The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1014: Understanding 'Gen Z' w/ J. Burden

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

60 MinutesSome Strong LanguageJ. Burden is a content creator and the host of The J. Burden Show on YouTube.J, a member of Gen Z, joins Pete to give a detailed breakdown of how he sees the Zoomer generation differing from those that came before it.J's YouTube ChannelJ's Find My Frens PageGet Autonomy Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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and any support you can give me helps with that. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekino show. Jay Burden is back. How are you doing, Jay? I'm doing real well, Pete. Thanks for having me back on. Of course. Why don't you remind everybody a little bit about what you do over there on your podcast? Sure. My name is Jay Burden. I have a variety of different platforms I'm on. I'm primarily known for the Jay Burden show, which is a twice a week interview show format very familiar to your viewers. I have kind of a rotating cast of interesting people kind of across the right wing. I also have a substack, the Jayburn show. You can find me there as well where you get some of my more structured thoughts, but I am first and foremost an interview host.

All right. Well, let me interview you then. The subject I contacted you and I wanted to talk about was Gen Z, Z, Zomers. and I'm talking about my friend Matt Erickson recently. He's been diving into generational differences recently. And one of the things that he, well, let's put it this way. When I look on social media and I see certain people talking and certain people who they're making sense to me, we probably want the same things. I'm Gen X. They're normally not boomers. They're normally not millennials. They seem to be in Gen Z. So you being a member of Gen Z, I thought I'd have you on to talk about this.

Let's start here. What do you think is the, what do you think are some of the main characteristics of Gen Z? All right, sure thing. So let's define our terms first. just so people aren't confused. Gen Z is effectively the term used for people born between about 97 and 2012. Those dates get a little bit fuzzy on both sides. My kind of mental demarcation between millennials and Gen Z is, can you remember 9-11? I'm 24 years old. I have no memory of 9-11 whatsoever. And that actually brings us to our first kind of important characteristic, right? which is Gen Z has no real memory of the liberal consensus, right, the post-war consensus. You know, obviously, you could still say that was going on during the Bush years, but the Bush years were not normal.

You know, that was seen as an aberration from the norm. Obviously, that continues up into Obama, then through Trump and now Biden. But essentially, I think one of the biggest ones is that they don't have as much of a connection to the quote-unquote good time. You know, one of the things that people like to make fun of people my age for is this weird kind of TikTok trend of people in their teens and 20s being nostalgic for the 1990s, you know, a time that they never really knew. And I think what that is is a longing for, you know, kind of a normal era, you know, an era when it was depoliticized when it seemed like things weren't constantly falling apart. And obviously that post-war consensus was fake, but, you know, it held up for a while. It seemed to be something that people could actually believe in. So what that means is, one, Gen Z is less connected to the boomer truth regime, right?

The pre-existing myths of that society. And in all of this, I think it's important to bear what I'm to take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, which is there's this kind of desire to view Gen Z as a monolith. It's this like based generation. That's not true. If we look at the averages, it's far from the truth, right? I think a study recently came out that says roughly between 25 and 30% of people in Gen Z self-identify as a sexual minority. Now that self-identify, right, not doing the deed, so to speak, but it does indicate a broad trend about that cohort, right? That they are highly susceptible to kind of the lies of post-modernity.

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But what my contention is is effectively they're kind of a flat bell curve. You have a lot of extremes. And part of that, right, is like I said, they were less connected to the preexisting narrative. So the great example, right, is World War II. If you go on any kind of like public facing forum, and obviously this is purely anecdotal, but you still see it. You'll hear pages and pages of stories where teachers complain about young people, people my age, laughing about World War II, certain, you know, war crimes associated with that, things like that. And effectively, it's because we never got the same kind of conditioning that later generations did. Now, part of that is just that the social fabric was

different. You know, part of it is that they're less churched, you know, less people my age go to these sort of, you know, non-denominational churches where a lot of cultural memes are passed on in this way. But another one, and this is a, I think, an important thing to bring up is that, you know, whereas baby boomers are children of the television, right? That's sort of how they ingested media, it's how they think about the world. Gen Z is the product of the algorithm, right, which is tailored to every individual person. So for instance, Pete, I bet if I ask you, you know, what song were you listening to in the summer of 1992? You probably have an answer, right? Yeah, I know exactly what bands I would have been listening to. Yeah. And I bet if I asked people in

your area, and look, I get it. You were in the music industry, so you're not kind of an average show. But, you know, if you asked, you know, a sample of representative people from around the same time, even if that wasn't their song, they know that song. You know, that was on the radio. And so the radio is kind of the way people ingested music to a certain perspective. But now, right, in the era of streaming, my song of 2021, well, came out 10 years before I was born. No one else my age may have ever heard of it because it was selected for me by the algorithm. Right.

And so what that means is Gen Z as a co-hold. is incredibly fractured, incredibly into all of these weird little subcultures. There are pros and cons to that, right? Like generally, if you're designing a healthy population, you would want people to be relatively normal, participators, you know, into kind of pro-social causes. But in our current era, right, when society is driven towards evil ends, this is where I think you get what you're identifying, which is that there are a lot of extremely right-wing, very based Gen Z, especially young men.

And I think that's because there is less of a normal culture. There's less of a shared culture. And so people are getting very, very into kind of niche subcultures. So that's part of it. Yeah, does that answer your question? Yeah, that starts to put us down the path. I guess the next thing I really wanted to bring up, and this is something that became really important to me

when I experienced seeing it in people in my personal life over the past few years is how is Gen Z at having in real life friends? So, I mean, I've never had a problem with this. You know, we were just talking, you know, before we went live that actually the last time I was on your show, I ended up, you know, meeting with a guy. We've become pretty good friends. Our wives hang out. But it's hard to say, again, as a generalization. I know exactly what what you meet, you know, that the screen has become the way that many people have their, you know, their social interactions. What I think is kind of interesting, and you saw this over COVID, is that you're kind of seeing two populations emerge, right? It's almost like the time

machine where you have like the Morlocks in the LOA or whatever, I can't remember what they were called, right? These two subspecies that have kind of diverged because what you saw over COVID was that I was in college during COVID that there were two groups of people. There were the people that basically decided, like, all right, you know what, I'm 19, I'm 20. I want to do something. I don't really know about this whole COVID thing. So I guess I'm just going to hang out anyway, right? I'm going to go to a party. I'm going to, you know, throw a, throw like a secret event, you know, so no one calls the cops on us. And then there were the people that are just now kind of coming out from under the rock. And they have diverged like you wouldn't believe, right? You know, there are these, and don't get me wrong,

many of them are in my generation who are horribly afraid. You know, they're agoraphobes. They don't want to go outside. They don't want to interact with anyone. And again, that is largely facilitated by, you know, the algorithm, by the screen. So one of the things that I think is relevant to this, and this is probably a negative, is that the social atomization we've seen in previous generations kind of facilitated by the internet has been turned up to 11.

And part of that is that in the death of common culture, you know, when you become this hyper-specialized human who's really into one thing. You know, there's a TikTok, which I've never really used is kind of infamous for this. But it becomes very difficult to relate to others. You know, because if all you care about, like in my case is, you know, reactionary books and elite theory, if you don't have other interest, if you're not a balanced human being, if you're just getting like sucked down an internet rabbit hole, it makes it kind of difficult to meet other people.

You know, it's a little bit hard to open a date with what's your favorite quote from Gaetano, Mosca, right? And I think that that kind of applied to different subcultures is a definite problem we see. Right. Like the one of the things that has been a narrative for a couple years now is the fact that Gen Z by and large is not having sex. Now, you know, Peter, you and I are both religious people, right? And, you know, mass, you know, mass casual sex is not necessarily a good thing. But there's a difference between people aren't having casual sex because they're. They're, you know, forming families. They're working.

They're, they're, you know, kind of productively employed by society. And then people aren't having sex because they're, you know, addicted to some like bizarre form of pornography and haven't seen the light of the sun in three weeks, right? That's sort of a different thing. And that goes back to making a distinction between this, the subculture of right-wing zoomers, which you've correctly identified. And Gen Z is a monolith, which has, I mean, very, very severe problems.

Right. And I think that, you know, we've talked about this idea of, you know, all of us as living through this kind of civilizational winter, being children of the ashes. But I think the most acute version of that just because of the way the time is kind of shaken out is, is Gen Z and to even a greater extent, Gen Alpha, which is the, you know, truly the youth right now. because of culture being deracinated, it's hard for cultures to form in local areas, unless it's an area that's basically been inhabited by the same people for a long period of time. I live in an area where there are families here who have known each other and live next to each other for 200 years. So there's a certain culture here. but in a lot of places that culture is gone. There's not this,

localities don't have a culture. And it almost seems to me like from what you're describing when you have people who, you know, go down the rabbit hole of elite theory and the reaction, things like that, at least the internet allows them to find their own people. And then, you know, there is the chance. And I've talked about this and other people have talked about,

it and we were actually talking about a project before we started recording that would allow people to move into the same area to, you know, start to maybe build that culture out for, you know, for generations to come. Certainly, right? And this works both ways. So one of the things that, you know, you'll see if you follow kind of conservative rage bait, right, is kind of this story and you've probably seen a half dozen times that runs something like this. Can you believe in this tiny conservative town in Idaho, they're having drag queen's story

hour at the local library? And you look at the librarian, right, filming herself on TikTok, because let's be honest, it's always a woman. And it looks like someone who is living in Brooklyn five years ago. And that's because that works both ways, right? That we're sort of seeing this air drop of progressive elite culture everywhere across the country. Again, because of that deracination. And you're 100% right about the kind of the reverse edge of that, which is that it offers an opportunity for people like us, you know, people with shared interests to connect and bring it into the real world, right? I kind of consider that, you know, the end goal of my project, right? Like what would be a success state as if more of that happened. I think that if we're

talking about Gen Z, I think one of the reason we see so many young men on the far right, And this goes back to another broad characteristic about Gen Z. I've mentioned the quote unquote sexual diversity, but it's also the most racially diverse generation in U.S. history, deliberately engineered to be so. And so what you see is the kind of slice of a generation who is not part of the Rainbow Coalition. Because if you're a young, if you're a young white guy, especially a young Christian white guy, there's basically no way for you to sign up with the regime. They don't really have a place for you. And I think that that serves our interests, right?

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Like, let's say I'm, you know, 40. Even if I had sort of these inclinations, there's that path of, well, you know what, like if, you know, I'm a little bit smarter than average, you know, I've worked hard in school. Like, I can always get a decent corporate job. And once you're making good money and kind of socially mobile, it's like being a political dissident sort of loses its appeal, right? You've got things kind of holding you back from that. But in, you know, current year, all of a sudden it's like, well, if you have a name that indicates you're of a certain complexion, right? If you are, you know, of a certain religious background, the corporate world does not want you.

And so there's a much less easy opportunity for you to join the regime, right? Similarly, obviously, in the apparatus of power. And so effectively, what I think you're seeing is a lot of people who would ordinarily be competent working for or at least not against the regime have sort of been driven into our arms because they have no other option, right? It's like, well, I'm not going to trune out. I'm not going to become one of these like catamites, right, to enter the regime or to please them to get a good job. So like where can I go and still be what I am at an essential level without someone hating me?

And that's effectively us and our friends, right? And so I think that's a significant force in our favor as well is that effectively the back end of the competency crisis, right, the fact that they are no longer creating or at least. hiring competent people is that those people don't just go away, right? They've just been pushed out of kind of their rightful spot in the hierarchy. I think along with that comes the idea of being completely blackpilled on anything financial. There's famously there was a post going around. I started sharing it. I don't think I was the first person who shared it. No, I definitely wasn't. where a boomer said, oh, when someone says, okay, boomer to you, say back to them, okay, renter, because they're never going to have it as good as we did.

How does a young person who may be even very successful and doing well, but still can't afford to get into a house, can't afford, you know, maybe driving a car, which is a good idea, drive a car that's 10 or 20 years old, How is that affecting this generation as well? It's massively affecting this generation because there's that idea again, right, that there is no way the system shakes out in your favor. You know, that the way the economy was rigged, which is effectively turning the economy into a nursing home, right? Just bending everything towards the end of, you know, funding retirement plans, funding entitlements for the aged. I mean, that kills, absolutely kills anyone's motivation to, to essentially to grind, right?

And some of this is, sorry to use Gen Z slang there, but we've sort of done the exact same thing that Europe did, right? Where they turned their entire state into a nursing home. But they did it through kind of deliberate act of government, right? Like we'll just take 60% of your paycheck and use that to pay for, to pay for someone's retirement. In our case, you know, we've kind of done it piecemeal. You know, so for instance, right, like, you know, as you mentioned, it's like, well, okay, maybe your taxes are only, only, you know, 25%. But now, you know, interest is whatever it is, you know, 7, 8%. Now your rent is more than a mortgage payment, but you can't afford it because you don't have the credit.

And so effectively, when you add it all in, it's like we're in the exact same place where there's this kind of like economic malaise. And it's very, very difficult to get around that and to essentially start riding that property ladder. I think one of the other things that you is sort of related to this is the way in which the sexual marketplace has completely failed. Right. So again, like I said, I'm married. So this is not something I, you know, see firsthand anymore, right? I'm out of the game. But looking at my friends, a lot of them are in a really rough situation. These are young guys who are successful, good looking, went to good schools, have decent jobs, and are having a really tough time really meeting anyone.

And one of the things you'll notice, right? And I've been talking a lot about Gen Z men and how many Gen Z men there are on the right wing is that Gen Z is incredibly politically divided by sex. as we've seen woman become a politicized identity, where woman doesn't necessarily mean the kind of dictionary definition, it means the kind of social one and a core component of that is and votes Democrat, right? To be blunt about it. That's created this kind of war between the sexes, but instead of this kind of externalized war, where it has men view women as a class, It's sort of this internecine knife fight, right?

It's very, very nasty. You know, when you talk to people my age, and this is born out in any number of studies, they're terrified of being canceled, being me-tued. Some of that, right, is the agoraphobia we talked about, right? Whereas just people who are not going outside, who aren't really functioning particularly well. I'm not going to deny that. But another part of it is people basically running the mental calculus of, well, you know,

if she doesn't like me and she turns this into. you know, a scandal, all of a sudden, I'm one of the guys that got kicked out of UVA because some girl decided to make up a story and run and tell it to the Rolling Stone. That was a constant fear when I was at school. People talked about it all the time. And in much the same way, I think that that has created a ton of people. Some of them are kind of punitively known as in cells, right, involuntary celibates men who literally cannot find a woman to go with them. But there are other guys who aren't necessarily in a situation that bad, who are looking at the dating market the exact same way that you just described people looking at the financial market, right, where it's

essentially, what does this system offer me? And the answer to that is, I mean, Tinder, right? Maybe even if you're good at it, which is a very small percentage of people, you have success on it, you get a, you know, an empty, you know, one night stand. Maybe, you know, you beat the odds. And now a sudden you're dating or married to someone who's also been on Tinder for the last five years, it's like it's not exactly a tempting prospect. And I think it's why, you know, you see so many stories that say things like, oh, you know, Gen Z is quiet quitting or Gen Z isn't working as hard as previous generations. And again, some of that is just, you know, natural human genetic degradation, right?

I'm fully happy to have that conversation. But I think another one is that the system as it is offers young people, very, very little to essentially commit to the system, to commit to building society. And I think that a lot of people are basically sitting around saying, like, well, why bother? You know, and I can just check out effectively. I think that's one of the one of the main issues going forward is, is that, you know, that culture we were talking about building is if people can't get married and can't have kids, that was a, you know, I'm Gen X and I didn't meet somebody and get, I think I married until I was 35.

And we ended up just not having, not having kids. And that was something that was also very Gen X in that, especially where I grew up in that there's really no hope. Everything was falling apart. We're going to get nuke by the Soviet Union any day, yada, yada. I mean, that is, you know, that's something that was, you know, basically held over our heads and something that was drilled into us. And it's good that that's not drilled into you guys. And I'm glad you guys didn't get the 9-11 thing either because that was even worse. But you did get the COVID thing.

And that was worse than both of the. them put together as far as I'm concerned. But yeah, going forward and looking to have a culture again, God forbid using the term even high culture again, unless people can come together, unless people can get married and have kids and concentrate on that kind of thing, informed communities around it. Really, we just continued down this road of no, no hope and no cohesion. You're 100% right. And really, the reason that I brought up that idea of, you know, two kind of subspecies

forming is actually something that I borrow from Ed Dutton, right? And he and I come from very different backgrounds. we have very, very different views on life. But it's always interesting when your personal anecdotes are backed up by science, right? And one of the things that he mentions is that we're seeing, and before I get into this, obviously immigration plays a major part in this. I'm not denying that. But what he says is interesting is that the people having children are radically different

than they used to be. That effectively, progressives do not reproduce sexually. They tend to reproduce. by effectively infecting Red America's children. But the kind of natural birth rate discrepancy between the two is increasing more and more as a group, Gen Z is less religious. So what you see is that, I mean, and I'm again, as I've said it, you know, someone in his early 20s, I have half a dozen friends who have one or two children and have been out of school just as long as I have, right? Because it is a religious community. So what you're seeing is that,

effectively only the religious, only the far right to use another term, are producing any sort of culture at all past, you know, sitting in the pod and playing Fortnite. So that's an interesting development. Now, where do these people come from, right? These far right zoomers. So certainly, some of them just grew up in the church, right? They were the ones whose parents kind of kept the faith. You know, they tend to have larger families. They grew up in it. They kept doing it. Right. It's probably the biggest one. Some of them, right, found it on the internet. You know, they were saying like, oh, something isn't right with the state of the world. You know, they read a few books, stayed up late, watching, you know, Hitler hype at it. So now they're here.

But I think one of the other places to look at this is other kind of side by side or parallel communities, right, that were started maybe 20, 30 years ago. So the two I look at are homeschooling and the Christian classical movement. So I went to a classical Christian school. It's where I met my wife. It's where I've met the vast majority of my friends. And again, the people who run those tend to be well-meaning boomers and gen Xers, right? They're not fully down the path as far as we are. But they do look at, you know, the education system.

They look at the need for a high culture and they say like, oh, we need to fix that. You know, we need to connect our young people to the great books, to the church, you know, to a real living culture. And what you see is actually really interesting is that they've created sort of a machine that produces children that produces graduates who are far more radical than they are. And so if we're looking at, you know, like, okay, what is a sign of something that has worked in the past and like they will continue to? It's communities like the homeschool community, communities like the, you know, the classical Christian one, which have been around for years now, been around for decades.

But if we're looking at, you know, where do our people come from? You know, what allows us to kind of bypass clown world, bypass this kind of like horrible satanic civic religion and pass our values on in a way that allows people to have children instead of, you know, cutting their genitals off and jerking to bizarre pornography? It's like, that's effectively the mechanism. So anyway, sorry, is that too much? Yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, it would always come back to the church.

Doesn't it always come back to when you saw cultures forming and when you saw communities coming together and you saw this less degeneracy, people being less bought into, you know, you say 25% of Gen Zers identify as some kind of non-binary. kind of thing like that. When I hear that, all I hear is, you know, all the people who, when I was growing up, were like, oh, I'm anti-communist. And they couldn't even define communism or find Russia on a map or anything like that.

It's just what it was. And you said that even though these people are identifying that way, they're not even doing anything about it. So it just seems like it's just another, you know, another cloak to wear, another identity. Because, let's face it, you know, and I'd say it. said this about, I came out of libertarianism and I've said this about libertarianism is one of the reasons why when you run into one online, they can be so dogmatic and so in the box of their ideology and they're not going to allow anything else in is because they don't have an identity

outside of it. They don't have family. They don't have a religion. They don't have a faith. And they don't have a cultural identity. So they've basically glommed on to this thing because it allows them to have some kind of morality. Hey, I'm anti-war. You know, I don't think people, I don't think babies should be blown up. I don't think all this stuff. Oh, the government, you know, basically they replaced, they replaced Satan with the government. All of a sudden the government becomes Satan.

And, you know, they have to, they're trying to find their Christ figure to defeat Satan. But I think it all comes down to identity. And people just not... Pst, did you know? Those Black Friday deals everyone's talking about? They're right here at Beacon South Quarter. That designer's sofa you've been wanting? It's in Seoul, Boe Concept, and Rocheburoix.

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The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro, search Coopera and discover our latest offers. Coopera, design that moves. Finance provided by way of higher purchase agreement from Volkswagen Financial, Services, Ireland Limited. Subject to lending criteria. Terms and conditions apply. Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited. Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

Being able to find an identity in this world and a shared identity with other people that they can rally around. Definitely. And if we look at the sort of negative traits of Gen Z, you see that desire for an identity. You know, the kind of, again, conservative rage bait of, you know, weird emo girls with kind of alternative Zsor pronouns, right? Okay, we can we can laugh at that. We can say that's ridiculous. But, you know, there's something behind that, which is a search for identity, a desire to have any sort of positive identity. And I think that, you know, what we see with Gen Z, millennials slightly, but they still kind of view themselves in relation to this is that the previous civic religion, right?

The civic religion of the American Empire, the GAE died. It was completely hollowed out. There was nothing to give it any sort of kind of vital force by the time it got to Gen Z. It was done. I think that the fact of mostly being born after 9-11 is sort of symbolic, right? that that previous kind of cultural narrative, that that meme, right, that kind of drove America after Nuremberg, right, the Nuremberg regime was fully and totally done. There was nothing left to it. And so if we look at it to kind of shift gears, right, to Gen Z humor, it tends to be

extremely postmodern kind of absurdist. And I think it is because they are a product of, to borrow a phrase from Bodriard of the Matrix, right, the desert of the real, you know, a time in which there is no one cohesive cultural narrative that effectively everything is up for debate. There's nothing that feels fixed anymore. And so I think it, you know, like if we're looking at what we can offer to people in those situations, it's effectively a hand up. It's like, oh, here, here's a way to order yourself. You know, this is how you be a good man, right? That's something that matters. And I think that, you know, when someone has never really had a plum line in that way, it's incredibly, it's incredibly necessary and incredibly appealing, you know, in comparison to that kind of eternal search for identity.

Something you mentioned earlier, you were talking about how even that Gen Z is a multicultural generation and even certain cultures that you would expect to be accepted by the region, regime basically get excluded. Is that, do you think that has anything to do with the fact that, you know, I interact with a lot of Gen Zers online who are Spanish, especially Spanish, but even other other things that are, their politics are a lot more radical than the average conservative, you know, they're a conservative granddad. Yeah, well, you're 100% right.

And again, I think that I think that part of that is a less is a much less strong connection to, you know, any type of preexisting social order. You know, so one of the kind of canards you see about Gen Z is like, oh, like he was a, you know, they'll say something like, oh, yeah, this kid was a radical communist two weeks ago. You know, now he's a national socialist. Tomorrow he'll be an anarcho primitist, right? This idea of completely disparate political philosophies kind of just drifting from one extreme to another, which again does sort of remind you of, remind you of Weimar, right? You know, these angry young men with really nowhere to go and just kind of a bone to pick, although I would say that generation is certainly much harder than Gen Z is.

I mean, like I said, you know, there is an ethnic component to it to a certain number of white guys. but the rise of the kind of radical Hispanic Catholic rate has been kind of interesting to watch. You know, I've said before I'm Protestant. I'm a white guy. That's not really my crowd. But to watch it from the outside, it does seem to be a lot of energy going on there. I don't really know where it comes from, again, because those aren't my people. But watching from the outside, I'm certainly impressed with their zeal and what they managed to get done.

As somebody who is in a group chat with some of them, it's, because they feel like they're a part of something. Their Catholicism makes them feel like they're a part of something. I mean, you should see when these stories come out about, oh, this Catholic organization is funding open immigration. We're not making excuses. You know, the Catholics aren't making excuses for that. They're like, how do we stop this?

You know, how do we, because a lot of these organizations, people don't realize, are completely They're independent. Any organization can call themselves Catholic. I found a Catholic or a Catholic immigration organization the other day that literally has no Catholics on the board. And it's and you're just like, well, so I think it's basic. The reason you're seeing it is the whole identity thing is through Catholicism. I mean, there was a time when you couldn't even, you weren't Spanish. You weren't considered a Spaniard unless you were Catholic.

And that brought the country together. That's why the country could survive 800 years of more rule and finally be able to kick them out. And take the country back is because they had an identity. They all had an identity that they were fighting for. It doesn't mean that they were like the most pious Catholics in the world, but they all had an identity. And it was something, something to rally around. And I think, I think that's what you're seeing.

It's interesting when we look at the preceding generation, right, the millennials. Because millennials and boomers sort of share the same, like, psychic spiritual bond that Gen X and Gen Z does. Now, some of that is just the fact that, you know, those are parent-child cohorts, right? Like my parents are Gen X, you know, all my friend's parents, for the most part are Gen X. So that that's part of it. But I think that, you know, millennials view themselves as living in kind of a modified version of the boomer narrative, right? Civil rights movement as the sort of, you know, the Great Crusade.

And they view themselves as sort of being more true to that than the boomers were. You know, like, oh, you couldn't stand up to your principles, but I'm going to do it. And so in that, there is that idea of identity as activists. You know, I am going to be, you know, a special person crusading for this social cause. And so that's where I think they get that kind of identity, which is sort of being virtuous in a civic religious sense, right? Like woke really is the kind of new civic religion. And for that generation as a whole, you know, adherence to that is seen as virtue. And I think that, you know, it's interesting you bring up that these, you know, these young guys, these young Catholics, you know, view themselves as that is their kind of defining feature.

Because I think that that's a very kind of healthy reaction to that. What Dave the distributors said, we're in a war of belief, right? And as I mentioned before talking about the death of the liberal consensus, the post-war order, that was a lie because it was this sort of artificial reality where, politics has presented to the public was, you know, a mutual disagreement between guys who were in the same class at Yale or same class in Harvard about relatively minor points of, you know, tax or foreign policy, right? But that kind of three quarters of a century of fake politics has put us in a situation where it is real politics again. Like real politics has come back with a vengeance. And that sort of war of belief where we are not merely arguing about, you kind of minor parts of, you know, physical policy. But it is these kind of grand questions of what is it to be a good man? What is it to be a woman?

What is right? What is wrong? You know, can we put up a statute of Satan in the state house? Like, that is a much hotter conflict. And that is a conflict, you know, it's interesting you bring up the reconquista because that's effectively a religious war in that same way. And I think that if we're looking at what do the next 10, 20 years look like, it's probably a pretty good hint. I know a lot of people, even people, you know, that we, we know and we like don't want to say that the progressivism is a religion.

They're not willing to die for it. Well, we have seen some people who are willing to die for it. So come up in the past year, year and a half two years. I don't know if it's anything other than the people in charge in the regime. just wanting to keep that power, keep that power that FDR created and then, you know, trickle down through the system. Or if it's a true belief, I mean, I think there are some true believers in there. But I think what's going to, what's going to end up happening is the true believers on our

side are going to far outnumber the true believers on their side, even when it comes to are elite, you know, whatever elite class is growing at the time, you know, at this time. And I think that they will, that's where you'll start to see the fact that the people who are going to be against this regime are going to be more serious about what they believe in and why they're fighting is why you'll start to see some change, you know, at least in my lifetime, I think you'll start to see change going in the other direction. I'm not saying as a message to a friend of mine, I'm not. saying that we're winning right now. I'm saying that the regime is getting weaker.

Exactly. And that's really the truly kind of like acidic effect of lying and constantly lying, right? Is it becomes very clear that everything you're saying is just complete and total crap, right, when faced with reality. And what that doesn't mean is the kind of, you know, conservative idea that like, oh, like we've showed the liberal that he's not right. You know, our graph has proved that he's wrong. Therefore, we win. That's not how the real world works. But we do have this problem of political formulas, right?

I mentioned Mosca earlier, but, you know, he has this idea of the political formula, which is effectively the moral justification for why the rulers rule. You know, like, I am in charge because of X. And as that political formula, that justification is built on untruth, right? the inability to actually, you know, support your claim on power, you know, saying like, oh, the economy's better than ever, you know, when everyone's wallet's getting lighter, you know, saying that, you know, like this is the freest and fairest election in history when, you know, at least half of people think that that is not the case. Okay, you can, you can pull off one or two of those, but that eats away

at your legitimacy, at your right to rule. And it's very, very hard to motivate people to take extreme action for a regime they see as illegitimate, right? Whereas, you know, even a regime that was not successful, like maybe the National Socialists or the American Confederacy, because they were perceived as legitimate by their, you know, adherents could motivate men to extreme ends. And I think that, you know, as that the kind of current civic religion of woke rots away because it is a fake religion, I think you're 100% right talking about that dynamic. And again, we have to be a lot of to look at this within the frame of, you know, the organized minority. Like the reason that I harp on Gen Z as a whole being kind of gay in both a literal and a pejorative sense is that,

like, we have to be realistic. But at the same time, we don't need 50 plus 1%, right? To quote Thomas, like this isn't the, we aren't the Latter-day Saints here. We're looking for a vanguard. We're looking for a hardened minority. And as it becomes harder and harder for competent young men who would the kind of person, the people who accomplish the sort of ends we want, if it becomes harder and harder for them to join on side with the regime, it becomes easier and easier for them to drop into the sort of vanguardist frame we have set up to catch them. And I view that again as a situation in which they are getting weaker and all the better as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, I think it's hard for people, you know, like the boomer generation, you know, who do see

the problems and would love to see change, they've just lived through all of it. They've lived through the Civil Rights Act. They've lived through the Voting Rights Act. They've lived through, you know, Breton Woods being, you know, being dismantle. They've lived through all this. They've seen 9-11. They, you know, they remember the Cold War. And I think it's hard for them to look and see what, where we are right now, which is just basically a, you know, they remember the Cold War. And I think it's hard for them to look and see what, where we are right now, which is just basically a journey through all of that and it coming to its logical conclusion and not see it being able to get 10 times worse than it is right now. And I think there's a possibility it could get 10 times worse than it is right now.

But I think with technology and with, you know, the fact that, you know, what you're talking about, people being forcibly kept out of power and kept out of decision making. They're radicalizing because of that. I just don't see how

anyone who's actually looking at this through that lens cannot at least have hope for the future. I mean, because if you don't have hope for the future, what are you even doing? I mean, it's just go

off and live in the woods or whatever. I mean, I was telling my wife earlier today is like, I mean, if I was completely blackpilled, I would just stop doing this and start my own business and just concentrate on one of the businesses in this area, getting into the businesses in this area or something like, I think that we're, I think guys like you and I who do what we do, I think we're on to something. And I think we're actually helping people to understand. that we can win, which gives them hope, which makes them live and improve their situation a lot more, and also to find like-minded people and start doing that basket weaving that so many people talk about. I mean, to be perfectly honest, just a plug for basket weaving,

which is a non-affiliated organization essentially designed to help our guys meet up. That's how I ended up starting a podcast, is that I just got a beer with Paul. And we ended up talking. And at the end of it, I was like, that was a really good conversation. How can I have more of those, right? I can't drive to anyone's house. But, you know, if you have a podcast, you're allowed to just talk to strangers on the internet for an hour and a half and they'll actually like, you know, accept that as a proposition. But to go back a step, right? If we look at in-group preference, right, what the Arabs would call assibia, right? That that kind of like preference for people like you, your tribe. How is that formed? Well, it's effectively

formed from suffering. Because when things are going well, you know, when the economy's booming, when you can get cheap stuff from China, you don't really need a tribe. You don't really need a network in the same way. It becomes kind of a waste of your time, not literally, right, just from certain perspective. But when things get rough, you have to kind of squat up, right? You have to find your people, you know, associate with them, build social capital. I mean, this is something we've seen through time, right? Cyclical history is essentially that exact same arc of, you know, a tight-knit group of, you know, violent men comes into power, gets fat, decadent, loses their power to another tight-knit group of violent men. But if we're looking at where do we produce a common bond, it is from

suffering, right? It's from shared experience. And I look at the way that things are trending in the West, where there are certain things that certainly are getting worse, is sort of a qualified white pill, right? Because the way that you produce a cohesive group of people is by having them go through something hard together. Let's look at the NSDAP. Those men were united by the suffering of World War I, united by the suffering of Weimar. And on the other end, they were kind of forged into a group, right? They were forged into a, you know, a tribe to kind of mix metaphors here. And effectively, I look at that decline is probably a good thing for us and ours. You know, like if we look at, you know, our movement, our people, and look, I love American

conservatives. They're my people. But they are not a vanguard, right? They're kind of fat and happy, to be honest. And I think that the coming hard times are, one, they're exactly what we deserve and exactly what we need. And I think that if we're looking at kind of a way to build a new culture, that's probably what it's going to come out of. I think the hardest realization is that when you study history, that you know that this is going to turn around at some point and that things are going to get better. And those, you know, those tough men, are going to create good times again. And then inevitably, when you explain that to somebody, they're like, well, how do you keep that?

And if history teaches us anything, you don't. Things are going to exist in a cycle. And I guess all you can hope for is that your progeny get to do something in those times that make it easier for for when their progeny have to go through those hard times again because I don't see any way out of this. You know, it's like you could you could talk about a thousand years and that's pretty hard. You know, even Rome went through its cycle. Well, certainly, right? And that kind of is the human condition.

And I think what separates us from the left in many ways is the fact that we're not utopians, right? working within the constraints of a fallen human nature. And so look, like when I'm when I'm thinking of what a based world is, what an ideal society is, I'm not imagining that it will be that thousand-year city on hill. But at the same time, I'd like to live in a society where I can be at least like a normal amount of safety and that my children will not be sexually assaulted by drag queens when they go to school, right? A qualified ask. And you know, this reminds me of a a point in de maestra, right, where he's talking about the French Revolution. And when he basically says is that like when corruption sets in into the body politic, there's only one way to remove it.

And that's to cut it out that effectively you have to pay in blood for your decadence. And I don't say that in a triumphant sense. Like I'm not excited about that. You know, if there were a way to get through this quickly and painlessly, I'd be all for it. But again, like you and and I are concerned with the world as it is, not the world as we want it to be. And so that I think is really the only path out of this. I think as we were saying, I was saying what Matt Erickson the other day is, you know, it'd be nice to just have people that don't, people in charge that don't hate us right now, you know, that aren't actively working against our interests that don't look upon us as the enemy. And, you know, it's, you know, it's.

been a very long time. And, you know, I just, if I can say anything, is, is that we can get that back. We can get that back. It's not going to, you know, people are like, nothing ever gets better. It's like, well, Russia got better. The 90s were terrible. It's better now. You know, a lot of countries, a lot of countries have gone through hell and they've pulled out of it. I mean, just look at what South Korea looked like, you know, 80 years ago. And look at what it looks like now. I mean, It may not be your ideal, but you would certainly rather be living in South Korea right now than you would have 80 years ago. So, you know, it's just, I guess the hardest part for me is to deal with people and speak to people and interact with people who just, they basically have no hope. And they, when you give them the answers, or the ones that have decided.

that there's only one way that they're ever going to be happy. Like they're, you know, the enemy, you know, the perfect becomes the enemy of good. And, yeah, it's just kind of hard to talk to those people. And when you try to talk to those people, they can definitely bring you down, bring you down to their level sometimes. No, 100%. And the existence of those people is why my muted list on Twitter is incredibly long. You know, it's just like, okay, I don't have time for this.

And it's because you bring up the idea of things getting better, you know, Russia getting better. Like I'll be honest, like, Russia hasn't escaped postmodernity. You know, they're still dealing with a lot of the same things that we are dealing with. But I look at someone like Putin, and it seems like Putin is at least signaling that he wants to try and solve those issues. And he doesn't hate the people that make up his country. Same thing with Buckele. Like I'm not trying to say that he's some messianic figure, but he doesn't seem to hate the people of his country. And, you know, look at the people who run our country and they seem to hate us and not just a little bit, right?

They seem to have this deep, bone deep hatred for heritage Americans. And so it's like, well, okay, that doesn't get us all the way to, you know, the Fourth Reich. That doesn't get us to based world and whenever these people want. But it is a major quantitative improvement. It's a huge difference from, I mean, even just the difference between hatred and neglect. Like I would even settle for just stop paying attention to me. And so to me, I view that as effectively, it's this kind of critique from nowhere, you know, this idea that like, oh, well, I am, I'm smarter than you. I'm more insightful than you because I can, can, you know, call what you're doing, you know,

a waste of time or containment or whatever. And like, okay, man, but also like, what are you doing? And if the sum total of what you're doing is effectively just making content, you know, with nothing else, it's kind of like, with no like call to action in it, with no like actionable information, it's kind of like, well, this is just a really, really depressing. I could just be doing something equally wasteful of my time and just be watching some dude play video games on Twitch, right? And at least then I wouldn't want to put a bullet in my mouth. I don't know.

I've limited patience for these types. Well, yeah. And they'll be the first one to say, well, what are you doing? And the problem with people like that is, is they've decided that the way they would solve the problem is the only way the problem can be solved. very much like Matt Erickson said, oh, you're not a real libertarian. You know, you're not libertarian enough for me. And if you celebrate some kind of incremental win, even in your personal life, or, you know, you advocate for something that's outside of their box, it's like, well, what are you doing?

It's like, I mean, basically I've taken two on my live streams reading letters of people. people who are contacting me and saying, this is how my personal life has gotten better. This is what I'm doing. This is, you know, this is where I was a few years ago. This is where I am now. You know, I, you know, listening to your show was part of the help for that. Well, yeah, I mean, well, thank you.

I appreciate that. I try not to tell people exactly what to do, but try to give them hints. but people are just if it's not their 100% way you know and they'll be these are like some of the first people will be like oh libertarians are just retarded it so I'll stop acting like one stop acting like everything has to be your perfect your perfect way I remember I was on I was posting the Buckelly speech the one he did um post election just that beautiful um the aesthetic of everything of being up on the house, the royal house there or whatever that is, the government house there.

And those, you know, just the people everywhere. And someone's like, he's kissed the wall. His wife is part Jewish. He's not your savior. Well, first of all, motherfucker. I'm not El Salvadorian. I'm not Salvadorian. So no, he's not my favorite.

But can I enjoy something for five fucking seconds? You fucking people who just want people to be as miserable as you are. You're 100% right. And to me, it's sort of the trap of this kind of like pathetic nihilism, right? And I realize there are some Nietzsche and nihilists who have a different perspective on this. So I'm not trying to throw them under that bus. But it's this idea that like, well, nothing will, ever fix it all so all action is pointless. And it bothers me because, you know, I'm a Christian,

but I look at the pagans. And in both the Japanese and the Nord's, right, the Nordic types, you see the same idea of fatalism. Like, oh, like, you know, the earth will be swallowed up. But I can still as a hero act and do something grand. And it's like you're not even the most interesting version of a nihilist, right? You're kind of this like pathetic, weak-willed version of it. And Jonathan Bowden, who, you know, as a pagan, talks on this topic at great length. And so to me, it's just the sort of ideology that you step over. You know, it's exactly the same thing that you mentioned as the libertarians, where it's like, this isn't, this is a serious game.

You're not playing seriously. You know, please get out of the chair. Yeah. I just want to get that message out there. It's like just let people enjoy things. It's like, is the kind of people who like, you're in a nice restaurant. and you're enjoying your food and everything and they have to come and remind you of like preservatives you know you know you know how about you just shut the fuck up how about just go away

oh 100% man you're right hey let's end this remind everybody where they can find your stuff and um i'll lend this sure things you can find the j burdon show on apple spotify youtube anywhere you listen to podcast you can find me on substack and twitter as well jay burton Same thing everywhere. And again, Pete, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Of course. No, thank you. Thank you. And it's really, it's really something watching your, you grow and your profile grow in this, in this sphere that we have here because I think you're one of the good ones. And I think that I think everything that comes out of your mouth is coming from a really good place. Well, thank you, Pete, really. That means a lot coming from you.

All right. Take care, sir.