Auron MacIntyre: The American Empire Is Racing Towards Collapse. Here’s How to Prevent It.

24:45Brilliant man. Yeah, absolutely. And 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. And 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.

25:18And 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 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. it's to perpetuate your existence inside that system. So what does it mean to be safe in your own home? For a long time, that meant good locks and maybe an alarm system. That was enough, but they're not enough. And you know that because the news is filled with stories of people who thought they were protected and fell victim anyway.

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27:04There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer. So the system, as one of its core imperatives, has got to divide the population. It feels that way. It doesn't... A lot of the... I mean, I'm coming to this slowly, but a lot of the ugliest things that the system does, inspiring race hatred, for example, I never have understood why you'd want to do that. Why would you want to do that? But they're doing it and have been for 60 years.

27:47Like, is that a long term? Can you continue doing that? Not forever, but it's a classic power strategy. So we need to understand that one of the things that power always wants to do is centralize and expand its reach. I think that's pretty obvious to a lot of people. But this guy Bertrand de Juvenal came up with this metaphysics of power. And his understanding was that what we would think of as the middle class, right? The kulaks. They're entrenched in society because they own a piece of the tradition. They own a piece of the land. They have actual communities. They have resilience. They have the ability to push back against the government.

28:22And so if you have this middle class, they're in the way of your power as a leader. Oh, yes. And so what do you do? Well, you take your high, your ruling class, and you pair them with a low class from outside of society. And 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. It's all their fault, the middle class. They're the ones who are keeping you back. They're the racists. They're the sexists. And if you just defeat them, we'll just give you all their stuff.

28:54And this is the wedge that is continuously used. the 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. That's just the dynamic we're seeing. And this happened in Rome. This has happened many, many times over. You can see many historical examples. So the H-1B thing is just a, so the enemy is what you call heritage Americans. What are those? Heritage Americans are those that are actually tied. You could find their last names in the Civil War registry. Like they have a tie to the history and to the land.

29:27And, you know, Samuel Huntington is a guy who I really like. He wrote the Clash of Civilizations and Who Are We? And, you know, I think won his debate with Francis Fukuyama pretty decisively. But, you know, he said in Who Are We? His book about American identity, the core of American identity is the Anglo-Protestant spirit. And he's a man of the center left, you know, as a Harvard professor, this 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. But he says even the Catholics and Jews in America take on this Anglo-Protestant affect in some way.

30:03And so you have to have this majority culture for people to assimilate to. And 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. And what is that way? Can you describe the Anglo-Protestant worldview? I mean, obviously we could spend entire books on that and that has been done. Well, it's almost never mentioned. It's true. Yeah. And 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 our economic and political systems, or have been benefiting from, Maybe not anymore, but those are the founders.

30:47It was 100 % Anglo-Protestant, like 100%. Right. So why don't we ever mention that culture? Because we're very terrified of the idea that ideas are particular to cultures and peoples. That sounds very scary in Old World. It's true. Of course it's true. It's obviously true. And we know that because now we laugh whenever we try to export democracy to Afghanistan or something, right? I know it from traveling a lot. I go to different countries and I don't hate their cultures or ideas at all. I don't have to live under them. I'm just visiting. I think they're really interesting, but they're very different because the people are different, inherently different.

31:22Yes, and when you change the people, you change the culture, which is why our Western governments are so busy trying to replace those populations. Yeah, when you change the population, you change the country. Yeah, you change the country and you change the principles that it's going to be founded on. We look at the Declaration of Independence and it says we hold these truths to be self-evident. If you go to Afghanistan, are the truths of the Constitution self-evident to them? No. Of course not. Because 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 the type of heritage that we understand.

31:59That's where that comes from. Again, it doesn't mean that other people can't be grafted into that and absorb that. But 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. And it's not the way the Constitution was even understood when it was written. Our founder said very famously that the Constitution is for immoral and religious people. They 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.

32:34All true. I interrupted you with my outburst of rage when I asked you what exactly are the presuppositions? What's the nature of this Anglo-Protestant culture that founded this country? I think this is where people get a lot of the ideas of a decent amount of individualism. This has always been a key part of it. also restrain government, the idea that government would be limited as something tied to the Magna Carta, right? Like, yes, they had a, you know, became a constitutional monarchy, but, 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.

33:16The idea that free speech is something sacred, that the individual conscience and the practice of religion is something that needs to be maintained. These are all core values that when you actually look in other societies, they don't look the same. Free speech in Germany does not look the same. There's no Slavic society, and I love Slavic societies, just being honest. They're great, but they don't see free speech as a foundational God-given right. They just don't. Right, and the - And they're whiter than I am. So 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.

33:58eliminates differences that we should be thinking about, right? Yeah, absolutely. Even inside European cultures, vastly different traditions. Closer, perhaps, than, say, someone in Eastern Asia, but still very, very different from place to place. And 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. And again, I think that serves the purpose of really just melting down culture in general, right? It looks like race is very divisive identity politics, right?

34:32Which to some degree it is. But the reason it feels so divisive, the reason it feels so unnatural is it's thoroughly unrooted from actual organic ways of being. It's completely removed from the things that make your life better when you have a holistic identity. It's just this rough collection of hatred for people who happen to have a different skin color, which doesn't get you anywhere good. Smart. So smart. can 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? To some extent, if you want to operate as an empire, and I think this is the crossroads that America is at.

35:13If you talk to Americans, the Democrat side will say, well, we're a democracy. And then Republicans will say, well, no, of course not. We're a republic. That's very different. If you ask them what the difference is, they won't be able to really explain it. No, no, they never can. There's a representative somewhere. They get all huffy, but they have no idea what they're talking about. Yeah, 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. That 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.

35:49And so the fact that the Republican type of government requires this type of virtue means it has to stay relatively small. And this isn't something I just made up. You can see this in Aristotle or Machiavelli or, you know, the founding fathers. They 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. And 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.

36:26And this is why so many people feel like the people they elect don't run the government. Of course they don't, because you don't live in a republic anymore. You live in an empire. And 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. Some people will call this the deep state. I 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. They'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.

36:59And 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 and instead have understood that just the mass will is the only thing that matters. And what's great at manipulating the mass will? Mass media. You may have noticed this is a great country with bad food. Our food supply is rotten. It didn't used to be this way. Take chips, for example. You may recall a time when crushing a bag of chips didn't make you feel hungover, like you couldn't get out of bed the next day.

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38:59The media is going to do it for them. That whole notion is like absurd. The media is a participant in the system. And what's funny is, again, if you look at the American tradition, if you just look at the people writing inside of the American tradition, they describe exactly this process and how it's going to take place. John C. Calhoun, vice president of the United States, served in multiple cabinets. This is a guy who laid out in one of his treaties that ultimately the American media would not serve as any kind of check, some kind of fourth estate, and instead would be used by political parties to manipulate the opinion of people, creating a winner-take-all situation in any given election.

39:41You have a situation where all political parties are suddenly incentivized to basically burn down the country, take as much as they can for themselves and imprison or otherwise deny their opponents access to the ballot box because otherwise they'll lose this giant Leviathan they built. And again, he's I think he wrote this in the 1850s, the 1840s. It was released after his death. But again, we can just look at the people who were part of the American tradition and they recognized that this is the function media was going to play from the beginning. Yeah. It does seem like we're moving toward dictatorship.

40:15And I'm not pointing at any one political leader or party even. I think the Democrats are much more eager for dictatorship than the Republicans generally, but I'm not even making that point. I'm just saying people's faith in democracy, whatever that is, has been badly shaken. And I just don't think you can govern in the way that our government currently governs forever. Do you think that's inevitable? Yeah, I do. I think Caesarism is a natural life cycle of any civilization. When you get to the oligarchic stage. Caesarism is it? Oh, so smart. Yeah, Oswald Spangler talked about the life cycles of civilizations.

40:57And after the age of money power, after the age of oligarchy, the only thing that can cut through the Gordian nod of this vast sprawling bureaucracy built on money is a strongman. That's what he predicts in any given age. Obviously, that's not the Anglo understanding, right? It's definitely not the way that you want to see. Let me speak for all Anglos when I say we're very opposed to that. Right. But if you aren't careful, if you don't understand how and why money powers come to dominate your society and created this rule of the oligarchs, people will cry out for that. Well, the only thing more powerful than money is violence.

41:32Right. So that's just kind of that simple. Yes. So if you reach a stage where money determines everything, which is where we definitely are now, we are in the age of oligarchs, and the people want some say, there's kind of like no other option, is there? No, and that's why you see them fall behind, you know, leaders like this very easily, right? And so you have a very precarious situation right now. We're at a very important crossroads in the United States. It's very rare that a nation decides to scale back its empire voluntarily. It doesn't happen very often. And we have to consider whether we think that's worth avoiding the current track we're on.

42:13Because there is a cost to scaling down empire, to be clear. You know, being the world hegemon has amazing benefits for you in theory. It has more benefits for your ruling class, and eventually it's going to destroy your population. But in the short term, the benefits are quite large. The empire always destroys the population. I believe that to be the case. It can be longer, it can be shorter, but over time we see this over and over again. Again, we can look at the classic example of Rome. It continues to expand its borders. A guy like Hadrian tries to pin it back inside, but eventually they end up just giving citizenship to everyone.

42:45And Caracal 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. And instead, what happens is they just keep importing Gauls until Gauls more or less just take over the empire. They take over every important aspect of it. So, again, a pattern that we see over and over again. It's very hard for empires not to do that. Why were they so successful within the empire? Well, they were the only people who weren't tamed anymore. I was about to say. So, what was the testosterone thing? Yeah, it really is. We need to import our own barbarians to fight off the barbarians because the people themselves are no longer willing to fight.

43:21And this is a key aspect of republics again. I know. Just like, it's all, it just, this record is on repeat. It's crazy. If 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. So 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 protect the United States without it. It was understood that being part of a republic meant being a soldier. Service actually did guarantee citizenship.

43:59It 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. Again, Aristotle said the citizen is he who is armed. Machiavelli said, you should never have mercenaries. You should never have paid standing armies. Instead, you should always have a militia. This is a core part of your identity as a republic. And 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. So the republic is done. The country's not done.

44:33The republic just becomes an empire. Right. That's what you're saying. So then what's, and we're there. So what's the life cycle of empire? typically. A lot of people think it's very short. Some people will cite the 250 year mark. But the one thing that is for sure is that these complex systems always reach a point of marginal utility that is just collapsing. They 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. And so you're just waiting for the Tower of Babel to fall.

45:13I think this is honestly a very deeply biblical pattern that repeats itself over and over again. We try to unite all of humanity under these imperial ambitions. And in our hubris, we're scattered back to our natural state as peoples. But the process is always brutal. So there's no happy ending for empire. There's those that can walk away to some extent, but you look at what the British have done. Yes, they, in some extent, passed their empire on to us. But what does that cost them? Almost everything, right? Well, everything. Yeah, it looks like they lost a war. The most degraded people in the world.

45:50Right. And so the question is, is there a happy escape? And I'm not sure what the answer to that question is. I think to some degree, the answer is a return to a localism that can actually reinvigorate the communities that cultivate virtue and create Republican governance in the first place. But do we have the will to do that voluntarily? Do we have the will to walk away from the centralization of power? I don't think that we do. okay um so you said this is the moment which is without many precedents in history where we're we are voluntarily trying to scale back the empire clear that that's what trump's election was about right and there are costs to that what are the costs well a large amount of that is going to be global influence right we if we're not in charge of an area someone else might be and that It also means that we're not imposing our standards and our understandings on the way that global commerce and all of these things should be affected.

46:53We're not controlling the diplomatic situation or the military deployment of foreign nations through our influence. And that can have large economic impacts. I mean, our entire dollar is based on being the global reserve currency. Withdrawing away from something like that is devastating. We are deeply dependent on this global system. We are as dependent on it as the system is on us at this point. And so untangling it is very messy business. A lot of the things that we have to sacrifice, cheap labor, global, you know, the global hegemony, the idea that we don't constantly have the ability to reach in and affect every international situation and dictate its outcome.

47:33Those are things our elites are unwilling to do. And we've already seen that in a place like Ukraine, right? Whereas we just came off of COVID, it's very clear that the ruling class had spent a large amount of their capital deceiving the world. And yet they immediately went right back into another conflict because, well, Russia is not allowed to conduct any business without the United States being involved in it. Now, if I was Ukrainian, I'd hate Russia. I have no particular love for what's happening there. But the idea that we would immediately jump in and try to dictate the terms of that conflict is a hubris that can only be tied to the idea that as a global empire, we have the right to tell you somewhere in the middle of Eastern Europe how we should actually be conducting a war like this.

48:14So what's the model for a society? So clearly this isn't working. It's chilling your description of this historical pattern, which clearly we're reliving yet again. But if you could start from scratch, like what is the ideal form of government? What is the ideal nation? Can you have a nation this big? Can it stay sovereign? Can it stay focused on its own people? I mean, is that possible? Well, the key, I think, is really understanding that this shouldn't be ideological. One of my favorite thinkers, Joseph DeMestra, said that every people gets the government that they deserve, that ultimately there is a correct form of governance, but it is different for different peoples.

48:58And so we can't look at one exact abstract idea of how government should run and say, we'll just force that down on everybody. Again, we've seen the failure of that with liberal democracy across the world. And so the key is really the organic cultivation of the way that your people live. Again, the Anglo-Protestant understanding of authority is very radically different than, say, the Chinese, one throughout history. And so what would be the correct way for us to live is very different from the Chinese. And that's okay. They don't have to— And that's okay. Right. We don't have to live in their system.

49:34They don't have to live in ours. We don't have to impose that artificially. But we definitely don't have that view in this country. So in Arkansas, I was reading, because I know one of the people involved, the attorney general of Arkansas, Tim Griffin, is a perfectly nice guy. But he's like considering bringing charges against some group, building some like housing development, and it's all white. And that's like a threat somehow to everyone else. There's no allegation they've done anything against anyone. just yet another indicator that our core beliefs as a country circa 2025 anyway are that, you know, everyone has to live in exactly the same way whether they want to or not.

50:18Well, this is a huge part of the Civil Rights Act, right? The Civil Rights Act itself is the end of freedom of association, which was a basic understanding of— Are you a racist? Oh, of course. You can't hold any of the opinions of our founders without being racist. We all know that. But one of the key understandings is that people have the right to associate as they please. Now, I would never frequent a place that's refusing to serve a black American. No, like that's not in my principles, but I should have the choice whether or not I should do that. A business owner should have the right to decide whether I should do that.

50:51And let's be honest, this is 2025 America. We're not getting Jim Crow back. That's unless and this is the funniest thing about conservatives. They'll say, oh, of course, America isn't racist. And they say, well, we can get rid of the Civil Rights Act then. Right. Because we don't need a giant government bureaucracy that that intervenes in every aspect of society, giving it a blank check for a large government power. You're conservative. You'd want to get rid of that. And they say, oh, no, no, of course not. What if someone somewhere is racist? Right. So we have to keep this giant Soviet level mind control bureau that, you know, that works across our entire society and warps every incentive from housing to employment to education.

51:25We have to maintain that. Why won't? Because if we're honest, most conservative politicians actually believe what liberals believe, that somewhere in the heart of America is just this giant pile of KKK members waiting to conquer the United States. and not just conservative or Republican lawmakers, but a lot of the opinion merchants out there on the so-called right turn out to have none of the core assumptions that I have of it. Maybe I'm like super liberal. I never, I always think of myself as the most right-wing person in the world, but I don't seem to have anything in common with them at all.

51:57I didn't know that until the second Trump term. Do you know what I'm talking about? Oh yeah, and it's been rather hilarious. Yeah, I'm pretty new to this. You've been doing this for a long time, but - Just 35 years. There's not too long, but no, you were like teaching school five years ago, right? Yeah. I've only been doing this for like three years. And so, yeah, it's been very eyeopening to interact with different personalities. Don't get me wrong. There are very sincere people. I want to, I want to warn people because everyone runs out there and just says, oh, this person's a grifter. He's a grifter.

52:27They're all selling their opinion. But you know, there, there are very principled people are very passionate people, but there are also a large amount of people who are in no way conservative, no way Republican, in no way right wing and make their living operating inside of these organizations. Even some famous ones. It's interesting. Very much so. Who is, I mean, I think we can say the majority of people in general are afraid. Just they're afraid all the time. You know, secular people are all afraid all the time. So I'm not attacking anyone. I feel sorry for everyone involved. But I think the majority of people on the internet giving their opinions are kind of fake on some level.

53:04But there are some real ones. Who are the real ones? who are the real ones that's you know i i guess personally i spend a lot more time in spheres that are off the beaten path yeah and so i think that there are some you know people out there that maybe don't have massive uh yeah you know fan bases or you know big voices in in influential halls of power but are speaking some of the most important truths out there today well i think you're one of them and that's one of the reasons that's the main reason i wanted to meet you and have this conversation because as much as I hate technology and electricity and all that stuff, and I'm like, I'm pretty, pretty Kaczynski'd on all that modernity business.

53:45I do think the best thing about the modern world is the internet and the fact that people who, you know, don't have any connections to anything can succeed on the basis of the strength of their wisdom and of their opinions. And I just think you're a perfect example. So you work for The Blaze, but you're very widely read on the internet. How did you get here? How did you do that? Was this something that you planned? Not at all. I mean, I've always been very interested in politics. I got a political science degree in college and I worked on a few campaigns, but there just wasn't much going on there.

54:28And so I ended up falling into being a local reporter for a while. I covered news and crime or politics and crime. And then I worked as a teacher, you know, for a long time. But when COVID struck - High school teacher. A high school teacher. Public school. Public school. Yeah. And when COVID hit, you know, I had all the opinions you'd expect from a talk radio conservative listening to Dennis Prager and Sean Hannity and these guys. And then when I watched, you know, the churches were closed and the strip clubs were open and you You couldn't go see a dying loved one in the hospital, but Democrats could riot in the streets and burn down your neighborhood.

55:06And nobody did anything, right? Like this is, I've been told my whole life by conservatives, this is what the Second Amendment's for, right? Like the government has closed the churches, guys, that we are across the Rubicon. And I thought I was going crazy because all of the people who had been spouting all of this my whole life were like, well, no, you're probably fine. We got to figure out how to work. And I just realized, okay, the Constitution is not stopping any of this. so I need to understand why. And so I started reading a lot of political theory outside of the mainstream. I read this guy, Curtis Yarvin.

55:35He just started writing under his real name. Used to be Menchus Mulbug. And he had a bunch of other authors that I needed to understand. And the more I read that, the more I wanted to share what was going on. Just in your spare time. Yeah, yeah. And so that's kind of how I started tweeting and putting out material and writing. So it's just pure citizen. Like you don't really know anybody. You're just reading this stuff and coming to your own conclusions. And then you start tweeting them out. And the next thing you know, you're doing it full time and you have a big following. Yeah, I think it's a situation where there are a lot of really important thinkers.

56:10And, you know, to be clear, I'm just standing on the shoulder of giants. Guys like Samuel Francis and Joe Soberen and Pat Buchanan and Paul Gottfried, who were sitting in the wilderness for decades and decades. And that's why I think the conservative movement was so intellectually impoverished for so long. We forced all of our brightest minds into the wilderness because they kept saying things that didn't jive with kind of a neocon agenda. And they had to be driven from polite society. And nobody said anything. And at the center of so much of that was William F. Buckley Jr., who, you know, I think had good qualities for sure.

56:41I'm not, you know, it was awfully nice to me, I will say. So I don't hate the guy or anything, but in retrospect, I mean, he really served one meaningful role in his life, which was to keep a certain variety of nationalism out of the conservative canon. Yeah, I think we can see this over and over again. I mean, you even think of a guy like Russell Kirk, right? Wrote The Conservative Mind, one of the intellectual giants defining the movement and more or less got canceled because he made one too many jokes about the capital of the United States being in Tel Aviv. You know, like that's all it took for you to get shoved off.

57:16You can have this monumental career and this critical position, and you can no longer be allowed in polite society, no longer get invited to the right dinners if you have the wrong opinions. It feels like things are changing fast. Do you feel that? Absolutely. Where are they going? They're going to go to a lot of interesting places. As you pointed out, the news sphere, and more importantly, the narrative sphere, has disintermediated, right? We're no longer completely reliant on a couple news channels and a couple big newspapers. And at first, the right would really like this because it meant that they could get around the left-wing control of all of these critical centers.

57:55But now people on the right are getting panicked because their narratives are also breaking down. You can't use the National Review and a couple of think tanks in D.C. to kind of dictate how people understand the world. I don't even criticize National Review. I feel, you know, I don't think people even know what it is. Do they? No one my age at this point, no. No. So they're panicked. Like Meghan McCain's all upset that people are saying things are just, she's never heard before. But I feel like people like that are irrelevant now. Or maybe I'm just hoping that's true. No, I think that's increasingly the case.

58:32Again, I can't think of anyone who isn't paid in the Beltway, who is under 50, who cares what any of those people think. Right. And so I think we're really going through a generational switch. I think the tail end of the boomer generation is still very much tied to the conservative institutions. They've had that cultural foxhole mentality for a long time, and they see those people as their champions. But I think everyone behind them recognizes that, hey, I followed these platitudes for decades and they never did anything for me. And you know what I want to conserve? The ability of my family to have children.

59:05Ah, amen. Amen. I completely agree. I've reduced my whole life down to that. That's it. That's my worldview. Can my kids have kids and live in this beautiful place called America? Will it still be beautiful? You know, will it be all low-income housing? No. You know what I mean? I think more and more the message that we don't live in an economic zone, but an actual nation is really resonating with people. Yes. We successfully somehow turned the right wing into the party of just disposable culture, disposable identities, disposable people. Who cares if the trade policy revolutionizes your town and gets rid of all the jobs and everyone gets hooked on drugs?

59:47At least the free market one, right? No, I don't care. I care about my neighbor. I care about my family. I care about the community that we've built for generations. I shouldn't have to pick up my entire life and the many, many generations of social fabric that exists there to go move somewhere else every time you decide it's slightly cheaper to make something in China. That's not the way, that's not a conservative way to understand our society. And I think that's why you're seeing all of these institutions lose their power, because ultimately what people really care about preserving is the American people, the American way of life, the tradition and existence of the people around them.

1:00:22And I don't think you can sell them the idea that like infinite foreign labor is worth taking a bunch of cruises at the end of your life and then making sure your kids can't own a home. Like those things are no longer something that actually sells to, I think, the coming generations. No, I think they're rejecting it with real hostility. Yeah. Do they believe in democracy? Do they believe the current system can ever improve the country? I think at this point, democracy is just a shibboleth. I don't think it really means a whole lot to people. It's, you know, what is our democracy? It's throwing the major candidate of the Republican Party in jail.

1:00:55That's democracy. That's how we protect our democracy, right? What does that phrase even mean at this point? I think people are ready for a government that cares about them, elites that care about them, elites who know that they're ruling and know that they have an obligation to a specific group and are no longer just using these people as pieces of exchange. So it sounds like what you think, not to put words in your mouth, but what you think is being rejected or going away is a fundamentally theoretical understanding of politics in the world that is just not satisfying. In the end, it doesn't serve anybody except for the people peddling the lie.

1:01:29What we're going to be staring down, living through, is an understanding of the world that's much more practical and real. Like, are you improving my life? If you're not, leave. Yeah, again, this is where we understand that the core, the foundation of politics is really patronage. What can you, the ruling class, those in charge, what kind of life can you provide for us? What can you protect? What are you doing? A very direct relationship, not abstractly, are you signing a piece of paper, a treaty somewhere in Western Europe that will theoretically secure my right? No. Can the person next to me have children?

1:02:09Can the guy down the street take his kids to church, send them to school without worrying about whether they'll be shot? Is that an option? Because that matters to me way more than the idea that you're defending democracy in Ukraine. Exactly. But I remember watching Biden, who obviously was an elderly man, who didn't have his full faculties and all that. But I still detected like sincerity on his face when he talked about Zelensky and his heroism and how he was Churchill. And this is the fight of our lives. You know, democracy once again triumphs over darkness. Like he really seemed to mean it.

1:02:45I thought that was real. Like the emotion coming out. Do you remember any of these pressers? I still. The boomer brain always reverts to some, to the most tired cliche. Why is that? Well, I think they came into the world at a time where America more or less conquered the world. And when America conquered the world, we received all the benefits of empire. And so they think of themselves, and we started as a country rejected empire, right? That's our entire foundation. We led a revolution against an empire because we had the right to be governed by our peers, by those elites that are part of our society and not across an ocean.

1:03:25And so it's a very hard story to tell yourself that you conquered the world in the name of freedom, right? And so I think there's a lot of cognitive dissonance there, and that requires a very cartoon, Marvel movie-esque understanding of the world. We're Captain America. We fought for freedom. But that's going away with that generation. It is going away. I mean, I do think there's something about, and I always beat up on the boomers. There are a lot of great ones, wonderful people. But, you know, broad strokes here. This really was the first generation in history to have basically every part of their life dictated by popular culture.

1:04:07I mean, it's the television generation, really, right? And regional differences just went away during those years, 1946, 1964. And they kind of lost the capacity to think critically or something. Do you know what I'm talking about? Again, I think it's because it's disembodied. As you say, the radio and then the television, you know, the train and then the automobile, these things collapsed the space inside of America that used to be regional, had specific understandings and ways of life. And when that happened, like you said, the only way to have a singular culture was through this kind of mass media projection.

1:04:43And so, yeah, I think, you know, the people make the joke, but, you know, the old person screaming at their television with the news is a, you know, it's a stereotype for a reason because that's the only way they understood how to absorb the wider culture. Yes. No, it's right. And I saw it with Republicans with Reagan. I'm not against Reagan or anything. Don't agree with everything. But I don't hate Reagan. But I mean, they get so... And there are former colleagues of mine at TV channels who are like, they talk about him and they just repeat the same eight phrases. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall or whatever.

1:05:18And they're kind of carried away in a sincere way. Like they seem to experience life in the shallowest possible way. Does this, do you feel what I'm saying? Sure. And, you know, a lot of that is the medium itself. There's statesmanship doesn't sell in soundbites, right? That's not really how that works. To be thoughtful, to be deliberate, to have that level of prudence requires deliberation and time. And you can't sell that, you know, in between ads. and so that's harder and harder for political voices to really show. It's easier to just repeat the slogans and we can hate people for that, but I don't think we should because I think ultimately that's human nature.

1:06:00Oh, I agree. I don't hate them. I just don't want them in power at all. And I just want people to remember that so much of what they hear is misleading, but what they experience is the truth. That is the truth. And if your children are addicted to drugs or your nephew dies of an OD and your kids can't get married and the best they can hope for is to work at some freaking bank. Like that's not the life that you want for your family. Like that's reality. And it's nothing to do with bombing Iran or democracy or some nonsense like that. Like how are your kids doing? I just think it's important to notice the world around you.

1:06:37Well, it's so amazing because so many people got angry with the Zoran Mamdani in New York, right? Yeah, they, oh, the socialist is winning. How could a socialist win? And it's like, I don't know, guys, have you looked at the fact that the average first time homebuyer thing is now 38 years old? Have you understood the fact that no one you know can get a decent job without going$100 ,000 in debt for a degree that objectively taught them nothing and they're actually just doing any learning they actually do on the job anyway? If you've built a society that shows people your system doesn't work. Now, I think there is a much better way than communism.

1:07:14Oh, I agree. But you have to show, though. You can't just sit there and obstinately say, no, we're the system ride or die. We don't care if you're homeless. We don't care if you can't have children. We don't care if you're going to live the rest of your life in your mom's basement. That's your fault. There's nothing wrong with the system ever. There's no reason to look at any of this. And I think, again, we're really seeing that shift, right? We're seeing that mentality shift in the younger conservative core. They truly understand, like, if I don't fix this soon, then I'm never having a future.

1:07:44I'm never having children. Like, my bloodline will end. My religion will fade because it's no longer practiced. My community will collapse. I don't have time to sit around here and debate. My bloodline will end. My religion will fade. And my community will collapse. Those are the things that you are programmed by nature, in fact, in my view, by God to care about. That's what matters. Absolutely. And the idea that we almost never talk about any of this, that any discussion on any of these ideas is completely deeply forbidden. Yeah. Then what are you trying to do to our society? I think it becomes pretty clear.

1:08:18Well, of course, of course, they're trying to eliminate it. Right. And that would include like my whole family. So, no, I, how radical are young people getting? More radical by the day. And, you know, I'll say this. After COVID, my idea that we're going to have some kind of revolution really faded pretty quickly. Yeah, I know. Right? I don't think we're going to have some, you know, 1776 revival here. I don't think that's going to be what happens. I think what's going to happen is people... 1789? I think what's more likely... I hope not. Let's hope not. Yeah. I don't want to go on the guillotine either.

1:08:52But I think more and more what's going to happen is people are going to check out. We're already seeing this, right? We hear people, men walking away from the workforce, walking away from forming families. We're going to keep eating out the center of what actually holds our society up. We think it's abstract ideas. What it actually is, is young men going out, working, forming families, finding worthy women, creating families, building societies together. That's what actually holds these things up. And it's all going to haul out from the center. And you can't import foreigners fast enough to solve this problem for you.

1:09:24And so what we're going to end up with is if we don't take radical action, I don't think it's some kind of armed rebellion. What we're going to see is a society that falls apart from the inside because it loses its capacity. It loses its ability to do complex tasks, to coordinate all the things that require this vast empire to function. And when those things start dropping out, then we're really going to be up a creek. Well, we're there. Yeah, we're at Sari's started. You can't fly across the country right now with a single stop and get there on time. It's not, you know, or the whole air, I know nobody seems to care, but like our air traffic system is like collapsed.

1:09:58Have you flown on a plane that's been on time recently? This was the getting here is probably the first time in a long time. Right. Anything with a connecting flight is possible. And this is just the competency crisis because we're specifically checking out all the capable people from our society while we're simultaneously importing a bunch of people who have not had that ability and are going to be automated out of existence for most of the jobs we're hiring them for anyway. And in no way are we cultivating a set of people who are ready to face the challenges of a complicated world that we're existing in.

1:10:29Yeah. So, I mean, I do disagree with you on one point when you say that there will be no rebellion. There'll be no violence. in response to all of this, I think there already is a lot of violence, but it's self-harm. So like, and you see this in formerly England, now the UK, but people are not fighting the government. They're not killing the tyrants. They're killing themselves. Yeah. Well, that's the beauty of importing factionalism into your society. The factions can fight each other, not you. Again. Right, but I'm saying the native population, the indigenous population of that island is decided to just kill itself.

1:11:05Yes. And then that's been the horrible tragedy is it either resigns itself to something terrible or, like you said, they just turn on each other. They never blame the people in charge. But again, that's the beauty of democracy. There's always another level at which there's another voter. There's someone else or some other faction. You just didn't select the correct people. It's never actually the people who are benefiting, making money off of your misery. So democracy is like a perfect way to dodge responsibility for crimes is what you're saying? It's an incredible pressure release valve when done.

1:11:37And again, I do think that small scale Republican government can work. We have seen that work. I think that was initially the intention of the United States and how it operated. But mass democracy, the idea that, I mean, look what they're doing in the UK. They just unilaterally expanded the franchise to 16 year olds. Why? What's the purpose for doing that? Pakistanis. Well, the younger population coming through. Also, they know they can control those people easier. These are this is a younger population is going to be more susceptible to mass media and manipulation. It's going to increase their control over that country.

1:12:11It'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 society and have a proven track record of taking care of their community. Instead, it's just literally anyone with a telephone or a television. That's all that matters. so democracy's come to the end is what you're saying uh we will continue to have elections uh you know that we will continue to go through it but it's it's increasingly a ghost dance it's increasingly a dead form of something that actually doesn't impact uh our society are you familiar with the ghost dance yes i am okay so one of the saddest stories in american history yeah this is how you got the massacre can you tell it sure of course so the so uh 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 and there was going to help them to reclaim their land.

1:13:09And this was at the end of the Indian Wars, this is after they'd lost. Yeah, this is after the Indians had lost. The majority had been forced on reservations continually over and over again. But the idea is they could reconnect with the spirit of their society by going through this ritual and their ancestors would protect them. And they actually all gathered together, mainly the Lakota tribe. And 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. And instead, you got the massacre and wounded knee.

1:13:41And this is in many ways what we are doing with liberal democracy. Now, we keep going through the motions. Oh, well, you know, there is a democracy. We vote. We do this. And this will change society. This will fundamentally change the way things work. But over and over, we just keep running into these hail of bullets because 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. We're people turning a steering wheel or mashing a gas pedal on a car without an engine. And at this point, the question of the Trump administration is, can you make America work like a republic again?

1:14:18Is that even possible anymore? I think they're trying. I 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. But they're running into every possible barrier you can imagine, legal, cultural, everything. And so I think that they're going to have to overcome a massive barrier if they want to attempt to return us to that system. And I'm not sure that they can. So if democracy is as kind of desiccated and useless and fake as you described, then, you know, nothing that fake can last. It's going to be replaced by a new system.

1:14:55What will that system be? And what will we call it? You 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. that ultimately the thing that allows for hegemons to operate globe-spanning or at least large regional powers to operate at the scale we're looking at in an advanced society like our own is a kind of soft totalitarianism. Requires it, is what you're saying. You can't actually run a country this big unless you're totalitarian. This is a systems issue. And again, some things are virtue issues, some things are principle issues, but some things are just system issues.

1:15:31Can you describe what that means? When we're looking at different political forms, they have limitations. And 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. It's going to start to come apart. The same is true when we get to these vast empires. They have to be run in a specific way. If 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.

1:16:05And one of them is the Chinese system. And that seems to be one of the most successful ones at this time. Again, I wouldn't want to live under it. It's not our way of being, but it is one that our global elites seem to be settling on as the model. Of course. Of course. Where your prison is invisible, but no less real. You don't have to take anyone to the gulag. They just can't get a job or a house or a wife. We don't need to put people in concentration camps anymore. You still might, but you don't need to do that anymore to be tyrannical. We can debank you. We can ensure that no one can ever hear your voice again, that you're never allowed in polite society, that there's a camera watching you 24-7 that will destroy your life if you step off the reservation.

1:16:45We don't need the trains anymore. What's interesting is that everybody seems on board with this in our leadership class. Like you imagine the Republicans get in power and they'll make it absolutely impossible for digital currency to become real. Central Bank digital currency. They're already taking steps. Republicans in Congress laying the found work, you know, the basis for that now. So is there any escape from it? Not for a while. Well, and I think this is also why we see all of our governments rushing towards artificial intelligence as well, right? Because this is another way to manage populations in a vast society.

1:17:21Algorithms that can constantly screen everything you're doing and everything you're saying and every opinion that you have and every piece of media you consume and what library books, if you're even checking out a library book at this point, if that even exists. Like these are things that are all critical and AI can do these tasks at scale at a high level of rapidity. And 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. But 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, as a way to exert their power.

1:17:56I don't think anyone's pretending otherwise. For all the talk of how AI is going to change the future, which clearly it will, there's almost no description of the upside for the average person. Like no one even bothers to tell the guy making 100 grand deer how this is going to make his life better. And it's even worse because it starts abstracting away people's understanding of reality. Your epistemology is fundamentally broken when you rely on an AI search engine to bring you the truth. And as somebody who was teaching high school not that long ago, I've already seen it with just the dumber versions of Google.

1:18:28No children have any context for any decision they're making. They don't, again, as we talked about, they don't have a link to history. They don't have a link to tradition. They don't have religion that informs anything. All the knowledge they have is what's delivered to them digitally in that search. That's what they believe to be authoritative in every area. And so when you see that over and over again, you realize the individual is going to have no decision-making power because they don't even have organic experiences in real life to draw knowledge from. All they have is the digital world that's been served to them through AI.

1:18:58So if you're older like me, you imagine censorship is the threat to speech, right? So there are all kinds of things that are true that are being said now in the internet right now that are like an actual threat to the way things are. So they have to be shut down. I mean, I'm just operating in that assumption. And they will be shut down, but they won't be censored. They'll be overwhelmed by AI. That's my guess. One of the things you can do is just flood the zone. You 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. Or 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.

1:19:39Either way, as you say, you don't have to do hard censorship. The 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. But 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. That's not how they're going to receive information. Mm-hmm. So 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, but underneath it all, the regime maintains power through technology, a social credit system of some sort where you do the well of the regime where you just can't live.

1:20:18You don't get executed, but no one would choose that. Only a tenth of 1 % of the population really rebels against you and then the, you know, the really bad ones you kill, but the rest you just like let live in obscurity? I mean, I don't think that's coming. I think that's here, right? How 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? We haven't formalized many of these things in the United States yet, but we've been building this type of soft power for generations.

1:20:49It's very clear that this is how our oligarchy intends to rule us and does rule us on a regular basis. Again, I don't think it's as severe as it is in China. I think we have more time before we get past the point of no return. But I think we're well into our era of being ruled by this kind of technocratic, omnipresent state. Then I don't – so here's the contradiction at the heart of your description. if you're saying that the ruling bureaucratic class maintains power by sowing chaos and division in the society, anarcho-tyranny. But if they have so much control, why do they need to do that? Why not have an orderly...

1:21:32I mean, the upside of a totalitarian society is order. I mean, it's not worth it. It's always bad, right? Or it's a violation of my principles. But at least there was no crime in the Soviet Union, or less, right? Well, I think the reason that they create the chaos is that this allows them ultimately to avoid the formation in any of the bonds that would push back against them. Of course. Right. But 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.

1:22:11create TSA. Sorry, I'm a prisoner to my outrage. But if they already have all this power, which they do, the tyrants, why not have an orderly society too? Well, they're still, as you point out, not entirely in control of the scenario. We're not quite there yet, right? There's still a good amount. I mean, Americans, whether they deployed them or not during COVID, are still in control of a vast amount of guns. There's still a ghost of federalism in our system. There is a level of obstruction that can be brought by localities and states and these kind of things. There is still a narrative factor involved also in our political formula.

1:22:51A political formula is the way in which your rulers justify their power. In China, their political narrative is very different. But the United States, it is built on this idea of we are a free society. We are a society that at the very least allows you every libertine desire that you have. As much sodomy as you want. Right, exactly. Yeah, not the right to live where you want next to the people you want to. No right to form a religious community, but lots of freedom of sodomy for sure. Yeah. Freedom to purchase a small child, if you like. However, you know, that— And some are availing themselves of the opportunity.

1:23:27Some conservatives. However, if that's what you want to call it. You think Dave Rubin's conservative? Like, what is conservative about Dave Rubin? He left the left, right, which is kind of the classic— I don't mean the left. It seems squarely there to me. I 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, you know, that kind of thing. Dave Rubin seemed, and Barry Weiss too, seem like the main purveyors of identity politics in the world that I live in. How have they left the left?

1:24:00There is one type of identity politics that is resoundingly celebrated on the right. Not by me. I don't like identity politics. I don't either, but there is one that is sacred. Tough shit. You know, I'm against it. So all identity politics. So, 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. But I'm not there yet. Anyway, 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.

1:24:48That's when you'll know they have complete totalitarian control. Or they recognize that the utility of destroying the country is coming to an end. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Because at that point, they'll feel like, okay, we own this completely. So why wreck it? It's our house now. Yes. And this is how you, you know, again, this is the classic principle of actually how you get a king, right? Because 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. So if you actually care about that, if you're actually going to benefit, why not invest your control in actually producing a better population?

1:25:24I completely agree. 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. Right. You know, if all your serfs die, you starve. Yeah, there's a true incentive to care for those people. Now, again, 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. And so what options are left? As we've said, at this scale, empire is more or less the only option. And then the question is, do you want some kind of autocracy?

1:25:58Do you want some kind of disembodied ruling council? Those really quickly become your options when you're entering into that kind of society. Can I ask, so you've said that the options are the empire continues to expand or we pull back the empire. Right. What about status quo, which is always my preferred option anyway, just in life? why does the empire need to keep acquiring and controlling? Why isn't it enough to say we're this awesome empire? We're great. We're awesome. And we don't need to manage every little thing, but we're in control of our hemisphere and like Japan and South Korea. And that's just great.

1:26:33Why do we need to control Yemen too? It's the natural hubris, I think, of any elites. Again, I think there are large incentives of scale when it comes to the managerial elite. But 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. And so if you've got this thousand-pound gorilla in the room, you want it fighting your enemies, right? And so there's a high degree of investment by different powers and peoples in wielding the United States as a weapon, not for the interests of our people or what would benefit us or even our empire, but what would benefit those individuals in the nations that they're associated with.

1:27:12And 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. When will we know that our old system is completely gone? I don't think we will for a long time. If you think about the way that Rome transitioned, of course, it started as a kingdom. It became a republic. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's the same cycle we were on. And then it became an empire. And when it became an empire, no one started calling Octavian or Augustus the emperor.

1:27:47He just assembled the different powers of the principate. And the Senate stuck around for many generations. They still had influence. There were many Roman emperors who had to listen to the Senate and the men who were there. They didn't disappear. But over time, we slowly see the way that Rome operated shifted. More and more power got moved into the emperor's hands. Less and less sat with the people and even with the aristocracy eventually. And I think you'll see something very similar with the United States. No one's going to come by and hit a gong and declare that the United States has fallen, the empire is over.

1:28:19We'll probably just see a similar change over time. But in Rome, one of the hallmarks of this evolution was the declining power of the legislative branch. Was that, I mean, we definitely see that here. For sure. And again, the Senate existed, it had influence, but yes, more and more it was very clear that that's not where decisions were made. And this is, again, very common in complex societies, larger bureaucratic societies come with it because to manage all of this area to all these peoples, all this scale, you need a high degree of expertise. And the people in the legislative branch simply don't have it.

1:28:56So 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. And 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. But even then, in our system, we've seen that the executive has trouble even controlling his own branch.

1:29:32The entire first Trump presidency was defined by his inability to wrangle the executive branch and bring it to heel. And 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. They knew that at the end, that was the biggest barrier to run in the country for the will of the people. Is there any hope of reform? I am skeptical, and I hate saying that because I love my country. It's the only place I've ever lived. I'm never going anywhere else. I'm never running away. This is my home.

1:30:03These are my people, and I'm never abandoning it. But I always say I'm short on the American regime, but I'm long on the American people. Will we have exactly the United States as we understand it in 20, 50, 100 years? I'm doubtful. But will the American people still be strong? Will they still be resilient? Will their way of life live on? That's what we're fighting for at this point. And that's achievable. I think that is. Could you imagine a country where people were allowed to kind of live according to their own customs in different regions? Yeah, and we've seen this again. This is a classic model of, you know, even the American understanding originally was federalist, right?

1:30:42This is how we overcame so many of our different cultures or understandings, even when we were simply a few colonies, because we knew that actually those states had their own way of doing things and we didn't need to reach in and manipulate them at every given time. But unfortunately, the story of the United States is the story of the erosion of those rights, right? We destroyed the 10th Amendment. The 14th Amendment completely, in incorporation doctrine, radically changed the way that we understand the different rights of our states. Obviously, the civil war and the inability of a state to leave had its own implications for how a region can be governed.

1:31:19So there are, even in our own history, real examples of how we can have individual customs and individual ways of being even inside our society. But we're much more like each other as Americans than we are different people. So there's still overlap there. You don't have to have radically different ways of life. But you are allowed a certain amount of freedom. You don't have to have the central government constantly dictating everything. But technology makes it easier for the central government. I mean, 1956, Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Central High School in Little Rock to enforce Brown versus Board.

1:31:57And that wouldn't have happened, you know, 50 years before because how would you get the 101st Airborne to Little Rock? You couldn't just put them on a plane. Right. And, but now, you know, almost anything is possible from Washington with technology. So, I mean, do you think there will be places if you have like a different view of things or you want to live near people like you? Will that be allowed? Again, 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. I think that all of the things we're talking about, all the technology, all the logistics, they require competence managing complexity, right?

1:32:39Yeah. The very thing we're losing. No, that's right. And so all of these impositions by the central government on our way of life require them to be able to coordinate these actions. And even though the technology is going to get more advanced, will we be able to regularly apply it? Will we be able to maintain it? Will you actually be able to deliver that power and control on a consistent basis? That's going to be the question, I think, that determines that. I 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.

1:33:11and some nice, by the way, but just dumb. So like, you know, everything was against the law, but you could do whatever you wanted to do. And that was kind of great. Yeah, there is a certain level at which a third world kleptocracy is freer than the society we're in right now. That's the argument. I used to make a dinner in DC to my neighbors and they really hated it. But I always say, you know, you can do whatever you want here. like whatever you want, except I guess be Donald Trump. But short of that, you could do whatever you wanted. Interesting. Do you, I noticed that there is this still to this moment, this desire to like kill the whites.

1:34:01I think it's so weird. I think it's like almost like the official policy or it's certainly the mindset of so many in power across the world. And I don't really understand what that is. It's majority white countries that are being targeted for mass migration. And it's only those countries. And I'm not saying this as some sort of crazy white partisan. I am white, but I'm not like obsessed with being white or anything, but I just notice it. And I think it's really evil, but I don't really know where that comes from. Where does that come from? Well, a large amount of it comes from the narrative that we tell ourselves.

1:34:40So 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. and any differences that show themselves that manifest between races can only be de facto evidence of racism, right? This is literally the law of the land. Most people don't understand that after Griggs versus Duke Power, we have this idea called disparate impact. And 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.

1:35:15That's the only explanation. So like, for instance, the Sheetz gas station chain started running background checks, criminal background checks on their employees, which makes perfect sense. You don't want someone who's a felon running your gas station, right? But 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. And even though that's just an objective fact uncovered by the Sheetz gas station using that standard, it's still racist. It's still their intention, whether they had it or not, whether or not they had the intention, they are still guilty of racism.

1:35:55And so therefore they have to get rid of this policy. This is the way we see our entire society. You have to, in some way, assume that whites have held down other groups inside your society. That's the only explanation for why they might be in one position and those other minorities might be in another. And so you have to destroy those people. You 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. Like that's the conclusion we seem to draw over and over again.

1:36:26And that gives a blank check to people to treat many people in America and other European nations as less than human. And boy, are they. There's 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. I don't know the context of it. I'm sure there's a lot I don't understand, but from the video, it looks like what happens a lot in this country is they were beaten up because they were white. Very common. And the stats prove it. But it's, that fact is suppressed.

1:37:03Every single person knows it. It happens in prisons. It happens in schools. It happens in parks. It happens at jazz festivals. But 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. But what I find interesting is that the authorities are like angry when you point it out. And there's this video of this kind of fat, middle-aged police chief, a person posing as a police chief in Cincinnati. We don't have any police chiefs who seem like they could actually be beat cops, I noticed. They're all like pathetic. And this woman is, she's angry and she's lecturing, you know, when you talk about this, it's disinformation.

1:37:41And like, there's no mention at all that these people seem to be targeted for the race. Even if they weren't, even if it was a colorblind crime, they're lying unconscious on the ground. She's not mad about that. She's mad that someone might be talking about white people getting hurt. What is that? So there's a lot of reasons behind that. But the most shocking one to your audience will be the community relations services. So if they're not familiar with this organization, it's statutorily required by the Civil Rights Act. And its job, in theory, is to go out and smooth over race relations in the United States.

1:38:14Wherever 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. In reality, what the CRS actually does is goes in and tells white victim families that they need to put out specific statements. They coach them through particular narratives. They are often provided with written statements to go out and talk to the media about it. And you'll see this pattern over and over again, right? Usually it's an elderly father figure if the father isn't available. They come out. They tell a story about how their child was great, the one that was killed.

1:38:51and that ultimately we should be focusing on the greatness of that child and that person who was killed and not the violence that occurred. We don't want to create division by focusing on the crime itself. And please respect my family at this time by focusing on the mourning victim and not on why this happened, what actually took place. Let's not focus on those details. None of that is an accident. That was a department created by the government. They stage managed the entire Trayvon Martin incident. These people have been involved in a lot of different. But they're targeting a specific group and that group is whites.

1:39:24Yes. And I just think it's bonkers that that could happen in our country and no one mentions it. And it's just so sinister. Again, if it was happening to Malaysians, I'd be like, come on, what are we doing? Yeah. And again, it's happening to the majority, the quickly disappearing majority in this country. Yeah, and again, I think they're given this blank check because ultimately whiteness is this inherent evil. That any disparity can only exist because white people did it to you and you're constantly a victim of it. And so any violence you bring against them is allowed. And 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.

1:40:12and the police, for instance, that police chief, she's not there to prevent the violence against that white couple. Of course not. She's there to prevent you from preventing violence against that white couple. That's the actual purpose she serves. On whose behalf? Well, again, I think it's not a mistake. I think this is something - It's definitely not a mistake. It's everywhere. And it's in every country. It's in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, UK, US. Everyone in those countries is exactly the same policy or a species of it. and exactly the same attitudes and all of them are enforced by force.

1:40:45And I think it is that these ruling elites find that it generates a wedge inside their societies that allows them to maintain power. It creates this disruptive effect that keeps effective communities from forming that would push back against totalitarian control. It allows them to raid these people and take their wealth and transfer it to new constituents who are easier to control. I think it serves both narrative and ideological interests, but also just raw power and financial interests as well. Man, that's dark. What are the signs of hope that you see in the United States? I think that there are many signs of hope that I actually see.

1:41:26I know we talked about a lot of bad stuff here today, but I think there are several big ones. First is that more and more people who describe themselves as conservative or right wing care more about their families and care more about their families, their communities than they care about ideology. And that that is starting to sink in. I 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. And we certainly don't 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.

1:42:06I think we're also seeing a willingness to adjust and look at the economy. It 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. But actually, when we see the results of it, they're harming our communities. And 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. And I see more and more young people looking at religion as a way forward, which to me is the most important thing. You do see that. Yeah.

1:42:40I don't think it's everyone. Well, it's never going to be. No, but those people who create intentional communities, religious communities, they're the people who are going to make it to the other side of this. They're the people who are going to be passing down their values. They're the people who are going to draw strength from a tradition and a transcendent truth that others don't have. And so I see more and more young people yearning for that. And I think that that is a huge spark of hope. So 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, but you see people who just sort of grew up in America deciding I'm going to join an intentional religious community?

1:43:27Yeah, I do. And I see more people forming, realizing they need to move near people who have shared values with them. I know certain people living in the Ridge Runner community in Tennessee and other examples where they recognize that not only am I 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. I need to actually physically live in a community with people who share these ideas. again, it's small amounts of people right now. It's still forming. It's still at its genesis, but I think it is expanding and I think it increasingly will be the successful societies in the United States.

1:44:07Amazing. Would you consider joining one? Yeah, I think I would. And 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. And 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. Eventually, 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. Luckily, I live in a community that's nowhere near that issue. And 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.

1:44:45But for many people, they don't even have that already. And And so for them, the moving is the easy decision. But what if you got a job in private equity in Woodside? Would you go? Well, the beauty now is that even if you have one of these jobs, it's all remote, right? There's no reason for us to have to live like this anymore. We don't have to cram ourselves into these horrific urban areas to pursue certain career options at this point. That's one of the few upsides of the technological downside we've been talking about. You can't actually just puck up and move across the country and live somewhere else and work in a different field.

1:45:17You don't have to be geographically locked into your particular industry. Of people under 30, how many do you know who have like liberal, like circa 2020 liberal attitudes? No, they're radicalizing in one direction or the other, right? That's what we're seeing is the mass polarization. Either they're getting very right-wing or very left-wing. And what is, I know what right-wing looks like and I approve in general. But what does left-wing look like? You're seeing a lot more people deeply invest in kind of the trans or polyamorous relationships. They completely throw off old social structures. They detach from any form of religion that's going to try to tie them to any tradition.

1:46:04You see them get economically radical. Again, this is why Mom Donnie is more successful than he would be otherwise. And you see them really getting aggressively attacking the idea of any kind of classic American or European connected identity that becomes a very passionate part of who they are. Really? So what is, so it's a South Asian identity? Like what is the identity if it's not tied to a specific? It's this really abstract progressivism. It's this really, they'll pull out maybe tribal culture, you know, they'll, you know, do some land acknowledgement or talk about the ancient peoples of some African tribe.

1:46:44But ultimately, it really is this hyper modern, progressive, completely derastinated existence where your identity is highly malleable. It can be changed from day to day. Maybe today I'm male, I'm female. I'm married to you. Now I've got three other girlfriends that we're all involved together. Our children don't really belong to anybody. You know, it's all the nightmare stuff that the right wing would do. It's been tried so much. Yeah. That's a very old path, actually. That's the Aleister Crowley path, who did not die happy, I will say. It 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.

1:47:25France can't say that. UK can say that. We can say that. But that may change. And if there is violence, it seems like it's going to come from that group to me. Well, it will come from that group for a couple of reasons. One, you know, up to this point, they basically had a free hand to do so, right? What is Antifa except a group of state shock troops deployed against the youth wing of the Democratic Party, of course. Yeah, it's their brown shirts, right? And so that's exactly what we see over and over again. And 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.

1:48:02They were right. And they were right. And so, yeah, if violence is going to come from anywhere, it's going to come from the people who have a blank check to do it. How will you respond to that? I mean, direct violence against family or probably, I will end it immediately, of course. That's our duty. And 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. Do I live in an area where my sheriff is going to arrest me for stopping a mob from attacking my family? Those are the decisions that people are making right now.

1:48:36I 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. and that's just as true of violence. You never stop violence just by yourself. If that kind of thing comes, you're going to need a community to stand with you. On that hopeful note, thank you. Thank you.

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