Dismantling Woke Patronage ｜ Guest： Inez Feltscher Stepman ｜ 1⧸4⧸23
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 35 minutes
Words per Minute
181.63757
Summary
Inez Stetman is a podcaster, policy analyst, and writer. In this episode, we discuss Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and the implications for free speech in the tech industry. She also discusses the role of the political class in shaping the ideas and ideas that we need to have in order to have a free society.
Transcript
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We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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Now, Inez Stetman is someone who I have interacted with on Twitter a bunch,
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but I had never got completely into some of her work.
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And then I saw an article that she put out here in the recent week, which I thought was
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Took a very good tack on kind of what's happening with Elon Musk and Twitter and all that that's
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So I wanted to invite her on and kind of have a conversation, maybe learn a little more about
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She's the host of the High Noon podcast, and she's also a policy analyst.
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So the article that you had here was on Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter.
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And a lot of people have focused on the free speech aspect of this, which I think is pretty
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I mean, that was Elon's kind of stated goal, or at least one of his major stated goals.
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Everyone makes the joke about the Babylon Bee getting banned and that kind of being the
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But the thing that you focused a lot on was not so much the battle for free speech, though
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I think we'll talk about kind of how these things are connected.
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But you focused on kind of how Elon is getting the bureaucracy over at Twitter and kind of challenging
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the preconceptions of many in the tech industry of kind of the support structure you need
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Yeah, I think the roots of this are really sort of James Burnham style analysis that now
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seems so prophetic to so many of us looking around at how economic, both economic and political
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And so really, fundamentally, I think this is a more substantive challenge in some way
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to the professional managerial class and therefore the ideas that they're able to effectuate
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both through public policy and through private economic power, right?
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So I think that the free speech, we can get into this, the free speech parameters are set
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And we've always had parameters around what was acceptable, considered acceptable free
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It was never actually good for your career in America to tattoo a swastika on your forehead
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and then try to go work at, you know, Dollar General, right?
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And I think Michael Knowles has done a good job laying out why there always have been some
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parameters around free speech, even if in America, we have very strong legal protections
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against government interference into free speech.
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So I think these things are all related because the problem is this political class and this
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particular sort of professional class that has very, very similar ideas.
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They're coming out of the same university system that both reinforces and sometimes introduces
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those ideas and makes them sort of homogenized.
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And the real question, I think, for Elon Musk is not a political radical, right?
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I'm under no sort of illusion that Elon Musk is our champion of the right, the right-wing
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And what he is is looking for value from his employees.
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And I think what he's starting to prove with Twitter is something more dangerous than allowing
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Kanye West back on to tweet a Schwarzenegger or whatever it is, right?
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I think what he's proving is that a lot of these people who are making very, very good
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money, essentially enforcing political diktat, their jobs are ideologically justified.
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I can take a third of the company who are actually the ones who are producing the value,
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the enormous value that these American tech companies are producing, maybe is coming from
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a small sector within that, mostly, you know, male, mostly white and Asian, right?
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And maybe we don't need this entire class of people who are credentialed through the University
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of Pennsylvania, like Yul Roth or, you know, through Harvard or through Yale, but don't
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actually add a lot of substance to the bottom line.
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Because in the end of the day, there isn't a lot of, I think what I wrote in my piece
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was, you know, this kind of ideological policing doesn't add to the wealth of nations at the
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And it's all kind of this house of cards of BS.
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And I think calling a lot of, like, essentially calling out a lot of the fact that this quote
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unquote value that is making a lot of people real billions, right, isn't actually resting
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So I think that that might be very, very important.
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That example might be very, very important, especially as we do go in potentially to a
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recession and a contraction of the tech sector.
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Because as you started to say at the beginning there, I think, you know, I'm not the free
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But I'm not the person who's the free speech absolutist.
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I think the idea that, yeah, there have always been boundaries.
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There will always be cultural norms about what you can say and what you can approach.
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But the ones that are being imposed right now are rather artificial and come from, like
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you said, that ideology that's very harmful and produces a lot of baggage.
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I really like the phrase you used, the Homer Simpson job, right?
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Their job doesn't, you know, as you say in the piece, there's a lot of scaffolding.
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A lot of our economy is warped around, you know, producing make-work jobs for these people,
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even though they're not adding anything significant.
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And this creates the elevation of guys like Yul Roth, who otherwise wouldn't have any particular
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value in an economy, has done some work that, you know, most people would pay almost no attention
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to, but is instead granted the ability to censor the president of the United States,
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Well, that's an insane amount of power given to someone who otherwise probably wouldn't
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And that's a very powerful tool of, like, you know, political patronage.
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That's something that will pretty much guarantee someone is on your side forever.
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If you can kind of invert the hierarchy and put people like that at the top and make sure
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that they have power over, like, a president of the United States, those people are going
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I mean, I really think Yul Roth is just this sort of quintessential example of someone
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of this type who's been very, very successful, right?
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So most of these people are not as successful as Yul Roth.
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They don't have as high positions in the company.
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They truly are this professional class, which, by the way, Daryl E. Paul, I think, writes
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And he's pointed out that the margin for, quote unquote, socialism on the left has shrunk,
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But what defines the rich is essentially moving with the boundaries of the professional class,
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So now if you have two income households, both making, let's say, $200,000, you end up with
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But the professional class is very, very good at protecting itself from the kind of broad
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base taxation, say, in Sweden, for example, right?
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Where not only the middle class, but the professional class as well is all heavily taxed for the welfare
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But I do think that's just like an interesting thing to point out that this really is the
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base of the Democratic Party now is this professional class.
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But yeah, I mean, I think that Yul Roth is just this perfect example.
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We just assume that people like Yul Roth are worth their very, very large paychecks because
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At this point, they're purely ideological, right?
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I quote in my piece extensively from his LinkedIn account, right?
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There's nothing on his resume that doesn't have to do exactly with these ideological concerns.
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And of course, they're very narcissistic and self-referential, right?
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He did his dissertation basically on his own sex life on Grindr, right?
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Like from the actual capital perspective, from that like CEO C-suite perspective,
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basically what they've been told is you have to hire a lot of these people and give them
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great perks and great salaries because they came out of the right universities and because
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of these sort of nebulous, sort of platitudinal level justifications, right?
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So it's like, if you don't hire these people, then your employees will not be productive because
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And there are therapeutic justifications as well, right?
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Um, you, you won't, if you don't have enough diversity on your staff, then, um, you know,
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Your ideas are going to suffer because you won't have the different perspectives.
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And I think what Elon Musk is doing is essentially saying that might not be true, right?
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And in fact, you might have a very fat payroll of people making six figures, not like small
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Maybe not Yule Rock level, level salaries, but six figure salaries, very nice living,
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um, and an enormous amount of power to impose their views on, on the rest of the country,
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um, that is, is given to them by that economic might that is really created by a small group
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of people within the company, most of whom are uninterested in this kind of stuff.
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Um, so I do think this is, this is perhaps if he can pull this off and I think they're going
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to try everything to make sure he doesn't, um, if he can pull this off, it may not be
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the free speech functions that are the most important.
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It may just be that example, sitting over there to other CEOs saying, you know what?
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You don't have to be held hostage by these people.
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You don't have to be held hostage by your professional employees, right?
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Cause at the end of the day, only a small percentage of them are actually doing much.
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And it would be really great to see the, uh, the free market pick up a W like that
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cause it's taken quite a lot of L's here recently.
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So it'd be great if we'd actually saw a free market force, uh, work in that way.
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But I do think you're right that it, it does having this stuff stripped away and still having
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everything operate fine and actually become more profitable.
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If, even if it doesn't force other CEOs to change their behavior, it truly lays bare kind
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of the ideological, uh, structure of the regime, right?
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Like we look at these people, well, actually let me ask you this.
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Cause I don't know how familiar you are with James Burnham, but, uh, you, you did cite
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Um, so if the managerial class is supposed to gain its, uh, it's indispensability by its
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Like that's where, that's why bourgeoisie hand over the reins of power to the managerial
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class, because they can operate massified structures in a way that the, you know, the
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But it's really interesting that these, that wokeness becomes kind of its own cottage industry,
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its own sub function of managerial status, where at least before the managerial elite were
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in theory operating a bureaucracy that did produce benefits, right?
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Like you were actually able to streamline production and deliver products and these kinds of things.
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But now the managerial subset has created not a product at all.
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And so it's interesting that you, you only, it's almost like the managerial elite transitioned
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over to a Leninist aspect where you're just placing commissars inside your corporation to
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make sure you have compliance, like you would IRS tax compliance.
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They're not actually operating the functions of the bureaucracy, the way that the managerial
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elite are actually supposed to do in order to gain their status and power.
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Um, there are economists, and as Byrne pointed out, right?
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There's a reason that we transferred away from, um, a kind of wildless capitalism more towards
00:14:08.840
And that's because it was offering real benefits, right?
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It, there was a lot of, of, uh, problems with it as well, but there was at the end of the
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Um, and that's, I think we're, we are at a tipping point in that regard where this, this
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managerial class, um, has essentially dealt themselves a huge amount of power in terms
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of public policy, a huge amount of influence in terms of cultural direction of the country.
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There's very much contrary to what the average or average citizen, like voting citizen things.
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Um, and at the end of the day, it's very much no longer clear that they are actually even
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producing anything at the end, except for that compliance.
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And, and so I think this is an interesting tipping point.
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We're going to see either we're going to tip over into just the absolute exercise of power.
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Um, where they no longer have to justify the exercise of that ideological power, um, through
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Cause right now, I think ESG is a really good example.
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Actually, um, ESG, they have to have right now in, in financially, right.
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Um, and legally, they have to have this economic explanation for why it doesn't hurt.
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Why it's actually better to invest in ESG funds.
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In fact, it might be better for your bottom line.
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And they have all kinds of statistical manipulations to show that that's true.
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Um, I don't know that it would be as successful without those platitudes.
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And if those platitudes are convincingly disproven, cause that's the thing about this
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Um, this kind of professional work, it's not always clear whether somebody is actually
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Because it's not like you get paid $1 per widget, right.
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And at the end of the day, you have a pile of widgets and you get your, your, your paycheck.
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There's a lot of room, frankly, for BS in this and into that BS has essentially stepped
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this ideology and this ideological, explicitly ideological credentialing.
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Um, but I think again, the, the, the Twitter counter example might show that that's all there
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is there, um, that there isn't that end of the day, uh, that actual value being produced.
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And look, it may take quite a while because America is very rich, right?
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That's another reason where we can get away with a lot of this stuff.
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Um, that wealth covers for a lot of garbage, right?
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Either we're going to tip into the direct exercise of power and like sort of a direct
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Where they're going to say, yes, we have this power because we are right.
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And we're going to apply it, um, to, to get the results that we want, regardless of any
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But what we have right now is this kind of hybrid thing where, you know, you're doing
00:17:04.440
Um, and I think Elon Musk has the potential to disprove the, the doing well part and we'll
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see what that ha what happens once that, that knowledge sort of seeps into the private sector.
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And I think that's a really significant victory.
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That's why I thought your piece had such a good angle because so often in the free speech
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debate, the key everyone thinks is, you know, you just get X amount of people on your side,
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Like you, you, you convince so many people that it's more important to be able to say
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the truth than it is to, uh, you know, comply with these things and the, the, the scales will
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But I think what people need to understand is that most people didn't just decide one
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day to wake up and lie about whether like men could become women or like who's really
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I think that those things happen because there's a slow and steady incentive process built into
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the system that kind of requires people to constantly, you know, tell themselves these
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And if you strip out the patronage, if you strip out the rewards, uh, for people, a parroting
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this stuff and be, you know, basically having jobs that exist only to run around and punish
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people for not parroting this stuff, then you will see a decent amount of reality reassert itself.
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And so in many ways, the stripping out of, uh, of these patronage jobs, I think is far
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more essential to the battle of free speech than the actual ideological debate around like
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whether the first amendment is an absolute right in private sectors or something like I, like
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while those, those discussions are important, I think people need to understand that like the
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actual abolition of the apparatus is far more valuable in this battle than like winning the
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debate club thing about, you know, whether we should have free speech or not.
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I mean, look, you, you get what you incentivize institutionally.
00:19:10.900
Um, you only have one or two or a handful, right?
00:19:19.640
Um, no, but you, you're, you're fundamentally, you're going to get more of what the power structure
00:19:25.300
rewards, uh, because people are self-interested, uh, and, and that's not necessarily like a
00:19:33.160
Um, and yeah, I think you're right that in fact, if you remove the reward structure for
00:19:38.240
a lot of this stuff, um, you'll get a lot less of it, not none of it, right?
00:19:41.880
Um, you do have your true believers and there, there are, I think the younger, there's a generational
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component here, the younger your employees are, the more likely they're true believers
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Um, because they've been raised in, within the parameters of the narrative that we currently
00:19:56.680
Um, they don't really, I gotta say at some level, they must know that, um, you know, some
00:20:02.280
of these things are not true just because they directly contradict.
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And here, I'm going to use the left, you know, lived experience.
00:20:08.460
Um, but, but on, on the other hand, uh, you know, ideology has the, the ability to, to
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I'm not going to use the overused, uh, final command of the party that two plus two equals
00:20:23.540
Um, the, the, the, the power of, of ideological indoctrination, which is really what it is for,
00:20:29.960
for like the lower half of millennials and Gen Z, right?
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They're really born into this, um, where basically since kindergarten, this is long.
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Some version of this has been taught, uh, by all official organs that are given any
00:20:45.960
If you are a good student, you know, this stuff very well, right?
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Um, if you do well in life, you know, these, the stuff very well, but yes, it is inseparable
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from that reward and that path to the good life.
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Um, and, and that path to both money and power, but also honors and, um, societal sort of
00:21:09.660
So all of these things are, are very important to people as they, as they should be.
00:21:13.500
Um, I do think actually what you're referring to is the, the winning the debate argument.
00:21:20.640
I think what we're seeing is the last affections from Gen X, right?
00:21:24.000
The people who are center or even left on the left, um, in the nineties, right?
00:21:29.720
Uh, Elon Musk probably falls into this category, right?
00:21:33.900
You have a lot of like these Gen X folks who just weren't fully indoctrinated.
00:21:45.780
Um, yeah, like, like you're seeing an accelerated move of these people out of the left because
00:21:53.380
It has nothing to do with the ideas that they believed in.
00:21:56.680
Um, although they're, they're related, actually, I wouldn't say nothing to do, but, um, that's
00:22:02.300
But, um, fundamentally, I just, I think we're seeing the last affections of a generation
00:22:08.800
And that gives people, I think, a false sense of security because they feel like everyone around
00:22:13.400
them is starting to wake up to this stuff, but they're not factoring in the, the, the
00:22:18.160
new rank of graduates every year into every single one of these powerful institutions.
00:22:22.780
Um, and those, those people are not questioning whether we're going too far with wokeness.
00:22:29.620
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, if like, uh, the woke language started to separate by
00:22:36.720
So like, if you went to Harvard, you know, um, that certain words are, are no longer acceptable
00:22:42.300
versus if you went to Brown, you might not know that, right?
00:22:44.760
Like it might literally class stratify like accents in the UK, you know what I mean?
00:22:49.920
Um, to be able to tell what school someone went to by what set of woke languages, um,
00:22:54.480
they use, but, uh, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but, um, I don't think it
00:23:02.940
Like we, we already see wokeness as a way to, to, you know, settle like internecine, you
00:23:08.900
know, uh, disputes inside the left and they're already using it to stratify, you know, you,
00:23:13.960
it was okay to be progressive, but now you need to start stacking modifiers.
00:23:18.660
So if you're a white guy in tech, you better figure out how to get, I don't know, you know,
00:23:22.820
trans, or you'd better figure out how to become, you know, two spirit or something like you,
00:23:27.660
you, you need to figure out some kind of ideological niche in order to make sure that
00:23:32.100
you stratify yourself away from the untouchables.
00:23:34.420
And so I think that you're only going to see that purity spiral, spiral increase.
00:23:40.580
I think there's a high likelihood that being on the bleeding edge of wokeness will continue
00:23:45.400
to be, you know, uh, the, the code switching, the jargon rearrangement will continue until
00:23:51.260
they can make sure that they're, they're very safe kind of in the, in that pattern.
00:23:56.000
Uh, so, so I, I think, I don't think that's a ridiculous thing to, to kind of believe, but
00:24:01.600
I do think it's a really important point about conservatives and just those who oppose
00:24:06.340
progressives, not understanding the gen, like what's coming up behind them.
00:24:10.000
Uh, CS Lewis, uh, in, in the abolition of men talks about how once you have a entire generation
00:24:16.260
that's completely socially, socially engineered away from basically all human instincts, that
00:24:22.580
Like there will no longer be kind of the natural ties to what made humans human.
00:24:27.140
You won't have that instinct to, to return back to the kind of the things that made you
00:24:34.920
And people don't understand that while, like you said, that the gen Xers, the kind of
00:24:38.780
the final def, uh, final defections of those who still had a way back to kind of that existence
00:24:45.340
that, uh, was there before the woke indoctrination, as that kind of falls away, the next generation
00:24:53.920
They have swam in the waters of deep progressive ideological, uh, indoctrination their entire
00:25:00.540
And so there isn't this innate pull back to the truth and, and kind of the, the natural,
00:25:08.160
So I think that is a huge issue for people because this is something I keep trying to
00:25:13.660
explain to those that are like for, you know, the, the, the pure free speech crowd, the people
00:25:18.640
who think that, well, if we can just get the ideological, uh, stuff out of there, if we can
00:25:24.320
just get people back to it, like a safe and neutral application of policies and rules, everything
00:25:30.200
But one of the reasons that like stripping out the bureaucracy is so important is that at
00:25:34.340
the end of the day, it's not really about the rules.
00:25:38.740
Like at the end of the day, you can change the, the technical terms of the Twitter, you
00:25:49.240
You can clarify the procedures, but the people operating them at the end of the day are the
00:25:55.540
And if it's full of what commissars, it doesn't really matter if you clarify that language and
00:26:01.400
try to provide some level of, uh, you know, some, some level of, uh, accountability, these
00:26:08.120
people are ultimately going to be able to manipulate the procedure in the way that will
00:26:12.920
Yeah, this is, this is also why I think, um, so some of the conservatives who are calling
00:26:19.200
for essentially the application of the tactics, um, to some degree of the left, um, sometimes
00:26:25.500
Um, sometimes I think it's really naive, uh, and, and in, in regard, especially, so like
00:26:32.100
they imagine that they can call like a couple of these bureaucrats to the carpet, right?
00:26:36.700
Um, and we can get rid of, uh, certain, like, for example, within the FBI, right?
00:26:42.760
Like we can fire a couple of people at the top.
00:26:45.240
Um, they imagine that it's, it is like fundamentally still, that power is still flowing through the
00:26:50.960
natural ways or not natural, but the, the American system, right?
00:26:55.420
And, and the reality is, yeah, the formal system.
00:26:58.640
And the reality is those rules will not be applied, right?
00:27:01.780
You can, you can tell the DOJ to go after their own.
00:27:04.600
Um, they're going to do that in a very different way and they're going to slow walk it and
00:27:08.660
maybe you'll get a scalp or two out of it, but you're not going to fundamentally change
00:27:11.660
the institution until you change the incentive structure, which is why I think one of the
00:27:15.880
most important things is to be able to do mass firing in federal government, um, and to
00:27:21.260
be able to, to put federal employees at will, uh, as opposed to, I mean, we have about 110
00:27:27.300
Um, uh, actually, let me see first, the first civil service can say the Pendleton act in 1883.
00:27:33.880
I mean, um, we have this very thick web of essentially job protections for federal employees
00:27:39.700
that protect them, um, not only from being fired, but also like there's very little you
00:27:46.600
You can kind of move them into a different department, um, which is usually like a lateral
00:27:51.580
You really can't even promote on the basis of, of, well, merit for one, but also, uh, whether
00:27:57.160
or not they're actually carrying out the objectives of the elected officials.
00:28:00.280
So something systemic has to actually shift so that we can actually go into these departments
00:28:08.040
Because I think the clearest example is the Trump administration and, and people, I really
00:28:13.300
get annoyed when both the left and like the sort of whatever you can call it, the David
00:28:18.460
French right say, well, oh, like the head of the FBI, Trump appoint is a Trump FBI, right?
00:28:24.380
Like, so how can you say that they were going after the right?
00:28:28.040
Well, because the rest of the FBI is not controlled by the president.
00:28:32.480
Um, none of these agencies are actually controlled by the president.
00:28:37.880
Um, and most of the people making those arguments, they know it, right?
00:28:41.680
They know that these executive agencies, um, and the administrative state is effectively
00:28:51.180
Now, if you had somebody like Bernie Sanders on the left, the bureaucracies might fight him
00:28:57.960
I mean, I'm, I'm not a Sanders fan, obviously, but like his particular brand, or at least before
00:29:02.880
he sort of walked his way back into the neoliberal fold, um, he might also have trouble implementing
00:29:08.680
some of his policies, but for the most part, the bureaucracy hums happily going after the
00:29:19.060
Even if we tried to use the same tactics, we tried to direct the FBI to, you know, do
00:29:24.000
some of the horrible things that it's done to Donald Trump to the, the, for example, to
00:29:27.500
Biden to do investigate Hunter Biden or whatever it is, it won't work for us because we don't
00:29:33.660
And this professional class is overwhelmingly one direction.
00:29:38.060
So 95% of the donations from federal employees, uh, in 2016 went to Hillary Clinton, right?
00:29:45.840
It's like trying to implement your policy in a faculty lounge.
00:29:51.440
I didn't want to make two points to, cause I think you made a good point about like swimming
00:29:55.020
in the ether when you're young and, um, you don't really know anything outside of this
00:30:01.160
I think there is an element of hyper novelty in tech here as well.
00:30:05.620
That makes a lot of this stuff seem, it makes the hard barriers of reality a little softer,
00:30:12.040
Um, if, if your primary identity is digital, uh, it becomes much more, and I'm not the first
00:30:18.540
person to observe that there's a connection between transgenderism and transhumanism, right?
00:30:24.400
But I think it's much easier to imagine that certain things could be true than even 20 years
00:30:30.580
Um, and then the other thing is, look, things that, that are contrary to reality will eventually
00:30:40.660
Um, it's true that what, what is the Horace quote?
00:30:43.780
Like you can chase nature out with a pitchfork and yet she keeps hurrying back.
00:30:47.340
Like human nature will reassert itself and some boundaries of reality will reassert itself,
00:30:52.780
but you can isolate yourself with tech and money for a very long time.
00:30:57.520
And that's not really a comfort to me as I don't intend to live 500 years.
00:31:05.040
Like this is not, this is, this may be a comfort in sort of the, the theological sense or whatever,
00:31:11.040
theological sense, but it's, it's not an actual comfort for us right here because our generation,
00:31:16.980
our children's generation, and perhaps our grandchildren's generation will, could potentially
00:31:20.860
live under a system that is tyrannical and contrary to any boundaries of, of reality.
00:31:26.880
We could isolate ourselves in that way from the consequences of reality for a hundred years.
00:31:31.280
Get unlimited grocery delivery with PC express pass meal prep delivered snacks delivered fresh
00:31:39.360
fruit delivered grocery delivery on repeat for just $2 and 50 cents a month.
00:31:48.120
And I think that's really, you know, a lot of people kind of in my sphere will have this,
00:31:53.620
well, everything will inevitably come around, right?
00:31:56.220
Eventually the wheel will turn and reality will reassert itself and, you know, things will
00:32:01.900
I think, you know, you're, you're exactly right to point out that those things will,
00:32:05.020
will happen inevitably, but yeah, we can, we can put that out for a long time, especially
00:32:09.100
as a nation, like you, like that's one of the things I liked in the piece, you point out
00:32:13.300
how much of our GDP is dedicated to ignoring reality, right?
00:32:17.500
Like the, the, how, how large our economy, how much of our economy, how big a percentage
00:32:23.160
of what we do is basically there to simply deny, you know, the, the truth, the, you know,
00:32:30.120
natural truths that, and keep them from reasserting themselves.
00:32:32.840
And as we get further and further into this, as we create more and more of these systems
00:32:37.620
and make more and more of our, we dedicate more and more of our brightest minds or, and
00:32:42.220
even our mid-tier minds into the maintenance of systems that completely deny reality, the
00:32:46.900
less likely we are to do anything of importance in the worst life is, is probably going to get
00:32:52.300
I think you're also right that, that things like tech will lead people into this mindset
00:32:58.120
This is Pareto's, uh, uh, uh, type one, uh, res, residues where like these are the people
00:33:06.380
who are best at combinations and, and recreating batteries.
00:33:10.040
They don't have a lot of, they don't have a lot of respect for established forms, that
00:33:14.800
And these are the people who are always going to predominate in classes like tech or entertainment,
00:33:18.640
creative endeavors are going to be dominated by these people.
00:33:21.100
So it is easy to live in that, in that land for a very long time.
00:33:25.980
But I think that kind of brings us to, to another aspect of this, something that you
00:33:29.500
mentioned at the beginning with Musk and kind of his, his reassertion of reality onto his
00:33:35.420
When he cuts a large chunk of his company, many people, uh, like yourself notice, uh, that
00:33:40.780
he left a lot of, uh, men, especially white and Asian men, right.
00:33:47.420
Those are the people who he identified as those that are essential to the operation of
00:33:54.380
That's a big problem for our society, not just for people on the left, but for people
00:34:00.380
Like there are a lot of people I think who are really uncomfortable with what happens if
00:34:06.700
a business does address its staffing to optimize its output, to increase the, you know, uh, its
00:34:18.780
And the truth is a lot of these make work jobs also create, you know, uh, jobs for favored
00:34:25.020
Those that have been enshrined in our society as those that have to be put into these positions,
00:34:32.380
even if they are not going to routinely achieve those kind of positions on their own.
00:34:37.580
And I think that's a really uncomfortable thing for a lot of people.
00:34:40.300
And I think it's something that will probably keep a lot of CEOs from following, uh, Elon Musk's
00:34:47.500
lead because even if he does pull this off for awhile, eventually you can't imagine, you know, lawsuits
00:34:55.100
I don't think a large chunk of corporate America is going to be okay with drastically
00:35:00.220
changing the demographics of their companies, uh, after all of kind of the propaganda and other
00:35:07.420
possible, you know, uh, lawsuits that they might open themselves up to if they do this.
00:35:12.220
I was, I was going to say, it's not just propaganda, right?
00:35:18.140
So let's, let's separate these, these two things.
00:35:20.140
Um, they're not totally separable, but, uh, there's sex and then there's race.
00:35:23.740
Um, and on, on, with regard to sex, I think it's pretty clear, uh, that one of the unpredicted
00:35:31.020
consequences of, of sort of our managerial shift that Burnham wrote about is that, um,
00:35:38.940
Uh, now there are plenty of men that fall into this category, of course.
00:35:43.180
Um, but I'm saying overall, uh, it, it seems like, uh, the, the boot stomping on, on the,
00:35:50.220
the human face forever is, is more of a, like, you know, sensible kitten heel or something.
00:35:54.780
But, um, in any case it is a sexed class, right?
00:36:04.700
Uh, even, even the center left or some folks at AEI, right?
00:36:07.180
We write about this as, uh, in an economic sense when manufacturing, uh, direct manufacturing
00:36:12.700
And the so-called service economies, um, or service industries or whatever are on the rise.
00:36:17.980
These are largely managerial jobs, for example, health administration, right?
00:36:23.020
Um, knowing what, how to code things so that you can bill Medicare.
00:36:29.980
Um, so, so that's, that's one aspect of this, um, in, in both cases, the race and the sex case,
00:36:36.220
you have enormous incentives in civil rights law, right?
00:36:40.060
Um, and I really think, and I've, I've heard that Chris Caldwell is, uh, working on an update
00:36:45.100
to this, uh, because he, he recognizes this deficit.
00:36:47.820
He just didn't get to it, um, in his book, but I really do think the changes in the nineties
00:36:52.700
are underrated, um, in terms of our civil rights law and the incentives they created.
00:36:58.140
Uh, I don't think we had nearly as big of this kind of problem.
00:37:01.420
And in fact, I kind of disagree, at least on the edges with Chris Caldwell's book.
00:37:05.820
Um, in that I think a lot, a small percentage of the changes that he is observing rightly
00:37:12.460
today, I think came between 1964 and the 1990s and a large percentage of those changes came
00:37:21.820
Well, we did, we made a couple key changes, uh, in the nineties signed by HW Bush, of course,
00:37:30.060
Um, but there were sort of several rounds of this bill and his party had voted for it.
00:37:34.460
And he, he kind of, he, he, uh, capitulated and signed the bill.
00:37:38.940
Um, so two of those major changes, uh, one, no cap, I mean, vastly expanded cap on the kind
00:37:47.100
That you can sue, uh, for this kind of like workplace discrimination, right.
00:37:51.740
Uh, there, there were pretty strict caps on it.
00:37:54.140
Um, there was a limit to what essentially the aggrieved employee could collect from, from his
00:38:01.260
So it became a much more painful, uh, tool to use against car companies.
00:38:06.380
But even more important is, um, and this came in the, in the sexual harassment context first
00:38:12.940
Um, as far as I know, I had to check with my colleague, Jennifer Braceres, who's really,
00:38:18.700
Uh, so she's, she's really an expert in this stuff.
00:38:21.260
Um, but, uh, so I think it moved from sexual harassment and sex case into the racial case.
00:38:28.220
Um, but basically the offense, legally speaking, I'm not now talking about, although they're
00:38:33.260
related, the, the, the sort of emotional offense, but the offense doesn't have to be, it used
00:38:38.300
to have to be objectively offensive sustained, um, over time.
00:38:47.100
So you couldn't sue your company for sexual harassment, as opposed to the particular
00:38:50.940
person, you could not sue the company for sexual harassment because one guy was repeatedly
00:38:56.460
asking you out like a colleague or whatever does.
00:38:59.660
Um, now after the nineties, you, you can, um, and more than that, you can, you can sue
00:39:06.380
for hostile workplace environment or for discrimination.
00:39:09.500
Um, if one guy has a bikini calendar on his desk and another coworker made an off-color joke
00:39:16.700
Um, and you said something to HR one time and nothing came of it.
00:39:21.660
Like you, you can, you can cobble together a lawsuit and over a series of like offenses
00:39:36.940
That gives companies exactly an incentive to make sure that no one could possibly be offended.
00:39:43.820
No person, no single employee, it makes an eggshell skull kind of rule for everybody.
00:39:48.940
Like if a single employee is offended by anything, if, if they can actually cobble together a lawsuit
00:39:54.540
from all these things and the dollar amounts rewards are quite high.
00:40:00.620
And they start, this is when all this kind of, um, trainings like workplace training started to
00:40:05.340
The sexual harassment trainings, the very funny ones that they can put in with the CD-ROM
00:40:09.500
right in the nineties, um, but that has melded, I think in a particularly tyrannical way with the
00:40:16.620
advancement of sort of therapeutic culture and with, um, the, the ideological strictness with,
00:40:24.780
with microaggressions with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:40:27.660
So I really think we're underrating how much of this happened in the nineties and the enormous
00:40:32.540
financial incentives that corporations had to make sure that nobody could possibly be offended at work.
00:40:37.660
Yeah, I think you're right that a lot of that accelerated in the nineties, but I, I, I would
00:40:44.700
side with Caldwell saying that the groundwork was all there beforehand that the infrastructure
00:40:50.780
both legally and culturally required to allow kind of that expansion needed to be there before we saw
00:40:59.580
I think you're right that the, the acceleration really happens there.
00:41:02.860
I mean, well then, then let me ask you this, what are the forces of the nineties that you think
00:41:10.620
I, we have a lot of people, you know, who, who, uh, kind of do Breitbart's famous, uh, you know,
00:41:18.300
A lot of us around here prefer to say that culture is downstream from power.
00:41:24.620
Why is the nineties this crucial hinge in, in the switch?
00:41:29.180
So first of all, um, I, I always have to defend Breitbart.
00:41:31.820
Cause I was, um, I was there when he was making those remarks and I knew him a little bit,
00:41:37.660
Um, he wasn't saying what the people who repeat that quote today were saying, actually,
00:41:44.300
Imagine, you know, in 2012, what he was saying was we need to pay attention politically to cultural
00:41:51.180
issues because in 2012, it was very much that autopsy, right?
00:41:54.300
The middle, like we need to move away from these divisive cultural issues and focus on cutting taxes.
00:41:58.940
And what he was saying with that line is good luck cutting your taxes.
00:42:06.700
He wasn't foreclosing political action on cultural issues.
00:42:15.180
But that being said, I know exactly what you meant.
00:42:17.100
There's a lot of people who use that, um, that phrase to say essentially that we need
00:42:21.980
only to, to, um, to have cultural solutions to these problems.
00:42:33.660
And in fact, um, Reagan, uh, in his farewell speech, uh, at, at the end of his farewell speech,
00:42:42.860
And, and gives the only answer that was available, uh, in 19, in the 1980s, right.
00:42:51.740
Um, one of the things he's most proud of during his presidency is that he's revived the American
00:42:55.900
spirit by which he means is kind of like cultural patriotism.
00:42:59.820
Um, but we haven't re-institutionalized it is what he said.
00:43:03.820
And he goes into this long piece of his speech where he talks about when he was growing up,
00:43:09.340
that if your family didn't reinforce these values, first of all, most people's families
00:43:15.580
Um, but if you didn't get it from your family, then you got it from school because in school,
00:43:21.580
And if, if you weren't a very good student, then you could get a watered down version by watching TV.
00:43:26.220
And the pop culture was actually like in alignment with these values.
00:43:29.740
And he's saying, none of these things are true anymore.
00:43:34.220
But he, he ends, and he said, actually not a problem.
00:43:36.700
This is the biggest problem, um, for our country and its future.
00:43:41.660
However, he ends, he ends it by saying, well, I guess we're just gonna have to discuss it
00:43:47.820
And I think from the vantage point, no, no shade on Reagan at the time.
00:43:51.580
Um, but I think from the vantage point of 2023 now, uh, that's clearly inadequate.
00:43:57.260
Um, this power is institutionalized as we've been talking about.
00:44:01.020
It's, it's applied through our laws very directly.
00:44:04.540
Um, and it has enormous shifts on what, you know, the, the folks who repeat that quote
00:44:16.940
Transgender issues is going to be just as fast.
00:44:19.500
Um, right now we feel like we have the cultural upper hand and there's a majority against it,
00:44:23.900
but these institutional incentives do their jobs.
00:44:30.380
I guarantee you in 10 years, those polls are going to look very, very different.
00:44:35.740
It's foolish to think that conservatives have the upper hand on this.
00:44:40.060
Uh, you know, that that's not what's being taught in schools.
00:44:42.940
That's not, that's not the culture that's being forced on the kids.
00:44:52.700
And there's no way that in, you know, five to 10 years, the, the next round of graduates
00:44:58.300
that come out of, uh, universities and inherit those managerial positions are going to be
00:45:03.420
anything but even more insanely radical on this stuff.
00:45:06.300
So yeah, I think it's really, really important for people to, to not pretend that there's,
00:45:14.060
And again, that the, uh, uh, reality may eventually assert itself.
00:45:18.780
Nature may eventually, uh, make itself clear, but I think, uh, there, there's a long space
00:45:26.780
So this might be a difference between us, actually.
00:45:30.780
Um, but I think that silent majority is closing, right?
00:45:34.300
So, um, I think again, this is very generational and as long as boomers and Gen X are, uh, still
00:45:47.580
Anyway, um, and, and more importantly, like Gen X is coming into its own and I'm, I'm a millennial,
00:45:55.980
Um, as Gen X is coming into its own, you know, Gen X is going to be the C-suite.
00:46:00.380
Um, we're going to have more Gen X politicians.
00:46:02.460
And I think you can see a notable difference, for example, between Trump and DeSantis,
00:46:09.020
Like there, there's a whole crop of, um, Josh Hawley, um, Tom Cotton.
00:46:17.180
And I think we'll have a lot of people in the Republican party who are Gen X.
00:46:20.780
Like I think Gen X is going to swing quite heavily for the Republican party in the, in the foreseeable
00:46:28.220
Um, so I think this is largely generational, but I think that gap is closing, right?
00:46:32.460
If we wait until millennials and it's not that far from now, right?
00:46:35.660
Um, the oldest millennials are just cresting 40, I think.
00:46:38.540
Um, you know, if we wait too much longer, like I really do think this, this is essentially a very
00:46:49.900
Um, and we're going to see whether these processes of, of democracy,
00:46:54.540
um, this is the, what you're skeptical of, uh, the, the process of democracy may actually
00:47:00.460
Cause I do think there's a silent majority out there right now.
00:47:02.700
Um, I don't think in 10 years, we'll have a silent majority.
00:47:05.580
And I think that that is because again, um, all the issues we're talking about,
00:47:10.380
the incentive structure is incredibly powerful.
00:47:13.180
Um, so I think what's going to happen is you're going to see a revolt.
00:47:17.020
Um, and then we'll see whether essentially the political power structures that exist
00:47:21.900
and the material structures that exist crumble in the face of that revolt or just become
00:47:29.180
Like we'll, we'll move to a more explicit, um, kind of tyranny than we, we have now.
00:47:34.860
I don't know what the answer to that question is, but I still think it's a question.
00:47:40.940
I, as, as you noted, I'm, you know, uh, less bullish on the prospects of that coming
00:47:47.500
I think if, if the last 50, some years of shift don't really convince you that the
00:47:54.860
public is in almost entirely malleable and that they're going to be able to produce
00:47:59.340
increasingly, um, consistent results, uh, I guess in the democratic process, I don't,
00:48:05.260
I don't know, but like you said, the crucible will come in the next 10 years one way or another.
00:48:10.620
Well, do you, I don't know, do you want to talk about the, the speaker, uh, throw down?
00:48:15.580
Is that, is that, I don't know, it feels boring to me, but do you, do you want to get into,
00:48:19.180
do you have a, a thought on the, on the drama on the GOP speaker battle right now?
00:48:24.700
Um, a little bit of one, which is that I think it's largely unimportant to the country.
00:48:30.620
Um, so I guess that's the, uh, you know, I, I do, I think it's, so I think the underlying
00:48:41.660
I think we've seen it bubble up, um, in the Republican party repeatedly over the years.
00:48:46.700
I sort of first joined politics during the tea party.
00:48:49.660
Uh, I was a member of the several different tea party groups, um, sort of grassroots groups
00:48:55.900
Um, I, and, and fundamentally there's a, there's a huge disconnect.
00:49:00.540
There's a disconnect between the leadership of the Republican party and the voters.
00:49:04.060
Um, and I think much more than there's a disconnect between Democrats and the Democratic party.
00:49:10.220
Um, and in fact, when people say that, that Democrats don't represent, um, sort of left-wing
00:49:16.140
interests, I think they are just underestimating or over, rather overestimating how many voting
00:49:21.260
Democrats actually agree with some of this cultural stuff, um, or whether it's important to them.
00:49:25.980
So I think the Democratic party actually does a quite good job, uh, representing the interests
00:49:34.540
The Republican party, there's a total disjoint there.
00:49:38.380
I mean, the first spike of this was Newt Gingrich in the, um, in the 2012 primaries, uh, I think
00:49:45.980
going after the media, he was like really the, one of the first person, uh, in the Republican
00:49:49.500
party to like really start to go after the media.
00:49:51.580
And he got a huge spike of, of voters and he didn't end up taking the nomination, Rami
00:49:54.780
did, but, um, he got a huge spike of voters and was very clearly his like finest moment
00:49:59.900
And I'm not saying Newt Gingrich is some kind of like anti-establishment figure, but he was
00:50:03.260
the first to like basically directly take on the media and say like, you, you know, why
00:50:13.180
The tea party also, I think is misunderstood as purely about economic issues.
00:50:16.860
That is not the tea party that I participated in.
00:50:19.020
Um, there's this cultural anxiety that fundamentally the leadership and the ruling class in this
00:50:24.380
country, uh, is taking it in a direction that is fundamentally different, uh, than, than the
00:50:30.860
American way of life or the traditional American way of life.
00:50:33.580
Um, and then of course we had the, the Trump rebellion in 2016, right?
00:50:38.620
And to some degree, the speaker fight is as well.
00:50:40.860
Although it's not clear to me that the replacement will be that much better.
00:50:46.140
So that that's really what makes me kind of about this fight.
00:50:49.020
Like if we were talking about putting in somebody, um, who is much more in line with,
00:50:54.780
with Republican voters, then I would think this is actually of utmost importance.
00:50:58.620
Um, but perhaps the fight itself is important in the sense that extracting a pound of flesh from
00:51:07.500
Um, I also don't think like McCarthy wasn't the biggest problem.
00:51:14.140
McCarthy is just obviously a non-ideological guy.
00:51:17.100
He's not like on fire about any of these issues, but he did seem more willing to actually do the
00:51:21.980
traditional job of speaker, which is wrangle coalitions, right?
00:51:28.700
He was sitting down with them and trying to work on their concerns and so on.
00:51:31.660
And sometimes they won and sometimes they lost.
00:51:33.260
And he certainly wasn't one of our guys, but McConnell actively McConnell would rather
00:51:40.860
work with a democratic majority and be in the minority than have the kind of Republicans that
00:51:48.780
And that's not an acceptable thing for a party head, right?
00:51:52.060
Like the least we can expect of our leadership should be that they're partisan.
00:51:59.420
Yeah, I think the, the pound of flesh from your leadership being the takeaway is probably
00:52:06.860
Again, uh, not, not here to endorse this, you know, democracy, but if you're going to do,
00:52:11.100
if you're going to play this game, the Republican base has to learn to actually make their politicians
00:52:16.940
deliver something for them and, you know, not to run through the laundry list of embarrassing
00:52:26.140
But like pretending that looking slightly disorganized while you force people in your
00:52:30.540
party to actually care about what you want is more clownish than continually feeding the Democrats
00:52:38.940
every single thing they want without almost any resistance is, is insane.
00:52:49.180
Like the, the appearance of unity is, would be great if the Republican party had any interest
00:52:57.900
And so telling me that, that unity is more important than forcing these people to the table
00:53:03.580
and making them give you something is just absolutely ridiculous.
00:53:07.740
But I wondered this at, you know, and there's, there's many reasons why this happens, but I
00:53:12.300
wonder if this is one of them, the ideological underpinning of government of like the role
00:53:18.860
government should play, I think is a big part of this because Democrats, because they have no problem
00:53:24.300
with the exercise of government power are more than happy to offer their constituents, like material
00:53:31.820
benefit, like vote for me, there will be more money in your pocket, vote for me, and you will have a job,
00:53:38.060
vote for me, and I will ensure that, you know, healthcare, college, whatever, like these things
00:53:44.700
And even if they aren't perfectly done, like you said, the Democrats, at least on a pretty regular basis,
00:53:49.500
provide some kind of actual material benefit for their, for their voters.
00:53:54.940
The Republican Party's idea is small government, we don't do anything.
00:53:59.100
And so we don't, so when they're in power, they don't build anything that benefits their voters,
00:54:05.340
they don't do anything that actually increases their material prosperity, they just don't do
00:54:11.020
anything, and they certainly don't punish their enemies, you know, that's something the left is
00:54:15.260
very good at when they're in power. And so the left is just constantly ratcheting things because
00:54:20.700
whenever they're in power, they are allowed the free hand to generate incentives for people to vote
00:54:26.140
for them and to increase their power inside institutions. And the right is basically
00:54:31.580
ideologically opposed to doing any of those things, and so they seem to lose the game over and over again.
00:54:39.020
You know, I, so I agree largely with what you're saying, and I think what you're pointing to is,
00:54:44.460
is actually the professionalization of political benefit and patronage has been a disaster.
00:54:51.740
I, I have, I'm a proponent of the spoil system, right? I think that the 19th century spoil system
00:54:59.180
was far more democratic and responsive to the will of the people, even as it generated a certain level
00:55:04.220
of corruption, than the professionalization of the civil service. Because a lot of those benefits
00:55:11.500
that you're talking about, and look no further, by the way, than student loan forgiveness, right,
00:55:16.140
which is a direct handout to a democratic key democratic party constituency, right? Literally,
00:55:21.660
we're going to write you a check. I, I think a lot of that is, first of all, implemented through
00:55:28.860
the administrative state, a relatively small percentage of it is actually passed through
00:55:32.700
Congress. So if you think about what the Democratic Party does, in terms of elected officials, I think
00:55:37.580
they're far less efficient at that game, than the administrative status, right, there are literally
00:55:42.780
millions of grants, half the NGOs, I mean, I've been pointing out for a long time that the Republican
00:55:48.540
side is essentially privately funded, and all of the mess, whether it is called private or not,
00:55:56.380
on the Democratic Party is heavily funded by the government. Universities depend as lifeblood on
00:56:02.220
student loan programs funded by the government. They also get trillions in grants, okay? You know,
00:56:08.380
just about anything you can think of, every NGO has like six different grants from, from all three
00:56:13.580
levels of government, municipal, state and federal, right? Republican or conservative
00:56:18.860
organizations do not have any of that. We're fighting on a completely uneven playing field,
00:56:24.220
particularly since the right has lost big business, right? Because there was some parity
00:56:28.860
when big business was essentially funding the right, and the left was funded by government, right? But
00:56:35.260
there's no parity at all now, because big business is funding the left. So that's, that's one point.
00:56:41.340
So I agree with you on that, that we need to develop. In some cases, the only consistent patronage
00:56:48.620
network on the right that I can think of, is one that perhaps has yielded, again, very little benefit
00:56:55.660
for the country, sadly. But I think the professional right, we're really good at identifying talented young
00:57:04.220
people, giving them fellowships, paying them a comfortable salary to be able to do, we do this in
00:57:10.700
the world of ideas. So we have found a way to duplicate the kind of patronage style part of
00:57:16.060
universities, but absolutely not the pipeline into power, right? The graduates of think tank fellowships
00:57:22.460
don't go on to rule the DOJ. So that, that link into power, that, that last piece has not happened.
00:57:29.740
But more broadly about the chaos point, it really feels increasingly, and I've read, I feel like a
00:57:39.500
thousand different takes from a thousand different people, actually pretty far range of the political
00:57:43.980
spectrum, that something feels fundamentally broken in every aspect of not just American life, but even
00:57:52.380
sort of in the West more broadly. And I think that chaos is just not reflected so directly, and people
00:58:01.340
call us whatever, doomers, crazy, whatever, because that chaos is papered over by an enormous amount of
00:58:07.740
wealth. And so I tend to think chaos reflected in our political institutions is a good thing insofar as
00:58:16.540
it's reflecting the underlying chaos, right? Like, you can't get less accountable for chaos than losing
00:58:24.460
a war and getting promoted. So I would like to see those people get fired. I would like to see some
00:58:33.340
chaos. I would like to see our political representatives fighting over these matters instead of pretending
00:58:40.380
that everything is fine under the surface because we have so much money that we're some, we're able to
00:58:45.100
lose a war in Afghanistan, right? And not suffer immediate massive consequences of that, except
00:58:52.220
the people who fight it, right? Which is a half a percent of people who are in the military connected
00:58:57.420
to military, right? But for most of us, we didn't feel the consequences of losing a war because we are
00:59:03.020
so rich. That wealth won't perpetuate, and that's maybe to like tie it back to the Elon Musk thing, right?
00:59:09.740
That wealth is not the natural state of the universe, okay? We are going to lose that wealth over time
00:59:18.220
if we squander it, and if a third of our GDP or more is just ideological compliance. It doesn't
00:59:24.700
generate the kind of wealth that has allowed us to ignore reality and ignore the fundamental
00:59:29.980
brokenness and chaos that we're living in. So, I mean, again, this could happen tomorrow,
00:59:38.780
or it could happen in a hundred years. It matters very, very much when. So, it's not meant to be like
00:59:44.700
sort of a zen thing, like things will work out. And also, you know, things working out might just be
00:59:50.700
that we are just conquered by some other people, right? Who don't buy into some of this stuff and just
00:59:57.020
continue to raise warriors and live in a more like tangible economy. So, it's not really meant
01:00:04.700
to be a comfort so much as a warning that maybe this Musk example is that important because
01:00:14.860
that wealth is dependent on things that we no longer do, or at least a large percentage of our
01:00:21.180
society no longer does. And that cannot go on forever. So, I don't know, again, not necessarily
01:00:30.700
a white pill because it's like, it could get much worse from here. But that kind of, that idea that
01:00:37.020
we should have unity or we shouldn't have even like the kind of chaos over a Speaker of the House battle
01:00:43.100
is completely naive, right? Like I'm glad to see the cracks appearing somewhat because the faster we're
01:00:50.060
going to have to actually deal with what's underneath. Yeah, that's very right. I'm 100%,
01:00:56.540
you know, Dan Crenshaw was saying, you know, anybody who's not for Speaker McCarthy,
01:01:03.500
they're just an enemy now. And it's like, yeah, the faster we can get Republican establishment guys to
01:01:09.420
just declare each other enemies and like, and openly dismiss the interests of their voters and just
01:01:17.420
continue to show that, that conceit. I think that's really essential. Like, you know, if the GP,
01:01:24.460
if the GOP is going to be of any value, it can only be a value after it's basically deconstructed itself
01:01:30.380
pretty fundamentally. And I think the, the more often that can happen, the better. But that said,
01:01:36.860
we have hit an hour and I barely got into like half the stuff I wanted to get, but, but I think it's a
01:01:42.860
good conversation. We've got some, some questions from the audience. Like all women, I love to hear
01:01:47.420
the sound of my own voice. Well, yeah, there you go. So that, that's why we're in the business,
01:01:52.460
right? All right. So I've got some questions from the audience here, if you don't mind,
01:01:56.620
run through these real quick before we go. Let's see here. We've got QuirtzZ7, $10 Canadian. Thank you
01:02:05.180
very much. Debate shows and academic debates gained popularity in 2009 to 2014 as millennials came of
01:02:12.620
age. Does this indicate a want of millennials? Maybe Gen X influence also love your authory name,
01:02:20.060
Ina Stepan. So yeah, that's interesting. We had, it feels like this was, there was a, maybe this is
01:02:26.540
part of the new atheist time or no, maybe this was lightly after, but it feels like there was a,
01:02:31.340
there was an obsession with kind of, you know, having the debate shows facts and logic, you know,
01:02:37.580
like there, there was a far more interest in this during that time. Do you think that's a,
01:02:42.060
there's a general racial generational difference there, a shift that maybe brought that upon us?
01:02:47.980
Um, it might be generational and it also might be just the, I think this is more clear in art actually
01:02:54.540
than in, I think maybe it's a function of the same impulse, but what we're seeing now is again,
01:03:00.540
I do think it's largely like Gen X and older millennials who are driving this, but, um,
01:03:06.620
the, the institutions that produce this culture, right? They are becoming so incredibly boring,
01:03:14.860
um, that you have a certain amount of, and I think it's always going to be a relatively small
01:03:19.260
percentage of people who are just like, I cannot listen to this anymore. Even, even if they sort of
01:03:23.340
agree with the fundamentals, it's just, it's just boring in the same way that woke Hollywood, like
01:03:28.220
the really formulaic woke movies always fail. The real power of the cultural left is when they
01:03:33.980
manage to work in, you know, a left-wing theme or two into a very like interesting character-driven
01:03:39.740
story. And when they, they go to these like sort of woke, like direct woke, like sort of, um,
01:03:45.340
propaganda films, they fail, right? Cause it's not interesting. And I think that's, that might be
01:03:51.100
part of this, right? I think there was a sort of an, and the move into podcasting and long form media
01:03:56.060
is very much, I think it's a very hopeful thing. Um, I, I think, uh, it's a good thing that people
01:04:03.580
are bored with what seems like the same talking points and like tomatoes being thrown back and
01:04:12.060
forth. Um, I do think that's a good thing. I do think there is some minority of people,
01:04:16.940
clearly there are literally millions of people who want to listen to Joe Rogan for three hours.
01:04:21.900
And all he is, is intellectually curious, right? Like that's, that's it. Like I'm not a huge Rogan,
01:04:27.340
um, listener. I do listen from time to time, but all his great strength is obviously that he's just
01:04:32.940
genuinely intellectually curious. And I do think there's a certain percentage of people who just
01:04:36.780
crave that after the kind of incredibly wrote, even if they don't have deep ideological objections,
01:04:45.020
Yeah. Have you seen the meme where it's, uh, Joe Rogan is like a barbarian king. He just brings
01:04:51.500
the, the, the wise man before him and says, smart man, tell me why the water falls from the sky,
01:04:56.620
you know, like just, just him doing that routine. Yeah. It's, it's very, it's very effective. I think
01:05:02.540
a big part of that is also found time. Um, the, the fact that our society has moved to,
01:05:08.540
uh, you know, you have the technology where you don't have to sit down in front of the TV and dedicate 30
01:05:14.300
minutes or an hour to watching a news program means that people don't have to have everything
01:05:19.900
condensed into soundbikes so they can move on to something. The fact that you can mow the lawn or
01:05:24.700
lift weights or, you know, do laundry or drive and get all this stuff, I think facilitates people's
01:05:32.620
ability to listen to those, those longer conversations. And the fact that the audience is
01:05:37.100
fractured, right? You don't have, it doesn't have to be talk radio. It doesn't have to be top 40. You
01:05:41.980
don't have to appeal to every single person driving. You need to appeal to a specific
01:05:46.460
subset of people who in drive time traffic want to learn more about the French revolution or
01:05:50.780
something like that. You know, like, I think that, that really facilitates that as well.
01:05:54.940
And why people are there, they're far more demand for long form than there was before.
01:05:59.660
But I do think it's totally true. And that rings true to me personally. Like I
01:06:03.580
am a huge proponent of the audio revolution because I listened to a lot of this stuff, not just
01:06:07.260
podcasting, but books and, um, and why exactly what you're saying while I do other things,
01:06:11.740
right? While, while I'm working out, while I'm doing chores, while I'm, and it really, um, has
01:06:16.380
been an enormous, wonderful thing in my life. Like I've learned a lot. I feel like, um, so I, I'm,
01:06:23.020
I'm a huge proponent of, of those things. Um, and I think that's totally true. There is a negative
01:06:28.940
side to cultural fraction, fracturing, right? Like we don't have a pop culture anymore. Actually, I would
01:06:35.740
argue like maybe game of thrones was the, the only. Yeah. A lot of people say that the last like,
01:06:40.540
and then maybe before that Sopranos, although Sopranos was very, still very niche. Um, even though
01:06:46.940
I think it's much better. Don't get me wrong. I'm not comparing them as terms of like literary merit
01:06:50.300
or artistic merit. I'm just, uh, we don't have, that's really has been one of the, um, consequences
01:06:57.020
for good or ill of the internet, right? It's that no matter what weird little thing you're into,
01:07:00.860
you can find the seven other people in the world, um, who are into that same thing, which is on the
01:07:06.540
one hand, wonderful and community building and, and, um, allows people to go deeply into something
01:07:11.180
they intra that are interested in, um, with, with a community of fellows. It's, it also fractures that
01:07:17.820
space where we need, um, to interact with people who are different from us, right? Um, so here I'm
01:07:24.380
thinking like there are downsides to having this kind of pop culture, but the upside is everyone
01:07:30.540
was watching Muhammad Ali, right? Um, watching those fights in America. And that brings people
01:07:36.620
together who are very different. Uh, and, and I think that that is also a force that we're now
01:07:42.700
missing. We're completely sort of fractured, um, culturally, and it makes it very difficult to
01:07:47.260
build a nation, right? It makes it more difficult to build a neighborhood, more difficult to build a
01:07:50.940
nation, especially when people find out that they might have something more in common with someone
01:07:55.500
in Timbuktu because they both love this like one weird thing. And in particular, when elites of
01:08:00.460
different nations find out they have more in common with each other than they do with their neighbors.
01:08:04.380
And so I think there are downsides to this, this kind of fracturing, but it definitely has personal
01:08:08.780
upsides. Yeah. Mark Fisher's wrong a lot about a lot of things because he was a communist, but he was
01:08:14.300
right about this. Like his best observation was, uh, that the, the, uh, the fact that all of these
01:08:21.980
cultures are now available continuously, that all, all these different decades and eras of music and
01:08:27.740
movies and, and all this stuff is simultaneously available is that you don't have one forged shared
01:08:34.140
culture anymore. People can escape into micro niche subcultures or, you know, you can go back and just
01:08:40.220
listen to metal from the eighties or, you know, listen to pop music from the nineties or only
01:08:44.940
watch movies from the sixties. And you don't actually have to care about what your culture
01:08:48.460
is producing now because there's just this, uh, the simultaneously existent, uh, backlog of culture
01:08:54.860
that, you know, anyone can escape to and not actually interface with the real world, which,
01:08:59.100
which is its own issue for sure. It also completely breaks down this distinction between culture and
01:09:03.500
counterculture, right. Um, and, and here I think Polly was very prophetic. Um, but there, there are,
01:09:10.780
there are things, um, that have always happened. And here, I think the best example is kind of sexual
01:09:16.140
minorities, right? Um, it's not that homosexuality is a new thing under the sun. It's not even a new
01:09:22.060
thing under the sun that there are men, uh, who get their sexual thrills by dressing like women,
01:09:26.060
right? This is very clearly a phenomenon in all societies virtually. Um,
01:09:30.060
the differences between the mainstream and the counterculture, right? We had these countercultures,
01:09:37.180
some of them very degenerate and some of them producing some beautiful art actually, right?
01:09:42.300
Like, um, and I think for example, uh, gay life in the 1980s in New York city is very much, uh, one of
01:09:50.540
an example of this, right? Where it's, it's actually, I think that there is a benefit, um, to those cultures
01:09:57.020
existing as subcultures as countercultures. Um, but the problem is there's no barrier now between the,
01:10:02.780
the, um, mainstream and, and the counterculture because every, every little faction has to be,
01:10:08.780
um, not in specifics, but like in essence, endorsed by everyone, everyone's little weirdness and
01:10:14.460
identity. Um, there are no weirdos anymore. You're not allowed to be like a freak or a weirdo or like,
01:10:19.740
and just exist outside of culture. Those things must be embraced by Delta, right?
01:10:24.780
Um, and I think that is bad for both sides of the equation. Like I, I think it's bad when
01:10:31.260
gay pride parades are endorsed by Delta. And I, I think it's actually bad, not only for the children
01:10:36.780
watching, um, but it's bad for gay culture when, when Delta endorses it and it becomes sort of bland
01:10:43.580
and corporatized and loses that, like that sense of rebellion and, and limitation of the, the, uh,
01:10:50.060
the rest of society that places barriers around it, that therefore engenders a certain amount of
01:10:54.540
creativity. And here I really sound like Camille Fahlia, but so.
01:10:57.020
Well, I think it's, well, I, I think there is, I think there's an observable phenomenon there that
01:11:04.860
I think a lot of people can understand. I mean, just ask, uh, all these subcultures that have been
01:11:09.260
now co-opted by, you know, the gamer gates and the, the comic book gates and, you know, all these,
01:11:15.500
all these different fandoms who, you know, maybe live their whole life saying, oh man, I can't wait till
01:11:20.220
someone makes a movie about my thing until they, and now the people who were the core audience of
01:11:25.100
those things have been completely, you know, derided and tossed out of their own subculture
01:11:30.540
because that culture had to be, you know, made safe and, and, and pasteurized and, and homogenized
01:11:37.900
so that it could then be, you know, elevated and served up to the wider, the wider culture, right? Like,
01:11:43.740
those niches are no longer allowed to exist with their own interests and their own standards. They
01:11:49.420
have to be, all the indoctrination has to be poured into those areas so they can then be
01:11:54.140
brought and made wide to, to everybody else. So I think there's a lot of truth there.
01:11:58.780
Uh, Johan Richardson for $20 says, uh, what role does a demography play in changes in the young?
01:12:05.820
If the portion of the young are less and less the long-term heirs of the first world civilization,
01:12:10.780
will the odds, uh, be tilted against the pres, uh, preserving the first world social structures?
01:12:15.980
I mean, that's a really good question. And I think there is definitely, you know,
01:12:20.780
an observable phenomenon of a lot of native people in, you know, first world culture saying
01:12:28.140
it's not worth, you know, participating anymore, especially as again, we see the incentive structure
01:12:33.020
specifically created to say, actually, we're going to elevate everyone who isn't you,
01:12:38.700
and you're going to have to, you know, justify all of your actions in every situation that you
01:12:44.380
didn't, you know, transgress some new cultural faux pas while trying to do the job and preserve
01:12:50.060
these different systems. I think there is an understandable, you know, walking away of many
01:12:54.860
people from the need to kind of maintain the systems that are holding up with culture that they no longer
01:13:00.620
see themselves reflected in. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's true, but I think the answers are
01:13:05.740
different to this question in the US versus Europe. Um, so I, I think that that's because America is
01:13:12.220
really, really assimilatory. Um, and the problem is not so much. So I guess maybe I depart from some
01:13:18.860
people on the right. Uh, I don't think that America's ability to assimilate immigrants has actually
01:13:24.860
gotten much worse. I think we're just simply assimilating them to a dominant ideology of America, which is
01:13:31.020
wokeism. Um, I, I think that actually we are quite assimilatory still. And in fact, we're projecting that
01:13:40.300
culture around the world, uh, because we do have an empire and, and it's cultural empire. Um, and so
01:13:47.500
now we are exporting, uh, this ideology just as we are assimilating our immigrants to it at home. And I,
01:13:55.900
so I, I tend to think like, yes, you can talk about perhaps, um, you know, changing the demographics of
01:14:01.260
the vote empowered specifically the democratic party that, that then passes these laws, but they're
01:14:06.060
almost tangential within the party, right? That break from immigrant vote to like woke policies,
01:14:12.140
it's running through a democratic party that's controlled largely not by, by people, uh, who just
01:14:17.580
came to this country. Right. Um, and so they might have some, some ideas about government programs and
01:14:23.900
wanting benefits and maybe don't have the same kind of, um, you know, culture of self-government as,
01:14:29.500
as Americans have. Uh, but what's actually coming out on the other end, I think has much less to do
01:14:34.860
with immigrants. And in fact, it's assimilating their children, uh, aggressively. So in Europe,
01:14:40.780
it's, I think it's quite different. Um, you have kind of the two extremes in Europe where, uh, I would say,
01:14:47.820
like, for example, in France, you just have a large unassimilated minority, uh, to that France has
01:14:54.060
very little interest in assimilating, but is now outbreeding them. Right. Um, and then in, in the UK,
01:14:59.900
they've bent over backwards to assimilate their, their immigrants, um, completely to the point where
01:15:05.180
they like disavow everything about British culture. Um, and, and have also not successfully,
01:15:12.460
I don't think, um, assimilated their immigrants because they've just assimilated. I was going to
01:15:18.140
say that that's the inverse. They haven't assimilated anyone. They've been assimilated.
01:15:23.420
Yeah. So I think these, these questions are quite different. So on the global scale,
01:15:26.540
obviously in the same vein as what can't go on forever, uh, won't eventually some civilization
01:15:32.700
will conquer another. I mean, um, if, if we don't continue to produce this much wealth, um,
01:15:38.780
I think we will be conquered eventually. Uh, but, but on the, the sort of shorter timescale,
01:15:44.300
I actually think this, this, this ideology and all of the power structures that we were talking
01:15:48.140
about for the last hour, I think they are powerful enough to assimilate immigrants too.
01:15:52.700
It's just assimilating it into something Americans from 40 years ago wouldn't recognize.
01:15:58.060
Sure. But I guess that doesn't really address the issue of those left behind by the assimilation,
01:16:03.100
right? All those who are being pushed out of those positions because the,
01:16:08.140
structural incentives are to make sure that those assimilated peoples are moved into positions
01:16:13.580
of power and in institutional structural advantage. Right? So you're right. Like,
01:16:19.020
I think that's a hundred percent correct that, that the U S is very good at this,
01:16:23.340
but the people who are the victims of this are those who are being displaced by it as it always
01:16:28.300
is. And those who are constantly the same people who are being dismissed, you know, uh, they took our
01:16:32.860
jobs as the joke, like, but yeah, but you don't have your jobs anymore. So actually that is a problem.
01:16:37.340
Right. So I think you're right that the U S is very good at the, at this, at this point,
01:16:41.020
but that only emphasizes the issue. It doesn't solve it. Well, and what you see is the needs,
01:16:47.180
right? Um, the, you, you see people drop out in fact. So Nicholas Eberstadt has some great work, um,
01:16:55.020
on this, but the, the rise of working age, and it is primarily men, right? Um, for all kinds of
01:17:00.460
reasons, these developments have been better for women, at least materially, um, have been better
01:17:07.500
for women materially than for men. But, uh, what we're seeing is working class men of primary working
01:17:12.540
age, uh, dropping out and, um, largely either existing on, um, welfare benefits or on side income,
01:17:22.380
um, that is illegally generated and largely, uh, getting dying deaths of despair. Right. I mean,
01:17:28.780
getting addicted to pay medication or becoming alcoholics. Um, and in some sense, that's
01:17:35.260
maybe that's just like, that's, that's good for, uh, not for, for us. Um, but for this managerial
01:17:43.020
class, right? Because this is the same Silicon Valley solution to this is give UBI, right? Give
01:17:49.260
people UBI, give them porn, give them, um, you know, give them pain meds easily legalize all the drugs
01:17:57.260
and let them die deaths of despair at 45 and they won't cost us any trouble.
01:18:02.860
Yep. I think that is unfortunately very much their approach. Well, Skeptical Panda, I'm sorry,
01:18:08.780
I've just, we've just failed you here, but, uh, uh, hi Inez and Oren, good to see another
01:18:13.660
based guest on the show. Remember no black pills. Uh, well, you know, we try, we try to keep, uh,
01:18:19.180
as positive an outlook as possible, but if you're looking for no black pills, you might, you might
01:18:22.620
have come to the wrong. I, I still, I, I still think that, that, uh, there could be a populist
01:18:29.660
revolution, um, in the United States. So here's your, your white pill stuff. Um, I still think
01:18:35.180
that's possible. There, there have been, uh, in my estimation for successful populist revolts,
01:18:41.340
uh, in American history. Um, the, the first being under Andrew Jackson, um, and that resulted in
01:18:48.620
something that I think is very relevant to our times, rotation in office, meaning bureaucrats.
01:18:53.900
And it started the patronage system that lasted throughout most of the 19th century was very
01:18:57.900
effectively used by the Lincoln administration. Uh, but it was then derisively called the spoil
01:19:02.380
system. Okay. But that, that started under Jackson. It was a major, and also Jackson killed the bank,
01:19:06.940
right? So two major structural victories of the Jacksonian populist movement, um, that had effects
01:19:14.700
that lasted for a century. Um, I think the next one was under FBR really. Um, and that had incredible
01:19:23.260
structural effects and lasting effects, right? Talking about the creation of social security,
01:19:27.740
um, the creation of, of the, the, the welfare state in, in large part, um, the total transformation
01:19:33.260
of the constitutional system of the United States. Um, so I think a lot of those things were bad,
01:19:39.340
but, uh, that, that was, uh, a lasting impact that we see today. Right. Um, and then the last two,
01:19:47.660
so I think the jury's still out about the last two is the Reagan revolution was a populist revolution.
01:19:52.620
Um, I think that largely it was successful in that it placed a president, a president in the White
01:19:57.980
House. I think it was largely unsuccessful in terms of changing the trajectory. It basically
01:20:02.540
stopped everything. Um, but didn't, as Reagan said, didn't really re-institutionalize anything.
01:20:08.540
And the institutions continued to, to drift left and exercise power. And now we are where we are.
01:20:13.820
Um, and I also, obviously the jury's still out on 2016. It seems like it failed to me. Um, but the,
01:20:20.300
the point being these, these movements have succeeded in American history. They have made
01:20:24.460
structural changes. Um, and I think some of the structural changes that would mark it as successful
01:20:29.820
for me would be a serious, some kind of serious knife in the heart of the university system as
01:20:34.540
a pipeline to power. Right. Um, and I think that could come in a variety of different policy ways.
01:20:39.260
Um, my own personal sort of thing that I'm stumping for right now, uh, is to use the student loan crisis
01:20:44.940
to, uh, heavily taxed universities to pay off student loans. Uh, and I think that has a lot
01:20:50.140
of benefits, but one of them is that it would be very expensive for universities and make it very
01:20:54.460
difficult for them to continue on the trajectory that they're on. Um, and, and another thing is we,
01:21:00.300
we like what I would call a success is some kind of gutting of the administrative state,
01:21:05.020
um, or at minimum exerting political control over the administrative state so that when a president who has
01:21:11.260
populist, uh, concerns or orientation, like Donald Trump is elected, uh, that he actually does control
01:21:19.020
the power of the state. Um, and I think that could come through merit reform in terms of like being
01:21:24.060
able to fire people, Trump's famous schedule F policy, but it applies only to, uh, about 50,000
01:21:30.700
people at the top. There are 2.8 million civilian bureaucrats. Um, but some kind of serious gutting of
01:21:38.060
the administrative state and then some kind of, of either gutting or convincing away from this
01:21:44.620
current path of, of, um, tech and woke capital. So those would be, I think three, and I'm sure you
01:21:52.060
could add some more of that, but I would say that progress or like structural change on, on those three
01:21:58.540
sectors. Um, I would consider that a success. And I think we could set ourselves up in such a way that
01:22:06.220
the American Republic can kind of digest younger millennials and Gen Z as, as of a generation,
01:22:11.580
um, with certain structural changes that make limitations on how much they can wield their power.
01:22:18.460
Um, and then obviously we have to stop the pipeline on the other end. So if you have to
01:22:22.060
get control of the education system, but anyway, I think it's possible. It's, it's an uphill battle,
01:22:26.460
but I do think it's possible. I don't think it's like, I mean, America, Americans are pretty,
01:22:33.020
I don't want to swear pretty remarkable people in the history of the world. Still. Um, the fact
01:22:40.060
that every single institution, um, including me, I didn't vote for anyone in 2016. Um, but every,
01:22:46.060
every single institution in American life, uh, told every single American relentlessly that you're a
01:22:53.660
bad person if you vote for Donald Trump. And they did. Um, the American middle class is not a bunch of
01:22:59.740
Russian peasants. Uh, they are used to having a certain standard of living. Um, they are used to
01:23:06.140
having a certain amount of control over their lives. Uh, and I do think there will be a pretty
01:23:10.620
substantial, substantive rebellion against the direction of this country, whether or not it
01:23:14.540
succeeds. I don't know, but I do think there will be some kind of real teeth rebellion at some point
01:23:20.780
because Americans aren't used to, um, I think large, uh, to large degree, Americans are not used
01:23:26.700
to being treated like surfs. I believe that before COVID, uh, I have a harder time. I have a harder
01:23:33.900
time justifying that belief now, but I hear you. The, the solutions are the, the things you identified
01:23:40.460
as victories are certainly correct. I think those are all valuable things that would make a significant
01:23:44.940
difference. Uh, Ben G here for $5. Nothing has changed for the positive, uh, positive with the Republican
01:23:51.820
party since the events that Sam Francis talks about in the King holiday. I know that essay is in
01:23:57.980
beautiful losers, but I, and I've, I've, of course I've read it at some point. I just don't have all
01:24:03.260
the points of that essay to mind. I wish I did. So I could give you more of an answer on that right
01:24:09.180
away, but I can't immediately remember all of the points he's made in there. I mean, I have a
01:24:13.820
journal idea of what he said, but I can't really go through all of them for you there. Sorry about that,
01:24:19.100
Ben, but, but I appreciate it. Um, let's see. I don't know it either. So I can't comment.
01:24:25.580
Yeah. Like I said, I read it somewhere in the middle of beautiful losers, but I can't, I can't
01:24:29.420
remember all the points at the moment. Uh, my tube, uh, for $1.99. Thank you very much. The right
01:24:33.900
loses because it lacks vision and spine. Well, that is certainly true. Um, yeah, I think there are
01:24:39.740
people, I think also vision and spine were beaten out of the right, uh, on a pretty regular basis.
01:24:45.580
Uh, I think the excommunication of many thought leaders, uh, was intentional, uh, and the selling
01:24:51.820
of kind of a controlled opposition was, uh, you know, has been there for a while. Uh, so I don't
01:24:58.220
think that's a unique feature of the right so much as, as something that was, you know, desired. Uh,
01:25:04.540
but I do think that is a big problem for the right. And I think you are seeing people recognizing that
01:25:08.940
problem. I think there are people actively taking action. The fact that you then have a fight over a
01:25:14.300
speaker, uh, with the right right now probably means that there are people taking notice of that,
01:25:19.340
but you are right that that is a very consistent issue. Uh, let's see here.
01:25:25.740
Uh, emergent perspective for $10. Do you think the internet allowing woke ideas to go way off the rails,
01:25:31.820
i.e. Tumblr may have backfired? Would the elite have preferred to go slowly via MSM evening news,
01:25:38.300
uh, deployment mechanism? Uh, possibly. So again, this is, so speaking of Sam Francis,
01:25:43.740
this is something that Francis talks about in Leviathan and Zen enemies. He says that
01:25:47.820
basically the, the managerial class and the left vanguard had more or less the same, uh, desires.
01:25:55.100
They had the same end goals, but that the, uh, the, the vanguard wanted to go far too fast,
01:26:01.180
the fast, the manager elite realized that they needed to boil the frog slower. And so that's why
01:26:06.220
they looked like enemies when they were actually allies. And that's why the vanguard has become more
01:26:11.500
and more okay where the manager elite are because they've kind of caught up with the eventual goals
01:26:17.260
of the vanguard. And that's why it seems like there's less tension between say like the corporate
01:26:21.660
press and, and, uh, you know, uh, left wing, uh, vanguard movements. Um, they, I think they're okay.
01:26:29.660
Uh, I think the, the, at this point, the corporations and, and most of the managers have bought in,
01:26:35.660
they've drank the Kool-Aid on the woke stuff. Uh, they probably still don't want to completely kill
01:26:40.220
uh, the golden goose with this. They are holding back things some, uh, but I think at this point,
01:26:45.020
they're kind of up to speed with the cultural revolution. And, uh, so maybe they would have
01:26:50.300
preferred to have, uh, more of a slow drip, but they haven't wasted much time and kind of onboarding
01:26:55.740
a lot of this stuff, uh, which is why we have kind of the, the corporate bloat of wokeness and
01:27:00.620
patronage networks that we do today. Um, the left is also really good at taking essentially plateau
01:27:07.340
moments, um, for the radicalism of whatever they've done to be absorbed by the American
01:27:13.020
public and to absorb a backlash. Um, here I'm thinking about more public policy than like
01:27:18.460
internet versus traditional media. But, um, I mean, you, you can look at it as there's,
01:27:23.580
there's been a backlash against each one of these major structural changes, um, quite powerful ones that
01:27:29.820
elected Republicans. And now we're back to the uselessness of doing that. Um, but
01:27:36.780
those changes have not been institutional and the left is very, very good at, I think,
01:27:41.820
and I don't want to imply even that it's like somebody sitting at the top thinking like,
01:27:45.420
uh, we just need to absorb this, but because they have institutional power, uh, and the right doesn't,
01:27:52.220
they have the, the, um, advantage of time, right? If we do, if we freeze everything right now,
01:27:59.900
we pass no new policy, nothing happens, they win. So I think that's the advantage of owning the
01:28:08.380
institutions. Yeah. Yep. All right. So, uh, Douglas, uh, you have a very long team, Douglas. I'm just
01:28:15.740
going to go with Douglas there. Thank you very much for your donation. It sounds like a fancy way of
01:28:19.580
saying bio-linitism is a thing. Uh, yeah, I'm not sure exactly when you entered that, uh, remark,
01:28:24.220
so I'm not sure exactly when, when you referenced that, but, uh, yeah, that, that is definitely something
01:28:29.100
that you could probably categorize in this discussion. Thank you very much. And then, uh, Dante's, uh,
01:28:36.460
Cacostri, uh, Cacostri, why can't I say this now? Uh, Cacostocracy. There we go. I did it. Uh,
01:28:44.620
thank you for your donation. Huh? I thought it was Cacostro, Cacostocracy.
01:28:50.540
From the Greek, you know, meaning. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, it's more legitimate than that. I thought
01:28:54.140
it was a joke. It is. It is. Uh, do, do you think the public will comply if lockdowns are imposed
01:29:01.420
again? Yeah, I think they will. Um, I, maybe that's the difference. I, I don't,
01:29:06.780
I think nothing has trashed, like openly trashed the power of the institutions and made it more
01:29:12.220
brittle as much as, as this, um, even in New York city where I live. Right. Um, I think it would be
01:29:18.540
very, very difficult to reimpose lockdowns, maybe not impossible, but I mean, even trying to reimpose
01:29:25.500
a mask mandate, I see largely failing in New York city. Now I think it would probably be possible in
01:29:31.260
Washington, DC and in my hometown of San Francisco. Um, yes, but we have entire states
01:29:36.300
now that would, I mean, I, I just, I think, I think pandemic is a, again, a black swan event.
01:29:42.060
Um, and I think that largely people more or less trusted their institutions, um, even as they were
01:29:50.540
disappointed over time in this kind of quiet way, but I think the pandemic really showed the rot.
01:29:56.140
And I, I, I would be surprised if there's uniform lockdowns that you might see them in like one place
01:30:03.180
or another, but I would be really surprised to see them broad based and maybe I'm wrong,
01:30:07.100
but we'll see which one, uh, which one of us is, is if, if the white pill or the black pill, uh,
01:30:12.460
Well, I think you're right that it's a mask off moment, uh, not, not to create any puns there.
01:30:17.740
I think you're right that it is a moment that reveals the rot, um, and does fracture faith in
01:30:23.260
the institutions. And in that case, in that way, it is that part of it is valuable. Um, but if,
01:30:29.020
do I think that you could see that kind of thing attempted to be reapplied and probably so successfully
01:30:35.260
reapplied in a good chunk of the country? I do think that there probably is still enough institutional
01:30:40.700
momentum to get that through one more time. Uh, but you are right that every time they do try to do
01:30:45.340
that, the, the intention, the attempt to flex that kind of raw power does cost them something.
01:30:50.780
Well, and, and the federalist system is going to help us here. And if you compare, um,
01:30:55.580
if you compare the, the responses in European countries, um, to the United States, uh, I think
01:31:01.740
theirs is better in some ways and ours is better in other ways. Their experts are a little bit more
01:31:05.900
more legit in the sense that when the data strongly moved in one direction, there was some acknowledgement
01:31:13.580
of that in the professional structures. Uh, for example, uh, you know, and, and I hear it for
01:31:19.740
example, don't get out of Europe, uh, in Israel, right? Israel went really, really hard on lockdowns.
01:31:25.580
They instituted vaccine mandates up to the second booster. Um, and then publicly announced,
01:31:33.340
this isn't working or rolling all of this back. Um, so in that sense, their expert class,
01:31:39.340
I think is still a little bit more actually scientific, which is not to say that it solves
01:31:43.660
some of these deeper questions of political power and judgment. Um, in America, our expert class is
01:31:51.420
worse, um, and more ideological and more useless. Uh, and I don't think you'll ever see our expert
01:31:57.340
class walk back anything like that. I don't think you'll ever see announcement like that in America.
01:32:02.060
Um, where you have like the head of the CDC saying we screwed it up. Um, on the other hand,
01:32:09.260
the federalist system here means that we have a counter example. The fact that Florida exists
01:32:14.780
is incredibly important because now we have a counter example to say, because otherwise,
01:32:18.780
if everybody does the same thing, right, you have no way of knowing what the outcomes would be
01:32:23.820
if you had done it differently. But the fact that we have counter examples and the fact that the
01:32:27.420
federalist system did hold up in this largely, right. Um, where you had very different paths
01:32:34.220
taken in different States. Um, that I think like, like Americans largely locked down a lot less than
01:32:40.940
most European countries, um, on average. So anyway, I think the federalist system was an enormous
01:32:47.420
advantage to us in this. I think it really proved the wisdom of the federalist system.
01:32:51.500
Well, as a Floridian, I certainly benefited from, from that and, and very grateful for, uh, for its
01:32:57.660
restrictions in that way. All right, guys. Well, I think we got through all of the questions. I want
01:33:02.460
to go ahead and thank everyone for coming by. And as where can everyone find your work? Do you have
01:33:08.380
anything exciting people can check out coming up, anything like that? Um, you can find my work at
01:33:12.620
iwf.org, um, along with those of my colleagues at independent women's forum. Um, and I also affiliated with
01:33:19.420
a bunch of other folks. Um, I, you can find most of my stuff on Twitter. Honestly, I, I tweet a lot.
01:33:24.460
I'm too much. Uh, it's at, you know, Svelcher F E L T S C H E R, but you can put in Stepman as
01:33:31.420
well. That's my married name. I just, I actually, maybe now I can change it because I wasn't allowed
01:33:35.180
to change the at handle. Um, because I was going to lose the check mark. I got it when like they were
01:33:40.940
actually still giving check marks to the right. Um, yeah, maybe I can change it now, but that's,
01:33:46.140
that's my at handle. Uh, and, um, you can find a lot of my work at various sort of conservative
01:33:52.220
outlets. Excellent. So make sure to check that out guys. And of course, if this is your first
01:33:56.940
time here, make sure that you are subscribing and also remember guys that you can now listen to
01:34:03.100
the show as a podcast, not just as the live stream. So if you want to go and subscribe,
01:34:08.700
it's on all the major podcast platforms, make sure when you do, you leave that, uh, rating and that
01:34:14.380
review that really helps a lot with all the algorithms and everything. I also went ahead
01:34:18.300
and released, uh, my latest chapter of the total state chapter five, just went up on, uh, the sub
01:34:24.300
stack. So if you want to go over there, you can read the whole thing. That one's free for everybody.
01:34:28.780
Uh, so if you want to read the latest chapter there as well, oh, we have one more chat that came in right
01:34:34.380
here. Uh, let's see. Oh, I see. We have, uh, Hans Herman Hoppe, uh, fan here, uh, Phil, $10, any
01:34:44.300
right wing political pan, uh, win that does not include the physical removal of post 65ers is a loss.
01:34:50.140
Yeah. I, I hear you, but I don't know that that's in the cards. I, I don't, uh, I don't know about the
01:34:55.740
prospect of that one, buddy, but, uh, anyway. All right. So let's go ahead and wrap this up guys. Thanks again,
01:35:02.140
everyone for coming by. And as always, I'll talk to you next time. Thank you for having me on.