Latest / Thinking Class / #143 - Auron MacIntyre - The West Has Already Become A Total State And Most People Inside It Have No Idea

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#143 - Auron MacIntyre - The West Has Already Become A Total State And Most People Inside It Have No Idea · Thinking Class

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillerman.
0:03
SPEAKER_00: Today I'm speaking to Oran McIntyre.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: Oran is the host of the Oran McIntyre Show on Blaze TV and the author of The Total State.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, Oran and I think out loud about why the HR department has become the political commissar of the total state, why it's not a state-run media but a media-run state, and why that distinction changes everything.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: Why Britain is further along the path to total control than any other country in the West?
0:27
SPEAKER_00: Why the First Amendment and American federalism are defense mechanisms that may not hold, why Texas told the federal government no and the federal government backed down, why the system doesn't need boxcars, it just closes your bank account and destroys your life, why constitutions don't make people, but people make constitutions, and what happens when you change the people?
0:45
SPEAKER_00: Are our Reno's strong gods and whether the gods that return to the West will be ours or someone else's?
0:50
SPEAKER_00: And why the right cannot govern when it wins, and what formation institutions must be built to change that.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: If you value serious long-form conversations like this, then subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, follow on Spotify, and support the show on Substack.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: This episode is supported by Aquinas Tuition, bespoke academic tutoring for children who deserve to be stretched, not managed.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: If your child needs more than their school is giving them, visit AquinasTuition.co.uk.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: And if you haven't already, go and watch The Call of England, my documentary series retracing H.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: V.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: Morton's 1927 journey to find out what is left of the old country and to see evidence of the new England that has emerged since that time.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: Episodes 1 and 2 are live now on YouTube.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Oron McIntyre.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: Oran McIntyre argues that every modern Western state is becoming total.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: And when we talk about total, we don't mean totalitarian, perhaps in the old sense, but total in the sense that there is now no sphere of life that remains outside of its reach, whether it's the corporation, the university, the church, and indeed the family.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: There's a single managerial system that seems to grow for its own sake.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: It flattens life and it doesn't appear to be able to be reformed from within.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: And I've spent 15 years inside the British corporate state, and I can tell you from the inside that Oran is right.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: And I want to understand with Oran today what comes after the total state, because it will end.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: This too shall pass.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: Oran, welcome to Thinking Class.
2:31
SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: I want to start with something your book describes theoretically, and as I mentioned, I've described I've I have experienced practically.
2:42
SPEAKER_00: It seems that at least in the corporate world, every compliance framework, every diversity initiative, every ESG policy, every mandatory training module everything within that bureaucratic setup is presented as neutral, I think true and that it's procedural unnecessary.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: But these systems are coming to uh govern every every aspect, not just of organizational life, but but downstream of that out in the real world.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: And they can't be questioned because to question it is to identify yourself as non-compliant.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: And I suppose you could say the HR department is becoming the political commissar, uh, the risk framework, a mechanism of ideological performance.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: Is that the total state?
3:34
SPEAKER_00: It's not jack boots, it's not the Stasi and the secret police, but it's compliance officers, uh, things that are so banal that people inside it don't recognize it as that kind of power.
3:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that is what has ultimately allowed the creeping uh influence of not just the government, but the media, academia, all of these centers of power that ultimately kind of drive the managerial regime.
3:58
SPEAKER_01: What's allowed them to kind of take on uh you know that this amount of centralized power without anyone really raising a hand is that ultimately, as you say, it's kind of the banality of the evil.
4:10
SPEAKER_01: It's the fact that over time we've seen these small changes, this small desire to uh tweak every little aspect of human life from interfamily relationships, romance, uh religion, you know, business arrangements, every social interaction in public.
4:28
SPEAKER_01: Every one of these is carefully managed uh by the different institutions inside of our society.
4:33
SPEAKER_01: And all those institutions, in one way, shape, or form kind of touch back to this core belief in uh a liberal democracy.
4:42
SPEAKER_01: But as we've seen very often, especially in the United States, when people refer to our sacred democracy, they don't mean the will of the people or the vote of the average person.
4:52
SPEAKER_01: They mean a set of institutions and a way in which the uh current ruling class maintains power.
4:58
SPEAKER_01: And the perfect way to do this with as little conflict as possible, the way to get people to think that they are not being ruled when they in fact are, is to tell them that these institutions are neutral, that they are kind of scientific, they are precise, they are there to produce the most efficiency and create the best form of life for everybody involved without really having any particular agenda or morality or any other uh you know thing that would make you think twice about why those rules are being imposed.
5:26
SPEAKER_01: And so by kind of presenting the current ruling ideology as then all hypothesis, the way that things should be and the default way that we should think about things before we have any question, you kind of cement yourself as the ruling class without imposing your will.
5:41
SPEAKER_01: Well, this is not my will.
5:42
SPEAKER_01: This is just the most scientifically correct way to manage this.
5:46
SPEAKER_01: This is just the way things are done.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: And that way we don't have to address the fact that I'm actually coming in with an agenda, with uh power I want distributed, with people I want to win and people I want to lose.
5:58
SPEAKER_01: All of this is ultimately an objective institution, and it's only really here for our welfare.
6:02
SPEAKER_01: If you oppose this institution, well, you must oppose the general welfare.
6:07
SPEAKER_00: There's a thread in there to pull on, which is about how bureaucracies automatically recognize one another as authoritative.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: I'd just like to know how much you think democracy is still actually viable in the current state of affairs.
6:27
SPEAKER_00: So I'm not calling for autocracy, I'm not calling for totalitarianism.
6:29
SPEAKER_00: I'm just asking, does it mean anything when we tick something against that box?
6:34
SPEAKER_00: Because it feels like there are back doors to people doing what they want.
6:38
SPEAKER_01: I think that democracy is in many ways a easily manipulatable mechanism to give uh some kind of legitimacy to our ruling class.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: Uh when we had a representative republic in the United States, when we had something that was far far smaller and had a far smaller franchise and a much less influential media, there might have been a chance that the actual votes being brought forward were the you know kind of the general opinions of the best men of the day, the gentlemen of the day.
7:12
SPEAKER_01: But in a mass media environment and a mass democracy environment, what you really have is a large number of people who otherwise could not possibly interact with the information they're being asked to parse.
7:23
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's simply no way that the average person can have an educated position on trade with China.
7:29
SPEAKER_01: They simply do not understand the issue.
7:31
SPEAKER_01: And so the only way to have information on those issues is to consume media.
7:37
SPEAKER_01: Media is the only thing that can hope to collate the amount of information you need to be a well-informed voter.
7:44
SPEAKER_01: And if all your information is coming from those sources, well, then your opinion is not your opinion.
7:49
SPEAKER_01: Your opinion is the media's opinion.
7:52
SPEAKER_01: And so functionally, what we end up with, you know, many people will talk about a state-run media, but that's the wrong way to get it.
7:58
SPEAKER_01: It's a media-run state.
8:00
SPEAKER_01: It's a state that's entire existence is dictated by the beliefs that are disseminated by not just the media itself, but again, also the universities, other, you know, thought leaders, tastemakers, NGOs that put pour millions or billions of dollars into shaping public opinion in their direction.
8:17
SPEAKER_01: We all understand that this is a big part of the game.
8:20
SPEAKER_01: You know, the only reason money matters in politics in a lot of cases is that money buys advertisements and advertisements buy wins because that's what it's about.
8:28
SPEAKER_01: It's about name recognition, shaping public opinion.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: That's what really matters.
8:32
SPEAKER_01: Now, I don't think that this means that democracy is entirely useless or never reflects the will of the people.
8:38
SPEAKER_01: I think it's very obvious that the left in the United States worked extremely hard to stop Donald Trump from being democratically elected.
8:46
SPEAKER_01: And they failed in 2024.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: Like it very clearly they were willing to do anything, including putting Donald Trump in jail to stop him from being uh elected by the people, by the will of the people.
8:58
SPEAKER_01: So there are limits ultimately to the amount of manipulation the system can bring.
9:03
SPEAKER_01: Uh, at some point, you do have to cross into hard power if you really want to deny the overwhelming will of a democratic majority.
9:11
SPEAKER_01: However, in any of the marginal cases, when we're down to a couple percentage points one way or another, uh, when you can put your thumb on the scale, uh actually uh it turns out the media is very, very good at manipulating democracy and producing very similar outcomes over and over again.
9:28
SPEAKER_00: You have nodded to some of the issues you've been facing in the United States, and your thesis, I suppose, has been primarily developed with reference to your country.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: I want to test it against Britain because while you are experiencing problems there, particularly amongst the bureaucratic machinery of government and political machinations, Britain certainly appears to be much further along the curve of the total state.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: So you have the First Amendment that will constrain the state.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: We don't have that.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: We have more people arrested for social media posts than Belarus, China.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: We've had police investigating non-crime hate incidents and they record them on your file without you knowing about them, that can stop you from getting jobs.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: We've got mans uh mans, men convicted for teaching pug, uh a pug to raise its poor.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: Um almost every institution, BBC, Civil Service, Church of England, they are all captured by the same managerial ideology.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: Do you think Britain represents a rather mature form of the total state?
10:40
SPEAKER_00: Do you think America is protected from becoming it?
10:43
SPEAKER_00: Or do you think America is also headed in that direction and the at least freedom of exchange that takes place amongst the average person because of the First Amendment is potentially going to be under threat because of the total state machinery?
10:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, there's a reason Terry Gilliam comes out with uh uh with Brazil, right?
11:04
SPEAKER_01: Uh, because uh it's very I think there's something baked into uh kind of the British um mindset of not wanting to offend people.
11:14
SPEAKER_01: You know, there's a there's a certain level of decorum that needs to be observed at all times.
11:18
SPEAKER_01: And I think the managerial state uh kind of uh preys on that uh uh that impulse for the British more than it does the Americans were a little more uh naturally willing to rub people the wrong way and ignore uh social niceties, as where I think uh the the you know the the compliance culture of uh the English does kind of drive them a little towards that direction.
11:42
SPEAKER_01: Um, but it is very clear that you know England is far more along uh this path, or I should should say the United Kingdom is far more along this path.
11:51
SPEAKER_01: I mean, what I constantly use examples of how things have gone in the UK to tell people to stop making huge mistakes in the US.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: For instance, you know, right now we have the flock camera controversy.
12:03
SPEAKER_01: Uh, they're wanting to coat every city in the United States and all of these uh cameras that are constantly going to be taking pictures of your license plate and everything else.
12:11
SPEAKER_01: Uh and the argument that some people on the right for them are making is, oh, well, you know, this will reduce crime, it'll allow you to track everything.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: This is positive.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: And my point has been, well, you know, the England is covered in CCTV cameras.
12:24
SPEAKER_01: Uh, were those cameras preventing a large amount of crime in the UK?
12:28
SPEAKER_01: Did they stop crime when you had uh that boy stabbed by uh, you know, the uh uh the immigrants uh where he bled out and the police came and you know arrested him for racism as he bled out there?
12:41
SPEAKER_01: No, of course not.
12:42
SPEAKER_01: But it did stop, you know, did it stop any of the stabbings of that immigrants did on children in the UK?
12:48
SPEAKER_01: No.
12:49
SPEAKER_01: But what it did do is allow the government to go after everybody who protested against uh you know immigration when it came to uh that that stabbing spree, and then there were the riots all across uh the UK.
13:00
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, how will these cameras be used in the U.S.?
13:02
SPEAKER_01: Well, probably the same way they're used in the UK, not to prevent crime, but to you know, track down enemies of the state.
13:08
SPEAKER_01: I think that the United States is heading this direction, but I do think we have a couple of defense mechanisms.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: As you point out, first, the the First Amendment is one of the few that is actually relatively still ingrained in the people, not just on paper in the United States, but people truly believe we have that right.
13:23
SPEAKER_01: It is being challenged.
13:24
SPEAKER_01: We did just have Shiloh Hendricks uh convicted of uh saying a naughty word to someone, uh, which you know is a clear violation of First Amendment and hopefully will be overturned.
13:34
SPEAKER_01: But the punishment is the process, even if that is overturned.
13:37
SPEAKER_01: Uh, she ultimately will suffer for having used a word, even though uh that is entirely within her constitutional rights.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: Uh, the other thing that I think the British don't think about as much, but I think it's just as important, is in the United States we have federalism uh in a real sense.
13:51
SPEAKER_01: The states were, you know, despite their the constant effort of the central government to erode these rights, the states in the United States were actually created to function as separate governments.
14:01
SPEAKER_01: Uh and so we have individual legislatures, we have county sheriffs who have high degrees of autonomy inside the United States.
14:09
SPEAKER_01: Uh they really do just have the ability to tell the government no a lot of the time.
14:14
SPEAKER_01: Uh and so because of that, it is more difficult for our central government to kind of push down as many of those consequences for defying the state as they like.
14:23
SPEAKER_01: Now, none of this actually unfolded, but a few years ago, uh the Biden administration was basically cutting uh the barbed wire open so immigrants could run across the Texas border on purpose.
14:34
SPEAKER_01: And Greg Abbott said, uh, you come and try to cut that again, and we're gonna deny you access.
14:39
SPEAKER_01: Uh and there wasn't some civil war over it.
14:42
SPEAKER_01: The the central government just backed down and they just stopped coming over and cutting the wire.
14:46
SPEAKER_01: And this is, I think, something that would not occur, I think, to most English, that you would just have a state governor who would say, No, go pound sand.
14:53
SPEAKER_01: Like we we're not gonna listen to you, uh, and would win that battle.
14:56
SPEAKER_01: So I think there are there are some levels of resistance in America that are not available to the UK.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: I remember that news item, and it hadn't really occurred to me exactly why the federal government would have backed down.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: What do you think that was, Auron?
15:10
SPEAKER_00: Were they afraid that had they continued, they might push Texas on to secession with all of that history?
15:16
SPEAKER_00: Or is it because as a nation, it is full respect and devotion to the rule of law or something else?
15:25
SPEAKER_01: I think it really was optics above anything else.
15:27
SPEAKER_01: I don't think they really thought that Texas would break away all of a sudden, uh, though, you know, God bless them if they did.
15:33
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but ultimately, uh, I think what they recognized is if Greg Abbott puts you know uh uh you know, put puts police officers or state troopers or whatever, uh, or or even the you know the the uh state uh national guard, if he puts it between them and uh actual like federal officers uh and says, don't cross this line, and they try to cross it so they can let illegal immigrants in, that's the end of the Democratic Party.
15:59
SPEAKER_01: Right?
15:59
SPEAKER_01: Like that the optics on that are so horrific that you're gonna try to start a literal gunfight over letting trying to get more illegals into the country.
16:08
SPEAKER_01: Uh that you know, that that's the kind of thing that could truly trigger trigger a generational backlash against your party, even if it doesn't come to violence.
16:16
SPEAKER_01: And it's not entirely impossible that it could, but it was unlikely that it would.
16:21
SPEAKER_01: And ultimately the real danger was the political backlash of that optical moment where you had literal armed men clashing with other armed men in the effort to open the border and destroy the United States.
16:33
SPEAKER_01: It simply would have been an impossible political moment to survive.
16:38
SPEAKER_00: You mentioned that the punishment is the the process.
16:44
SPEAKER_00: And I actually just wonder whether one of the things that might push even countries like the United States to a self-repressive or a self-censoring culture will be the development and mass installation of this surveillance technology.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: Uh namely, I say that on the basis of having heard someone making a point that uh it must be so destructive for those who've only ever known that your every move can be recorded, and they're referring to the smartphones in your pockets, thinking about what must it be like to be a child these days where you know that people can record your every move and it can be broadcast everywhere.
17:34
SPEAKER_00: And whilst we often talk about what if this group of people and this group of ideas wins and all of a sudden the things we've cherished start to get crowded out, could it be that very spanglerian idea that the decline of civilizations is manifold, and if you overlook technology and its role in it, then you're overlooking something rather large there.
17:58
SPEAKER_00: Do you think the technology itself might end up leading to a discarding of the First Amendment, even if it remains standing?
18:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I I think I you know make this case in my book itself that the idea of constantly being under surveillance or constantly, you know, the the very presence of social media changes the political paradigm.
18:20
SPEAKER_01: This is one of the things that forces the total state upon us.
18:22
SPEAKER_01: Previously, you know, if you had a political opinion, it might be something you shared with friends or family.
18:29
SPEAKER_01: Maybe you're even bold enough to write some kind of newspaper uh editorial or show up to a county commission meeting and voice it at a government meeting.
18:38
SPEAKER_01: But ultimately, it was not something that was going to be permanent, you know, out there all the time, and people did not expect you to make political pronouncements publicly.
18:47
SPEAKER_01: But with social media, there's this constant uh like void.
18:51
SPEAKER_01: It's not just that you said something on your social media if you didn't say something.
18:56
SPEAKER_01: It's a lack of declaration of your belief in the state ideology.
19:01
SPEAKER_01: That absence of declaration is itself a crime, right?
19:05
SPEAKER_01: It's it's the uh the green grocer with the uh you know uh world, you know, uh the workers of the world unite in the in the window.
19:13
SPEAKER_01: If I don't have that sign, the absence of the sign says something about me.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: It signals something to everybody else.
19:19
SPEAKER_01: So it's not enough to not say the wrong thing.
19:22
SPEAKER_01: You must make public declarations of the right thing.
19:25
SPEAKER_01: And I think that has been uh the thing that, especially during the like peak woke era, people were noticing the most.
19:32
SPEAKER_01: You know, you had to have the black square, you had to announce Black Lives Matter, you needed to do the land acknowledgement, you know, you needed to talk about how terrible George Floyd was, uh, you know, his death was.
19:42
SPEAKER_01: And if you weren't willing to do all of those things, just avoiding the topic was not enough.
19:46
SPEAKER_01: Your lack of declaration of those beliefs was the issue.
19:50
SPEAKER_01: And so that is the real problem of soft totalitarianism.
19:54
SPEAKER_01: Yes, you might have the technical freedom to have the First Amendment and say the thing, but what does it not say what you're supposed to cost you?
20:02
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's gonna cost you a job, it's gonna cost you entrance into university, it's gonna cost you the ability to make money, to you know, buy a how a home, to attract a mate, you know, to have a family.
20:14
SPEAKER_01: Like these things will all go away if you are not complying with speech codes.
20:19
SPEAKER_01: And so we don't need the trains anymore.
20:21
SPEAKER_01: We don't have to put anybody in boxcars in order to get them to speak correctly.
20:25
SPEAKER_01: We can simply cut them off from everything.
20:27
SPEAKER_01: And the technology allows us to make sure that you can't buy or sell, right?
20:31
SPEAKER_01: That you your bank account could be uh closed immediately.
20:34
SPEAKER_01: You could lose all access to online platforms where you need to do business.
20:38
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, uh this can happen immediately and with you know zero zero oppression from the government.
20:45
SPEAKER_01: It can come from all these other institutions.
20:47
SPEAKER_01: And that's why I think the total state is an important idea because it expands it beyond just the idea of the government proper, just the formal government as we understand it.
20:57
SPEAKER_01: And we rather understand there's a power structure that grows from the entire system and has the ability to apply these pressures outside of First Amendment or other protections that were only designed to stop the government and not these other institutions.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: Let's stick on the First Amendment for a little and we can think about the demographic implications of or shall I say, the implications of the demographic transformation that the United States is undergoing and whether there might be implications for your laws and institutions.
21:34
SPEAKER_00: This is very much a live conversation here in Britain.
21:38
SPEAKER_00: And I've just returned from two weeks in your country.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: I have this podcast, I speak freely on it, but I am always aware of the processes going on around me, those that I've talked about, the way that people can have police turning up at the door, or you can find yourself removed from a particular Particular job application process or all the rest of it.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: But what I noticed whilst in America, despite probably being able to speak more freely than most in the country, because I've tried to train myself to do so, is how psychologically free I felt.
22:17
SPEAKER_00: The point I'm uh trying to get to, however, is like Britain, America is undergoing massive demographic transformation.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: Not everyone that arrives in the diasporas that uh arrive in the country are going to have those liberal ideals that were instituted or constituted.
22:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh do you think that there's a chance that the things that you hold most dear in America will naturally change and decline as the peoples change, or do you think that people are so bought into the American ideal, the institutions and the laws are so strong that ultimately things like the First Amendment will endure regardless of whether the Anglo-Protestant culture has disappeared?
23:01
SPEAKER_01: Uh no, I I am a firm believer that uh, you know, constitutions don't make people, people make constitutions.
23:09
SPEAKER_01: Uh and so the the the First Amendment, uh the you know, the set of rights that Americans value, uh those were all tied to the way of life that Americans were living far before they became Americans.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you look at our Bill of Rights, it's it's just more or less the English Bill of Rights.
23:26
SPEAKER_01: It's it's you know, most of the rights that we have there are all the ones that you guys have given up at this point.
23:31
SPEAKER_01: Um but they were, you know, they they came from somewhere.
23:34
SPEAKER_01: You know, they came from the English tradition.
23:36
SPEAKER_01: Uh the Americans thought of themselves originally not as Americans, but Englishmen fighting for the rights of an Englishman.
23:43
SPEAKER_01: It was the denial of those rights of an Englishman that then drove them to say, okay, well, then maybe we're something separate.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: If if we're not Englishmen receiving those rights, then we need to declare ourselves something separate and maintain that tradition on our own.
23:56
SPEAKER_01: And that's the origin of those rights.
23:59
SPEAKER_01: It's not some objective thing that got rationally put into place uh before the country was founded.
24:06
SPEAKER_01: It was already a lived tradition uh that these people believed in deeply.
24:10
SPEAKER_01: Uh and so the continuation of that tradition has been largely one of the continuation of that Anglo-Saxon Protestant uh understanding of how we should conduct ourselves.
24:22
SPEAKER_01: If you change the people over time, especially rapidly, without any level of assimilation, you will, of course, lose those values.
24:30
SPEAKER_01: If there is not something for people to assimilate to, uh then ultimately uh you must become something else.
24:36
SPEAKER_01: And I think we've already seen that, you know, the idea of the First Amendment, even you know, the idea of uh the right to uh express yourself or the idea to uh you know worship as you please, or you know, our second amendment, the ability to actually defend itself.
24:49
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's something that a lot of people on the left don't believe in at all, uh especially when they come from other countries.
24:56
SPEAKER_01: They have no connection to this, they have no deep understanding of this value.
25:00
SPEAKER_01: They're very willing to discard it.
25:01
SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of what's happening right now on the right is a lot of people are looking at, you know, some of these new Muslim candidates in New York and other places who just clearly discard all of our beliefs, all of our values.
25:15
SPEAKER_01: They they care so little and they're so nakedly tribal about their politics.
25:19
SPEAKER_01: And they're standing around saying, well, you you can't do that.
25:21
SPEAKER_01: That's against the rules.
25:23
SPEAKER_01: Those are against our principles.
25:24
SPEAKER_01: Not understanding that like just because you walked into America and touched the magic soil, it doesn't mean that you have those principles now.
25:32
SPEAKER_01: Those things are something that are cultivated over generations.
25:34
SPEAKER_01: They're part of a culture, a tradition, a heritage.
25:37
SPEAKER_01: And when you abandon that and you just let other people come in without any connection to it, and you don't force them to assimilate to it, well, they're not going to just magically adopt that or play by the rules because you wrote them down somewhere.
25:48
SPEAKER_01: They're gonna do what they do, they're gonna live the way that they live, and they're gonna impose that upon you if they have the opportunity.
25:55
SPEAKER_00: I'm glad you brought up the English Foundation.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: There are some excellent, excellent speeches and writings from the Founding Fathers, and there's one that sticks with me in the first Constitutional Congress.
26:08
SPEAKER_00: There's an address that John Adams gives, and he's he's referring back to a trip he makes to Edge Hill in Warwickshire in England with George Washington, and this is a site of one of the big battles in the English Civil War.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: And paraphrasing him, he said, Oh, how short a memory is the memory of an Englishman.
26:32
SPEAKER_00: I stand here on holy ground.
26:34
SPEAKER_00: This is where we fought for the rights of all Englishmen everywhere, and yet everyone's forgotten.
26:40
SPEAKER_00: This is holier ground than even the churches that you stand on.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: Everyone should visit here to know where the rights that they have of liberty come from and that they've fought and died for.
26:51
SPEAKER_00: And that is very, very rousing, and it's something that we totally have forgotten in this country.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: And it strikes me in a melancholy way that there is an anti-Englishness, and I don't say this only as an Englishman, but just more broadly for the English speaking world.
27:08
SPEAKER_00: But the reality is is the world that has been created has a set of freedoms that everyone wants to benefit from, and they have been really good for the world and anyone who has the uh good fortune to live within them, and yet regardless of whether you're from that civilization or you've come to live in amongst it, there are very few who seem to be grateful for it and are aware of it.
27:39
SPEAKER_00: Do you do you feel that there is a rear guard action to try and protect all of this beyond just the politicians in Republican Party or wherever else, or maybe not even there?
27:52
SPEAKER_00: Or or do you do you think the historical memory, regardless of the founding fathers being Englishmen, but just more broadly what they were representing, do you feel that it is being eroded, or do you think there is a pushback trying to claim it once more?
28:08
SPEAKER_01: I think there is a pushback, but one of the reasons that I'm kind of doing what I'm doing is I recognized how that pushback was so poorly organized because it didn't understand itself.
28:20
SPEAKER_01: Uh again, so many Americans especially have been told that their nation is a product of a constitution, that it's it's a set of principles that were laid down before the founding of the country.
28:33
SPEAKER_01: And as long as you hold to those principles by themselves, that's what kind of creates the freedom, you know, the the love of kind of the culture that we're talking about.
28:43
SPEAKER_01: Uh but that, as we have already pointed out, is not the case.
28:46
SPEAKER_01: That's inverting the causation uh of you know, kind of where this culture comes from.
28:51
SPEAKER_01: And if you don't understand that, if you don't grasp that, then when you try to push back, you're just your your feet are planted in sand, right?
28:59
SPEAKER_01: You have no foundation for which to actually push.
29:02
SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, my my buddy Carl Benjamin often says that uh that uh liberalism is the sharia law of the English, um, which I think is exactly right.
29:11
SPEAKER_01: Like it it is it is the way of being, right?
29:14
SPEAKER_01: It works for the English.
29:17
SPEAKER_01: It looks, it works for Anglos and Anglo-descended peoples, right?
29:20
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't work for other cultures.
29:22
SPEAKER_01: And it's not because those cultures are bad, it's not those because those cultures are evil, it's because they just have their own way of life.
29:28
SPEAKER_01: And so while liberalism has a lot of benefits, it's benefits that are organized under the structures of kind of that Anglo constitution, that Anglo way of being.
29:37
SPEAKER_01: And if you don't have that, then you might enjoy some of the benefits, but you're also not very grateful.
29:42
SPEAKER_01: You don't really, because it's not your way of life.
29:44
SPEAKER_01: It's not the way of life you recognize as the one your people should be engaging in.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: So people are more than happy to show up on the shores of the UK or the United States or these other countries and to absorb the benefits, absorb the money, absorb the technology, absorb the progress.
30:01
SPEAKER_01: But they don't want to live that way.
30:03
SPEAKER_01: And they don't want to be expected to live that way because that's not the way they live.
30:07
SPEAKER_01: So when you flood one of our countries with a bunch of people from, you know, North Africa or the Middle East or uh, you know, South America, when they come in, they do not come with the expectations of Anglo peoples.
30:18
SPEAKER_01: They come with the expectation of their peoples.
30:20
SPEAKER_01: And when they show up, they live in the way that they're used to, and they're just willing to take on that stuff.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: And this is again why I try to explain to people in the United States, you know, why is Zoromam Dani being successful in the US?
30:31
SPEAKER_01: Is it because people really love communism?
30:33
SPEAKER_01: Does communism now make sense?
30:35
SPEAKER_01: Do we now suddenly think bread lines aren't real?
30:37
SPEAKER_01: No, of course not.
30:38
SPEAKER_01: The communism is simply a cover for people who want to take your stuff, right?
30:42
SPEAKER_01: It's a bunch of people who you know think, hey, that guy doesn't look like you, and I want the people who look like me to have all their stuff, so I'm gonna use whatever ideology I need to take it.
30:50
SPEAKER_01: And I think the same thing's happening in the UK.
30:53
SPEAKER_01: You have large migrant populations who are more than willing to exploit the holes in the liberal system to gain the benefits, but they have no interest in complying with liberal ideas.
31:03
SPEAKER_01: They have no interest in becoming part of the liberal system.
31:05
SPEAKER_01: They simply are going to feast off of its largesse, and if it collapses under them, that's of no consequence to them because it was never in their nation in the first place.
31:15
SPEAKER_00: You are implying a set of foundational or fundamental parts of human existence, that we value nation, we value family, we value faith and the sacred.
31:30
SPEAKER_00: And of course, as you're implying, different groups have different conceptions of how each of those worlds may be ordered.
31:37
SPEAKER_00: And R.
31:38
SPEAKER_00: R.
31:38
SPEAKER_00: Reno, editor of First Things, he wrote The Return of the Strong Gods in 2019 and made the argument that the whole post-war Western order was built on the dip deliberate suppression of those fundamental realities of human life.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: But that these strong gods, he called them, are now returning because they can't be per permanently suppressed, which is why you see the rise of populism, it's why you see flags going up on lampposts.
32:04
SPEAKER_00: And I suppose your argument tot makes the point that the managerial state totalizes to prevent their return.
32:16
SPEAKER_00: My question to you, Reno believes that the strong gods can never be kept down regardless of the architecture uh employed by bureaucracies to keep them down.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: My question to you is which force wins?
32:32
SPEAKER_00: Do you believe that the total state can suppress the strong gods indefinitely?
32:36
SPEAKER_00: Or does the hunger for all of those things eventually break through that managerial apparatus?
32:42
SPEAKER_01: No, I think that Rusty is ultimately correct.
32:44
SPEAKER_01: And again, I make the arg the a similar argument near the end of my book that ultimately the system cannot suppress these very human uh needs forever.
32:55
SPEAKER_01: It can do it for a very long time.
32:56
SPEAKER_01: It can, you know, put at great cost and expense to the population, uh, you know, work to suppress this as much as possible.
33:03
SPEAKER_01: But eventually you are fighting against human nature, and fights against human nature usually end in destruction.
33:09
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, you can run communism for a long time, but eventually it collapses under its own weight.
33:13
SPEAKER_01: You can run, I think, this uh kind of liberal managerial state for a long time by trying to alter uh human nature, but eventually those strong gods do come back.
33:22
SPEAKER_01: Now, the thing that we have to be careful about is, however, a couple of things, which, you know, again, Rusty, I think, lays out in his book.
33:29
SPEAKER_01: One, not all of the strong gods are good, right?
33:33
SPEAKER_01: Like they can come back in very vicious and dangerous ways.
33:35
SPEAKER_01: And so we have to make sure that when they return, we are selecting for the best parts of them and not just embracing whatever forces explode from this pent-up uh kind of box of Pandora that we've created.
33:47
SPEAKER_01: Simultaneously, we have to remember that just because the regime comes apart due to the return of these strong gods, it doesn't mean that we were the ones who ultimately returned.
33:56
SPEAKER_01: If you look at the history of uh civilization, uh, and you can see this argument from Peter Turchin, you can see it from uh guys like uh, you know, historians uh like uh John Glubb.
34:09
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but over time, these systems that become highly bureaucratic always fall to something that is more barbarous, uh, something that is not relying on uh kind of that uh marginal utility coming out of increased complexity.
34:24
SPEAKER_01: Uh and so it could be that you know America or the UK or the peoples of the West collectively uh break out of this managerial paradigm and reassert their more natural ways of being, their identities, the strong gods.
34:37
SPEAKER_01: But the other way this could go is that actually we just kind of slowly atrophy those things that have been uh you know crushed under the weight of the managerial regime.
34:47
SPEAKER_01: And then some people like uh, you know, different Islamic tribes end up rushing in to fill that void by being the strong horse in that scenario, being the ones that still have that identity.
34:58
SPEAKER_01: Uh again, so many, you know, the Romans were a force for just thousands of years, uh, but eventually, when they no longer had confidence of them in themselves, foreign Germanic tribes were able to come in and run roughshod over them.
35:13
SPEAKER_01: Is it because the Romans just, you know, didn't have the military might or technology?
35:18
SPEAKER_01: No, that still existed at some level, but they simply did not have the will to hold back these people and many cases imported them to run the very society that they ended up collapsing from the inside, which you know, both of our countries are kind of bent on doing at the moment, thinking that if they import enough people uh from outside, they could somehow solve their economic woes.
35:37
SPEAKER_01: They put them in positions like police officer and judge and all these things.
35:42
SPEAKER_01: Uh and that uh uh you know kind of puts us where we're at now.
35:45
SPEAKER_01: So I do think Reno is correct that ultimately the strong gods will return, but we should we need to be careful and that and we can't just assume that's a solution because the strong gods might be someone else's gods.
35:55
SPEAKER_01: And uh that that is uh just what how you end up with conquest.
35:59
SPEAKER_00: As you mentioned, Rome and the importation but also invasion of these different tribes.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: It even took me back to the islands that you, of course, are from ancestrally, that I'm from, and I think about my mix between Scots-Irish and English, but on the English side of things, derived from all of those four German northern German tribes, they were invited over by a f a a flailing Romano-British elite as the Roman Empire had fallen.
36:36
SPEAKER_00: Come and help me hold off all of the proles.
36:40
SPEAKER_00: I I need to shore up my position.
36:42
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to lose my villa.
36:43
SPEAKER_00: They invited over so many.
36:45
SPEAKER_00: Now, when the whole thing collapsed, they just created their own thing.
36:49
SPEAKER_00: And the country I sit in, England, named after those people.
36:52
SPEAKER_00: I have wondered this myself is ultimately demographics, does this mean that you may end up with something some entirely different to England?
37:03
SPEAKER_00: The kin culture, the historical memory, all of those things just change over a matter of generations.
37:10
SPEAKER_00: So perhaps what we are witnessing is potentially the changing of the guards.
37:15
SPEAKER_00: I I never want a black pill.
37:19
SPEAKER_00: I am always full of Christian hope that somehow we might be able to hold on to something here, but there's also the chance that we're just living at this point in history, this big inflection point, and who knows whether there's a will for a nation to survive.
37:37
SPEAKER_00: On the technological surveillance apparatus, one question is whether it is almost impervious to breaking down.
37:51
SPEAKER_00: So I know we believe the system will collapse under its own weight, but this surveillance technology is like nothing that's ever existed before, and we're all hooked into it in some way.
38:05
SPEAKER_00: But do you think that the technology itself means that it it can't fall apart, or do you think that ultimately it still needs to be operated by people with the will to continue the whole system and so it can be dismantled?
38:20
SPEAKER_00: Because I look at China, for example, and I know they have a more collectivist mindset, but there also have been attempts at uprisings, and they've always managed to be crushed pretty brutally.
38:31
SPEAKER_00: So I just wonder if military technology, surveillance technology might actually stop any of this changing of the guard, or again, do you just think it's fated, regardless of the technological development?
38:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there so there was a great essay uh by NS Lyons called The China Convergence that I don't think enough people uh have read.
38:50
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but I think that we are probably seeing every government scramble for AI, um, not just because it's going to win wars, uh, but because they also know it's the key to managing populations in a post-managerial world.
39:04
SPEAKER_01: Uh, I think that there is a belief that the managerial structure structures are breaking down, that we have reached the end of kind of uh the marginal utility of complexity inside bureaucratic institutions.
39:17
SPEAKER_01: However, AI might unlock a way in which we could continue to manage the population at scale without needing to employ those human bureaucracies that have been so critical in the past.
39:29
SPEAKER_01: There's a possibility to that.
39:31
SPEAKER_01: I'm of two minds.
39:32
SPEAKER_01: I mean, technology is always a disruptor, right?
39:34
SPEAKER_01: And this in many ways, uh, a lot of what we do is try to, you know, we spend a lot of time coming up with political ideologies to react to what are actually technological problems uh or things that have been brought about by uh technological uh innovation.
39:51
SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh communism, fascism, you know, and and modern liberal democracy are all responses to the Industrial Revolution, right?
39:59
SPEAKER_01: Like we still haven't figured out how to deal with that.
40:00
SPEAKER_01: Uh so are we gonna figure out how to deal with the AI revolution?
40:03
SPEAKER_01: I I'm doubtful.
40:04
SPEAKER_01: Uh however, we have to remember that technology is as much a disruptor to the current power as it is a helpmate.
40:11
SPEAKER_01: Uh so for instance, both of us are now having a conversation we probably would have never had 10 years ago uh due to the disintermediation of uh media, right?
40:20
SPEAKER_01: Due to the internet and all of these other new media uh podcasts, that kind of thing, streaming culture, all these things that have heavily disrupted the information flow.
40:29
SPEAKER_01: And you can see the establishment on both the left and the right panicking about the fact that they no longer have that 100% grasp on the media flows inside their environments.
40:38
SPEAKER_01: That said, the as you point out, there's also a million new opportunities for uh censorship under uh you know these regimes.
40:46
SPEAKER_01: Uh ultimately, I think that we're still gonna run into the same problem because the solution right now uh that most governments are going for is race to AI as quickly as possible.
40:57
SPEAKER_01: The problem is that AI creates even more of exactly the effect we're talking about.
41:02
SPEAKER_01: It requires a high degree of complexity.
41:04
SPEAKER_01: You have to, you know, we've already seen basically uh private computing disappear due to the cost of chips and RAM and hard drives and everything else because of the rise of AI.
41:14
SPEAKER_01: Uh, we're going to see, you know, we're seeing all these power uh stations being solely dedicated to the creation of AI.
41:21
SPEAKER_01: Well, guess what?
41:22
SPEAKER_01: All these systems are incredibly uh vulnerable to any kind of supply chain disruption, any kind of resource disruption.
41:28
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, they are, yes, in a way, uh creating these incredible tools for the government to use, but if the government can entirely rely on them and you know, uh a little bit of uh, how do we say this, creative uh interference uh by the people who are being ruled uh can easily disrupt those.
41:45
SPEAKER_01: Uh well, then power might be more omnipresent, but also more fragile than ever.
41:50
SPEAKER_01: Um so I think that we are kind of probably just seeing, I don't think history is over.
41:55
SPEAKER_01: I think we will probably see the same cycle of history that we have seen previously.
41:59
SPEAKER_01: It will simply manifest in a new and different way as it always has.
42:02
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but I I think there are new technological tools that could do exactly what you're saying.
42:07
SPEAKER_01: But I am doubtful that they will ever completely uh create the kind of uh enduring totalitarianism that we're predicting, which is uh who, you know, uh what Alistair McIntyre uh predicted in his book uh After Virtue, which I draw from when I talk about it in the total state.
42:25
SPEAKER_00: An absolute must.
42:26
SPEAKER_00: The the two McIntyres, reading them back to back.
42:30
SPEAKER_00: Let's think about what comes after the collapse in that case.
42:34
SPEAKER_00: I've implied that perhaps demographic projections in England and Britain will see it become something else.
42:43
SPEAKER_00: Absolut that's a slightly different diagnosis for a slightly different problem, but let's imagine that the total sea the total state does contain the seeds of its own destruction that it collapses.
42:58
SPEAKER_00: What then does your nation and mine look like?
43:01
SPEAKER_00: Do are people so put off by the idea of a centralized state that the United Kingdom breaks apart, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, they all go their separate ways?
43:16
SPEAKER_00: We potentially end up with regions breaking away into their own self-governing um territories because perhaps diaspora immigrant communities are governing things, how they like.
43:29
SPEAKER_00: Does the United States continue?
43:32
SPEAKER_00: Uh there are obviously points in history when secession has been threatened from the Lone Star State, Texas.
43:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh even California talks about it sometimes.
43:43
SPEAKER_00: Uh do you think that the Federal Union would would hold uh or do you think perhaps a deunionized, a federalised, not a non federal future um is what's coming?
43:58
SPEAKER_00: People will be just sick of the central.
44:02
SPEAKER_01: Well, as I say in my book, I think that in the United States, the situation is a little more uh obvious and natural.
44:09
SPEAKER_01: The path forward for that one makes very clear because as you say, we do have that history of federalism in the United States, and so we still have a good amount of autonomous government that exists inside states themselves in a way that I don't think really exists in the United Kingdom.
44:25
SPEAKER_01: Uh so it's not, and and I don't want to be, I want to be clear.
44:28
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that Texas or California or New York, never forget New York tried to see secede from the Union.
44:34
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but uh I don't think any of these states will ultimately uh leave in any official capacity.
44:39
SPEAKER_01: I don't think you're gonna get a declaration where we get, you know, uh the separation of the states.
44:44
SPEAKER_01: I think what's far more likely is that the federal government just becomes more and more inept, more and more weak, uh, more and more uh irrelevant, uh due and unable to kind of enforce its dictates.
44:57
SPEAKER_01: And we see the separate states start to gain more power because it simply becomes less and less uh fruitful to follow the instructions of the central government.
45:08
SPEAKER_01: So for instance, my state of Florida famously was uh very dismissive of federal regulations during COVID.
45:15
SPEAKER_01: Ron DeSantis uh stood pretty tall against a lot of uh, you know, the the pressure to uh you know kind of compel the people of Florida to follow that stuff.
45:23
SPEAKER_01: And uh no, you know, there was nothing that came, you know, there was no consequences for Florida.
45:28
SPEAKER_01: This and we have already pointed out the showdown of the border skirmish in Texas.
45:32
SPEAKER_01: Like we're already seeing the fact that states can generally defy the federal government.
45:36
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we we've seen uh even more so with the blue states in the United States, uh, they were continuously uh rejecting American immigration policy.
45:45
SPEAKER_01: We've had sanctuary cities for decades in the United States, and nothing has happened to them.
45:49
SPEAKER_01: They've never paid a cost, they haven't even lost federal funding or like completely ignoring these rules.
45:54
SPEAKER_01: So I think we're gonna see an increased uh tendency, again, not for like full-on armed secession, but simply people saying, no, we're just not going to comply with that.
46:05
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna do our own thing.
46:06
SPEAKER_01: And if you want to send the 82nd airborne down here, well, give it a shot, but we don't think you're gonna do it.
46:11
SPEAKER_01: And I think over time, you know, that will be it will be more of a drift towards state autonomy than it will be some kind of hard revolution in the United States.
46:20
SPEAKER_01: Uh in the UK, it's a more interesting problem.
46:23
SPEAKER_01: One, because your government structure doesn't really allow for the same type of uh nullification, uh, but also because uh, you know, geographically, the United States is just huge.
46:34
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, it's funny.
46:35
SPEAKER_01: Uh, when I was in the UK, I was like, man, I could drive from the top to the bottom of this country before I could drive to the top of the bottom of my own state in the United States.
46:44
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so the idea of each one of those regions breaking off into their own autonomous country seems difficult if only because of scale.
46:53
SPEAKER_01: I don't know that they could generate the natural resources, economic, you know, output, those kind of things to really sustain themselves in any independent fashion.
47:02
SPEAKER_01: Uh, I think that the, you know, while America has the government and perhaps spiritual advantage over the UK when it comes to collapse, I think what the UK has is demographic advantage.
47:11
SPEAKER_01: Despite all of the importation of foreigners recently, you guys are still, you know, what, 85% native population, 80% at worst.
47:20
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, the United States is uh 65% and falling uh you know pretty quickly.
47:26
SPEAKER_01: Uh and while we are seeing births among you know native white mothers uh increase more than other demographics, uh in general, we're still gonna see the majority of new Americans come from uh immigrate immigration and the children of immigrants in a way that the UK could theoretically not, as long as you know you guys start having babies and you know stop importing foreigners.
47:50
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think the current status for the live births here in Britain is that 53% of births are to white British mothers.
48:03
SPEAKER_00: So the school uh at school age children by 2031 the the white British will be a minority majority within schools.
48:14
SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, demographics, I think it seems that Britain is running an experiment that's perhaps even more extreme than the United States experiment since the 60s, but for now at least it's a little bit further behind that that demographic transformation, let's let's call it.
48:32
SPEAKER_00: Um well, let's think about how anyone trying to take advantage of the political moment, which is one that is growing tired of the uh status quo we've just described.
48:46
SPEAKER_00: You, of course, you being the United States, have had the moment in which a counter-elite through Donald Trump and his uh 2.0 administration swept to power.
48:59
SPEAKER_00: There is talk that Conservatives in America, having had the biggest political win in a generation, are blowing it because they don't know how to govern.
49:09
SPEAKER_00: And I think you've even suggested that if the right can't govern when it wins, then the problem's not power.
49:15
SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's something else.
49:16
SPEAKER_00: Uh and and I I wonder what that something else is.
49:19
SPEAKER_00: Is it because people on the right or whoever else it is, state counter-elite are spending so much time as individuals on the internet talking amongst themselves?
49:32
SPEAKER_00: But really what's missing is something like a formation institution, something which produces people who can actually lead.
49:39
SPEAKER_00: But obviously that takes us back to the point that most institutions are captured with the current ideology.
49:43
SPEAKER_00: So then what's the answer?
49:45
SPEAKER_00: If they if these other institutions can't be reformed, do we need to build new institutions outside of it as a parallel structure to form those people who will govern?
49:55
SPEAKER_00: Is that the answer, or do you think it's something else that needs to happen to take advantage of any political wins that sweeps away the old order?
50:03
SPEAKER_01: Well, people will often talk about some kind of conflict between entryism and parallel institutions.
50:10
SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, you have to back one strategy or the other.
50:13
SPEAKER_01: I think the obvious answer is both.
50:15
SPEAKER_01: You know, you should take wins in the establishment, in the formal structures of government and its institutions when you can get them.
50:21
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but you should also not delude yourself into thinking that that will be sufficient.
50:26
SPEAKER_01: Oftentimes, you know, people will say, we're not voting our way out of this, and this makes people angry as if you're suggesting that you should just shouldn't vote at all, you should abandon politics entirely.
50:35
SPEAKER_01: And that's not what that slogan is trying to tell you.
50:38
SPEAKER_01: What it's trying to tell you is that this delusional idea that you just walk up every four years, check a box for Donald Trump, and call it a day as if you've done your civic duty is ridiculous.
50:48
SPEAKER_01: That's not how the left operates.
50:49
SPEAKER_01: That's not how any actual organized minority that's going to wield power operates.
50:54
SPEAKER_01: They're constantly organizing and they do it across the board.
50:57
SPEAKER_01: They don't just do it in formal elections.
50:59
SPEAKER_01: They do it with civic organizations, they do it with fraternities, they do it with mutual aid societies.
51:04
SPEAKER_01: They organize politically all the time.
51:07
SPEAKER_01: And so when they're in power, they're not just sitting in office for four years waiting for the next guy to come by and implement his agenda.
51:14
SPEAKER_01: The minute they get into office, they can hit the ground running because they have the manpower, the staff, the organizations, the fundraising, thing, the messaging, the discipline.
51:22
SPEAKER_01: This is already prepared for them.
51:24
SPEAKER_01: Now, in some ways, the second Trump administration is the dog that caught the car, right?
51:29
SPEAKER_01: Like they had a very clear plan for getting to the car and biting the tire.
51:35
SPEAKER_01: Okay, we're gonna win this, and as soon as we do, we're gonna hit you with a thousand uh you know executive orders and we're gonna make all these things happen.
51:42
SPEAKER_01: And that's why the first three to four months of the Trump uh uh administration re-entering into power just felt like a revolution, man.
51:50
SPEAKER_01: They were getting rid of USAID.
51:51
SPEAKER_01: They were gonna downsize the civil rights division, downsize the Department of Education.
51:56
SPEAKER_01: They were gonna challenge birthright citizenship, all of these things.
51:59
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna start the deportations, the whole thing, we're gonna hit the ground running.
52:03
SPEAKER_01: The problem was about four to five months in, you've done all the executive orders you can.
52:09
SPEAKER_01: Sadly, we are still a democracy, and so you do have to pass laws to make these things stick.
52:14
SPEAKER_01: You can't just leave the order there, it will eventually be overturned by a judge, or you will hit some, you know, uh, some kind of hard wall of power, and you will actually need to codify these things into legislation.
52:25
SPEAKER_01: And the Trump administration, and this is not their fault, the Republican Congress is horrible, but it is horrible.
52:30
SPEAKER_01: And it didn't seem like they had a plan with what to do with that fact once they got there.
52:35
SPEAKER_01: One of the mistakes I think a lot of people have made in the second Trump administration is they forgot all their good elite theory.
52:41
SPEAKER_01: Like they started to pretend that winning an election in and of itself actually does put you in power.
52:45
SPEAKER_01: But of course, that should have been exactly the opposite message that we learned in the first Trump administration.
52:49
SPEAKER_01: Trump was elected, but he was not in power.
52:51
SPEAKER_01: His own generals defied him, his own executive branch defied him with zero cost.
52:56
SPEAKER_01: And when he came back into power, guess what?
52:58
SPEAKER_01: No of those people paid any cost.
53:00
SPEAKER_01: Anthony Fauci, we just found out, basically knew that the VACs would cause women to have miscarriages.
53:08
SPEAKER_01: And he's not even gonna go to jail.
53:10
SPEAKER_01: Like, forget what he really deserves, which I won't say on your show to avoid any uh, you know, government interference for you.
53:16
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but like, you know, the fact that this man is gonna just keep walking around free, even though he's you know basically on the level of any given Nazi scientist is insane.
53:26
SPEAKER_01: But that's exactly what's gonna happen.
53:28
SPEAKER_01: And when you have that scenario, you recognize, well, you weren't really in power, right?
53:32
SPEAKER_01: Like you don't really have power because the left had no problem locking up every single J6 protester and even people who weren't even at the event immediately.
53:41
SPEAKER_01: You know, they're no one was sitting there whinging about the constitution or any of that.
53:45
SPEAKER_01: They just threw these people in a dark hole and found sympathetic judges and locked them there for years with no real due uh process in most cases.
53:54
SPEAKER_01: And nothing happened, right?
53:56
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but when Trump's in power, I mean, we can't even arrest actual criminals, like people who really did do obvious crimes.
54:03
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so I think we have to understand that while I think the Trump administration is doing absolutely the best job that any Republican administration has in my lifetime, we just can't delude ourselves into thinking that that meant that ultimately you were going to kind of have the power necessary immediately to create this.
54:19
SPEAKER_01: One of the things I run into the most is people saying, well, we simply did not have the necessary people to staff the administration.
54:26
SPEAKER_01: And part of that's true.
54:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean, some of it is that the Republican Senate wouldn't even approve the nominations of the Trump administration.
54:33
SPEAKER_01: You know, I had friends like Jeremy Carl who were supposed to be moving into the administration who simply could not get confirmed in the Senate, even though it's a Republican Senate.
54:40
SPEAKER_01: But the other issue is that so many conservative, especially white young guys, have been denied access to college, have been denied access to leadership or mentorship programs, scholarships, all these things, that you simply have a dearth of guys who are ready to pick up and run.
54:56
SPEAKER_01: And if you're still waiting for like guys to come through the system that your enemies created to screen them out, well, then how are you ever gonna have the people to run any of these bureaucratic organizations?
55:06
SPEAKER_01: Every one of them is disqualified by their own demographics, much less their political beliefs.
55:11
SPEAKER_01: So if you need them to have those exact qualifications before they can enter into the system, well, the system is already selected against them.
55:17
SPEAKER_01: So what are you gonna do?
55:18
SPEAKER_01: So I think the answer is we have to do both.
55:20
SPEAKER_01: We do need to win elections, we do need to win formal power, but we also need to have parallel institutions because our own guys can't move through the institutions as they exist now.
55:30
SPEAKER_01: If you want to groom people to step into these positions, well, then you have to find alternative ways to go ahead and certify them for those positions.
55:38
SPEAKER_01: And you can only do that if you're creating parallel institutions with the ability to award such accreditation.
55:44
SPEAKER_00: Anyone listening out there with the clout and the motivation go and build something that's gonna contribute to this?
55:51
SPEAKER_00: Oran, before I let you go, I'm gonna ask you the question that I ask all of my guests.
55:56
SPEAKER_00: And that question is what if you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
55:59
SPEAKER_00: It could have been something big, a moral absolute you thought existed, or something more quotidian.
56:06
SPEAKER_00: And what was it that made you think differently?
56:10
SPEAKER_01: Um well, I mean, I guess it would the biggest thing would just be my total political shift from neoconservative to you know, whatever I am now, reactionary or something like that.
56:20
SPEAKER_01: You know, I used to believe the talk radio Republican line that, you know, we uh you know had this you know free and open liberal democracy and that we needed to spread it through warfare to other peoples who would recognize the beauty and uh you know uh miraculous nature of the American system once it was hoisted upon them.
56:41
SPEAKER_01: Uh and you know it was it was Donald Trump walking onto a stage debating uh one man that I used to be an intern for, uh saying, hey, uh actually uh we don't have to invade every country in the world.
56:54
SPEAKER_01: That's dumb.
56:54
SPEAKER_01: We can't install American democracy everywhere.
56:56
SPEAKER_01: Let's come home and do what we need to do to save the American people here and now.
57:01
SPEAKER_01: That should be our focus.
57:02
SPEAKER_01: That should be our priority.
57:04
SPEAKER_01: And the other people, well, they can go pound sand.
57:06
SPEAKER_01: Like right now, we have to take care of our country first.
57:09
SPEAKER_01: And uh once he said that, I then discovered that, of course, there was an entire uh tradition of this kind of nationalism on the right when you look at guys like Pat Buchanan or uh, you know, uh all kinds of other uh figures in the American right, Russell Kirk and these people.
57:23
SPEAKER_01: Uh and so uh, you know, Donald Trump may have presented that in the most, you know, kind of basic, uh, you know, wide spectrum appeal way, but it sent me down a journey that has kind of led me where I ultimately am politically now.
57:37
SPEAKER_00: Big transformation as well.
57:39
SPEAKER_00: You you've moved from being inside the educational establishment, teaching school kids, to doing what you're doing now.
57:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh I suppose there's a there's a uh a lesson in there for for people in that those of you who have a similar worldview to Oron and you're doing a normal job, is you'll find it very, very uncomfortable to be in that place because of uh the scale of the how captured these institutions are.
58:09
SPEAKER_00: And I know I certainly certainly feel it in the Cobra world.
58:12
SPEAKER_00: So uh more power to you, Oron.
58:14
SPEAKER_00: Uh you've done a magnificent job.
58:16
SPEAKER_00: It's been a huge contribution to the culture, your book.
58:19
SPEAKER_00: And on that note, what else can we expect from you?
58:23
SPEAKER_00: Are you writing anything else or are you sticking purely to your me media duties at the moment?
58:29
SPEAKER_01: Uh the media duties do make it harder to carve out time for writing.
58:33
SPEAKER_01: I have discovered that.
58:34
SPEAKER_01: Uh I I I I finally started picking up my next book again.
58:37
SPEAKER_01: I started I started writing it last year, and then just too much was happening.
58:41
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but I started in a second chapter, and then hopefully I will actually keep that momentum going here.
58:46
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but I I want to do, I wouldn't say a direct sequel to this total state, but uh to to explore further the idea of inhuman politics that uh in increasingly uh politics are being being moved out of the realm of human actors and into the realm of systems and artificial intelligences and other influences that will drive our politics forward.
59:08
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, so I think that uh you know hopefully I will stay focused enough to produce that text in a timely manner so it'll be applicable, but we'll see.
59:18
SPEAKER_00: Please do.
59:18
SPEAKER_00: It couldn't be more timely.
59:20
SPEAKER_00: I see people becoming AI prompt monkeys every day and for things that are pretty consequential.
59:26
SPEAKER_00: So please, please finish it.
59:30
SPEAKER_00: Where can people find you online and follow your work, Oran?
59:33
SPEAKER_01: Uh sure.
59:34
SPEAKER_01: Thanks again for having me.
59:35
SPEAKER_01: Uh you can find me over at the Oren McIntyre show.
59:38
SPEAKER_01: It's on Blaze TV.
59:39
SPEAKER_01: It's also on YouTube and uh Rumble and all your favorite podcast platforms.
59:44
SPEAKER_01: Uh I have my Substack, which is the Total State.
59:48
SPEAKER_01: You can of course pick up the book, The Total State.
59:50
SPEAKER_01: And then um, I have uh my handle.
59:53
SPEAKER_01: I'm on YouTube or I'm on Twitter and Gab and uh Instagram, all that under Oran McIntyre.
59:59
SPEAKER_00: Oran, it's been an absolute pleasure.
1:00:01
SPEAKER_00: Keep fighting the good fight.
1:00:03
SPEAKER_00: Speak again.
1:00:04
SPEAKER_00: Thanks again.
1:00:05
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.