Letitia James is a district attorney in New York City. She s been on a warpath against President Trump, and one of the groups she s been trying to get rid of is the conservative publication The Daily Beast. And she s got a guy on the show to talk about why she thinks she can get away with it.
00:04:50.240Well, Peter Brimelow was an editor at National Review.
00:04:52.560He wrote a bestselling book in the 1990s called Alien Nation, which really brought the immigration issue to the forefront.
00:04:58.220And he also wrote a cover story at National Review talking about the immigration issue.
00:05:03.480And as I think you've pointed out on a number of other occasions, he's another one of these figures who's been mocked for correctly predicting the future.
00:05:12.300Just about everything he predicted in this article, Time to Rethink Immigration, has essentially come true, most notably the fact that California is now a forever blue state.
00:05:21.220However, accurately predicting the future has never really been a path to success in the conservative movement.
00:05:25.880So he was essentially pushed out of National Review.
00:05:28.800And that's when he started Vidare.com, named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World.
00:05:35.060This was one of the first sites that really took advantage of the Internet.
00:05:39.600And it's worth remembering the way people used to speak about the Internet as this, and including liberals, especially liberals, in fact, this idea that open communication and free speech,
00:05:49.240this was all going to lead to the way democracy is truly supposed to work in a truly informed citizenry.
00:05:55.700And for some time, it did seem to operate that way.
00:05:58.840And Vidare had a big impact, despite essentially being frozen out by the conservative movement.
00:06:04.160It's published a number of major writers over the years, some of whom have now broken into the mainstream or the near mainstream.
00:06:11.880Steve Saylor, for example, his books were published by Vidare.com.
00:06:15.840Unfortunately for Peter and for his wife, Lydia, it seems that they've triumphed.
00:06:21.800And the price of their triumph was their professional destruction because immigration was always a tough battle within the GOP.
00:06:29.340You have to remember, the Wall Street Journal used to advocate for a constitutional amendment that said there shall be open borders.
00:06:35.320That was considered to be the establishment GOP position.
00:06:39.460Now there's really nobody pushing for more immigration, at least not openly, within the GOP.
00:06:44.160The Trump revolution really has reshaped the GOP, but that also means that they're a bigger target.
00:06:51.340And so now Letitia James, the New York attorney general, the same one who went after the NRA, the same one who was going after President Trump,
00:06:57.920basically put Vidare.com in the cross sites.
00:07:01.460And now after 25 years, it looks like that's it for this online publication,
00:07:05.120which really was an important part of not just conservative history, but Internet history.
00:07:11.060And I think the attack on it really shows how the norm of free speech,
00:07:15.180which I think we once considered to be fundamental to the American identity,
00:07:18.660has been completely wiped out with very little resistance.
00:07:22.860Yeah, it really is wild how things have changed.
00:07:25.480Like you said, Peter Brimelow and many others, Pat Buchanan, were really out in front of this a very long time ago.
00:07:32.700And Donald Trump's kind of picked up that banner in a very important way and shifted that conversation.
00:07:39.000You know, I played the clip of Bernie Sanders talking about how open borders was a Koch brothers conspiracy.
00:07:46.320And he was right about that, by the way, at the time.
00:08:12.220And then, of course, Donald Trump, who was a beloved real estate investor, TV celebrity, up until the point he started running for president and came down that escalator,
00:08:20.620at which point all the people who had worked with him his whole life decided they hated him and that he was a racist all along.
00:08:26.220In all of these cases, we see that the people who have achieved success within the system, it really can be taken away very quickly once you step on the wrong side of a lot of these issues.
00:08:37.680And the biggest issue fundamentally is immigration because immigration determines everything else.
00:08:44.120Demography is destiny, for better or worse.
00:08:46.980And if you don't get immigration right, nothing else really matters.
00:08:50.500And that's really been Vidaire's message since the beginning.
00:08:53.000Yeah, this is something that I've tried to explain so often to people.
00:09:00.620I understand that there are many critical things that we need to be able to focus on.
00:09:04.820But you're right that immigration is pretty much the linchpin because in a democracy, whether we like it or not, that is the reality of the kind of system that we live in.
00:09:14.800In a democracy, you are going to have the way that your decisions are made impacted by the people who cast the votes.
00:09:22.460And if you can fundamentally change the people who are in the country, which many people on the left and sadly even on the right seem more than happy to do, then you will change the way that they vote.
00:09:32.660The left is not squeamish about saying this.
00:09:35.400In fact, they brag about it all the time.
00:09:37.160As soon as we can transform Texas, as soon as we can transform some of these other states to Latino or something else, we can switch it over.
00:09:44.880They announce these plans on a regular basis.
00:09:46.700They act shocked and surprised if someone notices.
00:09:53.240But if you notice and say maybe that's not a great thing, all of a sudden it's a terrible problem.
00:09:57.020But you're absolutely right that this has shifted so dramatically over the years.
00:10:01.080And I think that's why we're seeing the crackdowns on free speech that you're talking about.
00:10:05.460You simply cannot let this kind of stuff come back into the popular consciousness.
00:10:10.740You can't let people understand the kind of issues that this creates because they might realize that their country is slowly and surely being changed underneath them.
00:10:20.200And so I wonder if you could get a little...
00:10:34.200So I was hoping you could go ahead and lay out, again, for people who are not familiar, what Letitia James is actually doing.
00:10:40.000What is her excuse for trying to shut down Vidair?
00:10:43.380What kind of leverage is she bringing legally?
00:10:45.740And why is that making it impossible for the site to operate?
00:10:48.480Well, to set the stage, we have to go back a couple of years and kind of shows how this whole thing works with the restriction of free speech.
00:10:57.180Vidair.com was trying to host conferences for several years between 2016 and 2019.
00:11:01.720And they kept booking conferences at hotels, and then the hotel would sign a contract, and then the hotel would cancel at the last minute.
00:11:10.260Eventually, they started putting in clauses where they would have to pay a penalty if they canceled.
00:11:14.600They would still cancel anyway, which might have been amusing a little bit, but the whole point was to actually host a conference.
00:11:20.920And so Vidair decided that they needed to buy their own conference venue because you simply cannot have a conference for right-wing ideas in the United States of America at a private business.
00:11:31.940You're just not – you can't get away with that.
00:11:39.820So that's why they bought this castle in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.
00:11:43.060They got it, actually, at a remarkably cheap price because it's West Virginia.
00:11:47.580It's a property that was having a hard time finding somebody to really look after it and give it the love it deserved, and they got a big donation one year.
00:11:56.880They started fixing it up, and that was going to be where they host these conferences.
00:12:01.360Now, Letitia James says it was the purchase of this castle which started her investigation.
00:12:06.460And you might be asking yourself, well, what does the Attorney General of New York have to do with this group operating in West Virginia?
00:12:15.100Well, in 1999, back when such things were really unimaginable, a lawyer who had passed the bar in that state set up the Vidair nonprofit.
00:12:25.220So it was still technically operating in New York.
00:12:29.020And that little thing, which, again, nobody would have thought of in 1999, is really what allowed everything else to be set in motion.
00:12:36.500Now, interestingly enough, even though the whole investigation was supposedly about this deal to purchase the castle,
00:12:42.360the very first subpoenas came from the Hate and Bias Prevention Unit from New York, which had just been set up,
00:12:49.740which is supposed to look into hate crimes, which to me sort of gives the whole game away,
00:12:54.200that it had nothing to do with any of the stuff that they actually say they're talking about.
00:12:58.060It had to do with shutting this group down.
00:13:00.580Letitia James, when she was running for office, even talked about how it was a problem
00:13:04.720that there was so much hate being spread online and how she was going to do something about it.
00:13:09.240Well, now we know what that looks like.
00:13:12.300It's interesting, too, that Vidair hasn't actually been charged with anything.
00:13:16.720You might be saying, well, what exactly is the problem here?
00:13:19.460The problem is they keep issuing subpoenas to the group saying you need to turn over all of this information.
00:13:25.220This included the names of all the writers, some of whom write anonymously.
00:13:29.840This includes all of the email communications.
00:13:33.060This includes various things about business relationships and vendors, all of which has a tendency to be leaked.
00:13:40.000As a matter of fact, it was actually Letitia James's office that leaked a number of Nikki Haley's donors.
00:13:45.040I suppose that was just a random accident.
00:13:47.620But if you're working for a website where it could be the end of your career, if you're a Border Patrol agent or an insider in government writing for the site,
00:13:56.440it's kind of a big deal if your name is going to get leaked or not.
00:14:00.380The bigger thing, of course, is that these subpoenas are extraordinarily expensive.
00:14:24.000And you may say to yourself, well, in the United States of America, the government can't just keep subpoenaing you forever until you run out of money and then shut you down.
00:14:32.660And it's like, well, yeah, actually, that is how the government works now.
00:15:02.920They filed for relief in federal court.
00:15:05.860The federal court booted it because in an extraordinary act, Letitia James actually refiled something in state court.
00:15:14.480And then the federal court said, well, the state court is dealing with this, so we're not going to touch it, which by itself was pretty extraordinary.
00:15:20.800Obviously, if you're dealing with New York state court, the people who are dealing with these cases are elected Democrats.
00:15:28.500Now, you have to ask yourself, if you're trying to move up in the world, in the New York political system, why are you going to side with Vidair.com on anything, regardless of what the law is?
00:15:38.660We are working in the realm of politics, and the idea that there's a separation between the law and politics, I think, is an illusion that really needs to die.
00:15:48.960Peter has said that a lot of this is sort of like being in a nightmare, because no matter what you do, the circumstances keep changing.
00:15:55.100Letitia James' office put forward different justifications for the information they were asking for when they filed in federal court, where they said they didn't want to know about the names of all these people, and in the state court, where they admitted that actually, yes, we do want to know the names of all these people.
00:16:11.340In theory, you're not allowed to do that.
00:16:12.960In practice, it simply doesn't matter.
00:16:15.220And you're also fighting against something that has unlimited resources.
00:16:18.400Vidair.com, on the surface, is a pretty marginal group in terms of its budget, in terms of its clout within Congress, say.
00:16:29.220It's not something that really is talked about as a power broker, and yet you see this extraordinary investment of money and time from someone who clearly has their eye on higher office.
00:16:39.580And you have to ask yourself, why are they doing this?
00:16:42.140Part of it may be because Vidair.com has grown in prominence as the immigration issue has become mainstream, but I think the larger issue is just because they can't.
00:16:53.960There's no actual institutional check to prevent blue state officials from acting in this way.
00:17:00.360And the heart of politics fundamentally is the friend-enemy distinction, something on the political right seems to have forgotten, but the political left has not.
00:17:07.900And so if you can destroy enemies, if you can take their money, if you can just make it that little bit harder for them to get things done, why wouldn't you do that?
00:17:17.020And we've seen it because this is the same person who went after the NRA.
00:17:20.740And, of course, most famously, this is the same person who went after Donald Trump in a real estate case that a number of business professionals in New York City considered to be utterly horrifying because Trump was penalized for doing the sorts of things that just about every real estate professional does.
00:17:35.160Yeah, and she's been, again, very clear about her intentions.
00:17:38.760I'm going to punish Donald Trump and obviously-
00:17:42.620I mean, you have to take a step back and really, I'd like to ask your audience to just really think about this for a second.
00:17:49.420When the chief law enforcement officer of the state says, I am running for office because I am going to destroy this political enemy and the people vote for them for that reason, what exactly is going to be the check on such behavior?
00:18:05.780What written laws, what constitutions, what elected judges who are appointed by these same liberals or run for office as these same liberals, how exactly do you stop that?
00:18:15.240And I think that this is something that the right needs to really come to terms with because we have this assumption that the system can sort of defend itself or that the law somehow works out.
00:18:25.760The rule of law is a social convention.
00:18:28.180And if one side just abandons that social convention, the rule of law itself goes away.
00:18:32.840And I think one of the key things to keep anybody from kind of lining up behind and defending what's going on here is this Alex Jones effect.
00:18:42.820I want to talk about that because it's very clear.
00:18:44.900I think that Vidair is a canary in a coal mine, much in the way that Alex Jones was when it came to internet censorship.
00:18:51.980But before we dive into that, guys, let's talk a little bit about your moral duty to hire base people through New Founding.
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00:19:58.740So you would assume that if you have a rogue attorney general going after a outlet, any outlet, right, in any place where journalism is occurring, that would be a huge issue.
00:20:40.760You can feel how you like about Alex Jones and the veracity of what he says.
00:20:45.020But obviously his cancellation, the way that multiple platforms simultaneously colluded to shut him down and shut him off and silence him was the very beginning of a large amount of Internet censorship that hit everybody.
00:20:59.900Not just the not just the out there people, not just the people wearing tinfoil hats, not just the people saying naughty things you're not allowed to say, but even basic mainstream conservatives lost the ability to say very important things, very important truths online.
00:21:14.180And Alex Jones was the first domino in that.
00:21:17.240And you kind of wonder if people had gone to the woodshed for Alex Jones, would we have seen everything that we saw with the 2020 election have gone entirely differently if the right had had the courage of its convictions to stand up?
00:21:29.880And now you look at what's happening to Vidaire.
00:21:33.060And are you guys getting lots of support from The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, all these right?
00:22:36.620They've been canceled from Constant Contact, Google AdSense, Amazon, credit card processors.
00:22:44.240There's I mean, the cruelest blow has to be the credit card processors, which came just a couple of weeks ago when they were trying to raise money for sort of a last ditch legal defense.
00:22:52.740And the banks were no longer willing to support.
00:22:56.140I believe it was Gab Pro because after Stripe canceled on the after go with somebody else.
00:23:01.140The banks were no longer able to provide such services.
00:23:03.840And there's good reason to believe that federal regulators are the ones pressuring these banks to say, hey, you can't provide credit card processing services to these specific companies that we're looking at.
00:23:36.140And it's been going on for a very long time, really, since 2016, certainly picked up speed in 2017.
00:23:42.660And I would call it the biggest cultural revolution of my lifetime.
00:23:45.920Bigger than transgenderism, bigger than anything else people can point to, because even in 2015, it would have been taken absolutely for granted by just about everybody that even if you disagree with what somebody says, they have the right to say it, especially on the Internet.
00:24:00.380You have the right to read whatever you want.
00:24:02.680And if there's certain information you want, you have the right to find it.
00:24:05.700Now, every single government in the West takes it absolutely for granted that they need to censor information in the name of protecting democracy.
00:24:13.200And while the United States still protects that right legally, de facto, that right really doesn't exist anymore because they've made it just about impossible to operate.
00:24:22.100Yeah, you can really tell that the pretense is gone.
00:24:25.280I remember my entire life people would defend places like the ACLU saying, look, at the end of the day, they defended the right of the Klan to march, right?
00:24:34.900No matter how vile the speech is, this is the United States and you have the right to go ahead and do that.
00:24:40.400And the organizations that are ostensibly dedicated to the protection of civil liberties are going to stand behind you no matter what.
00:24:48.260We always understand that even if we don't agree with what someone is about to put out, it's critical that they be allowed to voice that opinion.
00:24:56.240And people can take a look at your writing or others and decide for themselves if they feel like they agree with it.
00:25:02.160But they have to be able to see that first, right?
00:25:04.440Like that's the most basic right that you have is the ability to put that kind of stuff out.
00:25:09.560And again, it's fundamental democracy because what is the justification for democracy if people can't debate ideas?
00:25:15.560How are the people supposed to decide anything?
00:25:18.520And you would think that the right would have learned this lesson because if they're going to come for you guys, if they're going to come at the margins like this, they're obviously not going to stop there.
00:25:26.640It feels like the same delusion where people thought, oh, well, if we just swap like Ron DeSantis in for Trump, then they'll just treat him really nice, right?
00:25:35.520It's like, no, the problem is they've weaponized the entire system and the constitution doesn't mean anything because everyone involved has lost the spirit of it.
00:25:43.080And they're just looking for ways to get around and go ahead and punish their enemies anyway.
00:25:48.260And VDR, I would say, is probably – I mean this is the irony of the whole situation.
00:25:52.540It's less marginal now probably than it's ever been and it has less freedom to operate than it's ever had.
00:25:58.140The issues that we talk about have gone absolutely mainstream, arguably have taken over the entire GOP, taken over the entire conservative movement.
00:26:06.280And yet it's at this moment you get shut down and it's at this moment when the conservative movement is largely silent.
00:26:12.880And this gets to your point about the fact that there hasn't been much pushback.
00:26:18.240I mean one of the tragic ironies of this whole deplatforming push over the last decade or so is that if you're on the right –
00:26:26.880If somebody to your right or somebody you perceive as being to your right gets taken out, in terms of material interest, that's probably a good thing for you.
00:26:55.000And so there's always kind of a concrete interest in keeping silent, not saying anything, hoping that they won't come for you next.
00:27:02.940And you certainly see this game with a lot of people on the right where they don't defend certain targets, especially if they are afraid that that will bring the eye of Sauron on them too.
00:27:11.460But I think there's also a more cynical explanation, which is that the more people who get taken out, the more you can tell yourself that if you play it safe, you'll be able to capture the market.
00:27:20.480That may be good if you're trying to make a living in this, but if we're trying to win, if we're trying to save the country, if we're trying to defend the kind of liberties that every other generation of Americans could have taken for granted, this isn't a way to go about doing anything.
00:27:33.980And I think it's even worse than that.
00:27:35.480I think a lot of them recognize that many of the, you know, much in the mainstream conservative movement has seen some pretty significant failures and that's become very obvious to their base.
00:27:45.500And all of a sudden there's pressure from their right for the first time, I think, in a very long time to make changes.
00:27:52.660We see a lot of mainstream people panicking over the issues that are being addressed and who's addressing them.
00:27:57.880And so I think that they recognize that they can use the pressure of the left if only by their very silence to go ahead and get rid of that threat to their voice.
00:28:07.080And so why would they stick their neck out for the rights of people who are honestly putting kind of holding their feet to the fire and offering an alternative to what's kind of been the containment of right wing opinion in the United States when they can just kind of let the left do what they're going to do and say, oh, well, I don't want to touch this.
00:28:25.780Yeah, I mean, as a lot of people have pointed out, conservatives reach out to their left and cancel to their right, whereas the left operates the opposite way.
00:28:34.020You never see the left go after its own, quote unquote, extremes.
00:28:37.320They understand that those people kind of paved the way for what they're trying to do later.
00:28:41.340Certainly, if a conservative group exposed, say, somebody in the Biden administration for having been a communist, do you think anyone would care?
00:28:47.980Do you think a single, like, quote unquote, mainstream media outlet would even run a story on it?
00:28:53.360No, it would just stay in the right wing echo chamber.
00:28:57.360It does lead to a difficult conversation for a lot of the people on our side.
00:29:03.100And this is where I really want to ask the audience to take this to heart.
00:29:06.640We really do have to have a principled defense of free speech for everyone, everyone on our side, especially, but everyone in general, especially the people we don't agree with, because the left has completely abandoned this at this point.
00:29:22.140And if you look at the polls, a majority of the American people still believe in it, still believe in it as a principle.
00:29:27.640This weapon is there waiting to be picked up and we can hold it.
00:29:30.880But that also means we have to be willing to tolerate a certain chaos.
00:29:34.980We have to be willing to tolerate certain arguments on our side that might make us uncomfortable.
00:29:39.220But we have to be willing to go through this because the situation for our country has grown so desperate that operating as this kind of controlled opposition really hasn't gotten us anywhere.
00:29:50.680And I, for one, am not content to simply try to make a living within the conservative movement.
00:29:56.380If that was my goal, I think if that was your goal, there are easier ways to make a living and there are easier ways to make money.
00:30:04.820And if we're going to save the country, we have to make sure it's worth saving.
00:30:08.660And that means fighting for the First Amendment, not just as some abstract legal principle, but as something we can really use in the real world.
00:30:17.020So I think, like you said, a big part of this is that Bader has seen the increase in its own relevance in the current years.
00:30:25.000It's been fighting in these trenches for a long time, but these issues have now become central.
00:30:29.300And like I said, I think a big part of that is the return of many paleoconservative ideas.
00:30:35.880Now, as the name kind of probably shows most people, that's not a new thing.
00:30:40.660Paleoconservatives have been around for a while and they've had their moments.
00:30:45.320Obviously, again, Pat Buchanan and others have have rose have risen to prominence at certain times and had large platforms.
00:30:53.000But it's always been something that is pushed back under in many situations.
00:30:58.400I had I believe I read somewhere someone explained basically guys like Pat Buchanan were along for the ride with the neoconservatives back when the Soviet Union was a big deal.
00:31:09.280Right. When Russia really was an existential threat, you really did have to worry about the way of life that was, you know, that was being threatened there.
00:31:15.900And so they kind of went along with this as long as there was a larger enemy that had they had to kind of align themselves against.
00:31:22.940But once this was gone and then it became clear that America was going to come up with new and different ways that it needed to invade foreign countries and invite other countries into the United States, it became clear that something else was at play.
00:31:37.160We weren't just defeating the Soviet Union anymore.
00:31:39.600We were launching, I think, a wider empire and that that scared many people.
00:31:44.440Can you talk about the beginnings of some maybe some key figures in the paleoconservative space that people might be familiar with or might need to learn about?
00:31:53.140Yeah, I mean, a lot of the paleoconservative neoconservative divide may seem like a lot of inside baseball regarding the conservative movement.
00:32:00.740But it's important because these are the battles over jobs and positions and who gets to set the line for the American right.
00:32:08.360And that kind of determines everything that is to follow.
00:32:11.060There were some major battles between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives during the Reagan administration and later and the neoconservatives largely won.
00:32:18.700And that's why American policy took the direction it did under the Bush administrations and then going forward up until now, really up until Donald Trump, there were a lot of issues like non-interventionism, trade policy, immigration.
00:32:34.420A lot of these things that were just kind of left on the table and things that could have been done were not done.
00:32:39.360The most famous paleoconservative is, of course, Pat Buchanan, who was the conservative true believer, both under Nixon and then in the Reagan administration.
00:32:49.920And when he ran in 1992 and then in 1996, he experienced extraordinary attack from the conservative movement, especially National Review, William F. Buckley.
00:33:01.060A lot of people perceived this as a major betrayal because Buchanan was the guy for keeping Reagan on the straight and narrow and also keeping Bush one on the straight and narrow.
00:33:12.000And yet they stabbed him in the back as soon as they got the chance.
00:33:15.420When Trump won, Buchanan said something along the lines of I believe it was in Politico.
00:33:22.260And it's unfortunate because so many of the problems that we're dealing with now, Pat Buchanan had talked about in 1992 and 1996.
00:33:28.480And if the conservative movement had come around then, we just simply wouldn't be dealing with a lot of these problems right now.
00:33:34.940There would be no immigration issue, for example.
00:33:37.580Some of the other figures who have been popular, of course, are people like Paul Gottfried, Peter Brummel himself, of course, but also Russell Kirk, who if you've ever worked in the conservative movement, you'll know is the author of The Conservative Mind.
00:33:54.760That was kind of like the standard intellectual conservative text.
00:33:57.720Well, people don't realize that he was basically thrown out of the conservative movement for supporting Buchanan, along with people like Sam Francis and the libertarian Murray Rothbard.
00:34:09.720He was one of the people who was sort of the brain trust around Buchanan's first run.
00:34:14.140And one of the things that the metaphors that people have used when discussing the whole neoconservative, paleoconservative tension is that the neoconservatives were kind of the Johnny-come-latelys to the conservative movement.
00:34:28.700And when the civil rights movement became sort of the Black Power movement later on in the late 60s and early 70s, that's when they sort of broke with the left.
00:34:38.240But they were still fundamentally liberals.
00:34:41.500They were just liberals who liked using military force against the Soviet Union.
00:34:45.520And they were sort of welcomed into the conservative movement, but they were never really part of the group.
00:34:52.480They never really aligned with everybody else.
00:34:54.580And they were never really part of the grassroots.
00:34:56.500And as one person said, it might have been Kirk himself, you know, everybody rejoices when a prostitute sees the error of her ways and comes to church.
00:35:05.140But that doesn't mean you want her speaking from the pulpit.
00:35:07.560And that's essentially what's happened, where you had the conservative movement hijacked by people who were never really part of it and who not only took the movement in a direction that was highly unfortunate, but started kicking out the people who had actually built the thing.
00:35:23.820I would actually consider one of the people who I had the honor to know at the end of her life and was a big supporter of Trump in 2016, somebody who I think is the most effective grassroots conservative of all time.
00:35:35.000But I would definitely call it paleoconservatives, which is the late Phyllis Schlafly.
00:35:38.940There would be no conservative movement without Phyllis Schlafly.
00:35:41.900She was one of the first activists against mass immigration, against globalism, against so-called free trade.
00:35:48.200And yet when she, Eagle Forum was one of the most important grassroots conservative groups during the entire Cold War.
00:35:55.920And yet at the end, you never saw her really welcomed or given the honor that she was due because we were honoring people like Christopher Hitchens because he supported the Iraq War.
00:36:07.460Christopher Hitchens is an atheist who's never aligned with the right on anything.
00:36:11.800But you have National Review doing Hosanna's to him.
00:36:15.300I mean, there's a certain there's a certain element in which there's never really been an American right, because every time it seems like the movement is coming into its own,
00:36:27.040some people who were never really part of it shove themselves to the front of the line and then send it on these tangents that don't really go anywhere.
00:36:34.400And certainly we saw that with George W. Bush, where you had massive opportunities to do a lot of productive things,
00:36:42.000most notably shut down mass immigration following 9-11.
00:36:45.060And instead, things actually got worse.
00:36:48.540And now I think the Republican base has become so sick and so bitter of these continued betrayals
00:36:55.840that they're starting to look to the people who had been kicked out of the movement a long time ago,
00:37:00.300the people who William F. Buckley and his tradition of purges said were no longer part of the respectable right.
00:37:07.760Well, the respectable right has failed us.
00:37:10.000So maybe instead of looking to the respectable right, we need to start looking to the real right if we actually want to win this thing.
00:37:16.040Yeah. And it's amazing when you see everyone shrieking about this stuff.
00:37:18.820Like he said, you go back and read Pat Buchanan's books and they're just prophetic.
00:37:23.200It's exactly what happened. You blow by blow. Same thing, of course, with Paul Gottfried.
00:37:29.800And really, Sam Francis is one that I delve into in my upcoming book, The Total State.
00:37:35.880When you look at James Burnham and his managerial revolution, the fact that Sam Francis basically updated that book
00:37:42.460and Leviathan and its enemies and not only updated it, but expanded it in critical ways that, again,
00:37:48.060made amazing predictions that bear themselves out.
00:37:51.540You read that book and you look at what happened in 2020, it's a one-to-one.
00:37:55.800You feel like you've got a decoder ring for the future when you read that book.
00:38:00.380And these people, these intellectual titans who predicted all of this stuff, knew exactly what was going to happen,
00:38:05.380got pushed out. And who do they get pushed out in favor of?
00:38:08.680Guys with disastrous policies that have-
00:38:12.100Crystal, Pudhoritz, the architects of the Iraq invasion.
00:38:16.380I mean, none of these guys, Wolfowitz, if you want to go back to the Bush administration,
00:38:21.180Dick Cheney, if you want to, and certainly Dick Cheney's daughter, if you want to look at the kinds
00:38:26.480of leaders that the American conservative movement has been celebrating until recently,
00:38:31.060none of these guys have any accomplishments to speak of.
00:38:33.600None of these guys have ever done anything for us.
00:38:35.760All of these people have just kind of made things worse.
00:38:38.220Not kind of, have deliberately made things worse.
00:38:41.260And I think there's, this is one of the kind of delicate issues, and this would require a whole
00:38:46.440nother segment, but I think there's a real contempt for the conservative base by a lot of the people
00:38:54.400in the GOP and a lot of the people, even within some of the ranks of the conservative movement.
00:38:59.400A lot of these people, I think, got to where they are because of where they grew up or where they ran
00:39:05.100for office, but they don't want to be on the right. They're embarrassed by the people they have
00:39:09.500to go to for support. They want to be part of the inner party. They want to be part of the
00:39:13.340Democrats. They want to be part of the media establishment. They don't want to be kissing
00:39:17.180up to these grassroots conservatives, and they don't, they don't like these people. And I think
00:39:22.360they, they almost get off when they see these people dispossessed and hurt. And more than anything,
00:39:28.820the kind of incohate id behind the Trump revolution is really, we want a political movement that is,
00:39:38.120comes out of us and fights for us and fights for our interests and isn't ashamed of it.
00:39:43.820And I think every group in a democracy has the right to expect that. The American right is tired
00:39:50.560of being led down false paths by false prophets and being destroyed on purpose. And it's time that
00:39:56.540we have leaders who actually are part of us and want to do the right thing by us. If you look at
00:40:02.820Sam Francis, particularly, if we want to, the concept that has gone absolutely mainstream,
00:40:08.440it's the concept of anarcho tyranny, which is something you would have gotten blank stares
00:40:12.540from everybody, even five years ago. Now, just about everybody talks about that. And people say,
00:40:18.700you know, the purpose of a system is what it does. It's about who it's not about what the law being an
00:40:24.700arbitrary thing. People just laughing when the media says something like experts warn about
00:40:29.740disinformation and everybody just immediately says like, oh, they're lying again. This kind of
00:40:34.400contempt and distrust of leading institutions, it's a bad sign in one way, because it shows how
00:40:40.840American opinion is fragmenting. And these institutions have sort of lost the mandate of
00:40:46.580heaven. But I think it's a good thing and a necessary thing because there has to be this kind of
00:40:52.480cynicism toward people who have been misleading you this whole time.
00:40:56.240If you're going to recapture the idealism and the sincerity of a political movement that actually
00:41:01.820fights for you. Yeah. And that's why you see, I think, so many, again, mainstream conservatives
00:41:07.380panicking. Oh, we need someone. We need to be respectable again. We need to have. Come on,
00:41:11.800guys, be serious. Respectable to who? I mean, that's the question that's never answered.
00:41:15.540Well, and the description of we need to do serious politics as if serious politics has gotten you
00:41:20.800anywhere in the last several decades. The very people who have failed you at every turn are
00:41:25.960explaining how, once again, they're the real adults in the room and they're the ones that can lead you
00:41:30.320to victory. They just haven't happened to do that for the last several decades. They just keep
00:41:34.800picking these failing problem policies just randomly out of a hat, I guess. And like you said,
00:41:40.260I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that many of these people are just second rate elites.
00:41:45.080They're elites that didn't get to sit down at the cool table. And like you said, they're very angry
00:41:50.920that now they have to govern the chuds instead of being able to cover, you know, govern the blue
00:41:56.440state people. And they would love to go ahead and just switch you out for a voter base that the New
00:42:02.000York Times would praise, you know? Right. I don't think it's a coincidence. I don't think it's a
00:42:06.060coincidence that some of the worst Republicans come out of the deep red states. I mean, you saw
00:42:10.220Lankford, who was trying out of Oklahoma, who was trying to push that immigration amnesty,
00:42:14.260Murkowski out of Alaska. Senator Murkowski was talking about switching parties now.
00:42:19.140Of course, Cheney out of Wyoming. And all of these people, I think, are truly embarrassed and
00:42:26.020not a little bit hateful toward their own constituents because they don't want to be
00:42:30.320liked by these people. They want to be liked by the New York Times. That's what they've wanted all
00:42:34.060along. But they were stuck living here and they were stuck running in these areas. And now they are
00:42:40.520forced to represent people that they have no truck with and don't really consider themselves a part
00:42:44.700of. The American right really lacks fundamental representation. I mean, it's very hard to think
00:42:51.780of a certain person who represents you, who is a fighter for you, whereas just about every other
00:42:58.940group in America, no matter how marginal, can think of a whole list of champions that are saluted by the
00:43:05.720media and who they turn to every time there's a controversy. And I think that explains why Donald
00:43:11.840Trump has this remarkable hold on the Republican base, even though, as many of us would say, he may
00:43:17.800not even deserve it. Certainly, if we think of what happened with free speech, most of this happened
00:43:24.500when Donald Trump was in office. The Department of Homeland Security started targeting certain groups for
00:43:29.920being shut down while Donald Trump was president. Donald Trump was hosting symposiums on internet
00:43:35.620free speech, but he didn't actually do anything. And eventually it ended with he himself being
00:43:41.440deplatformed. So a lot of people are skeptical about whether he has the follow through. But then again,
00:43:47.500you look at the alternatives and they say, well, for better or worse, we have to ride or die with Trump
00:43:52.120because there's nobody else. And a lot of people keep thinking, like, can we have Trumpism without
00:43:58.120Trump? What is the future of the GOP after Trump? But I think that it sort of gets the question
00:44:04.740backwards. The question is, why did people rally to Trump and why do they continue to rally to Trump
00:44:10.220despite everything? And I think it's because despite the way he talks, despite the fact that he
00:44:16.080exaggerates and the way he stretches the truth sometimes, at the root, people know he's sincere and a
00:44:23.280fighter. And he does seem to actually care about the people that he's representing. And that is so
00:44:30.200unique on the American right because they've just been taken advantage of for so long. And I think
00:44:35.520half of America is crying out for a champion. And it's very tiresome to hear the conservative
00:44:41.000movement lecture on like, well, this is why you're not allowed to do it because our principles forbid us
00:44:46.180from pursuing our interests. I, you know, I've, again, I've had the discussion so many times because
00:44:52.040you're right. I don't think that Donald Trump probably is worthy of the movement that he is in
00:44:56.120possession of. I don't even know that he has the, you know, the ability or the follow through, as you
00:45:00.320said. But what I've tried to explain to so many people is they, you know, they whinge on about the
00:45:04.040problems is it doesn't matter because Donald Trump spoke to American identity in a way that no one had
00:45:09.620in generations. And you simply can't hand that off to somebody who's got a slightly better suit and is
00:45:16.320a little better, you know, a little more polished and talking points. There's a, there's an air of
00:45:20.920that. There's a leadership, there's a quality that's connected to that, that you simply can't
00:45:25.000transfer. You can't put on a spreadsheet. And that that's something that is so hard for a even good,
00:45:30.700I think, well-meaning conservatives who really want to win, uh, but, but can't grasp by like just,
00:45:36.740just being a slightly better, uh, implementation of policy is not the key for, for the mystery of
00:45:43.960charisma is it's a strange thing. It's not something that you can just get through talking
00:45:48.920points. And again, if people wanted somebody who classically educated and sprinkles his speech with
00:45:55.100aphorisms and lessons from history and has a long proven record within the conservative movement,
00:46:00.960then we know he's a true conservative and will stand with everybody and is also a committed Christian
00:46:05.680and will do all these things. Well, we had that guy and his name was Pat Buchanan and the
00:46:10.560conservative movement plunged the knife into his back with utter glee. So now we have Trump.
00:46:16.980Well, I think that, like I said, what happened with the dare is terrible. I hope, I know I've seen
00:46:22.680a couple other outlets talking about this. I hope more people do. I think it's critical. Like I said,
00:46:27.360people can have their disagreements, they can have their opinions, but if no one can read the opinions,
00:46:32.880then it doesn't matter that this is a free speech issue. This is a first amendment issue. People
00:46:36.820should have learned their lessons with people like Alex Jones, and they should apply those lessons to
00:46:41.900people, you know, uh, publications like the dare to understand what's going on and the fight that
00:46:46.840needs to happen there. Obviously people might have trouble reading the website. Where can they find
00:46:51.600your work at this point? Well, I'm on Twitter or X, I should say as Vita or James K. I've got the
00:46:57.320James Polk avatar. Vita.com is still up for now. I've got a book called Conservatism Inc. Battle for
00:47:03.380the American Right, which is still available on Amazon. And I just want to say, it's not a question
00:47:08.620about whether you agree with Vita or Peter Brimlow or anybody, any of the figures that we've talked
00:47:13.100about. Everybody right of center has a stake in this battle because they are coming for everybody.
00:47:19.120And we've been seeing this happen for years now. The way that service, essential services like
00:47:24.720financial services are being deplatformed, are being taken away from people for doing things
00:47:30.520that were absolutely taken for granted even six years ago. And it's the nature of the left that
00:47:35.520they have to keep expanding the list of quote unquote, hateful or unapproved activities. So if
00:47:41.320this isn't stopped now, you better believe it's going to come for those things that you may even
00:47:46.060consider to be respectable. They will come for you too. And so we have to stand together on free speech
00:47:51.960or most assuredly, we will hang separately. Absolutely. All right, guys, we're going to
00:47:56.160pivot over to the questions of the people here. We have Patrick Casey says, didn't recognize James
00:48:02.200without the motorcycle jacket. Great discussion. Yeah. Me wearing a tie. Very unique.
00:48:07.040Is it? Oh, I didn't know. Are you like, is that like mold bug? Do you have like a motorcycle?
00:48:11.600It's a long story. I generally not a suit and tie guy.
00:48:16.320Exactly. Cherub Cow says, Patrick, top three books on your mind at the moment.
00:48:23.280I promise I'm not kissing up to you. But actually, your upcoming book is one of the ones that I want
00:48:28.440to read the most when it comes out. I'm actually going through another deep dive into James Burnham
00:48:33.720right now with the Machiavellians. And because I'm working on a book my own, and I'm working on
00:48:39.660Leviathan again, which is something I try to approach every two, three years. I mean, it's a big book.
00:48:44.180Oh, yeah. The thing about Leviathan too is Sam Francis, I've got all of Sam Francis's writings.
00:48:49.480Unfortunately, I never got to meet him before he died. But Leviathan is seen as being sort of
00:48:55.360incomplete. I mean, it was found basically on an old computer, and then they decided to publish it.
00:49:00.860And so we don't know if this was sort of his grand unified theory where he unites some of the identity
00:49:05.980politics things he was writing about with his insights on Burnham. But it's the closest thing that
00:49:11.180we have. And so it's the closest thing we have to a grand unified theory of how politics works
00:49:19.960for the American right right now. And he is unpopular in some quarters because, and I think
00:49:26.340you'd agree with me on this, is he, as was James Burnham, was a modernist. He doesn't look to
00:49:32.080supernatural explanations. He doesn't trust in faith. He sees everything as very concrete and cynical
00:49:37.920and worldly. I don't think there's necessarily a contradiction between embracing faith and
00:49:44.720understanding that we also live in a fallen world. And politics is perhaps the most fallen
00:49:49.860industry of all. And people are going to operate in this way. And if you're going to win in the
00:49:54.740political sphere, you have to understand how fallen people act, not imagine that they act as you hope
00:50:01.700they would act. Yeah. Interestingly, that manuscript, like you said, I think is unedited. And you can tell
00:50:08.260when you read Leviathan because he repeats himself several times. That book would probably be at least
00:50:13.280a hundred pages shorter. Oh yeah. A hundred percent. And I'm sure there was a lot more stuff that he
00:50:17.480would have been brought in. And Sam Francis's writings are just about everywhere. But I mean,
00:50:21.800you can see how pithy and concise he normally was with his columns. And obviously Leviathan is a very
00:50:28.120different style of writing. And he is, it is, like you said, very materialist and modernist.
00:50:33.320Interestingly enough, the, the, uh, kind of, kind of the debate running between me and my buddy,
00:50:38.900Nima Parvini mirrors the one between Gottfried and Sam Francis about, about kind of the motivations
00:50:44.900of the ruling elite. And so I think there is a way you can apply Italian elite theory, you know,
00:50:51.140with that, even if you're someone who has a belief in the supernatural, who, who does, uh, if you are a
00:50:57.920person of faith, I don't think it's exclusive just because Sam Francis and Burnham do tend to fall
00:51:02.100on that side that, that you, you can't apply those lessons, but either way, it's a critical
00:51:07.080stepping stone in understanding what's happening right now. And I think, uh, not everyone's going
00:51:11.740to read that book just because it's a massive tome, uh, and relatively technical. Uh, but I think
00:51:16.520more people who are, you know, on the right and trying to explore those ideas need to do so because