Latest / PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy / Pill Pod 13 - Worst Marx in the Class

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Pill Pod 13 - Worst Marx in the Class · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:02
  All of us are going to be very heated today and we're gonna have to
• 0:06
  take turns. Are we gonna have to be heated? Uh? Eric,
• 0:09
  are you excited about this podcast or what? No, not at all.
• 0:14
  That's a good way, that's a good place to start. Eric wants to
• 0:17
  stay up in his ivory tower and as soon as culture war then he's like,
• 0:21
  nah, I'm above this. I'm floating in the clouds above this.
• 0:25
  Eric, just pound a few beers. Yeah, I'm already. I'm already
• 0:30
  through a bit of tequila. I'm feeling actually much more mellow than I should
• 0:36
  be. Probably whatever I was gonna say, you need to like let the
• 0:40
  dark side flow through you, let the anger exactly. Listeners, what's up?
• 0:46
  We were planning to move into marx as was promised, because the entire,
• 0:51
  the entire reason that we tried to go through Hagel was to at least
• 0:54
  give us some grounding to Okay, someone's got a police. Oh sorry,
• 1:00
  yeah, the fire, the fire stations right by my house. It's not
• 1:03
  the police. It's the fire. Don't worry, they're out the fires.
• 1:07
  Not authorized Marxist podcast. Yeah, they're coming to get all those postmodern neo
• 1:14
  Marxists rounding them up. As I was saying, we were planning to move
• 1:19
  into marx but then we had to call this emergency pod because of an article
• 1:23
  that appeared in the Culture War Skirmishes this week. So we will get to
• 1:29
  Marx eventually. I'm gonna have to brush up on my reading myself, But
• 1:33
  for now, we're going to descend from our lofty towers in the Elysium,
• 1:38
  our ivory towers, and come get our feet wet down on earth. I
• 1:44
  think we might get some heat on this episode that we don't usually get.
• 1:47
  So if you don't know us, we have a lot of letters behind our
• 1:49
  name, which we think provides us with the modicum of authority to wade into
• 1:53
  this ship. By the way, guys, this the e filter, the
• 1:57
  explicit filter, is going to be on for today, So pop your beers
• 2:04
  and rant away. Fucking yeah, beat me to it, Victor. Before
• 2:08
  we get into this event, this colossal event in the world of Internet leftism,
• 2:14
  I just wanted to ask you guys a question. Do you believe in
• 2:16
  Marxists? Now, do you believe in Marxism? But do you believe in
• 2:23
  Marxists? Do I believe they exist? We had a self avowed Marxist on
• 2:28
  the last episode. My understanding is they're kind of like Santa Claus. You
• 2:31
  know, they don't really appear except on those very special revolutionary periods where they
• 2:38
  arrive and they disseminate theory to the masses, who then spontaneously rise up and
• 2:44
  create a society philip pornographers and transgendered people and lesbians and all kinds of other
• 2:51
  wonderful things. Oh but I'm not sure, and yeah, no doubt about
• 2:54
  that. Boy, I don't know. I might have to be a contrarian
• 2:58
  on this because they're definitely are a lot of Marxist who believe in themselves at
• 3:01
  least are like unironic Marxists in grad school at least humanities and English programs.
• 3:07
  So this is just you kind of noticed these guys because they tend to kind
• 3:10
  of like name drop like commodity fetishism, like more often than Rudy Giuliani mentions
• 3:15
  nine to eleven, So you can kind of set you pick it up after
• 3:19
  a while, even if the conversation has nothing to do with like Marxism,
• 3:23
  It's like, oh, yeah, the author is clearly fetishizing X and Y
• 3:25
  subjects. So yeah, I'm not sure how much, like they're actually familiar
• 3:30
  with the theoretical end of things, but it does seem to have become the
• 3:34
  kind of default countercultural stance in some circles, at least in grad schools.
• 3:38
  So yeah, I mean I was thinking, I was thinking about our first
• 3:42
  actually ever pill Pot episode where we talked about the Jujacques versus Peterson debate,
• 3:46
  and I remember there's a key moment in that debate where Jujacques kind of pushes
• 3:50
  Peterson and says, you know, who are these Marxists you're talking about,
• 3:52
  right, like in the university, Like there's really none, not that many
• 3:55
  left at all. Like it's like, you know, there's people who buy
• 3:58
  who are into postmodern philosophy, or people who drawn Fuco or these other streams,
• 4:02
  but like actual Marxists certainly not in political science departments. Yeah, He's
• 4:08
  like, there's very there's very few left. And so I think in that
• 4:12
  to that extent, like maybe the answer would be there's a I mean even
• 4:15
  somebody like I don't know if you guys are familiar with Richard Wolf, it's
• 4:18
  like that that marks that alleged Marxist economist, and he's like kind of a
• 4:24
  Marxist, but he's a very I think he believes in Marxist critique. In
• 4:28
  fact, if I would rephrase this, I would say there are a lot
• 4:30
  of people in academia who who employ and find useful mark the Marxist form of
• 4:36
  critique to critique the economy. But in terms of Marxists who actually believe in
• 4:42
  the kind of old fashioned version of Marxist revolution, I think there's like less
• 4:46
  of those because even someone like Richard Wolfe, his idea is like, we
• 4:47
  have to bring more democracy to the workplace, Like that's basically his form of
• 4:51
  Marxism is like, let's democraty tie the workplace. Like does thinking about Marxism
• 4:57
  a Marxist make because you can be a Galien and all you have to do
• 5:01
  is let history think through you and they're bang, you are a Hegelian,
• 5:08
  but a Marxist. They have material responsibilities, right, you have to.
• 5:12
  You have to be seizing stuff. It's not like you have you put a
• 5:15
  bunch of buttons on your back and now you're are your backpack and now you're
• 5:19
  a Marxist or where like black skinny jeans, now you're a Marxist and smoke
• 5:24
  cigarettes every Marxist smokes cigarettes, that's true, I mean, the ones alleged
• 5:29
  alleged Marxists. But if you're paying rent, are you a Marxist? You
• 5:35
  are? If you hate your landlord, that's that's the rule. You got
• 5:40
  to always be like complaining about the landlord. Yeah, and smoking cigarettes when
• 5:44
  you're not supposed to really important. You never there's no such thing as a
• 5:47
  smoke free apartment if you're a Marxist, right, I mean, I'm totally
• 5:50
  willing to accept that Lenin was a Marxist, But even Lenin said I'm not
• 5:55
  a Marxist on a Russian communist, right, I believe Marx at one point
• 5:59
  said I'm not a Marxist. Marxism means whatever these people are invoking in my
• 6:03
  name. So you know, these controversies go way back to the nineteenth century.
• 6:08
  Yeah, it's interesting, the struggle to identify under a certainism. But
• 6:13
  then even yeah, it's funny, even the source of that is like,
• 6:15
  well, I'm not this, So it's just it's already it's been a contested
• 6:17
  concept for so long now that it's like, I mean, so that makes
• 6:20
  it actually a good question to ask, like, are there actually Marxists?
• 6:24
  I should say, though, one of the interesting things about this doctrine is
• 6:27
  just understandably more than any other one that I can think of that emerged from
• 6:31
  a professor's penn this provokes the most polarizing reactions, Like there are some political
• 6:38
  theorists and serious academics I know who will say, if you're a Marxist,
• 6:42
  this is just dribble. Why you bother with that any longer? It's nineteenth
• 6:45
  century economics at best, you know, the little Pagelianism splashed in, I
• 6:48
  think for co ironically, considering he's also lumped with these postmodern neo Marxist once
• 6:54
  that Marx was boring and you know, he didn't really find much of use
• 6:57
  to it, and then you can trast that with some other actions like Martin
• 7:01
  Hagland. I just finished his book This Life, and he almost gives marks
• 7:04
  a religious significance, right saying, Marx prophesies a new era of spiritual life
• 7:10
  that was to come once we were all free of wage labor under capitalism,
• 7:15
  and this is, you know, a society that's yet to come, but
• 7:18
  it's what we should all be striving for if we're genuinely faithful people who have
• 7:24
  any sense of humanity and any care for freedom. Well, we are not
• 7:27
  done the intro yet, so I think I need a sound effect that I
• 7:30
  can just drop in after every name drop, specifically for Matt so Hagland,
• 7:39
  what's up, listener? Can we just use like the internationale or something like
• 7:42
  that. You are listening to the Pill Pod today is Eric, Matthew,
• 7:48
  Victor and Victor second Victor Litvic, who we are also calling USSR Baby,
• 7:57
  so he's very familiar with Marxism, true true to format. Well, you
• 8:01
  may remember from the US episode too, so East meets West here Eastern Bloc,
• 8:07
  Victor and the Pill Pod, if you don't know, is the podcast
• 8:11
  where we only use the word comrade on ironically in bed. So how are
• 8:16
  you doing comrades? Good brother. We've been doing some heavy ship for the
• 8:22
  last few weeks. Many have said that our episode last week was the best
• 8:26
  one ever. Many are saying it it's around Well Matt h said it,
• 8:31
  and he's our most dedicated listener and the one who single handedly saved this podcast
• 8:35
  when we were all about to quit. So if you want to listen to
• 8:39
  the best episode ever, you have to sign up for the Patreon. Yeah,
• 8:43
  oh right, that was a Patreon only episode, right, and if
• 8:46
  you are a patron, I will underun I'm not ironically call you comrade.
• 8:50
  On everyone has a price. It's it's it's called capitalism. That was a
• 8:54
  check mate, So I have to say, like it was just I actually
• 8:58
  felt like I had read through the phenomenonlogy of spirit again after you've done that
• 9:01
  thing, because I was just like, man, we covered a fucking lot
• 9:05
  of talks. It was so if you want it, it's called pill Pod
• 9:09
  twelve. Become a patron today. Yeah, it's on uh what was it
• 9:13
  called again? Something of recognition. I gotta get mad props of Borner also,
• 9:20
  you know, yeah Borner was great. Yeah, yeah, no,
• 9:24
  he fucking it took like the most difficult theorist I can possibly think of,
• 9:28
  and really managed to make it seem relatively accessible and not just like accessible,
• 9:31
  but like vital. And it's so much nicer in over video chat than I
• 9:35
  imagined him to be, because on the on the chat he was like he
• 9:39
  seemed like defensive of the proper interpretation of Hegel, but then when he was
• 9:43
  actually there, he was like so nice and like charitable and amicable. Great
• 9:48
  too. I still feel kind of inhibited, not because of Borner, just
• 9:52
  because Hegel is such a it's such a thing getting Hegel wrong, getting Art's
• 10:00
  wrong, Like, I don't nobody cares if you get like Freud or Darwin
• 10:03
  wrong, But if you get Marx and Hegel wrong, it's like nice.
• 10:07
  I mean, if you get Freud wrong, it's just because you're repressing your
• 10:09
  own sexuality. Eric, that's the problem. Yeah, there's a there's a
• 10:15
  talking cure for that. But with Marx it's like you've betrayed the revolution.
• 10:18
  Well, I mean, if you get Freud wrong, it's because you don't
• 10:22
  realize that. You just want to bang your psychoanalyst, and you gotta get
• 10:24
  past that. So, without further Ado sopranos just came out, let's talk
• 10:31
  about getting Mark's wrong. Because Matt, Matt, thanks a fucking lot.
• 10:37
  You made us read the worst thing I have ever read for this week link
• 10:43
  in the description. Do not click on it. I warned you, and
• 10:46
  I know you're fucking gonna do it. Anyway. This is not an endorsement
• 10:48
  either of the article or the website, because both are dogshit. Anyway,
• 10:56
  Matt, what did you make us read this week? Yeah? Tell us
• 10:58
  about it? So it was an article in the kind of center right publication
• 11:05
  Quillette, which you know, full disclosure, I published with quite a bit
• 11:09
  back in the day, but that was before I turned into more of it.
• 11:13
  It's become so much more of a right wing echo chamber than it used
• 11:16
  to be. I feel like, well, the reason that I did it
• 11:18
  was actually because I want to reach out to conservatives and convince them that the
• 11:22
  left wasn't scary and also wasn't afraid of actually arguing with their ideas. But
• 11:24
  that's you know, near the here and there there. The piece was by
• 11:28
  your Mazzoni, who's the author of the virtual The Virtue of Nationalism, which
• 11:33
  one conservative book of the year back in twenty nineteen, and it's on the
• 11:39
  dangers posed by Marxism and why it is that liberals need to unite with conservatives
• 11:43
  in order to banish the specter of Marxism from the universities, from culture,
• 11:48
  from the media, and everywhere else where. It's managed to get its tentacles
• 11:52
  embedded. Yeah, and if that makes it sound more exciting, it's not.
• 11:56
  Make it from us. Five of us read it. You can skip
• 11:58
  it. Yeah, oh yeah, but although we'll talk about it here we'll
• 12:01
  talk about something so you don't have how to look at it, so that
• 12:05
  you don't have to exactly. I want to say, just just in defense
• 12:09
  of the article, I actually thought it was really interesting, not as a
• 12:11
  piece of intellectual history or commentary, because I don't think that it's really very
• 12:16
  good on those fronts, but as a kind of artifact that synthesized a lot
• 12:22
  of right wing stereotypes and concerns about marx together into a singular hole. It's
• 12:30
  really kind of fascinating because I don't know any other conservative commentator who's done this
• 12:35
  at such length and so publicly as Zony. Even somebody like Jordan Peterson,
• 12:39
  who rants on and on about postmodern neo Marxism or Ben Shapiro or whatever,
• 12:43
  has never kind of made a statement about this. Yeah, you're you're totally
• 12:48
  right. In some sense, it's true. Like the feeling I got when
• 12:50
  I was reading it was that that, like I was exactly reading something that
• 12:56
  all of these figures you just named, like Peterson, Shapiro, like Reuben
• 13:00
  Right, if they read it, they'd be like they would be like,
• 13:01
  yes, this is what I've been trying to say all this time. But
• 13:05
  now it's been said perfectly in a way, and if you want an endorsement,
• 13:09
  it's also been endorsed by Ted Cruz, who noted were Wolf. Ted
• 13:16
  Cruz came out of his cave to give his killer. Let's not forget.
• 13:22
  Oh did we export him to Why are we just exporting them? Yeah,
• 13:26
  he was born in California and the killer. Apparently we're not sending the US
• 13:31
  our best. Unfortunately, unlike Mexico, guys, I do got a shout
• 13:41
  out because I was checking, I was checking our stats. We have a
• 13:43
  lot of listeners in Texas, so comrades, I say this on ironically,
• 13:48
  we feel your pain living under the Zodiac killer Werewolf, Ted Cruz long lived
• 13:54
  Beato and the Revolution. Yeah. But you know, seriously, though this
• 14:00
  article was it just felt like a more sophisticated, like the Jordan Peterson view
• 14:05
  of just that Marxism is anything that involves oppress or and oppressed is like Marxism
• 14:11
  in addition to a few other things. But that's really what it felt like
• 14:13
  a very which, by the way, if that's if that's like a crucial
• 14:18
  feature of Marxism, then you know Aristotle is a Marxist because in the politics
• 14:22
  he says that you know class, we have to correct for class antagonisms because
• 14:26
  you have to. You have too many rich and poor people, then the
• 14:28
  whole society is going to fall apart. So like, by that logic,
• 14:31
  it just seems like even Aristotle would be a Marxist, at least in part
• 14:37
  well known. He's a well known Marxist, that Aristotle or even the American
• 14:41
  revolutionaries, Right, Yeah, Aristotle was a great reader of Marx. Well,
• 14:46
  you can't disprove it. If it's in Quillette, then it's true,
• 14:50
  the same way that the Beatles were great interpreters of Oasis. Right. But
• 14:54
  no, I just figured we should summarize it briefly. So in Hazoni's article,
• 14:58
  he claims that there are four fundamental features to the Marxist political framework.
• 15:03
  The first one is that Marx argues that all societies are divided into oppressor and
• 15:09
  oppressed classes, and that the state tends to enforce the interests of the oppressed
• 15:16
  of the oppressor classes. Secondly, that there's a kind of false consciousness that's
• 15:20
  disseminated across the body of the population as an official ideology. This means that
• 15:28
  both a pressor and oppressed aren't always aware of the dynamic that they're actually involved
• 15:31
  in. They may even think that it's justifiable. Thirdly, that there needs
• 15:35
  to be a revolutionary reconstitution of society that ends with the destruction of the pressor
• 15:41
  class and its replacement with a regime that's considerably more equal, and this will
• 15:46
  of course be a violent revolution. And then finally and fourthly, that Marxism
• 15:52
  are characterized by the desire to end class antagonisms through establishing a utopian state,
• 16:00
  and Posoni argues that how this is to be done is never specified. So
• 16:03
  those are the four features that he associates with Marxism, right, and what's
• 16:07
  different about Peterson because I have actually you said this is better than Peterson's reading
• 16:11
  of Marx. It's more sophisticated. I didn't say it's better, and I
• 16:15
  thought it was more or Peterson is more insipid because he doesn't actually use the
• 16:21
  words. This guy made an effort to use the words like false consciousness,
• 16:26
  the historical materialism, and class struggle, except he managed to twist these words
• 16:32
  so they're so unrecognizable from what Marx was actually talking about. So I want
• 16:36
  to ask you, guys, how do we approach this. Do we want
• 16:37
  to debunk any of these claims even with our paltry knowledge of Marx Or do
• 16:45
  we want to talk about why he wrote this article. I think we could
• 16:48
  probably do a little bit of both, but I would lean a little bit
• 16:52
  more towards the latter, just because doing a deep Frankly, I'm sure all
• 16:57
  we're going to be doing a debunk is not all is like the most necessarily
• 17:00
  interesting thing. Yeah, I mean, you don't have to go point by
• 17:03
  point. You can just kind of like attack the premise of what he's even
• 17:06
  arguing here, because he's coming at this from a very specific kind of like
• 17:07
  Cold War mindset, and that's sort of like the main problem kind of I
• 17:12
  can I I mean, one thing that I'll give you the premise, just
• 17:15
  the first the opening bit. Oh okay, we thought that nineteen eighty nine
• 17:19
  ended Marxism. Quote a mere thirty years later, Marxism is back and making
• 17:26
  an astonishingly successful bid to seize control of the most important American media companies,
• 17:32
  universities, schools, corporations, philanthropic organizations, courts, government, bureocracy,
• 17:38
  and churches. And that'd be pretty interesting in Marxist church. So Red scare.
• 17:42
  Basically, Yeah, that's the whole ground of the argument, is that
• 17:48
  there's some kind of Marxist takeover going on. Like that's what everything everything lives
• 17:53
  or dies on. Is that fucking true? Is there a Marxist takeover?
• 18:00
  I mean, forget about forget about the increasing wealth gap, forget about the
• 18:03
  centralization of control the media, forget about corporate ownership. There's a Marxist takeover
• 18:11
  going on beneath all of that other crap. And that's what we have to
• 18:14
  do. Forget that, like Donald Trump and his evidence, like this is
• 18:18
  the this is the fucking empirical point that everything in this article rests on.
• 18:23
  And like, is it fucking true? Is it true? I don't know
• 18:26
  if it is. If it's don't know about Well, this is why I
• 18:30
  asked the question at the beginning, do we believe in Marxist? So we're
• 18:33
  gonna go to Matt first and then to Victor. Okay, okay, cool,
• 18:37
  Well, I have an article coming out explaining why it is that I
• 18:40
  don't like this or don't agree with it at great length. So I'll just
• 18:44
  be really brief here and what are what where are you publishing it? It's
• 18:48
  gonna be in Jacobin. I don't know when it will come out, probably
• 18:51
  pretty soon since that's Marxist publication, so we can't believe anything they say.
• 18:55
  No, I think, I mean the mainstream media, dominant Jacobin magazine be
• 19:00
  read by millions it is. I mean, I'm getting paid. I'm getting
• 19:03
  paid almost a million dollars just for this piece, right because we have so
• 19:06
  many corporate owners who are willing to donate to us. Don't tell anyone that,
• 19:10
  but you know, my house is going to be financed like on the
• 19:14
  basis of this article. But no, basically in some I think the biggest
• 19:17
  problem with this piece is if you read it, he treats Marxism primarily as
• 19:21
  a political doctrine about oppressor and oppressed classes. And nowhere in this entire piece
• 19:26
  does the concept of political economy arise, which is shocking when you think that
• 19:32
  Marxist two most famous books are both entitled a Critique of Political Economy or Contribution
• 19:37
  to the Critic of Political Economy. And this is really telling, right because
• 19:41
  for his owny, the only thing that's significant about Marxism is this notion that
• 19:44
  there's an oppressor and that there's an oppressed class. Uh and he's kind of
• 19:48
  tired of leftist rallying behind the oppressed classes to try to change the status quo.
• 19:55
  He doesn't mind invoking the suppressor a press narrative when it comes to conservative
• 19:57
  groups that he feels are being impressed by a nasty liberals and aggressives. But
• 20:00
  generally people shouldn't be doing that. And when you do that, you lose
• 20:04
  a lot that's distinctive about Marxism and just treat it like some kind of pastiche
• 20:11
  of itself, because Marxism without a Critique of Political Economy really isn't much of
• 20:15
  a doctrine at all. There's nothing distinct or interesting about it. It's without
• 20:21
  the realm, exactly right. I wouldn't even call it coke. It's more
• 20:23
  like that PC brand or no name brand car. Yeah. And I think
• 20:30
  what makes this interesting, though, is that this is a very typical gesture
• 20:34
  on the part of a lot of political conservatives who endeavor to try to dissociate
• 20:40
  Marxism from its embeddedness in Hegelian philosophy in the critique of capitalist political economy,
• 20:45
  because all that stuff's fairly sophisticated and would involve some real arguments to actually undermine,
• 20:52
  and they try to treat it like it's just some kind of rhetorical political
• 20:56
  doctrine about a press or a press class that can be easily dismissed as basically
• 21:00
  whining on the part of certain groups of people, and once it's dismissed,
• 21:04
  you don't have to really deal with it any longer, which of course is
• 21:07
  not the case since we're living in a late capitalist, postmodern society. And
• 21:12
  if anything, a lot of what Marx has to say is more descriptively telling,
• 21:17
  I think, than it never has been before. And I think this
• 21:19
  is what they're ultimately worried about, even if they don't express that explicitly,
• 21:22
  and a lot of police pieces like that. So that's just my take on
• 21:26
  this. Yeah, no, so, I thank you for keeping it short.
• 21:29
  I assume that's short for Matt McMahon. Oh it is, I think
• 21:34
  so. I think it's very telling also that at the beginning of part two
• 21:37
  he basically like this is his evidence for saying that things are Marxist, or
• 21:41
  at least part of it. He says, you know, when people you
• 21:45
  know who he's referring to as Marxists, he's like, they'll disorient their opponents
• 21:48
  by referring to their beliefs with the shifting vocabulary of terms, including the left,
• 21:52
  progressivism, social justice, anti racism, anti fascism, black lives matter,
• 21:57
  critical race theory, identity, paul text, political correctness, wokeness,
• 22:00
  and more So, he's basically admitting, he's literally telling you right there in
• 22:04
  that sense, I am conflating Marxism with basically everything that I don't like.
• 22:11
  But he's so frustrating. He's saying, you are confusing me by turning your
• 22:15
  Marxism into all these terms, when he is the one turning Marxism into all
• 22:19
  these terms. I mean, the idea that these groups might actually believe different
• 22:23
  things and have different agendas is just really foreign to this piece of imagination,
• 22:29
  right, It's like really like black Lives matter, you know, as a
• 22:33
  Marxist movement. Was Martin Luther King a Marxist? You know? Was Abraham
• 22:37
  Lincoln a Marxist when he decided to end slavery? What the hell is going
• 22:41
  on here? Yeah? I mean the fact that that he's just folks so
• 22:44
  focused on the suppressor and pressed relationship, which was also I think what Jordan
• 22:48
  Peterson was obsessed with it, and like you said, like ignoring the political
• 22:52
  economy is so crucial, and I kind of think it's telling I almost when
• 22:56
  I read this and also listen there's also a Collette podcast where they interviewed author,
• 23:00
  and when I listened to it, I got this like strange feeling,
• 23:03
  like almost conspiratorial, that there's like a strategy behind this almost and like here's
• 23:07
  kind of my like half big conspiracy theory. Is like it almost seems like
• 23:12
  these argumentative moves by conflating all these different things with Marxism, it's like he's
• 23:18
  giving his fellow conservatives or other readers who lean conservative, the authority by writing
• 23:23
  this very sophisticated piece to be like, oh, like that's what Marxism is.
• 23:26
  I knew it all along. I don't have to think about Marxism.
• 23:30
  I don't have to take Marxist critique seriously anymore. This guy's told me what
• 23:33
  Marxism is, and I know that it's all those things that are bad.
• 23:37
  And the other move that he makes, which I think is really interesting,
• 23:40
  is he basically talks about how liberalism sets the stage for this right. He
• 23:44
  says liberalism, by like, by degrading like traditional values, opens the door
• 23:52
  to being able to complain about all these little grievances that people feel they're being
• 23:59
  misrecking gus in society or oppressed in society. So he's almost like doing a
• 24:03
  double takedown where he can be like, okay, like liberalism, it's their
• 24:06
  fault for for for opening the door to complaints about being about feelings of oppress
• 24:12
  from of oppression from different classes, and so now we can like it's an
• 24:18
  attempted takedown of like liberalism and what he's calling Marxism. But then all the
• 24:22
  while he's not even actually telling us anything about what Marxism really is. Yeah,
• 24:27
  so I'll interject on that point just to say, yes, there is
• 24:32
  an oppressor and an oppressed in marx it's the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. But
• 24:37
  he generalizes this to say that there's always classes and they're always trying to exploit
• 24:42
  each other, which, no, the only exploitation that occurs here is not
• 24:47
  due to fairness. It's not about being unfair. It's a being. It's
• 24:51
  one class owns the surplus labor of another class. That's it. It's not
• 24:56
  about it's it's a measurable effect. You can measure that. And he says
• 25:02
  like this is a quote. Marx argues that as an empirical matter, people
• 25:04
  invariably form themselves into cohesive groups. He calls them classes which exploit one another
• 25:11
  to the extent that they're able. And this is not what Marx is saying.
• 25:14
  He's not saying that we have like twenty groups everywhere. He's saying,
• 25:17
  we have a group of owners, and those owners own the labor of the
• 25:22
  people who don't own their own labor, and that's it. They don't form
• 25:26
  themselves into these groups based on identities. It's just because he owns what.
• 25:30
  All you have to do is open your eyes, see who owns what,
• 25:33
  and then you have classes. I want to interject also here because I think
• 25:37
  BRISONI said something that was really smart, and then I'm actually going to pass
• 25:41
  it on to lit Thick, as was called, because I think that he
• 25:42
  can maybe clarify some of the things that I'm thinking about here, because I
• 25:47
  think both Brazoni said was really accurate, right that the problem with these kind
• 25:51
  of pieces is this really easy for us to see here and pick on it
• 25:53
  from our standpoint, you know, as academics, and being like he doesn't
• 25:56
  understand Marxism, he doesn't know what it's about. But people don't really accept,
• 26:00
  like people in our position don't always understand that these pieces have a really
• 26:04
  powerful rhetorical effect, particularly a most conservative and liberal audiences. Because Pazoni has
• 26:08
  a respected intellectual right he wrote a prestigious book that won a major prize.
• 26:14
  You know, he went to Princeton. And when he says this is what
• 26:17
  Marxism is and this is why you should dismiss it, there's a huge number
• 26:21
  of people who will say, well, if a smart guy with all these
• 26:22
  kind of credentials is claiming this is what Marxism is and we can dismiss it,
• 26:26
  then that's just what we ought to do, right, And this is
• 26:30
  why you can't just sit there and say, wow, this is dumb,
• 26:33
  let's ignore it. It needs to be kind of engaged with right exactly exactly,
• 26:37
  And I figure Litviik probably knows why it is that these rhetorical strategies.
• 26:42
  You're absolutely right macus to that point. There is this whole like sort of
• 26:45
  industry out there which is kind of like using the specter of Marxism to kind
• 26:49
  of publish articles and kind of like feed this whole audience. But this really
• 26:53
  kind of seems to go back to the Cold War mentality that the author clearly
• 26:56
  is kind of coming from, because I don't know if you got remember like
• 27:00
  those commercials in the eighties or you've heard of them, like there's a bear
• 27:03
  in the woods. Some people say the bear is safe, who knows for
• 27:07
  sure? It's like vote Reagan and the bear is the Soviet Union. Basically,
• 27:11
  it's this ultimate appeal to emotions. It has nothing to do with the
• 27:14
  actual ideology of Marxism or anything like that, but it's much more about this
• 27:18
  Manichean struggle between the US and the evil empire. And so back then,
• 27:22
  obviously the evil empire was the Soviet Union, clear Marxist identified as communists.
• 27:27
  But once that collapsed, a lot of these analysts and kind of like think
• 27:32
  tanks in DC and everything didn't really have this adversary, right, So for
• 27:36
  a while it was kind of maybe, you know, the War on Terra.
• 27:38
  Radical Islam was sort of the new bear in the woods. But it's
• 27:44
  exactly and they tried to like call it fascism or even Marxism, but that
• 27:47
  didn't really work because it was so structurally different. But now, I guess
• 27:49
  what's exciting people like the author here is that you do have sort of like
• 27:55
  quote unquote self identified Marxists again in the West, and so the bear is
• 27:59
  back, the boogey man is back, right, and this opens like the
• 28:02
  sort of industry up again for talking about Marxism and Communianism that in that way.
• 28:07
  Yeah, And this is what I find fascinating about this article because it
• 28:10
  really is a kind of systematic outline out that kind of affective worldview, right,
• 28:15
  that these Marxians are everywhere. They're taking over the media, they're taking
• 28:18
  over culture, they're taking over academia. Right, you know when we need
• 28:22
  to stop them because they're omnipresent. Right, you should, you should,
• 28:25
  You should add this to your syllabus about conservative political thought. It's like it's
• 28:29
  such an interesting piece for that reason to actually read in that context. Yeah,
• 28:33
  like as a typological piece, it's really quite fascinating at least to me.
• 28:37
  But I kind of have a perverse interest in these things. Yeah,
• 28:41
  you said a word litvic that I wrote down as well, Manichean, And
• 28:47
  this is trying to get a little bit away from what he's actually saying,
• 28:52
  because I don't have a really hard time even considering that he believes what he's
• 28:56
  saying, but this manicheanism that you can conjure up this sort of world picture
• 29:02
  that's so simplistic, and I would be shocked, even teaching like second year
• 29:07
  undergraduates, I would be shocked to get a paper like this, because it's
• 29:10
  so conspiratorial in a cosmological sense, that there's this Lovecraft Cuthulhu devil like living
• 29:18
  in the sewers, creeping up to actually destroy civilization. And this is theory
• 29:23
  for like the twenty year olds, of course, the twenty year olds who
• 29:27
  just finished twelve Rules for Life and they want like some more politics to engage
• 29:32
  in. But I cannot think that he can believe this, and if he
• 29:37
  can, and all the comments, by the way, on this article are
• 29:40
  like, this is the most important thing I've ever read. I can't believe
• 29:44
  it's taken someone so long to say this, And I think I might just
• 29:48
  be an academic elitist or disconnected with this line of thinking, because I cannot
• 29:53
  fit this in my head as anything beyond a rhetorical strategy. Because if some
• 29:56
  people can believe this, then yeah, I'm out. As it's definitely like
• 30:03
  a remnant of the sort of geopolitical binary though from the eighties, where this
• 30:07
  guy clearly kind of like grew up because you did kind of have the sort
• 30:10
  of struggle between East and West then Reagan and Gorbachev and everything. But now
• 30:15
  he's sort of applying it in a very sloppy way to university campuses and sort
• 30:19
  of the western context in North America, where clearly that kind of Manicheanism is
• 30:25
  laughable. Yeah, as you're saying, well, so what I was saying
• 30:27
  before too, about like this this being a potential strategy, Like I agree
• 30:33
  pills that. You know, it's hard to believe that this is serious in
• 30:36
  a sense, which is what makes me think that there's a strategy, like
• 30:40
  some kind of a strategy behind this, because I think, like often when
• 30:42
  academics get a bit nitpicky about using the correct words, right, and like
• 30:47
  I think we do have that tendency. And I could imagine someone being like,
• 30:48
  Okay, well, whatever is it Marxist is in non Marxist, Like
• 30:52
  that's beside the point, Like are the things he's describing actually happening? Right?
• 30:56
  Like someone might ask that, and you know, to some extent you
• 30:57
  could say, yeah, sure, like some of these things that you're describing
• 31:00
  about like wokeness or whatever they're happening, but like to call them Marxist.
• 31:04
  Like this is where I think the strategy part comes in, right, because
• 31:07
  by saying that these things are a Marxist then you're like you're authorizing the dismissal
• 31:12
  of actual Marxism, which you know, doing a class analysis, doing an
• 31:15
  economic analysis of society, of of like how money is spread through a society,
• 31:21
  income inequality. Like if you're a conservative, like that's maybe that's like
• 31:25
  a scary thing to do. So it makes sense to be like, oh,
• 31:27
  no, like this is Marxism. Don't look at Marxism, you know,
• 31:30
  and I'm not a Marxist, Like this is coming from someone who is
• 31:33
  not a Marxist, but I value Marxist and economic analysis, and I can
• 31:36
  see that there's something insidious about, you know, like labeling something that isn't
• 31:41
  Marxist Marxism and then that that authorizes people to just be like, I'm never
• 31:45
  going to look at Marxism. Actually, Mark, there has to be dark
• 31:48
  money behind this though or something, because it seems like like Bernie is a
• 31:52
  third of the way to Marxism and he got fucking owned, He got a
• 31:56
  viscerated by all of these institutions that are supposed the Marxist exactly. I also
• 32:02
  think there's an important in there's another important in CITs aspect to this piece,
• 32:07
  which unless someone wants to pick up on something exactly that Matt said, but
• 32:12
  I kind of want to like also flag again the like which I think is
• 32:15
  almost the scarier part of this piece, which is the critique of liberalism itself,
• 32:21
  the attack on liberalism as a principle, because one of the moves he
• 32:24
  makes, which I think to like from a rhetorical perspective, is kind of
• 32:27
  interesting and smart, is like he says, look, liberalism has the basic
• 32:31
  claim that all people are free and equal, right and like so like,
• 32:35
  liberalism is the way that affirms everybody's equal dignity. Right, everyone has equal
• 32:38
  freedom. But then based from that foundation, then you can start making claims
• 32:43
  and pointing to classes in groups of people who aren't actually free and equal,
• 32:47
  and then that creates this cycle whether the Marxist will come in and be like,
• 32:50
  well, look, no one's free in equal based on liberalism, so
• 32:52
  we have to bring Marxist revolution, and then that creates this what he calls
• 32:58
  like this Marxist liberal cycle. I forget the exact term he uses, and
• 33:00
  like, I think what's kind of insidious about that is this is a covert
• 33:06
  argument for traditional conservative values because what a you're saying is like liberalism is based
• 33:10
  on this, Like he doesn't actually say that, but I feel like there's
• 33:14
  a subtext that, like, you know, people aren't free and equal like
• 33:19
  we should like maybe that's an idea that we need to like let go of
• 33:22
  and return to some sort of traditional society that values certain things hierarchically. I
• 33:27
  don't know if you guys agree, Maybe that's too much reading into it.
• 33:30
  Like that's sort of the sense I got from reading this, this sort of
• 33:34
  attack on the idea of equality as being responsible for Yeah, I've been a
• 33:37
  lot of It reminded me of a joke and the Crying of Lot forty nine
• 33:42
  by Thomas Pinchin, where the main character encounters a bunch of hyper conservatives who
• 33:47
  turn out to be really anti capitalist and she asks them like, well,
• 33:52
  why is it your anti capitalist exactly? And they're like, you just don't
• 33:54
  understand. We're anti capitalists because capitalism creates Marxists and we can't have that right.
• 34:01
  And this article seemed of a type with that kind of joke, because
• 34:05
  the artc has a really tangentious relationship with liberalism, because on the one hand,
• 34:09
  he doesn't like its commitment to moral equality and to freedom, and he
• 34:15
  sees those as genealogically prior to the emergence of Marxism, as a doctrine that
• 34:21
  also respects freedom and equality, but radicalizes that by saying even liberal society isn't
• 34:25
  enough. On the one hand, I think the reason why he's making the
• 34:29
  kind of gesture at the end of the article towards liberals is because he knows
• 34:32
  that tactically the people in the liberal center are either going to align with the
• 34:37
  political left, people like Bernie Sanders, people like AOC and so on,
• 34:40
  or they're going to align with the political right, and the political right can't
• 34:45
  win if liberals decide to side with the political left, so he needs to
• 34:47
  try to entice them in, even though he himself is not particularly predisposed to
• 34:52
  liking liberalism all that much, since it's basically just a better or less radical
• 34:58
  variant of what Marxists him as he understands it stands for you know what I
• 35:01
  mean, And to that point, yeah, he's also like exploiting divisions probably
• 35:06
  within like the current Democratic Party, where there clearly are two different wings,
• 35:08
  and he's basically telling like the old school Democrats, Look, if you're not
• 35:12
  with like the AOC Bernie Sanders wing, then you have to be a Republican
• 35:15
  conservative because otherwise, look at the doomsday scenario that I'm laying out. So,
• 35:19
  yeah, to your point, Victory, I think, I think,
• 35:21
  yeah, that is something conscious and kind of cynical that he's doing, where
• 35:24
  he's deliberately sort of exploiting that division even in sort of the left wing spectrum
• 35:29
  of American politics. Yeah. Yeah, and he's not subtle about it.
• 35:31
  I mean he basically says, like they're going to erode democracy and destroy it
• 35:36
  at the end. Right, And as I understand it, they came out
• 35:39
  or he came out on a podcast to explain this. I didn't listen to
• 35:43
  this, But Eric, you listen to the podcast. So what additional insights
• 35:47
  did you glean from listening to that? Yeah? I mean the way he
• 35:54
  actually kind of started the podcast like backwards, like started at like the end
• 36:00
  of his essay and then kind of went backwards, and he was like,
• 36:04
  the whole point of me like writing that piece was to give people like a
• 36:08
  framework for understanding the events of summer twenty twenty. And I thought that that
• 36:14
  was just that that just revealed the whole game right there, because like,
• 36:17
  let's explain what's going on in twenty twenty without a single reference to COVID,
• 36:22
  without a single reference to police brutality or police murdering black folks. Let's explain
• 36:30
  twenty twenty as an eruption of crypto Marxism in the leftist parties. And that,
• 36:37
  to me was just one of the most disgusting parts about this piece.
• 36:40
  Like, this guy's a fucking douchebag. He's trying to teach us about why
• 36:45
  everything's so fucked up right now. But it's not because of a pandemic.
• 36:51
  It's not because of the history of slavery and prejudice economic in the United States.
• 36:55
  It's not because of American imperialism and the mcdonnaldization of the fucking world is
• 37:01
  because of this crypto Marxism that's resurging after it fell in nineteen eighty nine and
• 37:08
  now it's coming back. And he tells this ridiculous fucking story about how the
• 37:15
  liberals in the sixties were doing good stuff. But it wasn't the student liberals,
• 37:19
  it was their parents. They were passing the civil rights laws, Like
• 37:22
  that was a big victory. Like let's just forget that the civil rights movement
• 37:25
  was going on for decades and decades and was frustrated and many of its aims
• 37:30
  and was much more radical than any of us understand today. Let's forget all
• 37:35
  that and say that was a liberal victory, and then we skip to nineteen
• 37:38
  eighty nine. That's point number two, and then we skipped to today.
• 37:42
  And that's his that's his fucking story. That's just that's just like reverse hagiography
• 37:46
  of Marxism and Eric the listeners cannot see him, but Eric is leading back,
• 37:54
  running his hands through his hair, frustratedly with pure exasperation. I don't
• 38:00
  even know what to do about this. Like I'm not a political theorist or
• 38:04
  anything, but like even like look at the near the end of his article,
• 38:07
  he writes about legitimacy. I mean by legitimacy, when one party recognizes
• 38:13
  its rivals as having a right to rule if it wins election. Isn't legitimacy
• 38:16
  in a democracy come from the people who elect the fucking party and not from
• 38:22
  one party saying you're cool. I hate you, but you can rule if
• 38:27
  I lose. Like, that's not legitimacy. Where the what fucking classic Yale
• 38:31
  was he taking? Or where the fuck he went to school? I think
• 38:35
  it's by telling now that when he talks about political legitimacy, the only two
• 38:37
  groups he mentions are liberals and conservatives, who are apparently the only people who
• 38:42
  respect democracy in this world. Despite the Victor Orbins, the Vladimir Putins,
• 38:45
  are Trump saying that he's going to cancel our pause the election. Right,
• 38:50
  he never acknowledges that the left can in any way be respective of democracy,
• 38:53
  and this is again what he I mean. He also commits the classic ridiculous
• 38:59
  meme that conservatives have, you know, where they bring up Stalinism as like
• 39:05
  some argument to show like how much it failed, right, Like this is
• 39:07
  always the classic kind of move that the meme conservatives like to like to latch
• 39:13
  onto and like, I think, what's what's forgotten in on Marxism because of
• 39:16
  like the experience with Stalinism is that like you know, Marx and like socialism
• 39:22
  is actually quite concerned with democracy, right, Like this is I mean,
• 39:24
  of course a failure of Stalinism was not enough democracy. But I think,
• 39:28
  like, you know, actual actual Marxism or like or actual socialism would be
• 39:34
  deeply democratic. But his claim at the end of the article, right,
• 39:36
  is that the Marxist endgame is is an end to democracy or something like that,
• 39:39
  which is totally you know, the opposite point of of what the main
• 39:44
  concern of Marxism, which as Eric was saying, right, like, legitimacy
• 39:46
  comes from the people, right, Like, the whole point of I think,
• 39:50
  like like a Marxist analysis is to in some ways like re legitimize like
• 39:54
  the sources of authority over how we build a life to together as people as
• 40:00
  citizens. Although to be fair, you do have to get rid of the
• 40:02
  boorgeoisi first, but the whole yeah, but I mean the whole point of
• 40:07
  the annihilation of the bourgeoisie is that there's no classes anymore because there's only two
• 40:10
  classes and they're getting their identity from each other. So if you eliminate one,
• 40:15
  the other's gone. Except that there's more proletarians than there are bourgeoisi,
• 40:21
  so it should be just a numbers game who wins there. But anyway,
• 40:23
  sure, and I think that's kind of where I maybe stop being a bit
• 40:27
  of a Marxist myself. But yeah, that's beside the point. I know,
• 40:30
  I don't think any of us are orthodox Marxist here. I don't know,
• 40:35
  Victor, have you had any last minute conversions since I spoke to your
• 40:38
  last a few weeks ago. Well, sound off, no, most certainly
• 40:42
  not being a child of Eastern Europe and all that. But what's interesting too
• 40:46
  is kind of like how the sad thing, the cynical thing in this article
• 40:50
  really is to kind of align the protest movements from summer twenty twenty, like
• 40:53
  to your point, Eric, with Marxism and to kind of like do this
• 40:58
  thing that was done even in like aat in American countries as well, when
• 41:00
  you had like a lot of liberation movements which were loosely affiliated with with Marxism
• 41:05
  or like the Catholic Church in that sense, and they were all kind of
• 41:07
  like demonized by right wing governments. There is like being communists, kind of
• 41:10
  like being third column movements. So there is this sort of cynical move there
• 41:15
  where he's sort of sidestepping the real issues of like racial and inequality and all
• 41:19
  these things and kind of just promoting this conspiratorial view of like you know,
• 41:22
  the creeping influence of Marxism and things like that, which I don't know like
• 41:27
  how much of a true believer he is, but like this is like an
• 41:30
  old kind of like rhetorical move where any kind of like demands for social justice
• 41:34
  are sort of like lumped in with Stalinism and things like that. So well,
• 41:37
  it's I mean, it's a very comforting fantasy for the conservative mind,
• 41:42
  exactly, it is. Yeah, it's striking also because if you look at
• 41:45
  a lot of the Black Lives matters protesters and advocates take the most intellectually sophisticated
• 41:50
  one. Corn All last too, I think is a great academic right.
• 41:52
  I've never once seen him appeal to Karl Marx as a justification for the protests
• 41:57
  against the George Floyd murder. Right. We talk a lot about MLK,
• 42:00
  right, we talk a lot about ironically and not considering Hazoni's own religious affiliation.
• 42:07
  You know, our duties is good Christians and the fact that we're trying
• 42:08
  to realize you know, the basic foundational values of our society. But there's
• 42:13
  really not a lot of marks to be found about this, and it's quite
• 42:15
  telling, Like victory were saying that they're trying to really lump what really is
• 42:21
  a movement against centuries of racial oppression into this old fashioned paradigm of USA versus
• 42:27
  Marxism or the West versus Marxism in order to just try to dismiss it when
• 42:31
  they're raising very legitimate concerns that are certainly tied to the critic of political economy,
• 42:37
  but aren't reducible to the critic of political economy. And what's funny too,
• 42:39
  is that like even like a lot of BLM activists wouldn't necessarily identify as
• 42:43
  being Marxists, like their focus is on is on specifically the race sort of
• 42:46
  framework, not the economic framework so much. But he completely sort of like
• 42:51
  overlooks that. Yeah, yeah, and it's really frustrating, right, And
• 42:57
  like a lot of people have said, I find it really distangeful that he
• 43:00
  doesn't acknowledge the fact that these people have legitimate reasons to be protesting on these
• 43:04
  issues, and some of them very well might not be Marxist, but nonetheless
• 43:07
  they have legitimate grievances against the status quo that should be acknowledged, particularly a
• 43:13
  long history of racial injustice and all that's kind of sidestep by this reductionism.
• 43:20
  Matt, I have like a quick question for you, because you've talked a
• 43:22
  lot more to kind of like authors like this and people who sort of promote
• 43:24
  this sort of worldview. Do you think ultimately they are just trying to kind
• 43:29
  of like advance a certain kind of industry and have like a sort of a
• 43:31
  nine to five job about this stuff, or are they really true believers in
• 43:36
  the sense of like the threat of Marxism and these kinds of issues. I
• 43:39
  was going to ask a similar question like this just feels like a ploy for
• 43:45
  relevance, and it may be the ineptitude of my imagination, but I cannot
• 43:50
  fit this world picture into my head. No, this is a fucking game.
• 43:55
  It's an opportunistic takedown piece with no substance. But I think it does
• 44:00
  have some substance actually to a lot of people who read it, right,
• 44:02
  And this is part of the problem, right of treating it in terms of
• 44:06
  the intrinsic value of this piece as an intellectual artifact, right, And an
• 44:08
  answer to your question, Victor, right, I think that a lot of
• 44:13
  these authors, on the one hand, definitely do believe that what they're saying
• 44:15
  has a certain amount of truth. But at the same time they're not really
• 44:21
  concerned about whether or not it's a literal truth, right. It's more of
• 44:23
  a visceral or gut feeling about what's going on. And this is something that's
• 44:28
  really important when it comes to progressives trying to understand how it is that conservatives
• 44:31
  apprehend the world. Russell Kirk, the author of The Conservative Mind, put
• 44:36
  it really well where you said, conservatism isn't so much a set of principles
• 44:38
  as it's an outlook or an attitude that you take toward things. Right.
• 44:43
  It's a very visceral reaction towards the world, and conservatives tend to apprehend things
• 44:49
  through the lens of affect more than their rationalist counterparts do, amongst liberal political
• 44:54
  theory and Marxist political theory or leftist political theory more broadly, which is so
• 45:00
  ironic by the way, because like I feel, like like all the conservative
• 45:04
  memes these days online, it's like about like logic and reason, like all
• 45:07
  the commentators, right, but like so many of their arguments are based on
• 45:09
  like some feeling they have about like society falling apart, based on like very
• 45:15
  slim evidence or selective evidence. Anyway, Soraty cut you off of no,
• 45:17
  no, but you're absolutely right. But the thing is what conservats are doing
• 45:22
  in those kinds of cases of what they've always been doing going back to the
• 45:24
  eighteenth century, which is recognizing that the parliaance of liberalism and of scientific rationality
• 45:31
  is extremely powerful in the twenty first century. So there's no way of jettising
• 45:37
  it and just appealing directly to affect. You have to kind of appeal to
• 45:39
  affect through the lens of scientific rationalism, right, which is a different kind
• 45:45
  of subject matter that we can talk about elsewhere, right, you know.
• 45:47
  But when it comes to this article, right, I think that a lot
• 45:50
  of people are going to sit there and just treat this as intellectually substance lists
• 45:54
  and therefore not worthy of engagement. But it is worthy of engagement because what
• 45:58
  this really does quite effectively, as it ties together a lot of things that
• 46:02
  conservatives have believed for a very long time, gives them a kind of systematic
• 46:07
  gloss and presents them with an authority and intellectual backing that a lot of people
• 46:15
  have wanted for quite some time. And through vindicating this sense of the world
• 46:22
  coming apart. Because cultural Marxists are attacking it. I'm not surprised that it's
• 46:28
  gotten the kind of rapturous response that it has, right because it really the
• 46:32
  essentially vindicates what a lot of people have felt this really for a long time
• 46:36
  on the political right. To try to move this forward, I would like
• 46:40
  to ask you guys what you want to do with this, because it would
• 46:44
  be absolutely pointless to break this article down line by line and show how it's
• 46:49
  not Marxism, because I think anyone who's even read Communist Manifesto one time can
• 46:53
  look through this and show that it's completely erroneous, like, for example,
• 46:58
  he says are the new classes or something like that Marxist pitt blacks against whites
• 47:05
  as the new class warfare. So anyway, like just leaving all that aside,
• 47:09
  there's two ways forward. I think we could talk about. We could
• 47:12
  talk about actual antagonisms between liberalism and Marxism to actually educate our viewer our listeners
• 47:20
  on what that actually is. Or we could talk about the general psychological impulse
• 47:24
  that requires this person to create such a an entity, a love Craftian entity,
• 47:34
  that all of his followers and retweeters to have to rally behind. So
• 47:37
  which of those two are either of those two avenues interesting to you or do
• 47:42
  you want to keep railing on this article? I think both of them are
• 47:44
  kind of interesting. And actually I'd like to talk about the love crafty and
• 47:46
  stuff because just for interested listeners, one of the themes that we were thinking
• 47:52
  of exploring before this article came out was political enemies, Right, Why it
• 47:58
  is that people set up x y ORSZ group as their antagonist and what the
• 48:01
  ideological and effective appeal of that is. And I think if we were to
• 48:06
  address things from this lovecrafting tentacle perspective, that would be kind of interesting.
• 48:12
  But I'm open to whatever. Plugging our Patreon once again. That's what we
• 48:15
  were talking about last week, is how what dialectics means is that you create
• 48:22
  your enemy just by means of you know, moving through the world and absorbing
• 48:25
  objects. This is a sedactor. Yeah, I think we've already kind of
• 48:30
  touched on that too, like by mentioning for example, like those old commercials
• 48:34
  from like the eighties where like Reagan's re election campaign was just like an image
• 48:37
  of a bear lurking in the woods, and everybody knew what the bear represented,
• 48:42
  but it didn't have to be like beyond the level of affect. Basically,
• 48:45
  it was this clear sense of like the enemy or the scapegoat in that
• 48:49
  sense. Yeah, and that's the sort of comforting narrative that like the author
• 48:52
  is clearly trying to kind of like go back to in this sense. Yeah.
• 48:55
  Yeah, And just in response to like Victor's kind of comment, I
• 49:00
  think that that kind of imagery wouldn't necessarily be effective in today's twenty first clintory
• 49:05
  climate, where people tend to be a lot more cynical and a lot more
• 49:07
  reticent to overtly propagandistic efforts, right, which is why you see a lot
• 49:13
  of these authors appeal to reason and logic and you know, facts don't care
• 49:16
  about your feelings, because that kind of gestures to the authority of scientific rationalism
• 49:23
  and kind of liberal open mindedness, even if the figures who actually tend to
• 49:27
  invoke this most frequently don't actually embody those norms in their approach, particularly to
• 49:34
  doctrines that they don't particularly like. Yeah. And what's fascinating too, though,
• 49:37
  like even in the sense of sort of solidifying the in group against the
• 49:39
  outgroup in that sense, is that the outgroup is portraying as not having logic,
• 49:44
  right, So it's still is sort of like this binary opposition, but
• 49:46
  it is much more sort of like looking to this question of logic, Yeah,
• 49:51
  as sort of being on our side versus their side. Whereas like the
• 49:54
  simplest part of the Marxist logic like to me, I'm not a Marxist,
• 50:00
  right, but it's so simple. It's where is the surplus of your wages
• 50:04
  going, who's benefiting from it? And then how many of you are?
• 50:07
  How many are you versus how many are they? Like this is just the
• 50:12
  simplest, most logical, empirical, open your eyes and count sort of logic.
• 50:16
  And then you know, the Marxists are paints, the hysterical ones when
• 50:22
  the other ones, the Conservatives are worried about Cuthulhu. But Bill, that's
• 50:27
  the thing, like, you can't really divorce that from this sort of like
• 50:30
  the fifty year old Cold War history here is that. Yeah, we wish
• 50:34
  we could kind of just look at it theoretically, but there is that historical
• 50:37
  baggage, which for a lot of people is how they primarily sort of understand
• 50:40
  the Marxist brand. Yeah. So Eric suggested that in the podcast, he
• 50:45
  sort of gave the way, gave the game away a little bit. So
• 50:47
  to those of you who listened to the podcast, did you get any indication
• 50:52
  from his affection that this was a rhetorical strategy or is this like sincere diet
• 51:00
  the whole belief ideology. Well, it's kind of I mean, one thing
• 51:04
  I noticed when I listened to it, which was kind of funny to me,
• 51:07
  was like, I mean, he basically does this in the article,
• 51:10
  I guess, but it was kind of like there was a moment where he
• 51:13
  literally said something very close to like verbatim of you know, wokeness or like
• 51:20
  you know, critical race therough or what I'm deciding to call Marxism, like
• 51:25
  like like he literally just says like I'm conflating these things, like that's what
• 51:30
  I'm doing here, and he and the other thing that I thought was kind
• 51:35
  of funny is like he talked about the reaction through the article is being overwhelmingly
• 51:38
  positive. He's like, it's only been two days, but like I'm getting
• 51:42
  nothing but really positive feedback from people. People are telling me that, you
• 51:45
  know, they this is like a good synthesis of what they've what they've been
• 51:49
  thinking for a long time. So you got good feels. He got good
• 51:53
  feels from it. He got good feels, but I mean I didn't exactly
• 51:55
  get anything. I mean, he to me, he's it sounds like he
• 52:00
  he kind of believes this, and he you know, I think he does
• 52:02
  have there's underlying it a very deep concern with U, like being a conservative
• 52:07
  and holding on to traditional values like like, to some extent, I felt
• 52:12
  like the article was sort of gesturing, you know, I know, he
• 52:15
  says he's okay with liberalism because liberalism at least affirms legitimacy of conservatism as being
• 52:22
  a point of view that you can vote for. But still, like,
• 52:24
  I kind of think his whole critique is built to be like, look like
• 52:28
  liberalism leads to Marxism, So you should be a conservative, you should be
• 52:31
  believe in traditional values. Well, he did write a book with nationalism and
• 52:35
  the title defending it, right, am I wrong? Which I should say,
• 52:39
  Uh, there are some elements to that book that actually are surprisingly insightful.
• 52:45
  And this is the one thing that I want to actually so tired of
• 52:47
  Matt's charitable readings. Can you just get on board with the dunk please?
• 52:52
  No, No, this is what I'm getting to. It's a real diamond
• 52:55
  in the fucking rough isn't it. I'm kidding, mad, I'm kidding your
• 53:00
  charitable readings, but no, this is the thing though, if you actually
• 53:04
  read the central section of the essay, he gives Marxism a lot of credit,
• 53:07
  but in a strange way, because Hazoni tends to approach the world in
• 53:13
  terms of political antagonisms. Right where he says, the real world, there's
• 53:15
  a pressor and a press groups. He really seems to believe this, right,
• 53:20
  and there will always be a dominant group and always be a subordinate group,
• 53:22
  and liberals have not recognized that, but Marxists have, And so he
• 53:27
  takes us almost a mastream perspective of acknowledging the realism of his real political opponents,
• 53:34
  which is the political left, relative to liberals, saying, they understand
• 53:37
  that this is a war and only one side is going to win, and
• 53:40
  we need to do everything that we possibly can to be the victorious side.
• 53:44
  Right, And this is kind of a weird attitude that some conservative authors sometimes
• 53:52
  take when they're dealing with the political left, like Joseph amaistra I adopted the
• 53:55
  same perspective when it came to Jean Jaques Rousseau, right that Jean Jaquessau.
• 54:00
  I was an evil man. He was destroying civilization, but he was also
• 54:01
  far smarter than most of the liberal centrist commentators who thought that you could take
• 54:06
  the kind of revolutionary ideas that he was developing and moderate them. Because life
• 54:12
  is ultimately an existential struggle for power, and the left is understand that the
• 54:16
  liberals don't, and we own the political right also need to understand that.
• 54:20
  Yeah, you get this in people like Roy Cohen and Roger Stone, I
• 54:24
  think that's their names, right, Like Trump's lawyer and Roger Stone, Like
• 54:29
  they're saying, this is a zero sum game and everything's a game. This
• 54:32
  is just game theory. We have to turn the rubs against our political opponents.
• 54:38
  Yeah, And that's the way he treats liberals, right, It's like,
• 54:42
  we need to turn the liberals against the left, get them to align
• 54:44
  with conservatism, even though we conservatives don't really want to be liberals, and
• 54:49
  ultimately liberalism is also going to have to go in the long run. But
• 54:52
  it's worked. It's shifted the entire country to the right over the course of
• 54:54
  thirty years. But that's the strange thing about what he wants out of the
• 55:00
  is that well, Marxism is delegitimizing its opposition. But like and he says,
• 55:07
  liberalism is a gateway to Marxism. But what does he want then?
• 55:12
  He wants conservatism to win and have a kind of neutered liberal opposition that can
• 55:17
  just be like the legitimizer of their rule. But in the end, the
• 55:22
  conservative traditionalism is going to be the position that wins out. And he's just
• 55:28
  turning it around. He's not shy about this. Actually, in another article
• 55:31
  he overt the calls for an end to what he calls liberal democracy and the
• 55:36
  advent of what he calls conservative democracy. Right, that ultimately there should be
• 55:42
  a highly traditionalist state that embeds a certain ethno religious standpoint in his laws and
• 55:49
  in his foundations, but liberals be allowed basically some room to try to agitate
• 55:54
  in reform basically much. But the modern state of Israel, it sounds like
• 55:59
  he's describing well, yeah, careful, careful, which is where he's from,
• 56:05
  Which is what I'm saying. That's clearly how he's approaching the world.
• 56:08
  Yeah, I know, by the way, I don't think that there's anything
• 56:10
  wrong with with with and I think Michael Brooks the lay Michael Brooks was smart
• 56:15
  and saying that, like, you know, there's nothing wrong with criticizing Israel
• 56:16
  as as a nation state. By the way, that is not intrinsically anti
• 56:21
  So whether or not it's legitimate, we do not need the ADL to become
• 56:24
  fans of the pillpod. No, that's the thing. You can't say anything
• 56:30
  about Israel because it's anti Semitism. But he does. He does. He
• 56:35
  is a nationalist, He is a religious conservative, and he does have a
• 56:38
  thing for political strong men like Orbon and like Russia and like Putin. You
• 56:45
  know, he has a thing for them. And he's really angry that the
• 56:49
  international community imposes laws and universal rights and all these things on Israel and criticizes
• 56:57
  their relationship with Palestein. So he writes a book book to express how angry
• 57:00
  he is and how liberalism is all marxistem fucked. Eric. Have you seen
• 57:08
  Putin without his shirt? I mean, he's pretty fucking sexy. I don't
• 57:13
  think strong man with a six pack. Conservatives love love strongmen like that,
• 57:20
  exactly. They're just too sexy for because for the feels that conservative needs affect
• 57:27
  affect exactly the affect. But no, like this is exactly what Eric is
• 57:30
  saying. I mean, I think is is exactly right, that there's there's
• 57:34
  a kind of that's kind of the point I was trying to make before,
• 57:37
  like that there's this weird move to delegitimize liberalism. Also because for him,
• 57:42
  like part of the key to the argument, as I see in this article
• 57:45
  is he's like, liberalism is dangerous in a way because it always opens the
• 57:49
  door to Marxism, right, because as soon as you a firm equal rights,
• 57:52
  you're you're opening the door to like this dangerous path. And of course
• 57:55
  there's nothing dangerous about traditional values and conservatism a parent. Well, I just
• 58:00
  want to say, it's almost like a gamble is listening or their algorithms are
• 58:04
  crawling our soundbites. The opinions of our contributors do not represent the opinions of
• 58:10
  the poem. I didn't even say anything. I didn't my own I didn't
• 58:15
  even say anything disparaging. I literally just said that it should be okay,
• 58:19
  Yeah, it's enough. Yeah. You know, in in the Middle East,
• 58:24
  they don't even refer to it as Israel. They just call it Disneyland,
• 58:28
  just to avoid these kinds of delicate issues. So did you hear the
• 58:31
  news out of Disneyland last week. Oh yeah, no, it looks bad
• 58:36
  in there. Well, see you we should just adopt that strategy to not
• 58:39
  anger your spontsors pills. I've been trying to deliberately avoid that, given that
• 58:45
  the last time I got into a debate about Israel the thread was two years
• 58:49
  ago and it's still going on. It resurrects itself. I think I know
• 58:52
  that thread. Yeah, is the pill pot? Is the Pillpot going to
• 58:54
  become the only anti Disneyland podcast on the internet. We've been at Disneyland since
• 59:00
  day two and we talked about book, we talked about Bouldrian. So we're
• 59:05
  opposed to Disneyland, the disneylandification right right, the world Disneyland. Yeah,
• 59:14
  oh shit, I'm getting into black books territory. I should should careful.
• 59:17
  Hey, this is a real quote from Baudriard. I am quoting simulation and
• 59:22
  simula crap. Yeah. Now, well, I think the one thing that
• 59:27
  I wanted to iterate, and this is one of the things that I bring
• 59:30
  up in my article, and it actually, I guess relates back to the
• 59:34
  argument that we had last week about Hegel is. Oddly enough, I think
• 59:37
  his Oonni is actually right about the connection between liberalism and Marxism, even though
• 59:42
  he doesn't necessarily want to be overt about it because that might alienate liberals and
• 59:45
  get them to realize that they have more in common with the political left than
• 59:50
  they do with the political right. Because I think that both liberalism and Marxism
• 59:52
  are distinctively Modernist doctrines that are committed to the idea that every person is a
• 59:58
  moral equal and that they're all entitled the freedom. And really the only substantive
• 1:00:02
  normative difference between liberalism and Marxism, they're huge descriptive and historical differences, is
• 1:00:08
  that Marxists believe that the liberal state is insufficient for actually recognizing the moral quality
• 1:00:15
  of all individuals and ensuring that everyone is free, whereas most liberals believe that
• 1:00:21
  the state as we have it right now is sufficient with even even if it
• 1:00:24
  needs a few cosmetic reforms here or there right whereas conservatism I disagree with that.
• 1:00:30
  Well, I mean, if we're talking about an actual Marxist state,
• 1:00:35
  which is only temporary, by the way, but no, the difference between
• 1:00:37
  Marxism and liberalism, perhaps the difference is property, property rights and the right
• 1:00:45
  to own property, and that the state can use violence to protect that right.
• 1:00:50
  Okay, so he gets it from Rousseau, of course. But if
• 1:00:54
  you m belief in the free market too, that's another big one, right,
• 1:00:59
  the ninth teen, seventies eighties neoliberal revolution, right where Hayakin Friedman's ideas
• 1:01:04
  became the backbone of Thatcherism and Reaganism. Right, And it's all about the
• 1:01:08
  free market, the government. The market is so complex that it's useless for
• 1:01:14
  the government to try to regulate it. So rather we should just have faith
• 1:01:17
  that it's going to work and that it's going to distribute rewards and punishments where
• 1:01:22
  they Yeah, of course that's a neoliberal conservative and liberalism like old liberalism.
• 1:01:32
  Hel like Rousseau comes in and says, there is no reason for you to
• 1:01:37
  buy into liberalism because you're going to be exploited no matter what. And he
• 1:01:40
  said this before Marx. Marx obviously picked up on it. But it's saying,
• 1:01:44
  if you don't have property, there's no incentive for you to buy into
• 1:01:47
  the liberal system because the only purpose of it, underneath everything, underneath all
• 1:01:52
  the language of you know, voting rights, speech rights, is just protecting
• 1:01:59
  the ownership of proper pretty by one class that exploits another to you know,
• 1:02:02
  work their land and work their factories for them. So that's the difference to
• 1:02:06
  me, isn't that the subtext? Isn't that the subtext here? Isn't that
• 1:02:09
  the subtext here like social liberals are a bunch of ballless freaks, and you
• 1:02:15
  should either just go into the Marxist side or you should join the neoliberal free
• 1:02:22
  market side, Like he's not he doesn't want you to be able to be
• 1:02:25
  Like, I'm a social liberal. I believe in like certain aspects of the
• 1:02:30
  free market and trade and globalization, but I also believe that the government should
• 1:02:35
  step in and regulate things every once in a while. Like the subtext here
• 1:02:37
  is almost like that's a position for pussies. So either just man up and
• 1:02:43
  become a traditionalist conservative and believe in the completely fucking free market, or go
• 1:02:49
  out and join the protesters and burn down some buildings and go to prison.
• 1:02:52
  Like isn't that the subtepe I here what this guy wants to say? Yeah,
• 1:02:55
  I think that is actually, in some sense what he's trying to say,
• 1:02:58
  right, But I think the ass between liberalism and let's just call it
• 1:03:01
  Marxism or the left is more complicated than that right, because essentially what you
• 1:03:06
  have in some circumstances are liberals who ultimately don't believe that human beings are moral
• 1:03:12
  equals. And you see these expressed in people like iin Rand, sometimes Fa
• 1:03:16
  High and so on and so forth, where they say people are unequal in
• 1:03:20
  their abilities, and this is reflected in the capitalist system. And when push
• 1:03:22
  comes to souve, they're more willing to SiGe with the political right because ultimately
• 1:03:27
  they don't hold on to the fundamental liberal principle that people are moral equals.
• 1:03:30
  They just kind of adopt liberal rhetoric about capitalism and freedom and property rights because
• 1:03:36
  it's expedient in the given moment. Right. But what I think sincere liberalism
• 1:03:39
  recognizes is basically the Kantian doctrine, which is that everyone is entitled to an
• 1:03:45
  equal amount of dignity and a certain level of freedom. And if you genuinely
• 1:03:50
  believe that, I think that his Zony ironically is actually right that people are
• 1:03:53
  always going to be attracted to Marxism because what Marxism says is that if you
• 1:03:58
  really believe that people are equal and deserve freedom, we don't live in a
• 1:04:01
  society where people are treated equally or have equal freedom, which needs you need
• 1:04:05
  to reform it very substantially. Right, And he talks about this article where
• 1:04:10
  he says, you know, there's this dance between liberalism and Marxism that goes
• 1:04:14
  on. And I think the reason that this dance has gone on for such
• 1:04:17
  a long time is precisely because a lot of liberals recognize that our society is
• 1:04:23
  highly deficient, and they're tempted by the kind of radical forms offered by people
• 1:04:28
  like Bernie Sanders or offered like by people like aoc Uh. And it's the
• 1:04:31
  job of people like Cazoni and other right repundits convince them that they shouldn't buy
• 1:04:35
  into that. Wait, sorry, are you accepting the premise that I mean,
• 1:04:41
  he's calling liberals pussies because they cave to the communists all the time,
• 1:04:45
  But there are no fucking communists. Yeah. The reason the reason that they're
• 1:04:49
  fucking like democrat whatever, like right lib they're fine with all these protests is
• 1:04:58
  because it doesn't tough much any economic conditions. They're they're exactly, they're fucking
• 1:05:03
  they're chilling. They're sipping champagne over Occupy Wall Street while people are protesting about
• 1:05:10
  rights issues and how there's not enough like representation in Hollywood or whatever. So
• 1:05:14
  yeah, you should protest. That should be something that changes, for sure.
• 1:05:19
  I think that's as economic changes. The companies that and that's the position
• 1:05:24
  of every like even moderate leftist and corporate America corporate can they fully fully like
• 1:05:29
  integrated these like you know, social justice ideas into their products like Nike,
• 1:05:32
  Right, you're getting trained on how to be like more sensitive. Yeah.
• 1:05:39
  No, I think that's definitely true of certain kinds of woe capitalism, right,
• 1:05:42
  which is why the Marxist critique becomes really relevant. What I'm just saying
• 1:05:45
  is that if you are a person who's genuine who genuinely adopts a liberal outlook
• 1:05:49
  on things, there's always gonna be this impatient to either move to the political
• 1:05:53
  right and say that people are not equal, uh and people do not deserve
• 1:05:57
  freedom because all their views are not equally valid, or you have to move
• 1:06:01
  towards the political left by saying, yes, people are equal, and if
• 1:06:04
  they are equal, then the kind of unequal society that we live in because
• 1:06:09
  of the critique of political economy that we can raise, that's a serious problem
• 1:06:14
  and we need to reform it right. And I think what Hazoni is trying
• 1:06:15
  to do is make sure that people who operate in the political center gravitate towards
• 1:06:21
  the political right rather than the political left, because he's smart enough to recognize
• 1:06:27
  that there are premises in liberalism that can tempt many liberals to move towards Sanders
• 1:06:33
  and AOC and all that, particularly millennials, when that's not what he wants
• 1:06:38
  to happen. And I should just shout out to our listeners if you are
• 1:06:43
  looking for a position on the political spectrum, Matt is a radical leftist lib
• 1:06:53
  liberal socialists. You can be proud of being a LIB and you can be
• 1:06:56
  on the left, but he's still a liberal cuck according to Marxist. Yeah,
• 1:07:00
  that's true. But I have I just like it period. I'm not
• 1:07:05
  a Marxist. I'm a YouTuber man. I have the same I'm pretty I'm
• 1:07:09
  very close to Matt. Matt and I have like very close political positions.
• 1:07:14
  Yeah. I also think that Marx was aware of this, right. I
• 1:07:15
  mean, one of the things that he says with angles in the Communist Manifesto
• 1:07:18
  is that with the advent of capitalism, for the first time, human beings
• 1:07:21
  are forced to confront the real relations that have existed since time immemorial but have
• 1:07:28
  always been included by ideology and traditionalism. Right, and throughout his writings he
• 1:07:32
  often talks about how it is that liberal society, in someone's sens this is
• 1:07:36
  quite an accomplishment because it does at least formally treat people as free and equal
• 1:07:43
  under the law. The problem is that they aren't actually equal in any real
• 1:07:47
  material sense, which is why the next stage in human history is going to
• 1:07:51
  be the advent of a common society, where we finally realize true freedom of
• 1:07:57
  self determination in the Agelian sense through the advent of a class of society.
• 1:08:00
  Right. But this isn't a break from liberalism in the sense that liberalism was
• 1:08:04
  bad and needs to be rejected, so much as it's the next stage in
• 1:08:11
  historical process of which liberalism was the highest form to exist thus far. You
• 1:08:15
  know what I mean. And this is why I think people like Zoni really
• 1:08:18
  react badly to this, because they recognize that under the right conditions, a
• 1:08:21
  lot of liberals can sit there and say things like, hey, yes,
• 1:08:25
  if we do believe that people are free and equal, maybe we shouldn't discriminate
• 1:08:27
  against people on the basis that race. Maybe we should allow people to practice
• 1:08:30
  their religion as they see fit. Maybe we should sit there and try to
• 1:08:33
  create something like universal healthcare systems and so on and so forth. Yeah,
• 1:08:39
  I do think it is interesting that he argues against like he lumps enlightenment liberalism
• 1:08:45
  into his critique. I find that pretty interesting. And he's kind of against
• 1:08:50
  this individualism, like he almost accepts the idea of group identity, but it
• 1:08:56
  should be defined by traditional values rather than by reason and abstract principles. Like
• 1:09:03
  I actually like that aspect of what he's doing, because individualism it's a croc
• 1:09:09
  of shit, And I think it's ridiculous that people like Peterson can still stand
• 1:09:14
  up there and say we're individuals first and groups second. It's like, no,
• 1:09:17
  the only reason you're an individual is because we are fundamentally social beings.
• 1:09:23
  Goes back to Aristotle. We're political animals, the Marxist Aristotle. We all
• 1:09:27
  know. But I think that's a step in the right direction, is to
• 1:09:31
  get away from this sort of atomism that liberalism wants to foist on us,
• 1:09:38
  and we're all just individual, rational actors in a marketplace. But then he
• 1:09:44
  sort of goes in the wrong direction with the religious nationalism, and I'm like,
• 1:09:49
  okay, no, let's take away individualism. But we don't need to
• 1:09:54
  put religious nationalism and traditionalism in there. We can put something else in there.
• 1:10:00
  And I guess I don't have it ready what that could be. And
• 1:10:03
  that's the critique of Marxism too. Once this is all gone, what is
• 1:10:06
  Marx's solution? What does the communist society actually look like? Which is which
• 1:10:12
  is? I guess that's a legitimate critique of Marxism, although like, I
• 1:10:15
  don't think I don't know how much Marx actually predicts that. I've often wondered
• 1:10:19
  this, Eric, like, if you were to create a philosophical system that
• 1:10:23
  gains enough tractuition, would you want to call it like tatism or like what
• 1:10:29
  was your own? Because tatism is just like a weird term, like also
• 1:10:33
  difficult mcmon mcmon mcmanon saying yeah, I don't think that works either. But
• 1:10:41
  it's the problem isn't bad. I'm not gonna lie very boring anglophone name.
• 1:10:53
  I mean, I'm easy because you just become a philosopher, which is which
• 1:10:58
  is not as? Which is not as? Again is declaring yourself a philosopher
• 1:11:01
  to step down. I have a very boring English name that I wouldn't care
• 1:11:06
  to name a theory after a Taitian works. There's a lot of words that
• 1:11:13
  have my name. I could play with that all right, but I think
• 1:11:15
  we're about that. It's too British. This is a it's coming to a
• 1:11:18
  natural close. But I just want to shout out to our guest, Victor
• 1:11:23
  litvic ussr Baby to give us the final thoughts here. I think we we
• 1:11:30
  went through a very cathartic like bell curve up and here I feel it was
• 1:11:33
  necessary. Yeah, we've got on the rage out and now I just feel
• 1:11:38
  like you guys should come down here. We'll have some martinis. Yeah,
• 1:11:41
  that'd be nice. Is the Romanian poet such and such said? No,
• 1:11:45
  No, it's just again. I take comfort in the fact that this is
• 1:11:48
  clearly kind of like one of those reactionary sort of like cries out against the
• 1:11:55
  movement of history. Basically, like it just seems like back in the sixties,
• 1:11:58
  if somebody had been writing about like Martin Luther King and trying to like
• 1:12:00
  associate him with the Red Scare or something. It's so clearly going to like
• 1:12:05
  date itself within just a few years, that if this is how he's criticizing
• 1:12:10
  like Summer twenty twenty and BLM and everything through like sloppy connections with Marxism,
• 1:12:15
  like these guys have already basically lost Like if this is the best that they
• 1:12:18
  can do, basically, Yeah, it's a good point. That's a good
• 1:12:20
  point. Can I also close out? I was just look at reading of
• 1:12:24
  the comments section in the article, and I think this is a This is
• 1:12:28
  a good one. Neil Bowling says, Wow, simply the most amazing article
• 1:12:32
  I've I've read anywhere in years. I'm fordings to everyone I know, liberal
• 1:12:38
  or conservative. There is so much here to digest. Thank God for Collette
• 1:12:43
  at one time. This is the sort of high caliber writing what could one
• 1:12:45
  could find in The Atlantic or The New Yorker. But of course those days
• 1:12:48
  are long gone. Dude, you know this, There's no possible way.
• 1:12:54
  But by the way, I have my own I have from the same article,
• 1:12:58
  a remarkable piece with so much to consider. It really frames and explains
• 1:13:02
  what we've seen happening over the past fifty years with the weakening and destruction of
• 1:13:08
  our institutional and societal foundations. Most simply, the best article I've ever destroy.
• 1:13:15
  That's a favorite word. Anyways, Okay, it would be it would
• 1:13:19
  be improper to not leave the last word with Eric, who's going to remind
• 1:13:25
  us why all of this doesn't matter? Oh my god, you want me
• 1:13:30
  to you want me to see us go off? You know, you know
• 1:13:34
  what listeners you know, if you're if you're on our side, and you
• 1:13:41
  probably are. If you're listening to this unless you're curious conservative, then fuck
• 1:13:45
  you. But and if you're twenty, if you're one twenty, then yeah
• 1:13:49
  you too. Just kidding, by the way, But if you do encounter
• 1:13:55
  this kind of viewpoint, you know, think of an analogy like if you
• 1:13:58
  meet a creationist, don't feel like you have to become an expert in biology,
• 1:14:03
  in evolutionary biology, and the history of life in order to argue against
• 1:14:09
  them. Just go with your gut. You're right. What he's talking about
• 1:14:13
  is not Marxism. It's not quote. Marxists know very well that their aim
• 1:14:17
  is to destroy the intellectual and cultural traditions that are holding liberalism in place.
• 1:14:25
  Don't let this fucking quack from Israel tell you what Marxism is. He doesn't,
• 1:14:30
  he doesn't fucking know. He doesn't know Goofy from Disneyland. We love
• 1:14:35
  Goofy, don't we, folks. Apologies to Mickey Mouse and all of his
• 1:14:41
  subsidiary. Don't listen to what this fucking guy has to say about Marxism,
• 1:14:45
  that's all. And you know what, in two hundred years, we're all
• 1:14:47
  going to be underwater anyway. Yeah, we're all going to be jingoists,
• 1:14:50
  nationalists, nationalists for Atlantis. What's the future like, They're going to be
• 1:14:57
  planetarians in the future when we're all inhabiting different worlds and I'm like, my
• 1:15:01
  world is better than your fucking world. Man, I'm a planetarier optimistic.
• 1:15:05
  If you think we're gonna get that far, yeah, it's I don't think
• 1:15:09
  we're gonna We got to get off this rock. From the members of the
• 1:15:13
  Pill Pod, thanks so much for coming. And uh yeah, if you
• 1:15:17
  guys wanna, we're just gonna keep talking after we finished recording. But you
• 1:15:21
  can cancel your recordings now after you say bye. Okay. Yeah, it's
• 1:15:30
  been I don't I don't want to say it's been a pleasure, but it's
• 1:15:33
  been something at the time