JD Vance Destroys Cancel Culture ｜ Guest： Jonathan Keeperman ｜ 2⧸10⧸25
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
182.53955
Summary
Jonathan Kieperman of Passage Press joins me to talk about the rise of the "Postponing" movement, and why it may be the death knell of wokeness, at least in the short term.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream with
00:00:04.420
a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy. There was an event that happened just
00:00:09.440
a few days ago and it seems somewhat innocuous with all the rapid transformations that are
00:00:14.800
happening right now in the United States, but I think this one is actually a really big deal
00:00:19.780
and it's worthy of its own episode. We need to take the time to understand how monumental this
00:00:25.080
shift has been. You know, Elon had this crack team of engineers he brought over from places like
00:00:31.100
SpaceX and they're going over the different departments in the United States government.
00:00:35.940
That's the purpose of Doge is to go through all these different departments and say,
00:00:40.260
where's the waste? Where's the fraud? Where's the abuse? And one of these guys happened to have a
00:00:45.560
few tweets under an anonymous handle that weren't so politically correct and the left started losing
00:00:51.040
their mind. He was asked to resign. All of a sudden we see this pattern of cancellation that we've
00:00:56.740
seen time and time again, but this time something very different happened. All of a sudden different
00:01:03.420
people on the right started standing up saying, you can't just go around firing everyone who misspeaks
00:01:08.620
or this administration is going to fall flat on its face. Elon started running polls about whether or not
00:01:14.480
this guy should be fired at all. And then finally, JD Vance, the vice president of the United States
00:01:19.720
jumps in and says, you know what? This guy should be rehired. I am totally against his cancellation.
00:01:26.160
I think we're looking at a very different moment on the right. And joining me to talk about this
00:01:31.060
today is Jonathan Kieperman. He is the head of the Passage Prize and Passage Press. He is very
00:01:37.980
familiar with the ins and outs of cancellation. Jonathan, thanks for coming on, man.
00:01:43.120
Warren, it is great to be here and to celebrate with you total poster victory. And I think that's,
00:01:48.860
in some ways, what we sort of witnessed over the last week and with this episode is in a kind of
00:01:56.540
formal sense, the rise of the poster, or at least there's been a kind of, I think, jubilee in some
00:02:04.480
sense that it's understood now in ways that were not true previously, that this certain category of
00:02:12.820
like discourse, and we can get into what the sort of idiosyncratic features are of this discourse
00:02:20.140
community. But this thing we call shitposting and like anonymous posting doesn't now come with a kind
00:02:27.980
of death sentence if it is discovered that you participated in this discourse. And kind of the
00:02:35.880
history of cancellations, at least in the kind like we've seen, and I think you and I are like in a
00:02:42.400
similar circle of people here, these doxing attempts, and it's always coming from the same
00:02:47.160
people, by the way, which are these far left journalists, what amount to Antifa activists,
00:02:52.640
and it's worth, I think, talking about here in the course of this conversation, who this journalist
00:02:57.800
was, Catherine Long, writing for the Wall Street Journal, where she got this information, how and
00:03:04.820
for what purpose, why was this published, etc. In any case, this routine you said of doxing,
00:03:11.960
which was supposed to kill any opportunity that the target of this doxing has to participate in public
00:03:19.540
life. I think that officially ended yesterday, or, you know, two days ago, whenever it was that JD
00:03:27.800
Vance and Elon Musk rehired this young man to come back and work at Doge. So I think it's a really kind
00:03:35.340
of monumental, you know, or let's just say symbolic episode. I do also want to like ask you, because I
00:03:45.620
know you've been in sort of back and forth with various people about, okay, is wokeness over? What
00:03:50.180
does that mean? I don't think we can go so far as to say wokeness is over. I'm guilty of maybe
00:03:56.180
participating in some hyperbole to that extent online. But I do think there is some sense in
00:04:02.360
which like this particular element of wokeism, this kind of cancel effect, which was a, I think,
00:04:09.740
like a critical load bearing pillar of what wokeness was, it was a way to enforce this sort of
00:04:18.060
ideological rigidity may have maybe over now. So like cancellation may now be on pause. And that
00:04:26.520
matters a lot, I think. No, it's absolutely huge. And to be clear, I don't believe that wokeness is
00:04:33.100
some kind of unbeatable force that it's inevitable that it's just never going to go away. My point was
00:04:38.840
always that the left could not choose to put the woke away, that they are ideologically committed
00:04:45.300
to wokeness. That is part of their belief, their religious belief, and also their political formula.
00:04:52.620
And so they can't just shove it in the closet because it becomes inconvenient. However,
00:04:56.540
wokeness can be defeated. It can lose. And I think that is what we are starting to see here. As you point
00:05:01.820
out, a critical load bearing pillar of the left strategy has been cutting the right off from its
00:05:09.340
vanguard, right? The left can say whatever it wants. Young people on the left, this is just the nature
00:05:15.180
of all young people, right? You get out there, you want to change the world, you say things that are
00:05:19.680
transgressive, you want to push the limits. That's just the definition of being a young person in general.
00:05:25.360
And when you're doing it politically, well, on the left, you're going to be saying things like,
00:05:29.560
well, Mao was right, or Stalin was right, or all these things.
00:05:33.080
Or Luigi Mangione should go kill people, okay? You should just like call for the death of anybody
00:05:40.160
Right. And this is what they do all the time. They do this as part of Antifa, whatever.
00:05:44.760
Bill Ayers can blow up as many buildings as he wants, kill people. It doesn't matter. He's going to
00:05:49.920
get a cozy professorship somewhere. However, anyone on the right who might have said, uh, you know,
00:05:55.860
uh, yeah, I'm racist. Ha ha ha ha. That person just becomes unhirable for the rest of their life.
00:06:01.420
And this is just an asymmetry that cannot be allowed to exist because that means all the left
00:06:06.760
wing's young talent is allowed to come in, circulate, reinvigorate their institutions and become
00:06:12.540
leaders while all the right wing's, uh, talent gets completely decimated before they even step into
00:06:18.680
the arena. They basically become unhirable before they even begin their careers. There's just no
00:06:24.240
way you can be a successful political movement when this is the way you operate.
00:06:28.460
And let's think about too, it's not just that it's like cutting out the vanguard, although it,
00:06:34.320
that it is doing that. And so it's, it's silencing or sort of eliminating a certain element of right
00:06:40.120
wing thought that can help push, you know, the sentiment on the right in one direction or another,
00:06:45.540
but you also think about, okay, what kinds of people participate in like edgy speech? Um, and
00:06:53.060
if you were a young person growing up in your formative years throughout this period of the
00:06:59.520
last decade, that we'll just like call the woke era for lack of a better term. And you didn't have
00:07:05.100
the instinct to try to upset the apple cart. Okay. That says something about you. Um, that that's not
00:07:12.680
necessarily a bad sign, but it certainly suggests that, you know, you're the kind of person you play
00:07:18.120
by the rules. You understand the constraints of different kinds of social pressures. You're very
00:07:23.140
much risk averse. And if you're talking about sort of the entirety of a political roster that you need
00:07:31.260
to make interesting things happen. And certainly given where we're at in our culture, in our political
00:07:37.040
moment, the kinds of radical changes that we need to see happen within our politics and within our
00:07:42.640
culture, what you're also removing from the, this sort of pool of people are precisely the kinds of
00:07:50.140
personalities who are going to be most likely to want to initiate the sorts of changes that need to
00:07:55.520
be made and take the kinds of risks that need to be taken in order to make sort of big things happen.
00:08:01.820
And so it's, it's, it works on so many different levels to the benefit of the left to completely
00:08:08.000
close the door, not just on the kind of speech, but the kind of person who just wants to get online
00:08:16.380
and participate with their friends, you know, like in, I don't want to just like be so dismissive to say
00:08:23.780
that it's just merely jokes. I mean, they are jokes, but they operate like in this kind of complicated
00:08:31.180
discursive space where they are funny and they use humor to sort of hyperbolize or, or highlight
00:08:38.800
certain points, but it's also a way again, to inject a kind of sentiment or opinion into the public
00:08:45.760
discourse that would otherwise be sort of impossible to contribute. And so it's really important that we
00:08:53.240
preserve people's ability to sort of make these statements, even as kind of unseemly, uh, or
00:09:00.740
uncomfortable as they might make, um, you know, our, our official sort of political spokespeople.
00:09:07.320
And this was so great about like JD Vance coming out and saying, I am not going to be
00:09:13.360
bow, breathe, uh, bow, breathe, brow beaten. And I'm not going to succumb to this kind of moral cudgel,
00:09:19.640
this moral blackmail that the left uses to get me to ostracize and condemn and disavow what this kid
00:09:27.520
said. Instead, he made the very reasonable point that this is just part of how people behave. This
00:09:33.340
is just part of how kids talk. And so that was incredibly refreshing. And I think actually took a
00:09:38.880
real amount of courage for JD Vance to do that. Absolutely. Again, you, you think about the way
00:09:45.260
that this gets approached here. You point out, well, these are jokes, but they, they're opening up a space
00:09:49.620
to have the discussion, right? They're, they're, they're wedging that window open as humor so often
00:09:54.280
does. And you can kind of see that reflected in the way that Vance has addressed other parties,
00:09:58.740
even on major news networks, right? Sorry, Margaret, I just don't care. I just don't care.
00:10:04.100
I just don't want this person in my country. I don't need another reason. I don't need to morally
00:10:09.220
justify myself to you. I am someone living in a real nation. That's not an economic zone. It's not
00:10:15.360
an office park. And I get to decide who lives here, me and the people in this nation get to care about
00:10:20.560
our families enough to say no. And you, you can sit there and try to harangue me with all your
00:10:25.260
leftists, you know, uh, you know, uh, moralizing, I don't care. We're just going to say it and move
00:10:30.800
on. Those kinds of things don't happen unless posters are posting it. You know, it's a government
00:10:35.940
of the posters by the posters at this point. And we know Vance is pretty plugged in to, to what's
00:10:41.860
happening there. But like you said, the way that he approached this was really important to me
00:10:46.340
because it's not, it's not just that he said, Hey, give this guy a pass. You know, that, that
00:10:51.080
would be one thing that would itself be impressive. He said specifically, we don't let the left set
00:10:56.920
the frame anymore. We don't let left-wing journalists decide what conservative or right-wing politics
00:11:02.340
looks like anymore. That is huge. That is massive because he recognizes the function that the
00:11:08.780
cancellation is playing. It's not just, Oh, well, we got to be careful about what people are saying.
00:11:13.080
We've got to, you know, make them do the apology tour thing. No, he says specifically, I know what's
00:11:18.020
happening here. You guys are trying to tell us who can be in our movement and you want to remove all
00:11:22.200
the most effective people, all the people who are most capable of communicating or getting the job
00:11:26.680
done. And we are not going to let you do it. We just don't care. We hope you're enjoying your Air
00:11:32.060
Canada flight. Rocky's vacation. Here we come. Whoa. Is this economy? Free beer, wine, and snacks. Sweet. Fast,
00:11:41.700
free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land. And with live TV, I'm not missing
00:11:47.520
the game. It's kind of like I'm already on vacation. Nice. On behalf of Air Canada, nice travels.
00:11:55.940
Wi-Fi available to airplane members on equipped flights. Sponsored by Bell. Conditions apply.
00:11:59.420
See your Canada.com. Yeah. And I, you know, again, with JD Vance too, there's of course this important
00:12:05.400
dynamic that, that needs to be spoken out loud, which is he has an Indian wife and has half Indian
00:12:11.380
kids. And the, you know, the sort of, uh, rhetorical sin that this kid committed was saying
00:12:18.740
one, normalize Indian hate. That was like the big tweet that they went after. And the other one,
00:12:24.380
which was something like I was racist before it was cool to be racist or something like that. And
00:12:29.460
there may be been some other kind of spicy tweets. And I think it's really important in this episode
00:12:36.260
that what was said was, would have been clearly and unambiguously verboten under the old rules,
00:12:44.760
because this wouldn't have had the same effect if we'd be sitting here like litigating sort of the
00:12:51.080
degree to which, you know, these statements were bad or, you know, were something that we should,
00:12:58.200
we should allow and like formal public discourse. No, it's, it's actually a good thing in this case
00:13:04.340
that these are like, these are, these are pretty spicy things to say. And nobody in a government
00:13:09.720
position should be saying something like that. And it's, it's also important that JD Vance with his
00:13:16.280
Indian kids has something at stake here and can still tell these people, no, I am not participating
00:13:23.520
in this kind of witch hunt and in this dishonest, uh, uh, kind of, um, implementation and enforcement
00:13:34.320
of rules that you don't apply to your own people. Instead, what we are going to do is determine for
00:13:41.480
ourselves within the kind of circle of the right on the doge team privately, whether or not this kid
00:13:48.780
is up to perform the task that he has been charged with, um, you know, by virtue of his work at doge.
00:13:56.700
And we're going to decide if he can work with his peers and we're going to decide, you know, amongst
00:14:03.020
ourselves, whether or not this person is a liability because he might fly off the handle, or if in fact,
00:14:10.780
it is just the case that he's a young guy with an anonymous count online saying things, uh, that
00:14:17.900
anybody might say sort of privately amongst their friends or in a locker room for jokes or in this
00:14:23.980
kind of ambiguous discursive space that we spoke about earlier. So it's, it actually is really
00:14:29.360
important that what he said was, um, like struck directly at the kinds of things that, that wouldn't
00:14:35.140
have been allowed under the previous kind of moral regime. And so it, yeah, like there are so many
00:14:40.740
dimensions to this where it does in so many ways, just completely sideline. Now that tactic, that
00:14:47.220
strategy that they have to attack young, right. People. Well, and again, this is so critical because
00:14:54.420
it's taking ownership of the discipline of your side, right? Because again, has been something
00:15:01.380
outsourced entirely to the left. Oh, well, if you, if you, everyone knows this, everybody knows this.
00:15:06.820
If you want to cancel someone on the right and you're on the right, you hit them from the left.
00:15:11.860
You never hit them from the right. You never come out and be like, oh, this guy said he was a
00:15:15.060
communist in the past. That's never what happens. You always go to his, you know, to, to his left and
00:15:20.820
say, oh, at one point he went to this meeting. At one point he talked to this guy. At one point he
00:15:26.020
was associated with this thing and it, you attack them from the left. The right knows that the
00:15:31.300
power of cancellation up to this point has been on the left. And that's where they have gone time
00:15:36.820
and time again in order to like their internecine warfare gets settled by pulling the left into it.
00:15:42.820
And that is a loser tactic. I mean, you know, if you just want to make a biblical appeal here,
00:15:47.380
the Bible specifically says discipline happens inside the church. Don't appeal to Caesar. Don't appeal to
00:15:53.380
Rome. Don't appeal to the magistrate. It happens in the church first, first in between the two of you,
00:15:59.460
then to an elder, then to the church body, but you do not go outside the family to settle business.
00:16:06.980
And that is how the left handles it. They decide whether Bill Ayers is a terrorist or a professor.
00:16:13.220
They decide whether or not someone with a communist past is just a slightly overzealous, you know,
00:16:19.780
activist who has a promising future or someone they actually want to get rid of. They make those
00:16:24.340
decisions. The right never makes those decisions for them. Never. And what we're seeing is finally
00:16:31.300
the right saying the same thing. We, you know, maybe this guy gets sit down and say, Hey man,
00:16:35.300
cool it with the posts, whatever, you know, but that's what happens. It happens internally.
00:16:39.300
He doesn't get skewered. The left doesn't pull him down. He doesn't get thrown to the wolves.
00:16:44.260
It is handled internally. And then you move forward stronger.
00:16:48.340
Yeah. And, and what's important here, I think, and something that might get missed in this discourse
00:16:54.260
is that, um, you know, those of us defending this kid are also making some kind of like
00:16:59.380
nihilistic claim about there being no rules or that there's no expectations of a certain level
00:17:04.740
of decorum or responsibility. Once you get into a position of power or public prominence,
00:17:10.340
that's not the case at all. There are still rules and there are going to be norms. And there is still
00:17:15.620
an expectation that if you're working in the federal government and you are working on behalf
00:17:22.100
of the entirety of the American people, that you do so with respect that you sort of, uh, appropriately
00:17:29.860
honor the significance of that position. And one thing the left failed at was that they didn't take
00:17:35.700
that responsibility seriously. And we don't want to repeat that mistake. However, now we are making
00:17:42.820
the rules around which, uh, those expectations around norms are determined. And we are going to enforce
00:17:49.860
those on our own terms as well. We're not going to let hostile journalists come in and tell us that
00:17:56.100
we have to fire somebody. We're not going to let the, by the way, the manufactured sentiment that the
00:18:02.820
left tries to create, um, in order to provoke an overreaction, which, you know, I, okay. So I,
00:18:10.260
I think it's important to actually, I wonder what you think about this, that actually the initial
00:18:14.500
reaction was to fire him and that like following the usual script initially, they just fired him.
00:18:22.820
Okay. This bad, there's bad press. They don't want to deal with it. And the expedient thing has always
00:18:27.860
been, you just put, toss this person aside and then you move on because the work of doge is more
00:18:33.620
important than this, than this one person. I'm sort of sympathetic to that. I think it's wrong,
00:18:38.180
but I'm sympathetic to that argument. So they did that. And, but then in this case,
00:18:42.340
it was through the process of then the right on Twitter. And this is important too. It didn't happen
00:18:48.100
like in the New York times and the pages of the New York times, there's just a bunch of people on
00:18:52.180
Twitter negotiating then whether that was the right choice and then offering an alternative
00:18:57.940
and being able to explain directly to Elon Musk and to the people at doge and to JD Vance,
00:19:04.580
why it actually is a good thing for us to reassert power over and control over these decisions.
00:19:10.420
Um, so, you know, I, I don't want to like make too, maybe too much of a big deal out of it, but I do
00:19:16.900
think maybe just like Trump losing in 2020 kind of like has turned out to be a good thing. Uh,
00:19:23.860
maybe having this kid initially be fired and then us rethinking this strategy was,
00:19:30.260
is actually a good thing in the end because we can like more forcefully than demonstrate
00:19:34.660
that we're in some new era. This isn't just a continuation of the old way of doing things.
00:19:39.540
Yeah. In fact, it's almost, it's so advantageous that I'm tempted to believe it's 40 tests,
00:19:45.940
right? Like, like, like it's a faint of, okay, we put this guy out there. Oh no,
00:19:50.660
we got a fire hit, but you know, they were ready to, to, to move it. I mean,
00:19:54.820
I would like to believe that they just heard the, they heard the, you know, like you're saying,
00:19:58.820
they heard the feedback and they, they responded once kind of the, uh, you know, memetic train
00:20:03.780
got rolling, they recognize the air and they made that adjustment, but I don't know. So quick that,
00:20:08.980
you know, maybe they did, you know, kind of recognize that this is something that needed to happen.
00:20:13.140
And they let people, whether it's a trap or not, whether it's, you know, 5d chess or not,
00:20:18.580
you're right that this is a, it's critical that this happened because it really sets a,
00:20:22.500
an entirely different precedent for the right going forward. And people need to understand
00:20:26.500
that this is going to trickle down significantly. This doesn't just impact JD Vance or Doge.
00:20:32.420
This is a signal to all a conservative media outlets, think tanks, uh, you know,
00:20:37.700
NGOs, everything. This is how we do business now. This is how you're allowed to do business
00:20:42.820
that we, we don't just leave our men stranded on the field. We make sure that we go back,
00:20:47.860
we pick these guys up and we get them back on the front line. And that is a game changer.
00:20:52.980
People just don't understand when you were on the left, it meant being protected forever.
00:20:57.780
You're going to have a job. You're going to get paid. You're going to, if you, if you make a
00:21:01.780
mistake, someone's going to stand up for you. You're going to get turned around and put somewhere
00:21:05.700
else. If you end up getting bounced out of the position, being on the left, having the sinecure,
00:21:10.660
making sure that you were untouchable, being on the right, dancing on landmines all day long.
00:21:15.860
The guy right next to you, like we said, is just looking to cancel you immediately. That's all
00:21:21.300
that happened. The fact that this has changed so significantly is huge. And to your point about JD
00:21:26.980
Vance and having an Indian family, you know, the, the fact that the press didn't give a crap about
00:21:33.060
his Indian family beforehand is amazing, right? Like none of these people, oh, don't you care about
00:21:38.100
your kids? Don't you care about your wife? Like they were talking about how they were tokens,
00:21:41.940
how, you know, JD Vance is a hypocrite, blah, blah, blah. All of a sudden they care deeply about
00:21:46.260
his familiar relations and, you know, how he's standing up for them. But again, Vance was not
00:21:51.540
baited, right? He turned around and said, look, yeah. Okay. I don't want you making fun of my kid,
00:21:55.940
but you know what? I really don't want my kid being so soft that they would take that, you know,
00:22:00.260
and be offended by it, that that would destroy their lives, that they would think that they need to
00:22:03.780
destroy other people's lives for having an opinion about them. Like that is so huge. Just,
00:22:08.580
just not caving to that pressure and immediately turning around and being like,
00:22:11.460
no, actually, like my kids are resilient and I'm raising them to be able to handle a joke
00:22:16.500
and we can just take that and move on. And you're not going to guilt me into any of this.
00:22:21.620
When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy
00:22:26.260
mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit,
00:22:31.060
but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that actually they will stay for dinner.
00:22:36.180
Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in
00:22:40.740
as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees,
00:22:46.660
exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart groceries that over deliver.
00:22:51.380
Yeah. And I, and I want to add on this point too, I do want to give credit to certain people, uh, who stood
00:22:58.500
up for this kid and offered him an opportunity for, you know, to go talk to them and, and sort of
00:23:05.940
explain himself. And I'm thinking specifically of some like Indian friends of mine and people who were
00:23:11.460
involved in the administration and close to doge and ultimately, you know, participated in this
00:23:17.300
decision-making. And, uh, you know, there's an old land shark tweet that comes to mind here,
00:23:22.660
which I'll just like keep on pause for now, but you know, like, uh, Indian Bronson actually was the
00:23:27.460
first person I saw sort of to tweet about this. I did see, uh, Balaji Srinivasan posted about this
00:23:33.860
and making a kind of, again, this sort of meta case for why it's important to allow this kid at
00:23:39.220
least the opportunity to apologize because we don't want to give power to the left and this kind of,
00:23:44.260
you know, uh, apparatus of Antifa activists and journalists, et cetera. And, and I'm not going to name
00:23:50.420
any names, but there were people inside of doge to, uh, Indians who realized, you know what,
00:23:54.900
there's a bigger object here. We have bigger goals than this, and we're not going to let ourselves
00:24:00.420
get distracted and sidelined by like these petty, stupid personal slights that someone might feel
00:24:07.860
over an insensitive remark. That is, uh, just a, a totally miss a misunderstanding and a miscalculation
00:24:15.300
of what our priorities are. And on the right, especially right now, there is so much
00:24:20.100
low hanging fruit for us to pick. There will be fights that, you know, might threaten to sort of
00:24:24.980
fracture the coalition in the future, and they'll run along a number of different dimensions and
00:24:30.180
perhaps even like questions over, you know, immigration and H1Bs will probably be a part of
00:24:35.460
that conversation, but we don't need to front run those, uh, potential fractures in the coalition
00:24:42.580
right now. There's plenty of us, uh, for us to do together. And there's still, you know, even though I
00:24:48.900
think sort of woke in the left and Democrats generally are clearly exhausted and clearly on
00:24:53.620
retreat, they're not like permanently defeated and we need to keep our sights set on what the
00:24:59.860
objective is here. And that's going to mean that we have a more tolerance for these coalition partners
00:25:06.260
and some, uh, like tolerance for where these disagreements are not just like insensitivities,
00:25:12.260
but then like, okay, let's also think, you know, the, the tech, right, these new people coming in,
00:25:16.340
they're going to have like a different set of values in some respect. And again, I don't,
00:25:21.380
this doesn't mean we compromise on the things we care about. People should not compromise on
00:25:25.300
the things we care about, but we should have a clear sense of where our fights are. And again,
00:25:30.500
I just want to say those people involved in getting him, his job back deserve credit for
00:25:35.540
understanding the moment and understanding what's important. Absolutely. And it's really critical to
00:25:41.940
break this idea that racism is the, just the worst thing you could possibly do. Look, right. First,
00:25:49.540
racism is fake. Okay. That's it's a fake commie word. You shouldn't have ethnic hatred for people.
00:25:54.340
Just to be really clear. Let's get, get out of the way. I don't believe you should have ethnic
00:25:57.780
hatred for people in general. That said the, what the left calls racism is just an entirely
00:26:04.340
manufactured thing. It's very modern. It's, it's specifically created to demonize many very normal
00:26:10.820
positions. Like one of the things this guy said that people were losing their mind about, he said,
00:26:14.340
I wouldn't want to really date outside my ethnicity. Now you can make a decision whether
00:26:18.900
or not you want to do that, but who are you to tell this guy who he's going to date? Like it's
00:26:23.860
entirely up to him. And by the way, his decision is very normal historically and very normal today.
00:26:30.020
Just statistically, if you look at dating patterns, most people won't say it out loud,
00:26:35.620
but he's just expressing the opinion that the vast majority of people practice in real life.
00:26:40.340
Again, you might not want to practice that and that's fine, but this guy is not saying anything
00:26:45.780
insane. And when you let people say that this is racist and therefore we have to worry about
00:26:51.300
racism and it's the worst thing, I'm sorry, but being a communist is just worst actually.
00:26:55.860
Like that's actually a much more morally abhorrent thing. Again, I don't think you should hate
00:27:00.420
people for their ethnicity, but this is just not what we're talking about here in general. And the fact
00:27:06.340
that we can defang that we can, we can move away from this hypersensitivity towards an issue that,
00:27:11.940
yeah, again, like I, you know, some behavior I I'll, you know, and when I see it, I'll tell you,
00:27:16.260
it's not good, but ultimately this is not the death knell. This is not the worst sin a human
00:27:21.060
being commit. It's not the thing that ends your career because it smells slightly of this thing.
00:27:26.100
And that's really important because again, the left is going to throw this over and over at you again.
00:27:30.660
If you allow this early on in your administration, that's how the first Trump administration ended up
00:27:35.140
with this problem, right? You had a lot of heavy hitters who came in and they wanted to make changes,
00:27:39.620
but they couldn't make it through Senate confirmation or other issues that got bounced
00:27:43.380
out of the administration. And we ended up with like John Boltons. If you want John Boltons,
00:27:47.620
then encourage this stuff. If you don't, then you need to be able to brush it off.
00:27:51.220
Yeah. And I noticed, I mean, to that point, uh, I I'm, I'm, I'm almost hesitant to say it out loud
00:27:57.380
because I don't want to draw attention to it, but you know, there are people trying to do the same
00:28:02.340
thing right now to like Darren Beattie who was pushed out of the first Trump administration for
00:28:08.660
some, uh, you know, vague associations with, um, certain groups. It wasn't even anything he said.
00:28:14.420
It was just like these vague associations with groups that were considered racist.
00:28:18.660
Now they're pointing to various tweets where you can read the tweets as being sort of racist. And
00:28:24.900
actually the, the response, I think you're right. The response to that is not to litigate
00:28:29.940
whether or not these things are racist. The response is to not have the debate over this
00:28:36.500
ambiguously, infinitely amorphous term that frankly means nothing and will never be applied
00:28:44.340
in a consistent way. And so again, I mean, you know, we, it's almost like cringe to talk about
00:28:50.420
like hypocrisy. Okay. Imagine if the other side did this, but we just went through 10 years
00:28:56.900
of the entire left institutional class telling us that we were bad people for being white. Okay.
00:29:05.060
That if you are white, you are somehow guilty of some sin that needs to be redressed, uh, through some
00:29:14.100
kind of political subservience to various people of color that just simply by virtue of being white,
00:29:21.620
that made you a bad guilty person. So we don't, we just don't have to sit here again and be lectured
00:29:29.700
by people who actually have no interest at all in like deriving any kind of moral truth or coming to some
00:29:38.660
moral understanding about what our relationship actually should be, you know, in a kind of
00:29:45.380
pluralistic democracy. No, because they're not interested in that. So don't get fooled into
00:29:50.820
engaging in that debate. You just don't have the debate at all. And I think that has to be the move
00:29:55.860
going forward. Or let me just rephrase that a little bit to the extent that that debate happens.
00:30:01.220
Again, it happens internally. We are going to create and enforce norms for ourselves.
00:30:07.380
We are not going to grant the left moral authority over us. That has to be our ethos going forward.
00:30:16.180
Yeah. I've said this many times, but it's not about not having standards. It's about making
00:30:20.580
sure that your standards are your own, that you're not outsourcing them to some other moral authority.
00:30:26.020
And you're right. The left has, it's not just that no one on the left, no one on the left will ever
00:30:31.060
be fired or canceled for their anti white bigotry. It's that the anti white bigotry was mandatory.
00:30:37.300
It's that it was institutional. You are not sufficiently racist towards white people.
00:30:42.820
Therefore, you are a bad person. That was literally the doctrine of our corporations,
00:30:47.460
our universities, our educational institutions, and our media apparatus for at least a decade,
00:30:53.380
probably more. So yeah, no, sorry. I don't give a crap what some dude tweeted. Like, I just don't
00:30:59.220
care. Is that guy running CNN? Is that guy running the department of education? Is that guy running a
00:31:04.500
major corporation? No, then shut up because you didn't care about any of those people when they
00:31:09.540
were attacking white people. You certainly don't actually care about them, you know,
00:31:13.460
endangering JD Vance's half Indian children. You don't care. If you had your way, you'd have a guy
00:31:19.060
like Luigi shooting those people. Let's be really clear. You don't give a crap about them. You don't
00:31:23.700
care about their safety. You don't care about them growing up in a world where they see themselves
00:31:28.100
reflected. It's all just garbage. It's all just moral blackmail. And that's exactly what Vance
00:31:33.780
said. I'm not falling for this moral blackmail. You can't do this to me. I don't care. And you know
00:31:38.340
what this, this revealed a lot to me because there were some people and I knew they were weak,
00:31:44.180
but it's nice for them to come out and show it guys like Aaron, Eric Weinstein coming out and oh boy,
00:31:49.940
you can't say that stuff. Oh, thanks man. Like I didn't know this was coming IDW. Oh, we're for free
00:31:56.020
speech. We're for free speech. We care desperately about free speech. The minute, the minute speech
00:32:01.700
frees up just a little bit. It's oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you talking about? Oh, we actually,
00:32:06.100
we were for the wokeness. We just wanted that little space where we could keep saying what we
00:32:10.260
like to say. They never cared about free speech. I knew they didn't, but it's nice for them to
00:32:14.100
announce that, you know, Sam Harris already unmasked himself, but great for Eric Weinstein to jump on
00:32:18.740
that train. Yeah. The backlash is worse than, you know, the initial crime and, and, uh, you know,
00:32:24.500
so, okay. So is it about free speech for them? Like, no, it's not about free speech. What are they
00:32:29.300
trying to do? They're trying to preserve this status quo, anti equilibrium or the illusion of the
00:32:35.460
equilibrium that, you know, and like many boomers, for example, had kind of consented to there,
00:32:41.860
there was like this tacit sort of agreement about how we would sort of treat ratios, ratios,
00:32:49.220
race issues in this country that prevailed basically through the nineties. And it was like,
00:32:54.020
we're just going to kind of ignore this stuff and not, it's like, don't ask, don't tell policy almost.
00:32:59.620
And this kind of was okay for a while. I mean, there were various problems associated with it,
00:33:05.220
but suffice to say that was the equilibrium that was in place. Um, the left, uh, defected from that
00:33:12.340
agreement, the left defected from that arrangement and the right for a long time was like stuck in this
00:33:18.660
sort of paralysis where they didn't know how to then sort of reorient, reorient their views and the way
00:33:26.020
they talk about this stuff as the left was, was breaking from the equilibrium. Someone like Eric
00:33:30.580
Weinstein or some of these, you know, quote unquote, you know, sensible centrists, all they want is to
00:33:36.900
reassert that old equilibrium and what inclusive of the left's defection from that equilibrium.
00:33:44.420
They don't actually care about that. What they, what they really care about is that the right is
00:33:48.740
going to recognize that the left defected and the right then is going to now construct our own norms
00:33:55.780
and rules about how to address these issues. And frankly, it's a long time coming. And I actually,
00:34:01.940
what's good about them revealing themselves is we don't want them participating in this negotiation
00:34:08.900
over what this new orientation looks like. They have, you know, this, this sort of model that we're
00:34:14.740
describing where we create norms and rules for ourselves. Well, that implies that there are people
00:34:20.020
within that circle, you know, the friend circle who get to participate in the negotiation of those
00:34:26.820
norms. And it's very good to know those people are not going to be allowed in. They don't get to help
00:34:32.820
participate in this negotiation that's going to happen. Yeah. I tried not to chuckle too hard when
00:34:38.660
I saw James Lindsay crying about being shut out. Like no one of the administration's listening to me.
00:34:43.060
It's like, Oh, that's gotta be terrible, man. Utterly boxed out. There's a club. There's a club.
00:34:47.860
Okay. You're just not in it, buddy. Learn to post him in mystery growth. It's tough, tough scene, tough
00:34:53.860
scene. Uh, so, uh, you mentioned the importance of discussing who Catherine long is the wall street
00:35:00.020
journal, uh, journalist. Um, I say that with all disrespect, uh, who, who, uh, ended up running,
00:35:08.260
uh, you know, the piece that kind of outed this guy. Can you give us a little bit of background? I know our,
00:35:12.580
our mutual friend, Ryan nationalists talked about it a little bit. Yeah. So definitely find Ryan
00:35:18.180
nationalist story in the spectator about this. Uh, she previously worked at business insider.
00:35:23.380
When I say work, she would just like, you know, give them docs material to work with. Um, so she
00:35:29.140
was, she participated in Ryan nationalist docs. He worked for USA ID in central Asia. She has a long
00:35:37.460
history. You can go back and find various grants that she's associated with for work in place.
00:35:42.420
Like Kazakhstan and elsewhere. Who is this person exactly? What is she doing? We don't know. How
00:35:48.820
did she dig up these archive tweets and firstly identify who this person's alt was find the offending
00:35:58.180
tweets. And what's interesting about this is that she was hired by the wall street journal one week
00:36:03.940
ago. This is the first story that she published for the wall street journal. Um, it is almost a 100%
00:36:12.100
certainty that this information was fed to her by someone else. My suspicion based on this person's
00:36:18.740
gloating about this on blue sky and previous, uh, instances of doxing that he has been, uh,
00:36:27.780
involved in is a guy named Travis Brown. Travis Brown is a former Silicon Valley tech guy. He's,
00:36:34.500
uh, I'm not sure exactly what his expertise is, uh, I'm not sure exactly what his expertise is,
00:36:37.220
but he was, uh, worked at Twitter, uh, pre Elon Twitter. He bragged about having source code for
00:36:43.780
Twitter and being able to farm Twitter for user information that otherwise wouldn't have been
00:36:50.100
public. He now works for an NGO in Germany called hate aid and the German government sponsors hate aid.
00:36:59.940
They, the German government sponsors, Travis Brown, putting together dossiers and lists of crime
00:37:07.300
thinkers that the German government can prosecute. Uh, the irony of that I'm sure isn't lost on most
00:37:14.100
people paying attention. He also gets money from an organization called the open knowledge foundation,
00:37:20.020
uh, who also have sued Twitter, um, to maintain their access to private user data. So, you know,
00:37:29.300
there's some interesting confluence of interest here and given doges targets over the last couple of
00:37:37.060
weeks, especially with this federal grant money, especially going after these bureaucracies that
00:37:43.300
we might broadly call the deep state. Uh, it's interesting now that the wall street journal of all
00:37:50.180
places has decided despite the low, uh, standards of this article, frankly, to publish this docs material as
00:37:58.740
a direct attack, obviously on Doge. So I don't have any deeper information than that. I can only
00:38:06.020
speculate based on what's publicly available knowledge, but there are suspicious elements to this, uh,
00:38:13.940
whole episode and this article that are worth exploring in more detail.
00:38:18.180
Yeah. And, and again, it's critical, critical for people to understand that there is very little,
00:38:24.660
if no air between journalists, deep state actors, globalist, uh, you know, uh, globalist alliances
00:38:32.420
and Antifa. These are the same people. These are the same people with the same goals. They are networking.
00:38:39.220
They are interacting. Like you said, we, you know, it's, it's speculation in theory, but in practice,
00:38:46.340
there's zero chance that the wall street journal just picked up this person in a week and decided
00:38:52.340
to turn around and print this basically gossip column on their behalf. If they didn't have some
00:38:58.340
kind of prompting, right? Like this, this is a paper that is very interested in the maintenance of the
00:39:03.860
status quo, the maintenance of the managerial regime. Uh, they are heavily invested in its continuance.
00:39:09.700
Uh, they are more than willing to take information from the kind of actors who would distribute it in
00:39:15.940
an attempt to peel off, take a scalp from somebody early on in an attempt to slow the momentum of an
00:39:21.380
organization that is very clearly coming for a lot of the people and, uh, you know, kind of
00:39:26.740
infrastructure that they rely on. Uh, and you should understand these people are enemies. Like these
00:39:32.020
people declare themselves, you know, when Donald Trump said they were the enemy of the people,
00:39:36.020
it was just, it was just absolutely correct. You know, that that's how they're behaving.
00:39:39.540
And that's exactly how you should perceive them. I want to just say quickly too, is the, uh, approach
00:39:45.940
to these people, the response to these people has to just be a blanket and summary. No, do anything.
00:39:51.780
They sort of recommend, uh, the right do vis-a-vis personnel or any kinds of political choices.
00:39:58.980
It is the equivalent of negotiating with terrorists. They are not, uh, acting in good faith.
00:40:04.500
They are activists and they want to do harm to the mission and objectives of the Trump administration,
00:40:11.380
of Doge, et cetera. And you cannot negotiate with them. And it's almost like no matter what they dig
00:40:17.060
up, even if it's really, really bad, you have to say, no, you cannot allow them to assert any power
00:40:25.140
at all over any of the decision-making. Uh, and that's it. There just can't be any exceptions to
00:40:32.500
this. The only way that you get rid of this over time is that you become completely unwilling to
00:40:40.100
engage with them at all. And frankly, nobody cares. There, there really isn't any consequence
00:40:46.660
for saying no to them. And so all this really requires is a certain kind of spine. It requires
00:40:53.220
JD Vance. And he's so good at this being able to go in front of, you know, whoever at CBS news,
00:40:58.740
Margaret, and just saying, I don't care. And that's it. That's the response.
00:41:03.620
And it's so critical, not because it, not only because it defangs the attack of the left,
00:41:08.580
which is extremely important. It keeps them from disrupting what the right is doing. It keeps them
00:41:12.580
from setting the frame and the standards, but you have to understand why journalists do what they
00:41:17.300
do. Okay. As someone, I just worked in local journalism. I was never in Washington DC. I never
00:41:22.500
did any of the heavy hitting stuff, but just in my experience, journalists are almost uniformly
00:41:28.100
mentally ill drug addicts who only do their poorly paid job because they are, uh, they are compensated
00:41:36.100
in influence. These are losers who would otherwise have no influence who do their job because
00:41:42.180
basically they get to stick it to people who otherwise would be superior to them because,
00:41:48.100
you know, uh, you know, because they, they wield some kind of information, some kind of platform
00:41:51.940
where they can drag them. The minute that these people lose power, the minute that they lose the
00:41:57.860
ability to cancel people, the minute that they lose the ability to destroy someone's life, the minute that
00:42:02.100
they lose the ability to redirect the direction that a government agency is going with one little
00:42:08.660
article. The minute that they lose that power, they lose everything. They lose all motivation.
00:42:13.940
All morale is destroyed. You can already see how the left is reeling. You can already see how desperate
00:42:19.540
they are to try to find some kind of foothold. Currently the hill they're trained to die on is we've
00:42:24.500
got to fund transgender operas in Columbia. Like that's the hill right now. Woke not being put away,
00:42:31.300
by the way. Uh, but, but like that, that's the hill they want to die on. Like that's how desperate
00:42:35.860
they are. If you can steal their ability to ruin people's lives and pressure people, you don't just
00:42:41.940
win a victory by protecting your own people. You also just destroy the left's morale permanently
00:42:47.300
because they are so driven by this class of hanger on these parasites who do nothing but run around and
00:42:53.700
try to destroy people in public that when that's gone, man, the whole world opens up. You just don't
00:42:59.460
realize how much of your behavior and how much of what can be done, how much of the political reality
00:43:03.940
is constrained by the existence of people like Catherine long. And once they don't have a job,
00:43:08.420
once they don't have the motivation to do what they're doing for the pennies that they do it for,
00:43:12.740
man, the whole world opens up. Yeah. I just, I want to paint like a quick visual for, for the readers
00:43:18.660
to kind of like, you know, uh, imagine like how this works and what what's happened over the last
00:43:24.660
couple of weeks, which is, you know, imagine, uh, there's like this populous sentiment and it's
00:43:30.100
created on X or like the Maga people have some desire or interest, and they want to communicate
00:43:36.260
that to decision makers, to JD Vance and Donald Trump and Elon Musk, et cetera. So the, in the,
00:43:42.340
in the old version of things, the Maga right could kind of organically, um, sort of, uh, aggregate
00:43:49.540
their interests and sentiment, but then it would pass through this, this media filter. And this is
00:43:55.380
where the sort of left comes in people like Catherine long or the wall street journal, wherever they come
00:44:00.180
in and they intercept that message and they manipulate it and they sort of scramble the signal
00:44:06.820
and then feed it to the decision makers in this kind of perverted, uh, way. And it's a kind of
00:44:14.420
degraded message. And so what the decision makers are basing their decisions on is a, is a false
00:44:21.780
assumption about the actual sentiment of their, of their base. And so what we've seen now is that
00:44:28.420
middle layer where, you know, the New York times or the wall street journal or whomever steps in
00:44:34.580
to interpret and then feed that signal up the chain to the decision makers has been totally removed.
00:44:41.620
And like, this is the magic of, of Twitter and X, like it, it is just this straight information
00:44:48.660
stream directly to the decision makers. And I think what we're seeing, part of what we're seeing
00:44:53.700
and why suddenly like JD Vance and Elon Musk have the courage to just say no to these people
00:45:01.220
is because we're able to tell them that's what we want. That that's kind of what, what, what is best
00:45:06.180
for us. And they're taking that on board to their credit. So I think we're in just like this totally
00:45:11.540
new environment where things are possible now that wouldn't have been possible, you know,
00:45:16.340
pre-Ela on Twitter. And it's, you know, it opens up all sorts of new opportunities for us.
00:45:22.340
Yeah. It really is that radical disintermediation that changes everything. And again,
00:45:29.220
the left is not inevitable. The left wasn't even popular. They won because they had a 800 pound gorilla
00:45:35.780
on the scale. They had, they were directing the entire federal government to fund them.
00:45:40.740
They were using every, you know, corporation to censor you. They were using every media outlet to
00:45:45.940
make sure that your politicians couldn't hear you and that you couldn't hear them.
00:45:49.940
All you have to do is wipe some of this stuff away and everything changes radically.
00:45:53.620
I wanted to get into the, the Kennedy center and, you know, passage press and, and, and, and a bunch
00:45:59.060
of other stuff with you, but I know you've got other commitments. So we've got a few questions from
00:46:04.500
the audience stacking up here before we switch over, Jonathan, where can people find your work?
00:46:11.060
Yeah. So I'm Lomas on Twitter, L zero M three Z. I have a publishing company passage dot press.
00:46:19.380
Um, that's at passage press on Twitter. We, you know, our goal for this publishing company is
00:46:24.820
kind of be the publisher of record for this new sort of moment that we're in. Um, Xeno systems,
00:46:31.140
Nick lands book that's available for sale as is this hat. Uh, you know, unqualified reservations,
00:46:36.660
Curtis Yarvin, Steve sailor. We got new books coming out from Paul Godfrey, uh, ride nationalists,
00:46:42.660
uh, John Derbyshire, um, all sorts of great stuff on the horizon. So go to passage
00:46:49.140
press, uh, buy the books, sign up for the newsletter. Um, yeah, I think that's, that's
00:46:54.180
everything for now. I like that. Oh, by the way, we have promo code, the blaze. Okay.
00:46:58.340
Promo code, the blaze 50, uh, I think it's free shipping, free shipping for the blaze.
00:47:03.460
There you go. I think, uh, you know, if you want to pick up Curtis Yarvin's new book,
00:47:06.580
you got that option there too. Uh, so you can, uh, get the free shipping on that.
00:47:10.420
That's right. Fascicles. Yep. Let's move over to our questions real quick.
00:47:14.900
Uh, Lord Sneed says, won't it be harder to remove lefties from institutions for spreading
00:47:21.140
anti-white, uh, hatred while keeping ELAS? I mean, they were never going to do it anyway.
00:47:28.180
I mean, I'll let you answer, but like the left was, it's not as if the right could assert control
00:47:34.500
over the left and say, well, we're going to remove our guy. So therefore you have to remove,
00:47:40.420
you know, that person who said that other thing, it's never worked like that. They were never
00:47:45.140
beholden to the preferences of the writer. And this goes back to this thing about like it being a
00:47:51.700
fair negotiation where each side is acting in good faith to congregate around some kind of shared
00:47:58.020
norms. That was never the case. So I would just say, don't worry about it. They were always going
00:48:03.060
to do whatever they wanted to do. We should still exert pressure where and how we can, but I don't see
00:48:08.740
this as a capitulation of our ability to, you know, get what we want, um, out of our own people.
00:48:17.780
Yeah. To, to mash up two passage, uh, authors here, uh, you know, Yarvin always points out that you
00:48:24.020
either can persuade people or you can do the anti-fascism crusade that Paul Godfrey talks about.
00:48:29.940
It's one or the other, right? You can, you can either try to purge everything or you can try to
00:48:35.380
persuade by making one thing socially cool and another thing, not those are your options.
00:48:39.860
Everything else is a failed half measure. You know, don't, don't do half the revolution,
00:48:43.700
either purge it all, uh, through a true like anti-fascist type, uh, crusade, or you got to
00:48:50.660
change it through the cool. It's one or the other. And so you're, you're either in the position of power
00:48:55.220
where you're just going to purge all the leftists, including all the people who used anti-weight
00:48:59.620
white rhetoric from all the institutions, or you're going to need to build the cultural
00:49:04.100
momentum to get that going. I think we're much more in the cultural momentum position at the moment.
00:49:08.660
And I think that's ultimately the healthier way to do it. Not to say that ultimately, you know,
00:49:13.060
you might not need to remove certain leftist elements from public discourse. If they are radical
00:49:18.740
enough, I don't think anyone should really be allowed to go around advocating, uh, for full scale,
00:49:23.140
like communist, uh, you know, race revolution. However, uh, at the moment we're definitely in the
00:49:28.660
cultural mode. And so I think that's where you need to be focusing when those battles take control
00:49:33.860
of your ability to dictate your terms, and then you can address these other issues.
00:49:39.460
Uh, Jeff here says New York times versus Sullivan needs to be reversed to make the media liable for
00:49:45.140
cancel culture slander. Do you think the expansion of libel laws would have any kind of positive impact?
00:49:51.060
You know, this is where I became a squish. Okay. Like I, I am unfortunately to your audience and maybe
00:49:57.460
a disappointment to you or, and I am kind of a free speech maximalist where this stuff is concerned.
00:50:02.180
I want these people to feel pain, but actually don't know if, you know, reversing or reconsidering
00:50:11.780
libel laws is the right way to do this. I have my doubts. I look at, for example, the UK,
00:50:19.780
which has much stricter laws against this sort of thing. And, you know, there was a recent case
00:50:25.060
amongst people we know there was this prominent case with Nina power and DC Miller and, uh, you know,
00:50:30.740
they were by any sort of meaningful, um, evaluation of, of the evidence innocent of the charges of like
00:50:39.220
Nazism essentially, which was what they were accused of. And it, according to UK law, that should have
00:50:45.300
been enough, but it wasn't because, you know, these decisions are made by judges who will ultimately make
00:50:52.820
determinations, um, that frankly, uh, don't match onto a common sense understanding of these terms,
00:51:00.420
but rather, you know, uh, adhere to their sort of preferred ideological interests. And in this case,
00:51:08.260
accusing all of us who have non leftist beliefs of being Nazis is just the way it's going to go. So
00:51:14.500
let me just say this. No, the, the solution I think is limiting the power of places like the Atlantic
00:51:20.420
or the New York times or the Huffington post who have called me a Nazi on multiple occasions,
00:51:24.580
a white nationalist Nazi, which has the intent, by the way, of just making it difficult for me to get
00:51:29.300
a job or to, to create reputational harm for me. The response is no, these, these things, we just
00:51:35.140
through cultural power need to limit these, the reach and significance, uh, of these outlets who engage
00:51:41.940
in this kind of behavior. Yeah. To be really clear, I'm not a libertarian at all, but when you don't
00:51:47.780
have total control over the regime, voluntarily changing the law so that the regime can flex on
00:51:54.340
you is a mistake. As you point out in Britain, yes, technically they have stronger liable laws,
00:51:58.660
but they only apply to the right. The left is immune to them, not because that's written in
00:52:02.580
the law somewhere, but you know, de facto, that is the case, whether it's de jure or not. And so we
00:52:08.180
really need to understand that until you are the one who is basically set like a generation of judges
00:52:14.180
into their, into their, uh, terms, you can't rely on them to rule in your favor. And so handing them
00:52:19.300
a weapon to bludgeon you is perhaps a mistake. Again, one of those scenarios where perhaps at some
00:52:24.260
point you have the cultural power to make those decisions, but you don't have it now. And so there's
00:52:28.020
no reason to really try to debate whether or not that's your move at the moment because you simply
00:52:32.740
don't have it either way. And by virtue of having that cultural power, let me just say, you then don't
00:52:38.100
need to change the law that becomes like a moot point. So, um, it really does just, it is just a
00:52:44.420
question of cultural power. That, that is my view on this. Yeah. Again, the law really becomes a
00:52:48.660
formalization of cultural power and perhaps an unnecessary or unproductive one, if you've done
00:52:54.340
things correctly. So ideally you don't need it, but even if you did need it now is not the time. So it's,
00:52:59.540
it's a poor tactical decision, whether it's ultimately principled or not.
00:53:03.300
Robert Weinsfeld says, if, if, uh, offensive jokes were, uh, uh, illegalized, the new Twitter,
00:53:10.180
uh, uh, awesome would be old Twitter, terrible, grow up, take a joke. Uh, how else are we supposed
00:53:16.340
to save Spider-Man? I mean, it's not just important that we can take a joke. I think actually humor is
00:53:24.420
an essential feature of who we are on the right currently. I mean, this is like where, where,
00:53:32.100
you know, roles have been reversed to some extent, but, um, you know, typically humor is
00:53:39.460
the provenance of the subaltern, the kind of like whatever group is in the weaker position,
00:53:46.340
sort of in a, in a, in a power analysis, because it's a way to sort of poke through the kinds of
00:53:53.140
platitudes and pieties of the sort of controlling regime. So it's not just that like, yes, humor is
00:53:59.860
obviously really good. I think on its own, it doesn't need any other justification beyond itself,
00:54:06.260
but it is a political tactic. And it is the case that like edgy jokes, I mean, just it's in the,
00:54:14.340
you know, it's in the description, they're edgy. They cut, they cut through the kind of
00:54:19.060
the hedge that otherwise might prevent us from being able to actually assert
00:54:24.100
our interest and get our ideas into the heads of, you know, uh, the public. And so this has been
00:54:30.980
our great advantage, by the way, on the online right for years, which is the left seated the ground
00:54:38.100
on humor. They just, they couldn't do it. I just don't think they have it in them to be funny anymore.
00:54:43.300
And so the right has used humor to its advantage and ought to continue doing so. And not, not to be
00:54:48.420
afraid. Okay. To be funny. It's still good to be funny, but context matters here. Context matters.
00:54:56.020
Tiny Stupid Demon says, uh, uh, that face, when you're doing a hundred miles an hour,
00:55:01.220
empty vodka bottle in your hand, stealing steering wheel out the window,
00:55:04.980
brick on the accelerator, and your opponent is not swerving.
00:55:08.180
Okay. This is a direct reference to Xeno systems. Nick lands essay chicken. You should all read it.
00:55:15.940
Very good. I have an episode on that one. So if people would like to, yeah, they can read it.
00:55:19.860
They can, they can look at the commentary. We, we got the whole, we got the whole package here.
00:55:23.220
Uh, perfect. All right. Uh, simpler says, uh, Trump needs to create tax incentives for corporations to
00:55:29.060
gut their anti white bias. Well, you know, interestingly, uh, something, you know, we've heard a lot
00:55:34.980
about colorblind, the, the, the regime being colorblind. Right. Uh, but Trump just came out
00:55:40.020
with an executive order talking about how we got to get rid of antisemitism. Now to his credit,
00:55:46.020
Chris Rufo came out and said, you know what, I've been pushing for colorblind. Uh, and this is not
00:55:50.340
colorblind. This is specifically, you know, singling out a group and saying they get special protection.
00:55:55.060
Now I think that there should generally be a freedom of association. I think people should be able
00:56:01.220
to form associations how they like, uh, and then we should be able to patronize them or not depending
00:56:06.580
on how they conduct themselves, you know? And so, uh, I think that's the way to handle that.
00:56:11.700
But if you're going to pass anti, you know, uh, Semitism executive orders, you can certainly pass
00:56:16.500
anti-white executive orders. And if you're going to do the first, then you should do the second.
00:56:20.580
If you're not going to do the second, then you shouldn't do the first. We should just have some
00:56:24.100
level of consistency when we're viewing this topic. Yeah. My own view on this, sorry. Cause I, you know,
00:56:29.460
is that carrots and sticks, uh, are just how you deploy them, uh, is, is a purely pragmatic
00:56:36.260
question based on what works and what doesn't work like providing tax incentives for anti-white bias
00:56:43.380
might work, but I don't know that that's the case. Um, if it did work, I mean, I guess. Okay. But, uh,
00:56:51.380
I don't think it's necessary. It's necessary. We just need to create sticks so that they don't
00:56:57.140
assert, uh, anti-white bias because by the way, they're already incentivized not to that sort of
00:57:02.100
natural dynamics of the market incentivize them not to have anti-white bias. Um, that's like an
00:57:07.940
important point here to make. Um, so the incentives are already there. It's just, they need sticks to
00:57:13.620
prevent them from making suboptimal decisions. Yeah. And just removing the artificial incentives
00:57:18.900
that were impressed on the market in the first place, which is part of what's happening now.
00:57:22.580
He also says, uh, Richard Harris's justice is a great book detailing how these problems were
00:57:27.540
created in the seventies. You can read it backwards as a step-by-step guide to demolishing it. Very
00:57:32.180
interesting. I haven't heard of that one, but, uh, I'll add it to my ever growing and never reducing
00:57:36.660
stack. Uh, let's see here. Matt Gertier says a huge fan of passage press. I must have bought a
00:57:42.820
dozen books from you all this past Christmas to give us gifts. Keep up the great work.
00:57:47.540
Thank you. Blast. Really appreciate it. Many, many excellent authors. They're
00:57:52.980
many friends of the show there. Definitely check it out. And Johan Richardson says,
00:57:56.660
seems like many of these problematic folks, journalists, bureaucrats, HR staff are women.
00:58:02.340
Wouldn't these gals be causing less trouble if they were home caring for their families instead?
00:58:09.140
I mean, you know, everybody in trouble. Look, it's an open question. I don't know. Uh,
00:58:15.540
uh, are they on average more likely to be women or not? I actually haven't looked at the data. I do
00:58:21.460
know in HR departments, it is the case. It's almost 70% women. Um, you know, I'm just going to say that
00:58:27.140
they should trust again. Okay. I will say on a serious note, all we have to do is remove the
00:58:32.980
artificial incentives that are imposed on people. And if we just allow people to behave, um, and sort of
00:58:41.220
follow what's in their best interest without the sort of ideological imposition of, uh, you know,
00:58:48.740
certain ideas, then we'll get the world we want to live in. Let's just put it that way.
00:58:54.260
I think you got, uh, you know, Steve sailor's next book there, you know, you can break down
00:58:57.780
stats, you know, get, turn Steve loose on this topic. I'm sure it'll be.
00:59:01.140
Yeah, maybe, maybe that's the answer guys. We're going to go ahead and wrap this up. Of course,
00:59:06.660
make sure that you are following Loma as you're checking out everything that passage press is
00:59:10.900
putting out. If it's your first time on this channel on YouTube, make sure that you're subscribing,
00:59:15.300
clicking the bell notification, all that stuff so that, you know, when these streams go live,
00:59:19.620
if you want to get these broadcasts as podcasts, you need to subscribe to the or Mac entire show
00:59:23.940
on your favorite podcast platform. And if you'd like to get my book, the total state
00:59:27.460
it's available in both print and audio book on Barnes and Noble or rather on Amazon at Barnes
00:59:34.020
Noble books, a million, and even your favorite local bookstore. Thank you everybody for watching.