The Auron MacIntyre Show - November 29, 2023


Should We Use Propaganda？ ｜ Guest： Kruptos ｜ 11⧸29⧸23

Topics
university education undermined deratination propaganda effectiveness during COVID propaganda warfare consumerist attention economy
Hosted by
Auron MacIntyre
Guests
Kruptos
Mentioned
Blind Chris Ruffo Jordan Peterson Phil Robertson Justin Trudeau Propaganda Robert Stanfield Carl Schmitt Sam Harris Darwin Aluo Jacques Ellul Curtis Yarvin Russell Kirk Tolkien Normie Jonas Kings Orrin Rufo
Troubles in Ireland ｜ Guest： Carl Benjamin ｜ 11⧸28⧸23 Will Javier Milei Save Argentina？ ｜ Guest： Lady Astor ｜ 11⧸30⧸23

Episode Stats


Length

59 minutes

Words per minute

176.37

Word count

10,526

Sentence count

624

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Should the right be using propaganda? If so, how should they be thinking about it and what should they do about it? In this episode, I speak with Alex Kruptos, who wrote a great piece on this topic.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:30.700 Hey everybody, how's it going?
00:00:32.280 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.
00:00:33.900 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:38.040 So, propaganda.
00:00:39.620 It dominates everything we see, everything we touch.
00:00:42.900 We know that we are just awash in this constant stream of left-wing propaganda.
00:00:48.140 However, we usually don't think about what that means,
00:00:51.180 what the implications are for the other side of the aisle.
00:00:54.200 Should the right be using propaganda?
00:00:57.000 If so, how should they be thinking about it?
00:00:59.300 How should it be implemented?
00:01:01.580 Somebody joining me today, Kruptos.
00:01:03.920 He has a great substack.
00:01:06.040 One of the better up-and-coming substacks.
00:01:07.760 Often mining the thought of people like Jacques Alul and Carl Schmidt.
00:01:13.260 Kruptos, thanks for joining me, man.
00:01:15.420 It's a pleasure and really looking forward to talking about this subject.
00:01:20.120 It's one that's close to my heart.
00:01:22.560 Yeah, like I said, you wrote a piece on this and I thought it was really good and I had some good insights.
00:01:27.360 And I wanted to expand that into a larger discussion because I think that this is an issue that very few people,
00:01:33.100 a lot of people recognize is a problem.
00:01:35.640 They, of course, say, oh, look, the propaganda coming out of the schools, the propaganda coming out of the media.
00:01:40.040 But they just think of this as some kind of infringement on an otherwise neutral process or space.
00:01:47.320 And so I think you did a great job of breaking down why that's not the case and how we should think about it.
00:01:52.820 So, guys, we're going to dive into all that in just a second.
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00:03:22.760 All right, so Kriptos, I think the first thing that we should do before we get into how we should use things,
00:03:31.020 how we should address this is first, we need a good definition of propaganda
00:03:34.640 because I used to be a public school teacher, which, you know, is most certainly its own form of propaganda transmission.
00:03:42.380 And I taught a civics class in which you would teach the definition of propaganda.
00:03:48.140 And what we told the students is that propaganda is bias or misleading information.
00:03:53.840 But, of course, that implies that there is some form of unbiased information,
00:03:58.840 some form of neutral information that we should be transmitting.
00:04:03.360 That's the job of everyone to transmit if you're in the media or if you're a teacher or something like that.
00:04:08.740 And if you're not doing that, then you're bringing this propaganda, this bias in.
00:04:13.980 But when we're talking about the concept of propaganda, what exactly are we talking about?
00:04:19.780 Yeah, the first thing that people have to kind of leave behind when you start talking about propaganda
00:04:26.080 is that it really isn't about truth and lies.
00:04:29.560 And this is where a lot of people on the right go off track because they see stuff coming out in the mainstream media.
00:04:41.660 They see stuff coming out in the news, coming out through pressers, politicians talking about it.
00:04:47.920 And they categorize it, you know, the lies of the mainstream media, right?
00:04:53.540 And so there is this sense, OK, so it's got to be bad because it's a lie, right?
00:05:00.180 And then what we need to do to counter that is then speak the truth to the lie.
00:05:06.460 And so if we give the truth, that will counter their lie.
00:05:10.220 And that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of propaganda.
00:05:13.600 And the best definition that I have is from Jacques Ellul's book, Propaganda, The Formation of Men's Attitudes.
00:05:22.720 And Ellul argues that propaganda, and this is, I'll just read the definition.
00:05:27.580 Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation
00:05:38.520 in actions of a mass of individuals psychologically unified through psychological manipulations.
00:05:46.380 And then further, propaganda is not aimed to elevate man, but to make him serve.
00:05:50.840 So there's a number of components there.
00:05:52.800 One is that you have people who are like mass man.
00:05:57.420 So in other words, they've been broken out of all of the groups and institutions that used to bind them and give them meaning.
00:06:04.860 And in some sense, protect them from the propagandist.
00:06:09.020 So that's a sort of deracinated person.
00:06:12.480 But then they're rebound together by the propagandist in these sort of mass narratives,
00:06:20.520 but not so much to change their thinking, but to get them to act the way the propagandist wants them to act.
00:06:28.960 So either actively or passively, the propagandist is trying to shape not so much their thoughts, but their actions.
00:06:37.540 So if they can get them to do what they want them to do, their thoughts will follow in line with the propagandists.
00:06:46.480 So take, for example, you start early with school kids, right?
00:06:49.920 So the school kids pretend to do protests or activism.
00:06:54.420 Well, the content of the activism is really irrelevant.
00:06:57.700 It's getting the kids to pretend to be active, like that they are protesting something.
00:07:04.200 And then later on when they're in their 20s, because they've already been an activist in, you know, from a young age,
00:07:11.040 you can then fill them with content, right?
00:07:13.480 And you can, that's when you can then, it becomes easy because they've already brought into the idea that they're an activist
00:07:19.240 and that being an activist is good.
00:07:21.240 And so then you can just give them the activist narrative that then sort of completes the action that they've already started with.
00:07:29.940 And an action can be as simple as something is like doing nothing or like hating you when the person I want you to hate, that type of thing.
00:07:37.820 That's great because there's a couple of things in there I want to focus on.
00:07:42.500 We're going to spend time just on the definition because that's got a couple of different parts that I think are really critical.
00:07:48.020 So the first thing is, again, as you said, most people think of propaganda as mind control, which isn't entirely wrong.
00:07:56.080 But as you're pointing out, it's creating the space for the action.
00:08:00.360 If you can create the form for the person, then it can later be filled with content.
00:08:05.940 And I think that's particularly important when people don't understand the dynamic that is laid out for them in the political realm.
00:08:14.680 They don't understand that the parts that they are playing have already been created and that the content,
00:08:21.640 the reason that it feels so often, for instance, that the right is reacting to whatever the left is putting out is that the left has that the right's form has already been created.
00:08:32.620 The way and actions and the way it's going to look at things has already been molded by propaganda so that by the time the content pours out of the content mill,
00:08:42.900 it simply flows into the form that was already created for them by the left.
00:08:48.040 Yeah. And it's not in some sense goes deeper than this, because we generally tend to think of it as just, you know, politicians, the news media.
00:08:57.920 But Aluo goes and argues that the whole of technological society requires propaganda to run.
00:09:06.540 You know, like, why do you get up and go to work five days of the week and work eight hours and try to be productive?
00:09:13.180 You know, you never stop to think about it. Right.
00:09:15.420 But those types of things are maintained by constant propaganda.
00:09:20.900 So everything you do in our society, and this is why Aluo's book, Propaganda, is so frightening,
00:09:27.340 is because the depths that he bores down to, you realize very, very quickly as you go through that book,
00:09:32.980 that none of your thoughts are your own, that just about every way that you perceive reality has been dictated for you by the propagandist.
00:09:42.420 And that the reason why you think the way you do is because you already act in line with the way the propagandist wants to get you to act.
00:09:51.100 So in a sense, you become a free market person because you get up and go to work every day, five days a week.
00:09:56.000 And you think that getting up and working hard and that, you know, the Protestant work ethic is a great thing because that's what you're already doing.
00:10:01.700 So you have this whole complex of ideas that you've already sort of since been like the boar or not the boar, like the matrix.
00:10:08.840 You've been born into it. Right. You're a slave and you've been born into it.
00:10:11.720 And part of that is just formed for you with constant propaganda from advertising to to everything.
00:10:18.680 So, you know, you go out and buy the shirt that they want you to buy.
00:10:22.680 Well, you're a consumer. So you justify consumer policies. Right.
00:10:26.900 So we need cheap goods and all. So all the way down the line and this these sort of same things then work in the political realm as well, too.
00:10:33.760 So the second thing I really wanted to get into that you said there that I think requires some expanding on is that the deratination is is key because those institutions, those social bonds, those other social spheres that preexisted the mass man protected you from propaganda.
00:10:55.660 So propaganda is a is a consequence of scaling civilization.
00:11:00.580 Can you talk more about why that deratination is so key and why those prior social bonds would have protected you from this propaganda?
00:11:10.820 It's it's a funny thing and it's hard to kind of convey. You more or less have to state it and almost accept it.
00:11:17.660 But in part of as the way our society went is that, you know, we used to have these tight knit communities that were in some ways very suffocating. Right.
00:11:27.540 You were told what your job was going to be, who you're going to marry, who you're going to friends were going to be, where you're going to eat, where you're going to go to church, where you're going to eat lunch after church on Sunday.
00:11:35.900 All of these types of things are dictated for you by the community. Right.
00:11:39.080 Your moral behaviors are all sort of dictated in the community.
00:11:42.800 So part of the 20th century was sort of the liberal shaking off of all of these community bonds.
00:11:50.300 So you could have personal choice, individual choice.
00:11:53.540 But what people didn't realize that is if your community isn't sort of dictating your life that way and dictating many of your choices, once you shake off the bonds of community, what ends up happening is that there's nothing protecting you from the state becomes the community for you.
00:12:14.040 So what happens is then the state provides all the things that the community used to.
00:12:19.980 And the funny thing is, is that when you're in a community, you actually have more room to think for yourself than you do when there's no community protecting you from the propagandist.
00:12:33.660 In a sense, your thoughts are more your own in a community, even though the community feels more suffocating.
00:12:38.220 So you get into the sort of the big faceless city with, you know, you can be anything you want, you can do anything you want, you feel free.
00:12:46.020 But now you're really at the mercy of the propagandist because you're alone, you're isolated.
00:12:50.000 And the propagandist can seize you and he can give you that sense of belonging.
00:12:54.960 Well, you buy the right clothes.
00:12:57.000 Now you belong to a group, you belong to the political party, this cause and all of these things.
00:13:01.900 Then he, the propagandist then gives you your identity.
00:13:05.020 So you participate in all these things and then by participating in them, the propagandist is able to seize you and manipulate you in a way that your local community never could.
00:13:17.280 Even though they felt more suffocating.
00:13:20.040 Yeah, I think that's really key for people.
00:13:22.380 We, we liked, I think we recognize this to some degree, right?
00:13:25.780 You can see people today, they look at, oh, children that are emancipated from their parents.
00:13:30.720 They don't, they don't become free because they're, you know, they're, they're still molded by the institutions, the schools, the media, these things.
00:13:41.320 They become, you know, more able to be, you know, there's, there's predatory ideologies, trans ideologies, all the, all these other ideologies that are preying on the children. 0.93
00:13:50.480 And they simply become subject to those instead of the beliefs of their parents.
00:13:53.640 But we think that kind of magically goes away once we reach some, some certain age where then we become individuals who are completely able to define our own reality and our own preferences and these things.
00:14:04.560 But what you're saying is without those institutions, that's not something that just falls away from children that, you know, in childhood and you become an adult and all of a sudden you can simply make choices for your own.
00:14:14.520 So that that level of influence continues if you do not have communities, you know, faith, family, these things that would otherwise push back, those influencers are going to continue to work on you.
00:14:25.980 And propaganda becomes more and more effective when you have fewer and fewer community influences to work against it.
00:14:31.960 Well, the, the case in point, it's exactly right.
00:14:35.140 The case in point, when you look at what happened during COVID, who were, who was the, which group was most likely to resist COVID mandates?
00:14:46.500 Well, it was tight knit church communities, right?
00:14:48.800 So you think all these tight knit church communities where they tell you how to believe and you can't be free and you know what I mean?
00:14:52.980 And they impose their morals on you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
00:14:56.100 But these were the groups that in spite of their insularity and their, their seemingly backwardness, they were the ones who were able to think for themselves. 0.92
00:15:06.620 And because they were part of a community and this community allows them the space, the separation, um, because they have these bonds, the state doesn't fill that need for them.
00:15:18.960 Their identity is not given to them by the propaganda.
00:15:22.080 They find their identity in the community.
00:15:24.840 And so they were able to step back and say, no, I'm not buying it.
00:15:30.400 Right.
00:15:30.980 And people looked at them and like, what do you mean you're not buying them?
00:15:33.540 You know, keep everybody safe.
00:15:34.920 Do all, you know what I mean?
00:15:35.500 You have to get the jab, wear the mask, you have to do the rights, what's right.
00:15:38.800 And they just said, nah, not really.
00:15:40.520 I don't buy it.
00:15:41.440 And, and, and everybody was kind of dumbfounded.
00:15:44.100 Right.
00:15:44.300 And so again, the propaganda machine kicks in and they're demonized.
00:15:48.180 So those that are already propagandized are then directed to, to hate these groups and to make them feel backwards.
00:15:56.160 Because again, that's what the propagandist does.
00:15:58.300 Right.
00:15:59.320 Um, and, and so, but these groups largely remained immune to the whole thing.
00:16:04.140 So I think it's, it's very important for people to understand that a key thing about propaganda, especially in kind of its Western context is that it, it, it relies on us thinking that we've broken away from the need for collectivity.
00:16:22.020 Right.
00:16:22.400 We, we, we often, we often phrase this as the idea between, you know, collectivists and individualists.
00:16:28.880 This is the battle.
00:16:29.600 But the truth is that the, the, the, this large amount of people who think they're going to be completely, uh, autonomous individuals actually end up being more, uh, or easier prey for propaganda.
00:16:42.220 They end up simply being compelled to comply with a more overbearing larger collectivity as where the individual communities are able to operate and resist against these things because they have more particular collectivities that allow them to put things, uh, above the, the good of, that the propagandist is compelling them toward.
00:17:03.160 Yes.
00:17:04.620 Yes.
00:17:05.320 And, and, um, because you no longer have an identity there, there, you know, this idea that you as a person are able to shape your own identity is just, you know, um, that you're able to provide your own meaning is, is really, really dangerous.
00:17:21.180 You kind of create the burden for, um, for shaping everything around you.
00:17:27.760 Like, you know, what does everything mean?
00:17:29.260 What is the world, you know, what's my purpose in life?
00:17:31.280 What's the meat, what, you know, what's, what should I do?
00:17:34.120 Who am I?
00:17:34.760 Right.
00:17:35.100 It used to be that that was all given to you, um, by your environment and you didn't have to make those choices.
00:17:41.060 So what ends up happening is to relieve yourself of the psychic anxiety of having to find yourself, discover who you are.
00:17:51.040 Um, the propaganda steps in and the propagandist provides that for you, the role that the community used to.
00:17:57.140 Right.
00:17:57.520 Um, and so now, but because of this, you feel emancipated.
00:18:02.640 And that's one of the things that propagandist does is he continues to make you feel emancipated, but now he is directing your sense of belonging, what you do, what you think, what your actions are.
00:18:15.040 And so it's, it's in a sense, very subtle, um, but you are part of the masses.
00:18:21.700 You are not an individual, but yet you're made to feel like an individual and yet your actions are directed because you just can't deal with the anxiety of having to understand and sort out and give meaning to the whole of life.
00:18:34.580 And so the propagandist just sort of steps in and provides it for you.
00:18:38.380 Right.
00:18:38.940 Absolutely.
00:18:39.460 All right.
00:18:39.740 So we spend a good amount of time on understanding what propaganda is, but I think that's really critical because so many people who engage in the conversation don't take the time to think about that.
00:18:50.260 And I think that's going to lay really good groundwork for then how we should think about the possible deployment of propaganda on our side, on the right conservatives, however you want to think about it.
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00:20:13.440 Alright, so I think we've got a better grasp on kind of how propaganda works, what it is.
00:20:19.660 So now the question that you kind of posed in your piece was how the right should approach it, because I think the story was, you know, that you had posted something on your Twitter and a lot of people were saying, well, that's not exactly something that Justin Trudeau said.
00:20:36.220 And so, you know, it's propaganda, it's manipulation.
00:20:39.400 And you were addressing this issue of, well, how should the right feel about that?
00:20:44.000 Like, should, are we compelled to never use this technique?
00:20:49.340 So I guess the first question is, is propaganda necessary?
00:20:54.320 Can't we just tell the truth, bring the facts and logic, and let that defeat the lies, right?
00:21:01.020 Isn't that the way that it's been framed by conservatives?
00:21:03.580 Isn't that the way to approach the space?
00:21:07.300 Yeah, so there's a number of different pieces here, right?
00:21:11.800 So the one piece is that, you know, the first of all, well, it wasn't factual, right?
00:21:18.140 And so we operate out of a, you know, a 17th century idea of what I'm drawing about, where you're trying to like factual, verifiable truth, right?
00:21:35.880 And so everything that is true, that sort of Kantian thing, and where, you know, if you can't verify it, it, you know, it lacks the kind of, you know, epistemological weight that something can be verified, right?
00:21:51.800 So we tend to want to grasp hold of this idea of the fact, right?
00:21:58.600 So, you know, if it's not factual, it must be bad, right?
00:22:04.180 Well, the problem is, is that this 17th century Enlightenment idea replaces an older idea of narrative and story, of storytelling and narrative.
00:22:17.500 This is one of the things that, like, say, for example, that Tolkien grabbed a hold of when you, the hobbits are always masters of lore, masters of the stories, right?
00:22:26.960 And the real truth is found in the stories.
00:22:30.400 Well, stories only become a problem in the modern era when you can record everything and everything can kind of have a kind of an exactitude.
00:22:40.220 And so we tend to think that this exactitude is what is most important, whereas older peoples, the ancients, so to speak, understood that the important things was the essence, the meaning of the event itself.
00:22:58.900 So you often go into ancient texts and you'll have, you know, speeches by famous people and you know that the speech was written.
00:23:05.680 This is not exactly what he said, but in a sense, it carries the essence of what he said, right?
00:23:10.760 So then I use this contrast with the Robert Stanfield, right?
00:23:16.600 Him catching that football awkwardly on the airstrip, right?
00:23:20.960 So you have a slice of true reality that then you take this quote unquote fact and you elevate it to consciousness.
00:23:28.600 And that's really what happens, right?
00:23:30.180 Is that you take this, this, this slice of reality and you elevate it to consciousness.
00:23:35.020 And then that consciousness quote unquote becomes the truth.
00:23:39.080 And then you can frame it in a narrative, right?
00:23:41.680 So we tend to do this ourselves all the time with our own.
00:23:44.780 If you apprehend, if basically, if you could not filter out reality, you would go crazy.
00:23:52.400 So we tend to fixate on things, you know, somebody's talking to you and like, I didn't even, sorry, I didn't hear you.
00:23:56.840 I was paying attention to something else, right?
00:23:59.100 I mean, those sound is there, that, that reality is there.
00:24:01.760 The sounds backing out bank bouncing off you.
00:24:03.920 The person is talking to you, but you don't hear it because you're focused on something else, right?
00:24:09.000 And so what happens with, with media is that the power of the media and so forth is to choose which slices of reality are focused on.
00:24:19.820 And then that piece of reality gets focused on and it gets elevated.
00:24:23.700 So let's take, for example, a common piece is white policemen shoots a black man, right?
00:24:30.680 So what happens in, if you only fixate on those events, no other events, not black on black crime, not black officers shooting white officers, not black officers shooting black officers, not white officers shooting white officers. 0.97
00:24:45.180 Not white, white shooting whites in crime, but that the only piece of violence that you get is white cop, black criminal, right? 0.96
00:24:55.540 Or black, maybe not even criminal, just, and, and, and then you elevate that. 0.99
00:25:00.700 And then you frame that with a narrative that, well, the cops are only doing with that because they're racist.
00:25:07.000 And you say, well, he's not racist. No, no, no. He just, he's racist, but he doesn't know that he's racist.
00:25:12.380 He has a systemic implied bias in his actions. He obviously killed him because of his systemic deep-seated racism that he's not even aware of. 0.90
00:25:23.280 Now you've got a narrative, right? So this gets elevated to consciousness.
00:25:27.680 Now, what happens is, is that we come along and think, well, that's a lie. It's not really a lie. It is truth.
00:25:32.380 You know, just like that Robert Stanfield bobbling the football, but it's, it's, you know, and maybe some policemen have implicit biases.
00:25:42.100 Maybe they don't, but you citing crime stats and all these other things, they don't mean anything because they're not facts because nobody notices and they're not elevated to consciousness.
00:25:50.880 And this is, I think, the thing that people struggle with is the combination of these two ideas of the, the, the sort of recording version of history, that it has to be the exact words that somebody said and not necessarily getting at sort of the essence of who this person is and what he means.
00:26:11.340 And then the other thing that we misunderstand is this idea that not all of reality can be considered a fact.
00:26:19.700 And this is one of the things that Ellul talks about is that only those slices of reality that are elevated to public consciousness and then given framing in the public conscious, um, become facts.
00:26:31.980 Everything else is just, it's nothing.
00:26:34.680 Yeah, this is really, this is really critical because we are, like you said, we are swimming in facts.
00:26:39.540 Like, and we are, have all of this stuff technically now available, especially through the internet.
00:26:46.000 In theory, we can drop any kind of fact we want at any moment that we, there, there's just this massive wave of information that we could interact with.
00:26:56.600 However, there's simply no way that we can do that.
00:27:00.060 And, and the average person, like you said, they would go insane if they tried to absorb and process and understand those things.
00:27:06.240 And so it's the, it's the focusing of the different organizations that bring these things into reality for most people.
00:27:14.060 We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures that are going to evaluate every bit of information that we come into contact with.
00:27:20.800 But that's just not how humans work.
00:27:22.800 We're, we're fundamentally narrative creatures.
00:27:25.140 We need these facts contextualized into a narrative for us to have any understanding of them.
00:27:31.080 And so one of the amazing things that propagandists have the ability to do is focus on those particular features.
00:27:37.180 So propaganda is not a lie.
00:27:39.400 It doesn't need to be a lie.
00:27:40.560 It could be a lie.
00:27:41.320 There are, of course, people lying through these things, but it doesn't have to be.
00:27:45.160 It can be the elevation of particular truths for particular reasons to set a narrative.
00:27:50.140 And I think we should all understand that by now when it comes to something like statistics, right?
00:27:54.860 There are so many statistics out there.
00:27:56.940 There's an overwhelming way of the statistics pouring over us in every situation.
00:28:02.280 And the truth is that you can make statistics say pretty much anything you want by simply focusing on the right set of data.
00:28:09.700 And so we constantly see these things manipulated because people simply bring a particular thing that could be true.
00:28:16.140 If you focus on exactly the right situation, exactly the right data set, exactly the right numbers, exactly the right situation.
00:28:22.340 But that does not actually reflect reality.
00:28:25.700 Reality might be better served by a holistic understanding that is more narrative in nature.
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00:29:02.280 Yeah.
00:29:03.020 And so the thing, sort of the next step to this, and this is one of the things that people really struggle with,
00:29:09.740 is that it's kind of when you get into sort of propaganda warfare,
00:29:14.860 that choosing the ground upon which you fight is the decisive thing, right?
00:29:22.000 So the propagandist, and this is the power of the mainstream media,
00:29:27.320 by choosing which reality will be focused on, which stuff gets elevated to consciousness,
00:29:32.640 and then also the power of giving it a framing, a story, a narrative.
00:29:37.560 By choosing which narratives are important, then you choose the ground on which you fight.
00:29:45.220 So if you, as a conservative, react to something in the mainstream media,
00:29:49.600 what you are doing is saying, this is the story over which we must fight, right?
00:29:56.680 So what you've done without realizing it is you have validated the importance of the mainstream media narrative.
00:30:04.500 And you think to yourself, well, then do we say nothing?
00:30:07.880 Well, no, it leaves you in a catch-22, right?
00:30:10.480 It's the same thing, too, with like grooming in the school, right?
00:30:14.340 It's in some ways, it distracts your energy from toppling the regime,
00:30:19.000 but can you really justifiably allow the groomers to continue to groom your children?
00:30:23.760 Well, no.
00:30:24.120 So you have to fight this side battle, and as a result, the regime remains in place.
00:30:29.820 And so really the important thing is being in a position to dictate the terms of the narrative.
00:30:39.420 So if any time that you can dictate the terms of the narrative, this is a good thing, right?
00:30:44.640 So take, for example, that Justin Trudeau quote, right?
00:30:48.140 So it got 100,000 views and over 1,000 likes, right?
00:30:52.900 And the purpose of it, you can look in the feed, people reacted to it.
00:30:56.600 There's basically two reactions.
00:30:58.000 One is the correct reaction in a sense, like, isn't Justin Trudeau an awful person, right?
00:31:04.120 And the other reaction was, well, that's a completely fake quote, or it's made up.
00:31:09.920 It's not verifiable.
00:31:11.080 Like, okay, yeah, it was said at a fundraiser, but nobody can verify that.
00:31:13.800 You're damaging us by doing it.
00:31:15.000 And I'm like, okay.
00:31:16.280 So I looked at it.
00:31:16.880 I don't really care because what you're talking about is my quote, and you're giving it more attention.
00:31:21.980 And the mainstream media functions in much the same way.
00:31:24.320 They don't care that you're giving your quotes because they're dictating the terms of the discussion.
00:31:29.360 And this is a thing that a lot of conservatives really, really struggle with, right?
00:31:33.060 So when somebody like Chris Ruffo is able to flip the tables on it and is able to make,
00:31:38.440 for example, the, you know, all teachers are groomers, a real thing, and the regime is on
00:31:45.540 a back foot, and you would like to say, you know, you get the regime starting to do like,
00:31:49.560 well, conservatives are the real groomers.
00:31:51.420 You know that it's a win because basically he made the regime look like what conservatives
00:31:55.700 look like normally.
00:31:56.440 Yeah, it's Ruffo, I think, is very good at this, and he's acknowledged this explicitly.
00:32:02.960 You know, people have attacked him.
00:32:05.340 The mainstream media has attacked him.
00:32:06.840 He's controlling language.
00:32:08.520 He's manipulating language.
00:32:09.520 He's a propagandist.
00:32:10.440 And he's like, yes.
00:32:11.820 Like, I, you know, he said this explicitly.
00:32:17.080 I am going to change the way that we talk about things.
00:32:19.440 I am going to change the way that we have a discussion about a topic.
00:32:22.720 But, you know, we, and a lot of people, you know, on the right say, oh, he doesn't, he's
00:32:27.180 not based enough, or he doesn't, like, whatever.
00:32:29.280 This guy understands the problem in a way that you don't.
00:32:32.680 And he scraps in a way that you don't.
00:32:35.100 And that is way more important.
00:32:38.220 Fundamentally changing the battlefield.
00:32:40.640 There's a reason that they hate this guy.
00:32:42.360 And this is something that I try to explain to people when they ask me, you know, why is,
00:32:47.280 you know, why does your style of things go differently?
00:32:50.720 Why does it do well?
00:32:51.880 And my answer is always is I'm stepping out of the frame.
00:32:55.080 It's, it's simply a, we, we are going to set the way that we look at this rather than
00:33:00.480 simply to then reacting to what comes out.
00:33:03.700 And so when Chris Ruffo goes in there and he sets a narrative to which the, the mainstream
00:33:09.340 media must set, step into the frame of that narrative and discuss it, that is a win.
00:33:14.660 And, and that is not him lying.
00:33:17.420 There's nothing wrong about what he is saying about say what the schools were doing to children.
00:33:23.640 There's, there's factual truth in what he is saying there, but the way that it was framed
00:33:29.220 specifically forced the discussion onto his terms and understanding that that is as if
00:33:34.940 not more important than the verifiability of any given fact inside that frame is really,
00:33:42.500 really critical for people to understand.
00:33:44.660 In a sense of like, to everybody knows that all teachers are not groomers.
00:33:49.540 I mean, even if the curriculum demands, like in Canada here, the curriculum pretty much,
00:33:55.260 I know a couple of teachers who have stepped away from teaching because they're just so
00:33:58.840 tired of, of being forced into teaching along these lines or lose their jobs.
00:34:03.560 So this, I'm just going to do something else.
00:34:04.920 Right.
00:34:05.320 But, you know, not all teachers are groomers, but once you begin to realize the totality
00:34:12.580 of it to say, you know, all teachers are groomers.
00:34:16.220 Okay.
00:34:16.800 Yeah.
00:34:16.940 It's not a verifiable fact, but it gives the essence of what's happening in the school.
00:34:21.920 Right.
00:34:22.440 And so there is this sense that it, it captures the truth of what is happening.
00:34:29.180 So, and this is really, I think the people, the, the, the reason why sort of enlightenment
00:34:33.920 ideas of the truth are so dangerous is because the ancients understood this far better than
00:34:39.940 we do, that stories have a way of revealing the truth of things in ways that, you know,
00:34:47.540 bland, scientific, verifiable, accurate reporting does not.
00:34:52.760 Well, this, this reminds me of, um, I don't know if you ever listened to the, uh, the debate
00:34:58.380 between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris on the definition of truth.
00:35:02.600 Um, but, but they spent three hours going back and forth and, and basically Peterson is just
00:35:07.860 trying to convey this very simple thing to Harris, you know, which is, yeah, I get that.
00:35:12.460 Like, maybe you're not sure that Jonas spent time in the belly of a literal whale somewhere,
00:35:18.260 but that story is way more true than some random statistic you have acquired.
00:35:24.580 And, and that was just something he could not grasp.
00:35:27.640 It could, could not grasp that fact.
00:35:29.940 And so I think a large amount of like the success of Jordan Peterson was simply explaining
00:35:33.500 the very basic thing you're saying, which is there is far more truth contained
00:35:37.780 in a narrative and a story than there is in some manipulatable propagandized table of facts
00:35:45.600 somewhere.
00:35:46.660 Well, and, and like you get to the common one, right?
00:35:48.880 And this is where a lot of Christians who were embracing the ethos of the time, this idea
00:35:54.440 of, you know, cause we tend to want to embrace the truth, right?
00:35:58.540 So this, somehow this, this idea of, of scientific truth, it seems very appealing, right? 0.98
00:36:04.380 But when you look at something like, you know, the first chapter of Genesis, any idiot can 0.91
00:36:09.640 look at you and tell you that that's not a videotape of how the world started. 0.93
00:36:13.660 So what's going on there, right?
00:36:15.740 Well, what's going on there is it's, it's, it's, it's explaining why the world is the
00:36:23.240 way the world is.
00:36:24.120 In a sense, it's giving you the meaning of the world, right?
00:36:27.660 It's revealing the essence of what the world is and, you know, it was created on purpose
00:36:33.300 by God with order.
00:36:34.940 And then it was corrupted later by human beings.
00:36:37.800 Well, this is a fundamental story that answers basic questions of why are things the way they
00:36:43.800 are?
00:36:44.920 Right.
00:36:46.060 And then, you know, the counter example I gave is, well, okay, if you reject God in
00:36:49.700 that story, then you have to come up with your own origin story, which is basically people
00:36:54.840 glommed onto this, you know, Darwin's thesis and made Darwin's thesis into sort of a cosmological
00:37:03.300 version of, of human progress, but expanded over the entire length of the universe to try
00:37:09.720 to explain why we're here and, and what it means.
00:37:13.160 So now you have two competing narratives and you really have to see it this way because
00:37:17.500 evolution narrative is no more verifiable than the first 11 chapters of Genesis.
00:37:23.080 And once you realize that it's very liberating, right?
00:37:26.040 Because now you're looking at, okay, which story now gets at the essence of, of the world
00:37:30.320 around me far better.
00:37:31.620 Right.
00:37:32.060 And I'm frankly, the, the version of Genesis is just far more appealing.
00:37:35.560 So yeah, God created the world in six days and that's the story.
00:37:39.140 And I'm okay with that.
00:37:40.480 I don't have to go beyond that.
00:37:42.880 So I think a lot of people are going to say, all right, well, maybe we can tell the truth
00:37:46.700 in propaganda, maybe.
00:37:48.320 Okay.
00:37:48.460 So I'm selecting which important part of the truth to amplify.
00:37:52.920 I can, I can get, I guess I can get on board with that, but why do I need to scale this
00:37:58.020 up to propaganda?
00:37:59.760 What, what about the modern world makes propaganda necessary?
00:38:03.660 Can't I just tell the truth and I just communicate the stories we've always communicated inside my
00:38:09.760 community, what, what's, what's the mechanical necessity of propaganda in kind of our modern
00:38:15.820 political situation?
00:38:18.180 Well, it, it, it comes down to like, let's take two societies, right.
00:38:22.220 And both are emerging out of, you know, say a pre-modern pre-technological space.
00:38:28.440 And, and one is maybe a little bit ahead of the other and they develop factories and assembly
00:38:34.260 lines and off of these assembly lines are rolling tanks, right?
00:38:39.440 Well, you're looking over at your neighbor and all of a sudden you're looking very, very
00:38:42.320 nervous.
00:38:42.700 These tanks look very dangerous.
00:38:43.860 And you may think to yourself, tanks are objectively bad.
00:38:47.120 Assembly lines are not good for human flourishing.
00:38:49.640 And the whole thing is just really distasteful, but there's still the fact of the tanks that
00:38:53.940 you have to deal with, right?
00:38:55.560 And so either you've got to be producing your own tanks or you've got to find a way to disable
00:39:03.400 and neuter their tanks, right?
00:39:05.000 So the tank problem becomes a real issue.
00:39:07.760 And this is what I think a lot of people fail to realize in the modern era is that what happens
00:39:13.160 in the technological world is that our political choices become vastly, vastly reduced.
00:39:20.460 And so in a world in which everything is shaped by propaganda, okay, you can try to, to,
00:39:28.420 to go a different thing.
00:39:29.720 And this is one of the reasons why I advocate the building of, of parallel polity communities,
00:39:35.680 because part of the way that you resist the sense, the tank that is propaganda is by creating
00:39:43.400 tight-knit communities again, intentionally.
00:39:45.320 And it can be done, but it just takes time.
00:39:47.740 But in the meantime, you have a war to fight and this war, unfortunately, you're going to
00:39:53.600 have to build some tanks.
00:39:55.040 You're going to have to learn how to do propaganda and, and you may not like it and it may make
00:39:58.980 you feel unclean and dirty to do so, but you need to control the narrative.
00:40:04.140 Um, cause if you don't, somebody else will.
00:40:07.640 So I think that explains the Machiavellian necessity of propaganda, which is important.
00:40:13.680 Yeah.
00:40:13.900 I'm somebody who works in Machiavellian political theory.
00:40:16.420 I'm not discounting that at all, but I think the immediate answer you're going to get for
00:40:20.980 people, uh, is okay, but what if we're, you know, we're Christians, right?
00:40:24.580 So we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard.
00:40:27.480 I get why, you know, some, uh, you know, heartless soulless guy can just say, well, this is mechanically
00:40:33.880 necessary.
00:40:34.600 Therefore I do this, but, uh, you know, but I'm, I'm compelled to not bear false witness.
00:40:39.760 So how, how as a Christian, should I look at the deployment of propaganda?
00:40:45.620 Is it, isn't that a problem?
00:40:48.540 It is.
00:40:49.460 And, and this is, this is the problem I think of, of the political in general.
00:40:53.820 And, um, I'm of the mind that the political is one of those, I mean, there will always
00:41:00.440 be social organization.
00:41:01.960 You know, this is that contrast between a world with sin and evil in a world without sin and
00:41:06.440 evil.
00:41:06.760 Well, we live in a world with sin and evil, which means that we have to deal with the
00:41:11.380 reality of the world that is even as Christians. 0.97
00:41:13.340 So, yeah, we'd like to have a world in which everybody always tells the truth all the time,
00:41:18.740 but unfortunately that's not the world that we live in.
00:41:22.740 So even in just like practical things from the point of view, like if you have a small
00:41:27.780 Christian state and you might think to yourself, we're going to do in our Christian state, we're
00:41:31.420 going to do things the right way.
00:41:32.920 Right.
00:41:33.580 But unfortunately, um, are you going to then declare all of the truths that you have to,
00:41:40.420 you know, you have to keep some secrets.
00:41:42.060 So in a certain sense, you can't tell everybody everything, which means in some sense, even
00:41:47.680 in your small little Christian community, like a small city state, Christian city state,
00:41:51.560 you've built it.
00:41:52.700 So at a certain level, as a, as a political leader, you have to lie to your own people.
00:41:57.460 You have to lie to your neighbors.
00:41:59.660 Um, you probably want to spy on your neighbors, which means that you're going to be encouraging
00:42:04.620 other people to not only to deceive, um, the, the, the neighbors, but also to betray them.
00:42:12.960 Right.
00:42:13.520 So there's a certain sense where politics in a, in a sinful world is an ugly business.
00:42:20.840 And, and in a sense, Tolkien was right that to grab the ring of power is inherently corrupt.
00:42:25.620 Now there's a certain segment of Christians who said, well, Christians want to have nothing
00:42:29.740 to do with politics.
00:42:30.500 And I always argue that, okay, that, that can be an option, but what happens, let's say
00:42:35.700 your evangelistic efforts are really, really successful.
00:42:38.660 And now you become majoritarian.
00:42:40.540 Let's say you're 75% of the population.
00:42:42.980 So, because you find politics distasteful, you're going to allow yourself to be ruled by
00:42:47.180 the 25% that are non-Christian. 0.99
00:42:49.240 No, that's ludicrous. 0.89
00:42:50.740 Right.
00:42:50.960 So now you have to answer the sense of how do we do politics in a sinful world with the
00:42:57.160 exigencies of politics, of having to keep secrets, of having to do spying, and then of
00:43:02.940 course, um, having to do propaganda.
00:43:05.900 Um, and, and so all of these things then come into play and you basically then have to
00:43:10.540 recognize that you want to get, that you're going to need to get your hand.
00:43:12.920 And this is maybe perhaps the biggest argument against democracy that, you know, if you reserve
00:43:18.720 it for a few people, they of course gain certain rewards that come with power, but they also
00:43:24.700 have, you only have a handful or a small group of people who then become corrupt by power as
00:43:29.680 well too.
00:43:31.180 Yeah.
00:43:31.220 This is a really interesting, and of course, this is, this is Carl Schmidt's point about
00:43:34.760 the total state is that once the, once the political, once the, you know, once there,
00:43:40.900 and, and of course, Curtis Yarvin talks about this a lot too.
00:43:43.880 Once you have this free, uh, political energy out there, once there's power up for grabs,
00:43:49.680 the society is going to be compelled to capture it, consume it.
00:43:54.500 And so when everyone has a role to play inside the political, then their propaganda has to
00:44:01.200 be thrown.
00:44:01.660 It has to, it has to go through every part of the society.
00:44:04.540 It has to infiltrate every social sphere.
00:44:06.720 They all have to be collapsed.
00:44:08.040 They all have to be subsumed under the state because it's the only state, the way that the
00:44:11.720 state can recapture sovereignty as where, you know, I think everyone prior to a modern
00:44:18.440 understanding of politics, everyone understood that there, that of course the King and, and,
00:44:23.400 and, uh, you know, uh, nobles people with high political functions, they of course had
00:44:28.640 lots of privileges, but they also incurred a large degree of moral weight for what they
00:44:34.260 were doing.
00:44:34.760 The, the politics warfare, these were, there's always dirty business and they were always going
00:44:39.820 to carry a lot of, uh, negativity around and moral weight around the actions that had to
00:44:46.720 be taken.
00:44:47.280 And so that's why that those functions were kind of kept in, they were hemmed into a specific
00:44:52.680 person or set of people because they weren't supposed to be spread throughout the entire
00:44:58.220 society.
00:44:58.800 Not everyone was supposed to have to deal with that on an individual level.
00:45:02.880 But when you disperse that, you know, that, uh, that authority, you also disperse that
00:45:08.820 responsibility and you disperse that need to dirty yourself with these actions.
00:45:14.040 And so instead of having, you know, Kings and a, and a few advisors and, and, and maybe soldiers
00:45:20.640 and such making these morally gray questions, uh, and decisions, you now have to force that
00:45:26.320 decision onto every individual when you involve them in the political.
00:45:29.680 Well, and, and there, there's another piece to it.
00:45:32.860 You're absolutely right, Orrin, that the other piece is, is also the technological, right?
00:45:37.320 So what does technology do?
00:45:39.200 It allows in technological systems, it allows us to harness power for the generation of money
00:45:45.560 and so forth, but allows us to do it at scale.
00:45:48.680 So, you know, with every level of technological advancement, so to speak, and especially once you
00:45:54.660 get into the managerial state, this really allows you to, to capture and wield power on a global
00:46:01.080 scale.
00:46:01.540 Because when you're down in the, in the, the realm of a small community, yeah, there's power
00:46:06.200 dynamics or whatever, but the scale of a small community never allows the abuses to accumulate
00:46:13.060 to, um, beyond a certain interpersonal level.
00:46:17.360 Um, and they are there, um, but once you begin to scale up to the level of, you know, multiple
00:46:23.480 villages, the king and so forth, then all of these weights of power and so forth also come
00:46:28.900 along with it, right?
00:46:29.780 The, the, the, both the, the benefits, but then also the abuses.
00:46:33.580 And then if you spread it across the whole of society, as you say, now you involve everybody,
00:46:39.220 the whole of society has to be propagandized because we're living in this global technological
00:46:45.780 state, um, that's being administered by, you know, through technique and whatever, through
00:46:51.160 the, this, you know, business and government or whatever are administering the state.
00:46:55.340 And so this propaganda, the, the whole power thing, it all has to be include everybody in
00:47:01.420 it.
00:47:01.660 Um, and unless you break the whole thing up, um, you, the only real way to approach it is
00:47:08.320 that as long as the, the modern state remains at the scale that it does, um, conservatives and
00:47:14.060 Christians are going to have to embrace the idea that political realities have to be dealt 0.50
00:47:18.620 with at that scale.
00:47:20.440 It also is the, the, the scale and the technology is also what creates this possibility of hyper
00:47:26.860 agents, right?
00:47:27.400 Where we have people compelled by these messages, these narratives, these ideologies that are
00:47:33.580 so completely disembodied from their wellbeing, their day-to-day lives, their communities, that
00:47:39.920 they take them to very radical extremes.
00:47:42.580 And I think that's why the narratives become more and more schizophrenic as we approach these,
00:47:48.340 these vast scales, because they're so completely disconnected from anything that would serve
00:47:53.860 a natural human community, a natural human idea of the good or wellbeing.
00:47:58.880 And I think that's why it becomes, uh, more and more, um, how do you say morally dicey for
00:48:05.860 people, it becomes harder and engaging because the stories are so far removed from what we
00:48:11.420 would recognize as the good or the true that becomes more and more difficult to engage them
00:48:16.680 without feeling like you're completely disembodied from.
00:48:20.660 Well, and this is in a sense, the reality of, of, you know, the technological world in a sense
00:48:25.680 of, you know, the, the professional managerial class who, who, whose lines are dealt in abstractions,
00:48:32.620 right? So you flip around to the other side, who are the other people? Well, their church
00:48:37.820 communities ground in real, you know, that, that are ground in real relationships in real life,
00:48:42.000 but they also have groups like the trades who deal in physical reality. Ask yourself, why were
00:48:49.440 truckers the ones that revolted in Canada? Well, because truckers are connected with real reality,
00:48:56.880 right? They're the, the business that they, that they are engaged in of moving physical goods around,
00:49:03.640 right? Is not an abstract business. Like it deals with physical. So those physical realities then
00:49:09.180 ground you in a way that the abstract realities don't. So this idea that you can change genders 0.98
00:49:15.400 and all these kinds of things to somebody who's grounded in physical reality, it just seems
00:49:19.560 ludicrous, right? But once, as you say, you've been disembodied and, and now you live in this digital
00:49:25.900 realm and you're completely deracinated in a sense that you've lost all touch with reality. Well,
00:49:32.220 if technology can allow you to change your physical nature into some sort of, you know,
00:49:37.740 recreated cyborg, why wouldn't you do it? Cause that's sort of, you know, reality is completely
00:49:43.980 fungible at that point. Absolutely. All right. So I think we need to go ahead and wrap this up,
00:49:51.600 but what then, I guess we've, we've touched on most of how, or, you know, I think the answer is
00:49:56.980 you will be compelled to use it. You know, propaganda is just a reality of kind of political
00:50:02.700 warfare at this point. And if you're not going to completely abandon the battlefield to your enemy,
00:50:07.120 then you're going to have to be engaged about it. Are there any parting thoughts that you'd like to,
00:50:11.380 you know, leave people with when it comes to the proper use deployment or way to think about
00:50:16.520 propaganda, since, you know, it's a known quantity, it's going to have to exist inside the political.
00:50:22.440 Well, as we said, one of the first ways I think is protecting yourself, right? So you and I are
00:50:29.360 very aware of this as little as possible, try to not pay attention to the news, which is really hard
00:50:35.540 to do when you're on Twitter. But it can be done, right? So if you're always reacting to the latest
00:50:41.240 thing, you are basically ripe for manipulation by the propagandist. If you're always reacting to the,
00:50:48.520 so stop reacting to the latest things, unplug yourself and try to relate to real ideas that are
00:50:56.080 bigger than the latest thing, but also then engage in real life. So be involved in a community,
00:51:02.240 go to church, you know what I mean? That type of thing. But then the other thing is to begin to
00:51:09.320 ask yourself, and it's okay, so let's say you've decided that you, you know, somebody like myself
00:51:14.360 who decided I need to engage the narrative battle, is stop reacting, and really think to yourself,
00:51:22.880 what can I do to dictate the narrative? And so that's in a sense of, is having a picture,
00:51:30.200 and this is where I, in the piece, I use the idea of the roadmap, right? So what you're trying to do
00:51:35.040 is to create a roadmap into a sense of, do you know where you're going? Or are you just reacting to
00:51:39.600 what's out there? Because if you're just reacting, you're just part of the problem, right? But you have
00:51:44.300 to, in a sense, have a map of where are we going? And so part of what we can do, maybe as propagandists,
00:51:49.840 but on the right, is to provide people with a map, a narrative that allows them to get where they're
00:51:57.180 going, right? And okay, yeah, it's a form of propaganda, but so we propagandize our own first,
00:52:02.560 so they have a map, but then once we have that map, we can then use that map to dictate the terms
00:52:10.000 of the discussion, right? Choose the elements of reality that we decide to elevate, and then
00:52:17.380 frame them in the way that we frame them to move people where we believe earnestly they need to go
00:52:25.340 in that regard. And so that's always a sense of what are we trying to build?
00:52:28.960 And this is why, like, people sort of, I think, begin the wrong way. They say, well,
00:52:33.740 we need to build a political coalition first. I'm like, no, before you start trying to build a
00:52:38.280 political coalition, you need to know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going,
00:52:44.200 you're basically at the mercy of whoever is going to spin you a narrative. So that's that sense of you
00:52:50.720 have to have a really very clear vision of where are we going? And then how do we provide a map to help
00:52:57.940 people get to where we're going?
00:53:00.000 And I think that's so important, because if you look at the failed movements of the right in America,
00:53:05.680 if you look at, you know, the Tea Party or MAGA, both of them were reactions to, you know, the way
00:53:15.100 that the Republican Party or the conservative mainstream was handling things. They had specific
00:53:20.820 issues. They had often powerful grievances, but they had no collective vision of where to go.
00:53:27.800 And so they were co-opted easily, not because they didn't have legitimate differences or an idea of
00:53:34.300 kind of what they were struggling against, but they had no way to inform what their vision would be next.
00:53:40.280 They had no way to know where they were going. They had no way to kind of communicate that and,
00:53:46.680 you know, counter-propagandize. And so whatever wanted to step in and fill that angst and direct
00:53:53.060 that angst ended up owning it because it never owned itself. It was simply a burst of energy
00:53:59.400 that had no direction and had no way to fill that. And so I think that's why the efforts of someone
00:54:05.180 like Rufo are so important. I think more people need to grasp that is if you want to, if you want
00:54:10.660 those things to last beyond the, you know, those short bursts of disgruntled, you know, anger or
00:54:17.540 political motivation, you need to have, like you said, not just a coalition, but a place for it to
00:54:24.860 go, a direction it's going to go and a way in which you can communicate that message and control and
00:54:30.120 protect that movement from the propaganda that's going to flow in and try to control that energy
00:54:35.140 and capture it once it's out there. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. I was going to say the one
00:54:41.680 thing that people have to understand is the left knows where it's going. And like the Republican
00:54:48.100 party looks so ineffectual because they don't know where they're going and all they're trying to do
00:54:52.880 is basically give payback to their donors, right? And so they have no idea. So they're just getting
00:54:59.140 power for the sake of power. And so they have no idea where they're going, right? No vision
00:55:03.060 whatsoever. But the left knows very clearly where it's going. So until the right can know where it's
00:55:10.020 going, it will remain on the outside. Excellent. All right. Well, we're going to move to the questions
00:55:15.660 of the people, but before we do, can you tell everyone where to find your work? Okay. So there it's
00:55:22.800 on Twitter, it's at underscore kruptos. And then on sub stack, it is seeking the hidden thing.com
00:55:30.600 seeking the hidden thing.com. And that should get you there.
00:55:35.120 Excellent. All right. Yeah. Make sure, like I said, it's one of the better, uh, up and coming
00:55:38.900 sub stacks, uh, delving into some important thinkers. So make sure that you check it out.
00:55:44.260 All right. So Cooper weirdo here for $20. Thank you very much, sir. I hate listening to
00:55:48.560 Normie cons talk about art, movies, comics, video games. It's all consumers unwilling to allow
00:55:54.240 their ideas in art. So we know, uh, so we know, uh, so we know our ideas are better, but I don't
00:56:02.620 express them. Are right wing ideas allowed or not? Yeah. I hear what you're saying. It's, it's
00:56:07.980 difficult because it's a lot easier to of course, make content reacting to popular things than to make
00:56:15.240 your thing popular. I mean, let's be honest, I could do movie reviews and talk about like the problem
00:56:21.320 of wokeness in whatever Disney film that just came out. And I'm not above, I've talked about,
00:56:25.780 you know, some mainstream entertainment and I might do more, but that would, that would be a far more
00:56:31.340 dynamic thing. You'd get way more views, way more traffic, that kind of thing. So the, the, the pull,
00:56:37.200 because as we've talked about, Kriptos has talked about here, the pull is of course, stepping into
00:56:42.060 the frame. That's where that has already been set for you. That's where the eyeballs are. That's where
00:56:45.720 the attention is. That's where the algorithms go. And so it's, yes, it's consumerist, but
00:56:51.140 more importantly, it's what drives the attention and the attention economy is, is a big part of
00:56:58.220 why that focus is there. It's a lot harder to a make good art, but even B, if you make the good
00:57:04.540 art, then you've got to get eyeballs on it. And that that's very difficult. So I think that for a
00:57:10.200 lot of people, you know, it's just a lot easier to chase the commentary on current mainstream art and
00:57:17.480 it's failings rather than try to go out there and make that. And I'm not an artist. I'm not creative
00:57:23.280 and that way. So I don't blame people for that because it is incredibly difficult. But that is
00:57:28.560 something that is going to be necessary. If you're going to win a culture war of any.
00:57:35.180 Then we have creeper weirdo here again for $5. I also think that the dissident, right? Worked too
00:57:40.760 hard to have based interpretations of liberal art. It feels like cope again. Yeah. I can connect to the
00:57:49.380 same thing. I think that it's, there's just a much more it's much easier to look into the art that's
00:57:57.700 being creative and find alternative readings. People enjoy that. They enjoy seeing, Oh, here's,
00:58:03.040 here's why this content is actually secretly based as opposed to going out and making your own thing.
00:58:08.900 Though I do, I would say there is value. And I think I do, I find these videos or this kind of
00:58:15.060 analysis entertaining. I do think it's interesting that so often the left, which has just excised the
00:58:21.800 idea that anything right wing can be positive often still makes things that portray truths that they
00:58:28.800 wish they didn't portray. And I think there is value in pointing that out, mining that out. Yeah.
00:58:34.120 Sometimes it is just like, Oh, the villains are always right. I think that is a shallow narrative that
00:58:38.840 sometimes right wing people do, but I do think there is valuable work in mining truths that are
00:58:44.220 unavoidable, even in the worst left wing art, because I think the, the inescapability of those
00:58:51.300 truths is something that teaches people, uh, you know, that, that there is, there's something other
00:58:57.360 than this just constant progressive propaganda that is true. And I think that's pretty valuable.
00:59:03.020 All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up, but once again, thank you everybody
00:59:10.280 for coming by. I want to thank Kruptos for coming on. Make sure that you are reading his piece. The
00:59:16.100 original one on propaganda is very good. Make sure that you go check out his sub stack. Of course,
00:59:20.460 if this is your first time on the channel, make sure that you go ahead and subscribe. And if you'd like
00:59:25.860 to get these broadcast as podcasts, make sure that you're going to the Ora McIntyre show on your
00:59:31.700 favorite podcast platform. And if you do that, leave a rating or review, it really helps with
00:59:36.440 the algorithm. Thank you guys once again. And as always, I will talk to you next time.