The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to this special episode of the Lotus Eaters. I'm Harry, today joined by the author Josh Neal, and we're going to be talking about his latest publication with Antelope Hill Publishing, Intolerant Interpretations.

00:00:14.280 Josh Neal is the author of American Extremist and Understanding Conspiracy Theories, and we're very grateful to have him on. Thank you for joining us, Josh. How are you doing today?

00:00:23.720 I'm doing great. It's a pleasure to speak with you. I'm a big fan of your program. Love what you guys do, and I'm very happy to talk about my new book.

00:00:32.080 Yes, I'm very happy to talk about it as well. So we were sent this by Antelope Hill, and I took up the opportunity to give it a read.

00:00:39.700 And I've got to say, I was very, very impressed. Just straight away for the audience, if you get the chance to pick this up, and you can pick it up on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, other retailers, you can get it from Antelope Hill's website.

00:00:51.540 Well worth a look, because it is a really interesting piece of sociology and philosophy looking at and critically examining some of the, what I would argue are some of the critical thinkers of our modern global liberal technocracy.

00:01:07.720 And again, it is very, very critical of these. These are thinkers ranging all the way from Karl Popper to Jonathan Haidt to Daniel Kahneman and the sociologist and child psychologist, I believe, Paul Bloom.

00:01:21.260 And let's start off with the first thing. What made you choose these particular authors to critique? Particularly somebody like Jonathan Haidt, whose work seems to be quite respected on both sides of the political aisle.

00:01:36.540 And Karl Popper, who I, as someone, I have my own critiques of him, but it's rare to find a lot of really thorough academic scholarly critiques of Karl Popper's work from a right-wing perspective.

00:01:50.540 Well, with regards to Jonathan Haidt, I first read his book 2014, 2015, and I won't say it changed my life, but it definitely, I was in between doctoral applications, I was trying to make it as a professional psychologist.

00:02:12.200 I didn't have a research project in mind, which was the major obstacle to pursuing a PhD. At least in the States, for a lot of the programs I was looking at, 2015, 2016, the types of, well, let's put it this way, the woke DEI regime was very much in full swing.

00:02:34.520 So when I was looking at different programs, it was, this is not every university, every research lab, but a lot of them were, you know, a black woman studying microaggressions, a gay person studying the comorbidity of depression and HIV, not to be vulgar or disgusting for your audience.

00:02:54.360 I mean, you scroll through a dozen of those, two dozen of those, and you think, maybe there's not really a place for me in this environment.

00:03:02.560 But I read Jonathan Haidt's book, and I had political opinions, but I, growing up, I was a libertarian some 10 years ago, I didn't, I had major issues with the way that the right and the left or the states, Republican and Democrat, were conceptualized.

00:03:21.820 And reading that book, I thought it was interesting, because Haidt used a lot of the more rigorous psychological models to make his argument, but at the end, it, I still had that same problem of, there's a conceptual issue.

00:03:37.960 Well, there's two problems. Any good liberal social scientist, no matter how good their analysis or critique is, at the end, their conclusion is always, well, we just need more progressive liberalism.

00:03:49.820 We just need more managerialism. We need more equality. We need more compassion. So that was one issue. But the other issue was, as I said before, this conceptualization problem.

00:04:00.140 Like, what do we really mean when we talk about the Democrats and Republicans, or the Tories and Labor, or, you know, so on and so forth?

00:04:08.800 And that had just been kicking around in my head for the last 10 years. And when I wrote my first book, American Extremist, which was more directly about American political culture, I started, I kind of put down my own foundations of what I think about politics.

00:04:28.500 And it was easier for me to revisit Jonathan Haidt and say, well, you know what, the problem here is that this is a liberal looking at a hegemonic liberal system, and he's not able to step outside of that framework.

00:04:42.640 He's not, for a social scientist, Jonathan Haidt, I think, is one of the good ones. He does a tremendous, there's a lot of things he invokes that are sort of heterodox in the social sciences.

00:04:54.140 He talks about group selection. That's a no-no. He talks about irrationalism, what he calls the social intuition model.

00:05:02.720 And irrationalism, which I sort of have my own issues with, is something you don't talk about positively in the academy, because irrationalism invokes things like Nietzsche.

00:05:14.780 It invokes things like prejudice and bigotry in the 20th century, and, you know, mass violence campaigns, which is not true.

00:05:22.780 I mean, you can maybe tease out a genealogical strain here or there, but you can't blanket condemn these philosophical traditions or points of view simply because of what's taboo in the current political climate.

00:05:38.180 So Jonathan Haidt was sort of an outlier. The rest of the people I focus on in the book have a more direct relationship to the ideas of the open society and liberalism, egalitarianism.

00:05:51.320 They have a direct relationship to the conspiracy, the fear-mongering about conspiratorialism.

00:05:57.580 So I put Jonathan Haidt in there because I had promised my audience for a long time that I would write a formal essay about it, but because I had also read – the thing that had helped me unpack Jonathan Haidt a little bit was reading James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution, and that sort of unlocked a lot of doors for me.

00:06:17.620 And thinking about the polarization in the United States in terms of political economy and demographics rather than in terms of strict conventional wisdom about political affiliations.

00:06:35.100 So someone like Karl Popper was very easy for me to choose. Richard Hofstadter, very easy for me to choose, because both of these are sort of liberal maximalists.

00:06:46.440 Both of them wrote extensively critiquing conspiratorialism. Richard Hofstadter is obviously most famous for The Paranoid Style in American Politics, an essay he wrote about Barry Goldwater, Robert Welch and the John Birch Society.

00:07:03.440 Obviously, obviously, Joseph McCarthy and the success of Red Scares in the United States. Karl Popper also wrote an essay called The Conspiracy Theory of Society.

00:07:15.920 Richard Hofstadter, in an earlier book, wrote The Conspiracy Theory of History.

00:07:19.980 So you have these liberal maximalists in the case of Richard Hofstadter – actually, both of them, Hofstadter and Karl Popper – in their youth were card-carrying communists.

00:07:30.520 Richard Hofstadter was a member of the American Communist Party. Karl Popper was active in communist demonstrations when he was still living in Europe.

00:07:42.180 In both cases, they moved to a liberal-moderate – heavily scare-quoting that – liberal-moderate position.

00:07:49.720 But they maintained sort of a philosophically unjustifiable prejudice against what we can call closed societies or nativism, conservatism.

00:08:06.520 Richard Hofstadter, also very famous for coining the phrase pseudo-conservatism to malign the types of people that Sam Francis would have called middle American radicals.

00:08:19.420 You know, just normal Americans with even a modestly conservative bent who are economically productive.

00:08:27.260 They respect the civic institutions.

00:08:31.080 They are participating members of society.

00:08:34.060 And bear in mind, at the time that Richard Hofstadter is doing some of his most important writings, the United States is going through this massive transformation.

00:08:43.080 It had just undergone the New Deal, and at the time of the paranoid style in American politics, the United States was beginning a civil rights revolution.

00:08:54.620 You have just normal Americans all across the country who neither like nor understand the direction that their country is going in.

00:09:04.600 And so these were people who were very easy to select, one, because they're very prestigious members of the recent liberal philosophical tradition.

00:09:14.700 Richard Hofstadter won multiple Pulitzer Prizes.

00:09:17.980 Karl Popper, also very easy to pick.

00:09:21.080 On the one hand, he's been a right-hand punching bag going back to the days of Glenn Beck.

00:09:25.480 But all you have to do is look at someone like George Soros, who named his foundation the Open Society Foundation.

00:09:31.500 And it's not just that he named it the Open Society Foundation.

00:09:35.180 It's actually that Karl Popper mentored many of these prominent liberal maximalists, one or two degrees of separation away from people like George Soros, Richard Hofstadter, Cass Sunstein, who's another sort of antagonist in the book.

00:09:52.300 He was the author of the book Nudge, wasn't he, Sunstein?

00:09:56.380 Yes.

00:09:57.100 Yeah.

00:09:57.360 He was also the information czar under Barack Obama.

00:10:00.980 It is interesting how all of these people connected to Karl Popper, who have this explicit goal of this open society, all default to a form of technocracy, which is increasingly top-down.

00:10:15.000 This is what I got out of James Burnham, was that there is something that changed liberalism in the 20th century.

00:10:23.920 James Burnham argues that the Soviets and the NSDAP were sort of developmentally ahead of Great Britain and the United States in regards of developing this elaborate technocratic managerial regime.

00:10:39.260 And certainly by the time we get FDR, the technocracy is being established.

00:10:47.380 Richard Hofstadter in his book Anti-Intellectualism and the American Tradition talks about the journey that American intellectuals underwent from being sort of alienated from the establishment to suddenly being critical to the establishment, the state administering policies, managing the population, nudging the population.

00:11:15.120 So this also brings in Daniel Kahneman, whose very famous book, Thinking Fast and Slow.

00:11:22.740 He published 10 or 15 years ago, and he was a Nobel Prize winner for his critique of utility theory.

00:11:34.860 But more importantly, he spearheaded this program called the Heuristics and Biases Research Program, which was this massive revolution in the cognitive sciences. 0.95

00:11:45.580 Without being unfair to him, sort of the received wisdom of his program is that human cognition kind of sucks. 0.70

00:11:56.240 It's unreliable. 0.74

00:11:57.760 It relies on these faulty intuitions.

00:12:00.420 And he makes sort of, again, this is one of the trends that I uncovered researching this book, is the extent to which all of these very intelligent, highly credentialed, well-placed intellectuals have a very unintellectually rigorous approach to presenting the ideas that they want the audience to accept.

00:12:25.340 I think this was particularly critical with authors like Popper and Hofstadter in the first essay in the book.

00:12:33.740 I noticed the passages that you were quoting from them, particularly as regards to conspiracy theories and labeling people conspiracy theorists.

00:12:44.160 I got a passage here from Popper from The Open Society and its Enemies, where he says,

00:12:52.060 conspiracies occur, it must be admitted, but the striking fact which, in spite of their occurrence, disproves the conspiracy theory is that few of these conspiracies are ultimately successful.

00:13:03.020 Conspirators rarely consummate their conspiracy.

00:13:06.000 To which you ask some reasonable questions, which are, what are these conspiracies that never turned out as intended or were never consummated?

00:13:14.540 Why did they turn out as they did?

00:13:16.740 What conspiracies did turn out as intended, were consummated?

00:13:20.000 Why was it so?

00:13:20.620 And you ask a number of other questions because these authors just seem to think that they can get away with stating it as fact without providing any evidence.

00:13:29.300 Which, ironically, for somebody who was a scientist like Popper, you would expect that he would have some kind of empirically rigorous evidence and argumentation to back up his statements.

00:13:42.340 Whereas he seems perfectly willing to just throw them out almost ad hominem, which, as we'll get onto later when we discuss the other idea that you introduce in the first essay of the ethno-narratives,

00:13:54.840 seems to be very consistent with this brand of thinker.

00:13:59.640 We just saw, I mean, you mentioned the John Birch Society.

00:14:03.320 I mean, we just saw the other day with Mark Levin's speech where he was going against Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes,

00:14:10.700 bragging about how he, how, you know, we've cancelled people before.

00:14:15.220 Screw saying we don't cancel people.

00:14:17.020 We cancelled Pat Buchanan, as if that's something to be proud of.

00:14:20.800 He doesn't mention him, but you mentioned Sam Francis.

00:14:23.260 They all cancelled Sam Francis back in the 1990s.

00:14:26.800 And he goes back and says, we cancelled the John Birch Society as well.

00:14:30.960 And in the essay, you have your own criticisms of the John Birch Society, where they didn't go far enough,

00:14:36.940 how they were still kind of trying to operate within this 1950s, 1960s conservative liberal framework.

00:14:45.520 But that was seen as enough of a threat by some people for the ADL to infiltrate them and to bring that organization down.

00:14:56.940 So these people really don't operate on the basis of argument, evidence,

00:15:03.780 anything that can really be considered within the Western tradition of empirical, self-reflective, introspective, critical thinking.

00:15:14.380 They really operate on the basis of bullying and name-calling and just mafia tactics operating as a mafia and crowding you out of your own movement.

00:15:26.040 It's funny.

00:15:26.840 The woke right is calling from inside the house.

00:15:30.300 Yeah, exactly.

00:15:32.840 Locked by Constantine Kissin, by the way.

00:15:35.380 Yeah.

00:15:35.840 Happy to have earned that one.

00:15:37.160 Oh, congratulations.

00:15:37.860 Well, I mean, that's why I titled the book Intolerant Interpretations.

00:15:42.500 There's a certain hermeneutic, probably butchering the pronunciation of that word, hermeneutic that I'm bringing to this work.

00:15:49.220 And I'm very transparent about this in a way that these fellows aren't.

00:15:53.120 I'm bringing a certain level of skepticism, you could even say hostility, into my reading, sort of like the ace up my sleeve.

00:16:04.460 Because I approach it, I read it, and I'm trying to read it as, what is this person saying?

00:16:09.540 Does it have its own merits?

00:16:10.900 But of course, I came to these people, Karl Popper, Richard Hofstadter, so on and so forth, Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, with a suspicion that these people were doing something, like you said, other than science, other than, you know, rigorous, empirical, substantiated, philosophical or empirical reasoning.

00:16:33.860 So, I mean, and the punchline at the end of the book is that you need to, just because something is published in a book, and it has a notable, prestigious publishing house on the front cover of the book, and the author has an Ivy League degree and you saw him on television or whatever, doesn't mean that the contents of the book are themselves meritorious.

00:17:00.280 It's all of this, to borrow a phrase from Robert Cialdini, who's a famous social psychologist, it's all pre-suasion.

00:17:09.080 In other words, you are sort of encouraged to accept the contents before you have read the contents, because it's front-loaded with all of this establishment, pomp, and circumstance.

00:17:21.620 There's credit, and this is sort of what defines technocracy, in a sense, that you have people who are rubber-stamped by the state, and you can now turn off your critical faculties and say, well, this is an approved authority figure, and what they are saying is correct.

00:17:39.820 At the very least, what they're saying is something that they've labored intensely over, even if they're marginally inaccurate here and there, well, this is a guy or lady who spent his whole life studying this, or her life.

00:17:52.840 So clearly there's merit to this, and people like Nathan Kaufness today, or Tom Nichols, who wrote The Death of Expertise 10 years ago, 12 years ago, as people like them lament, that's gone.

00:18:08.140 People don't believe experts, they don't believe credentialed professionals, and they don't believe them for reasons like you just presented.

00:18:16.640 Karl Popper makes these polemical declarations that he never tries to substantiate, and when you test the polemical declarations logically, they don't even cohere.

00:18:29.580 So there's one section in that excerpt that you quoted from, where Karl Popper, this is really funny to me, Karl Popper says that, for example, the reason that, you know, the Germans or the Italians didn't win in the 20th century is because they didn't have a completely accurate social theory to inform their government policy.

00:18:59.580 So in other words, if they were bigger nerds with lab coats and thick-rimmed glasses, then they would have won, and we would be celebrating them today instead of maligning them.

00:19:10.220 The amazing thing there being that, if anybody knows about the Germans of the mid-1930s, is that they actually did have a lot of writing and thought backing up everything that they were doing, agree with it or not, but he does understand how, I mean, wasn't he an Austrian Jew, Karl Popper? 0.52

00:19:29.520 So he should have a rather firm grasp of how autistic the Germans are with such things. 0.96

00:19:36.100 But there's those two things there, which is one which is the desire to try to reduce everything down to a elaborate tree experiment with very, very controlled variables.

00:19:51.300 And this is something that you discussed with Daniel Kahneman and his nudge theories, and also the research that he did into the way that the brain operates.

00:20:00.500 And he came to the conclusion that the brain has these two differing functions which clash with one another, that you actually contrast with the thoughts and work of, what's his name, Gerd, Gigerenz?

00:20:15.180 Gigerenz, could you pronounce that for me again, please?

00:20:18.020 I mean, I could be missing it too, but I say Gigerenz.

00:20:21.300 Yeah, Gerd Gigerenz, who sees the brain as a much more holistic organ that works together in a way that's able to spot patterns over repeated frequencies, whereas somebody like Kahneman wanted to reduce everything down to single experiments,

00:20:40.180 which prove that the brain on those single examples is unable to properly calculate something, the desired result, which actually in a way kind of results in a gotcha.

00:20:53.540 When I was reading the examples that you were giving of Kahneman, so for instance, he says,

00:20:58.220 If a test to detect a disease whose prevalence is 1 in 1,000 has a false positive rate of 5%, what's the chance that a person found to have a positive result as the disease, assuming you know nothing else about the person's symptoms or signs?

00:21:11.460 And you mentioned how with that example given, most of the students at Harvard answered wrong.

00:21:19.340 Only 18% of them gave the correct answer.

00:21:23.160 But when, for instance, you word the question differently in a way that goes less to a single example as given there and talks about the frequencies,

00:21:35.260 if it's got 1 out of 1,000 Americans has this disease, every time you do these tests, if you test 1,000 people, 50 of them test positive for the disease even though they're perfectly healthy.

00:21:50.180 If you've got 1,000 people, how many, if taking this test, who get positives would you expect to actually have positive?

00:21:56.820 And people were much better able to calculate the proper answer there and come to a 76% of the subjects when it's phrased differently were able to actually give the correct answer there.

00:22:11.200 So it's kind of this weird thing where Kahneman has formulated a problem in such a way as to kind of act as a gotcha to his own test subjects and kind of forms the problem in a way that only really exists in those sterile, controlled, perfect lab scenarios.

00:22:30.460 Whereas the environment that we interact with in a day-to-day basis is not a sterile lab.

00:22:38.280 We have all of these different variables.

00:22:40.120 We have all of these different patterns that we recognize through frequency, not purely through one-off occurrences.

00:22:47.020 So there's that idea.

00:22:48.200 And then there's also the idea that Popper is presenting, which is that in the same way that the scientist presents himself as purely neutral, the forces of history, so to speak, are purely neutral.

00:23:05.040 There is a one-way travel of direction for the way that history works.

00:23:10.240 So the reason the Germans and Italians weren't able to succeed during the Second World War was because they just got the conspiracy wrong.

00:23:19.160 That just wasn't the way that history was flowing, which completely ignores all of the other variables.

00:23:26.260 And this is the other thing that Popper and a lot of these other writers take out.

00:23:31.020 And I think this is Height's mistake that he makes when he's analyzing, coming to some of his conclusions, which is they completely remove, purposefully or accidentally, the role of top-down power in generating consensus and generating opinion.

00:23:48.520 I mean, Popper, for instance, there's the whole idea of the paradox of tolerance, which is argued quite often on social media,

00:23:59.780 where there's the one graphic that comes up of, here's what Popper said against the paradox of tolerance.

00:24:05.060 And then there's an opposing one that says, no, no, no.

00:24:08.120 It's kind of from like a centrist center-right perspective, where they say, no, here's what he actually means with the paradox of tolerance.

00:24:16.340 But then you actually go into the open society.

00:24:18.820 And interestingly enough, it's something that's been argued over.

00:24:21.220 It's actually a footnote.

00:24:22.780 It's an end note at the end of the book.

00:24:24.740 And I went through it, and the whole idea of the paradox of tolerance is you can't tolerate the intolerant because if you do, they will destroy tolerance, right?

00:24:33.520 Which seems like something that, for our current globalist, open society, liberal regime, is very useful.

00:24:41.880 Because what it allows them to do is just label their enemies as intolerant or as conspiracy theorists who are unwilling to tolerate opposing views to their conspiracies,

00:24:53.080 as we see often through the writers in the book, and then just say, well, you're off limits from discussion.

00:24:59.980 You don't get to participate in society.

00:25:01.800 You don't get to express yourselves freely, because if we do allow you to do that, then you are going to destroy everybody else's opportunity to do so.

00:25:13.920 And people try and argue against this by saying, like, no, if you read it, he doesn't actually mean that.

00:25:17.980 He means this.

00:25:18.700 And they go into a big word salad about why it's actually in favor of centrist free speech.

00:25:23.420 And then you actually read the passage.

00:25:24.520 And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, the government reserves the right to do this to people who are intolerant,

00:25:31.000 which ignores the fact that the government, by being the power center, by having the ability to propagandize and generate consensus,

00:25:40.400 can just label you a priori as intolerant, which cuts you off from discussion entirely.

00:25:47.680 And that's something that a lot of these writers do, which is they are ignoring the top-down position of power in generating consensus.

00:25:56.080 And I think that's where Height goes a little bit wrong, because I had, when I read the book, the same problem as you,

00:26:00.840 which is by the end he kind of defaults to a normal liberal, oh, we just need to keep defending democracy and things will turn out all right.

00:26:08.240 Whereas he's suggesting through the moral foundations that there's something inherently wrong with liberals' brains, almost,

00:26:17.820 by saying that, oh, they don't have these moral foundations.

00:26:21.760 And it plays into, as you explained, the conservative prejudice to, like, these liberals, they don't think right.

00:26:28.320 But ultimately, no, no, what they are, they are conformists.

00:26:32.680 They have been fed an ideology top-down that they have naturally conformed to, because, as we know, most people will go along to get along.

00:26:42.180 Most people are not natural mavericks who are going to step themselves out of the crowd if they can help it.

00:26:47.880 So it's not that they don't have these moral foundations.

00:26:50.400 It's that those moral foundations have been turned to non-conservative ends.

00:26:56.620 Yep.

00:26:57.200 And I think that's where he goes a little bit wrong there.

00:27:00.200 Sorry, I was going on for a little bit.

00:27:01.540 No, that's fine.

00:27:02.740 There's so many things I want to pick up on.

00:27:04.420 With regards to the paradox of intolerance, I would recommend to you and your audience a book by Daniel Ziblatt and Stephen Levitsky called How Democracies Die,

00:27:14.460 where they basically say that they take this paradox of intolerance and they say, well, that's literally how liberal democracies operate,

00:27:21.660 is that the major hegemonic parties will collude to shut out the radicals.

00:27:28.600 They will collude to marginalize sort of like the genuine, whether it's like Bernie Sanders style economic populism on the left or, you know, MAGA style populism, Nick Fuentes, whatever style, more nativist right wing populism.

00:27:47.400 These are the groups that are the most intolerant, which is a way of saying they are the most threatening to the paradigm of liberal democracy.

00:27:56.000 And something else as well, people want to draw these distinctions between Popper and like Frankfurt School radicals, for instance, like Mark Hughes.

00:28:05.160 But I fail to see how that's any difference from Mark Hughes's idea of repressive tolerance.

00:28:11.880 It just comes 23 years earlier.

00:28:14.280 These ideas had already been seeded within the government apparatus long, long before Mark Hughes ever wrote his essay for the consumption of university students.

00:28:25.080 By the way, Richard Hofstetter and Karl Popper were avowed acolytes of the Frankfurt School, which is like in their free time, they're reading that and it's informing their work.

00:28:36.120 The other thing you said about the social theory, I mean, this is maybe more of a heuristic than a golden bullet, but if you're going to make a critique, and I'm very conscious of this myself, you have to be careful that the critique can't be turned on yourself if circumstances should change.

00:28:57.860 In other words, if we are taking a Popperian view of fascism, national socialism, what have you, and we say ultimately it was an intellectual failure because they didn't have a rigorous enough social theory, just look at how things turned out.

00:29:14.380 If they thought it out, well, the calamity of the 20th century wouldn't have happened.

00:29:19.000 If we look at today's world, can we really say that the architects of liberal democracy had a coherent, cogent social theory that explained everything all of the time?

00:29:33.040 Clearly, they didn't.

00:29:34.720 Maybe your audience is familiar with the replication crisis.

00:29:38.040 That's a problem in the social sciences, in particular psychology, where many landmark studies have been revisited, and they found that either the data was falsified or there were discrepancies, inaccuracies, what have you.

00:29:53.240 Many of these landmark studies were studies conducted to present a formal liberal psychology, a formal liberal social theory that you could teach to university students, that you could publish on the nightly news, that you could write best-selling pop psychology books to propagandize the audience into believing things like,

00:30:19.060 Oh, the more interactions you have with a foreigner, the more you're going to like them, you know, contact theory, all of these kinds of things.

00:30:27.860 On experience, I can't agree with that one.

00:30:31.880 Well, because what's funny to me is that the most hardline, whether we say nationalists, nativists, conservatives, that I've met have all been people like me, people from metropolitan, urban areas, where every day of your life you're rubbing elbows with,

00:30:49.060 someone from Pakistan, someone from Kenya, someone from Kenya, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:30:55.320 So clearly it doesn't work because the most radical ideologically opposed people are the people most inculcated in these heavily diverse liberal totalitarian states.

00:31:07.100 Um, so that's kind of funny to me, um, there's, with regards to Jonathan Haidt and this, I'll put a bow on it.

00:31:15.680 Um, they all, like you said, whether knowingly or unknowingly adopt this bottom up sort of emergent social order theory, theory of social order that, that, uh, things just happen organically.

00:31:35.160 If you want to use it, if you want to use it, Delusian language, rhizomatically, you know, it's all flat, uh, horizontal, non-hierarchical, sporadic, voluntary, sort of impulsive.

00:31:49.460 And that's how power structures emerge in this sort of, um, spontaneous order, a will, sort of a will of the people, spontaneous order thing.

00:31:58.680 Um, but then you look at someone like Daniel Kahneman, who was the IDF psychologist embedded in the Israeli military.

00:32:07.320 He's, he's revolutionizing the field of psychology in this totally top-down manner as someone who's in one of the most, I guess, in the 1960s, we wouldn't say Israel was one of the most powerful countries in the world.

00:32:21.280 But nonetheless, they had a kind of prestige and authority and influence that other nations didn't have.

00:32:28.800 Um, and, and that's what, what his system, uh, the, the heuristics and researches, uh, heuristics and biases program has done is basically, uh, taken over the cognitive sciences.

00:32:43.800 There's very few people, prominent publishers in that area that will dispute, uh, the things that he said in terms of, um, this catalog of cognitive errors.

00:32:56.780 Now you go into any university psychology 101, the cognitive science chapter is just this laundry list of cognitive errors that, as you said before, that Kahneman basically in a sort of Wittgensteinian language game,

00:33:13.800 created a, a game, supplemented it with a type of statistical reasoning, basically putting his finger on the scale.

00:33:24.300 And then administering these tests to psychology students who a are, you know, they're like 18 years old.

00:33:32.980 They don't know anything B they're not technical, uh, uh, statisticians. 1.00

00:33:38.080 So they're unfamiliar with the language and the methodology being employed and they are deliberately being manipulated to produce an outcome that will justify what people like Daniel Kahneman or Richard Thaler or Cass Sunstein or any of these people believe, which is that you're a dumb, dumb, you're a dumb, dumb. 0.99

00:33:58.640 And we need, uh, and we need, uh, this paternalistic libertarian technocracy to make all of the decisions for you. 0.99

00:34:05.820 It's just, it's just remarkable.

00:34:07.240 Yeah.

00:34:07.840 And it is all in the, all for the goal, all for the aim of convincing people that in some way they're fundamentally due to just the way that the brain naturally happens, they're broken.

00:34:21.560 And this is, this is a through line that can actually be traced, um, through the entire work that you've presented here, all the way from Hofstadter and Popper trying to demonize what you deem to be, what you title authentic folk narratives, which is like, because of the complete deluge of information that we have these days in the information age, where it's kind of in a way designed to be non-understandable.

00:34:50.400 For the average person, people do come up with some crazy sounding ideas, but then also a lot of the crazy sounding ideas, when you look into the evidence of them, I'm thinking Pizzagate, for instance, seem to have a lot of evidence or at the very least lots and lots of converging circumstantial evidence that points in a particular direction, completely demonizing those kinds of narratives, which the mainstream media, if they were actually living up to their judgment,

00:35:20.400 should look into them, should look into the same way. And instead just top down branding them all conspiracy theorists, and you do get people, as you note in here, like, um, latter day, Alex Jones, who play into that caricature and stereotype a little bit too well.

00:35:38.400 well. Either way, those are normal ways of perceiving the world given the information

00:35:44.480 that you have access to and given the way that the brain functions through recognizing patterns

00:35:49.360 and seeing the frequencies of particular things and starting to paint a picture from them.

00:35:54.640 Then you've got Jonathan Haidt. And I don't think Jonathan Haidt is malicious in doing this. I think

00:36:00.460 of the authors that you're critiquing here, Jonathan Haidt does not seem to be doing this

00:36:04.780 on purpose. It might just be his liberal priors and his semi-conversion to conservatism that

00:36:12.820 motivated this unknowingly. But he stigmatizes liberals as not being morally complete, you

00:36:22.220 could say. And then Daniel Kahneman comes through saying, well, actually, if you look at it the way

00:36:26.680 that I've studied it, the brain doesn't work at all, really. This thing that's been keeping us alive

00:36:32.700 and was evolved to help us to navigate our environment doesn't work at all. And it creates

00:36:39.220 all of these problems and errors according to my standards, which aren't the standards of the real

00:36:43.660 world, but I'm a scientist. Therefore, I'm the priest class, you listen to me. And then you go

00:36:49.060 to the final essay where you're examining the work of Paul Bloom and his studies on child psychology and

00:36:55.000 the origins of evil, which seems to be him just trying to find a way to prevent armies of what

00:37:01.940 he sees to be baby Hitler from rising up all over the world. Anywhere in Europe, there's a baby Hitler 0.88

00:37:07.740 right now. So we need to beat into him that he has to be the exact opposite of that. He has to be a gay 1.00

00:37:14.260 race communist or else things will be bad for the Jews again. Is this through line just saying, 1.00

00:37:20.560 you're broken, you're broken, you're broken. You need us looking after you. And it does have real

00:37:25.140 world effects. I mean, from my own generation and my own experience, it especially has effects on

00:37:32.200 women. You talk about Paul Bloom, how he almost gloatingly talks about how when bombarded with all

00:37:40.120 of this anti-white guilt from a very young age, people experience a great deal of personal anxiety

00:37:48.300 just trying to navigate all of the different rules that you could call woke, people trying to be

00:37:54.240 woke and stick to all of the ever-changing rules of being woke. They end up just in this

00:38:00.180 permanent state of anxiety. And I know people who've been like that from a very young age. I was raised in

00:38:06.940 this environment. I was raised under these narratives. And when people have that permanent

00:38:12.940 state of anxiety, when they're told from everywhere, your brain doesn't really work properly,

00:38:17.880 you're broken. They do revert to following what authority tells them to do. They make it very easy

00:38:26.340 for something like the COVID lockdowns to push onto them this idea of like, oh, the science knows best,

00:38:34.000 do what the science tells you. And the darkest part of that is the doctors pushing medication

00:38:39.040 on these people. Loads of people that I know, because they think their brains don't work,

00:38:45.060 because they have this kind of social anxiety that comes with all of the problems of modernity,

00:38:50.340 the first thing that happens, they speak to a doctor, they get put straight onto medication,

00:38:54.060 which doesn't actually help them. It just makes them a client of the technocratic regime we live

00:38:59.960 under right now. Yeah, there's a lot there. It's just funny to me, when you were talking about

00:39:07.280 Richard Hofstadter, one of the sort of black marks in his legacy is the extent to which,

00:39:14.140 now, unlike Karl Popper, Hofstadter did name specific conspiracies. And in the two instances

00:39:20.940 that I'm familiar with, both he was proven wrong. He, in the paranoid style in American politics,

00:39:28.760 and I quote it, so you probably remember this passage, he talks about vaccinations. He says,

00:39:34.300 you know, even if, he does a sort of Jacques Lacan thing. Lacan was a famous French structuralist and

00:39:41.060 a psychoanalyst. And the sort of line that everybody knows from Jacques Lacan is,

00:39:47.300 if you are jealous, or if you are worried that your wife is cheating on you, and she is cheating on you,

00:39:58.400 it's still pathological that you had the skepticism about her. That's sort of like a

00:40:05.160 Lacanian syllogism. And Hofstadter uses this, does a version of this, he says, even if it's proven

00:40:13.660 that the government forcibly and covertly mandated vaccination. No, I'm sorry, he did fluoride in the

00:40:21.980 water. That was the example. Yeah, yeah. Because I was thinking, it reminded me of the character

00:40:26.640 from Dr. Strangelove, the Kubrick film. It was like, they're putting, they're destroying our virility

00:40:32.480 with chemicals in the water. But that's kind of part of this, which is it's showing these characters

00:40:37.780 as a point of mockery, but carry on. Yeah, yeah. It's one of the oldest media punching bags.

00:40:44.960 But yeah, even if it's proven that the federal government is secretly administering fluoride in

00:40:52.160 the water supply to bring about a socialist government, you would still be an irrational

00:40:57.680 paranoid crank to think that, to worry about it. And obviously, many decades later, we know

00:41:05.500 that that has happened. It's ongoing. Some years ago, the Massachusetts governor was,

00:41:11.260 it might have been Massachusetts. She's like, we need to put more fluoridation into the water 0.74

00:41:16.400 because of X, Y, Z political goal. And the other example he gave, and I don't quite remember this

00:41:22.320 exactly, it was from the Age of Reform, another Pulitzer Prize winning book of his, where he basically,

00:41:28.060 the Age of Reform is basically looking at the transition from the Gilded Age in the United States

00:41:34.220 to the progressive era of the 20th century. And one of the arguments he's presenting is that the sort of

00:41:40.620 the political concerns of the agrarian, if you want to say, Jeffersonian style population,

00:41:48.760 the old style populists, didn't gain traction until progressives almost a century later had taken them

00:41:57.660 up. Sort of disenfranchised, maybe petite bourgeois in places like Chicago and New York and elsewhere,

00:42:05.180 who are also feeling the burn from money power, from industrialization, from the replacement of their

00:42:15.720 era, which I would long for a great replacement of the 1830s, where it was just other Irish and other 1.00

00:42:23.420 Germans and other so on and so forth. But he does this sort of caricature of the populist

00:42:32.540 paranoia around money power. And then obviously, there was a study some 10 years ago, I cite it in

00:42:40.880 the book, where a guy went back and like forensically recreated, you know, follow the money, figured out,

00:42:48.680 you know, exactly how he was wrong. So he's using all these instances to sort of lambast and mock

00:42:54.140 the conspiratorially minded people. And the most famous examples he's used have been proven to be

00:43:02.140 correct in the opposite direction. And this is part of the reason I wrote this and the last book,

00:43:07.480 Understanding Conspiracy Theories. So I wanted to impress, I wanted to support the conspiratorially

00:43:14.960 minded and give ammunition, intellectual ammunition to the cause. Because in my view, and this is maybe

00:43:26.280 a very America centric view, to be right wing, or even to be American, is to be kind of a conspiratorially

00:43:35.180 minded person. The United States were founded in a climate of great power conflict. They were founded

00:43:44.880 with covert organizations like Freemasonry, and so on and so forth. The very first third party in the

00:43:58.080 United States, which was in that Gilded Age era, so we're not even 100 years after the signing of the

00:44:04.540 Declaration or the Constitution. And they were anti-papist, anti-Freemason, anti-mass migration,

00:44:14.640 the American People's Party, the know-nothings. These were sort of interregnum parties between the

00:44:20.500 Whigs and the Republicans. And they were concerned with the same types of things that we're concerned

00:44:25.860 with today. And these are fundamental civic questions. Who has control over the money? Who has control over the

00:44:37.780 government? Who are we as a people? These are fundamental existential political questions. And we can say

00:44:45.320 conspiratorial if we want. I would just say they're existential questions. And what is any conspiracy theorist

00:44:52.560 primarily concerned with? They're concerned with existential questions. There is a malicious power

00:45:00.180 out there who specifically wants to hurt me, or specifically wants to hurt my community, or my way

00:45:06.640 of life, or my religion, or so on and so forth. So these are deeply existential questions. The polemic

00:45:12.440 against conspiracy theorizing is a polemic against you and me engaging in existential discourse. Who are we?

00:45:22.560 What are we? How do we have influence? How do we provide for our children? And how do we,

00:45:31.060 I'm trying not to get too spicy here. How do we make sure that our way of life persists? You know,

00:45:35.980 which is what every group of people all over around the world have ever wanted to do, have ever consumed

00:45:41.960 themselves with, is we want to keep living. We want to be who we are, and we want to keep living.

00:45:46.960 Um, so there's more things you said. I, I don't want to take up too much time. I'll kick it back

00:45:51.880 to you. No, that, that's, that's all right. Um, that's all, yeah. Um, on, on the point that you

00:45:55.940 were talking about there with, with Hofstadter, um, to begin with, uh, where it's just like, well,

00:46:01.460 yeah, you could say that all of this stuff is happening maybe with the fluoridation of the water.

00:46:06.560 And even if it's right, then you're still wrong for thinking of it. That, that, that kind of polemic is at the,

00:46:12.260 uh, the heart of all of this, which is even if you're right, you're, you're wrong in one way or

00:46:18.680 another, you can't win because you are not at the levers of power, but this only further encourages

00:46:24.660 people to question, well, then if I'm not at the levers of power, if I can't do anything right,

00:46:30.020 even if I'm factually correct, well, why is that? Who is it that's determining that I'm wrong by whose

00:46:37.540 standards? Am I wrong? And that's where, uh, the, the spicy part of this whole thing, uh, does come

00:46:44.920 in. That's where the question of is all of the work that you're critiquing here malicious or not

00:46:51.360 comes in. Uh, because I, I think it's difficult not to acknowledge that every author that you're

00:46:58.160 critiquing in this book is Jewish. And we, we, we, we just have to be upfront about that. And that's

00:47:05.200 not to label all Jews as being in on some large conspiracy, but these particular liberal open 0.65

00:47:14.540 society types do seem to be Paul Bloom, especially you point out how he doesn't seem to be able to go

00:47:21.880 through a single page of his book on child psychology and the origins of evil without invoking the baby

00:47:29.340 Hitler fallacy without invoking that. We need to find some way of preventing the next Holocaust. We 0.98

00:47:35.680 need to, everything that he's doing is being heavily, heavily, uh, influenced by his experience

00:47:43.580 as an American Jew in the post-war era. You mentioned that Kahneman was an IDF Israeli, um, like he worked

00:47:52.340 for the IDF. Uh, so, so there, there is that question of whether or not this represents all people. And I

00:47:58.640 don't think that it does. Uh, we can both reference people like Paul Gottfried, who I think that we would

00:48:03.500 both agree has done some amazing work. Uh, he, like when you talk about pathologizing people, Paul Gottfried

00:48:10.200 has been one of the best at pushing back against that in his books, like after liberalism and

00:48:15.540 multiculturalism in the politics of guilt. Cause a lot of what you're discussing here is kind of 0.89

00:48:19.760 presaged by his work, discussing how people have been through the technocracy, through the post-liberal

00:48:27.860 order that we live in right now, pushed into this sense of feeling guilty for who they are. You're a

00:48:34.060 broken person. You need to let me, the elite technocrat mend your brain. But still a lot of these 1.00

00:48:40.920 people do seem to be motivated by their sense of their own Jewishness. And that's where you, you, uh,

00:48:48.140 you, you mentioned the idea of, of ethno narratives. And that's where this whole idea of the intolerant

00:48:53.820 interpretation comes from is, is recognizing that I don't think you can say that it's wrong

00:49:00.300 for people to recognizing or recognize all of that in these people's work to recognize where somebody

00:49:06.560 like Karl Popper is coming from, given his historical background to recognize, we mentioned the

00:49:11.900 Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School, um, you know, Theodor Adorno, his work, his massive, massive work,

00:49:20.080 the authoritarian personality, frankly, seems to me to be a pure attack on the idea of the stable

00:49:26.980 Western nuclear family that does seem to be influenced by his experiences as somebody who,

00:49:35.500 who was attacked by the, by the German regime of the 1930s. Karl Popper is going all the way back to

00:49:44.840 Plato to try and libel, because that's frankly what it is. We've discussed how his arguments are

00:49:50.520 completely specious. He's not actually making arguments. He's just saying, he's just libeling

00:49:56.740 these people. He's libeling the foundations of Western philosophy. So, so there is something to,

00:50:02.860 these people do seem to want to tear down a Western sensibility, a Western sense of selfhood

00:50:10.780 by weaponizing our own conscience against us so that they can implement their own rule by

00:50:18.060 technocracy. And that's that whole intolerant interpretation. There's nothing wrong with

00:50:24.020 recognizing all of that, reading it, and allowing yourself to be on guard against such a thing.

00:50:31.380 While also, of course, to be very clear, recognizing this is not representative of everybody, nor even

00:50:38.260 necessarily a majority or even significant minority, but these people are all in, are all in powerful

00:50:45.460 positions. Their word has had much more influence, sadly, than the work of somebody like Paul Gottfried.

00:50:52.880 Paul Gottfried, who was mentored by Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School.

00:50:58.000 Thank you for reminding me of that. Yeah, he came to very different conclusions.

00:51:02.720 Yeah. I mean, I referenced Paul Gottfried extensively, especially in that Jonathan Haidt essay.

00:51:10.160 There are very few... Paul Gottfried almost has like an Anglo sensibility in terms of

00:51:16.880 sort of like plain spoken objectivity. Like, that's one of the reasons I like

00:51:24.800 Paul Gottfried's work so much is that he has a really excellent ability to cut through

00:51:31.600 fluff and BS and just say, well, this is what was really happening. This is what really...

00:51:36.000 X represents X and so on and so forth. But yeah, with regards to Paul Bloom, and we're getting down

00:51:42.660 to the bottom of the hour here, so maybe I'll make my final pitch and just try to put all these themes

00:51:49.820 together. You get the sense reading Paul Bloom, and again, maybe Paul Bloom sort of seems like sort

00:51:55.500 of an outlier in this, but I would remind your audience that Paul Bloom is like one or two steps

00:52:01.380 removed from the dissident right, effectively. He does a lot of events with like Red Scare-affiliated

00:52:09.660 people. So, you know, he's like one degree of separation from our milieu. He's one of these maybe

00:52:16.120 more based, more moderate social scientists because he has certain niche views on other taboo subjects.

00:52:24.540 But you read his book, and you get the impression that he must have spent all night

00:52:29.520 binge watching the boys from Brazil, if he was so concerned about like knocking on the door,

00:52:35.180 and there was, you know, little Adolf there. The things that are remarkable about the book,

00:52:40.020 and you invoke this idea of an ethno-narrative, not my original conception that comes from

00:52:46.860 Jean-Francois Lyotard, who in his book, The Postmodern Condition, talks about the collapse

00:52:53.860 of grand metanarratives. And other people who've taken up this idea, like Stephen, I think his name

00:52:59.720 was Stephen Hicks, who's like a very Jordan Peterson tier.

00:53:04.020 Oh, yeah. He wrote that anti-postmodernist book, didn't he? Yeah, yeah.

00:53:08.940 Yeah. So he's one of the more prominent critics of postmodernity and postmodern thinking,

00:53:17.500 but they take on this idea of the collapse of grand metanarratives. That never really sat well

00:53:22.560 with me. It wasn't like people spontaneously stopped believing in Christianity, or Britannia,

00:53:31.300 or, you know, America, or whatever. It wasn't like we just woke up and said, oh, these things are

00:53:35.820 outdated, and we have TV now and microwave dinners, so who needs it? It was the, and because I don't

00:53:44.560 believe that, I sort of also don't believe in this idea of nihilism, that there's this epidemic of

00:53:50.140 people who just don't care about anything, and they don't see meaning anywhere. What they 0.97

00:53:56.120 specifically are experiencing is alienation. What they're specifically feeling is a disconnection

00:54:03.520 from their own tradition, and their own way of life, and their own historical, you know, continuity,

00:54:10.740 their ancestors, so on and so forth. So it's a very particular malady, which is the result of the,

00:54:18.020 what I call the conflict of ethno-metanarratives, which is basically a way of saying different

00:54:23.700 groups have different, have mythologized themselves in a particular way, and when they come into

00:54:32.220 conflict, there's not just physical conflict, particularly in our day and age. It's cultural

00:54:37.700 conflict, intellectual. You are making contact with other countries, you know, popular cultures,

00:54:46.120 media markets, so on and so forth. First contact for a lot of us is through media. You know,

00:54:54.060 before I ever met a Japanese person, there was Dragon Ball Z of my Saturday morning cartoon. 0.98

00:54:59.860 Same, same right here.

00:55:02.400 So, you know, before I ever met a British person, you know, I watched the Amadeus movie as a kid,

00:55:10.540 or a German person, I guess. There are a lot of English actors in that movie, but obviously it's

00:55:15.400 set in Germany. All the best actors are English. All the best everything is English. All the best

00:55:20.420 countries are English. America, England. So, not that I can claim a whole lot of English ancestry,

00:55:25.500 but anyway, you get this collapse of ethno-metanarratives, or confrontation between ethno-metanarratives,

00:55:35.760 and that's sort of how I view someone like Richard Hofstadter, in the sense that you have

00:55:41.440 Richard Hofstadter, your audience can fact check me here, go to Wikipedia. The very first two or three

00:55:48.540 sentences will say that Richard Hofstadter, and I'm paraphrasing, was effectively the figurehead

00:55:54.600 of the post-war liberal consensus. So, if James Lindsay is watching this and he's saying the post-war

00:56:01.340 consensus doesn't exist, that's a fantasy. Go to Wikipedia. Richard Hofstadter is literally

00:56:06.820 the one academic most connected with this consensus school of history. And what is he doing?

00:56:15.520 Richard Hofstadter was very prolific. He wrote about the entire American experience pre, even to when

00:56:23.040 it was just colonies, even to the 17th century, before the Declaration, before the Constitution,

00:56:28.460 before the Revolutionary War, before the Constitutional Convention. He's writing all the way up until his

00:56:34.000 death, which I think was the 1970s or 1980s. And he's representing American history to, at that time,

00:56:42.040 a still predominantly Anglophile culture and elite. And he's representing it, even though he's

00:56:48.760 disavowed his communist views, he's retained the ethnic core of those communist views, and he's

00:56:57.120 representing American history through that lens. And that becomes the dominant way in which Americans

00:57:03.880 see themselves. To such a degree, you can skip reading Richard Hofstadter if you really don't

00:57:09.960 want to. You can just go back on YouTube and find old episodes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

00:57:16.020 And every night, Jon Stewart is effectively parroting condensed soundbite versions of the Richard

00:57:22.780 Hofstadter worldview. So, why is there this epidemic in the United States and in many other parts of the

00:57:28.580 world? It's because you have this clash of ethno-narratives. Paul Bloom, just to bring it

00:57:34.800 to the close here, Paul Bloom is doing a sort of ethno-scientific, ethno-narrative approach to

00:57:44.340 developmental psychology. And we know this because, as you said, all but one of the references he makes

00:57:52.840 in the book, speaking to human cruelty, injustice, violence, things like that, are all historical

00:58:02.860 examples from his experience and his people's experience. And you also mentioned before that,

00:58:13.120 you know, he quotes a study. These are how you know these people aren't really interested in actual

00:58:18.400 scientific knowledge. He quotes a study, I think, conducted in one of the Scandinavian countries

00:58:26.300 showing that white people experienced intense anxiety when asked to think racially, to make

00:58:35.240 racial judgments. That is, to me, that would be such a landmark finding that you've got one population 0.97

00:58:45.180 on the planet that experiences extreme duress, stress, when they're asked to engage in a very

00:58:53.920 simplistic type of cognitive process. No other group does that. Only white people do that. And there's 0.67

00:59:04.420 no interrogation of it. Why is it this way? Why should it be this way? Shouldn't we be offering

00:59:11.660 interventions to help these people? There's no questioning at all. And the punchline of his book

00:59:17.780 is ultimately we need more of that kind of behavior. So you just take, you take one step back and you have

00:59:24.380 to ask, what is the purpose of this? Why is he doing this? What message is trying to be conveyed? What, what

00:59:31.920 is this person's attitude about the scientific literature in general? Is the attitude, well, all of this needs

00:59:40.520 to work for my pet interests. All of this needs to be made coherent with my specific ideological

00:59:46.960 commitments. Because if that's what it is, that's not science. That's an ethno-narrative. And I sort of,

00:59:56.820 in a few instances throughout the book, I expand what I consider to be an ethno-narrative to include

01:00:05.200 other things that maybe your audience will take issue with. Things like communism, I view as sort

01:00:11.140 of an ethno-narrative. And maybe to give a little insight, if anyone in your audience is going to read

01:00:16.860 this book after watching this, maybe read it with this in mind. Part of the reason I disagreed with

01:00:22.960 Jonathan Haidt and went and wrote a whole essay about it was because I didn't like the way in which

01:00:27.900 commonplace terms and concepts are being deployed so frivolously and liberally. Today's world,

01:00:36.240 everything is communist. I'm not, I don't live in New York anymore, but I'm from New York and

01:00:41.140 they just had a mayoral election. Zoran Mamdani won. And the sort of mainstream right is freaking out

01:00:49.740 that he's a communist. It's like that ended a long time ago. Zoran Mamdani is not a Trotskyist.

01:00:57.260 He's not a Leninist. He's not a Maoist. He's not, he doesn't have a poster of, of, I don't know.

01:01:07.720 Stalin. 0.56

01:01:08.960 Stalin or Brezhnev in his, in his study somewhere. He's a, he's a, he's a, in many ways, he's actually

01:01:16.040 a completely assimilated, uh, progressive liberal millennial. Um, but he's a communist.

01:01:24.700 Okay. That's going to lead to problems in a few ways, understanding Mamdani and how he got elected,

01:01:33.160 resisting Mamdani over the course of his administration. Right. That's why I use this

01:01:40.020 phrase metanarrative or ethno metanarrative, because ultimately, I mean, if you look at what

01:01:45.500 Lenin did in, in Russia, immediately following the revolution, there were some very liberal

01:01:52.780 socializing tendencies, you know, it's almost in some ways kind of indistinct or indistinguishable

01:01:58.460 from what has transpired here. I guess option A would be, we call all of this communism.

01:02:05.240 My solution would be, is we look at the specific people and groups of people

01:02:10.180 behind these actions, what is important to them and work from there. In a sense, what I'm trying to

01:02:17.040 do, I'm a sort of materialist in the sense that, um, I try not to ascribe to ideology, uh, what can

01:02:26.940 be understood by primal things like to borrow a phrase from a friend of mine, faith, family, and folk,

01:02:34.360 who you belong to things that you don't get a choice in things that inform your everyday waking

01:02:41.160 choices and actions. And if, and, uh, I'm hoping that this phrase catches on, um, because I think

01:02:48.520 if we start deploying language, like an ethno metanarrative, as, as opposed to ideological

01:02:53.680 language, we can actually understand what's happening and we can actually organize whether we're organizing

01:03:00.640 against it or simply organizing ourselves, uh, to, to achieve our own style of life. Uh, it doesn't

01:03:07.900 necessarily have to be like a, a political conflict or any other kind of conflict. I'm an American. I

01:03:14.860 believe in things like freedom of association. Um, I think, you know, we should be able to have our own

01:03:21.380 thing. And so, you know, there's always two options, right? You can go and attack the Mamdani's, 1.00

01:03:26.340 or you can create a, you know, anti-Mamdani space somewhere else. Maybe there's a third option.

01:03:32.400 I don't know. I'm ranting a little bit, but, uh, yeah, that's what I'm trying to say here.

01:03:36.700 Yeah. I think that's a good place to end it. If we just say that, I think one of my,

01:03:41.840 um, my best takeaway from all of this is that when all of the institutions and when all of the power

01:03:48.760 centers from the very moment that you're born all the way to your death are trying to tell you that

01:03:55.380 you are broken, that your brain doesn't function properly, that your foundations of morality are

01:04:03.160 all wrong and that you are evil from the moment that you're born, unless you are propagandized 0.89

01:04:09.720 and unless that you are controlled top down and nudged every waking moment of your life, 0.97

01:04:15.160 when that is a world order that is purposefully designed to make white people, people of European 0.82

01:04:22.600 descent, to be in a constant state of anguish and anxiety, that one of the greatest acts of

01:04:30.320 resistance that you can take is to recognize that you are not a broken person, to take a positive

01:04:36.460 message from all of this, which is that your brain works fine. You don't always need the medication.

01:04:45.260 You don't need to listen to these narratives that tell you that you're a terrible person just

01:04:51.300 because of the fact that your ancestors were more successful than everybody else's ancestors,

01:04:56.980 that your ancestors came up with the greatest works of philosophy, the greatest works of fiction,

01:05:02.660 the greatest pieces of music ever. That's something that you should be proud of. That's something that

01:05:08.060 you can be proud of and you can learn yourself. And I do think that people are starting to try and

01:05:13.360 break through and break free of these ethno-meta narratives. You can see just from,

01:05:17.740 we mentioned him at the beginning of this, Nick Fuentes being somebody who has suddenly

01:05:23.160 got a lot of mainstream push with the interview with Tucker Carlson. People can take Fuentes however

01:05:28.540 they want personally. I think that ultimately him and his message becoming more mainstream and

01:05:36.060 spreading out there is a sign of one very, very positive thing, which is that among a significant

01:05:41.380 portion of young white people, not just men, but young white women too, they are starting to break free

01:05:48.460 of this. And I think ultimately that people will, on a personal level, just feel so much better in

01:05:56.640 themselves if they recognize who they are, they recognize their traditions, they recognize their faith

01:06:03.100 without that anxiety, without that being forced on them, without their nose being rubbed into the dirt.

01:06:10.600 So that's one of my best takeaways, which is the people who spread these narratives were not your

01:06:15.840 friends. They wanted to weaponize your feelings of empathy and guilt against you. And it's time

01:06:23.220 that we start breaking away from that. And I think we really are starting to see a mass of people

01:06:28.820 starting to break away from that. So hopefully we can all take a positive message from that. So it's been

01:06:36.020 an absolute pleasure speaking with you, Josh. And for everybody watching, please pick up a copy of

01:06:42.440 Intolerant Interpretations. It's a really, really excellent book. We've not discussed the whole thing. We've

01:06:48.060 only touched on a surface level. There's some really fantastic analysis and writing in here. I'd really

01:06:53.840 recommend it. Where can people find you, Josh?

01:06:56.280 Well, first off, let me say thank you so much for the invitation. It was a pleasure.

01:07:02.720 You can find my first two books at imperiumpress.org, but they're also available on any other book

01:07:08.540 publishing site. This, the new book is available through antelopehillpublishing.com. You can also

01:07:15.640 find it anywhere else. I do regular video and essay content on my blog, jneil.substack.com.

01:07:24.580 And I'm also on xstilljneil, S-T-I-L-L-J-Neil. That's where you can find me.

01:07:32.920 Well, there you go. So please give Josh a follow. It's well worth it. Pick up his books. And again,

01:07:39.600 Josh, thank you very, very much for joining us. And to everybody who's watched this interview,

01:07:44.280 thank you for joining us. Take care.

01:07:54.580 Bye-bye.

01:08:01.800 Bye.

01:08:02.360 Bye.

01:08:02.620 Bye.

01:08:02.740 Bye-bye.

01:08:02.900 Bye.

01:08:03.520 Bye-bye.

Intolerant Interpretations ｜ Interview with Josh Neal

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