The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1300: Why One Country, But Not All Others? w/ Benjamin Boyce

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

114 MinutesPG-13Benjamin is the proprietor of the Calmversations YouTube Channel.Benjamin joins Pete to discuss his journey to the Right and seeks to answer the question of our time: Why can one country be one way while all others must be another.Benjamin's YouTube ChannelPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Antelope Hill - Promo code "peteq" for 5% off - https://antelopehillpublishing.com/FoxnSons Coffee - Promo code "peter" for 18% off - https://www.foxnsons.com/Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

POMAYOR. ALEEN. ALEEN SULEEN SULLIVAN If you want to get the show early and ad-free, head on over to the peak canyonez 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 sub-subs.

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So thank you. The Pekignana Show.com. Everything's there. I want to welcome, everyone. Back to the Pekignana's show. Benjamin Boyce is here with me for the first time. He's hired me on his show. And we recently met up in person.

So we did you come on the show. Yeah. And let's let's have a conversation. I want to talk about your path. Start off telling, tell people about yourself. Tell people, you know, as much as you're willing to let on, did you come from the left? What are you? I mean, just go.

Give some background, especially about how you started in the whole streaming thing and being on YouTube and stuff like that. Yeah. Well, I grew up in California, an evangelical Christian, and has some pretty powerful experiences when I was really young, impressionable. But I had what I consider a direct experience of the Holy Spirit very explicitly and powerfully in my life. And yet, with that said, my parents were involved in a cult, a California cult, in Mendez. County in San Jose. And that was very formative for how my family and then how I consider group solidarity and group identity and how overarching religious identity can be corrupted, manipulated by powerful charismatic leaders and what forms that relationship between a leader

in his flock. But my parents got out of that when I was five, though that's kind of a background with kind of difficulty with centralized authority, charismatic centralized authority. And politically, I was kind of just a kid until I started delivering paper route. I had a paper route. The news used to come in these sheets that you would bundle up with a rubber band and he'd drive around or right around 5.30 in the morning tossing these papers into driveways. And at some point in my teen years, I stumbled upon, it was a little bit before my teen years. There was this guy on the radio, on AM radio, that was balking at the narratives that were being promulgated by the papers in my hand. And this guy's name was Rush Limbaugh. And I think he was just,

He was a really small-time guy, and eventually he went national. But I was, I would listen to him before he went really national. I don't know how many, how widely syndicated he was. This was in Sacramento area, but I remember listening to him a lot in my teen years. And he would have these little, what would eventually become the foundation for a large part of the YouTube community in the Gamergate era, these anti-SGW rants and screeds. He would talk about the Femin Nazis and, you know, PETA people who are still just as idiotic as they were back then, but he would

bash the left quite a lot. And I found him to be pretty cool and funny. I remember when he had a short-lived TV show and I was big into Rush Limbaugh. But then I kind of grew up out of that, went to Bible College, ended up in Chicago, really big city, and explored life from 19, 20-year-old's point of view, doing a lot of experimentation, got really fed up with the church because I felt a huge disconnect between what people would propose God was and the sense of holiness in the church. And it was really lacking. My parents ended up in a very milk toast denomination.

My dad became a pastor within the Swedish Covenant Church, now just the Covenant Evangelical Church. Very standard Christianity. You sing songs. You do good deeds. but I wanted something more. And so I went kind of searching for something more. And I kind of bashed my head against reality at some point

and found a spiritual practice that was from the inside out. It was a direct contact with the holy almighty God's spirit. And then I wanted to be an artist. I'm trying to fast forward. I wanted to be an artist. I ended up working a lot in preschool. just because that was how I just found a job working in preschools. And I was good at that.

And I remember there's this phrase, those who know do, those who can't or don't know teach. And I ended up in preschool realizing I had to learn how to be a human being and really connect with what it is to be in this world and history and body. And I pursued artistic pursuit. specifically through novels and I had some heartbreak. And I ran ashore or in the shoals in my 30s. And I just ended up kind of just having a lost decade, lost all my ambition, lost really my connection to the world, really wanted to escape from the world. I was kind of been interrupt. Are you, your Gen X? Yeah. I was born in 76. So I'm kind of on that. I've said that

People ask as a Gen Xer, what is the number one characteristic with Gen Xer? And I said, pretty much nihilism. Yeah. It's something you're going to fight with. At some point, every Gen Xer is going to have a nihilistic phase that is either, they're either going to fight through or is just going to stay with them. Yeah. What do you think that's about?

For me, it was growing up in a Cold War, household where we're going to be bombed at any time. So who cares? Yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah, I guess there's that. And then I think there's that coupled with the American hegemony. We're kind of at the end of history. And when you're at the end of history, there really is no future. And there is, really is no past. There's just this eternal Costco present and, you know, blow jobs in the White House and, you know, you vote. And I remember longing for the meaning that I, had was inculcated to me that the boomers had so much meaning when they were young in the 60s you know they fought the power and they had all these huge artistic achievements media was at

their fingertips they had huge amounts of meaning and change and the 90s were just like okay so so I went and searched for meaning mystical meaning experiences I think Gen X is really focused on experience So you can see that reflected in one of the axioms or cliches that we embodied. I'm not religious, I'm spiritual, right? But anyways, I was really at the end of my rope. I didn't know what I was doing or why my girlfriend kicked me out of our house. My longtime girlfriend kicked me out because I was just going nowhere. I had to figure out something down the road from where she lived.

was this tiny little college called Evergreen State College. And it had a reputation of being really hippie, dippy college, but at the core of the learning experience was a deep emphasis on individual self-guided study, where you could basically, if you committed to yourself to it, you could get a master's degree education. You can get away with anything or nothing at Evergreen. It was really cheap.

I was old, never gone to college, so I got a lot of Pell Grants. and stuff and so i devoted myself to my pursuit my ambition which is i really wanted to write this one book and i had this idea for a book when i was 19 and i kept on hitting my head against that trying to get that done and so when i went to evergreen this was 2013 it was 36 and i was on fire to learn. And when I walked in there, I was surrounded by these kids and the kids were not really there. They didn't even know why they were there. And the second, my first day, I came in in the middle of the semester, so I was trying to catch up. So I hit the ground running. I asked everybody all these questions about the reading. I did all this extra reading and stuff. And my

teacher, the second day of class, she pulled me aside. She's like, I know you have been a teacher before, so don't take this wrong way, but could you not ask so many questions? You're kind of centering yourself in the discourse. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. I thought we were here to learn. And I felt embarrassed, but then I talked to my other, I went around and apologized to all the people in my seminar. They're like, what are you talking about? Like, you really helped me, because it was just after Christmas break, get back into the groove of things. And my teacher pointed out specifically this one girl who happened to be black. And this is important. The identity is important. that happened to be black girl who the teacher is really concerned wasn't really on boarding

with the college experience. And she was basically a teenager and was really not academically acute. But my teacher's like, I'm really concerned with this one girl in particular and giving her the room the space to grow and to discover her own curiosity. And the second, the class after that, that girl who was pointed out just took a nap. for the whole class. It was like this writing seminar component. I'm like, whoa, okay. This is just high school plus,

but that's fine because it's Evergreen. I can get away with anything or nothing. I'm just going to do a bunch of independent study. And I pursued my work, my Gessimt Kunstwerk, my building schroemen, my super work of fiction. And as I was pursuing that, the college, first of all,

just to backtrack when i stepped on campus it was like stepping back to the mid 90s in the sense that there was these banners about in the patriarchy harms everyone and everybody had these all the professors that no war and i stopped the iraq war it was like the iraq war had been kind of done at that point but they're still like anti-war anti-patriarchy i'm like this is really kind of weird and crusty it's like this little time capsule of like you guys used to be edgy and hip and now you're just kind of mossy and waiting for the next revolution. And what happened was that 2015 and then 2016 happened and this guy named Donald J. Trump got elected to the highest office in the land. And I remember this one of my, sorry, just to backtrack, I had given up on politics in 2003 when

Bush got back in. I was living in Portland, Oregon. I wasn't necessarily. a progressive, but I was rather on the liberal side of things, except I remember during that election, Portland was really on fire to make gay marriage, like the center platform. I'm like, one, this is a total, like, this is Carl Rove, like, playing you guys like a puppet master. And secondly, I don't think this is, I, you could still say this out loud. I'm like, I don't think gay people should be married. have a partnership whatever legal but marriage is a totally different category than then

homosexual relationship even if it's a permanent homosexual relationship just the category marriage is an important category it's the foundation of this civilization of human propagation so it's special that's a special thing um but anyways bush got re-elected and i was really upset by that i'm like i don't why do i even care about this stuff just john carey guy doesn't care about me this is a whole game i just completely forgot about politics you know i was i was mildly i felt good when barraq got elected i don't know exactly why but i thought it was like oh this is this is the thing this is the cool thing and uh little too little did i know decades later when i stumbled on curtis yarvin's early work minchus mullbug's work he had mapped out the

whole thing he had seen the whole thing that i had gone through but anyways don't know trump gets elected and everybody on campus was decimated. I remember that that election day, me and my friend, we were on the internet together and we were watching all the streams and getting all the data and like chatting with each other. It was like a big long party all that Tuesday. And I remember there's this graph. I don't know if I'm inverted or not, but Hillary Clinton's chances of success were like 97% and Donald Trump's were the inverse of that. And over the course of the day, like it went tick, tick, tick, tick. And I was so happy because fuck that bitch man that woman i was a burney guy i was really a burney guy because i thought you know he

he was bringing something new to the table and donald trump really turned me off uh that's kind of where i was that's how i saw things even though i was um i was on the gamer gate or the gamer side of gamer gate but trump was a little too far Bernie was like okay something might happen Hillary Clinton totally stole that total corrupt and I just wanted her to suffer and I was so glad I walked on campus the next day and everybody was like waiting for the Gestapo to just swing down to the vines and take all the migrants out of the classes and stuff they were so upset everybody was like like trembling they had this big rally in the middle of campus in the middle of campus at Evergreen there's this plaza called Red Square no joke and they all gathered there and there was something weird going on like the amount of vitrile and hatred and the weird way in which it was being spoken about it was like white people's fault the whole thing was racialized they were really really racializing the whole thing and i had seen evergreen they had a new uh not professor a president who came on in 2015 so a year before that

election. He came on and I was working in the media department. So I was on camera. I worked on camera covering a lot of the workshops and seminars and the orientations. The first message to campus George Bridges gave was that racism is the foundational kind of original sin of America. And even though we've ended slavery and we've done the civil rights thing, there's these glaring gaps in achievement and in wealth and in prosperity that are all due to racism. And we need to dedicate everything to figuring this out, to solving this problem of privilege and power. And I'm like, that doesn't quite make sense to me. And then I was listening to the professors talk about this postmodern critical theory, woke stuff. And it was, one,

really offensive to me because they were singling me out and just assuming so much about me because I was a straight white male. And you'd have to go through. And they introduced the whole pronoun thing. I didn't understand what was going on. It was just by Fiat. You had to say, all a sudden, now to nowhere, you had to say your pronouns. I'm like, what do you think is in my pants? And why do you want to know? Like, why does that matter? And I remember when they started these workshops about privilege, they started the students who were not the brightest bushels in the box were taking that as this is an opportunity. Empowerment is an opportunity to be an asshole. There's nothing holding me back from voicing my grievances and taking all of my resentment

out on everybody else because there's this perfect framework for it and would shut down conversation along sex lines and the the females were into it because they had been hoodwinked by feminism you could just end all argument all debate by just saying i'm a woman i remember they had this uh they had this protest free the nipple uh on campus about that time and i think this never a nipple it's never a nipple you want to see well it's so what the all the girls did with they show up without their shirts on and start screaming into the microphone And if you could just like ignore their voices, we were just like sitting there smoking like, oh, that's totally nice. Totally go for it.

There's no laws banning the nipple, but they wanted to have a protest and stuff like this. This performative protest. But I remember after, after Trump gets elected, the students started to agitate for these demonstrations. And they got really crass. I was covering an event. I was on microphone and camera for an event that was just celebrating the new chief of police, this female cop from the local district or county, Stacey Brown. And they were just going to invite her there, all her family come, have some cake,

introduce her to the community. She was an evergreen grad. She's a female. I was really keen on kind of a version of social justice. I got to know her that was rather reasonable, but she's a cop. so she understands how things can happen and safety and procedure. But the kids showed up or the students showed up with these horns and screaming and they were denouncing the police and her family was there. They're like, fuck you, you fucking pigs. And they're

just taking over the whole event and then eating all the cake and laughing about it. I'm like, this is really sick. And so I wrote a letter to the president. I'm like, you're teaching all this stuff about privilege and identity and it's not tied to any virtues or values. So it only, it, it, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no human content in this. It's just you are this box, I am that box, therefore I should have dominance over you because you have dominance over me, but there's no sense of what a human being is. And so this, this progressive dogma could work. when everybody's on the same page when they're all really nice and kind and want the best for everybody,

but completely gamable by anybody who's a sociopath. Anyway, so that year 2016 to 2017, I watched as the, I'd watched the professors and the administration make Evergreen all about this social justice echo chamber and dogpile from the professoriate would dogpile on each other if you weren't radical enough. they had this really hyper leftist ratchet going on where even they tried to cancel a tranny because the tranny's like you know listen i i have problems with identity you know you guys know that but but you guys have this you have this habit of saying that this is the most racist place in america and there's no evidence that it's racist and then they all dog piled on him her saying well you wouldn't know that because you're white you're blind to it because you're white you know

because you're intersectional blind blindness or whatever the yeah blinders um but anyways to kind of wrap up eventually in the spring of 2017 finals were about to happen there's all this energy all this cooped up energy and evergreen would always get crazy in the spring because it's such a it's in olympia washington it's really oppressive the it's dark and and moody and raining and just all bottled up and the sun starts coming out and the clothes would fling off and all this energy sexual and otherwise would be released and you could just feel it and it was all channeled into this racial dynamic and we can get into it but i made a documentary on this eventually the students found a reason to protest and it was a made-up reason there was some miscommunication one

student made fun of another student because they one student wanted a all black class. And the other student who was Native American said, well, I want an all white class. And they had a big dust up about it. And then somebody made some threats. So the police got involved. And then they were some kids who had made the threats were asked to just give their side of the story. And they were like, well, we're being detained when it's just like, you come over and you tell us what's happening so we could figure out what's going on. Well, we were detained. And Evergreen hates black people. And then the student body, probably about 5% of the student body, but it became more once it became a happening, decided to take over campus for about a week.

And they had this whole week-long protest where they would protest Brett Weinstein first because they found some emails that he wrote, questioning why we would make every professor at the end of the year grade themselves on their anti-racism, like give these personal confessions about how anti-racist they were. And he's like, well, you could just use that to hire and fire people based on this completely subjective category. And he wrote the emails and the student body probably egged on by certain professors made him the first point of contact for this whole week-long protest. And it got to a point where the student student body, like more and more, started inviting all this element from Olympia, this

Antifa element to come to the campus. They ended up taking over campus, like barricading the administration in the administration building and marching them all into this room and then having the struggle session with all these demands. They had all these demands for like 10 extra feet in the Equity Center because university of Washington had like 300 feet or 4,000 feet for their equity center, but we only had 300 feet, you know, like the, because University of Washington is really big, everyone's really small, they're really not safe on campus because they saw somebody at Walmart with a MAGA cap, so they

know that they're just surrounded by these racists. And the fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you were in this situation, the students live streamed the entire thing and their behavior was over the top and it was imminently clipable and streamable and any Rush Limbaugh with a with a camera and a microphone could just collect these clips and make hay it was just perfect hey for YouTube and I saw what was happening on the internet part of it and on the campus part of it and how I got involved in this medium was that Evergreen was being taken as just basic content for anti-woke stuff it was anti-woke hadn't really taken off at that point was called these SJW cringe compilations it was the cringiest of that kind of

material and i saw sargon and a lot of these streamers take this content and make fun of it but they didn't really understand what was going on and i had access to all the footage of all of the lectures and the workshops and the trainings that were instilling this very hyper-religious cult like echo chamber and instilling it into the faculty and into the students. And they formed a perfect orbors of just this feedback loop of utter resentment and rage. And the people who had taught the kids

that every institution was racist and you need to disrupt and dismantle them were in turn disrupted and dismantled because their system was itself racist, which they even say. Like we are as complicit in white supremacy as any institution. in the West. There's this beautiful vice mini documentary where one of the vice guys goes

and interviews the college president, George Bridges. And the guy interviews George Bridges says, you know, the students say you're a white supremacist. Is that true? And George Bridges is like, no, I'm not, well, I might be. Depends on what you mean. And the guy's like, this language just doesn't really make any sense. And so to encapsulate the whole story,

basically what happened in 2020 in the Summer of Love, had already happened at evergreen in a very distilled tight uh venue where you could actually study all the different dynamics and they recorded the whole thing that the students recorded the whole thing the the administration recorded the whole thing and because the student streamed it I was able to get all their footage and because the administration was a public college I could FOIA by hook and by crook I could get all the information because all public data was all owned by the state so I was able to get all the emails all those

videos, all those lectures, and compile and go through like bit by bit by bit the whole gosh darn mess. So that's how I got involved in it. And that, so we can leave that and go wherever you want to go, that sent me on a thread of questioning these progressivism and then liberalism and then what it is to be West. What is the concept of the West? And that's how I ended up where I am now covering and interacting with people that I'm interacting with now, like trying to understand the foundations of not just the mess, but what causes the mess and not just our prosperity, but what causes the prosperity and how those two things interact with each other.

What would you say is the most left-wing position that you held? Like, how far left do you think you had gone? That's a version of the question I like to ask when I ask, I want to. I talk to the DR, whatever they're called right now, the true right? I kind of like that phrase, though. It won't scale. The serious, right? The serious, right.

Yeah. The illuminated right. You got to do the eyebrows when you say serious, right? I like to ask right-winger's, like, how far back in time would you go before you're considered left-wing? Like, everybody's kind of left-wing at some point in time. Like, do you want to go back to feudal society, you know? like where's your breaking the enlightenment uh where's your breaking point a certain point

it doesn't even make sense um well i think that there's two different kinds of let it depends on what you mean by left because the left can mean liberalism egalitarianism egalitarianism or you got radical egalitarianism or it can mean proceduralism um certain tenants like the blank slate the way that government can be run by considering everybody as a rational agent that can kind of invent themselves or reinvent themselves in any given election system or uh season um what about the heat map the heat map Were you ever on that part of the, were you ever that heat map where you cared more for the people who were furthest away from you than the people who were in your immediate orbit? No, but that doesn't mean like there's probably a third dimension. Like, do I even care? You know, like this kind of denialistic. Do I even care? Like, how much care do I even have, you know?

There's denialism. But like I said, when I, I, I always kind of, because of my training in Rush Limbaugh, you know, school of ethics and politics, and also my Christianity, I think Christianity has a universalism to it, but the universalism is bounded by the dimensions of the creator and the created, like the individual and God. then everything is bounded by that. So I can't care about anybody if I don't care about myself. And I can't care about myself if I don't extend my care

to other people. But how much can I reasonably care for other people? How much there's a hubris in the heart of progressivism. And the phrase is effective altruism. If you look at the gilded age in America, like these barons created modernity through industrialization. And then once they solved the world, they said, well, we have to solve more things.

They took this problem-solving mindset to humanity in general. And they would think, well, we have to solve hunger. And then we have to solve population. We solved hunger. Now we have to solve population. So actually, now we have more hunger. There's net more hunger in the world because we're feeding more people. more people. And there's this idea that you can solve problems. You can solve the world that I think

is at the heart of leftism in a way. And I don't think that that's possible without massive amounts of technological prowess. But with every progressive technological leap, there becomes more and more problems to solve. And if you have that problem solving mindset, you erect these huge structures that then devour the world in the seek of in the search of ending hunger or ending this problem they problematize the whole thing and it's a it's a vicious feedback cycle and i don't think that it is i think it's hubristic i think it's faustian i think it's luciferian and i have all those components in me because i am a western man so i am luciferian i am faustian and how i think there's two types of Faustianism, one which is, I can solve all these problems. The other is, my spirit needs to

understand the world. There's this, I wish I had it memorized. There's this book by Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian. And there's this character, and it's one of the most startling characters in American fiction, literature, the judge. And he has this notebook. He's going around, he's documenting everything. You draw pictures, and then he'd burn the pictures and stuff. And everyone, one person asked him, like, why are you doing this? And he has this phrase, I wish I had it memorized about, like, that which exists doesn't have my, my consent to exist until I understand it. Like, there's this, this, I have to approve of things through my knowing of it, through my domination of it. And that spirit in its, in its deleterious or

degenerative form is leftism but it's also rightism it's it's western like the western modernity even though we try to escape from this left right polarity we could problematize it but they are two sides of the same coin and i i understand to a certain extent though i completely disagree with the application of the term woke right but i do understand that there are there is a spirit that is similar between the left and the the right. And the centrist, the woke centrist, if they start calling, well, I'm against left, the woke left, and now I'm going to invert this term the woke right. And they're the woke center. They still have this hubristic Faustian thing. If I understand, if I can categorize the

whole thing, I can solve all this problem. I can solve these political problems. I can solve these problems of humanity. And I think that there's this other manner in which we engage with suffering that Christ lays out where we don't try to solve the problems, that God has created in this world. We can take responsibility for the problem, say, we are fallen. I participate in this fallen world, but you don't, the Catholic Church doesn't set up charities, modern Catholicism aside, but they don't set up charities to solve hunger.

They set up charities to ease the suffering of those who suffer. And there's a different, humble relationship that then is empowered by the Western imagination and the Western Faustian spirit once it's organized correctly like god is going to take care of all these things i can take care of myself and in order to to pay it forward or to fulfill the gifts that i've i've been given i need to help other people in some manner some way shape or form i need to be helpful i need to be a contributing member of society right and that that's kind of right

coded to be a contributing, hardworking member of society. It's kind of right coded, but that is still, I still owe something to society. Society doesn't owe me anything, but I have a debt to society and I need to pay it off some way, shape, or form. I really problematize that in a, in a sense. That's my problem. That's why I do the interviews and not get interviewed because I do the Jordan Peterson thing. Well, it depends on what the word mean means you know the best critique the best justification i've heard for the term woke right is that the left is seeking to tear down historic medicine and so is the right in some way so is like the serious right or you know the is you know my i've said it probably won't happen in my lifetime i won't be

responsible for it, but I just want to contribute as much as I can to the destruction of the post-war consensus myth. The post-war myth, I want that gone. And I can see how someone can go, well, I mean, you're just basically trying to do the same thing that, you know, that leftists do when they tear down the myth of the founding or, you know, the myth of, you know, so I think that's probably the closest the closest um the best understanding of how somebody can call what is probably one of the worst terms ever horseshoe theory um but you know you can yeah i i think horseshoe theory is man like oh horseshoe theory like horseshoe theory is there for the same well these these are the same people the same people who use the term horseshoe theory or the same people who think that

like socialism in Spain, in Spain pre-Spanish Civil War is the same thing as a socialism that was in Germany in the 1930s. They're not near, they're not even close to the same thing. And I'm too lazy to, and I'm too bought into capitalism as the way through and the way out it as our Western religion that I just have to lump all socialism or all quote-unquote authoritarians. You know, oh, Germany fought Russia in World War II. Well, that's just two authoritarian fighting over who's going to be the main authoritarian. And they just break everything down to the simplest explanation. And I think that's what horseshoe theory is.

It's just a simple explanation for a complex historical subject that people aren't willing to read and study about. Well, it's really, really scary. The, one of the major events in my corner of the internet, which is, so I came of, I came into this business at the dawn of this IDW thing, intellectual dark web. Jordan Peterson had, was on the ascendancy and he peaked out beyond anybody's imagination. And he had people in his orbit that were all kind of tied together. And for some weird reason, Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris would sell out stadiums talking about truth, right?

So there was a kind of a magic moment in that. And it had a bunch of effects. The podcasting, new media came of age. You know, it was just kind of dicking around on the internet. And Carl Benjamin Sargon of the Cod really exemplifies this magic. from, I'm going to make ship posts and articulate an argument against my enemies, the SJWs, and then start to, well, actually, I have to understand what I'm fighting for. I have to understand this liberalism thing and then kind of disappearing for a while

and coming back with an education and really with a set of tools. And James Lindsay and I did a lot of content during the woke era covering the the genealogy of this woke stuff and how it's tied to postmodernism, tied to critical theory. And we kind of, we parted way as me and James at a certain point because I started to talk to people with different points of view than this liberal constitutional conservatism. And one of the main events that happened, it happened about a year ago. Darryl Cooper, I believe you guys have spoken on your show, right? Yeah, we, um, yeah, Darrell, I know each other. Yeah, I know you guys know each other. When he went on Tucker, Tucker's a

freaking genius. He's such, he's a loki. He's such a troublemaker. He's such a, he somehow has figured out how to shit post on his podcast. Like major. Like he's just brilliant. I would love to interview him one day. He's on my bucket list someday. But when he set up Cooper to fall by calling him. He just knows how to stir shit. And he, Tucker's very adept. He doesn't, he doesn't purity spiral, but he'll cause them to show the friend enemy distinction. And he did that with Cooper about a year ago. And Constantine Kissin decided that that was, well, Constitin had, he's part of trigonometry. He's very, very successful in the same business as I am. He's just an interviewer, But he's actually the one who said, he's actually the one who said, who talked about how both sides want to destroy myths. And that's actually the person I, I heard articulate it the best. I mean, other people have articulated it poorly, but he actually did it in sort of a good way. So. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he went, yeah. So Cooper saying offhandedly that Churchill and was totally in, in context, it's just a conversation starter. You know, just something a little edgy to get a conversation.

going and the way that the so-called open-minded marketplace of ideas set took his conversation starter of let's do an experiment a thought experiment Churchill is the worst guy in war war two he's the chief villain what do we have to do to make that make sense now whether or not you believe in it is one thing but just proposing that as a thought experiment should be open game it's a rich way we all no, alternative history is such an interesting topic. There's this subreddit, old history, which was really kind of cool back in the day. But he eventually all became about every other post is about Hitler. Every, like that whole, we can't get around.

Like, why are we like, okay, what if Hitler, you know, like, took opium instead of rent free. Rent free in the majority of mankind's brain. He's just living rent free 80 years after he's dead in the majority of mankind's brain. He won. He won World War II. And being able to enter into that conversation, or the inability to enter into that conversation shows the limit of the classical liberals. And the classical liberals, some of which are the left-left me's. And a lot of them go on a journey of not making it inside of the institution. And so started criticizing the institution. And when the institution really needed to be criticized, BLM and COVID era, a lot of these classical liberals were on the ascendant.

And when the conversation started to drift away from being anti-woke, that's where I parted ways with them because I want to entertain deeper levels of questioning. And they don't. They want to cling to a certain mythos. And so they, through their horseshoe theory, say anybody who is eroding this myth or questioning this myth or causing this myth to be questioned is an enemy. And then they'll go on these rants about how the friend enemy distinction is Nazism. We need to avoid that while they participate in the same thing. And so these blind spots arise. It's really fascinating to me. I forgot how we pushed off on that, just the Cooper thing, the mythos thing. And then, well, where do we go from now? Yeah, you just talked about how Tucker caused everybody, how he can do that.

And then how basically by Cooper just doing a real quick hypothetical, it caused, it exposed the, you know, classical liberal, yeah. It exposed the friend enemy distinction where there had been assumably no such friend enemy distinction. Now, COVID had done the same thing. And I watched this, the IDW was over as soon as it was named. Eric Weinstein created it and destroyed it in the same article. That sounds like punk rock. I forget who said it, but someone said punk rock died the first time someone said, let's start a punk man.

Yeah. And so that's why the main questions now, I think, are Britain and Israel. those are the two main questions. And until we figure out the right way to articulate those two stories, those two myths, that's kind of where the conversation is stuck right now. How do we have a Britain for the British, or in England for the English, rather,

sorry, I was schooled on that when I had Connor Tomlinson on my show just a couple days ago. How can we square Israel for Jews and not have England for the English? How do we have in England for the English? Now, America is a different problem or a different story, but those two, those two miniature stories will help guide our conversation on our quest for American identity.

And I think American identity is always going to be really dynamic because it's too big and too shallow to really be something that people will live and die for. And so I have a bus route right now. I do podcasting and I have a little, I work for a little school district out in the country here. And I spend a lot of time just driving through the country. And there's something that's just nagging at me this year about the land. Like the land and the people have a communication that is much deep. deeper than politics, but it is the most political thing.

And so I go online and I hear all these stories about Israel or Britain or the woke or the woke right or like all these big economic questions and these political questions, but it, it doesn't really make sense until, until I can square it with these people that I drive their kids around live in this place. And it's, it's got its own character. It's got its relationship. It's got its relationship. to sunlight that's different than the west side of Washington. And there's not a lot of money out here, so it's not really cosmopolitan. So there's a particularity to these people. And America, something that I try to really understand is how America is tied to itself by these roads. And you can drive down the same road a hundred times and not really understand how this part of the road turns into this part of the road.

turns into this part of the road, but there's all these little chapters. I go over the hill and I'm in a different area. And it's tied to this other area, but there's these, there's these places where it's neither this place nor that place and you can kind of feel it changing. And once you start to understand

that this huge land mass has all these different pockets and then these people fill up these pockets and become a part of the pockets. And then our culture adapts to that, our mode of being, our spiritual, our awareness. Spirituality is basically just our own. awareness of reality. It all is shaped by those containers. And they all kind of flow together by these roads. And America is a story of pavement, of connecting all these things through all these

different levels, trains and then pavement and now technology, these landlines and then these satellites. But we're all still kind of these creatures that are inside and outside of reality. and we get swept up in these big moments. I guess I'll end here. The IDW came together and it broke apart and broke apart in successive waves by these different topics that would break it apart.

Dave Rubin, who I don't admire at all for a variety of reasons, but he was instrumental in platforming Brett and therefore platforming me and getting the story, giving the Evergreen story traction. He was all about free speech and then October 7th happened. and a week later he's like free speech needs to end like here's here's where freedom of speech

ends and it's self-serving it's like okay well you get yours how do i get mine where's my ability to make the exception and the classical liberals want to be able to make the exception they want the institutions back i want some institutions because we have so much infrastructure that requires a ton of shit ton of competence but it also needs work ethic and it also needs love and care it needs somebody who cares enough and is is fulfilled enough by the meaning of their own life to take care of more and more people to to lift up to run these power plants and so we're living at this this my wife and i we talk a lot about it and our Our political conversation always kind of ends by, well, no matter what scale is the problem,

no matter what, we can't have a king, we can't have democracy, we can't have this or that thing because of the scale. Well, how do we scale back? We can't. So we're like at this inflection point. And then whatever AI is going to do with that, I don't know what it's going to do. Yeah, the, it's always going to come down to, and I don't care whether you're the IDW, you're the classical liberal, the James Lindsay crowd, it's always going to come down to individualism

versus collectivism. And the individual, the classical liberal wants to concentrate on the individual until someone challenges classical liberalism, and of course they tribe up. But they, the issue I see is that when, and you mentioned Israel, you know, and using England as an example, is that I think a lot of people will look at Israel and go, look, 70 million people died to prevent exactly what you are. And then after the war, a lot of people who had money and had influence and had power have bragged about the fact that they wanted every other nation. in Europe and in the West and America to not be an ethno state, but to be overrun and be multicultural. And it just so happens that a lot of those foundations and a lot of those

individuals have Jewish last names. And that, I think, is another thing that goes to the woke right. You know, it's like this is something you'll see even quote unquote right wingers say because well when you when you're talking about one group oh and i heard tucker carlson say this in the nick foente's interview and it was one of one of those things where tucker said it and i'm like yeah tucker you're just wrong he said you can't judge people you have to judge people as individuals you can't judge people as groups because um you know a woman doesn't give birth to a group and i'm like except for sarah And the Jews, and the Jews looking there like, we were giving, Sarah gave birth to us, we're a group, we're insular, we're, we're a closed society. That's why we can't be, that's why we can't deal with infiltration. That's why we can't self-criticize, because as soon as we self-criticize, we, we start to threaten the cohesiveness of what we're doing, of, of this project. And I think that's another point.

that the woke right goes to is you go to this individual versus collectivism and now you see a lot of the people a lot of the right you know the serious right in europe and in the united states going yeah this individualism has has basically destroyed us while we're being individuals there's one group over here and another group over here and another group over here that are coming together and they're just destroying us because we can't come together and not only can't we come together because it's just not in the European, Europeans naturally go towards individualism. It's illegal for us to come together. What banner do we come together under? Do the Irish now just with the Irish, the Spanish, with the Spanish, the English with the English? Or do we say, okay, white Europe? And as soon as you say,

oh, white Europe is going to come together, well, then that has to be destroyed, even though every other group, every other group is acting as a group. It's such, it's, I just had Nick Land on. He was, he was so gracious to me. You were, let me tell you something. Oren is a friend of mine. I love Oren. But your interview with him was, you know, it made more sense to me.

it there was something there was some way you were able to corral him and keep him focused that um i don't think oran was and especially when oran had um had him on with uh with dougan yeah that was just all over the place and i had dougan on too that was really yeah um the um but yeah i blame i blame my interview with land on land he is such a galaxy brand guy some reason he had found my work and he'd listened to me. So he already kind of knew me. So he came there and he brought him to me. He brought himself to me. I didn't have to go to him, not in a scheduling manner, but he brought the conversation to my level. And he trusted me, he trusted within that, that boundedness of connection. He just, he liked me. There's so,

you can do so much in a conversation if you like somebody. And just as a side point. There's these cancellation campaigns, soft cancellation campaigns by the, uh, the anti-woke crowd. We're like, oh, who are you platforming? Well, we don't like the kiss it. When Tucker had Fuentes on and the Babylon B guys who were de-platformed and then replatformed by Elon are now, well, we don't, we don't want to say that you can't talk to these people, but are you, are you challenging them? Are you asking tough enough questions? That's what people said about me interviewing Dugan because he's a Satanist or whatever.

It's like, but did you ask tough enough question? I'm like, you don't understand what my art form is. I don't challenge people. I don't have the power to challenge people. I only have the power to listen and to meet people where they are. And I have to be agreeable. I don't have to agree, but I have to be agreeable

in order to get to the next level of the conversation. I don't want to argue, I'm bad at arguing. I'm bad at debating, but I don't like it either. I want to go deeper. I want to get into understanding who this person is because that, and that goes back to what we were talking about, what I was talking about with Christianity is the transcendent comes through the imminent. We participate in these really high-level discussions by going through who we are. Like, why do I believe the way? Why do I think? Anyway, so Land talked about this really interesting study or theory, or maybe it's data, I don't know, about Western Europe,

there was a ban on cousin marriage. And that genetically altered us to have outgroup preference. And to have, that heap map is a byproduct of Christianity in a certain form saying, don't marry your cousins. And so we were allowed or able to scale in this way of having room for the individual, having distance between me and my clan, having this ability to trade ideas and goods with people that are not like me. And at some point, scale corrupted us when we started to interact with these groups who don't behave that way, are not programmed genetically that way. And so those groups have certain strengths. And I think it's almost like we're at this point where we want that, we want to be tribal.

But we just, there's something about it that is foreign to us. We're kind of like, like on the others, we're kind of thrust out of Eden in this way. This Faustian aspect of us that we wrestle with gives us so much power and freedom and the ability to explore, the ability to not need, but it also, it has this, we send ourselves into space, the space of nihilism. and the space between planets. We just do that. And so we're always kind of like reaching out. And I think a part of our divorce rate is because of that, we just don't, we're just like, you are you and I am me. And how do we, we go to counseling to get all these

communication tools. So we proceduralize this, this feeling of closeness when we're just outside of closeness. We're just outside of it. There's something to the Western mind and spirit that is, that's just who we are. And so we universalize. And I don't, until we accept that about ourselves, we can't solve that problem. And until we, we accept that about ourselves, we can't, we need the classical liberals doing their thing. And then through them, talking them off of that totally autistic or overly emotional ledge, back to some sort of react, well, okay, what, how does that make sense? We're not blank slacks. group is different. I don't need to judge them. I can still have those, I can have, I

have progressive lenses. I have this joke, this meme about the progressive, where I can see things really close and really far, but like the middle distance is kind of like weird, you know? And, and I think there's, there's this way where we are called to be bigger, be greater. And so tribalism, which some people call racism, is always going to be beneath us in a way. Like it just, it doesn't quite work. We go overboard with it or we can't really collectivize and we can't outgroup correctly. I don't know. There's this way that I kind of see their point, but I also see the DR point. But I also say, well, how does Europe reform? We were at a, beautiful event. And I talked to one of the event organizers and speakers,

Schilos, and he talked about neo-feudalism. And he contextualized the project of what they're trying to allow for young men to grasp at is this relationship to time that is much greater than line go up, than, you know, my own, like how do I retire it's like how do I create a legacy how do I how is my name going to be remembered in a hundred years and it's it's it's going back through it's my family it's my child it's my relationships with my community and building back up from that so it's that that Faustian spirit that's really grounded in the particular and and and it requires us to have a ton of patience and a ton of ambition

and a ton, a shit ton of work ethic. So feudalism basically tied people to the land. And that's something that has been engineered out of us. It's, you know, we, you know, if you grow up where I live right now, I don't live where I grew up. I chose very strategically to live where I live right now. But if you grew up here, a lot of the people I know, they're not looking to leave. They know that they're tied to this land.

They don't invest in, like, I'll talk to a friend of mine. He's like, my family's never invested in stocks. We always just buy land. And we buy up more of the land of the town and everything. And that's something that ties people to the land. Feudalism also tied people to the land. it basically made sure that your, your children would be, would be a part, you're not going anywhere. And the problem is, is that we've been engineered to believe that, no, line go up.

If your bank account is not constantly growing, if your investment account is not constantly growing, if you're not trying to move into like the, you know, the hot zip code, you know, the hot zip code, you know, the hot is zip code. then you're a failure, you're a failure, you're not living the American dream. And it makes one wonder whether, you know, what exactly, what exactly we bought into? Mm-hmm. You know, okay, capitalism, yeah, you know, the average person, you know, I may, my life, I may actually have a better life and live a richer life than a lot of kings did, five, six, you know, a thousand years ago, 1500 years ago. Okay. But what does that mean? What exactly does

that mean? Am I passing on a kingdom when I die? Am I, what exactly am, what exactly are people being bred to do? And it seems to me that people are being bred to perpetuate a system of financialization. We don't have a manufacturer. We're not a manufacturing country. We don't make things here. Yeah, we make things here. Okay. Yeah, but the exception proves the rule. We're a financialized society. Financialization is naturally high time preference. And if you're living in a, if you're living in a society that is naturally high time preference, that starts to rub off on you. becomes high time preference in your life, even your own behavior. I've heard people, you know, I've heard libertarians say like, yeah, I came out of libertarianism and narco-capitalism.

And I think we talked about this when I was on your show. And the, they have this idea that if people could just be more wealthy, that they'll make better decisions. And I'm like, history doesn't, history doesn't tell me that. History tells me that when societies become more wealthy, they become more degenerate. And you may not think, you know, the average person may not think they're wealthy, but compared to 99.9% of the people who ever lived, they are insane, they're abundantly wealthy. And, you know, how are we living?

How are we living? You know, and I ask that and people immediately want to go, oh, well, I'm doing great. You know, I'm following, no, it's, it's we. How are we living? How are we living as a society? How is your group living? If your group is living, you know, historically, as Thomas says, we want to live historically. We want to have a historical outlook on how we live, if that's fine.

But you have to understand that we live in a society as much as people want to, you know, hate to hear that because they want to be individuals. The society is going, if society goes to shit, it is going to come for you, no matter how, well you're doing yeah it wasn't a question no no what one part of it made me think about the Israel and Britain question I spoke with one of the Lotus eaters or ex-lotus eaters work on Carl's project he's a conservative's a Brit and no it wasn't Connor it was a I don't want to Oh, shoot, I don't want to stop the, look it up. Snaim, I'm really bad with these little things.

Is he still on Lotus Cedars or did he leave? No, he left. But he, what we ended up talking about was like, well, British identity and what is it, what are they, Josh Firm. Okay. And he would talk, we were just talking about his life and his outlook and, and he, and he, He kept on talking about going home to the English countryside and the shire. And I think Israel's identity is about this land. You know, like their whole claim and why it captures our mythos is that land.

That land means something. And Britain means something as a piece of land. And America means something as a piece of land. But I'm outside of that. I'm totally just not connected to the land. I drive, we just, I bought my first house, well, bought, whatever that means, you know, I'm paying, paying the bank for something repeatedly till I die. Or we move, we just move.

Like, I'm not really, nothing's really mine. I buy things and then I sell things. And I drive and I watch these kids who grow up and there's these little, there's these little cultures and every bus route. has its own little group of kids who kind of know each other and they behave in different ways there's kind of lower class kids and higher class kids and they behave in different ways and they have different responsibilities that are kind of put upon them from their parents and I I don't know when did how long have you been living where you live uh we bought this place

two and a half years ago I've been in Alabama about three and a half years three and half years. Yeah. Like, is that long enough? I moved to Portland in 2000. And I moved to Olympia in 2010. And we finally moved from the west side of the state to the east side of the state. And it's a different place and the people are different. But am I changed? I wrote this one story kind of subconsciously thinking through these questions about this Western identity and one of the characters. He was able to go from, it was, it was set in like 1820 France. And at that point, there was these different places in France who they still had different languages. They hadn't been modernized. What modernity did was it broke Europe into these states and imposed these languages on these states. And France had all these tiny little regions. And then they forced everybody to speak French, a very particular engineered form of French at that where they dropped. That's when they started speaking funny because it was

higher class to speak in this way. But this, this character was able to go to this completely distinct people and just fit right in with them and like vibe with them. And they vibe with somebody else. But who was he? He wasn't any person. He was this kind of this key master, right? This kind of not necessarily postmodern, but there's a postmodern aesthetic where I can, I can relate to these people. I can relate to that people. I can relate to this people. And I can kind of feel the difference, but I'm missing something of that particularity myself. But at the same time, I have a condensed form of particularity in my individuality. I'm Benjamin Boyce. I have a way that I speak. I have a way of being that is a little bit more distinct. So I do have a particularity.

it's it's more granular but I'm I don't have that rootedness I don't know if I'll ever have that rootedness I'm almost 50 I don't think I'll ever I'll ever get that I think there's a reason why Gen X isn't gonna have the White House like we are kind of we're not a lost generation we're kind of a meta generation we're kind of the footnotes and the headers you know we're the kind of the scribbles in the marginalia we're like the marginalia generation and so we have an ability to be outside And so our, I think our purpose is to, is to really help formulate where the next generation is going. We're not going to have a point.

I guess we have Tucker, right? Tucker's a Gen X. You think? Yeah, he's got to be. He is. Yeah. So we have the commentariat. We have a, we have an ability to, to take what was and give it to the next generation.

We have the ability, we have the flexibility to kind of, vibe with the kids. We can use their memes and we can get away with not being too cringe when we act like childish shit posters. We can do our, we can do the schizo posting, but we're strangers in a strange land. And I think that that has an impact on us, but it also gives us the responsibility to urge or to guide, guide the, guide the future in some way. We have a limited window where we're going to be relevant and we're only going to be relevant, and we're only going to be relevant insofar as we give the tools, the analysis tools, the critiques, and then the path towards rootedness to the next generation, even though we only know it because we're

missing it. And I'm speaking universally. So of course, it'll break down to any given person in Gen X is going to have more rootedness than I do. do you consider yourself right wing okay now right wing when i say that i'm not talking about the french parliament i'm not talking about um republican i'm not talking about i'm talking about yeah well here's a good one how would you define right wing do you think under your definition under the definition that you understand whether you are and when would you say that you cross that rubicon if you did i guess uh right wing is on the side of order right that nominalism anti nominomianism no i never there's certain words i can never retain

It's anomianism means against the law. Nomianism is for the law. Yes. Well, I've never used the term nomianism. I've always used the term antonomianism. So, I'm, I'm, I'm, yeah, there's order, but there's the judges. I mean, go back to Israel, go back to ancient Israel. there's a period of time.

There's a book called Judges where Israel was going off track and then there'd be these people that were called to set it a right. And they had to set it a right for a particular time under particular circumstances.

I think Samson's the only one I've really retained, but maybe Esther's in there. No, she has her own book. Judith maybe. But they come in during a period of crisis and they're flawed characters which makes them brilliant. characters so they're more than mythic their legend oh david is the most obvious and they

they have that they have that it's like trump it's like no he was he was saved from the bullet charlie wasn't trump was why i dave smith came to town and did a really good set like i was really surprised he did a lot better than I expected I didn't think it would be bad or good but it was really good he had such presence this comedy sketch and he talked about how much he dislikes Trump viscerally but he voted for him because how could you not like it's obvious that God wants him there for a certain time for particular purpose so we if if right wing is about order if right wing is about law well where does the law come from and who adjudicates the law. Solomon is a fallen prophet. He's probably the lowest prophet. I've heard

in a certain sophistic way of articulating the prophets that Solomon's the satanic one. He's the one that that is on the very lowest part of the hierarchy of the world. He's in the material level. But even the material level has a judge. He reigns during the good times. He, well, and well, good times, you know, create bad men, you know, right? Yeah. So, so I am right wing, but I am for a right wing that's attenuated to the, to the spirit of God and the spirit of the age. And that takes a certain person to be able to do. So I am kind of, I ascribe to the great men kind of version of history.

Carlisle Yeah And Thomas Carlisle There's heroes That come at a certain point in time And there's certain circumstances That would be considered left wing Or right wing

Depending on how you would view them I need to have Thomas on He scares me because I I got in trouble Well I got strong armed by certain people With certain hefty amount of power And

because I was talking about with people that you shouldn't talk about on certain questions of certain ethno state or maybe not an ethno state i don't know but thomas doesn't give a shit about that and i have to i have to kind of thomas is thomas is probably when it comes to that group he's probably the most level as far as you know i'm much more open to having a discussion and throwing everything out on a table when it comes to that group than he is only because he sees them as already being defeated. He doesn't really see them as being, you know,

it's basically all over, but the crying at this point. I mean, they're basically every country in the world saved two looks upon them and is just, you know, utterly disgusted. And in this country, you know, they've dropped below 50% approval. So when the boomers go, I mean, what do they do? And I used to say, well, what they'll do is they'll do a false flag or something like that, you know, a Muslim false flag to get them back. But people wouldn't believe it.

People aren't going to believe it anymore. I mean, Normies were like, as soon as Charlie Kirk got short, Normies were shot, Normies were like, well, why did Israel kill Charlie Kirk? It was like the day later. There were, you know, there were Normie YouTube channels going, why did Israel kill Charlie Kirk? And you're like, what? What do you? So they couldn't even do, they couldn't even get away with a false flag.

now, half the country would be like, yeah, we don't believe that. I mean, the government would still act and everything, but there'd be nothing behind it. And they don't, we don't even really have a military anymore. It's, so it's, okay, what, what would happen? So, yeah, I don't think there's any fear to have when it comes to having Thomas on. Thomas is a, you know, he's a philosopher. Yeah. No, I, I just wanted to say, like, he's not allergic to certain forms of, discourse that are not allowed well yeah well you put them you put them up on a on a panel in front of a room full of people

he's gonna perform but he means every word of it yeah well I just wait we're I I need to have my now I know what to ask like what is what are the dimensions of living historically so

right like what is right like the right way what is tradition like right wing is pro tradition well which tradition my tradition is leftism my tradition is modernity i don't i spoke with with dougan and he's like i'm anti i'm pro tradition anti modern i'm like well modernity is my tradition what do i can't you know the the lot of the discourse around the post liberal right i just i try to get us all to a position like well no we're post liberal, we're still liberals. There's certain parts of liberalism that we are actually trying

to save from itself because we want certain aspects of it. We want, I think it's embedded in who we are. It's when we criticize ourselves for being deracinated and being anti-tradition, we need to realize that that's our tradition. Our tradition is post-tradition. So how do we, where do we go back? where do we go back we want we want a Walmart and a Costco well we don't have we're we understand the language of everybody else around us but we still want the Costco well do you think that is why since especially since 2020 you've seen so many people um embrace orthodox christianity and go and catholicism is because there's a there's a tradition there that um that predates basically the Enlightenment predates the Reformation, which led to the Enlightenment.

And the, well, I mean, it seems, it seems that people, like, and also there's an identity with it. You know, Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson always says, Russian is Orthodox. When you're, you know, when, when the Bolsheviks sought to destroy. what it meant to be Russian, they destroyed the Orthodox Church. That's the first thing that had to go. So there is identity,

you know, it's like historically Spain. What do people think? Catholicism. You know, so there are groups, you know, same with Ireland. So what is, you know, what is the, is that what how people are embracing tradition

by going back to that? And then you have people going back to pagan, you know, jumping over 1,200 years and going to paganism and going, oh, this is, this is what my family practice, well, I don't know, you know, maybe, you don't know, it's 1,200 years ago, but sure, why not? That's what it seems like when you see this phenomenon happening, is that is one of the ways that people are saying, okay, I'm going to embrace tradition, and I'm going to reject modernity.

Well, it's, I don't know who, it was some big name who started going to church, maybe it was Joe Rogan or something. I don't know who it was, like somebody asked him about why he's going to church and he said, it just works. So it's not about the belief structure so much is that it, it gives you a script. It's like have family, believe in God, you're a sinner, Ask for forgiveness, take care of your family. Ask for forgiveness, take care of your family.

You yourself, as an individual, are less than what God wants you to be, and you need to go through the steps that every human being is called to go through in order to be purified and resonate harmoniously with the living spirit of God, which transcends history that can root itself in in history through the human animal, through the family. It solves the question of what a man is. It solves the question of what a woman is. It's really interesting to go to the Orthodox Church.

You see, I mean, there's a Greek one down the street. I went to a few times. And the women are very womanly in a very particular way. It's like their shape and their dress and their behavior. And then you see their relationship. to their children. And then you see the men are shaped in a certain way and behave in a certain way,

they stand in a certain way, and everybody's fit together. This little nativity scene like copy and pasting, copy and paste it, an infinite variation. You're like, oh, okay, that makes sense. And then they're all going through this rudimentary, redeemed form of ancient Judaic ritual. Right?

There's a sacrifice, but we don't do the sacrifice anymore because it's already made. So we're post, we're post temple in a way. And so we're, we're part of it. And that's the interesting thing about the West and Judaism is orthodoxies take on Israel. It's, it's take on the things. Like, no, you no longer have authority. You're no longer the special one. Everybody participates. Everybody is at the table now. And here's how we do it. they have a very interesting take on it and the more you look into um the see i don't you see things the way that the catholic church has been manipulated by certain ethnic group to re vatican vatican vatic was the catholic churches the vatic two was the catholic church as

Nuremberg they had to they had to change they had to they could no longer have the attitude towards um towards the Jewish faith that they that they had up until this time they could no longer when the in the Latin mass when the gospel is being brought from one side to the other the subdeacon is no longer covering his face because the gospel is blind you know the Jews are blind to the gospel He's acting as a representative, acting as a representative of the Jews as a whole who are, you know, I use this term for, for effect, but it's also true that they're Antichrist. And, you know, that's one of the problems is, is that in Vatican two, you had Nostratate, which basically was, oh, we're not, we're no longer going to say, sure, you're just. a different path to God. And, you know, even Israel Shahok in his book, Jewish history, Jewish religion, who was an Israeli Jew, where it is, he came out, his family were in the camps,

they moved to Israel after he lived his whole life in Israel. He wrote in his book that Judaism is in what you think it is. It's basically a polytheistic religion. They believe in multiple, especially through the Kabbalah and many of the rabbis believe in multiple gods. and the there's a there's almost like a sex a sex kind of uh sex religion among yeah sex magic happening there amongst female and male gods and yeah that's well i mean the catholic church basically in it through vatican two being infiltrated by certain certain groups um one group in particular had to, you know, well, they were convinced to drop this story. Now, you know, when I go to the Catholic Church, I never hear pray for Israel. I never hear anything like that in

the churches that I go to. But I'm sure there are some around. But yeah, there's, I think it's one of those things where a lot of people think that when the Catholic Church does something and when the Pope says something, every Catholic falls into line. And usually when the Pope says something, Catholic goes, yeah, I don't care. Yeah, unless you're speaking ex-cathedral and he's saying, you know, this is what the new doctrine is going to be. Most Catholics are just like, yeah. Oh, you're talking about taking in refugees because, yeah, we don't care about that.

Are you? We don't care what you say. Yeah. Yeah. Why? So why? Let's see. Baptized as a baby.

I grew up in Catholic Church, was an altar boy, went to graduate Catholic school, went to a Jesuit school actually fell away after high school, typical, typical story of a inner city Catholic, especially post-Vatican 2, went to, started going to a Baptist church, then a Presbyterian church, and then a Presbyterian seminary. But I felt the calling back to back to the Catholic Church when I moved here. And I found out that in the middle of Alabama, where there are nothing but Baptist churches, there's a Catholic church. And when I walked into it, I just felt I knew I was home. I think that, I think that Christianity and faith also has something to do with ethnicity. And my, you know, half of my family is Spanish and half of my family

is Polish. And they are, you know, Polish, Hungarian, Slovakian, their cat, both sides are Catholic. And I feel more comfortable in a Catholic Mass with the order, even with the, with a, with a new Mass, which is, you know, I'd rather, I'd rather like the, when I was, when we were in, when we were in, you know, Portland, I was able to go to a Latin Mass up there that was, that was really nice. I like the order of it. And, you know, a lot of times when I go to, and my wife is, you know, Protestant, when I go to the Protestant church, I feel like there's a certain level of chaos happening in that, you know, there's, I like the order of it. And that's just the way, you know, it's just who I am. It's just something that's in me. So, yeah, I think that that's what it is.

And, you know, people can fight and be like, well, if you're Catholic, you believe this, and that's not what the Bible says and saw the scriptura and saw the feeday and everything like that. And I'm just like, okay. Yeah. Have at it. You do you. Oh, well, that means I can't trust you.

Okay. Have at it. You do you. Yeah. I think there's some things that they're there, we're suffering under something that is like this imminent threat. And if you're not willing to put aside like a 500 year old thing, you know, it's like, well, then I don't, then we don't need to get together. I'm not, I'm not a Democrat. I don't need, you know, and I'm not one of these people who's like, oh, I need a million people on myself.

But no, I need like 20 or 25 good people who I can trust. That's about it. Trump has somehow tied together those factions on the right. Nick Land explained it as a trichotomy. There might be more, might be less. It was one of my better interviews in the entire seven years I've been doing this, um specifically about the right wing and trying to figure out what is going on on the right i was drawn to the right because they were they were doing something other than being anti-woke

they were being something other you know i spoke with james james is a paragon for good or ill and i love the guy personally we just have a tremendous beef on lines going on for a while now um but he he wrote a book with helen pluck rose as you know upstanding classical liberal liberals. It's called cynical theories. And they go through and they break down the whole postmodern critical theory, grievance studies stuff. And then he get to the end. They're like, well, what else is there? And it was like reading a pamphlet from 1990 Democrat convention. It's like civic nationalism. Maybe we need some civic religion in there somewhat, but not too thick. Not too thick of identity because that we can't touch identity. We can't be tribal. but we have to come together, you know? And I'm like, well, what else is there? Like, so you go and you read other critics of progressivism. And Yarvin led me to Burnham, and Burnham has those, that Machiavellian's book is absolutely essential reading to understand.

Mind blowing. The not, the not, well, there's the not left and then there's the not liberals. And the liberal mind has a hard time understanding the not liberal. you know, Machiavelli is just a bad word to them. He's the, it's probably stupid, but I think he's basically the Darwin, you know, like fundamentalist Christians can't comprehend Darwin. They're going to fight against evolution. And, you know, then they're up Shits Creek when they do that.

And then classical liberals, they're going to try to fight against Machiavelli, fight against Schmidt, but they just don't understand themselves. It's not prescriptive. It's just this is how the game works. and um and and so trump comes in and he articulates this vision in a heroic manner he becomes the embodiment of the spirit of america and he's set against these huge systems he smashes through the media and he gets his first term and then they destroy him with covid with the lockdowns and with biden somehow they just totally destroy and the the

riots Michelle Obama egging on those riots is so disgusting the Democrats would stop at nothing they would destroy the country to save it from Trump and and they they had the they had the imagination but he broke through that again he almost gets shot he breaks through it he's he has that one meme like I am the chosen one you know it's like even he kind of knows it but he treats it lightly he's got the mandate of heaven and he kind of understands it but he kind of just lets it rest lightly on him. And he ties together the whole thing.

And what happened when he was about to win, this all happened about a year ago, the Daryl Cooper thing and then the astro-turfing of this woke right term. So woke was no longer our enemy. Now let's fight against ourselves. Let's fight for the scraps. Let's not build anything.

The classical liberals are like, we can't decons, we have to go back to this World War II narrative. It doesn't work anymore. This rules-based order, Putin is just like, no. That's not how real history works. Real history works by certain calculated political moves. And some people will call themselves classical liberals,

but they only do that in retrospect. They do it because they won, and then they justify power afterwards. So they clean up power afterwards. So the transitioning from anti-woke to post-woke. And I don't know what's going to happen. Progressivism is, or the left is changing its tactic. It's changing its form. It's decreasing the amount of wokeness in it. It kind of understands that the tides are turning on a cultural war level. So the real work

kind of shows itself in the reaction to Fuentes, how Tucker is able to incite these purity spirals on the right and and to show who is trying to grasp after power but doesn't isn't worthy of power so what's going to happen after trump's big 10 approach happens i think the left is just going to take it back over because the left has entropy on its side and this weird organizational prowess this procedural prowess on its side so we have a limited time while the tide is down to kind of look across it's like like an estuary when the tide goes out there's all these different critters from all these different regions have the ability to kind of intermingle and then there then the tide's going to go back and so we have a very limited time

to make connections and to figure out how to create life life rafts and different to kind of understand our ecosystem a little bit before it comes back and technology goes forward and all these different things. So I'm just, I guess my work now is just trying to listen to the spirit of the age or the spirit coming through the age for what's the interesting conversation. And you can kind of see, anti-wokeness was an interesting conversation, lives of TikTok era, SJW, TikTok compilations now. That was interesting, but it's not really interesting anymore.

I think even the left is kind of done with their mutants in a way. So kind of I'm grasping for different tools. And whatever you said, Thomas says about living historically, I guess that's kind of what I'm trying to understand and connect with. And that requires me to have a different understanding of time. and of history than I have had. I guess that's where I'm kind of like stretching or reaching, grasping toward.

Well, I assume you think that if, like, in 2020, if the left gets back into power, that's going to be, you know, Biden targeted right-wingers, his cabinet mostly, his attorney general, well, his attorney general who, um, there seems to be ethnic grievances going on there. But, you know, what Daryl Cooper said recently, uh, when we had him on my, I have a side podcast called the Inquisition was that, you know, whatever you think about JD Vance, you want JD events to get elected in 2028 because it gives you at least another four to eight years to

build what you want to build to build, you know, if you want to build, um, you know something outside the system that will operate as the system and I think going forward what we're looking at is we're looking at breaking down into tribes I just had my states you think tribes um local areas states city states possibly and the I had Mike Maxwell on and he's the uh founder of Imperium press and he just put out a book called the tribal future of the west and he makes the argument that everything is breaking down into tribes now and people are going to start especially right-wingers are going to start finding their tribes and they're going to you know look at areas you know I mean look how many people are moving to Idaho that that are

adjacent to us and and to other areas like that and while people are doing that while people are saying strength and numbers you know we all We don't all have to live in the same building like the Branch Davidians, but we can all live in the same area, harder to take us out by a drone strike, that, you know, that eight years, like I said, no matter what, you know, you say J.D. Vance and people are like, well, you know, he's in with Peter Thiel and it's Palantir. And he really isn't our friend. And he'll want to kill us and everything. So Peter Thiel is like this mastermind who is going to, you know, as well, I mean, then just, I mean, literally, just give up. Please give up and just, you know, stop talking. If you really feel that way, you've given up. And why are you online? Why are you talking about this stuff?

You should be building your cabin in the woods and you should be looking to hold out for, you know, hold out for however long you want to or just end it right now. I mean, what is the point? I mean, you're not going to be happy. You're going to be miserable and you sound miserable. And most people sound miserable when they do this, when they talk like this. But, you know, the way I look at it is, yeah, I have to agree with Darrell. You get, you know, J.D. Vance gets elected in 2008.

And I think that that is something that even right wingers, a lot of people, quote, unquote, on the right, but at least in conservative ink and the Republican Party don't want because they see him as not being, you know, a friend of Israel, whether he is or not. whether he's a secret super double agent, whatever you people, people on the serious right think, quote unquote. Then, but I think that it, you know, it's really just, the future is not this government,

especially in its form. So you want it to die. You want to disconnect from it. And you want to, literally the only reason to even care about who gets elected is is whether that person wants you dead or not. The only reason your friends would get elected into the government is so that they can make some money, they can build some wealth, and they could run interference for you if

possible if a regime gets in there that's, that's hostile to you. So, you know, the way I look at it is, you know, three years from now, I'm hoping that I just want people to get elected who don't want me dead and that's that's about it you know and I'm I'm not saying that I'm going to be their greatest cheerleader I'm going to do like I do now if Trump does something good I'll say he did something good if Trump does something bad I'm going to say he did something bad that's what I've been doing all along but yeah I mean I just see the future as people coming together under the banner of American, you know, American heritage or whatever. I'm up for people doing whatever they want to start breaking up into groups because,

you know, trying to, the way I look at the United States government is, and the form of government we have right now is like a car. You have a car, I have an old car. I have a car that's over 30 years old now. And I have a truck that's over 30 years old. And I want it to stay on the road. But there will get to be, you know, and so if it breaks down, I have, I have a choice. If it's not working anymore, I have a choice.

Do I fix it, try to fix it? Or do I look at it and I go, it's beyond fixing. It's time to scrap it. This thing was beyond fixing a long time ago. And, you know, the great thing about hindsight is you can look and you can go, this thing was beyond fixing 30 years ago. this thing was beyond fixing 50 years ago it's been operating in one way my whole life and that way is oligarchy and to um as an enemy to people who you know seek to live a more traditional

life however one wishes to um define that so yeah i mean i'm just i'm just looking for the future as far as who's on my side, who do I have a lot in common with, and what can we build, and you know, can we just get to the point where there's somebody, you know, there's going to be somebody who's going to come into power who is going to want to harm us. The further we can kick that can down the road, the better. But in the meantime, we don't try to prop up and keep the system going. I'm, all you're doing is prolonging your demise. You're just making it worse. You're just you're strengthening a system you're you're strengthening an organ that at some point somebody is going to get in charge of and use to try and hurt you so why are you trying to prop it up unless you're

going unless Trump is going to defeat all his enemies in the next three years and we won't have to worry about that and then we can just sing kumbaya but that's not going to happen I think we've seen that Wow. Yeah. We live in this blessed land and time and history. Since World War II, we've just been living life on easy mode in so many different ways. And I try to hear the classical liberals anxiety about anti-Semitism. about questioning World War II and questioning the rules-based order. I try to try to understand why they're so anxious. And I just don't see fascism rising in America. It's just not in the nature of the land. And any sort of real politic, like real political energy,

is going to come from the people, and it's going to come from the land. the urbanites have their own system outside of those urban centers. I mean, classical liberalism works in a mostly white elite class taking care of a multicultural society. And it can kind of get away from that. And it can let so many rapes and murders happen and its little defunct utopia. And the people who want to manage the decline of America and return to a constitutional conservatism, that you know when when when when they get mad at people saying well that that that the people

that the constitution was written for and by no longer exist i think those people still exist but there's other people too and and like like like a real like fascist takeover of america it it's it's not going to scale you know like whenever whenever uh really fundamentalist strains scales up it it's kind of cheesy in america like i'm thinking the 90s christianity you know like how can you have forgive me for interrupting but how do you have fascism it with 350 million or 400 million people i mean you have may you have mayors now who are like yeah i we're going to fight ice all the way you have judges all i mean are you arresting every single one they're just going to pop up. Another one's going to pop up. This vast continent-wide government system of

governance is dead. You can't fix it. It is going to have to get smaller, whether that be returning to the more 10th Amendment kind of state states taking over. But I don't even think that's going to happen. I think it's going to be de facto. It's just going to, it's not going to be planned. It's just going to happen like so many, you know, like in 2010, Obama wanted to pass like this huge gun law. And there were, there were sheriffs in California who said, we're just not going to enforce it. There was a sheriff in Virginia who said, I will deputize the whole town so that it's legal for them to own firearms. And I mean, well, how do you, how does the, how does the left fight with that? Or how does the right fight with, you know, you have a hundred mayors who are like,

no one has the budget for that. I don't care how many people, ICE is hiring. They're not going to do, they're not going to be able to fix this. And anyone who thinks it, anyone who thinks this is going to be fixed is delusional. And anyone who is like willing to fight for it starts to border on like enemy. You have to look at them in the friend enemy distinction. really because they're going to harm your way of life somehow you're going to harm every you're going to harm everyone's way of life there's just no way that this can survive sam francis talked about this

the revolution of mass and scale you there's too much this can't scale one person can't make this scale it's just not and there's no cohesiveness it's not like franco in spain it's not like where you have you know most of the country is catholic and you can bring them in under that banner. You know, you're, you're looking at a country where it's like, you know, Protestants go on, on Twitter to, you know, say Catholics aren't real Christians and that they have a, you know, oh, they have, they have a sworn an oath to another country, the Vatican, and you'll have some Catholics that'll go on Twitter, and it'll be like, Protestants aren't saved

because they don't believe in transubstantiation and they're not taking, I mean, it's like, I mean, what, what? You think, you think, like, you think Caleb in Salt Lake City and Joel, who lives on the lower east side of Manhattan, have something in common? What, are you, what, like, what, what banner are you bringing them in under? 9-11 is over. Another 9-11 will not bring everybody together. So where, where is this coming from?

are you going to rally people under the uh the uh i get yeah you said the individual and the collective and that that uh that dichotomy or that that dialectic is uh i think that's what separates the the true right from the would be right and uh the you know the the the Some people get an ethno identity and some people don't. And if you're in this ethno identity, you need to not have that. But don't tell me what to do. The problems with authority, just the need to argue

and split hairs like you're talking about. And then you have people like Fuentes touching a nerve, starting something, but you're like, well, what is Fuentes going to be in charge of? Why would I be scared of him? He's talking bad about some people. I don't care. Like, who's he, who's gonna, what are they gonna do?

March around like that guy's brilliant for what he is, but he's not a military kind of guy. He's not gonna, he's not a great tactician. Maybe he can figure out the rhetorical strategies to get somebody that he wants into government, but he's still operating within that system. So I don't, I don't know what there is to be afraid of other than the common enemy and fear is its tool.

so that's why i really enjoyed about the uh the event that we were on and and meeting these young men and when i got back from the event my wife who who's getting just she's she's receiving tons and tons of of hate on her youtube channel um she hit a nerve for some reason with the uh the red pill men group the uh the migtao set and they're just just trying to tear her down over and over and over again. So when I got back, she's like, well, how much do they hate women? I'm like, they don't. Like these young men, this group, they're actually like asking for dating advice. They actually, they want women. They want to be in the right relationship with the woman. They have a, they have the correct amount of misogyny, which is

that necessary misogyny to let women be different than me and kind of give them their domain and I have my domain and then figure out how to harmonize those domains. But Just that little bit of teasing, right, to kind of like, you know, woman brain. I'm not going to, I'm not going to behave that way or like that drawing that distinction, but also honoring those distinctions, honoring those, the nature. Skelo said women are, women are incredibly more based than men because they're just tied by nature to reality in a way that men will never be able to be tied to. Now, that doesn't mean that they can't go off the track, as we see in our modern day cat,

cat, cat, wine, mom kind of era. But the, I'm really concerned with the, with not honestly seeing what's happening on the serious right. And that's kind of my role and my job right now is to understand them and to give them a place where they can be normified or where normies can interact with them in a kind of a gentler environment than their schizoid, racist, sexist, crazy. crazy lands um so that's kind of what i'm doing now i have to i have to bounce though i have i have a shift that i have to get to sure sure i'll just leave you with one thing that my um my buddy charles spadiel said and it's probably the one of the most true things you'll over here women are pragmatists pretending to be romantics and men are romantics pretending to be pragmatists and we need to reverse that back so um tell everybody where they

can find your work and i'll get you out of here i'm uh benjamin a boy on Twitter and YouTube. My podcast is Comversations. On YouTube, I'm like 25 subs away from 100,000. So if anybody hears this, want to give me a sub, you don't have to hit that little bell thing. But I just want that number so I can get that stupid little plaque and then I can relax on my rest of my calm versent laurels for a while. But that's my only plug. Benjamin, I appreciate it. Let's talk again soon. Thank you. Absolutely. Peter, always a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.