Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Is James Lindsay Wrong About the 'Woke Right'?

Transcript

Is James Lindsay Wrong About the 'Woke Right'? · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:00
  Hey folks, welcome to this very special DarkHorse intervention. I am of course Bret Weinstein. I am sitting with James Lindsay, the subject of the intervention.
• 0:09
  And I'm of course also sitting with Mike Nayna. Welcome to both of you.
• 0:13
  I'm feeling like this is a setup.
• 0:15
  Well, yeah. I mean, that's the only way this works.
• 0:19
  (Laughter) But in any case, glad to have you here.
• 0:22
  Obviously, this is not the usual Dark Horse setup. We have decided to use AI to render a scene from 1963. And I expect it will look pretty good.
• 0:34
  Actually, this is being filmed by Reed"Nice Wonder". I believe that's how he pronounces his name anyway. Very generously doing that for us. And we are here together actually at Freedom Fest, the largest gathering of free minds in the world, I think, is how it builds itself.(...) But in any case, we decided to have this conversation because you, James, have been on the hot seat for...
• 0:59
  Is it months now? Getting on nine. Yeah, nine months. Nine months. Baby's ready.
• 1:06
  (Laughter) Well, I can imagine that you're feeling back on your heels. You've taken a tremendous amount of heat, and a lot of it has been very ungenerous to you.
• 1:15
  That's true. And I think you know that Mike and I value you greatly as a friend and as a contributor to the intellectual space. And so maybe you have something to tell us that we haven't figured out about what you're saying. And maybe we have something to tell you about what's not getting through about your message or about the possibility that you have framed things in a way that isn't all that helpful.
• 1:40
  So anyway, let's have that conversation.
• 1:43
  Our first sponsor on this episode of The Inside Rail is Masa. Masa makes delicious, healthy chips that aren't going to make you sick because they're made with real, whole ingredients, the way that all of our food used to be made.
• 1:55
  These chips are fried in 100% beef tallow, no seed oils ever. You can taste the difference and your body can feel the difference. America's health is declining fast. Chronic illnesses, obesity, and autoimmune disorders have exploded. Why?
• 2:08
  Because we've swapped real food for cheap industrial substitutes. Consumption of seed and vegetable oils, soybean, canola, safflower, sunflower, and corn has increased astronomically over the past century, flooding our diets and causing chronic inflammation and disease. Big food companies have been pumping our food with artificial dyes, stabilizers, and other fillers for decades. In contrast, Masa chips have just three simple ingredients.(...) Organic, nixtamalized corn, sea salt, and 100% grass-fed beef tallow. Absolutely no seed oils, artificial dyes, or additives ever. Beef tallow used to be the standard cooking fat in America until not many decades ago. It is nutrient-rich, nourishing, and makes food taste incredible. It was replaced with seed oils, which are far cheaper and way nastier. But Masa is returning to traditional American cooking methods, creating tortilla chips with the authentic flavor and satisfying crunch your grandparents enjoyed. Masa also supports American farms and regenerative agriculture. Grass-fed ranching revitalizes soil health, boosts biodiversity, and protects ecosystems. It is just such ranches that Masa is supporting. Choosing real food heals us and our environment, which feeds back to make us healthier still. Masa is championing clean American-grown ingredients, transparency, and authenticity. Most of all, though, Masa chips are amazingly delicious. Try them with salsa or goat cheese or spicy pepper jam. Smother them in beans and cheese, or just eat them straight out of the bag.
• 3:31
  They are fantastic. Go to Masachips.com slash DarkHorse and use the code "Dark Horse" to get 20% off first-time orders.
• 3:39
  That's Masachips.com slash DarkHorse and use the code "DarkHorse" to get 20% off.
• 3:45
  This, of course, centers around your claim about something you have called the"woke right." And I will just say, at a personal level, I've heard you describe "woke right" many times, and I never get it. Never. And I will say, I am not against the idea that"woke" is a concept that can be broken away from the equity movement and properly applied elsewhere. I've done it myself. During the bad days of COVID, I regarded many of the people who took me to task as medically woke because... I would agree with that, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it just simply fit. So I have an intuitive sense of what it is that causes "woke" to be applicable to some other movement. And when you talk about the "woke right," I don't get it.
• 4:36
  And then when you tell me who's in the"woke right," I really lose track of how you've gotten there. So maybe you want to articulate what it is that you're saying, and this will give me the opportunity to ask questions about it. Mike, you jump in anytime you feel ready.
• 4:51
  Well, just before you go on, I would say I have a more narrow definition of"woke." I think it needs intersectionality to be called "woke." And I think once we start moving away from the quasi-religious movement that proceeds from this kind of intersectional worldview, where we might be talking about the framework that's in a similar realm, but I don't think we're talking about "woke" anymore. I think it kind of loses its function, really. And so I think I know what you're looking at.
• 5:20
  Although I see the landscape on the right as far more complicated, maybe, and so I just don't necessarily think you're off in the middle of nowhere. You're looking at something, you're trying to describe it. I just think it's a bad idea to call it "woke." That's kind of my position.
• 5:35
  Can I follow up on that? Yeah. I think actually, in some sense, what we're going to do is tease this apart carefully and figure out what it means.
• 5:44
  But "woke" used to be a term that I would have resonated with,(...) because what it meant was it was a term used by blacks in America for whites who understood the predicament of blacks in America. So it was a term of honor. And there is something to the black experience in America. And so I would have aspired to"woke." And then "woke" got taken over by something else that, of course, had that--what did you call it?
• 6:18
  Multicultural? No. Intersectionality.
• 6:21
  Intersectionality. It had that intersectionality component to it, but that was really a trope.(...) And what defined the "woke" revolution, as far as I'm concerned, was a passionate desire to include people who were understood to be useful and exclude people who were understood to be-- It's a functional political ideology.
• 6:46
  It's a way to get different groups with grievances together to create political change.
• 6:52
  Well, I would say it is a mechanism for dispensing with people whose positions are hard to reckon with.
• 7:01
  So that's "woke." Right. Both of you guys just said, "Okay, so, Mike, what if you had disparate groups on the right who don't agree with one another,(...) but they've cobbled together away, say, through a no enemies to the right policy, or sometimes no enemies on the right policy, to create a functional block of people who don't necessarily share the same views who want to include certain people who are functional to that project and exclude certain people who are not functional to that project. And now you have a functional political ideology cobbled around, perhaps different identity groups, but the identity groups are incidental, as we all know, to "woke" on the left, as we traditionally understand it. Larry Elder's black, but he's not politically black, so he doesn't count. You have to have the political view that went along with this-- and I agree with you, Bret-- colonizing ideology. And we should name what that ideology is, which is a form of neo-Marxism.
• 8:01
  So now you're losing me. I've already lost you. I think so. I mean, this may be a personal defect, right? This may just not be a way in which my mind works, and so when you go down this road-- We can do it in evolution, if you want, instead of in math.
• 8:15
  Well, I'm still with you, if you want to-- I don't know if I can translate it any better than James has, but I guess what I'm seeing on the right is there is an intellectual class that are trying to equip MAGA with an ideology, so with a kind of coordinating function. And in many ways, it looks a lot like what's happened on the left.
• 8:38
  So it's an ideology. It's fundamentally a few different kinds of nationalism, is what they're all circling around, and power politics attached to national identity as such.
• 8:47
  Yeah, yeah.(...) It would be great if it were more than one, but is there a small list of people who are so unambiguously in this category that I can start using it to check what you're saying?
• 9:03
  Yes. I don't know how familiar with some of them you will be. Let's shoot for ones I'm likely to be familiar with. That's the specific challenge here, because this is factional. There are different factions. So on the left, there's been, with this intersectional framework, a consolidation of power on what effectively works as one kind of constellation worldview. I say constellation because there's the race, there's the sex, there's the sexuality, and so on.
• 9:30
  They've been right-hand, left-hand.
• 9:32
  They'll take anyone with a grievance as long as you fit into their worldview. Right.
• 9:37
  But on the right, you have people, if we even just stick within the nationalist framework that I've articulated, there are at least three ways, without even getting into the American unique kind of experiment, there are at least three ways to think of a nation. It is a people, almost always is what you end up with as the definition. It's not necessarily like with the United States, or even frankly, I think of the nation of the United States and also the nation of Israel as covenantal, that it's defined by the covenant that it's made,(...) Israel with God of the Old Testament, or the Torah, and the US, the covenant is that we're going to have this project of self-governance based on these inalienable rights that we accept by faith or natural law are in fact inalienable and thus universal to everyone. And propositions like "all men are created equal," which means political standing. No man has any inherent authority over another man. So this is a covenant, right? So I'm going to take that one off the table, because there's cultural, ethnic, and political ways that you can define a nation. It's a people that are defined by this commitment to this geographical region, language, history, common destiny. That's a political definition. But maybe what made those people that was that they had a common ethnic heritage that of course became, it was very significant in many nations, but also very significant in Germany quite catastrophically when it got amplified to remarkable excess, wrapping in a weird occultism to it. And then you have like the experiment in Franco's Spain, which was that there was a cultural identity that defined the nation, which this was a Catholic Spanish nation, right? So you have a cultural, you have a political, you have an ethnic way you can define the nation. And so you intrinsically end up with this kind of identity group thing, but there are different ways to do it. Now, I know you asked for specific names.
• 11:38
  Within, say, the religious cultural, there is an entire large movement within, especially evangelical Christianity, that refers to itself or has referred to itself as the Christian nationalist movement. It sometimes calls itself the new Christian right. Yep.
• 11:54
  Stephen Wolf wrote a book about this. I don't know if you're familiar with Stephen Wolf. He wrote a book called The Case for Christian Nationalism. And this book is quite explicit about being a vision for a America that has a highest office above the three divided powers that's outlined by the Constitution called the Christian Prince, who is described as the living avatar of or vicar of Christ on the earth, which sounds a lot like the pope, except that this is Presbyterian as opposed to Catholic.
• 12:25
  And this theocratic element is one of the things that I lump into this woke vision because they have a vision of a religiously reunited and defined national identity that has been excluded from, in their view, full participation in society and its politics by a system of power that sometimes they blame as the post-war consensus.(...) Sometimes they blame it on this kind of generally anti-Christian attitude or secularism or secular liberalism.
• 12:56
  And so, like Stephen Wolf wrote that book, but there are many other players.
• 12:59
  William Wolf, not related, is a major player in politics. He's the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership. You have characters like Nate Fisher, who is the, or at least was, I don't know if he's still the chief of the American reformer, which is a kind of a journal, an online publication that's maybe their largest publication. But it's hard to talk about these things if you don't know these people.
• 13:24
  Right. So that's not going to work.
• 13:25
  Can I come in for a second? Because I think a lot of people misunderstand what James does. I think the core of what you do comes from your background in mathematics, your PhD, combinatorics, mathematical combinatorics, which is a kind of puzzle solving, mathematical puzzle solving. You spot patterns and you kind of move them around. And I think that you've applied that to the realm of ideas. And that's why he was a weapon in writing these papers, because he could, he's like AI. I used to call him a supercomputer. He spots the pattern.
• 13:58
  He could reverse engineer the structure.
• 14:01
  (...) And then he could apply it in some new space.
• 14:04
  Exactly. And this is his master skill. He was at JPT before it came along. And so what you're doing now to the idea space is, and you're not wrong. I think you're great at this. You're spotting the structure of the ideas, remove it from its content, and then you're finding the same structure on the right. So these are similar structural elements.
• 14:26
  We can talk about math.
• 14:27
  We call them homomorphisms.
• 14:28
  Well, there you go. And so that's what you're doing and you're doing it well.
• 14:32
  But I think once you remove it, move the content and you just look at the structure, we're in perfect idea land because some of these things are actually attached to the reality on the ground. Do you know what I mean? So if to me, if you remove intersectionality from woke, then it's like what we're talking about a structure. We can start talking about maybe archetypes or like onions or something.
• 14:56
  Straight white Christian male. I think we're off track here. You're not wrong about what James does. I think the question is, does James have a product from his work on this particular set of questions? Has he wrestled free from the chaos, the noise? Has he found an entity that's real, that doesn't have a synonym, and that can be passed on well enough to use it with precision? And here's the problem is that I don't do what James does, but I do something analogous in a very different way. And the fact that what James hands over never lands with me is a red flag because my sense is I ought to be able to figure out if he's pointing to a natural grouping.
• 15:48
  I ought to be able to find it having had a hint about what it looks like, whether I like the term woke right or not. I ought to be able to find that thing and then say, ah, here's where you have an edge defined incorrectly and we can have that discussion about who's got it more accurate. But it shouldn't be a amorphous thing that runs through my fingers every time. And I must tell you, I'm having the exact experience right here. Our final sponsor today is Dose. Dose for your liver is a tasty drink that supports liver health. Your liver has hundreds of functions in your body, most famously as a filter, an organ of detoxification.
• 16:25
  Modern life is pretty toxic, so your liver has been hard at work. Dose for your liver was formulated to cleanse your liver of unwanted elements, aid digestion, and maintain your body's ability to filter toxins. Dose for your liver has four active ingredients, milk thistle, ginger, dandelion, and turmeric, and a base of delicious organic orange juice. Dose is gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, and vegan, and it tastes fantastic. Dose comes in a sleek glass bottle with stainless steel shot glass to take your dose with. You can drink it straight or add it to other drinks. Zack thinks it would be excellent in coffee, but he'll grow out of that. Dose for your liver's in-house clinical studies found significant improvements in standard measures of liver health, as indicated by levels of enzymes including asparate, aminotransferase, and alanine aminotransferase. After study, participants drank Dose for as little as eight weeks. The liver produces and regulates cholesterol, stores vitamins and minerals, and impacts digestive and metabolic health, among many other things. Dose promotes healthy liver function, aids digestion, eases bloating, and even boosts energy levels. Stick with Dose and feel the incredible benefits over time. More energy, reduction in brain fog, and better sleep. Save 30% on your first month subscription by going to dosedaily.co.c or entering the code"darkhorse" at checkout. That's D-O-S-E-D-A-I-L-Y dot C-O slash darkhorse for 30% off your first month subscription.
• 17:51
  Let me try something different with you, Bret, and at the risk of us, again, going on a different off track track.
• 18:00
  What would you say in terms of, and I'm going to not, I'm not doing this like gratuitously. I mean this, but not biological evolution, but mimetic evolution. What would you describe, we'll take it out of the context of now and intersectionality and all this. Let's go back in time a century.(...) What is to you the relationship between communism or Marxism and fascism as its reaction against it? What's the evolutionary relationship of ideas? What are the mimetic leaps? What are the contours that continued?
• 18:35
  I think that's a good question. I'm not 100% confident of my answer here, but I will say every single time, and I spend a lot of time now despite being an unrepentant progressive,(...) I spend a lot of time with conservatives now, and I hear a lot of favorable things said about nationalism, and every time they say it, I stop them and I say, "I think you're using the wrong term." You have to distinguish between nationalism and patriotism, and patriotism I believe we should all be able to get on board with, and nationalism we should be very troubled by, and I say there's a very clean place that we all share that we can look at the distinction. And that is in John F. Kennedy's question when he said,"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." What your country can do for you is the nationalist description. It's your nation as a bludgeon, as a weapon.(...) Your nation is moving forward together in order to collect things from the world.
• 19:39
  Your willingness to sacrifice on behalf of your nation, that's what patriotism is. And you can be, I would argue, patriotic to a lot of things. Anything that you're willing to sacrifice for, ultimately maybe even your life for something you are patriotic to, whether it's good, bad or neutral.
• 19:59
  So I would argue that fascism is the sort of distilled nationalist essence. There are certain things that tend to go along with it, you know, the partnership between corporation and government. There is a very decidedly militaristic aspect that emerges very naturally from it.
• 20:21
  And so I see it as a set of beliefs or desires that should set off alarm bells because it does tend to lead to this very dark place.
• 20:35
  With respect to communism, you have kind of the inverse thing. You have this ideological belief that the interests of the collective are the thing to be maximized. And any time you have somebody naively maximizing anything, you're going to get a disaster out of it. And this is, of course, what we see with communism. So I guess the point is there's an analogy between the two. You have a puritanical obsession with something that's maximized and a willingness to accept the carnage that comes along with it, often literal carnage in both cases.
• 21:12
  And then you have the thing that divides them, which is, are they focused on individuals benefiting by using a nation together as a, you know, like a weapon?
• 21:26
  Or are they obsessed with putting aside individuality, which, of course, will never work, and partnering in some grand exercise?
• 21:38
  So that's not a bad answer. My thought is that there is a universalizing.(...) This is a funny word to say, so I'll qualify it in a moment or clarify in a moment.
• 21:49
  But there's a universalizing force in the communist ideology. The idea is that all human beings share something in common.
• 21:57
  And that thing that we all share in common is that we've been alienated from not just who we are, but also what we could be if we were to remember or recollect or return to who we are. Karl Marx actually described communism as the complete return of man to his social, which is to say his human nature. So a return is actually there. This is what we naturally are, but we've been alienated.
• 22:22
  What did he say alienated us from who we are? Well, in his case, it was private property. But in critical race theory, we would say it's the imposition of racial categories through white supremacy. And if we were in queer theory, we'd say it's the imposition of norms and legitimacy through the decision processes of people who define themselves illegitimately to be normal, whereas everyone outside of normal is queer.
• 22:45
  And so you have the same concept that again appears in the communist manifesto from the beginning,(...) saying that the entire movement of history, all of what human history represents, all of human activity, therefore, represents the conflict of the contending classes that are separated for Karl Marx by virtue of something that makes an upper class versus a lower class. But the fact is that we're actually all one, except for this stratifying line that generates an intrinsic conflict.
• 23:18
  And I try and bridge a gap here.(...) I think an Australian political philosopher Kenneth Minogue, he did this, what James is doing many, many years ago. So he started he's got a book called The Alien Powers, a Pure Theory of Ideology. And he's looked at the different, even libertarianism, feminism, Marxism, fascism, he looked at them all and he goes, what are the what are the common features of this thing? And it's fascinating that he can find just like James has the similar story structures and similar mechanisms that unite all these seemingly disparate ideologies.
• 23:59
  The identity politics comes from what I just said, right? So that you've now intrinsically, you've got everyone alienated in two different ways from who they really are.
• 24:09
  There are the people we get into the details. I'll just finish off quickly. I can't because I think it might be able to link it to your world. I've got to choose after I read this book, Alien Powers, I had it had a Gestalt shift that changed my perspective because I'd been looking at the intersectional ideology for many years and looking at structures and trying to figure out what the hell this is. And trying to figure out what the hell this thing was, because it didn't look like it was a description of reality. It looked like something else.
• 24:33
  And I came away from this thinking intersectionality is a complicated version of the stories a tribe would tell before they raid the neighboring tribe to steal their shit. It's like a successor kind of thing. And it struck me as this was the fact you can find these patterns within ideologies. It strikes me as that this is somehow archetypal or something like that. And I think that this is what James has stumbled into. And this is what he uses his great skill for. And I'll tell you what, I see it too. I just don't think that calling these different things by the same name, I think it creates a cartoon. All right.
• 25:12
  Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.
• 25:13
  There's still good fascism here.
• 25:15
  Okay. Sorry. But I am getting something from this for the first time.
• 25:20
  There is, and now we're squarely in my territory, there is a set, there's a toolkit that humans use to do certain kinds of things. And one of the key features of it is the falsification of history in order to justify the next move. And so the idea,(...) I mean, I can even halfway defend Mark's point about the fundamental nature of humans being collective.(...) Because when you're a tiny little tribe that finds food or starves together, the degree of surrender to the tribe identity is much higher. And so really the thing, it's not private property that wrecks this, it's scale, right? You get so many people, you don't know everybody, you don't have shared fate. The internal competition dynamics become overpowering, whereas they were the minor feature when you were a tribe of, you know, 10 people or 30.
• 26:20
  So anyway, I do think there is something to this falsification of history. You can make an argument that religious origin stories all have this character. And the problem is that the religious origin story version of it is, in my opinion, legitimate in order to create a cohesive mythology. Now, if that mythology is a good one, a morally good one, then the origin story supporting it is valid. If it's a justification for stealing other people's stuff, I feel exactly the inverse way about it. But the point is, it's an amoral technology. Creating an origin story to justify a move is a thing that people do.(...) And it does make me wonder about your application of Woke here because it's so universal that I'm not sure it's not going to just be something that you can spot everywhere and you can isolate any group that has any sort of analogy between its beliefs.
• 27:25
  It's as cave-swoke. Do you know what I mean? Like, you find it everywhere. Gramsci...
• 27:30
  Because it's all Gnosticism, just repeating in different contexts over and over again.
• 27:35
  Yeah, you see the structure again and again.
• 27:36
  That's what you're going to call it,"woke." Because you've had a Gnostic awakening to the true structure of society.
• 27:41
  But the question here is... This still happens in fantasy. Yeah, sorry. I really want you to get into this. But the question for me here is...
• 27:50
  These are structures, but they have differing levels of fidelity to reality.
• 27:55
  And so to call them all the same thing is to throw babies out with bathwater.
• 28:00
  Because I think right now, I'm more sympathetic to the Woke Riot than I am the Incessional Left.
• 28:06
  I think actually everybody should be, but the problem is that we're not confined to the choice. There are not two choices on the table to which we are committed with a rifle to our head.
• 28:15
  We've got to hold off on that. I want to let you finish your thought about the Fascism. About the Fascists. And then I want to get back to the question. Because I think what we now have is a better question.
• 28:27
  You've compelled me that you're using a technique, that that technique reveals patterns. You say you've seen one. I want to know whether the thing that you see is a natural grouping that I can recognize from my perspective with your help to find it. And we can talk about whether the term is right at that point. Or it's not a natural thing. And you mentioned, or I guess you mentioned, Chat GPT was analogous to what you're doing.
• 28:54
  I want to know if you're hallucinating.
• 28:57
  I mean, it does. I had it...
• 29:01
  I asked Chat GPT actually to write me, just tangentially, a short summary of Woke Right on a 10th grade reading level.
• 29:07
  So that I could maybe find something I could help people with. And it wrote me this thing and it gave great examples, very lucid examples about Republican congressmen. A famous Republican congressman said, "Well, who is it?" Oh, that's fictional. And it had like four or five of them. It just made them up. But it didn't mention that it made them up until I asked.
• 29:25
  So maybe this, but okay. So my question to you was, what is the evolutionary relationship, memetically, between communism and fascism? And historically, actually, it's a practical element as well, that everywhere that we end up with the fascist regimes in the 20th century, something preceded them, which was a decadent liberalism that was unable to manage affairs very well, which I will refer to as continental liberalism to compare it against American liberalism, which is a different philosophical grounding. But then you also had the incursion of Marxist agitation into that society. Mussolini was answering that, and Italy. Hitler was answering that very... That's what Mein Kampf is about, actually, in Germany. And that's literally the reason that Franco rose to power in Spain, was to stop the commies. And so the evolutionary link, what I was hoping that you would say is reaction. So reactionary is a word. We're all familiar with the word. It's distinct from conservative. It somehow means something stronger. But it's reacting to this combination of a weak and decadent liberalism that is enabling a communist agitation. And what it sees, in my opinion, is that the weak and decadent liberalism is allowing a... which is ultimately very individualistic, is allowing a collectivist ideology to come in and destroy things. So you need collectivism to answer collectivism as part of the mentality. Where is that collective? Well, what you had in communism is this universal idea...
• 31:01
  The way you're saying you have nationalist collectivism responding to communist collectivism.
• 31:06
  To universal polarizing...
• 31:08
  In a pragmatic fashion. This works for me.
• 31:11
  So communism has a bipolar... Or bipolar, I don't know. Bipolar is better, I guess.
• 31:17
  It has a bipolar universal framework.
• 31:21
  It's in fact, as I mentioned the word, I'll say it anyway, it's the Manichian Gnostic framework recreated in social politics and economics. What you have in fascism is, holy crap, this is going to ruin us. Our current system is not capable of stopping this. So we're going to replicate the parts that work, and we're going to get rid of the parts that the universalist... radical egalitarianism at the bottom of communism. And we're going to replace it with a rigid hierarchical structure around national identity defined in one of three ways. Which is, again, ethnic, cultural, or just political.(...) So what you end up with is, rather than everybody in the world being alienated from who they really are, in other words, their inheritance by dint of some original sin, the introduction of private property that becomes the basis for exploitation, whatever the story is. What you have instead in fascism is that there is a rightful inheritor to that national object and its fruits, which they have been alienated from by the excesses of tolerance of the soft liberalism that has allowed the Marxist agitation of radical egalitarianism. So you have radical anti-egalitarianism in a nationalist identity framework, which can be intersectional across ethnicities and across polities and across cultural aspects.
• 32:42
  Okay, let me ask you a question. So by the way, I do think I now get where you are. I do think you're hallucinating, and I will tell you why.
• 32:51
  But this is productive.
• 32:53
  I get your taxonomy now.
• 32:55
  What were the three things around which we could group ethnic, cultural, and political?
• 33:00
  Three ways to define a nation. All right.
• 33:03
  Yeah, I think I know why I do disagree with you, and I think I do disagree.
• 33:10
  The argument I have made, so again, not coming from mathematical groupings, but coming from sort of biology of people.
• 33:19
  I've made the argument that communism has an unfortunate analogy or an unfortunately tight connection in our minds with Marx.(...) And my point is, Marx didn't invent this. It's actually something that will canonically re-evolve when certain conditions occur, which you've described. Material conditions.
• 33:42
  Yeah, it's reacting to something real.
• 33:44
  And I think I know exactly what it is.
• 33:47
  Nature is a free market more or less.
• 33:51
  Free market to the extent that it works correctly looks like what happens in nature. There's resources, creatures figure out ways to access those resources. They exclude other creatures from the resources. That's kind of the way it's the downside and the upside linked.
• 34:08
  When people are grouped so as to have something free market like and natural in this regard, especially in the context of a governmental structure that can actually interrupt the functioning of that market, there comes a point at which something like 50% of the population recognizes that if forced to compete, they will be on the losing end. That for whatever reason, either through their own error, but more often because they just weren't given the proper environment to arm them for that competition, they know, ah, I live in a system in which I am destined to be a loser.
• 34:48
  Now, those losers have an incentive to collectively overthrow that system and redistribute its product. They may even have a legitimate gripe. If the system is corrupt, the point may be, hey, you're actually, you know, live in large on the productivity of my work for no good reason.(...) Right. It's not my fault that you sent me to a shitty school and I don't have the ability to compete in this market or the market isn't as open as it looks and I can't get access to it. So let's just overthrow the thing. Right.
• 35:18
  And the point is, so they create a phony story about the natural order of things and the equality of this that and the other that gets the losers to group together. They overthrow the system and it turns out their utopian vision doesn't work at all. And there's a pile of skulls. Right. So that natural process happens and the version of it that we know well is marks just as the version of genocide. We know well as Hitler. Right.
• 35:40
  So he has he's too closely associated.
• 35:44
  It's a natural process and it's one that we should learn to spot and interrupt.
• 35:48
  And the key thing is those who advocate for the free market have to do a much better job of making sure that the market matches the brochure that it actually does provide access to people so that they have an incentive not to overthrow.
• 36:03
  Can I. That's really good. But so I don't disagree with you because I see what you're saying. But I think you're jumping the gun because I see the right intellectuals on the right trying to many of them or many trying to equip Margot with an ideology, a successor ideology that's similar to what you're talking about. But if we use the term woke and we call this it's nascent idea space like everyone saw the recent tweet about heterodoxy being on the right and then the left being this coordinated nothingness and NPC world. So there are lots of ideas in this space. And for me, it's looking more like a soup of ideas, a lot of interesting stuff and a lot of valid grievances. And in there is the risk that you're trying to nip in the bud. But in nipping it in the bud and going too hard after this kind of work thing, there are all these legitimate grievances that if we cut off, then the then the ideologues are going to have the day in the sun.
• 37:06
  Well, that's all.
• 37:07
  Listen to this. This resonates for me.
• 37:11
  I think you think you see something and I know I see something.
• 37:14
  You do.
• 37:15
  I agree.
• 37:15
  You say something. Well, I've been looking at it for a long time now.
• 37:18
  But I now I now have a pretty good. I mean, you just you just spotted it. The point is he sees something crystallizing.
• 37:25
  OK. Yeah, it's too early to say it's a thing. It isn't a thing.
• 37:28
  And in fact, it might not be a thing.
• 37:30
  It's definitely a thing.
• 37:31
  Well, I'm not saying that all the pieces are in place. So I get that you're worried about it. But it's a set of factions, some of which are bent on gathering power to themselves through Machiavellian techniques,(...) which are very similar to the communist manipulations in their own right. And my hypothesis, which I've referred to for a long time as the law of intolerant factions, is that soup you're talking about will be dominated by the ideologues unless they are identified because the most intolerant faction through Machiavellian techniques, unless they are identified.
• 38:06
  And people are hopefully brought back out of that lost sense of grievance. Yeah, I don't want to cancel people, but you do it eventually.
• 38:15
  The solution to the paradox of tolerance at some level requires quarantining sufficiently intolerant views. And the reason that it will win is the same reason that conquest. Second law is so widely recognized here across the world.
• 38:30
  I think you're I think you're I think you're you're jumping the gun.
• 38:33
  And intolerance will beat tolerance every time.
• 38:37
  Here's the problem.(...) We have a new player in this story. And that new player has powerful advocates.
• 38:50
  The alternative to the pattern of history that you are describing is what I would call the West.
• 38:57
  The West is the alternative to going through this cycle. The West has never been completed as a project. There are days when it shines. There are days when it embarrasses itself. But the idea of a level playing field in which all ideas are expressible turns out to be fantastically productive. And it turns out it is so productive that you are actually better off tolerating getting the short end of the stick in the West than you are getting your fair share in a much less productive system, which is a strong argument for not going down this road. That's right. So again, we're going to get back to the problem of putting some names in this category, which I think the reason that there is a problem is that you're very early in spotting.
• 39:45
  The crystallization of this process, you think you know where it's going and you don't know because you don't know early.
• 39:51
  Do you think I am? How long do you think that this? I want to know.
• 39:53
  I want to know who's on the list. Is there anybody that I know and talk to regularly who's actually in this category?
• 39:59
  I don't know who you talk to regularly. I think Tucker Carlson's in the category.
• 40:03
  Here's why I don't think Tucker Carlson's in the category because Tucker Carlson talks to people like me all the time.
• 40:12
  So? Look,(...) I'm not a Christian. I'm damn close to an atheist.(...) He understands me to be a patriotic American. He values my opinion. He allows his audience to hear it. So the point is there's nothing about Tucker Carlson that is excluding people like me or Glenn Greenwald, frankly, from the conversation.
• 40:40
  He is behaving. I think Tucker, I would say, is one of the people who does not understand why I am obsessed with the distinction between nationalism and patriotism. Right. I don't think that I think he hears it, but I don't think it changes his way of viewing these things.
• 40:56
  So I understand that there's a part of him that just feels like I'll screw this.
• 40:59
  Right. But at the level of who he's choosing to amplify and talk to and listen to, it's actually pretty darn diverse. And that doesn't sound that sounds to me like the precise opposite of what you defend. I'd like you to make the case because I'm interested. I want to ask a question to get this case rolling.
• 41:17
  Okay. What if you had to describe Tucker's M.O. in terms of what he presents on his show, not necessarily just who he platforms, but the ideas that he presents, how he validates ideas, what ideas he thinks are the most important for people to listen to. And you had to do it within the framework that the left refers to as other ways of knowing. Would that be an easy or difficult project?
• 41:42
  In other words, marginalized epistemologies,(...) marginalized knowledges.
• 41:48
  It may be a flaw of mine, but try it in simpler terms.
• 41:53
  One of the key components of the woke epistemology, as we typically understand the term woke, which is called critical constructivist epistemology. If you want the technical terminology, which was outlined by a guy named Joe Kinchelow in 2005. Just to know the history, there is a book by the title, Critical Constructivism. And so he devotes a very large portion of that book to talking about how it functions as a system of knowing. Here's the thing.
• 42:20
  There's some book. No, no, no, no.
• 42:22
  This is the book of woke. No, I'm sorry.
• 42:24
  It is. You're talking to a guy who was literally chased off his own campus as if he was a witch for possessing racist beliefs that he did not possess. I know a lot about woke. I don't need to read the book. So. Wait a minute. What? I mean, I lived it.(...) That's what they said to you at Evergreen.
• 42:42
  Why? Where is the evidence? Asking for evidence is racist. No, no, no, no. I'm telling. Well, no, I lived it.
• 42:48
  I don't need evidence. I remember that clip in the film. But the point is you're telling me that our discussion hinges on a book that I have not read. No, our discussion.
• 42:57
  I was going to describe to you what this means.
• 42:59
  But you've already lost half of the book.
• 43:02
  Why does it require so much verbi?
• 43:03
  But I wonder I wonder if I can translate because. Yeah, no, no, I can't translate.
• 43:07
  Yeah. I'm just trying to hear it.
• 43:09
  Yeah.
• 43:09
  Yeah. No, no, no. But I'm trying to let me let me hear him out and I'll see if I can translate.
• 43:13
  Hold on one second. OK. You are putting an idea. Right. A two word idea into the world. And you are saying this is a useful category. Now, if we talk about the Woke Revolution, the intersectional one, it is not. It does not require you to read a book to figure out who belongs to this ideology. In fact, many of the world.
• 43:34
  No, no, no. We have this argument, not you and I. But culturally, we have this argument for a year. I spent two years, Bret, on stages across the country, speaking to sympathetic conservatives and libertarians, trying to convince them of this following thing, that critical race theory. That's three words. If you take out the middle word and just get critical theory,(...) I spent two years trying to convince America, conservative America, that critical race theory is a form of critical theory. All you have to do is delete the modifier in the middle. Before you go, so this was not an easy discussion for people for CRT for Woke on the Left.
• 44:13
  I think I'm 15 seconds.
• 44:15
  Darwin spent more than a decade, OK, trying to wrestle his hypothesis into a way to get the world to the world. That's how we get our hypothesis into a presentable form. We can now summarize it in less than a paragraph. So my point is I get that there's a lot of work that went into you figuring out what it is you think you see. I don't get why it is so hard to convey it and why we have to reference obscure texts.
• 44:37
  Very simple words very quickly. Woke epistemology means a preference for outside knowledges. There is a truth regime that excludes everything that would threaten its power base. And so anything outside of that truth regime is more likely to be valid and true because it challenges the existing power structure. That's woke.
• 44:55
  That's literally woke.
• 44:57
  I think you just invert. Maybe I didn't understand what you said, but I think you just inverted woke. It is not a preference for anything outside of the power structure. It is a preference for a very particular alternative.(...) Right.
• 45:09
  The idea intersects out because it has to challenge the existing power. There's a success.
• 45:14
  It's not anything outside.
• 45:16
  No, it's a very specific very outside.
• 45:19
  Correct, correct, correct. Very pragmatic as well. So maybe we talk about what if we're talking about ideologies in the next couple of years. Ideologies and their connections with us. So about what ideology is. And I think I think Carl Benjamin might have come up with this definition. And it's great. It's ideology is political programming for NPCs.
• 45:40
  I mean, that's a definition. The best treatment of ideology ever read was in Charles Mills book from class to race where he explains why you stop being a classical Marxist and started being a critical race theorist.
• 45:50
  I mean, we can I'm just giving a high quality.
• 45:53
  What it is, what he describes is that it is a function. You could use the word secular if you want. Yeah, but it is functionally a mythology that the ruling powers tell as the story to the entire population, including themselves to convince them. That's how society really works.
• 46:11
  Political programming for NPCs, because both of these sides want something. They want power. And so they've created structural stories in order to mobilize large groups of people to unite and mobilize large groups of people.
• 46:25
  I want to wrestle this to something simple enough to comprehend, to pass on and to critique. It doesn't it shouldn't require James presence to operate the thing. Yeah, if it's a real thing, it ought to be a variation of power structures. Well, here's the point. You say they want power. I'm going to say, you know what? That's the default state of nature. There is one alternative to it. That alternative is the West in which we agree that we actually want a level playing field. Now, is that stable in the long term? Can it be? I suspect so, but I don't know. But it is the alternative to every faction is going to want more power for itself. Okay, the idea that I actually given the opportunity to corral power to hoard it will actually prefer to level the playing field for future generations. That is a counterintuitive way of being. And my point is, it doesn't actually mean I want less power. It means that I will end up with more absolute. I don't mean political power, but more absolute ability to control my environment and make it the way I want it to be more liberty. If I engage in leveling the playing field and therefore everybody having a stake in protecting that level playing field rather than playing, you know, King of the Hill all the time. I will have more of whatever that liberty is in absolute terms. If I agree with others to protect the level playing field, then I will get if I decide to cheat and unlevel the playing field. So it is an alternative. I don't know that it can be stabilized long term.
• 48:06
  My sense is it works great during productive times. And then it gets overthrown as the music stops and musical chairs. But the story that you're telling, I believe you are warning me.
• 48:19
  Yes.(...) And that warning is important because the process you're talking about can catch you off guard and it can.
• 48:28
  Yeah, it operates like every other coup very slowly than all at once.
• 48:31
  And all at once. Right. So I'm on board with the idea that, hey, if I love the idea of the West and I want the West to work, I got to be very careful to keep an eye out for the thing you're talking about. I've got to be very careful not to embolden people who are committed to the thing you're talking about. But then you tell me it's Tucker Carlson and I feel like I'm going to be a little bit more confident. I'm talking about Tucker Carlson and I feel like, well,(...) I've sat with this guy when there are no cameras on.(...) He loves the West and he does not want me excluded from it because I'm Jewish or progressive.
• 49:05
  And I can tell he's actually you can translate from his perspective to mine.
• 49:10
  And there isn't that big a gap because at the end of the day, he does want the playing field leveled and stabilized. But you tell me I'm misunderstanding.
• 49:19
  And he's not. He's not an ideologue. I think that in so far as he's got a worldview, he might be absorbing it.
• 49:24
  I mean, he is an ideologue. He's a Buchananite paleoconservative.
• 49:28
  No, let me try a different direction.
• 49:30
  Well, maybe we come back to Tucker Carlson. Maybe we don't.
• 49:33
  Do you agree that there was a phenomenon 10 years ago, five years ago, whatever years ago called the alt right?
• 49:42
  Was that a phenomenon?
• 49:44
  Well, it wasn't what the mainstream media was calling it. No, no, no.
• 49:47
  Of course it was a phenomenon. The mainstream media destroyed the term. And they applied it to you. They applied it to your grandma. They applied it to rocks. They applied it to everything that they didn't like. Anything they didn't like was put in the category. I was alt right years and years ago when I was still openly screaming that I was left.
• 50:02
  So, and you were as well. But was there an alt right? Which called itself the alt right, as a matter of fact. Yeah, I think so. And they were kind of promasculin, a little patriarchy on that side. Jared Taylor is the openly white supremacist guy who was writing for that.
• 50:18
  Yeah, and it had a culture. Pepe the Frog was a funny and ironic portrayal of self in this regard.
• 50:29
  And so, Innocent Groy is that that's the age for it.
• 50:31
  You do know what alt stood for, right?
• 50:33
  It's an abbreviation. Well, alternate.
• 50:36
  Yes, that's right. And what makes it alternate? What is it alternate to? And what, in what way is it an alternative?
• 50:44
  It was, well, I mean, it's interesting because I think there's actually a lot in the term, you know, I would put progressivism against conservatism. I think you need to figure out which things to conserve and which things require change. And we're always in that dynamic.
• 51:02
  But the alt right was a non stodgy conservatism. It was modern. It was young.(...) It was, it had a sense of humor. Well, there was nothing dusty or gray about it, right? It was about there are some values. We've lost them. Let's not be embarrassed about talking about them. And then it had this decidedly nationalistic aspect, which was frightening. But you know, you had some energy playing with the fact that it was exactly right.
• 51:34
  It was punk concern. Was it generally, in your opinion, a problem, at least something worth keeping an eye on?
• 51:40
  Certainly the latter. Certainly the latter. Okay. And we all agree that the term was abused by both the left and the media and so on.
• 51:48
  That's just the most ridiculous.
• 51:50
  That's mostly for the audience.
• 51:51
  If I was alt right, that term did rain and damp.
• 51:54
  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, your dog was alt right too,(...) by virtue of being your dog. And so what if I put on the table that my conclusion after now a decade of studying woke in its native environment on the left, reading Alison Bailey talk about the difference between critical thinking and critical theory, for example, in great detail, is that what made the alt right alt was that it's woke in its own nationalistic way, which is a local tribe versus the universal dichotomous or bipolar tribe of communism. It is the reaction that I was talking about earlier, but now not in a modernistic militaristic form that you would have seen in the 20th century, but in the postmodern context, where if we take Jordan Peterson's woke is postmodern Neo Marxism, and we say there's this postmodern Neo fascism, at least an element within the alt right. Why not call that woke right?(...) If that's the only thing different?
• 52:55
  Well, I just I don't see those elements being dominant within whatever this this space is.
• 53:02
  Maybe it's helpful to tell the story of why I started using the term which I did not create, by the way, I'm not the progenitor of the term woke, right?
• 53:09
  First print note that I know of first appearance in print that I know, I'm sure it was somewhere else was in a article written by a preacher named Kevin DeYoung writing in the Gospel Coalition, reviewing the book I mentioned by Stephen Wolf earlier is a book review for the case for Christian nationalism. And he called his review the rise of right wing woke ism and described it in those terms by saying, you know, the same kinds of intolerance, the cancel culture, the victimhood, the identity politics at the heart of it and went through Stephen's book and showed in great detail, which is 500 pages. I don't necessarily recommend you get into, but he shows in great detail why he thinks calling it a mirror image of woke is correct. Neil Shambi is good on this. Neil Shambi picked up and he was using it. And then some other people were writing about it through late 23, early 24. I didn't call them this. I called them new right. I called specifically when it was Christian nationalists. I called them Christian nationalists. That's what they called themselves. I didn't ever like the term dissident right, so I didn't use it because it wasn't clear to me that that was the great term, but a lot of them use it for themselves. And then what happened to me in September last year.
• 54:19
  So 24, this is when I changed my mind and said they're woke. They attempted to cancel me for something completely innocuous.
• 54:27
  We got it.
• 54:28
  We got I think we've got what's happening here. Can I if you want to finish your your own.
• 54:33
  I mean, I put out something.
• 54:36
  It was on the Catholic holiday of Michael Miss,(...) which celebrates Archangel Michael or Saint Michael and President Trump, famously religious man, put out an image, a famous painting of Archangel Michael slaying the dragon, the Satan and the prayer, which came from, I think, Leo the 13th, which is a battle prayer. And I said, as I tend to do, this is just part of my research. Do you know that the new age occultists have a different view of Michael? So making this a huge thing in MAGA without adding the clarity that there is an entire occult interpretation of this you might not be aware of is dangerous. And I think somebody put him up to it. And I don't think he knows what it is. But we should be careful with this. And the blowback I got was so disproportionate, was so unbelievably insane, lost thousands of followers.
• 55:34
  James hates Catholics. James wants to ruin Christians. James is the enemy.
• 55:40
  Nasty threats. All of my direct. I have tripped that trip wire. And so I was like, this is not like James said something stupid or uncomfortable. The this, I got 30 times the blowback that I should have.
• 55:57
  You got religious fervor back for having.
• 55:59
  But not just religious. I understand that some Catholics, first of all, might have misunderstood it. But I also watched the phenomenon play out where I watched people who are influencers take what I said, change it into something I didn't say. And then that's the only thing I said.
• 56:16
  So can I frame what I think is going on here? I think that this is the problem, the center of the problem is that Twitter has become a bit of a hellhole. There's Groyfers. There's a lot of awful behavior there now. It's Groyfers, by the way, are a visible group that are woke right? The Gropers are on a big side wall. But I agree about the Gropers for sure.
• 56:37
  So what's happened here is there's an intellectual project. Jim sees something.
• 56:43
  And when you're on this intellectual project, you need to be quite precise about where you're pointing it. But there's the Twitter kind of Twittersphere personal problem that's going on here with people coming after you. And I think that you've come into this kind of militant almost mode and you're you're shooting wildly at. I come in and I haven't seen all this stuff that's happened to you when I speak to you personally, you're telling me all this horrible stuff is going on. Like, of course, that's the reason he's acting this way. But it's just horrible. A tweet thread. I'm like, what the fuck is he talking about?
• 57:16
  Exactly the same horrible stuff that the left to me first, when we did the grievance studies second one, I said I was going to vote for Trump.
• 57:22
  It's not one thing. It's just these you can't take a thousand people and say, hey, this is this is one single entity. You're you're absolutely right about this. And this phenomenon, we are evolved critters.
• 57:35
  Yeah, however, that happened as evolved critters, we make a natural assumption about what somebody else who was present saw, because you can make that assumption. I know what your experience of this room is like, I can teleport that far and imagine, right?(...) We come in and we see, you know, James, like, while swiping it, ghosts and things that just at phantoms. And it's like, what the heck is going on? And we have no idea what's been targeted him.
• 58:10
  And part of what's been targeted him is undoubtedly organic. And part of it is probably bot amplifiers. And something may involve a program with his name on the file folder that says how we're going to drive James crazy.(...) We don't know what the mixture is. And that means that that's where I feel like I lost track, because this is very personal to you in a way we can't intuit what happened.
• 58:36
  Well, I mean, again, I'm more interested in the pattern than the personal. And at this point, I was more confused than hurt or angry. But then the phone call started from people that had booked me this was in September, I had speaking engagements booked out through the end of the year still last year. And so I started getting the phone calls.
• 58:55
  I'm getting a lot of pressure saying you hate Christians, people are calling, people are asking and saying, we shouldn't have you. Can you explain yourself? Right. I started getting the phone calls. Some things did cancel me.
• 59:07
  Some things didn't. Some organizations had me and it turned into a giant struggle session in their organization over whether I should be there or not.
• 59:17
  And the fallout was bad for those organizations. So I want to. And then the invitations disappeared.
• 59:21
  Yep. Gone.
• 59:22
  Here's the thing.
• 59:23
  Now you're talking my language, because if you ask me the thing that I've been waiting for you to say, right, when I hear you defining woke right, and then I can't follow your definition, there's a reason. And it's because I know that there is an element that is probably not sufficient for the term woke, in my opinion, but it is definitely necessary.
• 59:45
  And it is cancellation.(...) It is the desire to silence the purge and the silencing. That's right.
• 59:50
  But here's the right wing. But here's the problem.
• 59:54
  Tucker Carlson isn't canceling people.
• 59:57
  Is it that he's not denouncing? Is it the right have their own saying that's a name that you know, the next one? That's my point is that I don't think it's in the category. And I say that he's adopted. I don't think he's adopted the cancellation tactics necessarily. But I think he's adopted the epistemology. And I think the epistemology is foundational to the worldview.
• 1:00:17
  Well, and this is where I think you're jumping the gun. Because what what I see him doing is talking to people who have the epistemology and talking to people who disagree with it, and doing what I think he does very well, actually, which is synthesize what he's encountering, based on a sense that he's entitled to ask questions. And, you know, he I think he frankly, does a good job of sitting across the table and empathizing, right?
• 1:00:48
  He can see through your eyes for the hour or two that you're sitting across the table from him. So do I think there's a danger that there will be this concentrated thing that you see rising and that will it will capture his attention or something will happen to him that will cause him to default in that direction, or there will be a file folder with his name on it and somebody will push him in that direction. Sure, I think I think we all have to worry about that sort of thing. But do I think he's in the category now?
• 1:01:13
  Would you have categorized, say, typical journalist on CNN, say it's 2018-19, who decided just, you know, to have interesting interviews and conversations with Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi before anybody really knew who they were?
• 1:01:27
  Do they qualify as part of this woke apparatus, would you say that? But we need to pre-crime here.
• 1:01:33
  I understand that it might turn out that you're at some point extremely prescient.
• 1:01:40
  And this is embarrassing for us.
• 1:01:42
  I'm actually 10 years behind the curve, in my opinion. Yeah, okay.
• 1:01:46
  I think I'm 10 years behind. But do you know what I mean? We can't like spot patterns in people's tweets and then just call them.
• 1:01:52
  Would you like to hear the story of the first time I decided to pay attention to these people?
• 1:01:55
  Yes, but I want to answer your question first. The journalist who does what you said is part of the apparatus. And in fact, the woke may take advantage of the journalist who's trying to get ahead by having the conversations. But no, I don't think these journalists are.
• 1:02:13
  The fake news apparatus, right? The fake news media. And so I contend that at a bare minimum, though, I think he's adopted the epistemology. And we can disagree on that and be friends. That's fine.
• 1:02:25
  I think there's a fake news alt media as well. And I think that Tucker Carlson's central in that apparatus, not peripheral, central to the fake news alt media apparatus.
• 1:02:37
  I personally don't think so.
• 1:02:39
  That's fine. Because, you know, you had another question with swimming in propaganda from every direction.
• 1:02:44
  Well, we're swimming in propaganda from every direction. My question, and this is increasingly like the central question of my public life, is who is actually on our side? And when I say our, I mean those who would defend the level playing field of the West. There are lots of people who will temporarily adopt that position because it advances their cause, but they're not committed to it in any deep way. And then there are a lot of people who are committed to it in a deep way.
• 1:03:14
  Very hard to tell the difference between those two things until something forces them to choose. But that's the question.
• 1:03:21
  Do I think Tucker is invested in the level playing field of the West?(...) I do.(...) Could I be wrong?
• 1:03:29
  Of course. I think that this may be true, but I don't know that he has the same definition of the West that you do.
• 1:03:37
  I don't think he would disagree with my definition. I'm pretty sure I've said it to him very directly and he's resonated with it. So again, I don't know.
• 1:03:49
  Frankly, I think the entire activist sphere is confused about how even to understand the game, you know, we're so busy looking for phantoms, spooks, people who come out of the intelligence apparatus, that we're not even aware that the intelligence apparatus probably isn't what we think it is. It's probably divided in particular ways. There may be elements of it that are patriotic and they're absolutely...
• 1:04:17
  And the external state actors are involved in this now. Right. And so the point is, it's an absolute mess. The signal-to-noise ratio is... Right.
• 1:04:25
  And we...
• 1:04:27
  The point is, there's an exact analogy to the fog of war here, right? You really don't know for sure who's actually on your team and who's just playing that way. And you have to begin to intuit it and you have to... That you're meeting with the person doesn't tell you enough.
• 1:04:44
  You have to allow time to reveal the depth of their commitment and you have to imagine that something that really wanted to fool you and had a very large budget.
• 1:04:54
  You know, if somebody wanted to spend 10 million dollars to create an unassailable person to put in your movement and then have them blow it up, you know, at the very...
• 1:05:04
  So you wouldn't even need to talk to people to signal boost. You just throw...
• 1:05:08
  Give them the Bitcoin. Do you know what I mean? If someone's... If someone matches your interests, you just go... You just fund them from afar. And we all know that we... Some of our income is coming from anonymous sources. If somebody is paying attention... You can just do this. And it's happening.
• 1:05:25
  You can actually skinnerbox them into doing your bidding.
• 1:05:30
  So even just with likes and retweets, so it's a lot.
• 1:05:32
  And I think that's probably...(...) That's the sophisticated propaganda techniques that are going on now. More so than injecting spooks into testables and things like that. I don't know that.
• 1:05:43
  I don't want to derail us, but what I would say is...
• 1:05:46
  I've probably talked to you about the time traveling money printer idea. The idea that if you know what's coming historically, you're in a position to take millions and turn it into billions with trivial effort.
• 1:05:58
  Whatever our antagonist is made of, it has access to this time traveling money printer. It knows about surely not every event, but it knows about many events ahead enough that it can print money. And if you have an unlimited black budget that isn't subject to control by any entity that would tend to control it, you don't have to choose between skinnerboxing people with likes and...
• 1:06:23
  But I think the problem is talking about this as one thing. I think there are so many interests now. It's almost like media got democratized, but so did propaganda.(...) And so even on a one-to-one, like some of the guys that we're talking to at this festival itself are propagandists, and they're doing it off their own back. And so it's like so many people are in the propaganda game.
• 1:06:44
  This is why it's so confusing.
• 1:06:45
  Well, this is what I'm saying about the fog of war. Yeah, this is where we are.
• 1:06:49
  And you know what it looks like? It looks like nature, right? If you walk into a tropical forest, you know, that vine may be a snake. You need to actually focus on it to know what you're even looking at, right?(...) It's very McLuhan, what you're saying. But the point is the critters in such a forest operate despite every creature that has an interest in doing so distorting their perceptions.
• 1:07:17
  The point is it's an arms race. Can you untangle what's out there faster than it can tangle it? And that's where we are.
• 1:07:24
  And frankly, we have to get used to the idea that that's the skill we have to hone.
• 1:07:28
  Well, there's a there's a problem with the content treadmill as well. I don't know if we're getting off track here, but this is why I pull back from being on the Internet. It's not good for my bank account, but being on that treadmill and having to talk about everything without sufficient time to figure out what's going on. I think it's a huge, huge problem in all this. Especially too much information is like having no information. It's dangerous.
• 1:07:50
  We don't even have the thing that end arranging scares me is we don't. There needs to be the equivalent of a site where we can simply have a chronology of events that we agree took place. Right.
• 1:08:04
  Things that were said, things that happened, this country attacked that country just so that we can all reference a shared factual narrative and then talk about all of our different perspectives on what it means. But the fact that you don't have that means an event can happen.
• 1:08:20
  The algorithm doesn't show it to you because it doesn't find you interested in it at best.
• 1:08:25
  And then it's like everybody else is up to date on the fact that something occurred that was very important and you've never heard of it. Like that's bewildered.
• 1:08:33
  It's like the AP wire that's actually functional.(...) It's what journalists used to use, although it was still propaganda.
• 1:08:43
  These things never they never worked as they should have, but they were good enough for at least us to have a conversation that we now can have. And I think part of what we're discovering here and I do at the end of this want to come back and figure out what we learned. But one of the things that we're discovering is that there's something profoundly important about the novelty, unique version of history that we personally are experiencing, which may show us something that others can't see. And they may come to regard us as having lost our minds when, in fact, you know, no, I actually did see the aliens land in my driveway and nobody else saw them. And now I have to live with the knowledge that there are aliens and everybody else is like, that's nice, you know.
• 1:09:27
  So, OK, were you headed somewhere?
• 1:09:31
  No, if you wanted the story of how I first caught wind of these guys or became aware of them outside of the vague alt right of the first Trump election.
• 1:09:41
  So maybe then before we do that, let's let's collect our gains. OK, I think Mike and I both have the sense that you are seeing something that it is worth being alarmed over, but that you're very early in spotting it. And maybe I'm now speaking for myself. You say if you agree that you may be jumping the gun on both the ability to define it and the understanding of how likely that trajectory is to unfold in some sort of nightmare scenario.
• 1:10:21
  And also the problem of legitimate grievances. Like, I think there's a real problem with smearing going going to scattergun approach and then taking down people that need to be heard, because I think that that's what that's a way to radicalize people. And so.
• 1:10:36
  Well, and you know, this is one of the things about Woke, which, you know, I sometimes felt like the lone voice saying this, but.
• 1:10:46
  You have a terrifically unfair society.
• 1:10:51
  Part of the responsibility for that falls on the right.
• 1:10:56
  The imagining that the market is fairer than it actually is imagining that externalities and unlevel aspects of the playing field are a minor player rather than the dominant force. Basically, you know, if rent seeking is 70 percent of the profit made in the market and your your free market mythology.
• 1:11:15
  So you're doing you're doing your genics economic left thing. Don't try and salvage the identitarians. Sometimes sometimes economic left. No, no. Well, I mean, salvage is absolutely insane. No, no.
• 1:11:27
  Tell me. Tell me that this is not a correct perspective.
• 1:11:31
  Yeah.
• 1:11:32
  If the idea that saves us is the level playing field in which everybody has an investment in playing the cards, they are dealt because the playing field is level enough that that's actually a good move.
• 1:11:41
  It's likely to work.
• 1:11:42
  Yeah.
• 1:11:43
  Then the point is the thing that takes us back and forth between some sort of communist meltdown and a fascist meltdown stops. So from the point of view of what the objective of the exercise ought to be, I think it is getting rid of that oscillation between these two impulses.
• 1:11:59
  The level playing field is what does it.
• 1:12:01
  And that means the playing field has to be sufficiently level that people are better off playing the cards. They're dealt than overthrowing the system.
• 1:12:09
  But I would say that that economic analysis you were talking about that the right overlooks, I think they have it now. That's MAGA. That's with MAGA now. I agree. So when we use left or right, we're kind of. Yeah.
• 1:12:21
  All I'm saying is the past right. Yeah.
• 1:12:25
  Has been stingy about people who suffer through no fault of their own. Yeah. If you if bad luck has made it impossible for you to participate in the market.
• 1:12:36
  Something through no fault of your own.
• 1:12:39
  You're born without the ability to walk.
• 1:12:41
  (...) You're actually our responsibility, in my opinion. If your own bad decision making puts you in that situation, that might be a different story.
• 1:12:48
  But this is the interesting thing is that what we're talking about with me saying a lot of this stuff has gone to MAGA is we're in the middle of a huge paradigm shift, a political paradigm shift. And this is why all the heterodoxy, as far as I can see, is on the right right now. And we have to we have to allow that landscape to find its feet footing. And if we're if we're scattergunning all sorts of ideas in this and calling them work right, then whatever this new paradigm will be, it might end up being the extreme version of what it could be, which is something really new and interesting, which is possible.
• 1:13:22
  So I think then all three of us are agreed that this is a perilous moment and an exciting moment. And the question is, which direction are we going to go? James is focused on a failure mode that is, I agree, likely to upend the whole project and therefore we have a positive side, too, by the way, but we can come to it.
• 1:13:43
  OK, but nonetheless, the idea that there's something to worry about, I think we're all agreed.(...) The question of whether or not it's a definable something in the present that we can mean, you know, I will point out I've wanted since the beginning of our conversation, a list of people and the only guy we've got is Tucker Carlson. And I don't think it's the names.
• 1:14:00
  Do you want? You just aren't going to know most of them. Okay. R. McIntyre at the blaze. I know him. He's woke. He's woke as hell. Is he excluding people?
• 1:14:09
  (...) He spent the last two years trying to convince the world that I hate Christians so that Christians won't invite me. OK. Yes. He accused me on his podcast, not his blaze show, of openly calling for the assassination of the sitting vice president so that people would think that I'm a horrible person.
• 1:14:29
  He devotes entire shows to my watching, at least knowing me, where every three sentences he says about me, at least two of them are malicious lies.
• 1:14:40
  OK, so I can't speak to those things. I haven't seen them. I can say from my perspective, anybody who wishes to exclude well intentioned people, good faith players on the basis that what they are exploring is not.
• 1:14:59
  Tolerably voiceable is, in my opinion, in the category. Right. I think you're clearly well intentioned. I do not see you as malicious in the slightest.
• 1:15:10
  I'm, as you know, willing to disagree with you on what you say doesn't make sense to me, but I don't. There's no part of me that worries that you're acting in bad faith. Right. Certainly not. So I can't see why excluding you from a conversation would make any sense.
• 1:15:24
  I don't even want these gentlemen canceled.(...) I just want them to act in good faith.
• 1:15:30
  OK, so what's the positive thing you were going to say?
• 1:15:33
  We get back to it. I mean, there are more names, but are they names I would know?
• 1:15:37
  So I doubt it. I mean, there's a lot of these people are not famous except kind of in this niche world of, you know, whether it's Christian nationalism, if you didn't know Stephen Wolf, it's it's Delph rings a bell, but I don't know.
• 1:15:49
  Don't know. Well, Nate Fisher, Aaron Ren, Joshua Abbott, toy, John Harris. I mean, you could just mention the other wolf, William Wolf, just kind of go down a list of a lot of these. Eric Kahn, Joel Webbin, Joel Webbin is this pastor that looks vaguely like Matt Walsh, but like a bad Xerox of him that puts his foot in his mouth severely in his on right wing watch every week now.
• 1:16:14
  There are lots of these guys. These are all openly theocratic. Some of them are openly anti Semitic. Some of them are open, not some of them are openly racist.
• 1:16:21
  Some of them are not.(...) So there are lots of people and just within that world, which is the part of it that I paid the most attention to because that's the first part of it.
• 1:16:29
  Dave Smith is in this category.
• 1:16:30
  Dave Smith's a libertarian. Yeah. I called him woke right once because I didn't know who he was. And he said the same thing that some of them were.
• 1:16:38
  That was the machine of what's going on.
• 1:16:40
  You're getting attacked and you go into this machine gun.
• 1:16:43
  Specifically, I was getting attacked and being asked, James, the thing you're saying doesn't exist. Give us examples of it. Then I see this remark from Dave Smith about something to do with Israel that matches exactly this kind of stuff the Gropers were saying. I don't know who he is. I just know he's a big following.
• 1:16:58
  And I'm like, there's an example of what I'm talking about. And it's like when you go to the park and a little dog starts following you around and you don't know why. And you go home, little dog. And Dave Smith's been following me around ever since. And like all the libertarians here are like, say Dave Smith's not woke.
• 1:17:12
  And I'm like, well, he's a critical government theorist as far as it goes, but he's not a woke right.
• 1:17:16
  He's not even on the right.
• 1:17:17
  OK, well, so that you got to admit that's an expensive error to have made. You live with them. It'll all boil down over time.
• 1:17:26
  And in my opinion, my advice to you is to clean that up thoroughly.
• 1:17:31
  I did that like in October.
• 1:17:33
  So but there's other stuff going on. It seems you and I have this joke about Peter Bogosian. It's like he he throws stones at a at a beehive. And he's like, why am I being stung? Well, why would they sting me? And I see that's happening.
• 1:17:49
  Well, that's what happened when I started getting stung over the first couple of things. Yeah. But then I realized this jungle's infested with hornets. And I've got I got a rock cannon to fire at them intentionally willing to take as many stings as it takes to get rid of the nest. Well, but OK. Then in fact, I kind of enjoy the stings.
• 1:18:07
  That's the problem. That's the problem.
• 1:18:09
  That's why you're in this position. So here's the problem.
• 1:18:12
  I'm not I'm not complaining about my position, though. Oh, no, no, no, but I'm actually I'm actually getting quite happy about it.
• 1:18:18
  But you're losing people like me. And I don't think that's such a good thing for you.
• 1:18:23
  What you're doing is and you know, it's funny, you've quoted me back to me several times in the last couple of days, things I don't remember having said. But when you say it, I remember it. There's something you quoted to me about more than flack over the target.
• 1:18:38
  Yeah. What was it? So when you know you're getting when you know you're right, is not just that you get the most flack when you're over the target, but when you get mutually contradictory flack. That's right. Yeah.
• 1:18:49
  So the example that I use is when I've nailed something interesting scientifically, what I hear is you're wrong and we knew that already at the same time. Right. Yes. Like, oh, that's the sign that you're on to some.
• 1:19:03
  Correct. And so right now I'm getting James is irrelevant. So we have to stop him. OK. But here's the problem.
• 1:19:08
  I think you have.
• 1:19:12
  You have flipped a bit with respect to.
• 1:19:16
  The Hornets.
• 1:19:18
  You are used to a world in which as you get close to something, you get hornets things and you've become like a bear. OK, now we have to go back to bees instead of Hornets, because you need to be getting the honey from the high.
• 1:19:29
  There is no honey.
• 1:19:31
  It's an empty hot. Well, but you're pursuing something right. You're pursuing some model of something that's really good and nobody else can build it because they don't have your toolkit. And you know that as you get one of these models really right, you get stung right a lot.
• 1:19:47
  And so you've come to associate those stings with success. And the problem is that there are ways to get stung that don't involve this. I'm totally aware of that. And so I think you're getting some stings from the machine gun indiscriminate shooting thing that you are falsely being reassured by rather than being driven to do with what I now think you should do, which is reformulate your critique.(...) Say, look, there is a canonical danger at this moment in history. Here's the thing that could happen. And here are six examples of what it looks like when it does. Here are some people who seem to be leading us in this direction. And then you need to be very careful not to include anybody who's not clearly in the category.
• 1:20:31
  You know, what's even more fun is when we don't name names and you say things. And they all come out on the Internet and say, why did they name me? For example, when Jordan Peterson went on whatever news show it was and said CNN, maybe it was, and he said there are psychopaths in every movement. And dozens of MAGA influencers said Jordan Peterson called us psychopaths.
• 1:20:50
  Yes, I actually am talking.
• 1:20:52
  Same thing happened when I talked to Jordan because it came out after the fact because we talked about Lucifer and Jordan called us Luciferian.
• 1:21:00
  I don't want to be too naively marketplace of ideas kind of guy here, but I just think it's really interesting conversations to be had. So I'd like to see you actually talking to a lot of these people that you're fighting because not on Twitter because it just doesn't work. You can't do it on Twitter. But but I'm grappling with a lot of the stuff in that realm. And I think there's a lot of legitimate agreements is there and some interesting thoughts and interesting players. And so that's what the action is.
• 1:21:29
  That is, by the way, the perfect ideal end. Because when you're dealing with subversive movements, for example, the grinders are so why why don't you debate Nick Fuentes? Because if you go to Nick Fuentes and he says 40 things and you hit 39 of them out of the park like a grand slam home run and you stumble, not even get the last one wrong. Yeah, that gets clicked. And that's the whole story. And there's a malicious game that they're playing and the entire apparatus. While I've spent the last nine months condensing and trying to understand what I'm talking about clearly, right? Yeah, they've been demanding I go debate them when it's clear that I'm not ready for that in the environment of an asymmetric political warfare circumstance.
• 1:22:11
  And then I think someone like Carl Benjamin, you could have a great chat with. I've had great chats with him.
• 1:22:16
  Yeah.
• 1:22:17
  So I would argue he's a good actor.
• 1:22:21
  I would argue you are not obligated and should be very cautious about interacting with people who are not acting in good faith. But I do think that there are people who are acting in good faith who are put on the back foot by your scattershot approach here and that you should be talking to them, that that would be productive and valuable. And I think the real point is you're doing your work for a reason. You're trying to accomplish something. It involves wrestling your model to a high level of polish. And I'm sure you're not there because it's been so hard. I mean, it's required this conversation for me to even know what you're talking about. So I would argue that those conversations with good faith folks who you think are in some somewhere near the milieu that you're trying to describe would be perhaps the best way to get to a tool good enough to prevent the failure mode that you're pointing to, which I agree is very important. It is on the table as a possibility and it does need to be avoided. But there's a second failure mode to this model as well, by the way, you may not be realizing. So just to draw back to Marx, Marx says that the history is a contention of classes.
• 1:23:38
  But at the end of the first paragraph of chapter one of the Communist Manifesto, he says that the fight through all of history ends in one not one way, two possible ways in the revolutionary reconstruction or reconstitution, I should say, of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes. So a second failure mode is not that MAGA becomes this neo-fascist force. It is simply that MAGA destroys itself from within and becomes unviable to continue the mission that is looking good or bad.
• 1:24:08
  It's looking very likely.
• 1:24:10
  So a Democrat blowout in twenty six or twenty eight that puts us not back where we were under the Biden regime, but in a worse place because now the right has been badly discredited on its own terms, which is what is in fact the failure mode I think is coming.
• 1:24:25
  OK, well, that's interesting. And I do think that that is very worth paying attention to, frankly, I think. And I don't really think of myself as MAGA. I feel I'm closer to Maha. I'm definitely about the West and, you know, MAGA is sort of fellow travelers. But I do think that I'm watching those tensions jeopardize the political clout and the ability to navigate intentionally. And it's spooking me because, I mean, the worst case scenario might be that whatever has taken over the the blue team does reassert itself.
• 1:25:08
  You know, the the red team having stumbled and called itself into question and that basically the deep state comes in foot on the gas and, you know, turns the key on the totalitarian state that it's been constructing. So I'm very concerned about that. And I do think it is a service to civilization for you to be spotting these nascent dangers. But in order to do the job right, you've got to be really careful not to overstep what's already taking place or what you can already say with clarity. Sure, of course.
• 1:25:48
  But I'm forgiving of my own mistakes. And there's a process there, too.(...) Iron is sharpening, hiring. As long as you go, you propose a thing. People say, no, you're wrong. You refine your view. They refine theirs. And there's a process to that that we don't have to freak out about in the short term.
• 1:26:06
  All right.
• 1:26:07
  You want to say in summation?
• 1:26:11
  Nothing, really. I think you hit it. It's great.
• 1:26:13
  I'll just say the loving. Since I never said my positive thing very quickly, the level playing field is called something.
• 1:26:20
  It is called common sense,(...) not in the sense of the things everybody kind of knows. That's not what it means. Common sense technically in the philosophical school means that reality is out there, objective to us.(...) And we all have both the sense apparatuses to detect reality with some fidelity, not perfect fidelity, and the sense making apparatuses of rationality to be able to process what we're taking in. And so common sense is this idea that there's not some secret hidden knowledge that only the people who agree with the cult are allowed to be the ones who dictate how things work. Right. So when you put the ability to put sense making into everyone's hands, not merely the people who have the right virtues or the right values or the right identities or whatever else, that's where we defend the thing that is kind of one of the key foundational pillars, not the only one, but we're running short on time to talk about the entirety of the West. That's a pillar of what holds up the West. And what has made the explosion that we've had since over the last 500 years, plus the entirety, in my opinion, of the American experiment truly work is that it's rooted in the idea that each of us without having to appeal to some special authority as opposed to somebody who's demonstrated their competence being a different kind of authority, but a special authority. I read The Secret Tablet. I read The Secret Book. I have the right heritage or whatever.
• 1:27:56
  Therefore, I get to speak and you have to listen. Just like with the woke left, I'm black, you're white. You have to listen to me. Shut up and listen. Right. That is the problem. That is woke. And the answer is no, everybody who wants to participate in good faith participates in good faith.
• 1:28:15
  All right. There's one thing I would critique about that, which is that your focus on the level playing field is about the idea layer. The most fundamental thing about the level playing field is the well-being layer. Right. The idea layer is as important as it is, and it's disproportionately important to people like us who, you know, think for a living.
• 1:28:40
  But the important thing about it is that it allows us to discover what is true in various different senses of that term through an unlimited discussion. And I agree good faith is the key element. I'm not interested. Subversives are a problem. Subversives are a problem. We have to tolerate them in order for all of us who are acting in good faith to have the freedom to actually consider ideas that are at first troubling and then turn out either to falsify themselves or to lead us to something useful or to turn out to be less troubling than we thought.
• 1:29:17
  But anybody, the hallmark, I would say, of bad faith is the desire to limit the discussion. Right. The unleveling of the intellectual playing field through cancellation is the key to how the well-being layer gets unleveled, which is what results in these revolts. So anyway, this has been a terrifically important discussion. I'm really glad, I think, to finally understand what it is that's motivating you. I would caution you, other people are not seeing what's happening to you. They're not seeing through your eyes. And so it looks like... Believe it or not, I don't go complain about it. Well, that's not the issue. The point is the utility of what you're doing depends on your ability to convey it to people and to persuade them that there's something worth paying attention to. To the extent that you look like you're lashing out at phantoms that aren't real, you're not doing yourself or us any favors. So I would just caution you, ask your friends whether they can see what you're seeing. And if they can't, then realize that that has to be part of the story, too. Here's what I saw that you haven't that tells me there's something we need to pay attention to.
• 1:30:29
  It's fundamental. Twitter is a communication device. If that's even what it is. Yeah. What do they have?
• 1:30:34
  Whatever's going on there, it's a deranging kind of tool. And so...
• 1:30:40
  We said years ago it's a deconstruction machine.
• 1:30:42
  Yeah. Yeah, it's a...
• 1:30:44
  Anyway, yeah, probably.
• 1:30:46
  Yeah, in any case, great discussion.
• 1:30:49
  Thank you, gentlemen.
• 1:30:50
  Mike Nana, James Lindsay.
• 1:30:52
  Thanks for joining me. You guys want to say something about where people can find you?
• 1:30:56
  Most of my work is on Substack these days. So just michaelnana.com.
• 1:31:01
  I am at newdiscourses.com. That is new discourses. You can tell I've done it before. Newdiscourses.com or follow me at Conceptual James. Awesome. All right.
• 1:31:11
  Well, thanks everybody for joining us.