The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1203: Diagnosing and Answering Modernity's Problems w/ John Slaughter

Episode Date: April 20, 2025

59 MinutesPG-13John Slaughter is the author of two books and the proprietor of the Old South Repository Substack.John joins Pete to talk about the themes explored in his new book, "Dispatches from The Old South Repository."John's Books on AmazonJohn on TwitterJohn's SubstackPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete'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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Head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingona show. John Slaughter's back. Hey, John. How you doing? I'm doing good, Pete. Enjoying Holy Week.

How are you? Yeah, yeah, the, I guess this is our week, right? This is our March Madness. Yeah, yeah, that's it was my March Madness. I don't watch basketball, so this is all I got. All right, so, man, we're going to have to start calling you John Prolific. What is this? You released two books in less than a year?

Yeah, yeah. And actually in Liston, I think the novel came out January 6th, and this was about a month and a half after that. So, yeah, it was pretty, pretty quick. Yeah, you have a full-time job and a family, and I'm over here like, and people tell me, oh, you know, you work really hard and everything. And then I'm looking at what you do. And I'm like, how do you do that?

My wife asked me the same thing. One of my secrets is I have a long commute. So whenever I want to write essays, I have things in my mind, I record myself talking them out. And then I go back and turn it into the written form. That's my secret. Yeah, I've had an idea for something long form for a while now. And I thought that that's the way would be the best, would be best for me to do it, would be to record it audio and then transcribe it and see how I can clean it up.

or more importantly, I have somebody who could clean it up for me. So, but yeah, no, it's congratulations. It's the first book, Crimson Vale. I know Thomas covered, covered the book very well on his podcast mind phase or over on his substack. I really enjoyed that conversation a lot. And then, you know, you're like, oh, you know, let me, let me throw out another book. book because, you know, hey, I'm that smart and I'm that, you know, I have so much to say called Dispatches from the Old South Repository. So why don't you give an overview of that and

then we'll start jumping into some themes. Yeah, so dispatches, Pete, is, it's a collection of what I felt were the, and other people, other people's input as well, but I felt were the best essays I had written over the last three years. And so I compiled them, you know, into a collection. And I kind of separated it into a couple of different categories because the entirety of dispatches covers a lot of ground. I mean, there's essays on culture, on religion. There's some, I don't know if I know. No, I didn't include any of the film critique.

But it's religion, culture, there's stuff about the South. There's advice for young men. There's some historical essays on historical figures that I found interesting. So it's kind of a, it just covers essentially everything that I find interesting and I spend my time, you know, writing about or talking about. And I wanted to compile it all and get it out there because I know, you know, myself, I don't really enjoy reading stuff online or or on my phone or on my tablet. So I wanted to put it in physical form for anybody who wanted to dive into it. And then I was kind of shocked when I started putting it together and I realized there's like almost 500 pages worth of stuff in here. So I was a, I was almost shocked at how much output I had as you were.

Well, it's good that you frame it that way. I know some of us are so busy that buying a 500 page book and trying to read a 500 page book is rough. But if there are single essays and people can consume it that way, you know, some of the best books out there are. are just essays that have been compiled and being able to read one at a time helps a lot, I think. So I'm saying that to tell people to go buy the book and not worry about having to read the whole thing at once. It's sort of meant to be read as essay upon essay, but also they all click together for a theme. I mean, what do you, maybe you mentioned it already, but what do you think that theme is?

Well, I think the overall theme is sort of, and it probably goes with, I think the first essay is entropy and rebirth because I was, a lot of what I was focusing and covering was the path of America, but how it has decayed in a lot of ways and how it has begun to fall apart, but also a lot of it leans into what. what the building blocks would be for the future, the sort of things that you would look for to start new, whether that's from the ground up or in preparation for whatever the future is going to look like. You know, I tend to lean towards, at the very least, probably some type of volcanization or something. And that's going to come with, you know, downsizing, whether it's economically or, you know, just in your local area, it being reduced to your local area.

And so I wanted to kind of bring that part into it, too, because it's not just a matter of like, okay, these are the problems and things are falling apart, but what do you do about that? So the overall theme is kind of looking at all of that and combining those together to kind of give an overview of what's happening and what we can do possibly or what you can do to mitigate those things or to improve on them in the future. Well, you mentioned entropy and rebirth. So let's dive into that. Looks like you have some Higalian and Spanglerian kind of influence there with like the

cyclical nature of civilizations, which isn't history repeats itself, but that there is a cycle to these things. You know, as I think Spangler said that, you know, once the high culture reaches the civilization point, that's when things start to go into decline. So, you know, you talk about how the old right had, has a nostalgia for pre-19. 60s America, but the new right seems to be accepting its inevitable decline. And you even mentioned Batman's Batman begins, which I think is probably the best movie out of all of them, if you're looking for philosophy and how Bruce Wayne wants to save Gotham. But Rajahul's

vision for rebirth really mirrors a little bit more of how a lot of people on the New Wright talk. No, exactly. And that is the first essay, which I entitled The Fall of Gotham, the Fall of America, because I was watching that film, you know, recently, or when I wrote this, right before I wrote this, and I realize the same thing that you're watching Bruce Wayne, and he is sort of a stand-in for the old right and sort of the old guard of America, not just because he wants to to save Gotham, right, if Gotham's the standard for America, but because he's looking at the Gotham that his father built, right, all the things his father did for the city, and the city still, obviously, the city kills him, right? And he's hell-bent on rebuilding or holding on to

these things that he doesn't realize not only killed his father, but also have left Gotham in the state that it is. And on the other end of it, you have Razo Ghoul, who does represent in many ways, sort of the accelerationist point of view. And explicitly from like the leak of shadows in the film, their philosophy is cyclical history. The only difference being that they claim that when they see the decay start to take hold at a certain point, they decide to sort of light the match, right, to speed things up. And so the real conflict, the only reason that Rosal Gould is seen as a villain is because instead of taking sort of a passive approach and noticing that the decline is coming and it's inevitable, he wants to kickstart it, right? And it's

that part that turns them into a villain. But outside of that, you know, you see this conflict between the two of them and they have these conversations, you know, multiple times. And every time, at least in my opinion, you know, Bruce Wayne's character kind of walks away on the losing end of it because he doesn't have an answer. His answer is just like, well, I just want to save it. I just want to be the good guy. But he doesn't understand that, you know, the city's run by criminals. It's crime infested, drug infested.

You know, it's corrupted to its core. And all he's doing is helping it stay in that state longer, essentially. Right. And this is the same thing you see with the old, right? You know, when you talk to a lot of boomers, you'll notice that they, they see everything with Rose. rose-colored glasses, but they also want to hold on to a pass that doesn't exist anymore. It's kind of like if you, you know, I've had this conversation where I've spoken with

with older boomers and some older Gen Xers about the dating market. Right. I'm married with kids, but I do think about it a lot because my oldest son is 11, so it won't be long before he's probably interested in that. And when I try to explain to them, the issues. in the dating market, I get kind of a blank stare and then they just repeat the same advice they got and they were kids because they can't seem to see the situation for what it is. And I think that's sort of the position that Bruce Wayne's character is in and also the old

right. They see a world that doesn't exist anymore. You know, and they can't fathom the idea that something new has to come or that something has reached a point that it is no longer sustainable. 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.

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Right, and the new right doesn't have to be like accelerationist to where you're like, oh, I want the money to supply to, so you completely to be destroyed so that people suffer and then we have some kind of revolution. It could just be like, well, democracy. doesn't work anymore. We need something new. And we can't fix Washington, D.C. Some of us think that Trump may try, but he's not going to be able to, he's not going to have the will to do what needs to be done in order to absolutely tear down what's been built there. Don't even know if that's possible. So, accelerationism or the new right or Rajahul's vision can be anything from like,

yeah, we want to see cities burn to, well, we just want to, a bunch of us want to move into the same area and have a shared culture and have that culture influence the politics of the town. And maybe those of us who would go, who would prefer having a morality that matches more of the morality of the past, we can influence that on our own. And so it doesn't necessarily have to be accelerationism to the point where, you know, New York City's on fire or, you know, the Turner Diaries. But you can actually go and do something else. And, you know, then you'll have the people who are the accelerationalists or the ones who want to save everything. And we're like, well, they'll just come and they'll, they'll waco you.

And, you know, so it's basically a back and forth. And it's a fight just like, you know, Bruce Wayne and Rajagl will have that conversation toward the end of the. the movie. Well, yeah, and if you remember, and I open the essay with that quote where he, where Razogholt tells, he tells Bruce Wayne that, you know, when a force grows too wild, a purging fire is inevitable and natural, right? And I think one way to approach this also is to understand that the longer that you prolong something, the worse, the worse the collapse is going to be, right? And I think, that's sort of the motivation behind in the film.

That's sort of the motivation behind the League of Shadows is if we go ahead and do this now, it is going to alleviate some of the suffering in the future, right? Now, I don't know that that's necessarily the best approach, but I do think on an individual level, that probably is a good approach insofar as you're looking at it through the lens of this is going to happen, and what can I do to prepare for it, right? Right. Like you said, whether that's organizing communities around like-minded individuals

or focusing on trying to sure up power in local politics because if these things occur, which there's no reason to think they wouldn't, those local positions are going to become exponentially more influential and powerful, right? So accelerating sort of your preparedness for that, I think, is a positive way to twist that accelerationism, a way. from, you know, this sort of chaotic, you know, version that they have, which is, well, we want to accelerate the collapse, period. I think the mindset to approach that with is we know this is going to happen. The only people who don't know that are ones who are either willfully ignorant or are so ideologically married to, you know, the old America or the America that they

grew up in that they can't see anything else. And so I think accelerating your preparedness and understanding this is going to happen. And the more, the better you are prepared for it, the the less it's going to hurt in the long run. Yeah, if you want to look at ideological division, all you have to do is look at Czechoslovakia. They broke up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia and they did it peacefully. And basically, the Czech Republic is more humanist. and Slovakia is more, you know, religious, traditional. Now I know people are going to be screaming at me because maybe they've been to a part of either one

where that contradicts it. But on the most part, this is what the checks wrote at the time, why they were doing it. So, you know, leave me alone, please. I don't need any more emails than I already get. So, yeah, you know, but people, you know, people will still go back to, well, you know, this national government that, I mean, basically, the only thing they can do is violence,

but it seems like they've gotten to the point where it's just targeting individuals. Yeah, I don't know that they even have the will anymore to target an area where, you know, there's a certain group in Tennessee right now that has all moved there. and there's some writer in like Nashville who's reporting on them and trying to take everything they say and turn it into their new KKK or their white nationalists or Christian nationalist and everything. And I want to thank that person for actually mentioning some of my banger tweets in his report. But yeah, I mean, that's all it is, is you have some old liberal who is like, oh, look at what these people are doing over there. and everyone's like, yeah, we don't care. I think, you know, this started a long time ago.

I always cite the Bundy Ranch incident as sort of the first example of their unwillingness to really enforce, you know. Whether regardless what people think of Bundy and the whole situation, the fact that they kind of stood toe to toe with the federal government and the federal government back down, right? they didn't have the will then. And this kind of repeated even though, you know, I have a lot of issues with Greg Abbott. And I don't really, I think it was more of a show, but still the fact that the government did not actually go down there and just force him to do what they wanted. We've slowly seen that. And that's transpired even to your point, even into this attempt to cancel people and go after people, it's even lost its ability to do that on the individual level, largely. And I think that's mostly due to a shift in in people's mentality.

There's so many, you know, they've been yelling at us for for a decade now, right? And it just, it's now they're just, they're just screaming into the void. Nobody's listening to them anymore, right? And I think that is definitely a sign, in my opinion, of their loss of their will to actually act and enforce their edicts. And part of me thinks that it might be because they know that, you know, if you try to enforce a law and you fail, that's worse than not enforcing it at all. And I think that's the position they're in now. Well, moving on, something that you pick up in the theme you pick up in the second essay, it talks about basically technology and societal advancements. And you'll even hear some people on the new right.

Talk about how technology is going to help us going forward. I remember on a gun forum, this is over 10 years ago, people talking about how really the only way we could have proper governance and, like, justice is AI. And I'm going, yeah, who programs that AI? Okay, sure. But, you know, you talk about how technology and societal advancements. And, I mean, this has some spangler in it, too, but it also echoes. Iluul and Kaczynski, that while they've helped us to live an easier life, you know, it severs us, you know, our human ties from nature and even God.

Yeah, I, so this goes into this, that particular essay I was hesitant to write in the first place, only because the, my view of natural selection, which comes through there a lot in that essay, is a little, I wouldn't call it heretical, but I guess it's sort of outside of the norm. And I tend to look at natural selection as a mechanism by which God maintains the balance of life, so to speak, right? And the way that I framed it in the essay is that if you were designing a world and you put life on that world and you wanted that life to be able to survive any situation, you couldn't come up with a more novel or more ingenious idea than natural selection so so a life form that can adapt to any environmental changes right and so and from that i kind of look at how that applies to to to people and that there's sort of this equilibrium where

you know when man is at his his most primal he's um he's he's sort of connected to uh the more animal, the more instinctual. And as he sort of grows and technology kind of comes in and you get agriculture, you move to this point where those abundance of resources allow for the people who have, you know, high IQ, high intelligence, it creates a division of labor and then they can focus on other things. And as that technology expands, you know, you free people to do these things. But what you also do at the same time is you begin to remove all the natural selection pressures that got the society there in the first place. All the little things, whether it's, you know, and it's difficult to talk about this a lot of times because people take this the wrong way. But even little things like infant mortality rates, when you're dropping those things to zero, you're creating a situation where you're getting a lot of bad traits that naturally.

would have would have been weeded out, they're growing exponentially. And the pressure then gets placed on the, you know, if we want to use like the Pareto distribution and look at it like 80, 20 and say 20% of the people are the ones innovating and creating, the ratio begins to warp because your society becomes overburden with people that no longer contribute in any capacity. And the technology only fully, only facilitates this more and more. you think of like medical technology right if we look at this is an example i use in the essay which is diabetic medications don't actually reduce the amount of diabetics they just allow people who are diabetic

to you know live longer lives and that's great and all but then they have more children and they pass on those eating habits and you know with more diabetics so the problem becomes worse and i think technology does this on multiple levels and what it ends up doing is it puts the situation society in a situation where it's so unfit to survive that it's unsalvageable because the people can no longer survive on their own. They become dependent on the technology, whether that's through medicine or even now, if we think of it in terms of the fact that nobody, you know, people can't grow their own food. They can't provide for themselves. But it does, it never stops, right? because the technology, again, like with Alul, that technique sort of is self-serving, right?

It's not that it's neutral, it's ambivalent. It just wants to survive, and it's going to keep going. And it reaches a point where, you know, you reach sort of the event horizon where the technological dependence becomes so great that there's no going back. And everything sort of collapses. And I think there's even an element of the sort of the Tower of Babel element, right? You begin to play God so much by interfering with the natural processes that society becomes unsustainable, right? And one of the examples also I use is if we look at dog breeds, there's a point where man is creating dog breeds that are amazing, right? You're getting German Shepherd, you're getting bloodhounds, you're getting collies, border collies.

But then you get the Bulldog, right, the English Bulldog, which reaches a point where it can. can't even reproduce on its own because a constant human meddling with technology. And I think that same analogy applies to what happens to a society as it becomes more technologically advanced. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community.

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visit drinkaware.com. You mentioned Rome in France and there, you know, by abandoning the natural order, you know, it leads to their culture. decline. I mean, you know, Roman France, we're talking about pre-industrial revolution. So how does, how do you see that working for those two? Well, I think it's, um, a lot of this is a byproduct of

the way that cities operate, right? And we know, you know, Spandrel called them IQ shredders. But if we look at, you know, as they become more technologically advanced, you know, this, and even for they're obviously technology, which is not as advanced as ours, they congregate into these cities. They're moved out from the countryside. And when they get into these places, it seems to be a natural occurrence that something like even feminism, right, and something we think of in modern turns shows up in Rome specifically, you know, Cato rails against this at some point. And you see their birth rates collapse, right? And it's just, it's a product of urbanization. I think that creates these unnatural situations because what I see it is is there's a certain amount of connection to the natural world that is necessary for people to understand how things operate.

And the farther, the longer they're removed from that, the less they understand why they do what they do. And so even something like having children becomes a question of whether you should or should not as opposed to just something that happens. right so i think it's a it's it's almost inevitable as people become disconnected from nature that they lose sight of the natural order of things essentially and when they do that they begin to act in unnatural ways and they begin to fight against things that were never questioned in the first place like no you know even today you know you see that with transgenderism um and i cover this a little bit in another essay in the book where i go in to more detail on the collapsing birth rates in Rome that I believe it was Augustus tried to,

you know, he, the Lex Julia, he had all these laws that attempted to raise the birth rate in Rome and nothing was able to do that because once they had reached that point, you know, he even talks about how towards the end almost every single, every senator in Rome was of servile origin, right? They're all, because the Romans were no longer having children. They had been living in the lap of luxury for so long that they can no longer do the normal things that they would. They have to go out and find people that are from a more primitive background to even facilitate population growth. Well, Yaki talks about how whenever a country goes hard on immigration, native birth rates stop. I think there's a metaphysical aspect to that.

but that'll take us off on a tangent. But, you know, basically what it does is it makes things more expensive. And we're seeing that now. I mean, people are like, I can't afford a house. Okay, well, we need to deport 40 million people and houses will be cheaper. Well, how does that work? Well, I mean, it's simple economics, not the junk economics that we get fed from every direction. But the, yeah.

I was going to say, Pete, well, you know, what's interesting about that as well is that, you know, there's a really small book and not a lot of people have read it. And it's called The Declient of Empires. It's by John Hubbard, I believe. But he talks about in that that he says that the immigrants and the outsiders that came in Jerome disappeared like water into the sands, I believe. I might be misquoting him, but he points out that even when they come in, that their populations begin to decline. Like, they only get a generation, and they immediately fall into the same trap. Yeah, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we're not meant to be pressed in. People be pressed into the same polity, into these gigantic huge polities.

You know, if you have people who are spread out, you know, I think what's the number, 80 to 85% of the population of the United States lives within, what, 100 miles of the coast of all the borders. If you have people spread out, then, you know, especially on the local level, that things can be a lot cheaper. You know, it's why, you know, where we live, a house is a hell of a lot cheaper than, you know, only I live an hour and a half from Atlanta. And you, you know, compare the price of houses. But the, Yeah, it seems like, and you know, it's something that, another thing that you mentioned in the essay is urbanization.

And I think it was Spangler again who, you know, mentioned that like in the 1800s in the 19th century, when people were pressing into cities, cities became like military barracks where they just went there to work. They worked 18 hours a day, went home to their barracks, slept and then went back to work. And, you know, things were so dangerous that there was a good chance they weren't coming home from work the next day.

So, you know, what kind of, how does the industrial revolution and urbanization take a toll on us? Well, right. And you consider, too, that within that same framework of urbanization, children become not necessarily a luxury, but I guess you could frame it as a luxury, but they become something that is no longer beneficial. right and when you're in a smaller more agricultural society or a rural environment children are a

benefit right you have a small farm you you have a trade or something that you that you operate locally the more children you have the more free labor you know if you want to look at it that way and that that's a net benefit but when you live in a city and you're crammed into these you know as Spangler called them, like worker barracks, right? Your children are just an expense. And again, when you're when you're so disconnected from the natural world that you no longer, like you see this right, like sex no longer becomes about procreation, it's just a physical act of temporal pleasure, right?

So they become so removed from that. Well, having, when you're thinking that way and then you factor in that children are essentially an economic burden now when you live in an urban environment, it's only natural that people are going to stop having children. And then this is where the technology comes in. You then apply or then you then give them the ability to stop having children through contraceptives, which that technology is only increased in our society, which is only going to magnify that problem. Yeah. Yeah. And then you take into consideration that when you have urbanization and unfortunately the urban centers have a tendency to move culture and change

culture then you have the mother who now because everything has become so expensive has to work outside the house and then you have to transition to a theme of another essay is you have a masculinity crisis and men aren't seen as the protector of the hero anymore. So you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I think this is one of the key issues sort of our time in a lot of ways is that the men have largely, urbanization and technological advancement allows for men to become optional, right? So everything that a man provides in a natural environment, the way things are intended to be structured, we could say, safety, security, they obviously provide, you know,

not just physical safety and security, but also economic. All these things that the husband would provide are now replaced by the state, essentially, which is only facilitated by a large a government and an urban centers where you can have things like a police force, you can have a fire department, you can have your ambulances, et cetera. And what this allows is for women to, like you said, they can leave the home because things become more expensive and they have to work. But in doing so, they are provided economic freedom. So they no longer need a man to provide anything for them economically, but they also no longer need the safety and security. So they no longer need a man to protect them, to keep them safe. And at first, this is kind of a good thing, right?

You don't want your women to feel uncomfortable when they're leaving the home or feeling safe. But that same safety over time, it becomes the illusion of safety, and they forget that they need a man at all or they need a husband at all. And then the purpose of the man completely fades to from, well, I need a husband for safety, security. take care of me when I'm pregnant to, well, I just want a husband. I just want a man. I want a husband. And of course, that's going to shape the way dating discourses is going to go because they're no longer going to seek out the traits that they would normally seek.

So they're going to seek out the wrong kind of men. And then this, of course, leads to, you know, you get problems with the divorce rate is going to go up and then the state has to step in and play the middle man. And once the woman is provided for on that stage again, she can now leave the man and the state will take his money and provide for her, she will then raise those young men in a situation where she'll teach them to be the kind of man she wants, but the type of man she wants is warped by the fact that she's never actually needed a man for anything. And so you create this sort of negative feedback loop where the women's view of the male and

the masculine is warped and then they pass that on to the children. And the boys grow up with that same exact mentality. Right. And then the danger of this is, and I'm not sure, I talk about this in a couple of essays, The real danger of this is, in my opinion, is that we're seeing with the rise of AI and some of these new, these new AI models that you can speak to, they're very accurate. And what they're going to do, in my opinion, is they're going to replace, they're going to do the same thing to women that the urbanization and this large sort of over, you know, draconian government does in replacing the male. these are going to do that for the female because these young men will no longer, the one thing they're going to need a woman for that hasn't been replaced is the emotional

support, the partnership there that you get from your wife, those are going to replace that and you're going to create this situation where neither males or females need each other to survive because you're going to give them the basic things that they would give from each other and so they're just going to completely be alienated. And again, this will just facilitate the drop in birth rate to an even greater extent. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest.

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with up to 1500 euro and gift cards annually, completely tax-free. And even better, you can spread it over five different occasions. Now's the perfect time to try Options Card. Options Card is Ireland's brand-new multi-choice employee gift card, packed with unique features that your staff will love. It's simple to buy, easy to manage, and best of all, there are no extra fees or hidden catches. Visit OptionsCard.I.E. today. Yeah, and to a certain extent, it even basically removes responsibility for any kind of individual justice that might be meted out.

If you're relying so much upon local authorities, police, the courts, everything like that, you know the martial ethos which i think is a term you used in it in in the essay just disappears and you know thomas talks about um you know when we talk about that there's a certain group in this country that doesn't the overwhelming majority of the crime you know thomas is like well i don't really have a problem with that group because they're not you know i why should i and they're not going anywhere. But there was a time when if people got out of line, you could deal with it. And I mean, that's just gone. You mentioned that to people. And it's not even like they're like, oh, I'm scared I'm going to get in trouble with the law. It's like, well, no, that's not how we do

things. Yeah, it's, this is ironically, this is a conversation I was having the other day. I have a strange respect for early 90s gangster rap, specifically for this reason, because I've always seen it as an expression, an extremely warped, it's warped, don't get me wrong on this, but it is an expression of a certain form of martial ethos and masculinity that hasn't been completely snuffed out yet.

And there's a certain level of respect, and there's a certain level of that which you need in a society, right? There has to be a healthy level of the potential for violence in order to keep things safe, right? This is something you see when you'll often hear a lot of feminists will talk about, you know, spousal abuse rates and stuff and why no-fault divorce and the legal system is necessary. But what they don't understand is that, you know, prior to this, again, going back to living in smaller and environments, if you were to be the type of man that would beat his wife, you had to worry about the fact that her brothers, her father, her cousins were all going to retaliate, right? You couldn't

just get away with this freely. And that was understood. And that keeps people in line. And as warped as that might be coming out of sort of like those urban communities, it exists for a reason. It's just a bad expression of it. The problem to a large degree is that we as a group have completely lost that because we have sort of become over domesticated, right? Yeah. Yeah, I know a mutual of ours, I won't mention who it is, but, you know, they were in public and there were, you know, two scholars, you know, being dangerous. It could have hurt somebody. And, you know, our friend went to the, went to the, went to there were police at this event, and the police wouldn't do anything.

Maybe he'll correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they were Indians. And he took it into his own hands. Well, it turns out that they were underage. And, yeah, now this person's in trouble. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, well, I was going to say they, it's ironic that they, you know, that they can behave in such a way. And then the minute that it's revealed that they're, you know,

underage, that they're, they're adolescents, their children, however they want to frame it, they treat them, they treat them like, like children.

And I don't want to go up on a tangent on this, but this, you know, when I was a, this is something that dawned to me when I, I worked as a cop for three years is, you know, the specific ethnic group that we see a lot of the crime from,

I realize very quickly, you know, I would deal with 30-year-old men who had been arrested for murder or assault and their mothers would call. And they, my baby this, my baby, that. And it dawned on me at that moment. It was the first time I realized, like, these people have never grown up. They're children in their entire life.

There's no man around to say, no, you have to be held responsible for your actions. They just operate the way kids do and they get out of trouble constantly. But then they become adults. And that sort of mentality and that type of policing just facilitates that infantilization that allows them, you know, but then you're treating a 15, 16-year-old boy like he's a, like he's a child. It's not going to go well. No, never, never.

And yeah, you, I'm sure you've seen the meme of, um, they actually believe that they're, that they're innocent because they, the past doesn't exist to them. They're always living in the present. So at that present moment, yeah, I'm not, I didn't do nothing wrong. But, all right, let's talk about solutions because, I mean, this can get depressing. When you go down, when you go down to Spanglerian rabbit hole, it's like, oh, boy. One of the, I guess, solutions you put in here is always one that I like to talk about. I used to talk about a lot back in the libertarian days, but arranged marriages.

and you have you actually call it a strategic pillar. So why don't we, why don't you go off on that and we'll see where this goes? So with arranged marriages, the first thing people have to understand, and a lot of people don't, when they hear arranged marriages, their mind immediately goes to India.

And they think of somebody picking children out and pairing them off with no real regard for anything other than what the parents want. And that is just one form of arranged marriages. There's really three different forms of arranged marriage. You have the one in which, you know, we think of in India. You have another form in which the parents play, they basically have veto power. So the child brings a potential mate in front of them and they kind of say,

yay or nay. And then you have the middle ground, which is what was practiced, at least in the upper the upper echelons of society and the aristocracy throughout the West, which was basically matchmaking. And oftentimes the aunt would play this role of matchmaker and she would try to find somebody that would benefit the family and benefit the person, whether it was the, you know, looking for a wife or looking for husband. They would find a partner that matched up well personality-wise and, and, and, brought benefits to them, right? And this was the way that most marriages were because it is a very foolish thing to allow teenagers to pick or young adults to pick just based on emotion who they want to marry, right? And the reason that I describe it as a strategic pillar is because we should

think of picking a spouse as not only somebody who benefits us, but that will bring something to the table for our family at sort of writ large, right? And this is the way that this form of arranged marriage worked. It was, okay, you live in a small town. You know, you, let's say your family owns some land. You own, you have a fairly large farm. There's a family down the road that owns, you know, a handful of shops. They own some property. If you, and they have a daughter that's, you know, ready to get married, you have a son that's ready to get married. By pairing, them together, you know, obviously taking into some consideration their personality and everything, but pairing them together, you only, you only serve to strengthen both families, right? And that allows

for, for you to build the building blocks of an impact, essentially, right? It starts small. This is essentially the same thing you see again in the, you know, the royal families. It's, you're marrying for the purpose of building something, not just for the two of you, but for beyond that. And so I think one of the ways that people can prepare for the future and build something is you can build a dynasty if you approach marriage through the lens of what benefit is this going to have for our family and the other family as well. we can merge, you know, if we're both wealthy, you're simply merging that wealth. If you just have power, both families have power, you're merging that power, you're creating the building blocks of something bigger. And I think that's something that people have lost sight of because we've treated marriage

just as like, well, I like you, you like me, you make me feel good, let's get married, not considering the broader implications of that marriage. and specifically for parents, it's important to start thinking this way because you should view the potential partner of your child, not just for what they bring to your child, but like, how does this benefit us? Right. We're going to get old one day. We're going to need things one day by pushing your children or pushing your children in a direction towards, you know, getting married to somebody who comes from a good family that has, you know, has, has means, it's only going to further strengthen them. And I think that's the way we can start from the bottom, you know, especially for families that are, you know, your middle class. You know, well, one really quick way to move up generationally is to say, hey, look, you know,

and I've talked with other guys about this. Like, you know, I have boys, right? And I'm like, you know, your daughter's close to my son's age. You know, when they get to be looking around to get married, it only seems logical to try to pair them up together. We are like-minded. We share similar values. We go to the same church, right? We're only going to combine what we've already built by doing that.

And that can create a lot of power in a very short period of time and not just financial power. I mean, again, you're talking about combining, you know, if you have land, you're just, you can double that, triple that, whatever the case may be, that you can really exponentially increase, you know, your family's influence. And that only, that will allow you to sort of dictate the way the future goes, especially if you live in a small town. Yeah, and I'll be the, I'll be a more liberal voice on this. I mean, if you have a church like that, it doesn't even have to be like one family, but your daughter or your son doesn't even have to have one like one choice.

There could be three, four, or five. it's just like well you're picking one it's going to be one of these three four or five you know and go ahead no i was i was i've joked before i don't have daughters but um i've always said if i had daughters the first thing i would do and i wouldn't tell her to go to college i would get her a job uh i would try to get her job at the country club is like a caddy and she'd marry an optometrist in six months you know like i you have to approach it with sort of that mentality i think and i obviously it's a little tongue and cheek, but that's the way forward for that, you know? Yeah, I've, you know, as somebody who doesn't have kids, I don't take advice from me.

You know, maybe use, maybe use me as a, you know, as a warning. But it would seem to me that it would just make sense. I know people who, you know, believe what we do and have a worldview that we have. And they're like letting their kids just go at like 18 and 19 and do and do whatever they want. And it just really tells me just how deep like enlightenment thinking and progressive thinking and classical liberal thinking have just taken hold, even in people who would essentially believe, agree with pretty much everything we're saying. Well, and it's absolutely right because I have gotten, when I've expressed this idea publicly to people that aren't in our spheres, I get a lot of pushback, a lot of pearl clutching. Like the idea that I would, because I'm pretty open about it, I've told my oldest son, I was like, you know, if I don't approve of who you to see,

side to marry. Like if me and your mom say, look, we don't, we don't like her and you go and do that anyways, you forfeit your, um, your inheritance, right? That's the way, that's the way I approach it. Like, look, there's certain, there's certain, I'm not saying we're going to force you to marry some, but this, this person, but we're going to at least approve of that person and we're going to push you in that direction. People don't like that because they think, well, you should be free to shoes. And the way I always explain to them that you have to remember that if you have a young son, right, when he's 19, 20, 21 years old and he's dating or you're just letting him date however he wants, he's only going to go after the things that a 19 and 20 year old boy want. And that's an

attractive woman at the base level, right? He's not thinking about what makes her a good wife, what makes her a good mother. Those traits aren't really in his head. That's the job of the parents to do. The parents have to be the ones from the outside to look in on that and say, look, I know she's attractive, but she's crazy. Or I know this girl isn't as attractive, but she's kind. She comes from a good family. They have money. She'll make a good mom. Like those things are not there in the forefront of the mind of the child. And that's the job of the parent to come in and do that. And when you don't do that and then you act shocked when your your kid gets divorced after four years, well, I mean, what did you think was going to happen when

you got married specifically on the basis of, well, she's hot, you know? Well, and it's the exact reverse of what we've seen now, where parents aren't raising their kids to choose a good mate, and then that they're not raising their kids to have, live historically, be, you know, be loyal to the family. and what the family wants. And you can see that in, you know, I mean, there is a whole, like, industry of bumper stickers where I'm spending my kids in inheritance. And, you know, you look at that and you're like, okay, well, I mean, I have to assume

you raised your kids in a progressive mindset, in a classical liberal mindset, in a deracinated mindset. Or maybe not. Maybe your kid turned out good, turned out well, you know, despite you, but still, it's like that kind of, I mean, you could see raising a kid to be like, okay, this is what you're going to be, this is what you're going to do. And if you defy us, if you defy our wishes, you know, we're going to cut you off. You're not going, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to be at this on your own. I mean, you, that makes sense. raising a kid to not without that attitude. And then, you know, at the end being like, oh, you know, well, I mean, it was all about us all along.

So, you know, we're going to be going on cruises while you, you know, go from woman to woman and everything. Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's modernity, just in everything. Well, and I think, Pete, I think the positive note in this is that with the decline, it's going to facilitate a necessity for, reliance on family. And so a lot of that is going to, in my opinion, a lot of that is going to naturally start to reverse as people no longer have the ability, they no longer afforded the economic freedom they once had in mobility, right? That's something I've talked about extensively with my parents and other family members.

Like, I fully expect my sons to live with me for, I don't expect to. kick them out at 18, I guess is my point, right? Because I know where things are ahead. I know how expensive things are, right? And I'm not going to let them sit around and do nothing, right? They're going to be building something because I want when they do get old enough and they've established themselves to get married, I want them to bring something to the table, which only increases their mate prospect, right? But I think this is going to naturally start to happen for most families. as that economic ability goes away, you're going to have to rely on them.

And with that reliance, we'll facilitate the ability for the father to, to warrant that same respect and loyalty again, because they're going to have to at a base level, right? They won't have the ability to just say, I don't care, Dad, I'm leaving. I'm going to do whatever I want. And that's going to, I think, make,

it's going to strengthen family bonds in the long term. And again, you know, if the families that go out of their way to do things like practice some form of arranged marriage to set their kids up, they're going to benefit from that in a long run, right? You know, look at how a certain ethnic group has benefited from in-group preference through, and they do this through marriage as well. That's what they've done. How does certain industries get taken over because they're passed down through family? families. And that starts with this, this, you know, these building blocks that we're talking about now. All right. I appreciate that. That was, that was a good talk. Tell everybody, tell everybody a little about the, your first book, Crimson Vale, and then tell them how they can find both of your books.

Yeah, Crimson Vale is, it's my first, my first novel. It is, it is a, it is a southern noir that borders on, It borders on more of a literary fiction, so it's very character-driven, and it explores a sort of a disillusioned private eye in a corrupt southern town, dealing with the Dixie Mafia and the death of his father, and exploring the themes of rebirth, of returning home, and what sacrifice really means. That's the general theme of the book. It's been out for about two months. It's gotten nothing but great reviews. I've done two podcasts with Thomas on it. So even if you're not into fiction,

there's enough of a philosophical bend in there. I think it's definitely worth your time. So if you're interested in that, that can be found. It's the pin tweet on my Twitter. And it's also, you know, the links to my Amazon, which also has my collection of essays, the dispatches from the Old South Repository as well. Thank you.

I appreciate it, and I look forward to seeing you in about a month at the OJC conference, if not before. Yeah, I will be there, and I have 30 copies of my novel that I'll be willing to sign. So if anybody's going and wants to pick one up, I'll have them with me. Awesome. All right, man. Thank you. Take care. Thanks, Pete.