Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 7/7/25 Auron MacIntyre on Democracy, Empire and America’s Future

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

Scott interviews Auron MacIntyre about his book on the failures of liberal democracies. They cover MacIntyre’s intellectual journey, the cost of empire, mass migration, Zionism in American politics and more. Discussed on the show: The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies by Auron MacIntyre On Power by Bertrand de Jouvenel Auron MacIntyre is a columnist, lecturer, and author focusing on the application of political theory. He is the host of The Auron MacIntyre Show podcast and author of The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies. Follow him on Twitter @AuronMacintyre This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated; Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Sign up for the podcast feed at Scotthorton.org or Scott Horton Show.com. I've got more than 6,000 interviews in the archive. for you there going back to 2003 and follow me on all the video sites and X at Scott Horton show all right y'all introducing oren mackintyre he is the host of the oran mackintyre show which you can find on all your favorite podcatchers and youtube and it's part of blaze media and he wrote

this great book that came out last year the total state how liberal democracies become tyrannies welcome the show how you doing doing well thanks man uh very happy to have you here great book Um, it's, uh, got a lot of criticisms of mass democracy, um, that I'm used to hearing from libertarians as well and has a lot of the same kind of solutions. And I know that you have some differences with libertarians. I'm not here to argue with you about those. I'm here to, I have you here to forge alliances on all of our sames rather than accentuating our differences because I think we have so much in common and especially on the most important things. Like, for example, building a statue of Pat Buchanan.

Okay, that's not one of the most important things, but that's certainly something we agree on. But, of course, he's a great friend of ours here. But yeah, so I guess go ahead and can you hit us with the overall thesis about the paradoxes and problems of mass democracy and individual liberty here? Oh, sure. I'm sure we can get into like different specifics, but the big. basic understanding as a you know i think a lot of people uh yeah i spent a decent amount of time as kind of just your standard talk radio conservative um you know the government was needed to be

small but you know it wasn't evil i didn't have to worry about it manipulating me these kind of things and then we saw what happened in 2020 and uh all of a sudden the constitution did matter bill of rights didn't matter no that stuff you know they're they're locking up churches they're throwing pastors into jail. You know, you can't go to a funeral of your loved one, but, you know, strip clubs are open, liquor stores are open. And it just became very clear that, you know, kind of the answers that I had gotten from conservatives on kind of what democracy was supposed to do or what constitutional republics

more accurately were supposed to do, it just wasn't working. And so I needed to kind of look for other thinkers who would explain more of what's going on. One of the reasons we've got a lot of overlap is that both, Hans Herman Hoppa and, and I are drawing from Bertrand de Juvenal. Basically, Bertrand de Juveniles, metaphysics of power, kind of lays out why democracy ultimately fails, why the different factions fighting inside of a society and grappling for power will inevitably grow the state

to a level where it basically has to have domain over every public or private function under the sun. and, you know, a lot of people, of course, you know, Hoppa, people who read Democracy, the guy who failed, you know, often come away wrongly understanding him as a monarch, but I think that, or a monarchist, but I think that's only because, honestly, he makes a more effective case for monarchy than he does for his covenant communities. But either way, however you see the resolution to that problem, the fact that democracy itself is an enemy of freedom, I think, is something that Peter Thiel and many other people

today have kind of noticed as provocative as that statement is, I think it's hard to deny at this point. Yeah. Well, I think it was Davy Crockett who said that a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have. And so in a way, it's even my kind of corollary to that is like any government powerful enough to keep the peace between the 50 states is powerful enough to want to try to take over the whole world, apparently. No, did I lose you now? Yeah, well, so now, so talk about the evolution of the total state because obviously democracy is so dysfunctional for so many reasons. I saw you on your show recently talking about the inevitability of patronage and how there's just so much power and wealth centered in Washington that there's so much spoils to pass out, favors to buy, and political machinations involved that kind of makes self-government and free market.

it's moot at a certain point, right? So I think one of the areas we might differ in is we're both acknowledging a fact of governance that government at scale has pretty critical issues. You can't operate governments at large scale, but you're going to have to give up stuff. You're usually going to have to operate as a large empire. Large empires usually need to fold multiple ethnicities and ways of being, cultures, languages, all these things into kind of one unit they need to

melt down as much of that as possible in order to make the whole empire run. And to me, this is detrimental because it destroys the character of the people that live under that society and ultimately dehumanizes them. It removes the interests of the government from any specific group and instead

aggregates it only to this disembodied state which exists for its own sake. I'm not against government power. in the abstract. I don't have a problem with states existing or acknowledging that there are legitimate uses of government power, even probably ones that you would find tyrannical on a certain level. For instance, I think blue laws actually reduce the power of the government by increasing

the power of other social forces like the church. And this is, I think, the critical lesson that maybe more traditional conservatives can take away from someone like Bertrand to Juvenile, that libertarians perhaps have not, even though they're both operating over the same understanding of the power of the state, there are areas in which the state exerting more power can actually increase freedom, or more importantly, there are social forces that if encouraged, are far more likely to restrict the overall power of the state than say just like constitutional, contractional obligations that you place on the government. And so it's one of those scenarios where I think that smaller government is better,

but not because government power is itself an inherent evil, so much that any government power beyond a certain size or beyond a certain scope necessarily has to detach itself from the well-being of the people that's supposed to serve. And so I think that more localized subsidiary governments create a scenario in which people are more likely to be governed in a way that accords with their understanding of culture and meaning, which therefore makes them feel free and liberated. This is Bertrand de Juvenile's point, is that ultimately the thing that feels artificial about government is not necessarily the requirements it places on you, but the requirements that do not accord with your understanding

of the good life. And so in this way, it's a very Aristotelian understanding about how government should be pursued yeah well now so you know i might value individual liberty and choice on a higher level but i think we are agreed certainly in the problems of mass democracy and on that level that's why i think all libertarians favor decentralization and repeal as rothbard says universal rights locally enforced so forget like the neoliberal thing about oh the declaration independence applies to everyone and that's why we're invading you is to secure your independence and this kind of thing nuts to all that we want to have the most localized communities as possible because after all you're much more likely to have your voice heard at the town council or even

the state legislature compared to the national government in Washington where if you're not part of some major power faction or even representing a foreign government or something your voice is meaningless well and this is why federalism was such a key part of the founding, you had a, in other, uh, more classic civilizations, you had kind of this, uh, aristocratic block that limited certain powers of the king and the wider state. And in many ways, you know, many libertarians point to feudal anarchy as, as perhaps one of the best states, uh, in which, you know, we've lived, even though many, you know, that might sound odd to the ears of some people. Uh, but the, the point being is that ultimately,

that fracturing didn't exist in America, we didn't have that aristocratic block that could lobby for things separate than the king and others. But what we did have was this hyper-regional area because there's just so many, there's so much geography in the United States. It was very difficult to centralize control in any one area and area. And really, a lot of government centralization is due to technology, something that libertarians have to ultimately tackle. You know, the function of centralized government is far more tied to trains. and telegraphs and the internet than it is to, um, you know, some rather nefarious plan. Those exist as well. Uh, but the point is that, you know, localizing the government was a

necessity, uh, just for its functioning, but it also created a dynamic where even though we were 13 separate states in a very real sense, we could operate as one republic because there was enough subsidiarity in the different governments to give them a lot of control. Now, Obviously, the story of the United States Constitution is basically the removal of that when we move from the, you know, the articles of Confederation to the Constitution itself. And then when we have battles over things like nullification and, you know, Shea's Rebellion and all of these different things, there's many different events through American history where slowly but surely we see the nation forged into an empire. I think the 14th Amendment and the end of the Civil War pretty much the conclusion of that process and really, FDR and the rest are just kind of cleaning up the inevitable fusion. But this is, again, something that you and I, even as people who oppose the level centralization we're seeing, this is something

we do have to grapple with because the point that Dejuvenile makes that both Hapa and I are drawing on is the fact that ultimately power does want to centralize. And it wants to centralize for a good reason. That power is an arms race between countries. And if China or some other giant power achieves a certain level of power and you do not match it, inevitably you will often end up under that control. This was understood by everyone around France after the Leveille en masse became a thing. You can't get unilateral disarmament of government centralization. And so unless you have a way to combat that geopolitical reality, there is an unfortunate barrier that we are facing when it comes to the possible fracturing and localization of governance. Yeah. Although,

it's certainly a lot easier to imagine China building a greater co-prosperity sphere, as the Japanese call their empire, over there somewhere rather than actually coming to the middle part of North America. It seems like that's the worry with this Thudicity's trap and all of that is if we refuse to give up our empire while theirs is rising, then we're destined to have conflict, but we recognize that we've overreached in the first place and we're overdue for retrenchment anyway, then it seems to me like it shouldn't be nearly as much of a problem. Yeah, and that's the real question. And this is, I think, what separates a lot of people who are, you know, doing commentary or political analysis right now is whether they recognize that the

most dangerous enemy for the American people right now has been the American regime. I'm somebody who with who ultimately uh does support trump to a degree i think he is the best chance that we've had on a certain uh border issues that are critical and really my my first issue uh but obviously there are there many failings there uh but ultimately uh well we recognize sorry i got lost what were we saying right before that um taylor i trailed off well i had i had said that you know on the because you brought up china and i was saying we don't necessarily have have to have a conflict with him because it's time for us to retrench anyway. Yes. And so the point is that while Trump is not perfect on this issue, he has been better

than most on the left and the right when it comes to war, though obviously what has happened in Iran recently raises a number of questions on that issue. But ultimately what we have to recognize is that even if Trump is a change in some significant way, the machine around him, the same one that ran him over the first time in his presidency is certainly not disappeared and there is a continued push to return us to a more neoconservative globalist understanding of how the world should be run and this is just poison to the United States whatever benefits the empire may have operated you know for us at one point are just gone it's more poisonous to our body politic than it is beneficial and I understand saying that that there would be rather

significant economic impacts for us, you know, divesting ourselves from this globe spanning empire. But as difficult as that would be, I think the cost of continuing it is much worse. And that doesn't mean that we're not going to have a geopolitical presence. That doesn't mean as a continent spanning empire just on this continent without going anywhere else, that we won't still have a significant role to play in world dynamics. But the idea that we have to be the central actor in every negotiation and every conflict and protect every aspect of every country that we think might benefit us in some way or thinks that we could benefit them in some way. That's obviously become toxic for the United States. And I think this is why Murray Rothbard said that war and

the question of war and peace is the center of the entire libertarian project, but he might as well just said in more general terms the entire project of the American Republic and freedom, because our constitution presupposes peace and that war is just a state of emergency temporarily until we win and then stop it but you can't have a limited republic and a world empire all at the same time forever that much is clear and so um and in fact it seems like so much of the domestic empire really is because of the foreign empire and i love this quote it i want to help make it famous it's from William F. Buckley from Common Wheel Magazine in 1952 where he's talking about the necessity of building a world empire

to confront the Soviet Union in the Cold War and he says as part of this we must accept a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores even with Truman at the reins of it all in order to fight the emergency of the Soviet communist threat and then so here we are all these decades later where that totalitarian bureaucracy is worse than he could have ever dreamed or prescribed and the Soviet Union's dead and gone

and yet the empire just continues to grow and so I think this was really Rothbard's point that was so, you know, appealing to me back especially when the worst of it was all getting kicked off 25 years ago was yeah, in this state of heightened crisis and emergency the state capitals might as well not even exist really right now

when when power is that centralized in Washington and all the decisions and shots are being called that far away. So it seems like we got to have peace first or at least, you know, some kind of atmosphere of normalcy to be able to roll back any of the other major encroachments and centralizations, you know, against the previous way of doing things that we put up with so far. Like, for example, the Department of Homeland Security and all of that stuff. This is where, you know, a lot of the paleo-conservative and the paleo-conservative paleo-libertarian alliance was born, right? Is that you had guys like Pat Buchanan, they were part of the Reagan Revolution, right? Like they actually believed, hey, we got to defeat the Soviet Union. And to be fair, I think at that time, it's pretty easy for us to look back now and say, oh, well, the Soviet Union, we never, we never destroyed the planet, so it's fine. But no, I mean, it was it was a bunch of evil countries doing evil things.

Communism is deeply evil. And honestly, we kind of owe the world to defeat it after, you know, allying with it in World War II to defeat what we thought was a more dangerous enemy, perhaps, at the time. But ultimately, we have a level of responsibility for the existence of these regimes. But that said, once the Cold War was over, what are we doing? Right? Like, that's the question. Okay, I was with you, neocons, to the point where we have.

had to defeat the Soviet Union, but now that's done. So what are we doing now? Like, why do we still have to go to war on a consistent basis? Why does, you know, why do all these departments need infinite funding? Why are we always finding a reason to make sure we're producing weapons and going to war? It becomes clear that that may have been a good excuse at the time, but you needed to figure out how to shut this off. And of course, that's always the hardest part of any government program. And back to, you know, the point of Republican governance. Ironically, Leo Strauss made this point in his thoughts on Machiavelli that you can't have a republic that is imperial and expected to last very long, that imperial republics, by their definition, have a shortened life cycle

because they're going to need to basically, you know, bring in large amounts of foreigners in order to boost their tax base and increase their scale and boost the ranks of their military, they're going to have to be in perpetual conflict in order to justify the standing army and the payment and everything else. And so Leo Strauss often considered the father of neo-conservatism pointed out that Machiavelli found this to be an untenable situation for Republican governance. And that's basically the point of my book is that we just don't, we're not a republic anymore. And we haven't been for a very long time. And we can't be a Republican until we take on certain understandings of the limitations of that government form, and one of them is

scale. It's not just centralization of power, though, that comes with it, but we simply cannot operate this large of a political entity and expect to receive real feedback between the rulers and the ruled. I'm not someone who believes in popular sovereignty. I don't think the people ever govern themselves in the literal sense. I think what governs populations is shared cultures and traditions and norms. And when those are properly followed, we feel free because we are people who are born into

societies with the telos. We want to fulfill ourselves in particular ways that are attached to our culture and our understanding of who we are inside our nation. But you can't have that when you're doing 400 million people and when you're bringing people in from all over the world on a constant basis and when you're constantly trying to conquer other nations. You can't have that sense of self and that sense of understanding that I think ultimately breeds to true liberty when you put yourself in this political situation. And so we need to be honest with ourselves about what form of governments we really have and the limitations

of the one we want if we're actually trying to return to it. Yeah. Now, I like that about Strauss echoing James Madison there about the danger of war and all that. And it won't be funny now, but I was going to joke and I still am that I guess the neocons were just reading between the lines and missed his actual point there on the surface about the damage that they could do to us all. They're working so hard to be esoteric

they couldn't take the hint. That's right. They're just so much more sophisticated than us, man. All right, now, here's the thing. The left wingers, they pushed me to the right on this one. Immigration has never been a very big thing. I'm from Texas. I've been surrounded by Mexicans my whole life and it's never been a problem.

I don't care and I don't see what the big deal is. But now I do understand over recent years I have come to understand the difference between immigration and mass migration. And I think there have got to be limits on numbers and percentages of people in this country who come from somewhere else and our ability to assimilate them. And then even as we've been talking about, what are we even assimilating them to, if anything? And what used to sound to me like just silly coming from more conservative alarmists about someday they're really going to want to take back the Southwest and rejoin Mexico and divorce themselves from the United States. It seems crazy to me like all these immigrants, they move here to be Americans because America is so much better than Mexico for so many great reasons. And that's pretty obvious. But maybe it's not as obvious to them as I thought it was.

and maybe some of the alarmists were right to be somewhat alarmed. And anyway, so I guess that's just to tee you up to talk a little bit about the importance of immigration in your mind and where you think we are with it now. Well, you know, if you look around the world, what you quickly discover, and I think we should know this because we both laugh when like the United States government says we've got a George Washington hiding somewhere in Afghanistan, right? Like, we all know that actually liberal democracy doesn't map on to every culture in the world. That's very clear to us. And that's because governance is not ideological. And this is something that conservatives fail for sure. But unfortunately, I think libertarians fall even more into is that they understand governance as like this abstract system of legal documentation.

And if you just kind of arrange the constitution properly and you get everyone to agree to the right contract law, then you like run society the way that you want. But that's not actually how that works because it turns out that contract law is presupposed on a basic understanding of like fairness, an understanding of right doing, even an understanding that people will respond to incentive structures correctly. Right? Like you don't have to look at a whole lot of Africa to recognize that,

you know, when, you know, the YouTubers go down there and build wells or, you know, the empire of Rust documentary where they, go in and like the belgians built all these trains for you and now nothing functions and that's not like just because no one went down there and explained to the people of those countries like why they aren't liberal democracy hard enough like there there's a real difference in the way that

peoples live their lives and we can recognize that when the united states is trying to impose its values on foreign peoples but for some reason libertarians and often conservatives forget that when the foreign peoples come here like like there's just some kind of magic dirt in the united States and once you touch it like you just you get the ability to suddenly like grasp all of these abstract principles that will turn you into a good american and the truth is that you know as we saw with i think the the la immigration riots and the mexican president literally telling her people to continue to riot to keep the remittance tax from going on them because that would hit the mexican government she says these are my people these are my countrymen she doesn't see them the mexican

immigrants in the united states as americans she and she doesn't think they see themselves that way either and so she's commanding them as a leader of their ethnic people. And this is why, you know, a bunch of guys waving Mexican flags in the middle of L.A. When they don't want to go back to Mexico is not actually a contradiction. It's a statement of conquest. Like these guys don't, they're, yes, they're here because things are better in your country. And they think if they take your country, it will be better for them. They're not under some idea.

Like, I want to adopt your way of life because it's so great. No, they want to take it from you, which is a classic move of any, invader throughout history. And so I think this is unfortunately the naive construct of a propositional nation. The United States does have a set of values. It does have a set of principles by which it lives, but those principles came from somewhere. They came from a specific tradition. The Anglo-Liberal tradition is its real genesis. And you can add people into that. It's not saying every person who comes in in the United States has to be an Anglo-Protestant in order to follow the constitution. But you have to understand that this is,

like actually grounded in a real historical set of ideas and ways of living. And if you just replace the people who hold those beliefs, you will get different beliefs. You won't just get, you know, the same beliefs with a new set of people with a different skin color. That's not how it actually works. Yeah. Well, and one thing is, I mean, I've known a lot of immigrants. I still know a lot of immigrants who are like super patriotic. They're the only one on their block flying an American flag. Only one who cared to ever read the Constitution. And no, you know, you know, know where their neighbors all went to government school don't know nothing don't care at all and and so but that's not everybody and i think what it comes down to is when you have these

massive movements of millions of people at a time then it makes assimilation impossible it just becomes as you're saying just transplanting entire different groups well you have this this bell curve beachhead effect too where you have to remember the first people who come to your country from another country will probably be some of the smartest people, the brightest people, the brightest people, most capable people, because they made it out of their country. Like they saw the system was bad. They wanted to go somewhere else. They had the agency to do all these things.

So, yeah, when you're loading a bunch of 130 IQ Indians into the country, you're like, yeah, we can have plenty of Indians here. You know, when you're putting in the hardest working people from any given nation, you're like, yeah, we can have more of those people here. But you recognize like, oh, no, they were the select few. out of their country and when they left like the country got poor like we're brain draining that country we're taking the talent out of that country and we're extracting the people who would be their leadership class who could do something better for them and we're importing it here

and that sounds good at first because it like boosts the number of doctors or engineers or skilled craftsmen we have but what happens when they inevitably bring their brother and their cousin and their cousin three times removed and all of a sudden like you said we have mass migration. Well, now you're not getting that that cognitive beachhead. You're getting the entire country. And it turns out if you bring the whole country, you get what was in that country before, that the people is the country, not just the nation, not just the the borders that have been drawn by the UN at some point. Yeah. And, you know, I think it's a great example because, for example, I've never met an Indian American who I had a problem with. Not that

I'm interacting with them all the time, but like they all seem perfectly fine to me. But then I did see this video. It was a giant business convention of motel owners and convenience store owners. Hey, that's what they're great at running. And there's a bunch of them there. And it may have been you that tweeted this or something. Forgive me, I'm not giving credit words too because I don't remember who post it. But a young woman is explaining how, yeah, all these people are from my saying.

cast right instead of you know boy no more caste system for me now I'm in America where I'm just a property owner like everybody else where this guy knows they're really bringing a caste system to the United States I'm sorry like there's got to be at some point you know that has to be canceled out by what we're already doing here and then the other important facet of that is there are a billion Indians and absolutely unlimited supply of them if they all want to come here so somebody has to be able to say well actually no we're not going to be a super duper majority indian culture now right and it's got to be somebody's right

to put a halt on that somewhere yeah it's amazing and i promise i do this unbidden it's not like i'm running around asking people about this in my daily life but it's amazing the number of people have come up to me without you know me raising the topic at all and they say you know we we started off with a few Indian guys in our HR department or tech department or whatever. And now it's all Indian guys. And now they're hiring more Indian guys and they're actually firing people or getting, you know, we just saw Microsoft lay off a bunch of people in America and immediately apply for more H-1B visas. And you quickly start to understand that, you know, this is an ethnic mafia, right? Like, this is a group of people who have not lost their in group. They might want

to be in America, they might even appreciate America's values. They might even think that there is a lot to it. But they're not going to forget who they're related to. And they're not going to not help out their parents or their cousin. And so very quickly you have entire industries. Again, as

you point out, hotels, gas stations, liquor stores, well known to once you have a couple Indian families owning them in any given area, they tend to get scoop up the licenses. And you know, to be fair, since we're we're on the libertarian podcast, we should attack the government for incentivizing this because

we have specific ethnic carveouts in our business loan system that allow immigrants to come over and exploit it, which is why I got so angry of Vivek Ramoswamy when he's just like, well, Americans are watching too much saved by the bell. And that's why Indians are outperforming. It's like, look, man, I might not think saved by the bell is, you know, is Beethoven, but you have specific ethnic carveouts built into the law. Like the Civil Rights Act makes it illegal for people to hire too many white people and you can hire as many Indians as you want and it won't you won't have any impact in fact you'll often receive some kind of bonus from the government for it and so there's you know there's a myriad of problems here and the government is certainly one

of them uh but it's very clear that we we can't you can't sit around and say i really like limited government and i really like the idea of communities governing themselves and then not understand the difference of like what constitutes a community and what makes them different. Because if you don't grasp that, then you're not going to understand why your importation of a lot of people who don't share that value reliably yields something that is really the antipathy of what you're trying to do here. Yeah. Hang on just one second for me here. You guys, I'm so proud to announce the publication of the Libertarian Institute's 14th book. It's Israel, winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War, Undue Influence, Deceptions, and the Neocon

Energy Agenda by Gary Vogler, former Senior Oil Consultant and Deputy Senior Oil Advisor for U.S. forces during Iraq War II. Remember how I wrote, and enough already, about how Ahmed Chalabi sold the neoconservatives on a plan to rebuild the old British oil pipeline from Mosul and Kyrkoq Iraq to Haifa Israel, if they would only get the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein for him? And how they bought it, because they are as dumb as they are corrupt? Well, Gary was there. As senior civilian consultant to the DoD and Iraqi oil ministry,

he had a unique window and experience witnessing the Pentagon neocons and their machinations on behalf of Israel before and during that war. And it turns out that even though they did not get their pipeline, as Vogler demonstrates, the neocons and their Lekudnik bosses figured out an effective plan B anyway. You are going to love Israel, winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War, Gary Vogler, available everywhere. Check it out, along with our other great books, at Libertarian Institute.org slash books. Hey, y'all, let me tell you about Roberts & Roberts, Brokerage, Inc. Nobody trusts the U.S.

dollar anymore. Foreign governments are stocking up on gold instead of $100 bills. One, they know they need to, and two, that means you need to, too. Interest rates are up, but for some reason not much for savings accounts. Park your money there and watch Uncle Joe Biden just counterfeit its value away. You can see how the Fed is afraid to raise rates to beat inflation for fear of popping the current bubbles,

at least before the election. So more inflation it will continue to be. Gold is your shield against monetary and price inflation, just like it always has been. Now Tim Fry and the guys over at Roberts are recommending gold over silver since the world's almost 200 governments

are putting their own pressure on the price, which should help everyone else who makes similar calls on their own. Of course, Roberts and Roberts can help you with platinum, palladium, and silver as well as gold. Don't let the Fed and the war party inflate all your savings away. Look up Roberts and Roberts at rrbi.co. That's rrbi.c.o. All right, well, listen, I am a libertarian, so I have to talk about the gold standard

for a second here because the root of this problem, a major part of it, is inflationary money. because if you're running a business, then obviously your labor overhead is the biggest pain in your neck that you have to fight inflation any way that you can. And so mass importation of foreigners is a great way to do that. You know, hire people to pluck chickens or to till fields or, you know, harvest the crops or all this work that you'd have to pay local-born, you know, working class or middle-class. American white people much more money to do. And at these prices, are you kidding, after all the debasing of the currency that the government has done lately? And so Trump, I didn't read deeply into it, but I saw the headline, Trump makes carve out for agriculture and hotel industry and might as well add a bunch more too because that's essentially what it is. As long as the government

is debasing the currency and the value of the dollar is always falling, then big business is going to always choose to replace their people, or at least reduce that upward pressure on wages and make their labor force feel much less confident and asking for a cost of living increase. And so people always focus on the Democrats want more voters. But Tyson Chicken wants more guys plucking chickens and the home builders want more guys work in construction. Oh, trust me, they, you know, the paleo-conservative camp I tend to fall into thoroughly understands this problem. You know, there's certainly been a uniparty on this issue.

And when even when Republicans made noises about border security in the past, nothing ever got done. And we always had more people coming in because that's what the donor class wanted. And so you're absolutely right that this is something that continues to drive policy for both the left and the supposed right. That said, Donald Trump. has reduced border crossings to the lowest I think we've ever had like in in pretty much you know since that's been recorded um and so uh that that does not excuse the carve outs that he has suggested uh don't worry we'll continue to chimp on that issue uh to the degree that that's an option uh but um you know is it is he exactly the same sorry no like that's just

not the case like i i i'm all for bagging on when he makes mistakes or double speaks or, you know, and I'm more than happy to point out that these carve-outs are atrocious and a betrayal of the voters. But I'm also not going to pretend like he and Kamala Harris are the same person. Oh, yeah. No, I agree with you on that. I mean, when I was growing up, it was just Clinton versus Dole or Bush versus Gore or whatever. No, this is clearly something quite different than that. And so, in fact, that was one of my questions for you is, you know, your book is written in the election year, but it's still in the Biden era where we're living in, you know, I guess Twitter's already been bought by Musk, so it's not exactly the height of

the worst of it, but we're still essentially very much in the woke era. And now something has changed with the election of Trump. It seems like a real repudiation. I saw where even they stripped the medals from that trans swimmer guy and all of this stuff. So, it seems like it's more than just symbolic that Trump won here. There really is a cascading effect from it. But so how far do you think it goes? Well, that's the real question. Of course, one of the big problems is the limitations.

You know, democracy means that one way or another, Trump only has three years to get things done. You can speculate on whether J.D. Vance will continue that legacy. But that will be the real scramble after Trump is gone of where the Republican Party goes. Trump is obviously deeply flawed, but his greatest strength is that he is non-ideological. And that means that he's very hard for the left to predict. And you can tell because they have just been on their heels the entire time after his victory. As you point out, you know, I mean, think about this Pride Month, right?

Did it even exist? Did it even happen? You know, you had a couple parades that didn't even, you know, no one attended. It was all about Palestine. and it was all about the war. And, you know, the, the, the woke stuff just did not permeate. Now, it's, it's, it's recapitulated itself. Um, there's, there's this weird synthesis of kind of a gay rights movement with, uh,

with, with, you know, Islamists, uh, to some degree, uh, but obviously, um, the left is having a difficult time trying to figure out how to put a coalition together. And the right, um, is doing its best to hand them something. If you hand them a war that will galvanize the left, that will make them the anti-war side, which would be a disaster because we worked so hard to try to teach Fox News boomers over Ukraine that, like, actually the conservative position is not to go to war all the time, and that these people don't care about your kids. And they're like throwing the boys of Appalachian, Texas into the meat grinder, you know, for a global elite that doesn't care about you is not worth your time. but obviously these lessons are hard to learn. And so it's something that is an ongoing battle. I think that ultimately we will see the left try to reconstitute itself,

but the battle is going to be as to whether the neocon consensus can reestablish itself inside the Republican Party or if there is a real Buchananite, you know, Bannon-style turnover in a significant chunk of the leadership. Yeah. All right. I mean, you brought it up there in that context, but it's a huge part of all of this lurking, dare I say, in the background and oftentimes the foreground. Zionism. How can you be America first when it's Israel instead? And this is going to keep coming up, Warren, right? Yeah. I, you know, I've, I always think about how to say this properly because no matter how you say it, everyone's going to be extremely angry. you. But I think that the very basic understanding of America first is that, you know, you should put the well-being of our nation before everything else. Now, many pro-Israel advocates will say, well, everything that's good for Israel is good for the United States,

but that just can't possibly be true. And I know this because Thomas, or rather, George Washington told me in his farewell address, that you shouldn't have favored nations and that the creation of favored nations is going to create factions inside your country. It's going to introduce foreign interests into your country and foreign influence. People are going to confuse the well-being of foreign countries with the well-being of your country. And very presciently, George Washington points out that if you create this dynamic where you have a favored nation, the people who actually defend the country will be attacked by those who have conflated the foreign nation's well-being with their own. And so the true patriots, the people who are actually valuing your

country first will receive vicious attacks by people who think self-righteously they are on the right side even though they have conflated the four nations well-being with your own now a lot of people have problems with how Israel came into being uh i'll leave that for someone else uh i'm i'm a historical realist i've listened to darrell cooper's uh podcast just like a lot of people uh it's it's enlightening people should listen to fear and loathing in new jerusalem but ultimately uh the world is filled with countries that were forged by conquest, including our own. And so, you know, Israel has a right to exist in the same way that any country that conquers an area and controls it has a right to exist. But it can have, it can exist without my money. It can exist without my troops. It can

exist without anything from the United States. Like either this is a sovereign nation that's capable of handling its own business or it's not. And so if that's the case, then just withdraw all money, all aid, and let them do their thing. I'm not really interested in constantly involving myself with them, but I want them to have basically no influence inside my country. And when Ted Cruz gets on Tucker Carlson and says, the purpose for me running for Senate was to be like the strongest defender of Israel, that's weird, man. Like that's, that's, that's really weird thing to say. Yeah. Well, and I don't mean this in a sarcastic way. Like, it's important. He said it in there. His Sunday school teacher told him so. What do you make of that? You know,

I'm an evangelical Christian. And so I've certainly heard dispensationalist theology. It is far from universal. I myself am someone who believes in covenant theology. I believe that Israel is the church. The church is Israel. The idea that there is this like genetic, ethno-national the eternal rights to the secular government to exist and to receive protection from the United States is just, I think, unbiblical. That said, like, I do think guys like Ted Cruz might be sincere. Like, he gets a lot of money from APEC, but honestly, I believe he also thinks that, you know, God kind of told them to do that. And you've got to address this. And this is something to be delicate about. One of the things that a lot of libertarians and a lot

the guys on like the quote unquote dissident right do is like they try to get up in people's face and they try to make them feel terrible for believing something like that and that really just gets them to dig back in because they're like oh well you just hate my religion or you just hate my country and what you really want to be able to do is express to them like no i love the country and i also share this religion but there's a misunderstanding here and you're going to cow catch a lot more flies with the honey of here's the true doctrine and here's what america first really looks like and here's you know, here's how a real understanding of Christianity can better inform the way that we operate our government as opposed to just like, you idiot, how could you believe this? You know, America's the, they're right. America is the great Satan. Like, this is where people lose the people you're trying to convince. If you're just trying to be right, then yeah, throw that stuff out of my guess you'll be right. But like, do you want to be right or do you want to win? Like, do you want to convince these people? And if the answer is yes, I want to convince these people, I want to make progress, then I think going to them with, you know with with the truth is much better and we're having a conversation about dispensationalism

that just has never existed in my entire life in the church uh and i think that's pretty helpful i think we're at a point you know there are a few zealots who are just like no you can never understand christianity the way it was understood for all of history you have to believe this strange novel theory that came around 150 or so years ago uh but they're they're dwindling and i think for the most part you're seeing a lot of people look at this doctrine and say oh, they're alternatives here, and maybe I should look into them, and that's a big step forward. Yeah, and that was what I was going to ask you is how much you think it's changing, because, you know, I remember so well that in the, you know, at the turn of the century there, it was, you know, John Hagee and some of the biggest TV preachers, he said the Cornerstone Church down there in San Antonio, but, and some of the biggest TV preachers, I mean, they're essentially promising, if you'll support this war, you'll go to heaven in your body. Like, we can get raptured, right out of this building right now John Hagey with thunder at the people but we got to go along

because get it, Middle East and the calendar change and like it's like the Bible guys and this is how we make Jesus come back and I think people really sincerely believe that but then it didn't happen or they got left behind too and then so now what and then they're going to what make them the same promises again if we go to Iran this time or something like The millennium has passed now, and I think all those kind of promises that we're going to see, you know, this, the left behind series, a kind of version of events here, I think is waning in plausibility even to people who are raised that way right at this point. It's too far gone. As Douglas McGregor says, time wins more arguments than reason. That's exactly right.

And, again, I grew up with the Left Behind series. I read all the books, you know, like I was the target audience for this. I swam in these waters. And I can tell you it, it's changing, you know, is it going to get, is it going to get done tomorrow? You know, is this, is this, you know, no, it's an uphill battle. You know, there's a lot of, some of it is generational. I promise you, no one under 40 and almost no one under 50 cares about, you know, Israel as like a messianic, you know, idea for Christianity more. like it just it just doesn't exist there's there's uh what i like to call boomer eschatology

which was you know this idea that american christianity are like basically the same thing and so like america's uh success is christianity success and there's no way that american christianity could ever part ways and this has been really damaging to american christianity because uh in a lot of ways we we yielded a immense amount of ground uh while not really taking the time to understand the implications of the faith. And this has been disastrous in foreign policy. It's been disastrous in culture.

It's why you got the woke revolution. And also it's why you got big government. Because when there's no alternative social forces like the church and community to take over the duties of society, the state takes them over. And that's what creates the total state.

The fact that the state can birth you and carry you through education, and midlife into death, and there's no other organization that has a duty or a call on you, that's not a mistake. That's how power secures an unrivaled hold on the population. So I think it's really critical, not just for foreign policy, but also for our battling against totalitarianism at home, that we see a religious revival of true and biblically accurate Christianity, not only because it will stop these silly arguments about the need to support a secular government in the Middle East, but also because it will, you know, allow us to create the kind of

communities that can rely on each other rather than the government and can push back against demands that the government makes, both on a local and state level. All right. Now, so your book ends with short-term pessimism and long-term optimism, as Rothbard would put it, more or less. You say the total state is doomed, but then again, you also acknowledge there's no going back I really like the way you talk about the compare constitutional revival

to the Indian ghost dance that one hit hard buddy but so can you talk about that and then what you see as possible optimistic futures for us here going over the you know medium term sure again the idea of

being governed by this constitution requires us to have a particular attachment to a specific way of life and whether we like it or not unfortunately the very factors that the founders laid out for constitution republic are just no longer with us right like we we aren't a virtuous people we aren't a people who are religious we aren't a people who are uh self-sufficient like this is just not who we are and very specifically the founder said if you aren't these people then the constitution can't govern you and you don't get that by just like writing out the the terms and

again, conservatives and libertarians make this mistake so often, they really want to replace like God and virtue with contract law. And so like if we can just write down that we're free and that you have to follow these rules, then that's how society will work. But of course, that's that's not true at all. And if your people have lost the character, uh, just as we said before, if you bring in a bunch of people who don't agree with this way of being, then you won't have it. But if your own people lose that way of being, you won't have it either. Uh, and, and the truth is that people in their constitutions will change over time. Republicans will be angry with that.

I'm talking about a living constitution. Yes. Yes, I am. And so what you have here is a case that the current model we have, which is more or less a distributed theocratic oligarchy across a global empire, is no longer operable. We saw the imperial faith lose when it came to the pride stuff and the woke stuff. It's very clear that that's not going to be able.

able to animate an entire empire and bind it together in the long term, no matter how many pride flags you put over, you know, embassies across the world. And so that means that along with our global reach, just the wider complex system we're trying to operate is going to lose over the long term. We're simply building up too much slack in the system. There's too much rust in it. There's too much waste in it. The logistics of operating complex systems are coming apart on us. And so we're necessarily going to reduce ourselves, I think, into smaller communities. I think, I don't know if we're ever going to get to the city state in its most classic sense, but in the United States, especially given our federal roots and the fact that so much of these

systems still exist, we're very likely to return to quasi-state government. And if that's the case, then we see the possibility for true revival because again virtue does not scale community does not scale republics do not scale but if you can return things to a place where we are operating more locally and at a smaller scale then the possibility to cultivate that virtue and reacquire the things necessary to make republican government as possible reemerge and so the downer is I'm short on America up front. I'm short on the American regime, but I'm long on Americans,

because I think ultimately we will see a return to something that was more akin to what the country was meant to be. And we're already seeing this with the self-sorting that happened during COVID. More and more people are moving into communities with shared values, recognizing the importance of putting out intentional communities. You can't just talk to some guy

who's got your values across the internet anymore. you actually need to live people, live with people next to you who actually care about the things you care about. And if you do that, you can start to build up this way of being that once again allows us to have, I think a more local, a smaller, a more Republican government, which both of us are looking for. Yeah. And that was kind of always my argument for the Constitution was it ain't paradise, but it's on the way there from here. You know what I mean? Although it does have unfortunately just the, it does come from the past. So it has that verbiage stuck to it of going back to it where like we could go forward to it where the bill of rights really is the rule

of law around here and we really care about it and geez if we're all Americans can't we at least agree on that you know and things like only congress can declare war on some of these basic rules that we're really smart and had such great arguments behind them back then that we should all still be able to agree with no matter where you're from right but that's the thing scott we can't agree with it no matter where you're from and that's that's what we have to grasp this is the most difficult thing is, you know, as you just rightly said, time wins more arguments than reason. In fact, reason wins very few arguments. And it turns out that truths are not self-evident. Truths are only self-evident inside specific traditions. Values are only self-evident

to people who hold them and perpetuate them because they are part of who they are at their core. And so you can't just like grab widgets from across the world and like jam them together and be like, here is the rational argument for small government. That just won't work. And so, you know, one of the key things that localization does for us is, and a concentration of values does for us is it allows us to recreate communities where we actually share the value, where the value becomes self-evident for us because we live it on a daily basis. And once it becomes lived, then the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, emanates from the

way we live, not the other way around. It's not the Constitution made America. It's that Americans made the Constitution. And if we can get back to the place where Americans can reignite communities that focus on those virtues, then, yes, we can have the Bill of Rights sitting on a desk somewhere, but we will want to live the Bill of Rights because that is who we are as a people. Yeah. And, well, that's what's cool about it is in a way that, like, the revolution already was one. And I don't mean FDRs. I mean, the original one.

That's the one we ought to be trying to conserve there because right in there in Madison. handwriting is what's now the 10th amendment which says it's not enumerated powers to Washington it belongs to the states that is the way the contract is written in the first place and obviously we're way past that but I think we could go forward to that if that was a real guiding principle because as you say it's going to be necessary because of how lousy the national establishment is at running things and in the end they can't continue to run things because they literally can't you know yeah our government is so inept you know we we can't land planes uh we can't operate our shipping lanes uh we we just basically

kind of give up if pirates are attacking our ships anymore you got dams collapsing a damn collapsed last year bridges you know get run into uh don't get rebuilt uh you know it's there's a long list of things we can point to. And we're just seeing the collapse of competence on every level because our educational system is geared to producing ideological converts, not to actually providing any kind of substantive ability to operate in the world. There's a lot of reasons things are going to come apart. And I think the smart people have already seen this.

And, you know, they're starting to recognize the importance of getting together, localizing, and building communities in a very real way. Are you familiar with the Afrikaners down in South Africa, what they're doing? No. So down in South Africa, you have the ethnic Afrikaners. They're basically your most right-wing white population left in the country, and they're blamed for everything. They tend to be the victim of the farm murders that you may often hear about. And so in order to, and the state has more or less declared war on them.

You literally have the leaders of major political parties chanting, kill the boar, which is the South Africans. And so they've created these self-sustaining cities where they have, you know, technical colleges and they run their own water and they take, you know, fill their own potholes and they defend, you know, they have neighborhood watches. They do everything themselves because, well, the government just isn't going to do it for them. And the government doesn't really have the time and the effort to go in and try to, you know, dispose them of creating these. And I think we're going to see more and more of this. this in the United States. I think you're already starting to see this where people are

recognizing that, well, I can't trust the government to provide all these things for me. It is inept and it's not getting better. And so the best thing I can do is move to an area and make sure that we're as self-sufficient as possible. Again, I think we'll probably see more of this happen under the state moniker than necessarily like individual cities. But I also know specifically there are individual cities where this is happening. And I think that this is just going to continue to develop. We might we might end up with a more federated state. But if I'm honest, I think ultimately what we'll see is probably the disillusion of even the continental American empire into zones that are more operable, the ones that can succeed, the ones that have good governance will

kind of overtake those and pull away from the central government. That's going to be a long process. I don't think we're going to get an official secession. I don't think anyone's going to come by and be like America is over. But I think slowly, but surely, states like Florida or others that got their stuff together more, they're going to pull away from the pact. They're going start ignoring more and more what's happening in Washington and relying less on less in all these centralized powers, be it in logistics or government or

monetarily or anything else. Everybody, that is Orrin McIntyre. The book is The Total State of Liberal democracies become tyrannies and check out his great show, the Orrin McIntyre show on YouTube and everywhere else. Thank you very much.

Thanks again, man. Thanks for listening to Scott Horton's show, which can be heard on APS Radio news at Scott Horton.org, Scott Horton Show.com, and the Libertarian Institute at libertarian institute.org.