00:00:32.700I came across a couple Next Generation episodes, and I started to pick up on all these things in it
00:00:37.840that seemed very, very progressive, even by today's standards,
00:00:41.300how Gene Ronneberry came up with the character Spock.
00:00:43.640He literally wanted to come up with a pointy-eared devil.
00:00:47.360Hello. Thank you for joining us for this Lotus Eaters interview.
00:00:50.560I'm very happy to say that today I'm talking to Wilhelm Iverson,
00:00:54.720formerly known as the American Krogan. He is currently on Substack under the Iverson
00:01:00.840Dilemma, where he produces video essays examining media and its effect as an agent of social
00:01:08.580engineering. He's also begun writing some articles on there. Formerly, with his American Krogan
00:01:14.700persona, he released video essays talking about video games and other types of media, where he
00:01:20.400went into great detail on the ethnic narratives underpinning games like the Bioshock series.
00:01:27.200Particularly important is his series on Bioshock Infinite called The Hatred, which I would
00:01:32.940recommend to anybody. Similarly, he's done videos on Call of Duty Vanguard and its distortion of
00:01:38.540history. And overall, his body of work is representative of a man with a deep and keen
00:01:43.680insight into political narratives and how they are spread by the mass media. Thank you very
00:01:49.340much for joining us today, Wilhelm. Thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate it.
00:01:53.800Well, as I mentioned before we were actually going live with this interview, and we're not live,
00:01:58.740before we began recording this interview, I've been a big fan of your work for a long time. I
00:02:03.520found it very eye-opening. And just to preface all of this, please, if you do get the chance,
00:02:08.620go and visit his substat, go and visit the Odyssey channel. I believe your YouTube channel,
00:02:13.060still under the American Krogan title, has got some content on it. Again,
00:02:17.760your Mass Effect video is on there. I would really recommend anybody to go and check out
00:02:24.620your videos. They're really, really good stuff. But mentioning your Iverson Dilemma sub stack,
00:02:32.380that's what we should focus on right now, is that's where people can find you right now and
00:02:36.700where you're producing your content. As mentioned in the little introduction, normally you're a
00:02:41.220media critic, and you use media analysis and criticism to dive into broader subjects like
00:02:49.300history, social engineering, social conditioning. The most recent thing that you have on there is
00:02:55.720your article on Curtis Yarvin and his supposed Doomerism from his recent interview with Peter
00:03:02.240McCormick on The Peter McCormick Show, and you have the little quote here from him where he's
00:03:07.460been asked about civil war and whether whites will actually stand up for their own right
00:03:12.880in the face of demographic displacement, where Yavin said that people have no balls and actually
00:03:19.540like, you know, they will not resist, they will not resist all of, you know, I'm going to, I'll
00:03:24.940try and cut some of the Yavinisms, shall we say, in the mode of speech. All of the thought that1.00
00:03:30.540they will get their muskets and put on their tricorned hats. When you go back, you go back
00:03:36.000into the period when people actually did this. But what the future is, is that it'll be like
00:03:40.640South Africa where people sit quietly in their houses and build more and more barbed wire and
00:03:44.860electric fences until finally they're exterminated in one big problem. This caused a lot of controversy
00:03:50.820and this caused responses from people like Zuma Historian, who you respectfully counter some of
00:03:57.720the arguments that Zuma Historian presents in his rebuttal to this. And you actually come down,
00:04:04.140regretfully it seems on the side of curtis yarvin in his analysis of american social dynamics
00:04:11.360so what made you want to write this article on yarvin's comments on mass demographic change and
00:04:18.140what made you fall more on his side regarding this because i think this is really important
00:04:22.460in understanding the social dynamics of america how america's got to where it is right now and
00:04:27.720the kind of ways that it contrasts with Europe um I guess you know a few years ago I probably
00:04:36.120would have been much more optimistic and I probably would have seen things much more through the
00:04:40.180filter that Zoomer historian is seeing it but uh I recently went back to the U.S. to try to make a
00:04:45.800go of it there again um you know for anybody who doesn't know I've been living in South America for
00:04:50.800about 12 years. And when I went back, it was a very big wake up call. Entire towns that I grew
00:04:58.980up in had been gentrified and had been completely replaced to one extent or well, not completely,1.00
00:05:05.780but replaced to one extent or another with foreigners. You know, you go into a big place1.00
00:05:09.660like Walmart or whatever, and you would just feel like you're right back in South America or the
00:05:13.440third world or wherever. You know, when I flew into Florida over the intercom at the airport,
00:05:20.440All I heard was Spanish and Haitian. So you just have a lot of these sort of experiences.
00:05:26.500And then you talk to actual heritage Americans and locals, and they don't have talking points
00:05:32.720and ideas that are really anywhere close to ours. I didn't run into a single person
00:05:37.260who I would deem to be one of our guys or somebody who was close to where we were at.
00:05:45.520I mean, it was very, very eye opening. So those types of experiences sort of led me down the road of realizing that we're like, we're really in a much worse place than a lot of us here in these spheres want to acknowledge.
00:06:00.580beyond that um you know if you just look at the if you look at the numbers um you know it's probably
00:06:08.780the u.s at this point is probably it's probably i mean officially it's 50 white or somewhere
00:06:13.600thereabouts you know depending on which in in the meme that i always see going around it's from
00:06:18.760kingdom of heaven where it's uh edward norton's king and like edward norton's character going
00:06:23.160silence of 57 white country speaking uh whenever it's directed at europeans you know so i i'm
00:06:30.520gotta broadly assume that the figure is like 57 but i know with america the statistics are a little
00:06:36.220bit weird because a lot of arabs yeah are classified as white as well yeah yeah i mean
00:06:41.880there's actually there's actually been some tweets going around of some um mina people you know
00:06:46.600complaining in the u.s that there isn't like a mina category uh and that they have either have
00:06:51.920to say white or other and you know the categorization of race in the u.s is very odd
00:06:57.860because sometimes victims will be accurately recorded
00:25:00.280It's just the fact that there are these massive differences in daily lived experience.
00:25:07.120Yeah, and when you talk about the kind of contradictory nature of a lot of it,
00:25:11.160it's something that you partially address in your other recent article,
00:25:14.560The Tyranny of the Individual, where you're kind of talking about,
00:25:17.980when we talk about why it is that Curtis Yarvin's Doomerism,
00:25:21.600despite the fact that some might argue, and there might be an element of this,
00:25:25.260that Yarvin himself in that argument is trying to be purposefully subversive. He's maybe trying
00:25:31.840to slip under the rug, the doomerism that you're talking about, whether or not it's realistic or
00:25:36.140not. But when we talk about like white people advocating for white interests, there is this
00:25:42.820contradiction and block in that, like you say, in America, so many people just aren't interested
00:25:47.980in thinking that way despite the fact that there is a kind of collectivist moral wider community
00:25:57.080that they are appealing to by forcing other white people into adopting a kind of radical open
00:26:04.440tolerant poparian individualism because you talk about the contradictions between say
00:26:11.200The anti-woke crowd advocating against the kind of woke video games where you're not allowed sexy women anymore, despite the fact at the same time, you know, they're also arguing basically in favor of massive corporations being able to turn your mind to mush by advertising with pornography for you.
00:26:31.300So there's all of these different contradictory elements of the white mindset that might be going behind somebody like Elon Musk or behind somebody like Peter Thiel and motivating them.
00:26:43.660This idea that they are just completely contradictory.
00:26:47.240Is that something that's, as Kevin MacDonald would argue, this kind of radical individualism as a moral collective community that you don't push other ethnic groups?0.80
00:26:56.560You don't see people like pushing Nigerians, that they all need to be radical individuals.
00:27:01.080you only see white people enforcing this with other white people is that something like kevin
00:27:05.880mcdonald would argue is just inherent to us because of the way that we've developed as a
00:27:10.880people or is that something that is more pushed on us by a lot of the post-war media that we've
00:27:16.580consumed my gut response to that is that it's just very very messy and it's hard to really parse out
00:27:23.700neatly uh there's certainly some of that uh i mean some of these things are just innate i i think
00:27:30.320since the Enlightenment, we've been more predisposed toward individualism. And at the
00:27:37.500same time, basically something I say in the article, The Tyranny of the Individual, is that
00:27:43.900I think I bring up Athanaric, and he was a 4th century Gothic ruler. He went around persecuting
00:27:54.500any goths who converted to christianity but he basically left christians alone and and you can
00:28:00.540kind of see that attitude ironically enough in a lot of modern progressive whites and even0.69
00:28:05.520conservatives insofar that they will they will leave other non-white groups alone and allow
00:28:14.540them to have their ethnic enclaves you know their political caucuses their identity groups their
00:28:19.280networks but if any white group tries to organize and say you know we have this exclusive identity
00:28:24.840here we don't want to incorporate everybody else or we believe that we have you know uh you know
00:28:31.200group rights that are unique to us both liberal and conservatives uh will white liberals and
00:28:37.300conservatives will feel that that is it is their right to stop that because they actually feel like
00:28:44.040they do share a collective white identity with these other white people and their collective
00:28:49.180identity is to not have an identity. Our collective identity is individualism. And I don't think I say0.55
00:28:55.620this explicitly in the article, but it kind of ties back a little bit to Rudyard Kipling's
00:29:01.360White Man's Burden parody, or whatever you want to call it, poem in 1899. He's sort of making fun
00:29:07.720of the white world for insisting that we have to go around with the civilizing mission and make
00:29:13.460everybody else just like us. I think to some extent, this collective white identity of non-identity0.62
00:29:20.380that is enforced on white people, but not on non-white people, it's sort of a continuation
00:29:26.840of that in so far that, and this is a little convoluted, I might not be making any sense,
00:29:32.540but the idea is that to some extent, conservatives and liberals feel that non-white people can't live
00:29:39.540up to these ideals quite yet or you know like individualism as as captain picard would view it
00:29:46.300is like the the apotheosis it's the end of history it's it's the pinnacle of human evolution and
00:29:52.240these other peoples haven't quite gotten there yet and so we need to be patient with them and1.00
00:29:56.040we need to tolerate them as they develop toward you know the pinnacle of evolution which is
00:30:01.720white anglo-saxon individual hyper individualism hyper capitalist individualism um so i think
00:30:08.280there's some of that going on but again it's kind of complex and you have like these other factors
00:30:12.420that play uh so you can't really neatly put it all into one model you'd probably have to like
00:30:18.660create some kind of a pie chart or something and sort of like quantify like you'd have to like
00:30:25.180list each individual individual set of factors and like quantify how much you think they're
00:30:31.100they're part of the overall pie if that makes any sense no i do get what you mean because it is is
00:30:36.680complex. And the other difficulty with it is I recently had an interview with Dr. Ricardo
00:30:41.660Duchesne, which should be on the website and on YouTube by the time that this interview
00:30:45.220goes out, where we were talking about the origins of Western individualism. He has this enormous
00:30:51.700book called Greatness and Ruin, where he's talking about the ability of the European mind to
00:30:56.620individuate itself and to abstract out, which developed going back to the Greeks, kind of led
00:31:02.780to a striving nature where you can put yourself above the natural world and you're able to develop
00:31:08.920these great systems of logic and mathematics that aren't replicated anywhere else in the world and
00:31:13.840it leads to things like the Enlightenment, it leads to the Renaissance, it leads to the European
00:31:19.280development of all of these different eras of art and music and kind of eras and stages that you
00:31:27.660don't see anywhere else, like he uses the example of China, where all philosophy post-Confucianism
00:31:33.920has just been minor developments and spins on Confucianism, which inevitably end up leading
00:31:39.980straight back to where they began. Whereas with European thought, you have all of this different
00:31:44.640individuated thought, where you can have Lockean individualism, that you can have Demaestra's
00:31:51.620conservatism you can have Nietzschean vitalism which do trace back to you could say a Greek
00:31:58.220origin but they're all very different from one another and reflect the ideas that these people
00:32:03.420wanted to put themselves out from the pack where other cultures wanted to remain within the pack
00:32:09.160so there's also the difficulty of like European individualism the striving to better ourselves
00:32:14.520from nature has led us to develop all of those great things that made European civilization
00:32:19.620great in the first place but then when it starts to get expanded out and out and out and out and
00:32:25.540the ambition and the mission creep sneaks up on you all of a sudden the overriding ambition
00:32:30.380as said in the white man's burden is that everybody else needs to be like us because
00:32:36.500it's not fair for them not to be like us yeah well i mean i guess the way something i've been
00:32:44.720thinking about a whole lot lately is that, um, once the age of discovery came about and you had
00:32:50.380all these technological innovations and, you know, uh, uh, Europeans sort of created the,
00:32:57.360the, the, the, the global capitalist commerce network, you know, just brought the whole world
00:33:02.500together. Once you have the whole world sort of connected in that way, the sort of Faustian
00:33:07.780individualist spirit of europeans uh meets uh the sort of particularist collectivist nature of
00:33:16.100most other peoples and you know once you know you have mass travel uh you have mass exchanges
00:33:23.740because you know up until that point people were largely isolated i mean you had some interchange
00:33:29.360here and there between you know parts of western asia and europe parts of north africa and europe
00:33:34.320but it was relatively limited you didn't have massive population exchanges over very short
00:33:40.040periods of time and so once the european sort of is in this global capitalist uh network um
00:33:49.020i i think that's sort of because of some of our innate dispositions you know because we're so
00:33:56.420much more individualist because we're not innately tribalist in the way pakistanese and some other
00:34:00.440groups of people are uh that sort of almost invariably leads to our demise uh you know i i
00:34:09.620hate to be that pessimistic about it but i think if we address that and we acknowledge that for
00:34:15.900what it is then we can kind of deal with it um if you pretend that oh we're really always we've
00:34:21.960always been super tribal and collectivist then you don't really get at the heart of the problem
00:34:27.960And because, you know, like a lot of people try to argue that everything in the post-war era is completely down to just propaganda. And a lot of it is propaganda. And a lot of Western peoples have been propagandized to be hyper individualist and hyper atomized.
00:34:45.620And there's a certain degree of capitalist enterprise that has brought that about, convenience, all of that.
00:34:52.220But at the same time, if you go back into even into prehistory, Kevin MacDonald makes a case that there are these indicators that there are some of these innate predispositions that were there before.
00:35:03.560And I think that's why you got the Enlightenment out of Europe.
00:35:07.660that's why you got uh that's why christianity developed very very well there and people
00:35:12.580adhere to the more individualist uh aspects of christianity um and uh yeah so if you sort of
00:35:22.060address that you know what's that socio-economic concept weird you know like you know they're you
00:35:29.500know i think we are books called weird and it's all based off of that stuff yeah it's just an
00:35:35.960acknowledgement that we are weird we are not like a lot of other peoples and if you acknowledge that
00:35:41.420and if you you know deal with what are the the primordial building blocks because it's you know
00:35:46.720freddie midyard said and well i think he said this when he was talking to kevin mcdonald in
00:35:50.840an interview but it's like you have to think of liberalism much more more so as a personality
00:35:57.240spectrum it's it's not like necessarily a hard ideology so much as it is a spectrum of different
00:36:04.500types of personalities. You'll get overly empathetic people. You'll get these hyper-individualist
00:36:10.260libertarian types. You get this whole consortium of Western personalities. And I think if people
00:36:19.560start looking at the problem more along those lines, then we're more likely to come up with
00:36:24.600solutions. I mean, that's how I look at it. Yeah, you could say that what you could do is you could
00:36:29.760turn that contradiction that you identify in the tyranny of the individual on its head where we do
00:36:35.640implicitly recognize ourselves as a moral racial ethnic cultural community which is why we enforce
00:36:43.960that hyper individualism on its head on each other recognizing that that is something that's
00:36:50.960implicit you could it would it would require depropagandizing people socially engineering
00:36:59.040people in ways that people might find uncomfortable, it would require convincing people to more
00:37:05.660explicitly recognize that moral community, recognize that we are individuals because
00:37:10.820we won't be able to, you can't propagandize people out of something that innate to the European
00:37:16.540character, whilst still reigning in the excesses of inviting the entire world in to enjoy those
00:37:25.100same benefits that we do that they just doesn't come naturally to them as well i think one of the
00:37:30.500big things and i mentioned this with dr duchene um and i'd be interested to see if you agree with me
00:37:36.300would be having to rein in capital and the hyper capitalism that we live under right now yeah
00:37:43.360because i think one of the reasons that hyper individualism is pushed so much is that by
00:37:48.480deracinating people and like you said you see this in america uh like you say you see you speak to
00:37:54.040people in Walmart and you see people in Walmart um the kind of deracinated hyper individualism
00:37:59.400just turns people into perfect consumers for products at Walmart if you're not connected to
00:38:05.340your any ideology if you're not connected to any ancestry or culture or history well then you are
00:38:11.640just a free uh if you're a quote-unquote free thinker then you're just a walking consumer to
00:38:18.460be sold products to i think i i kind of allude to this in the epilogue of the star trek series
00:38:25.900but i i you know i i brought up uh the film the lorax because it was all about you know strip
00:38:30.420mining and clear cutting and you know there are eventually consequences for it and then you know
00:38:36.680in the end of the film you know uh i forget what all the different animals are called and whatnot
00:38:40.560it's been so long but you see uh everybody drive off after they've clear cutted a forest and just
00:38:45.940strip mind everything. Um, I see radical individualism, you know, in capitalism and
00:38:52.360whatnot, basically strip mining, uh, the human condition and sort of strip mining human heritage
00:38:57.500and whatnot. And when you first, for a very brief period of time, there's a lot of capital you can
00:39:04.340gain from engaging in these paradigms, wherein you encourage radical Adam as Adam, radical
00:39:10.440individualism, but eventually there's going to be a big cost. Eventually you're going to have huge
00:39:15.620swaths of the population who are just completely nihilistic. They've given up, you know, and
00:39:20.560you're starting to see this, you know, with, you know, fertility rate drops, you know, that's part
00:39:25.020of, I think that's one of the indicators. You see a lot of people who want to justify, like, you'll
00:39:32.140see a lot of women in their 30s and 40s talk about how like, oh, I get to go home every day and watch
00:39:36.400Netflix, you know, and I, you know, I don't have to worry about my, you know, the kids that don't
00:39:40.120exist and i don't have this or that but you kind of see them sort of constantly justifying
00:39:46.440their misery because you can see that they actually are miserable on some level
00:39:52.060um but yeah i mean i'm kind of deviating a little bit here i think eventually even big elite
00:39:59.940capitalists uh tech bros and the like will have to sort of acknowledge that the current model we're
00:40:06.280does just lead to nihilism like you can't have a society of individuals in perpetuity like
00:40:13.240there's going to be a big cost like something i meant i think something else i mentioned in the
00:40:18.160epilogue uh is the co-founder of palantir talks about he would pay how he would pay like a 90
00:40:24.400tax rate if he had a functional society if he had a functional safe competent society how it's
00:40:30.240increasingly not able to live up to his standards. And the problem is that the paradigm that a lot
00:40:38.560of elites and capitalists and tech bros have brought about brings about the problems that
00:40:45.820they want to avoid. And so you have to eventually, if you want a functional, competent society,
00:40:52.000you have to acknowledge that the human condition actually revolves around some form of collective
00:40:57.580of tribalism you know uh you you can't you can't wish wish it away and you can do things to destroy
00:41:05.340all of that and can temporarily uh make a big profit off of it just like you can clear cut a
00:41:11.340forest but eventually there's there will be no more trees and you have to plant more trees or
00:41:15.640do something you know so yeah i'm kind of rambling at this point but you get the idea no i i do get
00:41:20.700what you mean and and with with that we've mentioned the star trek series uh a few times
00:41:25.420already and it does also play into some some questions regarding tech billionaires like elon
00:41:31.460musk or peter teal obviously peter teal he's more into his whole lord of the rings imagery with
00:41:36.960palantir and so how how he managed to think oh yeah the palantir that's a great idea i'll name
00:41:42.700it after that i don't know but he is also obsessed with the antichrist so who knows what goes on in
00:41:47.600Peter Thiel's head. Elon Musk is much more explicitly influenced by the tech utopian future
00:41:55.820of Star Trek. He has explicitly said in a number of interviews and presentations that he's given,
00:42:01.140I'm building Star Trek in the real world. Earlier on this year, I believe, he gave some speeches at
00:42:07.340a conference where he said, with the development of AI, which of course Musk has dipped his toe
00:42:12.560into with the development of grok and other technologies we'll be able to build a future
00:42:17.940within the next few years where people won't have to work everything will be purely automated
00:42:23.220people won't spend money because there won't be money anymore what he's talking about there is
00:42:28.980he's talking about star trek as described in your series at one point by picard where he's speaking
00:42:36.100to somebody from the past and he's saying we don't have money anymore so it does seem to be
00:42:42.000very influential on the worldview of someone like elon musk who i think can fairly be described as
00:42:47.960a gigantic nerd so was that something was that something to do with um why you decided that
00:42:56.520your big project to return to the uh to the realm of content creation video production
00:43:01.880would be star trek because of course it's a 16 part video series that you did on star trek and
00:43:08.800its progressive messaging, was it to do with this new paradigm that we live in with tech elites
00:43:15.040like Elon Musk being so influenced by it? Or was it something else that inspired you
00:43:19.820to make Star Trek? Why Star Trek in particular? I would say that that became a factor as the work
00:43:28.660was progressing. The tech bro and the post-scarcity stuff, it was kind of something I sort of realized
00:43:35.200when I started making the series, but I thought about that much more as the series
00:43:38.760developed what prompt like first and foremost i didn't grow up watching star trek uh i had always
00:43:43.900heard about it uh you know i was born in the early 80s so you know i i heard about it a lot
00:43:49.500through what i would call the process of cultural osmosis and you know i always heard about the
00:43:55.720characters i always heard about sort of the values and the ideas but it was never something i was
00:44:00.000interested in and then a couple years ago um i came across a couple uh next generation episodes
00:44:07.560And for some reason, I watched them and I started to pick up on all these things in it that seemed very, very progressive.
00:44:14.080Even by today's standards, they seemed progressive.
00:44:16.760And I started to think about how everybody says, particularly in modern entertainment, cultural spheres, they say things like, oh, you know, Woke started in 2015 and it's this recent phenomenon.
00:44:29.980And I just sort of thought to myself, well, Star Trek, you know, starting in the 1960s, shortly after the civil rights movement, during the Apollo space program, and then continuing later on in the late 80s, these things were very, very progressive, and they would find very well, they would find their footing in today's world very well, just at least in terms of their value.
00:44:52.800So I felt compelled to go through the series and sort of show just how progressive they were to everybody and sort of attempt to approve to prove that woke is something that goes back much further than 2015.
00:45:06.500It is a product of it is the culmination.
00:45:09.980It's the exponential culmination of a series of post-war paradigm shifts.
00:45:16.080So and that's something that I think the general public still doesn't get.
00:45:21.040a lot of people in our spheres totally get that that the progressive post-war values go back a
00:45:26.640lot further than than the 2000s but the general public does not get that and you have a lot of
00:45:32.000people today who are complaining about new star trek and saying oh it's so woke it's so bad it
00:45:38.260has all these weird progressive values and when you try to talk to them about how well the 90s
00:45:44.040and the 80s were kind of just as bad if you really go back and you look at it like and you can you
00:45:48.620can it's not just star trek it's loads of these it's everything it's not just you but you know
00:45:54.860um blackpilled devon stack as well on his um on his insomnia streams he's gone back and i think
00:46:01.000he did a three-part series called like um uh like everything was better in the 90s something like
00:46:06.220that or he just called it like the gay 90s and he just went back and he reviewed a few episodes
00:46:10.740of a few television programs that were very clearly pushing these um uh pushing these like
00:46:19.460progressive pro-gay rights um talking points but everybody looks back on those on the 90s and goes
00:46:27.060ah they were so clean of anything woke and it's like no you just don't understand from today's
00:46:32.780perspective that going back to them this was a radical social agenda that was being pushed on
00:46:38.380people so people are looking back at it kind of anachronistically and they're looking back at it
00:46:43.140with rose tinted glasses and i i've watched you know i i've watched star trek my dad used to tell
00:46:50.100me about how great it was my dad used to tell me about how you know like um not he didn't say
00:46:56.900progressive but how like forward thinking it was and my dad's you know like a center-right
00:47:01.500old school conservative in britain right and i would watch it i would watch it and even as a kid
00:47:08.120i was like oh yeah there's some fun space adventures going on here but even as like
00:47:13.240a kid like in my early teens i was like this is this is really preachy though so when i when i
00:47:20.480see the clips of the new stuff come out because they weren't subtle about it either when i see
00:47:25.400the clips of the new stuff come out where it is just like a fat black lesbian woman talking to
00:47:30.620like a non-binary transgender space alien or something and there's no white men on screen at
00:47:35.940all and people are complaining i go well yeah this is kind of just the next step along the path that
00:47:41.100star trek already exactly and exactly and i see people disagree with you on this i've mentioned
00:47:47.160it on the podcast as well and even within our own spheres within my own comment section people have
00:47:52.320been saying harry you don't understand this was uh this was not woke at all it's pushing an idea
00:47:59.300and this is kind of a razor fist line i'm interested on your take on this like razor
00:48:03.720razor fist for instance has said for a long time that star trek was actually anti-woke because it
00:48:09.540promoted a kind of individualism individualism and libertarianism it kind of comes from that
00:48:14.220libertarian idea that the more individualist and free market you are then the more right-wing you
00:48:19.760are supposedly gene roddenberry was highly influenced by by ayn rand so a lot of people
00:48:26.780argue that it's not actually subversive and that you're just reading too much into it which does
00:48:32.700get me banging my head against the wall a little bit when i when i encounter those arguments
00:48:37.400well immediately i mean there's all a whole bunch of things i could say to that um i get why people
00:48:43.120think think that way but what immediately comes to mind to me is how gene rondenberry came up with
00:48:48.320the character spock he literally wanted to come up with a pointy ear devil gene rondenberry was
00:48:56.940originally a southern baptist and he you know apostatized um he you know sometime around the
00:49:02.860age of 16 and you know he it was something to do over uh communion and you know he just viewed it
00:49:10.480as cannibalism and whatnot and he clearly has all this uh resentment toward his childhood religion
00:49:15.880but at the same time he incorporates warped elements of his childhood christian religion0.71
00:49:22.020into everything he does and he wanted to create spock as sort of this devil that it that
00:49:30.480superficially was the embodiment of the evil in his religion but was actually like better than
00:49:39.760than than everybody who adhered to their religion it's sort of like ah there's there's a term i can't
00:49:45.500think of it off the top of my head right now but he he was kind of acting just spiteful towards
00:49:51.200society he was just kind of saying um christians and society as it is now isn't progressive and
00:49:59.480you know it's backward and i'm gonna take this this this devil this preconceived notion that
00:50:05.480people have and i'm gonna imbue in this preconceived notion all the highest values so spock's gonna be
00:50:11.200he's gonna be more intelligent than everybody he's gonna be more measured you know he's gonna
00:50:15.280to be wiser than everybody and uh you know so so that's what comes to mind here um i don't think
00:50:21.540gene roddenberry was promoting individualism when he was doing that although the series does promote
00:50:26.020a lot of individualism but it's it's not a series or a franchise that is just about individualism
00:50:34.000um and then you could get into the borg and uh some of the other stuff that i think gene probably
00:50:39.720had a little less to do with because that's the other thing you have to consider well that's
00:50:43.880something is that a lot of people like the razor fist types and the center right types would argue
00:50:49.140that the Borg is an analogy for communism and therefore because they're presented as a thought
00:50:56.280controlling totalizing collective the show is arguing that collectivism is bad and what you
00:51:03.260should aspire to is individualism and all of these different other values that represent America
00:51:09.680because that's what picard and the others are doing that basically taking americanism into space
00:51:15.040yeah but i mean they're they're a super i mean you you really start to see this in uh deep space
00:51:22.500nine which again roddenberry really had almost nothing to do with because he was dead by that
00:51:26.620point um but you really see how the federation is just like the borg in that and there's even
00:51:34.180an episode uh where uh one of the maquis uh terrorists um has this big speech about it
00:51:42.080the federation america goes around enforcing federation american values on everybody else
00:51:49.760uh and it it there are actually times when picard outright punishes planets for not strictly
00:51:59.020adhering to his his his values like there's this one uh i actually didn't talk about it in the
00:52:04.680series i forget what it's called there's so many different episodes i can't remember them all it's
00:52:07.960um it was the one where uh the enterprise goes to this planet that is petitioning to become a part
00:52:15.160of the federation and they have a penal colony on a different planet where they put their ex
00:52:21.260super soldiers who have problems readjusting into society they genetically engineered these
00:52:28.240soldiers to engage in some kind of war that's never really spelled out that the episode never
00:52:32.680talks about the war itself the idea is that this society must be evil because they genetically
00:52:37.340engineered these soldiers and then after the war they put them on this planet uh because they were
00:52:42.160very dangerous and they couldn't readjust into society and uh picard uh long story short helps
00:52:49.900these soldiers fight a rebellion against their own government go to the capital take over the capital
00:52:56.040And then he leaves the planet's government in the hands of these super soldiers and says, when you are all ready for membership into the Federation, please reconsider your application.
00:53:09.480And if you watch the episode and you really think about it, he's punishing these people for not having like bleeding heart liberal values.
00:53:20.400And if you think about it, there's really nothing wrong with a society that came up with that, you know, a set of super soldiers that couldn't readjust into society from separating them to some extent.
00:53:32.560If like these guys literally like the one main character literally kills several guards escaping and he actually tells the audience and the other characters that he is programmed to escape.
00:53:44.760He is programmed to do all these things and he can't stop himself.
00:53:47.880it is it was entirely irresponsible for Picard to put that individual in charge of that planet's
00:53:55.520government uh so you just kind of see this I don't know if this is making any sense but you
00:53:59.640just see this kind of behavior over and over again uh with Picard he goes around superimposing
00:54:06.760federation values on different societies where those values may not work and it's sort of
00:54:11.500sort of contradicts the prime directive and it sort of contradicts uh Picard and the federation's
00:54:16.780other ethos which is that you know uh we need to leave societies to develop as they see fit
00:54:22.220uh they might have different considerations than than our own they might have different cultures
00:54:27.380and customs and we need to respect them so the series is very very very schizophrenic in that
00:54:32.020regard it just cycles back and forth between that and but you know yeah again you will see
00:54:37.600picard captain kirk everybody constantly violate the prime directive violate their own stated
00:54:43.080values if they feel like those if they feel like the values of that planet are in such contrast
00:54:49.180with their own american federation values that they just can't stand it so star trek really is
00:54:54.720just a big parallel for um america in the post post-war era well one of the other interesting
00:55:00.800things to note about what you're talking about there is the one of the it indulges in one of
00:55:06.360what i would argue is one of the most pernicious tricks that modern media engages in which is the
00:55:11.980bundling of all of these different behaviors and values together so that you associate this um
00:55:18.800these kind of liberal american values with things like picard being a very very cultured man he has
00:55:27.700a great depth of history he has a great grasp on history and culture he's a musician he enjoys
00:55:34.080shakespeare he has this kind of thing yeah he has this like old world mentality regarding like
00:55:42.820he's got this colonial look to him he's decisive he's a man of action captain kirk you go back
00:55:48.840almost every single episode he ends up physically overpowering uh some alien who's standing against
00:55:55.060him so that all of these positive masculine uh very admirable values bundled up with these
00:56:02.140characters with the intention of sneaking the liberalism in with them it's something that you
00:56:07.760see something i see it all the time when i see clips of um what is it i think it might have even
00:56:12.540been you i saw retweeting and discussing this was jack reacher where it's a scene of him this
00:56:17.300enormous roided out like 6364 super soldier superman type where he's talking to some young
00:56:24.140female recruit and he's like by the way i'm a feminist to let all of the masculine macho men
00:56:30.980watching know that if you really want to be macho then you're going to support feminist values
00:56:37.420yeah that i mean that you hit the nail on the head that is exactly what has been
00:56:41.820happening for decades and what people what i think people fail to understand is that
00:56:46.360in something like the the original series of star trek yeah a lot of this stuff was less pronounced
00:56:51.820i mean if you go and you look for it there's some pretty outrageous stuff in this series but
00:56:55.920overall you know i can accept the the perspective that it was less pronounced but like you said
00:57:00.760there are these little things uh snuck in there um that's why i um at one point during the the
00:57:07.540series i call it donkey smuggling uh we don't necessarily have to get into that but um yeah
00:57:13.120people don't understand how uh subversion actually works in the end that it starts out
00:57:19.360uh very small and very subtle it attaches itself to things that people like and then eventually
00:57:27.720it takes over things that people like entirely and people only really recognize it as subversion
00:57:34.260once it's completely taken over they don't recognize the initial steps it's like um people
00:57:40.120only recognize stage four of cancer not stage one it's it's excuse me it's kind of frustrating to
00:57:47.360deal with sometimes well just just for the audience that would say you're reading way too
00:57:53.080much into this because obviously we've talked about how it promotes these liberal values of
00:57:57.680individualism a kind of anti-nationalism or anti and like a like a pacifist mentality
00:58:05.480amongst some people what they would say with with woke or proto woke is they would say that
00:58:11.120what you need to look for is kind of like the proto trans ideology the proto ultra gay rights
00:58:17.480ideology that's where people would recognize kind of the social embryo of wokeness in these kind of
00:58:24.120incredibly progressive social values is there an example from any of the series prior to the more
00:58:30.020recent absolutely that you can give to to spell that out for people there's there's an episode in
00:58:34.840tng where uh there's a race uh an androgynous race called the janai and commander reicher has
00:58:42.520an intimate relationship with one of the members of the janai and the janai are ironically all
00:58:47.160played by women and uh they're um basically they go through a series of scenes where commander
00:58:57.660reicher uh miss he uses the wrong pronoun he uses the wrong pronoun to refer to like the main
00:59:05.640character um god i even forget her name i'm sorry it's just so much material so he's having this
00:59:11.780It's a 15-part series. We can forgive you for it.
00:59:14.800Yeah. So he's just talking to this Janai woman.
00:59:18.020Basically, the plot of the episode is there's a Janai space shuttle
00:59:21.480that gets trapped in some kind of space anomaly.
00:59:24.100And so they call the Federation in for help to rescue this small crew of Janai
00:59:28.340who are trapped in this space anomaly.0.60
00:59:30.620Commander Riker starts working with this Janai person0.56