The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1136: Becoming a 'Cultured Thug' w/ Mike Maxwell from Imperium Press

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

71 MinutesPG-13Mike is the founder of Imperium Press dot org and the proprietor of the Imperium Press Substack.Mike and Pete discuss the contents of Mike's book, The Cultured Thug Handbook: A Guide to Radical Right-Wing Thought, which he wrote for his publishing company, Imperium Press.The Cultured Thug HandbookImperium PressMike's SubstackPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Antelope Hill - Promo code "peteq" for 5% off - https://antelopehillpublishing.com/FoxnSons Coffee - Promo code "peter" for 18% off - https://www.foxnsons.com/Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete'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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I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cignonette show. Mike from Imperium Press is back. How are you done, Mike? I'm doing very well, Pete. It's nice to be back on the show. Yeah. Thank you. The time difference is quite something. Let's set this up for this time on this day, and that day is my day.

I don't know. You figure out what day is for you kind of thing. It's, yeah, it's something I'm used to now. The triangle of death is trying to organize an Australian and American and European guests all at the same time, which I've had to do many times. I've had a lot of practice at it, so I'm pretty, I've got a handle on it at this point. Oh, yeah, the culturedads stream that you did that I was on, that must have been a fun one. You had people coming in from all at all different time zones. Yeah, that was a blast, actually. That was a great episode.

Had a lot of fun without it. That was a lot of fun. All right. Let's get down to this because when you told me about this, I looked at the title and I was like, okay, okay, I like it. I like the term thug. I like what it sounds like. And then I started looking into it, and I was like, oh, wow, Mike did something that no one's done before.

And I'm impressed. So I'll just tell everybody a little bit about your new book. This is a book that Imperium Press is putting out that you wrote, that Mike Maxwell wrote, the Cultured Thug Handbook. So where did this idea come from? It actually came from, speaking of culture dads, it came from my broadcast partner on that podcast, Dave Martel. And it predates culture dads. So it goes back a number of years, actually. Basically, Dave and I had been, he has another show called The Bog, which went on hiatus for a little while, but at the time he was doing it, it's back now.

And I'd been on a number of episodes on that show. So Dave and I kind of knew each other. We'd been podcasting together. You know, I'd guessed it on his podcast, you know, two or three times or something like that. We were friends. And at the time, this was back in, oh, probably 2020. So I was really hitting the podcast circuit very hard. I'd been on a lot of different podcasts.

And I was starting to kind of get a reputation for being the, guy that can break down complicated concepts in pretty plain language. It's just, yeah, one of the things that I always, that I believe is that if you can't explain something basically in like an ELI-5 way, then you probably don't really fully understand it. So that's something I've always tried to do, really to test my own knowledge and also to be able to communicate it is to be able to explain it. in, you know, just plain language.

So that's what I tried to do on podcasts, breaking down all kinds of things from, you know, very alien ideas from the archaic world, like the Roman world, all the way to, you know, political concepts like the state of exception or the friend-enemy distinction or throneness or all of that stuff. There's a number of concepts in this book. And so before there was a book, Dave suggested to me, he's like, Mike, why don't you just write like a little pamphlet thing, you know, like a couple of paragraphs

for a bunch of different ideas, like big brain ideas in our thing that we could just give to guys and they could just, you know, it would be a short thing or whatever, you know, 50 pages. And it can kind of serve as a little ideological introduction manual for people. And I thought, oh, that's a great idea. But I also, at the time I kind of thought to myself, I'm sure this has been done before. So I kind of started looking into it, and of course, I found that it hadn't been done before, which was really surprising. So I took this idea, and I squirled it away, and I started making, first of all, I started making a list of, well, what concepts would I want to talk about? And as with anything, what began as an idea of, okay, well, let's do like a, you know, 10 or 12 with them or something like that. let's make them each one page long.

That kind of grew in scope to what the book has eventually become, which is 45 separate concepts, 100,000 words. So, you know, it's quite a much more substantial work than it began as. But anyway, I started making a list, first of all, and then the list kind of organized itself into three natural categories. The first is, so there are three sections in the book, and the first section is what I call the 10-step program. So the idea of the book is that it explains radical right-wing concepts,

but it does so in a way that you can basically give it to somebody who's pretty much uninitiated. Now, I wouldn't give it to a Keith Olberman or a Rachel Maddow, I think that it will just, they'll light their hair on fire. But if you give it to an intelligent layman, somebody who is ideologically neutral, or especially somebody who has seen what's been happening for the last couple of years, maybe the last five or six years, and is not happy with it, somebody like that who's kind of sick of the woke ideology, sick of all of the, like, you know, liberal kvetching over Trump and all that stuff,

if you give it to that person, it pretty much will get them to where we're at, but it has to start from square one. So that's what the first section is. I call it the 10-step program. It's like you're in Alcoholics Anonymous or something, and you have to be weaned off of this, like, poisonous ideology that we call liberalism. So it starts basically from just noticing that in Trump's first term, that even though he was ostensibly the boss,

even though he was the executive, he wasn't able to really do anything. And it kind of takes that, and it explains what we call the state of exception, one of these really actually quite deep concepts. Sorry, it explains that in light of his failure, basically. And it takes that, and then it builds up from there over the next nine chapters after. into basically explaining what liberalism truly is, which is, I mean, the TLDR is that liberalism is the most extreme ideology that's ever existed in the history of the world.

It is fundamentally a form of amnesia, and even more fundamentally than that, it's not even an ideology, it's really more of a symptom of the end of a society. So it kind of gets you from, let's just say where Jordan Peterson is, is at to that point over the course of 10 chapters. So it's pretty ambitious. That's the first section. The next section after that, it explains a number of illiberal concepts.

So it's taking things that we understand and use in our discourse regularly, things like biolaninism, things like the progressive stack, physiognomy, and a number of other things. Very often ideas that have been coined by people who, were alive today. And it just basically, you know, it lays out those concepts so that you can kind of understand what people are talking about in our sphere. And then the last section, which is actually the second half of the book, it makes up

the bulk of the book, is what I call the big ideas. So it chronologically starts from the ancient world. and it uses one absolutely epical thinker for each chapter to illustrate a concept. So one of them, it begins with Homer and the concept of oikophilia, which is basically the love of home. It's the opposite of, well, it's what liberals call xenophobia, but like framed in a way that's like it's positive and it's kind of like the foundation of everything. So it starts from Homer and explaining xenophilia in the context of the Odyssey,

and it moves through to, again, it's quite a few different chapters. We do a chapter on the book of Job and the Bible. We do a chapter on Confucius and the rectification of names, and so on and so forth, all the way to the contemporary era, where I think the last chapter is on Alistair McIntyre and his book After Virtue, where we explained the epistemic dependence of rationality on tradition. So it's a very, very ambitious book in its scope. It is, of course, an overview of these concepts.

But in this overview, I try to pack in a lot of really good aphorisms and really deep interpretations of these ideas that just kind of give you a little bite that you can then follow in a different direction and all that. There's a big bibliography. Once you've done the book, there's lots of places you can go with it. So that's kind of as succinct as I'm able to give an overview of what the book is. Ready for huge savings?

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Yes, and that was a good description. When I was, I told you today I went through the 10-step. program and I saw the first four as like one block where you're basically you can you can look at the first four state of exception deep state cathedral high low middle high low versus middle and you can explain and I thought you used perfectly why wasn't trump in power the last time that he was when he was president is well I mean he didn't somebody. makes decides the exception and he didn't do it and then you just went through and you know we're able to show just basically how government works and as i'm as i'm reading this i'm i'm just floored because

first of all none of these is is longer than an article like a substack article and you explain it perfectly i think that the first thing i thought was someone who doesn't really know someone who maybe maybe saw a you know got a glimpse of a bout in video on on youtube could pick this up and really start to start down the path you think that's you think i got that right yeah and i appreciate that um you know you that that's that's your take on it because that means that i've succeeded basically yes you're right the first four chapters form a a a block where it starts from just noticing that Trump failed and that he wasn't really in power, although on paper he was.

And it sort of takes that, and it then explains how the government really works and how power actually operates. So the first is the state of exception where the sovereign is the one who decides on the exception. That's the famous formulation by Carl Schmidt. it, but obviously that wasn't Trump, so Trump wasn't the sovereign. Okay, so what was the sovereign? Well, the next chapter is the deep state. So it explains in that chapter, it gives a sort of basic overview of what a deep state is and the fact that deep states have existed in every society going back to the ancient world.

But I don't spend too much time sketching out what it is because I think most people understand it. What I explained mostly in that chapter is how it operates and how it works. So from there, we move on to the cathedral, which is basically it's a neo-reactionary concept that in a nutshell means that, like what the cathedral is basically the continuum between the public and private sphere. It's the idea that there is no real public-private distinction. the deep state isn't just the government. The deep state is also Twitter, well, not anymore, but it was Twitter.

It's Google. It is Harvard. It is the Ford Foundation, the Open Society, the foundations, you know, it's NGOs, big tech universities, and whatever the other fourth one I mentioned is. Yeah, it's just basically, it's, so the government,

if you think of the government as sort of bleeding into the private sphere, there's a gray area between those different things, you will understand the cathedral. And then the next chapter after that, because, I mean, this is all great, but it doesn't explain how this soft power gets translated into hard power. And that is reserved for the fourth chapter, which is the high, low, versus middle concept of, of how power works. So basically, the, we think of the high as the center or the, let's just call it official power.

Let's just, you know, the government to put a bookmark on it. The middle is all of the intermediary powers, so it's everything outside of government that also wields power. We could think of things like prominent individuals in the ancient world, clans, unions, the church, all that stuff isn't part of the government, but it does,

it's kind of like the government deputizes it to do things. Or it's possible that it could be in tension with the government and want to get free of the government and actually do its own thing. So the government basically has a bit of a tense relationship. The high has a tense relationship with the middle in this picture, and the low, which is everybody else outside of elite circles, is basically deputized to keep the middle in check. So the government deputizes an underclass to keep things like, you know,

to keep the church down, to keep unions in check, to keep prominent people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump in check, things like that. It's kind of the reverse of the meme view of history where, you know, the elites of all stripes basically stomp all over the little people. So this high-low versus middle explains how the riots in 2020 were able to actually operate, where basically what you had was the deep state in concert with the cathedral, deputizing an underclass of whether it's minorities or sexual minorities

or women and things like people who are ostensibly have little power in society, it basically takes those people and it kind of activates them to work in the service of its own power. So that's kind of how the high low versus middle operates. Now the first four chapters, as you mentioned, are kind of black pilling. So the first, it just explains, and this is necessary, right? If you're going to do radical surgery, it's going to hurt a little bit. So this is what we kind of have to do for the first couple of chapters. The next chapter after that, there's a little bit of a term.

And it goes to noblese oblige. So this is an idea basically that the term means nobility obligates. And this is something that liberalism denies. It thinks it's not possible, which is why it's sort of allergic to power, at least open power. and so this chapter on noblesse oblige explains how a functional society works how does a society that's not you know dilapidated and falling apart and and all of that how does that work well it works on the principle of noblesse oblige so there's a bit of a turn there and the next several chapters kind of explain in positive terms like what a real society actually looks like

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with vouchers from Trump Dunebag. Search Trump Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Thunbiog, Kush Faragea. Yeah, let me get to that because there's a couple there that, well, there's one there that I had to go back and read over, but one that I really wanted to go over is because I'm reading, and are you familiar with Lagucco's book, The Demon and Democracy? You ever heard of it?

I'm not. I read it again. It's a Polish. Polish guy just basically shows how democracy and communism are basically the same, how they operate in the same exact way. And his thoughts on it, there's a lot of endoxa in there. So once you talk about that, because that's, I think people will look at that, that term and be like, well, what is that? And then they'll look at it. And it's because it's something we'll never we're going to learn under liberalism.

It might be something they have to read a couple times. So can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. Yeah. In this book, there are a few kind of, you know, 50 cent terms. There's some pretty big words here to describe things that we all understand, and a lot of them are Greek. So this is one of them.

And Doxa are, it's a concept that comes out of a book by Aristotle called Topic. Actually, it's in a few of his books. But, so what endoxa are are opinions or starting points for reasoning that are, you know, they're either held by reputable people or they're kind of handed down by the tradition. They're basically the root assumptions, the bedrock assumptions, the axioms that we begin from. and the question is, how do we get those? How do we get these assumptions? Because what liberalism tells us, because, I mean, I gave some pretty uncharitable

interpretations of what liberalism is a bit earlier, but to be a little more charitable to it, what liberalism is, is it's the idea that the abstract individual reasoning from his own premises is the epistemic authority. right? So the epistemic authority is not a book that we've inherited from time out of mind. It's not a tradition that's been handed down through the ages or anything like that. It's the brilliant individual that sort of begins from his own self-generated premises and then is able to kind of move the world and change the world on that basis. So you would think of somebody like a Newton or a Kant or a Darwin, although Darwin's an interesting case that we might get to later. All of these rational individuals are, you know, they're the epistemic authority, and the idea behind liberalism is that each of us individually is able to evaluate the deepest truths by simply considering them in light of our own reason. So that's liberalism put as charitably as I possibly can.

What endoxa are basically is, as I said, they're those assumptions, but they're not assumptions that you generated yourself. They are the assumptions that are arrived at through long intergenerational experience. So your reasoning is only as good as your premises. If you begin from false premises, your reasoning is not going to. going to be valid. No matter how sound it is, like you may draw the logical conclusion from those premises because the premises don't actually attach to anything real, your reasoning is going to be flawed. So the question then becomes, how do you get these premises? Well, by definition, an axiom is not rational, right? Because it's not, it doesn't actually, it's not justified

by anything. It's pre-rational. It's just a brute fact. It's just something that is there posited with no further justification. So there's a kind of, there's a kind of problem with the rational individual reasoning from his own premises because then you have to basically say, okay, well, each of us individually as the highest epistemic authority. Does this really seem a solid way to begin as opposed to, let's just say, the things that have worked for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And of course, when you sort of explain it clearly like this,

it's obvious that the premises that have weathered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are the place to begin. So where do we get these? basically get them from tradition. And the whole endoxa chapter is me kind of explaining why it is that the oldest and the most solid and the most established, like the most long established axioms are the ones that we want to go with. And I give the analogy of the vampire.

So the reason why the vampire is scary isn't just because. he's going to suck your blood, it's because he's old. Excuse me. It's because he's been there forever. It's because he has just sat in his castle for centuries and centuries, and just like all he does is read and acquire knowledge. And basically, if you're somebody who believes in, like, rationality and science and everything like that, I mean, all science really is, is it's an intergenerational empiricism.

It is, I mean, science is empirical in its very nature, and that empiricism just means drawn from experience. What science does is it takes, you know, empirical data, and it integrates them into a framework that then explains the world, but it does so in a way that it passes that down over time. So Newton has the idea, while Newton first believes in the Aristotelian physics of motion, But then he comes to understand that that's not the case, and he comes with his laws. He believes that everything's made of corpuscles, all this stuff.

And because that explains reality better than the alternatives, that becomes the standard. But then over time, we realize that there are some things that Newton can't account for, then relativistic physics comes in and so on. This whole process is basically like taking an empirical, like a set of data and interpretations that explain that data and then handing it down to the next generation. It gets refined over time. Basically what I'm saying is that science is a tradition. And tradition is really the paradigm for epistemic authority. It's not the rational individual.

It's actually the tradition. So endoxa are really the. hard-won starting points, those axiomatic beginnings that are clawed out of the muck that you get basically from long, hard, cruel, and bitter experience. And what liberalism wants to do, and rationality and modernity sort of in general, it just wants to throw all that away every generation, which is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. So basically, in dox the chapter isn't justification of tradition, but using an Aristotelian term. Ready for huge savings?

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Okay. You had mentioned Darwin and when I saw this when I read the title of the chapter I was like, okay, this should be interesting

but the way you approach this is different. You want to give Now, one of the reasons I have no problem, I think, I don't have a problem asking you. Do you get the idea that this book is going to be one of those books that a lot of people buy and give to people? I hope so. It's kind of designed for that. Yeah, I have a feeling that this book is going to be like one of those books that people are going to buy like 10 at a time and be like handing them out and telling people,

don't pay attention to the fact that it's over 400 pages. You can read it in bite-sized chunks. and especially the 10-step program, which is just so concise and so perfect. With that aside, Darwin. Talk a little bit about what your thoughts are of mentioning Darwin at this point, after endoxa. Right. Okay. So this is the chapter that follows the one that I've just explained.

So from the end of that sort of like that four-chapter run of like negative, I don't want to say negative negativity, but it's like a negative vision of the world. It's like this is how the world works and it's terrible and we can do better. And then there's a little, there's a turn with the Nobeless Oblis chapter. Over several chapters, we kind of get to understanding that tradition is actually the way that things need to work. And in fact, it's the way the things always do work. It's just a matter of like we can deny it and then just be like, silly and way off track, or we can accept it, and then we can actually come to grips with

the world. So what this chapter on Darwin explains is basically that what traditions are, is a, they can be, traditions can be understood in the context of natural selection. So what traditions are fundamentally is natural selection having operated on, institutions and beliefs. And as I sort of alluded to, or as I mentioned in the explanation before, traditions have weathered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. So these are things that have been sort of honed in the crucible of like hard and cruel and bitter experience.

They are something that we should take very seriously and be very, very, very reticent to abandon even when they seem like they're doing the wrong thing. Joseph de Maistra, who is one of my favorite writers, gives an example of of like dynastic monarchy, so non-elective monarchy, right? Where the, first of all, monarchy is something that most people don't take remotely seriously as a political principle today. but the idea that monarchy is something that can be inherited, like that the kingship can be inherited is just,

it's so outside of anything that we would ever believe in today that it's almost like ridiculous. It's like a punchline, you know? When Jordan Peterson's yelling about merit, he's explaining, he's basically saying that, he's saying the opposite of this, right? But the thing is, we should step back for a second and just look at the situation from an objective perspective. The fact is that this form of monarchy, as ridiculous as it seems, as much as it doesn't comport with reason, has built the world.

It really has built the foundation of everything up until the day before yesterday. And so we should probably be a little bit humble because really just being remotely right wing in your, orientation is about humility. It's really about epistemic humility. What we need to do is take a step back and say, well, why is that? But before we even arrive at a justification of it, it's important just to notice that it has built everything. So maybe there's something that tradition knows that we don't. Maybe there's something there that is actually, it's so deep and so difficult to understand that it's kind of inaccessible to our reason. So what these ideas are, what traditions are, is something that natural selection has

basically operated on for a long time and is selected for because it's adaptive, right? Another way we could put it is that we have the slow, organic growth of traditional folkways. and another thing that Maestra says is that these organic folkways the fact that they have grown up slowly over time that they've evolved over time is actually a reason why we should take them seriously because

you know something like the French constitution of 1791 right which is after the French Revolution this constitution that was supposed to be written across the face of reality for all time with a great trumpeting forth of praise and long deliberations, longer revisions, and so on and so forth. This constitution of 1791, which was a conscious attempt to start from scratch, this constitution, which is, you know, this epical shift that was supposed to last forever, only lasted a year.

And we've had like 15 of these things, 15 French constitutions since then. So maybe the idea that we should just like dig everything out and start from scratch, maybe we should have a little bit of humility and say, that's probably the wrong approach. and what Maistra gives us in the work of circumstances, which is his term, is the opposite, basically, that the slow organic growth of institutions over time is evidence of its being solid, basically. Meistra, at the time, he counter-revolutionary in the wake of the French Revolution. Meister really, really did not have any respect for these French constitutions. He really, he thought that the English constitution was the bees' knees.

He was really like he thought that that was awesome. Because the English constitution, unlike, say the American constitution, doesn't have a set of framers. It doesn't have somebody who wrote it because it's so old that it is just organically evolved over time in a way that comports with the folk soul of the English. it fits them like a glove because it's grown up organically over time. And what I explain in this chapter is, first of all, that that can be reconciled with Darwinism or natural selection,

as I mentioned. I've explained what this is, the work of circumstances, and I also explained later in the chapter that this comports very nicely with ideas of divine law. So whether that's pagan divine law, the Roman idea of Foss, or even the Vedic idea of

Rita or the Christian idea of Providence, that this is basically the will of God made manifest in the world by slow organic growth, where God uses the people who write the law or who speak forth, you know, the tradition. God basically uses them as circumstances. The men themselves don't write the laws. The men themselves are circumstances. employed by the divine to write the laws. So this chapter is probably the one, I think that people are going to be the least familiar with the concept, but I think because there hasn't really been a word for it,

something that's kind of been under the surface in the radical right for a long time. But I think this is basically what people mean when they say that, you know, we need to have an organic, society. We need to have traditional folk ways that, you know, what is ancestral to us is right for us. I think what they're basically saying is a combat. It could be filtered through a Darwinian lens, a traditionalist lens, or a divine law lens. And that's really what this chapter is about. Yeah, that's the word that I was, that kept coming into my mind was organic when I was reading it. All right, so we talked about liberalism.

And so part two is called illiberal concepts. And then when you look at the titles, some of those people may automatically go, well, wait a minute, these look like things that are a part of liberalism now. So let me pick one out. You have the Proposition Nation. How is the Proposition Nation an illiberal concept? concept. Right. Okay. So the proposition nation is the idea that, what's the best way, how can I put this? Okay, so the

proposition nation is the idea that membership as part of the nation, so to be, let's just say American, is to hold a set of beliefs, right? Is to affirm a set of propositions. Now, of course, that in itself is completely liberal. There's nothing illiberal. about it. But to understand it clearly is basically to understand its falsehood. So I give an example in this chapter where there's like an exchange between Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher, which is a pretty good summary or crystallization of a confrontation between an illiberal and a liberal. So what happens in this exchange between Powell and Thatcher is that there's a disagreement on whether one owes a loyalty to values or ideals or to one's people. And what Powell says is he says,

I would fight for England even if it was communist. And Margaret Thatcher, it was just like her brain through a divide by zero exception. It didn't understand, like it could not actually grasp this concept. And she says, that's nonsense. If I send British troops overseas to fight, it's going to be for our values. And Powell says, values can't be fought for. They can't be destroyed. They, or anything like that. They exist outside of time and space. And what you're really fighting for is your people. And so this is a great, this is a great crystallization of the difference between a liberal and an illiberal. So the liberal will at the end of the day, fight for ideology. And the illiberal will at the end of the day fight for something

concrete and embodied their own folk. It's as though, I mean, Thatcher had basically just been confronted by the difference between American republicanism, which is what she's all about, and English conservatism or Toryism. So propositional identity is something that is, like when you understand what it is clearly, it is not a good thing. It's basically something that can't hold your society together. And in some ways, this is probably the point, because, of course, the sovereign, when it's malignant, wants to keep the country weak so it can continue to rule over it and wants to keep

people divided so that they can't challenge its authority. And this is what happens when your identity is a set of propositions. You can't be argued out of, I mean, you can be argued out of any propositional identity in theory. I mean, some people, you know, just attach themselves to an ideology and never budge. But the fact is that on average, and this is what we care about, we don't really care about exceptions. It's part of another chapter. We care about what happens on average, which is why stereotypes work. But on average, people who their whole identity is wrapped up in, let's just say, I'm a conservative,

or I believe in freedom of speech, or I believe in this and that and this and that. I believe, if your identity begins with I believe, then it's something that you can be argued out of. And that's fundamentally a weak identity. Nobody will ever argue you out of who your mother and father are or what color your skin is. That is a strong identity. And also the proposition nation itself is like the idea that our countries are just like a set of values that are to be affirmed and nothing else that no matter who you are like who you were born to, all your enthronedness, the idea that that doesn't matter, all that matters is belief, is kind of a halfway house to globalism. So there is a very, very large contingent of people on the,

supposedly on the right, who are basically civic nationalist. So this is really what civic nationalism is, is this propositional identity, which is not really nationalism at all. It's just sort of incipient globalism. It's sort of like an intermediate stage on the way to globalism. Because, you know, take for example the propositional identity that is America, right? If you ask a civic nationalist what the actual beliefs are that America represents, he's pretty much just going to give you the tenets of liberalism. You know, he might say something like, you know, it's a very much.

about individualism, limited government, popular sovereignty, all these different things, right? And then ask the same, not the same person, but ask a person from Britain or a person from Canada or a person from South Korea, for example, what the propositions are that underlie their societies. And it's still going to be liberalism. It won't be distinguishable. these propositional countries are indistinguishable from each other. So at that point, if you have basically an identical list between these different countries of what they're about, then the globalist is just going to turn around to that point and say, well, why do we have different countries?

And he's going to be right to do that, at least beginning from right from the perspective of starting from that assumption. So there is really no principled way to defend countries at all if they're propositional. So basically, if your identity is affirming a set of propositions, you kind of have to be globalist. So the proposition nation turns out to actually be a contradiction. Civic nationalism is not nationalism. It's just globalism that hasn't got there yet. So this is the reason why I put this chapter in here and why I frame it as an illiberal concept.

Because if it's understood clearly, it actually spells the end of nationalism. So it's a fake kind of nationalism, and it's important that we hold it up for what it is. There's another one in here, another term that a lot, I like to throw it around. A lot of people like to throw it around is under illiberal concepts, is a narco-tirony. And I'm sure we have, there are billionaires on Twitter who are talking about our narco tyranny. So it's a concept that more and more people are getting, getting familiar with now. So how do you, how do you label that under illiberal concepts? So anarcho tyranny is a term that was coined by Sam Francis, which kind of gives it some illiberal bona fides to start with.

But it's a term that I actually, I thought was pretty. stupid when I first heard it because I thought it was supposed to be basically like an actual ideology like anarcho-communism or anarcho-capitalism or something like that. But it's obviously just a brute contradiction, right? And the way that Sam Francis explains it is that it is both anarchy, you know, the failure of the state to enforce laws or the, if not the failure, or maybe the abnegation of its responsibility, and also tyranny, which is the enforcement of laws unjustly or oppressively. So that seems kind of weird.

What kind of a Hegelian move can you make to reconcile those two? But basically, anarcho-tirony is about punishing the innocent and protecting the guilty, right? It's where you get anarchy. So the government institutes anarchy where it's supposed to keep order and punish criminals and so on and so forth. But it's also tyranny. So, you know, government overreach, basically,

where it's supposed to leave people the hell alone. You know, it's the synthesis of those two things. It's punishing things that are normal and right, like going to church and you know believing in all of these old and outdated concepts like things like patriarchy

ethnocentrism it's cracking down on all these things tyrannically but it's also just letting criminals like run through the street Thomas Carlyle had a really good term for this he called it anarchy plus a street constable

and that's a great way of framing anarcho tyranny it's it's both negligence on the one hand and malice on the other. It's like the worst of both worlds. So I give a lot of examples of anarcho tyranny in this chapter. One of them being... Sorry, go ahead. No, I was going to interrupt, but no, please go on.

Okay. So one example that I give because I'm a Canadian is the introduction of legislation by the liberal government in 2021, where criticism of Muslims and homosexuals would earn one a $20,000 fine. At the same time, and I think pretty much in a space of a month or so, there was an academic in a university in Canada that called for the end of whiteness, and we all know what that means. It's not like the end of an abstraction. It means the end of white people. So on the one hand, you have people, it's impossible to criticize people who are in your country because they're taking advantage of the negligence of the government. But on the

other hand, it's illegal also to defend the native stock of your country because it's in the process of being erased. So that's a good example of anarcho tyranny. It's again punishing the innocent and protecting the guilty. Another good example is the Sackler family, right, with Purdue Pharma, who basically created the opioid crisis that we all understand. You don't really need to go into that. Who were, you know, they were prosecuted, but they were also later given legal immunity to lawsuits. So they're basically like prosecuted and convicted or whatever. And they were given legal immunity because of course they had been convicted already. But at the same time, they were allowed to declare bankruptcy. And before they did that, they withdrew $10 billion from

the company. So none of these people individually personally had to declare bankruptcy or lose any money, it was just a company that was liquidated, and they all individually got off basically scotry. So that's another example of anarcho tyranny. I give lots and lots of them. There's probably about five or six different ones like that that I give. But there's lots of other ways that anarcho tyranny works as well. One of them is by having a, and you know, Pete, you and I are both sort of ex-libertarians, and this is one where we kind of got to give libertarians at least a little nod here. One of the most effective ways that anarcho tyranny works is by having a massive

complex network of vague, unclear, contradictory, and obscure, like, laws and regulations. So, basically, you know, what happens is that you are always guilty of something. No matter what you do, as soon as you step out your door, there is some sort of law that you've violated And the state basically, because of this massive Kafkaesque network of laws, the state has to choose which ones to enforce. And of course, that choice is made not on the basis of reason or fairness or justice. It's made on the basis of political expediency.

So you think back to the, I think it was in about 2012 or something like that, where the IRS, it came to like, that the IRS is just like completely targeted conservative and right-wing groups and left liberal groups alone. That's another example of anarcho tyranny, is basically using the law in that way. It's like the haphazard application of law for political reasons. Anyway, this whole chapter basically is framed in the context of the Floyd riots of 2020, when the government basically turned a blind eye to not only like lighting, everything on fire, which is bad enough. But doing that at a time when supposedly there was this civilization-ending pandemic happening,

they basically said, okay, normal people, you've got to stay in your house because there's this big pandemic, you've got to wear the mask, you've got to tow the line, you've got to bend the knee and kiss the ring. But all of these anti-Fa protesters, well, they're allowed to run rampant on the streets. We're allowed to have these huge protests with three. tens of thousands of people because actually it's not really COVID. That's the health emergency. Racism is the health emergency.

So we've got to let these people run free, light everything on fire, smash all your windows, destroy your businesses, overturn the election, all that stuff. We've got to let that happen because we basically just have political ends to serve. So anarcho tyranny was the reason why this term has, started to become, it has currency today, is really because of that situation with the George Floyd riots. Everybody saw it. It was the first time that it was completely out in the open and just undisguised anarcho tyranny. So now you've got people on Twitter talking about it

because thankfully Elon Musk has purchased it and now there's at least one place that you can say a few things. So anarcho tyranny is an illiberal concept because, it basically just explains how liberalism is totally negligent in its application of the law. All right. So in the first two sections, you pretty much tear down liberalism, show how it operates, and then show the concepts that are byproducts of it, basically. And then, you know, once you, once you figure this all out, it's like, okay, so what are the answers? And part three is called The Big Ideas. And I'm just going to pick one out for the sake of time here. And something that might jump out at someone who's looking at the scanning through the table of contents and just smack them right in the face.

Regner Redbeard's might is right. This one. I like this chapter. I like this chapter because it's actually pretty nuanced. I mean, all the chapters, I mean, none of them are really, like, not nuanced. But this one especially, because might is right seems like the most monstrous idea imaginable to anybody, including us, right? And we're, of course, accused of having a might is right ideology of stomping all over the week and everything like that. The radical right is supposedly a boot stamping on a face forever, et cetera, et cetera, right?

But of course, we don't believe that might is right because that basically what might is right means is that whatever it is that's that has won deserves to win, which it makes kind of morality impossible. You know what I mean? if the like ubermensch basically stands beyond good and evil then how is it like isn't doesn't that just mean that like we're just making stuff up you know what i mean like that there are no values beyond the individual this seems to be completely at odds excuse me completely at odds with what we said before about tradition everything like that but when you think about a little more deeply might is right actually has, it's not dismissed so easily, I guess.

Because first of all, you at least have to have, a morality has to have force in order to be moral at all. Because what would a morality look like that in principle even can't be enforced? This is something that was mentioned in that chapter on Darwin, is that for a thing to be good, it has to exist. And for a thing to exist, it has to be strong in the first place. Ragnar Redbeard, who is this anonymous author, basically, this book is quite interesting. It's a very poetical exposition of the idea that the strong should rule over the weak.

And this is something that seems completely at odds with all morality. it seems like a Nietzschean ubermensch thing that's just like completely overturns like, you know, any traditional ideas of morality. But if we actually look at traditions, if we look at the actual traditions that are embodied in reality, we do see this. We do see some echoes of the idea that strength is moral. For example, one of the chapters that I go into earlier in that section is on the book of Job. excuse me the book of job is my favorite book in the bible by a long shot i really like this because it tries to grapple with the problem of theodicy which is the problem of evil it tries to grapple with that in a way that is the most convincing out of any other solution that i've seen um given that's typically given

to the problem problem of evil being basically that you know if god is both um is omnis omnipotent, omniscient, and all good, then why is there evil in the world? This is a hard question for, especially for like a monotheistic faith. But I think the book of Job gives a convincing answer. And that answer basically is, sit down, stop asking questions, where were you when I built the foundations of the world? Which is kind of a crazy thing to say. Like it's almost a non-answer. But when Job, so most people are familiar with the book of Job, there's a pious man by the name of Job, who is struck down unfairly, apparently, by, you know, basically it's a wager between God and the devil or the adversary. It's a wager between God and another divine intelligence or something like that,

where the adversary basically says, look at this man who's really pious, do you think he would still be pious if you didn't reward him? And they sort of enter into a wager. God punishes Job until Job curses him. And then Job basically says, God, why are you doing this?

This is totally unjust. And then in a very interesting answer, what Job says is not he doesn't give a reason. God doesn't give a reason. He doesn't give a justification. He says, where were you when I laid the foundations of the world? Which is a very interesting thing. Because the subtext there is basically, how can you question the ultimate authority? Because it doesn't even make sense to question the ultimate authority. Because the ultimate authority is also your starting point, your endocrat. song for being able to challenge anything morally. You see what I mean? It's kind of like taking the government to court. It doesn't really make sense. So anyway, that's the book of Job. I think this is a

wonderful illustration of the sort of the knots that you can get tied in with trying to like establish morality outside of the divine. But the subtext there is basically that strength or power or authorship is the sort of basis of moral authority. The reason why God's will is unquestionable is because God is the author or the creator of the world. Now we don't just get this idea in the Old Testament. We also get it among the Greeks as well. There's a famous exchange between the Athenians and a smaller Greek people called the Millions and the Peloponnesian war. So basically the Peloponnesian war was a war between Sparta and Athens for mastery over all of Greece. The Melians were a, they were a colony of Sparta, but they tried to remain

neutral. And of course they ran up against the Athenians, and this neutrality didn't really save them. So as the Athenians were conquering the Melians, they said, basically you get the famous line, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. So the Melians are trying to appeal to natural law. They're trying to appeal to morality and just be like, you know, why are you conquering us? We've done nothing wrong. And the Athenians say, because we can, basically. And the Melians come back and they say, well, you know, you shouldn't step all over the idea of natural law because, it might protect you at some stage later.

And then the Athenians turn around and say, if you were in our place, you would do the same thing. So it's like this is pretty harsh and hard to understand from the standpoint of modernity. But when the chips were down, even Athens, which is this cradle of philosophy and humanism and democracy and all these wonderful ideas that the modern world takes for granted, Granted, even Athens was happy to revert to a might-is-right idea when it comes to war.

So speaking of war, basically what might is right, another way of putting might is right is that there is no, what we might call law of nations. So the law of nations is sort of international law. It's what people today call the rules-based order, the laws of war and everything like that. what might as right is saying is there are no laws of war basically there is no higher court than war and you know liberalism tries to dispute this and it does so very famously in the aftermath of world war two right with the the Nuremberg trials but it's kind of ironic that the only way that liberalism can do that the only way that liberalism can do that the only way that liberal can say, no, there are laws of war and you have to obey them, the only way that it can do that is by winning a war. You see what I mean? It's really ironic that way. So this idea of the rule of the stronger or might is right can be found in ancient times and it can be found in modern times. I give another example in this chapter of the Chinese mandate of heaven, which is perhaps the most clear expression of might. is right because what the mandate of heaven is is basically that the ruler who sits on the throne is justified and you know his sovereignty is basically um is justified by the fact that he is

sitting on the throne on the dragon throne so it basically is in some ways kind of the ultimate conservative principle because what it says is that whoever rules over you is uh just justified in ruling by virtue of the fact that they are there. So this is kind of, you know, it kind of gets us back to the idea that like, well, doesn't this mean that like, you know, there is no morality apart from force? And, you know, for that matter, what good is it to us in the radical right who are completely out of power? Right. But another interesting thing about the mandate of heaven is that it was, it was at once in China used to justify the emperor. But on the other hand, it was also used to justify rebellion.

Because, of course, if the rebellion succeeded, that means that the mandate has passed to the usurper, right? So in some ways, it's kind of this like super dangerous tool or weapon that can both be, like, it can be the strongest justification of tradition and the established order, the status quo. but it can also be the strongest justification of revolution and usurpation and everything like that. So it kind of feels like, well, maybe we should just put it away. But at the end of the day, it's kind of like, I mean, all ideologies kind of rest on it. You know what I mean? when all arguments for wokeness and intersectionality and third wave feminism and all that, because these are such thin and flimsy ideologies, at the end of the day,

the feminist lib-tard is going to say, well, if our ideology is so wrong, why did it win? Right? and, you know, there basically is no comeback from the classical liberal. And when the classical liberal, you know, of the, let's just say, of the 19th century, looks at Christianity and says, and all Christian arguments, like from Joseph de Maestra to, you know, Louis Bonald, to Ludwig von Haller, all of these counter-revolutionaries, all these counter-enlightment thinkers had so much better arguments than any liberal

which is kind of make them seem like children and by comparison at the end of the day the classical liberal would then turn around and say well if Christianity was so great why did we defeat it and this can go back further and further and further and further every revolution at the end of the day

will, you know, when it's really pressed, it will fly to this idea that if our thing wasn't so good, why did it win? So the chapter doesn't really come down and say, might as right is a good thing, nor might as right as a bad thing. It just says at the end of it that these are hard questions. might is right seems to be much more foundational than people think and that the one thing that we can kind of take away from it is that we should have a nuanced idea of it right we shouldn't reject it out of hand because you know it's something that's super ancient it goes back a long long way so that in itself means that we should you know maybe take a second look at it kind of thing well i think that was a That was a great little lesson there.

And just I wanted to mention people will say, oh, well, Job is the Old Testament. If anybody wants to read the same thing, read Romans chapter 9 in the New Testament, and you'll get the same exact argument there. And it's one of the reasons why when I was in seminary, people didn't like to talk about Romans chapter 9, because it seems very unchristian. But, well, I really appreciate this, and the book is, looks fantastic. It's probably once I started going through it, I was like, this is a book that I'm excited about. And I'm definitely looking forward to giving it to some, giving it to some people and handing it out.

Definitely a gift kind of material there. So tell people where they can get it. Yeah. Well, we've made a very simple URL. go to, it's just Imperiumpress.org slash C-T-H. That'll get you there. And if you want to buy some additional copies for friends, we now have a bulk discount. So I think it's 15% off if you buy three or more. Maybe it's five or more. But anyway, it's like a pretty hefty discount for a handful of books. And if you want to buy

10 or more, you get 20% off. So we've already had a bunch of people that have placed bulk orders. This would make a really, really good gift for some people in your life that a lot of the audience knows. It may not be the thing that you want to give to your like CNN watching Boomer Dad. Although maybe, I don't know if he's open-minded. But, you know, for those folks that are at your gym or your dojo or, you know, at your church group that are, you know, just starting to come to grips with the

questioning the narrative, basically, this book is a really good way to kind of, not just get their feet wet, but to really get them pretty far into our, into our way of seeing things. Now, it is, the language doesn't pull any punches. There's a little bit of vulgarity in there, just sort of shop talk. It's sort of meant for, meant for the boys, really, although I'm sure women will appreciate it as well. It's also religiously neutral. I myself am a pagan, but it's not a pagan book. It's not a Christian book. It's just really an illiberal book. There's lots of reference to all of our traditions all throughout the West, lots of examples that pulled from the Bible, lots from classical Greece and the

Norse sagas and things like that, as well as more modern examples. The book is kind of written in the wake of 2020 as well. So it's something that is for a lot of our guys. I think it's going to have a very broad appeal. If you go to Empyriumpress.org slash CTH, then you'll find it. And I think it's going to go a long way. Mike, I appreciate it. I always enjoyed talking to you.

I always learned something. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Pete. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.