The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1298: **Throwback** Paul Gottfried on the Neo-Cons and What it Will Take to Defeat the Regime

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

93 MinutesPG-13Paul Gottfried was the Raffensberger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College. He is the author of many books, including Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America and Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right.This a re-release of episode 285 published 7/15/19, and episode 880 published 4/11/23.A Paleoconservative Anthology: New Voices for an Old TraditionChronicles MagazinePete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

Thank you. If you want to get the show early and ad-free, head on over to the Piquinez Show.com. There you can choose from where you wish to support me. Now listen very carefully. I've had some people ask me about this, even though I think on the last ad I stated it pretty clearly. If you want an RSS feed, you're going to have to subscribe your son. substack or through Patreon. You can also subscribe on my website, which is right there, Gumroad, and what's the other one? Subscribe Star. And if you do that, you will get access to the

audio file. So head on over to the piccunioness show.com. You'll see all the ways that you can support me there. And I just want to thank everyone. It's because of you that I can put out the amount of material that I do, I can do what I'm doing with Dr. Johnson on 200 years together and everything else, the things that Thomas and I are doing together on continental philosophy. It's all because of you, and yeah, I mean, I'll never be able to thank you enough. So, thank you. The Pekignano Show.com. Everything's there. All right, I'm here for the first time with Paul Gottfried. How are you doing, Paul? I'm doing well. Thank you. Thank you. I wanted you to come on today. And I wanted you to give everybody just basically a primer on what a neoconservative actually is.

As we were talking before, we started recording, there are a lot of people who were referred to as neoconservatives, but they just may be allies of the neoconservatives. So I'll just start with this first question. Who would you point to as the atom of the neoconservative movement? Yeah, you know, this is a debate that I used to have with my late friend Murray Roy. Lothbard, like, who was the first neoconservative, I suppose, was like Samuel Johnson, you know, saying, you know, who was the first wig? It was the devil or something like that. The neoconservative movement, I would argue, sort of starts out. And here I'm citing the late Sam Francis, almost like Namier's presopography. I mean, you're dealing with families and family connections. The crystal.

the pedortzes are sort of the the most important. They're the Paramount families in terms of the construction of a neoconservative of a family hierarchy. And I think that's what it's about in the early days. I mean, it's the empire built by these families who take over what by then is an almost more abundant

conservative movement or one that had shaken up, weakened, had defections. And they basically impose a it, what is, you know, a combination of sort of liberal internationalism and very right-wing Zionism, together with their own, you know, personal hang-ups like hating Germans, white southern reactionaries, or people, you know, who they looked upon with personal revulsion, given their own cultural background. But all of these things become part of a neo-conservative ideology that is created by family.

And by their retainers, it's almost medieval in character. Then what happens, like, you know, within the next generation, is that neoconservatism becomes an ideology that exists quite independently. And by now you can kick Bill Crystal out of the movement or Max Bood or these other people can go somewhere else. And there's a very clear gestalt of ideas and attitudes that are properly associated with neoconservatism. number one this very

in your face Zionism a willingness to call anyone who disagrees with your version of liberal internationalism and Zionism as an anti-Semite or a racist usually in an effort one might say to win support from the left

you know in ostracizing people another thing is an interest in holding positions in the State Department and in departments of government that allow you to impose your ideology or shape popular approval for it, for instance, working in the Department of Education, the National Endowment for Humanities, the U.S. Department of the U.S. Information, the Department of the U.S. Information,

these are all agencies that, you know, from the 1980s on became no strongly occupied by neoconservatives. sort of goes from prosopography or, you know, families in their connections to an ideology. By now, I would say it is the dominant ideology of the conservative movement, certainly in foreign affairs, and certainly in the attitude towards certain countries, and above all, sort of in a willingness to come to terms with the left on certain issues like certain social issues, gay marriage, human rights stuff, expanding the welfare state, but not doing it in a way that would hurt the interest of people who sponsor neoconservative politics and neoconservative magazines.

Now, before we go on with the neocons, you said something there that I wanted to ask about. You said that it dominated the right-wing movement right now. Trump fit into that? When you look at Trump, and, you know, because he is the chief in charge of the conservative movement right now, using air quotes right there, how does he fit into that? Well, it fits very easily. If you look at appointments that he makes, like Pompeo, well, we agree that Bolton is not a nationalist, is a nationalist, not a neol-conservative, really, but he's certainly allied with them. The speeches that Trump gives,

very neoconservative, you know, about American nationalism has now been equated with a human rights foreign policy, you know, spreading our doctrines of tolerance and equality and so forth all over the world. These are neoconservative tropes that have become absorbed or become incorporated into the administration and how it sees itself. Although I think what has properly become an even more dominant, a voice within the Trump administration are the West Coast Straussians, people like Michael Anton, Chris, what's his name, Bus Kirk, American Greatness website, these people sort of bring with them the doctrines of Harry Jaffa that, you know, America is a universal nation founded on a proposition that all men are created equal. Something, by the way, which the neoconservatives took from the West Coast Straussians, you know, that that is a foundational position of the neoconservatives, that America is a nation, unlike other nations, because it's based on a proposition that all men are created equal. That comes from the West Coast

Straussians originally and then was absorbed by the neoconservatives, and it's sort of a creed that they hold in common. I wanted to go back to the genesis of this, because there's a, there's a popular story about the founding of the neocons saying that the original neocons mostly came from the left and were probably influenced more by Trotsky than anyone else. Yeah, I think that is partly true, but I think it was also exaggerated by people who were reacting against them. Some of the first-generation neoconservatives sound

like deviationist, communist, or Marxist. Probably Jay Loftstone was a deviationist communist living in the United States, originally Lithuanian Jew who moves his family moves here. And many of the early neoconservatives are associated

with the Loftstone movement. The reason that they are considered to be Trotskyists is they believe in, you know, a perpetual global revolution, not to bring about, you know, a Marxist socialist regime, but a regime that is based on their view of American equality, democratic equality. But in their revolutionary global zeal, they sound very much like Trotsky. Because as a matter of fact, you know, I was reading this report of how Secretary Pompeo and President Trump are creating a human rights agency that will monitor human rights throughout the world and preparely instruct people on how to live. This sounds very neo-conservative, but in its universalism, its attempt to sort of control the world and bring it into line with what these people see as American revolutionary ideas. deals. It also sounds very Trotskyist, although I think the connection is not as direct as some people would care to see. I think there's a kind of leftist Gestalt that is present in New York. I think they are people of the left. They represent a radical left that at some

point broke from the left, you know, from the American left and from other left. But there There's stress inequality, revolutionary transformation, and universalism sound very, very much like Trotsky, or even like the French Jacobins who come, you know, in the end of the 18th century. So there is this leftist revolutionary zeal and ideology, which seems to be driving neoconservatism. that term perpetual revolution um i i believe they took that from lord acton and acton when he said that term he was talking about perpetual revolution for freedom to expand personal freedom so yeah i think yeah we always get a those of us who advocate for more liberty always get accused of trying to appropriate terms from the communists and this is from the communists or the socialist or whoever. This seems like a time that it was the other way around.

No, I think it was actually simultaneous because I think in the 19th century, the talk about perpetual revolution was probably very common. And, you know, I think probably classical liberals and revolutionary socialist took it over about the same time, although they obviously meant something very, they meant very different things. obviously we're going to want to talk about war but you had talked about how a plan of the neocons was to get into all facets so when it comes to something like the department of education what would be their goal in infiltrating and influencing the department of education well okay their goal and taking over the department of education would be to have their educational goals and their foreign policy policy positions and their view of American history taught in all public schools. And their view of American public is pretty much the mainstream liberal internationalist view of America that I grew up in the 1950s, although it also allows for the recognition

of other positions that the United States has taken since then in the form of overcoming inequalities, women's rights, the things that were not particularly big in the 1950s. So it's essentially, you know, an American-centered progressive view of history, which they would like to teach. Now, the reason they want to get jobs in the National Endowment for Humanities would be very different because there they just want patronage, which may have been one of the reasons they destroyed Mel Bradford and people on the old right who were trying to take it over in the Reagan administration, that that brings tremendous power to the neoconservatives in terms

of being able to confer favors, you know, on their own followers and people who are willing to follow their party line. But in the case the Department of Education, I think what they want is a more direct power in terms of being able to shape, you know, shape public opinion about certain things. they're very much interested in shaping public opinion in such a way as to further their own ideological and practical political goals. Do you know of any way that they tried to infiltrate and even influence churches? And specifically what I'm talking about are Protestant, your traditional Protestant churches,

because it seems that combining dispensational Christian eschatology, which is very pro-Israel, Israel cannot do any wrong. It would seem that they would want to also, and I've heard things like out of, I've heard speeches out of the Chatham House in England recently where they're talking about where the head of the CFR was talking, Hoss, and he was talking about how, you know, we've been able to really influence the leaders

in the Protestant churches in the United States. And I'm not saying the CFR is conservative. I mean, they're actually, their ideas go all over the spectrum. But it seems like they would try to get into the churches as well and to influence the leadership in the churches, at least. Yeah, I think there are two things going on sort of independently here. On the one hand, there are Protestant churches. are generally very pro-Israel, except for the ones that have, you know, wandered all the way over the left.

It's not just the dispensational, it's other Protestants who are very pro. And I think it's partly based on a concern with not appearing to be anti-Semitic. Now, there's no reason that one would think that, you know, American Protestants have stood out as anti-Semites or, you know, Northern European Protestants generally have because they've been more pro-Jewish than other Christians historically although there have been some residual medieval anti-Semitism

that one might find here or there or social prejudice or something like that. But they really don't have much of a record of anti-Semitism. But when I say in sort of compensating for this, they will really bend backward to show that they love Israel that the founders of Christianity were all, you know, Jews and probably Jewish nationalists.

This, of course, is greatly exaggerated, but you do hear this coming. It's not just from dispensationalists. I think generally Protestants in the United States and in England have been very phyllosemitic and very pro-Israel. But this is something which the neoconservative had begun to notice, because more leftists, more anti-Christian Jewish groups generally hate these people because they, you know, like evangelicals, you know, they're against gay marriage

or something like that. Well, the neoconservatives really don't care that much about these social issues, but they are passionately pro-Israel and they support the right wing in Israel. So here you have these Protestants who want to be nice to Israel who support them, who make trips to Israel, Israel, who are very well received by the government there, and the neoconservatives are very good at playing on this. I mean, it's a sentiment that already exists, but what they have done is they've tried to enhance the sentiment and reward people who express this view, so that, you know, you get somebody like Dennis Prager, who is an archetypal neoconservative, you know, constantly praising these nice Christians who love Israel.

Israel and sort of stressing our shared political values with Israel. Sheldon Aedelson and his wife Miriam are very strong backers of all kinds of conservative organizations in America. They have a free newspaper in Israel, a free daily. Yes, they do. And so does Murdoch. You know, the Jerusalem Post is owned by the Murdoch family. and they are fanatically expansionist nationalists.

You know, I mean, they're not just, you know, run-of-the-mill or generic Zionists, the people put out the Ruslim Post there on the extreme right, you know, expansionist, nationalist, Zionist in Israel. Although in the United States, you know, they favor gay rights or whatever, you know, is acceptable, social, you know, mainstream, social positions. But in Israel, they're very strongly, that's their position. But, you know, most of these people are quite willing to build alliances with pro-Israeli Protestants. But I think

these Protestants would be pro-Israel in any case. It's just that the neoconservatives, you know, want to reward them for taking these positions. Can you talk a little bit about any kind of influence the neoconservatives had during the Reagan era? Well, they had a very extensive influence. They were able to occupy, you know, physicians in the United States Department of Information. They were all over the State Department. They had power in the Department of Education. What might say, the apogies of their influence were reached in the Reagan administration

and then again in the George W. Bush administration. In those two administrations, they seem to be able to do whatever they want. wanted, I think they're climbing back into power into Trump administration, despite the fact that leading neo-conservatives were never Trumpers, but they sort of had enough people allied with Trump to have influence. I mean, people like Bill Bennett, certainly Bolton, Norman Podoritz was a strong backer of Trump, as son John, who's a very, very left-leaning Republican, was a never-Trumper and, I think, supported Kasich.

So, but there was enough of a neo-conservative presence in the Trump administration to get them some influence there. And I imagine that Ivanka and Jared Kushner sort of leaned very strongly in a neo-conservative direction, so does Pompeo. Now, when it comes to Iraq War I. the first Iraq war. What was the neocon influence into that? Well, I mean, they did have plans for a war like that that that went back well before the decision by George W. Bush to invade Iraq.

They plans going back to the 90s. There's a very good book by not well-written, but, you know, very well-documented. I was talking about the first Iraq war, George H.W. Bush. Oh, you mean the one against Kuwait? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Against or for Kuwait. Yeah, for Kuwait against Iraq.

Well, most of the neoconservatives were extremely enthusiastic about that war. I don't know how much direct influence, however, they would have had on the George H.W. Bush administration since he, and his advisor Baker tried to keep the neoconservatives at a distance. They may have decided to become militarily involved there quite independently of the neoconservatives, despite the fact that the neoconservatives gave that military venture a very, very strong support. Okay. All right. So through the Clinton years, you had the Iraq embargo, the sanctions that killed, we believe,

could kill half a million, but it seemed like more of the action was in Kosovo, which that, the Kosovo War wouldn't be something, would that be something the neocons would have an interest in? Believe it or not, there was divided opinion then. Charles Kroohtamber was very strongly against bombing there. Basically, because he saw the Serbs as, you know, people who had been friendly to the Jews during the Second World War and didn't mean. much like the Muslims on the other side.

Some neoconservatives backed that were others that not. I think generally there was something less than, you know, exuberant support for the war that came from the neoconservatives. Unlike, you know, the invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush, which the neoconservatives had worked years to bring about. Now, when Bush got into office, and he ran, this is Baby Bush, W. Bush. Right.

He got into office and he had run on a humble foreign policy. His foreign policy was almost, could be compared to Ron Polish. Right, right. But then he went and staffed his cabinet with, I mean, he had, the closest people to him were Cheney, his vice president, Rumsfeld. Who else am I forgetting? The people on his immediate staff, would you consider them to be neocons? Are they neocon-friendly? Well, Romhill is probably neocon-friendly, although Mitch Dexter seemed to be, you know, erotically enraptured by him.

And I think she said about Ron, because he was sort of like an unexpected, you know, support of the neocon course. And the case of Cheney, I think, is, you know, support for neoconservative course. causes was not surprising. His wife, his daughter, you know, were sort of authentic neoconservatives or authentic neoconservative allies. And much of the rhetoric, by the way, the neoconservatives helped place Lynn Cheney in the position of director of the National Endowment. I had been, by the way, her competitor for the job, but I was very quickly marginalized in that struggle. But, you know, they had already established very close ties to the Cheney family when Lynn became director of the NEH.

The neoconservatives, of course, helped to direct that agency. And Cheney, as vice president, very often sounded like a neoconservator. It gave you neoconservative reasons for doing things. So I think Cheney was very definitely in their orbit. Another very important person who is maybe underrated is Michael Gerson. who was the speech writer and one might say sort of moral confident of George W. Bush. You know, he wrote those marvelous speeches about how everyone on the planet was, you know, yearning to be delivered from non-democratic governments by America,

which stood for, you know, universal democratic values. Those landmark speeches were written, were delivered by Bush, were written by Gerson, who also seemed to have had considerable influence in shaping George W. Bush's rudimentary worldview. Let's go to the wars. Okay, right after 9-11, the invasion of Afghanistan, what would be the neoconservative interest in invading Afghanistan? Well, I don't think there was any specific neoconservative interest there. It was just the place where the Taliban seemed to be coming from. they seem to have some connections with the attack in 9-11. Of course, Saudi Arabia also had connections,

but we, you know, for strategic reasons, were expediential reasons, decided to ignore that. I mean, the neoconservatives, of course, were in favor of that. If you remember that after 9-11, they were hoping to really militarize American foreign policy and practice a very aggressive form of liberal internationalism. And one of the things neoconservatives were saying is this person is a pre-9-11 thing

that you cannot be taken seriously because this is a pre-9-11 mentality. And this, of course, assumed that because of 9-11 and everybody was to become an aggressive nationalist, you know, or believe in national expansion or saving the world for democracy. they liked Afghanistan, it was fine, but to them this was simply the, you know, the first thing to be eaten, you know, the first thing to be eaten, you know, the first order of the day in what was to be, the first course, in a very, very long meal that would involve, you know, all kinds of military activity. So, of course, they liked Afghanistan who did not be enough for them.

Yeah, so let's jump forward to Iraq. Paul O'Neill famously said that they were planning the invasion of Iraq right after the inauguration, and this is before 9-11. What was the obsession at that point? You've already said that, you know, you really can't make a correlation between Iraq War I under H.W. Bush, and, you know, the neocons didn't hate it, but it doesn't look like they planned it, but it looks like Iraq War II was, you know, really pushed and even could be orchestrated by the neocon. So why was that so important to them?

Well, there's a book called the something like The Open or the Open Cabal, but it's by a, I think a person now retired from the Department of Education named Steve Snigorsky, and it's a very long, detailed and boringly written book on how the neo-conservatives plan the war against the Iraq. It is meticulously documented. Snigorsky was, you know, Daniel Kinnock had his book published because he was attacked as an anti-Semite for writing. And I have no idea why.

I'm Jewish, and I wrote a very long introduction to the book, you know, praising it. It was not even anti-Israeli. I mean, the argument he was making was that American neo-conservatives planned the war. And not from the time of the inauguration going back into the 1990s, They had people like Frank Traeger, who'd been an earlier foreign, neoconservative foreign policy advisor, and it would have been my contemporary for a while when I taught at the NYU Graduate School. Trager and others were planning that war from the 1990s on with neoconservatives.

They were simply looking for an occasion to stop the war, find a precedent which started for them. So, I mean, the plan goes back to a much earlier point in time than the inauguration of George W. Bush. It was just something lying around which they planned to use. And it goes back to the First Iraq War. They were unhappy that the First Iraq War did not result in an invasion of Iraq, right? And they were very, very angry at Colin Powell and others and Baker who opposed invading Iraq. So they come up with this plan for it.

One reason that they are driven by this plan is that at the time they're putting it together, the Israeli government looks upon Iraq, not Iran, but Iraq as their primary enemy. So by taking out Iraq, they would be removing what the Israelis viewed as an existential threat. Now they'll say the existential threat is Iran. Back then, it was Iraq. Yeah, now they say it's Iran. You fought a war against the Sunnis, in Iraq, which would seem to be. benefit Iran and now you're right and that one leads to the other yeah yeah which creates

ISIS which um it strengthens al Qaeda creates ISIS and yeah just a whole mess and now it's time to attack the Shia it's the same people that in the 90s were having the Israelis were funneling weapons through the whole Iran-Contra thing and all of a sudden it seemed like in five years, not really in five years, but now they're the enemy. Now we can do secret deals with them, but publicly we're going to talk about how horrible they are. So why don't we finish us up by talking about, is the neocon movement stronger than ever? And how do you see to just basically defeat this ideology? Well, I have no idea how you defeat the ideology. And I think what they've done is they've taken over the conservative movement. And most of their major

themes are integral to what I call conservatism Incorporated is now pushing an aggressive foreign policy a conservative movement heavily funded by defense industries and as I say Zionist casino owners

I have no idea how it can be changed I have a book coming out with Cornell University Press in the next few months which is an anthology of critical essays about the conservative movement which banned me, by the way, 30 years ago and has become my mortal enemy

ever since. The neoconservators, though, are so basic to media conservatism. I mean, they provide the sponsors, and they also provide, you know, what has become the dominant ideology, which is about, you know, American exceptionalism,

fighting wars for democracy, bringing human rights everywhere, and being willing to compromise on social issues, many economic issues, in order to build a large tent, as I argue, mostly with the central left. They're not interested in paleo-libertarians or paleo-conservatives, whom they rightly assume are going to die off pretty soon. What they want is to build an alliance with the people at the Atlantic or the moderate people at Washington Post or New York Times, who lets them, who lets national review, editors write for them, and so forth. The neo-conservatives, people say, well, there's no more neoconservatives, and there's not, in the sense you don't have something called a Bolshevik movement after the Russian Revolution,

right? Which has is what had been Bolshevism running Russia. So, I mean, the neoconservatives are in exactly the same position. I mean, they have been so wildly successful. They run what is the authorized right. And anybody who becomes a Republican, a conservative, a populist president, will sooner or later be taken over by neo-conservative ideologues. And this is happening right now with the Trump administration, you know, every day more and more. Because Trump was a kind of unknown quantity, and he's a man who I think had no really firm political convictions, sort of political adventurer.

and the neoconservatives were there. They provided advisors. They appear on Fox News. They write for the Wall Street Journal. You know, they're providing a certain intellectual depth of what there is or substance to what there is of the Trump or rhetorical substance to the Trump administration. So I think that as much as I might despise them, the neoconservatives have an extremely bright future ahead of them. Well, I wanted to ask you one more question because,

in a couple of days, I have an episode coming out with somebody who remained anonymous, but he works inside the military industrial complex, and he's worked for contractors before, and I had them on just to spill the beans. The neocons, what is their relationship with the, with the Boeing's, the North of Grummans of the world? It is extremely close. You know, it's incestuous, in fact. No, you look at We're Heritage Foundation, which is, you know, a thoroughly new conservative, particularly on foreign policy for a neo-conservative organization.

They are loaded with money from the, you know, the former CEO of Boeing almost became the president of the Heritage Foundation after DeMint left. Then they found this black woman to take the position, who's sort of, you know, sort of nondescript, that sort of makes them appear to be sort of reaching out to minorities but I think it might have been too obvious so they picked the sum of Boeing but they're heavily funded by by defense industries

I think this represents a kind of I've written these books on the conservative movement back in the late 1980s early 1990s most of the money going to heritage which then had a budget about one tenth of what it has now was coming from these conservative foundations, which the neoconservatives took over like Smith, Richardson, Olin, Bradley. Once they took them over the money, sort of went into heritage.

But now a lot of the money is coming from defense industries for AI, for Heritage Foundation, for other essentially neoconservative think tanks in Washington. What books, what have you written that if people want to get more information and get even deeper into the neokine ideology, can you point? Well, I have written three not widely reviewed books on the conservative movement. I also have a book on Leo Strauss and the Straussians in the American, which Cambridge publish, which discusses the connection between Straussians and the present conservative movement. Then I have a book coming out this year. With Cornell, which is a critical study, which contains a number of, I only wrote two of them. Mine is not. I've had a long essay on purges, but then we have essays on funding and stuff like that.

And Cornell University Press will be publishing that. I'm sure it will be blacked out by the conservative movement. They might even get some of their liberal friends to black that out. But I think the book will sell very well. So, I mean, all of these things, all of these works deal with the conservative movement. But I do have three monographs. Two of them are out of print. One of them is still available.

And then we have what I hope is this blockbuster, you know, of critical essays on the present conservative movement. It's funny how you're, when you talk about the present conservative movement, how you were just talking about it, you didn't even seem to be making a distinction between neocons and conservatives. It's just almost a given. Right. I mean, they're totally fused. When I hear people say, well, the neoconservators are just one of a number. Really, you know, it's like saying the Nazi Party in Germany was one of a number of parties

or, you know, the Communist Party in East Germany. I always compared to Communist East Germany, because you had the S.A. Day, which was the Marxist Communist Party power. But then they had all these other parties, you know, which were technically on the books, you know, a Lutheran peasant party or something like that. And I, and they said, you see a lot of parties. And I said, but there's only one that runs the show, you know. The other are just there, you know, as part of the display, you know, part of an exhibit, but only one runs it. I think the neoconservatives are in the same position. Libertarians, I don't think of any influence on anything. I mean, Jonah Goldberg calls himself a little.

libertarian. He's in favor of every military adventure favors a vast welfare state, but he's a libertarian because he doesn't like Trump's populism or a Trump that is placing a tariff on something. So Goldberg says he's a libertarian. I mean, I don't think the libertarians have any influence whatever. So then why is Tucker Carlson not only crapping all over libertarians on a pretty regular basis, but he even mentioned Austrian economics. He goes after right. He goes after Austrian economics. Because the libertarians are not even players in the game. So if you beat up on them, that can make any difference. Nobody cares what you do.

By the way, a lot of what Tucker Carlson says sounds like paleo-conservatism. I've written a few columns in this. We never allow me or any other paleo-conservative onto a show because his sponsors won't allow it. but you know if you attack the libertarians who cares I think that's his attitude well it was great talking to you thank you for uh thank you for coming on the show sharing all this and I'll link up to a couple of your books

so that if people want to get deeper into this they can they can certainly jump in well thank you for having me okay all right have a great day thank you yeah bye bye I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cignon as show I am happy to have Dr. Paul Gottfried whipped me today. How are you doing, Dr. Godfrey? Okay, fine. Great. Well, the reason I asked you to come on today is because a new release called a paleo-conservative

anthology came on my radar when your, uh, when your protege, C.J. Engel told me about it and sent me a copy. And I started reading it. And immediately your introduction just sucked me in because there were so many names in there that I recognize. And as a former libertarian, I mean, Rothbard and Lou Rockwell's name just pulled me right in. But let's start with this. I'm sure a lot of people know this story, but a lot don't. How did paleo-conservatism even become a thing? Yeah, that's a good question. And, you know, it's one that I tried to address in the introduction that sucked you in. Yeah, the paleo-conservatives are not what they are generally criticized for being, I think was Rich Lowry, who maintained that these were not the important

conservatives before the 1980s in the neo-conservative ascendancy, to which my response is that we never, we never claimed we were. In fact, the paleo-conservatives, were sort of an original movement that came out in the 1980s and which incorporated various elements of the old right, of different old rights, even going back into the 1930s, and what held it together was a rejection of neoconservatism and a global democratic foreign policy and a defense of an expanding,

leveling administrative state. And those were sort of the, issues around which paleo-conservatism gelled. And I was the one who invented the term like Palaisos in Greek, which is ancient or old, right? And making the argument that we represent the old conservative tradition, not just one tradition, but many traditions. And what what held us together was a resistance against the neocon interlopers who took over in the 1980s. And, you know, they hated us in turn and banned us from conservative organizations and banned us from conservative magazines and so forth. And it was actually the coming together of the band

that resulted in a paleo-conservative, paleo-libertarian alliance in the late 1980s, which lasted for a few years, then it sort of dissolved and now it's sort of coming back in a different form. But another important thing to keep in mind is that most of the Pellio-Conservative leaders were not necessarily the people who were in front of the old movement. I mean, there were people like Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbitt, Forrest McDonald, and others who were sympathetic to our side. But the people who became leaders like Tom Fleming or myself, Lou Rockwell. We were not really leaders of what had been the Buckleyites before, the Buckley conservative movement or the amalgamation of conservative thinkers and conservative opinion around anti-communism, which of course was the linchpin, right, of the National Review conservatism

organized in the mid-1950s through William F. Buckley and former communists. we, you know, we were not the leaders of that movement, but rather we were conservatives who came along maybe two decades later and came to dominate what became paleo-conservatism for a while because we were crushed by the conservative establishment by the mid-1990s. How did the attacks on Emmy Bradford begin that? I mean, really, it seems like, it magnified what was the attacks? Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, it sort of provides a cause around which paleo-conservatives and even paleo-libertarians

like Lou Rockwell and Murray Rothbard rallied. So, you know, it was one of those things that has a unifying effect on what then was sort of an incipient movement. And all the paleo-conservatives, paleo-libertarians felt absolutely indignant. at the way Bradford had been treated and the campaign, the character assassination launched by the neo-conservative press against him. That was very important. One of the points I make is that there are some turning points that are more important than, and there are some positions that are more formational than other ones. For example, some paleo-conservatives.

were pro-Israel, others were anti-Israel, or pro-Serb or anti-SERD, didn't care about the Serbs. Those, I would argue, are sort of secondary positions. The war against the neoconservatives and the catalyzing effect of what happened with Bradford, you know, in 1981, I think bring the paleo-conservative movement into existence. Do you see a continuation of the pushback against Bradford and any kind of southern heritage, how Claremont continues to lionize Lincoln? Right. Yeah, I mean, obviously, it continues.

I'm just supposed to be a keynote speaker at this Abbeville Institute gathering this weekend. And, you know, I'm making the point that. that, you know, the Southern Conservatives were entirely driven out of the conservative movement after the defeat of Bradford. I mean, they just, like, disappear. And, you know, a part of it is their own fault. They really don't fight back very effectively. And, you know, Southern conservative today means a supporter of Nikki Haley or, you know, Tim Scott or somebody like that. So, you know, those are the only, you know, they're quite happy to have Confederate back.

battle flags removed and you know i i remember lindsay graham made a speech against um nascar drivers who have confederate decals on their cars i mean it's just like ridiculous they used to be all over the place you know in that in 19 uh the 19 i think 1992 election uh the democrats featured a confederate battle flag you know at uh bill clinton when he spoke um so you know it wasn't that long ago when it was an iron symbol. But, you know, they've all run for the hills. And I think this was an absolutely cowardly stupid thing to do. But, you know, this is the price you pay to appear, I suppose, on Fox News. But in any case, the Southern conservatives are entirely in retreat. I wanted to read a sentence from your introduction in a paleo-conservative anthology and have you

comment on it. You said that one faction grounded its conservatism in hierarchical order and the other a somewhat idealized concept of the people. What does that mean? Yeah, I think you actually have these sort of almost two conflicting elements within paleo-conservatism. There is a populist element. There's a whole, as a populist tradition, we're all the way back to the 1950s. And, you know, you find these in people who admire Wilmore Kendall and others, George Carey, other populists of this period. And my assistant, one of my assistants, Pedro Gonzalez, very definitely represents this populist strain. And as, you know, it's always glorified the people and, you know, makes no bones about supporting a welfare state, a large welfare state to protect

the working class. You also have a libertarian element, which I, to which I, to which I refer, you know, and these are people who, you know, sort of want to go back to the American Constitution as understood around 1850 or something, and they entirely reject the modern welfare state, there's strict constitutional, strict constitutionalists and so forth. Then you have others who are simply, you dislike modern equality, the idea of equality, believe in hierarchy and degrees in society and sort of make no bones about this. But all these groups have sort of come together. In fact, there's combinations.

You've got someone like Hansem and Hopper who really, I don't know, he's sort of marginal to the alliance, but I suppose he's sympathetic to some of our views. But Hans would, you know, is both a defender of hierarchy and an anarcho-libertarian. So, you know, you do get these combinations, but it's combinations of ideas and worldviews that are excluded from the present conservative movement.

They're sort of on the outside. And, you know, we're a kind of catch-all in the end. So, you know, not all of the views that we represent are compatible views. Not all the views that find themselves in our big tent, you know, are compatible with other views that are found there. In Carl Horowitz's essay, he says that the present conservative movement was largely a neocon construction of the 1980s. Is that how you see a like a daily wire or those kind of publications which would would talk about ending the welfare state but also would never say.

don't send money to Israel kind of thing. Right. Yeah. No, I think Horowitz is right about this. What I've seen take place is that the neoconservatives from the 1980s have moved in two directions. Some of them have become Claremont Institute populist, you know, and we agree with them on, you know, or at least part of a paleo-conservative camp, agree with the populace.

And I write for American greatness, which is a Claremont publication. together with people who are my neo-conservative enemies in the 1980s, you know, we're on the same side here. Other, the younger generation of neoconservatives who aren't that young anymore, they're already in their 60s. People like David Frum, Bill Crystal, Max Boot, Jonah Goldberg, I suppose, is a neo-day. They've all become liberal Democrats, essentially,

or right for bulwark or something, you know. never Trump, centrist, leaning left or something like that. But the conservative movement is entirely neoconservative, even though the original neoconservatives have gone in different directions. But, you know, you pick up something like National Review. You know, it's like a vulgar imitation of commentary in the 1980s, except for some of the pieces maybe by Andrew McCarthy that, you know, show a good legal mind. But, you know, most of the stuff could easily have appeared in commentary, although it was a little less of a Zionist angle.

But the mainstream conservative movement is, you know, I think by now is irreversibly neoconservative. I mean, there's the argument that somehow, you know, the neoconservative is just one of a number of elements. So, you know, they're just, or they've gone or they disappear. This is utter nonsense. You turn on Fox News. Mike Pompeo and all the other people they have, you know, sound like Norman Podoritz and, you know, neo-conservatives of the, of the 19, there's no difference. And the only difference I see is that on social issues, the present conservative movement is well to the left of the neoconservatives, LGBT and stuff like.

I mean, they pretty much accept this by now, whereas the neoconservatives of the 1980s were puritanical. You know, they'd oppose gays. They were in the military. And so, so I think on social issues, the conservative movement today is well to the left of the neoconservatives of the 80s, but certainly on foreign policy and the talk about democracy and human rights, they sound very much like neoconservatives. One of the other things you wrote in here was, and this will lead me into another area I wanted to go into is you said the main reason that paleo conservatives were driven out of the movement and then often slandered was they stood in the way of those who took their place

their presence made it hard for their ambitious successors to build friendships with those on the left who welcomed a moderate position yeah how when you start bringing in when you start allying with people who are on the left and who are more moderate, what does that do to your movement, in your opinion? Well, I mean, what it does is, is it obviously dilutes to conservatism and it sort of puts you in a situation. We have to keep moving to the left in order to maintain your alliances, because the left is not going to come in your direction. They have, you know, they control the energy field. So what has happened is the conservative movement on most issues has moved to the left since the 1980s, although they do favor things like, you know,

dropping corporate tax rates or things to please their corporate sponsors. And every now and then they talk, you know, an increasingly meaningless way about family values. I don't quite sure what that means anymore. You know, probably two lesbians married to a transgendered or something, but give money to the Republican Party. yeah well the reason i i brought that specific quote of yours and i had it highlighted to talk about was because the latest issue of chronicles you wrote an article called marks marks was not woke um is that yeah says uh about yeah marks was not woke okay and only read one little section here says what has become a shrunken uh denatured liberalism was

abandoned for a successor ideology wokeism. That's what the Pazone says. Further, there may be no way back to what has been resoundingly repudiated and what took generations to collapse. Only an equally determined collectivism can effectively resist those who have ended the liberal era or what became the pale imitation of one. You, in your latest article, and there's articles, by a few people in there talking about Marxism and wokeism. You say that this, what's called wokeism, is not Marxist, but it's liberal. Why do you say that? Yeah.

It's important to understand when I'm using the word liberal, I do not mean liberal in the sense in which I discuss liberalism in my book after liberalism, which Prince and published in 1999, which is a discussion of 19. century bourgeois constitutional liberalism. This is nothing to do with it anymore. This is the argument that I'm making that liberal has undergone so many conceptual and semantic transmutations since around 1850. It no longer means, you know, the views of Tocqueville or the views of Disraeli or so people in the 19th century, right? Or even Grover Cleveland, it means or it didn't mean having a large welfare state, having the government control social policy, in order to provide

for our liberty or expression of liberty. And that becomes sort of the usable definition of liberalism, of the John Dewey, progressive, variety, even the New Deal, the Great Society, and so forth. When I was in graduate school, people who called themselves liberals, you know, we're not trying to return to John Locke. They were, you know, there were people who believed in an extensive welfare, say, state, social engineering, and so forth. Nonetheless, there is at least some pretense that these liberals believe in open discussion. And one of the arguments I made a guy, as I just don't remember this era. I mean, when the ACLU was running, I'm going to defend this man.

I mean, they didn't remember them defending some Nazis. They didn't defend me. You know, they had a few showcases. We're going to defend these extreme exterminationist anti-Semites or someone. What about people who were just, you know, generic conservatives? They didn't really care about them. And, you know, I remember my own experience with liberals that was beaten from pillar to post by them as a young professor.

I was denied tenure in universities. And I remember other people suffering this by people who call themselves liberals. No, I'm not saying they were in. inconsistent in their views. I think they understood liberalism very different. They were going to advance human freedom here and elsewhere through state control by socializing us so that we would all, you know, we'd all think scientifically and properly and rationally as they wanted us to think. And then finally the word liberal I see becomes identified with gay marriage or a liberal becomes identified with transgendered or something like this.

And my view is that there is a kind of degenerate liberalism here because we're giving people, the state is going to provide you with expressive freedom at the cost of other people being denied freedom. And then you get people, I suppose, like Barry Weiss and her friends, like Douglas Murray, who are gay atheist, but they don't want their friends canceled. If they cancel me, they don't commit damn. They don't want their friends canceled. So then some of their nastier friends who are walk says, you know,

these people have just crossed the line and we're going to deny them the right of you. My view is by the time you reach that point, we're not talking about the liberalism, you know, of 1850 or 1860. We're not talking even about the liberalism of the New Deal. We're talking about a, what I said, sort of a pale imitation of a pale imitation of a pale limitation of liberalism. So there isn't very much to save. Now, the more questionable statement I'm making, which nobody seems to challenge. And I was attacked by this guy, James Lindsay, from the dark web or this, he went after me. And apparently like hundreds of us. He's another one of

those leftists that the right invites in. I know. I know. He hates me. He hates me. And he attacked me as a supposedly smart, stupid person. And there were like hundreds of thousands of people reading this. And he attacked me because he insists that wokeism is Marxism. And then he quotes somebody named Paulo Freer, who is a Brazilian Marxist educator who is not woke. He's a Marxist. Yeah. I mean, you know, he did write something on ecology once, but he's a piece that I don't see him coming up for LGBT or Black Lives Matter or anything like this. There is, but I have not been attacked for my last statement that only another collectivism can defeat this collectivism. And I believe that's true.

I think the liberal error is over. And whether it will be collectivist nationalism, whatever it is, it'll only be a collectivist right at the end of the day that can defeat this enemy. I don't think the idea we're going to return to constitutional. I mean, my sympathy, I said with these people, I don't see how it's going to work. that was my immediate, I retweeted him when I saw that this morning. And I said, the center is never going to defeat the evil that we're fighting against. Right.

And here's the thing about him is this is how he, he was, no one knew who he was. He wrote, he and a couple other people wrote some fake, um, thesis that were, they became famous by writing fake thesis that were like insanely woke. And then as soon as that happens, the right, people on the right, even people I respect, see him, see him as some, oh, well, you know, we have so few, you know, we have so few allies. Let's ally with everyone and everyone. And they, and then I find, you know, then I see him putting out tweets. This is like two years ago where he's like, I am way, understand, I am way more scared of the right than I am the left. Yes. So that tells me he wants to. Yeah. And that tells me he wants to fight this from the center. How is the center going to fight against this when the center is what, in my opinion, this is what it comes out of. Yeah. No, I agree. I agree. It's, you know, it's sort of like asking the Nazi party to fight Hitler's regime or something. You know, I mean, I suppose it could, it could work. But it is interesting

of all these people on the right who have been ostracized and they don't want to associate, They don't associate with me, with any of my friends, but they're quite willing, you know, to align themselves with the more moderate woke elements, you know, against the more extreme. This is the story of the conservative movement since the 1980s. These sort of building alliances with the left while excluding elements of the right that are seen as socially unacceptable to the left. Yeah. Yeah. The, but that whole, the one point you, made. And I think that everybody is so concentrated now on the fact that, you know, you're saying liberal, you're, well, let me ask you this. Hold on. Let me ask you this. I look at liberalism. I look at the founding of this country. And I think of things like I think of securing the

blessings of liberty, language like that. I think of Franklin and maybe it's apocryphal. We have a republic if you can keep it. If, to me, the failure of liberalism, if classical liberalism inspired the founders to create this, and there's, they did something, there's something fundamentally wrong with what they did if it went from where it was then and it ended up here. Why? I mean, they could, they were right in their time, but containing that system depended on a certain social and cultural order, which doesn't exist anymore. You know, these were property-owning, Protestants, in all communities, you know, who believe that divinely given morality, strong families,

a certain kind of authority system within their communities. And that system works there. Unfortunately, we don't have that anymore. We have an unrestricted franchise. I mean, anybody can vote. When I was a young professor, I remember, they would not allow college students to vote, certainly not in local elections, and Madison was. Wisconsin because they did not establish residence. Now they just go on, they all vote, and they vote for the Democrats who are going to give the, you know, forgive their loans, right? And just look at the way American women have changed their, American and European women have changed their values entirely. They no longer care about family and children and, you know, they run around supporting transgendering and stuff like that.

I mean, they're unbelievable, unrestricted abortion. But I think there's been a cultural moral transformation, which makes the kind of system that the founding fathers wisely put together no longer workable. You know, I mean, it depended on a certain cultural patrimony that doesn't exist anymore. And the question is, where do we go from here? Well, I guess the question is, is if that cannot work, what they tried to set up, did not, cannot work in a multicultural. society right how do you fix that when there's only one answer to ending how a multicultural fixing a multicultural society yeah well i mean the the answer is either a right-wing authoritarian regime you know left wing or the thing is the left is so crazy you can't even get anything as good

as marxism anymore they're just totally insane um and the uh the other thing is succession but i don't know how it's going to work you know i'm that's fine How do you succeed? You know, the town, we are a very conservative town, and then we're surrounded by woke leftist and so forth. In 1861, at least it made geographical sense as a session. Now, you know, you're going to have, you have to go street by street, you know, separating people.

I don't know how we're going to get out of this, but this woke madness has to be ended. Otherwise, we're all done. Oh, yeah. So the other day, I was reading an article by Murray Rothbard in 1992, and he was talking about Sam, it was an article just talking about Sam Francis and his book, Beautiful Losers. And he mentioned in there, he mentioned you, and he mentioned the therapeutic state. And, well, talk about the third. He's writing that 30 years ago.

Right. Talk about the therapeutic state 30 years later. Yeah, it's much worse. Everything Murray wrote about it, that I wrote about that. happened it's it's it's unbelievable he didn't live to see the you know the the uh the nightmare come true uh or how far the nightmare would extend but uh yeah i mean it is a therapeutic state i mean it's it's fighting uh it's fighting normal people as insane it has to reconstruct them uh and uh you know the people who would normally be considered insane are the ones running

things um uh but i i i it is interesting that there is a certain kind of leftist gestalt here that I'm aware of, sort of in looking, I mean, they're doing this the name of equality, not just liberty, that there were certain people who are historically denied equality. Therefore, we have to give them all compensatory justice, and we have to punish people who historically deny them equality, right? I mean, so there is this egalitarian, this leftist egalitarian strain that runs through woken together with this sort of degenerate liberalism, which is, you know, which takes the form of this expressive freedom, we're going to help you to change your sex when you're five years old or whatever you want to do because you would have been denied this right before and you would have been victimized up until now. So now we're going to let you do all of this stuff. And the people who complain have no rights because they would have oppressed you in the past. Another thing, I had you on the show a few years ago, and we talked about Antifa, which was growing at that time and was becoming more popular.

But now, now that it's become basically a part of the state, it's a state function, how do you, how would you even bother to? And I tell people just don't, don't go out there. Don't go against them. They're protected. There's no right wing bail fund to get you out of jail or two. How do we go forward with them? What is, can you think of any answers to this? Well, I do have this hope that these people will destroy themselves.

Because I think what you have are very incompatible elements that have somehow become confused as the woke left. And you think about it, what do black nationalists have in common with homosexuals, lesbians, all of these snowflake types, they have nothing in common with them, except they hate white male Christians or something like that. I mean, they can agree on what they hate, but there's very little else that unites them. In Europe, you have, you know, you have a feminist out there demonstrating in Germany with Muslim, Muslims, Muslim nationalist, or people who want to Sharia states.

Now, really, they have nothing in common except that they hate Germans. You know, they hate normal Germans. They blame them for every evil in history. The question is, will a time come when these people turn on each other? And I hope to live to see it. And it could be very nasty, but that's one way out. I just don't think the right has very much power behind it. I don't see anything.

I mean, I'd like to believe Joe Biden that the greatest danger are white nationalist extremist. I don't see them. Where are these people? They must be hiding from me. Well, I mean, even if they did present themselves, they'd immediately be arrested. They'd have the book thrown at them, just like the gentleman who made the meme telling people not to vote in 2016. Right.

And let's face it, a former president has been indicted. How much hope does a right winger have right now to get out there and actually do a right-wing protest at this point is seen and labeled as white nationalists and everything? And it is immediately cracked down upon them. Yes. And you have about half the population saying it's a good thing we're cracking down. on them because they're dangerous yeah and you know the the the the the local left controls education the media um and you know they're able to create a totalitarian state much more effectively than the communist or nazis because they don't have to really kill a lot of people to do this right

i mean they they just control communications the communications that existed in germany in the 1930s that hitler used were absolutely primitive compared to we had today so you know you could you can force people into line, maybe just by jailing a few, which they've done, you know, and, you know, the FBI and of course, the point is, the question that I keep raising, is it a point going to be reached when some of these Antifa and other thugs become actually dangerous to the state? You know, I mean, the solution then, I've argued is the one that Hitler used in dealing with brown shirts. You simply have to wipe them out. And they'll wipe them. them out and they'll say they're really white wing right wing nationalist or they're they're white

supremacist even if they're black or something like that they'll make up some story uh which the gullible of course buy because they believe anything that the left tells them and i i think i think at some point that is going to happen because some of these people are becoming very violent i mean you read this stuff about what happened in georgia which has become a thoroughly blue state yeah i left i left a year and a half ago. I know. Yeah. I mean, what do you do? Well, part of it, of course, is the black vote, which tripled as a result of the civil rights, the civil rights error and the voting rights act. It's, you know, you can say, fine, there's the right to vote, but I think what happened there was that the state, you know, wrote roughshod over districts that did not present a certain

percentage of blacks voting in them. So there was almost sort of artificially inflated vote get them all. And of course, the blacks at the same time were becoming politically radicalized. If they had, if they'd obtained these voting rights in 1900, it was very different because they were Bible reading Republicans back then, right? But it was what went after, but they were useful to the left because they were becoming radicalized in this period. And the vote, and then, of course, women were becoming radicalized because of the feminist movement, right? And college students and government workers. So there you have. have the combination and immigration of course you know the most immigrants tend to vote with the

left and you have all those things in Georgia right I mean it's oh yeah it's around Atlanta oh Atlanta is just basically take Atlanta's taken over the whole state so yeah there is I'm thinking the western part of the state you have Marjorie Taylor Green being elected right I mean that's up in the north in the northwest yeah yeah that's a very very red area yeah So you mentioned that really the way you see this happening is a swing to the right, a right-wing movement, a right-wing authoritarian movement. When I was reading that article by Rothbard, he mentioned James Burnham. And he mentioned that one of the reasons he didn't like James Burnham was he said,

I just don't know what this guy believes. And, you know, when you read James Burnham, Machiavellian's, when you read manager or revolution, suicide of the West, you get an idea of what he believes, but he really astute ideology as much as he could. Is that what it's going to take to defeat these people? Because their ideology seems to change with the wind. And ideology seems to me, you know, Sam Francis wrote a lot about ideology, how it just never materializes.

It's always dreamed up in a lab. And once you introduce it, once you introduce it to the air, it just absolutely disappears. Is that what is going to take a non-ideological other than, you know, we need to destroy these people in order to do that? Yeah, I disagree, of course, with Sam Francis and with Burnham on this, because I think people do believe ideology. And ruling classes believe ideology. I mean, you know, it's not just like they make up these myths in a laboratory and then try them out on the people. do believe them i you know i i have no doubt that hillary clinton is a feminist you know she's not just using this at you know at some levels as i say henry the eighth uh believed in the seven

sacraments even if he you know had all these wives killed and so forth i mean i uh people do believe in their ideologies i think sam and i disagreed violently on that point um yeah i i i think the hatred of the left will form an ideology just as the hatred of normal people in Western civilization, Judeo-Christian values and so forth, forms the ideology of today's left. I think it'll be sort of a kind of button-down or very simple, unadorned kind of reaction, just as the left you know, sort of creates its ideology around the destruction of Western Christian bourgeois society, I think the other side is going to act the same way. I mean, you know, when along living in an age of religious wars in the 17th, as in the 17th century, or, you know,

communism fighting fascism in the 1930s, I think this will be a much less complicated kind of struggle if the right can organize itself. And I think that's, uh, something that we still, you know, have to ask ourselves whether it's possible at all. Does the right need its own set of elites before this can even start? Oh, absolutely. No, they need elites. They need organizations around which they can build themselves up. And they have to basically do all the stuff the left is done.

You know, this is my argument, like we have a two-party system. You have one party that is effective, totalitarian, and brutal, and the other ones are people who sit around, you know, in their offices and, you know, look at the stock market that day, or try to get along or believe in some kind of bipartisanship. That doesn't work, right? It's asymmetrical warfare. You need a right that is like the left, you know, as able to beat it. So, you know, the question is, can you organize that right, sort of given the repressive power of the leftist state, the leftist media, their total control of most civic institutions at this point. It's going to be very hard to do. Here, let me ask you this, because this is a question that this discussion gets brought up a lot.

we've been talking we've been talking about the the way to defeat this what's in power right now and a lot of people will say if you have an ideology of you know individual like say the ideology that the the country was founded upon they say that if you betray that ideology by becoming by becoming tyrannical getting power and using it to crush your enemies you know using it, you know, I mean, I know you're the, you're the best scholar on this man, but, you know, Schmidt's friend enemy distinction where you reward your friends and you punish your enemies. People say that once you do that, it's there is no way that you can actually, once you step over that line, there's no way of coming back and saying, and, you know, giving people their liberty back. Now you're just going to become a dictator. From now on, it has to, the only way you can keep it is with an iron fist. It may be true. I don't know. By the way, Schmidt did not say you're supposed to reward friends and punish enemies. It sounds more like Machiavelli. He just said that politics is organized around the polarity of friends and enemies. But I think that certainly describes what's going on right now. But I think that somehow you can make peace with the other side is ridiculous. I mean, you can't. They can destroy you. And, you know, the

question is what do you do to fight back because you're going to have to resist them and uh you can't count on winning elections because the elections get rigged anyhow and you may not even have enough people to win the elections because they're they're able to control consciousness or shape consciousness to such a degree that opposition can't even thrive psychologically or uh logic i mean it's just they they they hold all the good cards and the question is what can you do to you know to prevent them from becoming even more destructive, and bipartisanship isn't going to work. It's ridiculous. I'm not sure you can go back to the views of the founding fathers, who, by the way, we're not total individualists who all do respect to Murray Rothbard. I mean, they believed in

strong communities, religious communities, and they were hierarchical. You know, they just believed in a liberal framework for government. They were, you know, 18th century liberals in that respect. they did not think they were going to organize their families around that principle or even their communities. But, you know, in the absence of that kind of, you know, strong organic community, it's sort of hard. And of course, what the modern state and the ruling class does is break this down. I mean, they totally pulverize these relations. You know, in Canada, which is, you know, more advanced than we are, you commit a criminal offense. There's something that is, you considered demeaning by transgendered now. I mean, they've passed laws like this. I mean,

you can't do anything. Have you boxed in? It was, you know, how here a sexual predator or somebody who's been convicted of a sex crime can't go within a thousand feet of a school. Up there, there's a member of parliament who's trying to get a law passed that anyone who I think says a slur or a joke, an off-color joke, anywhere within a thousand feet of like a drag show or a dry clean story hour goes to jail. I mean, it's, that's where we're, and the press conference looked like something out of Saturday Night Live. It did not look real. Right, right. So where are we? Yeah, well, we're not quite as bad as Canada. I think it takes a certain kind of mentality to reduce that kind of horrible government. One of the things I think we have to

stop doing is talking about the democracies or the liberal democracies. And we have to stand up for human rights, to stand up for rights in this country. I mean, I hear these neo-conservatives, like Pompeo, they drive me crazy. You know, we stand for you. Well, I mean, we're destroying constitutional liberties in this country. I mean, let's worry about what's happening here first. But part of the neoconservative mentality is to stress how good, things are here. They're fine. You know, we are an exemplary democracy, so we have to go all over the world, you know, converting other people necessary by force. And paleos believe that things are pretty rotten at home. And we have to address problems here rather than bring democracy to Pakistan

or Nepal or someplace like that. Well, if I think we both agree that, I agree with you that a right wing movement is the only thing that's going to stop this. In your opinion, if people wanted to read certain authors, researchers, whatever, to get ideas about how they may go about organizing power or to do that, who would you recommend reading? Yeah, you know, the REIT Chronicles, because we do have stuff on this, I mean, I could always you know, recommend like my young protege, Pedro Gonzalez, that you read, I don't know, Carl Schmidt or James Burnham or Sam Francis. I mean, they're all worth reading. A lot of other

people worth reading. The problem is that many of those who are analyzing these problems are addressing situations that are different from ours. Our situation is in some ways much more complex than the one these people are addressing. For instance, if you look at suicide of the West by Burnham, he is looking at an American which liberals don't want to fight against the communist. And the big threat is communism. I wish that were the big threat. That was totally manageable threat. This one is not. And liberals are sort of their meant they're weak and they want to tolerate their enemies, which is nonsense. They do not want to tolerate. They want to destroy their enemies, so-called liberals. But I think he's sort of looking at liberalism.

He has almost an idealistic view of liberals. Even when he was writing, I don't think he was tolerant as Burnham thinks they were. So I find a lot of people who were writing, you know, 30, 40, 50 years ago, whom I admired at the time, no longer are addressing a situation or seem to be addressing a situation similar to ours. And I suppose this reflects my own historicist of you that historical situations keep on changing. But I think our situation is considerably graver than the one that Burnham was looking at or the anti-communist of the 1950s or 1960s. And we've gone well beyond the welfare state. You know, we're dealing, we're dealing with full-blown totalitarianism right now. And it's totalitarianism that could win in elections, which is unusual. Because, you know,

Hitler never got more than a third of the votes in an honest election. And the communists couldn't even get that many in an honest election. I think they got, you know, 11, 12 percent in Hungary or something after the war. The American Communist Party never won more than 83,000 votes in 19, I think they ran Earl Browder at the time. The woke left can get $80,90 million. This is unbelievable, and they're much more dangerous than the communist. It almost seems at this point that if you're someone on the far right who is actually looking towards the future and trying to figure out a way to end all of this,

probably the best, I think really the best way to live would be to live like a dissonant in one of those communist countries where you just assume that at any time the worst can happen, you prepare for it, and you just keep doing what you're doing and living your life. I know a lot of people who are just miserable. They look at this and they see it as insurmountable and they think they believe it's miserable. And they make themselves miserable by doing it, but a lot of the people, when you read like a Vaclav Havel or something, he didn't seem miserable. He seemed like he was hopeful, especially in his writings. Yeah, there's a good reason that he's hopeful because the Communist Party, while it might

have been, you know, arbitrary and capricious and unkind to people, did not have the support of the Czech nation. They didn't like them, although initially after the war, you know, know, they gravitated toward the Russians because they were angry with the Germans. But, you know, they never had majority support anything like that. And as time went on, the Jeff became very anti-Russian and very anti-communists. There also was the so-called free world on the other side, you know, who supported Havel. We don't have that. I mean, we can get Putin maybe to support us, you know, somebody like that.

We can find Victor Orban in Hungary, I'm sure, is a very nice man in this, but he's, you know, running a country with about 10 million people. That's not going to help us here. So, you know, we do not have the support system that Havel did. Most of America's satellites, which I, is what I refer to the members of NATO and Canada, they're just like, you know, bad imitations of the United States, which do what we do, and sort of grovel. you know, used to be Ravel before us, you know, they're worse than we are. I mean, their governments are more extremists. It's like, you know, the Albanians are more extreme communist than the Soviets and the more extreme form of what we are. So our situation is much more desperate in some ways than the one described by Havel and other other communists, other dissenters from the, from the communist. And then, like I said, when you throw the multicultural, culturalism in our mix and many, the mix of many of the countries you've mentioned that have just been flooded with people from the outside who don't share the native culture, that just

makes it, it's that much harder to overcome. Well, the worst thing, and I find this talking to even family members, younger family members is their view of what happened, even three, four years ago, is constantly being shaped by the lying media. So, you know, I'm told that, you know, Biden may be doing some things that are bad. It was much worse under Trump because it was a Christian theocracy back then. I was told this. I don't. And this was. Yeah, I wish. And of course, this person listens to NPR about 20 hours a day but this is what they actually think what life was like three years ago and then i grew up in the 1950s which was you know worse than nazi was like worse than living

in nazi germany apparently but uh you know this is what you're up against these people are being lied to constantly by lying uh ideologically driven media paid for by the state of course you know it's even worse at twitter um I think it was earlier, it was last week, late in the week. They labeled NPR as state media. Right. That's what it is. State affiliated or something.

They're actually state-controlled media. Yeah, that we pay for. Yeah, we pay for it. All right. Well, thank you for this. I really appreciate it. Please plug anything you want. where can people get the book and you know oh paleo conservative anthology it's lexington books

and unfortunately it is expensive but uh you know maybe an entire family can save up for a year to buy it so uh but it's you know it's everything you want to know and more about about paleo conservatism yeah and then of course chronicles which is uh i i enjoy getting the paper copy every in the mailbox area you know so I think that's one place, as you mentioned earlier, where you're going to get the kind of message that if you realize exactly what this government is, like a lot of people do, how did we get here? How do we, the people who write for Chronicles, they agree with you. And they're, if you read the articles, you're going to at least know that you're not crazy and there's somebody out. He was thinking like you are.

Maybe we're all crazy. Maybe Joe Biden is the same one. Oh. Oh. That makes me wish... That's even scarier idea. That makes me wish space travel was real right now. Dr. Gottfried, I appreciate it.

Thank you very much. I don't know. And... I don't know.