The Auron MacIntyre Show - January 06, 2025


Top Reads of 2024 ｜ 1⧸6⧸25

Topics
Sovereignty by Bertrand de Juvenal Thus Spake Zarathustra American identity and cultural assimilation Thoughts on Machiavelli by Leo Strauss
Hosted by
Auron MacIntyre
Mentioned
Leo Strauss Samuel Huntington Charlie Kirk Russell Kirk Jeremy Carl Machiavelli Winners Friedrich Nietzsche Spake Zarathustra Tucker Carlson Joseph Tainter Jean Baudrillard De Tocqueville Paul Gottfried Michael Anton Carl Schmitt Sean Hannity Pat Buchanan De Juvenal Matt Walsh and 4 more
Terror Rings In the New Year ｜ Guest： Lafayette Lee ｜ 1⧸3⧸2025 Elon Takes On the UK Government Over Islamic Grooming Gangs ｜ Guest： Carl Benjamin ｜ 1⧸8⧸25

Episode Stats


Length

27 minutes

Words per minute

166.02

Word count

4,552

Sentence count

288

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

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

It's that time of the year where I go over the best books that I read or the most important books I read in the previous year. You're supposed to do these lists right before New Year's Eve, so you get all the clickbait. But I've always been bad at that. I always try to sneak in one more book, finish one more thing before the end of year, and I want to include it. So, the tradition has been for me to always do the Best of lists in January, right after.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
00:00:02.320 Rocky's Vacation, here we come.
00:00:05.060 Whoa, is this economy?
00:00:07.180 Free beer, wine, and snacks.
00:00:09.620 Sweet! 0.95
00:00:10.720 Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
00:00:14.760 And with live TV, I'm not missing the game.
00:00:17.800 It's kind of like, I'm already on vacation.
00:00:20.980 Nice! 0.94
00:00:22.240 On behalf of Air Canada, nice travels.
00:00:25.260 Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
00:00:27.200 Sponsored by Bell. Conditions apply.
00:00:28.720 CRCanada.com
00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, it's that time of year where I go over the best books that I read
00:00:35.980 or the most important books that I read in the previous year.
00:00:41.020 You're supposed to do these best of 2024 lists right before New Year's
00:00:45.780 so you get all the clickbait.
00:00:47.800 I've always been bad at that.
00:00:49.240 I always try to sneak in one more book, finish one more thing before the end of the year
00:00:53.220 and I want to include it.
00:00:54.340 So, the tradition has been for me to always do the best of lists in January right after.
00:01:00.820 So, we'll continue with that.
00:01:02.840 So, let's start at the beginning here.
00:01:04.620 These are the top nine books that I read in 2024.
00:01:10.320 Number one, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville.
00:01:14.080 I'm not breaking any new ground here.
00:01:18.300 Obviously, Democracy in America is kind of the classic political text when it comes to understanding
00:01:24.980 early American government.
00:01:27.020 Alexis de Tocqueville is doing a good mix of sociology, history, and political theory.
00:01:33.140 Well, it wasn't really history at the time, but it is for us now.
00:01:36.540 You get the idea.
00:01:37.460 He is surveying America through these fresh eyes with these outsiders' eyes 1.00
00:01:42.880 and he's trying to understand what's going on
00:01:45.340 because this isn't a book, despite what a lot of people think,
00:01:48.440 that is just extolling the virtues of democracy.
00:01:52.080 De Tocqueville believed that democracy was kind of inevitable,
00:01:55.540 that eventually his country, France, was going to have to make peace with the fact
00:02:00.000 that democracy was coming and he wanted to look at kind of the premier democracy at the time
00:02:05.620 and say, how is this working here?
00:02:07.560 What is the good?
00:02:08.480 What is the bad?
00:02:09.460 Is there anything specific in the nature of Americans
00:02:13.000 and the way that they live their lives that allows them to operate under the system?
00:02:18.680 He does have a lot of great insights into the nature of what he calls the Anglo-Americans at the time
00:02:25.440 and how their folkways and customs and traditions and beliefs enable a system like the one that existed in the early United States.
00:02:34.340 And he points out that some of these things will work for other Europeans.
00:02:38.880 Some of them won't work at all and are very specific to America.
00:02:42.320 He also takes the time to point out some of the deep flaws with democracy.
00:02:46.600 He says some things that would be shocking to many conservatives today,
00:02:50.460 including that the problem of individualism is going to end up dominating a lot of American society
00:02:57.000 that could end up tearing apart the system that they have.
00:03:00.600 Of course, for all of de Tocqueville's hits, he also has plenty of misses.
00:03:04.300 For instance, he predicts that there's no way that the northern and southern states could go to war over the issue of slavery.
00:03:10.580 So the book is valuable for what it is, a snapshot of a particular time in the United States history
00:03:16.580 when its institutions were still relatively young,
00:03:20.440 and it gives you this perspective of what's going right, but also what could go wrong.
00:03:25.280 There are a lot of good insights and thoughtful observations here,
00:03:29.380 but they are spread over a lot of toast.
00:03:31.940 Again, it's a long book, and in parts, it can definitely feel like a slog.
00:03:36.080 So I recommend, but keep that in mind.
00:03:38.080 Number two, Sovereignty, Bertrand de Juvenal.
00:03:44.100 I know that I've talked your ear off about On Power from Bertrand de Juvenal.
00:03:48.900 It truly is one of the most important political works I have ever read,
00:03:54.020 and I really can't recommend it highly enough.
00:03:56.760 That said, it's not the only thing that Bertrand de Juvenal wrote,
00:04:00.020 and while Sovereignty is not quite as powerful a masterpiece as On Power,
00:04:05.760 it's still really, really good.
00:04:07.280 He does retread some of the same ground here because de Juvenal needs to take the metaphysics of power
00:04:12.960 he developed in On Power and poured it into this new work.
00:04:17.580 However, this book, unsurprisingly due to the title,
00:04:20.560 really focuses more on the nature of authority and sovereignty,
00:04:24.620 where it comes from, why it's obeyed,
00:04:27.700 when it feels unnatural, when it feels natural, how it's wielded.
00:04:31.760 De Juvenal is certainly drawing a lot from Aristotle and from the tradition of the Catholic Church.
00:04:38.120 There's a lot of discussion of the common good and the need for people to understand their organic places in society,
00:04:45.260 how that fulfills people and makes them feel like they are part of something that is more meaningful and worth perpetuating.
00:04:52.340 He also has this really important insight that ultimately liberty isn't the absence of authority,
00:04:59.140 but rather it's being governed in accordance with the way of being of your people.
00:05:03.820 Basically, the more that the rules which are being enforced are simply the instantiation of kind of organic customs and traditions
00:05:13.060 and expectations that you have as a shared group,
00:05:17.660 the less it feels like it's any kind of arbitrary authority being applied.
00:05:22.520 And it's really about these unnatural alien restrictions being placed on you.
00:05:27.880 It doesn't matter if they're being placed on you because they're coming from a tyrannical, despot monarch,
00:05:33.440 or if they're being placed on you by democracy or aristocracy or technocracy.
00:05:40.200 The point is, if the rules are in accord with your natural culture and your natural tradition,
00:05:46.720 they will feel like they will basically not feel like rules at all
00:05:50.340 because you are going to comply with them 90% of the time anyway without any kind of coercion.
00:05:55.840 However, if you don't have a shared culture or if the system being imposed on you contradicts your shared culture,
00:06:03.160 then it will always feel arbitrary.
00:06:05.640 It will always feel as if your liberty is being restricted because it is.
00:06:11.520 It's not the system itself.
00:06:14.400 It is the thing the system is applying.
00:06:16.880 Does it feel alien?
00:06:18.200 Does it feel strange?
00:06:19.760 Does it feel artificial?
00:06:21.500 If that's the case, then the system will always feel tyrannical
00:06:25.980 because it has to be in order to impose that artificial system onto everybody.
00:06:31.400 Again, great book.
00:06:32.960 Always a fan of Bertrand de Juvenal.
00:06:34.920 Can't recommend his stuff highly enough.
00:06:37.260 Number three, The Unprotected Class.
00:06:40.340 Jeremy Carl.
00:06:42.260 Anti-white racism has been a huge problem for a long time and it's been very obvious,
00:06:47.000 but it was also extremely taboo to talk about.
00:06:50.140 Even just five years ago, this is something you only heard from the farthest fringes of the internet.
00:06:56.840 Even discussing it could get you banned off of pretty much every platform.
00:07:01.280 Now it's something that Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh talk about on a regular basis.
00:07:06.980 If you're familiar with what's going on, if you're very online, then this book isn't going to break a lot of ground for you.
00:07:14.820 But for the many, many, many people, the large percentage of the American population that doesn't know what's going on,
00:07:21.840 Jeremy Carl does a great job of laying this out in detail, systematically explaining how this works, how it's impacting people.
00:07:31.360 He brings the receipts in every situation.
00:07:35.580 And really importantly, this book is very measured and thoughtful in its tone.
00:07:41.340 It's not a polemic work.
00:07:43.540 It is something that is just laying out the facts in the most honest and obvious way possible.
00:07:50.460 And that's really important for a subject like this.
00:07:53.000 A lot of people like to go in and be as edgy and splashy as possible.
00:07:56.440 But when you're trying to sell this to the average conservative, something they know is already true but they think is very taboo to say,
00:08:05.260 you need to say it in a very careful and thoughtful way.
00:08:08.540 Make it okay for them to look at it.
00:08:10.340 And that's exactly what Jeremy does.
00:08:12.880 This is a book you can hand to your parents without reservation.
00:08:16.060 It's not edgy.
00:08:16.980 It's not looking to be extreme.
00:08:18.420 It's not looking to be radical.
00:08:19.780 It's just telling the truth.
00:08:21.640 There's a reason that Jeremy has been able to take this book onto Tucker Carlson's show and Charlie Kirk's show and he's presented it to members of Congress and it's even been cited by judges and their rulings.
00:08:34.580 This book is important not just because of its contents but because of its timing.
00:08:38.940 It's the best measured level-headed look at a critical issue that is finally being addressed in the mainstream public.
00:08:47.380 And you should definitely read it and you should definitely give a copy to people who you think might be interested in understanding more of this but were always worried about kind of the, again, edgier elements that had been attached to the discussion beforehand.
00:09:00.600 Great book.
00:09:01.260 Check it out.
00:09:03.320 Number four, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche.
00:09:07.680 In this late winter of civilization, in this time of kind of the managerial bug man who has just been turned into gray goo
00:09:35.360 and is intended to consume things and take no risks and do no great works, there's really no better critic of a moment like this than Friedrich Nietzsche.
00:09:46.960 Obviously, once again here, I'm not pulling something out of obscurity.
00:09:50.880 This is a famous work for a reason.
00:09:53.060 And Nietzsche really hits the nail on the head when he talks about the last man and the way in which our civilization will die out,
00:10:02.660 the way that the great individual is just completely suppressed by a society like the one that we are operating in.
00:10:11.160 Obviously, being a Christian, I don't agree with everything Nietzsche says here.
00:10:16.700 And I think it's critical since it's become, it's come back into fashion to have this cooties theory of history.
00:10:23.340 We can't read anything that we might have disagreements with.
00:10:27.660 If someone said something somewhere in a book that is different or wrong, then we can't learn anything from the rest of what they've said.
00:10:36.620 It just doesn't work for me, sorry.
00:10:38.440 And I think ultimately, Nietzsche does have critical insights for what we are dealing with today, even if his overall understanding is incorrect.
00:10:48.540 So yeah, in this moment where we live in a system that is all about flattening everyone down, making everyone the same, suppressing greatness, suppressing genius, suppressing vigor and vitality and risk.
00:11:04.200 In a moment like ours and in a system like ours, Nietzsche really is a powerful critic and he is challenging us to do something very, very different, see the world in a very different way.
00:11:15.400 And so yeah, you should definitely check out Thus Spake Zarathustra.
00:11:21.240 Number five, who are we? Samuel Huntington.
00:11:26.300 This is the book that follows Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, which I've already recommended to you.
00:11:32.340 And in Clash of Civilizations, he touches on for a chapter to the importance of this question, who are we?
00:11:41.080 He says we are ending this bipolar moment in world foreign policy where we have the communists and the anti-communists, and that is defining everyone's worldview.
00:11:52.140 It's highly ideological.
00:11:53.360 And instead, we are going to shift back to a more organic understanding.
00:11:58.360 He believed that it was going to be based mainly on religion, but also language and blood bonds and everything else that have classically shaped identity throughout history, not just this highly ideological bifurcation of the world.
00:12:13.040 And so this book, this sequel, is basically trying to answer that question.
00:12:18.080 And I give him a lot of credit because remember, Huntington is a guy of kind of the center left.
00:12:22.720 He's a Harvard professor.
00:12:24.140 This is not some edgy right-wing guy.
00:12:27.160 He could have just left that observation or just never made it, but he certainly could have left that observation on the table where it was.
00:12:33.820 But instead, he wanted a real answer.
00:12:36.440 He wanted a study of what we could do about this.
00:12:39.400 Is there any way that we can rediscover the American identity?
00:12:44.500 And Huntington is very clear that the propositional nation is insufficient.
00:12:49.640 He says, yes, you will have propositions to which your culture must assent and that those that want to join your culture must assent. 0.98
00:12:58.080 But those propositions are going to come from somewhere.
00:13:01.080 They are going to be the instantiation of a way of being of your people.
00:13:06.100 They are not just free-floating principles.
00:13:08.780 They are tied to a history and a heritage and a language and a religion, a belief system.
00:13:15.580 These things are grounded.
00:13:17.300 They're not just free-floating.
00:13:19.020 And Huntington concludes that the ground for those propositions, for those beliefs, is the Anglo-Protestant tradition.
00:13:26.380 That this is the heritage of America.
00:13:30.080 That it is English, primarily, and that it is Protestant, primarily.
00:13:35.660 And those other aspects of American culture that have been added change it and make it something distinct.
00:13:41.980 It's not just English and it's not just Protestant.
00:13:46.100 But that is the substrate from which all of American culture arises.
00:13:51.100 And he says, ultimately, that people must assimilate to this.
00:13:57.300 To be clear, Huntington is a man of the left.
00:13:59.700 He's not saying, no one can join this.
00:14:01.980 This is only for Anglo-Protestants. 0.99
00:14:04.260 America can never have anyone else in it. 0.97
00:14:06.300 He's not saying that.
00:14:07.460 But what he is saying is that anyone who comes, anybody that wants to be a part of the United States, must conform themselves to this baseline.
00:14:17.700 That we have to maintain this Anglo-Protestant baseline as the culture of the United States. 0.95
00:14:23.340 And anyone who wants to join, they can't come and say, oh, well, we are going to kind of like some of your freedom stuff.
00:14:30.000 But we're going to add in this part of our culture, our language, our religion.
00:14:35.040 No.
00:14:35.440 No.
00:14:35.820 He says, this has to be the core.
00:14:38.080 If we're going to maintain American identity, then it has to be Anglo and it has to be Protestant. 0.97
00:14:43.920 And again, I think this is a great book because it is so measured.
00:14:48.300 Right.
00:14:48.620 You can go to the right of this.
00:14:50.100 You can say he's wrong about certain aspects of this.
00:14:53.180 However, coming from a center left Harvard professor, this is a very measured take on a very important issue that a lot of conservatives are too scared to discuss in this moment.
00:15:04.100 So I think it's a really good place for you to start.
00:15:07.020 And maybe, again, a book that you can hand to your parents, to somebody who wants to explore this issue, but doesn't want to hear a lot of stuff from a bomb thrower.
00:15:14.420 Number six, thoughts on Machiavelli, Leo Strauss.
00:15:22.140 I had never read any Leo Strauss until this year.
00:15:25.100 I had heard of him, but I just never dove into his work.
00:15:27.980 And this year I read Natural Rite and History, Thoughts on Machiavelli, and his essay on Carl Schmitt.
00:15:35.160 I went to Thoughts on Machiavelli because I needed to do more research on Machiavelli.
00:15:40.440 I'd kind of gotten to the edges of my own scholarship.
00:15:43.500 Apparently, this is his most complex and esoteric book.
00:15:47.760 I didn't know that at the time, so I just went in and gave it the surface level reading.
00:15:52.520 In that capacity, I think it's a good book.
00:15:55.100 It's got some valuable insights.
00:15:57.320 He's certainly a first-class scholar of these different philosophers and brings out different aspects that you probably haven't thought about, even if you've read the book several times.
00:16:07.560 That said, you also have to be careful because Strauss specifically talks about the ability of the commentator to kind of slip in his own thoughts under the guise of commentating on another philosopher.
00:16:20.300 And Strauss is, of course, doing that in this book.
00:16:23.220 Everything that he says isn't exactly what Machiavelli meant or was saying in any given passage.
00:16:29.940 So you need to have a pretty good knowledge of Machiavelli.
00:16:33.660 You should have probably gone through The Prince and the Discourses on Livy multiple times if you really want to get the most out of this.
00:16:41.460 And apparently it's a book that you can read over and over again and find all these weird hidden things.
00:16:46.840 It's got enough footnotes that they are themselves, like their own little puzzle with insights in there.
00:16:53.280 There's numerology and everything involved.
00:16:55.980 They're almost the size of the basic book itself.
00:17:00.000 So I'm sure Michael Anton is sitting there and discovering the center of the universe on this one.
00:17:07.140 Like he's somebody who is just obsessed with that and deeply interested in it.
00:17:11.500 I don't know about the Straussian project.
00:17:15.060 I don't think I like it both of the ways that it's been described to me.
00:17:18.600 One way is that it's this Nietzschean will to power thing.
00:17:23.040 You got to tell a noble lie, but that's only to keep the masses quiet so you can exert all this power and create your own world.
00:17:30.660 And then you have this kind of pseudo universalism thing that it's trying to do is kind of the other interpretation of it.
00:17:37.420 And I don't think I like either of those, but purely as a work to help you understand Machiavelli, I think Strauss is good at pulling insights, not just on Machiavelli, but many of these other thinkers that he discusses in places like natural right and history.
00:17:54.860 And so I would say you can read Strauss, but I would remain skeptical of kind of his larger project, his overall conclusions.
00:18:03.920 Again, at least the way that they've been described to me, I haven't read all of his works yet.
00:18:09.700 I don't have a heavily informed understanding of his wider system that he's trying to put together.
00:18:16.100 So I can only speak on what I've heard and what I've seen so far.
00:18:19.620 But I would still say if you want to get a deeper dive into any given philosopher Strauss, even if you don't agree with his worldview or his overarching project, he is a great scholar.
00:18:31.880 And I think he is going to bring something valuable to the discussion for you to chew on, again, even if you're not embracing an overall worldview that he would endorse.
00:18:41.660 When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from Winners, I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from Winners?
00:18:51.660 Like that woman over there with the Italian leather handbag. 1.00
00:18:54.600 Is that from Winners?
00:18:55.800 Ooh, or that beautiful silk skirt. 0.99
00:18:58.340 Did she pay full price?
00:18:59.580 Or those suede sneakers?
00:19:01.140 Or that luggage?
00:19:02.220 Or that trench?
00:19:03.380 Those jeans?
00:19:04.060 That jacket?
00:19:04.800 Those heels? 1.00
00:19:05.660 Is anyone paying full price for anything?
00:19:08.620 Stop wondering.
00:19:09.880 Start winning.
00:19:10.440 Winners find fabulous for less.
00:19:13.560 Number seven.
00:19:15.200 Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard.
00:19:19.560 Now again, if you're operating in the cooties theory of intellectual exploration, then Baudrillard is obviously forbidden.
00:19:28.440 This guy is definitely postmodern.
00:19:30.900 So if you're worried that you might be infected by the postmodernism, then steer clear of this one.
00:19:36.380 This is the book that inspired The Matrix.
00:19:39.500 Every college philosophy student falls in love with it at some point, and it's easy to see why.
00:19:44.640 It really does address issues that are rather glaring in modernity.
00:19:48.900 Baudrillard focuses on the separation between the signified and the signifier,
00:19:53.940 the way in which our language and art and other aspects of life have really been cut off from our organic experiences that normally would have informed these things.
00:20:05.700 Basically, we've lost the ability to just have kind of these normal, grounded, real experiences to define our life in the way that we communicate with each other.
00:20:17.160 Instead, everything is an iteration on an iteration on an iteration, and that gives us this feeling of being in a simulation where nothing we're actually discussing or interacting with is real.
00:20:30.660 It's all just us working from these distorted concepts so that we never actually make contact with something that isn't a copy of a copy.
00:20:40.380 And that's what gives us this hyper-reality that Baudrillard talks about.
00:20:45.260 He talks in detail about the media and the way that it dehumanizes and distorts reality really helps to create this postmodern condition.
00:20:55.240 Of course, you can't take everything out of this, but ultimately it's short work, and I think it's one that's worth reading.
00:21:02.620 Number eight, the collapse of complex societies.
00:21:06.880 Joseph Tainter.
00:21:07.700 So this is another one of those books that I am going to recommend, but I'm going to begin with a large caveat.
00:21:15.540 Tainter is a materialist.
00:21:18.140 He's just reducing everything down to material and specifically economic explanations, and this leads him to make some embarrassing statements.
00:21:27.540 He completely dismisses guys like Spangler and Toynbee and just calls all of their work ridiculous nonsense because it acknowledges the existence of factors that aren't on a spreadsheet somewhere, and that's a huge problem for him.
00:21:42.020 It's just not scientific enough.
00:21:43.700 He sounds like a Redditor.
00:21:45.080 Also, because he is trying to reduce everything to this one material cause, it makes him contradict himself in some areas.
00:21:53.160 For instance, he says that the inefficiency of bureaucracies is not enough to go ahead and explain certain scenarios, and then he goes on to talk about why they do exactly that.
00:22:04.600 Why these bureaucracies become so inefficient.
00:22:07.760 It just seems like he's rearranging language to make it fit his one particular phrase so that, oh, then it's a grand unifying theory.
00:22:16.420 But ultimately, I do think that the book is worth reading because Tainter's core thesis is sound, that a reduction in marginal utility when it comes to complex societies is a huge problem.
00:22:29.220 He thinks it's the only problem.
00:22:30.820 He's pointing to this as the only cause we can really acknowledge or prove.
00:22:35.260 I think that's too simplistic.
00:22:36.880 However, this is a serious problem.
00:22:40.040 The loss of return on investment when it comes to complexity really is huge.
00:22:45.040 And while that shouldn't be a revelation for some people, he lays it out in a way that I think makes the case very well.
00:22:52.620 And it's important because that does seem to be a problem for a lot of people.
00:22:55.940 They can't believe that scale and complexity can ever have a downside, that it ever has limits.
00:23:01.660 To this day, I am still beating this drum and people look at me sideways like I'm crazy.
00:23:06.560 What do you mean that a republic can't expand to the entire globe and still function the way it did when it was the size of a city-state?
00:23:13.980 I don't understand.
00:23:15.640 Of course, we can just create a global system of trade that is entirely interconnected with no downsides.
00:23:22.740 Again, I think the book is flawed due to the author's ideological limitations.
00:23:27.820 But that said, it's still a very important piece of the puzzle and one worth understanding.
00:23:32.440 Number nine, the conservative mind, Russell Kirk.
00:23:38.600 The conservative mind is always referenced as one of the definitive texts when it comes to American conservatism.
00:23:46.840 But you don't hear people actually talk about the contents of Russell Kirk's thought very much anymore.
00:23:52.640 It's important to understand that this isn't just some kind of Fox News, Sean Hannity, pop conservatism that Russell Kirk is talking about.
00:24:01.060 He is specifically discussing the importance of conservatism not being ideological, being grounded in the conservation of a particular people, a particular way of being, a particular place.
00:24:12.820 It may still not go far enough for a lot of right-wingers, but it's still a very important overview.
00:24:19.680 Russell Kirk is giving us a survey of conservative thought all the way from Burke up to the modern day.
00:24:26.540 Kirk has a lot of different entries in this.
00:24:28.760 It's a very long work, but you can kind of read it piecemeal if you want, because he's zooming in and focusing on different thinkers, different parts of the tradition.
00:24:37.820 It's something that's easy to kind of pick up and put down and you don't completely lose the thread of the argument over seven or 800 pages or whatever it is.
00:24:47.380 So Kirk was eventually placed in kind of the paleo-conservative corner of the GOP, along with Pat Buchanan and guys like Paul Gottfried.
00:24:56.100 And one of the reasons we don't hear about Kirk that much anymore is he was kind of canceled later on in his career for regularly making the joke that American politicians kept confusing Tel Aviv with Washington, D.C. for the capital of the United States.
00:25:09.940 So I would definitely recommend The Conservative Mind.
00:25:12.880 It's something that's going to, again, give you that survey, that broader view, and the context in which conservatism has evolved.
00:25:20.940 Even if you don't think of yourself as a conservative, you are certainly tied to that intellectual lineage in some way, and it's definitely worth knowing.
00:25:29.660 All right, guys, well, that is it.
00:25:31.600 My top nine reads of 2024, bringing it to you at the beginning of 2025, like I so often do.
00:25:38.680 I do want to throw in an honorable mention on this one, Nick Land's Xenosystems.
00:25:44.140 I didn't include it because it is something that I have been reading for years.
00:25:48.460 However, in order to read it, you always had to have this kind of weird collection of PDFs because the site's been down and it was curated, but it was entirely online and kind of this collection put together by a internet anon.
00:26:02.480 But now we have Passage Press, and they went through and actually reselected everything, curated it properly, put everything in categories, making it much easier to read.
00:26:12.660 And, of course, it's in a physical volume that is very nice.
00:26:15.980 So if you never read Xenosystems or if you did read kind of the online scatterbrain version of it, but you want something that is nice, that you can hold in your hands, that is put together in an order that makes it make more sense,
00:26:29.260 then I encourage you to pick that up from Passage Press.
00:26:33.200 All right, guys, we're going to wrap it up, but if you liked this video, please go ahead and click like.
00:26:38.240 If you haven't subscribed to the channel yet, now is a great time to do so.
00:26:42.220 If you want to get these broadcasts as podcasts, then you need to subscribe to The Orr McIntyre Show on your favorite podcast platform.
00:26:49.300 And when you do, leave a rating or a review.
00:26:51.240 It really helps out with the algorithm magic.
00:26:53.860 If you would like to pick up my book, The Total State, it is now out on audiobook.
00:26:58.840 So if you've been waiting to listen to it, now is a great time.
00:27:02.000 Start your new year out with The Total State.
00:27:05.380 Of course, if you would like to follow me on Twitter or Gab or Substack, if you want to get these episodes on Rumble or Odyssey, the links to do all of that are down below in the description.
00:27:15.560 And of course, you can catch all of my shows and all of my columns over at The Blaze.
00:27:19.920 Thank you, everybody, for watching.
00:27:21.760 Have a great new year.
00:27:22.860 And as always, I'll talk to you next time.