Chapo Trap House - 348 - Dragged Across Concrete feat. Marcus Barnett & Osita Nwanevu (9/9/19

Episode Date: September 10, 2019

We hear from our UK correspondent Marcus Barnett, and attempt to make any sense of anything going on with Brexit. We're then joined by the New Republic's Osita Nwanevu to hear about his experience watching David French and Sohrab Ahmari debate whether liberal civil society should continue to exist if it means we are threatened by Drag Queen Story Hour. Osita's New Republic piece: https://newrepublic.com/article/154977/right-wings-cultural-civil-war-drag

Hey everybody, we got a double shot of interviews for you this week. First up is our boy Marcus Barnett reporting from the UK on what the fucking hell is going on over there. What bloody hell is going on? Short answer is nobody really knows, not even our guest, not us, not any of the ones in charge. Something might happen soon or maybe it won't, but we don't know what that thing will be or will not be.

Regardless, Marcus always enjoyed to talk to you in his clever Mank accent, always enjoyed to hear. And then following him, we've got a returning champ, Osino Wenevu, to talk about the recent intellectual mind warrior event between David French and Saurabh Amare at American Catholic University, a debate that will define the future of being an insufferable nerd in this country well into the future. He was there, live, covering it. I heard Amare cheated by bringing out the power glove.

He hit ABABAB, select and start before the debate. Alright, so first up is Marcus Barnett. We're going to kick things off this week talking a bit about goings on internationally with our friends across the pond. At the end of the day, what the ruddy hell is going on in the UK with the bloody Brexit mess? And to talk about it, it's our old friend, that big girl's blouse, it's Marcus Barnett back again.

I think he's now our official Chavo UK correspondent at this point. Yeah, I'd say. So Marcus, last time we saw you is when we were over in your neck of the woods at the UK, hanging out. And I got to say, you know, up until then, our European tour or UK tour, rather, I got to say I was a moderate on the England issue. But now that I've spent some time there, I've been redpilled and Marcus, we got to get rid of England.

I mean, you see the need to destroy it now, right? Yeah, I know. I had this. I would do it to ourselves. Very clearly. Marcus, I had this sort of naive cosmopolitan attitude where I was just like, oh, the English, you know, we share a language, sort of a shared cultural history. They've made so many of the wonderful television programs I like that they can still go on

existing as a country, right? But no, now I'm very broken people. Now I've seen it close up with my own eyes. I'm fine with that. As long as the North can break off and we can have a People's Socialist Republic of Manchester. Amber, you read my mind and Marcus, let me pitch this to you. So here's the way it's going to work.

The North part of England will retain, it'll be like Hong Kong. It'll retain certain formal bourgeois liberties and sort of a semblance of democratic liberties. But then like the Midlands and South and all of that, just pure one party, just state rule, just pure totalitarianism. Oh, well, that sounds about right to me. I mean, you know, most of the Northwest is already a one-party state for labor. Every time you have a local election, you just get Lib Dems or Conservatives just screaming about how the Soviet state of Manchester or Red Liverpool is untouchable and free from

any democratic accountability and so on and so forth. Well, very soon they will be free of any democratic accountability once we take over. The parliament's not going on at the moment, there's no democratic accountability whatsoever. Okay, Marcus, we wanted to talk about what the fuck is going on with Johnson, with Brexit and all of these machinations and shenanigans and we were trying to sort of prepare ourselves just saying, okay, so Johnson wants to have a no confidence vote on himself so there's an election before the 34th and we just kept tripping ourselves up over it because I feel like I'm checkmated at every turn trying to understand what's going on.

Do you have any idea? Yeah, it's very, very hard to understand what's going on because something new is happening every few minutes. I've just got in front of me now something that happened in the past hour, which is the MPs have voted by 311 to 302 votes to force Dominic Cummings, you know, Boris' Steve Bannon, to release all of his texts, emails, WhatsApp messages and all of the private communications detailing the decision to pro-rogue parliament. There's going to be so much inappropriate perverse sexting that you have to wait there.

Christ, can you imagine parliament like ordered you to show your WhatsApp messages to people? And the pro-roging parliament, that would be the thing where they literally just there's like, okay, the Queen is in charge now or she passes it without any parliament. Swans are actually in charge. Well, so the sort of the prorogation is a way to pass through legislation very, very, you know, swiftly and aggressively, Clement Atley's government did it in, I think, 1948 to put through a steel legislation to nationalize the steel industry because they just wanted to basically push it through all processes, but it's pretty boring and an archaic way

to push through your policy against entrenched opposition. So as best you can explain it, like, what has happened since Big Mad Boris has become PM? Like, what does he want to, what is he trying to achieve here? Well, I think that he recognizes the poor state the Conservative Party is in and what is it that is in a really perilous state, you know, really, you know, people say the Labour Party is in a pitiful way, but God, look at their side. And I think that what he's trying to do is trying to, he's trying to sort of get the

enthusiasm and the sort of insurgent nature, if you like, of the Brexit campaign in 2016 and kind of like apply that into the Conservative Party, like a sort of like radical entryism into the Tories. And that is why he is wandering around Scotland and petting cows. Well, it's going really badly. This is why I'm quite surprised. Even the cows look unimpressed. You know, into it.

No one's into this. So, like, there's this October 31st deadline, right? And there's been so many of these deadlines in the past with Brexit, like just kicking it down. This is what's really hard for me to understand is, like, what, whether you are pro-remain, pro-Brexit, pro-no-deal Brexit, you know, soft-consent Brexit, negotiated-kink Brexit, I don't, or the UK, like, what bargaining chips do they have with this Brexit thing? Because, like, they voted to Brexit.

The EU, like Brussels or whatever, are just like, OK, you're going to do it, right? So, like, is it, how can they back out or negotiate anything at this point? Well, it's completely broken, and it's really unclear what, you know, Europe is saying. For a very long time, people like Michel Barnier, they were interested in having a sort of change in the political climate, and there was a school of thought that he was interested in negotiating with a Jeremy Corbyn-led Britain, but obviously things haven't gone particularly well since then, and not necessarily for the Labour Party, but things have reached fever pitch, to be honest, in terms of the direction that practically everybody wants the country

to go in. And it's essentially ended up meaning that the only people who have any form of insurgency now are people who want a no-deal Brexit, and people who want to revoke Article 50, which would effectively mean we wouldn't be leaving the European Union. Politics has become really, really polarized incredibly quickly over the past four or five months. What, like, a no-deal Brexit, like, what would that mean for the UK? Like, why is this such a scary or, if you are Boris Johnson, like, a preferable thing?

Well, there's a lot of widespread fear that lots of medicine, you know, which is made in Europe, you know, for, say, you know, people who need insulin, they might not be able to get their insulin, which is obviously absolutely terrifying for people who are particularly vulnerable in British society. Yeah, no, imagine living in a country where people couldn't get their insulin. That's fucking, that's fucking dark. We don't know anything about that. I'm drinkable, right?

Yeah. But this is a big thing now, actually, there was this big outcry from the British public about the Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, like, trade deal. And a lot of people were worried that the NHS was going to be on the table, and lots of big pharma was going to come over to the United Kingdom and effectively just absolutely like wreck our NHS and, you know, put a wrecking ball through it. And Liz Truss, one of our ministers, she said, you know, she tried to reassure people by saying, you know, look, we're never going to touch the NHS.

This is just, you know, this is not on the table. But Donald Trump, you know, your man, Trump, he was absolutely right. And he said, look, you know, everything is on the table. There's so much privatized parts of the NHS already, there's no way you can effectively say it's a state asset, you know, so in effect, like, you have to, when you're discussing with, you know, say, you know, America, the, you know, some aspects of the NHS, which is currently not privatized, may have to be or may have to fall into the hands of American corporations in exchange for other stuff that we want.

Right. And we've been actually trying to sort of wedge our way, we being American pharmaceutical companies, which I personally represent, we've been trying to wedge our way into the NHS since like the 60s, like you can find big, you know, the representative for Bath would like to denounce the efforts by American pharmaceutical companies, you can find that shit in the minutes from like the 60s. Yes, it's all there. It's all there.

I mean, the creation of the NHS is such a really, you know, astonishing and unique thing, you know, this like centralized state system, which just provides health care at the point of a point of need, like it is extraordinary and the night Bevan, he said he had to stuff their mouths with gold, referring to the pharmaceutical companies. Look, you think you like it. You think you think you like your NHS, but you have not experienced a health savings account. The thing is, is that they give you flexibility.

I'm sure I might be experiencing one soon. Look, it's a good deal. You get health savings accounts, you get the big sodas again. Yeah. See, it's fun. In the game, you get to learn a lot of new rules, and if you don't follow them exactly, you die. Yeah, that's great.

Well, you've got to give me some tips for that, some good life hacks. Literally. You know, keep me out of the game. I guess my big question is, what is our boy, Jezza, how is Corbin and the good part of the Labour Party? What is their strategy and all this because from what I see is just seems like Corbin's playing it kind of cool. He's waiting in the wings, but what is their strategy here?

The current strategy of the leadership is to push for a general election. Currently, we're all geared for really, really going hard on the general election. Lots and lots of things are being planned in terms of mass strategies involving the half a million strong membership that we have, utilizing the power of the trade union movement, using stuff like momentum to start pushing on social media and developing a lot more sort of like easily, easily accessible viral content, particularly focused on stuff around the manifesto and particular demands of the manifesto, which are never, ever covered in mainstream discourse.

But, you know, things that, you know, are hugely, hugely popular to the public, such as that rail nationalization, taking the water back into public ownership, you know, things like this. And everyone's kind of geared for that. But at the moment, yeah, there's quite a lot of confusion about the strategy. Well, our strategy recently was that we don't want to call for a general election until we rule no deal as illegal, which happened today. So that did happen today.

Yeah. And there's going to be a vote in parliament today about whether or not to have a general election, but it's expected to be rejected. So why is Corbin a chicken? Why is he a chicken man? Because I'm seeing him dressed up as a chicken man. They were handing out broiled chicken to reporters or something, which, by the way, incredibly British.

I saw the picture of the chicken, it looked just gyre. It looked humorous, didn't it? It was disgusting. It was just, it was like a fucking eraser head chicken. It's like, if somebody in America tried to stunt like that, it would be like Popeyes or something. Something appetizing. What the fuck?

What's that fucking idiot that kind of like, he's like a British alt-right guy and he really just wants to be American. And he like... He's called... Yeah. Yeah. That's the one. Yeah.

Yeah. Watson. And he had that thing, you know, of the ride to getting better at humor. So why is he, why is he a chicken, though? What do they want him to do? That he was... The actual, like, text that the chicken came with, it says something along the lines of move over, Colonel.

There's a new big chicken in town. What's he chicken about, though? I don't understand. Yeah. I think it's about talking Colonel Sanders. Is he chicken for not calling a general election before the October 31st deadline? Or is he chicken for not accepting a no deal? I've got him for me now.

Move over, Colonel. Jeremy Corbyn is the new biggest chicken in town. Well, I guess it's because he didn't call a general election when immediately wanted him to, which would have been stupid since the whole strategy is to rule a no deal Brexit out of order. So... Make it illegal. Boris Johnson's strategy, when that theory of, oh, maybe they'll call, maybe they'll

forget their entire strategy and call an election early and then they don't fall for that. Well, I'll just call him a chicken and then the hell do it then. To be fair, he does forget things. It's like, it's the stains chicken calling. Wow. Yeah. But I mean, like...

That's not a bad... For someone who, like, literally forgets what he's saying as he's saying it, he's just assuming that, like, his enemies will just sort of, like, lose the thread. I've got a question for you guys. What do you guys make of Boris compared to Trump? Because I think, I don't think he owns it in the summer. I mean, he's a little sexier. Well, I...

If you can imagine... Hold on. I disagree with Matt. I said he's not as hot as Trump is. Oh, come on. I feel like... Because Trump does the thing where he leans forward, like he's on the bow of a ship. And I just feel like Boris is more solid, like he stays over his center of gravity.

So you can imagine wrestling... He can stand. Yeah, exactly. You can imagine, like, wrestling to the ground and... Well, I used to think maybe... Was that really a good footage of him knocking a kid over, playing rugby? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Solid. I used to think maybe, like, he was more, like, mentally put together than Trump. But then there was that thing in front of the policeman. We just sort of couldn't figure out what he was saying. And it's like, why are all world leaders senile right now? It's great. I love to see it. Marcus, my favorite thing with Boris Johnson that I've seen recently is, like, when he

was... When it was the Tory leadership race, and he was, you know, the frontrunner, but he was doing a lot of media trying to distinguish himself. And there was an interviewer who asked him, like, you know, Boris, what do you do in your free time, you know, just to relax? And you could see the... He was like, pause, mouth, a gait for a second, like, as you see the gears in his head turning and he's just thinking, don't say drink all the time, don't say drink all the time, don't

say drink all the time, don't say get drunk every fucking night. And then he just... what he came up with, he says, I like to paint buses on the crates of wine that I have in my house. So I ended up saying, like, I have so many crates of... empty crates of wine in my house that I paint them for fun, which is, like, the funniest way of saying, like, I'm an alcoholic in my spare time. And he was describing the people that he paints on the bus, right? He makes people on the bus.

Well, it's like what Margaret Thatcher said, if you're over 25 and taking a bus, you're a loser. Yeah, you're a loser. What do you want to be able to make in the buses? But, Marcus, one of the other, I guess, entertaining aspects of this whole story is this whole thing with Boris had the vote in parliament and then he had, I guess, all these defections from his own party where they voted against him and walked off the floor of the parliament. Yeah, this is really good.

So this guy, Philip Lee, he is this fucking, I guess he's quite like an American style of nasty politics. He's very, he's really, really, really hostile towards, you know, like, refugees. He's very, very hostile towards refugees, but he considers himself to be, like, liberal. But he did this whole really stupid thing where he said that in a parliamentary hearing, all immigrants should be, all immigrants and refugees, sorry, should be tested to see if they have hepatitis B or C or HIV AIDS. And he said they should be tested.

And obviously, like, people just immediately said how utterly fucking inhumane that is. And his response to it was like, oh, well, you know, actually, this is a, this is actually a really good thing for the gay community because it means that they won't get HIV AIDS. He's a fucking, you know, he's a really fucking horrible guy. He does sound American. Yeah, it is, it's really, really American. And obviously he like, he adores the European Union because it's this, you know, just like monolithic neoliberal trade bloc that regulates capital.

And he's all about that. So who knows, actually, if he's a good guy or a bad guy. So that essentially is the nature of the split within the Tory party between the vote that Boris Johnson lost from his own party with like those defections or those people walking out. Who are conservative, but like pro-U conservative, like kind of, but also I think that Dominic Cummings is a kind of a, he got called a career psychopath by David Cameron. And it's quite like a sort of common thing to hear him referred to as a poorly Leninist

because he's a little bit like Bannon. He's a very, very direct, very tactical. He's very serious about what he wants, but, you know, there's a few eccentricities about him. He's never been like a conservative party member. He did loads of really like madcap, you know, stranger sort of business dealings in the East, including, I think, trying to organize a railway system. I think it might be like a flight, like a flight path from one part of Siberia to Ukraine

or something like that. And this was like just during Perestroika. And I think like the KGB shut the operation down. So he's got this very eccentric past. He's got mad, he's got madcap plans for trade with the Far East, what, selling opium to China? Well, that's the sort of thing I think Boris would be interested in. It seems a bit of like a 19th century, like opioid addict, isn't it?

I think one of the things that confuses people too in America about this stuff is that there are left wing anti-Brexiteers and there are left wing Brexiteers and there are also right wing anti-Brexite and right wing pro-Brexite. What is the division in the Tories, do you think, between like sort of the kind of protectionist, more nationalist type, like, you know, pro-Brexite and the, you know, what we would recognize more of the capitalist pro-EU kind of Tory party? Like, was it like half and half or what? Well, there's a very small group of Tory MPs called ERG, who are, you know, they've always

been like very, very, they're called European Research Group and they've always been like very, very staunch Eurosceptics, always been very, very hostile to the European Union and Europeanism in general. And their whole thing is interesting because although they've been the kind of main standard bearers of Euroscepticism on the, you know, kind of hard right of British politics, Dominic Cummings, who spearheaded the Vote Leave campaign, he had this extraordinary diatribe leaked about how much he'd like hates them, like he doesn't really stand with them. He thinks they're all just a bunch of kind of dunderheaded fools from the past who just

want to relive British imperial glory. And so, like, people don't really have, well, Dominic Cummings doesn't really have a lot of time for the ERG, but they're the ones that are really kind of like, you know, looking towards the past, basically, and thinking you can break away from Europe and, you know, build like a strong imperial Britain, but then most of the conservative MPs are just interested in the very smooth running of capitalism and therefore, you know, pretty fine with the European Union. Well, none of these people seem to like each other, which I'm enjoying a lot.

I mean, it does. Yeah, they absolutely hate each other, but look, the unity that they show is extraordinary. Like the absolute, I mean, if we had the unity of their class, it is extraordinary, you know, it's extraordinary how they can deliver it. There's some family strife here, Boris's own brother got, what, like kicked out of the party and Winston Churchill's grandson. Yeah, how fucking good is that? So, wait, like, so this means they like, they like deselected him or something, which means

that like he can't stand. And then if there is a general election or something. Yeah, I mean, this is to punish him. Nicholas Somes one is so good. And Nicholas Somes is Churchill's grandson and like he was like, I mean, he was in tears when he was, you know, doing his final statement in Parliament. It was so funny. But like, I don't know, it's the way that Brexit has created these, these situations

where these, these are really guilty men have been able to sort of like, like reinvigorate and revive their own like, sort of public integrity by sort of declaring they're opposed to nasty Boris and, you know, like the calamity of Brexit. Well, the Phillip Lee guys, he's fucking scum of the earth. And I was like reinventing myself with some like, sane liberal who wants to bring Britain back from the brink. Okay. Now, this is starting to sound very familiar, very familiar over here.

Like, I mean, so Winston Churchill's grandson, the only thing he was really known for in Parliament was like about maybe like 15 years ago, about six female in a collective complaint against him, the sexual harassment. And they, they also mentioned when one of them was briefed into the, to just a newspaper at the time about it, they mentioned that they used to respond to his sexual advances by shouting click, which was in reference to a book that his ex-wife wrote in which she said that having sex with him was like a double cabinet falling on you with a key still inside of it.

Oh my God. Damn. Wait, wait, wait, he kept running for office after that. He didn't fucking kill him. Jesus Christ, no shame those freaks have. Wow. I don't know more about her, I mean, I'm sure she's evil too, but that's just a great fucking line.

Yeah. Absolutely horrible guy. I mean, he was making like a woofing noise. Oh, no, no, actually, actually, there was a really good one as well. So, you know, I was the Campbell, like the old Blair Wright spin doctor Malcolm Tucker favorite character. Yeah. That's the one.

So like, he apparently like called the palace to Campbell about 10 years ago. And just I was kind of like trying to abuse him over the phone and was screaming stuff down the phone. I'm like, oh, you sex god, you are Donis, you the greatest of all great men. And then like when the other person answered like actually spoke back to him, it was like the Alistair Campbell's youngest son. Talking dirty to Alistair Campbell's son. Oh my God, very, very Tory behavior.

Oh my God. Yes. They're just repulsive people, you know, and like, I honestly, so John Burko, the speaker of the house resigned today, you know, because he was like a little bit quirky and he was kind of known as being privately a little bit of a liberal and a bit skeptical towards Brexit and Boris Johnson. You know, he's just faced all of these really, really, you know, glowing, you know, comments from all sides of the house, to be honest about how good he is basically, like this

is some fellow who, you know, had to, he was going to face an investigation over some like really, really serious bullying allegations from his former staff, you know, where like people are being very, very, you know, condemnation about the way he talked to people, you know, this included some staff members saying that they, you know, they had like, you know, PTSD as a result of like dealing with him because he was just so aggressive. This is the guy that was in that clip I saw going around where I watched it and I was like, again, how the fuck is this a real country? Like what the fuck is going on here where he literally said was like, you really are

an incorrigible rogue and he says, to the right honorable gentlemen, when you're dropping off your kids at the school that our children go together, you're not a naughty boy like this. And I was just like, what, what is going? What is this shit? It's been a fucking, it's been a stupid country for so long and it's fine. It's just been catching up with us as well, you know, the games up. Wait till these people start dying, by the way, because then you'll get like, if you're

lucky, like a weird McCain funeral where all the liberals will just start like, you know, saying like, this is when the conservatives were good people, they were honorable men and then you'll just spend the whole day vomiting. Well, Marcus, I mean, like you mentioned how like all of these, these, you know, absolute ghouls are now sort of rebranding themselves as like, you know, putting country over party and standing up to, you know, Brexit and mean Nasty Boris. I mean, this is a phenomenon we're, we're well acquainted with here in America with Trump and the sort of respectable right, if you want to call them that.

I mean, like another kind of parallel we were talking about, and I'm interested in your thoughts on it, is how this idea of like ever since the Brexit vote passed, like the remain has become like the same kind of fixation that liberals have in this country with like Russiagate and Donald Trump and it's just like, oh, they blame Russia for Brexit. Yeah. Like it's this idea that like, there's something happened that they never thought was possible of happening and it's like sort of frozen them all in amber and they, they, they just sort of can't get amber frozen, but like, you know what I mean?

Like it's become kind of an identity and a fixation and that like no politics can move forward until they just get, get their way or just go back in time and sort of undo the thing that happened that they can't deal with. Yeah. I mean, they really, a lot of the people who kind of brand themselves as a, you know, like, you know, hashtag FPP, you know, really remaining people, there's this really, really big sort of thing of them to sort of just imagine anything that happened before 2016 has been like, you know, like really, really solid in just a different world, you know, and everything just changed

in June, 2016. And that was that. And they, they love talking about things like the 2012 Olympics, you know, Yeah, I remember that when Daniel Craig kicked off the events with the really, really big thing for them, you know, like the opening ceremony, which you just, it's like, a grotesque spectacle. Yeah. It was like quite intelligently done, but it was fucking, you know, it wasn't real.

And there was like, any boy all directed it, right? There was no people kill it. There was like, you know, war veterans killing themselves over the bedroom tax and, you know, like really punitive benefits measures and, you know, like hundreds of people are getting made homeless every single year. You know, it was a really, really unpleasant society in 2012. It's just they didn't care. It really is this like parallel thing that where it's like, you know, for us, it's the

Obama years and all of the liberals just want to go back to when they were able to ignore the misery and chaos. And now that like, you know, their man isn't in the White House, suddenly these problems are more visible and they don't know how to deal with it. They can't deal with it politically. They're just in denial. They're just completely, they're trying to just, you know, completely overturn the democratic process, anything they can possibly do to make it go back before they knew how bad things

were. Yeah. So the crisis years have finally caught up to them and they have no meaningful or productive solution, you know, or like a way out of this. So the only answer is just to retreat into like a very recent past, which wasn't real anyway. What, but like overall, like Corbin has gotten a lot of shit for not being like, you know, pro remain enough.

Like what is the labor part of Corbin's labor party? What is like their current stance as it comes to Brexit? Well, so I mean, it is a little incoherent. It's kind of being ripped a lot because I think currently we're undergoing a process where like the whole of the party is trying to work out what we're really going to do because it looks like we're on the cusp of power and even it's one of those things where it's like, you don't want to be complacent, but the way that the media is shaped against us, even if we're just 10 points behind now, I mean, we were 18 points behind when the

general election was called in 2017 and we received the hung parliament. Now I think if we, you know, lots of the polling are saying we're between seven and 10 points behind, although in the past week, this might even change by the time the show comes out, but in the past week, we've been about 2% ahead of Boris and the Tories. So I think that we, if we just basically lead a general election charge by talking about Brexit as little as possible and talking about the things that really matter in this country, you know, like the whole infrastructure of British society is completely crumbling. This report came out today about like teachers talking about how upset they are because there's

been like a record number of teachers reporting that their five year olds, six year olds and seven year olds are openly discussing killing themselves in classrooms, you know, like it's a society like a really profound like crisis and there needs to be some sort of positive reform of the whole country or else it's just going to get worse and worse and worse and more and more and more dilapidated. And I think if we led a campaign based around this and based around positive solutions to very, very real problems that millions of people are facing, and I think we probably will win it on a, you know, like a very minority government.

But currently the, you know, what we get caught out on is that we are going to win the election. We're going to go to the European Union, negotiate a much better Brexit deal which prioritizes workers rights, environmental protections and so on, and then we're going to put it back to the public on a sort of confirmatory vote. Now there's a huge debate over whether that is going to be a, you know, like a labor deal or a no deal. I believe that was the, that was what united the union, which is a very influential left wing trade union.

I believe that's what they wanted. But currently the strategy seems to be it's going to be either the labor deal or a remain votes. I think you can see why it's going to be complicated. Cool. Cool. So just no idea. Yeah.

I mean, yeah. I understand entirely that it comes across as incoherent because it is, but it's a balance because it's completely split Labour's political coalition in half this, you know, when you're talking about 75 of Labour's 75 target seats for the next election voted leave and something like 61% of our constituencies voted leave, but over, you know, two out of a third of our membership voted to remain, you know, it's created a huge, you know, like opening chasms in the party itself. So, you know, it is like a very, very complex situation to manage, I understand.

But to me, it's all about moving away from the whole argument and emphasizing how completely broken this country is and how it needs to be positively restricted. Right. So, final question, what is Ireland, what's going on with that? We were just, actually, I have had to explain the backstop like 10 times and I've never gotten better at it. And I think that it's also like the approach to it has changed like in the last like five days anyway.

So that's, I have no idea. Can you like sort of walk us through like Northern Ireland and the backstop? So what do you want to know particularly because it is a very, very ugly topic, isn't it? Are the troubles going to kick off again? That's what I want to know. Are we going to bring back new wave music and pub bombings? Balaclavas. Yes.

That's what I want to know. When Britain was fun, I think the big thing is, is just, you know, what's the backstop and what would violate the backstop and what kind of a deal wouldn't? So the backstop is just a kind of, it's just a name given to a very, very sort of like slack drafted agreement between Britain and the European Union that just stops a hard border in Ireland, you know, which means like there won't be like military checkpoints or you know, the Irish police checking you or whatever, if you're crossing into the north or vice versa.

That means that it means, it probably means keeping Northern Ireland in some aspects of the single market. It's obviously a huge political football because I think like Leo Veradka, the Irish Prime Minister said yesterday that basically the removal of the border will just affect you know, no deal Brexit because the major stakeholders in Ireland and Northern Ireland won't accept this and the European Union won't accept it either. Cool. I mean, it's not a sexy topic, is it?

Should I mention, I may be just like, no, no, no, it isn't a just a topic. It's just that there's no solution, like with this, there's no prediction we could possibly make at this point. I mean, I want to make a prediction just to comment more so. It just recently came out that Lord Monbatten was a petto. So IRA, most effective sickle hunters in history. Let's get them back on the case. IRA true detective season four.

Let's go. Well, did you, did you see any of that new book about Lord Monbatten that just showed how batshit insane he was like, in 1968, he was interested in plotting a coup against Harold Wilson, who was our kind of like center left Prime Minister at the time. Just because he nationalized a few things and, you know, set up the open university, people thought that he was a Soviet agent. And yeah, and Lord Monbatten really did think that and he was interested in like implementing a plan, which would mean that like this little block of generals, like industrialists and

you know, various captains of industry would be like propelled into a new government, which deposes Harold Wilson. And people around him were really interested in having a Sir Oswald Mosley, you know, with the head of the British factory. They wanted him to lead this national government. All right. Well, does he have a grandson or something, or he'll solve this thing? I like the idea that like, that like Harold Wilson, who was, yeah, again, like not a very

threatening figure. They were like, let's bring in Mosley. There's never been a Soviet agent named Harold. I'm sorry. It's just not. I'll check up the list of my my dad's uncles. I mean, this does tell you that if Corbyn gets in there, he's going to have to arm the chabs immediately because there will be a coup.

How do you know that word anyway, that's the Internet. Yeah. It's just like memes. Oh, wait. My mobile. What are you talking about? Wait, Marcus, I got I got one more question for you. Another thing I don't understand.

Who are the Lib Dems and what are they? What are the who? Who's the typical Lib Dem voter and politician? How would you? How could you describe them? I don't know. It's kind of like you can't really, you can't really define the Lib Dems by anything, particularly remain though, right?

That's like their deal now. They're the remainers. Yes. Yeah. I mean, yeah, they are, but they basically just like change to fit whatever, whatever sort of like major, you know, soft, you know, soft, but serious, like outcry in society there is at the time, you know, they were really into a, you know, get rid of tuition fees.

Like infamously, they were really interested in getting rid of tuition fees and that meant they had a huge, huge kind of insurgent campaign in 2010 with Nick Clegg, where they got millions of student votes, never, never, ever received them before. And within about nine months, because they got enough votes to actually form a, a coalition with the Conservative Party, within about nine months of being in power, they'd already like voted to triple tuition fees, which led them over to student riots and so on. My impression, or at least what I suspected is that they were just like sort of liberals that might have been Blairites, but were like too unsuccessful to get their, to work

their way into the Labour Party. Yeah, but there's also these, I don't know, there's kind of like a, there's a good article on by Solomon Hughes, who's a really good British investigative journalist. It's on Jacob and it's called the Lip Dems, his new friends. And he sort of like goes through them a bit because they've always tried to posture themselves as being, you know, like economically competent, but kind of socially progressive and forward thinking and so on. But like, you couldn't really say that about them now.

I mean, like Tim Farron, their former leader was like an obsessive homophobe, he was, you know, really, really, really angry, like, you know, far more angry than any like sane individual could ever be about equal marriage. And you know, you used to abstain on all sorts of just generic progressive legislation that would just, you know, help LGBTQ plus people, you know, like loads and loads of the people like Chuka Ramona are interested in all sorts of politics and they flirted with quite hard right? Labour politics for a while, quite socially conservative politics.

I mean, Chuka Ramona himself, I remember him saying about two years ago that we should, we should just basically make an agreement with the European Union, where we keep all the economic benefits of the European Union, but we just ban immigrants from coming into the country. It's just fucking horrible. That's a great position. So I like the rapacious capitalism part. I don't like the part where we get to, you know, help refugees.

That's the idea is like, you know, the sort of like the regulation and neoliberalism across the UK. Give me that. But like, I would never like to live next to a Polish person. Cool. Very cool. Thank you. So that's a big aspect of liberal Democrats, too.

I think the only consistent thing that you can say about them in terms of policy and character is that they're all, you know, for their own particular reasons, obsessed with preventing the Labour government from getting into power. Well, Marcus, I want to thank you so much for your time and for filling us in on all that. Like I said, hopefully you will be, you know, the Northern Viceroy when America does our regime change style invasion of the UK. I can't wait to be a commissar for Donald.

Yeah. It's forcing Donald's will. No, it's, yeah. Great to talk to you again, Marcus. Do you have anything, anything to plug? I don't know. Yeah, the Labour Party. Oh, how about this?

Let us know when you guys call a general election and we'll come over there and do like a sort of whistle stop rat pack style tour. 100%. We're going to go to the Midlands and just boost it for Corbyn and we'll just be out there and be like, don't know what this town is. Don't know anything about Brexit. And we're from Brooklyn here for Jeremy Corbyn. We could do really madcap rallies with you.

We'd be great at it. Yeah. We could sing High Hopes. Yeah. You could come over and Hillary T-shirts, you know, we're still with her. Yeah. Absolutely. Marcus.

Once again, man. It's great to talk to you. You too. Thanks, man. All right. Take care, everyone. See you soon. Bye.

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Order. Order. Order. getting his two-time Chapeau Appearance Challenge coin. Ossida is now at the New Republic. And I'm very excited to be talking to you, Ossida, because you just did some on-the-ground sports reporting from the wide world of intellectual combat.

I'm talking, of course, about David, French, versus, versus, versus. So-Rab, Ameri, Ameri, moderated by Ross, doubt that, doubt that, doubt that, at the American Catholic University, versity, versity. You covered a intellectual debate that has been roiling the intellectual side

of the conservative movement in America for the New Republic. It's a piece up right now called The Right's Culture War is a Drag. Sorry, The Right Wing's Cultural Civil War is a Drag. So, Ossida, could you give us some background here on the lead up to this, this clash of the Titans? Yeah, so I was very thrilled to be at the sort of

Ali Fraser of conservative posters last week. But yeah, so the, the basic background is that for several months now, a number of conservatives have been really terrified by a phenomenon called Drag Queen Story Hour. This is a, I guess it's a group, although it's not really formally organized as a single group, but some folks who basically

invite Drag Queens to public libraries across the country, have them read to children, make arts and crafts, sing songs, this kind of thing. In May, Sarabha Mari, who is the op-ed editor at the New York Post, saw an ad for one of these events that was gonna take place in Sacramento and posted it to Twitter saying that this was an evidence of a new demonic front in the culture wars.

It should be noted of course, Sarabha Mari lives in New York City, was sufficiently threatened by this event, a gazillion miles away in Sacramento to make a post about it. And it would have just stayed, you know, an odd tweet, not from the fact that he continued in a thread and said that one of the people

preventing the right from adequately addressing the threat posed by Drag Queen Story Hour was David French. David French, I'm sure, you know, everyone knows as a friend of the show, one of the most prominent never-trump conservatives on the right, and Amari says in a tweet that mentions French that French is too polite and too naive about the threat that progressives pose

to conservative values to really be an effective warrior for the right. French sees this tweet, writes his response in national reviews saying that for all of his, I guess, politeness and nice-kindness, he's been a fighter for conservative causes in the courtroom, he's been an advocate for conservative causes in national review.

And this sort of creates a back and forth, and during his back and forth, it emerges basically that Amari's main beef against French and the establishment conservative movement is that he thinks that they're too respectful of what I guess people call the classical, the values embodying classical liberalism, sort of like free speech, freedom,

the press re-expression and all of these things that we sort of understand as part of the bill rights and all of this stuff. He thinks that the American conservative movement has become too respectful of those values to really fight an effective battle against the progressives and the left, who he sees as won't upends all of those values

in their brazen attempt to force people to watch and to attend Drag Queen Story Hour. You quote the original tweet in the piece, again, about Drag Queen Story Hour in Sacramento, California. The tweet was, this is demonic. To hell with liberal order, sometimes reactionary politics are the only salutary path. So yeah, this was the Fort Sumner, I guess,

start this right-wing civil war between him and David French. And I guess David French represents the traditional kind of evangelical right-wing Christian, who also civility and appearing as a nice guy is very important to him, whereas Sorab represents a kind of more, I don't know, Francoist Catholic right for whom culture war is not really a metaphor, but something quite literal.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the word that gets thrown around with Amari is integralists, and people sort of think that he might be a sort of a new vanguard of Catholic integralists who think that the country should basically become a theocracy, enthralled a certain set of Catholic social values, this is up against

French's more traditional evangelical Protestantism. So I basically think that, and I say this in the piece, that for all of this sort of talk that French and Amari have had about the extent to which they differ on liberal values and the extent to which French or other conservatives aren't nice enough to fight the battles that Amari thinks are worth fighting, there is a substantial amount of overlap

between the two of them in the way that they talk about the left and the way that they talk about progressives, and in their willingness, both of them, even though French calls himself a classical liberal, their willingness to both use government's power to impose certain cultural values on people they disagree with, the most obvious example of this would be abortion rights.

Large swaths of the country is now effectively impossible to get an abortion, French supports this. French is in fact so pro-life that he voiced basically unreserved support for that Alabama bill earlier this year that basically banned nearly all abortions, a bill that was so extreme that even pro-life conservatives, and even the editorial board of the National Review said that, you know, this is way out there,

this is going to be counter-productive movement. French actually wrote a piece saying, no, this is good, this is in fact an essential part of what we need to sort of want a final assault on Roe versus Wade. So for all of the talk about classical liberalism and French's defenses of individual liberty, they're still both, you know, familiarly cultural conservatives,

in a way that I think people, you know, that they're same old, same old in a lot of ways. And, you know, you mentioned that, I mean, really, probably the funniest part about all this is what kicked it off is this idea that this drag queen story hour phenomenon, and you begin your piece by, you know, listing a number of the, you know, insane acts of mass murder

that have happened in America just over the last couple of weeks. The fact that now 96% of all American school children undergo active shooter drills, like the same way we did, you know, fire drills at school, which, you know, I'm sure won't warp their minds in any way. But, you know, you go down this list of like genuinely, like terrifying and bizarre things

that we've now come to accept in American culture. And then you write, take full measure of liberal alarm and consternation over gun violence and its impact on our youngest. And you might come to understand the terror inspired within a particular corner of the conservative world this year by drag queen story hours. And, you know, getting into the debate itself,

you said basically you were shocked to find out how much of this debate at American Catholic University still was talking about drag queen story hour. Yeah, and that shouldn't have been. But, you know, I really went in there expecting Amar to say, look, you know, I got made fun of for focusing initially on drag queen story hour. But really I was using that as an entry point

to say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But really like the first 30 to 40 minutes of this exchange was Amar just like detailing different parts of drag queen story hour he found objectionable. He cited a video in England, not even in this country where there was a drag queen story hour where apparently one of the drag queens was teaching kids how to twerk.

And he quoted from, I guess captioned in the video, just sort of describing this person teaching these children, you know, this dance move. And he said that this was, you know, evidence of how demonic it was. He said at one point that there are 35 chapters across the country. And this is evidence that this is a growing movement

that's going to subsume all of our children. And French, I think, you know, was himself also surprised by this. He sort of scoffed at the idea that 35 chapters of this thing was a real threat to conservative order in America. But one of the things I get out in the piece is that French and I think the establishment conservatives

who have aligned themselves with him in this debate don't really have a right to be as surprised as they are that Amari is sort of abandoning the liberal project. I mean, French has also been somebody who is framed the progressive left as being overweening, overly draconian and it's in position of certain social values. One of the questions for me,

I've always had at the conservative movement is how can you, if you're somebody like David French, write every other week about how supposedly there's this sort of mass slaughter of infants in abortion that takes place in this country every year by the millions and then sort of leave that and say, but we still want to respect our interlocutors and we still think that they are not necessarily bad people

and they deserve rights and so on. Right, it just shows that they don't really believe it. Exactly, and then somebody like Amari inevitably comes along and says, well, wait a minute, like if we do believe that these people are mass murderers, then why would we extend them to sort of write some privileges of liberal society? Why wouldn't we wage an actual war against them

and sort of defeat this immorality? And I think that's ultimately like the more coherent position if you believe what conservatives claim to actually believe. And I think that's why Amari's attacks on friends have been so compelling and have rocked so much of the conservative world. I think that there are a lot of, I went to Catholic University,

I saw a lot of young people there who were traditional Catholics and other young people from across difference, we're according to the conservative movement who are very into this sort of new war footing that Amari is trying to get people on. From reading your article and the other accounts of this debate that I've seen,

my sort of conception of the difference between what they're actually arguing over, and again, in your article, you do a very good job of showing how the David French position is not the nice liberal position by any means, so we shouldn't be giving him too much credit. But from what I can identify, it seems that the difference between them

is that David French and those like him basically take for granted that the Christian right wing point of view culturally has lost and is now a moral minority in this country, and that essentially they would like to use the state to sort of preserve the rights of their alternate lifestyle, whereas Amari is just like, no, we should impose a Catholic social order

that overrides the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, we've seen over the past couple of years sort of various ways that traditional social conservatives have tried to deal with the reality, cultural and political reality of their situation. Roger got a lot of attention for his book on the Bendered Option,

which is sort of a model for conservatives retreating into particular communities where they can sort of live the lives that they want to away from the nefarious machinations of people who run Drag Queen Story Hour and things like it. But Amari is just sort of fundamentally not willing to make that compromise.

He still believes in the form of Christian dominion that Bill of Rights should control this country. I think it's very similar. You know, I wrote, I went not long ago to the National Conservative Conference also here in D.C., where you had people like Amari, but people who I guess were less explicit religious in talking about some of these cultural issues.

But you had there also this sort of sense that people were willing to throw away certain nostrils and certain norms that social conservatives had revered for so long, because they believed that by doing that, they could secure for themselves an amount of power that even though they are a majority in the country, even though they're never gonna be able to get people

to agree with him on, you know, how bad Drag Queen Story Hour is, they're not gonna win back public opinion on gay rights. They still believe that by abandoning the liberal values, they can secure for themselves enough political power to at the very least make other people's lives as miserable as they can. And that's something they can do because this is a country that has countermajoritarian

institutions that disproportionately power the American conservative movement. So even if it's the case that Amari's never gonna convince people like us that transgender people are terrible and that drag queens are demonic, certainly at the state level and places where conservatives have a lot of power,

they can do a lot of damage to LGBT rights, to reproductive rights for women. And still at the federal level, of course, you know, because of the way that power is allocated, conservatives are gonna enjoy a seat at the table, federal policymaking for a long, long time, if they don't enjoy the support of the majority of the American people.

I just, I'm curious of like where someone like this ends up on kind of an economic spectrum because it seems to me like, if you're spending all this time on drag queen story hour, even people who are sort of generally what we would consider kind of just culturally conservative in America are not hardened reactionaries. Like they might be like, I don't know about that,

but they don't really care. Like it doesn't seem like drag queen story hour is even like enough of a platform to even show up on those people's radar, even as a novelty. Like is there some kind of, you know, implicit sort of like economic program or is it, I mean, the Catholic thing

goes a lot of different directions. Yeah, I mean, but I noticed, you know, reading some of Mary's other work and what I've noticed going to things like the National Conservatives Conference is that there is definitely a real willingness in this corner of the right to rethink market fundamentalism,

to make the governments establish a larger role for government in providing people health care and beating back some of the machine reproducing the equality because conservatives, cultural conservatives think the capitalism has been bad for the family in all kinds of ways. Obviously that's a lot of social, right. And there's obviously there's been

a lot of social dislocation. The conservatives think has been caused by capitalism, but also, at the very least, they see that social dislocation being caused by some of the economic patterns in the past few decades, even if they don't connect that necessarily with capitalism as a system.

And they see, you know, industrial ruin as something that leads to social ills. And these are things that I think have created a real willingness to think very fuzzily about the extent to which conservative movement might have an interest in moving leftward on certain questions, but it's still very hazy in the way that like some of Trump's sort of loose talk

during the primary about health care and trade policy was hazy. But the thing that I think people should understand about that is that when you have these conservatives then derailed by talk about dry queen story hour and by a Mari sort of demonization of the left and sort of tales of cultural ruin and progressives trying to force

whatever gender ideology they imagine progressives want to force on everyday people. And when that enters the conversation and all of that sort of productive rethinking of conservative economics can get derailed. And I think that's what the left should really pay attention to in the conversation that there is in sort of right wing populism,

something of a kernel of economic awareness that if the cultural conservatives succeed in burying under all of this nonsense is gonna go away. And I think that that's something that people should really pay attention to and understand about this. Like that there is something happening but it could evaporate very quickly. Acida, the fascinating thing to me about Amare

and not just him but as sort of a figurehead for, I don't know, yeah, like you said whether they want to be called integralists, trad cats or I would prefer just classic hard right Catholic fascism, like you know. Nerds. Yeah. I prefer nerds.

Nerds, yeah. Carlists. Yeah, whatever, yeah, all these guys. Amare converted to Catholicism in 2016. Oh, it's a convert. Like I said, my cat is older than his religious faith. And like literally this entire phenomenon, I don't know a single trad person who was cradle Catholic.

They're all like young to late in life converts to Catholicism and our friend. We know Catholics, they're loud, tacky people who go to mass once every couple of months because their grandmother yells at them. They're not these people. No, they're not the nerds. They're not the people.

They're not nerds. The tweed cape wearers, you know? And. No, they are the guinea-tea wearers. But our friend Ev, Agent Napoleon had a really good point about this where it was just like, hey everybody, I just found out about this group two weeks ago. They're so good in fact that I'd like them

to have dictatorial control over the entire country. And it's just like, could you be maybe a little bit more humble about this shit? Like you just discovered this like. Yeah. A couple of weeks ago, dude. Yeah, settled it all down. But also to me like, but going off of that

and like in reading the, both you're right up of it and some of the people who were live tweeting this debate. And when I've encountered interviews of the Maori in the past, I think a journalist in New York magazine did one. And what it always comes down to is this question of like, okay, like you're hinting around the, you're nibbling around the outside of this like,

okay, liberal culture is demonic and needs to be destroyed. But like, what are you actually going to do? Like if we just gave you that power, like what would our society actually look like? And when pressed on that, I think either they don't know themselves or more likely are being purposefully very cagey about what they're actually thinking about.

Did that come across in the debate to you? It definitely did. I mean, Amar didn't really offer any solutions, for example, for drag queen story hour beyond. He wanted to bring the head of something called the modern library association, which doesn't exist before Congress. Wait a minute, you mean those really nice books?

Yes. I want the King Librarian to stand trial. He said that and also passing local ordinances might be sufficient enough to deal with a threat. If you're a conservative, find your business and the local, you know, if that's what you believe. Yeah, if the people of Sacramento are fine with it, then like, in fact-

If you're a conservative, you don't, you believe in like these fractured local politics. No, but like for him, it's not so like, yeah, that door only swings both ways. As far as I can tell, the people of Sacramento couldn't care less that there's a drag queen story hour at one public library, like every other, yeah. I mean, I think for Amar, I think that cultural conservatives

like him have this sort of like hazy in the sky vision of what they dream America might be. But if they were ever to get the amount of power that they think that they want, I think it'd sort of be like, you know, the dog that chases the car doesn't know it. You're the damn joker. Right.

I mean, I think that they depend so much rhetorically and just sort of spiritually also on this idea of perpetual martyrdom that they're always losing, that the left is always a sentence, that the right is always the underdog. That is so fundamental to who they are and their whole political existence

that I don't know that they would even be equipped to really, to manage the country in the way that they might. They would certainly do a lot of damage to people that they dislike. But I don't think that there's any kind of real comprehensive program for redoing America. I don't know, maybe Mari's gonna write up one in the next couple of months,

but it's not something that we've seen. It's just sort of a constant list of grievances about the left and what it's doing. In six months, he might be a Scientologist. I do think it is worth also considering the possibility that this just might be like a weird kind of trend that's festering in this liminal political state where all of the traditional institutions

are fake bullshit parties anyway, for the right and the left ostensibly aren't doing anything for any of their constituencies. And so this is the things that are like, this is the algae bloom after the hurricane. Yeah. I see that, it drives me crazy whenever I read these debates or like they try to like lay out their point of view.

Yes, drag queens are demonic, liberal culture, literal actual demons, the influence of Satan. I would like doubt that or Dreher or Amari or any of these people just to be asked point blank, gay people in American society, what are you gonna do with them? If you're gay in America under your ideal society, what does your life look like?

What is your interactions with the state? Like, is that illegal now? If so, how is that gonna be policed? Are you gonna say, yes, I think people should be put in jail for being gay or having gay sex? They never wanna jump to the point of policy because basically they have to, as we have figured out on this show,

admit that either they don't really believe what they're saying or they would impose draconian or a horrifying policies on people because they do believe it. So either you don't believe that there's like a baby holocaust happening all the time and you just say it because you're a cynic and a careerist or you do believe it and you wanna put women in jail. And so you have to say that, like you have to say that.

And I think that's why French is more realistic because he's like, these aren't popular positions and these aren't gonna mobilize people. Like no one likes us. Yeah, whereas Amari has this fantasy that he's gonna like fucking organize these fucking requites out of like the humble American, like, you know, lump in American Christians

who are all gonna just get triggered by a tracking story hour, even though it's pretty clear just by watching American culture that these things have, the way the conservatives were worried would become accepted over time. And we say that's good and they think it's horrible, but the fact of it is unavoidable. And like where he's gonna get these guys

or we're gonna get the snap to this stuff who have now like pretty much shown by their support of Trump and stuff. They don't really give a shit about any of that moral bullshit when it comes to politics. It's really just a kind of a set dressing. Then, you know, I guess I think it's because he's so new to it.

He has not really gotten the message on how things work in this country. And so he thinks, no, we'll just, we'll tell everybody, we'll go town to town, tell everybody about the drag scene story hour. They'll pick up their pitchforks and they'll follow us like fucking, like the Vande Rebels during the French Revolution.

I like the idea of like him trying to hold a rally in some place where they had like drag queen story hour and someone screaming, you don't even go here. What I'll say about French, I mean, I think it's true that he is more in touch with the objective reality on the ground, but I'll say that it's often in the case that being panicked and being out of touch with realities

actually serve the conservative movement really well. And I mentioned this in the piece. I mean, for example, the conservative movement has this idea that the media in this country is extremely left wing, terribly biased towards conservatives. And their certainty of that convinced them to create a separate media infrastructure that was just as biased as they imagined

the liberal media to be. And that media infrastructure at Fox has proven to be tremendously important institutionally for the conservative movement. You can look at the same thing happening with the conservative universities that conservatives were supported because they believe academia is really biased.

Like there are all of these ways in which conservatives do exactly what they imagined the evil left is doing and actually wind up as a consequence of that doing or creating really, really important institutions because they have this warped sense of how out of power they are. And again, what they fear isn't even like an ascendant left. It's just like a malaise of liberal hegemony.

How about like the room itself? You know, I mean, as you said, this was billed. They even had some dumb name for it, like Thrilla and Manila, but not clever or rhyming at all. So let's do like a Harold Letterman, you know, Teddy Atlas style, tale of the tape. Let's get ready to bumble. Out of all, like again, I've read the write-ups of this

in the, you know, the right-wing press or the intellectual right-wing press, I guess. And they all seem pretty unanimous in declaring David French the victor of this debate. What was it like in the room? In the room, I will say that I'm already got most of the applause lines that I noticed. Like David French would, at multiple points,

launch into this sort of like, very sort of like well-stated textbook defense of classical liberalism while you have to respect the right through your enemy because you don't know when you're going to be out of power and you're going to want those rights yourself and blah, blah. And Mari would just say, well, they're aborting a lot of black babies in New York

and we don't care about that. And he'd get applause, you know, like you just sort of like flatly reject the entire edifice of liberal norms. And that was compelling to at least half the people in that room on a consistent basis. And again, I will say that there were a lot of young people there.

It was a mix of sort of like older at his professorial types, but also a lot of younger Catholics, a lot of sweaters. Any walking sticks? Any walking sticks? I'm sure there were a couple of walking sticks. I saw a couple of monks there. I saw David Brooks there, actually, naturally. But I think that Amari, you know,

in the room was getting a lot of support, even though he wasn't, you know, as quick on his feet as French was. Because like, again, I think that there are people who substantively are with him. I thought just in reading the live tweets of it, I thought Amari actually got the burn of the debate. When David French was like,

you and his Spike Jones voice was like, you're talking to me about courage? Until you put your boots on the ground in Iraq and risk your life. And then Amari said, weren't you in JAG? Which was a great line because yeah, he was in fucking JAG. He was, that's a question.

He was a fobbit. But at the same time, I watched the actual video clip of it and Amari spits it out very shame-facedly. Like he doesn't deliver it in like, you know, live as good as it read in the thing. Like he sort of sent it under his breath. He is a nerd and probably grew up online. Yeah.

He's not going to be able to talk the peasants into revolt, I don't think. I mean, Amari is just like a very self-spoken person and that really came through across the debate. There'd be times where you'd say something that I think he intended to be really acidic, but like he would say it kind of quietly like that line about French being in JAG.

But one of the things I didn't get in the room, cause I was sort of off to the side of the stage and wasn't really looking at people up front. It wasn't until I watched the video when they posted it and I got back home. I saw just how viscerally uncomfortable everybody on that stage was, especially Ralph Stoutford. Ralph Stoutford looked like he wanted to fold

into himself that entire debate. And he was just like very sort of earnestly trying to get them to find common ground, especially at the end. And that is exactly when things went off the rails. The thing that actually prompted that insult from Amari is like Amari was going back to the Kavanaugh hearings and sort of making the claim based on what I don't know that David French and establishment conservatives

were not adamant enough in their defense of Brett Kavanaugh when after he was accused of rape and French got very indignant at the idea that he had not sufficiently defended the Kavanaugh from multiple assault accusations. But like to your point about the Kavanaugh thing, where he was like, I wouldn't trust you to go to bat for credibly accused rape as Brett Kavanaugh.

I was like, he said, Amari said, I don't think a President Jeb Bush would have gone to bat for Kavanaugh the way Trump did. And then French Craig rightly said, his dad went to bat for Clarence Thomas. Like, what are you talking about? And I don't think he- It was funny, it was exactly when he said that

somebody who was next to me, next to the stage, yelled out, no, Bush actually went to camp David during Clarence Thomas and that was evidence that Bush had not been sufficiently behind him. Oh. They still remember that shit? Jesus Christ. I will say this.

I think Jeb is- Psychopedic memories of every single thing that happened during these hearings and are really fanatical about it. And I guess, I think there are people in that room who really, really did believe that- That's the thing. There's sexual assault trial enthusiasts.

That's their hobby. I actually, he was at camp David. Superfans. I will say I kind of agree that Jeb wouldn't because he does not have the spine of his father. Of anyone. Of a spine at all. He does not have a spine.

He has a cartilaginous, you know, ridge. Yeah. But it didn't take that much time. I mean, Susan Collins got up there and defending how, this is not a very high bar to clear for the conservative movement, which is why, which is what made Amari's conference so substantively odd. I'd be weirded out too if I were French

because French really did was on one defending Recaven on that entire time, like the rest of the conservative movement. So I think what's interesting about this is like, despite the fact that, you know, the online nerds who have scored this debate said that French was the clear winner. Amari, you know, made a fool of himself

and was shown to be a sort of petulant, nasty man. However, I gotta say, I agree with you and your piece is that like maybe he lost the room or if anyone who watched it on YouTube, but it is the Amari side of this split in the right that I think is in ascendance. And you right here, it is the Amaris, not the Frenchess who will be poised

to inherit the movement and do the slaying from here on out. Not only because they're more openly illiberal attitudes sit better with the right's new populism, but because ironically those attitudes spring from conservatism's deepest, sturdiest roots. The defenses of old hierarchies that led early conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke to regard the then woolly and new ideals

underpinning classical liberalism and its revolutionary proponents with deep caution and often open suspicion. Yeah, Amari is a true conservative. I mean, classical liberalism is in sort of laissez-faire economics is what we sort of have all come to believe within sort of conventional politics and recent times of being definitive

of what conservatism is. But all of that stuff was sort of grafted on after the fact to a conservative traditionalism that was really just about making sure that the people who were already at the top in the aristocracy and their values were maintained in society that is fundamentally what conservatism is. Lassez-faire capitalism became a means to that end.

And now that people I have seen and cultural conservatives have seen that, well, you know, capitalism can actually be very woke and people that they don't like can sort of like achieve levels of influence within the system that they didn't anticipate. I think it's only as a consequence of that that they're sort of like now,

I guess as I said earlier, there's reckoning with economic realities, but I think for a lot of people, it is the fact that culturally capitalism has created choices that they didn't want people to have that has sort of produced this shift away from that fusionism. But Amari is sort of a throwback

and a traditionalist conservative. And those are the people who've always been at the crux of the movement. Those are the people who've always been its soul. And the only reason why Amari is gonna win is that French already agrees with him on half of this stuff anyway. He agrees with him on restricting abortion rights.

He agrees with them on imposing restrictions on pornography. There are all kinds of ways in which French for all he talks about the liberal values and classical liberalism is willing to subsume those values under his own sort of cultural religious preferences. So I think that Amari has already basically won the argument.

The fact that you have all of these sort of button up conservatives gathered in a place like Catholic University to take Amari seriously is evidence that he is in fact in sort of the cat bird seat here. And just as the establishment conservative movement was bewildered by the rise of Donald Trump and didn't get it, I think that within its more intellectual circles, there are things happening

that have also caught the old guard flat footed that shouldn't be catching them flat footed because I think that to attach to classical liberalism to understand that it's not fundamentally what conservatism is about. I mean, I think what we're seeing here, and this is something we've talked about on the show before is that the classical liberal model

or sort of our constitutional model, which as you mentioned is already anti-majoritarian, they've used quite ably to basically put themselves in the driver's seat of all three branches of government quite ably. But what they can't do is that those same sort of bourgeois freedoms and market choices have created a culture that is completely now

beyond their grasp. Like I think they have now almost lobotomized themselves out of any ability to create culture at all. And it is completely passed them by and it's like their success politically is tastes like ashes to them because people are okay with other people being gay or don't go to church every Sunday or horror of all horrors,

there are drag queens at our libraries. And if they're like, oh shit, if the Bill of Rights has led to this, then let's just get rid of that too. Right, exactly. I mean, there's a complete inability amongst people in the Marys camp to recognize any meaningful political victories

that the right has won, I think, over the past decade. And there's a point during the debate where French straight up says, you know what, if you actually look at the number of abortions that are happening in this country, they peaked in 1981 and there are fewer now than there were when abortion was illegal on the eve of Roe. This is the astonishing fact.

And it means absolutely nothing to them, Ari. It means nothing. As long as you can see a gay person on TV, as long as they're drag queens at the library, they're losing. It doesn't matter that conservatives can win the presidency multiple times without a plurality of the people

supporting the election of conservative presidents or that they control a number of states in the country totally, that they're throwing people off the voting rolls. None of that means anything because the cultural power that they believe that the left has is so total that nothing that they can actually achieve

in the political sphere really holds a candle to what they imagine we can sort of do in the cultural space, you know, on TV and movies at the library. All of that is more important to them. They've had like a monkey's paw success because what's the point of ruling the country if no one likes you and they think you're uncool?

But meanwhile, it doesn't matter because they still are able to terrorize us from that throne. And meanwhile, all the Libs are still in charge of culture and they're just mashing every button to get people to be good now. We gotta make all the movies and TV shows good so that the people will maybe not vote

for these guys anymore. And it's like, yeah, you're just making it worse. Marvel Universe Gromchians. And it's like, this is just beating, this is making everyone want to just kill themselves. Just, it's all bad. Yeah, it's just both sides just bashing you in the head from one or the other from culture or politics

until you're just a little beaten nub. Last question here, Ocita. I got to ask about our boy Freeway, Freeway Ross Douthat. How did he do as a moderator? Did he ask any interesting questions or any standout moments from Ross in your view? No, not really.

I mean, as I said towards the end, like he really tried to get them to sort of find common ground. He sort of like would not, not literally, but kind of like nudge French to be like, well, you also think women shouldn't have reproductive freedom, right? Like you all should be happy together.

But he, I mean, it was really towards the end of this looking beat. Like there's a point when that actual spat happens between French and Amari on, you know, French cults or Amari, you said that French was a jag. Douthat was talking to like the host of the event and being like, look, you asked me to come do this. I'm doing the best I can here.

This is like out of my hands. Like he was really kind of a passive moderator, looking very tired throughout. And I don't know that he would enjoy doing something like this again. Well, I think he did get them both to agree that pornography should be made illegal. Yeah, that was the most important part for him, I think.

So. Again, I would, I would really like to hear. Talk to him on the JVB. I would really like to hear from them, like how they plan on carrying that out at this point. Well, I mean, there's like stuff happening in the Senate with Josh Hawley in social media. And I think that people see that as sort of like

the vehicle for beginning to explore content restrictions online. Functionally, I don't know that that actually gets anywhere. At one point, French during the debate joke, like, look, if you, if you think that banning pornography is something that we ought to do, I don't think Donald Trump's going to be your man on that. Sorry.

And I think he's probably, probably right. Not just about Trump, but a lot of people on the right who are not going to be as willing to give that up as they might pretend to be for appearances. Well, I'm sure they'll find a way to, yeah, demonize and actively punish, you know, the women involved in it. But everyone else I'm sure will still be jacking off

with impunity. You'll take it from my cold dead hands. Well, I think your hands will be pretty warm at that point. All right. Well, Ossida, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for covering this interminable fucking debate. I mean, yeah, this is real high level mind combat. That I honestly, though, none the less,

I think does point to like an interesting schism in the right that I think I think is going to is probably not going to go away. I think it's going to be it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. And if more people just become, yes, integralist now or amber nerds, nerds, whether they will become even more

insufferable nerds. Yeah, but they'll become even even more angry and violent nerds than they already are already. So Ossida, the pieces up at the New Republic, we will link to it in the show description. Thanks so much for joining us again. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me.

All right, everybody, that's our show for this week. Hope you had a good time. We will talk to you again soon. Bye. Bye bye.