The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - James Lindsay: How the WOKE RIGHT Is Leading Conservatism Toward Collapse

Episode Date: December 14, 2025

🔴 James Lindsay: How the Woke Right Is Leading Conservatism Toward Collapse In this episode, Lindsay lays out how “wokeness” has re-emerged on the right in a new form — one defined by victimhood, forbidden knowledge, conspiratorial thinking, and identity-based power claims. Using concrete examples, he explains why this mindset undermines truth-seeking, corrodes political judgment, and ultimately leads to electoral defeat. Tucker, Candace, Fuentes, Mental Illiness, anti-Semitism... All of it. AI Chapters: 00:00 Introduction – James Lindsay and the Grievance Studies Affair 01:48 How Absurd Academic Hoaxes Got Published 06:12 The Dog Park Rape Paper Explained 09:56 Why Exposure Didn’t Lead to Reform 12:58 What Lindsay Means by “The Woke Right” 15:41 The Epistemology of Forbidden Knowledge 16:52 “Just Asking Questions” as a Worldview 18:06 Identity, Victimhood, and Resentment Politics 22:47 Conspiracy, Demons, and Fringe Beliefs Going Mainstream 27:10 Cult Capture, Narcissism, and Incentives 32:55 Nick Fuentes and the Acceleration Trap 37:58 Antisemitism, Immigration, and Scapegoating 44:38 The Political “Third Rail” Problem 49:22 Rogan, Podcasts, and Influence 01:01:35 Why This Leads to Electoral Defeat 01:10:48 The “Abscess” Metaphor – Internal Collapse 01:18:12 Final Warning and What Comes Next

All right, we'll do a brief intro, James, and then we're off to the races, as it were. Sounds good. So I'm just waiting for the okay from our sound engineer. Okay, we're rolling. This is live from the table, the official podcast of the World Famous Comedy Seller, available wherever you get your podcast, in particular on YouTube, which is how most people view it. This is Dan Natterman here with Noam Dorman, the owner of the World Famous Comedy Seller, with locations in New York and Las Vegas, Nevada, Perry Alash and Bair.

is here we have with us via Zoom James Stephen Lindsay American author known for the Grieven Studies Affair in which he Peter Bogosian and Helen Pluckrose submitted hoax articles to academic journals in 2017 and 2018 to test scholarship and rigor

in several academic fields. He's written several books including cynical theories how activist scholarship made everything about race, gender, and identity and why this harms everybody. That was a bestseller that he wrote with Helen Pluckrose.

Please welcome James Lindsay, everybody. Thank you for joining us. Hi, James. By the way, you know, Peter and I have become friends just by totally, you know, coincidence, nothing to do with you. And if you guys had, if you guys were known simply

for that great thing that you did, exposing all the bullshit in academia, literally you would be a historic figure despite all the stuff you're doing since then. Actually, give us a little... So the audience should know about this, but I've found that many people don't. Give a little five-minute or less explanation

of that chapter of your life because this was just delicious for people like me. Go ahead. All right, I give you the time frame first. This is a 2017-2018 project. It's on the back of a discovery from summer of 2016. Peter and I've been watching

the academic literature, gender studies, primarily sexuality studies, the stuff we all call woke now. And we had recognized that they had kind of jumped the shark, and there was a problem in publication there. So they published in particular in summer of 2016 on half a million dollars of National Science Foundation money, a paper arguing that the science of glaciology needed to be made feminist, or else we'd have climate change or something. And Peter and I decided enough was enough, and we had tried criticizing what was happening with, you know, the academics in these departments. We had tried dealing with the DEI apparatuses on campus. All this did was get Peter in trouble, got us called

names. Nothing happened. We got told we didn't have PhDs in the subject, so we weren't a lot to criticize it because we didn't know what we were talking about because we weren't experts. So Peter has this wild idea that we write an academic hoax. So at the beginning of 17, we sit down, We copy an idea. I copied an idea from gender and society, which is like the number one gender studies journal in the world. They had a paper a year or two earlier that was characterizing, it was menstrual blood as the social construct was the title. And so I thought, how funny if we just changed it to penises and wrote it about guys. So we wrote this paper called the conceptual penis as a social construct.

We said penises basically should be thought of as a social. construct, not as anatomical organs, because there's trans women who are preoperative. You can't say it's a male sexual organ. That's just not fair. Therefore, it's this social construction that men identify with. It makes them braggards. It makes them macho. It causes all the problems in the world, especially climate change. And we send this off. And we send it to a small masculinity's journal. They don't take it. They forward it internally to a predatory journal called cogent social sciences, obviously being predatory does, little did we know we'd actually uncovered an academic scandal there that the publisher was internally running a money-making operation by taking shoddy papers and sending

them off to a publication mill. But we didn't pay attention to that. Instead, we said, look, gender studies is BS. And we hadn't proved that, really. So a lot of people got really upset. Other people thought it was great. It was very partisan. Obviously, the conservatives thought was funny. And we got challenged by Alan Sokol, kind of in good faith, and by a couple of other people that wrote for things like Salon and Bad Faith, that we would need better papers, more papers, better journals, blah, blah, blah, to really prove our point. So Pete and I get on the phone, Pete proposes, as you know Pete, then, no, he proposes a gentleman's bet that I'm, nobody in the right mind would bet for money because you know how it's going to work. But he proposes a gentleman's

bet and says, I bet you if we do all that and we succeed, nobody changes their mind who criticized us. And I was like, of course they won't. But let's do it. So we decide to do more papers, better journals, the whole nine yards. And we embark on what we call the grieving studies affair. I guess summer of 17, late summer 17, we get started as August. I think we take off off to the races, write as many papers. The goal was to write as many papers as we could for one year, then just see them through the publication process until we were done and then report our findings. And we wrote for 10 months, actually, not a year, because things started getting unwieldy. We had 20 papers in circulation.

Some of them had already been published. How much work does this take you? It was like, when I say full time, it was like all I did from when I woke up until I went to bed pretty much every day for this entire period of time for 10 months. No income. It's like an obsession. It's like an obsession. Yeah. I mean, usually, you know, a solid academic in the humanities is going to publish maybe two of

these a year. And we were publishing one every two weeks or finishing one, I should say, and submitting one every two weeks on average, and then juggling the comments and the revisions and everything. I mean, at one point we had, I think, like, 16 or 17 of them out there at once. And it's just so much to do. Do you remember some of the titles, like the greatest hits? Yeah. So the most famous one that actually was our undoing because journalists discovered it and decided it couldn't be real, and they were correct, was called human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity in urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon.

And so we pretended that we were analyzing people's reactions to dog humping at the dog park to determine whether or not they supported rape culture. of course we concluded that straight men do support dog rape so they would obviously analogously support human rape therefore there's rape culture therefore we can overcome rape culture by training men the way that we train dogs using obedience manuals and shock collars and leashes and that kind of stuff if only it were politically feasible that's an actual phrase if it were politically feasible we would leash men and so that was a big one that one was our undoing uh We wrote a paper for a journal called Fat Studies where we said that the sport of bodybuilding is, like, you know, bodybuilders have big bodies, fat people have big bodies. The title of the paper is, who are they to judge? And so we claim that the sport of professional bodybuilding unfairly biases against fat and in favor of muscle. And so in order to be an inclusive sport, it would have to include a new category of competition called fat bodybuilding, which would be non-competitive. it would be a political exhibition of fat on the bodybuilding stages in between the other parts, I guess, of bodybuilding demonstration. It's like a Monty Python sketch, actually.

Yeah, they all were. How many were published? How many were published? Okay, so this is a little bit complicated. Let me explain for your audience because not everybody's an academic. Academic publishing is really a slow, torturous, drawn-out process, right? It's not like publishing an op-ed where you submit it and an editor reads it. and it just gets published or doesn't, like in a week.

It can take, from submission to acceptance, can take days, weeks, or months, usually months. And then from acceptance to publication can, again, take weeks or months. And so I'm going to break it all down. We had four of them that actually got published, but seven had been accepted for publication by the time the Wall Street Journal discovered that we were fake and told the world in October of 2018 that what we were doing was fake. seven more were under peer review in six of them that accounts for all 20 were retired as hopeless we couldn't fix them so those were the earliest ones we wrote we didn't know how to make it work we hadn't got the hang of it yet and then the next 14 all of them went to peer review very successfully and seven of them were actually accepted and four published and the dog-humping paper got an award for excellence in scholarship in the field of feminist geography And these are all available online? Yeah, actually, my website's called New Discourses.com.

I have a grievance studies hub that I built out on there. So you can go to the menu and find grievance studies. I think it's right at the top. And every single paper in all the peer review comments are published where anybody can read everything that happened for themselves. What is feminist geography? So it's the, if I remember, it's the analysis of places and spaces and environments, which apparently are not the same things, from a feminist perspective,

to show how that they reproduce male-centered patriarchy and oppression of women. We're going to move on to today's world. I have one more question in case you guys don't have it. Was there anybody involved in this on the journal end that said, oh, my God, we're really letting ourselves down here. Thank you for uncovering this problem. you've done us a favor. We're going to repurpose ourselves and recommit ourselves to integrity here. No, absolutely not. In fact, there's something even funnier if you really want to kind of jaw-dropping, semi-horrifying laugh.

John Stossel not only interviewed Peter and I about this in the wake of us doing it, but then he got in contact with the editor for the journal Sexuality and Culture, which published one of our papers, which is going to be. got quite the adult theme. We said that straight men can overcome transphobia by practicing, putting things up their butts. That's true, by the way, but that's coincidence. He interviews the editor of that journal who then defends the acceptance of the paper. The paper Rafinetti's journal accepted, titled Going In Through the Back Door, claimed you could reduce straight male homo hysteria and transphobia through receptive, penetrative sex toy use. Correct. sounds like oh it's not your everyday article and it's not this is a specialized journal that deals with sexuality and culture will decrease transphobia and increase feminist values yeah what is

the problem with that i i don't see a problem it is again it's a statement that could be could be correct it's nothing really absurd or unusual oh it's really funny you coined this term right. Now, I think there's some, it's disputed a little bit, but as far as I'm understanding it, that was your term, correct? I did not coin the term. I get the credit. I popularized the term, certainly, and I can take almost all the credit for that. There's a handful of other people who had been using the term. I started using it last summer, 2024 summer, but it had actually been floating around in circulation at the very latest by the end of 2022 using a couple of of people that are, you know, one's a pastor, one's an evangelical writer who had been

criticizing a book in the Christian nationalist genre called The Case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe. And they had noticed that Stephen Wolfe's construction of what he believed was a Christian nationalist order mirrored a lot of the things that they saw from. the woke left, the identity politics, the victim had orientation, and so on. So they were calling it right-wing woke-ism and woke-right as early as 22. I didn't pick up, I had said it a couple of times here and there, but I didn't take it seriously until the end of summer, 24, at which point I started using it like I was firing out of the gun in the front of an A-10, like just as much as I

could. And at that point, I got associated with the term. I put a lot of legs under the term. It wasn't like, hey, these things are similar. I said there's deep, at least epistemological reasons why they're the same. This is the right term. So I'm the guy. Explain what the term woke right means. I've actually, to be honest, I've had trouble internalizing it and integrating it to my thinking. Well, that's because what we consider woke, we correctly understand to be a species of leftism. And I don't mean being politically oriented toward the left. I mean leftism, a way of thinking about the world. It can be attached all the way back to the French Revolution with the people who sat on the left of the king in the

National Assembly, who were the Jacobins, who had this very radical revolutionary idea about reordering society under their vision. So we have this idea of leftism that thinks about the world in a particular way. We could talk a lot about Rousseau or Marx or so on to kind of characterize what that is. But it has, and I think that, and I wrote this in cynical theories, which we published in 2020. We submitted in 2019. So I'm talking, you know, six, seven years ago, I was writing very clearly what I thought, we didn't call it woke at the time, but what we thought the word woke means. And we said that there is a orientation toward knowledge and there's an orientation toward politics that comprise this way of thinking in the world. The orientation toward

knowledge is that marginalized knowledge is to be favored. So if you believe there's a power structure in the world and it wants people to believe and think in a certain way, but not in others, and so the not in other ways of knowing must be intrinsically superior because they're being excluded for some power-driven reason. And its orientation toward politics and power is that it wants it. It feels decentered and it wants to center itself and claim the mantle of power so it's covetous of power and it believes that that which has been marginalized by the existing power structure as it reads things in the world must be illegitimate therefore that sorry what has been marginalized must be legitimate because the structure itself is illegitimate

so we're going to favor the marginalized ideas the other ways of knowing that is what we're essentially saying that the people in power are bad therefore we can infer that what the people in power want is the opposite of what's good. So what they don't want is... Not quite. There's more to it. Okay. The people in power are corrupt is the key idea.

Okay. And therefore they've rigged the game so that they stay in power. Therefore, the things they suppress must be true because the real reason they're suppressing them is so they can keep their power. I see. And so now you're using this term to describe a bunch of right wing, a whole cast of characters on the right. So let's tick off a few of those people and show us how this.

makes sense, how the label makes sense for them? Sure. I mean, the most prominent one, and he's a very interesting case, because with this epistemology that I just described, he fits it to the T, but you wouldn't necessarily, maybe at least until the last few months, maybe, have even tried to identify him with the rest of it, but I've been banging a drum for a long time that Tucker Carlson is a key example of this way of thinking. His whole schick of just asking questions, or I'm just saying the things nobody's allowed to say, even though he says it on his huge podcast literally hundreds of times. We're not allowed to criticize Israel, therefore it must be valid to criticize Israel. We're not allowed to suspect Jews operate in some kind of a shadowy cabal to control the world,

so that must have a grain of truth to it. This is the whole schick that Tucker Carlson's running. This is the favoring of marginalized knowledges or excluded knowledges, alleging that there's a corrupt power structure, they call it the post-World War II liberal consensus, it has a name, which is why he drags this Nazi apologist repeating David Irving, this Daryl Cooper, onto his podcast to say Churchill was probably the real villain

because we have to question everything that we've ever thought. And installed by Zionists. That always gets lost in this nutshell of Daryl Cooper. That's the key point to me. Churchill was a villain, but that villain was in place because the Zionists wanted him there, installed him. That's right. Sorry. And so the point is that you have to, and that that speaks

exactly what I'm talking about. We have to believe that the entire way that we've all thought about the world since World War II is actually a construction of a power system arranged by some shadowy group, in this case, Zionists who are actually pulling all the strings. And the reason that we're not allowed to validate claims about history that are incorrect is not because they're incorrect, but rather because they would call into question the power structure that is trying to keep itself illegitimately in power. So he's textbook woke, whether he has the identity politics, which now we all see he does. At the latest now on Tucker Carlson's firing from Fox News, a new text message revealed by the New York Times alarmed Fox executives.

The text message obtained by the New York Times from Tucker Carlson is racially charged. The New York Times published a text message from Tucker Carlson to one of his producers. sent the day after the January 6th attack at the Capitol. Carlson described a video he had seen in which a group of Trump supporters had attacked someone he called an Antifa kid. It was three against one, at least, he wrote. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable, obviously. It's not how white men fight.

The message continues, I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they'd hit him harder, kill him. Carlson wrote, I could taste it. Then the message said, an alarm one. off. I'm becoming something I don't want to be. The Times reports members of Fox's board of directors became aware of the unredacted version on the eve of trial and were so alarmed by Carlson's views on violence and racial superiority. They took steps to investigate Carlson and settled the case for nearly $800 million. Whether he has the victimhood orientation,

which we now see he does. It reminds me of my favorite story ever. So it's about 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem and Jesus shows up and he starts talking about the people in power and he starts doing the worst thing that you can do, which is telling the truth about people, and they hate it, and they just go bonkers, they hate it, and they become obsessed with making him stop. This guy's got to stop talking. We've got to shut this guy up. And I can just sort of picture the scene in a lamplit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus thinking about what do we do about this guy telling us.

telling the truth about us. We must make him stop talking. And there's always one guy with the bright ID and I could just hear him say, I've got an idea. Why don't we just kill him? That'll shut him up. Whether he has the like dig up people's old stuff and like hold it against them forever, which we now see he does, that wasn't all visible three or four months ago when I was calling him out or six months ago when I was calling him out as woke. But the epistemology has been there from you know, a couple of years ago at the least, that which we are not allowed to know must be more true than that which is considered established knowledge. And that makes him woke. There's your key, most famous example. Is that quote that I see online a lot, allegedly from Voltaire,

find out who you're not allowed to criticize and that's who controls you? Do you know what I think? If that's a legitimate Voltaire quote, I've heard that that's... I've heard that the quote's apocryphal to Voltaire, and I forget what the actual circumstances of the quote are. I remember using it at one point in getting absolutely laid on a grill of embarrassment over what it, who really said it. But I don't remember the, I don't remember the source. So, you know, I don't have a, I guess I could open a window on my laptop and look it up. But that's allegedly apocryphal. It was allegedly not a good situation. But it's one of these things where something can be partially true and yet misleading or, you know, sometimes false. So this is the case. You know, a very simple example that I give

is, and this actually happened a couple of years ago with the left back in 2020 and 2021 to everybody's great dismay, you're not supposed to question that two plus two equals four. But the reason is because 2 plus 2 actually equals 4. There's no political agenda to stop people from believing 2 plus 2 equals 4. Nobody in particular benefits from believing that there are other values that 2 plus 2 could take. However, this was exactly the argument that the woke left made in 2020 and 2021 after I accidentally baited them into defending 2 plus 2 can equal 5, which they did furiously after Nicole Hannah-Jones picked it up. to try to make fun of me.

All I did was post a joke about it, and for some reason, she got involved, and then everybody had to pile on and pretend, including Fields Medal winning mathematicians, trying to prove that there are ways that 2 plus 2 doesn't equal 4, which I thought was the most insane thing in the whole world that this was happening. I couldn't believe it. But the thing is, is nobody's telling you, don't say 2 plus 2 equals 5 because there's some weird power thing. They're saying, don't say 2 plus 2 equals 5 because it's wrong, right?

So you could say, well, my math teacher says I'm not allowed to say two plus two equals five, right? And so my math teacher is ruling over me, according to this alleged quote of Voltaire. But no, your math teacher's not ruling over you. Your math teacher's trying to help you get the simple mathematics right. By the way, James is a math, a PhD, I think? Yeah, my PhD isn't math. That's right. And so when I say two plus two equals four, I really mean it. Oh, we're a better plus PhDs right here. All right. Okay. Now, there's, there is a glimpse. difference to me between the woke left and the woke right. I should preface it by saying, we're living through the weirdest political time in my lifetime. Never before have people have like the mainstream or a mainstream political force milieu been associated with things like demon attacks, underwater satanic beings, uh, uh, kent. M-trails, crisis actors, saying that people like Alex Jones are supernatural profits. I mean, and, you know, the woke left were nuts, but I never thought they were crazy,

if you know what I mean. That's what happened to me? That's what happened to you? Oh, yeah. I had a direct experience with it, and I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs in the bed and mauled. physically mauled. And a spiritual attack by a demon? Yeah, by a demon.

Claw marks on my side. And I was just in my boxer shorts and I went and flipped on the light in the bathroom. And I had four claw marks on either side underneath my arms and on my left shoulder. And they're bleeding. The US government has physical evidence of crashed non-human-made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft. species is flying hypersonic aircraft over our cities. So they're from here and they've been here for thousands of years, whatever they are.

And it's pretty clear to me that they're spiritual entities, whatever that means, they're supernatural. The Pentagon has spent decades studying in these otherworldly remains in order to build more technologically advanced weapons systems. They don't behave according to the laws of science. So these are spiritual phenomenon. There's no evidence there from another planet. planet. I mean, I think that's the op, that's the lie, that they're from Mars. It's a binary. They're either, you know, if you're on team good or team bad, you can assign any name to it you want, but like, what are these things? Are they good or bad? And I think some of them are bad. And if the U.S. government knows that or elements, the people within the U.S.

government know that, then, you know, then they're serving a bad force. Not that everything Alex Jones says is right. It's not. Not everything I say is right. You know, Alex, I know Alex personally, so I know what he was going through. And, you know, everybody wants to talk about mental health and they want to praise people for being honest about their mental health issues and support them on their mental health journey to wellness. Alex has gone through some real issues. And one of the reasons why he's gone through some issues is because that guy is uncovering real shit that's terrifying every fucking day. Well, and he's also, channeling some stuff.

You can't call 9-11 in detail because you're super informed. But supernatural is real. There are people called prophets and there are people who were prophets who weren't called profits, but there are people who have information or parts of information, bits of information, visions of information come to them and then they relay it. It's not from them. They received it.

But there is obvious mental illness here going on in the woke right, and nobody seems to want to do anything about it or even acknowledge it. Am I wrong? How do you feel about that? I mean, obviously, Tucker Carlson was not mauled by demons, right? We know that. I think that this did not happen. I do not believe that he was mulled by a demon. I thought it was very peculiar that he put that out. And so there were kind of two interpretations of something like this. Just to confirm your claim, yes, there are some very wacky beliefs happening on the woke right. Oh, I just wish you now.

I forgot about Candace Owen says that Christian babies are being murdered every year in Passover and trap doors and Egyptian, Egyptian planes. And Tucker doubled down on this like yesterday. Egyptian planes following Charlie Kirk, what's her name, Erica Kirk around. But she actually got the time zones wrong, so it's not even true. But it doesn't even matter that it's not, I mean, it wasn't true anyway, but it doesn't even matter that her argument is blown up. People still, now it's in there and people are going to keep repeating it.

Go ahead. I'm sorry. Right. No. So there are two ways that we can interpret these things, or maybe three. One is, like you said, that these people are just mentally ill. I actually don't find that to be super plausible. I think that they're actually sharper than people are, than their statements make them out to be. They're more calculated. Now, I say that with a caveat, which I do believe that there's pathological narcissism in all these. these cases. Of course, I'm not a doctor. I can't diagnose that. But I would be very, let's just say I wouldn't be surprised at all if somebody did successfully diagnose cluster B, personality disorders, pathological narcissism in these people. So that's that kind of caveat added. I think that they are the one explanation is that they're mentally ill. Another is that they are trying to see how far they can get other people to believe things. Right. What will people swallow? Because once you swallow something false and you defend somebody who said something preposterous, you actually become quite committed to those people because now you have to admit that you were made a fool of

in order to change your mind to say, you know, okay, finally it's gone too far. So I actually think that this is a technique to lock people into a cult belief system with themselves as kind of the narcissistic figures at the head. So I think it's actually much more calculated. So they're saying properly crazy things because they're daring people to disagree. And of course, they'll attack some people who publicly disagree. And then the people who buy it are now locked in pretty tightly because they have accepted this. But there's another component to this, which is that not only are people on the right after the COVID era in particular highly predisposed to believe that there are these really far-fetched conspiracies running their lives, there is also the

fact that they're tapping into other avenues of exactly the belief structures that I think they're trying to undermine. So evangelical, mainline evangelical Christianity is by far the strongest and most solid political block. The only problem with them is that they don't vote reliably, but they're the strongest and most solid political block in the United States. They are reliably center-right to kind of, you know, not far right, but firmly in the middle of the right. So they're socially conservative. They're usually economically conservative. They're generally pro-Israel. They're generally not bigoted and all of this stuff. And they, when motivated properly, constitute one of the strongest political blocks in the country.

If you can shave even a few percent of those people off or get those people to fight with each other or to start to doubt, you take them from 90 percent in favor of Israel to 70 percent in favor of Israel as a block or get them fighting with each other. Now you've really achieved something, and things like demon attacks and these kind of fringe out there, old-fashioned-sounding religious claims that people like Candace and Tucker are making, tap into a spiritual sensibility that resonates with a target audience. And so I think this is extremely calculated. I do not think that they're crazy. I think they're doing a very sophisticated, psychological, and political warfare operation against target groups like mainline. Christians and the conservatives who have been psychologically injured, not by dint of the virus or the vaccine, but rather by the political and social circumstance that COVID visited upon us over the past five years, things like the president of the United States coming out and saying

it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Let me break in there, because this is quite interesting what you're saying. First of all, it shouldn't, the parallel, I hope it's not lost in everybody that you started by telling us how you set about to create these outlandish stories that people will. get sucked into. And now you're saying that, I believe you're saying that Tucker Carlson actually sat down and did his own version of your wild stories, for his own purposes, you were fighting for good. He's fighting for evil. But now I actually think he's mentally ill, but let's just put that aside for a second. So if this is a sociopathic, um, uh, evil strategy that

relies on great psychological insight that he had to somehow intuit that people would go with him as opposed to say, what the hell is it matter with you? Okay, so now he's a con man here. Now, you have people like Donald Trump Jr. and J.D. Vance. Now, they're aware that he's saying this insane stuff. Do they know that this is a hoax and a con here? Do they think he's meant, Like what, like as you get one removed from him, the people who are close to him, why are they supporting him on this? What do they believe is the truth? Don Jr. is not any kind of evangelical. Like, what's going on there?

I would love to know. Vance and John Jr. are the two huge open questions floating around, well, actually, TPSA's loyalty is the third big open question, floating around basically. the Tucker insanity train, whether this is calculated political warfare, whether it's literally insanity, whether it's some interesting blend of the two, those three entities are not making sense right now. This is the easiest slam dunk political win for J.D. Vance right now for mainstream conservative America because Tucker Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes. very visibly, very controversially, then Nick Fuentes immediately comes out and viciously attacks

J.D. Vance's wife and children. All right. Why would we let this fat guy who's married to a jeet and works for a gay CIA fed? Why would we let him grow? It's like so insane. The J.D. Vance operation is in full swing, man. Think about it. Andrew Tate and Bronze Age Pervert and all these people for years, All they talk about is going to the gym, being a vitalist, fighting the Matrix, India smells bad, all this kind of shit. And now they're all in favor of a fat race mixer who's married to a jeet, who named his son Vivek, who was mentored by a Jewish neocon and a gay fed, Peter Thiel, and the guy's in bed with fucking Israel. And that's your guy? your guy is literally a fat gay race trader who married a jeet on the typical racial grounds you would expect somebody like Nick Fuentes would attack on

and then it's so simple without even having to get into the weird politics of it for JD Vance to come out and simply say leave my wife and kids out of this this is ridiculous I denounce this behavior keep my wife's name out your motherfucker mouth Yeah, or something like that too. Quoting Will Smith said, yeah. Yeah, as right Will Smith said, yeah. Was that Will Smith? Yeah, yeah, that's right.

This is, but this has not happened, and it does not appear forthcoming. So what that relationship is lends itself to start generating the same kinds of suspicions. You know, are they in on some, you know, gig? Why is that the thing? And I don't know what the answer is. All I know is that one of my heuristics that I've developed. recently is know them by how they circle the wagons. Tucker, for example, interviews Nick Fuentes, and the most telling part of that for America and conservatives in America

was not that it happened, but rather who sprung to Tucker Carlson's defense, very oddly, Megan Kelly being overwhelmingly the most visible character in that story. People were shocked and Kevin Roberts at Heritage being another highly visible character. This shocked the conservative half of the nation to see these two characters defending Tucker's interview here and kind of on very what felt like dishonest terms. So James? Know them by how they circle the wagon. The best, the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. That's that. I've heard that. That's at Yates Palm. Oh no, the center shall not hold. Yeah, yeah. The things fall apart. The center shall not hold.

My phone. Sorry. Yeah. So, but, but here's, like, if we say, know them by how they circle the wagons, if that's a useful heuristic, and I'm not saying that it is, but it is one of my more useful ones that I'm using now, which might end up humiliating me. Can you explain what heuristic is for Perry L's benefit? It's like a rule of thumb. It's like a rule of thumb. It's, you know, it's, you know, it's, you know, thank you so much. Now I can follow along the whole conversation. If you use plain language, I rule of thumb, the academic journals don't even read your papers. You have to say heuristic. things like that. Go ahead. Yeah, that's right. Nobody will read it. You have to put that with a citation. So anyways, if we take this as a rule of thumb for figuring out, you know, who's helping who, and is this maybe actually got some element of conspiracy behind it, are people working together, coordinating, then all I can tell you is there's a weird amount on all of these kind of radicals on the right going back a long time now, at least a year, maybe over a year, of circling the wagon very even preemptively around J.D. Vance, which casts some suspicion in that direction. Other than some of the things J.D. Vance himself says and some of the company

that he's kept very closely, it's the third kind of big piece of evidence that makes me suspect that J.D. Vance might actually be entangled in this. And in fact, might be the object of this project. So funny, I was, I was in the car. Sometimes I'm in the car and as I get older, I'm just, you know, sharing this. I was speaking about the other day. I find it harder and harder to focus in a good way. There's so many things on my mind. I don't know if it's diminishing brain capacity as more and more things in life bearing down to me. But I have two moments of clarity. One is in the shower where I just kind of lose myself in a zone and the other is driving. So now I've taken to sometimes when I have a thought in the car, I just press

record and it, you know, it records and transcribes what I was thinking. So I'm just going to read to you the two paragraphs that I wrote on the way here. It's probably not good English what I said. What we're seeing can be likened to a pus-filled abscess growing within the conservative movement. It's not so much a regression to the mean of historic anti-Semitism, as I've said before, but a feral return to a state of nature where anything can be true, no matter how outrageous, as long as it's directionally consistent with deep hatred of the Jews, and ignoring it and hoping it will go away through, like, the normal immune processes that we use to depend on no longer seems reasonable. It has to be lanced in some way. I think that's the

word lanced. So, if you agree with that, and it is this blister or abscess as growing and growing, going. How are we going to lance this? Is it just going to be electoral defeat that does this? What the fuck are we going to do about this? I mean, so far, what I've watched is they, they tend to stick the lancin themselves by going too far too fast. Well, God bless Nick Flintas. God bless him. He's the best weapon against them right now. They just keep, to use the vulgar phrase, they just keep tripping over their own dicks. And bless them for it. I don't know who's going to take down Tucker Carlson better than Tucker Carlson is going to take down Tucker Carlson. I do want to add to the substance of your abscess metaphor here, though, is it's not just

Jews in Israel. It is any successful minority during this period of perceived downward mobility. And I bring that up because South Asian immigrants that are in high-paying professional jobs, meaning Indians primarily, are equally scapegoated or nearly equal. scapegoated and attack to the point where they're now starting to vote for Democrats again in large numbers and sticking it in in Republicans' faces and saying, you said, you told us to go home, so we did, back to the Democratic Party. And their hatred for the highly successful, legal, and legitimate immigrant across the board is another one of these hot wedges that

they're using. I don't know that wedges are supposed to be hot. I've mixed my metaphors, but you get me. It's a very important wedge, a very sharp wedge that they're using to divide the conservative movement writ large and to break the cohesion in this kind of coalition that's supported the Republican Party in the last few years. And so you see that in the H-1B visa debate, which has become very hot, this question that, you know, okay, we want to send some illegal immigrants home. Well, who do we send? And so that, you know, on the far end, it's like obvious criminals, drug dealers, you know, violent criminals, drug dealers, and so on. Then it's like all of them.

And then it's like, you know, send the legal ones to, right? And then you've got this weird argument about heritage Americans to where if somebody doesn't have sufficient American heritage, maybe their citizenship should be held suspect. And you, this is a equal, I bring that up not to get into the nitty gritties of immigration debate on the right. But even to suggest that some of the immigration debate on the right is intentionally, in my opinion, divisive and has been introduced up until maybe last Christmas, nobody was seriously, even the most hardline Republican who's wanted to get rid of every legal immigrant who's in the country, period, no matter what their record, no matter what their circumstance, did not say, let's go to legal immigrants and get rid of them too. but suddenly that's on the table. Why? Because it creates another division and they're able to scapegoat downward mobility onto a successful minority group.

In this case, it's Indians. Jews, of course, are still getting it worse and it's much more intense and Israel is a much sharper and bigger wedge and anti-Semitism as well. But this abscess is nastier than just anti-Semitism. It has a toxic stew of the entire immigration plus the entire reversal of the intersectional hierarchy.

Yes. I agree with you. I agree with 100%. The only distinction I would make is that most of the outlandish, nutty, crazy theories attach themselves to the Jews. The arguments against the browning of America are more traditional and at least can be debated. And by the way, there is a similarity between the left and the right. on this, even though the left will never admit it, is that, you know, Nick Flentes thinks we have

too many brown people in America, and Steve Bannon doesn't want too many Fortune 500 companies with Asian CEOs. And the left freaks out about that. And yet, the left fought tooth and nail to allow the Ivy League to limit that the number of Asians that it was accepting and the number of Indians that it was accepting. So what is that other than the tacit admission by the left, that we have too many brown people in America, too many people of color in America. I mean, if we didn't have too many of them, we wouldn't need to concoct these methods

of keeping them out of our colleges, right? So really, if they're honest with themselves, they agree with Nick Flentes. And then it gets, and then, you know, just brings my mind to something I'm almost reluctant to talk about. But, yes, when people are outperforming other people, it breeds resentment, of course. especially at times when, when, you know, I don't know, affordability or the white working

class is hollowed out. Yeah, hollowed out, yeah. So I respect that. So people want to concoct reasons why Indians and Asians and Jews are doing better and they would like it to be a systemic reason, something that can be remedied. But what if the most plausible, or what if a, what if a plausible reason. Turns out to be the most likely reason. I'm not saying this is true, but what if it is, that actually one of these people are smarter.

And there's nothing you can fucking do about it. Indians are always going to outperform. Well, the Indians that we allow to come here on those visas are smarter because they're selected that way. For whatever reason, what if the Asians are smarter, meaning there is no jiggering you are ever going to be able to do with the system other than legally denying them access to the college or something? You're a math Ph.D. What was the makeup of your...

Wait, let me just finish my point. But it's the same point. No, no. I say, what, how, at some point, science is our enemy here. Because at some point, if that is the case, it will become undeniable. And we'll be destined to a politics that will never be frank. Well, no politicians ever going to be able to say that. So now, Dan, you want to add to that. Well, well, what were your colleagues in the math, in the math, as a math,

Ph.D. Was it overwhelmingly Asian, Indian? Or you... No, it was overwhelming. It was vastly predominantly white. There was a non-trivial, you know, contingent of both East Asian and Indian, South Asian people there as well. But I wouldn't say that they were even like a, I wouldn't, I wouldn't go so far as to say they were even a significant minority. There were some Europeans. One of the hottest shots in our department at the time was a Greek guy, actually. We had a couple of really hot-shot Greek mathematicians, had a couple of scary, smart Russians, but no, it wasn't. And, you know, there's some Hispanics, but it was pretty, pretty light, and just a smattering of blacks. So it was overwhelmingly white, and that might be because I was at a state school in Tennessee, as opposed to a Ivy League in New England or in California or something like that.

But no, it wasn't like, and also this was like mid-2000s, like 2003 to 10 is when I was at the University of Tennessee. So this is what's so dark about what Nick Flint is spreading is that it's all baked in already. And he can complain about things. And, you know, and everything that he talks about, if we're honest, there's a kernel that many people will reverberate with. When he says, I don't want to wake up in a neighborhood where I don't share anything with anybody who lives around me, I've said many times, I don't want to wake up in a Hasidic neighborhood. You know, like, I get that. And when he talks, when, when Pierce Morgan was reduced to trying to argue that you should be just afraid of a white mass shooting on the streets of Chicago as you should be of a minority crime. This was insane.

Of course, people are afraid of crime, just like Willie Horton was a key thing for George H.W. Bush. and, you know, a number of his things have a kernel of an issue which we are grappling with and need to be grappled with. But obviously, it's going to sound very corny. The only solution to these issues is going to be to pull together, imploribus unum, to de-emphasize our ethnicities, to encourage intermarriage and into, maybe slow immigration, and to, I keep wanting to say it's true, you know, to love each other as a nation. We have to become one nation.

And this is where the people interviewing Flentes are failing. They're trying to embarrass him by catching him saying, you know, something racist. But he's not embarrassed by that. Well, they have to press him on us. Okay. Now, once you've denied Israel the five, ten thousandth of our budget, which they get as part of it, you're complaining about the Jews having too much power. What are you going to do about it, Nick?

What kind of America do you propose where we're not going to have Jews who are influential and powerful anymore, given the fact, as I said before, that they're very fucking smart. Nobody can't hand these successes out to them. I mean, every Jew I know, they're one generation, Barry Weiss, who Tucker Carlson was scuring. It's not just that I disagree with Barry Weiss or she's calling me names or I calling her names or whatever. It's like in no fair system and no meritocracy would Barry Weiss rise above secretary. Like, actually, and I mean that. I've been in this business my whole... I've been in this business since Barry Weiss was breastfeeding, okay?

There's no world in which Barry Weiss rises to the top of a news network except a rigged world. That's it. I met her father. He's a furniture salesman. You know, I'm just... Oh, furniture salesman could be quite prosperous, but any case. No, but I'm saying she didn't have any built-in advantages like Tucker Carlson did. And, you know, just to veer off, I'll cut it in where he just talked about how stupid she is.

You know her, I know her. This is so offensive to me. And by the way, I disagree in my bones with Nick Flentes. I would never say he's stupid. Barry Weiss. I don't think he's stupid either. Of course not. And Barry Weiss came from the daughter of her furniture salesman.

She was on an editor of the Wall Street Journal, then a columnist at the New York Times. Then without any safety net, she just left it all behind. She wrote a scathing editorial or resignation letter that I'm sure Tucker Carlson probably commented favorably on at the time. without a net she starts a whole new thing she rises to the top yet again that is not what stupid people do smart people no anyways so yeah even more immediately what characters like fentes and carlson with his just asking questions and it with with with wentes he just says it you know carlson plays this little dance around it but what they're doing i i've been referring to this for some months i think i thought of this back in may a friend of mine actually suggested it to me i don't want to

take too much credit. But he called it the politics of the third rail. And so what has happened, especially with the past maybe 10 years, maybe we could go back to the 90s and say 30 years of political correctness culture is that there's an awful lot of political third rail space. It's just things you're just not allowed to talk about or else you're going to get yourself blown up, even though some of the stuff is totally true. Some of the stuff is totally not even impolitic. My favorite go-to example, I've had so much frustration over the years. I grew up in the Southeast, right? So I grew up around people who, no joke, still call the Civil War the War of Northern aggression. You can tell that by my laughter that I do not agree with them

and I think it's quaint and humorous. But I've heard the arguments for, say, Confederate memorabilia, like the Confederate flag, since I was a child. The high school that I went to considered our football battle flag, the Confederate flag, until my junior year. Okay, so I wasn't, I'm not unaware of Confederate memorabilia in the way that southerners actually think about it. In full disclosure, I live in East Tennessee, not middle or West Tennessee, so we wanted to bail during the Civil War and be union, and we consider all you slavers out in plantation country in the west of the state, not really part of Tennessee. So, you know, I grew up in this weird kind of cultural Melu, and I hear heritage, not hate, and all this, right? And so I listen to these guys, and I get the

argument for Confederate memorabilia, Confederate statuary, and so on. And they're like, listen, the point isn't slavery. We understand that the war might have been about slavery. The point's not slavery when we fly the flag. The point's not racism when we fly the flag, and we do understand that racists also use it for racist purposes. For us, it's symbolized. It's symbolized. It symbolizes sovereignty. It symbolizes that the northern states don't get to come in and tell southern states how to run their business. And so it's just a symbol of basically that middle finger saying F you, you don't get to tell me who I'm going to be. And I'm like, okay, so this debate flares up every few years for whatever reason on the public stage, and I used to try to weigh in on it.

And I wouldn't even say I believe this argument. I would say this is the argument. And immediately, defend slavery. Like what? So I just got blown up. That's an example of what I'm talking about about political third rail space. I'm not allowed to make that. I'm not allowed to even tell people what the argument on the other side is because the other side's argument has been rendered so taboo that we're not even going to listen to it. And eventually this has a breaking point where the society where there's just so much of this bullshit territory where people can't talk about real things that people say, you know what, to hell with it, to hell with the taboos, to hell with the rules, to hell with your political correctness, I hate it. And then you have a character like

Nick Fuentes who steps in and just breaks every rule and looks and his own words, really fucking cool doing it. And then you have a character like Tucker Carlson's like, you're not allowed to do this. So I'm going to just broach the subject and pretend I'm playing the game, but I'm going to break the rule too. And it's very attractive to a broadly pissed off people who are pissed off because they've been silenced on legitimate topics, not only illegitimate ones. And so until we break the mystique of this third rail and we start to really talk about these, like you, you know, you brought up, maybe these guys are smarter, maybe it's cultural, maybe it's selection bias, as was suggested, you know, we're bringing over the smartest from India, the smartest from

Japan or China or Korea or whatever, and we're leaving the, you know, the troublemakers at home, and maybe it's that, but maybe the people that are actually here that are of those dissents are actually smarter, and what are you going to do about it? You know, the Ashkenazi thing is real. So what are you going to do about it, right? Tough cookies. They're smarter than you, and now you're going to get out competed because we brought them in. Well, if we can't talk about, that was you stepping into that third rail space and saying, let's actually have this uncomfortable conversation about this. If we can't have responsible actors dominating that conversational space, what we're going to end up with is Nick Fuentes saying things very irresponsibly in that

space like he's holding up a flag that people are going to chase. Literally, in some cases, the Nazi flag. Sam Harris offered quotes, I think David Frum, saying, I'm paraphrasing, if liberals won't defend the border, fascist will. You know, you know, if reasonable people are not going to pay some attention to these issues, which are in some sense reasonable, the fucking Nazis like Nick Fuentes will have a field day with them. Yeah, we just watched like a couple of years ago, you know, you're not supposed to say the N-word. Nobody's supposed to say the N-word. We all kind of get that.

All right, fine. There's obviously a weird double standard, you know, but we're not supposed to talk about that either. But then we watched this poor guy in the middle of political correctness, woke critical race theory culture, this poor communications professor at like USC or one of the California colleges, teaching on Zoom, because it was COVID, so he's on Zoom, teaching his communications class, explaining that in Chinese, when you can't think of the word, it means the thing inside your head. Gu is the indefinite article in Chinese, or maybe it's the definite article I don't remember, but it's an article in Chinese means kind of vaguely thing. In Ne, NEI means inside. NEI is rendered in the opinion. So NEGA means inside thing. It's the thing that's in your head that you can't think of.

So you say it when you would say um in English. As with an A, not an E, A, not an ER. It's GE, actually, in the opinion. It's N-E-I-G-E in opinion. But not ER. N-G-G-G-E. Go ahead. Go ahead.

G-U. It's an uh sound. So anyways, he's teaching this, and he's like telling his class in... over Zoom, look, if you talk to Chinese people, this is a communications class at a grown-up college, you know, significant college. If you run into Chinese people in business, they will say this. Do not be alarmed. It is not the racial slur that it sounds like. And he gets sanctioned or fired or something. It's insane. For saying something too close to the racial slur. This is ridiculous. And so people see this and they're like, this is obvious third rail space. This is a place

where Nick can step in and say well he can't say that well I'll just say the word and he does it and he looks in his own language again talking about Hitler in that case really fucking cool because he's breaking this obviously ridiculous taboo that made no sense whatsoever

so the left for the last 30 years has built so much it's like the you know the third rail is a subway analogy for people that don't live in the city like you guys it's the electrified rail if you touch it your toast it's like the left has managed to electrify all three rails. They've just spread third rail space everywhere. And we've hit a breaking point

where people are sick of it. Stuff with COVID was very alarming for people. A lot of people believe people died because of things they weren't allowed to say. And their families got disrupted and they lost their jobs and all kinds of stuff because they weren't allowed to say true things. And now you have this opportunity for these actors to step in. And so what I think, yes, everything that you said is like we've got to unite as a nation. We've got to restep into that. so it's called academically a superordinate identity as Americans. However, we've got to understand the dynamic as third rail space that they are operating within, they're recruiting in. And what they're recruiting are these lost boys or disaffected people who are just frankly pissed off at how

much censorship and silencing and bullying and bad-mouting they endured over all this political correctness nonsense. Yeah, I agree. And by the way, I agree with you about I always have. I mean, going back years, I always agreed with your kind of being of two minds about the Confederate stuff because I always felt that. Well, if you have a people who views themselves as a people, it's not us to decide if there are people or not. It's not up to the Israelis to decide whether the Palestinians or people, some of you hear, arrogant Jews, and you're not even a people. No, there are people, then they're entitled to some symbols and, you know, some iconography. their people. And by the way, the law very much treats them as a people, the Voting Rights Act.

I don't know. I can't remember the current state of it. But for years, we had a Voting Rights Act, which singled out those people for special treatment in terms of the way they conducted themselves, because if you're part of that group, we don't think you can be trusted. And they say, okay, well, yes, this group, this is our, oh, you can't have, what are you, want slavery back? So, yeah. And you said something nice, which is, I think you're really. right most of them in this day and age if you explain to them well you can see how that reads to other people you can

certainly understand that a black person sees that and they associate that with slavery and you may want to make some concessions to that if you approach them in that way they're like yeah yeah you're right maybe there's some other way around this but if you say to them you're a racist you want to bring slavery back they say go

fuck yourself this is my flag and I'm keeping it yeah they buy a bigger one and put it up on a giant flagpole next to, you know, I-95, whatever, in Florida. And that's very human. By the way, just getting back before we were almost out of time, it went so fast, about this Tucker Carlson mental illness thing. I don't believe, I've said,

I don't believe he's like Joaquin Phoenix, you know, staying in character the whole time. But I had a thought of his mental illness, like, okay, if you think you were attacked by demons, and by the way, some people have tried to make the argument that, well, actually, you know, religious people believe in demons. And I looked into the DSM, and it talks about this. Yes, religious people believe in demons in theory, but they don't actually believe, like, demon attacks.

Like, in other words, if you walk in on a religious person and their wife is dead, murdered on the bed, and it's only one person it could have possibly been, no religious person has said, well, yes, it could be that person, but it also could have been a demon. We don't know. Like, you can't go to court of law and say it was a demon attack and get a southern evangelical jury to consider it. for half a second. They don't, they don't actually believe in demon attacks. They believe in demons in a, you know, in a, ethereal way. But I was thinking that, so okay, even, you believe in demon attacks. Now you believe you were attacked by a demon. Now this is not ordinary. In some way, I imagine, you believe you were attacked by demons because you've been stepping on their, on their neurologic points. Like, you, you are so righteous that you have, you,

have gotten on the radar of the demons. And the demons feel that you need to be put down because you're a threat to the demons because you are so good and righteous. This is a narcissism. But I believe that would, well, it would explain. I just have this intuition that Tucker Carlson thinks he was attacked by a demon.

And in his heart of hearts, he thinks he was attacked by a demon because what he's saying is so true. And they wanted to take care. I know a pretty strong contingent of evangelicals now who strongly do believe that demon attacks of that sort are real. I don't know that it would show up in court or that they actually end up killing people. But I've talked to a non-trivial number of people who fully believe that, you know, actual demon possession that they can chase out with the word of God or with the name of Jesus are occurring and that people go crazy and they have all these kind of like demonic behaviors, like, you know, very criminal things or very crazy things, foaming at the mouth. and whatever else, and that they've encountered this in their own lives. And so there is this

non-trivial population. And Tucker, regardless of his actual belief state for himself, is actually activating that population with this line. Now, just bring up, there is an intelligence operation. I'm sorry. But what about speaking? Oh, no, there's an intelligence operation called a Buffalo run, which is where you get a target group that you wish to discredit to start believing something that everybody's going to later be revealed to be crazy or that most. people will believe is crazy. And you get them to run really far with that belief, and then you pull a rug out from under them and completely discredit them. And so it's, I'm not saying that that's what Tucker's doing, but it can fit the pattern. I think the narcissistic cult

cult capture is probably a more succinct explanation. And he may, you may be right. He may fully believe that that really, I mean, he made a high production value video explaining this story like it was a documentary. So he might truly believe that this is what happened to him as well. And that does fit. Exactly. That is the narrative that you are attacked by demons specifically when you're rendering a service so undeniably to God that the demons become angry and they go after you to take you out. So that would tap into that belief structure, whether he has that or not, but certainly within the population of people who believe in such things, they would be convicted by that? Why would Tucker be attacked by a demon

unless he was doing something so holy that the demons would be angry and attacking? Touching demon nerve? These people that speak in tongues when they get in, they get it together and now they're speaking in tongues as if they're possessed by some unearthly power.

Yeah, I know many of those people. And so they believe that they're being possessed at that moment. Although, you know, Glenn Lowry in his autobiography, he said, because he was in part of that, he's one of those groups, he confessed that he he faked it he faked talking in tongues just to fit in so he couldn't be the only one but go ahead there's a fancy academic word for that too it's a glossololalia if anybody wants it just since we're doing

the fancy make fun of james for knowing big words thing um tease james i guess is better way to phrase it but uh yeah but i know people they don't believe that they're being possessed by a demon when they're doing the speaking in tongues they believe that they're actually getting a like message from a holy source and uh it's it's a thing it's very it's not uncommon common, I think, is a better way to put it within a lot of charismatic evangelical Christianity, as it's called. The furthest end of that is the snake handling people, but there's not a whole lot of those people. We could talk about this endlessly because I'm so fascinated by Joe Rogan. Have you been on the Joe Rogan show? Four times. Four times. So that Joe Rogan is another thing like,

I mean, he's, he defends Alex Jones. He seems to be pretty tight with Tucker. Tucker will go on there and say something like Alex Jones is a divine prophet. He predicted 9-11 in detail and it's perfectly ascertainable that this is not true. You can listen to the recording of what they claim is Alex Jones predicting 9-11

and it's very clear he was referring to the 93 bombing and he didn't predict it and it's and so what the fuck is going on with Joe Rogan? Like what is with these people? I can't that's what I'm saying. It's the weirdest time of my life because we always had various currents in our politics, but usually if you were associated with bad shit craziness,

that was the end of you. You were never heard from again. And now it seems to have no effect. Maybe it's the Candace Intelligence Agency. Who knows? So do you have any theory? I don't want to put you on the spot with Rogan, but do you have a theory on why he doesn't seem to be bothered by this?

If we were going to give Rogan the old ocean personality test, right? And check his big five. The O in Ocean is for openness, you know, like it's some kind of like intelligence quiz right now to remember what the other letters stand for, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Very good, very good. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I got them all. I think so. So O is openness.

The point is that, like our friend Peter Bogotian, if we were to give him or Joe Rogan the test, like they would come back like a hundred and tenth percentile in openness. Oh, Peter's open, yeah. Yeah, totally all the way, like beyond the scale. But so is Joe, right? Joe is, he's got some natural skepticism, but he, and, you know, he, it shows a lot. But he is, I mean, like UFOs, Bigfoot kind of, like he's, he's, he'll entertain some ideas, right? And he'll go down the rabbit hole with those ideas. And, and, you know, he'll test out, you know, different, I don't know what he does now, but historically it's known, you know, done some various, you know, drug use and whatever else. So he's got open. is my point. The point with that is that that's exploitable. Now, Joe Rogan just served a very visible, which he got attacked for repeatedly role, whether it was for, you know, in COVID, he did very visibly the ivermectin thing. They accused him of eating horse medicine. Then it came on later to the election. He starts having on more and more conservative voices. It starts swaying a lot of public opinion. He has Trump on specifically. This is considered to be not inconsequential and

determining the outcome of the 24 election. Kamala, obviously, was invited and refused to do it, and so this was this huge scandal. So Rogan has a high openness score and was undeniably consequential in the 2024 election. If there are forces that be that do manipulative scalduggery, I would put a lot of money down to bet that Joe Rogan has a lot of what we might refer to as assets close to him that make sure that they take advantage of his openness score to lead him to believe crazy shit that he'll then say on his show. In other words, I think there's a bunch of assets around Rogan hanging out at the mothership telling him crazy stuff and he doesn't know what to believe and what not to believe and they inundate him with this. The whole comedian

community that's kind of got like a podcast presence, you know, that intersects with conservative politics in some positive way has all kind of gone down these rabbit holes together. And I would just bet you this is a highly infiltratable space. It's a very easy space and you have very suggestible people that are willing to entertain ideas. And if I were an intelligence agency, I would have Joe Rogan surrounded by a bunch of things to make sure he doesn't screw up electoral plans in the future. Well, James, you sound a little conspiratorial yourself there. Oh, 100%. I got a hat right over here, there's just tinfoil right on it. But, you know...

I predicted the... No, I didn't. Never mind. Go ahead, but... No, I was just going to make a joke about predicting 9-11, but I couldn't think of another disaster fast enough and it fell flat. But, and I don't mind people

even with ridiculously open minds, but then there comes a point where something is verifiably untrue, as with this Alex Jones thing. Or as with various things Candice Owens has said, and we're seeing people like Rogan, And my friend Megan Kelly and people like Dave Smith, something has changed. They rationalize it.

It's my friend, this, and that, where in a space which was supposed to be sanitary, meaning like this is an intellectual space and friendships and everything have to be secondary to our profession, which is a profession of telling the truth. And it's no longer that bright line. And they will allow people that they know are not telling the truth, that they know are misleading their listeners. Megan Kelly doesn't have Candace Owens on, but she calls her brilliant and this and that and kind of gives her an endorsement.

So the whole thing is corrupted now. And it's, I mean, you kind of alluded to it before. I'd said the same thing, sort of, you know, maybe it's just all going to collapse under its own weight because it's so implausible it can't hold and there's some illusion to it because although it takes up

an enormous amount of ones and zeros on Twitter we don't really know how many people in the real world are actually in the thrall of this stuff and I do not Trump there's a lot of flukes that happen like Mamdani won but you know he didn't have to win

if Cuomo had been a halfway decent moderate candidate, he probably would have won. Trump won just barely on the heels of this ridiculous Biden mental decline and Kamala Harris, the worst candidate by far of any candidate we've ever seen. So it was not any kind of a show. Trump was not any kind of a shoe. And so if you imagine 2028 when the fatigue of Trump is set in, when the economy probably won't be doing that well, Well, the Democrats are probably not going to make that mistake again. They're probably going to nominate a robust candidate. And J.D. Vance is surrounded by these lunatics and then double talking.

You could just imagine him just crashing and burning. And that will be the lancing of this abscess. And that'll hopefully be the end of it. That's what I'm hoping for. I like that. The hard part is Fuentes hopes for the same thing. This radical right hopes for that to happen because then we're going to get four years of Democrats again on the rampage, seeking revenge. Maybe they're going to be very DSA oriented like

Mondami. I don't know. Maybe it's going to be Newsom. I don't know. Something like this. President AOC is a word that I hear way too often. Something like this. And they predict anyway. They bank, in fact, openly bank on the idea that it's going to be terribly oppressive, especially for conservatives. It's going to be a woke nightmare. And they're, I mean, Fuentes makes this argument openly. the goal is therefore to create such an insane right-wing backlash that they get the right-wing fascist dictator that trump wasn't trump wasn't their guy and they find the guy and the huge backlash comes in 32 and that's when you know the rike begins the woke rike i suppose and this is i mean lansing of the abscess assumes that electoral catastrophe resists

results in lowering the crazy rather than the crazy accelerating. And so far, we've only seen more acceleration of the insane. So I actually think that what you just laid out is the plan that involves this crushing defeat in the next election, which I think is being engineered. And in order to set the stage to have the big swing the other direction that breaks the whole system in 32. I was saying being engineered, engineered by who? Tucker Carlson. Candice, all these people that are just turning the entire conservative movement, either turning it nuts or associating it with things that are completely nuts. Because like Tucker is a paleo

conservative. We take all of the like suspicion that he's working for a foreign government or he's an asset or a CIA or whatever off of the table. Tucker is a paleo conservative. He's pissed off that MAGA stole the post-Obama moment from the conservative movement, which could have gone Pat Buchanan's direction finally on the heels of Obama with all the frustration, but instead, here comes Trump down the escalator with this very pro-America. People say centrist, Democrat, it's not exactly accurate, but this MAGA agenda, and it's not PaleoCon, and it borrowed from Paleo-conservative themes and then didn't enact them. And so these guys feel ripped off. And I know that this Pat Buchanan Paleo-Conservative model is part of it, because when I

I was calling these people woke right. They literally replied like a bunch of dorks. We're not woke. We're the Buchanan right. They called themselves Buchananists. They're trying to get Trump to give Buchanan a presidential medal of freedom for God's sake. So there's this other political model, which is an older version of American conservatism that's been on the back burner since the 60s with William F. Buckley basically. defining the direction of the so-called neo-conservative movement, that that thing has to be

overthrown. And you can get completely organic there. So these guys are, this Buchanan right that has this post-liberal politic, which certainly J.D. Vance is embedded in, definitely is looking to kind of break the grip of MAGA for a post-Trump Republican Party and take it in that direction. But usually with radical splinters, the game is that they take it. it if they can and if they cannot take it, they burn it down. And it appears to be that's sort of what their game plan is. So it might be engineered by who would be Tucker, Candace, this whole podcaster network that all seem to support each other for some organic and maybe some inorganic reasons. Um, I don't know what the reasons are. Certainly there's this, you know, it's a very

actually limited audience. They're all, they all have overlapping audiences. So they can't alienate anybody else in podcast to Stan, as Constantin Kitsin called it, because they share audience with all these people. So I think that is being engineered by a paleo-conservative or post-liberal agenda in order to derail MAGA from the future of the conservative movement, the establishment Republicans from the future of the conservative movement, and to replace it with this Buchananite radical thing that I've been calling woke right for the past year. What would be the manifestation of that in terms of the government that they envision? Well, you read Patrick Deneen's book. Patrick's kind of in there. Patrick has done a number of public events speaking about his book called regime change alongside both Kevin Roberts and J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance has backed this book. And the book regime change calls for a new political order that is a what what Deneen calls a mixed constitution. So the goal would be to replace the constitution pretty much entirely with a mixture of a monarchy and

aristocracy with limited democracy. This is the model that he proposes. So we know these guys work with Patrick. It's go look up J.D. Vance and Patrick Deneen. You'll find 3,000 pictures of them. They certainly work together. You can watch videos of J.D. Vance endorsing Patrick Dene's book, this specific book, which is his second major work after why liberalism failed. So you can envision that they have a completely different economy where the government is very proactive with this economy, what its actual political structure is going to look like as more open question in the American situation. But certainly J.D. Vance has indicated openly that he wants to use the administrative apparatus that the economy should be made to work for the citizens of America.

We have to have a debate about what it means to be American. He said it's not just a place or an idea. It is a people and that people has a defined set of characteristics, which kind of sparked the heritage American debate. So these are all things that are in the milieu directly out of the man's mouth. And so you can assume that when he said that we should have an economy that works for the people. We have to figure out who the government will be assigned to figure out who the people that are valid are and how to arrange the economic order, which is probably going to smell awful social credity, to make sure that those people are winners in the economy because the economy is meant to work for it, but for them. But if you have a national identity that

the economy is being rigged to redistribute toward that's actually called national socialism, whether whether we associate it with the German, the National Socialist German Workers Party or not is irrelevant. The model is actually a national socialist model. And that's all super concerning. So what's the future look like? Well, I don't know, but that meshes with what kinds of things Tucker's saying. It's meshes with what the NatCon, the National Conservatism Movement, is pushing in a different vein. It meshes with what we hear out of the radicals at the Blaze who are pushing the Schmidian politics of unbound executive and this new, economic model, it matches with the American moment, and it kind of fits with all the pieces

of this kind of post-liberal milieu. So I would say that, probably. All right. Well, you know, we'll see, I have trouble envisioning it. I'm, I'm a big believer in America. And unless we're entered into a time of real scarcity, an economic, you know, disaster a la the 30s in Germany or, you know, even a depression. I don't see these kind of dark, negative ideas taking power in my United States of America, especially as there's so many people who are not white in the country. That's, that's, I don't think that's a naive hope. I think that's going to be what happens.

But we shall see. I share your hope to be clear. I'm just suggesting that I think these are the idea set within that, within which that group of people is working. Well, Candace is a black woman, so she, in terms of the national identity, I don't know that she's on board with that. They're fucking crazy. She's useful to the movement.

She'll get special treatment, or they'll just kick her out beforehand, but Candice is a grifter, so she'll find a way to fit in. Yeah. And, you know, just last thing was it has to be the last thing. I actually, you know, I remember in the 90s when NAFTA was being debated and all the people that I admired and assumed I should think like them were saying. were free traders. I remember very well, Papy Cannon making arguments and saying,

he does seem to be making some sense. You know, like he's, he's a compelling figure. But what I don't understand from these people is the notion that America, although we might save some money, that the savings of the money would be worth having freedom snuffed out on planet Earth. And, you know, I've never been able to understand it.

Like, really, you guys all think that we even here in America would be better off if the Nazis had taken over Europe and, you know, Papua, well, they wouldn't have invaded England. Okay, let's say, you're right, Pat. Let's say England was this lone island, you know, in Europe, just, you know, somehow managing to hold on. It certainly wasn't going to be a prosperous England. and it wasn't going to be a prosperous America,

and our entire attention would be devoted to making sure that they don't spread to the last two places they haven't taken over. I was in Dubai, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, and I saw this remarkable place of tolerance, and I know it's artificial, and I compared it to Epcot and Vegas and a cruise ship, and I get it. Nevertheless, if, like, Iran wanted to take over

Dubai and snuff out this frontier of Muslim and Arabic tolerance, I would say absolutely not. America has absolutely every interest. I mean, we're not going to send 100,000 people to die, but certainly of every interest to try to make sure that they're not allowed to extinguish, they're not able to extinguish freedom in the country. And this extends to Taiwan and Ukraine, because things, as I always say, things are always trending one direction or another, and if things start trending the wrong way in terms of freedom on planet Earth, the notion that we can just be bystanders to this while we save our money,

which supposedly somehow we're going to then use that money to, like, really make changes around here, which is bullshit. Nothing's going to change because our problems are not really money. So that I've just never understood. I never understood that point of view, and I haven't really heard them defend that. Our friend Coleman Hughes is going to be debating, I think, think somebody important in a few months. And I hope he's going to put that question to them. Maybe I'm not supposed to expose it. All right, James, we're done. I'm very, very happy that you've done this. I felt some trepidation on your part. Maybe that was my imagination, but I hope you had a good experience. And if you have anything else you want to leave the listeners with,

go ahead. Otherwise, we're going to sign off. Anything else you want to get off your chest? No, it's been super fun. I appreciate it. And maybe we can do it in person. It looks like it's a pretty cool setup you've got there. Oh yeah, we love to do it. I'm going to get up to the city next time. Oh, that'd be fantastic. Okay. James, Lindsay, everybody, your website again? New Discourses.com.

And your Twitter handles anti-communist. What's it? What is it? No, I'm at Conceptual James. What's the anti-commies? What I get that from? That's the how I describe myself. James Lindsay anti-commonies.

He's back on Twitter. But no, it's conceptual James. And since we talked about it, I'll just tell you. It's a joke. It's a conceptual penis, but you swap out. penis for James. So I'm literally like making fun of myself with my handle. I thought it was cute. All right. James Lindsay, everybody. Thank you very much.