The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1144: 'Woke Right-Type' Accusations are Nothing New w/ Josh Neal

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

77 MinutesPG-13Josh Neal is a former psychology professor and author of the books "American Extremist" and "Understanding Conspiracy Theroies Vol. 1"Josh joins Pete to discuss his recent piece, in which he demonstrates that the justifications for the "Woke Right" allegations are not new.'Woke Right' is the New 'Paranoid Style in American Politics'Josh's SubstackJosh's YouTubeAmerican ExtremistUnderstanding Conspiracy Theroies Vol. 1Josh on TwitterPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'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 Pekingana show. Josh Neal is back after a long hiatus. What's happening, Josh? Yeah, it's good to be back. I appreciate the invitation. As I was saying to you before we went live, this is live, I think, right? Yeah, well, no, we're recording. We're just hanging out, you don't know what I was saying before? I had to, what's the saying? I had to get my ducks in a row. And I did, and it was good because it helped me put a lot of things into focus. And I feel like a lot of my energy in this space, this community has gotten like, laser-focused, much narrower, much more refined. I'm so much happy with my writing, and that's obviously what we're here to talk about.

So, yeah, thanks for asking me on. Yeah, absolutely. So I've done as much as I can to stay away from this topic in my episodes, in my substack. I'd bring it up here and there. But the thing I liked about, and we're talking about the woke right, something that it looks like James Lindsay might have came up with and, you know, and then a bunch of other midwits are running with like Constantine Kissin and people like that. And the reason I decided I wanted to talk about it is because after I read your substack about it that Unz picked up, I was, you come out from a completely different angle than most people. Most people are like here, you're coming at it from actually a historical angle and comparing it to something that's happened in the past. So what was your reaction the first time you heard the term woke right?

Well, it made me think of, and I wrote this in the essay, but it made me think of when people started using SJW against Trump people back in the day. I mean, I was, you know, we're both not spring chickens per se. We were both fully formed adults 10 years ago, so we have a really good memory of who the players were, what ideas were happening, where the culture was moving. And I wasn't alt-right or nationalist or anything until after basically Election Day 2016.

But I was online, and I followed all the memes. I followed all the stuff that kind of trickled upwards to YouTube and like Stefan Malianu and people like that or Scott Adams. And so I remember the anti-SJW moment. I guess some people who were plugged into Gamergate would say, you know, it had something to do with that too. And so I remember like for a couple of years, like 2010 to 2014, 2015, like social justice this, social justice that, social justice warrior. And then the moment that there was the Trump right came in and was starting to really be effective, pushing back against all of the crazy late Obama era politics.

Suddenly that got turned around on people like me who were just like, you know, I thought I was just being like a rational, normal person, like a normie with like my head on a swivel. But now suddenly it's like, oh, now we're going to turn this rhetoric back around on you because now we've got to control you. Like we've scapegoated all these people who are now out and now you're the problem and so we're going to throw it at you. So it made me think of when SJW was turned. on the right wing. And so my first thought after that, or my second thought, I guess, was just like, okay, this is just a slur. Like, this is very obviously a smear to, again, kind of go after the harder wing of the

Trump right, but also to go after, like, real nationalists, real identitarians or real conservatives, real Christians, real pop. Basically, people with a spine and a backbone who are willing to call a spade a spade and I'm not going to play euphemistic word games and step around the thorny issues. So those are my first thoughts. And then I also kind of thought it wouldn't stick. But James Lindsay has like really, like a dog with the bone,

he just keeps, he's kept putting it back out there to the point where he started building like a coalition with the Triggernometry people. And then when that, I guess this would have been a week ago, maybe a week and a day, when that clip went on Twitter, like there's a light bulb moment. I was like, oh, this is,

because he actually explained what he meant by woke, right. He gave this whole sort of counter-narrative against our worldview. And I was like, oh, I know what you're doing now. Like, you're actually trying to put forth this other worldview. And this is familiar. I've seen this movie before.

What I thought is most interesting about it, was it was coming from somebody and then adopted by other people who were, I didn't leave the left, the left, left me people. And normally when something like this happens, it's usually the quote-unquote right wing that's doing it. You know, Jonah Goldberg putting out liberal fascism or something like that so he can accuse anybody who's, you know, to the right of, Eleanor Roosevelt of being a fascist.

And yeah, that's what I saw. It's like, okay, so this is like IDW adjacent, you know, intellectual dork web, people adjacent who, and the first thing I thought was, Lindsay, he's just grasping because he's kind of irrelevant. He's blown his load on what he does. okay, you explain to a bunch of people who are too, you know, are too offended by Paul Gottfried to go read what he wrote 25 years ago where he could tell you exactly what this whole woke stuff is. And he was a prophet back then. And he's writing two right-wingers. But, you know, right-wingers always want the approval of the left. They don't want the approval of anybody to

their right because, you know, those are just Nazis. But yeah, that was the thing that, It was these, those left, the left left me people, you cannot entertain them. You cannot give them the time of day. You cannot platform them. They will always stab you in the back. I don't, how the fuck the people don't know this? I did that with somebody with like one specific person in the past. One specific person I did that with in my libertarian days.

And I learned, deleted all those episodes. repented and it's like it's not going to happen if i have a leftist on it's going to be a leftist who's not here to talk about leftism or rightism they're an expert on like ukraine or something like that you know so isn't it weird isn't it weird that it's the left left left the left left us guys yeah um i was thinking about that last night and it the thing that's um i guess there's two things that makes that suspect. One, these are not people with agency. So it's not like they, it's in the phrase, the left, I didn't leave the left, the left, left, left me. In other words, you were totally fine with the way everything was happening, the direction the country

was going in, the way your own party operated. But actually, your party wasn't happy with it. Your party was like, we don't need you anymore. So these are not agency, these are not people with agency like they didn't come to this eureka moment where they suddenly realized that that they were you know on the wrong side of history or whatever um so and they also like don't have any self-reflective ability either they just they think that they were always in the right and you know they were always morally correct not politically right um and and that the left just got too wacky but really what happened was the left uh you know left progressive liberalism had somewhere else who wanted to go.

It had a schedule to keep up with. We got to get to the next stop. We have to wage the next battle in the culture war. And now, you know, the left left me. Those people are now just, they're the latest scapegoats. And that's kind of what, like the same thing with the SJW thing. It's like, okay, clearly Trump comes in. The political culture is different.

We need somebody to hold the bag for us. and we'll dump it on BuzzFeed. We'll dump it on Vox. We'll dump it on blue-haired crazies. We'll dump it on people that are not useful to us anymore. And that's the same thing with Woke. It's like, okay, as people are saying on Twitter, you know, Woke was defeated at the ballot box.

Asterisk, asterisk, I don't totally condone that statement, but just for the sake of conversation, you know, things are different. and some people have to go. The regime has to kind of cut some dead weight in order to pivot. Whatever is going to happen over the next four years, it has to do something different, and that means getting rid of things that don't work anymore. And so this woke left thing is just a, it's now a scapegoat that lots of people in the establishment are, whether cynically or honestly or whatever, are willing to dispose of

and maybe even look at a little bit critically. So they can sacrifice that. Now you can call the new enemies, which is people like us, people who put Trump in office, people who liked Project 2025, so on and so forth. People who are supporting Daniel Penny, by the way, he just beat another count today. So we need to be dealt with,

and they've got this convenient tool. Just as a final thought, is I kind of admire the way that the system really can repurpose everything that happens. Like they can turn a bad thing into a good thing. So like woke was this horse that they rode into or rode into power on. And then it became something that was not feasible for them anymore or problematic. But it still has a use for them. It's still a cudgel they can beat us with.

So I just, I think there's something kind of darkly funny about that. But yeah, those are my thoughts. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favorite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs.

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something you said there about how there was a it was a train their

you know leftism is this train and it's moving and it took a direction it went in a

direction that they didn't want to follow where they had to get off. I've been reading this book, The Demon and Democracy by Rizard Lagutko, and he talks about this.

He basically says, if you have a political ideology, that is a path, that you're going somewhere with it. If it's not like you're seizing power and saying, stop, this is who we are.

We're trad-cath. We're right-wingers. We're, National Socialists, whatever the fuck it is. If you're not taking power to say this is where, if you're looking at a path going forward, you're a liberal. You're trying to move in a direction to make things better and better and better. No, there's already, that's not the goal of politics.

That should be like your personal life. That should be your church life. Maybe your church wants to, has goals, but your politics can't have goals. Your politics has to be something that stays in one place and protects you so that you, and it's not trying to move you anywhere. Because if it's trying to move you somewhere, you have to go with, if you don't go with it, if you decide to go with it, now you're on the path of it going left or right or everywhere, and you're basically screwed. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So, all right.

in the article, and here's the thing that I think you brought up that really no one else has brought up. You had a heading called The New Paranoid Style, and you bring up Richard Hofstetter. Why don't you get into exactly why you bring up Hofstetter and how you related to this woke right thing? Yeah, so this was kind of a convenient. thing for me because I've been reading up on the post-war consensus the last couple of years for a lot of my writing. And it started with Carl Popper. Last time we spoke, I think which was back in February, was just before my new book, my most recent book came out, called Understanding Conspiracy Theory.

And it was very much based on the idea that a big part of contemporary conspiratorial culture has to do with the development of the post-war consensus. and James Lindsay on his recent trigonometry appearance, and this I consider to be a major own goal, like a crazy faux pa. He went ahead and he basically spilled the beans on our worldview. And he said it in half the time it takes us to say it. He said it maybe more articulately than a lot of us can say it. He named a lot of the players involved.

I mean, he showed all of the receipts. It was really kind of impressive. It's like if you wanted the elevator pitch for the radical right or the nationalist right, you could clip out that section. And he talks about how, well, the woke right believes in this thing called the pooky postwar consensus, this crazy idea of a post-war consensus. And I have been reading about Richard Hofstadter, who was a celebrated historian throughout the 40s and 50s. He's a New Yorker like me.

He's from Buffalo, ethnically Jewish, but American. and he was an avowed American liberal. In his youth, he was a Marxist. Like a lot of people at that time, he was a Marxist. I believe he may have even been affiliated with the American Communist Party. And like a lot of people of his ilk at that time, when communism in Russia changed, moved in a more Stalinist direction,

people like Hofstadter said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is the left leaving me kind of thing. like, whoa, pump the brakes, dude. We don't want to do this. And, you know, my suspicion, which I think is born out historically, has a lot to do with the fact that Stalin moved Russia into a more kind of ethnic, sort of nationalistic, sort of traditional culture due to moving into a wartime footing, due to all kinds of things that were happening.

And so it wasn't Bolshevism anymore. It wasn't Leninism anymore. It wasn't what the kinds of things that people like, Hofstadter saw in it. It wasn't that intensely liberalizing political force that it was early on. Because when Lenin came in, and I'm not a historian, I don't really have the greatest understanding of Soviet Russia. But, you know, some of the things that Lenin and the Bolsheviks did when they first came in was liberalize a lot of things. Abortion, marriage laws, you know, sexuality, sexual ethics, things that look a lot like what liberalism has done here. around the world is what happened there.

And so obviously people like Hofstadter sought that. They said, hey, that's great. Stalin comes in, changes the direction of things, more religious, more ethnic, more chauvinistic, more chest thumping. You know, he's a Georgian bank robber, Stalin. So he's a strong man. And that didn't appeal to people like Hofstadter. So Hofstadter pivots disavats his communist past and disavows his historic,

his uh historic was it material history history i forget what the phrase is um the the marxist kind of genealogical materialism he disavows dialectical dialectical materialism yeah thank you thank you um and he starts moving in this direction of what's called consensus history now at the time in the united states consensus history again this had been 30s 40s round about there was how a lot of historians viewed history. That's how they did a lot of their history writing. Charles A. Beard being a good example of this, Charles A. Beard basically kind of put forth his own, if you want to say, like, I say this very, very loosely, sort of his own American spin on what people might think of as a kind of Marxist historiography, because he emphasized economic class conflict.

Not using Marxist language, not on Marxist terms, not without other Marxist baggage. He's often been confused or interpreted as a Marxist historian. As far as I can tell, that's not the case. But anyway, Hofstadter comes in and he makes some alterations, adjustments to this Beardian hypothesis. And as a result, he's kind of given, he's branded as the new face of consensus history. And he's looking at things like educational reform over the course of American history. He's looking at things like the emergence of populist parties over the course of American history. He's looking at things like gun rights, the gun culture in the United States.

And as is relevant to this essay, in the 1960s, he's looking at what he called pseudo-conservatism, which would have been at that time the Barry Goldwater president. presidential candidacy, the John Birch Society. It would have been McCarthy and the Red Scares. And he's calling this pseudo-conservatism. It's his way of sort of smearing the most populist wing of the American right at his time in the same way that James Lindsay is doing today with this idea of the woke right. And he's basically saying that, well, you have this group of people who are engaging in a sort of analysis of power relations, but they're doing it because they're parochial backwoods yokels who are paranoid and mentally ill.

And that was the essay, paranoid style in American politics, talking about the John Burke Society, talking about Barry Goldwater, talking about all this kind of aggressive conservative energy that was developing at that time, which, of course, they needed to do something with. They didn't want that to become hegemonic in the United States. When I say they, I mean, the progressive liberals, other factions in the United States at that time. So that eventually got published a year later in a collection of essays. And I just, it just looks, there's a couple of things in the way that Hofstadter presented his case that was just very similar to me as to how James, Lindsey presented his picture of the woke right in both cases they're they're

presenting the narrative from the point of view of their opposition in the case of James Lindsay he's walking us through the development of the post-war consensus he's walking us through Bill Buckley in the National Review kicking out the real conservatives he's he's name-dropping all of these intellectuals who are blacklisted from kind of academic and the popular culture like Carl Schmidt. But then at the very end of it, after basically laying out all the facts and laying out all the receipts, he just says, but it's woke. But all of this truth, okay, okay, okay, okay, but it's woke. Now forget about it.

Which is basically what Hofstadter did. He's talking about the ethnic replacement of German-Irish Catholics and Anglo-Saxon Protestants. he's talking about he's well he's talking about the john birch society and the resistance against communists he's talking about robert welch in the birch society he's talking about McCarthy and he's laying out these facts and at the very end of it when we at the pivotal moment when you have to either say like

they're right we should do x as a result of this he says but they're paranoid and so we can swipe it under the rug and it's illegitimate and it doesn't matter and they're all crazy kooks and they're all parochial they've got their their pitchforks and their torches and they don't really know anything there's some really really remarkable things he says in the book like he uses the example I don't know if you're one of these people that gets into this kind of stuff but he brings up

fluoride in the water supply reading it I'm just like totally I'm just familiar way so he says there's one passage where he says and this is very Lacanian Lacan was a French psychoanalyst. There's a famous quote attributed to him. If your wife is cheating on you, if you fear that you're, even if you, let me walk it back, if you fear that your wife is cheating on you and she is, you're still paranoid for worrying about it. So to chew on that for a second, like that's a crazy kind of statement to make.

Hofstadter does the same thing. He's like, even if the government puts, fluoride in the water supply as a form of social control, political control, and they were doing it to buttress a larger socialist agenda. You would be crazy for thinking that. And now you read that in 2024 and it's like we've, for 20 years or more, we're reading all of these reports about, well, that's what happened. And that's why it happened. It's like not only did they put fluoride in the water supply but they did it for this kind of biopolitical demographic control along the way towards rolling out this comprehensive socialist agenda it's just like that's really really crazy to read after the

fact but um yeah so in addition to this kind of comprehensive narrative and the the use of a pejorative i just think that there's uh i lay out some other arguments in the essay too i don't know if you want to get to them but those are just the most remarkable things that allowed me to draw that comparison. ESB transformed how the country powered itself once and now we're doing it again. Working with businesses all across Ireland helping them reduce their energy costs, reach their sustainability goals, and future-proof their operations. Because this is not just for us, it's for future us. Contact our Smart Energy Services team at ESB.com. You catch them in the corner of your eye.

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Yeah, I mean, we can get to the other arguments. I just wanted to say it's, what's funny is, as Lindsay is listing all of these things, which are historical facts, painting them as conspiracy theory of these things, for a second?

Yeah, you rober that out pretty badly. Okay. So let me start that again. So one of the things Lindsay did that just was, he's listing all these things and he's listing all these people and he's trying to present it as a conspiracy theory, yet like all the people he's mentioning

are writing that they're doing these things, or writing these things that these things have happened, are saying there is a post-war consensus, are bragging about the fact that they've changed the social and political habits of the American public. And I think the thing what Lindsay is, is that he realizes he's losing and that his classical liberalism, I remember he had this tweet, and I think it's the tweet that got me blocked, because he said, the only thing that can defeat the left, the woke on the left, is classical liberalism.

And classical liberalism hasn't even gotten started yet. And my comment was, so what you're saying is real classical liberalism has never been tried. And this was at a time when he was attacking Paul Gottfried as woke. And Paul Gottfried said on my show, and like people did. didn't hear it. People said, no, Paul said this. I'm like, go back and listen to what he said. Paul Godfrey said the only thing that is going to defeat this left authoritarianism is right-wing authoritarianism. And I agree with him. That that is the only thing that reverses the post-war consensus is to the one thing that actually, that they were actually fighting against, that the whole

war, the whole world had to go war against, you know, back in time when the post-war consensus was in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, um, in the, um, the mid-war years between the wars, when it was starting to formulate and people were literally fighting back. I mean, you had new political movements rising to fight against it. And I think Lindsay just realizes, I think he's in a panic. I think he's in a complete panic that he knows that, he knows that, People are just falling away that, like, say what you want about MAGA people. I think MAGA people right now at this point want change, and they don't care how they get it. They don't care if, you know, Trump has to become an article to president.

They just want change. And I think that's what scares the crap out of these people, is they know that eventually this is coming for them. Yeah. Yeah, you were a libertarian in the previous life. I was a libertarian in a previous life. I remember reading Thomas D. Lorenzo, like, Abraham Lincoln is the American dictator. It's like these were the kinds of concerns people had seven, 10, 12 years ago. And if you talk to your average conservative, they don't care at all, especially post-COVID.

Once things, you know, stopped heating up in the COVID era and you're able to go out and do things again, I did a lot of going out. I think probably like a lot of people did. Like let me get some air. And just talking to people, business owners, whether it's like local bars, restaurants, whatever, people who had to close businesses, people who kept their businesses open at extreme cost to them and their families and their financial security and things like that. And to a person, every one is saying things like, well, I won't repeat what they said on air.

But they were saying things like, I don't care what has to happen. I do not care what has to happen, but it has to happen. These are the kinds of things that they were saying. And just to your point, like, we've almost, I say this again with a little bit of an asterisk, we've almost been able to have kind of any other political option presented to us, but something like a strong conservative executive. We've had all of these flavors of right liberalism, libertarianism, paleo-libertarianism, conservatism, paleo, military, or minotarianism, whatever, all these flavors on the left of different brands of socialist, communist light, communist, diet communism,

thunder, whatever, like mango communism, like boilerplate neol liberalism. We have had every kind of personality, every flavor, every color. But the one thing we haven't been able to have. And it's also the one thing, that we had to fight a 10-year culture war, almost 10 decade-long culture war, just to be able to get, is something like right-wing authoritarianism. So, yeah, the thing about, like, getting on Paul Gottfried's case and calling him woke, it's like, he's probably, like, one of the best bridges from, like, the genesis of woke to us that exists. Like, he studied under Herbert Marcuse.

You know, he was thrown out by these. old school communist left wing, anti-family types, anti-capitalist types, anti-everything good effectively. And he's documenting it for decades and decades. He's documenting it. So just, yeah, James Lindsay is definitely shitting his pants. The thing that I, the thing I've also kind of come to realize about his whole position is this, and it makes me think he's, I guess there's two, you.

You can always play this game of, does he know what he's doing or does he not know what he's doing? I'm not going to put on my mind reader hat, but just taking what he says at face value, his worldview only makes sense if you don't interrogate it. If you don't think about it, if you don't really ask any questions, then it sort of works. But the moment you start picking, pulling it threads, it really doesn't make any sense at all. So the definition that James Lindsay gives for Woke, I'm actually going to read it for my essay here. Yeah, read it. What does Woke up to a structural politics that marginalizes people like me, and we need to band together in solidarity in order to be able to create a powerful enough oppressed coalition to flip over the power structure by putting ourselves at the center and claiming power for ourselves?

So what he's saying is that what it means, actually, there was an even better quote, actually, to awaken a critical consciousness of the power structure. So that's actually the, I tweeted that at him and then he blocked me. So woke is to come to a critical consciousness of the power structure. That is such a thin or kind of like widely applicable definition as to fundamentally not have any real meaning. And it's why he's waging this, like, weeks-long jihad with people like, what are you even talking about? How can you call these people woke? Because if you think about something, you're being critical.

And everything has the structure, so you're becoming aware of the structure. So one, like, he's basically saying you have to be unconscious. You have to not think about things. We want this, like, illiterate, unconscious liberalism, where we just float around in the world. and we don't really pay attention to what's going on. 90s liberalism, basically. He wants to go back to a time where things are kind of like you're like embryotic, like you're in your mom's belly,

and things are warm and gushy and you feel good and you don't have to worry about anything. One, that's not the world we live in anymore. Two, that's not a good world to live in at all. Like, imagine being this brilliant academic mathematician, you've got all these prizes and awards, and you're telling people that you want them to, not be critical thinkers. Like that's not even, that doesn't even follow from the kind of 90s

liberalism that we lived through that I grew up in where it's like, be a critical thinker. Like, you know, baby Josh in elementary school, like grow up to be a critical thinker. Like everyone's saying, critical thinking is good. Build your critical thinking skills. And now here's James Lindsay like, critical thinking is bad. Don't do it. It's like that's kind of ridiculous, but also like by that own definition, coming to to a critical consciousness of power structures, like he is woke by his own definition. How can you reverse engineer this Marxist revolution

without coming to a critical consciousness of the power structures that produced woke Marxism? He wants to talk about Franz Fanon and all of these other people, like you have to think and deliberate and research and work and be critically. You have to critique the power structure. You have to come to an aware. of the institutions and networks that created this.

So this is one of the reasons why I say that it's predominantly a smear. It's what I called regime polemics, because he's basically working for the system to come up with a larger bat to beat us with. ESB transformed how the country powered itself once, and now we're doing it again. Working with businesses all across Ireland, helping them reduce their energy costs, reach their sustainability goals and future-proof their operations. Because this is not just for us, it's for future us. To find out more, contact our Smart Energy Services team at ESB.aE forward slash Smart Energy.

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Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited, trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Well, and one of the other things that he ascribes to woke is he's like, oh, they're studying Carl Schmidt, the friend enemy distinction. When you call someone woke right, what are you doing? Are you not practicing friend enemy? I mean, it's the, this just goes to show how retarded classical liberals are. And I'm not talking about like historically classical liberals. If it's 2024, and you're still a classical liberal, and you're not just, I don't know, you don't really have anything,

you can't join the discussion. You're not in the discussion anymore. Classical liberalism has been so, I mean, just marginalized, and it's just so dead in the water that the people who are arguing for it, just in arguing for it, they contradict their own, their own assertions about other groups.

And it's, you're, he's some great intellectual because he wrote a bunch of fake papers and got them. I mean, come on. Come on. Oh, and then you, then you completely rewrote the Communist Manifesto. The only thing you left in there that would jump out at anybody was something about a specter. And I can, that's the way I write where I'll, I'll borrow a really famous kind of line from somewhere and rearrange it to make it. And if I'm reading that, I'm just like, oh, okay.

So, because I read that thing and I'm like, if I didn't know this was supposed to be the Communist Manifesto, I wouldn't have known it. Because I've read the Communist Manifesto many times. I didn't see it in that. All I saw was him using some kind of device where he's picking the most famous line. out of it and then using it, which is a device I use. But I don't use it to fool people. I use it because it's like, oh, look how smart I am, basically. How many times have you seen somebody say once as tragedy, again, is farce?

Like, I've written that phrase. Everybody uses it's like just part of, it's part of a vocabulary, right? But it's, it does remind me of, frankly, I was going to say 10 years ago, but really at any point in the last 10 years, it sounds like a blue-haired commie who says, you uttered the magic words as just like Hitler, that therefore you're bad. It's the same type of psychology. It's the same type of logical, you know, way of analyzing this. That whole episode, by the way, I'm glad you brought it up because I kind of forgotten about it.

tell me if you had this feeling there were two real problems I had with that it was the Christian reformer was that the name of the website that published this oh god I can't remember the American reformer yeah yeah yeah so there's two things about that that stuck out to me right away

one the American he kept calling it the leading woke Christian national it's like they have less than 20,000 subscribers on Twitter I didn't even know them I don't even know who they are never heard of them right and i'm a christian i have no idea who they are and i'm someone who reads interview christian nationalists and i had no clue who they are because it's like i don't know

so it's kind of arbitrary yeah yeah it's very arbitrary again this is a kind of thing that's common in regime polemics is because you're working on behalf of the establishment when you select something it becomes significant right like it it has the the importance and the meaning that you imbue it with, right? So if James Lindsay as a representative of, you know, big gay, you know, big gay liberalism, and he says, well, this is the institution, this is the Christian nationalist woke paper of record,

well, him with his half a million Twitter subscribers and his network of academics and his sycophants are now, that's it, that perception has been created, that becomes part of the discourse. You now are kind of pushing up against this brick wall even trying to refute that, right? So that's like this sort of polemical power he has as a member. And he complains, by the way, as a brief aside, he complains all the time.

Like, he doesn't get the star appointments, and he's kind of left out of all the cool hipsoires. So, like, obviously he's not the same thing as, like, Ibram X. Kendi was, you know, and even though he is, he's bankrolled by somebody, I'm not going to. to name because this person is very litigious. But he's bankrolled by a by a big-time evangelical who has ties to Big J. money. Yeah, I'm not surprised to hear that.

So there's this arbitrariness to selecting the American reformer as the woke right paper of record. But also, I mean, again, you and I, we've written things, We've published things. We've tried to get things published at places for, you know, whether it was a libertarian paper or a conservative or whatever. Or even like maybe your town, your local newspaper in your hometown.

Like I kind of know, like, I have some idea of how things get published and like what that review process is like and how extensive it is. like does it really prove that they like that by publishing this kind of mishmashed paper that it actually reflects like they actually are co-signed like the act of publishing obviously is a sort of endorsement but knowing that like it's the internet things move fast and quick it's a shoestring operation they don't have all this much they don't have a whole team of editors They don't have people who it is their job to just do that 40, 50 hours a week. They see something. It comes through in their email.

They probably look at it real quick. And they say, okay, we'll publish it on Wednesday at 3 p.m. Thanks for your submission. Does that prove that they are secret woke Marxists? Or does it prove that in a fast-moving technological economy where you are part of the alternative media and there's maybe, I don't want to say anything bad about the American reformer, I don't know them, But just as an example, like maybe you don't have the most strenuous submission review process. Maybe there's a couple of things you look for it and then you just publish it.

It's like, actually all you've really done is demonstrate that the economy around publishing is probably not as rigorous as it ought to be. Right. Like this is not an actually ideological point that you're making. This is like sort of like a banal business failure of the business world in the, internet age, like, there's so many things that were goofy about it. And, like, it's just funny to me, like, every time he's tried to slam the, you know, big comical Acme hammer down on us, it's like, it bounces back and hits him in the face. Like, you know, it's like Wiley Coyote and the Roadrunner, it's like he, he runs into the,

the tunnel painted onto the brick wall and bounces off of it. He's just, it's, it's, um, it just to your point. And I'll leave it here when I'm done. It does really reek of a guy who's desperate and like kind of shitting his pants and in a full-blown panic. Yeah. Yeah, he's worried. He's seeing his meal ticket disappear. That's what it is.

And he knows that his meal ticket right now is going into milk toast events with milk toast evangelicals who love Israel. and who hate the woke. And he goes in there and tells him some stories about how all of this came from Karl Marx, and it's all Marxism, so you better be scared. And because, you know, that's really dangerous stuff and everything, even though it's, you know, it's like, I mean, it is in practice and it is in thought, but it's like, I mean, he's never going to talk about the fact that liberalism has no gatekeeping mechanisms that allows anything to come, you know.

oh, well, you're just going to have the marketplace of ideas and you're going to come in there. And if you have the marketplace of ideas and you're a classical liberal, well, classical liberals are not about Schmidian, you know, Schmidian exceptions and Schmidian friend enemy. So I don't care if a communist gets a job at the local university and then another one, and then another one, and then another one. I mean, he knows that this is, that liberalism has as much to do with the takeover with this post-liberal, you know, this post-war consensus.

I mean, the post-war consensus is liberal. It is liberalism in its final form. And, well, I mean, maybe not its final form. I mean, it could get worse. It could get to a left, pure left-wing authoritarianism. But what we're seeing now is liberalism. It is, we're going down this path and we're, there's an end point. There's an end point, but we just can't get that.

there. We just took a right. We got to get back on the path. What do we got to do to get back? And then all these other things just sneak in. He just, he knows. He knows. I'm convinced that he just knows that this classical liberalism that he totes because he can't call it what he really wants to is, which he's a leftist. He has said that he would rather the woke left wind than like the West become tradcalf again. He's actually seen. Has you read that? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, he said that.

Yeah, I can pull up the screenshots of it. Yeah. Yeah, he would rather the woke left win. Like someone said, well, you know, what if it has become Tradcath? He goes, that we're not, I don't want that. I would rather the left one. Yeah, he's not a friend to right wingers, but right wingers are such fucking pussies that they, like, they have no problem.

They're reaching left, well, reaching left and punching right. and that's what they've been trained to do by the post-war consensus, and that's exactly what he does, and he's taught a bunch of people to do. And unfortunately, a lot of evangelical Christianity has just reached out. A lot of evangelical Christianity is, quote, quote, we lose down here, quote, which means we can't do anything, love our enemies, never says anywhere to love God's enemies, and these are the kind of people who in 1936 in Spain, while priests and nuns are being executed in the streets, people would say, no, that's the way it's supposed to be because, you know, I mean, we can't, we can't fight back. We have to love our enemies. Yeah. I think it's funny. Again, just one final comment on the whole American reformer situation. All kinds of people that I didn't really think would line up alongside. It's literally like the story.

stone toss meme of like, you know, the two, play the tug of war, and then you look to your left. It's like, who's behind me? It's like, suddenly Ashley St. Clair and Mike Sernovich are behind me, like, what the hell's going on? Like, all these people who either are really not part of that conversation or their message is not really a hyper-literate message, like in the case of Ashley St. Clair, are like, but like, don't you think, like, some of this is, like, worth considering like the most milk toast tepid thing like i think like either sargon or mike sarnovich were both like yes but his criticisms of capitalism were accurate okay which is one line of of rebuttal that you could take and i think ashley st clair was like yeah but don't you think

there's any room at all to criticize the system that we're in it's like you won't even allow for the possibility of self-reflection that's how you know you're the bad guy dude like you won't look like Dracool. You won't look into the mirror. That's how we know you're the bad guy. You have no reflection. We know you're the bad guy. I'm inclined to think, and this is maybe armchair or psychoanalyzing. And just because of these are things I've seen pop up on Twitter in the last few days, I'm inclined to think that he gets, you know, nobody blow up my DMs or send me an affidavit or anything. I'm inclined to think he gets up to some weird perp stuff. You know, somebody posted a picture of him taking a selfie, like,

in the nude with, like, a potted plant precariously positioned where his genitals are. It's like, so you put that on the internet, man? Like, there is something wrong with you. And the thing about, like, even his social media personality, it says something to me, like, this is kind of a dysfunctional person. Because he's on trigonometry, and he starts off. And he starts off. you know, Constantine Kissin asks him, what is the woke right? And James Lindsay starts kind of apologetically like, gee, you know, maybe I've used woke to liberally. It might not be the best word.

So he's like kind of a human being a little bit at the start of that interview. And then you watch him on Twitter and he posts like he's a 14-year-old. And everything is really... It's just edge-lording. Yeah. It's like this is not actually mature. adult man. And that's the type of person that the establishment has left. Like these are like they're reserved troops. This is like calling in, I don't know, the National Guard and it's like

the fat guy from the bar with like terrible diabetes and his legs are all swollen up. It's like they're not sending their best. Okay. They're not sending their best. Well, you know, what's all what else is interesting about the post-war consensus is that it's while they are sneaking in a lot of like social Marxism, if you use any kind of critique or if you agree at all with Marx or Lenin or anybody of that ilk, if you say, oh, well, you know, they made a really good point here about industrial society and capitalism. I saw this today. They were talking about this kid, an Italian anarchist who's assassinating people in the streets,

again? What year is this? The, they were saying, oh, well, he's, like, really into, like, Ted Kaczynski and everything like that. I'm like, and they're like, oh, that means he's a leftist. That's what the, um, the Jewish from, uh, from Lipsa TikTok said. So, oh, that means he's a leftist. I'm like, you read Ted Kaczynski?

The whole first 37 parts of that is him completely shitting on the left. And then he explains why tech, why, technological society, what it's done to our psyche and what is done to us and what is done to our nature. And to argue against that, you're retarded. So it's like you can, what the post-war consensus says is, oh, we're going to sneak all this Marxism in here and this socialism here and basically, you know, and Marxism in a way, we're going to strip away family. We're going to, we want you to become the liberal, the post-war consensus man and woman and everything. But if you agree at all, where you say, well, I think Marx and the German ideology made some really good points about what's happening to society.

Well, then you're a Marxist. It's like, wait a minute, but you're promoting stuff. You're promoting shit that's almost literally Marxist, and we have it in our society. We've pointed it out. And what now? So you can't even win with these people because it's like you can't. They can have it one way, but they can have it both ways. You can't.

That's the power of, again, that's the power of being a regime polemicist. You set the rules, you establish the frame, you determine what pieces are in play, what pieces aren't in play, what's hypocritical, what isn't. Just to kind of go back to the parallel between Hofstadter and James Lindsay between Woke Right and the Paranoid style. You know, one of these other things, and I think it's exempt, it demonstrates what you're just talking about, is the way things that there's kind of self-evidently farcical or hypocritical are used in this polemical pejorative way. So one of the key arguments that Lindsay puts forward is that the woke right

behaves just like the woke left. Like this is kind of like this is one half of his entire argument. He says that there's an ideological component. He says that there's a practical component. And the practical component is how we behave the same as the woke left. We use social media the same way. We believe in an oppressed oppressor dialectic the same way. I'm going to actually try to pull up some of the examples he uses here.

Sure. So, yeah, he says that they create an illusion, that there is support for one thing and distaste for another. He says that both are highly invested in a little. identity politics. And he says that ultimately, what else can you call this but woke? And so therefore there's this complete, you know,

what he thinks he's done is eliminated any difference between Pete Canona's and Josh Neal versus I don't know, Slava Gijek, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Luigi Manjian,

whether he's anarchist or not or whatever. Like, actually, there still are fundamental differences, even if you can point to superficial similarities. So this is another thing that is a very telling passage in the paranoid style of, in American politics, where to dispel the, to kind of like defang this, what he calls pseudo-conservatism, he points to the rivalries of right-wing conspirators. territorial groups and shows how that they are identical to their opposition. So he talks about the KKK and he says, well, you know, they wore priestly uniforms just like

the Catholics. And they had this strict hierarchical structure just like the Catholics. So actually their rivalry is kind of like this petty envy and is totally illegitimate and they're just paranoid. Never mind the fact that the KKK were made up of a specific group of people. from a specific place operating under a specific political pretext with a very particular set of goals for themselves

and, you know, the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church, like not the same thing, right? Or that he uses the example of the John Birch Society versus, you know, this communist spook. And he says, isn't it really remarkable that they both fight a zero-sum ideological war? It's like, okay, so they're really, both really committed to the ideas that they have. Therefore, there's no difference at all

between, you know, mom and pop from down the street who give their $100 every month to the John Birch Society and communist organizers who are like burning down houses and whatever. He also gives the example of Christians, Christian anti-communists versus communists, and the exact phrase here, just let me pull it up. It's so goofy. One second. Okay, so he says, you know, Christian anti-communists were intellectually and spiritually vigorous like their communist foes. They admired the vigor of their communist opponents, and they tried to emulate it. And that's how we know that there's no actual rivalry here, that the right-wingers are just paranoid. By the way, there's never any actual kind of antagonization

or examination of the left-wing people on that side of the... The communists are just like kind of unimpeachable to Richard Hoxer. To a guy. Father Cofflin and Justice Stalin, same person. Yeah. It's common. You would even think that a guy who had formerly disavowed his communism and like shredded up his communist party, you know, credit card or whatever might have like an interest

in publishing, even just a safe face. publishing like even tepidly communist critiques just to distance himself and the public perception he's created. But no, he does, same thing with Karl Popper, not to get off on a tangent, although I guess with Karl Popper, later on in his career, he did become more critical of communism. But Carl Popper is another, again, architect of the post-war consensus, literally the Open Society Foundation is based on the title of his book, and he was a mentor of George Soros. Didn't he come up with the term conspiracy theorist? He wrote an essay called The Conspiracy Theory of Society.

I don't know if he coined the phrase. But that's a great essay, by the way, very, very ridiculous stuff that he puts in it. But another guy who, like in a previous life was a communist, and when he does his big-brained intellectual defense of liberalism really only has time. to talk about how bad fascists are, how bad nativists are, how bad Nazis are, how bad populists are, how bad nationalists are. It's like, guy, you were with the communists and you almost got killed by them. And you can't even give me a sentence about how bad that is. And again, I'm being a little bit hyperbolic because he does talk about Marx in the open society and his enemies.

But most of that book is spent slagging nativism. It's spent slagging the closed society, which would be a nation that protects its borders and has law and order and has a vaguely authoritarian hierarchical political structure. So, I mean, these guys just telling themselves. It's remarkable. Yeah. And there's really, I think at this point to argue with them is you're giving them legitimacy. because I don't know that if you look at how many, like, followers he has on Twitter, and people say, oh, Twitter isn't real life.

People said that, like, eight, nine years ago. Twitter has become real life because it really is the public square. So, you know, you look at how many followers he has. You look at if he posts something. If he posts something about classical liberalism, he's lucky to get, like, the amount of likes. he's lucky to get 10% of the likes of like a meme account, just posting a meme. But when he posts about stuff like this, he may get like double that.

And all that tells you is that no one's buying this. The only people who are really going along with it are people who are so bought into his worldview. And let's face it, yeah, I was talking about this with a friend of mine on his show this afternoon is that a lot of people who get into a quote-unquote movement, they're just looking for God. They're looking for their God. And if somebody's like really into, you know, classical liberalism and anti-woke, James Lindsay can become their God really quick. If you're if you're really into like free market economics, Ludwig von Mises can become your your God really quickly. And that's just basically what we're seeing.

I mean, I don't know. Really, if you had to guess, do you think James Lindsay has any kind of influence on the incoming Trump regime? None at all, I'd assume. Then he complained that, like, they literally didn't even ask me. Like, I think he said something to that effect on Twitter. Like, no one's calling me. Why?

I would assume he has best. Why? What are you going to tell them? What are you going to advise them on? I mean, if your goal, Trump has said, look, I think most people are at the point where it's like, just get rid of all the people, get rid of all the illegal immigrants. If he got rid of half of the illegal immigrants in this country, at this point, that would just be a win. because, I mean, no one's expecting, no one's really expecting success.

No one who's realistic. No one who understands how the administrative state works, how the post-war consensus works, is really expecting an insane amount of success. But, I mean, is he going to be for that? How does he help that? How does he help? Like, say Doge, say this Doge outfit,

does start dismantling the, managerial estate, managerial estate. That's what he's fighting for. So why is he complaining about, what is he expecting them to invite them in there? So he can tell them everything that they're doing wrong because we have to keep doing it.

We just have to go back to the 90s, bro. I heard was Sohabo Mari and which one is Sohabo Mari? He's the one, is he Claremont? What? I think he's, Is he an editor for Compact? Yeah. Who's the, is he associated with Claremont?

I can't remember. I think he might. Yeah, so, and he was talking to Dave Rubin. And this was three or four years ago, and when I was just listening to everything. And now I just can't listen to everything. And they were talking about how we need to go back 10 years. This all started falling apart 10 years ago. And I'm like, who's asking, who listens to that and takes that seriously?

Who says in like 2000, in 2021 that we just need to go back to 2011, what we need to go back to the ending of Barack Obama's first term? But these people are retarded. And I'm fully convinced. I become convinced to this more that I, the longer I do this, these people are just trying to keep a job. They're just saying the things that they need to stay in their job. If they were to deviate one bit, they'd get fired. They'd have to go somewhere else. They'd have to, you know, why would you change your opinions on why would you all of a sudden become a Carl Schmidt fan, you know, when you've been a John Locke, when you've been promoting Lockeian philosophy your whole

life? Especially if you're making your living off of it. you're cutting your income off. That's why Lindsay, that's why Lindsay's acting the way he is. It's because he's, his income, he's seeing his potential downfall and more than that,

not being invited to be on the stage anymore. And he's one of those people who can't take that. I, well, this, I was thinking the exact words you were saying, as you were saying them, which is that a big part of getting involved in this scene for me has been realizing some of us are fighting for ideals and outcomes and some of us are fighting for paychecks.

So that's very astute, totally co-signed that. As far as So Rob Amari is concerned, I do believe he's connected with Claremont. He was the editor of Compact and commentary. He is the editor of Compact now. He was previously the editor of Commentary. And I do think he was like a Claremont fellow or something. But yeah, I mean, yeah, it's not surprising that these people would want to go back to, like, the period when their sinecure first opened up. Like, yeah, I want to go back to 10 years ago when you opened the floodgates and gave me, you know, a lifetime job at Gay Boy Inc. or whatever.

You know, like publishing bullshit.com. Like, yes, please, I want to go back to that time so that I can have that job. I don't know that I have anything else to say on that point other than when you asked, like, what influence would James Lindsay have on the incoming Trump administration? I immediately thought of that really weird anti-St. Michael bit he was on. So imagine your Donald Trump, like, you can't even get a tweet out the front door with that James Lindsay, like, excuse me, this is really a big problem and you need to stop doing it. It's like, okay, this guy is trying to, like, kick 40 million people out the front door and you're raising a stink over a tweet.

Like, yeah, you don't actually have a place here and don't let the door hit you on the way out. He was wrong about Orrin McIntyre being the guy behind that. I'm the one with the St. I'm the one with the St. Michael Coyne right next to me when I podcast. It was you. It was you all along, Pete. Tell everybody about your book on conspiracy theories. I understand the conspiracy theories. Yes. So, yeah, last time we were wrong,

we talked about American extremist, Imperium Press, the chapter on individualism and socialism, or sociopathy, rather. Yeah, my book came out in February of this year. It's actually part one of two, and the new book is coming out early next year. But understanding conspiracy theories, I had worked on it for like five years.

um it's it's half of everything i have to say about the subject matter but um yeah i came into nationalism through the conspiracy uh content if you want to say online you know i i i read all the jim mars books i read you know i listened to alex jones i watched his documentaries on the police state i listened to coast to coast uh i watched i was a young person a very young person when loose change and zeitgeist were like the thing on the internet's and um it was really harrowing honestly to like develop a conflict to become a man hormonally and like mentally uh at the same time you're being hit with this incredible technology called the internet and all of the information we have available to the human species so you know and of course i grew up with 9-11 like

I remember the day the towers hit. I was sitting in my sophomore biology class with the cute redhead teacher at my Catholic high school and being pulled out of the classroom thinking that my father was dead. So like these are all deeply like, and there's hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people with a story just like that. So it's not my pity story that I'm saying to your audience. Lots of people had stories like that. I grew up in New York City.

that was the formation of my consciousness. I remember when you could go on an airplane and it was nice. And I remember a couple of years later when you went on an airplane and a morbidly obese Haitian person grabbed your bowls. Like I lived through that. Okay. So the Patriot Act and everything that followed from that. So the idea of, and now we're not,

we're living in this moment where conspiracy theories are kind of like a thing you can cash in on. It's like a career. You can be an alt-media guy with a TikTok account doing the whole, you know, your blurry face in front of like a text scroll going, isn't this, look at this and this kind of in here and it's like you can do that as a career. And 15 years ago, 20 years ago, if you did that, you were a pariah, you were medicated, you were kicked out of polite society. So it took me coming into this nationalist community, learning a few new things that mainstream conspiracy culture from 10 years ago didn't let you in on. People like Michael Collins Piper, like if I had known about Michael Collins Piper 15 years ago, it would have saved me a lot of trouble. I didn't learn about him until like two and a half years ago.

And it's like, oh, well, this guy is not like the skeleton key that literally unlocks everything. it clears up a lot of stuff. So I think the thing that's really, that my selling point for the book is, there's a neutral way to think about conspiracy theories. Because we're now in this point where people of a certain age, like that is who their identity is. It's like, I just am a conspiracy theorist, right?

And it's very difficult to think clearly because there's sort of this heuristic in the conspiracy theory community, where because you had this skepticism about things that happened in the past, you have this sort of like Gnostic, pure knowledge of everything that's happening now and conspiracy. Oh, this is a false flag just like what I saw 10 years ago. There are heuristics that work and then there are heuristics that don't work. And so what I was trying to do with this book was try to, establish, okay, really what is a conspiracy theory? How does it work? Why is everyone today in this

hypervigilant, paranoid neurotic mindset where there is a conspiracy lurking, or I should say an illegitimate conspiracy lurking behind every door? Ten years ago, if you were a liberal Democrat, the big bad, and it actually has been the same conspiracy theory for the last 10 years. The big conspiracy was Russia, Russian bots, Russian hacking, Putin, Donald Trump got urinated on by a prostitute in a Russian hotel, and that's the blackmail. They've got, sorry to be lewd with you and your audience, but maybe if you've got young people in your audience, they didn't know that that happened. If you were going through the first Trump campaign, like, that was the October surprise, and we're all just sitting here like, are you kidding me?

So the basic punchline here is, you know, conspiracy theory effectively is a folk account of history. It's you and me trying to figure out what's actually happening without the benefit of a PhD, without the benefit of a Walter Cronkite, without the benefit of some expert or authority, a regime, a James Lindsay, a regime-approved personality who can disseminate a coherent narrative to us. that we can go back to sleep and then go to work and then pet you know a little pete junior on the head and send them off to soccer practice you know the things that make our day-to-day life livable so what you really have is that this folk history and then regime history and there's this tension between the two so i talk a lot about that i talk i bring in a lot of marshal mcclouin to talk about

how the internet has created this unique paranoid culture that gentleman that he was on Joe Rogan he popularized the phrase mass formation psychosis you know that that's been one of these phrases to explain kind of why everyone is so crazy and why everyone is so distrusting of of the things that they see and the people that they live around I don't think we actually need novel language I don't think we need it if anything this book does very similarly what my first book did which was like take the psychology out of it take the psychiatry out of it. Because as I make the point with the, you know, Jim, uh, Jim, uh, Jim Lindsay and Hofstadter, the psychology that's been used to make sense of our political life has made it worse. Because it isn't a psychological problem intrinsically. It's a political problem. It's a social,

cultural, civilizational, historical problem. We're dealing with real things, not just artifacts of the mind. And we need to be able to treat it that way. So that was probably a little incoherent, but it's a great book, and I hope your audience loves it. No, anything, I promote anything from Imperium Press. I send people there all the time, and they just get

lost in it. Thank you for mentioning coast to coast, though. It reminds me. I haven't listened to I keep it on my phone to listen to every once in a while, his 1996 interview with William Luther Pierce about that. Yeah. And

it was one of the only episodes that you'll ever hear Art Bell like going at the guest, like attacking the guest. It's, uh, it's wild. But the thing I love about it is Pierce is just so even. I'm here to tell, here to tell my story. I'm here to, um, you know, answer all these ridiculous claims that have been made and everything. But, yeah, there's some, uh, there's some good stuff out there. And, you know, Turner Diaries and Hunter, those are, those are good books to, to check out.

You know, I mean, there's some compelling writing to say the least there not to slam Alex Jones because he is sort of a folk hero for a lot of people even to me but it's like yeah coast to coast did that in the 90s and it took Alex Jones until like 2017 to have David Duke on

and he came at David Duke the same way that William Luther Pierce got treated so it's the same kind of tension in the right wing, and this is one of the hypotheses of my book and my new book, it goes back to the John Birch Society, in effect, where you have, or between Buckley and the National Review and the Real Right, or between Buchanan and the conservative, ink, there's this tension between the mainstream post-war consensus right, and then the more principled, hard-line nationalists, and that has always existed. This is why there was an alt-right,

This is why James Lindsay complains in that interview with Constantine Kissin. Well, they don't even actually attack the left who's supposed to be their real enemy. All they ever do is attack the conservatives because conservative ink is proximally our biggest threat. Because our message, we have to squeeze our message through this very narrow funnel to get half or a quarter or a third of our ideas out in this very domesticated way. because conservative ink is the problem. What did Nixon say? Write it a thousand times, the media is the enemy. Conservative Inc. is the enemy.

So that's, you know, that says it all right there. Yeah, it wasn't the Clintons that got Sam Francis canceled and fired from his job. Yeah. It was the quote-unquote right-wingers. Yeah. All right, Josh, I appreciate it. Thank you. And let's do it again soon.

Appreciate it. Absolutely. No.