The State of the Anti-Woke Coalition | Guest: Benjamin Boyce | 9⧸18⧸24
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 23 minutes
Words per Minute
190.76524
Summary
Benjamin Boyce joins me to talk about the anti-woke coalition, how they feel about each other, and whether there's any hope for the future of the movement. In this episode, we also discuss the radical left's attempt to take control of the Supreme Court, and how we can stop it.
Transcript
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We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
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Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
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I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
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So many of us hate it, but do the factions that hate it hate each other more than they hate Wokeness itself?
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And he kind of serves as a nexus for many different factions that have some kind of problem, I think, with Wokeness.
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Some of them are more of your traditional conservatives.
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Some of them are concerned leftists, just hoping that they can pull things back from the edge of insanity.
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But I thought he would be a great guy to talk about the state of the anti-woke coalition,
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what these different factions feel about each other,
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and whether he thinks there's any kind of future going forward for those that oppose this movement.
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But before we get to all that, guys, let me introduce you to, of course, our guest today.
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Like I said, I want to get into all of these different factions,
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what Benjamin thinks about the developments that have been going on and kind of this anti-woke side.
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All right, so Benjamin, I think when I said you were coming on, a lot of people said,
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It's the only one left that I can actually put up with anymore.
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Because I think so many people are extremely tired of this way that a lot of people frame things.
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I'm just the guy that is, you know, looking at the facts.
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Do you even see yourself as a centrist at this point?
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So when I started doing my work on my channel, it was because I went to the most wokest university
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in America that went super woke, Evergreen State College.
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And so I spent a lot of time studying that event and studying the way that this anti-racist
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and leftist-ish post-modernist progressivism played out in psychologically and then in people's
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And so I started studying those things and I started interviewing people to gain more understanding
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So I just was participating in understanding the critique of wokeness.
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And so I became more and more skeptical of leftism over time because of the psychological
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aspects of it, the aesthetic aspects of it, and then also the stuff that you talk about
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and kind of people in your wheelhouse about analyzing power and how it operates.
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So I'm definitely skeptical, but I like the liberal framework or the aesthetic of just
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being open to conversing with people and meeting people where they are.
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Though I do select who I speak to, radical leftists turn me off and I have a hard time
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So I'm not like, I don't go both sides as deep as I do.
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I'm more interested in what's happening on the right than what's happening on the left.
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And I'm more skeptical of what's happening on the left than I am skeptical of what's happening
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So I think by behavior, I'm a liberal, by behavior, I'm a centrist because I just suspend
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my own opinion to allow, you know, interacting with other opinions.
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So kind of constitutionally liberal, if not officially political in the, in the kind of
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assuming of those, those priors and that system of political belief.
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Well, I spoke with, I spoke with Sargon of Akkad, Carl Benjamin earlier and this summer,
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this past summer, and, you know, going through his critique of liberalism and, you know, and
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he keeps on coming back to like, liberalism is the outgrowth of a people and a state in
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And the liberal assumptions are trying to interact with the blank slate and rational agents and
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And he's critiquing that, but I still hear him critiquing it as a liberal because he's
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He can't escape liberalism any more than, you know, these other cultures can escape their
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And I think that, you know, growing up when I did in the nineties, eighties, nineties,
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And even if I put on airs of being communist or fascist or whatever, it like, it doesn't
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There's a lot of people who don't like the term post liberal, but I think it's actually
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super helpful, at least in, in the sense that, you know, guys like me might have a lot of
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Carl might have a lot of critiques, at least to what liberalism did as it mutated beyond
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But as you say, ultimately, we're both still creatures of kind of this post enlightenment
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A lot of the assumptions, a lot of the language, a lot of the symbolism that we onboard is marinated
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And so even as we're trying to find what comes next, we recognize kind of a natural end,
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perhaps, to the cycle of this belief, as so many ideologies and beliefs do come to a particular
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And we are still using much of the language because there's no way to escape it.
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I found this particularly interesting when I looked at some of some philosophers like,
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you know, you look at someone like Deleuze who did call himself a Marxist, but a guy like
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But they both heavily are using that language, even though Land would say that, say, Deleuze
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But the culture of academia at that time is so heavily marinated in it that even those
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that are critiquing it or trying to break out of many of the assumptions can only really
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use the language that is currently in fashion if they want to be taken seriously, if they
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want to be able to communicate with their peers.
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And so I feel like there's a moment there where we're post a lot of this stuff.
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We're looking at at least some of its assumptions are falling away.
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But the only way to address that is still inside some level of liberal critique.
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And so you have you have a moment of there's this somewhat liminal space where you're, you
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know, you're you're possibly moving, transitioning from one way of understanding the world to
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But you can only really still do it with the language of the previous ideology.
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And in this way, I think ultimately anything we make or anything we do beyond this, be it
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left or right, will be post liberal in the sense that it will have to carry the language
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It will carry some of the assumptions, some of the understandings forward.
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You know, you don't completely discard an entire paradigm for hundreds of years.
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You generally you carry some level of that into the next iteration.
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If that makes sense, what's something in liberalism that is going away or that needs to be reviewed?
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Because when I speak, when I argue about liberalism with my wife, she's like, well, I don't want
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But I'm like, well, I don't even think the liberal, like us 90s guys, like understand
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We used to have authority in the institutions, but that's going away.
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So I don't even think we have a concept of authority, but we have a knee jerk reaction to authoritarianism.
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So when we critique liberalism, people get defensive about it because they want that liberty and
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And so I think that that's what they critique when they critique woke.
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And now this idea of the woke right is people in the center, whatever that means, looking
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at a growing desire or at least overture of a totalitarianism that's being kind of, you
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When we critique liberalism, do you want to live in a post free society, a post liberty
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Well, I think, and I know this is going to sound pedantic, but we got to define our terms
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I think there's a danger in conflating freedom and liberty because none of the ancients would
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have understood what the libertine aspect of our current culture as liberty.
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That's not, you know, ordered liberty was something that was manifested in a community.
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Aristotle understood this as a relation between people who fill certain roles.
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You could not live a virtuous life without being inside a community.
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And therefore, you could not have the liberty to pursue that life unless you were in these
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communal relations and took on roles and aspects that were necessary for the flourishing of
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humanity at the level in which you engaged with it.
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And so when we say freedom, a lot of people are like, well, the freedom to do heroin in
00:11:25.920
a gutter, that's a little different than, say, the liberty to pursue, you know, the building
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of a family, the worshiping of, you know, a deity.
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These things are there are degrees of liberty that are not necessarily just just completely
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I think this is the failure of liberalism at its end point now.
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And, you know, Paul Godfrey does it really good.
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If you want to I don't know if you've ever read any Paul Godfrey stuff.
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And really, he explains that what we think of as liberalism today, kind of this post John
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Dewey mutation of liberalism, this managerialism, as I've written about, we've talked about
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before, is radically different than the liberalism of a, you know, John Locke, you know, John Locke
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said atheists shouldn't be allowed to hold public office, you know, that they should be put,
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The idea that his liberalism, the liberalism that said, well, free speech, but not for
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atheists, obviously, like and as compared to the liberalism of today, these are radically
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And so, you know, the problem I have with most classical liberals is that they are in no way
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classically liberal, like they in no way actually deal with any of the arguments or the any of the
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context in which arguments were made for liberalism in its founding, right?
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They don't actually hold most of the beliefs that classical liberals held.
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What they mean today is this radical libertine understanding.
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And one of the things that's sold under this is the idea that there's just no authority,
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as if like somewhere the kids in the 90s that, you know, they just, there was no authority
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There are always religious icons that we just didn't acknowledge.
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And so I think there's, I think there's this moment where people like to pretend like,
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oh, well, because we're in this transitory state between perhaps the conservative understanding
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of liberty and the more progressive understanding of liberty.
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And the 90s kind of sat in this, in this transitory moment.
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It felt like just in that moment where both sides were battling and had pushed each other
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away that you could say or do anything, but that was only because the rails, it was that
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we were transitioning from one set of rails to another.
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Not that all the rails had just been disposed of.
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But so what, do we have a choice between different sets of rails?
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And I, that could probably bend into the critique of the woke is always implicitly the desire
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So like Christian nationalists, probably a little bit stronger than the classical liberal,
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which is a little bit more, you know, founding fathers, more like hold these things, these,
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we hold these truths self-evidently, but loosely, you know.
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Well, I do want to avoid, you know, the, the role reversal of you interviewing me, but
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I appreciate your, your, your, your judo here of, of, of reversing the interview, but
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I do actually want to understand because I know what I believe, you know, I'm more than
00:14:39.840
happy to, to respond, but I genuinely am, I'm here to, to understand as, you know, for
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someone who is not sitting somewhere, I guess, in whatever we're calling the new right or
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the distant right or whatever, you know, as, as somebody who comes from a little different
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background is interviewing a wider variety of people.
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What I want to grasp is, is your sense of this, because as you point out, you know, there's
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And I remember this moment, you know, when I first kind of ran into, I guess what we could
00:15:06.700
call YouTube political spheres in, you know, 2015, 2016.
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I, I heard about this thing called Gamergate ran into this guy, sour gun of a cod and from
00:15:16.440
him, I just, you know, Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro and all these people, I really wasn't
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familiar with Milo Yiannopoulos, you know, who's, who's now making his return, I guess.
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But, you know, this moment of where, where it was just a lot of people who didn't like
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what was happening on college campuses and all of these things.
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And they seem to have very wildly different views.
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You had people who described themselves as hardcore leftists and you had people who were,
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you know, Ben Shapiro, who was supposed to be at, you know, I understood at the time
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as this fire breathing conservative, you know, and you had this, this very broad understanding
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that whatever is happening right now in public is not good, you know, and, and, and we need
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But the longer this has gone on, and at this point we're at least 10 years removed from
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kind of the beginning of this anti-woke push, a decade later, it feels like the woke have
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not gone away, that the power of wokeness, there, there may be, and we can get to that,
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I guess, you know, as well, whether this is kind of fading or not, but, but, but it feels
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And because there's not been a definitive solution, we now see the factions starting to say,
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We have to avoid the woke right because we need to be more objective.
00:16:30.820
Well, no, we need more Christian nationalism because your objective centrism was simply
00:16:36.280
No, we need more, you know, return to the constitution because that's really what's going to, you
00:16:40.720
know, and so each one of the factions having gone through 10 years of not really seeing
00:16:44.460
the anti-woke coalition, uh, have, have a big victory are now saying, well, we need more
00:16:51.180
And so I just, I just wanted to know where you thought that left everyone standing or, you
00:16:56.860
There's a pretty interesting history that should be written at some point because you're right.
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Gamergate is really powerful because that's just a, that's, that's an influx point, but
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also 2017, something happened in 2017 and 2018, where I landed on the scene with, uh, Barry
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Weiss wrote this article about the intellectual dark web.
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By Eric Weinstein, which is Brett Weinstein's brother.
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Brett was not my teacher, but we were, we were at the same college and, uh, for a moment
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there, you saw this really weird thing happening where Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson were selling
00:17:36.280
Like they go on these speaking tours and all these people showed up.
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So there was something fascinating about everybody wanted to go and listen to a college lecture.
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And then there's also this big switch from, uh, the mainstream media and written articles
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to the dawn of the podcast and people really going back to an oral and oral society rather
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And I think that that's interacting with our brains in novel ways and causing us to make
00:18:04.040
different connections with, uh, our content and the content creators.
00:18:08.640
And there's these parasocial relationships and there's this audience capture because
00:18:13.940
So this is, this is all happening within a context of some very novel technology.
00:18:18.200
And, and I think that that stuff is disrupting a lot of how we look and relate to each other
00:18:26.140
So there's that and the IDW tanked at a very specific moment.
00:18:31.100
There was this guy named Travis Pangburn who's doing most of the bookings and he ended up
00:18:36.240
getting in trouble because he was, it was unintentionally, I'd study this for a bit.
00:18:40.780
I don't think he intended to do it, but he started doing a pyramid scam where he was selling
00:18:45.280
tickets for the next event to pay for this event.
00:18:47.380
And it just ran away from him because there's no way that these intellectuals could actually
00:18:54.400
And it kind of, there was this moment in New York where they're all going to meet and
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it was just this great centrist talking across boundaries and it just kind of collapsed on
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And a lot of people were out of money and it kind of fizzled in this way, and this iteration
00:19:11.440
And from that moment, they stopped, they, they got more and more into their own bubbles.
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That group of people, they were kind of like these, it's kind of the Avengers, you know,
00:19:19.440
like they all had their different skin colors and, and their suits of armor and, and kind
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of like their, their wheelhouses and stuff like that.
00:19:26.240
And then, then a number of different shocks occurred that split them up over different
00:19:35.440
And you see where Sam Harris was in that group and Brett Weinstein was in that group.
00:19:40.620
And they had two totally different ways of interpreting the response to COVID and, you
00:19:46.500
know, all the medical stuff and the institutional stuff.
00:19:49.320
And from what I saw, Sam, who has no God, ended up believing in the institutions and putting
00:19:55.320
so much faith in these things called institutions.
00:19:57.880
And that's why he really hates Donald Trump because Donald Trump's an existential threat to
00:20:03.540
Brett has a more evolutionary psychologist lens or just evolutionary biology lens.
00:20:09.660
And he critiques power and these systems of power in a different way where he can critique
00:20:15.280
He doesn't necessarily have to believe in these institutions, though you can see him getting
00:20:19.280
really antsy about, you know, the amount of technology and the, how complex our society
00:20:27.480
We need these institutions to regulate the power grid.
00:20:30.720
And if we set up these nuclear armaments and nuclear energy things, we have to have a whole
00:20:35.400
bunch of competent people and we have to trust these institutions too.
00:20:38.640
So he's, but you see this breakdown in communication on that issue.
00:20:44.580
And what Paul VanderKley, who's a Calvinist, reformed Calvinist minister in Sacramento, I don't
00:20:54.180
He spoke about these, he spoke about discourse kind of as a delta, like the end of a river
00:21:00.380
where there's all these different streams and there's these different lives that live,
00:21:03.820
life forms that live in these different streams.
00:21:05.520
And every once in a while there'll be this, this flood and all of these creatures will
00:21:10.200
intermingle and then the, the flood will die down and they, they separate.
00:21:15.400
And so what we see is there, there, there's these instances where people will meet and
00:21:20.440
gather, and then they'll eventually go into their different streams and their different
00:21:26.740
And they can't communicate to each other anymore.
00:21:29.460
And I think that when you have a common enemy, that's one way that people gather together.
00:21:34.460
And when you describe the woke, that was a common cause.
00:21:40.900
We know that, you know that you, you talk about it in your own way, uh, critiquing it
00:21:45.040
through, I don't know, I don't want to pigeonhole you, but like Machiavellian power analysis
00:21:49.380
kind of stuff, which I think is really interesting.
00:21:51.540
Um, so, so you've always been picky about your produce, but now you find yourself checking
00:22:02.300
At Sobeys, we always pick guaranteed fresh Canadian produce first.
00:22:09.320
When, when the enemy, so I guess to try to get to your question, people found common cause
00:22:19.420
going against the woke or found common cause like fighting against lockdowns.
00:22:23.560
And then that issue tends to be beyond them, beyond any given one of them, because it's,
00:22:30.520
this is why I like your type of analysis, because there's something about it that's baked into
00:22:34.560
the system and until we figure out that the system, until we figure out this, how to attack
00:22:44.720
We're kind of throwing toothpicks at a dragon kind of thing.
00:22:48.000
And we do it all together and we feel really good.
00:22:50.340
And, and, you know, every five days, like the end of wokeness, the end of woke Disney,
00:22:54.980
the end of this, the end of this, but it keeps on rearing its head.
00:22:59.000
Um, and so I think it's frustrating for people who are really concerned about the direction
00:23:04.520
of history and our society, um, to see this problem, to speak about it, get a lot of credibility
00:23:11.300
speaking to it, and then see their efforts kind of wasted and they have to make compromises
00:23:17.940
And that's what the beauty of this thing called MAGA, I think there's something that's loose
00:23:22.680
enough about the big tent Trump approach for some reason that is allowing many people to
00:23:28.460
And, and so when I see, you know, people attacking each other who are nominally all against this
00:23:38.720
And so there's just something promising in the direction of that on a political level.
00:23:47.040
No, no, no, no, this is all fascinating and I'm just absorbing it for a moment, but yeah,
00:23:51.920
I do think that there needs to be a, actually, uh, let's, uh, let's cut to a break real quick.
00:23:57.320
And then when we come back, I want to go deeper into, I want to go deeper into, uh, the coalition
00:24:04.420
Cause I, I do think there's a lot to, uh, to, to unpack there, but yeah, let's hear from
00:24:08.980
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So I think the part you got to at the end there was really critical because when you
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have different factions, when everybody has a different agenda, but they are co-belligerents
00:25:40.680
to some degree, you're going to end up in this scenario where the longer the fight goes
00:25:46.240
on, the more the factions start to recognize their own differences, especially when it comes
00:25:53.480
Like you're trying to coordinate along this axis of anti-wokeness, but you recognize that
00:25:58.780
maybe there's different aspects of wokeness that you actually oppose more than others.
00:26:03.700
In fact, there might be some parts of wokeness that certain enemies, certain allies actually
00:26:14.420
And maybe they want to keep a certain piece of that, or maybe they don't want to go as hard
00:26:18.840
against it, or you realize that the more you try to coordinate across these goals, you
00:26:23.920
realize that actually the lack of shared values or moral vision prevents you from cooperating
00:26:32.320
And what a guy like Trump does is, for better or for worse, however people feel about this,
00:26:40.180
He acts as somebody who steps in and says, whatever the problems are, what the differences
00:26:44.680
are, this is the direction we're going, and maybe I'll be the great decider and I'll sort
00:26:50.300
these things out when we're done, but right now we crush this enemy, right?
00:26:57.040
If you're going to be in my movement, you find a way to work together, and then we can
00:27:03.660
And so I think that's kind of the function that that serves.
00:27:07.740
Not that it ultimately resolves many of these problems, but at least gives you a central
00:27:13.980
figure that kind of allows you to say, all right, well, at least we're on this team.
00:27:19.240
It really is leadership that solves this problem more than hashing out the ideological differences.
00:27:28.580
That was another interesting thing about the IDW, so-called, or the people in it.
00:27:36.120
They were not PR people, and you can see a lot of cringe coming from them because they
00:27:40.720
would not, they're not natural politicians, you know, they're kind of professors and stuff.
00:27:44.240
And so you see their evolution as public figures, and there's just a different landscape when
00:27:48.560
you are in the public sphere that it molds you, it shapes you.
00:27:52.040
You take on the form of a demagogue, whether you like it or not.
00:27:57.680
And it's kind of scary when you're like, well, I don't want to be a leader or anything,
00:28:03.900
I see people go, they get, you know, 10,000 followers, and then they think that they're
00:28:09.300
a leader, you know, and they're not really a leader.
00:28:13.420
And so, you know, these different woke or anti-woke factions, they have different critiques,
00:28:21.100
but they're not necessarily, well, and then they have different, so I love to talk to them
00:28:28.580
And it's always like, it's so nefarious, it's very nebulous.
00:28:33.760
So somebody like Trump, he's got this, he's got meme magic.
00:28:44.860
He's, yeah, that's a really good quality of a leader.
00:28:50.620
You see that one about Kamala dodging interviews and Trump dodging.
00:28:56.580
So, but on the reverse of that, a lot of, you get a lot of attention and you have to have
00:29:03.800
a certain amount of ego to attract that attention.
00:29:09.360
And so that's another test in actual political movement or change, political change.
00:29:16.580
You have to know when to follow and you have to know when to be a leader.
00:29:20.320
And you can't just be a cat going here and there and scratching everybody's, you know,
00:29:25.680
hindquarters that, you know, deviates from your plan.
00:29:30.020
So they're lightning rods in a certain respect, but they're only going to go so far.
00:29:36.240
And so you have to kind of, I think it's really beneficial.
00:29:39.800
Just like my studies of your crew, like the DR, the new, the new right, whatever it is.
00:29:45.820
It's like, there's all these individual thinkers with these individual ways of putting things
00:29:49.940
together and they have different personalities and you put them into a can and you shake them
00:29:55.620
But if I can survey them, then I can kind of start to build a picture or rely on their
00:30:01.460
different levels of analysis to get more stability in my view of the world.
00:30:06.040
But the question is, why do I need a view of the world?
00:30:10.320
Are we even built to think this way about the world, about, you know, all these wars
00:30:15.100
going on here, these huge, uh, inorganic egregores, these states and stuff.
00:30:28.700
Yeah, I think that really is the, the, the crisis is we are dealing with a problem of scale
00:30:34.040
that simply, I don't know that we have the ability to overcome.
00:30:37.560
Like I genuinely, I am critical of the idea that really we can maintain social organization
00:30:43.500
at this level, which I know is terrifying to someone like say Brett, because he's like,
00:30:47.100
well, we have a lot of really dangerous stuff that's requiring organization at this scale.
00:30:51.600
And of course he's entirely correct, but I guess my point is that's true, but better to
00:30:57.880
realize that limitation now and adjust for it best you can rather than saying, well, we
00:31:04.440
just have to make it work because otherwise everything comes apart because what you end
00:31:09.000
up doing is only going further down that role, only investing more in, you know, the type
00:31:15.280
of scaling that is going to require the type of scaling, you know, it becomes a, a self-feeding
00:31:20.280
The real accelerationism is, is actually our, our willingness to plug ourselves into vast
00:31:28.140
grids that require, you know, even more acceleration.
00:31:31.920
And so I think this is that, that itself is its own problem, but I think this is also why
00:31:37.260
the anti-woke coalition is, is so many factions because in a real, in organic politics, you would
00:31:44.500
have communities and communities would have shared moral visions based on shared history and
00:31:49.820
religious understanding, cultural ways of being, this would not be a grand ideological, you
00:32:00.640
But because we have abandoned so much of that form of social organization and we have embraced
00:32:07.060
really the ideological last century or two, we've almost lost the idea of what that even
00:32:14.180
And so now, you know, people are so geographically removed from the people who share their values
00:32:19.700
and their common understanding that ideology, the only way, this is the same problem people
00:32:25.680
Like they, because we've lost the idea of ethnos, we have this really ugly block of race
00:32:30.920
politics now because everyone only understands how to operate at scale on these, on these very
00:32:38.040
And we have the same problem, I think with politics and ideology.
00:32:41.020
We, we only, well, that's why we're still arguing over ideologies that have been dead for a
00:32:45.580
century at this point, you know, fascism, oh boy, yeah, it's coming back.
00:32:50.840
You know, even communism at this point, you know, one way and where maybe we have gay
00:32:54.400
race communism now, but Marxism, as we understand it, classical Marxism is dead.
00:33:01.680
And so, you know, we're still arguing over these ideological constructs because we don't
00:33:06.240
even know what organic political organization looks like.
00:33:09.600
And then when we have a collection of people who are like, well, we don't like the wokeness
00:33:14.460
because it's a somewhat cohesive understanding, not based even on, you know, congruent ideologies,
00:33:19.700
but just basically incentive factors that drive this giant complex of intersectional ideology.
00:33:26.740
You know, we don't, the only thing we know how to do is then ourselves like, you know,
00:33:30.740
say, well, if we just get a little more of my ideology, that solves the problem.
00:33:34.000
And there's no real, you know, every one of these people who I've sat down with in real
00:33:38.500
life, any of these internet people I've sat down in real life, I've gotten along with.
00:33:44.800
But as soon as you get back into the, you know, these kind of, you know, these internet
00:33:49.360
cells and into these ideologies, there's just no, there's no crossover anymore.
00:33:54.040
It's all, you know, protecting your, your turf, your, your area.
00:34:02.240
I mean, we, I got into a dustup with Constantine Kissin or Constantine Kissin about his critique
00:34:08.880
of the woke right, his critique of Daryl Cooper and Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.
00:34:14.260
And I felt that he was bottling up a lot of thinkers on the new right or dissident right
00:34:21.080
and trying to cast them all as woke because they have a different understanding, a different
00:34:26.800
And so I, today I was blessed to get to hash it out with him and just really investigate
00:34:34.020
him and let my misconceptions fall away and just listen to the guy and see who he is and
00:34:40.780
how he's operating and kind of test his authenticity by listening to him and then allowing him to,
00:34:46.940
to state his case and then kind of coming to a more, a better understanding.
00:34:50.280
But the incentive structures of the internet is if you say spicy things, if you come out
00:34:54.280
pugilistically, uh, co-belligerent, I, is that a word?
00:35:01.420
People who are not allies, but are fighting on the same side.
00:35:05.140
It's just, you can, you get a lot of traction by acting in a certain way, but that, that way
00:35:13.280
And you have to, you don't just, you know, people say touch grass, but really being conscious
00:35:20.100
of the human being that you're touching through the internet, the human, the, the internet's
00:35:27.500
But it's not, sorry, not, not, I don't want to, I don't want to roll you over here, but
00:35:32.560
The internet is not a, a, a, a, a avenue for human connection at all.
00:35:38.460
I don't think humans are capable of, uh, truly understanding each other, uh, at that
00:35:46.820
Like, um, you, you know, the, how they put the portals in New York and Ireland and the
00:35:51.580
minute they put those, those like video portals in the Jewish tunnel theory.
00:35:57.300
People have already forgotten about that story.
00:35:58.960
No, they put the, um, they put the video, video screens, the live video screens.
00:36:06.620
Well, perhaps if you take the Jewish tunnel, you eventually end up in Ireland.
00:36:09.740
Uh, but, uh, but they put these screens up and, um, when, when they did, the first thing
00:36:16.620
that happened is like, people just started, you know, flicking each other off.
00:36:20.620
Which is, you know, whatever they started insulting each other across continents and eventually
00:36:24.740
escalated to the point where like guys from Ireland were sticking like pictures of
00:36:28.580
And like, I hope, I hope that you all die in the next areas, like that kind of stuff.
00:36:33.080
And I, I don't think that's a mistake and I don't think that's weird.
00:36:36.880
I don't think that's just a moment in our culture.
00:36:38.940
I think humans are literally incapable of treating abstract objects on a screen as people
00:36:46.320
and attempts to force humans to do that are actually just misunderstanding human nature.
00:36:53.040
But I could be wrong about that, but that is my strong, how do you explain, how do you
00:36:58.420
Cause everything you do is facilitated by human connection.
00:37:01.120
I mean, you have a bunch of people listening to us now, live chatting back at us.
00:37:05.280
They're here, they're spending their time, their attention attending to us.
00:37:08.760
Now it's one way we're not attending to them unless we'll read some super chats later on.
00:37:16.460
So, uh, I'll let, let's do some post-modernism here.
00:37:21.440
Like we're, we're getting into hyper-reality here, right?
00:37:23.820
Like how many levels of abstraction, like how, how many levels of the hyper-real can we be
00:37:29.020
on and still be interacting in a truly human sense?
00:37:34.900
Like I have made friends on this thing we call the dissonant, right?
00:37:40.420
Like I am now personally involved with, share meals with, had drinks with, but until I have
00:37:46.820
made that in my real life connection, it is significantly different than people who I
00:37:51.980
only know on like Twitter DMs or those kinds of things.
00:37:55.140
And then there's another level of abstraction between like complete anons.
00:37:58.480
And as somebody who started as an anon, I'm not here, you know, knocking that at all.
00:38:06.020
But there, there is a difference, uh, between, um, even just completely anon interactions
00:38:12.160
and like, and people recognize, again, as people who are trying to organize in real life,
00:38:16.760
we have recognized this, you know, guys who are putting together the old core glory club
00:38:20.740
and the skilledings, they've recognized that the, you know, you know, the first thing is
00:38:24.840
sharing, uh, just face-to-face conversations, not just being a JPEG.
00:38:28.960
And then, you know, being in real life at, you know, these are all different steps that
00:38:33.700
build trust, that build community in a real way.
00:38:35.880
And so there is a certain level of human connection that is occurring right now, but there are
00:38:40.300
people who live their entire lives, as you pointed out in this very parasocial bubble
00:38:43.820
because they, you know, the, in, in very unhealthy, because they believe the thing on the internet
00:38:48.420
is a real human interaction when it isn't at all.
00:38:56.980
I was invited to a conference around the gender issue, right?
00:39:00.540
Some, uh, gender skeptical people, some gender critical, just like this, this rad tag group
00:39:05.900
of scientists and concerned parents and detransitioners and stuff.
00:39:09.720
And I stumbled into that story by just interviewing and having these conversations with these people.
00:39:15.420
And I ended up interviewing just tons of people.
00:39:17.740
And what I did by doing that was that I gave each one of them a voice and then they recognize
00:39:25.520
And then it just kind of, I, I had some small part in facilitating this organization.
00:39:30.340
And when I went to Ireland and I met people, there was some of the parasocial where people
00:39:34.580
were like, oh, you're Benjamin Boyce, or they'd hear my voice.
00:39:36.620
They fart, start falling asleep because that's what they used my work to do.
00:39:40.980
And, you know, I had some Pavlovian kind of like nighttime Zoloft, uh, powers.
00:39:50.600
Like, I was just like, oh yeah, like I see your whole body now, not just your, you know,
00:39:54.800
this part of you, or like now I, I put the, that little gif or profile picture to an actual
00:40:03.420
body, but it didn't, it felt totally porous to me.
00:40:06.940
See, for me, it feels very different, but perhaps that's just dispositions, you know?
00:40:12.060
But, so that being said, I, you know, I just became a stepfather of a year and a half ago.
00:40:18.000
And so I spent a lot of time with these boys, 10 and 12.
00:40:21.740
And, um, how I spend time with them is to do things with them.
00:40:27.360
I'm really into all these different Euros and stuff.
00:40:29.400
So we're using this completely constructed, fabulous system to be together and interact
00:40:39.020
And so like our personalities and the table talk and like learning different skills,
00:40:43.160
learning math, learning how to pay attention, learning strategy, learning all these different
00:40:47.020
We're using this simulation, uh, you know, this game simulation to facilitate this other
00:40:57.100
I like having interviews and stuff, but like I get really antsy around people.
00:41:00.500
So I want to have something to do while I'm with people.
00:41:03.720
So I know there's, I need a little bit of an escape from people in order to be with
00:41:12.200
So I'm somebody who, uh, played, also played a lot of board games.
00:41:15.740
We've talked about that, you know, at some point we'll have air.
00:41:19.560
Well, then next time we'll, I'll have you on just for the straight board game discussion.
00:41:24.540
I want to know all your, your favorite fiddly German games, but deck builders are also important.
00:41:28.940
So make sure you, you, uh, uh, you research, but, um, you know, I'm somebody who is very
00:41:34.340
familiar, uh, as somebody who, who, uh, you know, was around these like gaming stores.
00:41:39.800
I know that there are these, you know, there's these very awkward, you know, autists and in
00:41:44.520
order to get them all together, they all have to memorize the same facts about like Warhammer
00:41:48.560
40 K or magic, the gathering, they don't really talk until you like put that in the center.
00:41:54.340
And then once you do that, you can actually reverse engineer humanity out of them.
00:41:59.540
Like once they start, you know, but they have to like Spurg about space Marines or whatever
00:42:07.200
And then like, once you've done this, then you can, and this is just what culture used
00:42:12.560
Like all cultures are just these high, this high degree of complex interactions that you're
00:42:19.160
So we're all referencing the Iliad or we're all referencing Faust or we're all referencing
00:42:23.160
the Bible or we're all referencing Warhammer 40 K, but there's something that is becomes
00:42:27.600
this, you know, substrate from which we can, you know, uh, create this, this interaction.
00:42:34.020
That's not what I'm talking about when I'm talking about the internet.
00:42:38.880
I think it is incredibly difficult at scale for people to, uh, across giant distances, uh,
00:42:46.400
be able to regularly interact and treat another person as if they are a human being.
00:42:53.320
Like just in crowds, think about the way that dynamics change when you go from like two on
00:42:57.600
two to, you know, 200 on 200, like just that itself or 2000 or 2 million.
00:43:03.080
Like they're just, the scale really does radically alter those, those, uh, interactions.
00:43:09.420
And so I think that is a huge factor that, you know, you can't just say, oh, well, it's like
00:43:14.720
I think there, there, there, something gets lost there.
00:43:19.560
Jesus said that whenever two or three are gathered in my name, I am there.
00:43:29.480
But remember there, he also talks about the importance of gathering in person.
00:43:33.100
Actually, that's a critical, critical factor as well.
00:43:36.460
Um, you know, I, I, I don't, it's again, it's, I have made friends, I have organized,
00:43:43.960
I'm not saying this is impossible, uh, in its entirety.
00:43:47.960
I'm not saying there is no human element to it.
00:43:50.180
What I am saying is just that there is, uh, I, I don't think that ultimately it's entirely
00:43:56.360
possible to treat every human being on the internet as a human being.
00:44:00.300
Uh, it, it, that is not something that's available to you.
00:44:03.860
People can barely treat the people in their, their actual community as human beings.
00:44:08.760
And I, I, I think that there's a level of, uh, of distancing and abstraction that makes
00:44:14.200
it very difficult for people to do it on a regular basis.
00:44:17.180
I think I, at the bottom of these political, uh, problems and ideologies and stuff, it's
00:44:22.400
just human psychology, uh, spirituality, like just being mature, being responsible, understanding
00:44:32.080
And until we return to that, then none of these systems are going to work.
00:44:37.080
And so when, when we talk about post liberalism or liberalism or the failures of liberalism,
00:44:43.340
it's like, maybe it's not the failure of liberalism.
00:44:45.260
It's the failure of liberalism to, uh, to keep something central to the human experience,
00:44:52.180
to put something on top of, of our value system.
00:44:55.360
And there's something that's missing on top and people will say, you know, it's the
00:44:59.920
But whenever somebody like a Christian nationalist wants us to return to a Christian nation and
00:45:04.760
they make an argument that we always were a Christian nation and we don't work as a nation
00:45:10.500
You're like, well, there still needs to be a living God in the heart of Christianity.
00:45:14.520
And you can't turn people to Jesus who in their heart are not turned to Jesus using
00:45:19.280
that framework that I kind of believe, kind of don't believe, depending on who I'm talking
00:45:23.500
Um, and to, so to instigate some level of solidarity, I think it has to simulate connection.
00:45:31.680
So the internet does simulate connection and it simulates ego.
00:45:38.700
And I think, I think it's a human tool and that it can be made out of human beings much more
00:45:44.540
But right now we're kind of serving the machine rather than, uh, the machine serving the human.
00:45:50.500
But it's just like anything, you know, like you drive, do you drive the car?
00:45:55.300
Kind of thing, you know, like road rage and stuff like that.
00:45:57.640
So again, I have to apologize to your audience.
00:46:01.580
The way that my mind thinks, I just kind of shoot things out.
00:46:11.260
That's like I said, I wanted to explore, you know, options that I don't normally go to
00:46:18.060
That's the, that's the whole reason we're here, but we might just disagree on the question
00:46:23.660
And, and we'll find out, I guess, who's right, but that might be as, as far as we can go down
00:46:29.180
But I did want to steer us a little back towards the, the actual question of the coalition itself.
00:46:34.940
So if you, you know, if you look at the coalition as it stands, as you pointed out, you were
00:46:40.060
just talking out to Constantine and when it comes to woke, right.
00:46:42.820
And I certainly was thinking about him among others when I wanted to address this topic.
00:46:47.800
You know, I am somebody who is not a stranger to the, for the need of some level of public
00:46:55.460
Like for me, these are my rules of engagement and they're just mine there, you know, so others
00:47:00.780
But for me personally, you know, I understand co-belligerence.
00:47:04.620
So my, my general rule, I think, I think that, um, you know, uh, ultimately, uh, it's correct
00:47:13.640
Haywood's no enemies to the right, or, uh, is generally a good guiding principle.
00:47:20.040
The, the only time I try, the only time I violate that specifically is, is, is when I see someone
00:47:29.320
So when I, when I look and I see someone saying, oh, we can't include that guy because he believes
00:47:35.720
something that, you know, is beyond the pale and we have to guard that from the right.
00:47:39.380
That is pretty much the only time I try to throw the elbow.
00:47:42.360
Not that I won't point to people being incorrect.
00:47:45.260
Why do you, why do you want to keep things open like that?
00:47:47.680
Uh, because, because I want to build the widest, uh, widest possible co-belligerent, uh, coalition,
00:47:53.480
uh, to, to at least defeat the current system as it is the, the, the, and I think importantly
00:48:00.100
to keep the lines of communication open, the longer, the, the more you allow people to gatekeep
00:48:05.580
people from the right, uh, the farther right out of the situation, the more you make it impossible
00:48:13.740
Uh, and so I think it's critical for, you know, for that opportunity, but also because
00:48:19.280
you simply are weakening your ability to wield power when you, you know, spend your time allowing
00:48:25.420
people to cut a lot of important or critical aspects of the coalition out.
00:48:30.100
But at the same time, I don't want to, I don't want to, you know, say that I'm just this neutral
00:48:34.220
Like I do have ideological or, you know, theoretical disagreements with people.
00:48:39.140
I do think there are right and wrong ways to do things strategically.
00:48:42.300
I do think that there are, for instance, to, you know, to pick a hobby horse, classical
00:48:46.940
liberals who still believe in this idea of institutional neutrality and centrism, and we
00:48:56.720
Like, I do think that that's a flaw and that, and that lie is built into the woke system in
00:49:03.060
They, they, they, they portray themselves as both the arbiters of this, of this kind
00:49:09.700
of neutrality, acceptable neutrality, but at the same time are obviously pushing pretty
00:49:16.000
But by assuming that that is a true promise and that you can return to that true promise
00:49:20.480
and the woke are just, you know, guarding against it, but not realizing that that promise
00:49:25.720
I think that that creates issue, but you know, I, but I separate that correction of a ideological
00:49:32.680
or theoretical difference from a direct attempt to like, you know, um, expel someone from the
00:49:40.240
Like, sorry, you just can't be in here because you don't, you haven't fully bought into this.
00:49:45.160
And so therefore there's simply no way that you are acceptable.
00:49:47.860
And I should actively encourage others to exclude you from any efforts that we might
00:49:53.920
Even if it comes to the cost of losing other people, because a guilt by association isn't
00:50:00.300
Like you are facilitating, let's just say some things that are odious to other potential
00:50:06.180
And by allowing that in your wheelhouse, you know, like the Nazi dinner party, like there's
00:50:12.900
a little bit of truth there, but not that everybody's a Nazi if there's one Nazi in the
00:50:16.780
room, but there is like, you know, you, you're not going to have buddies with the, why are
00:50:23.060
And then, you know, like, like try to get some money from the Zionists too, you know,
00:50:26.780
like you're going to have to make decisions, right?
00:50:30.000
And, and, but the, the, you know, the, the problem here is of course, look, look at someone
00:50:34.260
Like anyone who has actually looked at his work understands what Daryl is trying to do.
00:50:40.720
I don't even agree with Daryl on, uh, on certain things.
00:50:44.040
I think he's a bleeding heart leftist on certain, on certain issues, but Daryl overall is a
00:50:50.060
guy who I think is trying to be incredibly honest and point to human suffering and the
00:50:55.420
ability of humans to go to terrible places pretty much across the board.
00:51:01.560
And the fact that a guy like him would be so easily painted as some kind of Nazi sympathizer
00:51:07.140
by just incredibly lazy people who pretend that they're fighting for free speech, who pretend
00:51:11.880
that they're fighting against woke cancellation, just really that that's what I worry about
00:51:19.960
Cause if we associate with these people, they'll drive out what you end up is seeing how easy
00:51:24.080
it is to just with some guys like, you know, maybe Churchill made some mistakes.
00:51:27.860
Maybe actually there's a, there's, there's a complex situation.
00:51:30.860
And while I thoroughly, you know, decry the actions of the Nazis, perhaps they're not just
00:51:37.860
Perhaps they had human motivations and there's a history and relations behind this simply by
00:51:43.080
bringing that up, you still see the knee jerk reaction built in, even the people who pretend
00:51:48.060
like they're fighting against that very knee jerk reaction.
00:51:51.660
And that's the, that's the kind of thing that I'm attempting to sort out.
00:51:54.800
But we got to get rid of that gag reflex to some extent.
00:51:58.340
That's why I was so, uh, I was honored to have kissing on and I'm glad that he, he allowed
00:52:02.940
me to interview him because we drill, drill down into it.
00:52:05.780
And unfortunately I watched the wrong Daryl Cooper interview.
00:52:08.800
So I didn't know how to exactly counter his claims, kissing's claims about Daryl Cooper.
00:52:13.400
But I do see when you dive into, when I first started venturing into that dissident, right,
00:52:19.840
you know, you're like, Oh, this is really interesting.
00:52:23.700
And then all of a sudden you see like, like Thomas seven, seven, you're like, okay, this
00:52:27.100
guy is like, he's like, he wants to be, at least he's broadcasting.
00:52:32.060
And then even in your comments and stuff, there's a lot of people who have really big
00:52:35.460
problems with this race of people, um, a certain race of people, every comment just
00:52:42.880
And I just don't know how to, how to navigate that without kind of being touched by it in a
00:52:49.720
way, like being touched against my principles of like, like kind of a Christian understanding
00:52:54.960
that there is, I don't know, how do you, I'm still a baby in this area.
00:52:58.560
Like, how do you square human self-interest, group self-interest, tribalism, um, with resentment
00:53:05.120
and people feeling like a lot of their opportunities are being taken away or they're being controlled,
00:53:10.520
uh, in what they can say and what they can't say and what their children learn by people
00:53:18.220
Like, I understand the pattern recognition is just going to be happening, but I'm wary
00:53:23.120
of like living on that level of the pattern recognition and escaping those different tiers
00:53:29.520
of pattern recognition is really important to me.
00:53:33.220
Yeah, I, I guess the, I guess the question is, you know, and this is, this is always the
00:53:41.460
problem is like how much gatekeeping can liberalism do and still hold to its idea and pretend like
00:53:47.900
Like there, there's, because the answer that it seems to me that this liberal neutral neutrality
00:53:55.860
requires an awful lot of cancellation and destruction and, and, and, uh, abandonment.
00:54:02.820
You're okay with that because you think that that's built into any human system.
00:54:08.760
Like, I, I think that that's, that the unavoidable, even to the people who pretend that it is avoidable,
00:54:13.720
they actually end up doing it and doing it rather vigorously.
00:54:16.960
Um, and so, you know, you're, the question, this is, you asked the question earlier, and
00:54:21.400
this is always the liberal question, who decides, right?
00:54:25.080
Who decides this is always, and the, the attempt by liberalism is always to construct something
00:54:32.960
It used to be God, but we don't do God anymore.
00:54:36.660
And so it's a constitution or it's an assimilation of, uh, academics.
00:54:41.540
It's institutions that have been credibly verified.
00:54:45.520
There's something that is beyond reproach outside of the system that will decide this for us.
00:54:51.700
And all that is, is a shell game for sovereignty, right?
00:54:55.820
It's saying, well, there's no sovereign person.
00:55:01.700
There's no, but no, we just have this consensus that's been arrived at by this outside force.
00:55:07.460
That's uncritiquable, you know, and, and, and then pretend like that's an actual solution.
00:55:12.180
But the truth is that just someone always decides that there is always a sovereign, that it will
00:55:18.860
The power will always rest in the hands of a person or a group of people.
00:55:23.240
And that's really uncomfortable for, especially because we recognize a, you know, we, we've
00:55:29.160
been bred to understand that that's, that's a bad outcome, but be also because there is
00:55:33.660
a lot of truth that ultimately having our fate in the hands of someone else is a scary thing.
00:55:38.480
You know, you, you talked about leadership, but also, you know, being able to follow.
00:55:44.880
Everyone just wants to believe that they are actually in charge and they have the liberty
00:55:50.440
Uh, but that's just not true and as uncomfortable as it is, an exception arises, right?
00:55:57.180
And, and so, you know, and, and the, the problem is the exceptions keep arising and that becomes
00:56:03.840
You know, I think that's why someone like Brett is in the position he's in.
00:56:06.660
There's a crisis of institutions because too many of these exceptions have arisen for him
00:56:12.000
I saw a video yesterday where he was talking about like, he's skeptical of the entire, entire
00:56:16.560
childhood vaccine schedule, but yeah, but, but, you know, but, but, you know, you recognize
00:56:27.220
Like once you've killed God and you're wearing the blood on your hands, then you really are
00:56:33.740
in this moment where, who do you trust and who decides and what do you make?
00:56:37.060
And now liberals have just killed their own God.
00:56:39.060
They've just, they're just looking at the blood on their hands of their institutional
00:56:47.980
I think it's, I think it's the, you know, as we've talked about before, I think that
00:56:52.580
ultimately it's the scaling down of these, of these communities.
00:56:56.960
I don't think we can operate at that scale, but.
00:57:03.700
I think that an AI articulation of these various different societies, like the scaling back,
00:57:11.200
but still having a Costco, I guess that's what ultimately my, my post-liberalism is.
00:57:17.820
You know, I just, I don't know what my shared moral vision is, but my shared vision involves
00:57:25.380
Like you pay your little fee, you get your $2 hot dog, you know, you get your bulk, you
00:57:35.700
We get along, I'm, you know, I spend so much time looking at the horrors of the world and
00:57:39.640
all this contention and polarity politically, but then I sit in traffic.
00:57:46.520
I mean, I'm stuck in traffic, but I get to listen to my podcast.
00:57:51.280
So I think with the grace of God, we've been led here.
00:57:54.220
And I think by the grace of God, we can figure this out.
00:57:56.960
There's something that is sustaining us that allowed us to get to this level.
00:58:04.020
And I think that we weren't led here just to fall away from it.
00:58:07.260
I don't know what that future holds, but I do think that there's an amazing power of grace
00:58:12.800
and promise in each one of us, that good discussion, that using the internet wisely and properly,
00:58:21.600
and then opening up to contentious discussions about interpreting history, questioning narratives
00:58:27.360
and stuff like that, shaking those little ossified stories, and even getting pushback for kicking
00:58:35.620
somebody's sacred cow and then assessing whether we can do without that particular sacred cow
00:58:41.040
or that some cow is going to be there, you know, that that's possible.
00:58:47.720
Yeah, I guess I'm just, yeah, I guess you could call it more cynical, but I don't really see
00:58:54.760
Like, yeah, that's why I want you guys on my side, you know, I want to be on your side
00:58:59.820
too, you know, but like, there's a lot of, there's a lot of good in the anti-woke grift
00:59:05.680
They all got a bunch of big egos, which is fun, you know, but that kind of trips it up
00:59:10.840
I mean, there's certainly this, you know, and I try to do my best, but you know, we're
00:59:14.760
all human, you know, there is obviously this desire to be seen and to, you know, to build
00:59:23.220
this persona and have this idea that you're unassailable or that you, you know, and there's
00:59:27.860
this desire to churn content and drama and back and forth and all these things.
00:59:37.760
We have this because so, and it's a weird thing now because I'm interacting with more
00:59:42.280
formal academics than, you know, I would have previously, but there's this weird moment
00:59:48.320
where, when I step into these formal academic settings, they're, they're so wildly and radically
00:59:54.860
removed from any practical application or understanding of like what's happening.
00:59:58.860
So, and, and there's so few right-wing ones that are allowed even in academic settings
01:00:03.720
at this point that most, especially on the right of what used to happen in say, you know,
01:00:08.280
a college or university or, you know, it's a think tank somewhere is happening online.
01:00:12.820
You know, this is probably stuff that maybe shouldn't happen there, but it is.
01:00:16.900
And so there's this, this strange moment where, yeah.
01:00:21.000
I hate this word, but I don't have a better one at the moment.
01:00:23.360
Thought leaders on, on the side in our, are also content producers.
01:00:29.180
And there, that creates this issue because, you know, for all the problems of the university,
01:00:35.640
it did give a certain amount of ability for people to cultivate thought and, you know,
01:00:40.320
run it against each other and perfect these things in an environment where they didn't
01:00:44.640
have to like run out in front of a million people and, and regurgitate it every week.
01:00:51.300
So when you have these fights, it's a, it's much more philosophy done in the, in the forum
01:00:57.160
Like you, you better be able to argue with Plato.
01:00:59.340
Cause if not, he's going to, he's going to make you look like a fool in public and they're
01:01:04.820
Well, I think that that's helping us to, uh, get, um, broader understanding of these
01:01:10.540
so-called thought leaders and, and just to see somebody, that's another aspect of the
01:01:17.800
When you add time to it, like I've been doing this for seven years, you've been doing this
01:01:21.920
for a while too, you know, somebody could probably try to judge you by one tweet, but
01:01:27.320
like seeing your history and then also seeing your voice, seeing you pop up in different kind
01:01:31.740
of media, you kind of become a fleshed out human being.
01:01:35.960
And so you're going to have weak moments and strong moments, and you're going to go through
01:01:43.600
I really enjoy, especially the people, um, whether they like it or not, they go through
01:01:49.680
Jordan Peterson's had very drastic, um, kind of stages in his presence.
01:01:55.580
And I was seeing him evolve to the next level and kind of integrate himself more.
01:01:59.880
James Lindsay used to be an atheist, but more and more he's, he's grappling with these truths
01:02:04.200
and it's just amazing to watch him, like just basically having to say, you know, Christ was
01:02:16.120
So when we talk about, like, I kind of got into, uh, I was trying to stand up against
01:02:23.340
this idea of the woke right, because it was just going to be used to cast a bunch of people
01:02:28.860
out of discourse and to cut off all of that creative energy that's being released.
01:02:34.700
But, but I also recognize that the right need this desinant right place.
01:02:39.820
It needs to be attacked early and often because it gets, it starts huffing its own farts, just
01:02:46.780
And it gets into these really stupid memes, you know, you'll lose, there's this woman
01:02:50.760
question that like is constantly, what are they going to do with the women?
01:02:55.720
You have these starlets rise up like Alex, Alex Kishuta, you know, and then she's like,
01:03:00.720
you know, has to deal with all this kind of misogyny.
01:03:03.060
So there needs to be a little bit more propriety, you know, and you can call it woke, you know,
01:03:07.500
like, like treat the women nicely kind of thing, but it gets ossified.
01:03:12.000
And so it needs like these attacks, you know, Daryl Cooper going on top.
01:03:15.460
Tucker and Tucker probably, uh, one of Kissin's, uh, objections with that interview was just
01:03:22.040
how Tucker didn't provide any pushback and made Cooper out to be something that he wasn't.
01:03:37.160
Um, but, but Daryl Cooper jumping out of this weird thing where he's using, using this fascist
01:03:45.580
He did a tweet where he said, uh, you know, Hitler taking over Paris is vastly preferable
01:03:54.520
And is he saying that fascism is better than a wokeness or is he saying that the slow decay
01:04:01.100
of our civilization from the inside out is less preferable than, than a strong man?
01:04:05.900
Like there's all these different layers of analysis, but because, and he knows that Hitler's
01:04:09.740
the trigger, but in your, in this little domain where you guys are over here, like you're sharing
01:04:14.740
good morning, Hitler jokes and stuff like that.
01:04:16.580
There's like, there's a code there, there's tongue in cheek there, but once that gets thrown
01:04:20.640
up onto, you know, Tucker Carlson and then into the mainstream, it can't survive that level
01:04:25.720
of analysis or that level of joking can't survive.
01:04:28.180
It casts a lot of your comrades, sorry for the word.
01:04:34.120
What's the, what's the, what's the fascist word for a car?
01:04:36.760
I don't know is there, but it makes you guys all look fascist coded or it makes you guys
01:04:47.600
You guys want to defeat your enemies and maybe you do, maybe you don't, but it kind of that
01:04:53.960
discourse, like these memes kind of don't, they jump out and then they, they degrade.
01:05:02.680
And so the, the right, your side has to reevaluate if it wants to scale, it has to reevaluate some
01:05:13.120
If it wants to go there, if not, then some people will look at it and take the best parts
01:05:17.980
of what you guys are doing and take and just leave the rest behind.
01:05:21.940
And then the good ideas will get, uh, will pop up and then start to shape discourse over
01:05:27.180
So it's any given individual's, um, choice, whether if they want to go kind of centrist and
01:05:32.660
mainstream, like Nietzsche coming out of the cave, you know, you come out of your dank, uh,
01:05:37.700
dungeon of dissonant right discourse and you bring something to the forum, right?
01:05:41.740
Or the forum comes to you, rattles it up and then it stirs things up and it real, real enlivens
01:05:51.880
I like the people going into the fray and I, I want the, uh, the dissonant right is one
01:05:56.480
of its awesome aspects is that it was bred in this contentious where it was bred based
01:06:04.880
It's, it's a lot of knife fighters because that's all they had there.
01:06:13.080
And yeah, I, this, to be clear, I'm not even against necessarily the internecine warfare.
01:06:18.940
Um, you know, necessarily people are always like, well, why don't you in the sky just
01:06:23.740
It's like, well, cause we both recognize that our worldviews are incompatible.
01:06:26.980
And while we have a shared enemy, we recognize that ultimately only one person or one, one of these
01:06:35.300
And so, you know, I'm, I'm not, uh, I very rarely are like, well, whatever you do, you
01:06:40.920
know, don't, I just, uh, like I said, I, I, when I see people trying to completely excise
01:06:47.300
someone from the conversation, that's usually when I push back.
01:06:50.700
If you have, you know, something, if you have something to say and you say, well, I just
01:06:57.580
I think that there's all kinds of problems with this.
01:06:59.280
And this is, you know, then obviously I think that's critical and you have to have
01:07:02.940
You have to, you have to make those decisions, but Benjamin, we've already gone over an hour
01:07:08.560
So I don't want to lock you down forever, but, uh, before we go to those questions, uh,
01:07:15.180
Uh, Benjamin, a voice on Twitter and YouTube, I guess I'm on bit shoot and rumble, but rumble
01:07:25.380
I know some people have great success, but yeah.
01:07:30.400
So if you know how to get me to the field bucks, I'm here for it.
01:07:35.320
Um, uh, Curtis Yarvin, I'm talking to your super chat.
01:07:39.300
Curtis Yarvin said, I have resting Mormon face.
01:07:46.280
Benjamin a voice across all, and then conversations is, uh, the podcast name.
01:07:52.700
If they have it before, lots of great interviews with many people that have been on here as well
01:07:57.040
as many people have not, so they should definitely take a look there.
01:08:02.260
Tiny Rick says on being post-liberal and evolving our language, I propose that people
01:08:06.680
don't have rights, God given natural or otherwise people have desires.
01:08:11.140
Some should be honored, uh, honored others shunned thoughts.
01:08:24.780
I don't think people really, it's not a natural concept, even though they call it natural rights.
01:08:29.140
Like we do have needs, desires, parameters of behavior and parameters of freedom that
01:08:34.140
if we succeed in standing and walking, we can run kind of thing.
01:08:39.220
And we need coaching to do all those different things.
01:08:42.480
I think natural right is something that has existed in human understanding throughout history.
01:08:47.840
But again, it has almost always been in the context of communities and how those communities
01:08:54.300
I think when you try to extract, uh, extract those and make them universal, uh, then they
01:09:00.500
And what you find is groups agitating for blocks of rights for their group rather than understanding
01:09:06.680
rights as something that is a interaction within that group.
01:09:11.020
It's a progressivism, uh, post civil rights progressivism took, went from civil rights to
01:09:17.840
And that's, that explains so much of the behavior.
01:09:24.360
Heretic says, I'm not sure if we can really solve woke without finding a way to dial down
01:09:29.180
individualism, which is the wellspring of modern liberalism.
01:09:35.600
There is this dichotomy and I think there's, uh, I think there's some truth to this, but
01:09:42.040
And if you just say this straight away, there's this moment where most people look at wokeness
01:09:49.340
Like it's a bunch of people spouting, you know, uh, uh, neo-Marxist bromides and they,
01:09:53.660
you know, they all have this idea of blackness or whiteness or, you know, the trans or whatever
01:10:00.620
But at the core of this, there is, I think the point that liberalism dismantled most of
01:10:06.880
the lower order, organic identities through the understanding of individual, of individualism.
01:10:15.280
And so in many ways, woke is an attempt to reconstitute those at a macro level, uh, in
01:10:20.280
blocks that are too artificial and wide for them to be in any way healthy.
01:10:24.420
So, uh, there, there is a, I think there is a pathway from liberalism to wokeness, but
01:10:29.800
something that maybe defenders of liberalism might not immediately recognize because they're
01:10:39.820
And we have to form a collective of individuals in order to fight back.
01:10:45.580
And there, there you have your anti-woke post-coalition.
01:10:48.920
It's in many ways, the anti-woke coalition suffers the same problem that like the libertarian
01:10:54.160
party does like, like, like you're basically like, we, you know, yeah, we're the official
01:10:59.820
cat herding, you know, uh, collective that's, that's the plan.
01:11:05.520
K and says, if all, uh, if, if, if, if all is a political formula is elite theory, a political
01:11:11.540
formula, who does it serve podcasters making money off of unlocking the secrets of power?
01:11:16.780
No, there, to be fair, there is a real aspect of a mystery cult of power that you could
01:11:23.320
Mystery cults for those who are unfamiliar are like replacement religions where the, the,
01:11:28.460
the truths are not metaphysical, but they are layered behind all of this intellectual
01:11:35.600
And if you could just peel back the next mystery, the next mystery, the next mystery, finally,
01:11:41.740
Um, the, the one thing I will say, and this is, this is a disagreement between myself and
01:11:46.380
my friend, academic agent, he offers, um, elite theory is a value neutral, uh, approach.
01:11:53.900
Um, and this is not true in the same way that Machiavelli was not offering a value neutral
01:12:00.340
approach to politics, which is what he, you know, Machiavelli was saying, well, I, I am
01:12:07.080
But behind Machiavelli's stripping down of kind of that, that, uh, uh, antiquity and,
01:12:13.260
and Christian understanding, uh, that medieval rather Christian understanding, he was a fan
01:12:17.500
of antiquity, but, but, but behind that was him espousing ultimately some framework by
01:12:25.400
And so I want to be careful, you know, I've, I've said this many times, elite theory can
01:12:29.140
be a tool, but if you treat it as an end to itself, if you treat it as well, this is just
01:12:34.000
the objective truth rather than understanding that actually society rests on, uh, decisive assertions
01:12:41.640
of moral visions, um, then you'll be telling yourself the same lie that liberals told themselves,
01:12:46.700
which is what we have is this objective system and that does it all by itself.
01:12:51.060
And we have the truth because we're part of this objective system when actually you've
01:12:54.880
just constructed another ideology in which to, to kind of park your values.
01:12:59.360
Uh, and so, so I think that that's really the critical distinction, but I don't know.
01:13:09.260
It's the, my, my extensive, uh, experience as a public teacher in a public high school
01:13:13.500
teacher, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, tiny Rick says on the election, I see the underlying theme
01:13:20.500
as, uh, woke, uh, versus anything but that, uh, what makes Trump so frustrating is how bad
01:13:32.260
So, you know, I, again, I, I think almost that Trump's power is really his ability to
01:13:36.660
just cut through those divisions and say, yeah, I'm the leader.
01:13:43.440
He, he has the ability to herd cats because basically he, he wields real world power.
01:13:49.640
And so, you know, the, the problem with so much of this coalition is it's abstracted.
01:13:56.340
Trump has the ability to forge it into something real by having actual real world sway and power.
01:14:00.660
So he says, you got to come to the table because I'm, I'm the only deal in town, which again
01:14:04.720
is, is usually what that leadership seat, cesarean role really, uh, is.
01:14:13.520
Oh, I was just thinking about the, uh, split between, uh, this probably a year ago, Chris
01:14:20.980
Um, did they, they had a, they had a spat that they actually like, yeah, they had the knockdown
01:14:32.660
Um, but Chris being the practical one and Curtis being the abstract one, I'm waiting for
01:14:39.340
Curtis to kind of like do something, get a little bit more saucy, but I think he really
01:14:44.900
enjoys kind of being the, the philosopher more than the King.
01:14:48.080
And so I appreciate his critique of Rufo, uh, but Rufo gets results.
01:14:54.820
Well, and I think, you know, there's a, there's this weird moment, you know, the left does this
01:14:59.680
You know, there's a Vanguard and there's a mainstream and the Vanguard is pushing the
01:15:04.000
And no one is stupid enough to think that that hurts the left, but for some reason people
01:15:09.520
act as if that hurts the right, you know, everyone looks at the left and says, oh, well,
01:15:14.320
the fact that they have this robust intellectual class and that they're constantly pushing towards
01:15:19.060
a specific goal and that they're keeping their mainstream leaders in check by encouraging
01:15:23.140
them and feeding them, you know, uh, ideas that, you know, nobody thinks this is a liability
01:15:27.720
for the left, but they act as if like one guy, like we finally got one guy doing a little
01:15:33.080
bit of philosophy and saying, maybe we could do this differently.
01:15:35.600
All of a sudden, this is just the end of the right.
01:15:44.360
I, I, I think it is, but only in relation to the fact that basically most right wing thought
01:15:50.860
There's a reason that guys like Paul Gottfried and Sam Francis and even Pat Buchanan spent a
01:15:57.720
Um, and so, um, everyone on the right recognizes that there's an advantage of canceling to their
01:16:03.440
Uh, people on the left recognize that canceling to the left is actually generally a bad move.
01:16:10.160
Uh, and that's because the right is serving, uh, their left as where the left is serving
01:16:24.060
Uh, Thuggo said, uh, does Christianity with its focus on sacrifice, nonviolence,
01:16:27.720
violence, uh, and altruism lead us to, uh, the, uh, lead us vulnerable to Marxism.
01:16:35.280
Um, I understand that assertion, uh, you know, I always go back to the same thing.
01:16:39.620
Um, Oswald Spangler said that every civilization has this kind of mere atheism to its animating
01:16:48.640
spirit, uh, that at the end of these civilizations, those things always take hold and Christianity,
01:16:54.460
you know, Marxism is most certainly a Christian heresy.
01:16:57.480
Progressivism is at least for sure is a Christian heresy.
01:17:01.940
But does that mean that Christianity leads to this?
01:17:04.680
Well, you could say that in some sense, but I think every founding animating, uh, metaphysical
01:17:10.600
ideology, like eventually leads to its, its opposite.
01:17:13.820
So yes, but only in the sense that this is Christianity's opposite.
01:17:17.120
If you had a different ideology, you would simply produce a different opposing, you know,
01:17:21.500
antithesis, I guess, since we're being Hegelian here.
01:17:24.280
Well, I think the one thing that saved me, uh, getting swept up in cult like thinking or
01:17:33.640
Cause I just know that on my founding level of my existence, I only report to one power.
01:17:41.920
Um, and I can see that everybody else ultimately reports to that one power.
01:17:46.320
Now I, there has to be some level of social organization, but ultimately I stand before
01:17:50.900
God, nobody else judges me, nobody else controls me, and I'm going to balk at anything like
01:17:55.280
So I think my fierce individualism does come from, uh, Christianity because of that relationship.
01:18:03.640
Uh, Jacob Zendel here says, there appears to be a lot of petty infighting in the right.
01:18:08.040
I like James Lindsay, but don't follow the Twitter drama.
01:18:14.100
Uh, I'll, I'll avoid this question only because I am so often the, uh, the, the target of said
01:18:19.420
So I don't have an objective answer to that question.
01:18:29.540
Uh, George Heyduke says, when it comes to Netter, what happens when today's allies become
01:18:35.200
tomorrow's enemies, neo-pagans versus Christians, future conflicts being set in motion?
01:18:40.700
Yes, that is always the question, but for victorious coalitions, that is always a question
01:18:49.240
Uh, but people who, who are staring at this monolith that they think their biggest problem
01:18:53.680
is the guy right next to them rather than the monolith in front of them.
01:18:57.360
Um, I think you're misunderstanding your problem.
01:19:08.940
Uh, Kane says, want to honor your guests and say, uh, uh, you disagree with acquisitions
01:19:17.640
You're really breaking the stereotype wide open.
01:19:20.100
Um, George says, any mention of Red Scare adjacent racist articles in the NYC scene?
01:19:28.080
I have never listened to a single episode of Red Scare.
01:19:30.840
I know this whole thing exists, the, you know, dark, Yarvin dark elves.
01:19:37.060
I guess I've met certain people, but I am completely, you know, uh, detached from that.
01:19:47.480
They talk like girls who are just over the hangover from last night's club date.
01:19:52.060
And they're like in this like sweet spot of like coherency, but they're about to get
01:19:58.940
The only thing I know about them is that people complain about them or thirst after them.
01:20:02.740
I don't, I don't have, I don't actually know anything about their, their ideology or their
01:20:09.680
I think I've seen them defend Steve Saylor once.
01:20:12.160
So they have my, they have my goodwill in that area.
01:20:14.920
Uh, life of Brian says, no one seems to have raised the central subject.
01:20:19.000
What is the current role of the IDW and the anti left fight?
01:20:27.040
Uh, I mean, I don't know about you, Benjamin, I feel like what we were basically talking about
01:20:30.460
was that the IDW has dissolved and that it's really returned to becoming individual thinkers
01:20:36.180
who have kind of gone into different areas rather than being a cohesive movement.
01:20:40.260
I, I do appreciate the critique of containment, uh, where they, they, they, they run away.
01:20:46.460
Like there's this kind of like this nematic valence or truth to the meme that they kind
01:20:55.420
They found an audience on the right and then they want to rearrange the furniture of the
01:21:03.640
So there is that because I think that they're at heart, they are liberals and they don't want
01:21:08.620
to be associated too much with the deplorables.
01:21:11.460
So I think that there is a snooty snuffiness and they're really only trucking with you all
01:21:17.540
because they, they were told that they weren't cool enough to be on the insider club.
01:21:27.120
I hope that shakes up and, uh, over time, but they, they, they're basically elites that
01:21:32.460
they're looking for, they want to be on a pedestal and they had to step off of it because
01:21:36.700
they couldn't truck with certain things that the pedestal is doing, but they're, they're
01:21:42.340
Just kind of like this general behavior that I see.
01:21:45.000
Yesterday's revolutionaries don't really want to be on the right, but they know they
01:21:49.700
And so if the right's the only thing they can be in charge of them, I guess they're going
01:21:54.800
Uh, cyber chud says, uh, what have you got up there?
01:21:57.680
I can see walk among us, but I don't recognize the other two.
01:22:00.500
Uh, the albums, we have, uh, the misfits walk among us, which is right here.
01:22:04.640
Uh, then I have, uh, uh, Avenged Sevenfold, uh, Nightmare, and then we have, uh, Children
01:22:12.580
Uh, so that is the spread of, of metal, uh, albums.
01:22:17.380
I've got a couple of people who enjoy the rotation of albums.
01:22:20.060
So we've always got a new one coming up every few weeks.
01:22:22.860
So I just have Jordan Peterson and his most kissable photo.
01:22:28.320
He's playing with a little tool and he's wearing a sweater.
01:22:35.540
All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wind this up, but it has been great talking
01:22:46.820
So now that we've both, uh, you know, talked about how great we are and how much we appreciate
01:22:51.640
each other, I would remind everyone to check out your channel.
01:22:54.280
And of course, if it's your first time on my channel, subscribe, click the bell notifications,
01:22:59.560
If you want to get the broadcast as podcasts, make sure you subscribe to the Omer McIntyre show
01:23:05.940
Maybe you are the elite you've been theorizing about.
01:23:09.040
You know, there, I, I certainly do not, you know, there's this weird thing, you know, people
01:23:22.140
I noticed some level people, it's just, I don't know.
01:23:24.780
It's very, very odd, but if no one's a leader, then I guess we end up in the situation we're
01:23:33.800
I don't think I have the, I don't think I have the, uh, the delivery in the crowd.
01:23:37.600
Or at least I need to get a lot better at dodging bullets.
01:23:43.560
All right, guys, thank you everybody for watching.