.
01:07:08.240Yeah, don't let the it's over, we're back cycle kind of destroy your psyche.
01:07:12.560Remember that this is a long battle, and it's great to win now, and you need to continue to win.
01:07:16.960You need to have the passion to continue.
01:07:18.840But that doesn't mean, like you said, there won't be setbacks, there won't be moments of loss, and it doesn't mean you don't need to continue to keep up the work that you've won the victory, and now you can just go grill or whatever.
01:07:29.040All of these things need to be remembered as we move forward.
01:07:31.920All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.
01:07:33.620As always, it's great talking to Nate.
01:07:35.160Make sure that you're following his work.
01:07:36.920And if it's your first time on this channel, you need to go ahead and subscribe on YouTube, click the bell, notification, all that jazz.
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