Nate Hockman of the National Review joins me to talk about his new piece on the influence of radical transgender ideology in conservative states like North Dakota and South Dakota, and why it seems to work its way into deep red states like Texas and Arkansas.
00:01:51.080So we're going to get into your piece on North Dakota and why radical gender ideology has kind of infiltrated that state and why it seems to be able to work its way not just into these deep red states, but many different right-leaning institutions.
00:02:07.180But before we get to all of that, for my listeners who might be unfamiliar with you, can you give a little bit of background?
00:02:12.580How did you get started in what you're doing now?
00:02:24.820But I've written all over the place, Claremont Review of Books, American Mind, some mainstream publications like the New York Times.
00:02:30.720But my main post is at National Review, and it's where I do most of the reporting, especially the long-form stuff that you'll find like this.
00:02:40.480So your piece focuses specifically on North Dakota, though, like I said, we're going to talk about other states and why this isn't just a phenomenon there.
00:02:48.600But, you know, you started the piece by talking about how there's this, you know, radical conference on transgenderism in a state that we wouldn't otherwise think of as one that would be predominantly left-leaning.
00:03:01.640Why is there a massive conference on this in a place like South Dakota?
00:03:07.060So South Dakota, it's the third most conservative state in the country in terms of the actual sort of public opinion conservatism of its population.
00:03:16.160I cited that at the beginning of the piece.
00:03:17.520It's been controlled by Republican supermajorities since like 1996.
00:03:22.060So it's sort of, I mean, that was what caught my attention in the first place.
00:03:25.500There's this big third annual sort of Midwest Gender Identity Summit for transgender medical specialists, which is sort of, you know, standard issue gender identity experts, you know, actual surgeons who do in-state surgeries, including on children for sort of gender transitions.
00:03:42.540And I looked into it and it's being hosted at the Sanford Research Center, which is sort of the big outpost of Sanford Health, which is this major health care company based in Sioux Falls in South Dakota.
00:03:54.660It's the largest employer in South Dakota by a degree of like 700 percent.
00:04:03.120So it's really by far the largest and most, at least economically most powerful institution in the entire state.
00:04:10.280And as a result, it has the ear, I would say to put it excessively charitably, of a large segment of the Republican establishment in South Dakota.
00:04:19.540And when I started looking into it, this wasn't the first time I'd kind of dug into this stuff in South Dakota, but it was the most comprehensive sort of investigation.
00:04:27.180What I found was that basically the South Dakota legislature, despite being a bicameral Republican supermajority, hasn't been able to pass almost any sort of anti-gender ideology kind of conservative transgender bills over the course of the last decade.
00:04:41.920Even the kinds that you've seen in much less red conservative states like Florida, you know, you've also seen stuff in Texas and Arkansas.
00:04:49.320And the result of that largely is because the influence of this massive health care company, which, you know, happens to profit off of puberty blockers and sex change surgeries.
00:04:59.380But also, I think it's just ideologically committed, along with a lot of transgender activists pushing this stuff.
00:05:04.700And unfortunately, the GOP establishment in South Dakota has gone along with them.
00:05:09.040And I think South Dakotans are unfortunately reaping the negative consequences.
00:05:13.920Yeah, I think there's a lot of interesting ways to approach this, but let's go ahead and look at maybe the GOP establishment there first, because I come from a state like Florida, where basically if you want to get elected for a very long time, unless you happen to be in like Miami, you needed to be a Republican.
00:05:32.680And so that means a lot of people take what we call the Republican baptism in Florida politics, where they came down and, you know, they had been Democrats their whole life.
00:05:42.100They had held like center left opinions.
00:05:44.300They had been involved in unions and all kinds of other things that are considered traditionally left wing.
00:05:51.580But all of a sudden they're down in Florida and they need to get elected.
00:05:57.080Nothing has really changed in their ideology, but they do have the correct indicator on the ticket to make sure that they can, you know, the primary is the election in a lot of these places.
00:06:08.000Is that the kind of thing happening in South Dakota?
00:06:10.780Are the majority of people there in the legislature actually Republican or right wing?
00:06:15.360Or do people just understand that they need to become Republican in order to get elected?
00:06:21.340I mean, one particularly damning example that I found is this guy who just got elected to the statehouse this cycle, you know, November 2022, who happens to be the husband of the majority whip in the state Senate, Helene Duhamel, ran as a Republican.
00:06:36.220And surprise, surprise, got elected with a lot of financial backing from from Sanford groups, by the way.
00:06:40.860But he had previously run and won for a bunch of local sort of state offices as a registered Democrat.
00:06:48.520He had been a registered Democrat his entire life.
00:06:51.440And he, you know, oh, by the way, he had donated thousands of dollars to Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2007 and 2008.
00:06:57.820Right. So just exactly what you're describing.
00:07:00.400Lifelong Democrat, as far as we can tell, going back more than a decade,
00:07:03.620who understood that if he actually wanted to get elected to the state legislature, he had to flip the D and put an R next to his name.
00:07:10.960And we have no indication that he has changed any of his beliefs.
00:07:14.940It also raises questions about one of the most powerful people in the state legislature who happens to be his wife.
00:07:22.760And there's been some some sort of commentary by local media about the fact that if you you know, if you're a Democrat and you want to win in South Dakota, you just run as a Republican.
00:07:31.100But I think the the deeper issue in South Dakota that I found, which is certainly not limited to South Dakota,
00:07:38.100is that there's just this sort of old school business friendly sort of chamber of commerce wing of the GOP,
00:07:44.700which exists at the national level as well, which was raised in an era where, you know, the business of of America was business,
00:07:50.980where basically there was no real problem from the conservative perspective of going along with what business interests like the Chamber of Commerce or Sanford Health were pushing for.
00:08:00.660And the sort of economic argument, you know, that that what what we want to do is basically just what is best for sort of GDP growth was a relatively viable argument.
00:08:09.560It made sense. And a lot of a lot of those folks in places like South Dakota are still convinced by those arguments when they're made by the South Dakota Chamber of Commerce or Sanford Health or whatever,
00:08:20.620even when it means advancing these extremely radical sort of cultural policies, which are certainly at odds with what South Dakotans are actually actually think they're voting for.
00:08:31.540And I think they're just at odds with any reasonable interpretation of conservative principles.
00:08:35.540Yeah, that's the thing. I hear what you're saying. And that does make sense that they kind of go along to get along with the business interests.
00:08:42.720But there is a big difference. And I don't think there should be. I mean, people should understand that some of the business policies like, you know, mass immigration,
00:08:50.640those kind of things that have destroyed the American worker and American culture were just as destructive as what business is trying to push now.
00:08:58.020But I can understand why the average person isn't immediately shocked by, OK, we're going to let some more workers in.
00:09:06.060I can see how that wouldn't immediately set off alarm bells. But the kind of things that are being pushed now are literally child mutilation.
00:09:12.280It's literally allowing, you know, boys to come in and, you know, beat up a woman under the guise of female participation in sports.
00:09:20.940I mean, these are things that are these bills that are supposed to be protecting children against this kind of stuff are being held back by people like the governor of the state.
00:09:30.820I mean, what's going on that they don't see that this is very dangerous?
00:09:35.460Yeah, really quickly, I totally agree with what you said at the outset.
00:09:38.580You know, the Chamber of Commerce, I think, has always been at odds with well, certainly obviously been at odds with the sort of populist or, you know, furthest right wing of the GOP on issues like immigration.
00:09:48.720That's the most obvious one. But, you know, I did a long piece about the National Chamber of Commerce last year and the Chamber of Commerce of the 1990s wouldn't have dared to touch kind of like diversity, equity, inclusion stuff, LGBT stuff, et cetera,
00:10:03.480because it understood that that was sort of unacceptable to working with Republicans, who were basically the main party they were working with.
00:10:11.260And also just because big business leaders weren't as left wing or at least as radical back then as they are now.
00:10:18.320So there has been a shift, but certainly the Chamber of Commerce wing, I don't think, has ever been really on the right side when it comes to a lot of important issues.
00:10:25.860But the sort of Kristi Noem situation, you know, Noem has positioned herself as this sort of conservative fighter on the national stage.
00:10:34.820Her big claim to fame was that South Dakota was the only state that never locked down, which is true.
00:10:40.720But another part of the investigation I found was that she actually tried to lock down the state and she was blocked by conservatives in the state legislature and then turned around and took credit for it.
00:10:49.200But I think a variety of her missteps, most notoriously, her veto of this ban on men and women's sports in March 2021 have invited some deserved scrutiny of her record.
00:11:01.900And what sort of began to unravel was that both Noem and a lot of other Republican leaders in South Dakota were much more loyal to big business interests,
00:11:10.640particularly Sanford Health, than they were to, you know, the actual conservative voters who elect them.
00:11:16.280Now, let's talk a little bit about the preoccupation with business interests, because you hit that pretty hard, and I think rightly so.
00:11:25.100And I think this presents a really huge problem for conservatives, right?
00:11:28.760Because understandably, most Republican governors want to grow the economies of their state, right?
00:11:33.960They want to welcome large businesses into their state so that these people can provide the kind of employment opportunities and economic boosts that will really, you know, make them stand out.
00:11:45.480The problem is that, like you said, at this point, all of these companies are very radically left wing.
00:11:51.860And that means that necessarily, even if it's not their direct intention, conservatives are welcoming a kind of left wing fifth column directly into their state.
00:12:02.480So no matter how conservative or red ideologically or culturally their state might become, they are dependent on the economic apparatus of these large companies who will inevitably, it seems, influence the state in the leftward direction.
00:12:16.320Right. And that has become all the more apparent, you know, if you look at red states, not just South Dakota, but everything from the sort of 2015 battle over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana, the overturning of the bathroom bill in North Carolina.
00:12:29.940Now, there have been a bunch of really high profile examples in recent years of this sort of big set of big business interests having sort of fused their economic power, which has a lot of clout in especially smaller rural states like South Dakota, with these really powerful national and local left wing activist groups on cultural issues.
00:12:51.380And the problem is, I think, that the sort of old school business friendly wing of the GOP, which is often the majority of the GOP in these deep red states, which is why the sort of deep red hue can be deceiving from the outside looking in, are often unwilling to actually put up a fight because it's sort of not the way that they learn to do politics.
00:13:11.080And it's also, by the way, the majority of their campaign donations a lot of the time.
00:13:17.240So Sanford Health, I think, in South Dakota, is one of the most extreme examples we've seen thus far, just because of the extreme nature of exactly what is being pushed in a state which is one of the most conservative ones in the country.
00:13:29.540But it's a phenomenon that you see all across the country, even or even especially in a lot of deep red states, which I think have become complacent because they think of themselves as conservative states.
00:13:40.500And it does raise serious questions about, you know, when I hear someone like Greg Abbott talking about wanting to build sort of a Silicon Valley in Texas, I understand that argument for having sort of a really robust economy with a lot of GDP growth.
00:13:53.740That's obviously important. You need people to have well-paying jobs. It's one of the bases of sort of a good way of life.
00:13:59.080But the side effect now is that you are inviting these extremely powerful actors with a demonstrated commitment to an extreme left-wing cultural agenda into your state.
00:14:10.680And what we've seen is that those actors are going to turn around and lobby for things that your voters are not actually interested in, and I would say runs contrary to their interests.
00:14:19.700Now, you mentioned the activist groups. I think one of the main players here that you talk about is the Transformation Project.
00:14:30.000And what's interesting about the Transformation Project is it's involved in things including state-funded priorities that are overseen by, you know, the departments headed by, you know, people like Christine Noem.
00:14:47.180So what is the Transformation Project? What was its role and kind of its interactions with Sanford Health? And where is it funded from? It's not all inside the state here, right?
00:14:58.480No, it's, I mean, I haven't seen the exact sort of breakdown of its financials, but a hefty amount, and I would be pretty comfortable saying the majority of its funding comes from out-of-state groups,
00:15:08.680including a lot of sort of powerful national left-wing groups that we're comfortable with.
00:15:13.880But the Transformation Project was the co-host with Sanford Health of this big Midwest Gender Identity Summit,
00:15:21.200which is coming up next week, I think January 13th in Sioux Falls.
00:15:26.300And I thought they were interesting, A, because they're sort of at the center of this mini-controversy over this Gender Identity Summit,
00:15:32.540but B, because they're sort of a perfect representation of this extremely powerful coalition of forces,
00:15:41.140which are funded by out-of-state interests, which really are responsible for pushing a deep red state like South Dakota left.
00:15:48.720The Transformation Project's funding, you know, they're getting, they got 100,000, more than $100,000 donation from the pop singer Ariana Grande,
00:15:55.440because she started this sort of Defend Trans Youth Fund.
00:15:59.320This big LGBT foundation in Los Angeles donated their annual gala to raising $145,000 for them,
00:16:07.320and that included donations from, you know, all the big Hollywood studios, Hollywood actors, the Kelly Clarkson show, right?
00:16:12.900So it's this powerful national coalition of left-wing groups, and with a lot of money behind them,
00:16:20.280are basically parachuting in to South Dakota via these local groups that are sort of astroturfed,
00:16:27.360like the Transformation Project, and they're working alongside this really powerful Sioux Falls-based healthcare company,
00:16:34.180Sanford Health, to organize these kind of astroturf protests with the funding of and the backing of a lot of Republican politicians
00:16:42.820to kill this long line of social conservative bills, including things like a ban on, you know,
00:16:49.120sex gene surgeries and drugs for children, which we've seen passed in states like Arkansas,
00:16:54.080but in South Dakota was killed in the Senate Health and Human Service Committee
00:16:58.040by a lot of legislators who were very close with left-wing activists and with Sanford Health.
00:17:04.300Now, one of the things that you talk about with the Transformation Project is that they hold what almost sounds like a religious ceremony
00:17:10.640where they burn the old names of the children who have undergone this process,
00:17:16.580and I want to ask you, you know, a lot of people have different opinions on it,
00:17:21.560but I always like to sample the opinions of the people who are on the show.
00:17:25.540Do you think that these are separate phenomenon, or do you think they're kind of codependent?
00:17:31.460Do you think that the financial incentives are driving the actions of these people?
00:17:36.560Do you think it's purely ideological and the business leaders are being pulling behind?
00:17:41.140What do you think the different admixture is of these two interests?
00:17:46.080It's one that I was sort of pondering throughout the process of writing this piece,
00:17:49.440because we know that increasingly, especially as sort of prescriptions for puberty blockers skyrocket,
00:17:55.940you know, over the course of the last couple of years, especially, that this is a profitable industry.
00:18:00.040And it's an industry with, in a very gruesome way, a whole lot of growth potential for these big healthcare companies.
00:18:06.680We know that Sanford Health profits off of sex change surgeries and puberty blockers,
00:18:10.680including for sometimes very young children.
00:18:13.920So profit can't, to me, you can't talk about the issue without talking about the profit motive for a company like Sanford Health.
00:18:22.700I do think, though, that if you just look at not just Sanford Health, but the kind of larger American medical bureaucracy,
00:18:29.280which it's a part of and which its leadership comes from, they are just really ideologically committed to this stuff.
00:18:34.600They really believe that the chemical castration of young children is a public good, which should be actively lobbied for.
00:18:41.440I think it's, you know, particularly convenient that that ideology sort of lines up perfectly with their profit motives.
00:18:47.060And I think we should always be skeptical when these kind of ideological beliefs are just too perfectly nestled in with things that make these organizations a lot of money.
00:18:55.480But I think that that a lot of the doctors, maybe most of the doctors who are sort of showing up as Sanford lobbyists to lobby for this stuff,
00:19:02.720think of themselves as doing it for, you know, ideological social justice reasons.
00:19:08.420They may get the backing of the sort of corporate leaders, at least partially because of profit.
00:19:12.020But I think the story that Sanford tells itself is an ideological one.
00:19:17.060Yeah, I think it was the Daily Mail who just ran a piece.
00:19:21.340It might have been them, but they just ran a piece on the kind of the Canadian euthanasia market.
00:19:26.740And it's all of these doctors, you know, bragging about the number of people they have now euthanized.
00:19:32.600And I think for a lot of people, it was shocking was like how enthusiastic and how much almost a badge of honor they wore it as.
00:19:39.940And I think people really need to understand that it's, you know, material incentives matter and people will move with them.
00:19:50.620But they will also always build an ideology that's going to kind of undergird that.
00:19:55.800And so it's not very difficult, really, to get people, especially who feel like they're on a vanguard, the tip, they're the tip of the spear that's driving the revolution,
00:20:05.000to back like really horrific things and be very proud of it, especially when it then lines up with them winning in every other material sense.
00:20:13.660Right. It's, you know, I think this is part and parcel of this broader ideological apparatus, which a lot of, if not most of the people who are a part of it,
00:20:22.660I think firmly think of themselves as genuinely and authentically believing, but is also like like any sort of ruling class ideology.
00:20:30.700It's one of its primary functions is to entrench and justify and propagate the power of this sort of ruling class apparatus,
00:20:37.720which includes the medical bureaucracy and its allies in these activist groups.
00:20:42.280So it's a coalition that I think increasingly is sort of taking public shape and is throwing its weight around, particularly in red states,
00:20:48.580which, you know, has goes all the way down to sort of these local transgender activists foot soldiers,
00:20:53.900all the way up to the sort of major leaders of medical bureaucracies and billionaire philanthropists who are held together by this public story they tell themselves
00:21:03.340and by an ideology which they sort of actively propagate.
00:21:07.260But that ideology also serves to sort of further entrench, you know, the power of this sort of managerial apparatus
00:21:13.740and to delegitimate its opponents, which I think, again, is part of the pull for them.
00:21:19.420So you've always been picky about your produce, but now you find yourself checking every label to make sure it's Canadian.
00:21:26.920At Sobeez, we always pick guaranteed fresh Canadian produce first.
00:21:31.200Restrictions apply. See in-store or online for details.
00:21:33.880Now, speaking of delegitimating their opponents, you talk about how, you know, there's a noticeable divide in the state legislature.
00:21:45.120You have the people who are actively employed by Sanford Health who are voting on its behalf,
00:21:54.420even though they're supposed to be Republican.
00:21:56.140But it's not just that these people are, you know, are supposed to be conservative but are promoting this stuff.
00:22:03.940You also have an active effort by outside forces to purge those that oppose this activity from the legislature.
00:22:11.300You have people lining up to fund the removal of incumbent representatives who aren't willing to go along with this
00:22:19.280or who are trying to push the bills that would protect children from this stuff.
00:22:23.260Right. With the backing, you know, all the way up to the top of Kristi Noem, by the way,
00:22:26.620it's worth noting that her office is sort of consistently denied that there's any collusion with, you know,
00:22:32.160SDAO, SDSMA, which is the Sanford lobbying groups and their allies in the in the state Senate.
00:22:38.940But she has there is a hit list circulated of names of the actual conservatives in the state legislature who were opponents of the kind of Stanford transgender stuff.
00:22:49.460It was circulated by Lee Schoenbeck, who's, you know, the president of the state Senate and up until recently was a very close ally of Kristi Noem's.
00:22:56.800And Noem, you know, just conveniently happened to endorse the primary challengers to pretty much every single conservative legislator who was on the hit list.
00:23:05.220And Schoenbeck was out in public saying that Noem was, you know, the greatest ally that they had in that endeavor.
00:23:09.580So I'm a little skeptical of Noem's claim to not have been involved.
00:23:13.220But regardless, it's that that whole campaign to primary all of these actual conservatives who were a sort of structural barrier to Sanford's goals in the state legislature
00:23:24.860had the financial backing of these Sanford lobbying groups.
00:23:28.980But it also enjoyed the sort of public support of a lot of Republican leadership in South Dakota who happened to be chummy with Sanford and its and its allies.
00:23:37.820So, again, you're seeing the sort of coordinated apparatus which crosses these different sort of institutions working together as a cohesive class,
00:23:45.680which, you know, you see that phenomenon in a lot of different red states and at the national level.
00:23:49.860But it was just particularly stark in the context of South Dakota because we think of it from the outside as being such a conservative state.
00:23:57.220Yeah, I was going to say we just saw the showdown with the leadership in the House. Right.
00:24:01.640And again, you know, we see holdouts for not willing to back the speaker as, you know, terrorists in many cases.
00:24:11.720So this is hardly some kind of isolated incident.
00:24:15.460Anyone who is in somewhat in step with the voters seems to be, you know, lined up for a purge.
00:24:22.380And the conservative leadership, you know, using those words loosely, seems to always be vastly to the left of the people they're supposed to be representing.
00:24:32.640I want to get into that a little deeper in a second.
00:24:34.600But before we move on, I want to bring up one more example that you kind of sent over me today,
00:24:40.940an article that you had also written previously on Utah Governor Spencer Cox,
00:24:47.020because we don't want it to seem like this is just a phenomenon in, you know, South Dakota or just happens to be centered around Kristi Noem.
00:24:55.100There are many Republican governors, and Cox is probably even more egregious here,
00:25:00.680willing to step out and completely embrace this ideology even while being, you know, the governor of one of the redest states in the country.
00:25:09.700Right. And Cox, I think, really is, to my mind, the most egregious Republican governor, at least in a red state.
00:25:16.440I mean, you can sort of point to sort of blue state Republican governors like, you know, Massachusetts and Maryland,
00:25:22.100where their embrace of a certain kind of social liberalism is, to a certain extent, pragmatic because they are governors of liberal states.
00:25:29.460But Utah is supposed to be and is, by all accounts, still a very conservative state.
00:25:34.980And Cox is one of those guys, you know, I haven't looked into the actual sort of institutional economic incentives behind what he's doing,
00:25:42.520although I'm sure they exist. But he's clearly someone who's really ideologically committed to the most radical edge of the kind of left wing cultural revolution.
00:25:52.360And, you know, you can you can sort of go down the list.
00:25:54.740He's sort of vetoed all of these different transgender bills.
00:25:57.800His veto of this ban on men and women's sports was overridden by the state legislature in, I think, 30 minutes.
00:26:04.720So luckily, there's still some actual conservatives in the Utah legislature.
00:26:08.200But there is this video of him, you know, tearfully apologizing to LGBT activists when he when he failed to sort of pass this or to kill this anti LGBT bill.
00:26:18.860He put his pronouns in his Instagram bio for a while.
00:26:23.440You know, he introduced himself with pronouns in these various sort of forums.
00:26:26.700He defended this this this scholarship program by the Utah Jazz, which excluded white kids, said it wasn't racist, obviously racist.
00:26:35.400So, you know, that's an example, I think, again, of the power of the sort of ideological apparatus where somewhere someone like Spencer Cox is more loyal to
00:26:43.600the kind of centers of left wing ideological power and to the sort of public narrative that they tell than he is to the views of the of the people who actually elected him
00:26:54.480with the understanding, implicit or explicit, that he was going to govern in their interests.
00:27:00.140And I think in the context of Utah, it's partially at least because I spent a lot of time in Utah and Utahns are extremely nice people.
00:27:08.000Mormons are very nice people. They conceive of themselves as very kind, nice people.
00:27:12.060And the problem is that the sort of national left has defined nice in terms of basically going along with the transgender agenda.
00:27:21.440And it's sort of often conceived of as mean to sort of do something like ban the chemical castration of 12 year olds.
00:27:28.460And I think Cox clearly has bought into that. And again, it's it's it's a demonstration of just how deep the kind of tentacles of this apparatus reach into the reddest parts of America.
00:27:38.280So now that we've done a pretty good job of establishing, you know, what's going on here and why it's phenomena across many different areas, not not just in South Dakota, but but multiple places in the United States and at the national level, I want to ask you a deeper mechanical question, because I'll be I'll be interested to pick your brain on this.
00:28:00.000I have my own thoughts. I have my own thoughts, but we'll you know, let's get yours first.
00:28:03.400Is this new? Is this a phenomena of of the wokeism, the current cultural revolution?
00:28:10.120Why is this happening? Why is it that the GOP candidates of today are, you know, far more progressively left wing than liberal Democrats from the 90s?
00:28:22.460It's a good question. And I'm curious about your thoughts as well.
00:28:26.780The apparatus is clearly not new. I mean, you can go back and read someone like James Burnham talking about the sort of managerial elite, you know, almost a century ago.
00:28:36.060And that's clearly, I think, the apparatus he was describing with this sort of fusion of a variety of different institutions that had sort of traditionally been in competition with one another.
00:28:44.720You know, the federal bureaucracy, big business, the universities, et cetera, under under the guise of one sort of cohesive class, which often, you know, moves between the different institutions and the institutions, I think, have adopted the kind of left wing ideology we're thinking about as their ideological apparatus.
00:29:02.300So, again, like the sort of institutional power structure has been around for a while.
00:29:06.860I do think that the ideology and their willingness to sort of aggressively lobby for it has become more extreme.
00:29:14.160And I also just think that they've become more brazen in their efforts to do things that they previously thought they couldn't get away with.
00:29:20.540You know, we weren't seeing Republicans or the kind of lobbying groups like Sanford Health that funded them lobbying against bans on sex change surgeries for kids a couple decades ago.
00:29:31.260That's probably because it wasn't even an issue.
00:29:32.880But the fact that it is an issue, I think, speaks to the sort of radicalization of the managerial ideology.
00:29:40.120So, again, that sort of apparatus and the sort of power centers are not new.
00:29:44.680And the kind of cohesive class that governs them is not new.
00:29:48.700But the the the that classes sort of attempts to sort of hollow out all these red state institutions and ultimately their ways of life as a corollary has become much more aggressive and brazen than, you know, even even in the America that I was born in.
00:30:04.880But if these if this isn't new, then then my question is, why do we see this leftward drift?
00:30:11.380Like, why is there why is there always an incentive for Republican leadership or conservative leadership to drift leftward?
00:30:21.080Right. Like we under you're absolutely right that it's accelerating.
00:30:23.500And I do think that Burnham's understanding of the managerial class is and their incentives, especially when it comes to like de-territorializing things and re-territorializing them into the market for the for the utility of easier management is is an eye opening thing.
00:30:41.780Like, I think that is essential. But why why do we see this cycle over and over again on the right?
00:30:49.240I'm I'm I say this because I'm writing a piece on it.
00:30:52.260So that's so spoiler spoiler. I have I like I said, I have my own thoughts on this.
00:30:56.920But why why do we constantly see the incentives to always move leftward?
00:31:03.620And again, I don't I think you can go back to Buckley or before that and see that this has always been the way that the American right has operated since 1950, at least.
00:31:14.400Why why isn't there an incentive to serve the base?
00:31:17.960Why isn't there incentive to be to the to be to the right to have the vanguard to the right of the voters?
00:31:24.580Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, this was a critique from the right of Buckley.
00:31:28.380I think in the case of Buckley, it's a little more complicated. I'm not contractually obligated to say that, but I mean, I think Buckley was was overall a salutary figure.
00:31:40.200But one one thing he was criticized for was and this was a major debate.
00:31:44.580There's a fault line in the right at the time was trying to sort of conceive of the conservative movement as seeking affirmation of and membership within this sort of managerial regime.
00:31:56.300Now, he made strong arguments for that, but it was it was a critique.
00:32:01.440And the critique was that if you're actually going to fundamentally achieve the things that you say that you want to achieve,
00:32:09.680you're going to be sort of neutered by your membership in a class which is sort of functionally institutionally committed to opposing those things.
00:32:17.940But the the I think the to answer your larger question, the sort of Republican elites, you know, sort of always seeming to capitulate to the left in ways that the left never capitulates to the right does have to do with their membership.
00:32:31.660And or at least proximity to these centers of power, which are wholly dominated by controlled by the left and particularly the cultural left is where you see, you know, these kinds of capitulations.
00:32:44.800And, you know, that manifests in a lot of different ways.
00:32:47.640It manifests in the sort of public narrative control of the sort of dominant conversation.
00:32:53.340You know, there's this thing called the New York Times effect that people talk about where, you know, conservative media like National Review can run 100 pieces about something,
00:33:02.160but it'll it'll likely have less social effect than if the New York Times runs a really long piece about it.
00:33:07.480The good example of this was sort of anti-porn, where you get all these conservative anti-porn activists spending decades sort of lobbying for sort of harsher crackdowns on child pornography,
00:33:18.060sort of human trafficking, et cetera. And then Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times did one big piece and all of a sudden legislators in the U.S. Senate sort of moved on it.
00:33:27.120So so that sort of power differential in terms of these narrative forming and policing institutions is huge.
00:33:34.100But it's also just the fact that if you look at like the composition of the Republican elite, they are formed by and come from often, not always, but often these kind of managerial elite institutions.
00:33:45.100They go to elite universities in D.C. They frequent a lot of institutions that kind of sit at the center of of that.
00:33:52.480They're they're often chummy, as we talked about with big business, which is very much representative of this class.
00:33:57.740As a result, either explicitly or implicitly, you know, consciously or subconsciously, they sort of think in terms of the framework that has been set by a regime that is that is hostile to the things that the people who actually elect them are looking for.
00:34:12.200And that's why they see it as acceptable to capitulate on things that people sort of outside of or with less proximity to those power centers see as unacceptable.
00:34:24.100Yeah, I think that's right. I think a huge part of this is the fact that the very skill set that allows you to operate a party to to write, you know, pieces for a major publication to produce a television show, those kind of things are the skill sets that are acquired inside the institutions that are promoting managerial values.
00:34:44.100And that means that at the end of the day, even if you see yourself as the right most person in those institutions, you're still far to the left of the people who are you're supposed to be representing.
00:34:57.100And so over and over again, we see people moving this direction, because really, you're not giving up that much by, you know, letting a little bit of the right wing stuff slide at the end of the day, you're still the most qualified person on the right to kind of lead it.
00:35:11.400I think there's also a huge problem with the neocon effect, where you have these people come in, they fall out of the left because the left has gotten too radical for them.
00:35:22.560And, you know, this is the famous Ronald Reagan, I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.
00:35:27.340And now those people enter to the right and because they are of the managerial class, because they are the well spoken, they are the properly trained, they are the properly credentialed, they feel the entitlement to lead.
00:35:41.920And because the right wants to be able to win a victory, they immediately move to acquiesce to the demands of these new members of the right wing coalition.
00:35:50.500And all of a sudden, you see, you know, guys like Buckley cancelling people to his right in order to take control, you know, of the movement.
00:36:00.780And I think this is a very old cycle. This is not new. I think this is something that is repeated over and over again.
00:36:08.440And, you know, that's why we continuously see, you know, our leadership in, you know, the current year to the left of, again, Democrats from, you know, 20 years ago, because they are the Democrats from 20 years ago that got shoved out of that movement and they got forced to the right.
00:36:29.780And now that they're there, they have the quality to lead. And now that they're in leadership, they know that they need to get rid of their right wing if they're going to be able to maintain their power there.
00:36:39.640Right. I'm glad you brought up neoconservatism because I actually think it gets to this sort of deeper problem with the kind of ideological power or influence of the left.
00:36:48.880In fact, it was speaking of James Burnham as well. I wrote this column today where I was quoting this 1972 essay that Burnham wrote criticizing neoconservatism in National Review, by the way.
00:37:01.620But Burnham argued that while neoconservatives had broken with liberal doctrine, they retained the emotional gestalt of liberalism, which is liberal sensitivity and temperament,
00:37:11.980which is part of this sort of deeper critique of neoconservatism, which in many ways controls the kind of central apparatus of mainstream conservatism now,
00:37:20.020which has actually accepted a lot of the basic premises of the left and often just counters that sort of pragmatically or practically speaking,
00:37:28.400conservative ends or conservative means are a better way to reach left wing ends.
00:37:33.560And you see that, you know, across the spectrum, like, you know, one of the things that, you know, constantly gets me is you hear about, you hear conservatives.
00:37:41.220I mean, the sort of the sort of low IQ version of it is Democrats are the real racists, but the sort of higher IQ version of it is the argument that,
00:37:49.840for example, abortion is systemic racism or the public school system is systemic racism or I don't know, the welfare system is systemic racism.
00:37:59.960And what they're what they're doing is they're indicting these left wing policies using an extremely left wing premise,
00:38:06.760which is that any policy that has a disparate racial impact is evidence in and of itself of the sort of systemic racism and that ultimately that America is rife with systemic racism.
00:38:17.500It's just left wing policies instead of right wing policies.
00:38:20.140And you regularly hear conservatives make those kinds of arguments as if sort of appealing to that is going to convince people on the left, which it never will.
00:38:27.300You're never going to beat them at their own game. But it's evidence also of the kind of internalization on the right of these sort of core left wing premises about,
00:38:37.520you know, the purpose of public policy being sort of egalitarian redistribution and social reconstruction.
00:38:43.540And, you know, the idea that America is a systemically racist country, which it isn't.
00:38:48.400You know, you see that, you know, there's there's a there's a House GOP statement in January 2020 about the Trump economy,
00:38:54.560where they're boasting about the fact that under the Trump economy, women's wages are rising higher than raising rising quicker than men's wages.
00:39:02.520And women of color's wages are, you know, are growing faster than both women or men's wages who are white.
00:39:09.940It's the same thing. I mean, like we actually know that that that women's wages rising faster than men's wages is bad in terms of marriage formation,
00:39:18.820because there's an enormous amount of social science showing that women don't want to marry men who make less than them.
00:39:24.280But again, it's the sort of internalization by this official organ of the House GOP that the way to make the case for the Trump economy is that women are getting richer faster than men are.
00:39:33.720You know, you can go down the list. You can find any number of examples. That one just stood out to me.
00:39:36.900But that's kind of one of the that was one of the sort of founding credos of neoconservatism.
00:39:42.680And it was a subject of criticism from the kind of old right and from the paleos during the kind of neo paleo wars,
00:39:49.120which is that the neos had basically embraced conservative public policy, but kept the left wing ends.
00:39:56.400But, you know, the neos won that war pretty decisively. And the paleos and the old right were were often pretty marginalized.
00:40:02.780And the result is that a lot of what what passes from mainstream conservatism today also retains that kind of emotional gestalt of liberalism that Burnham was talking about in the 70s.
00:40:12.920So now that we have a better understanding of kind of why this has been institutionalized on the right, here come the hard questions.
00:40:20.960So and the ones that I don't have necessarily an immediate answer.
00:40:26.020I have some ideas, but but I don't want to claim to have all these answers either because they are genuinely difficult questions.
00:40:31.540So if we see that there is an innate problem with the class that shares these values across both parties and the institutional incentives built into these and the adoption of frames and those kind of things,
00:40:48.020what is the move here? Because we've already acknowledged that, like, OK, we understand that, like, inviting these massive corporations into your right wing state will probably make it drift left wing.
00:40:58.660But what's the answer? Just don't have corporations in your state like that seems like economic suicide, right?
00:41:04.800We say, well, the managerial class is going to necessarily push the conservatives to the left.
00:41:12.120Great. But what's the plan? Like, don't have educated people in don't have people who are able to operate, operate bureaucracies inside the right.
00:41:18.980Like what what is the escape mechanism here? How do we see our way around this corner?
00:41:24.180Yeah, it's it's sort of the question defining question of our age. I would be I would be sort of I mean, I don't I don't claim to have sort of like the perfect comprehensive answer.
00:41:35.400If I did, hopefully people who are smarter and more powerful than I did would also have that answer.
00:41:40.140But I think it's a bunch of different things. I mean, there's a sort of granular sort of policy level question.
00:41:44.100And there's like the big sort of paradigm question. The granular sort of policy one is the sort of obvious stuff of stop listening to the Chamber of Commerce and business groups or taking your cues from them in terms of public policy.
00:41:56.460When it comes to, you know, all the cultural stuff, you know, the transgender issue, immigration, you know, critical race theory in schools, all of that stuff in every red state, you can find the Chamber of Commerce, which used to be the GOP's kind of like, you know, constituency lobbying against anything that social conservatives try to do.
00:42:12.480And for Republican voters to actually start holding their Republican leaders accountable, because in places like South Dakota, you know, if Republican voters had more time, I think, to sort of spend paying attention to what was actually happening in their state legislature, I think they'd be outraged by what was happening.
00:42:30.800So the Republican base is really, I think, the right's friend in this fight. And that kind of gets to the larger kind of framework question, which is that you stop looking as a sort of source of your power, of your agenda, of your sort of priorities inside the kind of managerial apparatus, and you try to organize resistance to the managerial apparatus in the places that are the farthest away from its proximities in power.
00:43:00.800It's maybe a little spicy, but there's actually, this was one insight that Mao Zedong had when he was, when he was, when he was fighting in China, which was that the people who need to lead the kind of counterinsurgency are the ones who are the furthest away from the centers of power.
00:43:16.760So he sort of his innovation in Marxist theory was that you go to the peasants, who are the ones who are the most alienated from the regime and the most sort of resentful towards it, to kind of be the kind of organizing ethos of your movement.
00:43:31.660I think the Trump base is a pretty good analogy for that in the context of what we're talking about, the kind of the sort of the middle Americans are the ones who are the most alienated by, alienated from sort of denigrated by and hurt by these kind of national managerial institutions.
00:43:47.760And those are the ones I think where we should be, those are the people that we should be organizing into a kind of self-conscious coalition to actually make a bid for power in these national institutions.
00:43:59.820But there is a real, I mean, there's a real sort of point to be made that because that managerial apparatus is where power lies in America, to a certain extent, what conservatives in the right are doing, are competing for power within it, rather than, you know, trying to overthrow it outright.
00:44:16.720Because the, you know, at least, at least for now, you know, that, that's the sort of institutional framework that we're stuck with.
00:44:23.240But I think thinking in those terms and understanding how sort of power functions in America today is a pretty good way to get a lot of Republicans to wake up and realize that kind of going along to get along with these big business interests, particularly on these cultural issues, is not the way to win.
00:44:40.100Yeah, Francis, Sam Francis, had basically this outlook, he said that you're, you know, one of the reasons that kind of the Buckleyhead approach failed was that it was attempting to work from within the managerial framework, and that the, if you don't have a critique of the framework, then you simply have, you're only, you're only negotiating your place inside of it, you don't have any hope of actually fundamentally dismantling it or opposing it in, in any serious way.
00:45:07.440I guess one issue that I think is a big problem in this, because, of course, Mao's approach is, it might be revolutionary for communism, but it's not particularly revolutionary when it comes to, like, understanding of power.
00:45:22.140This is the juvenile and high and low versus middle.
00:45:25.040This is the, you know, the power looking to, to kind of erode the opposing power structures seeking out, you know, the periphery.
00:45:35.160But in order to do that, you need to have, I think, the high, right?
00:45:40.060Like, so you can, you can take the, the Trumpian coalition, but it needs to have another power center with the ability to erode the manager, managers in the way that the managers eroded the bourgeoisie power, right?
00:45:51.820And so you need an alternative power center with the ability to kind of take that coalition and wield it as a hammer against kind of the managerial apparatus.
00:46:00.780I think a lot of people look at a guy like Elon Musk, and I understand why, and I think there's some merit to that.
00:46:05.960Do you see any, any figures or any other competing power apparatuses that might be able to wield the Trumpian coalition in that manner?
00:46:14.860Well, I think the, the sort of other strategy and the two can, I think, can and should coexist.
00:46:20.780And, but this is where I think Elon Musk is, is indicative of, of this sort of second strategy is that you need class traders within the apparatus, right?
00:46:27.320I mean, one of the sort of weirdest critiques that you hear from some conservatives of sort of sort of populist right wingers is, you know, well, you know, like at least the populist elites.
00:46:35.860It's like, well, you know, he went to Harvard or he went to, this is something that people say about someone like Josh Hawley, like, oh, he went to Harvard or Yale Law.
00:46:41.380So he's a hypocrite for sort of styling himself as like a populist representative of the people.
00:46:45.440It's like, no, every serious populist movement in history has understood that you need elites and you need sort of class traders, you know, FDR, whatever you think of him was a class trader, right?
00:46:55.280He was someone who came from this kind of upper, upper crust of American society, who styled himself as someone representing the interests of workers.
00:47:03.560So, so, so finding people who are sort of allied with and believe in your cause and who are willing to sort of align themselves with the kind of like mass grassroots within the apparatus.
00:47:17.160And those people do exist in DC is, is, is one way to make your way in, you know, Elon Musk is an example of this.
00:47:22.900I mean, he's, he's sort of different than the managerial class and that he's in this weird way, this, this sort of remnant of this older kind of America where the ruling class was this kind of capitalist entrepreneurial class, which is not the same thing as the managerial elites.
00:47:37.780Who don't really invent things or, or particularly are particularly innovative.
00:47:41.860They draw their power from managing these kinds of preexisting corporate superstructures.
00:47:47.300Musk is actually, you know, an entrepreneur.
00:47:50.440But he was also, you know, obviously, you know, he's wealthiest man in the world, I think.
00:47:53.720So he is, is from the upper class and he moved in those circles his entire life, even if he was not quite the same as the, as the kind of normal membership.
00:48:02.920So the, but again, the, you know, those two strategies can kind of, can exist with, with one another.
00:48:10.560So Musk's attempted takeover of Twitter, and we haven't seen exactly how it's going to play out yet.
00:48:16.120But that's kind of an example of someone that you could call a class trader or someone who kind of represents like an outsider institution, but also is familiar with working within all of these different apparatuses.
00:48:29.000Actually wielding the power that they have to, to take over.
00:48:34.560And I think, you know, in, in those examples, a big part of the role of someone like Musk is to open up space for the building of those institutions that exist outside of and in diametric opposition with the kind of managerial apparatus.
00:48:48.640Because the managerial apparatus is, is obviously invested in killing any attempts to build sort of things that could actually present a real threat to their power.
00:48:57.960And someone like Musk neutralizing their attempts to do that, at least in the context of Twitter, is one of the most valuable things that he can do.
00:49:05.220Yeah, I know why people have a lot of hesitation around guys like Musk, and it's fair, like, don't, don't go all in on that.
00:49:14.260Don't think that he's, you know, super based and 100% aligned with you.
00:49:17.360But do remember that almost all of the guys who have led these kind of things tend to be guys who came from the power structure, found themselves with no other place to go and then reach out to the disaffected people.
00:49:31.020So, like, you know, Caesar didn't want to be a populary, but he ended up having to be because the other option was to have the Senate completely destroy him.
00:49:39.480And, you know, I don't know that Trump wanted to represent the red states the way he did.
00:49:44.340But, you know, the only option left was, was that because the left was, was more than willing to abandon him.
00:49:50.500If Musk wants to get the things done that he, or if Musk is going to get the things done that he wants to get done, the left won't let him.
00:49:59.080So just because someone, you know, works inside of the system to some level, that doesn't mean that they're not, there's not an opportunity.
00:50:05.800People, people often have to rise to that stuff when kind of the forces of history come to them.
00:50:10.240It's not that they've always been on your side and are just ideologically aligned with you.
00:50:14.840Right. No, I think that's exactly right.
00:50:34.100I'm at N-J-H-O-C-H-M-A-N, N-J Hockman at Twitter.
00:50:38.720And I've got, yeah, I've got some other big stuff in the pipeline coming up.
00:50:42.460I kind of want to dig more into some of the stuff that we're talking about, because, because as we were talking about, you know, this is not something that's unique to South Dakota.
00:50:51.360I've written about it in other red states before.
00:50:54.120But I think particularly in these rural areas where the local media is either totally neutered or just doesn't have the resources, you know, there's a lot of reporting to be done.
00:51:03.220So let's keep an eye out for some of that stuff.
00:51:20.180And I think this goes along with our talking about the class, the managerial class structure part of this, right?
00:51:26.800That because these people might be the right most person in D.C. or New York or, you know, whatever part of California they grew up in, they are still left leaning and are willing to acquiesce compared to the base.
00:51:42.420And there's sort of longer commentaries about what the actual sort of substance of living in a city sort of does to one's sort of worldview.
00:51:49.820I grew up in a city, so I'm not I'm guilty of whatever whatever sort of indictment that presents.
00:51:54.220But it's true that the sort of cultural milieu that you come from is just very different in terms of like some of your sort of core premises, even if you think of yourself as a conservative.
00:52:05.080And certainly if you're formed by the kind of institutions that represent those those urban worldviews, like Ivy League universities, for example, you know, that's going to affect the way you think of some of things.
00:52:16.000Even even as a conservative, you have this very vivid sense of where the kind of wall is on the rights and what things you can't pass.
00:52:24.220Which just doesn't exist, at least to the same extent on the left.
00:52:46.960Now, I think this has been a pretty consistent critique.
00:52:49.600I know it has of me, and it's certainly a lot of people are adopting this as well, understanding that the frame is the problem, right?
00:52:57.680That we're the right is largely running around chasing the new stories and using the language that the left wants them to.
00:53:05.180I see guys like Chris Ruffo who are doing good work to try to shift this, but where are the maybe some of the key points where the right can try to refocus and set the agenda?
00:53:17.860What things do they need to do to make sure that they're not constantly chasing the left wing narrative?
00:53:21.500Well, I mean, a lot of it plays into everything that we're talking about in terms of taking your cues from constituencies and institutions insofar as they exist that don't have the same proximity to these kind of power centers.
00:53:34.340But I think the best example that I can come up with, and you can criticize aspects of it, but the pro-life movement, what they did was very, I think, indicative of what needs to be done across the board in terms of building outside institutions, new original institutions dedicated to a policy agenda, which was obviously opposed by the power centers that we're talking about.
00:53:58.360And then organizing, you know, in terms of decades of activism, grassroots, you know, door knocking, et cetera, et cetera, an entirely different sort of institutional media apparatus that set its own narrative and was in many ways sort of a counter hegemonic narrative to the sort of central one.
00:54:15.260And then sort of through that organization and through the sort of building of this sort of counter hegemonic narrative made it, you know, completely unacceptable if you wanted to be a national Republican to not embrace at least a version of their policy agenda.
00:54:29.580If you look back to the to the 70s, you know, even even a decade after Roe v. Wade, you know, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party were both kind of 50 50 on the abortion.
00:54:39.360You know, Nelson Rockefeller in New York, who's a Republican governor, signed the most liberal abortion law in the world at that time.
00:54:47.660And what the pro-life movement was extremely successful in doing is basically taking over the Republican Party apparatus on the one issue that they were lobbying for and remaking it in their image.
00:54:57.180And what they what the way that they did that, again, was through the sort of twin approaches of building a grassroots kind of consciousness, a coalition in the Republican base that was aware of itself as being pro-life and a sort of institutional superstructure through big activist groups, pro-life media, you know, et cetera, et cetera, which sort of built the sort of narrative and the kind of calling, you know, agenda that they that they coalesced around.
00:55:23.460And, you know, you see that with things like the Federalist Society as well.
00:55:27.840All of these institutions are worthy of criticism, too.
00:55:30.820But the pro-life movement, I think, was the most successful social conservative movement in recent memory, at least, because they actually took this kind of grassroots outside insurgent coming in approach.
00:55:45.320And, you know, they enjoy a lot of power still to this day as a result.
00:55:48.060Yeah, one hopes that the the right will be able to do that in ways that facilitate further victories as well.
00:55:56.740That's, you know, that's a good point about the ability of them to kind of shift.
00:56:01.920And a lot of that is because the parties were more regional than ideological at that point.
00:56:06.800But and there's there's a lot more to that as well.
00:56:09.400But it's an excellent point that they were able to acquire that level of power due to their approach.
00:56:14.800The key thing, however, is that it didn't allow the conservatives to then win additional victories.
00:56:21.080In fact, in many in many ways, it just facilitated the left's acceleration of things like the Respect for Marriage Act and these kind of things.
00:56:30.460Right. And so and so one of the key things I think conservatives need to understand is winning on policy issues comes after winning power.
00:56:39.480And and that has to be a key aspect as well.
00:56:43.220Yeah. Yeah. Just really quickly, the pro-life movement was committed to one specific issue and they did remarkably well on that.
00:56:49.700But absolutely the sort of roadmap is is much broader than that one issue.
00:56:53.720And you've seen Republicans hold on to the pro-life issue as they sacrifice basically every other social conservative commitment.
00:57:00.280Right. So you need a much more kind of all of the above approach.
00:57:04.640Glow in the dark here again. Thank you very much.
00:57:06.320Sure. Any right winger on the or religious person worth their salt will know that sin sells.
00:57:11.680Will you take the 30 pieces of silver for your morals and objections?
00:57:15.800I mean, yeah, this is obviously a huge part of, again, Republicans embracing this pro-business problem.
00:57:23.340Right. Is that there was always the inevitable truth that businesses make far more money by dismantling your community and your traditions than they do by upholding them.
00:57:35.640And so there there was always this unspoken but implicit agreement that you were going to be able to kind of slowly but surely sell this kind of stuff to Americans under the idea of free enterprise, free markets, these kind of things.
00:57:50.020So escaping that ideology is increasingly important.
00:57:53.440I mean, there are even sections of libertarians understanding this now.
00:57:56.700So, again, I'm hopeful that the the the commerce, the chamber of commerce constituency of the right is is waning in power, at least slowly.
00:58:10.100But that will be an essential part of victory moving forward.
00:58:13.420Right. And I will say, you know, I don't usually sort of defend libertarians, but one thing that a lot of libertarians have often been correct about is that a lot of ways, a lot of times the ways that this functions isn't purely kind of entrepreneurial, free market, free enterprise capitalism.
00:58:30.120You know, big business basically enjoys its monopoly over various industries by collaboration with, you know, quote unquote, big government, the managerial regime, whatever you want to call it.
00:58:42.180But the kind of entrepreneurial sort of small and midsize businesses are often a threat to the big businesses that are actually throwing their weight around and big business allies with the federal bureaucracy and regulators a lot of time to box those sort of smaller competitors out.
00:58:57.480Those smaller competitors also often happen to be much more culturally conservative because they're based in sort of regional identities, whereas these kind of multinational corporations have no allegiance to any regional identity or even to the often to the nation that they exist in.
00:59:13.980So we've got Friendly here for ten dollars off topic, but judging by your musical taste, I think you enjoy Gamma Ray and Eduguy.
00:59:23.080If you haven't listened to these bands, I highly recommend would be interested to know if you enjoy yet.
00:59:28.680You have correctly identified me as a power metal guy.
00:59:30.920And yes, I have heard both of those bands.