TRIGGERnometry - August 01, 2021


Michael Malice - The Case for Anarchy

Topics
police brutality anarchism vs. government monopoly
Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Mentioned
Michael Malice Jack Dorsey Mark Zuckerberg Tony Blair Trigger Ridge Jordan Peterson Thatcher Stalin Tucker Carlson Jonathan Haidt Susan Wojcicki Greta Thunberg Boris Johnson Jeremy Corbyn David Cameron H.L. Mencken Kim Jong-un Theresa May King George and 12 more
Cancelled Anti-PC Comic Speaks Out Dan Wootton - Will Harry and Meghan Destroy the Royal Family？

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour

Words per minute

182.03

Word count

11,071

Sentence count

477

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

22

sentences flagged

Hate speech

19

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Trigonometry, Francis and Conner are joined by American author Michael Malice to discuss his new book, "Why We're Here," and to discuss the current state of American politics and how it relates to the alt-right.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.
00:00:10.400 I'm Constantin Kisham.
00:00:11.500 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:00:17.460 Our brilliant guest today is an American author, Michael Malice. Welcome to Trigonometry.
00:00:21.760 Thank you so much. I'm very excited.
00:00:23.840 It's great to have you on the show. Listen, for anyone who's not familiar with you,
00:00:27.560 As with all our guests,
00:00:28.680 just tell everybody a little bit about who you are,
00:00:31.080 how are you, where you are?
00:00:32.040 What has been the journey through life
00:00:33.300 that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?
00:00:35.400 Oh, I got to do the work?
00:00:37.880 Absolutely.
00:00:39.040 What is this?
00:00:40.120 This is how the show works. 1.00
00:00:41.460 We do fuck all, just get you to talk. 1.00
00:00:44.140 I win some contest at Burger King 1.00
00:00:46.180 and now I got to go on the show
00:00:47.280 and just do all the talking.
00:00:49.320 This is always kind of odd.
00:00:50.780 I guess I'm the author of Dear Reader,
00:00:54.840 the Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong-il, which is a book about North Korea and pretty
00:01:00.060 much everything you need to know about that awful, awful place. The book after that was called The
00:01:04.920 New Right, which is a look at the kind of alternative right wing, including the alt-right
00:01:10.740 here in the States that culminated in the Trump victory. And my most recent book, which is I think
00:01:15.480 why we're here, is The Anarchist Handbook, which is anarchishandbook.com, which is a compilation
00:01:20.140 that I've written or compiled to be more precise
00:01:23.680 when people kept asking me about anarchism means
00:01:26.040 of all the prominent anarchist authors
00:01:28.020 in the last couple hundred years in one handy package.
00:01:32.120 Well, you say the last book is why you're here
00:01:34.420 and certainly the case,
00:01:35.520 but also your previous book as well,
00:01:37.200 The New Right is something that we'll incorporate
00:01:39.720 into what we talk about.
00:01:41.020 Very much in the spirit of getting you to do the work.
00:01:43.720 One of the things we kind of chart on our show
00:01:46.140 is the political landscape
00:01:47.660 and how that's been evolving over the last many years.
00:01:51.660 And there's so many aspects to that we could get into.
00:01:54.680 But let me ask you a very broad-based question,
00:01:56.960 which is what is happening in the West,
00:01:59.600 particularly in the Anglosphere, in your opinion?
00:02:01.820 What do you think are the kind of focus points
00:02:04.380 that we should look at?
00:02:06.640 I don't know about should,
00:02:08.440 but I mean, there's lots of things that are happening
00:02:11.020 that I think are historically unprecedented.
00:02:14.160 Um, I can't speak that well to British politics, although I follow it fairly closely. 0.99
00:02:20.380 What happens here, but we import your shit five years later or now two years later. 0.98
00:02:25.320 So you just talk, you have it backwards. 1.00
00:02:27.480 We import your shit. 0.99
00:02:28.680 Thatcher led to Reagan, the Fabian society led to the council of, uh, it was, what is 1.00
00:02:34.160 it called?
00:02:34.480 The CEA, whatever it is here.
00:02:35.900 So Britain, uh, Thatcher talked about this, her books right behind me, that you guys are
00:02:40.660 kind of the petri dish and then american ideas follow suit so i think it's actually brexit
00:02:45.920 presage trump um you know those are similar phenomenon in the states i think we are at a
00:02:52.880 kind of and this is always the case in politics kind of an inflection point because for the last
00:02:58.580 four years so much of the sound and fury was about trump and reacting to him or supporting him and
00:03:04.980 you know whatever his latest outrage of the day happened to be whether synthetic or feigned now
00:03:10.580 that he has left uh the oval office and his lockdowns are kind of um receding into the
00:03:17.020 background i think among um thought leaders particularly you know the corporate press
00:03:22.660 there seems to be a little bit of confusion as to who the latest boogeyman is going to be
00:03:27.300 uh who are they going to rile up the masses against and and create as the villain of our time
00:03:32.540 uh they tried to do tucker carlson to some extent matt gates who's a congressman from florida
00:03:37.520 and what happened on January 6th, but nothing seems to be sticking.
00:03:42.800 There doesn't seem to be the outrage and the frothing of the mouth,
00:03:46.560 which was so entertaining to watch over the last four years.
00:03:50.980 What we are seeing, I think, and which I'm doing my best in my very limited power to escalate,
00:03:58.120 is an increasing division in American politics
00:04:01.920 and an increasing inability of different political worldviews
00:04:06.000 to have any kind of conversation at all. And I think the further that happens, and I think it's
00:04:11.000 increasing at a fairly strong pace, the better it's going to be for everyone involved.
00:04:17.900 Do you think part of the problem, Michael, is that we now conflate politics and morality?
00:04:22.420 So for instance, people on the left think people are not only wrong about their political opinions,
00:04:26.900 but they're also evil, etc., etc. I'm from the Ayn Rand school, so I don't understand how one
00:04:35.440 can separate those two things. I think the moral and the political are by and large synonymous. I
00:04:41.980 don't really understand the claim that one can make politics without, you know, a moral basis
00:04:47.580 for it. And I think what we're seeing in Jonathan Haidt covers this very well in his book, The
00:04:53.000 Righteous Mind, there seems to be a sort of this crusade mindset, which I think is absolutely
00:05:01.140 wonderful among people who are, you know, in a broad sense of the left and a broad sense of the
00:05:05.720 right, which leaves very little room for moderates, which is something I'm very pleased with, you know,
00:05:11.040 having, you know, enormous amount of contempt for people who describe themselves as moderates.
00:05:14.860 So having that kind of us versus them mindset, you know, as an anarchist is a very useful tool
00:05:23.060 towards breaking down political discourse, which inevitably ends up in loss of freedom for one
00:05:28.420 group or another. Well, it's actually great that you bring up moderates and why you despise them.
00:05:34.880 Francis and I probably consider ourselves moderates. What's wrong with being moderate?
00:05:40.820 Someone who has no principles in theory is going to be of very little use in terms of putting forth
00:05:46.620 their ideas in practice in a political sense, especially when you're dealing with an enemy
00:05:52.660 class, which is inherently malevolent. And if they had their druthers would engage in just the
00:05:58.400 worst kind of atrocities. So to stand up against that and to say, well, we need to hear both sides
00:06:03.600 is a position I don't find to be tenable. I suppose it's a question of definition.
00:06:08.880 And maybe moderate isn't the word. I certainly think of myself more as a centrist. And what I
00:06:13.180 mean by that is I have very strongly held views and principles that are right of center and equally
00:06:18.740 strong and strongly held principles that are left of center. But it's not an absence of principle.
00:06:25.300 It's just my principles don't tend to match neatly onto the right or to the left.
00:06:31.120 Do you see what I'm saying?
00:06:32.400 Yeah, but that just kind of makes you a bit of a, you know, a gadfly.
00:06:36.360 It doesn't mean you're in the center.
00:06:37.820 I mean, so I don't I think that word is is just to me just noxious because it just speaks
00:06:46.880 to people who like describe themselves as kind of agnostic because they just don't want
00:06:50.640 to address the issue at all.
00:06:51.740 um so i i i don't what do you see as the efficacy of uh describing yourself with that label
00:06:59.220 yeah your criticism is valid in that i am not satisfied with the label i just
00:07:05.240 i know that politically i don't align with either left or right and there doesn't seem to be another
00:07:10.020 pigeonhole for me well i i can resolve that in one in one question do you think some people are
00:07:15.360 better than others? No. Well, hold on. Do you mean more valuable or do you mean superior in one way
00:07:24.940 or another? Do you think some people are better than others? At some things, yeah. Okay, so you're
00:07:30.460 on the right. If you're on the right, you answer yes. And if you're on the left, you have to give
00:07:34.200 a speech. So that is a litmus test that people can use to figure out if they're on the right or left.
00:07:39.160 Francis, he claims to be old school left wing. Can you debunk him live on that?
00:07:43.280 Many people who are old school left wing would be regarded as the right.
00:07:46.720 There's this very silly idea, which I'm positive you two don't ascribe to, which regard right and conservative and Republican and Tory as synonymous.
00:07:56.660 You know, as people who understand world politics, to claim these three, these terms are interchangeable is very bizarre.
00:08:04.600 But it's very useful for corporate media because if there's two choices and right equals Republican or Tory in your case and left equals Labour or Democrat and I dismiss one of the two teams then in a binary fashion, therefore I've proven the other one and things get very simple.
00:08:22.080 Right and left are just complicated, nuanced positions, and they depend on what the axis happens to be.
00:08:27.880 But this kind of attempt, and this is also done in political parties as well, to reduce it to, you know, I'm right, therefore I'm for Boris Johnson, who is identical somehow to Theresa May, or as if Sir Keir and Jeremy Corbyn are the same phenomenon either.
00:08:44.920 It's a very, or Tony Blair, it's a very wacky way of systemization.
00:08:51.620 And if it is a very wacky way of systemization, doesn't that therefore mean that our political systems are no longer fit for purpose because they don't represent us adequately?
00:09:01.240 They've never been fit for purpose. That's the basic anarchist critique, that the idea of representation is inherently not just false, but nonsensical.
00:09:10.880 What does that mean? Elaborate on that a little bit.
00:09:13.160 Meaning that if I go to the supermarket, you know, I have infinite choices of what to buy to drink, breads, so on and so forth.
00:09:21.620 But that I have to pick someone who's going to speak for me both for foreign policy and for health care and for taxation.
00:09:31.400 And I don't get to pick the person I want because a lot of my neighbors think otherwise.
00:09:36.200 This is a very bizarre claim that if I vote for Tony Blair and I get Theresa May, then Theresa May represents me.
00:09:45.880 I want Tony Blair to represent me.
00:09:47.560 And obviously they didn't run against each other.
00:09:49.120 So that whole basis, which we're all, many people seem to accept, would only be regarded even as a hypothesis if we've been trained to believe this since birth in government schools.
00:10:01.060 If someone came to you as an adult and say, if you vote for person A, but a lot of people vote for person B, person B represents you, it wouldn't even make sense as a hypothesis.
00:10:12.720 Like, what are you even talking about?
00:10:13.960 This person represents me.
00:10:15.020 This is my lawyer.
00:10:16.020 This is my accountant.
00:10:17.060 This is my doctor.
00:10:17.940 but when it comes to politics it's a popularity contest that I really don't have a choice about
00:10:22.780 it boggles the mind. And Michael you make that point and it is a perfectly valid one so what
00:10:28.480 is the alternative? Freedom. But what does that mean? It means that if you want someone to be
00:10:35.780 your doctor this is who you have as your doctor and this is who you want as your lawyer this is
00:10:40.700 your lawyer you can fire them at any time and anything that is historically done through the
00:10:46.640 state can either be done voluntarily or shouldn't be done at all.
00:11:16.640 So you're leading us nicely down the garden path of the arguments you make in your latest
00:11:25.780 book.
00:11:26.620 I guess the question most people would be asking at this point, well, there's two ways. 0.98
00:11:32.080 I can ask a stupid question, which is what most people would ask, which is- 0.99
00:11:35.620 Let's do it. 1.00
00:11:36.060 Come on.
00:11:38.000 Let's speak to the masses.
00:11:39.920 Let's do it.
00:11:40.660 It's not even about the masses, actually.
00:11:42.060 I think the masses actually wouldn't ask this question, but a political journalist might,
00:11:45.620 which is, oh, you think there should be no state?
00:11:49.540 And that's a very simple way of asking it.
00:11:51.640 So let's do that first.
00:11:53.360 Yes.
00:11:54.440 And what would be there in its place?
00:11:59.280 What would be, what happens when you,
00:12:01.920 I'm going to apologize to you guys over across the pond.
00:12:05.600 What happened when we abolished King George?
00:12:07.800 Who's going to be the king?
00:12:09.320 What happens if you leave the Catholic church?
00:12:11.500 Who's going to be the Pope?
00:12:12.500 So this concept that you need to have some kind of political figurehead to represent you and this person is irreplaceable is simply not true.
00:12:20.940 No, but those two things, well, not those two things, but King George was replaced with an alternative power structure, one that you guys in America are still fighting to shape exactly as you want.
00:12:30.760 uh he he was actually replaced with a power structure that was itself replaced in a coup
00:12:37.040 uh in philadelphia the constitutional convention where that it was a conspiracy where everyone
00:12:41.380 swore themselves to secrecy lock the door and basically overthrew the government
00:12:45.060 through largely peaceful means the replacement for any um organization would be you know infinite
00:12:53.080 people uh providing solutions and everyone else in a position to either uh use their services or not
00:13:00.140 But this applies to security. This applies to health care. This applies to education.
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00:14:32.300 Okay, so let me ask
00:14:34.200 this slightly more intelligent question,
00:14:35.840 which is I enjoyed your conversation
00:14:37.480 with Jordan Peterson.
00:14:38.480 We had Jordan on the show a number of times.
00:14:41.100 The Petersonian question here would be,
00:14:43.540 well, human beings like many animals
00:14:46.680 or almost all animals live in hierarchy
00:14:49.580 and are unable to exist outside of one.
00:14:52.620 100%.
00:14:53.220 So hypothetically, what would happen
00:14:56.080 if you get rid of the power structures that exist
00:14:58.720 is another power structure would emerge
00:15:01.140 and human history would tend to suggest
00:15:03.780 that the people who are most vicious,
00:15:06.400 most brutal, most well-armed, et cetera,
00:15:08.700 in that power structure would initially take over 0.97
00:15:11.280 and then that would probably settle down
00:15:13.240 into something a little bit more peaceful.
00:15:14.540 Are you not just opening up the door
00:15:16.360 to like a violent struggle between small groups essentially if you do that well no you're
00:15:20.760 describing is the status quo so in politics the most vicious sociopaths are the ones who end up
00:15:25.720 getting at the top what you would have in a decentralized system is when you have like for
00:15:30.680 example i don't know how it works over in britain but let's talk about here in the states and the
00:15:34.180 police right if you have a police officer who engages in ways that is murder or just completely
00:15:40.060 outrageous and i'm not talking about a racial element there's things you can go on youtube
00:15:43.400 There's just infinite cases of the police acting in ways that are just completely egregious.
00:15:48.080 There's having a government monopoly on this as having a government monopoly on anything means there's no accountability.
00:15:54.980 There's no space to really make things better.
00:15:57.720 Whereas if I have an issue with, let's suppose, Harrods, right, and I want to return a sweater, Harrods policy is very clear.
00:16:04.460 We have a dispute. I want to return the sweater.
00:16:06.720 They won't take the sweater or they will.
00:16:08.400 It's resolved quickly and immediately.
00:16:10.120 if harrods is i go into harrods and i get beaten or tased for whatever reason very quickly i can
00:16:17.360 go on social media and this becomes a huge scandal even if i was in the wrong that's what's amazing
00:16:23.140 thanks to things like publicity and and dynamic communication uh stories blown completely blown
00:16:28.820 out of proportion and out of context but the the issue is very quickly the issue needs to be
00:16:34.140 addressed whereas if you look there's a case here in the states this young man named duncan lemp
00:16:38.940 and they had a no-knock warrant on him.
00:16:41.860 I don't know if you guys have that over there.
00:16:43.000 You probably might not.
00:16:44.220 Basically, the line I always had is even Stalin had the courtesy to knock.
00:16:49.640 So they break down your door and it was, I think, 3 in the morning.
00:16:52.600 He was in bed with his pregnant girlfriend.
00:16:54.840 They murdered him through the window and they dragged her through the broken glass. 0.86
00:16:59.740 They won't release the body cam footage and none of the police are having any consequences.
00:17:03.840 At the very least, if you had choices in security, there would be consequences for the perpetrator, and you wouldn't have the ability to choose another agency as the one providing security for you.
00:17:17.900 and there would be immediate huge social media and probably corporate media reactions to this
00:17:24.660 consequence. As it is, having a government monopoly and having the corporate media very
00:17:30.140 much in bed with them, which I certainly have in the UK here in the States, there are no
00:17:34.940 consequences for everyone and everything's swept under the rug. So that is one example of how if
00:17:40.380 you did not have a government monopoly and had competition and choice, there would be more
00:17:45.320 accountability and less murder by the state. Okay, Michael. So I'm going to push back with
00:17:50.320 you. So let's say that works on a national level. What about a global level? You're going to have
00:17:55.640 countries like China. You're going to have countries like Russia, totalitarian regimes
00:17:59.940 are interested in power, land grabs, et cetera, et cetera. Doesn't it leave you open and vulnerable
00:18:04.500 to these types of nations? Why aren't we invading Canada? Why aren't you guys invading? Iceland
00:18:11.000 doesn't have a military why hasn't britain conquered it and you we're too incompetent mate
00:18:15.960 well actually i would argue that because they live under the american umbrella of protection
00:18:19.840 like right of the west sure so the the point is there's just because governments exist on earth
00:18:25.920 does not mean anarchism is not tenable i'm not arguing at all that for this perspective to work
00:18:31.300 it has to work globally china will still exist but i don't understand a mechanism if say uh um
00:18:37.540 Scotland, right? If Scotland seceded from the UK and, you know, they just did not have a
00:18:42.900 government and became a stateless society, how is China going to be invading them or any other
00:18:48.580 nefarious nation other than Britain itself? But you aren't advocating this for Scotland,
00:18:52.860 you're advocating it for America. I think it would be easier to invade Scotland than to 0.98
00:18:57.120 invade an anarchist America, don't you? You haven't seen them drinking much. You haven't
00:19:03.380 many Scots, have you? I'm not even advocating this for America. I'm just advocating this for
00:19:09.260 whoever wants it. And if it has to be a small Isle of Wight or whatever, that's perfectly fine with
00:19:14.720 me. There's I'm not someone who thinks and, you know, it historically, and this is something the
00:19:21.220 West needs to appreciate. If you read comic books, if you read sci fi movies, the guys who want to
00:19:26.460 conquer the world are the bad guys. So I'm in no case advocating that this has to work and it has
00:19:33.220 to work on a global scale. It is my view that if this does work, it'll certainly attract people
00:19:39.020 towards that area. And if it doesn't work, okay, that area is a disaster. In neither case is there
00:19:44.100 a claim that this is something that needs to happen or should happen on a global scale.
00:19:48.720 And we've been touching actually on authoritarianism. This is something that I
00:19:52.520 really wanted to speak to you about, Michael. So you've got your roots in the USSR, Soviet Union.
00:19:58.720 you went to America I believe at the age of two years old. Constantine is from the USSR. My mother's
00:20:04.300 Venezuelan. We've all experienced different forms of authoritarianism. One of the things that I found
00:20:09.840 really shocking in the UK, I don't know as much as in America, is just how willing people in this
00:20:15.320 country were to submit to an authoritarian, let's call it what it was, an authoritarian rule, but
00:20:22.060 not only that, also to snitch on their neighbors, also to feel this sense of paranoia in everything
00:20:29.700 they did and everything they said. And the way we descended into that just seemed to happen
00:20:36.220 practically overnight. Did that surprise you? It surprised me to the extent, but it's useful
00:20:42.380 information. H.L. Mencken, who I'm sure many of your listeners are familiar with, was a great
00:20:47.040 newspaper man of the early 20th century. And he had a quote which I've been using, I think,
00:20:51.460 on a daily basis in the last few months, which is the average man does not want to be free.
00:20:55.440 He merely wants to be safe. And I do think that's the case. I think if I'm an average person and I
00:21:01.680 really don't want to stick my neck out and I want to be someone in a school of fish, that's not a
00:21:06.080 bad strategy for me. You know, I'm going to, you know, put food on the table. I'm going to have
00:21:10.820 some modicum of happiness. People like to claim that we're living in 1984, but I think Aldous
00:21:16.460 Huxley's Brave New World is a lot closer to the reality. Instead of that hard authoritarianism
00:21:21.400 of you know the stalinist 1984 you have the soft corporate authoritarianism of come to the office 0.97
00:21:27.800 do your job come home you can watch crap television eat crap food but you're never going to have to 0.81
00:21:33.380 be worried that you're going to have to think or that anyone is going to threaten you given that
00:21:38.780 that's the case of the a mindset of the typical human being uh democracy on its face is something
00:21:45.300 i do not therefore find palatable it is i have a different preference their preference is for
00:21:50.220 safety, over freedom. That's fine. I'm not interested in changing their mind. What I am
00:21:54.980 interested in is creating mechanisms to make sure they are not in a position to use their fear of
00:22:01.140 autonomy to have restrictions on my freedom. And now how that would work out is obviously a very
00:22:06.220 complicated, long conversation. My gut tells me technology is the best way to make this happen.
00:22:12.180 But I agree with you. But the other thing that I think is of interest that people need to
00:22:16.560 appreciate is what the lockdowns gave is a position for lowest status people to have ways to increase
00:22:24.520 their status and to assert dominance over others. Because I saw this on the subway. I had my podcast
00:22:31.800 so I could actually go into the studio on a daily basis. And first of all, seeing the New York City
00:22:37.820 subways dessert in the middle of the day is something very surreal. It's hard to describe
00:22:42.800 as a lifelong New Yorker. It's like being in a movie. And I'll never forget this moment I put
00:22:47.000 on my Instagram. This was a year ago. It takes a lot for me to get offended. And this was really
00:22:51.960 one of those moments. There was an Asian dude in his 30s. You know, he was very Western in his
00:22:56.380 appearance. This wasn't someone who was, you know, some kind of stereotypical immigrant or
00:23:00.640 something like that. This older man, his 50s, white man, stood over him on the subway, literally
00:23:06.300 screaming at him, why aren't you wearing a mask? You're in America, so on and so forth. Just the
00:23:10.800 most base vulgar uh you know xenophobia and that's a word i don't think i've ever said before you
00:23:17.280 know even thought about and i realized wait a minute if you were really scared of this virus
00:23:21.880 which i can understand why you would be why are you getting physically close to him the train car 1.00
00:23:27.040 is quite large this guy's a jerk he's you know in your in his mindset okay he's a moron doesn't 1.00
00:23:32.060 speak english whatever stereotype you want to ascribe to him get away from him but clearly 1.00
00:23:36.260 the guy felt empowered and understandably so given the context of the media and the culture
00:23:42.180 to scream and stand over in a very aggressive manner and another human being so given that
00:23:49.600 uh this is not an uncommon mindset and we've seen it over and over where people were proud of
00:23:54.940 themselves uh to turn on their neighbors and call the authorities on them you know i had this tweet
00:23:59.920 where there was a huge reaction to it um uh and i stand by completely one of the questions we always
00:24:06.060 had in the West, and I'm sure everyone listening to this has thought about at one point in their
00:24:10.700 life, is how did Nazism happen, right? Were the Germans uniquely evil? Was this something where
00:24:18.380 they just, you know, everyone just like, I got to get along or else I'm the next target. And what
00:24:23.260 we saw is that once enough of the kind of decision makers create an outclass or an enemy, very
00:24:31.660 quickly everyone is champing at the bit to kind of join in on them so all these people on social
00:24:37.160 media love to think that they're the ones who would be hiding Anne Frank in their attic but
00:24:41.180 what we've seen is they not only would turn them in turn her in and her family they would go on 0.84
00:24:46.340 social media boasting that they kind of turned in someone who's the enemy and I'm doing the right 0.99
00:24:51.680 thing and I should receive accolades for it and that kind of uh scary aspect of the mindless
00:24:57.700 malevolence which is so common to the average person who does not really a thinking being
00:25:03.240 is something i think more of us are increasingly coming to grapple with now whether this is good
00:25:08.400 or bad i think is secondary i think once you have data you have to accept it as a given and make
00:25:14.680 decisions accordingly as opposed to thinking in some kind of weird leninist way well we can just
00:25:19.780 remake these human beings and make them something they're not all the evidence i've seen is to the
00:25:24.320 contrary, that these are roughly the equivalent of barking dogs. And if you have barking dogs,
00:25:29.860 you have to deal with them as barking dogs. I'm not saying you put them down, but I'm saying,
00:25:33.980 all right, we've got a lot of dogs in this neighborhood. What are we going to do about it?
00:25:38.260 It's interesting because I put a tweet out exactly saying this very thing. What you've
00:25:42.560 seen in the last 18 months is which side of the barbed wire fence you would have been on.
00:25:47.100 Yes. Great metaphor.
00:25:48.320 and and the thing is that that is quite a scary realization so you just think this is what the
00:25:57.000 mass of the people will in this society at least and in your society will will lean to in times
00:26:03.040 of crisis particularly pandemic we know historically people become way more quote-unquote
00:26:08.800 conservative in times of of disease uh and you but you at the same time you've said i don't know
00:26:15.340 whether it was a throwaway commenter, you mean, you meant that you're writing a book called The
00:26:19.280 White Pill, in which you are, in which you're going to express how optimistic you are about
00:26:24.100 the future. But for many people, your version of optimism is a kind of perverse optimism,
00:26:30.160 which is you are optimistic about the breakdown of the society we have, because you expect a
00:26:36.020 better one to be available down the line. Is that right? No, that's not why I'm optimistic. I'm
00:26:42.720 optimistic because this book i don't want to spoil it too much but uh when people this is what i tell
00:26:49.960 people i go when you look at jeremy corbyn if you look at uh you know nancy pelosi who's the
00:26:56.500 house speaker here or you look at the new york times today or you know whoever your villain of
00:27:01.860 the moment is are they really a more competent powerful threat than hitler than stalin uh than 0.96
00:27:10.620 the newspaper people of, you know, 80 years ago when we didn't have social media to call them out
00:27:15.140 on their malfeasance and depravity. So when you put it in those, when you look at these people
00:27:20.860 who, uh, the people who are on the side, the angels, which I certainly regard myself as being
00:27:25.120 are up against and to regard them as unstoppable foes to me seems deranged.
00:27:32.320 Michael, sorry to jump in. Let me jump in though. The thing is I, I, where I, I agree with you on
00:27:37.040 that. That's absolutely the case, in my opinion. Where I disagree with you very strongly is that
00:27:42.360 we are up against those people. I don't think we are. I think we're up against the Jack Dorsey's
00:27:47.140 and the Mark Zuckerberg's who are using the power that they have to shape the way society is going.
00:27:53.160 Apart from Susan Wojcicki, who we absolutely love, please don't shadow ban us.
00:27:56.480 Yes, exactly.
00:27:56.980 I'm sorry, but I don't think Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, even if they were committed
00:28:03.020 ideologues intent on spreading their, you know, agitprop, which I don't think they are to the
00:28:08.260 full extent at all, are anything comparable to, you know, the Stalinist era and the CP,
00:28:15.120 especially in Britain. It's, I don't, if you ask me what Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey's politics
00:28:21.780 are, none of us know really fully. I would regard them as probably these kind of, you know,
00:28:27.360 left of center, typical urban, you know, elites. But at worst, these people are nothing in terms of
00:28:35.740 both their motivation and in terms of their vision of what a society should look like to be
00:28:42.160 What about the fact that they can take down the president of the United States and prevent him
00:28:46.060 from speaking to the people that he normally speaks to just like that? I'm not in favor of
00:28:51.060 any politician being allowed to speak. And that's the glib answer. The serious answer is
00:28:57.760 they are not in a position to completely censor the president. They're in a position to censor
00:29:04.040 him. I don't even like using the word censor here, but they're in a position to block him
00:29:08.220 from using their mechanisms to speak. But there's no shortage of alternative sources for him to have
00:29:16.100 immediately been able to get his message out so even when they're doing their best they can't do
00:29:22.000 anything about it meanwhile if you look at 70 years ago their entire schools of thought which
00:29:27.740 were not only regard were completely invisible but were regarded as heretical and just nonsensical
00:29:32.780 to even discuss so i think that i i do i'm not a utopian i look at improvement and progress in a
00:29:40.200 context i think it's asymptotic but you i think that's what people uh we have kind of recency
00:29:46.020 bias. Right. So we look at things that have they been the last 10 years. I'm taking the longer
00:29:51.060 view. And I think if people do take that longer view and compare things to how they were to look
00:29:56.800 at this, look at the winter discontent in Britain. I mean, in the 70s, you guys didn't have
00:30:01.640 electricity. I mean, it's just bizarre. People don't realize because we have it so good now,
00:30:08.560 even during these lockdowns, how bad it was basically yesterday. And we forget about it
00:30:15.620 because we weren't there or because we're not living it. And that's just the 70s. That's even
00:30:19.680 talking about the 40s and the 30s, which were just, compared to today, absolute nightmare dystopias.
00:30:25.900 And do you think part of your worldview, Michael, is informed by your roots, as it were? The fact
00:30:31.780 that you probably had parents, grandparents telling you about what it was like to live in
00:30:35.180 the Soviet Union. So you have a point of comparison. I have the same, Constantine has the same. But
00:30:40.440 the reality is for a lot of people growing up in America or the UK, they don't understand that
00:30:46.020 because that has never been explained to them. Someone should write a book about that, don't
00:30:50.440 you think? Yeah. So stay tuned. It'll be out within a year. That is something that you as
00:30:58.520 a fellow countryman appreciate, the complete naivete of people in the West of just how bad
00:31:05.820 it can get you're from venezuela i mean it's that's like the unspeakable horrors that are 1.00
00:31:11.380 going there we're just completely oblivious to it uh there's this american idea like let's talk
00:31:18.020 about the russian mindset versus the american mindset right i had a i have i pay a decent rent
00:31:23.140 my rent's pretty low it's below the market because i'm a good tenant and i had an issue with my sink
00:31:27.900 um and every american's like just go complain to your landlord and make him fix it and i go
00:31:32.860 So from the Russian mindset, it's like, OK, if this costs him $100 to fix, he's just going to raise my rent by $100. 0.75
00:31:41.660 So now I'm out $1,200 for the year instead of fixing it myself.
00:31:45.380 This concept that authorities are self-serving and catching their attention is a bit like the eye of Sauron is something that in the West, maybe until last year, it never even entered their heads.
00:31:57.540 But as those of us from Eastern Europe and from Venezuela appreciate, we do not have that perspective on authority as, you know, neutral or benevolent.
00:32:06.480 We, you know, inherently are like, all right, I may have to pick up this snake, but I have to be aware that it has teeth.
00:32:13.720 Yeah, well, it's funny you mentioned that you're writing a book about it.
00:32:16.960 I'm also writing a book called An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West, covering much of the same ground.
00:32:22.560 But we kind of hijacked you when you were on the train of thought about your optimism for the future.
00:32:29.160 And part of that, I hear you, if you take the long view, absolutely, we live in better times than we have in the past.
00:32:35.860 I guess the question I would have for you is one of the things we also know from the past is things can go from very good to very bad quite quickly.
00:32:44.340 and a lot of the conversations we've had recently haven't exactly left us or our audience with it
00:32:50.260 with the sense of optimism about the future so why are you optimistic that things will get better
00:32:55.680 from here rather than a lot worse a lot very quickly sure so i think there's an increasing
00:33:01.380 amount certainly in america i can't speak for britain although i would suspect it's the case
00:33:05.920 there where uh the population by and large certainly the ones who are kind of intellectually
00:33:11.920 curious have are just completely tuning out the agit prop coming out of corporate media and the
00:33:18.300 universities and the politicians it's no long it used to be even 10 years ago uh someone put forth
00:33:24.300 an issue and then you you spend time discussing the pros and cons of the issue now uh you
00:33:31.380 increasingly especially with since trump uh you'll have some politician put forth an idea
00:33:37.160 and it's dead on arrival there's not even a pretense that we're going to sit down and have
00:33:41.540 this discussion. Increasingly, people think that the other team, correctly, is not engaging good
00:33:46.840 faith. A good issue on this is gun legislation here in the States. Obviously, we are much more
00:33:51.780 liberal in that subject in the classic liberal sense than they are in the UK. But for a long
00:33:57.100 time, it used to be, all right, Democrats will put forth gun restrictions. The conservatives
00:34:02.600 will argue about gun restrictions. Now conservatives are increasingly understanding, okay, this is just
00:34:08.720 a nonsense article argument. There's no such thing as an assault weapon, AR-15. It's a standard
00:34:13.700 weapon. So our answer isn't going to be to discuss things with you. We are going to put forth our
00:34:20.180 bills. We are going to increase gun proliferation, which is the best answer to gun control. So at the 0.99
00:34:25.720 end of the day, no matter what you guys are stamping your feet about, there's nothing you're
00:34:29.880 going to be able to do about it. So that kind of change in tactics to, as opposed to we're going
00:34:36.340 to argue issue by issue, as now we're going to look at your techniques, disarm them, and make
00:34:42.500 sure you can't use them in the future. That is very, very healthy. Ann Coulter, who's obviously
00:34:47.760 a very controversial figure, who says things very provocatively, made a good point in one of her 0.99
00:34:52.800 books where she said, if you're a Republican, the New York Times isn't calling you racist,
00:34:57.400 you're losing. There have been school shootings in America, which is something that is just
00:35:02.860 unspeakably horrible and tragic and whenever these things happen immediately the next day
00:35:08.480 you'll have politicians trying to leverage this to argue for gun control and this used to be for
00:35:13.260 the gun rights people something that would knock them on their heels and there was a huge media
00:35:17.860 campaign after um there was a school shooting in florida david hogg and all these kids you know
00:35:22.900 regard as propaganda figures we should listen to the children because somehow they know what
00:35:26.240 they're talking about why i don't know why they're in school i don't understand if they're so wise
00:35:29.280 just like Greta Thunberg but that's a separate issue and there was no no I was shocked um back
00:35:36.360 and forth on the gun rights issue they're like yeah we're not having this conversation and this
00:35:40.360 is when the bodies were still warm so to have that kind of change where you know they're not
00:35:46.980 engaging good faith they're not letting a tragedy go to waste we need to take these people at face
00:35:51.780 value that's fallen away and that I think is a much more effective strategy where you understand
00:35:58.500 all right there's always going to be a group you could they could call themselves republican they
00:36:03.880 call themselves democrat who are interested in oppression and putting forth their cockamamie
00:36:08.880 schemes onto the population and there's increasing people who are like all right what mechanisms can
00:36:15.040 we put in place that whatever bs they put forward in the future they're not going to be able to do
00:36:20.520 anything about it here's another great example there was a lot of hand-wringing in 2016 about
00:36:25.340 the american election putin putin putin the russians the russians the russians it was not
00:36:30.920 legitimate 2020 the day after the election oh this was the most honest election in history
00:36:36.680 somehow trump in four years went from being complete corrupt to being a complete angel when
00:36:41.920 it comes to uh democracy i don't know how they managed to talk out of both sides of their mouth
00:36:47.960 but they don't care it's whatever furthers their agenda at the moment increasingly uh because many
00:36:53.220 of these ballots were mailed in, which is open to fraud. I'm not at all claiming that there was
00:36:57.480 systematic fraud. Different Republican states are putting mechanisms in place to restrict
00:37:03.840 one's ability to vote. There's a, oh my God, this is racism, the Klan, Nazism, blah, blah, blah.
00:37:11.160 But they're realizing you're going to be called racist Nazi Klan regardless. We might as well 0.67
00:37:16.840 change the rules so that we win because we're paying the cost of having this outrage and
00:37:22.940 insults and beratement, we might as well reap the benefits. So that kind of approach is, I think,
00:37:28.320 a big sea change from how things used to be 10 years ago. And that is one big reason for optimism,
00:37:35.080 a change in strategy for those of us who are in favor of freedom, which I do not regard as
00:37:40.440 synonymous with democracy, of course, and opposed to, you know, what Menchus Malbuck calls the
00:37:45.480 cathedral. But Michael, let me push back on that somewhat, because isn't debating ideas the very
00:37:51.920 foundation of our society and by debating ideas don't you find that actually you find where the
00:37:58.160 strengths are to your argument you find out where the weaknesses are and you find actually you truly
00:38:02.960 find what out what you think because you have your ideas challenged and the second part of the
00:38:08.480 pushback is the weapons that you use against your opponents will invariably you be used against you
00:38:14.640 when they are in power yeah sure so first of all i don't think the basis of a society good ideas
00:38:20.780 the basis of a good society is peace. And I think the biggest threat to peace is the state.
00:38:25.920 It is only the state that can wage murder in a systematic way. It is only the state that can
00:38:30.420 wage theft in a systematic way, both through theft and taxation, excuse me, and something
00:38:35.000 called asset forfeiture. I don't know if you have that over there. Over here, we have something
00:38:38.260 called asset forfeiture, which is a very bizarre legal system, which is if I'm a police officer
00:38:44.500 and I believe that you used your car, your house, your bank account in furtherance of the drug
00:38:49.480 trade. I can seize it. It is added to my budget. And then you have to go through a whole legal
00:38:55.360 process, although you don't have any money or a car anymore, to try to get it back. And as a result
00:39:00.820 of this, the total of asset forfeiture has now in America surpassed the total of all burglaries
00:39:05.620 combined. So that sort of thing is something that has to change immediately. I'm not interested in
00:39:11.780 having the right ideas or the wrong ideas. That is secondary to me in terms of putting food on the
00:39:17.600 table, being secure in my person, all these other things. I'm perfectly happy being wrong
00:39:24.320 as long as I have Maslow's hierarchy of needs being met. There's lots of people who have
00:39:30.920 disparate ideas in every country. By definition, many of them are going to be wrong. I still want
00:39:36.300 them to have food and I still want them to be secure in their property and their person and
00:39:40.100 their family. So that is much more primary than having the right ideas. Well, I'm sorry. In terms
00:39:44.980 of the tactics yeah it is my view that the enemy class will use any tactics in its capacity up to
00:39:53.660 and including mass murder and once you realize this is what you're up against you have to start
00:39:59.180 fighting back so i do not agree for one second uh that the villains in in either of our respective
00:40:05.360 countries the only thing that is restraining them is their inability or they're not having a need
00:40:11.320 at the moment to put these um tactics into practice but in terms of them like kind of oh
00:40:17.960 should we really do this i don't think that's a concern in their part at all they genuinely if you
00:40:22.760 watch those footage from belgium uh where there were people sitting in a public park and police
00:40:28.340 on horseback were clubbing old men in the face because they're outside in a park uh i don't
00:40:34.660 think you can put anything past these people uh aren't there was talk wasn't there talk in britain
00:40:40.220 of going door to door to make sure people were staying home or being vaccinated. There was talk
00:40:45.080 of that here. It's just, I don't see how you could put anything past these people.
00:40:49.420 So Michael, I want to ask you actually a question, a longer question, but the short question is who
00:40:54.440 are they? Sure. So it's the power structure. It's the ruling class. So who is that exactly?
00:41:01.960 Sure. It would be the universities. So how it's, the ideas start the universities,
00:41:06.200 which are literal monasteries of the progressive faith.
00:41:09.160 They're promulgated and turned into kind of sleeper cells
00:41:12.420 or shock troops via the media and entertainment industries
00:41:16.780 where a certain mindset is regarded as not as true and just a given.
00:41:23.280 And then it's promulgated further through government schools
00:41:26.440 and public school teachers.
00:41:28.280 And then it's implemented, if necessary, by the state via the police.
00:41:32.520 hey francis think about all the times you've used wi-fi at a coffee shop a hotel or even at
00:41:40.060 your parents house happy memories well without expressvpn every site you visit could be locked
00:41:46.620 by the admin of that network and that's still true even when you're in incognito mode even
00:41:51.600 when you're in incognito mode still happy memories what what's more your home internet provider i'm
00:41:57.300 talking comcast at&t whatever can also see and record your browsing data and they are legally
00:42:03.340 allowed to sell it on to others i'm so screwed you are trigonometry is now going to be a solo 0.84
00:42:11.920 project and that is why i use expressvpn expressvpn is an app that encrypts all of your network data
00:42:19.360 and reroutes it through a network of secure servers so that your private online activity
00:42:24.520 stays just that private unfortunately so sadly every site you visit every video you watch or
00:42:34.300 message you send gets tracked and data mined but when you run expressvpn on your device
00:42:39.140 the software hides your ip address so expressvpn makes your activity harder to trace and sell to
00:42:45.320 advertisers finish absolutely done for and the best part is how easy it is to use the app literally
00:42:52.480 has one button you tap it to connect and your browsing activity is secure from your parents
00:42:57.020 eyes Francis please stop crying my new suede shoes are getting wet if you don't want to end up like
00:43:02.640 me and stop your parents from protecting your privacy go to expressvpn.com trigger and get
00:43:11.060 three extra months for free. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash trigger. Go to expressvpn.com
00:43:23.820 slash trigger to learn more. So coming back then to what you were saying about your reasons for
00:43:32.760 optimism, which is if I can translate it correctly and do correct me if I get it wrong, is the left,
00:43:39.700 can I say that the left has been using certain tactics against the right, which is calling them
00:43:45.980 names? Is that you? You're frowning. I don't like that expression, the left. Right. Because there
00:43:51.480 are many people who we would all agree are on the left who are amazing human beings who maybe I
00:43:57.920 disagree with on an issue or that, but who would be first and foremost to be fighting this thing.
00:44:03.000 So I don't think this is a very kind of boomer conservative mindset, which I'm not saying you
00:44:06.940 guys hold no we're not the left is a monolith which is just historically and worldwide just
00:44:12.820 right so so yeah exactly and it's always a struggle when when talking about these issues
00:44:18.800 because you're trying to speak to to the way the conversation is being had at the moment so
00:44:23.640 that side are they progressives who is it that's been using these tactics of calling everyone names
00:44:30.660 and sure so with britain i i mean if it was just down to names we'd be in a utopia right can you
00:44:36.920 you imagine this is my goal my goal is to have a free society where the worst thing someone can do
00:44:43.140 is go up to you and call you the most horrible epithets which is basically what i do on a daily
00:44:48.000 base on twitter if that's the case right and the worst thing someone can do is you know insult my 0.98
00:44:53.260 mother and call me just just just a garbage person they might be right but at least we're living 0.89
00:44:59.960 peacefully and civilly and no one has to worry about a knock on the door and uh the filth barging 0.99
00:45:05.960 in. So what I specifically referred to in my previous book, The New Right, is evangelical
00:45:11.660 progressive, evangelical, evangelical progressivism. I'm scared to say it because I'm going to invoke
00:45:17.340 the eye of Sauron. And it's basically a totalitarian worldview intent on conquering every
00:45:25.220 aspect of society, which does not regard as anything outside its purview. And I'll give you
00:45:30.520 a good example. If you look at, I talk about this in The New Right as well. If you look at video
00:45:35.080 games if you look at sci-fi movies right even places people go to escape reality other planets
00:45:42.680 other dimensions back in time is not safe to be outside their purview they genuinely feel that
00:45:50.500 every aspect of our culture including our bedroom is something where they are in a position to not
00:45:56.560 only opine which i can understand that you can make the case for that everything should be up
00:46:01.420 for discussion, but to impose their perspective on how to live. If this is what you are up against,
00:46:08.780 you know, this kind of absolutist, universalist, totalitarian mindset, there is very little room
00:46:15.000 for negotiation and you have to create tact. You're not going to show a creationist fossils
00:46:20.740 and disprove their worldview. They're just going to take whatever evidence they see
00:46:25.900 as furtherance of their perspective.
00:46:28.600 Right. I agree with that.
00:46:29.740 So maybe aggressive wokest is a better way to summarize.
00:46:33.660 I don't know if you like that word.
00:46:34.760 I don't like calling it wokest, and here's why. 1.00
00:46:36.280 Because in Britain, at least, it has its roots in the Fabian Society,
00:46:39.640 which started in the late 1800s.
00:46:41.480 And for those who don't know, their mascot was literally,
00:46:46.460 look this up because it sounds like something a crazy person is saying,
00:46:50.140 a wolf in sheep's clothing.
00:46:51.540 because their argument is all right we can't have a totalitarian dictatorship voted overnight
00:46:57.380 but what we can do is death by a million cuts little by little we implement these ideas and
00:47:04.960 by the time we're done we're going to have everything within the context of the state
00:47:09.380 later they were realized you know maybe if we're calling ourselves a wolf of sheep clothing we're
00:47:14.380 showing our hands so they change their mascot to a turtle or a tortoise rather um but that
00:47:20.400 These people are playing the long game they have for 100 years.
00:47:24.400 They've been after everyone's children for over a century.
00:47:27.900 The whole point of government schooling is, in their words, to create good citizens, which is a euphemism for breaking young independent minds, banishing critical thought from their psyche, and making them malleable, subservient, and interchangeable with everyone else.
00:47:44.440 They got the idea from Bismarck and the Prussian model where his idea was, OK, let's take schools and basically create an army starting from age five kindergarten.
00:47:54.080 There's a reason why it's a German word.
00:47:56.240 So I think when people realize how long this has been going on and how systemic and deep these roots go, there's going to be a lot of epiphanies in terms of what the consequences of this have been.
00:48:09.160 All right. So these evangelical progressives, as you call them, I was just coming back to the question that I'm still desperately trying to ask, but I appreciate the clarifications because they are important.
00:48:22.860 They have been using these tactics against the rest of society or whoever it is that they're targeting them at.
00:48:31.140 And now you are optimistic because some of the people who are, in terms of the examples that you gave in America, identifiably on the right, the people who care about gun rights, etc., etc., they are now fighting back and ignoring the tactics and not, they're essentially not complicit in their own demonization anymore, right? 0.99
00:48:53.220 They're refusing to play along in this stupid game. 0.99
00:48:56.020 Right. 1.00
00:48:56.200 Now, if I play that movie forward, there's two ways that ends. And I know you're a big advocate for one of them. Either you get a civil war or you get a peaceful separation of the United States into red states and blue states.
00:49:09.360 that's that's a that's a medium-term goal yes i mean and this claim this it's a so one of the
00:49:15.480 lies we hear here in the states is that any kind of national separation has to be done violently
00:49:21.780 uh and they're like can you give me one example of a country where allowed secession it's like
00:49:26.980 yeah czechoslovakia brexit norway and sweden these were all done very peacefully and everyone lived
00:49:33.500 happily ever after as a result brexit of course was not a smooth transition but it was hardly you
00:49:38.420 know violent uh or you know a civil a lot of milkshakes got thrown man a lot of milkshakes
00:49:43.260 went flying a little bit of epithets were hold on twitter yeah yeah so but i mean you yeah yeah
00:49:48.620 but i mean the joke is important because one of the techniques they use is look as bad as thing
00:49:56.240 if i had the choice between the status quo and another american civil war i would probably choose
00:50:03.700 the status quo because this a civil war was just a complete nightmare situation the loss of life
00:50:10.120 and property and and recovery was unconscionable so it's behooves them uh you know it's the kind
00:50:16.960 of like you don't want your battered wife to leave it's like baby you're not going to find 0.98
00:50:20.560 anyone else who's going to love you as much as i do and at a certain point you realize oh this is
00:50:25.620 a lie they're saying this because they realize i do have other options and they have to persuade
00:50:30.720 me to stay because they have to paint the alternative as full of just blood and destruction.
00:50:36.660 And when you realize that there's plenty of contemporary counterexamples and, you know,
00:50:42.100 who's going to do what, who has the will to do this, it becomes very clear which option
00:50:46.780 is preferable.
00:50:47.560 I'll ask a final question in this line of discussion, because this is interesting to
00:50:51.740 explore intellectually, if nothing else.
00:50:54.000 There seems to me the obvious contradiction in your argument is that you've got these
00:50:58.340 people that you refer to who will use any means including up to and including mass murder.
00:51:04.280 And at the same time, you think they will let half the United States go peacefully
00:51:08.400 if it so chooses. That doesn't seem to square to me.
00:51:12.740 So Al-Qaeda is a good example. Al-Qaeda would have no problem committing mass murder. They 0.90
00:51:17.020 just don't have the power to do so. So at a certain point, it becomes a matter of do they
00:51:21.600 have the will do they have the capacity uh and i and the more people are becoming aware that this
00:51:28.640 is a situation the harder it's going to be to pull off their uh bullcrap you had in the american
00:51:35.860 civil war you know they fought there was it was not at all inevitable uh what happened was the
00:51:41.540 south had something called fort sumter which was the north considered northern property they had
00:51:45.580 barricaded and then they fired a shot we wouldn't have been in world war ii rightly or wrongly and
00:51:52.120 i'm not at all implying that it was the wrong thing to do without the attack on pearl harbor
00:51:56.560 right previously to pearl harbor this is a european war we just did that with woodrow
00:52:01.220 wilson the great war why are we killing ourselves for them again we just went through this this was
00:52:05.880 a complete calamity then there's a strike and it's like all arms uh on deck so it's not at all
00:52:12.060 inevitable that there would be a violence at all or that if there was violence it would necessarily
00:52:18.540 lead to a large scale it could be very the civil war for example is a good example when there when
00:52:23.960 it first started uh the south the confederates who i do not at all regard as the heroes let me be
00:52:29.180 clear had an opportunity to seize washington take over the white house and hold lincoln captive
00:52:35.180 they were so invested in their ideology of national sovereignty that they felt okay if we cross this
00:52:42.880 line across this rubicon we're going to be hypocrites so they didn't do it if they had done it 0.74
00:52:48.080 and kind of been a little bit hypocritical the war could have been resolved very very quickly
00:52:52.380 so it's not at all the case that if there is a conflict that it has to be that long or that and
00:53:00.160 Even if they win, look at it this way. Let's suppose there's like 100,000 people who agree with me who want separation. If they're put down with great force, which I am terrified to imagine, that still wouldn't have to take five years. It could be resolved very quickly. So it's all a matter of willpower. And that, I think, there's a decreasing amount on behalf of some of these people, certainly among the masses.
00:53:26.520 So, Michael, the question I want to ask is what part do the corporations play in this?
00:53:31.060 Because there's many people who argue the corporations are now far more powerful than any government.
00:53:35.400 We can see this with regard to taxation.
00:53:37.820 They essentially do what they want, how they want, whenever they want.
00:53:41.940 They don't do what they want, however they want, because they can't come in your house and kill you.
00:53:45.720 One of the tweets I had, which I certainly think, is that corporate America has done a far better job of spreading Maoism than the Chinese Communist Party ever dreamed of in the States. 0.75
00:53:58.040 So when the riots were happening here, I tweeted out that they're about 48 hours from getting corporate sponsorship.
00:54:05.320 It was within minutes when that ended up happening.
00:54:08.020 But I mean, you laugh, but growing up, we were all taught that corporations are basically like mild Republicans.
00:54:17.460 They're kind of the fat guy with the cigar, whoever pops out to the golf course or like Mitt Romney, you know, or like David Cameron.
00:54:25.680 Right. Like that's the corporations. It's this kind of vaguely right of center, doesn't want to ruffle feathers, you know, just wants business and everyone to get along.
00:54:34.000 And it's kind of this milquetoast mindset. What we're seeing instead is given that corporations are almost exclusively manned by people who are the products of these universities, which are spreading these depraved, malevolent ideas, once they're in place, this is Gramsci's march through the institutions, then they are going to, without having to have anyone in their earpiece, organically spreading this kind of ideology and philosophy.
00:55:01.500 now does that mean we have to raise harvard to the ground no does that mean does that mean it
00:55:09.640 would probably be a net benefit yes wow so you think that because surely that we can reform
00:55:17.960 institutions can we not michael or create alternatives or create alternatives at the
00:55:22.040 very least that's the one okay go for it explain why we create alternatives and how and how and not
00:55:28.820 reform institutions? I think some institutions are inherently irredeemable. And I think it's
00:55:34.500 also useful in terms of morale to watch them raised and burned to the ground, because that's
00:55:39.880 a concrete victory that people who are less intelligent can point to and regard as an
00:55:45.220 accomplishment. In a very evil sense, if you look at 9-11, that must have been incredibly motivating
00:55:51.100 for the terrorist class in the Middle East, because North Korea, that's the book I wrote,
00:55:55.580 obviously, dear reader, what they often talk about is we're a shrimp among whales, that we're a tiny
00:56:01.600 country, and yet we're giving the finger both to China and to the United States. And from their 0.93
00:56:08.220 perspective, there's something to that. They're punching way above their weight class. So I think
00:56:13.020 many institutions are inherently evil. They've been evil for a very long time. Their complicity
00:56:20.760 in things like, uh, the Ukrainian genocide, uh, you know, Hitler, uh, Stalin is something they've
00:56:27.000 never had accountability for. And I'm not interested in accepting their apologies, uh,
00:56:33.080 this many years after the fact for what they've done. I'm interested in watching them, uh, be
00:56:38.760 destroyed and suffer in the process. And how do we create alternatives? That's my Soviet mindset 0.97
00:56:43.080 coming through. Yes, I can, I can feel that. Uh, but we, we talked about creating alternative
00:56:48.620 institutions. How do you do that? I mean, how does anyone create anything? You have,
00:56:55.720 I have an idea, I get capital, I put my shingle up and then I attract people to
00:57:01.580 my venue. Creating alternatives to universities is going to be increasingly easy because for
00:57:10.140 example, I had a fan who, I'm going to show all of our age now. He sent me a contribution. He said,
00:57:17.160 oh, can I interview you for my school paper? I looked at his Twitter, the kid's in high school.
00:57:21.040 I'm like, kid, I'm not taking money from you. And he goes, no, no, no. I have a hundred grand in the
00:57:24.940 bank. I do e-commerce, right? So it's very hard to tell this person, you should go to university
00:57:31.960 for four years. And if I'm an interviewer, a recruiter, and I have two resumes, this person
00:57:38.560 went to Cambridge and this kid in high school is making a hundred grand a year because he invented
00:57:44.500 a website, who would I want to hire? Now, the Harvard guy is going to, or the Cambridge guy,
00:57:48.860 excuse me, is going to have technical knowledge and he's going to bring a lot to the table.
00:57:51.940 It's no question. But in terms of being competitive, it is not at all clear to me,
00:57:56.660 or I don't think to anyone, that it's clearly the Cambridge guy who you want to choose from,
00:58:01.240 as opposed to, let's suppose, 40 years ago, it would have been absolutely clear where,
00:58:05.500 okay, this kid's some young entrepreneur who made some butcher shop. This guy went to Cambridge.
00:58:11.220 If I'm playing roulette, I'm putting my money on Cambridge.
00:58:14.500 There we go. I mean, Michael, it has been an absolutely fascinating interview. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We've got a couple of questions for our local supporters after this, but our interviews always end with the same question, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?
00:58:31.100 um that's a great question i'm not a big should person but i think what the issue that i think
00:58:40.500 is the least discussed is the increasing inability in european parliaments which is going to spread
00:58:48.160 to the states to form coalitions uh you saw it in the swedish elections you saw in the italian
00:58:53.760 elections on the czech elections um increasingly we used to and you're seeing in germany now where
00:58:59.820 the elections are going to be in September, and for the first time in German history,
00:59:03.500 they're going to have to almost certainly have a three-party coalition, whereas historically
00:59:08.440 it's always been one. And then under Merkel, she's had to have a coalition with the Social
00:59:11.640 Democrats. This inability to form a majority, well, Iceland's another example, a majority in
00:59:18.540 terms of putting forth the state's vision, I think is a very healthy thing to the breakdown
00:59:23.960 of having a government monopoly.
00:59:27.540 You're true to the cause
00:59:29.180 all the way to the bitter end, Michael.
00:59:30.960 Listen, it's been a pleasure chatting with you.
00:59:33.320 I recommend everybody get all your books.
00:59:35.580 The New Right I particularly enjoyed.
00:59:37.520 And The Anarchist Handbook,
00:59:38.940 is that the one that's the latest one?
00:59:41.520 AnarchistHandbook.com, yes.
00:59:43.180 Fantastic stuff.
00:59:44.460 Thank you for coming on the show
00:59:45.900 and thank you all for watching at home.
00:59:47.740 We'll see you very soon
00:59:48.680 with another brilliant interview like this one
00:59:50.440 or Raw Show.
00:59:51.760 And they always go out at 7 p.m. UK time.
00:59:53.960 2 p.m eastern eastern standard time take care and see you soon guys we hope you've enjoyed this
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