The Michael Knowles Show - The Fall of Rome 2.0

00:00:00.000 Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire,

00:00:11.700 I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate

00:00:17.020 to know that for destruction, ice is also great and would suffice. We don't know exactly how the

00:00:22.600 country is going to collapse, when it will collapse, if it will collapse at all. And there's

00:00:27.460 a big debate on the right right now about whether we're in late imperial Rome, late Republican

00:00:35.480 Rome. Maybe we're not in Rome at all. One of the clearest, most profound essays I have read on this

00:00:41.340 topic came from my friend, Mike Anton, lecturer in politics and research fellow at the Hillsdale

00:00:47.120 College's Kirby Center in D.C. Mike is the author of The Stakes. Mike served on the National Security

00:00:52.560 Council staff under President Donald Trump. He's done lots of interesting things. And Mike,

00:00:57.460 is going to clarify for us, I hope, exactly what is going to happen next in American politics.

00:01:03.780 Sir, thank you for being here.

00:01:05.480 Thank you. Unfortunately, the clarity that I can offer is the clarity of saying we don't know.

00:01:11.580 So I am a dabbler, more than a dabbler in these historical comparisons we all have. In fact,

00:01:18.420 some of the criticisms or commentaries on the article have been, oh, there he goes again talking,

00:01:24.340 you know, it's that done to death Rome comparison. But I felt it had to be summarized precisely

00:01:30.100 because it is so done to death and so dominant. We had to acknowledge that, look, this is the

00:01:33.680 comparison everybody wants to make. But my point isn't to say that we're going to follow that

00:01:37.680 track. It was to start by saying there's a reason people make a comparison because there are a number

00:01:41.940 of similarities. That's not the focus of this article. Focus of this article are the differences and

00:01:46.680 not just the differences between America and Rome. The differences between what the situation in the

00:01:52.200 United States is today. And from what I can tell, the differences between that and anything that's

00:01:58.260 come before you, there are things which you grope to find a historical parallel and you can't find

00:02:03.380 one. Now, I will preface this. This is this is call this false modesty or what you will. I'm not a

00:02:09.500 historian. I did. One of my three college majors was history. I think I'm above average in historical

00:02:15.400 learning and understanding, but by no means an expert. So I've always there are a lot of caveats in the

00:02:20.560 articles to say, I don't think this has ever happened before. I will state a certain phenomena

00:02:24.320 and then say, I can't think of an example of this. If there are people out there who want to say, no,

00:02:29.440 no, Anton, you know, here's the point you made on page 19 or whatever. But in fact, there's a direct,

00:02:34.220 you know, the Cappadocian empire of 378 BC went through exactly this. I'm all I'm all ears. I want to

00:02:39.860 hear it. But what I was trying to do was show a series of things that I think are unprecedented and

00:02:45.920 that because they're unprecedented, they make predictions difficult or impossible. And they

00:02:52.820 put us in a sense, uncharted territory. So even even the Rome comparison, as apt and useful as it

00:02:58.860 is for many reasons, ultimately can't can't serve us as a guide. So for those who have not yet read

00:03:05.960 the entire essay, and I would strongly encourage people to do so because we are awash in a sea of

00:03:12.580 political commentary and most of its crap. But this one's actually quite illuminating.

00:03:17.560 What exactly is unprecedented about our situation compared to every other historical example?

00:03:24.700 Well, I believe I begin with immigration, migration, population change. Obviously,

00:03:30.500 that's happened over the years. I mean, you know anything about history, you know that people move

00:03:35.220 around a lot and not just individuals, but families and tribes and even almost whole nations can migrate.

00:03:41.800 So that has happened before. What I point to in this case is the rapidity, okay, point one,

00:03:50.440 the sheer numbers, point two, and to use one of the great buzzwords of our time, the diversity,

00:03:56.880 point three. Now, this is before you take a position on the goodness or badness,

00:04:01.280 consequential, consequentiality or irrelevance of this. Let's just face the facts. By my count,

00:04:07.580 and it's a rough and dirty count because I'm not a demographer, but I looked at all of the best

00:04:11.960 sources I could find, reputable sources like Pew Research Center. You count up how many people have

00:04:17.040 come legally since the 1965 Immigration Act changed the U.S. policy. You do your best to estimate how

00:04:24.680 many have come illegally. Then you do your best to estimate, you know, their descendants of children

00:04:30.900 and grandchildren. And I would say that it's about 100 million over 50 to 55 years. It could be 90,

00:04:39.640 it could be 110, but let's just, it's about 100 million. In that brief a period, it has never

00:04:46.100 happened before. You go back to some of the great mass migrations in history, that's just never

00:04:50.360 happened before. And the other thing is the diversity. So lots of people are coming to the

00:04:55.980 United States. But they're coming from literally everywhere. This has never happened before because

00:05:01.280 the technology wasn't around. So if you, in the ancient world or in the early medieval world,

00:05:05.240 if you wanted to cross the Danube and go into Italy or go try to see what was left of the Western

00:05:10.080 Roman Empire, you could do that. But you weren't coming from the Central Asian steppes. You weren't

00:05:14.540 coming from Sub-Saharan Africa or the Cone of South America because there was no way for you to get

00:05:19.300 there. Now you can come from anywhere because transportation is, is, is, is easy by historical

00:05:25.220 standards. And so not only do we have the greatest number of people entering one country over the

00:05:30.240 shortest period of time, we also have the widest variety of sources. And that includes differences

00:05:34.880 in religion, language, culture, uh, outlook, you name it. And it's just never, it's never happened

00:05:41.480 before. Now we're told diversity is our strength. I quote, which by the way, I have to the best of my

00:05:47.860 knowledge found no earlier source for than a Dan Quayle. If you can imagine that speech from 1992.

00:05:54.120 Um, well, you know, historically and philosophically diversity beyond a certain point has not been

00:05:59.500 thought of as a strength. Uh, I quote Aristotle's politics where he says, look, ethnic conflict

00:06:04.960 basically happens whenever two peoples from a different source get together. And he's talking

00:06:09.180 about differences between Greeks of so fine a shade from our distance. We wouldn't even recognize

00:06:15.140 the difference, right? If we were to say to him, well, Mr. Aristotle, we can one up you here. We've

00:06:20.580 got, you know, we've got three, uh, Abrahamic faiths and then we've got Eastern face. And then

00:06:26.300 we've got people of no faith or this, that, and then we get into the linguistic stuff, which makes

00:06:30.920 the tower of Babel look like, um, you know, uh, an average high school that offers Spanish and French.

00:06:36.180 And that's about it. Uh, we got, he would be astonished and say, yeah, I don't know how this

00:06:39.620 is going to work out. There's a funny moment in Dante when Dante is up going up to heaven and he

00:06:44.960 meets with his one illustrious ancestor from whom he gets his family name. And this is the one guy,

00:06:52.060 Caccia Guida. And Caccia Guida, who is in heaven, he's saved, he's a saint. He, he laments how

00:06:59.040 everything was better in Florence before all the immigrants came in. And it's a little bit of a

00:07:04.320 politically incorrect moment, but that would be the historical understanding of things.

00:07:09.200 Yeah. I mean, look, people like to quote, well, I like to quote Machiavelli, but on this specific

00:07:12.700 point, you know, Machiavelli praises immigration as one of the sources of strength that made Rome

00:07:17.160 great. Basically he's, he's pretty blunt about this though. It was because of the manpower just

00:07:21.380 needed a lot of people to put together these big armies and then go around and conquer the world.

00:07:25.120 But if you read him a little more carefully, he also says this really changed ultimately the

00:07:28.840 Republican character of ancient Rome. So there's a parallel that may be apt, um, for us

00:07:34.060 I just think, you know, like I said, I start off with the number, the speed and the diversity.

00:07:41.380 And I don't think that that's ever happened before. Um, I go into the character of our ruling

00:07:48.220 class, which I'm not a fan of. I think I've made that plain enough in various writings and podcasts

00:07:53.360 and other talks. Um, but you know, a rapacious elite that doesn't serve the interests of the people

00:08:00.460 it governs. That's not new. I mean, that's happened before. It's the particular character

00:08:06.180 of our elite that I'm not sure has ever happened before. I was just reading last night again,

00:08:10.520 cause I think I'm going to do a little, a class on this, you know, Xenophon's Syropedia and some

00:08:15.400 of the commentaries or, and then I went through a passage in Xenophon's Hyrule where Hyrule has to

00:08:20.700 say, you know, no tyrant wants a healthy people. You got to kind of keep them down. You got to keep

00:08:25.300 them half broken because the healthy people are the ones that are going to come and overthrow you.

00:08:28.300 But all right, yeah, that that's fairly common. But I mean, has any tyrant ever pushed, you know,

00:08:32.920 transgenderism and some, so many of the crazy things that are being pushed on us today and

00:08:39.640 we're demanded to accept them before, uh, this is new. I mean, popular manias, they've certainly

00:08:45.940 happened before, but the types and the speed with which these things are happening, um, they seem,

00:08:51.540 they seem new to me and the determination that the current ruling class is going well beyond what it

00:08:56.460 needs to do to keep the people, um, uh, unwilling or unlikely to rise up and revolt against them and

00:09:03.340 seems to want to punish them in a punitive way that I don't have a whole lot of, uh,

00:09:09.600 horse historical antecedents for that I can draw on.

00:09:12.460 There does seem to be a kind of masochism as well. And this is hard to wrap one's mind around,

00:09:17.800 which is that it's not merely the elite pushing all these sorts of pathologies on the plebs and on all

00:09:24.180 that they're, they're pushing them on themselves in a way too. You know, when, when the largely

00:09:30.600 white liberal ruling class pushes anti-white racism through critical race theory or what,

00:09:36.740 whatever other phenomenon, presumably at some point, this is going to come back to haunt them.

00:09:42.500 When they push the radical gender theories, uh, many of their own children have fallen prey to that.

00:09:47.500 So what, what, what are, what are they thinking?

00:09:48.980 I, I, I don't know. Uh, I've been, I puzzle over this a lot. I think I say in the article that,

00:09:56.360 you know, they, and it's exactly what you say. This is kind of an, in a sense, it's an intro white

00:10:02.340 fight. Um, a largely white ruling class hates a largely or an even more mostly white, um, middle

00:10:10.360 or working class. And so, and in order to attack them, condemns the whole white race and then tries

00:10:16.680 to exempt itself, but they don't have a coherent or convincing reason why this doesn't apply to

00:10:21.200 them. You're just supposed to sort of know that if you're, if you hold the right opinions, if you

00:10:26.340 went to the right school, if you work in the right job, if you live in the right blue metro area,

00:10:30.380 you're okay. You're not a bad person, but if they were to spell it out, you know, if there's this

00:10:35.580 group over here, that's bad and we're okay. They, they know that that somehow that doesn't work

00:10:38.920 rhetorically and they can't make it consistent. They can't make it sound consistent. And they also know

00:10:43.480 that many of the people to whom their hateful rhetoric appeals don't want to hear a distinction.

00:10:49.080 They want the blanket condemnation. So they give them that red meat blanket condemnation. That's

00:10:53.360 probably the wrong phrase to use. Some of these people are probably eating soy, but whatever.

00:10:57.440 They give them that blanket confirmation and then they just try to pretend that it doesn't

00:11:02.180 count to us. And I say exactly what you just said, which is they're, they're banking on a hope that

00:11:08.260 this will never turn around and bite them, that this will not blow back on them in any way.

00:11:12.200 And for the most part so far, it hasn't, although you could say it kind of is, right? I mean,

00:11:16.520 these ruling class citadels are the ones suffering the most. You wouldn't want to be in Chicago right

00:11:21.080 now. Right. That maybe that's not the heart of the ruling class, but Manhattan certainly is

00:11:24.960 down San Francisco certainly is. And these places are suffering badly from crime, from homelessness,

00:11:30.660 from the mentally ill and the drug addicted on the streets, from antisocial behavior of all types.

00:11:35.120 And precisely because they don't have a coherent way to convey this, well, we're exempt from this

00:11:42.200 judgment, but you're not. They've now, so they, they used to be better hypocrites. That is to say,

00:11:46.880 it used to be that the ruling class would say, you know, yes, we need, we need bail reform. We need

00:11:51.040 criminal justice reform. We need all of this stuff, but not in Manhattan. Manhattan needs 40,000,

00:11:55.280 you know, New York city needs 40,000 cops, a strong jail system, serious district attorneys,

00:12:00.120 and we've got to get everything under control. Even though that was hypocritical and the logic

00:12:04.940 didn't lead you there, they would say it anyway. Now they're so bought into their own arguments that

00:12:10.540 they watch as their own citadels get torched and they go, yeah, I can't, I have nothing to say

00:12:15.040 against, I can't even be a hypocrite and oppose that. I, you know, it's a marvel to watch. They're

00:12:20.140 not yet waking up. To what degree you alluded to this earlier, to what degree is this a technological

00:12:26.800 problem? Meaning you couldn't have had the largest migration of people in ever in human history

00:12:31.700 before the technology permitted it. And, and on the other side of that, one of the things that we

00:12:38.500 hear, one of the great praises we hear of all this modern upheaval is, well, at least you've got your

00:12:44.820 iPhones. You know, we live in this modern, we have the metaverse, we have video games, we have robots

00:12:50.060 injecting you with things. We have all the wonder wonderments of, of technology. So how do we grapple

00:12:57.500 with that? Well, I don't, I mean, grapple with it. The, the, the real expert on this who you should

00:13:02.360 talk to is, is James Poulos, who I will say testified before Congress, uh, I guess late last

00:13:08.240 week, um, and got kudos from the members of Congress who understood him, which sadly given the quality of

00:13:14.740 members of Congress probably wasn't as many as we would like. Nonetheless, it technical or so these

00:13:19.940 technologies does a couple of things. One is I, I definitely, I don't think, or at least I suspect

00:13:25.600 that it would not be possible for wokeness and this kind of mental pathology to be as virulent and as

00:13:31.940 widespread as it is absent social media, which is a relatively new phenomenon in human, in, in, even in

00:13:37.940 our own lives. I mean, there's no social media when I'm a kid. Um, in fact, it's often pointed out,

00:13:42.400 you know, people around my age will be the last generation to grow up entirely untouched by this.

00:13:48.020 It comes around when you're an, only when you're an adult and therefore it didn't really get its

00:13:51.140 hooks into you. Well, everybody born after a certain point, never knew a world without it.

00:13:56.440 And it completely shaped the way that they look at things. Another aspect though, of the phone and of

00:14:02.400 the screens, which I do point out in the piece is it's, it's an attempt by the regime for lack of a

00:14:07.860 better term to just drug us. It's like we, you know, inflation is really high. Crime is up.

00:14:13.080 You're not going to get a, the kind of job you want. Your degree is worthless. Well, we're going

00:14:17.400 to make it up to you by, with streaming and, and, and screens and scrolling. Um, and the more you're

00:14:23.440 preoccupied with that, this gets back to the point, this is sort of precedented, right? This gets back

00:14:28.040 to Hiro's point. I want to put the citizenry to sleep so that they don't come after me. Well, in the

00:14:32.620 ancient world, you couldn't do it with screens in the modern world. You can. So there are aspects to the

00:14:36.540 screens that I think have historical precedent. And then there are, there are aspects that don't.

00:14:40.300 Well, it does, it does make you wonder too, if the great achievement of the age is all the streams

00:14:46.320 and the tweets and the likes and, and sending you all sorts of weird, creepy, sexualized images.

00:14:52.760 How productive is that? Is that, is, you know, when I think of the, the technological innovation of

00:14:58.600 the vacuum cleaner, that seems to be much more productive than Twitter.

00:15:02.180 That's definitely true. I, I, I intuit, I can't say I know, but I intuit that we're living through

00:15:08.800 and actually a pretty nonproductive age. And one of the reasons why everything feels so fake

00:15:12.640 and the economy has to be, you know, jerry-rigged in certain ways and the numbers fudged and, and, and,

00:15:18.680 and pumped up with fiat money and all of this is because there really isn't any underlying

00:15:22.360 productivity going on or very little. Um, all this prosperity kind of feels ephemeral and illusory.

00:15:29.560 And, um, it's, it's possible that the inflation that we're now enduring and which is apparently

00:15:34.420 slated to get a lot worse, um, is a sign of that. Those kinds of things though have precedents.

00:15:40.720 Let me get back to something you said earlier, which is this, this, this, the self-loathing

00:15:45.020 is unprecedented. I, I, I struggled to find, I found, you know, plenty of historical examples

00:15:51.840 of nations that fell or just sort of went through a long decline. This mass hatred, and it's not just

00:15:58.620 in the United States. You're seeing it in Europe, in certain countries or parts of certain countries.

00:16:03.000 You're seeing it around the world. I don't know that that's ever happened before. Um, I mentioned,

00:16:07.980 um, the fertility rates at one point. When has, have not just one country, but, you know, a dozen or

00:16:16.140 two dozen countries ever have fertility rates so far below replacement that demographers are talking

00:16:20.680 about potential extinction. I'm not sure that's going to happen. Anything can happen and things may turn

00:16:25.020 around, but it's, it's, it's bizarre and, um, kind of scary to watch. You just, you, you see rises and

00:16:34.280 falls depending on material considerations, external considerations, political considerations. But, um,

00:16:42.120 you know, I don't think we've ever seen an extended period of such low rates in so many countries that

00:16:48.000 all at the same time, like we're seeing today.

00:16:50.020 But what you're describing Mike is a situation where the native populations of a number of

00:16:56.060 countries and notably our own is declining rapidly. And there's simultaneously a massive wave of

00:17:03.720 migration from all over the world. Uh, but I was just recently reading the, uh, SPLC and reading

00:17:10.460 MSNBC and CNN. And I am told that is a wild racist, evil conspiracy theory called the great

00:17:16.700 replacement. How dare you? Unless they say it, unless it's okay. That's true. They do admit it

00:17:22.320 that they say we're replacing you because you're bad. That's great. If I say, so you're replacing

00:17:26.940 me because I'm bad. They say, how dare you? Right. This is one of the things that I find,

00:17:31.340 you know, propaganda has also been around forever, but the techniques that they're using now, I don't

00:17:37.720 know that have precedent. Essentially they, they require you to lie on their behalf. Right. So

00:17:45.800 Michael, we're going to replace you. Wait, you're going to replace me. Michael, I didn't say that.

00:17:50.360 How dare you? Now tell me after immediately after I say it, your response should be, you never said

00:17:54.960 it. All right. Repeat after me, Michael, I'm going to replace you. Your response is you're not going

00:17:58.380 to replace me. That's what they expect us to do. And they punish us if we don't play along.

00:18:02.460 There was an article. I forget it was in the New York times or Washington post. I guess there have

00:18:05.980 been actually many articles to this effect, but, but there was one I remember in particular where the

00:18:10.560 headline was, yes, we are replacing yours. It was, we can replace them. That's right. It's still

00:18:17.820 there. And, and, and I think the Michelle Goldberg was the, was the author and she will be one of the

00:18:23.980 first to condemn you. If you, you know, quoting their own words back to them is a, is a sin. Now,

00:18:29.160 this is a phenomenon that I've looked at in other venues and tried to explain. They have a messaging

00:18:36.320 problem. I'm actually writing about this right now and I haven't finished the piece. They have a

00:18:39.260 messaging problem, which is that part of their message is to, um, rile up their shock troops.

00:18:46.480 Again, this is part of what the, what, what the, the, the, and the really, uh, virulent anti-white

00:18:50.920 rhetoric is about. Just rile up the shock troops. And that could include non-whites who are anti-white,

00:18:55.900 but also some whites who really have taken it. They've drunk the Kool-Aid and they believe

00:18:59.980 whiteness is bad. And if they're, they're guilty of original sin by being born of this particular race,

00:19:04.400 they need to use that rhetoric to rile up their base, but it's hard to do that in private so that

00:19:09.760 others don't hear it and think, wow, that sounds like anti-white hatred. That sounds kind of racist.

00:19:14.980 So they can't not say it. They just have to, they have to condemn you for noticing and for saying it

00:19:20.940 back. So that's part of the, part of the rhetorical ploy. We get to say it. You don't get to say it.

00:19:26.600 In fact, we require you to deny that we said it. It's, this seems unstable and I suppose it is

00:19:32.680 unstable. And you see that breakout in, uh, in the inability to control some of the riots and things,

00:19:37.780 uh, that, that were in no small part racial last year. And actually speaking of those riots,

00:19:43.840 you, you've mentioned George Floyd, the patron saint of contemporary leftism as a real, as an

00:19:50.840 emblem of this movement and also as unprecedented. Well, look, I said, whichever position one takes

00:19:58.920 about the specific circumstances of his death and the outcome of the trial, right? And the official

00:20:03.600 position, the only one, you know, this is a basically catechism for the regime at this point

00:20:07.960 is he was murdered. He was an innocent lamb who was murdered. That's it. You are not allowed to have

00:20:12.420 any other opinion. Okay. Even if you accept that insistence by the regime, as I think I put it in the

00:20:18.280 article, one would have to say that George Floyd did not live his life in a way to make such a death

00:20:23.780 improbable. That is to say, you can go back and it's in the public record as much as they try to

00:20:29.840 suppress it and it can't all be suppressed. So essentially it's taboo to talk about his life.

00:20:33.700 You can't mention all the convictions. You can't mention all the arrests. You can't mention many of

00:20:37.580 the crimes and many of the, and many of the very bad things that he did because only a bad person

00:20:41.580 would mention that. But they're, they're out there. And I say, if you, if you look at all of this,

00:20:45.660 even if you think he was completely innocent at the, uh, in the circumstance at which he did die,

00:20:50.220 the ridiculous, I find response to his death, I mean, and tragic response to his death. I mean,

00:20:57.820 cities burned, lives lost, a crime wave that we're still in the midst of a year and a half later that

00:21:03.900 shows as yet no signs of slowing down. But also if you remember, he got the equivalent of like three

00:21:08.920 state funerals and drawn in horse drawn carriages with celebrities everywhere in attendance,

00:21:14.780 thousands of people. I mean, you know, this is like, I can sort of get it. You know, Bob Dole

00:21:20.580 just died. He lied, he lay in state in the Capitol and then went to the national cathedral. All right.

00:21:24.940 Somebody like that who served his country honorably in war was a, um, uh, a senior

00:21:29.100 statesman, a presidential candidate. You sort of get those levels of honors for a person like Bob Dole

00:21:33.620 for George Floyd and whom, to whom statues have been erected around the country, murals painted around

00:21:39.500 the country. The, the, the, the intersection where he died has been a sort of made into a holy space

00:21:46.540 that, you know, I just have to say, this is not a person who lived his life to be worthy of that

00:21:51.300 level of admiration. And I don't recall, I can't think of another instance of a whole country,

00:21:57.400 a whole civilization elevating someone like that, even if they really were a martyr in the specific

00:22:02.720 circumstance, but elevating someone like that overall to almost a kind of godhood in a way.

00:22:10.980 Even the Catholic University of America, just recently it was revealed, had an icon up of what

00:22:18.500 would have been the Madonna and the Pieta of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion, except it was a

00:22:27.160 black woman and a black man. And the black man, according to the artist is a, a, a George Floyd.

00:22:32.620 And this was at the Catholic University of America. So we're, we're seeing in some cases,

00:22:37.500 explicit religious iconography. Yeah. I mean, look, this is an over quoted phrase,

00:22:43.320 but I'll, I'll quote it again. Anyway, you know, the famous Chesterton, when people stop believing in,

00:22:47.760 in God, they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything. I mean, the, the lack of religiosity,

00:22:52.800 the lack of something genuine to look up to, it's leaves in the human. I completely believe this.

00:22:57.740 It leaves in the human soul, a vacuum that must be filled and it can be filled with preposterous

00:23:02.960 and even destructive enthusiasms, which is unfortunately what we're going through now.

00:23:06.900 Now that's not new. That's not unprecedented. The specific nature of what we're going through

00:23:10.840 now though, I believe is unprecedented. Well, speaking of religion and Catholicism, I,

00:23:16.300 before I let you go, I have to touch on this final point that you made in the essay, which is,

00:23:21.340 look, I try to avoid the near occasion of sin. Okay. I try, I don't want to look lustfully on any

00:23:27.900 image, but for all of my life, especially growing up in New York, I look up at billboards and images

00:23:33.240 and it's all these hot chickies wearing not a lot of clothing. And because we are told sex sells.

00:23:39.500 Yeah. And you know, the, the only thing worse than that, I guess, than all those hot chickies in

00:23:43.880 lingerie would be not hot chickies wearing lingerie, which is what appears to be happening all around us.

00:23:49.480 So no, they're forcing, they want to say that I, um, look, this gets to be actually a fairly

00:23:54.080 profound topic. So I will try not to go on too long, but you know, in the ancient, ancient

00:23:58.360 philosophy, there's a bedrock assumption that there, that beauty is a real metaphysical category

00:24:04.820 that's immutable. It's not in the eye of the beholder. In other words, which is a phrase

00:24:08.820 everybody knows. If you look it up, it's actually from a book that's utterly forgotten. Nobody remembers

00:24:12.660 the title or the author. And that includes me. I have to look it up again. It's only known for this

00:24:17.260 one phrase. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which basically means all aesthetic standards are

00:24:21.460 relative. Right. Right. If we're just sticking with aesthetics. Now, if we're going to take the

00:24:25.800 Greek beauty could be more than just how something looks, you know, there could be the beauty of a

00:24:29.620 thought, the beauty of a concept and a lot, but let's just stick with aesthetics, right? It's all

00:24:33.640 completely relative is what that notion means. Now that's actually not true. It's not the way people

00:24:39.680 perceive the world or live their life. Most people just on a gut level can tell beauty from

00:24:45.000 mediocrity or from just ordinariness all the way down to ugliness. And what the regime is doing is

00:24:50.900 in the name of pure relativism, eye of the beholder, it wants to say those who have or traits that have

00:24:58.640 up to now been considered not beautiful, we're going to promote and we're going to hit you in

00:25:02.840 the back of the head and we're going to say you will consider these beautiful or else. Right. We're

00:25:06.880 going to and I dare you to say that that obese woman with the piercings and all of the other

00:25:13.580 stuff that, you know, conventionally would not be considered beautiful staring down, uh, at you

00:25:18.260 from eight stories up as you walk by the street. I dare you to say she's not beautiful because we'll

00:25:24.420 punish you for that because that just shows that you're whatever add the suffix I S T you're this

00:25:30.580 system, you know, you're racist, you're, you're sexist, you're, I don't know, fattest or thinnest.

00:25:35.160 And what does it, what does it mean? I mean, I guess to be against something you are, that is.

00:25:39.320 So if you're, if you're phobic, I'm fat, I'm fat. Am I fat phobic? I don't know. I mean,

00:25:44.140 I like Chesterton. I mean, he was, he was kind of, but I don't want to see it on, uh, billboards

00:25:48.540 in lingerie. I mean, look, the fact of the matter is, I mean, pick a name, you know, uh, from the

00:25:53.520 either, whether from the past, you know, Grace Kelly is prettier, was prettier than a modern

00:25:59.600 lingerie. It's just the, and, and 99.9% of human beings, that's their gut instinct. And you can,

00:26:05.160 you can bludgeon them into professing the opposite, but it's tyrannical to do so. And

00:26:09.800 it's not ultimately effective. They don't, they won't believe it in their hearts. If you say,

00:26:13.840 which one do you think is, uh, you know, which one do you rate the 10 and which one do you rate

00:26:17.440 the one they're going to make? Almost everyone's going to make the same choice every time because

00:26:21.480 that's ingrained in our nature and older thinkers, both in the religious tradition and in the

00:26:26.380 philosophic tradition had this right. And that's not something that I think can be changed.

00:26:30.860 But this, this is true. The phenomenon and our reaction to it is true beyond the lingerie

00:26:37.160 models. This, this is true of architecture. There's this strange fact that in the back half

00:26:42.940 of the 20th century, beautiful buildings stopped being made and buildings that formerly were beautiful

00:26:49.480 were made uglier. Why? Why are, I, I totally agree that they're doing this and that they are forcing

00:26:56.580 us to say that some hideous brutalist building is gorgeous and you know, it's just like the

00:27:01.760 lingerie model, but why are they doing this? Why? Um, good question. I mean, my, my go-to books

00:27:08.920 on this, um, which I heartily recommend to people because they're immensely entertaining and as well

00:27:15.300 as learned. Now, a true critic would say these, these are not serious. And this shows that Anton is

00:27:19.860 a Philistine. I don't care. I'm rejecting their theories are the painted word and from Bauhaus to

00:27:24.920 our house, both by Tom Wolf. And there was, it was both a sense of, well, all of this other stuff

00:27:29.900 has been done to death. So we got to come up with something new. Um, but then there were very

00:27:33.800 specific theories that the modernists had, you know, um, that, that come out of the philosophic

00:27:39.900 tradition or not tradition. I'm sorry, but the rejection of the philosophic tradition that, you

00:27:44.080 know, well, it's time to shock the bourgeoisie. It's time to transvaluate our vow, all values.

00:27:49.220 It's time to undermine the bourgeois and these kinds of things. And this gets translated

00:27:54.160 into art and architecture so that it becomes almost obligatory. Look, I have to drive through

00:27:59.980 downtown Washington pretty frequently and cheek by jowl, you will see beautiful neoclassical

00:28:06.480 buildings with monstrosities. Uh, and any, as you say, anything built after a certain period

00:28:11.840 of time, well, almost is a monstrosity. And also Wolf, Wolf does point out the extent to

00:28:18.300 which, um, it's just a fad that the intellectual sort of put one over on the patrons who are

00:28:23.760 paying for it. And the patrons deep in their heart don't like it, but they feel like they've

00:28:27.260 got to go along, go with the flow. Otherwise they'll be thought of as rubes. I think I used

00:28:31.920 to know this from memory and I'll probably get it somewhat wrong, but the very first sentence

00:28:35.460 from Bauhaus to our house goes something like, Oh, beautiful for spacious skies and amber waves

00:28:39.660 of grain has ever in the history of the world. So many wealthy people paid for so much

00:28:44.640 architecture. They absolutely detest it. And he goes into like the guys, like I'm, I'm

00:28:48.820 a corporate CEO or I'm the chairman of the board and I'm building my new building and

00:28:52.180 I've had visions of what it should be. And then the, the slick architects with the horn

00:28:55.820 rimmed round glasses come in and they go, no, it's going to be a steel glass box, take it

00:28:59.760 or leave it. And I do it even though I hate it because I can't bear the shame. These guys

00:29:04.520 have social status over me. They're superior to me in the, not in terms of money, not in

00:29:11.160 terms of power or what they can do in society, but somehow their status as intellectuals and

00:29:16.180 cultural arbiters is so high that I have to just eat it and do what they want.

00:29:19.720 I saw this recently. I was on a subway in Manhattan and the, actually going back to the model

00:29:25.420 description, there was an ugly model selling some type of clothing and the messaging, the

00:29:31.460 words on the, on this page said that this was a revolution. And if you bought this particular

00:29:38.180 set of clothes, you were participating in a revolution. And you see this aesthetic revolution

00:29:42.440 where beauty will be repressed and ugliness will be, will be promoted and demanded by the

00:29:47.160 regime. So in the few moments that we have left on the topic of revolution, if you were a

00:29:53.780 gambling man, Mike, how does this all end here in our beloved US of A?

00:29:58.640 Uh, I'm not a gambling man. And I ended the article exactly on this point saying, I don't

00:30:04.300 know. I, the, the, the closest thing to a conclusion that I'm willing to give is that

00:30:09.200 going long on woke America seems like a sucker bet. I don't think this can go on for much

00:30:14.920 longer. Um, and I've had this debate with others, you know, in particular, this is a point

00:30:20.180 there. Um, Curtis Yarvin and I come back to a lot. He thinks the present situation can just

00:30:24.520 basically last indefinitely. I think that's obviously wrong in part because nothing lasts

00:30:28.080 indefinitely, but because it's so obviously incompetent, anti-natural, unsustainable.

00:30:34.020 I mean, you know, okay. America has been through crime waves before. Um, I lived through the

00:30:41.240 seventies as a fairly young kid to be, to be fair. Um, uh, and I've certainly read about

00:30:46.800 the John Lindsay era and the insanities in the Bay area of the, of the seventies, sixties

00:30:51.220 and seventies. I just wrote a piece about this. It'll be out in first things one soon. Um,

00:30:55.520 I've never seen anything like this though, where rioters sack downtowns and all of the

00:31:02.540 corporate leaders in the city and the mayor and everybody, maybe the police chief is the

00:31:05.900 only dissenter say you go for it. You know, this is, you know, what's the, the mayor of

00:31:10.160 Baltimore people need space to destroy. We should let them do that. I, that's never happened

00:31:14.300 before. I mean, how can, how can that last? How can a situation like this last for 10 or

00:31:19.320 20 or 50 years? You never know because our situation is unprecedented. Something

00:31:25.200 unprecedented longevity for dysfunction and psychopathy could be a feature of it. But if

00:31:32.280 there is nature as I and many like me and many who have read my, the same books and the authors

00:31:37.960 of those books for that matter, if there is nature, as we understand it, then this can't

00:31:41.840 last. I don't ask me when it ends, but I, it can't last.

00:31:44.520 That's a sort of consolation, although it's a consolation with that conservative optimist

00:31:50.540 caveat that things could of course get much, much worse, but it is a consolation that it

00:31:55.200 won't remain like this forever. Uh, everyone has to go read the essay. It's terrific.

00:31:59.460 Unprecedented by Michael Anton in the new criterion. I look forward to the new essay coming out

00:32:04.840 in first things and, uh, Mike, thank you as always for being here.

00:32:08.680 Thank you. Love to, love to, love to see you as ever.

00:32:14.520 Bye.

The Michael Knowles Show - December 29, 2021

The Fall of Rome 2.0 ｜ Mike Anton

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