In this episode, I speak with Michael Schellenberger, a journalist who was a Democrat at one point, and has since turned more toward the conservative side of politics. We talk about how to understand the rise of the conservative wing of the political spectrum, and how to deal with the threat posed to Europe by mass migration and the globalist utopians.
00:00:00.000If you don't shoulder your political obligation, then the tyrants will take the right to do so out of your hands and use it against you.
00:00:08.400I think the last 12 years, we should think of it as a woke reign of terror.
00:00:12.820I mean, really, it starts with Black Lives Matter, ends with the election of President Trump.
00:00:17.060We discover, thanks to the Twitter files, the existence of this elaborate censorship industrial complex complete with government-run disinformation efforts.
00:00:25.860How much of government spending is wasted?
00:00:27.920You know, it's classic Elon. It was chaos. It was contradictory.
00:00:34.700You know, Jordan, I'm filled with a lot of optimism.
00:00:37.560You need to get married. You need to have some children. Your family has to be an integrated part of your community.
00:00:43.120You have to serve your state and your nation.
00:00:45.940If everyone can cooperate and compete, then every desert can bloom.
00:00:57.920Hi, everybody. I had the opportunity to speak today to Michael Schellenberger, who's, well, he was a Democrat at one point, like so many people,
00:01:14.100and has turned more to the, well, I wouldn't say conservative side exactly.
00:01:21.220He's turned to whatever this new emergent side is that's signified by the union, let's say, of Trump and Musk and J.D. Vance and Mehmet Oz and Robert Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, etc., etc.
00:01:33.560Whatever that is. And I've had Michael on as a guest a couple of times on the show.
00:01:40.680He's a journalist. He broke the Twitter files.
00:01:44.860Elon Musk gave him access to the Twitter back end to delineate what had been occurring before Musk purchased the platform.
00:01:54.400And Michael was also instrumental in breaking the WPATH files.
00:02:01.920And WPATH is, well, you could call it an organization, but it's more like a cabal of perversion and incompetence, I would say.
00:02:11.420And WPATH put themselves forward as a scientific consultation group that established gender-affirming care as the standard of care,
00:02:24.040a standard that was immediately adopted by the lackeys and bootlickers at the American Medical Association
00:02:29.720and the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, etc., ad nauseum forever.
00:02:36.760And so Michael's a pretty useful journalist, and he's been assessing Elon Musk's work at Doge deconstructing USAID, for example.
00:02:51.300And I wanted to talk to Michael about his views on Musk's efforts, on Musk himself, let's say,
00:03:03.140on this strange collaboration between Musk and Trump and the other people that we mentioned,
00:03:10.560and about, I suppose, his deeper insights, if any, and likely, on just exactly how to understand what's going on,
00:03:24.880how to understand this rise of new conservative or new traditionalist populism,
00:03:31.580how to understand the threat that's being posed to Europe in terms of mass migration and the globalist utopians,
00:03:38.840how to understand the philosophical and spiritual basis of this revolution in governance that we see manifesting itself before us,
00:03:51.320to understand the role that technological transformation is playing, for example, in facilitating Elon Musk's ability to do his sleuthing and uncovering work.
00:04:02.400Well, it's all part of the attempt to get to the bottom of things, and the bottom's a long way down,
00:04:07.680and so it's down the rabbit hole we go with Michael Schellenberger.
00:04:10.480Well, Michael, it's good to see you again.
00:04:13.480It's been about 10 months since we spoke, so it seems like a lot longer ago than that,
00:04:18.720but I guess that's because, well, the world keeps turning upside down and spinning, so it's disconcerting.
00:27:45.000That's, it, what that means is that if you set up a shell company, what it appears to mean is that if you set up a shell company,
00:27:52.120and you sent professional-looking invoices to the federal government, that they would pay them without question forever, no matter how much they cost, just so you wouldn't complain.
00:28:04.940So, okay, so Musk is in there, Musk is in there with this incredibly sophisticated technology, rapidly tracking down spending.
00:28:13.620So, the first question is, like, what the hell are these agencies actually doing?
00:28:19.680And it's not like anyone knows, not thoroughly.
00:28:23.720Then the next question, of course, is how much of it is waste?
00:28:29.580Okay, so the management literature indicates management and literature on productivity and creativity.
00:28:37.180There's two indications from that literature that are germane.
00:28:40.180The first is that 65% of managers in private companies add negative net value to their companies.
00:29:41.380Well, then that brings the question that you raised.
00:29:45.080It's like, well, now we have to rethink this from first principles.
00:29:49.920And like my sense, you tell me what you think about this.
00:29:53.420I know this woman named Magat Wade, and Magat's quite the interesting character, very charismatic, entrepreneurially oriented African, and a very fierce advocate of free markets.
00:30:11.840And her belief, and many people believe this, is that foreign aid is actually counterproductive to the countries in question for like 50 different reasons.
00:30:23.520Partly because it's not that easy to help people.
00:30:26.460And it's a lot easier to do harm with stupid money than good.
00:30:31.840It's harder to do good with money than it is to invest it wisely.
00:30:36.780I mean, and those are kind of the same thing.
00:30:38.400So, you can just make a case that the whole idea of foreign aid is based on a 17th century model that presumes that we have to stop the world's incompetent people from starving.
00:30:52.240And like, we're just not there anymore.
00:30:54.300The only reason that people ever starve in the world now is for political reasons.
00:30:58.360There's plenty of everything to go around.
00:31:03.260And how should it be distributed, if it should be distributed at all?
00:31:06.680And then, you know, so, and you, you know, you asked what'll be the new role of the United States?
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00:32:35.260Fourth right defender of free speech in the free market.
00:32:38.880At ARC, you're going to ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
00:32:42.380Our answer to this, because I think it's an answer to the question you posed, is that we need a rethinking on a more conscious level of the principles that have made the West free and productive.
00:32:56.920And we need to reorient ourselves in alignment with those principles.
00:33:00.920And that's mostly a cultural endeavor rather than a political endeavor.
00:33:05.300So, well, okay, that's an information dump.
00:33:09.440And so I'm curious about your take on it.
00:33:23.920You try to reduce it, but one of the things we find is that you can waste more energy trying to reduce waste.
00:33:30.980It's often why, when you go to these studies of, like, buildings and whatever, there's a high level of energy efficiency.
00:33:35.720You can always get more efficiency out of a building.
00:33:37.560And they always go, well, if we put more energy and time into reducing efficiency, yeah, but then you wouldn't be running your business anymore, right?
00:33:42.780So there's, like, you can waste time trying to deal with the waste.
00:33:47.740That shows not just a kind of, you know, I think people tend to think of fraud like, oh, the police haven't done a good enough job or the police are corrupted.
00:33:55.420It represents a weakening and corruption of the body, of the system, that you're actually, as you said before, it's not, there's always parasites.
00:34:53.060Every single major institution, medical power, educational power, media power, political power.
00:34:59.000And what gets revealed when Elon and Trump break open, the U.S. government, as we see this agency that was always there in their peripheral vision, that we sort of knew about, but you kind of forgot about, USAID, Agency for International Development.
00:35:14.800And what opens up is a bunch of, you know, things that you had forgotten, but are important to remember.
00:35:20.280The first is that human economic development, prosperity, growth comes from within.
00:35:26.220It comes from the core values of within, namely delayed gratification, hard work, saving on principle, waiting to get married until you can afford your own home and sustain your own family.
00:35:37.300Which means, you know, healthy sublimation, that those things are the recipe.
00:35:45.380Integration, integration, not sublimation.
00:35:49.420Well, I think, well, it's an important distinction, and I've been thinking about this a lot.
00:35:53.960Because, like, you could think of sublimation as self-control, and you could think about it as a variant of the Freudian superego that inhibits, you know, but there's a power dynamic presumption there, which is that the way that you obtain control over your own impulses is by using something akin to force.
00:36:13.800And that's not a good metaphor, because what someone who's successful on the sex and aggression side has done is integrate those, they've subdued them, they've put them in their place, and they've become an integral part of their personality, but they're not ruling, right?
00:36:34.780So, someone who's integrated his shadow, so to speak, isn't someone who's castrated and weak, it's someone who's fully capable of being aggressive at the drop of a hat, but doesn't, or devotes it towards, you know, stalwart defense of the perimeter, let's say.
00:36:53.500And with regard to sexuality, well, here's a funny statistic that I think is just so hilarious that it's emblematic of the times.
00:37:01.840The people who have the most sex are religious married couples.
00:37:10.180Now, you know, but that just says everything, doesn't it?
00:37:13.280Because the promise of the sexual revolution was hedonistic, narcissistic, extended adolescence at best, was that if we just got rid of the Freudian superego and all the power-mad censors, let's say,
00:37:31.840and prudes, everybody would be having sex all the time with everyone, and wouldn't the world be wonderful?
00:37:38.320And the truth of the matter is that sex is a lot more fragile than anyone thought, and there's a lot of ways to destroy it and very few ways to foster its development.
00:37:48.440And it turns out that long-term committed monogamous marriages are the answer to that, and also the answer that sustains civilization itself, because it's also predicated on this sophisticated integration towards a future end.
00:38:06.020And there's something else you pointed to that's of unbelievably critical importance, and people don't understand this at all, although Adam Smith understood it.
00:38:14.700Now, we have this idea that one of the main sources of our wealth is natural resource, and I don't even like the concept of natural resource.
00:38:25.840I think it's a disguised form of Marxist presumption that wealth is just laying around for the taking, you know, and that some people get to the wealth first, and that's how they get rich.
00:38:38.820It's like, Japan doesn't have any natural resources, and it's rich, and there's also a phenomena that you know about, I imagine, called the resource curse, which is the repeated empirical observation that there's, if anything, a slight negative correlation between national prosperity and the presence of natural resources.
00:39:00.060Well, why? Well, easy money corrupts. That's one reason. But there's a deeper reason. The deeper reason is, the only natural resource is trust. And trust is dependent on honesty. And the reason that trust is the only natural resource is because if I can take you at your word, we can cooperate, and I don't have to worry about the snakes in your head.
00:39:30.060All I have to know is you'll do what you said you'll do. That means we can make a contract. Not only that, we can make one. We'll both understand it, and we'll both keep it. And that means that we can cooperate. And if everyone's like that, then everyone can cooperate. Or even compete fairly. And if everyone can cooperate and compete, then every desert can bloom. And Japan is a great example of that.
00:39:54.620And so, you know, Venezuelan, Argentina, great counterexamples.
00:40:30.000He has the power of the manly man, but keeps it in reserve to protect his family, you know, his bride, his children, his family, his nation, civilization. But he's not going to abuse his power.
00:40:42.480So we've seen a regression where civilization was created by gentlemen. As you said, gentlemen, they became gentlemen. In the process of creating civilization, they become gentlemen. Or in the process of becoming gentlemen, they create civilization.
00:40:55.020Which is to say a society based on universal rules on the view of humans as all equal under first God and then equal under the law.
00:41:06.880And that everybody has these fundamental, inalienable human rights. This is the basis of what we call Western civilization. And it's a civilization of gentlemen.
00:41:17.280Well, we've seen a mass derangement, you know, over the last 12 years, but particularly with the election of Trump, you saw a derangement occurring in every institution.
00:41:27.460And what happens with USAID is, and within the intelligence communities and the foreign policy establishment is a massive derangement and abuse of power where the gentlemen stop being gentlemen.
00:41:40.060They become aggressive manly men and they become aggressive manly men and they decide that they know what's best and they can't stand all this democracy, which they call populism.
00:41:48.120They dismiss as populism and they describe populism as its opposite.
00:41:53.320They project onto populism, totalitarianism, and in the name of preventing totalitarianism, create a censorship industrial complex, which was already, we know, was international.
00:42:06.940U.S., U.K., U.S., Brazil, U.S., Europe, Canada involved in it, particularly the Five Eyes, all run, all coming out of the intelligence community because they're the ones that had run the censorship and disinformation operations, again, in Arab Spring and then the color revolutions.
00:42:22.200They turn all that back on the United States, first with the Russiagate conspiracy theory, this idea that Trump is secretly controlled through a sex blackmail operation by Putin.
00:42:32.140Second, through the, you know, the dismissal of COVID origins, then you see it with the Hunter Biden laptop, an elaborate conspiracy theory that the laptop is a Russian information operation as opposed to, which they knew it was not because the FBI had the laptop seven months earlier and used.
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00:43:46.100Basically, Jedi mind trick, brainwashing to pre-bunk or program the journalists and the social media companies into thinking that a future story about Hunter Biden and Burisma would be a Russian hack and leak operation and spreading disinformation in advance, programming people, and then demanding censorship on the basis of it.
00:44:08.760And I think we're going to find out a lot more about January 6th as well as a kind of construction rather than something organic.
00:44:16.360A clear decision was made at a minimum to not provide adequate security.
00:44:21.600We know that for sure because the Capitol Police Chief has written a whole book on it.
00:44:27.400And so you look at that series of events and you also look at what the U.S. security state had done in places like Brazil and the Philippines and other parts of the world.
00:44:34.320And, of course, this goes back decades and it's a clear it's a clear counterpopulist effort run by these deep state organizations run by people who had lost their minds, you know, who have all the rational abilities.
00:44:48.020They had Trump derangement syndrome and turned their enormous powers, their incredible psychological, sociological, political, technological powers against their own people to undermine democracy and attack free speech.
00:45:01.880Okay, so let's go back to the first part of that, that declamation.
00:45:10.280You talked about weak men and strong men.
00:45:14.060And so I want to just put a little twist on that.
00:45:26.800So if you look at the way that human beings develop neurobiologically, what you see is that from birth to the age of three, human beings are basically, you could conceptualize them as, you could conceptualize the baby and the toddler as a sequence of instinctive drives.
00:45:54.500Now, drive isn't exactly a good metaphor because these systems aren't deterministic.
00:46:00.660They're more like personalities than they are like drives.
00:46:04.300But you come into the world with a set of motivations intact and a set of emotions operative.
00:46:12.720And so the motivations are orientations of aim, let's say, towards physical contact, towards play, towards physical gratification, towards hunger, thirst, temperature regulation, the basic subsystems that orient you so that you don't collapse physically, let's say.
00:46:41.420And the emotional systems are basically positive emotion that attracts you to things and negative emotion that freezes you or causes you to retreat.
00:46:52.140Now, an immature person who is a weak person, let's say, because we're going to equate those.
00:47:00.320An immature person is someone who's still dominated by those systems.
00:47:05.080And so a two-year-old moves from the domination of one motivational system to another.
00:47:12.460And it isn't until they're about three that they can start to integrate with other people.
00:47:17.260That's when they start to learn to play.
00:48:27.320And it is the basis of mental health, I believe, which is quite a radical claim.
00:48:34.560Like, you cannot—and I think you see this, for example, in the data that show that liberal, progressive young women who are, like, fragmented and hedonistic and immature,
00:48:47.320they're rife with mental illness, depression and anxiety.
00:48:50.620They're dominated by negative emotion and have very little hope.
00:48:54.200And it's because they're not integrated.
00:48:56.380And so, the men that you described as gentlemen are actually integrated and mature.
00:49:02.740And their ethos isn't weak hedonism or power.
00:49:08.140Their ethos—this is something I really want to develop at ARC, and in the next book I'm writing—
00:49:12.460their ethos is one of voluntary self-sacrifice, right?
00:49:18.120And that it's voluntary—so the voluntary sacrifice is present to future, right?
00:49:23.840So you sacrifice the present to the future.
00:49:26.180That's control of—delay of gratification.
00:49:29.300And you satisfy—and you sacrifice your subjugation to your own whims to communal stability and productivity, right?
00:50:01.560That is the foundation of civilization.
00:50:03.740That's central to the Christian ethos, for example.
00:50:06.480And it's laid out in the Old Testament writings as well, the ethos of sacrifice, let's say.
00:50:11.580And so, I think we're at the point where we can actually understand this.
00:50:14.540And my sense is that a return to first principles is going to involve a conscious understanding, a conscious understanding this time of the ethos on which our civilization is founded.
00:50:29.100And I'm curious about your ideas about that, see, because I can't see how it can be any other way.
00:50:34.020Like, to be civilized means to be social, reciprocal, right?
00:50:41.260And to be social means you're not selfish.
00:50:46.480But then you might ask, well, what is selfish means?
00:50:48.840Well, it means you're not governed by your immediate whims.
00:50:54.660You're governed by an impulse to integrate yourself internally with the future and with other people.
00:51:07.940And that's deeply enough embedded in human beings, so I don't think there's any difference between that and the instinct to develop and mature.
00:51:16.720And that's part of that hero's journey path, right?
00:51:19.480That's the pathway to maturation that produces that gentlemanly behavior upon which civilization is founded.
00:51:28.760And I can't see, how would you argue against that?
00:51:31.960Like, you could do what Foucault does and say, well, there's nothing but power.
00:51:35.540It's like, well, Foucault believed that because he wanted to rape little boys in graveyards and have that be okay.
00:51:41.800You know, I mean, he thought of power as the ultimate deity because he was trying to justify his own pathology.
00:51:50.800And there's plenty of that on the progressive and hedonistic side of the conceptual world.
00:51:57.240Yeah, no, I mean, I think we're, it's really, I mean, this is why I was so excited to talk to you, Jordan, because I think, well, we talked last time also about narcissism and nihilism.
00:52:04.600And I think since that, since it's almost been a year and we've been working on our book still on this, on, on that gets at these issues, I think we have a better picture of what's happened.
00:52:14.920And you, first of all, when you have your civilized, your liberal democratic civilization with respect for human dignity and human equality and free speech threatened, you get more grounded.
00:52:26.340I mean, I've been, I was concerned around the ways in which the most civilized people, the elites, have been undermining civilization since my, since really my first and second book, both on the environment and on homelessness, undermining, for example, the security of a city, you know, making cities dangerous again.
00:52:47.180And we, you know, we just saw in Los Angeles, I had always, we'd been, I've been writing about defunding the police for years.
00:52:52.840We just learned in Los Angeles that they had been defunding the fire department.
00:52:56.480That's how far the degradation of civilization had gone.
00:52:59.800And I knew as soon as it happened that there would be voices right away who would say that there was nothing that could have been done about it because humans were doomed by climate change.
00:53:10.040There's, how could we possibly protect ourselves from a fire?
00:53:12.560I mean, who could ever imagine there being fires in the most fiery part of the United States, right?
00:53:19.160So, will we, but I think we have a better picture now, Jordan, too, where, you know, you get this really precious, I mean, just this tiny moment of this thing we call the enlightenment.
00:53:31.280Of course, it comes out of 1,500 years of Christianity, but we get this period, really 17th century, 18th century, really, 18th century, where there have been all these wars and everyone's, you know, Hobbes and everybody's tired of them.
00:53:46.440And they're like, we have to have order.
00:53:48.880And Locke comes in and amends that and says, you also have to protect the citizenry from each other.
00:53:55.060But you have still a picture of what it means to be a citizen, right?
00:53:59.500And it is tied to this idea of being a gentleman.
00:54:01.520And we're also trying to teach this at University of Austin.
00:54:04.340But it's a picture that a citizen, it's not just something, yes, you're a citizen by fact of being born in that nation, yes.
00:54:10.580But there was this older idea of the citizen, which came from older Europe, which was that to be a citizen was something that was a privilege and an honor.
00:54:19.540And it came with some intense responsibilities, and you're in service, you know, so you sort of say, what is it?
00:54:26.320The gentleman is in service of civilization, of peace, of prosperity, of freedom, of reproduction, continuing the civilization, continuing.
00:54:35.800There's a picture of an evolution of human consciousness.
00:54:38.700As we've talked about before, that, you know, gets into trouble when the stories that Christians had told start to get challenged, you know, by Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, we get to the crisis of meaning, we get to nihilism, the death of God.
00:54:56.380We had two first bad waves of a totalitarian nihilistic response to the death of God in fascism and communism.
00:55:04.220They get repressed and we push away, but then we get this thing we call wokeism, and it develops and develops after the fall of communism, really starting in the early 90s, and then fully comes to, it's just deranged, mad power with the woke reign of terror, exercising this just wanton aggression and nihilism.
00:55:28.840I think you can make a case, and I think this is the appropriate case, and I think it can easily be documented historically and mythologically, that when the integrating ethos collapses, that's equivalent to the death of God.
00:55:45.500And the reason for that, specifically in the West, is because, well, here's a way of thinking about it.
00:55:51.940There's no doubt that the passion of Christ is a archetypal representation of voluntary self-sacrifice.
00:55:59.040I don't think that would come as a shock to anyone to say that.
00:56:02.280But when you understand that the ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice is the antidote to power and hedonism, then that takes on a new light, because then you might say, well, what happens if you kill God, so to speak, in the Nietzschean sense?
00:56:17.760And at least in the Christian West, what that means is you remove from the central place the insistence that the drama of self-sacrifice is the altar of the divine, let's say.
00:56:35.740Now, you outlined to some degree the Enlightenment reasons for that.
00:56:40.480It's like part of what's happened is that the rational mind did a very bad job of distinguishing mythological and narrative reality from objective reality, right?
00:57:27.360Like, it's almost right, because we do need a transcendental grounding for our morality.
00:57:33.140But it's not to be found exactly where Sam was looking.
00:57:37.220And I think there are complex technical reasons for that.
00:57:40.320But the consequence of the rise of the Enlightenment, and this is something that, you know, this is the time that people like Steven Pinker, too, identify as the birthplace of the modern state.
00:57:54.380They think of that reaction of rationality against the superstitions of the underlying religious ethos as the moment of clarity that freed the West.
00:58:06.360But they don't take into account the fact that the deposing of that central icon produces the rise of both power—that's the communists and the fascists that you described—and this nihilistic hedonism, which is equivalent to disintegration and degeneration.
00:58:26.920Now, Nietzsche knew that was going to happen.
00:59:09.340Because if you're a hedonist, you have to use power, eh?
00:59:13.520And the reason for that is that if I'm a hedonist, and it's all about me, why the hell would you associate with me?
00:59:23.900Because if it's all about me, it's certainly not about you.
00:59:27.300And that means that to gratify myself in the moment, I have to use force.
00:59:33.600And so there's this—you see this dynamic, by the way, extremely brilliantly portrayed in the movie Cabaret, right?
00:59:44.140It shows the degeneration of the Weimar state into this gender-fluid hedonism.
00:59:49.420And all the while, the same party—what would you say?
00:59:55.760The same people possessed by the spirit of Dionysius are just inviting the Nazis in because they want the heavy-handed fist of authority to impose some order, right?
01:00:06.840Right, right. So then the question is, well, what's the alternative to that, right?
01:00:10.300And the postmodernists, the neo-Marxists, say, well, there's nothing but power.
01:00:15.200But that's not true. That's not true. It's deeply not true.
01:00:19.380That mature, integrated ethos that you identified, let's say, with the students that you want to produce at the University of Austin,
01:00:26.860and that's our aim at Peterson Academy as well, you know?
01:00:34.260Well, yeah, I mean, I think that there was this forgetting—there was a hubris that we didn't need these thousands of years of inherited virtues and values.
01:00:47.780The hedonism manifest—you know, it's the feeling of power is sort of the ultimate hedonistic thrill.
01:00:54.920And as you said, it's empty, and it's also completely free of all of the wisdom of these past traditions.
01:01:03.340I mean, every wisdom tradition, I think, by definition, has in it that lesson of the line between good and evil runs through the hearts of all men.
01:01:12.560You know, be careful when fighting with monsters that you not become one.
01:01:16.380You see the speck in your neighbor's eye.
01:01:19.880Right. There's always—the true wisdom traditions are always emphasizing our mortality, warning of hubris, emphasizing humility and honesty and these really simple basic virtues.
01:01:34.740And yes, do they change over time, of course, but yet they also mean the same thing.
01:01:38.140That all gets forgotten, and so you get this kind of secular post-Cold War establishment.
01:01:47.360And I mean, you know, just exactly what it sounds like, media, university, foreign policy, intelligence community.
01:01:53.720Because remember, the intelligence community is full of very intelligent people, and they just—they're the children of light.
01:01:59.840Just what exactly what Reinhold Niebuhr warned against in his famous lectures from the 1940s, that liberals imagine they're children of light.
01:02:10.240We're just going to go into these countries and help them.
01:02:12.680Just going to go in there and help them.
01:02:14.320Then we're going to help them decide who to get elected.
01:02:17.200And you got married to some of the darker forces, which was the CIA, and starting to try to control who gets elected in Italy and then in Greece.
01:02:24.480And you go all the way from the 40s on, and, you know, it has a huge moral victory with the fall of communism.
01:02:33.000You know, the U.S. foreign policy and being trying to have this huge moral victory.
01:02:37.400We then have 9-11 and a kind of, you know, an early sense of moral righteousness, and then it descends into the horrors of Iraq.
01:02:45.100And then, frankly, we went and overthrew a bunch of governments in the Middle East, surreptitiously, Eastern Europe.
01:02:50.540And it was a maniacal—I think it was just a power trip, as we would say.
01:02:53.980These guys are getting off on their power.
01:02:56.380And so that when Trump gets elected, I mean, they just couldn't—they just couldn't allow a nationalist and populist to just rule.
01:03:05.280They had to invent this elaborate story about how he was Hitler, and it was fascism, and it was—and there was going to be—you know, this was just like—I mean, it was insane.
01:03:15.240There was, like, no evidence to support any of it.
01:03:17.080It was a complete projection of their own totalitarian fantasies on Trump.
01:03:20.820And, I mean, it's just out of Shakespeare.
01:03:23.320It's out of Greek tragedy, Jordan, where, of course, I mean, I think everybody on the right in the United States right now is secretly—they won't say it, but they're secretly happy that Trump lost in 2020 because he comes into much more power now than he would have had in 2020,
01:03:38.240capable of eliminating, you know, basically our most important, you know, intelligence cutout, our most important, you know, covert, overt, you know, regime change agency.
01:03:52.240And with much more authority and—hopefully much more authority and wisdom rather than power, right?
01:03:57.560And with the moral authority that comes from popular vote.
01:04:22.400Like, there was an element of Trump that was huckstery, you know, and that's a deep tradition in the U.S.
01:04:28.800Well, like Colonel—was it Tom Parker, the guy who ran Elvis?
01:04:33.360You know, the huckster salesman is a pretty deep American archetype, and there was a fair bit of that about—there was a fair bit of that that was part of the drama of Trump.
01:04:44.840But he's got a seriousness of intent that wasn't there before that I think you get from being tried in the fire.
01:04:51.560And then, you know, I was concerned about his narcissism because Trump is very extroverted, and he's very disagreeable.
01:04:58.380And those are the predictors of narcissism as pathology.
01:05:01.600Like, not everybody who's extroverted and disagreeable is narcissistic, but that's the tilt.
01:05:07.200But, you know, I've watched him share the stage, for example, with Elon Musk, and if he was genuinely narcissistic, he would be jealous of Musk.
01:05:19.000Like, because, you know, you might say, well, if you're a narcissist and you're president, that's good enough.
01:05:23.880But that's not—that just means you don't know anything about the clinical world because nothing is enough for a narcissist.
01:05:32.040Like, there's no filling that hole because it's all about them.
01:05:36.680And that's—the more you make it all about you, the deeper the hole.
01:05:41.520And yet, Musk, you know, Trump has been—he pulled in Kennedy, you know, and Kennedy and Musk, I would say, and Tulsi.
01:05:50.100But even of those three, Kennedy and Musk were probably the only people in the United States who could really give Trump a run for his money in terms of implicit fame and influence.
01:06:02.660And yet, he invited them along, and they agreed to play, and so far it seems to be working.
01:06:09.940And, you know, J.D. Vance is also an interesting choice because Vance is smart and competent and dynamic.
01:06:19.120And he's not the sort of weak vice president that—
01:06:34.080You know, I just don't think Trump really believed in God until he almost died from a bullet.
01:06:39.320I mean, all of which remains mysterious, unsolved.
01:06:43.480You have maybe the greatest innovator in American history, you know, working to reform government.
01:06:49.080You know, you have these incredible story arcs with Tulsi and Bobby coming from the left, even the radical left, really, if you're being honest, coming to this place.
01:07:00.300Which, you know, to kind of even get that story arc of our villains in this story, you know, the characters who have been abusing power in the ways that we've been looking at.
01:07:08.940These are people who forgot what America was.
01:07:12.560I mean, the United States has been very reluctant to do foreign entanglements.
01:07:18.860I mean, the rise of the media industrial complex, of the kind of mass media complex, it's so recent.
01:07:27.040It's 100 years old in the United States.
01:07:28.920It sort of gets created by U.S. elites in order to persuade young men to go fight in World War I.
01:07:35.480That was when we really start with government propaganda.
01:07:38.340By the time you get after, you know, World War II, of course, it just goes on steroids.
01:08:06.900That is the third rail of American life.
01:08:09.280If you start to step on someone else's free speech rights in the United States, this is a country that defends the—it's like, as far as I can tell, I can't find another country that allows Nazis to march in neighborhoods of Holocaust survivors.
01:08:22.280That is U.S. law from Supreme Court, from the Brandenburg decision in the 1960s, reinforced in the Skokie decision.
01:08:31.180These guys went and messed with the First Amendment.
01:08:34.320They then went and tried to incarcerate their political opponent, making up just phony thing after phony thing about him misstating, him misdescribing the payment to the porn star, and that that was somehow five felonies, or that somehow he had some papers.
01:08:56.380You know, even though he's the only person that can declassify, somehow he took some papers to his house and it merited an FBI raid on the house of a former president?
01:09:15.720These are people that forgot what the United States was, and they had got conditioned to thinking that their power—they thought that they were the United States.
01:09:25.560They thought that in their narcissism and their nihilism and power, but they forgot that—like, you just go back to that period of 1776, the founders of our country were hardcore.
01:09:36.460They were hardcore in their demand for democracy and free speech.
01:10:01.940It's embarrassing for world leaders to go there.
01:10:04.780It's run by a cartoon character villain, a character who's literally in Joe Rogan's toilet.
01:10:13.200Like, you go to do a Joe Rogan podcast, he's in the toilet.
01:10:16.180That's how seriously, in the pop culture mind, he is a ridiculous villain.
01:10:21.800World Economic Forum—because I know you founded ARC in part—I'm sure you had a lot of motivations—but certainly in part as a counterweight to world—you're not the counterweight.
01:10:30.880ARC is the main event for intellectual life in the West, oriented around a continuation and, first of all, a celebration of human specialness, a continuation of Western civilization as the best and only way to help all humans achieve their internal potential.
01:10:51.100It's this—I mean, so for me, what a year for ARC.
01:10:54.900I mean, and it's a moment to kind of—I think you look back—and it's not January, but you knew the Janus face.
01:11:17.520You have to be able to sit—in 1960, you had to be able to be handsome on television.
01:11:21.920That's what the television revolution was about.
01:11:23.700The podcasting revolution is you must be able to sit for three hours with Joe Rogan and answer questions.
01:11:28.620And if you are unable to do that, as Kamala Harris was, you can't be president, okay?
01:11:33.520So you've got to have some intellectual fortitude and stamina.
01:11:38.880And then we've got this massive technological question in front of us in terms of AI.
01:11:42.560We have two wars that are about to be wound down, need to be wound down, big questions around NATO, existential questions around our commitment to NATO.
01:11:51.440So I can't think of a kind of, you know, more important—I mean, I think it was pressing it to set up ARC.
01:11:57.900I think ARC has so much gravity as a center for this.
01:12:01.740It is the twilight—it's not even the twilight of the idols.
01:12:06.260We are in the—you know, we are zero dark 30 of the idols, and I think we're coming to daybreak.
01:12:14.180You know, a new dawn is coming, but it's still very dark.
01:12:18.580We're morally obliged to presume that the future is a welcoming and abundant place.
01:12:29.060Once you're not naive, once you're not naive and you've passed through the valley of nihilism,
01:12:34.520your moral obligation is to sustain your faith in the future.
01:12:39.300There's no difference between that and faith in civilization.
01:12:42.620There's no difference between that and faith in the spirit of life itself, right?
01:12:48.180And we should also point out, too, that that commitment to free speech, you know, there's—if you cease to interpret freedom of speech as a hedonistic freedom,
01:12:59.520which is the freedom to say what you want for your own purposes, you can see it as a reflection of the particularly Christian insistence,
01:13:08.960although not only Christian insistence, that the word is the divine mechanism by which the cosmos itself is sustained.
01:13:19.540And at minimum, there's something deeply psychologically true about that,
01:13:24.240is that we cast our selves and our families and our societies, we cast them into being,
01:13:33.560especially the being that's good with truthful, forthright, honest, merciful, and just speech.
01:13:43.720And you can't touch that because that is the dynamic principle that keeps the land of promise alive.
01:13:52.800And so understanding the metaphysical assumptions upon which the freedom of speech is predicated is—I think it's now crucial.
01:14:01.540And it is shocking to us at ARC how rapidly the—how rapidly things have pivoted.
01:14:10.440And we're also praying that, you know, we don't fall prey to the same power-mad tendencies that typified the WEF.
01:14:22.300Now, I'm—you see, you talked about the betrayal of the elites.
01:14:27.340We should delve into that a little bit, you know, because there's a very interesting dynamic going on in the US and in Europe with regards to so-called populism.
01:14:39.580It's rebellion of the sane and grounded, although inarticulate, working class against their elite betters, so to speak, or at least the elites who think they're better.
01:14:53.680Now, the reason they think they're better is because they worship the intellect, you know, and that's one of the potential dangers of so-called meritocracy.
01:15:03.780You know, the—when you go to a place like Harvard, let's say, even when it's functioning, the implicit assumption is now you're among the better people.
01:15:14.300And the thing is, it's true that you're among the smarter people, but there's no correlation, for example, between IQ and conscientiousness, like zero.
01:15:31.560There's no indication at all that intelligence and wisdom or intelligence and morality are the same thing at all.
01:15:39.280Partly because if you're intelligent, you can do crooked things faster, right?
01:15:45.420So, that's not a moral—there's nothing implicitly moral about that.
01:15:49.660Now, it's in the interest of the Luciferian intellects to assume that moral superiority—and in fact, that's like the nature of the Luciferian is to assume moral superiority.
01:16:04.000But there's a usurping element of it, too.
01:16:07.380And so, the problem with the intelligent, let's say, and the self-satisfied simultaneously is the problem, the eternal problem of pride.
01:16:17.200You know, you're blessed by God, at least, so to speak, because you're, you know, your IQ is three standard deviations above the mean.
01:16:26.600And instead of being grateful for that and attempting to use it in service, you worship it and presume that you're ordained by the powers that be to rule the world.
01:16:38.620And look at where then the revolution comes from.
01:16:44.240I mean, certainly there's been—I think you can argue there's been some return to some spirituality.
01:16:48.980There's been some return to, you know, some appreciation of marriage.
01:16:52.120But the real revolution is around the nation-state and binding us together as a nation—that is what did it and what is doing it around the world.
01:17:03.200And nationalism, in its modern form, I'll say—there's a debate about how long it goes back—but nationalism in its modern form is fundamentally democratic.
01:17:12.780Because what is nationalism, if I follow Leah Greenfield's definition, nationalism is, you know, a common people—you know what I mean?
01:17:24.660A common citizen bound by a sense of equality, that we're all—you might be rich, I might be poor, you might be smart, I might be dumb.
01:17:32.900We're all Americans, or we're all British, and that that comes with entailments.
01:17:38.700There are consequences of your national identity, but it is fundamentally democratic.
01:17:44.240Once you're a citizen, you have a say, you have a vote.
01:17:48.640And so what got eroded with the snobbery, the elitism, the hubris, the pride, the arrogance of our elites—and this is out of Toynbee, and this is how civilizations fail—the creative class or the elites in a civilization start to identify with the elites in a different civilization and also sympathize and want to bring in the working people of another nation.
01:18:16.840Well, that's exactly what we saw happen in these Western countries, where the allegiance is between—with other elites, you know, mediated by organizations like the World Economic Forum or the United Nations or any one of these elitist organizations.
01:18:30.700And so you've seen this beautiful populist nationalist backlash to it that says, no, we have a national—we have thousands of years or hundreds of years of a national tradition that's special, that hands us a set of virtues and values that have sustained us and our families and our societies.
01:19:11.620The way that we've dealt with that at ARC is by turning to the Catholic social doctrine, although it's much older than Catholicism itself, of subsidiarity.
01:19:21.140And so in the story of Exodus, there's the emergence of civilization as an alternative to the tyranny of the pharaoh and the slavery of the Hebrews.
01:19:32.540So imagine tyranny and slavery as two poles.
01:19:36.280You might say, well, is there an alternative to that?
01:19:38.580That's the same dichotomy as power and hedonistic immaturity.
01:21:34.640That's, at minimum, that's the principle of voluntary self-sacrifice.
01:21:38.640And I believe, and I think this is part of being in this post-enlightenment age, partly a consequence of being wherever the hell we are now, that we can make all that conscious and really understand it.
01:21:54.340And then, well, I've watched people, you know, who have made this conscious.
01:22:01.480I've talked to so many young men who were disoriented or attracted by power, let's say, you know, that kind of toxic masculinity that's exemplified perhaps by Andrew Tate.
01:23:01.280Yeah, I mean, I think to your point of we now know that the greatest pleasures come from delaying gratification and that hedonism is actually a poor strategy to gain pleasure.
01:23:15.300That happiness is something that comes as a side effect in pursuing your bliss, in the words of the great Joseph Campbell, or at least life's purpose, living a meaningful life.
01:23:26.380And so what got stripped out of this globalist WEF vision was a vision that had just stripped every nation of its core meanings.
01:23:39.020It just had basically not just disregarded.
01:23:45.060It had started, they had all turned on their own incredible traditions as somehow as evil, that these incredible national traditions.
01:23:54.000And I'm with you on the subsidiarity concept, by the way, I love that.
01:23:56.940I want the French to be the most French.
01:24:13.340Well, I hope that this prodding that the president's doing is, I hope that the prodding is actually inspiring a healthy response from Canada to say, because I think the question goes to Canada goes, great.
01:24:23.940Under the Trudeau vision that Canada is just part of this global monoculture, well, then who cares if you become part of the United States?
01:24:31.860That's just one step in towards becoming part of a global government.
01:24:35.420I mean, it's a soullessness that got exposed, that creeped in.
01:24:43.980And you realize when you get down to what is a nation, it's got a soul, it's got a culture, it's got a set of traditions, it's got a set of values.
01:24:51.980And they're meaningful, and they give life's meaning, they give something to aspire to.
01:24:57.240And so to just go and denigrate them, as has been done for decades, as just slavery and oppression and these singularities of singularity, evil, it's all just, you know, the modernity and civilization just culminated in the Holocaust and the atomic bomb and climate apocalypse.
01:25:16.560I just think we have, I think that the great thing that's occurred is at least in the United States, I think that is now repudiated and that the left isn't going to find, Democrats aren't going to find any success there.
01:25:29.420I think you're going to see a victory by AFD in Germany this month.
01:25:32.820It won't probably be first, but they're going to make a huge victory.
01:25:35.820It looks like Nigel Farage's party is coming very strong, certainly in France.
01:25:39.260So I think we could be seeing a re—and I don't think it's as—I think the funny way it's manifesting is that it's very moderate, actually, you know, like this rebalancing.
01:25:50.020I mean, they can call it radical, but what was radical, the extremist, was what the establishment was pursuing in the name of countering populism, in the name of countering the return of democracy.
01:26:01.020So, you know, Jordan, I'm filled with a lot of optimism.
01:26:05.180I mean, just the executive orders—last time I was here with you, we were dealing with the sterilization and mutilation of children.
01:26:58.040Human Western liberal democratic civilization has been the high point in that.
01:27:03.300And that really the alternative is just might makes right.
01:27:06.960It's an—it's the pre—it's the Hobbesian world.
01:27:09.280And we don't want to go—I think, you know, the American people have said we don't want to go back to that.
01:27:12.920We don't want to go live in a world where you—where every president gets put into prison by the next president or where committees of experts decide what the truth is.
01:27:21.340Because—so for me, it's just, you know, I just kind of look at it and I go, it's a completely open plane now.
01:27:28.500And, you know, we don't—we're not seeing these reactionary totalitarian forces able to even respond to what's been happening.