In this episode, we re-visit Nick Land's political theory and look at how he and Curtis Yarvin came to understand the role of money in American politics. We re also joined by a live-stream of the Democratic National Convention from Tucker Carlson's live event in Iowa.
00:01:37.900He was asking people in, you know, big questions in a one-on-one format that I thought was very different and much more informative than your average debate.
00:01:48.480You know, normally these people get on stage.
00:01:50.240We have maybe 30-second soundbites as everybody tries to interrupt each other and fight for time.
00:02:00.980It was a one-on-one with Tucker, who obviously is somebody who's very on top of kind of where the party's at, where the issues are at, where the base is at.
00:02:10.100He had a lot of tough questions for people.
00:02:12.920A couple of campaigns exploded right there on stage in real time.
00:02:16.920And so that was very different and I think much more informative.
00:02:21.120I think a lot of people in the base appreciated that candidates were not getting a free pass and that they were actually having time to make.
00:02:27.320But at the same time, having time to make their points.
00:02:29.640You know, it wasn't a big gotcha session, but it also wasn't just a big hug fest.
00:03:08.460So today we're going to go ahead and get into the work of Nick Land.
00:03:12.880We're returning to Nick Land and his political theory.
00:03:17.360Remember, Land is himself a former Marxist who ended up running into Menchus Moldbug or Curtis Yarvin, as he's now known, and took a very interesting path into kind of right wing political theory.
00:03:33.560So we're going to see some of his thoughts will still be lingering over from kind of that disposition when we look at the role of money today.
00:03:40.460But I like to go over Nick Land's work because it's some very formative stuff.
00:03:46.640It's stuff that helped to build up some of my understanding of politics.
00:03:51.420And it is a great complement to Curtis Yarvin's work, which I think more of you are probably familiar with.
00:03:57.020But it's also can be notoriously difficult to get through.
00:03:59.680Again, we're working from a XenoSystems blog today and the fragments of that kind of defunct blog.
00:04:08.020And these are a little easier to tackle when we get into them.
00:04:12.240But I think it's very useful to break these down bit by bit.
00:04:16.160A lot of you guys come here for kind of the more technical side of politics.
00:04:20.840You know, if you want people yelling about the latest outrage, you know, I do some of that, too.
00:04:26.820So I try to make sure to give people some quality here, you know, not just all filler, you know, try to get some ideas on the program.
00:04:37.240So that's one of the reasons I'm doing this series to kind of flesh out these more complicated theoretical points so we can better understand the issues that come up in the news when they come around.
00:04:48.460So we're going to go ahead and turn our attention to Nick Land's essay here on power.
00:04:54.200Many different thinkers have had an essay called On Power, an entire book.
00:04:59.620Bertrand de Juvenal comes to mind as one of the best.
00:05:02.920But he is speaking here directly about ideas that concern state power.
00:05:09.280A lot of people, there's a lot of debate.
00:05:11.820I'm sure you've probably seen, and I even made a video kind of, you know, contrasting these ideas of power.
00:05:18.080Or something like Starship Troopers, which famously said, you know, forces violence.
00:05:25.080And this is where all authority derives from.
00:05:28.160And then you have places like Game of Thrones, which kind of said, OK, but what is power?
00:06:18.340And he'll get into this, how power and the idea of power coincide, which will become a little more important here in a moment.
00:06:26.020Even among pre-civilized social animals, where the temptation to confuse power with force is strongest, the need to demonstrate force is only sporadic.
00:06:37.100And wherever force is not continuously demonstrated, power has arisen.
00:06:43.000So we're already seeing our delineation here between the idea of force and power.
00:06:47.940So if you said directly force and power are the same thing, Nick Land is going to say no.
00:06:53.980And I think if we really look at most situations, we kind of inherently understand this.
00:07:00.800We know that force and power are linked.
00:07:03.800Actually, I think the major mistake that many people in our modern world make is to think that force and power are not linked, especially, again, in the United States, where we talk about the power of the government.
00:07:16.720It's constrained by the Constitution, you know, checks and balances, that's the people that really have power.
00:07:48.600But here, Land is just trying to make it very clear to us that force and power, while they have a relationship, they are dependent on each other, they are separate things.
00:08:00.520And in fact, he says here, wherever force is not continuously demonstrated, power has arisen.
00:08:07.460So power in Nickland's construction is what starts to exist when something that wants to own or dominate or control something in regulation or on a regular basis no longer has to continually apply force.
00:08:24.540So that's going to be the beginning of the idea of power.
00:08:29.320What is – that is how dominance distinguish itself from predation.
00:09:04.500On occasion, no doubt, a predator dominates its prey, convincing a struggling herbivore that resistance is futile and its passage into nourishment is already virtually over.
00:09:20.940Even in these cases, however, a predator does not seek to install an enduring domination.
00:09:27.300It matters not at all that its command of irresistible force be recognized beyond the moment of destruction.
00:09:35.060There's no social relationship to establish.
00:11:09.860I see someone saying like a farmer and livestock in chat there.
00:11:12.860And yeah, that's a good example with the animal kingdom, right?
00:11:15.360Though often you don't even necessarily have to fully dominate.
00:11:19.020It depends on how domesticated the animal is, right?
00:11:21.560If it's a very domesticated animal, then minimal domination will be required.
00:11:25.220If it's a less domesticated animal, the more will be required.
00:11:28.200But that is a good example that you're giving there of kind of that back and forth, right?
00:11:32.880If the farmer is going to come back to that animal and milk it or, you know, shear the sheep or whatever.
00:11:41.340If they're going to continuously glean some kind of advantage, they can't just go out and just completely destroy the thing that they want to continuously gain advantage from.
00:11:51.920You don't want to kill the golden goose, right?
00:12:07.980You know, I'm a free individual who operates inside my society.
00:12:12.940But there is a relationship here that you need to understand.
00:12:16.380Don't just be offended by that initial kind of picture there because we need to understand this relationship that he's talking about.
00:12:24.700Of course, at the beginning, he's just talking about these really uncomplicated relationships, basically, or even a lack of relationship between the predator and the prey.
00:12:34.140So obviously, he's going to talk about more complicated relationships, more nuanced relationships that tend to be between humans as we move on here.
00:13:19.440All governments, I don't care how free you are, I don't care what kind of constitution, rule of law, whatever your founding myth is, that's all very nice.
00:13:28.400But the reason your government is in power is at some point it settled the question of force.
00:13:36.440And if you don't think that's true, all you have to do is look at the history of the United States, right?
00:13:41.140So the United States, we start off with this really loose confederal government called the Articles of Confederation.
00:13:47.260For kids who don't know, the Constitution is not the first governing document in the United States.
00:13:52.560That's not what governed the United States for about the first 10 years of its existence.
00:13:58.900It was the Articles of Confederation that first governed the United States.
00:14:05.380Well, the Articles of Confederation didn't put very many restrictions on the states.
00:14:10.820It let the states more or less do what they want, which was kind of the whole point, right?
00:14:13.900The states were supposed to have rights and freedoms.
00:14:16.140They were supposed to have the majority of the power.
00:14:17.960They wanted a weak federal government because they'd just gotten rid of a king and yada yada.
00:14:23.420And so the Articles of Confederation were a very loose governing document.
00:14:28.380They didn't really have a standing army.
00:14:30.300They didn't really have the ability to wield a lot of force against the people.
00:14:34.840Well, at some point, the government of Massachusetts figured out that it couldn't really pay off its portion of the war debt from the Revolutionary War.
00:14:45.620If this sounds familiar, that's because that's exactly what happened to start the Revolution in the first place.
00:14:51.820The government, the British government, the crown, decided to tax Americans after the French and Indian War to pay back all the debts they had acquired.
00:15:38.020They didn't say, oh, well, I mean, I guess that's fine because you're free people.
00:15:42.520No, they did their best to get to actually the governor of Massachusetts ended up assembling a private army because he couldn't get there was really no United States Army.
00:15:51.000And the state itself would not raise money for the army, but I don't want to give you guys the whole history lesson.
00:15:56.520The point is that they put down this rebellion because for all the Declaration of Independence and, oh, whenever, you know, men feel like a government is oppressing them, they can break away and start their own government.
00:16:10.700It's their duty to have the right of rebellion.
00:16:12.980Yeah, all that stuff just vanished, right?
00:16:24.320And then they wrote the Constitution to make sure that they could centralize more government power and it would be harder to rebel.
00:16:30.800And you could tell it was harder to rebel because then there was the Whiskey Rebellion.
00:16:34.920And George Washington, as the first president of the United States, actually went out and quelled the Whiskey Rebellion.
00:16:40.420So it turns out, actually, you didn't have the right to rebel and you weren't just a free citizen of the United States who could decide to break away at any moment.
00:16:48.040And, of course, if we had any question about that, that was settled with the Civil War.
00:16:52.740And so the idea that, you know, the government does not need to exert force is a fallacy.
00:17:00.060Obviously, all governments start by securing a monopoly of violence inside their borders.
00:17:06.760Any government that does not have a monopoly of violence, more or less, inside its borders will be a failed state.
00:17:13.720That's pretty much the definition of a failed state is the failure to secure a monopoly of violence inside your own border.
00:17:20.580So, again, violence or force is a critical part of any state's operation.
00:17:28.160After that question is settled, after the question of force inside the state is settled, then you can work towards building civilization.
00:17:37.720Once you have settled the question of violence, then you start getting the emergence of order.
00:17:44.100And then you start getting the emergence of law.
00:17:46.540And then you might be lucky enough to get the emergence of liberty if you're if you're very lucky and you're in a very specific place in time.
00:22:03.960Now, I think that's not exactly true with lion-style leaders, leaders that are from the marshal cast who are clearly generals, field marshals.
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00:22:49.120They are more likely to be okay with the display of force.
00:22:53.960However, the key thing about it is it is very limited and effective.
00:22:58.400They might be willing to use force more often than, say, a Fox-style government.
00:23:05.200However, when they use it, it is swift, it's brutal, it's effective, it's limited to its area, and then they move on.
00:23:12.560And once they use it, they demonstrate that they don't need to use it very often because they are so competent at it that no one would really want to go up against them.
00:23:22.140So, for instance, if you want to get the difference between these two regimes, if you protest in Canada, what do they do?
00:24:26.600Like, you disappear or, you know, you get cracked down on.
00:24:30.560You're entirely removed from the situation.
00:24:33.540We don't have to worry about you anymore.
00:24:35.040Again, more swift, more brutal, very effective, but messy.
00:24:40.220So there's a kind of a visceral reaction people have to the use of force that can possibly delegitimize or destabilize a government depending on how they use it.
00:24:51.820However, if they're swift and brutal and effective, very few people are going to regularly challenge their power.
00:24:57.000And so what he's saying here is, again, whether you're in a soft, fox-style government, which is trying to use primarily manipulation and trickery, or if you're in a more forceful, lion-style government, which is very good at force and can use it very effectively and very swiftly and brutally.
00:25:15.680Either way, if these regimes are strong, they have to use force, because either they're so good at manipulation they don't need to use force, or they're so good at force nobody's going to mess with you.
00:25:28.400And so the key to understand is, how often do they use it?
00:25:32.960If they're regularly, brutally using force, whether they're good at it or bad at it, that means that they don't have power the same way, because power is the idea.
00:25:44.020When power is in place, you don't need to resort to force on a regular basis, because the power is what's holding everybody in place, whether it's the threat of force or the threat of propaganda, you know, manipulation, financial control, whatever.
00:26:00.200Whatever that tool of the state is, if they don't have to use it very often, if they don't have to use force very often, then they're in a good place.
00:26:09.700If they do have to use it very often, then you know they're weaker, which is why I think we can probably see, in a regular basis, that many Western regimes are growing weaker, because they used to be able to—and remember, this is internally, guys, not externally.
00:26:23.180We're not talking here about using force against other enemies, though that is also part of power, right?
00:26:28.880If you can project power through the strength of your military, you don't have to use the military as often.
00:26:34.000But what I'm talking about here is internally.
00:26:36.200We're talking about internal security forces, internal police forces.
00:26:40.260We can see that many Western nations are weakening because they used to be able to use manipulation, to use finances, to use propaganda to better control their citizens.
00:26:53.400And some of them are now having to resort to force more often.
00:27:26.900So all he's saying here is if you're just going with raw dominance, if your position is unstable, then you have to regularly assert force all the time to show people that you're in charge and they're not.
00:27:38.420People are willing and able to test your power.
00:27:42.860And so the only way for you to maintain that dominance is the regular use of force.
00:27:49.000This is the sign of a relatively weak regime because they constantly have to be tested.
00:27:55.440People are willing to test them all the time.
00:27:58.000And so they have to constantly show that they are strong.
00:28:01.060Now, again, remember, if you have a situation like North Korea and I don't want to pretend to be an expert on North Korea.
00:28:09.540So I'm not going to play at some kind of foreign policy kind of expert here.
00:28:17.060But if you have a regime like that, that is kind of known more for its force, the people might be terrified of the force that the regime would expend on them if they cross the line.
00:29:35.480But they are so good at using propaganda that it can convince you that you are being taken care of, that you are free, that you are doing what you need to do.
00:29:45.160And therefore, they don't need to reexert their force on a regular basis.
00:30:31.480Its truth is inextricable from a derealization so that when it's practically interrogated by forces determined to excavate its reality, it tends to nothing.
00:30:45.640It means you can't separate power from the fact that it doesn't actually have to be realized.
00:30:51.620The whole power that has to be realized, power that needs to be actually manifested and used, exerted in the real world in a concrete way, is already failing power.
00:31:04.180Like he said previously, the need to exert that force, the need to apply pressure, shows that you are already losing some of that magic.
00:31:14.420So if you are realizing your power, you're actually losing it in many ways.
00:31:21.560And we can see this, by the way, I've talked a lot about force here, but we could also see this in a propagandist sense, right?
00:31:27.460So if the regime needs to tell you a man is a woman, that's a big ask, right?
00:31:34.320Like that's a kind of a raw power move, right?
00:31:38.320Because it's so clear that that's not true, that throughout all of human history, it hasn't been true, that your grandparents, grandparents, grandparents knew that.
00:31:46.660The simplest peasant in the middle of nowhere knew this, right?
00:31:50.260So when a regime tries to tell you that you have to believe that, that's quite the flex, right?
00:31:56.000So if the regime has total power, if it really has that incredible degree of power, it can just tell you that and you'll just say yes, right?
00:32:04.780You'll just say yes because that's the level of power exerted by the system, by the state.
00:32:11.360However, if a lot of people say no, as many people are now, and they're pushing back against that, that means either power has made too big of an ask that it didn't have the actual power to make real, or it has weakened and it needs to start applying some of its force.
00:32:33.580Now, again, it may not do that directly with like stormtroopers, but it's going to need to start pushing soft power in a way that breaks its illusion of control, right?
00:32:43.020If I see everyone desperately censoring and desperately trying to cancel and everyone desperately trying to push people out of university or whatever who say this out of the medical field, then I know something's wrong.
00:32:55.440I know that I can see the machine scrambling to control, and if I can perceive the machine, if I can see the cathedral, as it's often called, the deep state, the mind control device, if I can see the mind control device, then it's broken, right?
00:33:12.780If I can see the reality manipulation tool and perceive it, then it's not doing its job.
00:33:21.360And so that's what he's saying here is that the power should have perfect control.
00:33:27.460Like perfect power would have perfect control.
00:33:29.460Obviously, we never really achieve perfect power.
00:33:53.340We're talking about all these different corporations.
00:33:57.880We're talking about these bureaucracies.
00:34:00.040We're talking about all these different elements that are used to kind of keep power simultaneously.
00:34:06.580So we want to discard the notion that the state or the regime is simply only the arms of government that are described in the Constitution or wherever formally on paper.
00:34:19.560But if it has to exert that level of control, if it doesn't simply make those orders and they are followed, then that means there's something wrong.
00:35:25.740When the force is called upon, will they respond?
00:35:31.060When that inevitable check on power comes, when the question comes, will the people who actually hold guns and actually run tanks and actually fire missiles say yes to an order?
00:35:44.540And in case you want to understand who holds power in the United States, when Donald Trump told the military to get out of Afghanistan, they said no, right?
00:36:03.700That means that he was not wielding power.
00:36:07.480It means power existed somewhere outside of the president's constitutional authority, right?
00:36:15.220And so even though an individual soldier might have a weapon or an individual soldier might have a cruise missile, might have an airplane, a pilot might have an airplane.
00:36:27.620Some guy might be manning a minute man, you know, a silo somewhere.
00:36:32.720They are still operating on orders, which means that while they have direct control of the force, they do not have the power.
00:36:42.060And if a entity cannot call upon that force, if an entity calling itself the state cannot call upon that force, then no power exists.
00:36:54.240No surprise, therefore, that power can evaporate like the snow slopes of a volcano, as if instantaneously, when an eruption of force is scarcely more than a rumble.
00:37:06.520Power is the eruption, not the happening.
00:37:10.620Or sorry, power is the eruption, not happening.
00:37:22.620He's saying that because power is, in many ways, this is this idea, that power and the idea of power are the same thing, the minute that force no longer listens to power, power can evaporate.
00:37:43.480And power is the eruption not happening.
00:37:47.580What should happen directly is that those with force should use it to immediately take what they want, right?
00:38:02.320Like, in a direct kind of state of nature scenario, those with power would just, sorry, those with force, those with a weapon, those with whatever, a gun, would just go ahead and immediately take whatever they wanted, right?
00:38:25.160And in fact, he says, not only does it not contain it, it never even occurs to those that wield the force that the force is actually theirs to control, right?
00:38:35.440And this is why military chain of commands are so important, right?
00:38:39.180This is why the United States especially is constantly straining the civilian control of the military because they never want the military to feel like they're the ones who actually own the force, right?
00:38:52.180They don't want them to feel like they're the ones that are actually in charge of the force.
00:38:56.200The force is something that you're holding for power.
00:38:59.880And the power never really even has to constrain the force because the force would never think of acting without power say so, right?
00:39:09.040That's what makes it power is that its simple existence means that force cannot even imagine a scenario in which it would exert itself without the command of power.
00:39:20.540And if that's gone, if that vanishes, if that leaves, then that force suddenly becomes its own and power just poof, gone, right?
00:39:30.080And all of a sudden, it's all about force again instead of power.
00:39:34.720Now, if you're wondering why it's become really important for the Biden administration to purge those ranks, right?
00:39:43.520And they said it openly today on Twitter, there's a U.S. Air Force adjacent organization.
00:39:50.740I think they're like a civilian arm of it, but they're like connected in some way.
00:39:56.120But they're like, we're basically getting orders from top down, like get rid of white guys.
00:40:00.580Don't have white dudes in like positions of authority.
00:40:04.700We don't need any more white pilots, right?
00:40:08.000You'll see the same thing when they had the vaccine purges in the military, right?
00:40:14.760They wanted specifically, they tried to get rid of anybody who wouldn't take the vaccine, but they were also wanting to get rid of after the events of January 6th and everything.
00:40:23.300They wanted to get rid of anybody who was a MAGA supporter.
00:40:25.280If you made too many Trump posts on your social media, if you had an NRA membership, you could be flagged as some kind of danger.
00:40:34.080They wanted to get anybody who wouldn't immediately conform to power out of the military because they're planning to make some moves.
00:40:43.820And they want to make sure that the military doesn't think that it's independent of power.
00:40:49.420They want it to be entirely dependent on power and entirely spellbound by power.
00:40:54.300That's why they want to move more client classes in there.
00:40:58.600They want people, they want to move a large amount of immigrants in there.
00:41:01.940They don't want anyone who has a connection to anything except the regime.
00:41:07.300They don't want somebody who has some kind of connection to the people, to any kind of other loyalty that wouldn't be directly under kind of the regime.
00:41:15.460And they're doing this for a very good reason, that this is actually just smart power politics, right?
00:41:20.920You want your security force entirely dedicated to you as the ruler.
00:41:25.100You don't want them dedicated to you as the people, maybe as the people who don't want to be completely totalitarian, you know, be controlled by a totalitarian government.
00:41:32.960You want an army or a force that is loyal to you and not to a government.
00:41:38.740But that's the exact opposite of what power wants.
00:41:41.460They want force to never think of using itself, exerting itself in any cause except in the orders of the regime.
00:42:09.440So to conceive economic power as wealth is to misconstrue it as rationalized force and thus to miss the idea.
00:42:20.800True economic power is thoroughly derealized, yet authoritative, derealized, yet authoritative standard and store of value as instantiated exclusively in fiat currency.
00:42:35.340I'll read that again because I kind of broke up there for a second.
00:42:37.700So true economic power is a thoroughly derealized, yet authoritative standard and store of value as instantiated exclusively in fiat currency.
00:43:24.540But the whole reason he went through this explanation of power was actually explaining to you what economic power is, right?
00:43:31.060So just like you might think of military power as the ability to, like, produce soldiers or government power as the ability to produce FBI agents who have guns and can fight you.
00:43:43.160He's saying that's not real power, right?
00:43:47.940Power that has to be manifested, that has to be shown.
00:43:51.100If they have to use the security forces against your own people, you don't really have power.
00:44:23.520It simply exists through promises like fiat currency.
00:44:26.640If your fiat currency is respected, you have economic power.
00:44:31.220If people will take pieces of paper with no value and no backing to them that cannot be exchanged directly for some kind of specie currency, right, and they will treat that as a store of real value, now you have economic power.
00:44:47.700Because you don't even have to manifest it.
00:44:50.060Someone can show up to your gold window with a dollar bill and you can just laugh in their face.
00:44:53.600You don't need to manifest that economic wealth for them.
00:44:58.620You don't need to show that to them because you have fiat currency power.
00:45:07.080Monetary signs that are not backed by anything beyond the credit or credibility of the state are tokens of pure, supremely idealized power in its economic form.
00:45:19.560They symbolize the effective, because untested, suppression of anarchy.
00:45:57.560And the idea, as it with power, lives and dies by this.
00:46:02.020So if you have built your power on a fiat currency, then the destruction of that fiat currency is the destruction of your power.
00:46:12.440If you built an economic empire on the idea that your fiat currency is the standard and it has not been tested, you don't have to manifest that wealth, and then you have this amazing power.
00:46:24.500But the minute it's tested, it can evaporate.
00:46:28.620Again, just like that military power, right?
00:46:31.680The minute force refuses to respond to power, like the snows on the slope of a volcano, power can evaporate.
00:46:39.700And this is also true when it comes to fiat currency.
00:46:46.040Those who recognize the completion of power in an idea, celebrants and antagonists alike, have no reason to object to its belated baptism as the cathedral, our contemporary political appropriation of numinous authority, served by an academic, journalistic, judicial, and administrative clerisy, prominently including the priest of fiat adoration and financial central planning.
00:47:15.180All right, so that's a lot of fancy words.
00:47:18.980He's saying if you recognize that complete power as an idea, whether you celebrate it, whether you're a fan of that idea, or you're against it, if you understand that as existing, then you can't really object to this cathedral.
00:47:34.780Again, that's Land and Yarvin's word for what many people would call the deep state or the regime or the system.
00:47:40.840I know a lot of people don't like the phrase cathedral, fine, call it whatever you want, understand the idea, right?
00:47:46.900Grasp the idea behind it, this decentralized consensus manufacturing apparatus that rules the Western world.
00:47:56.380And he names all of the ways that it's assembled.
00:48:00.400So how is this government system assembled?
00:50:42.520So obviously leaves us with a cliffhanger there.
00:50:45.020This is more of a explanatory essay than it is a essay of solutions, which is so often the case, right?
00:50:54.640Way easier to kind of pick these things apart and explain how they work, explain how the ideas are linked than it is to solve this problem.
00:51:02.260But in many ways, I think he is telling you how this problem gets solved.
00:51:05.640Everyone has to stop believing in the system, right?
00:51:08.420He's saying the whole system works together.
00:51:15.420So if this system falls apart, everything falls apart.
00:51:20.380If any parts of the system are supported, the system continues in some form.
00:51:25.220And so he's not directly, you know, spelling out everything that would be involved in this.
00:51:30.100But this is why I think Nick Land is a big proponent of Bitcoin.
00:51:33.420He's gone on and on about how important Bitcoin is because Bitcoin does exactly this.
00:51:39.660It challenges the authority of the state because the state, the authority of the state is backed in this economic system.
00:51:48.220It is backed in its ability to control currency.
00:51:50.480If the state can no longer manipulate currency, then it no longer has a string hold on sovereignty.
00:51:57.060And as we've learned when it comes to the, you know, force part of that, any state that no longer has complete sovereignty that hasn't settled that question is a failed state.
00:52:07.320If the United States has a bunch of people not using its currency inside of its currency, it's a failed state.
00:52:13.020And just as if it had a lot of people, a lot of gangs who controlled the entire country, it's a failed country, right?
00:52:18.580A crypto state and a narco state would have a similar failing, right?
00:52:24.620So I'm going to go ahead and wrap that up.
00:52:26.900Got a few questions from the people here, guys.
00:52:29.560So we'll go ahead and pivot over here to the super chat.
00:52:35.280But like I said, you know, guys, I've done a number of these episodes now.
00:52:40.180If you want to know more about Nick Land's thought, if you want to connect some of these ideas, of course, you know, you can watch my episodes.
00:52:47.500Also, you can, of course, read Nick Land's work.
00:52:50.400He has The Dark Enlightenment, which is now in print from Imperium Press, if I am correct about that.
00:52:59.040Xeno Systems Fragments is something you would have to download off the Internet.
00:53:16.840You know, all these things used to exist only digitally, but they're now going to exist physically in the real world since these ideas have become more popular.
00:53:25.040These thinkers have become more popular.
00:53:26.780And so you can read them kind of yourself.
00:53:29.260And then there's also Fang Numina, which is kind of Land's work when he was more of a Marxist.
00:53:37.340Those are still very interesting, but they are the least approachable parts of his work.
00:55:08.480And I think that in this situation where we're probably not going to get a lot done at the national level, I think Donald Trump is the best choice because he is basically a rock getting thrown at the cathedral.
00:55:19.620He's a rock being thrown at the deep state in the media.
00:55:22.360He is the most kind of disruptive and destructive force.
00:55:27.460Donald Trump, he did some good things.
00:55:29.220Some of the things he did when he was governing were good, but in general, he wasn't the most effective implementation of policy, right?
00:55:36.620Ron DeSantis, if you think the system works, if you think the system is salvageable, if you think the institutions can be reformed, then Ron DeSantis is your man.
00:55:45.760If you think the systems aren't salvageable, if you think that they aren't going to be turned around, then I think Donald Trump is your man.
00:55:53.940Either way, I respect either of those positions.
00:56:55.460So I don't think you should debase yourself and destroy like your reputation, your credibility, and your personal relationships over something that's not going to really matter at the end of the day.
00:57:06.820So my argument is not one of like everybody needs to get together and sing kumbaya because this is the most election of your lifetime and we all got to get out there and vote for the guy who's going to save us.
00:57:18.400My argument is just it's probably not going to matter and actually I think guys like DeSantis are way more useful controlling states and local politics and making the push for change there than I think they are like going to the national level and just running themselves headfirst into the deep state.
00:57:35.700Like if neither Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump is going to dismantle the deep state, I'd rather have Ron DeSantis, you know, doing good stuff in Florida and showing other governors how to get things done and have Donald Trump just, you know, plow into him like a bull in a china shop like he it's what he does.
00:57:56.840I think that it it's going to matter to some extent like the election could matter.
00:58:01.760You know, people still believe at least to some extent in the power of elections.
00:58:06.540And so, you know, I think like a Ron DeSantis or a Trump presidency would be better than a Joe Biden presidency.
00:58:13.320So it's not that it doesn't matter at all, but I don't think it matters as much as people think it does.
00:58:18.960I don't think it's the the most important election of our lives.
00:58:22.100I don't think it's the thing on which all all civilization hinges.
00:58:26.060And I don't think but debasing yourself and trying to destroy other people is really going to be worth your time.
00:58:31.760I don't think anything I say about that is going to change anything.
00:58:34.620In fact, I know it isn't because I've already said this ad nauseum like for a year straight and no one listened to me and they're not going to listen now.
00:58:44.080But that said, you know, there is still some there's some value here.
00:58:59.180I don't think so, because, for instance, guys like Vivek Ramaswamy, who I don't think should be president, you know, he's promising guy, but I don't think he's he's in a position to be president right now.
00:59:10.040But he did say things during that forum that I think advanced the conversation in useful directions.
00:59:16.040He talked very forcefully about militarizing the border.
00:59:19.300He talked very forcefully about the need to dismantle the FBI.
00:59:22.640Now, I don't think he's going to win, but I think his willingness to talk about those things and get big rounds of applause and move the Overton window in the conversation in that way really matters.
00:59:35.420And so even though, like, he's not going to win his presence in the conversation changes the conversation.
00:59:42.980And so I do think there are battles to be won there.
00:59:45.420I think there are things that do matter there.
00:59:47.180But this, like, knockdown drag out, you know, battle that people want to have over DeSantis and Trump, I don't think it's useful.
00:59:54.920But again, I don't think anyone's going to going to listen to me.
00:59:58.140I don't think anybody's going to save their self-respect or their standing.
01:00:03.000And I guess to some extent, a lot of these things get forgotten, right?
01:00:06.640I mean, look at how many people who were never Trump were then able to, like, jump back on the bandwagon after that.
01:00:13.360A lot, you know, some of them were completely tossed off, but a lot of them showed back up.
01:00:17.860Many of them ended up even inside the Trump administration, right?
01:00:20.800So these things can be quickly forgotten kind of once everything is done.
01:00:25.520And so I do think it's important to remember that as well.
01:00:29.480People who you think might be kind of scuttling their entire chance maybe aren't doing that, depending on kind of how they're managing that.
01:00:37.620That said, guys, let's go ahead and wrap this up.
01:00:40.120I want to thank everybody for coming by.
01:00:42.700Of course, if you would like to get more of these shows, make sure to subscribe to this channel.
01:00:48.760And if you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, make sure that you are subscribing to the Oren McIntyre podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
01:00:57.440Guys, I'm happy to say that the podcast has now reached basically the same audience size as the show itself, which is pretty wild.
01:01:06.120Basically, the audience has almost doubled in the, like, six or seven months that the podcast has been a thing, along with the growth of the show itself.
01:01:14.560The channel has also grown quite a bit, and that's amazing.
01:01:41.760I, you know, just while I'm being thankful here, I'll say it one more time.
01:01:46.900I know guys who have been on here since I was just a JPEG, and I had, like, 100 subscribers on the YouTube channel who are jumping on streams with the blaze, like, while I'm commentating on presidential kind of primaries and being like,
01:02:09.200that's our guy, oh, great, we're so happy to see him, blah, it's so great to see you're in there.
01:02:15.000Knowing that people who have been there since the very beginning, who have supported me through all of this, through the buildup, going, you know, alone, and then, you know, joining the blaze.
01:02:25.680To see you guys excited about that, I mean, of course, it's very cool to have those opportunities, but it really is, I'm just very grateful, very, very thankful.
01:02:38.140There's been a lot of hard work, you know, I put a lot of time in, but without you guys, it never would have even come close to having a chance.
01:02:45.640And it's just incredible to watch your community come alongside you.
01:02:50.500So many people I've been friends with on Twitter and interacted with and, you know, on YouTube and Rumble and Gab and now kind of in real life with some of these Shieldings events.
01:03:01.920Just having them cheer you on and everything, that's just an amazing thing.
01:03:06.480I can't tell you enough how grateful I am.
01:03:09.680So I want to thank everybody for coming by, guys.
01:03:12.080And as always, I will talk to you next time.