The Lie of Transgender Centrism ｜ Guest： Nate Hochman ｜ 2⧸15⧸23
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 4 minutes
Words per Minute
187.81161
Summary
Nate Hockman of The National Review joins me to talk about the growing trend of centrism in the transgender community, and why it s time for a more "centrical" stance on the controversial issue.
Transcript
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Hey, everybody. How's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great show with a returning guest that I think you're really going to enjoy. I'm here with Nate Hockman of The National Review. Thanks for joining me, man.
00:01:46.620
Hey, man. It's good to be back. Thanks for having me.
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Absolutely. So we're going to be getting into Nate's piece today. He's been talking about this looming idea of transgender centrism. We're going to kind of break down some of the events we've seen here recently.
00:02:00.580
We've got protests in front of the New York Times building. We've got people trying to, I think, turn the ratchet on this issue some. And so we're going to get deeper into that in just a second.
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Nate, looking at your piece this week, it was funny, or last week, it's funny because I saw it just as other people were talking about kind of the need to take another look at transgenderism, need to calm things down a little bit.
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There needs to be kind of a central or a centrist position where, you know, people get the rights and health care that they need, but, you know, their parents are involved in decisions or something like that.
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Tell me a little bit about what's going on and why people are suddenly pushing for this kind of moderate position on transgender, you know, transitioning for children.
00:04:41.260
Yeah, you know, we've seen sort of pieces like this surface from time to time over the last few years as transgenderism has become this kind of hot button culture war topic.
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Because, you know, as early or as late as 2016, it just wasn't as much of an issue in the national conscience as it is, as it was sort of after 2018.
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But this is something that this kind of culturally moderate, often elite center right does in every single culture war issue.
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And it's always the sort of prelude to just full concession, which is, well, we need to sort of seed some of the sort of progressive claims about this particular cultural agenda.
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You know, we need we can make concessions, we can negotiate, we can compromise.
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You know, it's the spirit of American pluralism.
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You heard that on, you know, debates over marriage.
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You heard that on debates over, you know, gays in the military.
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So it's sort of the reason that this bulwark piece that I was responding to, which is by an AEI fellow, Giselle Donnelly, which was calling for basically a culture war truce on gender ideology.
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The reason it caught my eye is because I know that there are conservatives who are who are interested in this kind of compromise position.
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And I think as it becomes more and more of a hot button issue, you're going to get more and more conservatives sort of losing their stomach for the fight.
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So I'm optimistic because I think that the conservative movement writ large actually has really coalesced around a much more aggressive agenda on gender ideology than we've seen on past culture war issues, which makes sense because its claims are so patently insane.
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But you are going to see, I think, more and more think pieces from this segment of the right that we saw in the bulwark, I think, at the beginning of this month from Giselle Donnelly basically saying, look, both sides are crazy, right?
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On the one hand, you have people that want to, you know, surgically mutilate 12 year olds.
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And on the other hand, you want you have people who want to go back to the biological understanding of men and women a la 2012, right?
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But that kind of centrist position, it doesn't actually have any firm ground to stand on because whatever is centrist is just whatever's in the middle of the shifting ground and the ground continues to shift left.
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And eventually, particularly on the question of what is a man, what is a woman, conservatives just have to stake their flag and say, this is the definition and we're not going to go anywhere.
00:07:04.860
Yeah, you can definitely feel that conservative case for childhood transitioning building in the background.
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You can feel the attempt to turn the ratchet on this one already.
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We've seen a lot of stories coming out of different conservative outlets about how, you know, wokeness is over.
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We're almost done with this craziness, the transgender madness or all these other things.
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These things are dying down and it's only, you know, a few more months of this and it'll all just go back to normal.
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You can already see the fatigue setting in, especially, like you said, with there's a couple different actors here, I think, that are that are involved with this.
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Like you said, there's this the center right is very establishment, libertarian-esque right that just wants to say, well, you know, we're always at a taunt on social issues.
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The left pushes and we're the ones that say, oh, slow down for a minute.
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So you have those folks and then you have others who, you know, maybe aren't from that crowd, but would much more would like to focus on other issues.
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And really, the culture war is not their their wheelhouse or this aspect of it isn't.
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And so they're like, oh, man, I really just wish we could just stop talking about this and move on to anything else.
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And so we see kind of both of these forces working to kind of advance this idea.
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Now, I think it'll probably be obvious for most people, but you laid out the case pretty well in your piece.
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So I wonder if you'll just make it to people real quick.
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Why is it impossible for there to be a centrist issue issue for an ideology that is basically designed from the ground up to destroy the basic understanding and traditional understanding of families and culture and societal structure?
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Right. So there's sort of two reasons that there isn't anything that could conceivably be accurately described as transgender centrism.
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The first is the kind of meta issue that I was talking about before, which is that in the culture war, as the culture continues to gallop left right over the course of the three past three or four decades where conservatives have lost decisively on every issue except for abortion.
00:09:10.780
The centrist position that gets staked out is just it's just following that ground leftwards.
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Right. It just is the middle of whatever the playing field happens to be.
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So if the culture war, as I believe it is, is actually this fundamental debate over first principles, over what truth is, the meaning of men and women, the meaning of marriage, the meaning of the nation state, American history.
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Right. Like these fundamental core debates. There's a true position and there's a false position.
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And the true position doesn't change along with the trends of the time. Right.
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So staking out a centrist position and and sort of deciding what that centrist position is based on what happens to be considered left and what happens to be considered right in the kind of mainstream is not an actual principle position.
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It's kind of just squishy in the middle, you know, meaningless, kind of both sides are crazy, you know, stuff.
00:10:04.640
But the other thing is in the sort of particularities of the transgender issue.
00:10:09.820
And this is what I was writing about in the piece is this is in in a very real way, the final frontier of the sexual revolution.
00:10:18.460
It doesn't mean that there won't be more frontiers after this.
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If we lose this one, I think it's going to get much darker if and that's why the stakes are so high.
00:10:26.060
But the the premise originally of the sexual revolution was to liberate men and women from the kind of traditional circumscribed gender roles that we had as a society cultivated for them.
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And the kind of political, economic, social, cultural structures that had kind of grown up to sort of cultivate, steward, reinforce those things.
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So once you had conquered those sort of traditional institutional gender roles, the next thing was to liberate men and women from the very institution of the meaning of marriage, which is traditionally defined as between one man and one woman.
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The final frontier, and this isn't a totally original point by any means, but it's an important one, is literally the biological makeup of men and women themselves.
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And this is where things get really, really dark, because it's no longer just dismantling institutions, changing cultural mores.
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It's an artificial technological assault on the human body itself.
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And it's dismantling not just the idea of men and women, but the actual basic evidence that men and women exist, which is literally written into the composition of male and female bodies.
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That is, there's no sort of moderate concession to that, right?
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There either are men and women or there aren't.
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Men and women exist as distinct entities, or they don't exist.
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And if you believe that they don't exist, you are on the side of the transgender left.
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If you believe that you do exist, in the framing of this bulwark piece at least, you're a right-wing radical, if you're actually willing to enforce those ideas.
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So moderation is kind of a siren song, in this case.
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It's just a slightly slower, maybe not even that, concession to this trend.
00:12:02.340
You know, there's a very hard biological reality here, and you're either on one side of it or you're on the other.
00:12:07.740
Yeah, if you're okay with turning kids into meat Legos and pretending like it's going to have no impact on them later on in life,
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then, yeah, there's really no way to pretend that you're somehow in the middle of this issue.
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But I think it's very interesting, you know, yesterday, South Dakota state rep had a tweet talking about how it was un-American and dangerous to believe that the safest place for a child was in a household with a married mom and dad.
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And I think that just kind of shows you how moderation doesn't exist on any of this stuff.
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It's always about getting the foot in the door and then accelerating as soon as possible once you can kind of get past those barriers.
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You had all this about, oh, well, you know, this is just making the best of bad situations, and we need to understand people where they are and blah, blah, blah.
00:13:00.180
But you're only a few years down the road, and all of a sudden it's, well, having any standard for what a family is or having any conception of the good,
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that, you know, having any standard by which you should expect people to behave themselves and raise children,
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even if they don't meet it all the time, isn't itself deeply un-American.
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You know, it doesn't matter that this is something that's been part of America.
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Of course, since its foundation, it's the basic family unit that pretty much everything is built on top of.
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All of a sudden, this is too radical and too extreme and anti-American.
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You know, history just kind of started, you know, 10 years ago,
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and it feels like the same thing is happening here with the transgender movement.
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I mean, we're told over and over again that the concept of a slippery slope is a fallacy,
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and it's like, how can you watch what happened over the course of the last two decades and still reach that conclusion, right?
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Like maybe in the abstract, in an esoteric sense, using, you know, a slippery slope in a classroom argument or whatever could be a fallacy.
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But it's obviously true as a practical matter that, to your point, what moderation and concession actually means,
00:14:01.860
even if it feels like a sort of moderate or meaningless concession in the moment,
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particularly when we get to the transgender issue,
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is just expediting a much more radical process and movement to dismantle,
00:14:13.960
like the basic building blocks of civilization.
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I mean, not just the building blocks of America,
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although obviously the American family has been the core of American society for most of our history,
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but of the entire Western civilization that America was sort of the culmination of, right?
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It's always been organized in some way, shape, or form around the family.
00:14:30.380
And we've not only dismantled our conception of the family
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and the kind of institutional, legal, and economic structures that we built to support that understanding,
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we are now at the point where the only acceptable frontier left to conquer is universal homogeneity, right?
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A complete wiping the slate clean of any distinctions or particularities between men and women whatsoever.
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And again, in sort of the practical context, that has really dark implications for how it affects children.
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I don't know if you saw the recent report about the Missouri Transgender Clinic,
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but the sworn affidavit from a caseworker there who used to believe in this stuff
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is genuinely horrifying, what they're doing to children,
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often the most vulnerable mentally ill children in our society.
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But also, again, on a sort of first principles social level,
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if you have a breakdown of a society that's ordered around a recognition of very real distinctions
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that will exist whether or not our culture recognizes them or not,
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you have a society that's organized around lies, around falsehoods, rather than around truth.
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And that, again, leads to very dark places very quickly.
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Yeah, I think it's really interesting how even some of the activists who have been trying to push against this
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are making classic conservative mistakes, even if themselves are not terribly conservative.
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A guy like Andrew Sullivan, who is now for some reason labeled conservative by many people.
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But the same day that you were printing your piece,
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he was out there praising a Washington Post piece, saying,
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This is something that brings real sanity to the situation.
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Why? Oh, because it said that parents should be involved if a child is thinking about transitioning.
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Not saying we should have restrictions or, you know, no, just saying,
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well, but, you know, someone should probably check with the parent first
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And it's amazing because Andrew Sullivan is somebody who, of course, is famous for his,
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you know, his assistance in destroying the traditional definition of marriage.
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But he has been very hot recently over the fact that these, you know,
00:16:40.440
gender clinics are obviously oftentimes targeting what would probably grow up to be gay men, right?
00:16:46.180
And as a gay man, he recognizes this as an existential threat.
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Okay, we're basically wiping out the gay population by transitioning them all to, you know,
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to females, you know, through surgery or whatever.
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And he says, okay, this is an existential threat to something I hold dear,
00:17:02.320
something I care about. He fought for gay marriage.
00:17:05.380
And then, you know, his movement decided to get rid of gay men.
00:17:08.260
So what does that really mean at the end of the day, right?
00:17:10.720
But here he is after making all of these impassioned arguments about getting rid of this stuff
00:17:15.820
and how dangerous it is saying, well, maybe we can, you know,
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like find some common ground as long as someone checks with a parent first.
00:17:23.580
Right. There's a saying, I think I've seen you tweet it out before.
00:17:26.740
It's like the revolution has to stop at the operating table, right?
00:17:29.740
Like you don't get to pick and choose. Once you're sliding down the slope,
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you don't get to pick and choose like an off point.
00:17:35.360
Like the momentum is happening. You open the door, you know, whoever you're talking about here,
00:17:40.540
whatever conservative sort of militated for concessions.
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And you don't get to sort of wake up a decade later and go, whoa, whoa, whoa.
00:17:46.900
You know, this is, this is out of control now. Right.
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It's like, that was always what it was going to be about.
00:17:51.160
And if you're still operating on the premise that you can actually negotiate with the revolution,
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you don't really understand what the revolution is and what its aims are. Right.
00:18:00.440
It's fundamentally what its aims are is the dismantling and the destruction of Western civilization.
00:18:05.760
And actually, in their most honest moments, these activists are very explicit about that.
00:18:10.380
The sort of radical transgender activists that this bullwark piece I was responding to
00:18:14.720
cited as, as the example of the extreme left was this ACLU transgender activists saying,
00:18:21.920
you know, criticizing the legalization of, of, of gay marriage, because marriage is a fundamentally
00:18:28.140
violent institution and we need to dismantle it altogether. Right. Like they're coming for the
00:18:32.700
very building blocks, the very sort of core institutions and structures of Western civilization.
00:18:37.500
And, you know, saying that, that you can compromise with that fundamental goal is to completely ignore
00:18:43.840
the nature of the goal itself. So look, I, you know, I, Andrew Sullivan and I, we've never met
00:18:49.700
where mutuals on Twitter, I give him credit for being much more self-aware. And I think some other
00:18:54.100
activists who don't want to admit to themselves, you know, effectively what they've wrought,
00:18:58.960
he is clearly horrified by the cultural left today in, at least in some, in some areas.
00:19:04.400
But I think, you know, people like that have to ask themselves and do some real introspection
00:19:08.440
about how we got here. And the conclusion that any rational analysis will arrive at is that we
00:19:14.200
couldn't have gotten here if we didn't make those earlier concessions. And it's insane to me that
00:19:19.280
we're still talking about making concessions today, because if this is what we're caught up with in
00:19:25.500
2023, and we continue to make concessions, what is it going to look like in 2033? I mean, I really,
00:19:31.580
I shudder at the thought. And I think that's precisely why there's a, there's a moment now where
00:19:36.940
conservatives have to draw a bright red line and stand by it.
00:19:40.400
Yeah, I don't know how aware Sullivan is, because he's always defending like drag queen story hour.
00:19:46.060
But anyway, so I've just seen his anti-multi raids.
00:19:49.200
I gotcha. Yeah, I mean, you're, you're right. He is often in this, almost in this kind of
00:19:54.240
IDW, you know, liberal that was mugged by reality, you know, scenario where he, it's the, it's the
00:20:00.880
newest version of neoconservatism. And then it's, it's, I'm probably here to stay, unfortunately,
00:20:05.780
for a while, but I don't know where I had something before I got sidetracked there. But
00:20:12.740
well, now I completely forgot. Anyway, let's see, I was distracted by,
00:20:18.660
but yeah, I think there's a continuous need to kind of look at the, oh, yes, that's right. Yeah.
00:20:27.940
There's a Mott and Bailey that's always being played with the revolution, right? It's always,
00:20:31.880
well, we only have a little bit of, you know, we're just fighting for a particular right,
00:20:37.100
a particular cutout, a particular functional thing that allow people to live the way they
00:20:41.440
want to live or, or, or have better lives. And then you always see like when no one's looking
00:20:46.660
or when they feel strong, that actually, this is, like you said, part of a revolution that is
00:20:50.980
aimed directly at society. One of the things I really like is if you go back and read a lot of
00:20:56.320
kind of edgy Marxists, even guys like Nick Land that eventually became far, far more right wing,
00:21:01.660
they'll just openly say things like we really support the feminist movement because it dissolves
00:21:06.220
the family and dissolving the family is key to Marxist agenda moving forward. Like we can't have,
00:21:12.120
you know, fully automated space luxury communism until we dissolve the family in its entirety,
00:21:17.760
because if we don't dissolve the family, then we can't dissolve national borders.
00:21:20.660
So, so it's funny that people who are like are explicitly out to destroy, you know, Western
00:21:27.040
civilization, tell you blow for blow, like, no, we need to get rid of gender, gender roles. So then
00:21:32.840
we can later get rid of gender definitions. So we can later destroy the family. So we can later
00:21:37.160
undermine the stability of the state. So finally, we can, you know, melt down all these borders,
00:21:41.920
homogenize everyone, and kind of create this global communist utopia. So they're not really very,
00:21:47.220
like I said, very coy about what they want to do when they think that, you know, they can get away
00:21:51.560
with it, that they'll just run back to these, to these safe arguments about, oh, well, at the end
00:21:56.740
of the day, it's making sure that people can see each other in the hospital or something, or make sure
00:22:00.740
that someone can get adopted. But, and, but you see really when, when, you know, everything's cut,
00:22:05.600
the cards are down on the table, they know exactly what they're doing. And this is fully intentional.
00:22:10.580
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Exactly. And this is why I think it's really important for conservatives to actually read
00:22:45.460
the kind of intellectual heavyweights of the actual hard left, because they're just much more honest
00:22:52.460
than the ostensibly sort of moderate, sort of technocratic, you know, New York Times editorial
00:22:56.440
board progressives. Their goals are fundamentally the same, maybe with slightly more moderation,
00:23:02.020
although oftentimes there's really no distinction in terms of the moderation versus radicalism.
00:23:06.380
radicalism. The rhetoric is different, and the honesty with which they deliver their goals is
00:23:11.880
different, obviously. But, you know, the Mott and Bailey thing is one of the most sort of
00:23:19.720
significant things that conservatives fall for, because they take progressives at their word
00:23:24.360
that that's not really what it's about. Where if you actually, you don't have to even read radical
00:23:28.800
leftists. If you actually just look at the substantive nature of what they're militating for,
00:23:33.520
and you follow that to its logical conclusion, it's obviously what it's about. There's, I think
00:23:38.960
there are a lot of kind of sort of quote unquote, center left progressives who authentically believe
00:23:44.400
that their end goal isn't, you know, the destruction of Western civilization or whatever. And when they
00:23:49.580
scoff at conservatives making that allegation and accuse them of being hysterical, they probably
00:23:54.040
largely think that that they are being hysterical. But if you, again, if you actually look at what their
00:23:59.120
substantive goals are, it is a kind of radicalism that began on campuses in the 1960s, and sort of seeped
00:24:05.360
out, you know, militated this long march to the institutions, that has been absorbed into the kind of
00:24:11.040
language and idiom of like moderate progressivism. So moderate progressivism now is basically just a
00:24:18.460
euphemistic sort of veil on the much more radical ideological project, there isn't really moderate
00:24:24.040
liberalism like there used to be, there are plenty of problems with moderate left liberalism as well,
00:24:28.760
largely because it actually couldn't put up a fight against the radicals once the radicals
00:24:32.640
came calling, but it doesn't exist at all anymore. And even the sort of ostensibly moderate Democrats,
00:24:39.320
for example, are are militating in the cultural sphere, at least for something that was confined to
00:24:45.620
the most radical student activists in the 1960s. One of the statistics I always point to is the fact that
00:24:52.400
every single House Democrat, including the one from red districts and purple districts,
00:24:56.660
except for one, voted for the Equality Act. And if you know anything about the Equality Act,
00:25:01.980
it's basically the end of First Amendment conscience rights in America. That's actually, you know,
00:25:06.420
what it does is it writes sexual orientation and gender ideology into federal civil rights law,
00:25:12.860
with no religious liberty protections whatsoever, an earlier bill with religious liberty protections,
00:25:17.400
it got taken out, which effectively means that if you are any kind of dissenter in the public square,
00:25:23.580
in a publicly funded institution, a teacher, a coach, etc, etc, you want federal funding for your,
00:25:29.400
you know, business. If you are critical of gender ideology, you're effectively persuaded non-grotic,
00:25:34.980
reduced to the class of a second class citizen. The quote unquote moderate Democrats all voted for that,
00:25:40.240
which would have been inconceivable even a couple of decades ago. So it's much more deceptive when they
00:25:45.920
talk and they sort of deliver their messages about equality for trans people and LGBT people, etc.
00:25:51.360
But it fundamentally is all pulling in the same direction and working towards the same goals.
00:25:56.740
And conservatives need to actually understand that if they're going to effectively confront it.
00:26:00.880
Yeah, like you said, it's so easy for people to get focused on those near arguments and just not
00:26:05.860
follow things to logical conclusion. You're constantly shamed for just noticing the obvious. And they really
00:26:11.480
love to do this. They love to code this as as low class, right? Oh, if you if you notice something
00:26:16.600
very obvious that when we suggest one thing, it will ultimately lead to another to another, you're
00:26:20.840
just some hysterical hysterical backwards yokel. And of course, this is also why you need to pass this
00:26:26.340
stuff into civil rights law with no religious liberty protection, because the point is to make it
00:26:32.860
impossible for people of faith or just anyone with an opposing opinion to be able to interact with
00:26:38.380
almost any public institution, because, of course, all corporations, all, you know, all public
00:26:43.180
institutions, all of the stuff must abide by this dictate. And so if you can write this into civil
00:26:49.600
rights law as it stands, then you can make sure that basically no person with any real conviction
00:26:54.880
is able to have a bank account or work at a major corporation or have a job in the in the US
00:27:01.560
government, any kind of position. It's effectively purges society of this without even having to,
00:27:07.280
you know, no gulags are necessary. You can just make sure your thought criminals can't process a
00:27:11.820
payment or get a job or get a mortgage. And then, you know, they're just homeless people who can't
00:27:17.120
afford to have families. But, you know, they're free, right? They have they have liberty. So that's
00:27:20.880
fine. Yes. And this is the enormous power of the kind of civil rights state in general is what it did
00:27:27.040
is it took the managerial revolution. I know you and I have talked about James Burnham before that began
00:27:32.200
decades prior, which was basically the bureaucratization of all of American society,
00:27:37.460
the fusing of what had previously been private business with government, the replacement of kind
00:27:42.080
of entrepreneurial, small regional firms with these massive corporate bureaucracies,
00:27:47.000
multinational corporations, and then obviously the administrative state and government and created
00:27:51.840
this new class of managerial elite whose claim to power was kind of technocratic administration.
00:27:56.540
What the civil rights state did was it basically injected that with increasingly radical cultural
00:28:02.880
left politics. So even as the managerial regime consolidated power over American society, and it
00:28:09.240
became increasingly difficult to just participate in American life without coming into contact with
00:28:15.240
and often being a subject of the managerial regime, the diktats around cultural leftism became
00:28:22.220
much more stringent and radical. And again, with the Equality Act, what you're looking at in many ways
00:28:27.160
is the sort of final frontier of that, where not only are, you know, people who have traditional
00:28:32.960
conservative views about marriage, you know, facing, you know, complete marginalization from the public
00:28:38.920
square. Now, anyone who doesn't think a man can become a woman or even more radically that a 12-year-old
00:28:44.060
with a mental illness should be pumped full of puberty blockers as the first resort will also not have
00:28:49.580
access to like the basic aspects of, of not just political, but sort of social participation to
00:28:55.500
your point, payment processors, obviously a job, you know, you know, the technology, the sort of
00:29:02.180
Silicon Valley apparatus, all of that is, is inextricably linked to the managerial regime and by
00:29:08.080
extension, the civil rights state. And the continued radicalization of that apparatus means the
00:29:13.780
continued radicalization of American society writ large, because in many ways, it is the commanding
00:29:18.740
heights of American society writ large. Those are the stakes, right? So to return to the original
00:29:23.360
point about centrism, what is the moderate position there, right? If the moderate position is a concession
00:29:30.060
to that, it's, it's just, you know, progressivism driving the speed limit, to use the popular phrase,
00:29:35.940
you have to actually actively resist it, and you have to be willing to be accused of being a radical
00:29:41.660
or a yokel, you know, or, you know, being marginalized from mainstream institutions that
00:29:46.360
buy into this stuff. Because the alternative really is the destruction of American, ultimately Western
00:29:51.980
civilization, which I happen to like, and I would, I would rather, I would rather live in a world where
00:29:56.720
it still exists. But that requires taking what could be conceived of as a radical position sometimes.
00:30:03.400
Yeah, and it's interesting that the Republicans, you know, the, you know, just kind of the
00:30:08.280
establishment right didn't know what to do with this when it first came up. You, I don't know if
00:30:12.300
you remember, you know, the Caitlyn Jenner emerges, and all of a sudden, the right wings like, well,
00:30:16.040
we've got one of our own now, you know, as they so often do, the left has discovered a favorite class,
00:30:22.460
and we've discovered a member of the favorite class that's willing to defect to us. So now we
00:30:26.500
understand how to handle this. And so for a while, that seemed like that was the tact, we're going to run
00:30:31.180
Caitlyn Jenner for the, for, you know, governor of New York, or whatever, you know, they were trying to
00:30:37.280
sell at the time. And then slowly, but surely, the kind of the understanding of what was going on and
00:30:42.580
where the base was going to force them to go with this kind of came upon them. But it's interesting that
00:30:47.480
at the beginning of this, they didn't seem to have any particular pushback against it. And I think that
00:30:52.780
that's really indicative of kind of the corporate connection with the Republican Party, especially, you
00:30:58.300
know, speaking of Burnham and the managerial revolution, one of the things that Francis,
00:31:02.840
Sam Francis really focused on and expanding on Burnham, was that he pointed out that the the need
00:31:08.320
to homogenize was, of course, a key part of Burnham's managerial revolution, but he expanded this
00:31:13.520
particularly into cultural and social issues, right? So you needed to go ahead and make sure that
00:31:18.420
everyone had the same kind of hedonistic values, they didn't have anything specific, in particular to
00:31:23.700
a religion or a culture or tribe or anything that would require people to live a different way.
00:31:28.760
And of course, you know, people who are interchangeable and constantly looking to consume
00:31:32.500
new identities are particularly good customers for large bureaucratic organizations that constantly
00:31:37.660
want to sell them things and want them kind of on an internal wheel of consumption when it comes to
00:31:42.760
drugs and clothes and surgeries and all the all this other aftercare mental care that would be
00:31:48.420
necessary after all these radical procedures. And so it was very easy sell, I think, for most
00:31:53.560
corporations. And of course, you know, places like AEI that push, you know, corporate liberalism
00:31:59.700
to say, oh, well, you know, this is something we're on board with, we don't have any kind of
00:32:04.740
philosophical opposition to this. And I think that's why you saw that holding pattern pattern from,
00:32:11.620
you know, the establishment GOP and others in the conservative movement early on, because they're
00:32:15.940
like, well, business seems to like this, they don't seem to have any problem. And now we just see this
00:32:19.820
being, you know, speaking out against this will get you, you know, destroyed in any corporate boardroom
00:32:24.260
will get you fired from any corporation. And all of a sudden, you know, we realize, oh, maybe we do
00:32:29.400
have to push against this because its ubiquity is just so much that it's impossible for half the
00:32:36.960
Exactly. And I'm glad you brought up neoconservatism earlier, because it's sort of inextricably linked to
00:32:42.180
what neoconservatism is. Now, today, everyone thinks of neoconservatism as a foreign policy
00:32:48.300
hawkishness, basically. And it is that, but that's not, it didn't begin as a foreign policy
00:32:53.940
ideology at all. It was the kind of liberals who were mugged by reality. But what the first
00:32:59.900
generation of neoconservatives explicitly said, this is not like a, you know, spurious accusation,
00:33:05.380
and this is their words. If you read Irving Kristol, this is what he says. He said, you know,
00:33:09.080
Kristol wrote a bunch of essays where he's like, well, we never really stopped being liberals.
00:33:11.900
You know, we really just sort of reappropriated, you know, liberal goals, but we are, you know,
00:33:19.580
championing more conservative ends, et cetera, more moderate liberalism, et cetera. And as
00:33:23.560
neoconservatism came to dominate kind of mainstream conservative institutions, and then ultimately
00:33:28.760
the GOP, those basic liberal premises and assumptions seeped into the kind of dominant mainstream,
00:33:35.820
you know, what is colloquially called conservatism, Inc., but really is just the kind of nucleus or the
00:33:40.580
ethos that the mainstream Republican Party and its intended institutions swim in. So what the
00:33:47.460
neoconservatives sought was accommodation with rather than reaction against the managerial regime.
00:33:53.740
That was what was different about neoconservatism, again, in their own words, not mine, than the kind
00:33:59.580
of old right or the traditional conservatism. And what that means is ultimately that the managerial
00:34:06.080
ideology, which seeks homogeneity, to your point, because it's much more easy to technocratically
00:34:12.180
administer an entire nation and ultimately an entire world that is wiped clean of any distinctions
00:34:17.780
between regions, between cultures, between men and women, ultimately, all of that is sort of subsumed
00:34:24.420
into this, you know, homogenous, universalistic managerial state. And that kind of technocratic
00:34:31.120
impulse never really was left behind by neoconservatives. They just wanted to reach
00:34:37.280
those goals via, you know, child tax credits or, you know, targeted tax cuts in opportunity
00:34:43.160
zones, right? Like all these things that we hear about from these institutions. If you actually hear
00:34:47.940
about how they frame it, it's fundamentally about reaching liberal egalitarian goals. And the only
00:34:53.760
sort of counterpoint they have is that conservative policies are the better way to reach those goals.
00:34:59.200
They share the same basic premises. So to the point about Caitlyn Jenner, you did have this
00:35:03.840
Democrats are the real transphobes moment for a second. I think we've mostly left that behind,
00:35:09.040
thankfully, but it's indicative of the same basic impulse. Over and over again,
00:35:14.420
what mainstream Republicans and kind of establishment conservatives are saying is,
00:35:19.140
no, we basically agree with what you want. We just think that our policies are a better way to
00:35:24.320
achieve them. That's not what I'm interested in. I have very different goals than the left. And it's
00:35:30.400
not a means ends debate for me. It's a means and ends debate. And ultimately the ends are really
00:35:36.120
what's important in these debates. So that kind of concession to sort of managerial technocracy
00:35:43.020
is not conservative in the traditional sense of the word. And it's also completely ineffective
00:35:47.880
as a mode of resistance against the managerial regime. Yeah. For some reason, it never strikes
00:35:53.240
people that so many of the rocked rib conservative leaders started their conservative journey by
00:35:58.280
saying, well, I didn't leave the left. The left left me, right? Guys like Ronald Reagan, you know,
00:36:03.400
said this. And it never occurs to them that, oh, that means these people still see themselves in the
00:36:08.540
same position as where when they thought of themselves as leftists. And there's no real lesson
00:36:12.800
to learn. They just think that the revolution went too far, like you said, had different means.
00:36:17.060
And again, to kind of look at Francis's dissection of the managerial state, he said the
00:36:23.100
neoconservative movement, you know, kind of fails because it fails, like you said, to directly
00:36:27.940
challenge managerial apparatus. It's always about how to properly. And he disagreed a little bit. He
00:36:34.160
said that they do have maybe some slightly more conservative goals, but he said that because they
00:36:39.600
refuse to, because they want to turn the managerial apparatus in their favor, they want to redirect it
00:36:45.400
towards their ends rather than the more radical ends of the liberal vanguard, that that's how
00:36:50.720
they're going to oppose it. But they have no real, no real attack on managerialism themselves,
00:36:56.720
no alternative, no real critique of the process, what the problems are and what the solutions could
00:37:01.160
be, which kind of dooms them from the outset, because they're always just going to kind of be
00:37:05.120
these sheepish guys running behind the movement saying, hey, if we only did it slightly differently,
00:37:09.460
it could come out better, but they don't really have any, any true issues with how the mechanisms
00:37:15.560
themselves are working. Right. And you saw the culmination of this, again, right around the time
00:37:21.500
of the Bush era, where they started, you know, meeting with with left wing, you know, racial activists,
00:37:27.380
for example, and saying, well, we also want sort of racial egalitarianism, and we're going to do it
00:37:32.280
only through, you know, opportunity zones, school choice, etc, right? Like, I mean, school choice is
00:37:36.980
great. I support things like child tax credits, even, right. But the the seeding of the basic
00:37:43.800
premise that the goal of public policy is social engineering to achieve egalitarian outcomes is a
00:37:50.220
radical departure, a from, you know, the basic conservatism, a lot of the old right, and even
00:37:56.940
the first sort of generation of conservatives. Francis had a very interesting relationship with
00:38:01.140
Buckley, like he was critical of him, but I think he was less critical of him than people think,
00:38:04.500
like, he sort of saw the first, he saw a lot to like in the first generation of conservatives. And
00:38:09.140
then the when neoconservatism took over, it became much more polemic. But regardless, the, the,
00:38:16.000
the sort of seeding of that basic premise that public policy should be social engineering towards
00:38:21.920
egalitarian ends means you've already, you've already lost the war, right? Because you're working,
00:38:26.680
you know, to the same sort of homogenous society. And, and what grounds do you have to object to
00:38:32.360
something like transgenderism when it comes along, right? Because the left can call your bluff
00:38:35.560
legitimately, they can say, well, you said you want egalitarian outcomes to you want to use public
00:38:40.140
policy for egalitarian outcomes as well. So you see this, you know, it's pervasive in conservative
00:38:46.300
discourse now, right? You hear people talk about, well, abortion is systemic racism, the welfare state
00:38:51.520
is systemic racism, public schools are systemic racism, minimum wage systemic racism. And what that
00:38:57.260
relies on implicitly is like the Ibram X. Kendi premise that any policy that has disparate racial
00:39:03.100
impact is systemic racism, and that this is a systemically racist country, ultimately, which
00:39:08.420
again, is a massive succession. There's a there's a statement from the House GOP, I think it was the
00:39:13.200
Commerce Committee in 2020, there's touting that under the Trump economy, women's wages have risen faster
00:39:20.080
than men's wages, and women of color's wages has risen faster than both of them. And it's like,
00:39:24.420
oh, is that what conservatism is now? Right? Like, it's it's making sure that, you know, women are
00:39:28.840
richer than men, which we know empirically, you know, reduces marriage rates, which I thought
00:39:33.540
conservatives care about, right? But it's all trying to make their case for themselves and their policies
00:39:38.920
to the left, which is never going to love them. But it's a function, I think, of the strata they
00:39:44.060
occupy and that a lot of them come from. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. You know, the GOP
00:39:48.960
did a main account on Twitter had a tweet a few days ago about how the GOP was going to do all of
00:39:55.440
these things for the black community and all you know, you're going to make sure that you have the
00:39:59.860
opportunity for businesses and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, okay, so actually, the GOP is just
00:40:04.960
fine with identity politics. It's more than fine for racial pandering. Like you said, the GOP only knows
00:40:11.580
how to talk in the frame of the left, no matter how much it complains about the frame of the left.
00:40:16.440
It's always talking about, oh, well, you know, civil rights. Well, we have to frame this thing
00:40:21.820
as a civil right for it to be important, or this has to benefit these specific protected, you know,
00:40:27.880
communities and classes, if it's going to be of any value at all. And so we have to focus on those
00:40:33.600
things using languages, of course, they would never, you know, dream of using for other communities.
00:40:37.860
But of course, the Republican Party is really just a collection of things that the left lets them do,
00:40:43.340
right? They don't have any particular principles when they talk about all this junk about, oh,
00:40:48.620
we've got to be colorblind, and we don't care about, you know, pandering to different communities,
00:40:53.080
and we don't believe in identity politics. Well, actually, that lasts about 14 seconds. And then
00:40:57.360
you've got Nikki Haley talking about how only a woman can do this job, right? Like, they're immediately
00:41:02.160
jumping right back into left wing frame and left wing tropes, because at the end of the day,
00:41:06.780
like you said, they're far more interested in making sure that they don't transgress any of the
00:41:10.840
barriers the left has put up than actually coming up with a game plan to, I'd say, I don't know,
00:41:15.120
beat the left at something. Yeah, the conservative girl boss iteration thing is one of the most
00:41:20.140
obnoxious things just viscerally for me, right? Like, you see it from, obviously, Nikki Haley,
00:41:26.340
you see it from Chrissy Noem, you see it from Nancy Mace. There are plenty of, you know, Republican
00:41:31.820
women who are actually really staunch conservatives. So it's not to sort of impugn them. But there is a
00:41:36.520
a cadre of often more culturally moderate Republicans who talk that way. And it, and again,
00:41:46.000
it's like, who is this for? Who is the target of this, right? Do you think like a Republican base
00:41:50.600
voter, like, you know, a non-college educated, you know, unionized iron worker in like rural
00:41:56.360
Michigan is going to be like, yeah, like you, that's right. Like only a woman can do this,
00:41:59.940
right? And it's like, no, you're talking to the New York Times editorial board. That's who your
00:42:03.660
audience is. And the New York Times editorial board doesn't like you. And it hates your voters.
00:42:08.540
And the fact that you are more interested in what they think, ultimately, than what your voters think,
00:42:13.220
and what your interests of your voters are, says a lot about a, the social strata that you occupy,
00:42:18.020
and the worldview that that you're a proponent of, you don't, it's not, you know, a conspiracy
00:42:22.420
theory, you don't have to look very closely to see, you know, how, how that operates. So there are
00:42:28.940
divisions in Republican elite politics, too. Like there are Republican politicians who don't do this. And
00:42:33.460
and, and even push back against it. But the fact that it is prominent in the kind of elite sphere of
00:42:40.740
the Republican Party, in a way that there's no sort of inverse comparison for on the Democratic end,
00:42:46.660
says a lot about how power actually operates in America. And it's very much operated with and for,
00:42:54.280
or by and for the left and against the authentic right.
00:42:57.100
Yeah, it's so interesting that you mentioned the New York Times editorial board there, because of
00:43:02.820
course, today, the New York Times is catching a lot of heat. They they printed like what an article
00:43:09.500
or two that wasn't completely 100% glowing in every possible way about like, you know, transitioning
00:43:16.200
children. And all of a sudden, this has created quite the uproar. There are hundreds of their contributors,
00:43:21.380
I believe, who've, who've issued a letter of condemnation. GLAAD is outside of their offices
00:43:27.160
today with one of those billboard rolling electronic billboard trucks talking about how the New York
00:43:32.580
Times is, is dangerous. And you can't question anything about the trans movement, like, just just
00:43:39.060
imagine that the most mild pushback imaginable from one of the most left, left wing organizations,
00:43:46.260
you can, again, imagine being something that sends people into like this complete apoplectic spiral.
00:43:52.300
But what do you think about this, this sudden need to strike back against the incredibly right
00:43:57.960
wing New York Times? Well, the other mortal sin that they committed is they hired David French,
00:44:02.580
that radical, who knows no is a rabid, you know, frothing at the mouth, transphobe right winger.
00:44:08.840
No, but that was actually I mean, I wrote a blog post about this New York Times letter against the
00:44:14.260
New York Times by New York Times contributors today. And I was pointing out this talking point
00:44:18.700
is the culmination of this kind of gathering talking point that you've seen pop up increasingly over the
00:44:23.960
last few months, which is that on trans issues, specifically, the New York Times is basically
00:44:28.800
it has a right wing editorial slants against transgender people. And there was a post by a
00:44:35.160
former media matters matter, media matters editor on her blog last month, that was titled something
00:44:42.880
like, with hiring of anti trans writer, New York Times declares war on LGBT people, who was the
00:44:49.960
anti trans writer, David French, right? Yeah, hiring David French is declaring war on LGBT people.
00:44:55.380
Mr. Blessings of Liberty, you know, himself, your edge, right? Like, yeah, really, real hard
00:45:01.320
hard line right winger. But again, it what it indicates is that this is how power works in
00:45:09.520
America, particularly in the culture sphere. And what the this I think it's now more than 200
00:45:14.940
signatories, this open letter, you know, going after the New York Times, they're not interested
00:45:19.840
actually in balance, right? Like empirically, if you look for five seconds of what New York Times
00:45:24.400
coverage or transgender issues is like, it's obviously left wing. What they are motivated
00:45:30.420
by is the sense that this is their newspaper, right? And and giving any conservative a hearing
00:45:36.420
is an unacceptable concession to the right. And that's what bias is. I was jokingly saying
00:45:44.640
today, there's that saying you always see it like BLM protests, which is when you're accustomed
00:45:49.780
to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Like that's actually what it was, right? It was like,
00:45:54.240
you publish like one anti trans piece, right? And it's like, this is bias, right? Because you're
00:45:58.980
accustomed to complete ideological conformity, because it's your newspaper. And that's why it
00:46:05.220
feels so biased, because there was outrage about like two reported pieces that actually gave a fair
00:46:10.340
hearing to conservative activists, and like Ross Douthat writing an anti trans piece, right? Ross Douthat is
00:46:17.080
way more right wing, actually, to be fair, than I think the New York Times would ever hire today.
00:46:22.460
But the fact that he exists there is a subject of sort of unending teeth gnashing for progressive
00:46:28.320
activists. And it's not because they want, you know, a fair and balanced coverage. It's because
00:46:32.540
it's their newspaper, and the right is supposed to be boxed out of it completely.
00:46:36.760
Yeah, I wouldn't say much about Ross Douthat, he does have some level of actual conservatism. You know,
00:46:41.940
I disagree with him on plenty. But yeah, that is a huge problem for them. It's interesting,
00:46:47.080
because I think they love this moment. Actually, I think they're desperate for this moment, because
00:46:51.360
the left wing vanguard is so boring today, right? Like, what? How are you radically left at this
00:46:59.000
point? Radically left of what the President of the United States who wants to enshrine the right of
00:47:03.260
child transition into civil rights law? How are you getting to the left of this guy? Right? Like,
00:47:08.980
how is that even possible? Or at least the people who operate him, you know, but it's amazing
00:47:14.200
that, you know, the left wing vanguard, if you're some guy who wants to be a rebellious college kid
00:47:19.660
on the left, like, where do you even go? And so I think they love these moments, because they get to
00:47:24.140
pretend for a moment that there's some kind of struggle, right? Like, yeah, the good old days,
00:47:29.700
when we had to harass the mainstream in order to get them to listen to us, you know, GLAAD is itself
00:47:35.820
just corporate leftism. And they're out there pushing against another piece of corporate leftism,
00:47:41.360
the New York Times, in the hope of what, like, pushing the New York Times towards a position
00:47:46.180
they basically already hold anyway. It's a lot of theater, but I think they love the moment,
00:47:51.260
because it means they get to kind of, you know, put the old saddle back on the revolutionary horse
00:47:55.960
and ride it out for one more show before they have to kind of retire the whole thing. It's ridiculous,
00:48:02.120
it's almost entirely theater, but it does give them that moment of pretending that, you know,
00:48:06.680
they are, there are still revolutionary moments, there is still a need to get out in the streets
00:48:11.200
and fight back, that kind of thing. Yeah, the revolution happened 50 years ago, guys, like,
00:48:15.640
you know, hang it up, right? You're, you're in, you know, tenured positions at Ivy League universities
00:48:20.440
and, you know, Times editorial board now. But it is, it's play acting at radicalism, because they still
00:48:25.560
think of themselves as radicals. And in an important sense, they are radicals, insofar as their goals
00:48:30.740
are radical, and are, you know, the Latin root of the word radical is like, is literally root,
00:48:37.280
like uprooting something, right? Like, what they're trying to do is uproot the core basis of American
00:48:41.880
civilization. And they've done a decent job at it for the last 50 years. But the, it's, it's always
00:48:50.080
just sort of funny to me to hear the language of, you know, protecting the most marginalized and
00:48:55.540
fighting, you know, the power structures in America from these people when it's like, what
00:49:00.760
you're talking about is a bunch of podunk rural, and I don't mean podunk, like, you know, in a
00:49:04.960
derogatory sense, but just literally like rural state legislatures in red states, who are paid like
00:49:11.160
$14,000 a year, you know, for their legislation and are up against the most powerful institutions
00:49:16.860
in the United States, the, you know, national teachers unions, all these major powerful activist
00:49:21.160
groups with an army of phalanx of litigators, the New York Times and the Washington Post and the
00:49:25.080
rest of legacy media, one of the two nations, the nation's two major political parties, and, you
00:49:29.680
know, at least a quarter or a half of the other one, Silicon Valley, you know, big tech, like,
00:49:33.900
that's what they're facing. And they're courageous enough, some of these state legislators to
00:49:38.220
actually take that on. But the reframing of it as the powerful being the marginalized and the
00:49:44.980
actual marginalized being the powerful is essentially a psyop. It's basically a way to justify
00:49:52.240
continual abuse of power and continual marginalization of the actual marginalized people
00:49:57.880
in America in pursuit of ideological goals. It's worked out pretty well for them for the
00:50:02.900
last few decades. I think conservatives are starting to sort of, at least some conservatives
00:50:08.240
are starting to sort of wake up to how this dynamic works. But we've got a long way to go.
00:50:13.160
Did you see, speaking of, like, sad attempts at rebellious activism, did you see the satanic
00:50:21.180
temple showing up to the Idaho state legislature?
00:50:24.960
Yeah, I only saw, like, pictures and, like, tweets. So I don't know that much about it. But it was
00:50:28.800
Yeah, they were there to protest a bill that would keep, you know, child transitioning from
00:50:33.860
happening. Or you, sorry, you can't pump eight-year-olds full of puberty blockers. And of
00:50:39.160
course, these people are 100% on board with this because, you know, satanic temple. By
00:50:43.400
the way, guys, there is no such thing as ironic satanism. Like, all satanism is just real
00:50:48.220
satanism. But it's just that satanism has always been lame. So the thing is, like, you
00:50:54.280
see these guys, and they're all standing around. And it looks like, like, maybe the world of
00:50:58.120
Warcraft servers were down, you know? Like, everybody there was just, you know, they couldn't
00:51:03.880
have been edgy if they tried. They were the softest, weakest, least scary people in the
00:51:09.360
world. But yeah, we're Satanists here to fight against this thing. That just shows you how
00:51:13.640
performative and ridiculous this stuff is. When your temple of Satan is, like, on board
00:51:18.400
with all this stuff, they're calling it their own rituals so that they can get it justified
00:51:22.920
in all these different areas and try to do constitutional workarounds. I mean, again, thank
00:51:26.980
you for properly labeling this stuff. I really appreciate the formalization. It makes it a lot
00:51:31.700
easier. But also, it's just funny how sad it is. Like, how impossible it is for these
00:51:36.520
people to be rebellious anymore. Sorry, like, you're the ones in power. You're the mainstream.
00:51:41.920
It's very obvious. And it's hilarious that when these people gather together and try to
00:51:46.700
look menacing or, oh, we're fighting, it's like, no, you're just terrible LARPers. It's
00:51:51.660
embarrassing. Yeah. You know, at least the 1960s radicals were, you know, the Black Panthers
00:51:57.660
were edgy. They were scary, right? You know, walked around their neighborhoods with
00:52:01.480
shotguns and they got out, you know, they got into, like, deadly shootouts with the cops,
00:52:06.080
right? Like, does anyone think, like, the, you know, 26-year-olds who, like, spend, you
00:52:11.240
know, you know, I don't know, like, spend, you know, 12 hours a day in their basement,
00:52:15.020
like, you know, showing up at the, at this Idaho State Capitol with, you know, plenty of
00:52:20.720
positive coverage in the national media, et cetera. Do you think they, you know, get into
00:52:23.600
deadly shootouts with cops? Probably not. Like, Angela Davis, who was, you know, almost on the
00:52:28.560
College Board AP African-American studies curriculum until DeSantis said nothing doing,
00:52:34.240
she was an accomplice in, like, a murder, murder kidnapping and was on the top of the FBI's
00:52:40.960
most wanted list and was a fugitive from the law, right? Like, she's crazy. I think she,
00:52:45.900
her ideas are awful for America, but, like, that's edgy, you know? Like, you're actually
00:52:49.440
participating in something with real stakes. Like, now it's a perfect, this is actually a
00:52:53.440
perfect sort of analogy for the, the development. She's, she's like a professor emeritus at one of
00:52:58.280
the University of California schools, right? Like, that is exactly how this works. All of the actual
00:53:03.160
radicals in the 60s either died, you know, they went off or to live on, like, you know, communes
00:53:08.460
and farms in, like, rural Oregon, or they got tenured positions at the top universities and, you know,
00:53:13.320
at the, at the editorial board of the New York Times to continue spewing their ideas.
00:53:17.060
So, so that sort of radical dissent doesn't exist when all of the powerful institutions are on your
00:53:25.400
side. And it's, it's, it's, again, it's the reason they keep doing that, I think, is partially
00:53:30.540
psychological, because it's fun to play act of being a radical, and partially because it gives them an
00:53:35.800
effective cover for the exercise of power. You know, the, one of the weird phenomenons in America
00:53:40.560
today is we have an elite that insists that it's not the elite, and that allows it to be sort of all
00:53:46.920
o'blessed, no oblige, right? And to exercise its power in increasingly tyrannical ways, because it's
00:53:53.780
sort of shrouded from the perception that it's actually in power when it obviously is.
00:53:58.220
Yeah, we kind of had that weather underground pipe bomb to college elite professor pipeline for
00:54:03.880
a while there. But yeah, it's true that the, the kind of the oligarchical nature of our distributed
00:54:10.040
power network right now means that everyone gets to pretend, you know, billionaires are walking around
00:54:15.200
with, you know, t-shirts and, you know, and jeans from Old Navy pretending like they don't rule the,
00:54:22.060
you know, large chunks of the world, college professors, or yeah, we're, we're, we're the
00:54:27.060
oppressed, even though we can cancel any human being on the planet at any moment. This is just a
00:54:32.160
constant feature of our society, unfortunately, and you have to bring some level accountable,
00:54:37.480
accountability to these organizations, which is, you know, why it's great to see guys like Chris
00:54:41.660
Rufo doing what they're doing in places like Florida, because you really hope that this builds
00:54:46.440
a model for conservatives on how they can kind of bring these institutions to heal and, and kind of
00:54:52.540
generate a leadership class with a, with a little more accountability and a little more groundedness
00:54:56.960
to, to what's going on. But that said, we've got quite a few super chats stacking up before we
00:55:04.320
pivot over to those, Nate, can you tell people where to find your work?
00:55:07.040
Yeah, just Twitter. Um, I would advise against following me, but if you must, it's
00:55:12.140
at N-J-H-O-C-H-M-A-N, and I post anything relevant I do on there.
00:55:18.840
Excellent. All right, let's go over to the people's questions here. We've got glow in the
00:55:22.740
dark for $5. Thank you very much, sir. Uh, the slippery slope, uh, slope only works one way. If
00:55:28.500
you're opposed to leftism, you'll eventually become a Nazi or authoritarian projection by left to
00:55:34.240
undercut them. Yeah. I mean, obviously, uh, there's this idea that if you have any subtle
00:55:39.440
opposition to left, there's only one way for you to go. And that's become some kind of crazy French
00:55:44.440
right-winger actually funny enough. Uh, I'm going to probably do a stream on this tomorrow. NPR just
00:55:48.900
did a, uh, an article about how Christian nationalism is on the rise. The idea that the, you know, that the
00:55:56.000
United States should be a Christian nation is this dangerous new idea that's sweeping the country.
00:56:00.300
Almost half of Republicans believe this. Uh, Oh, okay. So half of the conservative party
00:56:05.900
believes this thing that has been the major belief in the United States through almost its entire
00:56:10.680
history. Yes. Crazy and radical, right? But that's what they do. They get to reframe every bit of this
00:56:15.020
as some kind of radical insurgency, um, which, you know, but maybe that makes, uh, you know,
00:56:20.580
conservatism sound more exciting than it is. Who knows? Maybe that's a good recruitment tool, but
00:56:24.600
that is certainly their aim is to just make any, even the most mild pushback, nothing but,
00:56:28.920
uh, a straight pipeline to authoritarianism. Yeah. Right. And the number of Republicans who
00:56:34.220
actually think that America should be a Christian country, because I've written a little bit about
00:56:37.220
this, uh, has been declining because the Republican base is secularizing, which is its own problem,
00:56:41.780
which is an issue. But, uh, you know, the whole like rising threat of Christian nationalism,
00:56:46.480
uh, completely ignores the fact that the Republican base is, is actually less Christian than it ever
00:56:50.600
happened. So. Yeah. 50% is actually a super depressing number that those are rookie numbers. We got
00:56:55.900
to pump up those numbers boys. Um, but let's see glow in the dark here again for $2. Thank you very
00:57:01.100
much. Continues cultural revolution circa 2023. Yep. We're always in year zero around here. Uh,
00:57:08.880
glow in the dark. Thanks again, man. Bulwark, uh, make concessions or you are far right. Yeah. I mean,
00:57:14.300
I, I don't know who the, so, I mean, I know who the Bulwark is for in some sense, right? It's,
00:57:19.120
it's for people who want to read, um, a right coded criticism of, uh, of conservatism, but like,
00:57:28.460
are there any conservatives who actually read the Bulwark? This is just for New York times readers
00:57:33.060
who want to pretend like they have some level of balance, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the dispatch
00:57:37.700
is to the right of, of the Bulwark. Like the Bulwark is not, it's, it's, it's almost cliche to say the
00:57:42.240
Bulwark is like not conservative anymore. Right. Cause it hasn't been pretty much since its founding,
00:57:46.340
but that's why I, I, you know, this response to this Bulwark piece I wrote was an exception I made.
00:57:51.640
I tried to ignore them mostly because it's not a good faith publication. It was founded by a bunch
00:57:56.540
of disgruntled neoconservatives who were angry that the Republican party wasn't listening to them
00:58:00.200
anymore, or at least was listening to them left. And since then it's basically just been a platform
00:58:04.400
for enacting those resentments against the Republican party. Uh, it's not really, it doesn't
00:58:09.120
really have any coherent principles. Uh, most of the stuff they write isn't particularly interesting or new.
00:58:13.760
Um, it's, it's, it's all sort of the, this weird pretense of false centrism that isn't rooted to
00:58:19.420
any real principles. And it's just, uh, pretending to be in the middle of a, of a rapidly leftward
00:58:24.960
shifting, uh, cultural dynamic. Uh, creeper weirdo here for $5, a friendly reminder when society is
00:58:32.400
so far left, any shift to the right feels like theocracy. And yeah, that that's of course the
00:58:38.320
beautiful thing about what the left has done. You got, you got to give them credit where credit is due.
00:58:42.920
They've managed to turn, you know, radical progressivism into the null hypothesis, right?
00:58:48.220
We, we know that separation of state, at least under the new liberal definition, uh, that
00:58:54.240
somehow all conservatives have managed to onboard, which is just super depressing that the separation
00:58:59.580
of church and state means that any kind of, uh, religious value is immediately theocracy. So the
00:59:06.160
left gets to push every one of its radical viewpoints, every one of its moral dictates and treat
00:59:12.060
them as secular. So they aren't impacted by the constitution and any kind of right-wing values
00:59:17.360
immediately theocratic. It's a nice game and it makes it very easy for them to pretend like they're
00:59:22.220
pointing to something like the constitution for validity. Right. And the whole null hypothesis thing,
00:59:27.120
I've written a little bit about this as well, is why, uh, the right is always framed as the aggressor
00:59:32.740
in the culture war. Like if you saw this with the whole gas stove freak out, right? They said they wanted
00:59:36.940
to ban gas stoves and a bunch of conservatives noticed that they said that. And then it was
00:59:41.100
like, Oh, the right is bringing, you know, gas stoves in the culture war. It's like, it's because
00:59:44.120
the continual leftwards movement, uh, of the side that's on the right side of history, because history
00:59:48.380
only has one direction that's just neutral and any reaction to it, or even noticing that it's
00:59:53.480
happening. That's when it becomes the culture war. You see it in pretty much every, every sphere of
00:59:57.740
politics now. Yeah. I have some friends who are like, well, the culture war is always a
01:00:02.400
distraction. There's always something more meaningful. And I just fundamentally disagree.
01:00:06.340
The culture war is how all this more meaningful stuff got smuggled in right over and over again.
01:00:10.800
This cultural ratchet has then enabled the degradation of forms that allows the other
01:00:15.540
parts of the progressive agenda to get implemented. So the culture war is one of the key entry points
01:00:21.920
of all the other stuff you hate far from being some kind of silly focus to distract you. It's
01:00:27.380
actually the entry point for, for all the stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It's everything. Yeah. Uh,
01:00:32.920
creeper widow here for $5. Republicans could elect Jesus Christ with Fred Rogers as VP and left would
01:00:38.840
still hate anything the right does. I got a million of them. Yeah. I mean, obviously any Republican,
01:00:45.560
any right winger, anyone who's trying to build some kind of consensus by reaching to the left
01:00:49.780
is just playing a fool's game, right? Like these people hate you. Uh, and I was tweeting about this
01:00:54.780
yesterday when it comes to, you know, many, many Christians who are trying to play this game,
01:00:59.320
like, look, the, just say the truth, right? And, and maybe the truth isn't politically right-wing
01:01:04.780
that's fine. But, but just tell the truth for your Christian beliefs because the left hates you,
01:01:10.260
right? They, they, they, they know you're on the wrong side. They know you're the enemy,
01:01:14.660
whether you understand it or not, they know who you are. And so there's just no reason to play these
01:01:19.160
games anymore. You know, it is, it's just very foolish to believe that you're going to strike the
01:01:24.280
right balance. You're going to create the right frame. You're going to put together the right
01:01:27.500
rhetorical response. And all of a sudden the left's going to be like, oh, okay, no,
01:01:30.700
we can live with these people. We're done with the revolution. We'll just put our arms down.
01:01:33.640
It's not going to happen. Yeah, no, the truth doesn't change with a political or cultural
01:01:38.220
convenience, even if only one person in the world believes that it's still the truth, right? So
01:01:41.940
if conservatives aren't going to defend that, then, then nobody is. And we really, we really are lost.
01:01:47.760
Uh, Atraxa here for $2 says anybody's monitor break upon seeing, uh, Nikki's, uh, POTUS ad.
01:01:54.200
Yeah. I mean, this one is just, just an embarrassment. It's what, what I love is that
01:01:59.680
even, uh, mainstream conservatives kind of already realized that this is just going nowhere. Um, but
01:02:05.720
you know, she's got enough money. She's got, she's got enough people who are signed onto the chamber of
01:02:11.180
commerce Republican wing to kind of pay consultants for a while. And so I think this is just going to
01:02:15.840
happen no matter what the good news is like, it's doomed to fail. So you might as well just enjoy the
01:02:20.140
lulls, you know, just, just go ahead and, and, uh, you know, dunk on it while you have the
01:02:24.300
opportunity, but because soon it will be gone and you'll no longer be able to enjoy the, the kind of
01:02:28.380
the clown show that is the, the attempt at running here. I don't know. Some people have told me, I,
01:02:33.460
I, I don't give it enough credit that there, there really is a chance of Nikki Haley breaking through,
01:02:37.780
but I'm pretty doubtful. I don't know. What do you think?
01:02:40.480
No, I mean, I look, anything can happen, right? Like maybe there's massive undiscovered Nikki Haley
01:02:46.060
constituency in the GOP voter base. I don't think there is. Um, but her opening ad was a perfect
01:02:51.440
example. We've been talking about in terms of concession to left-wing premises. Like it started
01:02:55.280
by talking about like, Oh, I grew up on the wrong side of the train tracks and it was this dividing
01:02:59.960
line. And, uh, you know, and that was supposed to be this metaphor for, I assume sort of systemic
01:03:04.820
racism. And then she goes on to be like, you know, they say America is a racist country. You know,
01:03:09.480
they say that our founding principles are racist. And then the ad ends.
01:03:12.960
Right. Like there's no, like there's no, like, but they're wrong. And here's why it's just like,
01:03:19.860
well, they say it. Right. It's like, great. Like, I'm glad that our conservative fighters in the year
01:03:24.280
of our Lord, 2023 are basically opening their presidential campaigns by, by, by seating left-wing
01:03:30.100
premises. Yep. Absolutely. All right, guys. Well, I think we hit everything again. I want to thank
01:03:35.800
Nate for coming on, make sure that you're following him on Twitter and checking out all of his work.
01:03:41.080
And of course, if you enjoyed this, go ahead and hit like, go ahead and subscribe. If you're not
01:03:46.540
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01:03:51.240
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01:03:57.140
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01:04:02.080
on the blaze. You can check that out. That came out yesterday and guys, as always appreciate you.
01:04:07.740
We appreciate you coming by and I'll talk to you next time.