In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with my good friend Dr. David Axelrod to talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict and why we should all be concerned about it. We talk about why the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is so complicated, why we need to be worried about it, and how to deal with it.
00:00:00.000So I feel like the Trump administration is finally figuring out that allying yourself with Benjamin Netanyahu, while there's definitely some overlap in interests, and I don't think any of this is personal, but when you form an unbreakable alliance with any foreign country, you're likely to get hurt, and American interests are likely to get hurt.
00:00:19.620And I think it's dawning on them that, you know, if another country, I don't know, decides to move 2 million people by force in the biggest internment mass migration since the Second World War, you don't want to have to take credit for that.
00:00:35.860Obviously, this is a terrible situation in the Middle East, and you can sit around and say, oh, you know, Israel should have been formed one way, Palestine should look at it.
00:00:44.820But the truth is, at the end of the day, these two peoples are completely incompatible, and one of them is going to try to remove the other.
00:00:52.780Nobody should ultimately think that's positive, but if you look throughout history, the solution most nations have to this issue is ethnic cleansing.
00:01:00.980That's just what happens throughout history.
00:01:02.920Again, you don't have to judge it one way or another.
00:01:04.920You just have to look at history and know that's how these things tend to get resolved, and it's ugly business for anyone, and why should we involve ourselves on either side of that, right?
00:01:13.800I just don't understand how that would ever serve America.
00:01:55.160Now everyone has an iPhone and it's going to be on video.
00:01:57.560It's totally immoral and disgusting, but it's also, as you just pointed out, inevitable.
00:02:02.760Again, it's messy, but it's a historical reality, and if we deny that, then we're going to end up getting caught in this never-ending cycle.
00:02:12.220The only reason this really hasn't happened, again, one direction or the other, it's not that I think the Palestinians probably wouldn't have a similar solution if they were in the Israelis' shoes,
00:02:21.460but the only reason this hasn't happened is there has kind of been this international consensus to involve ourselves in what otherwise would be a natural process throughout history,
00:02:30.560and so that's why we find ourselves stuck here over and over again.
00:02:33.340This is never going to get solved through diplomacy.
00:02:35.160You're never going to work out the ways in which you find it.
00:02:37.980No, it's going to end with one group displacing the other.
00:02:40.720That's just going to happen, and it's just not our problems.
00:02:44.140There's no reason we should have our money, our treasure, our people, or more importantly, our moral worth tied up to any of this.
00:02:52.460But that's kind of the American way, isn't it?
00:02:55.920I mean, historically, and you've taught history, that the United States forms unbreakable alliances with countries that share its values.
00:17:42.380And so, those different identities were distinct.
00:17:45.880And we even had different neighborhoods, entire states that were settled by very different peoples, even though they're of European descent.
00:17:51.960But as we have racialized, as we have become only interested in those macro categories, all of those separate white ethnoses that once existed have been pulled into a singular identity.
00:18:21.760So, but why would you want to erase all of those very real differences?
00:18:26.520Like, why pretend that Swedes are the same as Sicilians?
00:18:30.400Because eventually, each one of those particular cultures creates a high level of resistance to both standardization and scale of managerial power.
00:18:39.660But most importantly, to government power, because peoples with particular traditions and identities aren't going to just go along with whatever the government says.
00:18:48.360They have real, organic, deeply seeded understandings of who they are.
00:18:58.460The religious, people with high degrees of individual transcendent identities, right?
00:19:03.940This is my group, my practice of my religion, the people I go to church with, the people in my community, they are more important than whatever the state believes.
00:19:11.900And the only thing that can push back against that, it's not abstract principle.
00:19:18.500The words in the constitution only restrict the government if they reflect particular understandings of peoples and the way that they live their lives.
00:19:25.520And that's why those communities were more resilient, because even if there was no paper constitution to protect them, their real beliefs, their real identity actually resisted the state.
00:19:36.720So your thesis is, we see the world becoming homogenized, and there's something in us normal people, I think, that find that very distressing.
00:19:48.280Very distressing, and that's why we seek out places that are different, because we understand that the actual diversity of peoples is somehow important.
00:19:55.820We can feel that, and it's certainly interesting.
00:19:58.040But there are huge forces pushing against it, leveling forces.
00:20:02.960Everyone's the same, same attitude, same sports, same food.
00:20:07.420And your thesis is that's on purpose, that's not natural, and it's a power grab by governments.
00:20:14.860Well, I think the better way to understand this is by a managerial class.
00:20:19.620They're certainly part of the government, but a big change has happened, especially after the Industrial Revolution.
00:20:36.700We were very reliant on their ability to lead.
00:20:40.700But what has happened over time is that we've found that that is a very inconsistent way to produce results.
00:20:46.780And so the best way is to remove human agency from decision-making.
00:20:50.660And when we do that, we can increase the level of scale at which we can produce results in government and business and weapons manufacturing and everything else.
00:20:59.340And so ultimately, if we can go ahead and abstract the human condition, if we can create a set of parameters by which people always have to act, then that allows us to create a situation in which we're producing bigger and better results without needing to understand any particular culture or people or rely on any type of human prudence or decision-making.
00:21:21.760This is what everyone gets very angry about when they call any kind of bureaucracy, right?
00:21:25.760They're stuck in a phone tree, and there's no one who can make a decision.
00:21:28.720There's no one who can overrule the machine.
00:21:31.440Every even real person they're talking to is kind of talking like a robot.
00:21:35.480And that allows the call center to handle more calls than they would if each individual person was actually making decisions and helping people.
00:21:43.740But in the end, it actually destroys the whole purpose of the call center.
00:21:48.660And that's what's happened with our managerial elite.
00:21:51.080They now only exist to serve their power.
00:21:53.840They now only exist to serve their global network.
00:21:56.560It involves, of course, governments, but involves NGOs and banks and educational institutions and media institutions.
00:22:03.920This is an entire class of people with the same interest set that are all working constantly to ensure that their power grows and the agency of individual people in their actual homelands is reduced.
00:22:14.080One of the core beliefs about economics I think that most people have because it's just intuitive is that in order to receive a reward, you have to provide a service like doing something useful, moving the ball forward, feeding people, giving them shelter, educating their children, allowing them to go to heaven or whatever.
00:22:32.480But like there has to you have to be adding something in order to take something.
00:22:36.960And what I'm struck by with the group you're describing is how little they add.
00:22:40.340And I wonder if there's like kind of any precedent for that in human history.
00:23:09.720They protect you from criminals, right?
00:23:11.120Like there is some kind of transaction that is occurring here.
00:23:14.300But over time, the more you control the market, the more you don't have to offer the product, right?
00:23:19.000This is why we hate monopolies because they create scenarios in which you don't have to be reactive to the needs of the people.
00:23:25.760You don't have to keep providing because you're the only game in town.
00:23:28.200And more and more people understand that the only way they can interact, not just in their country but globally, is with these managerial apparatuses.
00:23:36.620You have to work inside that framework.
00:23:39.240And so they continue to run in this race thinking that it's going to get them somewhere.
00:23:43.180But it's really the only thing available to them at this point.
00:23:46.440And so we are seeing in many different places around the world, people are pushing back against the managerial elite.
00:23:52.780You hear people like J.D. Vance or Vivek Ramaswamy talking about the administrative state and the need to dismantle the deep state, all of these things.
00:24:00.980We see people in the U.K. understanding that ultimately their government and not some foreign enemy is actually the most hostile thing to them.
00:24:11.360But the system is vast and powerful and extremely wealthy.
00:24:14.480And all of this is very difficult for people to do, especially because they've been trained for the most part to not even recognize that they are ruled, that there is a ruling class, right?
00:25:06.700And his third law is that at the end, an organization, a bureaucratic organization is just going to look like it's operated by a cabal of its enemies because it eventually turns into an organization that only serves the members of the organization and not the actual purpose it was stated for.
00:25:25.760And so every one of these managers, everyone who's disassociated from both the people you're serving and the original organization itself is just going to turn every piece of the organization into their own little power grab, their own little fiefdom where they can secure more.
00:25:38.280And that's why we see the managers exploding in every form of business, whether it's consulting, if you look at public education, where my experience came from, you know, you have a thousand more administrators than you do teachers because the incentive is not to actually educate students or actually serve the public that you were created to serve.
00:25:55.120It's to perpetuate your existence inside that system.
00:25:58.540So what does it mean to be safe in your own home?
00:26:00.820For a long time, that meant good locks and maybe an alarm system.
00:26:03.840That was enough, but they're not enough.
00:26:05.360And you know that because the news is filled with stories of people who thought they were protected and fell victim anyway.
00:26:11.940SimpliSafe can help prevent you from becoming the next victim.
00:26:15.660Instead of just responding after somebody comes into your home, an intruder enters, SimpliSafe can stop them from ever getting in in the first place.
00:29:28.520Well, you take your high, your ruling class, and you pair them with a low class from outside of society.
00:29:34.620And that high and low versus the middle is the way that you break apart society because you promise the new voters or the new participants that you will give them whatever the kulaks have.
00:29:45.380It's all their fault, the middle class.
00:29:46.840They're the ones who are keeping you back.
00:29:50.040They're, you know, they're the sexists.
00:29:51.040And if you just defeat them, we'll just give you all their stuff.
00:29:53.980And this is the wedge that is continuously used.
00:29:56.840The large amount of our government right now is just a wealth transfer between heritage Americans and the new political class that's being moved into rural society.
00:30:18.940Heritage Americans are those that are actually tied.
00:30:20.860You could find their last names in the Civil War registry.
00:30:24.240Like they have a tie to the history and to the land.
00:30:27.400And, you know, Samuel Huntington is a guy who I really like.
00:30:31.020He wrote the Clash of Civilizations and Who Are We?
00:30:36.720And, you know, I think won his debate with Francis Fukuyama pretty decisively.
00:30:40.760But, you know, he said in Who Are We?, his book about American identity, the core of American identity is the Anglo-Protestant spirit.
00:30:49.320And he's a man of the center left, you know, as a Harvard professor.
00:30:52.120This is a guy who's not, you know, he's not, oh, you can only be an Anglo or a Protestant to be part of America.
00:30:56.760But he says even the Catholics and Jews in America take on this Anglo-Protestant affect in some way.
00:31:03.620And so you have to have this majority culture for people to assimilate to.
00:31:07.980And so when we're talking about a heritage American, we're either talking about someone who is tied specifically to that tradition or someone who has come here and has been here for generations but understands that they are conforming to that way of being, that that's the core of society.
00:31:22.220And what is that way? Can you describe the Anglo-Protestant worldview?
00:31:28.020I mean, obviously, we could spend entire books on that and that has been done.
00:31:34.900And which I think is interesting because those are the people who founded the country and set up every system that we're benefiting from now from, you know, our economic and political systems or have been benefiting from, maybe not anymore.
00:32:23.040And when you change the people, you change the culture, which is why our Western governments are so busy trying to replace those populations.
00:32:46.280Because when they said self-evident, they meant to people in our tradition, to us, to the people who descended us, who share our values, who speak our language, who speak, you know, the type of heritage that we understand.
00:33:00.920Again, it doesn't mean that other people can't be grafted into that and absorb that.
00:33:04.900But the idea of a purely propositional nation that is in no way tied to a culture or a people but is entirely a collection of abstract things agreed to in some social contract before society even began is just ridiculous.
00:33:17.080And it's not the way the Constitution was even understood when it was written.
00:33:20.920Our founders said very famously that the Constitution is for immoral and religious people.
00:33:24.580They had a particular understanding of how we would have to live our lives and what that would look like if we were going to be able to live under the republic that they erected.
00:33:36.180I interrupted you with my outburst of rage.
00:33:40.380When I asked you, what exactly are the presuppositions?
00:33:47.860What's the nature of this Anglo-Protestant culture that founded this country?
00:33:52.680I think this is where people get a lot of the ideas of a decent amount of individualism.
00:33:57.940This has always been a key part of it.
00:34:00.000Also, restrained government, the idea that government would be limited as something tied to the Magna Carta, right?
00:34:05.220Like, yes, they had a, you know, became a constitutional monarchy.
00:34:08.400But, you know, we can see a direct line from what the English were doing with their set of government in the way that we understand, you know, our society.
00:34:16.800The idea that free speech is something sacred, that the individual conscience and the practice of religion is something that needs to be maintained.
00:34:23.920These are all core values that when you actually look in other societies, they don't look the same.
00:34:29.520Free speech in Germany does not look the same.
00:34:45.780So it's not, it is like, it's much, that is to your very smart point about lumping all these different, very distinct cultures into the white group eliminates differences that we should be thinking about.
00:35:02.440Even inside European cultures, vastly different traditions.
00:35:05.980Closer, perhaps, than, say, someone in Eastern Asia, but still very, very different from place to place.
00:35:11.940And the fact that we've just kind of melted that all down into this, you know, binary or between a couple of few races as if that's like the complete understanding of who peoples are and how they live their lives is just silly.
00:35:23.740And again, I think that serves the purpose of really just melting down culture in general, right?
00:35:28.060Like, it looks like race is very divisive identity politics, right?
00:35:55.040Can you have a continent-sized country with hundreds of millions of people in it with completely distinct cultures with totally different assumptions about things like natural rights?
00:36:08.500To some extent, if you want to operate as an empire, and I think this is the crossroads that America is at.
00:36:13.760We, if you talk to Americans, you know, the Democrat side will say, well, we're a democracy.
00:36:19.040And then Republicans will say, well, no, of course not.
00:36:27.700They get all huffy, but they have no idea what they're talking about.
00:36:29.360Yeah, and the real difference is that republics have self-government because the body politic sees itself as being a necessary participant on a regular basis.
00:36:39.680That the individual sees themselves as needing to cultivate a certain amount of virtue and individuality that allows for a level of self-governance that otherwise doesn't exist.
00:36:49.420And so the fact that the republican type of government requires this type of virtue means it has to stay relatively small.
00:36:57.080And this isn't something I just made up.
00:36:58.900You can see this in Aristotle or Machiavelli or, you know, the founding fathers.
00:37:03.460They understood that scale was a very dangerous component of government forms and that if you created this vast empire, even a continent-sized empire, much less a world empire, that was going to radically change the way that you had to govern.
00:37:17.880And we have continued to expand our imperial ambitions as the United States, but have never addressed the impact it's been having on our governance.
00:37:27.200And this is why so many people feel like the people they elect don't run the government.
00:37:30.920Of course they don't because you don't live in a republic anymore.
00:37:35.000And the empire has a large amount of machinery that hums right under the surface and it's constantly serving its own interests on a regular basis.
00:37:42.220Some people will call this the deep state.
00:37:43.540I wrote a book called The Total State because I think that really encapsulates a far wider understanding of the managerial lead and the power they hold.
00:37:51.420They're not just in the unelected bureaucracy, but they're in the media, they're in financial institutions, they're in education, all of these different things that manipulate our public opinion.
00:37:59.920And really the ability to manipulate public opinion has become the one skill necessary to govern at this point because we switch from this idea that we have a people, a specific people ruled in a particular way through virtue in a republic.
00:38:13.540And instead have understood that just the mass will is the only thing that matters.
00:38:17.260And what's great at manipulating the mass will?
00:43:39.760A guy like Hadrian tries to pin it back inside.
00:43:42.300But eventually, they end up just giving citizenship to everyone.
00:43:46.120Caracal expands it to the entire empire in the hopes that this will eventually bring the identity of the empire back and get people to fight for it.
00:43:53.860And instead, what happens is they just keep importing Gauls until Gauls more or less just take over the empire.
00:43:58.820You know, they take over every important aspect of it.
00:44:01.620So, again, a pattern that we see over and over again.
00:44:03.820It's very hard for empires not to do that.
00:44:05.660So, why were they so successful within the empire?
00:44:09.900Well, they were the only people who weren't tamed anymore.
00:44:31.740If you go back to the Federalist Papers, you can see Hamilton telling people, look, I know you're scared about standing armies because we all know that standing armies are a detriment to free republics.
00:44:42.500So, if you want us to not have a standing army, you need to turn over control of all of your different militias to us so that we can, you know, protect the United States without it.
00:44:53.940It was understood that being part of a republic meant being a soldier.
00:44:57.620Service actually did guarantee citizenship.
00:44:59.700It was the idea that your willingness to stand and defend what was yours was what made you a citizen worthy of contributing and voting and being part of the body politic.
00:45:09.020Again, Aristotle said the citizen is he who is armed.
00:45:12.120Machiavelli said you should never have mercenaries.
00:45:14.320You should never have paid standing armies.
00:45:16.400Instead, you should always have a militia.
00:45:18.500This is a core part of your identity as a republic.
00:45:21.840And the minute the people are no longer willing to fight and have to contract their fighting out somewhere else, you know the republic is done.
00:45:39.240So, what's the life cycle of empire typically?
00:45:42.960A lot of people think it's very short.
00:45:44.320Some people will cite the 250-year mark.
00:45:47.400But the one thing that is for sure is that these complex systems always reach a point of marginal utility that is just collapsing.
00:45:56.100They can no longer squeeze enough power, enough wealth, enough influence out of increasing one more rank of the complexity of their societies, conquering one more area, adding one more complex system.
00:46:08.780And so, you're just waiting for the Tower of Babel to fall.
00:46:13.380I think this is honestly a very deeply biblical pattern that repeats itself over and over again.
00:46:18.680We try to unite all of humanity under these imperial ambitions.
00:46:22.200And in our hubris, we're scattered back to our natural state as peoples.
01:12:57.860Well, the younger population coming through.
01:13:00.740Also, they know they can control those people easier.
01:13:03.720These are, this is a younger population.
01:13:05.360It's going to be more susceptible to mass media and manipulation.
01:13:08.000And it's going to increase their control over that country.
01:13:10.960It's not, it's not a democracy or more properly labeled a republic in the sense of a smaller group of people, all who have a serious investment in society and have a proven track record of taking care of their community.
01:13:25.000Instead, it's just literally anyone with a telephone or a television.
01:13:56.040So, there was this idea, of course, for many Indian tribes that they were communing with spirits when they went through a particular dance that this was going to bring the power of their ancestors.
01:14:07.000And that was going to help them to reclaim their land.
01:14:09.680This was at the end of the Indian Wars.
01:14:12.680Yeah, this is after the Indians had lost.
01:14:14.520The majority had been forced on reservations, you know, continually over and over again.
01:14:19.420But the idea is they could reconnect with the spirit of their society by going through this ritual and their ancestors would protect them.
01:14:25.680And they actually all gathered together, mainly the Lakota tribe.
01:14:29.820And when the U.S. Army was sent to respond to this gathering, this is, you know, they performed the ghost dance thinking that this would protect them from the bullets of the soldiers.
01:14:38.740And instead, you got the massacre and wounded knee.
01:14:41.260And this is, in many ways, what we are doing with liberal democracy.
01:14:45.100Now, we keep going through the motions.
01:14:47.020Oh, well, you know, there's a democracy.
01:14:51.240This will fundamentally change the way things work.
01:14:53.880But over and over, we just keep running into these hail of bullets.
01:14:56.740Because the thing we're using, the power that we're trying to leverage, the power of the republic that existed at the founding, it's no longer connected to the actual rules here.
01:15:07.000We're people turning a steering wheel or mashing a gas pedal on a car without an engine.
01:15:12.360And at this point, the question of the Trump administration is, can you make America work like a republic again?
01:15:21.080I think they're actually trying by stripping away much of the bureaucracy, attempting to take direct action whenever possible to improve the lives of Americans.
01:15:28.680But they're running into every possible barrier you can imagine, legal, cultural, everything.
01:15:34.520And so I think that, you know, they're going to have to overcome a massive barrier if they want to attempt to return us to that system.
01:15:57.280You know, there's a lot of people, and I think there's probably some truth to this, who think that we're all converging on the Chinese system.
01:16:04.400That ultimately, the thing that allows for hegemons to operate globe-spanning or at least large regional powers to operate at scale we're looking at in an advanced society like our own is a kind of soft totalitarianism.
01:16:32.760When we're looking at different political forms, they have limitations.
01:16:35.820And like we said, with the republic and the republican tradition, everyone from Aristotle to our founding fathers recognized that scale is an issue and that if you try to run your large empire as a republic, you're going to run into issues very quickly.
01:16:50.480The same is true when we get to these vast empires.
01:16:53.020They have to be run in a specific way.
01:16:54.740If you want to control the opinions of people, if you want to leverage popular opinion and a particular understanding, if you want to use the economies of scale that you need in those type of societies, there's only so many ways you can operate.
01:17:05.940And one of them is the Chinese system.
01:17:07.360And that seems to be one of the most successful ones at this time.
01:17:10.220Again, I wouldn't want to live under it.
01:17:11.440It's not our way of being, but it is one that our global elites seem to be settling on as the model.
01:17:16.740Of course, where your prison is invisible, but no less real.
01:17:23.200You don't have to take anyone to the gulag.
01:17:25.580They just can't get a job or a house or a wife.
01:17:28.380We don't need to put people in concentration camps anymore.
01:17:31.360You still might, but you don't need to do that anymore to be tyrannical.
01:18:12.980And I think this is also why we see all of our governments rushing towards artificial intelligence as well, right?
01:18:17.360Because this is another way to manage populations in a vast society.
01:18:21.740Algorithms that can constantly screen everything you're doing and everything you're saying and every, you know,
01:18:26.340opinion that you have and every piece of media you consume and what library books,
01:18:30.080if you're even checking out a library book at this point, if that even exists.
01:18:32.760Like these are things that are all critical and AI can do these tasks at scale at a high level of rapidity.
01:18:39.660And so I think that all of our technology is increasingly – a lot of people have said that American technological revolution will free us from this.
01:18:47.560But honestly, every piece of technology that as we understand it right now is most usefully deployed by the regime as a way to control people,
01:19:35.780They don't have religion that informs anything.
01:19:37.520All the knowledge they have is what's delivered to them digitally in that search.
01:19:41.460That's what they believe to be authoritative in every area.
01:19:43.940And so when you see that over and over again, you realize the individual is going to have no decision-making power
01:19:48.680because they don't even have organic experiences in real life to draw knowledge from.
01:19:53.720All they have is the digital world that's been served to them through AI.
01:19:58.220So if you're older like me, you imagine censorship is the threat to speech, right?
01:20:04.320So there are all kinds of things that are true that are being said now on the internet right now that are like an actual threat to the way things are.
01:20:22.060One of the things you can do is just flood the zone.
01:20:24.180You can flood the signal so that there's no way to pick out the truth from the vast amount of information that's flowing over you.
01:20:30.820Or you can curate the environment properly through AI on a consistent basis to where people don't even realize that the environment is being curated in the first place.
01:20:39.140Either way, as you say, you don't have to do hard censorship.
01:20:41.720The information is out there somewhere if you're one of those radical extremists who is thinking for yourself and looking into any of this stuff.
01:20:47.320But for the vast majority of people who are never going to put that kind of effort into it, that's not the way they're going to see the world.
01:20:52.640That's not how they're going to receive information.
01:20:56.200So to the form of government we're getting, you believe it's most likely we wind up with some kind of Chinese form of government where there's a president and a legislative body.
01:21:07.280But underneath it all, the regime maintains power through technology, a social credit system of some sort where you, you know, you do the well of the regime where you just can't live.
01:21:18.340You don't get executed, but you just, no one would choose that.
01:21:20.920Only a tenth of one percent of the population really rebels against you.
01:21:25.640And then the, you know, the really bad ones you kill, but the rest you just like let live in obscurity.
01:21:33.220How does that not describe the society we have currently where people are regularly debanked, where they do have their entire lives destroyed by the social credit system on a regular basis?
01:21:42.940We haven't formalized many of these things in the United States yet, but we've been building this type of soft power for generations.
01:21:49.620It's very clear that this is how our, you know, oligarchy intends to rule us and does rule us on a regular basis.
01:21:56.180Again, I don't think it's as severe as it is in China.
01:21:58.360I think we're, we have more time before we get, you know, past the point of no return, but I think we're well into our era of being ruled by this kind of technocratic, you know, omnipresent state.
01:22:11.920Then I don't, so here's the contradiction at the heart of your description.
01:22:14.460If you're saying that the ruling bureaucratic class maintains power by sowing chaos and division in the society, anarcho-tyranny.
01:22:27.140But if they have so much control, why do they need to do that?
01:22:30.440Why not have an orderly, I mean, the upside of a totalitarian society is order.
01:22:38.300Or it's a violation of my principles, but at least there was no crime in the Soviet Union or less, right?
01:22:45.120Well, I think the reason that they create the chaos is that this allows them ultimately to avoid the formation and any of the bonds that would push back against them.
01:22:55.420But if their technological superiority is so profound, if you can't buy a plane ticket, if you disagree with them, and we're clearly moving toward that, then TSA, you know, George W. Bush does not get, as much as he's reviled, and he is, he's not reviled enough.
01:24:37.760I mean, it seems squarely there to me.
01:24:40.280I mean, this is the line we hear over and over again that, well, I jumped away from the identity politics stuff, except, you know, when it attacks any of my identities.
01:25:16.960So, I mean, when I start lecturing about how you're not allowed to, you know, criticize Northern Europeans or something, Episcopalians, then you'll know that I'm every bit as bad as Dave Rubin.
01:25:28.720Anyway, at some point when the regime decides actually we're against crime and we do have to have real borders and, like, I don't know, we care about drugs and we don't want the society to, like, collapse completely, that's when you'll know they have complete totalitarian control.
01:25:51.980Or they recognize that the utility of destroying the country is coming to an end.
01:26:04.600And this is how you, you know, again, this is the classic principle of actually how you get a king, right?
01:26:09.920Because they're generationally invested in the well-being of the land they're ruling, the people they're ruling, and they have the power to control the outcomes there.
01:26:18.700So, if you actually care about that, if you're actually going to benefit, why not invest your control in actually producing a better population?
01:26:24.800Yeah, I mean, feudalism is so much better than what we have now because, at least in feudalism, the leader is vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.
01:26:33.180You know, if all your serfs die, you starve.
01:26:36.160Yeah, there's a true incentive to care for those people.
01:26:38.380Now, again, there is also, that also exists in a republic if properly managed, but as we've noted, we're well beyond the requirements that even our founders laid out for a functional republican government.
01:27:35.960It's the natural hubris, I think, of any elites.
01:27:39.100Again, I think there are large incentives of scale when it comes to the managerial elite.
01:27:43.560But then again, as we've discussed, there's also, I think, a lot of people who, when you're the global hegemon, they want to influence the United States and use it for their own purposes.
01:27:52.300And so if you've got this thousand pound gorilla in the room, you want it fighting your enemies, right?
01:27:57.360And so there's a high degree of investment by different powers and peoples in wielding the United States as a weapon, not for the interest of our people or, you know, what would benefit us or even our empire, but what would benefit those individuals in the nations that they're associated with.
01:28:12.400And again, this is why Washington warned so much about the factionalism because this is what's going to create those different incentives inside your elites to stop serving the people and start serving the favored nation or the outside.
01:28:25.740When will we know that our old system is completely gone?
01:28:29.260I don't think we will for a long time.
01:28:32.340If you think about the way that Rome transitioned, of course, it started as a kingdom.
01:29:37.380But yes, more and more it was very clear that that's not where decisions were made.
01:29:41.160And this is, again, very common in complex societies.
01:29:45.720Larger bureaucratic societies come with it.
01:29:47.760Because to manage all of this area to all these peoples, all this scale, you need a high degree of expertise.
01:29:53.120And the people in the legislative branch simply don't have it.
01:29:56.200So what happens is all of the legislative decisions get moved into the executive side, which is, again, what we've seen in the United States, because it contains all of these different organizations with all these experts that can operate all the mechanisms of scale that the congressmen simply don't understand.
01:30:14.260And so it turns out that all of our legislation is just written by a bunch of legislative age and a bunch of lobbyists and foreign influence while the actual stuff gets done inside of the executive branch.
01:30:26.880But even then, in our system, we've seen that the executive has trouble even controlling his own branch.
01:30:32.400The entire first Trump presidency was defined by his inability to wrangle the executive branch and bring it to heel.
01:30:39.180And that was obviously their intention this time when they went in, which is why guys like J.D. Vance were talking about the importance of dismantling the administrative state.
01:30:46.040They knew that at the end, that was the biggest barrier to running the country for the will of the people.
01:32:05.160The 14th Amendment completely, an incorporation doctrine, radically changed the way that we understand the different rights of our states.
01:32:13.020Obviously, the civil war and the inability of a state to leave had its own implications for how a region can be governed.
01:32:19.380So there are, you know, even in our own history, real examples of how we can have individual customs and individual ways of being even inside our society.
01:32:31.760But, you know, we're much more like each other as Americans than we are different people.
01:33:22.320Again, it's going to depend on how powerful the central government is able to, or how long a powerful central government is able to maintain control.
01:33:32.460I think that all of the things we're talking about, all the technology, all the logistics, they require competence managing complexity, right?
01:34:01.420I mean, I lived in a tyrannical city most of my life, but the people running at Washington, D.C. at the local level were so stupid that you could kind of do whatever you wanted and corrupt and some nice, by the way, but just dumb.
01:34:14.500So, like, you know, everything was against the law, but you could do whatever you wanted to do.
01:35:35.880Well, a large amount of it comes from the narrative that we tell ourselves.
01:35:39.840So, post the World War II and especially post the Civil Rights Revolution, the purpose of the United States is to remove any differences between outcomes for different races.
01:35:52.620And any differences that show themselves that manifest between races can only be de facto evidence of racism, right?
01:36:00.320This is literally the law of the land.
01:36:01.540Most people don't understand that after Griggs versus Duke Power, we have this idea called disparate impact.
01:36:07.620And this disparate impact doctrine says that if there are any outcomes that are different between groups, even if you didn't intend to be racist, you must be racist.
01:36:17.580So, like, for instance, the Sheetz gas station chain started running background checks, criminal background checks, on their employees, which makes perfect sense.
01:36:25.420You don't want someone who's a felon running your gas station, right?
01:36:28.900But they lost a case against the federal government and had to settle this massive fine because more minorities were being selected by the background checks and removed because they had more criminal records.
01:36:40.980And even though that's just an objective fact uncovered by the Sheetz gas station using that standard, it's still racist.
01:36:49.440It's still their intention, whether they had it or not, whether or not they had the intention, they are still guilty of racism.
01:36:55.160And so, therefore, they have to get rid of this policy.
01:36:58.860This is the way we see our entire society.
01:37:00.840You have to, in some way, assume that whites have held down other groups inside your society.
01:37:07.660That's the only explanation for why they might be in one position and those other minorities might be in another.
01:37:13.180And so, you have to destroy those people.
01:37:14.660You have to, all your hatred is justifiable because at the end of the day, those people probably, you know, they have some sympathy with Nazis or they're somehow related to mid-century Germans.
01:37:24.260Like, that's the conclusion we seem to draw over and over again.
01:37:27.040And that gives a blank check to people to treat many people in America and other European nations as less than human.
01:37:35.300There was this kind of amazing case in Cincinnati recently where this white couple, there's video of it, were at some jazz festival and got surrounded by a group of black people who just, who beat them unconscious.
01:38:10.440But what's so, and it's obviously awful as it would be, you know, that all that violence is awful, racial discrimination is awful, whatever.
01:38:17.640But what I find interesting is that the authorities are like angry when you point it out.
01:38:22.040And there's this video of this kind of fat, middle-aged police chief, person posing as a police chief, um, in Cincinnati.
01:38:30.840We don't have any police chiefs who seem like they could actually be beat cops, I noticed.
01:38:56.040So, uh, there's a lot of reasons behind that.
01:38:59.100But the most shocking one to your audience will be the community relations services.
01:39:02.720So, if they're not familiar with this organization, it's statutorily required by the Civil Rights Act.
01:39:09.220And its job, in theory, is to go out and smooth over race relations in the United States.
01:39:14.520Wherever there's going to be a hotspot, you deploy the community relations service, the CRS, to that hotspot, and you try to calm the tensions between different communities.
01:39:24.740In reality, what the CRS actually does is goes in and tells white victim families that they need to put out specific statements.
01:39:33.260They coach them through particular narratives.
01:39:36.260They are often provided with written statements to go out and talk to the media about it.
01:39:40.440And you'll see this pattern over and over again, right?
01:39:42.560The, the, usually it's an elderly father figure, if the father isn't available.
01:40:43.560And again, I think it's, they're, they're given this blank check because ultimately whiteness is this inherent evil.
01:40:48.840That it's, that any, that any, again, any disparity can only exist because white people did it to you and you're constantly a victim of it.
01:40:57.540And so any violence you bring against them is allowed.
01:41:00.020And this is what creates that anarcho-tyranny dynamic because especially the Democratic Party, but to some extent even the Republican Party, has created a blank check for certain groups inside our society to wield violence as they see fit.
01:41:12.700And the police, you know, for instance, that police chief, she's not there to prevent the violence against that white people.
01:42:18.740What are the signs of hope that you see in the United States?
01:42:21.360I think there are many signs of hope that I actually see.
01:42:26.040I know we talked about a lot of bad stuff here today, but I think there are several big ones.
01:42:30.540First is that more and more people who describe themselves as conservative or right-wing care more about their families and care more about their communities than they care about ideology.
01:42:42.500I think we're also seeing a big shift, especially on the right, when it comes to the idea of perpetual war and foreign policy, that we don't constantly need to be at war, that we don't constantly need to be the world's policemen.
01:42:54.180We certainly don't need to need to be doing that on the behest of any foreign nation, that the purpose of the United States government and any of its institutions, including the military, should only be the well-being of our people.
01:43:06.620I think we're also seeing a willingness to adjust and look at the economy.
01:43:10.640It used to be that the right would never look at something like tariffs or any kind of economic policy that would violate the Bible of Milton Friedman.
01:43:19.600But actually, when we see the results of it, they're harming our communities.
01:43:23.660And more and more people are willing to say, no, conservatism is conserving my community, not some abstract commitment to a policy that is harming my neighbor.
01:43:31.480And I see more and more young people looking at religion as a way forward, which to me is the most important thing.
01:43:46.500But those people who create intentional communities, religious communities, they're the people who are going to make it through the other side of this.
01:43:55.320They're the people who are going to be passing down their values.
01:43:57.900They're the people who are going to draw strength from a tradition and a transcendent truth that others don't have.
01:44:03.820And so I see more and more young people yearning for that.
01:44:07.060And I think that that is a huge spark of hope.
01:44:09.980So you see people forming young people having grown up in this, not just people from subcultures, not just the Amish or the Orthodox or other highly committed religious communities.
01:44:21.920But you see people who just sort of grew up in America deciding, I'm going to join an intentional religious community.
01:44:29.220And I see more people forming, you know, realizing they need to move near people who have shared values with them.
01:44:36.660I know certain people, you know, living in the Ridge Runner community in Tennessee and other examples where they recognize that not only am I, you know, need to be more serious about my religion and forming these communities, it's no longer sufficient for me to talk about them abstractly online.
01:44:52.100I need to actually physically live in a community with people who share these ideas.
01:44:56.840Again, it's small amounts of people right now.
01:45:11.260And one of the main reasons I have not done something like this is I have lived where I've lived for a very long time.
01:45:17.700And I think that you have a certain duty when you have that history and you've already built that community to work to save your community first.
01:45:25.300Eventually, there is probably a panic button where, okay, I've got to get my family out of here because things are too bad or too difficult.
01:45:33.080Luckily, I live in a community that's nowhere near that issue.
01:45:37.700And because I've lived there for so long, I would rather build that up and invest in that rather than shred that and try to build it somewhere else.
01:45:45.720But for many people, they don't even have that already.
01:45:47.740And so for them, the moving is the easy decision.
01:45:50.700But what if you got a job in private equity in Woodside?
01:48:14.720It seems like if we're going to have violence, and unfortunately, I suspect that we might, we've gone so long with no violence, really 160 years, which is amazing for any society.
01:48:51.120And so that's exactly what we see over and over again.
01:48:54.500And it's only going to get worse because not only do these people feel morally justified, they also thought that they would never face any consequences.
01:49:18.680And that's, I think, intentionally why people are forming communities where they are moving to places where they know they can trust their neighbor to stand by them when a mob comes.
01:49:27.380Do I live in an area where my sheriff is going to arrest me for stopping a mob from attacking my family?
01:49:34.340Those are the decisions that people are making right now.
01:49:36.220I live in Florida where a lot of people moved after COVID and in no small part because they wanted to live in a state where they were next to the people who would stand against government tyranny in one way or another when it came.