The Auron MacIntyre Show - June 06, 2023


Is America over Pride？ ｜ Guest： Inez Stepman ｜ 6⧸5⧸23


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 11 minutes

Words per Minute

183.48088

Word Count

13,105

Sentence Count

609

Misogynist Sentences

7

Hate Speech Sentences

22


Summary

In this episode of High Noon, I chat with Ennis stepman, host of the Independent Women's Forum, about the growing anti-gay backlash on the right, and why this might be a symptom of a larger problem.


Transcript

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?
00:00:31.760 Thanks for joining me this evening.
00:00:33.640 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:38.140 So we've seen, of course, American Ramadan kick off here.
00:00:42.320 It's had a lot of different battles back and forth, though, this year.
00:00:46.960 Usually this thing kind of comes and goes without much fanfare,
00:00:51.080 other than, you know, getting all the corporate propaganda in your face for the next month.
00:00:55.120 But we have seen a bit of a shift this year.
00:00:57.280 There's been some pushback.
00:00:58.540 There's been some question about whether Pride is really as popular as people think it is,
00:01:03.680 whether there might be a popular backlash that's been building up for a while,
00:01:07.140 why this might all be occurring.
00:01:09.020 And discussing this with me today is Ennis Stepman.
00:01:11.820 She is the host of High Noon, and she's over at the Independent Women's Forum.
00:01:19.040 Thanks for joining me.
00:01:20.580 Yeah, at least you didn't say International Women's Forum.
00:01:22.640 That's where I was going.
00:01:23.320 So, yeah, we're not that.
00:01:28.480 But yeah, it's definitely been it has been a bit of a white pill Pride Month, I feel like.
00:01:34.680 Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that.
00:01:36.260 So I guess we can start with just kind of the boycott phenomenon.
00:01:39.500 So I'm somebody who remembers a lot of these throughout the years.
00:01:43.200 I grew up in kind of a Southern Baptist household, and I remember these boycotts against Johnson and Johnson and Disney and these different companies that would kind of push back against family values or make decisions that kind of Christian conservatives weren't big fans of.
00:01:57.840 And they try to organize these boycotts, and they just went nowhere.
00:02:01.140 They did nothing.
00:02:01.920 They never had an effect.
00:02:03.760 You know, they were tossed around for a few months and nothing happened.
00:02:07.280 This year, it seems like it's a little different.
00:02:09.660 We've seen some pretty significant drops in valuations for companies like Bud Light and or sorry, Anheuser-Busch and Target kind of off of these boycotts.
00:02:21.620 We've seen a sustained effort from conservatives.
00:02:24.840 It's not just going away after a week or two or a month of it.
00:02:28.280 It's really been continuous.
00:02:29.580 What do you think that made it kind of stick this time around?
00:02:33.860 Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting question in itself, and I'm not really sure quite what the answer is in terms of why this seems to be the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of people.
00:02:45.660 I do think the trans issue directly has a lot to do with it, and particularly trans issue is applied to minors, but it seems to be broader than that, right?
00:02:53.940 So I've noticed a lot more sort of muted response from corporations, even around putting up the rainbow flag or sort of the private stuff in a way that even a year ago, I just remember my inbox being inundated.
00:03:07.940 Like every single company that I've ever bought an appliance from or any minor trinket from sent me just an explosion of rainbows and naked men dancing, you know?
00:03:20.280 And I really have noted – it's like notably less this year.
00:03:25.060 So as to why this finally tripped off a serious boycott response on the right, I can't say.
00:03:31.420 I mean, I was fed up with this kind of stuff a long time ago, so I think maybe somebody who just got fed up would be a better person to ask.
00:03:39.720 But I do think it points to two important sort of structural things.
00:03:44.740 One, woke capital, the corporations, right?
00:03:49.460 They're both an incredibly powerful piece of the leftist coalition, and I would say on the political level, the swing of corporate America away from sort of culturally neutral but vying for their own interests financially through the Republican Party,
00:04:06.320 swinging into the Democratic Party and then really asserting cultural interests has been the most powerful sort of aspect of cultural leftism in America is getting the great American corporations on board with it,
00:04:23.340 and not just tacitly but actively where they were lobbying in state legislatures against culturally conservative pieces of legislation.
00:04:30.600 They were leading, you know, capital strikes against entire states that crossed the cultural left.
00:04:37.340 It's the reason that we saw so much capitulation, especially among small red states, to a lot of this stuff is because they're corporate donors,
00:04:45.800 and they're not even just donors but large job-granting institutions within the state.
00:04:51.540 We're telling them we're going to pull out of your state over these cultural issues, and that has been very powerful.
00:04:56.280 But I think what we're observing now is it's also the most brittle and easily scared piece of the institutional left, right?
00:05:06.280 Whereas I think it will take a lot more to scare, for example, universities away from their political and cultural commitments.
00:05:17.440 You know, woke American corporations are still looking at the bottom line at the end of the day,
00:05:22.720 and I think there's been a combination of this backlash actually happening and sort of the end of several years of incredibly high profits and bottom line,
00:05:34.260 especially for corporations like Amazon, for example, during the pandemic,
00:05:38.620 that have really insulated them from any kind of backlash in terms of some of their political commitments in the last few years,
00:05:45.780 and we're seeing kind of an end to that gravy train.
00:05:47.460 But yeah, so I think it's possible to say that they're both one of the most powerful mechanisms of enforcement for the left,
00:05:53.800 but also the easiest to still scare in a way that academia and perhaps actual government bureaucracy is not.
00:06:01.240 Yeah, I don't think you could scare academia away from those commitments without a bulldozer,
00:06:05.060 but I do think that you're right that woke capital does – I think a lot of the people there do believe in this stuff.
00:06:12.080 I think they are in some ways true believers, but they can get that direct feedback mechanism of the bottom line in a way that,
00:06:20.500 like you said, the government and maybe education, those kind of things, don't immediately feel that impact.
00:06:26.700 They don't immediately see stock prices fall.
00:06:29.340 They don't immediately see large consumer boycotts, those kind of things, in exactly the same way.
00:06:34.900 And so it's understandable that these would be members who at least need to cool kind of this mechanism down.
00:06:40.460 They'd need to slow it down a bit.
00:06:43.520 I think that you're right that the kind of the transgender issue, especially targeting children,
00:06:49.100 did play a pretty big part in making this stuff unpalatable.
00:06:54.960 I think a lot of people, like you said, may have already been fed up with it to some degree, like yourself.
00:07:00.400 But when they kind of saw that this was targeting children, that this is kind of full blast at them in this nonstop way,
00:07:07.420 I think that it pushed a lot of people who otherwise would have just sat on the bench or wouldn't have wouldn't have really made a big fuss about this to start actually taking some level of action.
00:07:19.280 I think also the fact that particularly the Bud Light one kind of came with a with a meme that that attached to it.
00:07:27.960 It had something that kind of signaled a status, you know, the guy at the end of the bar who's ordering a Bud Light is no longer one of the guys is now some subject of ridicule.
00:07:38.620 It's it's something that kind of sticks with people in a way that like, oh, well, we don't go to Disney more because they don't support our family values.
00:07:45.000 I mean, you would hope that people would kind of make decisions based on that, but it doesn't, I think, have kind of that that visceral social kind of reflex that the way the kind of the Bud Light boycott did.
00:07:57.540 And so I think, you know, then the the also the kind of sustained effort of kind of conservative activists.
00:08:05.860 Usually you don't see that level of focused attention.
00:08:09.220 In fact, you see this a lot in kind of the left wing press right now, you know, complaining about, you know, guys like Matt Walsh or whoever going after these companies.
00:08:19.240 Oh, they targeted these companies that they specifically organized against them.
00:08:22.400 It's like, yes, you know, the way you do all the time.
00:08:24.680 But but they're kind of shocked and amazed that conservatives would have a class of pundits or activists that would actually be able to focus the attention of kind of the proles in a way that would actually impact the bottom line of these businesses.
00:08:39.220 Yeah, I think that's all true.
00:08:40.720 So this is not necessarily a disagreement, but sort of adding to I think some of these consumer mechanisms.
00:08:48.320 So the third the third example recently has been the DLA Dodgers, right, where there was a serious ticket sale plunge.
00:08:54.900 It strikes me that these boycotts, for example, would not be successful in the banking sector, right, because there are structural reasons why consumer choice.
00:09:10.020 So it hasn't just been that the right has not effectively hung in long enough in a boycott.
00:09:15.860 Right. I think there's also been structural reasons why those boycotts have been ineffective, even when they have been implemented in the past.
00:09:23.820 And I think actually I can't remember for what reason, but Kellogg's I remember there was a sustained back in like 20 sort of 12 era.
00:09:32.200 There was a sustained boycott of Kellogg's. Right. And then people very quickly figured out that it wasn't just a matter of choosing one cereal versus another cereal in the grocery store that like all the cereals belong to Kellogg's.
00:09:43.960 Right. So there's an element of monopoly power here.
00:09:46.540 And even when there is no actual financial monopoly or economic monopoly, there's a cultural monopoly to a lot of these sectors.
00:09:54.460 So there is no non woke bank. Right. All of these, if you take any of the major national banks, leaving aside credit unions that come with substantial, they're not an interchangeable product.
00:10:06.020 Right. With a big national bank. They come with, you know, basically that consumer choice mechanism is not operative because all of these these companies, let's say, you know, whatever, Wells Fargo or, you know, Bank of America, Chase, whatever, like list off the handful that exist.
00:10:27.920 Right. If they all make the same cultural decision and they all decide, let's say, to go all in on on, you know, George Floyd mania in 2020, which is largely what we saw happen, they can count on all of their competitors to do the same thing because they all come through the same universities.
00:10:48.200 They all like hold certain left of center cultural views. Right. And this has to do with, to some extent, the economic and class structure of of the way that money is now made in corporate America.
00:10:59.920 But they can essentially count on the fact that their competitors are going to do the same thing or something similar.
00:11:04.800 So they're not really worried about pissing off conservative consumers to such an extent as in a market where you have a lot of different competitors.
00:11:14.680 Right. Like beer. Right. Domestic cheap beer. There are a lot of competitors and a lot of those competitors have essentially remained silent on these kinds of cultural issues.
00:11:23.320 So there was an easy alternative for people to switch to. Whereas a lot of these these perhaps more important sectors of the economy, there is this functional cultural monopoly.
00:11:33.060 And the only comparison that I can really think of that seems in certain key ways to be similar to that is actually the the so-called Green Book South.
00:11:46.600 Right. But before the Civil Rights Act is passed, at least the 64 Act, as opposed to the one in the 50s, the piece with the public accommodations piece.
00:11:56.660 Right. Because the argument was, well, it's you know, it's not we can't resolve this through consumer boycott or any of those kinds of mechanisms because it's not just one hotel, for example, along a southern route of the United States that's refusing to serve all black customers.
00:12:13.640 Because of a cultural commitment, that hotel can be sure that none of his competitors in town will be serving that customer either.
00:12:22.320 So there's no like punishment. Right. There's no market punishment that's happening because for cultural or political reasons, all of those hotels in the same area had the same rule.
00:12:32.660 So they weren't there was no way for one of them to sort of get ahead by they would have to flout very serious sort of cultural norms and conventions.
00:12:41.000 And that was the argument for public accommodations. Right. Because they you know, the response was that you have to actually write down in a book the small number of hotels that actually in the entire American South would serve black customers.
00:12:54.060 And I think that's actually kind of what's going on in a lot of these sectors where you only have a handful of big market participants, none of whom actually makes up a economic monopoly.
00:13:06.040 But altogether, let's say, have 90 or 95 percent market share. If all of those CEOs decide to make the same cultural commitments, you have essentially a cultural monopoly.
00:13:16.480 And then consumer choice and these kinds of boycotts just is not a way of punishing them. Right. There's no mechanism for the customer to do that.
00:13:26.040 Yeah, no, I think that's right. I have a YouTube friend, academic agent. He famously did this, tried to boycott Gillette after.
00:13:32.260 I don't know if you remember, they did this kind of anti man ad a few years ago and he said, OK, I'm not going to do this anymore.
00:13:37.720 And I think they're owned by Johnson and Johnson or someone, S.E. Johnson. And he figured out that basically they actually just manufactured every single possible shaving product that he could he could get at the time, along with the most food products and everything else that, you know, household cleaning products and everything.
00:13:54.580 And so the ability to actually kind of boycott those things just because you don't realize how large these conglomerates are.
00:14:00.400 And then, like you said, it's not just that conglomerate, it's all the other ones that would hold a similar position.
00:14:05.500 And, you know, so these companies don't have to worry about that.
00:14:08.180 So I think it is important for people to recognize these these structural impacts as well.
00:14:12.780 And I guess that's that's kind of more what I wanted to get into with you here, because I think a lot of people, you know, myself included, are happy to see a W here in some way.
00:14:23.140 It's good to see that some kind of action here took place and there was there was a level of win to some extent.
00:14:30.820 But I think most people, at least I hope most people is certainly something I've been hitting on my channel quite a bit, is that if this is any kind of win and I don't know how to what degree it is.
00:14:41.180 But if this is any kind of win, it doesn't really stick around unless there's real structural change, unless there's real institutional change.
00:14:48.460 And the the the momentary victory of getting, you know, the Major League Baseball to switch off their pride logo on Twitter or something, it feels good.
00:14:57.980 That's a that's a nice dopamine hit for the moment.
00:14:59.940 But, you know, we just saw I don't know if you saw that clip of Larry Fink that's been kind of going around Twitter today of him, you know, talking about, you know, BlackRock.
00:15:08.560 Oh, well, you companies just have to force these changes.
00:15:11.640 You have to hire women.
00:15:12.940 You have to fire people of color.
00:15:16.000 You have to make these changes.
00:15:17.240 It doesn't matter if the market wants to do this or if the companies want to do this.
00:15:21.240 They have to do this and we're going to force them to make these changes.
00:15:24.500 And when you have, you know, companies or organizations like BlackRock forcing this into kind of every major corporation in the United States and the wider world, then it's really hard to pretend that one market hit one place or another is really going to completely kind of shift the momentum.
00:15:42.120 Right. You know, there's sort of the the battle of and I I'm very much in favor of these boycotts.
00:15:48.440 I think, as you say, as you said, right, like I think they're a W for us.
00:15:52.100 I think it's important what is put out in the public square.
00:15:55.140 I think it's important that there is a pushback, that there's it's not just the ratchet is not completely going one direction, that there's actually some kind of blowback for a company publicly declaring itself for the cultural left.
00:16:07.560 I think that that is a positive development in our politics.
00:16:10.160 That being said, the question is what's actually changing, first of all, even within these companies that are being hit.
00:16:16.520 So leaving aside the structural issue that exists in many sectors, important sectors of the American economy, and I'd add to the structural issue that I was talking about with this cultural monopoly, everything you just said.
00:16:26.980 Right. So, you know, ESG investing.
00:16:29.940 Right. That's something that has to be dealt with on the political level, not the boycott level.
00:16:32.780 Right. And there's there's a bunch of other sort of structural reasons why these these companies are going left.
00:16:39.520 I'll give you another one is that their workforce increasingly is coming directly through K-12 and university where their younger workforce is, to your point about earlier, about who's a true believer and who isn't.
00:16:52.480 The younger workforce are true believers and because of sort of the professional managerial way that our economy works.
00:16:59.980 Right. There's a limited number of these professionals who can do these non interchangeable creative type jobs, for example, coding.
00:17:07.680 Right. Or being a computer engineer. Right.
00:17:11.320 So the job pool with the correct skills because of other structural issues with our education system is disproportionately, quote unquote, true believer.
00:17:21.860 Right. So that's going to force certain changes from the bottom up in a company, even if the CEO is looking at the bottom line and the boycotts and saying, I don't know.
00:17:29.980 Right. But it's good that at least there's a counterforce to all of that.
00:17:34.400 But the question is how much that counterforce is actually really changing companies behavior.
00:17:39.240 Now, maybe they don't post the pride flag on on their Twitter account.
00:17:44.420 They're still providing an enormous amount.
00:17:46.300 And I know your favorite subject, an enormous amount of essentially private patronage to the left with having these enormous HR departments and DEI departments.
00:17:55.240 They're providing a lot of six figure jobs to people who are essentially political commissars.
00:17:59.460 Right. And they're weighing in in a very direct lobby way behind the scenes in a lot of state legislatures.
00:18:07.380 And so the question is how much of that activity starts to go away.
00:18:10.880 And here I do think, again, this is not to say that the boycott is ineffective.
00:18:15.580 I think it's providing a pressure.
00:18:17.700 But the question is to what you said. Right.
00:18:20.480 How much that pressure is actually converted into something longer term, like dropping their DEI departments, for example, which already the market pressures are.
00:18:29.760 I'm happy to report from the last time that I went on here and we were discussing this, I think, a few months ago, like in January or something before the major downturn, for example, in the tech sector.
00:18:40.920 Happy to report that there is some data now to say that they are starting to cut, quote unquote, the fat in their DEI departments and their HR departments.
00:18:48.720 Right. That a lot of CEOs in the economic downturn are looking at not hiring as many of these kinds of patronage positions.
00:18:55.720 So there are some there are some positive wins in our sales, but there are a lot of institutional forces against it.
00:19:02.020 And we shouldn't be blind to that fact or treat this kind of boycotting stuff as though it solves the political problems involved because it doesn't.
00:19:10.140 Yeah, I think that's really important.
00:19:11.880 Again, I think there is value in this.
00:19:14.280 I think, like you said, it's important to have those those W's.
00:19:17.200 I think it is important for people to see that there is no there isn't a lack of cost for being a corporation that goes out there and kind of says these things and pushes these things at least extremely publicly.
00:19:28.700 But I am wondering there's a there's a debate between me and a few other people about whether the kind of the establishment has the ability to put the woke away, whether they have the ability to ratchet down on this stuff and kind of go back to business as normal, pretending like there's a level of cultural detente.
00:19:52.880 There's there's there's a neutrality that can be achieved and they can kind of just return to a more functional system, realizing that the accesses of kind of the woke vanguard might have been necessary for them to secure some level of power.
00:20:06.500 You know, maybe maybe maybe blow out the Trump election or something, but may not be good for them in the long term.
00:20:13.460 Do you do you feel like kind of the and then obviously we're talking about a decentralized kind of consensus here?
00:20:22.520 Obviously, I don't think there's one person who's passing down orders of when this would be ratcheted up or down.
00:20:28.860 But do you think kind of corporate America, the left wing establishment, progressive educational institutions, the kind of thing, do you think they have the ability to kind of regulate themselves in the way of kind of making this stop or slowing it down to the point where it no longer pushes red America to the edge?
00:20:46.280 Or do you think that's something that they kind of have lost control of?
00:20:50.240 It's a good question, and I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think the the forces that I listed just now in the last answer that I gave, those are real institutional forces.
00:21:05.360 And we would be foolish to think that, you know, sort of a few boycotts or a few W's for the right would overturn those forces.
00:21:14.640 So one, there's a generational turnover that is related to the takeover of the education system.
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00:21:55.720 Oh, I lost her there for a second.
00:21:57.560 I know she's having a little bit of internet.
00:21:59.540 Oh, there she is.
00:22:00.260 You're back there.
00:22:01.160 Yeah, sorry, just lost you for about 10 seconds.
00:22:03.280 Right.
00:22:03.580 So in the K-12 system, right, the takeover was complete at minimum 30 years ago.
00:22:09.960 So we've had 30 years of K-12 indoctrination from the leftist cultural perspective in public
00:22:15.680 schools since, and so that's produced an entire generation and a half of kids who came through
00:22:22.820 this.
00:22:23.040 Now, obviously, there are some exceptions.
00:22:24.520 There are some kids who take their values from their family more than they do from school
00:22:29.220 and so on.
00:22:29.840 But, you know, overall, indoctrination does work, right?
00:22:32.740 This sort of framework of the world as the United States is inherently racist, for example,
00:22:37.520 does come through in polling surveys generation over generation.
00:22:42.820 And then, of course, the university system has been obviously left for so long that, you know,
00:22:47.100 William F. Buckley wrote Gone in Mount of Yale more than 70 years ago,
00:22:51.700 complaining about the takeover being already complete 70 years ago in the university system.
00:22:56.820 But I think what has made this particularly powerful in the last 30 to 50 years has been
00:23:02.880 the changes in our economic situation where the way to get rich in America, the pipeline
00:23:10.540 to wealth and power really started to run primarily through these education systems.
00:23:17.800 And some of that is a natural economic consolidation of the type of work that Americans were doing
00:23:24.980 and selling into a global market.
00:23:27.640 And some of it was direct policy choice, right?
00:23:31.780 Here I'm thinking about making it, quote unquote, unconstitutional to administer tests
00:23:37.400 in Griggs, right?
00:23:40.440 Right.
00:23:40.720 You can't administer a test.
00:23:42.120 So now we have to send people for $100,000 to university to make sure that they have, like,
00:23:46.560 a minimal level of intelligence or competence to do a particular job.
00:23:50.500 Whereas before, you could administer a test and screen applicants that way.
00:23:53.720 So some of these things are policy choices.
00:23:56.400 Some of them are larger economic forces.
00:23:58.360 And I'm not an economist or somebody else can talk about how it or rehash Burnham of how
00:24:04.700 we moved from sort of a Wild West capitalistic economy more in that direction to something
00:24:09.240 that is more bureaucratic and managerial and that gives an enormous amount of both political
00:24:15.080 and economic power to this kind of managerial type jobs in a managerial class.
00:24:21.380 So that all has something to do with it.
00:24:23.800 But again, I don't want to de-emphasize how many actual policy choices we've made that
00:24:28.240 have run the pipelines of wealth and power directly through universities and that I said
00:24:35.080 were captured, right?
00:24:35.840 70 years ago, right?
00:24:36.920 So all of those things are very real.
00:24:39.080 And then from the top down, you have these kinds of ESG forces within companies, right?
00:24:46.140 And the way that investment capital moves also creates enormous incentives to go woke.
00:24:53.600 So you're getting it from the bottom up.
00:24:55.180 You're getting it from the top down.
00:24:56.540 And you're getting it from the law directly, right?
00:25:01.200 From civil rights law.
00:25:03.620 And that has changed.
00:25:05.280 There were major changes made in the 1990s.
00:25:07.220 And I can't remember if you've had Gail Harriet on.
00:25:11.000 If you haven't, you should.
00:25:12.340 And I talked through these changes with her on my podcast, High Noon, a few weeks ago.
00:25:16.600 And I really think like it's a, not so much missing piece, but like the specifics of the
00:25:22.580 substance are missing in so many of our conversations about, for example, the expansion of the Civil
00:25:27.460 Rights Act and so on.
00:25:30.160 Really, those changes in the 90s made it so that corporations were very vulnerable to large
00:25:35.000 dollar settlements from subjective offense on the basis of race or sex.
00:25:42.560 And that's really when we start to see for the first time these kinds of words like political
00:25:45.780 correctness and diversity training and so on in these corporations, which now is a $1
00:25:51.600 billion business, apparently, business sector, these kinds of trainings, was originally that
00:25:57.320 we made changes to this law in the 90s that made it much, much easier for any aggrieved employee
00:26:02.200 to collect enormous amounts of money or at least to drag a company through expensive litigation
00:26:07.860 that they would then be worth it for them to settle before they get there, right?
00:26:13.120 Those incentives are all going to still be in place.
00:26:16.460 And so, yeah, maybe they're not going to put a pride flag on their Twitter account, you
00:26:20.720 know, but HR is still going to be worried, you know, and on behalf of the company of being
00:26:25.960 sued if any one of the employees in the office subjectively finds something offensive.
00:26:31.120 That incentive is still going to be there.
00:26:32.720 So, again, I don't think that these boycotts solve the problem.
00:26:35.940 I think they're a new force that is in our column.
00:26:39.460 Um, and I think that's a positive thing, but again, I think we'd be dumb to, to think
00:26:43.700 that like, this is flip a switch.
00:26:45.380 We're going to be able to boycott our way out of all of these structural forces.
00:26:48.880 Yeah.
00:26:49.340 And I think that's, that's gotta be the job of conservative leadership.
00:26:53.140 Those who are actually interested in fighting back against this stuff.
00:26:56.200 And it's really noticeable.
00:26:57.300 I think that they're notable that a lot of people don't, I mean, there, there really does
00:27:01.340 seem very clear that even in the, this kind of moment of, uh, somewhat, uh, you know,
00:27:08.600 positive movement, you know, finally a win in this column a long time, we're already seeing
00:27:13.460 a lot of kind of conservatives say, Whoa, Whoa, Hey, you know, we can't, you know, we, we
00:27:18.940 got to return to the pride of five years ago.
00:27:21.180 You know, we've got to, got to, got to roll back to, to that point.
00:27:24.140 It seems like there's a, uh, uh, you know, we just had, um, uh, Ramaswamy on, uh, I think
00:27:30.100 he was on, uh, was it MSNBC or CNN or maybe even Fox news, but he was at anyway, he was
00:27:35.720 asked, you know, would, would you remove the, or would you reinstate the ban against, you
00:27:40.160 know, transgender soldiers in the military?
00:27:41.980 And he's like, Oh no, you know, that, that, that would, you know, they would be able to
00:27:45.340 continue to serve.
00:27:46.420 And so this guy who has been in many ways, um, you know, to the right of guys like Trump
00:27:51.220 or other people, uh, on this, on other issues, uh, is, is already locking in kind of where
00:27:57.540 this is.
00:27:58.280 And so I think it's interesting that there's, uh, I think it's really important for those
00:28:04.700 who are kind of interested in pushing back on this to explain to kind of the conservative
00:28:09.740 voter or the kind of the populist movement, that this is something that is structural, that
00:28:14.620 these are long-term things, that this is something that has to, uh, that has to be
00:28:18.800 attacked through many different avenues and just a, a popular boycott here or there.
00:28:23.660 The, the, the reassertion of the free market in one or two areas is not going to kind of
00:28:29.420 create a more popular, uh, push against, you know, all of this stuff that there are far
00:28:34.500 more, uh, you know, kind of deep-seated issues that they have to address very systematically
00:28:38.940 if there's going to be any headway.
00:28:41.100 Yeah.
00:28:41.620 I mean, I think this question really boils down to a rather simple division, um, between
00:28:48.660 conservatives, let's say, um, the, you can call it the new right, whatever, um, which
00:28:53.500 only represents a relatively small percentage or at least a minority percentage of, of even
00:28:59.100 the Republican voting base, right?
00:29:00.600 Let alone the country at large, um, and our various coalition partners.
00:29:05.140 And I, I, the little phrase that I keep using and put TM on or whatever trade market is, um,
00:29:13.000 you know, the culture war is the big tent.
00:29:14.480 And I, I believe that I think there are a lot of moderates and independents, um, who
00:29:18.820 are really invested in, for example, issues about what their children learn.
00:29:24.020 I think the, the Youngkin victory in Virginia really showed the power of this kind of coalition
00:29:28.460 that includes a lot of, of, um, Democrat voters.
00:29:31.160 It includes a lot of independent voters.
00:29:32.980 Um, and it includes a large part of the Republican party that just, you know, until the last, let's
00:29:37.400 say five or six years was really not aware.
00:29:40.800 And especially since COVID was really not aware of how four institutions were tipping
00:29:46.060 on certain cultural issues.
00:29:47.520 So that's a good thing that we have this coalition.
00:29:50.300 That being said, there's a huge split in that coalition.
00:29:53.240 And I call it the nineties split, right?
00:29:55.860 Do you believe that the state that we had of sort of detente on some of these issues in
00:30:02.080 the 1990s, um, is like a perpetuatable, uh, situation?
00:30:09.240 Or do you think that some of the commitments that we made in the nineties, but even before
00:30:14.200 that, right?
00:30:15.100 Going all the way, I would put it back to the late sixties.
00:30:17.300 I know that, you know, Saurabh and Pahmari will take it back to 1776, right?
00:30:22.100 Um, but I think there's a good argument to be made for the 1960s.
00:30:25.660 We can have that maybe a different time, but regardless of how far you, you put it back,
00:30:29.800 right, is that the taunt in the nineties, essentially a special moment in time where all of these
00:30:37.260 forces were sort of not, they were, they were well on their way, um, but had not yet reached
00:30:42.460 a tipping point within a lot of these institutions, um, so that we could have this illusion in
00:30:47.280 the nineties of, of normalcy in the way that we related to each other, or did essentially
00:30:53.440 woke show up five years ago, right?
00:30:56.700 Did we just all go crazy?
00:30:58.180 And we were totally fine up to that point, but then a bunch of crazies showed up and
00:31:02.380 took it too far.
00:31:03.400 And now this backlash is going to correct that last five years.
00:31:06.440 Right.
00:31:06.860 And that seems to me to be totally out of keeping with the actual anthropology or whatever you
00:31:12.120 want to call it.
00:31:17.940 Nope.
00:31:18.560 Like that a little bit.
00:31:19.340 It's wrong.
00:31:21.320 Sorry.
00:31:21.840 Internet problems.
00:31:22.580 But, um, but I just think it's wrong as a matter of history.
00:31:27.040 And, and the most obvious way in which it, you know, that it's wrong is because if you
00:31:31.480 go back and you read social conservatives writing in 1990, they predict everything that
00:31:38.180 happens.
00:31:38.680 It didn't happen.
00:31:39.580 You know, it didn't suddenly come out of a bag.
00:31:41.180 Like, you know, five years ago, these ideas are, are intellectually connected.
00:31:45.080 They're structurally connected.
00:31:46.380 The laws that were passed earlier on are connected to each other.
00:31:49.940 And I'll just give one, um, very concrete example, but I think it's illustrative of how
00:31:55.980 legally these things proceed.
00:31:58.180 Um, we've had this huge debate now and a huge pushback against on the basis of parental rights.
00:32:04.760 Right.
00:32:05.380 Um, and especially in the pediatrician's office, um, one prong of that pushback has
00:32:09.460 been, no, don't you dare, like I have parental rights.
00:32:12.340 Don't you dare pediatrician, you know, tell my kid or trans my kid without my consent.
00:32:17.560 Right.
00:32:18.140 Uh, do, do not prescribe my kid puberty blockers without my consent.
00:32:22.080 Do not, you know, um, to dress my kid by they, them pronouns without my consent, right.
00:32:27.440 As a parent.
00:32:28.720 But the fact is that in that, that medical office back in the nineties and early two thousands
00:32:33.900 in, in many States, we'd already lost that battle, um, over birth control and abortion.
00:32:40.760 Right.
00:32:41.360 Where in most States, um, there's some teenage age, some States it's like 14, sometimes States
00:32:46.540 at 16.
00:32:47.140 There's some under the age of majority age where, um, doctors are allowed, uh, to circumvent
00:32:54.940 parental permission and allow kids to make medical decisions for themselves at an age
00:33:01.440 younger than 18.
00:33:02.220 It's just that the trans procedures have been added to the list of things that have already
00:33:07.320 been taken by that nineties social liberalism consensus out of the hands of parents.
00:33:12.380 So there's not really a sharp line to be drawn between the law on, you know, circumventing
00:33:17.880 parental authority on birth control and abortion and circumventing a parent parental authority
00:33:23.780 with regards to puberty blockers.
00:33:25.480 There isn't that sharp line.
00:33:27.660 You know, I think you're right that that 90 split is really important.
00:33:31.360 And I think that you're also correct that this, there's kind of this delusion, you know,
00:33:35.540 it's like a lot of these people, you know, just look at the nineties and it's like, there's
00:33:39.140 a ball and you throw it up in the air and then, you know, kind of gets the, to the apex
00:33:42.460 of its arc and they're like, oh, well then balls just live in the air.
00:33:46.660 That's just where balls reside because that's where I first saw the ball.
00:33:50.100 And it's like, no, there was travel to that point.
00:33:52.500 And now the crash to the ground is the natural consequence of everything, you know, but they're
00:33:57.800 just looking at that thing, suspended in the air and saying, no, this is, this is just how
00:34:01.140 culture works.
00:34:02.220 And I wanted to ask you about that.
00:34:03.540 Cause yeah, you, you made a good point there.
00:34:05.620 And I want to get into this cause I, if I'm, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't
00:34:09.960 think you're, you're a religious person really, but you've kind of acknowledged something that
00:34:14.760 I think is really important.
00:34:15.840 And we, we've talked a lot about the structural aspects of this.
00:34:19.020 And I think those are all really important.
00:34:20.780 I think it's essential.
00:34:21.620 They don't get talked about enough, but I think it is really important for people to
00:34:25.820 understand that this linkage is real and it was predictable.
00:34:29.540 Why do you think that the kind of businesses and the political structures lined up in such a
00:34:36.720 way with also kind of this moral behavior that was predicted by many conservatives, many
00:34:43.780 religious people in the eighties, in the nineties, that then eventually came true.
00:34:48.440 Why do you think that all of those things kind of lined up behind the future that many of
00:34:52.860 these people predicted, but the whole time they called it ridiculous.
00:34:55.840 And now not only is it here, but they're embracing it and encouraging it full, full speed.
00:35:00.720 Well, there's one answer that's about broader modernity and, and then there's a short, more
00:35:07.180 concrete answer about the United States, I think, um, and some, a very specific vision of the
00:35:13.640 self and rights that really, to my mind, springs up in the late 1960s and then takes some time
00:35:19.620 to actually sort of grow beyond the fringe and especially invest itself in academia and in
00:35:26.220 these institutions that then sort of pump out cultural revolutionaries, um, on these topics.
00:35:31.420 So that's one is this, this, this concept of the self, a therapeutic answer to this larger
00:35:37.440 problem, Ritchie and problem of the death of God, right. And the lack of, of any kind of legitimate
00:35:42.500 authority, uh, to assert the good on anything in a substantive way. And I think you really see that
00:35:49.240 right in the, the David French versus, um, Saurab debates, right. Where you see French constantly,
00:35:56.160 referring back to essentially what our small illiberal norms for the adjudication, like the
00:36:02.360 purpose of those norms is how to adjudicate in a peaceful way within the nation, these substantive
00:36:09.300 debates that often have moral dimensions to them, but even if they don't, they have, they have a
00:36:14.780 substance to them, right. Is this the good or is it bad, right? Is this in the common good or is it
00:36:20.720 not? Um, and, and you see this total atrophy of, of the ability of anyone on the right. And I really
00:36:28.480 think, cause if you go back to the 1950s, that is not the case on either side, the left or the right
00:36:33.080 in 19, the 1950s America, this is not the case. You have these substantive moral arguments. Now you
00:36:38.640 have them within our system that guarantees a certain amount of, of step back from the federal
00:36:44.240 government, but on the state level, you have these substantive moral debates. What is obscenity? Can
00:36:51.300 we ban it from the public square? Right. Um, what should the law be about abortion and the beginning
00:36:57.640 of life? Right. And you have substantive moral debates on these things. And one by one, these issues
00:37:03.980 were plucked out of the public square and out of, of democratic control, whether by the courts or
00:37:10.120 bureaucracy or by this, this, whatever atrophying of the right to just be unable to assert, um,
00:37:17.620 with any kind of authority on pronouncement on moral matters to the point in the nineties where
00:37:23.060 you get this like sort of idea of the moral majority of conservative Christians, for example,
00:37:28.760 as being like these, these like nattering women from church that have like, they're just basically
00:37:34.440 mockable, um, in the mainstream square because they're still talking in that language of, of
00:37:40.460 actual moral assertion that has just been banished from the right. Um, and the left gets into this
00:37:46.940 position, by the way, by asserting these liberal norms about sort of, well, I'll say what I believe
00:37:53.080 and you say what you believe and will like adjudicate this as citizens. But once they actually have power,
00:37:58.380 they, of course, like they slam the gates shut on those kinds of norms, uh, because it's not
00:38:03.400 actually what politics is. Like you can have a small illiberal system that adjudicates in some way
00:38:10.660 these questions and perhaps limits them in some way. But again, this expansive vision of, of the,
00:38:18.460 of liberalism where there is no legitimacy to these moral debates in a political way and passing,
00:38:26.740 you know, legislation, right. On these moral questions, um, that didn't exist in the United
00:38:32.580 States until the 1960s. So either we've never had a small L liberal state, like until 1968 in America,
00:38:42.400 we didn't have a small L liberal state at all, or, um, you know, this, this expansive view of liberalism
00:38:51.460 has seeped into the right, um, and replaced what actually makes liberal government in some degree
00:38:58.120 possible, which is the legitimacy of, of basically in a big country like the United States, now 350
00:39:04.340 million people, you're going to have substantively different visions of the good and people have to
00:39:09.400 have some political way of determining for the body politic with some legitimacy and authority. What's so?
00:39:16.640 So I actually don't see in some ways related to the religious question, because I think that atrophying
00:39:21.760 is related to, you know, the inability to just say God, God says so. Right. Um, but that doesn't
00:39:30.720 fully explain what happened, right. Because even when people still believed that God said so,
00:39:36.080 the right sort of neutered itself. And you see this with religious people today on the right who,
00:39:41.880 who still like David French neutered themselves on this question because they think that asserting
00:39:46.660 moral authority in a political way is inherently illegitimate. And that's, that's never been the
00:39:52.420 case in any society except ours for the last like 30 or 40 years. Well, and it's never been the case
00:39:58.920 anyway. It was just the type of moral authority, right? You were more than able to assert moral
00:40:04.320 authority the other direction. It was only from the Christian right, uh, where moral authority was
00:40:09.380 oppressive. Moral authority asserted in the name of gay marriage was more than fine. Uh, so it's,
00:40:14.660 so it's not that moral authority was unassertable. That is, that's the case now. And that is the
00:40:19.060 thing that's changed, I think more recently. Right. But if you go back to the 1960s, and this is why I
00:40:23.580 think some sort of libertarian liberal centrist types feel that quote unquote, the sides have flipped.
00:40:29.660 Right. If you go back to the free speech movement in Berkeley, for example, they are asserting
00:40:34.680 protections based on, on quote unquote, neutral norms. When they themselves were in, in the moral
00:40:40.100 minority, they were saying, no, they're appealing to pushing these liberal norms further and saying,
00:40:46.320 no, just don't pass a law about it. We can coexist. Right. And then you do have a flip where the left
00:40:52.160 starts to assert. And I think that was connected to the progression of sort of going from this, there
00:40:56.600 is no truth post-modernism to now the resurrection of its own kind of moral authority and religion
00:41:03.620 in this final stage, or I don't know, final, but our current stage of leftism, where they're now
00:41:09.520 very comfortable aggressively asserting moral truths or just not moral truths compatible with
00:41:15.200 Christianity or the traditional American way of life. But they did use that language of neutrality
00:41:21.160 for several decades in between when they were in the minority. And that's why I think a lot of people,
00:41:27.120 and I think especially generationally, if you go back to boomers or so on, they're sort of
00:41:30.600 susceptible to this kind of neutral language. Because that was the appeal, the ask from the
00:41:37.140 left to the right, culturally, that sort of won. And now we're seeing inevitably that actually
00:41:43.400 you can't take moral questions out of politics. Even if you call a moral assertion neutral, it
00:41:48.560 doesn't make it so. But the right still hasn't, I think large parts of the right still haven't
00:41:55.160 caught up to the idea that, yeah, they're allowed to do it too. Like you are just allowed to make a
00:42:02.420 moral assertion. And then there is a political, the liberalism, quote unquote, part of this is that
00:42:09.180 there is a political process in the United States to adjudicate those kinds of questions. You vote on
00:42:15.160 them in the States. Now, ultimately, every political process is as a cover for, you know,
00:42:22.340 a substitute for violence, right? So if you have such different visions of the good that you can no
00:42:26.800 longer grant any legitimacy to the opposite conclusion when it's done through the political
00:42:32.420 process, then you have a breakdown in the political process. You have a breakdown in politics and you
00:42:36.340 have a reversion to the state of nature where people kill each other over these kinds of things.
00:42:39.560 Well, not the state of nature, but it is the reassertion. We're approaching the Schmittian
00:42:45.720 friend enemy. We're nearing to the point where the moral visions are so separate that those who
00:42:53.380 hold them can only be the other. They can't be qualified as part of the polity anymore because
00:42:58.900 the things that they hold are so disparate. There's no shared culture across which they can actually
00:43:04.180 have a moral conversation. And if you stop having a moral conversation, the only option that's left is
00:43:09.480 oppression or outright, you know, violence. And so you're ending up in a very dangerous situation,
00:43:15.820 but one that people seem to be more and more embracing. It seems impossible for the left to
00:43:21.600 imagine a time where they're not in almost complete control of the moral vision of the United States
00:43:27.860 and they frame any imposition on their will to completely impose that moral vision as one that is
00:43:34.260 existential to them, which they might be right about seeing as how wild their vision now is.
00:43:41.160 I just want to add something to that because I think it goes to a really important misunderstanding
00:43:47.000 that, at least from my perspective, I hear all the time about our politics.
00:43:53.020 And my friend Alexi Coray had a great article on this in public discourse. But there is an extent to
00:44:01.220 which essentially our discourse, but I would say specifically for the purposes of this conversation,
00:44:08.320 the left and the way that they legislate and the way that they are pushing people to the wall
00:44:13.180 on a lot of these moral questions, right? There is this element that they just, they don't,
00:44:19.380 it's our politics is actually not political enough because it is emptied on at least one side of this
00:44:24.920 kind of moral assertion that is necessary. That our politics aren't political enough because we're
00:44:31.280 not ever actually getting to these questions and we pretend that we can adjudicate all of this through
00:44:36.820 process rather than through substance. There's a danger there because once those divides, those actual
00:44:46.100 substantive divides become sharp enough, right, the political process then gets delegitimized
00:44:53.480 necessarily. And I think that's what we're happening, what we're seeing happen all the time
00:44:58.880 from both the left and the right. Now, and a lot of that is justified in the same way that Schmidt
00:45:04.200 wrote about it being justified, right? That because essentially the process, liberalism,
00:45:10.720 is not able on its own to stand in for these kinds of actual political questions that inevitably that
00:45:19.700 process becomes delegitimized, is not able to sustain itself. You can't sustain the liberal process
00:45:25.160 without some kind of actual way of legitimately getting to an answer as a collective polity. Now,
00:45:33.540 in a large mass democracy, right, you're never going to get universal buy-in and there are always going
00:45:39.460 to be factions and so on. And federalist papers write expressively about this and how to adjudicate
00:45:44.780 these kinds of pluralistic problems. But it's like we've forgotten that the substance exists at all.
00:45:52.960 And I think that's really dangerous. And it points to, first of all, like we're all like,
00:45:58.440 the, Alexi Carey used this great example of the, have you seen the video of the dogs where they're
00:46:04.280 barking at each other like crazy because there's a fence between them? And then somebody hits the
00:46:09.100 button and the fence goes away and all of a sudden they like, they back off. We've forgotten
00:46:13.600 that, you know, the consequence of this kind of stuff is violence at the end of the day. Like
00:46:20.120 that's the final, I don't want to say final solution, but, but like, that's how these things
00:46:24.560 are ultimately adjudicated, right? When there are two conflicting visions of the good within the same
00:46:30.280 polity. So we've forgotten, right, that the fence, the fence is there and we imagine that we're
00:46:36.640 barking at each other. But, but in fact, like we are only behaving this way because we're so divorced
00:46:41.860 from the consequences of it. But, but also it points to the sort of something that sounds like
00:46:49.560 a contradiction, but it isn't. The solution here, the less dangerous path is actually the more
00:46:57.060 politically quote unquote extreme one, right? It is for the right to actually re-engage on these
00:47:03.460 questions. Um, in the same way that if we actually had an agenda, uh, that, that did go after the
00:47:11.440 institutional power at the left and actually substantively and structurally sort of pushed
00:47:16.580 back against the power that they've been able to add and then use against half the country,
00:47:21.720 right? Paradoxically that creates that kind of quote unquote extremism is what we'll save is our
00:47:29.480 only chance in my view to save any of these liberal norms and the kind of peace that we have had
00:47:34.260 based on them, right? Because if you continue in this direction, you get Franco, right? At some point,
00:47:41.220 the, the part of the country that has substantive answer A and not substantive answer B has to decide,
00:47:47.540 you know, they, they, they lose all faith in the legitimacy of any of, of these, these procedures,
00:47:53.200 right? And you see that with elections today. Um, and, and they essentially say, well, if you are
00:47:58.860 going to behave as though we are enemies, I will also treat you as an enemy and I'm going to hire my
00:48:05.520 own strong man to, and maybe, maybe that's inevitable. Maybe we're, we're going, the solution
00:48:11.020 is only Caesarism, right? But, but to the extent that it's still possible, um, so that's my dog to the
00:48:17.380 extent that it's still possible to salvage a lot of the things that these centrists or sort of squishy
00:48:23.120 Republicans say they actually want to preserve. It is in the aggressive advancement of right
00:48:29.280 substantive politics, because otherwise I don't see any way this stops until there's all legitimacy
00:48:37.460 in, in liberal procedure lost. But I think that's the problem. I don't think it can be sustained.
00:48:42.940 I mean, Schmidt didn't think liberal procedure could be sustained because it would lead to the total
00:48:47.000 state. He thought that the, the basically, whenever you have this kind of democratic mechanism,
00:48:52.100 the only way for one faction to continually assert its dominance over the other is the capture of
00:48:57.700 all institutions is the collapse of all other social spheres. Every, every sphere has to become
00:49:03.480 political because total control of all spheres is the only way to maintain the popular sovereignty,
00:49:09.880 uh, kind of mandate. And so I think that that's why you're seeing conservatives back into the corner
00:49:15.800 in the way they are, because every institution or, you know, progressives to kind of push things to the
00:49:21.460 extremes that they're doing must be completely captured and must be unable to kind of allow even,
00:49:26.940 uh, any kind of substantive pushback, any kind of substantive politics from the right. And so I think
00:49:32.400 that's kind of a necessary feature, uh, unfortunately. Uh, but I wanted to ask you one more thing before we
00:49:38.500 kind of get to the questions of the people here that kind of goes back to the mechanical, uh, part of
00:49:44.300 this. Uh, I know you're familiar with James Burnham and the managerial, uh, you know, revolution,
00:49:49.260 uh, but I don't, I don't know how familiar you are with Sam Francis. He wrote to took up a good bit
00:49:54.400 of, uh, kind of James Burnham's work. And while of course Burnham does a great job of explaining
00:49:59.820 kind of that transformation from, uh, kind of the bourgeoisie capitalist, uh, uh, style of, uh,
00:50:06.780 kind of Western governance to the managerial governance. I think Francis does a good job of
00:50:11.040 explaining kind of the cultural side of it and the revolution that it goes through and why that's
00:50:15.580 mechanically necessary. And his contention is that, uh, kind of managerialism requires the
00:50:23.000 destruction of all cultural and moral particulars in order to make subjects, uh, more compliant and
00:50:30.040 more predictable to make sure that managerial systems can be readily applied, uh, kind of across
00:50:36.080 the board. And so that he, and he kind of believed that you basically needed a leftist progressive
00:50:41.540 kind of cosmopolitan hedonism, the kind of gray goo, everybody's moral particulars into one large
00:50:48.700 managerial block. And so he thought that just as you need a economy that can produce, you know,
00:50:55.560 mask and mass and scale, uh, for managers to thrive and the expansion of those institutions,
00:51:01.320 you also need basically the dissolving of call, uh, of kind of culture and morals and religion
00:51:07.440 into kind of one uniform hedonism. If you're able, if you're going to be able to kind of manage people
00:51:13.320 on a social level. And that's kind of why he thought that we were seeing the process along
00:51:18.680 with managerialism that we were seeing, I didn't know kind of what you thought about that thesis.
00:51:23.720 I probably have to think about that more, um, before I give you an answer. Uh, not that,
00:51:29.660 you know, my answer compares to some of these, um, prescient guys, uh, decades ago, but what I will
00:51:38.080 say is, is necessary in a, a bureaucratic and managerial both society and economy is that certain
00:51:46.040 virtues, um, let's use the word virtues, uh, certain virtues are inconvenient. Um, right. So here I'm
00:51:56.400 thinking about, uh, you know, even, even within, like, let's say, let's just say the pursuit of glory,
00:52:03.960 which is something that, you know, motivated mostly young men, um, in most civilizations, right. And, and
00:52:11.600 like, I don't know, comparatively the Roman civilization, right. You had opportunity for glory as a soldier.
00:52:16.240 And that was actually like a great part of your advancement. Um, at least when, you know, at least
00:52:21.800 some parts of, of Roman history that we like to read about, um, right. That was a huge part of,
00:52:27.960 of how you advance in society is by demonstrating courage and, and grabbing glory and ambition in
00:52:34.140 that sense, right. In a bureaucratic society, you don't want that. Um, you, you want consensus
00:52:41.840 building and attention to procedure. Um, and, and there's, there's more collective decision-making
00:52:48.080 that is, is, is necessary and also a certain abstraction of accountability, right. Um, because
00:52:55.160 there's that Futurama, um, episode where, where, uh, the bureaucrat says like, you're, you're technically
00:53:02.360 correct, the best kind of correct, right. That's the essence of the bureaucracy. Um, and look,
00:53:07.760 everything requires some amount of bureaucracy back in the, the, um, founding era of the United States,
00:53:13.960 Jefferson was complaining that Hamilton's, um, treasury department was bloated and bureaucratic
00:53:19.160 because it had 23 employees. That's laughable to us today. And, and I do think there's this element
00:53:25.980 of a mass, mass society, mass nation. Once you expand beyond the city state and like sort of the
00:53:31.240 classical political philosophy of the city state, right. You do need some amount of standardization
00:53:37.220 of bureaucracy of best practices, right. To be able to make either an economy or a political unit
00:53:43.720 work on that kind of scale. Um, but there is a question of tipping points. And so for example,
00:53:50.520 I think it's pretty obvious that, that, um, what people are calling the long house or whatever
00:53:55.580 online, right. The feminization of certain institutions is related to them being bureaucratic,
00:54:02.180 right. You're going to get more women in positions of power when decision-making is diffuse
00:54:08.900 and less accountable and not direct directly related in a concrete way to the end product in the same
00:54:16.020 way. You're going to get more of those kinds of values, whether from men or women, um, in a large
00:54:22.120 managerial corporation where you're not worker a on the line and you were responsible for 20 widgets by
00:54:29.680 the end of the day. And if you, if you produce 18, your pay is docked. And if you produce 22,
00:54:34.420 you know, your, your pay is, is, um, granted or like, um, you know, Andrew Jackson had like 20 jobs,
00:54:40.960 right. Because people in the 19th century, they would gain and lose fortune sometimes,
00:54:45.460 you know, three or four or five times in their lives. Um, that's a direct accountability mechanism,
00:54:50.340 but in a bureaucracy, that kind of direct accountability doesn't happen, right. When,
00:54:54.080 when the end product, and this is why, you know, the DMV is so frustrating or whatever,
00:54:57.660 right. There's, there's nobody who's directly accountable or invested
00:55:01.180 in the end product being X, Y, Z. Everybody's responsible for their little piece of the
00:55:06.840 procedure in collection with everyone else. And that necessarily elevates people with certain,
00:55:13.180 you can call them quote unquote virtues, um, that are probably disproportionately feminine ones. Um,
00:55:20.280 look, some of these things are virtues, right? Uh, uh, attention to collective decision-making
00:55:23.980 is a big virtue in a family. It keeps harmony in a family to some extent, right. Um, but the
00:55:30.940 question is, are they then well-applied in an economy, um, or to be, is it good to have the
00:55:37.240 kind of economy that rewards collective decision-making and harmony over say glory and production?
00:55:44.500 Um, so I do think these things are related in other words, but I would have to think specifically
00:55:49.300 about what Sam Francis had to say about it or whoever, whoever else had to say about it at longer
00:55:54.920 length, but I do think there's a connection between the type of virtues that are given honor in a
00:56:02.220 society to use language that seems in our bureaucratic society, it seems completely, uh, sort of anachronistic
00:56:08.320 in itself, right. Um, those, that set of like character traits that are elevated in that kind of society.
00:56:16.200 So instead of building centurions, you build Pete Buttigieg in the kind of economy that we have,
00:56:23.600 right? So, I mean, there are massive downsides to that. I think we're seeing a lot of the downsides
00:56:29.000 to that. No, I do think that's exactly right. All right. So we've got a number of questions building
00:56:34.620 up here, but before we pivot over there real quick, uh, can you tell people where to find your work?
00:56:39.420 Is there anything exciting people should be looking for or anything they should check out?
00:56:42.980 Sure. Um, so, uh, you can find my work at IWF.org along with that and my colleagues. Um, we do work
00:56:49.060 a lot, for example, on Title IX, uh, which I think is, is really important. Um, some of the stuff, again,
00:56:54.020 you have to be able to work out through the bureaucracy, but I think we were instrumental in actually
00:56:58.900 grinding the, like putting, throwing sand in the gears of bureaucracy over Biden's Title IX changes that
00:57:04.900 incorporate gender identity into the word sex. Um, we have officially, they have, they have delayed,
00:57:09.720 um, implementation of those regulations because there were so many comments in part driven
00:57:13.640 by IWV, our sister organization, right? Um, in part, in large part driven by IWV and some of our
00:57:19.740 other coalition partners that we have formally made them like they can't get through all the comments,
00:57:24.620 so they're going to have to delay the regulations, which hopefully will take them past the election.
00:57:29.020 I don't know. Anyway, so that's the kind of work we do. I really, um, recommend checking it out,
00:57:33.580 IWF.org. Um, and then for me personally, you can find me on Twitter at, you know,
00:57:37.840 Svelcher, F-E-L-T-S-C-H-E-R, or you can type in, you know, Stepman and I will come up, but the handle
00:57:42.980 is different. Excellent. All right, guys, let's check out the questions of the people here real
00:57:48.040 quick. Uh, just from Creeper Weirdo here for $2, the 90 split right on target. Yep. No, that's,
00:57:54.200 she's exactly right that that is where I think the fault line is inside the kind of woke resistance at
00:57:59.680 the moment. I had a talk about that with, uh, Seamus Coghlan, by the way, if you guys want to
00:58:03.840 check that one out as well, will the, will the anti-woke coalition hold? Uh, that was a few days
00:58:08.940 ago. You can check that out. Uh, Creeper Weirdo here again for $5. I feel like a lot of centrists
00:58:13.720 just want to go back to watching Star Wars, reading comics, playing video games, and they don't want
00:58:18.280 real change. I mean, yeah, I mean, that's obviously true that again, we, a lot of people felt like
00:58:23.040 there was a moment where, uh, they kind of have the ability to kind of indulge in whatever kind of
00:58:28.680 cultural, uh, excess, hobby excess, whatever they enjoyed. They didn't have to think about real life.
00:58:34.000 They didn't have to worry about the questions of the political, uh, history was over. Those things
00:58:37.800 had been solved. Uh, there was no need for anyone to really get involved in that. Uh, but then they
00:58:42.000 stopped you from playing your video games. And so now you watch people like us. So, you know, it's,
00:58:45.460 it's a positive, possibly good, uh, development there. Uh, let's see, uh, judge a lot here for $10.
00:58:52.900 Thank you very much. Uh, glad to catch you live. I don't get to very often. Yeah, it was, uh,
00:58:57.320 it's always great when we have kind of these evening streams, uh, different groups. Normally
00:59:01.500 I go live around three in the afternoon, but of course, uh, glad that different people can't
00:59:05.860 tune in, uh, for these as well. Uh, Jacob here for $5. Who are the three little bus on the bookshelf?
00:59:12.880 Uh, we got Jackson here, Lincoln and Jefferson is Jackson, Lincoln and Jefferson. Gotcha. All
00:59:19.620 right. I knew I saw Washington, but it's not behind me. It's big. Gotcha. Uh, let's see here. We got,
00:59:25.420 uh, $2 just, uh, donation from a meal. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Uh, let's see,
00:59:32.120 uh, uh, thuggo for $5. How much, uh, the left success is culture war is facilitated by money and
00:59:39.860 power as opposed to philosophical creep. Well, I think we definitely touched on that, uh, in our
00:59:45.920 discussion here, but I think obviously, uh, and as is pretty good at going through and explaining
00:59:51.440 kind of those mechanisms, those funding mechanisms, those structural mechanisms, uh, the way that
00:59:56.340 kind of money is, is involved. And, uh, you know, of course we both like to talk about how
01:00:01.140 patronage is involved. So I think those are huge. I think the mistake is always pretending
01:00:05.580 it's one or the other. Uh, you know, we usually see, uh, people settle in it's, oh, it's all
01:00:10.220 ideology or it's, you know, it's all money and they don't really mean it. Uh, I think it's,
01:00:14.460 it's remembering that it's, uh, a bit of both, but I don't know if you want to expand
01:00:19.300 any more on that in this, but just, just to add, and I think we, we did touch on this,
01:00:23.140 but, but just to add, um, one concrete thing, a lot of the ideology that people talk about
01:00:31.180 ideological creep, the thing that funds, let's say the Bernadine Dorn types who are in the
01:00:36.480 university is then pushing out sort of their intellectual heirs into all of these institutions,
01:00:40.620 right. Um, it's largely public money. So the left has been funded whether through grants or
01:00:45.960 through direct things like $800 billion to the K-12 system every year annually, right.
01:00:50.700 They have a huge pot of money that they're reaching out of the public fisc. Um, and the
01:00:55.880 right has always been quote unquote privately funded, but until the last decade or two and
01:01:00.140 that success of that revolution, right. Um, the right previously had the funding of big
01:01:05.880 business. Now, maybe even that wasn't obviously wasn't really a parody. Um, because oftentimes
01:01:11.080 big businesses donate to both sides. Anyway, they, they, you know, they want to have access
01:01:14.560 no matter who gets elected. Right. But there was some kind of parody in our politics in terms
01:01:19.060 of the money in our politics, because the left was getting this enormous public investment.
01:01:22.640 The right was getting a big business investment. Now that the big business has swung into the left,
01:01:28.020 right on the, on almost all of these cultural questions and the power of that has swung into
01:01:32.140 the left. And maybe this is where boycotts, I think can make a difference. If, if, um, it scares
01:01:37.340 companies out of, of doing that, you have a massive money imbalance. But I think the other way to
01:01:42.320 correct that imbalance is for the right to actually claim its portion of public funding.
01:01:46.880 So that's, I mean, one way to think about school choice is not just exiting the system and allowing
01:01:51.820 parents the freedom to do that, but it's also thinking about taking the money that is now currently
01:01:58.040 going to a leftist institution and hoping to invest it, let's say in a classical school,
01:02:03.020 because there's no reason that, that the right half of this country isn't owed its, its education
01:02:09.180 dollars. There's nothing, you know, written in stone that says we must give all of our
01:02:13.500 800 billion dollars in tax money to these leftist controlled institutions. So in that case, it's a
01:02:18.600 way of, of, of siphoning some of that public investment and making it fair on the basis of
01:02:25.400 how many people in society want, you know, want this kind of ideology versus that. So I think that's,
01:02:30.460 that's a, a, maybe not a permanent solution, but it is, it is an incredibly important solution
01:02:34.480 of siphoning public money away from leftist causes, but that you, depending on where you,
01:02:39.880 you know, where you're looking, the solution might be that like a practical solution might
01:02:42.920 be different. It might be just, you know, cutting grants or giving grants, for example, in the arts
01:02:47.900 to like right-wing artists from, from a lot of these arts foundations that are, are funded with public
01:02:52.380 money, right? So I think we just have to think more about grabbing our part of this public investment
01:02:57.840 because, um, sort of staying away from it on a libertarian ideological basis, um, maybe, maybe
01:03:05.400 worked for some time while there was this huge big business private investment. Um, obviously didn't
01:03:10.740 work that well because that's where we are right now because we are here right now, but like to some
01:03:14.680 extent worked, but now that that private investment is down to individual billionaires, there's just no
01:03:19.820 way the right can compete financially with the left unless we're willing to, to take our piece of public
01:03:25.480 investment. I think. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, the, the revenue revolution was subsidized
01:03:30.500 guys, like you, you paid for it and the, you know, the, the approach of saying, well, you know, we're
01:03:35.820 the party of small government. We're the size of small government. Well, that's nice in theory. I wish
01:03:39.800 that was true. Yeah, I get it. If you shrink the, the size of the government pie, then they wouldn't
01:03:43.700 have a lot to give to people, but the success rate of that is basically zero at this point. And so you
01:03:48.920 have to start thinking about, okay, well, if this funding is going to exist and it's getting, you know,
01:03:53.340 just funneled directly to my enemies, how can I break the flow of this and redirect some of it to
01:03:59.080 my friends? Uh, you really have to start understanding that, uh, the, the pillaging is
01:04:03.900 like, I am sorry. Like I am going to just make all of the libertarians a very angry night right now,
01:04:09.120 but, uh, state pillaging is the most enduring thing next to the existence of like, I don't know,
01:04:15.360 religion and family in human organization. It will continue for the rest of your life and the life of
01:04:21.660 everyone, you know, every, every child and grandchild and great grandchild you have.
01:04:25.660 And so the only question is in whose favor is it done? And I know that's tough. I know that's not
01:04:30.580 what people want to hear. You would like to reduce it as much as possible. I would too,
01:04:34.460 but there is just a reality that you have to deal with and you have to become comfortable with the
01:04:39.200 idea that if these funds are going to be appropriated and they're going to be distributed,
01:04:43.280 distributing them in your direction is far better than just saying I'm principled and I'm never
01:04:47.940 taking a dollar of this and watching it all go directly into the coffers of your enemies.
01:04:52.040 I mean, so to add, I do think there are prudential concerns here. Um, you know, there, there are
01:04:57.440 smart ways to do this and dumb ways to do it that will, will backfire, um, even more strongly. Um,
01:05:04.480 but I, I also think like as a way of convincing libertarians or centrists who are uncomfortable with
01:05:09.680 this, um, there needs to be guns pointed from both directions in order to convince people to disarm,
01:05:15.300 right? There's a sort of mutually assured destruction element to this, that actually,
01:05:19.160 if your goal is to, let's say, reduce the amount of public money that's sloshing around in, in sort
01:05:26.000 of all of these, these political fights, right? Um, if that's your goal, let's say a long-term
01:05:31.760 Republican and libertarian goal, getting rid of the department of education, right? Something that
01:05:36.000 Reagan came into office saying he was going to do department was created in the last year of
01:05:39.760 Jimmy Carter's term. Reagan was not able to get rid of it for eight years. Okay. And it had,
01:05:44.740 was only a year old at that point. So we don't have a great track record in getting rid of these
01:05:48.940 things to the extent that I think it's even theoretically possible to get rid of some of
01:05:53.740 these departments. It's probably exactly through participating in them equally that you can then
01:06:00.780 push the left to a point where they're like, well, we really hate what Republicans are doing
01:06:04.440 with the department of education. Every time they get in office, right? Um, of course, this depends on
01:06:09.220 sort of elections continuing and different parties actually winning them, but leaving that aside,
01:06:13.840 right? You can imagine a situation in which the left actually decides, well, maybe it's better for
01:06:18.400 both of us to disarm. Maybe it's better just to get rid of the department of education. Um, but
01:06:22.760 that's not going to happen when there's no risk to the left, when Republicans come into office,
01:06:28.380 right? So like to some extent, if your goal is to get rid of some of these things, politicizing
01:06:32.860 them and using them on behalf of the right may actually be what gets, you know, sort of both sides
01:06:37.240 to stand down. Yeah. I don't know if I have a ton of faith in some of these mechanisms of
01:06:41.540 democracy, but if you have faith in them, at the very least, you have to make a, you know,
01:06:45.620 a serious threat, the other direction, right? Like you're saying, yeah, you have to actually
01:06:49.180 participate in a way that would make the other side want to not invest power into the government.
01:06:53.780 If you believe that that's actually what's going to hold these things at bay, you can't just,
01:06:57.600 you know, uh, kind of, kind of play it safe on your side and expect them to do the same.
01:07:02.300 All right. Uh, Cooper weirdo here with our last one again. Thank you very much, sir. Uh,
01:07:06.240 is this, uh, the right-wing backlash or the beginning of the backlash? Also, do you think
01:07:10.820 it will stay with boomers or millennial and zoomers get involved? Uh, that's a difficult
01:07:16.200 question. Uh, I, I'd like to try not to be too, too black billed here. I think in a lot of ways,
01:07:22.340 uh, we just hit, uh, kind of the last gasp of natural revulsion to the inverted moral hierarchy
01:07:32.500 that the left is, uh, assembling. I think the attack on children, the direct attack and the,
01:07:38.080 uh, the aggressive push for mutilation on children kind of triggered the final self-defense mechanism
01:07:45.040 that existed, you know, the, the, the last, the last reflex that people had left that have been
01:07:51.520 worn away. I really hope that's enough for people to start to see where we're at and how kind of close
01:07:58.380 to the edge you are and how necessary it is to kind of push back and fight. Um, but I think that,
01:08:04.960 uh, there is a danger in that this too is kind of circumvented in the way that so many of these
01:08:12.080 other social revolutions were by pulling this out of the democratic mechanism, like, and as was
01:08:17.980 talking about and just putting it into the procedure and that just kind of ends up being
01:08:22.740 the last bit of, uh, of kind of that battle. I really hope that's not the case. I really hope that
01:08:28.000 you can see that there is for the first time in a long time, a substantive pushback against this
01:08:32.540 stuff in a way that we just have not seen pretty much in my lifetime. Um, but, uh, but I would say
01:08:37.840 that things are a little close to the edge than, than I'd like. So two, two, three things to add.
01:08:43.480 The first would be, um, it depends how the backlash is consolidated, uh, strategically,
01:08:49.380 politically, structurally, how that backlash, what that actually does, because there was a backlash
01:08:54.100 against gay marriage, right? People want to forget, like, even in California, they couldn't pass
01:08:58.480 gay marriage, right? It was voted down. Um, but now if you look at polls, right, it's completely
01:09:03.920 shifted because the institutions over time, they don't, if you hold the institutions, right,
01:09:10.420 you just sit tight and wait for the generational turnover and for institutional turnover and for
01:09:17.160 backlash to dissipate just by, you know, realities of democracy and the fact that people don't have time
01:09:22.860 to constantly be like angry about this stuff, right? Um, so you can just sit and wait, whereas
01:09:28.360 it's on the backlash to then consolidate this, this into a structural and political result that
01:09:34.000 changes the balance of power going forward. And the last thing I'll say about this is you say boomers
01:09:39.560 or millennials and zoomers, you've forgotten about Gen X. I'm millennial, but I'm like a Gen X booster.
01:09:44.960 The, the political sort of survey data on Gen X is that Gen X is going much more conservative than
01:09:50.140 boomers were at their age. In other words, they're, they're moving off the baseline in the right.
01:09:54.920 And I think that's why the next generation of, of leadership on the right is almost all Gen X and
01:09:58.820 the next generation of leadership on the left is going to be all millennials, right? In the
01:10:02.380 Democratic party, it's going to be a handoff from, you know, Nancy Pelosi to AOC. Um, in the Republican
01:10:07.380 party, there may be a handoff from boomers to, right, your Josh Hawley's, your Ron DeSantis's,
01:10:13.220 your, um, you know, sort of next generation, JD Vance, right, is also Gen X. Like you see a lot
01:10:18.520 of the, the Gen, Tom Cotton, right. A lot of the Gen X leadership I think is representative of the
01:10:24.620 fact that the generation X is going quite right wing. Now they're still pretty normie, like by
01:10:28.960 our standards, but, um, in terms of generations, don't forget they are small, but don't forget
01:10:32.900 them between the boomers and the millennials comes Gen X. Yeah, no, I, I, I think that might be true.
01:10:37.800 I sit, uh, right in that, uh, sweet spot between, uh, Gen X and, and millennials. So, uh, I think there
01:10:43.860 might be some truth to that, but all right, guys, I think we got everything. Aaron, let me just
01:10:47.780 double check to make sure we don't have any more super chats. All right. Yep. I think that is
01:10:52.420 everybody. All right, guys. Well, I just want to say thank you to everyone for coming by. Once again,
01:10:57.580 make sure that you're checking out all of Inez's stuff. Make sure that you are, of course, also,
01:11:03.540 uh, making sure to subscribe to this channel if it's your first time here. And if you would like
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01:11:19.340 that really helps with all the algorithm stuff. All right, guys, thanks for coming by. And as always,
01:11:23.800 I'll talk to you next time.