The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 102 ｜ The People Who Pray for the Apocalypse ｜ Benjamin Teitelbaum ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

00:00:00.000 In 2021, the world is a very tricky place, endlessly complicated.

00:00:05.900 Society is in decline or appears to be.

00:00:09.680 It's only March and already the targets of cancel culture include Dr. Seuss, Pepe Le Pew, Dumbo, Gina Carano, Sharon Osborne, Bill Burr, Shakespeare, Parler, the guy from Bachelor, the other guy from the Food Network and most of all, Mr.

00:00:26.980 and Mrs. Potato Head. Holy cow. 1.00

00:00:31.340 Meanwhile, we have gained racist strippers at the Grammys. 0.68

00:00:37.900 After three years of nonstop cancel culture, the left claims that cancel culture doesn't even exist.

00:00:44.900 In their next breath, they claim that, and this is a direct headline from The Washington Post, nobody loves cancel culture more than Republicans, end quote.

00:00:54.180 Just like Antifa, it's just an idea.

00:00:59.940 Even so, I don't think that we should trust any idea that causes an unprecedented amount of damage to almost every major city in America, but that's just me.

00:01:10.780 But that all wouldn't matter because we can't even agree on whether or not truth still exists.

00:01:16.180 I'm going somewhere.

00:01:18.740 I'm going to the podcast, and that's what this is all about.

00:01:23.600 A growing number of radicals claim that truth doesn't exist, which leaves people like us who believe in the traditions of the Enlightenment, the idea that there are certain truths that are self-evident.

00:01:39.740 It leaves us feeling more and more isolated.

00:01:43.580 All of this stuff is happening so fast that we barely have time to comprehend one ridiculous disaster before another dozen pop up.

00:01:52.300 A few months ago, I met a guy who is remarkable because of what he's done and what he can explain.

00:02:02.120 Today's guest has spent the last 10 years examining the movements that have led to all of this chaos.

00:02:10.880 He wrote about it in his book, War for Eternity.

00:02:14.960 Now, this is a book that defies political classification.

00:02:19.120 It doesn't fit neatly on either side of the fence because what it talks about is the war for eternity, a global war.

00:02:29.920 This is probably why Glenn Greenwald called it an indispensable text for understanding the most profound and tumultuous political shifts in defining societies on every continent, end quote.

00:02:45.260 Ditto for me.

00:02:46.820 On top of being an author, today's guest is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and a scholar of radical nationalism.

00:02:56.260 This one, every person on the right needs to hear.

00:03:02.700 Today, Benjamin Teitelbaum.

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00:04:29.960 Ben, when I found your book, War for Eternity, I don't know if it was like I found a lost

00:04:50.960 brother or if if I felt like, oh, my gosh, there's now a club of three of us that are

00:04:59.220 paying attention to this.

00:05:01.820 This is, I believe.

00:05:05.480 The one of the most important subjects that can be talked about today, especially for people

00:05:14.620 who are on the right.

00:05:15.760 And I have I have said so clearly for so long, just because people say they're with you on

00:05:25.060 X, Y or Z, it doesn't mean that they believe the same thing that you do.

00:05:31.440 And we are in a society now talking about right wing extremism.

00:05:38.200 And I think the media and everybody else wants to make that into just everybody who voted for

00:05:43.520 Donald Trump.

00:05:44.400 But this is right wing extremism.

00:05:47.480 And it's extraordinarily concerning and confusing.

00:05:52.880 Right.

00:05:54.240 Yes.

00:05:55.140 Yes.

00:05:55.580 And I have to say, Glenn, it's really to your a compliment to you that you're interested

00:06:01.040 in patrolling this this area of your own political coalition, because you're entirely right.

00:06:08.380 This is all politics where you bring together different factions.

00:06:12.960 You're going to overlap in some area.

00:06:15.480 That's why you can form a coalition with somebody.

00:06:18.140 But the question is, is what about those areas where you don't overlap?

00:06:21.220 Right.

00:06:21.480 Important is it?

00:06:22.020 And how how polarized are you on those topics?

00:06:24.720 And the problem with this, the reason why I say this is confusing is because I first discovered

00:06:32.840 this by reading Dugan from Russia.

00:06:36.800 And if you read his work, you can read it as an average person.

00:06:43.900 And I could get three chapters in to one of his books and go, yeah, I feel that way, too.

00:06:50.900 And if you don't understand the difference of what he's saying, using the same words you

00:06:58.800 might use, you are on it's the difference, really, between the road of death and the road of life.

00:07:06.600 Am I overstating that?

00:07:08.960 I don't think so.

00:07:10.560 I don't think so.

00:07:11.360 And I think that sometimes small differences are consequential here.

00:07:17.540 We it's interesting.

00:07:19.420 There's I think when I'm presenting this this body of thought, especially to conservatives,

00:07:24.020 especially to religious conservatives, you will hear them say that, oh, this is sounding

00:07:30.120 good.

00:07:30.540 Ninety percent of this.

00:07:31.680 Ninety five percent of this is sounding good.

00:07:33.740 And then there's a little sliver of something there that makes them that I actually had Rod

00:07:40.400 Dreher once say to me, all of a sudden he'd be reading this and they get the feeling that

00:07:44.140 there was like someone in the room watching him.

00:07:46.080 Yeah.

00:07:46.240 A creepy feeling that.

00:07:47.100 Yeah.

00:07:47.360 Over this because it's hard to pinpoint.

00:07:49.300 Yeah.

00:07:49.600 It's hard to pinpoint, but it's there.

00:07:50.780 And I think that that feeling of something over your shoulder is I mean, I read I read

00:07:59.900 this stuff and I feel it's evil.

00:08:02.860 I mean, it is darkness as much as you would get from somebody who believes in the 12th

00:08:09.280 the mom, you know, in the end of the world.

00:08:11.700 It is that dark and that evil.

00:08:15.440 So let's start at the beginning.

00:08:17.500 And I think if the average person was asked to define what a traditionalist is, I might

00:08:25.900 define myself as a traditionalist.

00:08:27.800 I believe in the Constitution.

00:08:28.820 I believe in the founding fathers.

00:08:30.660 I I believe in America.

00:08:32.820 I go to church on Sundays.

00:08:35.120 You know, I believe in, you know, God and mom and apple pie and Chevrolet.

00:08:40.220 But that's not what we're talking about.

00:08:45.880 Everything that you just described, I think, could be labeled traditionalist with a lowercase

00:08:50.580 T.

00:08:51.340 And that's the only little bit of help that we get here in identifying what this is.

00:08:56.880 Right.

00:08:57.120 When we talk about an uppercase T traditionalism, we're talking about a very, very small spiritual

00:09:03.740 and eventually political movement that really comes into existence in the early 1900s.

00:09:10.300 And yes, they might share with you a belief that things used to be better or that maybe

00:09:16.680 the principles that we should live our lives through today and which we should hold to in

00:09:23.380 the future were established in the past.

00:09:25.480 Right.

00:09:25.740 And therefore, that we should be critical of the notion of progress.

00:09:28.600 Right.

00:09:30.300 But they wrap all that in in something far more arcane and esoteric.

00:09:36.720 And they wrap it all in in a sort of worship of the past and also a belief that where we are

00:09:44.680 headed right now is going to lead us to destruction.

00:09:46.840 And that that destruction is good and necessary.

00:09:50.200 And Dugan describes this as and we'll get into who Alexander Dugan is in a little while.

00:09:55.520 But but yeah, I don't know if this is the way the American traditionalist and we'll explain

00:10:01.440 what that means here in a minute.

00:10:03.580 Dugan describes this as the the apocalypse or the end of the world as described biblically

00:10:12.400 and but they're working to bring it on because it's good.

00:10:18.240 Yes.

00:10:18.840 OK.

00:10:19.160 Yes.

00:10:19.480 And that's the way it is with traditionalists all around the world.

00:10:22.960 It is really the biblical apocalypse.

00:10:27.680 Not quite.

00:10:28.840 OK.

00:10:29.120 So maybe right here is where we start to see a distinction between between, let's say,

00:10:32.860 a conservative Christian and one of these capital T traditionalists.

00:10:36.280 OK.

00:10:36.980 So the way let's say in the apocalypse that you would hear about in the Bible, in that

00:10:43.260 biblical tradition, it tends to be followed by some sort of heavenly utopia.

00:10:50.280 Right.

00:10:50.800 Right.

00:10:51.840 A rapture.

00:10:53.160 Right.

00:10:53.780 The traditionalists instead see an earthly apocalypse as being the prelude to an earthly utopia.

00:11:00.980 And it's in this that might seem like a small difference there.

00:11:05.300 But so there's no Jesus returning on this one.

00:11:09.500 Not not in the sense that they are talking about.

00:11:12.100 OK.

00:11:12.260 They're talking about human society, secular, political, worldly, material society returning

00:11:18.560 to a utopia.

00:11:19.760 Right.

00:11:20.080 And again, that might seem like a small difference, but it means that destruction can become the

00:11:28.100 tool of a politician, someone working with actual material politics in the world today

00:11:34.200 who could bring on destruction in the most concrete sense that we would think about based

00:11:40.820 on the promise that afterwards everything is going to be better here.

00:11:44.300 And that's because we've destroyed progress.

00:11:48.360 We've destroyed the modern world.

00:11:52.240 Yes.

00:11:52.900 Correct.

00:11:53.420 Including the ideas of the Enlightenment.

00:11:57.680 Including the including especially the ideas of the Enlightenment.

00:12:01.460 So this is where this goes off the rails so quickly if you know what you're looking for.

00:12:09.200 But if you said to a lot of people, even on the left today, I mean the extreme left, you'd

00:12:15.500 say the ideas of the Enlightenment, we got to stop that.

00:12:19.580 There is no empirical evidence of anything that works with the philosophy for a lot of people

00:12:25.460 on the extreme left.

00:12:27.440 Right.

00:12:28.420 Yes.

00:12:28.640 Yes.

00:12:29.260 Opposition to individualism, opposition to meritocracy.

00:12:33.700 All of those principles that come from the Enlightenment are, yes, are being targeted on the left, of course.

00:12:40.380 Right.

00:12:41.560 How do these people fall into, have they just inserted themselves into the right-left spectrum?

00:12:53.080 Are they using the European right-left spectrum or how do they fit into right?

00:13:01.080 Because that's not, I know they are fitting into the right, but they don't fit once you

00:13:07.420 know who they are.

00:13:09.760 Absolutely.

00:13:10.560 Absolutely.

00:13:11.620 These are not people who are going to be in partnership with Ted Cruz, with Paul Ryan.

00:13:18.100 Right.

00:13:18.200 When you ask if they could fit into the right, yes, it is typically the European nationalistic

00:13:24.740 right that they're going to have more resonance with.

00:13:27.700 Remember, one of the key objects, one of the key targets of this way of thinking is the

00:13:35.620 free market, is universalism, the belief in universal human rights or universal truths,

00:13:42.140 the sort of conceptual world that we see communicated in the U.S. Constitution.

00:13:48.200 Rights, we take these rights as being self-evident, for example, for all people, a universalism

00:13:54.320 in Christianity.

00:13:55.540 They instead, they want to see a world that is a little bit more siloed, a world where

00:14:03.480 individualism is subordinated to the collective, a world where capitalism is subordinated to

00:14:09.340 the nation state.

00:14:10.120 Are there strains of that, let's say, in American conservatism?

00:14:14.200 Yes.

00:14:14.920 But they're much more pronounced in the European context.

00:14:19.140 So it's not an accident that when we see this come into American politics, it is when the

00:14:24.920 American right is starting to fuse a bit more with that populist nationalist right that we

00:14:31.520 see in Europe.

00:14:32.140 And that is happening in America.

00:14:35.240 It's so important to separate Europe from America. 1.00

00:14:37.820 But it happens when populism happens here because you connect on the things like, I believe in

00:14:46.160 God.

00:14:46.800 I believe that these traditions shouldn't be lost.

00:14:50.080 I believe in some of the old ways where conservative means to conserve the things of the past that

00:14:58.020 worked, not to reject the future and progress, just conserve the things that work.

00:15:04.180 They don't they reject the future and all modernism.

00:15:09.660 But you, again, don't know that.

00:15:11.920 So when you're talking populism, they can just slide in covertly and you don't know.

00:15:21.080 Absolutely.

00:15:22.000 Absolutely.

00:15:22.560 This is an example of that coalition building.

00:15:25.600 And populism overlaps more with this way of thinking than free market liberalism or libertarianism,

00:15:33.200 like what we tend to say in the United States.

00:15:35.400 Right.

00:15:35.840 So there the coalition is popular.

00:15:38.620 It conflicts with populism as well, though.

00:15:40.800 Here, too, we see a sort of marriage of necessity between this capital T traditionalism and populism.

00:15:50.080 And they will work together for a while.

00:15:52.200 But the question is, is if let's suppose one of them succeeds, let's suppose Trump's movement,

00:15:58.060 let's say, really materializes and achieves all of its goals.

00:16:02.000 At that point, we would see potentially these two strains of thought break apart.

00:16:07.680 They can also collaborate with libertarians up to a certain point.

00:16:12.600 So both of them oppose the establishment, oppose a strong liberal government, a centralized federal government.

00:16:21.540 Question is, what happens with that government is disassembled.

00:16:24.680 Correct.

00:16:24.860 Is it left that way or is a new sort of theocracy put in place?

00:16:28.500 I found that's where I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly with a a very strong environmentalist.

00:16:39.560 I am I consider myself an environmentalist.

00:16:41.880 I'm concerned about the environment.

00:16:43.720 I also could read a thermometer, you know, global warming.

00:16:46.980 And I also will give the fact that if there is warming, it doesn't seem logical to me that man doesn't have a role when we have done what we've done to the earth and the air.

00:17:00.520 Yes.

00:17:01.120 However, I disagree on the solutions that are proposed.

00:17:06.420 And and I found myself with a guy who believes in carbon credits, that the government needs to be involved 100 percent deeply.

00:17:18.460 And he found that what the World Economic Forum is doing with ESGs is a sham.

00:17:26.400 Now, he's in one of the biggest hedge funds, BlackRock, and he said for a while there, I thought, well, at least we're doing some good.

00:17:35.600 Now, I realize we're not.

00:17:38.280 This is actually very harmful.

00:17:41.100 And we can agree on those two things.

00:17:44.240 And and he was kind of in bed with something that is diametrically opposed to him when it comes time to actually do something.

00:17:55.240 Right.

00:17:55.720 Yes.

00:17:56.540 OK.

00:17:56.900 Yes, absolutely.

00:17:58.600 Absolutely.

00:17:59.160 I mean, I mean, there again, we see that a small a small difference.

00:18:02.820 Yeah.

00:18:03.840 It becomes big in the end.

00:18:05.240 Can make.

00:18:06.100 Absolutely.

00:18:06.740 Yeah, absolutely.

00:18:07.980 OK.

00:18:08.520 So.

00:18:11.000 Before we get to the American side, which is really very important, I've been ringing this bell.

00:18:18.300 I honestly, Ben, I've been looking for you for a long time.

00:18:21.220 I'm like, how are we the only ones that are talking about this?

00:18:24.440 I've been ringing the bell about Alexander Dugan for a long time and even his influence here in America, especially in the churches.

00:18:35.240 He's very well financed and and and very well connected all around the world.

00:18:43.460 Let's start with him.

00:18:44.860 Yes.

00:18:45.180 Who is he?

00:18:45.840 That's quite a question because he's difficult to define.

00:18:50.360 You could call him a philosopher.

00:18:52.880 You could call him a media personality.

00:18:55.260 You could also call him a diplomat or you could call him a political operative.

00:18:58.960 Some people would call him a warmonger.

00:19:00.580 And at different times, he appears to be all of those things.

00:19:04.260 He has written some very influential books in Russia.

00:19:07.840 He wrote really a seminal text called The Foundations of Geopolitics right after the fall of the Soviet Union, which essentially outlined a plan for Russia to reassert itself against the United States once the Soviet Union had disintegrated.

00:19:23.560 And and and it was it was elaborate, although he left out a lot of his a lot of his earlier esoteric occultist yearnings and interpretations of the world.

00:19:35.760 Dugan has a very complicated background, which which we probably don't have time to get into.

00:19:39.680 But so he writes that text.

00:19:42.680 It becomes essentially required reading for the next generation of Russian military generals.

00:19:48.120 And when you have someone like that and you're talking about intellectualism, I'm sure you know this, Glenn.

00:19:53.020 It's hard to quantify their influence.

00:19:55.400 Yeah.

00:19:55.520 How do they how do you quantify the influence of someone like Sean Hannity, yourself, Bill O'Reilly, Rachel Maddow?

00:20:01.640 That's this.

00:20:02.220 This is a soft pattern.

00:20:03.460 So that's where that's where Dugan enters the stage in the late 90s.

00:20:07.280 Later on, we see him being employed as an advisor to certain members of the Duma in Russia.

00:20:15.580 We see him almost inexplicably showing up in situations of profound diplomatic tension when Russia was having this conflict with separatists in Chechnya.

00:20:29.020 Dugan turns up to be one of the mediators in their debates.

00:20:33.440 This is officially, again, just a philosopher.

00:20:35.500 Later on, 2015, when Russia, Turkey, Syria have a major diplomatic crisis over the shooting down of a Russian plane by Turkish forces on the border to Syria and in Turkey.

00:20:50.060 We don't know how all these players got together and solved the situation.

00:20:55.600 It was it was very tense for a while.

00:20:57.200 And about a month or two after everything had resolved, Ankara and Moscow had had come up with an agreement.

00:21:03.840 It turns out Alexander Dugan was the mediator again.

00:21:06.860 So and throughout all of those instances, we don't quite know what his official role was.

00:21:14.720 He has met Putin.

00:21:15.960 He's never been an official advisor to Putin, but he he seems to be used in these key places.

00:21:21.180 So so but he is kind of a guy that you wouldn't want to publicly connect with if you're a Russian politician, I think.

00:21:33.940 I mean, I've seen his interviews, whatever the big interview show, kind of like our 60 Minutes where they sit around that big, huge tables.

00:21:42.200 And it's a one on one interview.

00:21:46.560 He has I mean, he has talked about to the guy's face rationally. 0.97

00:21:52.460 He's like, yeah, I think some people need to be executed.

00:21:54.980 And the host said, would I be one of those people? 0.98

00:21:57.360 And he said, well, yeah, yeah, you should be gone.

00:22:00.160 I mean, he is he is as frightening in some ways as Hitler must have been in 1930, 1928. 0.82

00:22:11.860 A guy with no power really seems like a fringe player.

00:22:16.100 But the things he says, if you take him seriously and literally, he's an extreme danger to the world.

00:22:24.720 Well, think of it in this terms, if you if you compare him to someone like Hitler, who he says, if I'm not mistaken, he says Hitler's problem. 0.80

00:22:35.100 He didn't go far enough. Right.

00:22:38.520 I'm not sure if he would still say that today.

00:22:40.900 OK, but he has.

00:22:43.140 OK, well, think of it in these terms, in these terms.

00:22:47.300 But he he looks at the United States, he looks at, let's say, the founding principles of the U.S.

00:22:53.060 and considers them to be a sort of metaphysical evil, looks at the universal values that are espoused in the Constitution, enlightenment values, the individualism.

00:23:06.920 And and says that these are values that anyone opposed to them cannot coexist with.

00:23:13.500 That sets us up for a sort of all or nothing conflict.

00:23:17.700 And he believes that Russia, Eurasia in particular, have a sort of also of metaphysical mandate to push against the United States.

00:23:28.520 There's not a lot of room there for coexistence.

00:23:32.380 So when you see a sort of apocalyptic yearning in this way of looking at the world, that's where it's rooted is a belief in a fundamental inability for us to coexist.

00:23:41.400 And that's one reason why throughout his history, he's also wanted to see a coalition, not just with with Russia and, let's say, China, which is which is fairly well, well publicized.

00:23:53.380 But he's also been quite interested in bringing Mujahideen, Islamist enemies of the United States, together so that all of these anti-American forces can collaborate against the West.

00:24:04.260 And and again, for him, this is this is more than just geopolitics, geopolitics and states represent a metaphysical spiritual conflict in his mind, secularism, individualism, enlightenment values, modernity versus the premodern versus tradition versus eternity, essentially, which is represented by these these other states.

00:24:26.940 And again, it might sound it might sound wacky, but this is this is a person who has had a major platform and has figured into high level diplomatic actions.

00:24:37.820 OK, so if the thing that stuck out when I first started looking into him is that his symbol for his philosophy or or whatever you would call it, is the ancient symbol of chaos.

00:24:54.420 Correct.

00:24:55.060 Right. And anybody who's been watching or listening to me for a long time knows that I said beginning in 2006, I think.

00:25:06.880 The thing to look for in the future will be those who want chaos.

00:25:13.520 That's the real danger is the chaos theory of just tear it all down and somehow or another it'll magically be better.

00:25:21.980 This is the philosophy of the extremists in Iran with the 12th, the bomb. 0.96

00:25:28.260 This is his viewpoint as well.

00:25:32.600 He he rejects capitalism, fascism and communism.

00:25:39.460 He says those were the the three that were really tried in the 20th century and all of them failed.

00:25:46.680 But he's his fourth political theory is really more of a of a hybrid of all of the bad parts of each of those.

00:25:54.760 Right.

00:25:55.100 You could say, yes, it almost it looks at those at those other modern political ideologies, fascism, communism, liberalism, and and tries to find in them a way to consistently oppose individualism, individual freedom.

00:26:15.540 You could say an interest in economic advance and progress finds a way to oppose all of those ideas and wraps them, wraps them into one.

00:26:25.500 OK.

00:26:27.300 Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

00:26:28.880 OK. His his religious.

00:26:31.560 The religious. The religious side of this.

00:26:35.740 He is.

00:26:37.060 Yeah.

00:26:37.360 I.

00:26:37.980 In fact, I'm pretty sure he doesn't even believe in God, does he?

00:26:42.780 He says he absolutely believes in God.

00:26:45.280 OK.

00:26:45.860 But not a God really that I would recognize.

00:26:49.000 I know he cloaks himself or tries to bring back the, you know, a renaissance of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

00:26:57.880 But I it seems to me that that's more of a vehicle than an actual belief.

00:27:06.040 Am I right?

00:27:07.140 Well, let's let's back up for OK.

00:27:09.400 So most traditionalists, these capital T traditionalists we were talking about, they they look at world history and they say that ages millennia ago, certainly before the time of Christ, there was a single true religion. 0.60

00:27:23.080 That's the tradition, capital T. That's what that's what it is.

00:27:26.620 And that over time, this tradition, this religious truth was gradually forgotten, destroyed.

00:27:33.440 That's why we started writing is because we started to forget it in their in their history telling.

00:27:38.280 And the truths that were that were contained in it were splintered in all these different directions and they can be found today in piecemeal fashion in certain religious practices, typically the mystical versions of, let's say, Islam, sometimes Christianity.

00:27:54.300 And in Christianity's case, it's typically Catholicism and East Orthodox Christianity, sometimes Kabbalah and Judaism.

00:28:01.820 But but but most often it's Hinduism.

00:28:04.520 Now, that means that some traditionalists, some traditionalists might convert to Christianity.

00:28:11.340 They might endorse Christianity. 0.67

00:28:12.560 And on the and on the face of it, yes, they would appear to be a Christian like you, Glenn.

00:28:18.320 But there's this back story to it, which is the belief that Christianity is just an imperfect pathway to something else, something pre-Christian, something larger than Christianity.

00:28:30.740 Most often traditionalists believe that it would be like the the Druids and things like that.

00:28:37.980 Right. And is it almost a Gnosticism, a Gnostic approach that you're born knowing and then you lose it or, you know, there's only a few of us that really get it.

00:28:49.460 Well, that's an interesting way to put it.

00:28:52.100 OK, the truth is that, I mean, if they think that once there was there was a true, authentic revelation to humanity, they also believe that today you can only get a scrap of it if you fully devote yourself to one religious path.

00:29:06.580 But that doesn't mean that that religious path in some way has a monopoly on truth.

00:29:11.280 It's just one of many.

00:29:12.300 But during your lifetime, you have no hope of of of, let's say, pursuing all of them to their to their fullest capacity.

00:29:20.340 So that's why they would devote themselves to this.

00:29:22.960 Now, there are other traditionalists who say Christianity should not be a part of this, say that it is the odd religion out.

00:29:30.840 And actually, that Christianity is what led to progress, progressivism, secularism, the Enlightenment, modernism.

00:29:38.520 You're probably familiar with that.

00:29:39.900 I would tend to agree with that, especially individualism.

00:29:43.880 Can we go back to Hinduism for a second? 0.97

00:29:46.700 Have you read Hitler's Monsters? 0.74

00:29:49.580 Yes.

00:29:50.060 The text is 2017, right?

00:29:52.280 We are brothers, because that is a very difficult, scholarly kind of book made for geeks like us.

00:30:01.160 And in that, he talks a lot about how Hinduism was something that they were pursuing, that they that, you know, they they they that they say they were Christian and they certainly weren't Hindu.

00:30:20.920 But they had this mystical belief and it was driven by Hinduism.

00:30:26.520 Hinduism is there connection there?

00:30:28.660 And what is that about Hinduism that draws these people?

00:30:33.500 Oh, certainly, certainly.

00:30:34.560 So so when we think about, you know, Nazism, we think about the veneration of the Aryan race, which which, of course, Hitler saw as this blonde, blue eyed master race of Germanic people. 0.70

00:30:45.060 The term Aryan, you might not realize this, but that relates to what is thought to be a tribe of North Indian people who eventually invaded India from the north.

00:30:58.940 Yeah.

00:30:59.060 And and also other territories in that that area, the the word Iran.

00:31:03.820 Yeah.

00:31:04.380 Also derives from Aryan.

00:31:05.980 It means the land of the Aryans. 0.85

00:31:07.900 And and there there is some historical truth to that part of the story where things get much more complicated is when you try and connect as Hitler was doing Europe to that.

00:31:18.020 Correct.

00:31:18.820 That particular history.

00:31:20.360 Now, all of those we speak about Indo-European languages.

00:31:26.620 Right.

00:31:26.840 These are languages going from from the Indian subcontinent all the way up to Iceland throughout throughout world history.

00:31:34.060 All of those languages do have a lot in common with each other.

00:31:36.860 Right.

00:31:37.400 And that might suggest that there is some sort of history of all the people living in that area.

00:31:42.120 But that's why that's why Hitler got to the Vikings. 0.97

00:31:46.380 Right.

00:31:46.560 That blue eyed, blonde hair kind of Viking look and which also brought in all of the, you know, I'm trying to Wagner kind of stuff.

00:31:56.640 Right.

00:31:57.320 Yes.

00:31:57.840 Yes.

00:31:58.140 And does Dugan do the same thing?

00:32:02.300 Is he saying that the Russians are that Aryan?

00:32:06.620 Absolutely.

00:32:07.400 Part of the Indo-European world.

00:32:08.900 Absolutely.

00:32:09.440 Okay.

00:32:09.860 Absolutely.

00:32:10.340 And think of it in these terms.

00:32:12.680 So they believed, and there's truth to this, that the pre-Christian religions that spread from India through Iran, Zoroastrianism, paganism through Europe, that they were all part of the same religious world, actually.

00:32:26.660 They're all variations of the same thing.

00:32:28.940 Christianity comes in.

00:32:30.440 Islam comes in.

00:32:32.040 For Europe, all those practices die off.

00:32:34.340 But in India, they don't.

00:32:35.980 In India, they live on as Hinduism. 1.00

00:32:37.740 So there are a lot of people who look to Hinduism as being the last remnant of European pre-Christian paganism.

00:32:45.640 And therefore, especially if you're, let's say, one of these figures we're talking about, Alexander Dugan, or a traditionalist, you see Hinduism as being virtuous and maybe even better than the other religions because it is older and because it hasn't been tarnished.

00:33:03.060 That makes it closer to that eternal, ancient truth that they're trying to get to than the other practices.

00:33:11.680 That's one of the reasons why Hinduism is elevated. 0.94

00:33:16.240 So when he uses, because he talks a lot about the Eastern Orthodox Church reestablishing itself, and that is purely like Hitler using Christianity as a vehicle to help him destroy. 0.64

00:33:34.700 There's no love here for the Eastern Orthodox Church, right? 1.00

00:33:39.400 Or is there?

00:33:40.020 I don't think that I think the way to put it is that there's no partiality for Christianity.

00:33:45.820 I think you're entirely right in saying that the Eastern Orthodox Church for him serves the function of being a banner for nationalism.

00:33:52.760 Correct.

00:33:53.360 Yeah.

00:33:53.500 Something everybody can unite on.

00:33:56.460 Every Russian can unite.

00:33:57.940 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:33:58.580 And when we get to America, that's why Christianity is important.

00:34:02.960 Again, it's not that this is a Christian movement.

00:34:06.020 In fact, it's the opposite of a Christian movement. 0.94

00:34:08.040 It's that it's a banner that they can use to unite people on because those people who are Christian will hear words about tradition and they're like, yeah, I'm with that.

00:34:21.920 Right.

00:34:22.840 Right.

00:34:23.320 OK.

00:34:23.620 Right.

00:34:24.160 But thing thing in these terms, though, I mean, Christianity, the principle that Christ's salvation was available to all people throughout the world and all times.

00:34:35.140 And this this is what is behind the evangelistic impetus to a lot of modern Christianity.

00:34:41.040 That is a sort of anti-nationalistic doctrine.

00:34:45.020 That is that is that is a way of looking at global society that says that the boundaries we put around ourselves are actually a problem and actually stopping a divine message from getting through.

00:34:57.460 So it's the it's the opposite of using Christianity as the banner of a tribe, let's say, that is only a message for some people.

00:35:04.160 That was part of the revolutionary element in Christianity was this universal element.

00:35:11.020 So so by treating Christianity in this way, you really are violating a principle of it.

00:35:15.320 And that's, again, another reason why a lot of traditionalists do not identify with Christianity.

00:35:20.320 They are an anti-Christian right in most cases.

00:35:22.760 All right. Now let's talk about this.

00:35:25.300 We've got two other people to go through, and one of them is extraordinarily important in America.

00:35:31.240 But let me just touch base one on one more thing.

00:35:36.400 He is he's kind of the.

00:35:41.300 Kof, I can't say founder, but the co-leader in some ways with in in the world, he's really made the push.

00:35:52.360 He into Europe and some of these really spooky European right organizations are really gaining traction with his help, his fundraising and his his connections.

00:36:13.980 Am I wrong on that?

00:36:15.460 We're talking about it.

00:36:16.620 Alexander Dugan.

00:36:17.340 Absolutely.

00:36:17.920 Yeah.

00:36:18.100 When so so nationalist parties in Europe have really had a decision of kind of what are their geopolitics going to be?

00:36:27.300 Correct.

00:36:27.760 Are they pro European Union?

00:36:29.460 Are they pro United States?

00:36:30.780 Are they pro Russia?

00:36:32.620 Dugan has been a force pushing, especially in Austria, Italy, Hungary and France to make sure that this ascendant politically powerful movement from from the right in Europe will be pro Russian.

00:36:48.820 And in a lot of instances, he's been successful in that.

00:36:51.420 I could mention Greece as well.

00:36:53.020 Oh, yeah.

00:36:54.040 In saying that, OK, as these political forces are imagining a new a new role in the world for their respective nations.

00:37:03.020 Are how are they going to relate to Russia?

00:37:04.960 And and he's been there to say, well, if you are social conservatives, Putin is your guy.

00:37:10.200 Right.

00:37:10.620 In fact, he I think he's the guy that was behind.

00:37:14.260 I think it was Notre Dame one year couldn't afford the Christmas tree, which is traditional.

00:37:20.420 And I think either he funded it or Putin funded it.

00:37:25.460 You know, basically, Russia is your leader.

00:37:30.040 You're your spiritual.

00:37:31.800 Especially when it comes to your spiritual leader.

00:37:33.980 Yeah.

00:37:34.160 When it comes to spiritual matters and cultural conservatism, we're we're the ones who are behind you.

00:37:39.200 Yeah.

00:37:39.460 Not not necessarily leader defender probably is better.

00:37:43.500 Yeah.

00:37:43.800 They're your spiritual defender.

00:37:45.920 Because we believe in those traditional values.

00:37:49.540 Absolutely.

00:37:50.440 And Glenn, when you talk about this cultural conservatism and Christianity being being a sort of facade, it's especially clear when you look at Putin's past because he did not care about this at all.

00:38:02.340 At all.

00:38:02.460 At all.

00:38:02.580 The beginning of the 2000s.

00:38:03.440 Correct.

00:38:03.740 No, he he had no ideology when he began, you know, really solidifying his power.

00:38:09.760 Cultural conservatism came later as as he began to to imagine a geopolitical role and a message for himself, aside from just Russian might.

00:38:21.380 So let me just stop one more place with him.

00:38:25.560 Brexit.

00:38:25.900 I know he was involved in Brexit, but I don't think that the average person in England had any idea what he stood for.

00:38:37.120 He was just against the European Union.

00:38:40.640 He's for destruction of everything.

00:38:42.840 Yes.

00:38:43.900 And he helped, if I'm not mistaken, fund and advise some of the Brexit.

00:38:51.020 Pieces.

00:38:52.100 Is that true or not?

00:38:53.480 I don't I don't know that much about about Dugan doing that personally.

00:38:58.200 He certainly was supporting it and he was using his media outlets to to support Brexit.

00:39:02.760 In his mind, a weakened European Union means a weakened United States in Europe and there and thereby also opportunities for Russia to push outward. 0.80

00:39:13.300 But as you're mentioning, also, this is an example of destroying and disintegrating some some political entity.

00:39:19.860 And that that appeals to Dugan, no doubt.

00:39:22.440 And also, I think people and because I can watch I can watch England and relate to it without being emotional, you know.

00:39:33.440 And so it's a better place to really understand it, because in some ways we feel the same way.

00:39:39.360 But that's not us.

00:39:41.600 And what people were feeling, the if you were a traditional Englishman, you were losing your heritage.

00:39:50.480 They were now starting to say that you can't even fly the British flag and, you know, Great Britain isn't so special and maybe they have some problems in the past and we should erase that.

00:40:01.880 And we should be more of this global community.

00:40:04.400 And you were seeing all of these influences coming from outside of your country.

00:40:10.580 You found them damaging and your politicians were lying to you.

00:40:16.320 That is the American situation.

00:40:18.500 And that's what a traditionalist needs to be able to march in and say, we're with you and we can help you.

00:40:27.380 Right.

00:40:27.720 Absolutely. Absolutely. And add to everything that you just said, there's there's also the question of sovereignty there.

00:40:34.560 Right. There is the fact that, you know, British English fishermen and fishermen were not able to control their own destiny.

00:40:42.340 And changes to fishing laws would take place that, you know, in halls of power that were so remote and so inaccessible that, yes, of course, you I think it's very easy to understand feeling disgruntled and feeling resentful of of that political political entity.

00:40:58.840 The question is always what is going to fill the void when it is destroyed and what interests are going to be served by each action that makes this complicated.

00:41:08.600 That makes this something other than a black and white situation.

00:41:11.440 OK, so now before we come to America, there's a second leader of this.

00:41:19.260 Tell me about him.

00:41:20.860 So his name is Olavo de Carvalho, and he's most often just described as Olavo, his first name.

00:41:27.460 He is a Brazilian. He lives in the United States.

00:41:30.800 He's lived in the United States since 2005.

00:41:32.960 And if Dugan is hard to characterize, if I can't really decide whether to call him a philosopher or a political operative, that's that's even more so the case with this figure, Olavo.

00:41:43.640 He's recognized today as being most often, quote unquote, the guru of Jair Bolsonaro, who's the president of Brazil.

00:41:51.420 He rises to power in Brazil after a major political power vacuum and a lot of resentment against the progressive left administration and establishment in the country's government.

00:42:03.980 But Olavo is he's a media figure.

00:42:09.500 He's an educator. He's a philosopher.

00:42:12.080 He does not have any official position in the Bolsonaro government, although he does have acolytes who, let's say, currently the current foreign minister is a former student of his.

00:42:22.460 He's past ministers of education have come straight straight out of his sphere of influence.

00:42:28.960 So so nothing formal.

00:42:30.680 And yet you will not find a Brazilian political observer who does not consider him extremely powerful.

00:42:37.940 Now, he is known to most of the Brazilian public as a sort of Catholic zealot and as a as a conservative Christian voice.

00:42:47.660 Not all of them know that he is also in the past an astrologer, spent most of his time working in astrology.

00:42:56.800 And it appears in the 1980s that he converted to Islam and still today, some of his sons are still still affiliated affiliated with Islam.

00:43:07.300 The story behind that, how you could be both, let's say, a convert to Islam and a Catholic zealot.

00:43:13.760 And an astrologist.

00:43:15.940 And an astrologist, yes, rests with this history and traditionalism.

00:43:22.440 He was initiated into one of the most closed and, let's say, direct ideological and, let's say, religious schools tying to the to the original traditionalists.

00:43:36.300 This he was initiated into the religious school, the Islamic school, the Tariq of Frityov Shun, who is a follower of a man named René Gounon, who started traditionalism, essentially.

00:43:47.480 And throughout most of his career, he has been interested in studying esoteric, occultist, alternative spirituality, new age sort of stuff, in addition to traditionalism.

00:44:01.420 And relatively late came to conservatism and then, let's say, populism and the right.

00:44:09.180 Earlier in his life, he was a communist.

00:44:11.060 So this is this is a highly eccentric figure, produced a lot of text, has a lot of followers, difficult to characterize, but undoubtedly powerful as well.

00:44:23.820 Why is he here in the United States?

00:44:24.960 We don't really know.

00:44:28.220 That's a great question.

00:44:30.340 If you ask him, he would say that the political situation in Brazil just got to be too tiresome and he had to leave because the leftists were were just running amok, essentially.

00:44:41.760 What is strange is that now he's in so much favor.

00:44:44.820 I mean, there are literally squares of people holding placards with his name on it, shouting that Olavo was right and the president, Jair Bolsonaro, gave him a medal.

00:44:55.660 He still will not go back to Brazil.

00:44:57.360 So so I think some shrewd observers are suspecting that there are there are some major legal issues that would come into play where he just to go back into the into the country.

00:45:07.860 Now, here's where it becomes personal for a lot of conservatives, and it is one of the reasons why I was adamant against Donald Trump at the beginning.

00:45:24.220 And it wasn't had didn't have anything to do with Donald Trump.

00:45:27.880 It had everything to do with who he was surrounded by.

00:45:31.040 And I am not convinced at all that Donald Trump knows or understands nor cares about any of this stuff.

00:45:42.640 Would you agree with that or not?

00:45:45.140 Absolutely.

00:45:45.800 OK, absolutely.

00:45:46.920 I don't think he would get through a page of this.

00:45:48.980 I don't think he would.

00:45:49.820 But he is advised or has been advised by the main anchor here in America, who I find to be an extraordinarily disturbing man, Steve Bannon.

00:46:05.160 He's the he's the third in this unholy trinity.

00:46:09.960 Steve Bannon, just to give give some insight, we've been talking about Alexander Dugan quite a bit here in this program.

00:46:17.260 In November 2018, after he left the White House, Steve Bannon met Alexander Dugan in Rome.

00:46:23.900 They spent an entire day together.

00:46:26.140 The purpose of the meeting from Bannon's side was to push a geopolitical agenda.

00:46:32.420 But the the reason that the two of them got together in the first place was because they both identified with traditionalism in different ways.

00:46:41.840 They both shared this this way of thinking.

00:46:44.360 How did so that is how did Bannon where is that coming?

00:46:49.840 Traditionalism, where is that coming up in America?

00:46:52.660 How does he trip into this?

00:46:55.560 It's it's complicated and contradictory, of course, because for most most of the history of traditionalism and for most traditional lists, the United States itself is an abomination.

00:47:06.700 It is a state created in modernity and with the values of the Enlightenment.

00:47:13.660 That's that's part of our DNA in their mind.

00:47:15.760 So how you could combine that with traditionalism is a real question.

00:47:19.340 And it and it and it took a lot of work.

00:47:21.340 But for Bannon, he has been interested in this world, this alternative spirituality world for quite some time.

00:47:29.980 People tend to read his biography and see a lot of gimmicks.

00:47:35.260 Let's say, you know, Ben Shapiro, for example, you know, is a strong critic of Bannon and sees, you know, just kind of one gimmick after after the next with him.

00:47:43.620 That that can be true in certain respects.

00:47:45.760 But he has been interested in this this ideological world well before he got involved in politics.

00:47:52.180 That kind of begins during his college years when he is interested in Buddhism and transcendental meditation, stuff like that.

00:48:00.000 A lot of people were into that, of course, in the United States.

00:48:02.200 But as he moves in the 80s and the 90s, he he's not only reading these authors and authors close to them.

00:48:10.400 He's also starting to associate with other people who do as well, starting to participate in communities.

00:48:16.320 One thing I document in my book is is that in the early 90s, he was meeting with a group of alternative spiritualists, alternative spiritualists in California who were all followers of a mystic named Gurdjieff, who may be known to some of your some of your readers, who's kind of adjacent, not really a traditionalist, but but in the same world.

00:48:36.600 And throughout that time, he he learns about traditionalism.

00:48:42.120 He starts reading deeply into it.

00:48:43.560 I was very impressed, actually, by the breadth of his knowledge.

00:48:46.600 Of course, I spent about two years interviewing Bannon about this.

00:48:52.200 And when we get into the 2010s, then we know that he's he's also reading Alexander Dugan, familiar with Dugan, admiring his books, not just a reader, but an admirer of Dugan's writing.

00:49:04.460 And that all ends up being the prelude to this meeting in this attempt to collaborate.

00:49:10.040 Great. So this is first of all, you're an ethnomusicologist by trade.

00:49:16.660 That's what you do, right? Yes.

00:49:18.340 Which I don't even know what that is.

00:49:19.600 You study music like jazz and and track it to or what?

00:49:26.600 You could do that. Ethnomusicology is the combination is the study of music and culture.

00:49:32.140 So it's you could say that I'm an anthropologist.

00:49:34.440 I what I typically say to people is that I'm a scholar of politics.

00:49:38.120 I like I study politics and culture. And in contrast with my political scientists, colleagues, I think that the most important political developments do not take place in a ballot box.

00:49:48.940 Not they're not registered on opinion polls.

00:49:52.060 They take place in culture. And so music is something that I've looked at in the past.

00:49:55.520 But when music is not involved, I'm happy to depart from it as well.

00:49:59.740 That's interesting. I'd love to talk to you about just that.

00:50:03.000 I mean, I'm fascinated by Martin Luther King when he said no movement is a real movement unless it has a soundtrack.

00:50:10.300 And and and he's exactly right.

00:50:14.480 Yeah. So but so if that's your gig and you're not interested in things, really, you your depth of knowledge is enormous.

00:50:24.220 How did you get interested in in this with Steve Bannon and how did you get so many interviews and get him to say the things that he said on record?

00:50:37.700 Not shyly.

00:50:40.100 That that last question, Glenn, I can tell you right now, I do not know the answer to I.

00:50:47.120 Bannon likes attention.

00:50:48.560 I think that he likes attention from from academics and I know how to be persistent.

00:50:54.340 That's part of part of the back story here is I made myself in a nuisance and showed up at his house.

00:51:00.540 Yeah.

00:51:01.540 When I got the slightest hint of receptiveness.

00:51:04.800 So that that helps.

00:51:08.060 But I don't know why he divulged as much as he did to me, to be to be completely honest.

00:51:12.800 The fact that he was meeting with Alexander Dugan, why why he told me that I've I haven't the slightest the slightest clue.

00:51:18.500 But to the first part of your question, I I've been studying these movements and these these ideologies for about a decade.

00:51:27.040 And I knew about traditionalism from Europe.

00:51:29.640 I knew that it was kind of the strange wing of of, let's say, the right wing populist nationalist cause.

00:51:37.500 Right.

00:51:37.660 That was that was really European right. 0.86

00:51:40.040 European right has changed politics over there forever.

00:51:42.560 I mean, it was it was a major historical transformation these past these past decades.

00:51:48.140 Traditionalism, you would see these figures show up at seminars, at rallies, at, at, you know, political festivals and things like that.

00:51:57.420 They were not the movers and the shakers.

00:51:59.260 They were the oddballs at the at the edge of the gathering.

00:52:01.980 And that's partly why when I heard that Bannon read some of some traditionalist authors, that's all we really knew.

00:52:10.560 Let's say 2017, 2018, there are a few journalists who learned a little bit about this.

00:52:15.520 That was enough to to catch my attention, because I didn't think anyone with political power, anyone who had kind of succeeded at climbing up, climbing through the halls of power in the way someone like Bannon had.

00:52:30.120 They would ever, ever, ever even know about this stuff.

00:52:34.520 I guarantee you embrace it, let alone embrace it.

00:52:38.360 That's a whole nother stage.

00:52:39.580 I guarantee if you went around Washington prior to to Bannon's arrival, asked senators, congressmen, if they ever knew of any of these authors, they would have no clue.

00:52:49.040 I think if I said traditionalism, they'd start talking about something else.

00:52:53.000 I have to tell you, honestly, I I think I've had in 10 years one guest who, you know, they're, you know, very smart politically, globally.

00:53:06.860 I'll say Alexander Dugan.

00:53:09.060 And I think I've had one person say, oh, yeah, that's that guy.

00:53:13.200 They all dismiss him if they know him.

00:53:16.340 And most don't even know what this is.

00:53:19.440 And it's so toxic.

00:53:21.520 This is I mean, it's it's it's striking because his primary cause and the way if he has had influence, it has it has been influence in stoking the Kremlin on into additional conflicts with the West and with the United States.

00:53:39.220 So, you know, Dugan has served as a mouthpiece for the war cause in Georgia, said that Russia needed to intervene in Georgia.

00:53:48.080 Your listeners might remember that that particular conflict, because to do so was actually to fight against the United States in Ukraine.

00:53:58.100 He did the same thing, demanded and started, you know, drumming up support in Russia for military intervention into Ukraine and worked in Syria as well.

00:54:08.880 To make sure that a coalition between Syria, Russia and even Turkey in a complicated way would maintain itself so that the United States would would stay out of it.

00:54:18.980 So this is this is an actor who is principally opposed to a lot of U.S. geopolitics.

00:54:24.260 So I share I share I share your reaction over the fact that not more U.S. politicians know about him.

00:54:31.180 Yeah. When we when we look now at Bannon, I'll never forget 2015, 2016.

00:54:42.480 You have Alexander Dugan on his YouTube channel just raving about Donald Trump.

00:54:49.740 He is our man. 1.00

00:54:51.320 And I think if you're an idiot, you think, oh, see, the Russians are behind him. 1.00

00:54:59.580 Is that a Bannon influence? 1.00

00:55:01.800 Was that a chaos call?

00:55:05.120 Why?

00:55:05.400 Why was he for Donald Trump?

00:55:08.800 When you when you talk about chaos, that that's my principal interpretation of this.

00:55:13.380 We can all think what we will about Donald Trump.

00:55:16.180 One thing we could probably agree on is that he was a fundamental break with the status quo in U.S. politics.

00:55:21.760 Right. Right.

00:55:22.280 Whether you like it or you or you don't like it.

00:55:24.020 Right.

00:55:24.720 And when you have something like that, when you have an establishment exploded, all these different interests can start to fill that void.

00:55:34.220 And you can have a widely divergent range of thinkers and actors who see an opportunity for themselves.

00:55:42.680 And that all that is magnified if you have someone like Dugan who simply likes the chaos.

00:55:49.700 It's not necessarily that he wants to see the void created by Trump filled with someone who he likes.

00:55:57.140 It is simply the fact that the void has been created.

00:56:00.640 That itself is the goal for a lot of these thinkers.

00:56:02.900 And what is the goal that excites them?

00:56:05.220 What is the goal of Steve Bannon then?

00:56:07.960 Because if you're really a traditionalist, you don't want the United States.

00:56:11.940 You're looking for a great end of all of this and a restart of something else.

00:56:21.260 Steve Bannon meeting with Dugan as an American also doesn't make sense.

00:56:26.920 He calls us the land of the or the people of the sea, which Dugan does, which is anybody in the NATO alliance.

00:56:34.500 He wants the people of the sea to be destroyed.

00:56:38.080 Yes.

00:56:38.600 What is Bannon's endgame here?

00:56:41.000 What what did he see?

00:56:42.120 When he in interviews talks about the disassembly of the administrative state, think about that as the tip of the iceberg.

00:56:52.400 Think about that as the the public facing explanation for an agenda that might appeal again.

00:57:00.300 Let's say to libertarians who think the federal government has exceeded its its limits and rights to be rolled back in Bannon's case, though.

00:57:07.580 There are multiple layers behind this.

00:57:10.540 There is the belief in his case that if if the administrative state is pulled apart, if if that takes place, something will come back up to fill its void.

00:57:27.020 That is going to be essentially almost a pre-enlightenment version of the United States, something that predates the U.S. Constitution, something that I'm sorry.

00:57:35.960 Ben, can you give me the high point of pre-enlightenment anything on the planet?

00:57:43.040 Pre-enlightenment that was called the Dark Ages.

00:57:46.520 What what is so attractive about the pre-enlightenment world?

00:57:53.180 For these thinkers, it would be the primacy of spirituality.

00:57:57.860 Let's say it would be the disinclination toward globalization, the notion that the world could be, let's say, spiritual, collectivist, anti individual and also bounded, that you would not see expansion of goods, trade, peoples, governments, that everything would be would be kept in its in its place.

00:58:26.020 And that you would not have free radicals, individuals just moving, moving up and down the social ladder and across borders in any which way.

00:58:35.080 So when I'm describing that that sort of ideal, again, bits and pieces of that, I imagine, might might resonate with an American conservative and bits and pieces of it might not.

00:58:45.860 Small government does.

00:58:48.060 Small government, right?

00:58:49.260 Not probably destructive, not destroying the government.

00:58:53.300 No, and and we also might we also might think differently about the role of religion in public life.

00:59:03.820 Right.

00:59:04.360 But most often, most often, these thinkers want to see something akin to a theocracy.

00:59:10.900 I haven't heard Bannon say things like that.

00:59:12.840 But if you talk to Alexander Dugan about, well, who's who's the ideal state?

00:59:16.500 Where do we have the ideal nation in the world today?

00:59:19.180 Iran is the answer. 1.00

00:59:21.480 Because they're says it's Iran.

00:59:23.720 The reason why is because at the pinnacle of power in Iran is not a wealthy class.

00:59:33.020 It's not a military elite.

00:59:34.580 It's certainly not some proletariat workers alliance.

00:59:37.640 It is the priests, right?

00:59:40.460 The priest caste, the mullahs, a prioritization of religion over everything inside the state. 0.97

00:59:46.560 So when you look at the U.S. and you ask me, well, what does what does Bannon hope comes in place of of the state that would be destroyed?

00:59:57.420 I don't think it's a libertarian version of simply new decentralization.

01:00:03.040 I don't know that it is Iran.

01:00:05.020 He's never said anything like that.

01:00:06.340 That to me, Bannon, when you get to details, things get get complicated. 0.96

01:00:09.760 He's not he's not stupid, but it is in that direction.

01:00:13.740 It is it is a vision of the United States that is not as attached to the principles of the Enlightenment as it is for virtually all other conservatives. 0.92

01:00:22.140 And the Constitution.

01:00:24.260 And the Constitution, which is itself an Enlightenment era document, which is universalist, which in his mind paves the way for globalization, which is individualist, which paves the way for a lack of solidarity within the nation state.

01:00:37.020 So replacing those those values in his mind will it would be something more, let's say, less American, less inherently enlightenment, liberal and modern.

01:00:52.460 So people would say to me, I've heard this.

01:00:58.960 I can't tell you how many people in the press I have called and said, look, we disagree on everything.

01:01:03.460 But when you're thinking about the religious right or you're thinking about a spooky right, this is what you're talking about. 0.80

01:01:12.360 And Alexander Dugan, if I'm not mistaken, his translator is either the wife or the girlfriend of Richard Spencer, the the Nazi here in America.

01:01:22.820 So they're they're they're they're they're really tied into things.

01:01:28.040 They either get a glazed over look or they'll say, what does he matter?

01:01:33.300 And I'll say, well, because Bannon is part of this and nobody and they'll say the same thing every time.

01:01:42.140 He's he's no big deal.

01:01:43.920 He has no influence.

01:01:45.240 And this is this is the complicated thing, because they can get away with saying that.

01:01:52.800 Right.

01:01:53.340 It's it's very hard to quantify Bannon's influence as well.

01:01:56.860 I don't think that someone sitting on the National Security Council should be relativized.

01:02:00.960 I don't think that that position should be relativized into nonexistence.

01:02:04.400 Right.

01:02:04.640 If you have a seat on the National Security Council, you have power and influence.

01:02:08.300 If you are the the manager of Trump's 2016 campaign, you have influence.

01:02:14.560 But when we look when we look at Bannon, we can not only talk about certain, let's say, secretary or leadership or administrative administrative assignments that he helped help make in the early days of the Trump administration.

01:02:29.780 We would look not only to some of the immigration policies that he pursued.

01:02:35.860 And I get I know that probably a lot of our viewers and myself might have different thoughts about that.

01:02:41.520 But I think that the key the key thing with Bannon was also his ability, A, to narrativize the Trump movement.

01:02:49.200 By that, I mean, to explain and try and give meaning to what was going on, to say it wasn't just a good storyteller of of stuff.

01:02:58.780 Yeah, he's a Hollywood guy.

01:03:02.360 He's a Hollywood guy.

01:03:03.740 And if again, if you should never overlook the power of telling a good story and the way that adds meaning to these movements.

01:03:12.180 But he is also a sort of networker, a backroom personality and influencer.

01:03:19.480 It's ironic because he seems to relish the limelight so much at the same time.

01:03:24.600 But he brings people together.

01:03:26.300 He works on different projects.

01:03:28.700 He he networks.

01:03:30.840 He's global.

01:03:31.620 And what do we see?

01:03:32.660 He is global.

01:03:33.880 He he worked on the Brexit campaign.

01:03:36.640 Right.

01:03:37.620 Yeah.

01:03:37.920 Not so much Dugan, but Bannon did.

01:03:40.220 And he worked on the he worked in several other European countries organizing these right wing parties, which are not the Tea Party.

01:03:52.020 It's just not the same thing.

01:03:54.740 They're absolutely not the Tea Party.

01:03:56.620 This is it's they are anti-libertarian.

01:03:59.660 Right.

01:03:59.940 So that and and more and more increasingly, they're explicit about that fact.

01:04:04.340 So also bringing in in Brazil, Bannon's chief efforts in Brazil were not only connecting with Olavo de Carvalho, who I spoke to you about earlier, but also also trying to to stoke the branch of government that was aligned with his particular values in relating to traditionalism.

01:04:25.220 So all of those all of those things are going on.

01:04:29.040 Some of his projects are catastrophic failures.

01:04:31.720 Some of them are sort of, you know, goofy mishaps, but occasionally they're not.

01:04:38.420 And we have to look at the meeting with with Dugan in particular.

01:04:42.460 And this does not mean that, you know, Russiagate was true or anything, but it certainly attests to Bannon's vision to bring the United States and Russia together, not on the basis, not on the basis of shared economic or political values, but on the basis in his mind of a deeper religious ethno religious identity.

01:05:01.660 Probably not so much ethno, but deeper religious identity.

01:05:04.920 I will tell you, when they first started saying stuff about Russia, right after he was elected, during when he was elected, I think I might have said it, you know, when he was first named to the Trump election.

01:05:20.880 I, I was like, I don't Russia, everything, everything Russia is now tainted. 0.98

01:05:27.840 Um, and honestly, I thought we would find Bannon in the Russia stuff, but the Russia stuff turned out not to be true as they were saying it.

01:05:40.980 Trump wasn't involved in it and nothing, but Bannon was involved in Russia in an entirely different way.

01:05:50.560 And, and, and, and at a deeper level, right, he's, he's, he was talking about, and his vision was a union between Russia and the United States against China, the basis of which would be something other than what we were used to seeing in geopolitics, not economics, not political values, but a deeper tribalistic union between our, our, our peoples in his mind.

01:06:14.060 Um, it's, it's important to pay attention to this to spiritual leaders in a way.

01:06:20.820 Yes.

01:06:21.500 Yes.

01:06:22.480 Dugan was not interested because in his mind, there's the fact that if the United States is a Christian nation, that in and of itself does not mean anything special to him.

01:06:31.120 He has no, in his, in his worldview, he has no more allegiance to the Christian West than he does to Islamic Iran. 0.87

01:06:39.380 Iran, right?

01:06:40.280 In fact, he has more interest in Iran because Islam and religion is more deeply embedded in the States, uh, in his mind.

01:06:48.180 But you have, that's what Bannon was trying to do.

01:06:50.160 Right.

01:06:50.340 And you have Putin understanding, no love for Christianity, but understanding, uh, if I'm a spiritual defender, if I'm a defender of all the things these, he's almost Constantine, if you will, where I don't care what you decide, just come together.

01:07:06.700 Cause we'll be a great army.

01:07:09.320 Absolutely.

01:07:10.120 Absolutely.

01:07:10.680 This, this is about, about giving character and meaning to what is otherwise a fairly crude play for political power in Russia on, on Putin's part for Dugan and the people pushing, uh, pushing for a more, let's say a more ostensibly Christian Russia.

01:07:27.220 It has, it has, it has actual ideological content and meaning to it.

01:07:32.180 It's about pushing, using religion to push against the United States. 0.96

01:07:38.320 All right.

01:07:39.980 Bannon is probably looking maybe at some prison time.

01:07:44.440 Uh, you know, it's, uh, things are not going well for him, et cetera, et cetera.

01:07:48.980 Uh, tell me, tell the, the viewer, the listener who is like, Oh, that's a fascinating story.

01:07:57.080 And I believe maybe those things might be true, but it's, it's not going to make an impact here.

01:08:04.080 Tell people what to look for, where it is, you know, how to stay away from it, how to spot it.

01:08:11.820 I would, to begin with, I'm not sure that Bannon is going away.

01:08:18.520 Um, he's in a legal fight right now, following his pardon from president Trump.

01:08:22.620 There's things are very much up in the air as to whether or not he might still be implicated in a legal battle surrounding this, this border wall.

01:08:29.740 Um, but what we see around Bannon and around this particular movement, traditionalism is a complete disregard for the status quo.

01:08:41.820 And for the establishment, and that might sound good at face value, but I would certainly encourage, uh, encourage your listeners to ask always, okay, if we destroy this, what comes next?

01:08:54.760 Who does it?

01:08:56.100 What fills the void?

01:08:57.360 It's never, it's always the same thing.

01:09:01.160 Um, I've been saying it since 2007.

01:09:04.020 I agree with hope and change, but change to what?

01:09:07.980 I agree with making America great again, but how you have to know it, the slogans and the things that you connect on are not enough.

01:09:19.580 You have to know, please define that for me.

01:09:23.660 Right.

01:09:24.860 Yes.

01:09:25.520 Yes, absolutely.

01:09:26.660 Absolutely.

01:09:27.200 What, what comes next?

01:09:28.460 Because it's, it's very easy.

01:09:30.880 A, it's very easy to destroy something.

01:09:32.540 I mean, this is a, this is a common critique of the right against the left that, that, you know, we are completely convinced of your ability to tear down something, not convinced at all at your ability to build something up in its place.

01:09:44.280 Um, those same, that same line of questioning could be posed to this wing of, of the right as well.

01:09:52.080 Um, destruction to what end define, define the movements, define the categories.

01:09:56.500 So that's, that's one thing to say.

01:09:58.960 Another thing to bring out in this, um, is that traditionalism, the appeal of this way of thinking, we might consider it spooky.

01:10:08.200 It might be dangerous.

01:10:09.480 It can also be true that it responds to actual problems in society.

01:10:14.400 Um, and I, I see something there.

01:10:16.660 I'm willing to admit, even though I, I'm, this is not my political home per se.

01:10:20.620 I can still acknowledge, I think that there is a problem if society does not have any commentary on spirituality in it.

01:10:29.820 If there is no emphasis on collective spiritual life, that doesn't mean it needs to be part of the state, but it is a problem that we have always known.

01:10:39.600 With classical liberalism and enlightenment values is that it's great at social mobility.

01:10:44.660 It's great for freedom.

01:10:45.980 It's not always great for community.

01:10:48.020 It's going to, it's going to be weak on those points.

01:10:49.940 It's going to be weak on spiritual community.

01:10:52.460 So there might be reason and cause to think about strengthening, uh, collective spiritual life in our societies.

01:10:59.700 However, that would take place so that there is not this gaping want in need that can be filled by an actor who you don't get to choose.

01:11:09.040 Uh, by someone who can come in and address the need for reasons that could be entirely mysterious to you.

01:11:16.760 I can't thank you enough for a writing this book, um, and spending the time.

01:11:22.460 I would love to have you on again.

01:11:25.320 Uh, I just, I just, uh, I don't know anybody else who has done the work.

01:11:30.800 Um, and I am, I'm grateful because it's really important.

01:11:34.940 Thank you.

01:11:35.880 I, my, I'm grateful to you for your interest in it.

01:11:38.380 Thank you.

01:11:38.760 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

01:11:51.580 We'll be right back.

The Glenn Beck Program - March 27, 2021

Ep 102 ｜ The People Who Pray for the Apocalypse ｜ Benjamin Teitelbaum ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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