The Pete Quiñones Show - The Josh Neal Episodes

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

5 Hours and 46 MinutesPG-13Josh Neal is a former psychology professor and author of the books "American Extremist" and "Understanding Conspiracy Theroies Vol. 1"Episode 1009: Individualism, Anarchism and SociopathyEpisode 1144: 'Woke Right-Type' Accusations are Nothing New Episode 1192: Anti-Conspiracy Activist's Self-Interested Motivations Episode 1216: Freud, Sexual Abuse, and B'nai B'rithThe ArticleIntolerant InterpretationsJosh's SubstackJosh's YouTubeAmerican ExtremistUnderstanding Conspiracy Theroies Vol. 1Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Piquino show. I'm here with Jay Neal. Jay Neal, right? Jay, Jay, Jay's okay? You can call me Josh. Josh Neal. What's going on, Josh? It's going well.

It's a great pleasure to be speaking to you. I have to say, shout out to my friend Jefferson Lee. He put me on to you because you have this great series with Thomas 7 on like all these historical things. And it's just a real, it's a real public service you two guys do. So kudos to you. Oh, thank you. And then tomorrow starts the 1990s Balkan Wars.

All right. Let's go. Yeah. Tell everybody a little bit about yourself. Well, yeah. So as I said before, I host or co-host the Jefferson Lee show with my friend Jefferson Lee, who's also in this. I write, I have a substack.

Jayneal. I branded it as psychopolitics, and it's mostly essays on psychology and politics. and there's an accompanying YouTube channel. My first book with Imperium Press is called American Extremist, The Psychology of Political Extremism. And I actually got a new one coming out with them in a few weeks called Understanding Conspiracy Theories. But yeah, for people who don't know me,

I've been, I would say, in the radical right with my name and face out there since 2017, 2018, I made the switch, I think, like, for a lot of people I know, we were hardcore Trumpists, like, very libertarian, but like on that cusp of, well, what used to be called the libertarian to alt-right pipeline. And so I was one of those guys. And when the Syria strikes happened, that's when I started to look away. from Trump and start looking to other things. And then in 2017, obviously, that was the alt-right. So for people who don't know me, that's my background.

Tell me a little bit about American extremists. Yeah. So a little bit of a personal story. I was in 2019, I was involved with some people that your audience may be familiar with, people like Richard Spencer, so on and so forth. Augustus Invictus, at the time he was running for office. presidential office and remember yeah yeah and it was wild um great guy terrible what happened to him um he's out obviously and so he's just he's back to streaming you know to your audience

show him your love and affection it's a great guy but uh i got doxed as a result of getting involved with a lot of those people and i had already you know i came into the alt right because i have a background of psychology, maybe you guessed from the title of the book. And I went, you know, I didn't go the doctoral direction because the kinds of questions I was interested in were more political and philosophical than like strictly speaking about mental health or whatever, social science research I guessed on today. So I was already working on some stuff observations I had over the years, but it was really like getting into the radical right was like having the veil pulled away from your eyes entirely.

And then getting doxed as a result of that kind of made me have to confront some kind of realities. Like when I got into it, I was like, oh, well, Nazis, that's not a real thing. That's just like a libtard fantasy. And by and large, it's not, it's not like there's a well-organized, politically active machine that has political, cultural, material, resources, things like that.

Obviously, that's not happening. But nonetheless, there are people who espouse those views, and they range from totally harmless, tepid, you know, contributing members of society who just want the trains to run on time. And on the other end are actual degenerates, people you wouldn't want to associate yourself with. In reality, I think as most people probably knows, that really is an extreme, heavily ostracized minority. not just by polite society, but even in these kinds of circles. I do think we do a really good job of self-policing, maybe to our detriment, because obviously the left doesn't do that at all. They just set their freaks loose.

So when I came out of that, I felt like I had some unique things to say about what was wrong with American politics left, right, and center. And so I kind of wrote the book imagining, I'm holding someone's hand through a red pill process. A very, you know, not like cutesy memes and gifts. Like this is a little bit more you're going to have to take some

breaks. You're going to go back to the corner and have them, you know, fucking whatever those things in boxing that they put when you start developing the mouses, they put that huge fucking like think or compress on your head. Like this is a red pill like that, but you'll need the compress and everything. So it starts

off talking about media control, myth mythological narrativeizing as the framework people should be thinking about rather than like ideology or so on and so forth and so I carry people through this you know here's what's you know here's what myth is here's like how how this kind of psychological framework is is influencing your decision making so on and so forth and I give actual lots of citations to that And then obviously going of the media, you know, this is, because the basic thesis of the book is, it's not an original idea, I just really kind of beat the hell out of it over the course of the book, is that the liberal establishment is genuinely where political violence originates from, whether it's, you know, forced integration by, by gun, by the military, whether it's Antifa, in the streets, which is not so much a thing right now,

whether it's journalists going after you. Go ahead. Just wait. Oh, yes, right. Just wait. Yeah, I don't want to speak too soon. Knock on wood. So getting people to think, which is very easy

if you're talking to conservatives, because they already hate the government, and they hated the government for like 150, 300 years. Americans have just always hated the government. And so it's very easy to be like, well, here's this persecutory framework, but you have to adjust some of the variables because obviously Connink runs on his own persecutory framework and it's false, as we all know. So that's the basic thesis. And then I try to explain how that is. And in some cases, it's talking about literally, I was writing this during 2020.

So every week I'm like kind of pseudo like almost like a historian of it, like an ancient Roman historian. Like there were this many black people on the street this day and they busted this many heads or whatever. So it's half like, okay, philosophical analysis but also half like detailing the actual political violence that was happening at that time. I actually think it made it even more impactful because it's like here's theoretical stuff. Here's some nice sources and citations. And then also, here's a video of a black guy stomping on someone's head until they're bleeding all over the place. Obviously, that's not what's in the book. And then taking these people, you know, well, here's what's wrong with the left wing in America.

Here's what's wrong with this centurism, liberalism, kind of informally, and then what's wrong with the right. And a lot of it relies very heavily on kind of classical psychoanalytic theories, but it's not. all psychoanalysis. And as Mike likes to say, the book does take Freud back for the right. So, I mean, if you have, if you're allergic to or sensitive to Freud, and obviously I understand why people would be, it's very much like a different spin on kind of a familiar story. One of these days, you've got to come back and do an episode just on narrative building, because I mean that's where everything is and anybody who doesn't realize that after the last four years is just not paying attention they're in their ideological box and they're you know playing playing with

it's them and their friends playing by themselves you know it's just um you haven't stepped out to look around and see exactly what's happening out here but um one of the things that I really been looking at lately is um individualism and I think it's hard to to miss that this was individualism was a big part of the founding of this country. You can see it in the founding documents. People will argue that, sure, you know, there was individuals, people talked about individual rights, but there was collectives and everything. Well, sure.

Okay. Yeah, there were collectives and everything. But everything always moves left, it seems. So you sort of knew that it wasn't going to. last. Anyone who you could look at, you know, things, things don't get better until they get really, really, really, really bad. And so there's a section in the book where you talk about it's after the narrative part about the narrative where it's individualism, anarchism, and I think it's sociopathy. So can we get a little bit into, you know, like what you

see as when it comes to individualism is that what you see is that is that what you see this society and this culture being all about uh yes and no um pros and cons on both sides of that equation i mean uh kevin mcdonald obviously famously has written about this i think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that the western tradition is the tradition of the individual However, in the same way to be a liberal in the 18th century meant something different than to be a liberal today. To be an individual in the 18th century meant something different than it does today. I've been reading a lot of San Francis and James Burnham lately, and, you know, one of the things that San Francis emphasizes, sorry, I just lost my train of thought, is that...

So 18th century liberalism is different than liberalism today. And then being an individual. Okay, thank you. So he talks about, like, for instance, great safe, very good job. You know, he talks about, okay, you know, there's these different types of liberals. And if you were a liberal in the 18th century, actually, you know, fundamentally what's, what's distinguishing it from today's liberal is all of these restraints and considerations and obligations and duties and belongingness and embeddedness that is. the background of all this cool, sexy, Enlightenment, liberal stuff that we started doing

over the last couple hundred years. There was a story in the news not too long ago, maybe a couple of years ago, someone was trying to get Immanuel Kant canceled because they found his private correspondences where he just talks about racism and hating women and stuff like that. And it's like none of these people,

it was just a foregone conclusion that whatever they theorized was occurring in a homogenous European Christian context. So same thing with being an individual. You still had responsibilities and obligations and duties and other things. Your individualism was still curtailed by larger social forces, the church, the different political organizations, and so forth at that time. And so you still had to fit in society, but today it's really the opposite.

Society is now increasingly bending to accommodate the most extreme individual people who can collectivize and then create this political edifice that makes the rest of us conform to them. Where I work, you know, I had to accommodate a gender non-whatever kind of person. And, you know, that's their individualism

kind of like having this warping effect on the social fields around them, like, well, suddenly the rest of us are caught in your madness, and that's just part of the equation. You said before, you kind of like hinted at the mold bug line about, you know, Cthulhu always swimming left. I think that's obviously because technology has this corrosive effect on social norms and mores, the ultimate consequence or outcome of which is this kind of radical liberation from all of this social embeddedness going on. So today to be an individual is, I mean, I'm not the first person to say this. Your audience hopefully very well understands this. To be an individual today is

unlike probably any kind of person that has ever existed in human history. To the point, I remember for a short spell, I was a teacher, the university teacher. And I remember, telling my students like 10 years ago like because the hot question I would always get day one like intro psychology class is like okay professor deeds what's up with all these trans folks right and then like I'm trying to go through the like syllabus and they're like can you make sense of this to me like all right hold on but like to go through that conversation with them and be like well guess that's not even weird like just wait seven years and you're going to have people like with prosthetics and you're going to have to start calling them what they want or

Just the, the, the, if you want to say, the continuing like a revolutionary spirit of this is just going to keep bringing new manifestations of this. So with regards to the title of that section, individualism and sociopathy, the argument I make is that effectively to be like an entrepreneur, you know, the Foucotean self-entrepreneur to be this neoliberal person, to be an American, you know, extensive air quotes. is to be this radically self-constructed person with like no predecessor, no context, no pretext. It's solipsism. I mean, it's every nasty word you've ever heard in a philosophy class, but ultimately it's pathological. Do you see that as like particularly a post-World War II phenomenon where you really start seeing things? this it all start breaking apart as far as a real change in what it means to be an individual uh yes although the seeds of that were very clearly starting to show in the 50 60 years prior to that so you

know the the progressive tradition in the united states at the turn of the 20th century was a Nazi progressive vision um to put it indelicately i mean everything that the third rake did not everything But the things that we mostly remember them for, the economic policies and the kind of extreme technocratic interest on social policies, those are Anglo inventions. That's Atlantisist philosophy, turn of the 20th century. American and English men are looking out at the world and they're seeing what we've come to inherit. And they're like, oh, my God, what the hell do we do about all this? And I think there was some kind of attempt to shepherd in a new vision of the individual that could, you know, protect the white race, to protect white people, to protect America, to protect England, the British Isles, to protect political sovereignty in European nations, so on to protect the Constitution. I mean, these things are all synonymous, really. It's not like they're separate things.

If you want to protect the Constitution, if you want to save America, if you want to do the, I almost said Norman Rockwell, if you want to do the George Lincoln Rockwell thing, well, it's all the same thing. But yeah, so as far as that post-war aspect of that, I look at the post-war order, and this is an argument I make in my upcoming book, there was a slur that was very common at that time used by effectively the radical right whenever they would talk about. the liberal consensus, you know, they would talk about, well, that's what they would call it. It was this consensus view and it had a kind of derogatory, kind of like proto-libtard. Like if you were the consensus, you were brainwashed, you were just spouting kind of like this newfangled liberal social ideology that had no popularity really or history prior to the Second World War. So this consensus was. the meeting of, you know, the dying Atlantis Empire and this surge of European migration

into the West, of a very particular type of European from Russia, maybe the pale somewhere over there. And they met in the middle. The West had to be saved. We, you know, the whole European experiment, like 20th century is like this great tragedy of us just like figuring out new ways to just roast each other and by the middle of the 20th century how many of us are left not a lot of the good ones so it's this waning western empire that's bringing in a lot of this well as we know now ex-bolshevist you know or descended from bolshevist types who came in wanted to find a place in America and they found flattering ways to reinforce the waning american liberal ideology in a way that made sense post, you know, Sam Francis to speak to invoke him one more time, post this managerial

revolution, this mass managerial revolution. So, you know, a lot of ideas and concepts that emerged at that time that are not necessarily related. Maybe if you tried to do a genealogy and try to connect these things like Glenn Beck on Fox News with his whiteboard, maybe you couldn't do that. But nonetheless, they're all talking about the same goal. I invoked Foucault before the entrepreneur of the self, his idea of neoliberalism, this is the new American economic policy post-World War II, which the major emphasis of which was about this internal kind of psychic development that was supposed to be essential to unlocking this American economic engine to fulfilling, you know, the old American idea, but in a new way, uh, in this new technocratic

society. And so my inherited wisdom, you know, I'm a little bit younger than you. I'm still in my 30s. I had my birthday earlier this week. The things I was told growing up that were good pieces of advice, follow your dreams, do what makes you happy. This is like the, uh, head smashed in, you know, inherited version of like the Foucotean ideas like you can liberate yourself and you can be anything that you want and all of this is like a radical political act but it's also American and blah blah so um i think it's specifically and obviously the purpose of this consensus being you know how do we manage the existing populations while we get this new migratory program in place so i feel like that individualism, not to get like crazy tinfoil hat, is not like an intentional thing that was

done like we're going to ameliorate or we're going to anesthetize people while we start moving infinity Africans around. I think it was kind of a natural development, but the consequences obviously for us have been terrible. Yeah, it's sort of like we've become, we're like these radical serfs or these radical annuities, walking annuities. Basically, what they wanted was a transactional society, and it basically turned a sense of transactional beings. And that's part of the individuality of it is what are you contributing to commerce? It's what the military is now. I mean, if you go to the Navy's website, it will say that they are there to protect the sea lanes for commerce in the world, you know, so that it can move.

And yeah, so I was thinking you were, one of the things that you had mentioned was how even with the individualism of the old, of the previous to what we're dealing with now, when you had church, when you had family structure, when you had a lot of things to keep you grounded to keep you as part of a tight knit, I think R.R. R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong God, something like that. Yeah. And that's what I was thinking the whole time was the goal of crushing, you know, like the Italian-American society and mutual aid societies, churches, and the family is to turn everybody into this radical kind of monetary instrument. basically yeah i well some things to keep in mind as you're talking i've always got the eternal like devil angel on one side or the other i'm a terrible contrarian so as you're talking i was

starting to do a bit a bit of a like a hey man that's not really fair right because i was starting to think well transaction has always been part of society you know the internal critic who's like watching us and thinking they're full of shit i'm trying to answer them as i'm listening to you like And there's always been an economic component to society. So fundamentally, how is this different, right? Because that's probably what someone who's listening to you and disagrees with you and me might say. And fundamentally, it's a qualitative difference more than anything else. One of the things I was thinking of that I think is a really good example of what you're talking about,

a modern phenomenon, is exactly how the red pill nanosphere community has ended up in, like, this year, where if you listen to or read people in these communities talk about, specifically men, talk about, you know, why they fail with women or why feminism sucks or why the world is giving them a raw deal, so on and so forth, is they start talking about, like, they roll out their laundry list of things that they expect the woman to bring because it's a tit for tat, you know, I want to solve the freeloader problem, you know, all of these things where she, if she doesn't, you know, if she doesn't cook and do this and that and have $1,000 and $40,000 and blah, blah, blah, blah, it's like, for one thing, it's

very feminine because like that whole transactional thing was like trying to solve the native sexual inequalities between men and women and trying to solve like all of these complex social problems, fertility, pair bonding, alleviating tribal conflicts, so ameliorating tribal conflicts, so on and so forth. And so on the one hand, you know, qualitatively has a different is part of this inversion. The wrong people have become the bean counters. Bean counting is kind of a womanly thing. And I don't mean that in a derogatory sense. Like, you know, they mind the domestic life. You know, they're very fastidious details in that, that manner. They make up 80% of domestic spending. Like, that's their domain. That's a quality.

qualitative difference. But now that it's also, I was going to say this before, it's also much more egotistical. And we might as well say egotistical pejoratively, egotism. I mean, we might as well say, really, when I talk about individualism in the book, it's probably better to say egotism, an extreme radical egotism, which is all about, well, ultimately, like, you're not really interfacing with direct reality because you're interfacing first with this buffer of your own self-aggrandizing bullshit, which the contemporary version of individualism is just like constantly throwing, it's like a guy just always throwing gasoline on the fire so you can come up with ever more insane cope, like this guy Will Stancel on Twitter.

I don't know if you've been watching him. It's like, we're going on a full business week of this, and all you're watching is just egotism. Yeah. Yeah, it's remarkable. Well, let's talk about this, because we can talk about individualism, we can talk about anarchism, but when it crosses over, and in your personal life, I mean, that can cause enough problems, especially relationship-wise with your family. But let's cross over into the political now. When that crosses over into the political, where do we end up?

What's the path down that road? yeah um well anarchism is one you know expressly political manifestation i have a very small i would say like maybe sub 10% sympathy for anarchism um but it's not morally related to what you typically see from anarchists i mean most people i think have a it's why we like vigilantes the punisher the batman because innately we all especially as conservatives i think have a distrust of society. We have a distrust of large groups. We have distrust of things that we can't see, smell, taste, touch, hold accountable, so on and so forth, for better or for worse. And gosh, I don't know where my brain is today. But anyway, so the point about anarchism, right?

So it's a little tougher for conservatives, or maybe it's a little easier for conservatives. That's what I was getting at. But nonetheless, like political anarchism, it's distinct from individualism and that I think it is more specifically about kind of, you know, the Ed Dutton, mutational load, spiteful mutant, uh, sexual deviant situation. Like at bottom, it seems to me that anarchism politically is just about protection of, of, um, I don't know what words I can use on your show. Uh, yeah, I don't care you go say, uh, the common pizza types, right? So it's like, it's effectively like a political organization for pedophiles.

I don't think there's anything more meaningful to anarchism about that. But then again, again, it's like, well, how do you even have like a political block of pedophiles be participating in your democratic society? Well, I think that's, you have this continual radical liberation. I don't know if individualism is related to this, but certainly the criminal as being elevated, you know, into a higher moral position than, you know, people who enforced the law or people who simply. follow the law might not be related to individualism per se but it's you know this cascading decay of american society well it's a it's a tool i mean if we're going to talk about sam francis we can talk about our narco tyranny and i know a lot of uh i know a lot of anarchists especially a narco capitalists who absolutely hate that term because you know it seeks to um you know

it makes anarchy look bad and um historically uh it's let's talk about the spanish civil war I can do that for 10 and 12 hours. Okay? When I think of anarchism, I think of the Spanish Civil War, digging, disinterning nuns and priests. But when you look at a society where basically the people in charge are off doing whatever they're doing, like you were just mentioning, but they're allowing, they can only get away with that doing what they're doing by unleashing the word. drugs of society upon the good people and telling the good people they can't protect themselves from the dregs of society and then if the dregs of society do something really horrible they don't even just like this cop that just these cops that got jumped in new york a couple days ago and they were the people

who did it migrants illegals were released on wood no bail it's all a tool and it's anarchy for some not for others and definitely not the kind of anarchy that anarcho-capitalist won, at least most of them, I would have seen. Yeah, there's a certain, like, just base conformism that we all have as, like, human people with souls, that these people don't. Like, I mean, that kind of, look, I went through an edge lord atheist phase, you know, I mean, I never spit on priests or did anything really terrible, but, you know, I probably said some untoward things towards our lord.

but like that degree like we're going to dig up nuns we're going to you know desecrate graves we're going to just try to innovate new ways to spit on the normal social institutions around us that's really what anarchism tends to be a lot of times it's it's that like lack of conformism like that thoughtless conformism i just go to church because it's because it's there and i just love Jesus, because that's what I do, right? Like, it's not even contemplating on it. But as far as, like, individualism and, like, what are the political consequences of that? Well, I think by and large, I think the two biggest outcomes are depoliticization, right?

Because if you're an egotist, the kind of persuasive filter that ultimately matters is like, oh, does this titillate me? Does this interest me? Does this speak to me? Does this have an immediate application to my life world as I perceive it? Whereas, like, really political action is, like, extroverted. It's about looking at other people, looking at the problems of other people in society. It's fundamentally, I mean, real politics is extroversion.

I don't want to use psychiatric language and abuse it that way. You know what I mean. You're nodding in agreement. So on one hand, it's depoliticization. And then obviously, on the other hand, it's like, it's extreme, well, not just identity politics, you could say would be part of it, maybe counterintuitively, but also like single issue voting, like all this wacky stuff. Like I only care about zoning laws or whatever. I mean, as opposed to like nationalist, folkish politics where it's like, well, everything is a political question. Everything has to be addressed politically.

and we're going to have a vehicle to put people in those places to do that, right? Like the individuals who are part of the collective and see them as selves as such and then can function as individuals in service of the collective. You know, that's like, again, part of maybe that's why it's better to say egotism because ultimately being an individual is a good thing. It's who we are. It's our tradition. We couldn't really abandon it if we tried.

And so fundamentally, what's different is this profoundly psychological dimension to modern life. You have to have justifications for everything. Everything's personalized. You're encouraged to make everything yourself. And for a lot of people, that means their politics too, which is not always a good thing. I still engage with libertarians online. I know. I'm a masochist.

And, you know, one the other day was like, oh, so, you know, what's a bigger, what's a bigger issue than economics? And, you know, one of my friends posted up, you know, drag queens from Weimar and drag queens now. And he's like, oh, oh, I'm supposed to be scared of the men dressing up like women. And that's just, that's exactly what it is. It's the meme of Rome falling. And, you know, the guy's saying, oh, how does this affect me personally? But it does. It perfects you profoundly personally. I have a working theory. It's not, I'm not totally, maybe I shouldn't bring it to you, but I'll do it anyway. It has a lot to do with the explicitly property focused tradition in, I think, the Western economic au revoir, if you want to say. This is, you know, people like me who came up six, seven years ago when like the NASBOL thing was popular. popular. And the reason why people like Keith Woods and whoever are constantly fighting these accusations of communism is because I think the aspect of Western political society, which is kind of like libertarians, but not strictly limited to them, the kinds that think of, well, they think of America. What makes America great is its economy. So ultimately there's this extreme economic.

preference or overprivileging, but they look at like Adam Smith and they look at how we solved the issues of property in the Western canon as being like definitive to who we are. And, you know, I have a different temperament. I actually, I mean, outside of like toothbrushes and things like that, I kind of don't care so much about property. You kind of figured those things out. Like, I don't know, maybe because I, in another life I was a musician. Well, you know what an anarcho capitalist is going to say, oh, so you don't. don't mind if I move into your apartment, right? Well, and our macro-capitalists don't mind if they move migrants into my apartment. So, like, fundamentally,

you know, they're, yeah, they, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, they were, I mean, they were, I mean, I saw, I was going back and forth with a guy today who was like, like, like, debate me on Israel, debate me on Israel, debate me on Israel, debate me on Israel because I'm like, well, I mean, I know the history of Israel and I know how it was founded and um, I'll have the opinion. If you found something on terrorism, you're always going to have terrorism there. So anyway, but then what do you find when you go into his tweets? Open borders, free trade. And then, you know, well, do you feel the same way about Israel? But, no, I mean, so it's like these libertarian types, they're just, oh, well, yeah, if I say we shouldn't have open borders, that

means that I worship the border patrol. And that means that I'm a boot liquor. Whatever, dude. Well, yeah, there's, they're anachronistic. It's one of the, like, most BTFO political ideologies post-2015 with communism is a very close second. But ultimately, these are materialists, which I think is related to egotism, which is related to this obsession with private property, mine, you know, delineation of what is mine, this over-elaborated, legal artifice to define what is mine. I mean, ultimately, in a fulkish setting, these questions answered themselves, right? Like, my brother, if I leave my shirt at my brother's place, like, there's not going to be World War III because my property, he's holding my property.

It's like, whatever, I'll see him next week. It's not the end of the world. Because I think also there's a certain assumption in a. folkish, nationalistic America first society of like, hey, man, I love you. You know, like we're related to each other. We come from the same place, probably even literally, but metaphorically, you know, in terms of the grand myth, myths that animate our lives, like, we're the same. And these types of nerdish economic questions, which do need to be solved.

And at complex societies, obviously you need to think about those kinds of things. But it's a fixation. It has a lot to do with paranoia. I think all of, once we start highlighting these psychological factors, the types of people become very clear who they are. Well, you use the term sociopathy in the header there under individualism, anarchism, and sociopathy. So when you use sociopathy, how are you using it?

Yeah, so it's one of these funny psychology words that has a million definitions. I gave my own loose-ish definition in the book. I actually don't have it in front of me, so I don't remember what I said. Do you have it? Yeah, I'm looking for it right now. I can't find it, but go on. I'll see if I can spot it.

The main thrust, because it's one of those things that people confuse with psychopathy, right? And, you know, these are very poorly defined concepts, yet they do stand for something. and it means something when you use them. Psychopathy, effectively, we're talking about, you know, in loose colloquial terms, we're talking about the most dangerous, violent,

abrasive, non-conforming members of society. Yeah, you have here. Okay, so it says sociopathy as a concept is poorly defined within the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology and owing to its operational weakness is greatly abused by the lay public and sadly professionals especially, often conflated with other somewhat nebulously defined terms such as antisocial and psychopath.

Here, sociopath should be understood as an individual with an impoverished social feeling, often exhibited by the following characteristics. Impulsivity, weak ego defenses, narcissism, irresponsibility, callousness, and attachment-related anxiety. Yeah, I think that covers it because if you want to think, in a congenital sense, sociopathy, very small representation in the overall population, not a lot of natural sociopaths, but we're mass-producing people due to this, you know, this intention to destroy the family, destroy the community, destroy the nation, religion, borders, so on and so forth. I mean, if you encourage people to get divorced,

if you encourage people to be sexually liberated, then that naturally has the consequence of weakening the social unit we call the family children grew up with fewer resources also think of like the crazy psychiatry fads and child rearing fads over the last hundred years um each one's kind of like perverse and dysfunctional in his own unique way from the one that came before it so like for example like kids don't sleep with their parents uh you know you don't nurse the children you don't you intentionally ignore the children and some of these have caveats It's appropriate at certain times under certain conditions for certain people, et cetera, et cetera. But that's not how America works.

That's not how marketing works. And an idea is brought to people. And we try to do this one size fits all thing, which is not good. So you get people with these attachment related disorders. Fundamentally, what that means is while they didn't spend a lot of physical time with mom and dad, they are on a hormonal, neurological, probably other levels, malnourished, underdeveloped. And there's a very limited window that infants and small children have to get these resources, especially when it comes to social development.

It's really like age five, age six. And the trend over the last 15 years is to shove as many. screen and images and highly stimulating things at ever younger children, so they're not socialized with people. Anyway, then they go through a crazy education system that's racially diverse and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What do you have? You have people who don't know how to develop relationships who don't actually, on the structural level of their brain, they can't look at you and see you as a person with a soul, like that they need to respect the dignity of like all of these things that are kind of, I think, second nature to people who maybe are older, grew up

with a different way of life, had more, like put in more rounds interacting with people. So you have this mass like phenomenon of kind of like an artificial sociopathy. People are constantly to invoke the transactional thing from earlier. They're constantly looking at other people as means to some other end. They are in a fundamentally exploitative mode of social interaction. And they are themselves very distressed and suffering often to the point of some kind of addiction or otherwise impairment, fixation, fetish, what have you. Sex, politics, food, tattoos, all of the above.

And the thing, and I'll close it off on this. I've got gab fever all night. I apologize. Like I said, I'm a younger guy. I turned 38. It was very common. Still is, but when I was younger, like normal millennial discourse is, is this kind of neurotic of like, am I normal?

Can you, can you affirm that I'm normal? Are you secretly a sociopath? This paranoia of like, what laundry list of mental disorders do you have? how quickly can I find it out and then what are we going to do about it? For some people, it would be like, let me find it out so I can avoid you. And for other people, it's like, let me find out so that I can never get away from you, right? Like, anyway, point being, the sociopathy, like, is just the norm, almost. It also seems a lot of people point out that so many people these days there, when they

refer to truth. It's always something subjective. And it seems like if you're this radical individual, you know, this neoliberal kind of individual, your morality is going to be based around how anything affects you. You can't have a universal morality if everyone's an individual. You also can't have political organization if everyone's an individual. So this is even more meaningfully, the ultimate political outcome of individualism, if all justifications, all explanations, any rationalization you can offer has to come specifically from you, your specific circumstance of life, from the exact moment you were born until exactly this moment, you can't have reference to anything else like you are atomized. You're one node, but all of the circuitry

around you has been like smashed with hammers. So you can't plug into the larger network. And that's very pernicious. I mean, ultimately with that type of lot, the question, like, how does this affect you personally? Like, that is a persecutor's logic. That is someone who, that's friend-endemy stuff. Like, I don't talk to you or my brother or my friend or my neighbor like that. I get involved because I realize that we're part of the same thing and there's not really a conflict or a contradiction between him as an individual and the social. that he's plugged into like this is a big problem with libertarians too collectivism collectivism is

like one of these still remaining buggy words uh in politics and they only really see it with libertarians but it's like one of it's again it has to do with egotism right because there are always collectives a type of social activity is ultimately a collectivist activity um so i mean all this boils down to that Jefferson Lee would say as nationalists, the economic or the unit of society is actually the nation itself, the people, right? But in neoliberal society, it's just you, not even your kids, not even your grandparents, unless they want to blame you for things, shame you for things. But it seems that there is a group and I think we know that pretty much down the middle, when it comes to the most important things, you know, Republicans

and Democrats are going to get together. I mean, if you're, if you're having a vote on whether, you know, anti-Semitism is irrational and repugnant, everyone's going to vote for that. If it's a vote for war, everyone's going to, you know, there's going to be very few people who are going to abstain or even say no. It's always issues that, where it's like, oh, well, it's like two financial systems or the two competing financial systems or, whoa, no, we're not going to cut taxes now. Yes, we're going to cut taxes now. It always seems to be like the things that do cause the most control or cause the most damage to the system and the people financially and bodily war, sending kids off to war for nothing.

Those are right down the middle, okay, everything's good. We've given you the, you're allowed to fight about this here, but it's the whole elite theory thing too. You do have some people who get together, 535 of them and then, you know, stretch it out a little bit from there, who agree on things. But when everyone is a radical individual, when everybody's a neoliberal, individual getting groups to get together to possibly push back or to even supplant what's existing makes it impossible it's like they it's like they designed the perfect system if it was a hydra you wouldn't even know where to start cutting off heads because yeah yeah yeah so the individualism thing um also is a great tool for them

because 350 million people can't organize against what is essentially probably what 2000 well yeah there's there's a lot of aspects to what you just said um what was a devil what was the angel devil said did i say something that you uh that made you no just what just i always think because as the older i get the less psychologically inclined i become or in fact I mean, maybe I should say the more I think about these types of issues, the less psychology factors into my ultimate kind of analytical process. Not to say it's unimportant because it's, you know, it's explicitly on a psychological battlefield that what you just said is being waged, right? It's by putting you into just your body and blocking off all of the

literally social resources that make us who we are. Like, just on a small level or been like with a group friends and then the chat ended or the friend group fell apart or maybe you just like checked out for a little while and you felt like dumber or like less sharp or less on your less like like you normally are because actually you're like plugged you're like plugged into the Avengers like okay I've yeah now now I have plus 15 IQ points because the guy next to me is a super genius. and I've absorbed all of his knowledge, right? So, like, so much of what makes us great, even as individuals, are the relations that we have.

And to impose this program of individualism is to impose this program of ultimately kind of psychologist, which makes us all prisoners of our own fears and anxieties, except for those of, you know, people in the audience who are extroverts and not neurotic. You know, I hate you. I hope you have a great life, but I hate you. you. The rest of us, you know, it's, it's this, I'm imagining like the guy on the train throwing the coal into the, into the oven or whatever. Like, you've just got to, it's just endless coal. You can just kind of keep like psychologically, you just have continual resources to harm yourself. Because life is difficult. Being in the body is weird. Nobody

gets it right. Do we all come from crazy circumstances? And there's a criminal exploitative class at the top of everything. So it's not exactly, you know, rosy pictures, rainbows, things like that. However, there's no devil and angel. I just do like to emphasize that, you know, this is a program of containment. These are the parameters through which that gets achieved. And so, yeah, like, if you can't get a couple of people together to flyer or rally or protest or pass around some kind of petition. I mean, those first barriers, and they're the most important barriers, a lot of the times, are fundamentally psychological, like seeing myself as a unit with Peter R. Kenonias, right? Like, that's a psychological hurdle that you have to clear. Not expecting, there's the joke

about, like, you know, the guy who like meets, hangs out with his cousin from like Norway or Denmark and then gets a Venmo for like 78 cents because of half of the cost. you drank on the way to work together like that kind of like tit for tat am i going to get everything out of peter that peter is getting out of me like that's not a normal response if we're a family a folk we think okay we're going to work all this out together so yeah i feel like i'm repeating myself a little bit but i'll leave it a bet people need to hear that um let's finish on this what's icophobia uh it's the hatred of the familiar or fear of the familiar uh maybe even disgust of the familiar it's what every midwesterner every midwestern 18 year old

you know just at a fresh out of college who moves to New York that I've ever met that's what they're all like oh my God Wyoming is so terrible it's like fuck you I'll go there in a second let's straight place it's well I say this is someone who suffers it right like if you want again, on psychological terms, what is eukophobia? It's high trait openness, right? You are a novelty-oriented person. You, by your temperament, experience lower levels of disgust at unfamiliar or things that would typically trigger disgust, right?

You feel less disgust. You're more inclined to experiment, try new things. You're more novelty seeking. You're probably less neurotic, neurotic meaning the intensity of negative emotions that you experience? Like, sometimes we think of neuroticism as just like self-attacking, but it's more like how hot does the engine get when you're stressed? And if you're very neurotic, well, it gets very hot very quickly and it takes you a very long time or maybe never to totally decompress. Not literally never. That would be like a very extreme case. Comorbidities up to you ha.

But there's a certain type, but it's also of the condition that we've inherited, especially, and I want to emphasize this, it's technologically facilitated. It is absolutely, like, you would not see the kind of Jesus Christ get me if there was not an ease of the ability to get the fuck out of town. So, you know, travel being the way that it is. These things encourage psychological tendencies that have pros and cons. You know, I love Peter Gabriel's album. That's also his like, I'm a third worldist, you know, screw whitey album. But it's great, and he has a great ensemble of musicians, and he's playing this kind of world style.

And it's interesting and it's cool. But you can't live there. And yeah, I mean, the flip side, I guess, is oikophilia. And this might be like the conservative disease of too much veneration of tradition and too much kind of, well, to be crass, boot licking, right? Like the extreme oikophiliac is effectively the bootlicker and the extreme oygophobic is going to be the, you know, the race trader or just the traitor.

It's funny that that came up because I was saying on Twitter the other day that like the town I live in, I have friends who their families have been here for 200 years and they own land here, they own businesses here. And even though, you know, they went an hour and 20 minutes away to go to college, they came back and they knew they were going to come back because they were continuing a tradition and continuing a legacy. And I think it's really interesting to find out that when you start talking about that to people and you're like, you know, it's not too late to start, do that now, find a plot of land, find something, start building, you know, start living, you know, as Thomas 777 says, start living historically. teaching, you know, teaching your progeny how to do that. And, um, the amount of pushback that you can get from, get from talking like that is just, you know, what if I want my kid? What if my kid

meets somebody, you know, from another state, you know, and they wants to get married with someone from another state. But he or she can move there. Yeah, you can move there. You know, if you have 10, if you have 10 acres, if you have 20 acres, why would you want him to go buy a house, just have and build the house on the property and, you know, stay there and, you know, build something and build a legacy of some sort. When you look at Monticello and Mountaine and places like that, I mean, those were supposed to be

legacies and now they're museums and I think Monticello is now a museum to woke of some sort. And I don't think that's oikilia. I think that's just the way people have lived and kept order within society for for hundreds and hundreds of years until we this technological revolution but also this individual revolution the and they would certainly like to paint when i say they i mean people who are opponents of our worldview uh would certainly try to paint that as i mean they

would take it a step further i could feel like might be kind of a sort of polite way still derogatory ultimately in this context but they're going to take that to the next step and say I mean, they're just going to accuse you of being like an inbreeder. And it immediately becomes some kind of dysgenic, disgusting thing, which ironically or humorously enough is like the opposite. You know, the thing that they're instituting is very much what they're accusing us of trying to promote. I would just say one thing. I mean, again, it's also part of the political program. If you deindustrialize major parts of the country, it becomes.

a less attractive place to live and what happens to the people there they get fat they become addicts they die early they beat the shit of their kids and their wives they they they fucking kill people uh they they turned the local law enforcement into just bullshit they turn the court system into everything decays and young people grow up in that young people who are naturally have an inclination to explore and and and persevere and test boundaries uh and are very much bored with the familiar, especially in the climate that we're in, what else are they supposed to feel when they look at the town they grew up in and people either leave or they die? That's a political program. And that's also something I think people don't understand all that well. I talk to friends

and I'm like family, I wish I would have grown up in a family that would have put such a great importance on family and the family land and everything. My grandmother, mother, my grandparents had land in Puerto Rico that could have been handed down, but of course, it got sold off like all boomers do and everything like that. I didn't want the money. I wanted, yeah, I wanted the legacy. But the, I'm talking to a friend of mine and saying how important family is like, well, my parents were shit. My, you know, my mother, my mother was a piece of shit. And it's like, well, why? Why? Do you think there was some kind of external circumstance? do you think they grew up in a in a society that gave them this mentality that just

poisoned their food did all this stuff to them that made them become become like that you know it can all start with you and I mean that's I don't know if it's trauma induced I hate to use that word but or if it's more akin to this individualism and egotism we're talking about mind but you know like I not to get too personal I mean I had I love my family I'm glad I had the family that I had I'm glad I grew up where I grew up I like my life but it was the greatest situation but I always felt and this is something I saw reflected in the people who grew up around me was that at a certain age you look at the people around you as people who have had to answer the same challenges of life that you have to answer and then you come to understand them

a more human way. I look back on my parents and of all the things I'm dissatisfied with now as an adult, I think back, well, when they were my age, well, they probably thought the whole world was like constantly on the precipice of nuclear abomination. You know, like they really thought that, right? For decades, they really thought that. It was a real thing. And before that, everyone they knew had like fucking pieces of them blown off in vietnam or korea or WW2 uh and before that maybe they grew up poor and maybe their parents what lived through the their lived through the great depression maybe they were immigrants and they came here and they had all kinds of like like generally speaking you know like when when lefties

talked about how awful and brutish and violent and terrible history has been they're right it's It's a rough go. You know, the 20th century was literally us just like, how do we fucking kill more? How do we kill more European people? Industrial, baby. Let's do it. Your parents inherited a hellscape. Grandparents inherited hellscape, your great-grandpa.

We've actually, maybe for only a couple of generations, have kind of had it pretty good. You know, you didn't have to go through child labor. You didn't have to, like all the things you could, you had adolescence. That wasn't the thing. a hundred years ago. There was no idea of let kids be kids. Oh, don't, you know, don't give little Timmy too much homework. That idea did not exist. Turn of the century, 20th century, British psychiatry was telling parents just short of beat your kids. It's good for them, right? So this is all a very different thing. And maybe I'm willing to bet it has more to do with the

psychological dimensions of suffering and trauma that people don't look at these prior generations see that humanity and want to be the torchbearer for that tradition. That's where I ended up. That's where most of the people I know ended up. And if you want to end up there too, I think ecological questions. Cool. All right. Remind everybody where they can find your stuff again and I'll end this.

J.neal.substack.com. That's for the substack on YouTube, psychopolitics, on X, Psychopolitics with a K. and then check out Imperium Press for American extremists and then probably in like three weeks understanding conspiracy theories. And thank you again so much, Peter, if you're patient and your invitation. No problem.

And come back real soon and we'll talk about narratives or something like that. Absolutely. Thank you, Josh. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingana show. Josh Neal is back after a long hiatus. What's happening, Josh? Yeah, it's good to be back.

I appreciate the invitation. as I was saying to you before we went live this is live I think right yeah well now we're we're recording we're just hanging out you don't me whatever as I was saying before I had to what's the saying had to get my

my ducks in a row and I did and it was good because it helped me put a lot of things into focus and I feel like a lot of my energy in this space this community has gotten like laser focused much narrower

much more refined. I'm so much happy with my writing. And that's obviously what we're here to talk about. So yeah, thanks for asking me on. Yeah, absolutely. So I've done as much as I can to stay away from this topic in my in my episodes, in my substack. I'd bring it up here and there. But the thing I liked about, and we're talking about the woke right. something that it looks like James Lindsay might have came up with and then a bunch of other midwits are running with like Constantine Kisson

and people like that. And the reason I decided I wanted to talk about it is because after I read your substack about it that Unz picked up, I was, you come at it from a completely different angle than most people. Most people are like, here,

you're coming at it from actually a historical angle and comparing it to something that's happened in the past. So, So what was your reaction the first time you heard the term woke, right? Well, it made me think of, and I wrote this in the essay, but it made me think of when people started using SJW against Trump people back in the day. I mean, I was, you know, we're both not spring chickens per se. We were both like fully formed adults 10 years ago.

So we have a really good memory of like who the players. were, what ideas were happening, where the culture was moving. And, you know, I wasn't alt-right or nationalist or anything until after basically Election Day 2016. But I was online, and I followed all the memes. I followed all the stuff that kind of trickled upwards to YouTube and like Stefan Malianu and people like that, or Scott Adams. And so I remember the anti-SJW moment. I guess some people who were plugged into Gamergate would say it had something to do with that too and so I remember like for a couple of years like 2010 to 2014 2015 like social justice this social justice that social justice warrior and then the moment that there was the Trump right came in

and was starting to really be effective pushing back against all of the crazy late Obama era politics suddenly that got turned around on people like me who were just like, you know, I thought I was just being like a rational, normal person, like a normie with like my head on a swivel. But now suddenly it's like, oh, now we're going to turn this rhetoric back around on you because now we've got to control you. Like we've scapegoated all these people who are now out and now you're the problem and so we're going to throw it at you.

So it made me think of when SJW was turned on the right wing. And so my first thought after that, or my second thought, I guess, was just like, okay, this is just a slur. Like this is very obviously a smear to, again, kind of go after the harder wing of the Trump right, but also to go after like real nationalists, real identitarians or real conservatives, real Christians, basically people with a spine and a backbone who are willing to call a spade a spade. and I'm not going to play euphemistic word games and step around the thorny issues. So those are my first thoughts.

And then I also kind of thought it wouldn't stick. But James Lindsay has like really, like a dog with the bone, he just keeps, he's kept putting it back out there to the point where he started building like a coalition with the trigonometry people. And then when that, I guess this would have been a week ago, maybe a week and a day, when that clip went on Twitter

like there's a light bulb moment I was like oh this is because he actually explained what he meant by woke right he gave this whole sort of counter-narrative against our worldview and I was like oh I know what you're doing now

like you're actually trying to put forth this other worldview and this is familiar I've seen this movie before what I thought is most interesting about it was it was coming from somebody and then adopted by other people who were, I didn't leave the left, the left left me people. And normally when something like this happens,

it's usually the quote unquote right wing that's doing it. You know, Jonah Goldberg putting out liberal fascism or something like that so he can accuse anybody who's, you know, to the right of, Eleanor Roosevelt, of being a fascist. And, yeah, that's what I saw. It's like, okay, so this is like IDW-adjacent, you know, intellectual dork web, people adjacent who, and the first thing I thought was, Lindsay, he's just grasping because he's kind of irrelevant.

He's blown his load on what he does. okay, you explain to a bunch of people who are too, you know, are too offended by Paul Gottfried to go read what he wrote 25 years ago, where he could tell you exactly what this whole woke stuff is, and he was a prophet back then, and he's writing two right-wingers, but, you know, right-wingers always want the approval of the left. They don't want the approval of anybody to their right, because, you know, those are just Nazis. But, yeah, that was the thing that, It was these, those left, the left, left me people, you cannot entertain them. You cannot give them the time of day.

You cannot platform them. They will always stab you in the back. I don't, how the fuck the people don't know this? I did that with somebody with, like, one specific person in the past, one specific person I did that with in my libertarian days, and I learned, deleted all those episodes. repented and it's like it's not going to happen if i have a leftist on it's going to be a leftist who's not here to talk about leftism or rightism they're an expert on like ukraine or something like that you know so isn't it weird isn't it weird that it's the left left left

us guys yeah um i was thinking about that last night and it the thing that's um i guess there's two things that makes that suspect one um these are not people with agency so it's not like they this it's it's in the phrase the left i didn't leave the left the left left left me in other words you were totally fine with the way everything was happening the direction the country was going in the way your own party operated but actually your party wasn't happy with it your party was like we don't need you anymore so these are not agency these are not people with agency like they didn't come to this eureka moment where they suddenly realized that they were on the wrong side of history or whatever. And they also don't have any self-reflective ability either. They just,

they think that they were always in the right. And, you know, they were always morally correct, not politically right. And that the left just got too wacky. But really what happened was the left, you know, left progressive liberalism had seen. somewhere else who wanted to go. It had scheduled to keep up with. We got to get to the next stop. We have to wage the next battle in the culture war. And now, you know, the left left me.

Those people are now just, they're the latest scapegoats. And that's kind of what, like the same thing with the SJW thing. It's like, okay, clearly Trump comes in. The political culture is different. We need somebody to hold the bag for us and we'll dump it on. BuzzFeed. We'll dump it on Vox. We'll dump it on blue-haired crazies. We'll dump it on people that are not useful to us anymore. And that's the same thing with Woke. It's like, okay,

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

are willing to dispose of and maybe even look at a little bit critically. So they can sacrifice stack. Now you can call the new enemies, which is people like us, people who put Trump in office, people who liked Project 2025, so on and so forth, people who are supporting Daniel Penny, by the way, he just beat another count today. So we need to be dealt with, and they've got this convenient tool. Just as a final thought, I kind of admire the way that the system really can repurpose everything that happens. Like they can turn a bad thing into a good thing. So like woke was this horse that they rode into or rode in, you know, rode into power on. And then it became something that was not feasible for them anymore or problematic. But it still has a

use for them. It's still some, it's still a cudgel they can beat us with. So I just, I think there's something kind of darkly funny about that. But yeah, those are my thoughts. something you said there about how there was a it was a train there you know leftism is this train and it's moving and it took a direction it went in a direction that they they didn't want to follow where they had to get off i've been reading this book uh the demon and democracy by risard le gutco and he he talks about this he basically says if you have a political ideology that is a path that it's, you're going somewhere with it. If it's not like you're seizing power and saying, stop, this is who we are.

We, we're tradcath. We're, you know, right, we're right wingers. We're national socialist. Whatever the fuck it is. If you're not, if you're not taking power to say this is where, if you're looking at a path going forward, you're a liberal. you're trying you're trying to move in a direction to make things better and better and better no there's already that's not the goal of politics that should be like your personal life

that should be your church life maybe your church wants to has goals but your politics can't have goals your politics has to be something that stays in one place and protects you so that you and it's not trying to move you anywhere because if it's trying to move you somewhere. You have to go with, if you don't go with it, if you decide to go with it, now you're on the path of it going left or right or everywhere, and you're basically screwed. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So, all right. In the article, and here's the thing that I think you brought up that really no one else has brought up. You had a heading called the new paranoid style and you bring up

Richard Hofstetter. Why don't you get into exactly why you bring up Hofstetter and how you relate it to this woke right thing? Yeah, so I, this is a kind of a convenient thing for me because I've been reading up on the post-war consensus the last couple of years for a lot of my writing. And it started with

Carl Popper. Last time we spoke, I think which was back in February, was just before my new book, my most recent book came out, called Understanding Conspiracy theories. And it was very much based on the idea that a big part of contemporary conspiratorial culture has to do with the development of the post-war consensus. And James Lindsay, on his recent trigonometry appearance, and this, I consider to be a major own goal, like a crazy faux pa he went ahead and he basically spilled the beans on our worldview and he said it in half the time it takes us to say it he said it maybe more articulately than a lot of us can can say it he named a lot of

the players involved i mean he showed all of the receipts it was really kind of impressive it's like if you wanted the elevator pitch for the for the radical right or the nationalist right like you could clip out that section and he talks about how well the woke right believes in this thing called the pooky post-war consensus, this crazy idea of a post-war consensus. And I had been reading about Richard Hofstadter, who was a celebrated historian throughout the 40s and 50s. He's a New Yorker, like me, he's from Buffalo, ethnically Jewish, but American. And he was an avowed American liberal. In his youth, he was a Marxist. Like a lot of people at that time, he was a Marxist. I believe he may have even been affiliated with the American Communist Party. And like

a lot of people of his ilk at that time, when communism in Russia changed, it moved in a more Stalinist direction. People like Hofstadter said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is the left leaving me kind of thing. Like, whoa, pump the brakes, dude. We don't want to do this. And, you know, my suspicion, which I think is born out historically, has a lot to do with the fact that Stalin moved Russia into a more kind of ethnic, sort of nationalistic, sort of traditional culture due to moving into a wartime footing, due to all kinds of things that were happening. And so it wasn't Bolshevism anymore. It wasn't Leninism anymore. It wasn't what the kinds of things that people like Hofstadter saw in it. It wasn't that intensely

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

Stalin comes in, changes the direction of things, more religious, more ethnic, more chauvinistic, more chest thumping. You know, he's a Georgian bank robber, Stalin. So he's a strong man. And that didn't appeal to people like Hofstadter. So Hofstadter pivots disavows his communist past and disavows his historic, his material history. I forget what the phrase is, the Marxist kind of genealogical method. Historical materialism, he disavows. Dialectical materialism.

Thank you. Thank you. And he starts moving in this direction of what's called consensus history. Now, at the time in the United States, consensus history, again, this had been 30s, 40s, roundabout there was how a lot of historians viewed history. That's how they did a lot of their. history writing, Charles A. Beard being a good example of this,

Charles A. Beard basically kind of put forth his own, if you want to say, like, I say this very, very loosely, sort of his own American spin on what people might think of as a kind of Marxist

historiography, because he emphasized economic class conflict. Not using Marxist language, not on Marxist terms, not without other Marxist baggage. He's often been confused or interpreted as a Marxist historian, as far as I can tell, that's not the case. But anyway, Hofstadter comes in,

and he makes some alterations, adjustments to this Beardian hypothesis. And as a result, he's kind of given, he's branded as the new face of consensus history. and he's looking at things like educational reform over the course of American history he's looking at things like the emergence of populist parties

over the course of American history he's looking at things like gun rights the gun culture in the United States and as is relevant to this essay in the 1960s he's looking at what he called pseudo-conservatism which would have been at that time

the Barry Goldwater presidential candidacy the John Birch Society it would have been McCarthy and the Red Scares and he's calling this pseudo-conservatism and it's his way of sort of

smearing the the most populist wing of the American right at his time in the same way that James Lindsay is doing today with this idea of the woke right and he's basically saying that well

you have this group of people who are engaging in a sort of analysis of power relations, but they're doing it because they're parochial backwoods yokels who are paranoid and mentally ill. And that was the essay, paranoid style in American politics talking about the John Burke Society, talking about Barry Goldwater, talking about all this kind of aggressive conservative energy that was developing at that time, which, of course, they needed to do something with. They didn't want that to become hegemonic in the United States. When I say they, I mean, the progressive liberals, other factions in the United States at that time.

So that eventually got published a year later in a collection of essays. And I just, it just looks, there's a couple of things in the way that Hofstadter presented his case that was just very similar to me as to how James Lindel Lindsey presented his picture of the woke right. In both cases, they're presenting the narrative from the point of view of their opposition. In the case of James Lindsay, he's walking us through the development of the post-war consensus. He's walking us through Bill Buckley in the National Review, kicking out the real conservatives. He's name-dropping all of these intellectuals who are blacklisted from kind of academia, and the popular culture like Carl Schmidt.

But then at the very end of it, after basically laying out all the facts and laying out all the receipts, he just says, but it's woke. But all of this truth, okay, okay, okay, okay, but it's woke, now forget about it. Which is basically what Hofstadter did. He's talking about the ethnic replacement

of German-Irish Catholics and Anglo-Saxon Protestants. He's talking about he's well he's talking about the john birch society and the resistance against communists he's talking about robert welch in the birch society he's talking about McCarthy and he's laying out these facts and at the very end of it when we at the pivotal moment when you have to either say like they're right we should do x as a result of this he says but they're paranoid and so we can swipe it under the rug and it's illegitimate and it doesn't matter and they're all crazy cooks

and they're all parochial. They've got their pitchforks and their torches, and they don't really know anything. There's some really, really remarkable things he says in the book. He uses the example. I don't know if you're one of these people that gets into this kind of stuff,

but he brings up fluoride in the water supply. I'm reading it, I'm just like, totally familiar way, yeah. So he says there's one passage where he says and this is very Lacanian. Lacan is a French, was a French psychoanalyst.

There's a famous quote attributed to him. If your wife is cheating on you, if you fear that you're, even if you, let me walk it back, if you fear that your wife is cheating on you and she is, you're still paranoid for worrying about it. So to chew on that for a second, like that's a crazy kind of statement to make. Hofstadter does the same thing. He's like, even if the government put fluoride in the water, as a form of social control, political control, and they were doing it to buttress a larger

socialist agenda. You would be crazy for thinking of that. And now you read that in 2024, and it's like, for 20 years or more, we're reading all of these reports about, well, that's what happened. And that's why it happened. It's like not only did they put fluoride in the water supply, but they did it for this kind of biopolitical demographic control along the way towards. rolling out this comprehensive socialist agenda.

It's just like, that's really, really crazy to read after the fact. But, yeah, so in addition to this kind of comprehensive narrative and the use of a pejorative, I just think that there's a, I lay out some other arguments in the essay, too. I don't know if you want to get to them, but those are just the most remarkable things that allowed me to draw that comparison. Yeah, I mean, we can get to the other arguments. just wanted to say it's

what's funny is as Lindsay is listing all of these things which are historical facts painting that them as conspiracy theory these things these things

I don't know for a second yeah you rober that out pretty badly okay um so let me let me start that again so one of the things lindsay did that just was he's listing all these things and he's listing all these people and he's trying to present it as a conspiracy theory yet like all the people he's mentioning are writing that they're doing these things or writing these things have happened are saying there is a post-war consensus are bragging about the fact that they've changed the social and political

habits of the American public. And I think the thing what Lindsay is, is that he realizes he's losing and that his classical liberalism, I remember he had this tweet

and I think it's the tweet that got me blocked. Because he said the only thing that can defeat the left, the woke on the left, is classical liberalism and classical liberalism hasn't even gotten started yet and my comment was so what you're saying is real classical liberalism has never been tried and you know and this was at a time when he was attacking paul gottfried as woke and paul gotfried said on my show and like people didn't hear it people said no paul said this i'm like go back and listen to what he said

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

And I think that's what scares the crap out of these people, is they know that eventually this is coming for them. Yeah. You were a libertarian in the previous life. I was a libertarian in a previous life. I remember reading Thomas D. Lorenzo, like, Abraham Lincoln is the American dictator. It's like these were the kinds of concerns people had seven, 10, 12 years ago. And if you talk to your average conservative, they don't care at all, especially post-COVID. Once things, you know, stopped heating up in the COVID era and you're able to go out and do things again, I did a lot of going out.

I think probably like a lot of people did, like let me get some air, and just talking to people, business owners. whether it's like local bars, restaurants, whatever, people who had to close businesses, people who kept their businesses open at extreme cost to them and their families and their financial security and things like that. And to a person, every one is saying things like, well, I won't repeat what they said on air, but they were saying things like, I don't care what has to happen. I do not care what has to happen, but it has to happen. These are the kinds of things that they were saying.

And just to your point, like, we've almost, I say this again with a little bit of an asterisk, we've almost been able to have kind of any other political option presented to us, but something like a strong conservative executive. We've had all of these flavors of right liberalism, libertarianism, paleo-libertarianism, conservativeism, paleo, military, or minoritarianism, whatever, all of these flavors on the left

of different brands of socialist, communist light, communist, you know, diet communism, communism, thunder, you know, whatever, like mango communism,

like boilerplate neoliberalism. We have had every kind of personality, every flavor, every color. But the one thing we haven't been able to have, and it's also the one thing that we had to fight a 10-year culture war, almost 10-decade-long culture war, just to be able to get is something

like right-wing authoritarianism. So, yeah, the thing about, like, getting on Paul Gottfried's case and calling him woke, it's like, he's probably, like, one of the best bridges from, like, the genesis of woke to us that exists. Like, he studied under Herbert Marcuse. You know, He was thrown out by these old-school communist left-wing, anti-family types, anti-capitalist types, anti-everything good, effectively. And he's documenting it for decades and decades. He's documenting it. So just, yeah, James Lindsay is definitely shitting his pants. The thing that I, the thing I've also kind of come to realize about his whole position is.

is this and it makes me think he's I guess there's two you can always play this game of does he know what he's doing or does he not know what he's doing I'm you know I'm not going to put on my mind reader hat but just taking what he says at face value his worldview only makes sense if you don't interrogate it if you don't think about it

if you don't really ask any questions then it sort of works but the moment you start picking pulling at threads it really doesn't make any sense at all. So the definition that James Lindsay gives for Woke, I'm actually going to read it for my essay here. Yeah, read it.

What does Woke mean, woke up to a structural politics that marginalizes people like me and we need to band together in solidarity in order to be able to create a powerful enough oppressed coalition to flip over the power structure by putting ourselves at the center and claiming power for ourselves.

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

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

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

that we lived through that I grew up in where it's like, be a critical thinker. Like, you know, baby Josh in elementary school, like grow up to be a critical thinker. Like everyone's saying, critical thinking is good. Build your critical thinking skills. And now here's James Lindsay, like, critical thinking is bad. Don't do it. It's like that's kind of ridiculous. But also, like, by that own definition, coming to a critical consciousness of power structures like he is woke by his own definition how can you reverse engineer this marxist revolution without coming to a critical consciousness of the power structures that produced woke Marxism right he wants to talk about franz fanon and all these other people like

you have to think and deliberate and research and work and and be critically you have to critique the power structure. You have to come to an awareness of the institutions and networks that created this. So this is one of the reasons why I say that it's predominantly a smear. It's what I called regime polemics, because he's basically working for the system to come up with a larger bat to beat us with. Well, and one of the other things that he ascribes to woke is he's like, oh, they're studying Carl Schmidt, the friend-enemy distinction. When you call someone woke right, what are you doing? Are you not practicing friend-denemy?

I mean, it's the, this just goes to show how retarded classical liberals are. And I'm not talking about like historically classical liberals. If it's 2024 and you're still a classical liberal and you're not just, I don't know. You don't really have anything. You can't join the discussion. You're not in the discussion anymore. Classical liberalism has been so, I mean, just marginalized and it's just so dead in the water that the people who are arguing for it, they just in arguing for it, they contradict their own, their own assertions about other groups.

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

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

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

That whole episode, by the way, I'm glad you brought it up because I had kind of forgotten about it. Tell me if you had this feeling. There were two real problems I had with that. It was the Christian reformer, Who's that the name of the website that published this? Oh, God, I can't remember. The American Reform.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So there's two things about that that stuck out to me right away. One, the American, he kept calling it the leading woke Christian national. It's like they have less than 20,000 subscribers on Twitter. I didn't even know them. I don't even know who they are. Never heard of them, right?

And I'm a Christian. I have no idea who they are. And I'm someone who reads, interview. Christian nationalists and I had no clue who they are because it's like I don't know. It's kind of arbitrary. Yeah. It's very arbitrary.

Again, this is a kind of thing that's common in regime polemics is because you're working on behalf of the establishment, when you select something it becomes significant, right? Like it has the importance and the meaning that you imbue it with. So if

James Lindsay as a representative of you know, big a gay, you know, big gay liberalism, and he says, well, this is the institution, this is the Christian nationalist woke paper of record. Well, him with his half a million Twitter subscribers and his network of academics and his sick of fans are now, that's it, that perception has been created, that becomes part of the discourse. You now are kind of pushing up against this brick wall, even trying to refute that, right? So that's like this sort of polemical power he has as a member. and he complains, by the way, as a brief aside, he complains all the time.

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

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

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

And they say, okay, we'll publish it on Wednesday at 3 p.m. Thanks for your submission. Does that prove that they are secret woke Marxists? Or does it prove that in a fast-moving technological economy where you are part of the alternative media and there's maybe, I don't want to say anything bad about the American reformer, I don't know them, but just as an example, like, maybe you don't have the most strenuous submission review process. Maybe there's a couple of things you look for it, and then you just publish it. It's like, actually, all you've really done is demonstrate that the economy around publishing is probably not as rigorous as it ought to be, right?

Like, this is not an actually ideological point that you're making. This is like sort of like a banal business failure of the business world. in the internet age. Like, there's so many things that were goofy about it. And, like, it's just funny to me, like, every time he's tried to slam the, you know, big comical Acme hammer down on us, it's like, it bounces back and hits him in the face.

Like, you know, it's like Wiley Coyote and the Roadrunner. It's like he runs into the tunnel painted onto the brick wall and bounces off of it. He's just, it's, it's, um, Just to your point, and I'll even hear what I'm done, it does really reek of a guy who's desperate and, like, kind of shitting his pants and in a full-blown panic. Yeah, yeah, he's worried.

He's seeing his meal ticket disappear. That's what it is. And he knows that his meal ticket right now is going into milk toast events with milk toast evangelicals who love Israel and who hate the woke and he goes in there and tells him some stories about how

all of this came from Karl Marx and it's all Marxism so you better be scared and because you know that's really dangerous stuff and everything even though it's you know it's like it I mean it is in practice and it is in thought but it's like I mean

he's never going to talk about the fact that liberalism has no gatekeeping mechanisms that allows anything thing to come, you know, oh, well, you're just going to have the marketplace of ideas and you're going to come in there. And if you have the marketplace of ideas and you're a classical liberal, well, classical liberals are not about Schmidian, you know, Schmidian exceptions and Schmidian friend enemy. So I don't care if a communist gets a job at the local university and then another one, and then another one, and then another one. I mean, he knows that this is,

that liberalism has as much to do with the takeover, with this post-liberal, you know, this post-war consensus. I mean, the post-war consensus is liberal. It is liberalism in its final form. And, well, I mean, maybe not its final form. I mean, it could get worse. It could get to pure left-wing authoritarianism. But what we're seeing now is liberalism.

It is, we're going down this path, and we're, there's an end point, there's an end point, but we, we just can't get there. We can't, we just took a, we took a right, oh, we got to get back on the path, what do we got to do to get back? And then all these other things just sneak in. He just, he knows, he knows, I'm convinced that he just knows that this classical liberalism, that he totes, because he can't call it what he really wants to is, which he's a leftist, he has said that, he would rather the woke left win than like the west become tradcath again he's actually oh yeah oh yeah he said that yeah i can i can pull up the screenshots of it yeah yeah he would

rather the woke left win like someone said well you know what if it was become tradcath he goes that we're not i don't want that i would rather the left one yeah he's he's not a friend to right wingers but right wingers are such fucking pussies that they like they have no problem They're reaching left, well, reaching left and punching right. And that's what they've been trained to do by the post-war consensus. And that's exactly what he, that's what he does, and he's taught a bunch of people to do. And unfortunately, a lot of evangelical Christianity has just reached out. A lot of evangelical Christianity is, quote, quote, we lose down here, quote, which means we can't do anything.

Love our enemies, never says anywhere to love God's enemies. And these are the kind of people who, in 1936 in Spain, while priests and nuns are being executed in the streets, people would say, no, that's the way it's supposed to be because, you know, I mean, we can't, we can't fight back. We have to love our enemies. Yeah, I think it's funny, again, just one final comment on the whole American reformer situation. all kinds of people that I didn't really think would line up alongside it's literally like the stone toss meme of like you know the two play the tug of war

and then you look to your left it's like who's behind me it's like suddenly Ashley St. Clair and Mike Sernovich are behind me like what the hell's going on like all these people who either are really not part of that conversation or their message is not really a hyper-literate message like in the case of Ashley St. Clair

are like, but like, don't you think, like, some of this is, like, worth considering? Like, the most milk-toast, tepid thing, like, I think Mike Cerner, either Sargon or Mike Cernovich were both like, yes, but his criticisms of capitalism were accurate, okay, which is one line of rebuttal that you could take. And I think Ashley St. Clair was like, yeah, but don't you think there's any room at all to criticize the system that we're in? It's like, you won't even allow for the possibility of self-reflection. that's how you know you're the bad guy dude

like you won't look like Dracool you won't look into the mirror that's how we know you're the bad guy you have no reflection we know you're the bad guy I'm inclined to think and this is maybe armchair or psychoanalyzing

and just because of these are things have seen pop up on Twitter in the last few days I'm inclined to think that he gets you know nobody blow up my DMs or send me an affidavit or anything I'm inclined to think he gets up to some weird perp stuff uh you know somebody showed a posted a picture of him

taking a selfie like in the nude with like a potted plant precariously positioned where his genitals are it's like so you put that on the internet man like there is something wrong with you and the thing about like even his social media personality it says something to me like this is kind of a dysfunctional person because he's on trigonometry and he starts off you know constantine kiss and asks him what is the woke right and james lindsay starts kind of apologetically like gee you know maybe i've used woke too liberally it might not be the best word so he's like kind of human being a little bit at the start

of that interview and then you watch him on twitter and he posts like like he's a 14-year-old. And everything is... It's just edge-lording. Yeah. It's like this is not an actually mature adult man. And that's the type of person that the establishment has left.

Like, these are like they're reserved troops. This is like calling in, I don't know, the National Guard, and it's like the fat guy from the bar with, like, terrible diabetes and his legs are all swollen up. It's like they're not sending their best, okay? They're not sending their best.

Well, you know, what else is interesting about the post-war consensus is that it's while they are sneaking in a lot of like social Marxism, if you use any kind of critique or if you agree at all with Marx or Lenin or anybody of that ilk, if you say, oh, well, you know, they made a really good point here about industrial society and capitalization. I saw this today. They were talking about this kid, an Italian anarchist who's assassinating people in the streets again. What year is this?

They were saying, oh, well, he's, like, really into like Ted Kaczynski and everything like that. I'm like, and they're like, oh, that means he's a leftist. That's what the Jewish from, from Libs of TikTok said. So, oh, that means he's a leftist. I'm like, have you read Ted Kaczynski?

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

It's like, wait a minute, but you're promoting shit that's almost literally Marxist. And we have it in our society. We've pointed it. it out and what now so you can't even win with these people because it's like you can't you they can have it one way but you they can have it both ways you can't that's the power of that's again that's the power of being a regime polemicist you set the rules you establish the frame you determine what pieces are in play what pieces aren't in play what's hypocritical what isn't um just to kind of go back to the parallel between Hofstadter and James Lindsay between woke right and the paranoid style. You know, one of these other things, and I think it's exemplary, it demonstrates what you're just

talking about, is the way things that, there's kind of self-evidently farcical or hypocritical are used in this polemical, pejorative way. So one of the key arguments that Lindsay puts forward is that the woke right behave, just like the woke left. This is kind of like, this is one half of his entire argument. He says that there's an ideological component. He says that there's a practical component. And the practical component is how we behave, we behave the same as the woke left.

We use social media the same way. We believe in an oppressed, oppressor dialectic the same way. I'm going to actually try to pull up some of the examples he uses here. Sure. So, yeah, he says that they create an illusion, that there's support for one thing and distaste for another. He says that both are highly invested in identity politics, and he says that ultimately, what else can you call this but woke? And so, therefore, there's this complete, you know, what he thinks he's done is eliminated any difference between Pete Canonas and Josh Neal versus I don't know, Slava, Gijek, Bernie Sanders,

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Luigi, Manjean, whether he's anarchist or not or whatever. Like, actually, there still are fundamental differences, even if you can point to superficial similarities. So this is another thing that there's a very telling passage in the paranoid style of, in American politics. where to dispel the, to kind of like defang this, what he calls pseudo-conservatism, he points to the rivalries of right-wing conspiratorial groups

and shows how that they are identical to their opposition. So he talks about the KKK, and he says, well, you know, they wore priestly uniforms just like the Catholics. And they had this strict hierarchical structure just like the Catholics. So actually their rivalry is kind of like this petty envy and is totally illegitimate and they're just paranoid. Never mind the fact that the KKK were made up of a specific group of people

from a specific place operating under a specific political pretext with a very particular set of goals for themselves. And, you know, the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church. Like, not the same thing, right? Or that he uses the example of the John Birch Society versus, you know, this communist spook. And he says, isn't it really remarkable that they both fight a zero-sum ideological war?

It's like, okay, so they're both really committed to the ideas that they have. Therefore, there's no difference at all between, you know, mom and pop from down the street who give their $100 every month to the John Birch Society and communist organizers who are like burning down houses and whatever. But he also gives the example of Christians, Christian anti-communists versus communists,

and the exact phrase here, just let me pull it up. It's so goofy. One second. Okay, so he says, you know, Christian anti-communists were intellectually and spiritually vigorous, like their communist foes. They admired the vigor of their communist opponents. and they tried to emulate it. And that's how we know that there's no actual rivalry here,

that the right wingers are just paranoid. By the way, there's never any actual kind of antagonization or examination of the left-wing people on that side. The communists are just like kind of unimpeachable. To Richard Hoxer. Father Cofflin and Justice Stalin, same person. Yeah. You would even think that a guy who had formerly disavowed

his communism and like shredded up his communist party you know uh credit card or whatever might have like an interest in publishing even just to say face publishing like even tepidly communist critiques just to distance himself and the public perception he's created but no he does he's same thing with carl popper not to get off on a tangent although i guess with carl popper later on in his career, he did become more critical of communism. But Carl Popper's another, again, architect of the post-war consensus, literally the Open Society

Foundation is based on the title of his book, and he was a mentor of George Soros. Didn't he come up with the term conspiracy theorist? He wrote an essay called the Conspiracy Theory of Society. I don't know if he coined

the phrase. But that's a great essay, by the way, very, very ridiculous stuff that he puts in it. But another guy who, like, in a previous life, was a communist. And when he does his big-brained intellectual defense of liberalism really only has time to talk about how bad fascists are, how bad nativists are, how bad Nazis are, how bad populists are, how bad nationalists are.

It's like, guy, you were with the communists and you almost got killed by them. And you can't even give me a sentence about how bad that is. and again, I'm being a little bit hyperbolic because he does talk about Marx in the open society and his enemies, but most of that book is spent slagging nativism. It's spent slagging the closed society, which would be a nation that protects his borders

and has law and order and has a vaguely authoritarian, hierarchical political structure. So, I mean, these guys just telling themselves. It's remarkable. Yeah. And there's really I think at this point to argue with them is you're giving them legitimacy

because I don't know that if you look at how many followers he has on Twitter and people say oh Twitter isn't real life people said that like eight, nine years ago Twitter has become real life because it really is to public square. So you look at how many followers he has, you look at if he posts something.

If he posts something about classical liberalism, he's lucky to get like the amount of likes. He's lucky to get 10% of the likes of like a meme account, just posting a meme. But when he posts about stuff like this, he may get like double that. And all that tells you is that no one's buying this. The only people who are really going along with it are people who are so bought into his worldview. and, you know, let's face it, yeah, I was talking about this with a friend of mine on his show this afternoon, is that a lot of people who get into a quote-unquote movement,

they're just looking for God. They're looking for their God. And if somebody's, like, really into, you know, classical liberalism and anti-woke, James Lindsay can become their God really quick. if you're if you're really into like free market economics Ludwig von Mises can become your your god really quickly and that's just basically what we're seeing.

I mean, I don't know really if you had to guess do you think James Lindsay has any kind of influence on the incoming Trump regime? Oh, none at all. I would assume. Then he complained that like they literally didn't even ask me. Like I think he said, said something to that effect on Twitter.

Like, no one's calling me. Why? I assume he has... Why would that? Why? What are you going to tell them? What are you going to advise them on? I mean, if you're,

if your goal, Trump has said, look, I think most people are at the point where it's like, just get rid of all the people, get rid of all the, the illegal immigrants. If he got rid of,

you know, half of the illegal immigrants in this country, at this point, that would just be a win. Because, I mean, no one's expecting, no one's really expecting success. No one who's realistic. No one who understands how the administrative state works, how the post-war consensus works, is really expecting an insane amount of success.

But, I mean, is he going to be for that? How does he help that? How does he help? Like, say Doge, say this Doge, outfit does start dismantling the managerial estate managerial estate. That's what he's fighting for.

So why is he complaining about, what is he expecting them to invite them in there so he can tell them everything that they're doing wrong? Because we have to keep doing it. We just have to go back to the 90s, bro. I heard was Sohabo Mari

and which one is Sohabamari? He's the one, is he Claremont? What? I think he's Is he an editor for Compact? Yeah. Who's the, who's like, is he associated with Claremont? I can't remember.

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

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

of it. You're cutting your income off. That's why Lindsay, that's why Lindsay's acting the way he is. It's because he's, his income, he's seeing his potential downfall and more than that, not being invited to be on the stage anymore. And he's one of those people who can't take that. I was thinking the exact words you were saying, as you were saying them, which is that a big part of getting involved in this scene for me has been realizing some of us are fighting for ideals and outcomes, and some of us are fighting for paychecks. So that's very astute, totally co-signed that.

As far as So Rob Amari is concerned, I do believe he's connected with Claremont. He was the editor of Compact and commentary. He is the editor of Compact now. and he was previously the editor of commentary and I do think he was like a Claremont fellow or something but yeah I mean yeah it's not surprising that these people would want to go back to like the period when their sinecure first opened up like yeah I want to go back to 10 years ago when you opened the floodgates

and gave me you know a lifetime job at at gayboy ink or whatever you know like publishing bullshit.com like yes please I want to go back to that time so that I can have that job. I don't know that I have anything else to say on that point other than when you asked, like, what influence would James Lindsay have on the incoming Trump administration? I immediately thought of that really weird anti-St. Michael bit he was on. So imagine you're Donald Trump, like, you can't even get a tweet out the front door with that James Lindsay.

Like, excuse me, this is really a big problem. And you need to stop doing it. It's like, okay, this guy is trying to, like, kick 40 million people out the front door and you're raising a stink over a tweet. Like, yeah, you don't actually have a place here and don't let the door hit you on the way out. He was wrong about Orrin McIntyre being the guy behind that. I'm the one with the St. I'm the one with the St. Michael Coyne right next to me when I podcast. It was you all along, Pete.

Ha, ha, ha, ha. Tell everybody about your book on conspiracy theories, understanding conspiracy theories. Yes. So, yeah, last time we were wrong, we talked about American extremist, Imperium Press, the chapter on individualism and socialism, or sociopathy, rather. Yeah, my book came out in February of this year. It's actually part one of two, and the new book is coming out early next year. But understanding conspiracy theories, I had worked on it for like five years. um it's it's half of everything i have to say about the subject matter but um yeah i came into nationalism through the conspiracy uh content if you want to say online you know i i i read all the

jim mars books i read you know i listened to alex jones i watched his documentaries on the police state i listened to coast to coast uh i watched i was a young person a very young person when loose change and zeitgeist were like the thing on the internet's and um it was really harrowing honestly to like develop a conflict to become a man hormonally and like mentally uh at the same time you're being hit with this incredible technology called the internet and all of the information we have available to the human species so you know and of course i grew up with 9-11 like I remember the day the towers hit. I was sitting in my sophomore biology class

with the cute redhead teacher at my Catholic high school and being pulled out of the classroom thinking that my father was dead. So like these are all deeply like, and there's hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people with a story just like that. So it's not my pity story that I'm saying to your audience. Lots of people had stories like that.

I grew up in New York City. that was the formation of my consciousness I remember when you could go on an airplane and it was nice and I remember a couple of years later when you went on an airplane and a morbidly obese Haitian person grabbed your bowls

like I lived through that okay so the Patriot Act and everything that followed from that so the idea of and now we're living in this moment where conspiracy theories are kind of like a thing you can cash in on. It's like a career. You can be an alt-media guy with a TikTok account doing the whole,

you know, your blurry face in front of like a text scroll going, isn't this, look at this and this kind of in here and here. It's like you can do that as a career. And 15 years ago, 20 years ago, if you did that, you were a pariah, you were medicated, you were kicked out of polite society. So it took me coming into this nationalist community, learning a few new things that mainstream conspiracy culture from 10 years ago didn't let you in on. People like Michael Collins Piper, like if I had known about Michael Collins Piper 15 years ago, it would have saved me a lot of trouble. I didn't learn about him until like two and a half years ago. And it's like, oh, well, this guy, it's not like the skilled and key that literally unlocks everything. it clears up a lot of stuff.

So I think the thing that's really, that my selling point for the book is there's a neutral way to think about conspiracy theories. Because we're now in this point where people of a certain age, like that is who their identity is. It's like, I just am a conspiracy theorist, right? And it's very difficult to think clearly because there's sort of this heuristic,

in the conspiracy theory community where because you had this skepticism about things that happened in the past, you have this sort of like gnaustic, pure knowledge of everything that's happening now and conspiracy. Oh, this is a false flag just like what I saw 10 years ago. There are heuristics that work, and then there are heuristics that don't work.

And so what I was trying to do with this book was try to establish, okay, really what is a conspiracy? theory? How does it work? Why is everyone today in this hyper-vigilant, paranoid, neurotic mindset where there is a conspiracy lurking, or I should say an illegitimate conspiracy lurking behind every door? Ten years ago, if you were a liberal Democrat, the big bad, and it actually has been the same conspiracy theory for the last 10 years, the big conspiracy, was Russia, Russian bots,

Russian hacking, Putin, Donald Trump got urinated on by a prostitute in a Russian hotel, and that's the blackmail. They've got, sorry to be lewd with you

in your audience, but, you know, maybe if you've got young people in your audience, they didn't know that that happened. If you were going through the first Trump campaign, like that was the October surprise,

and we're all just sitting here like, are you kidding me? So the basic punchline here is, you know, A conspiracy theory effectively is a folk account of history. It's you and me trying to figure out what's actually happening without the benefit of a PhD, without the benefit of a Walter Cronkite, without the benefit of some expert or authority, a regime, a James Lindsay, a regime approved personality who can disseminate a coherent narrative to us

so that we can go back to sleep and then go to work and then pet, you know, little Pete Jr. on the head and send them off to soccer practice, you know, the things that make our day-to-day life livable. So what you really have is that this folk history and then regime history, and there's this tension between the two. So I talk a lot about that. I bring in a lot of Marshall McLuhan to talk about how the internet has created this unique paranoid culture. That gentleman, he was on Joe Rogan, he popularized the phrase, mass. formation psychosis you know that that's been one of these phrases to explain kind of why everyone is so crazy and why everyone is so distrusting of of the things that they see and the people that

they live around i don't think we actually need novel language i don't think we need it if anything this book does very similarly what my first book did which was like take the psychology out of it take the psychiatry out of it because as i make the point with the you know Jim Lindsay and Hofstadter, the psychology that's been used to make sense of our political life has made it worse because it isn't a psychological problem intrinsically. It's a political problem. It's a social, cultural, civilizational, historical problem. We're dealing with real things, not just artifacts of the mind. And we need to be able to treat it that way. So that was probably a little incoherent, but

it's a great book, and I hope your audience loves it. No, anything, I promote anything from Imperium Press. I send people there all the time, and they just get lost in it. Thank you for mentioning coast to coast, though. It reminds me, I haven't listened to,

I keep it on my phone to listen to every once in a while, his 1996 interview with William Luther Pierce about that. Yeah. And it was one of the only episodes that you'll ever hear Art Bell like going at the guest, like attacking the guest.

It's wild. But the thing I love about it is Pierce is just so even. I'm here to tell my story. I'm here to answer all these ridiculous claims that have been made and everything. But yeah, there's some good stuff out there. And, you know, Turner Diaries and Hunter, those are good books to check out. you know i mean there's some compelling writing to say the least there not to slam alex jones because he is sort of a folk hero for a lot of people even to me but it's like yeah um

coast to coasted that in the 90s and it took alex jones until like 2017 to have david duke on and he came at david duke the same way that uh william wither pierce got treated so it's the same kind of tension in the right wing, and this is one of the hypotheses of my book and my new book, it goes back to the John Birch Society, in effect, where you have, or between Buckley and the National Review and the Real Right, or between Buchanan and the conservative Inc. There's this tension between the mainstream post-war consensus right, and then the more principled hardline nationalists, and that has always existed. This is why there was an alt-right. This is why

James Lindsay complains in that interview with Constantine Kisson. Well, they don't even actually attack the left who's supposed to the real enemy. All they ever do is attack the conservatives because conservative ink is proximally our biggest threat. Because our message,

we have to squeeze our message through this very narrow funnel to get half or a quarter or a third of our ideas out in this very domesticated way. because conservative ink is the problem. What did Nixon say?

Write it a thousand times. The media is the enemy. Conservative Inc. is the enemy. So that's, you know, that says it all right there. Yeah, it wasn't the Clintons that got, um, it got Sam Francis canceled and fired from his job. Yeah.

It was the quote unquote right wingers. Yeah. All right, Josh. I appreciate it. Thank you. And let's do it again soon. Appreciate it. Absolutely.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekinguono show Josh Neal's back. What's happening, Josh? It's going well, Pete. Love talking to you. Thanks for the invite as well. You're a very gracious host, and we always have a good conversation, so I'm looking forward to it today. Yeah, I appreciate that.

Appreciate that a lot. Thank you for doing the Old Glory Club live stream last week. Gave us some context into the JFK mess and other things. But last time you were on, we talked about the term woke, right, and we talked a little bit about your second book, understanding conspiracy theories. But the new book, Intolerant Interpretations, starts to go even beyond that and really starts to get into, start tearing apart. It seems like you're trying to tear apart, like the basis behind these. conspiracy theories, where they came from, and basically how they grew. And specifically, you know, it's really easy to say, oh, the president's head exploded and, you know, it looks like it came from

the front. But, you know, they're saying it came from the back. But no, it goes much deeper than that when you start getting into conspiracy theories. So, you know, the first part of your new book, you specifically talk about Richard Hofstetter and Carl Popper. So jump in there and start talking, you know, if you can start there and take us down the road of where we're at, where we came from to get to where we are now. Yeah. So again, thanks for having me on to talk about the book. Available through Antelope Hill Publishing, it's called Intolerant Interpretations.

And if you use code, I guess code Pete Q, you have 5% off. So, yeah, I have an analytical thing. So cool. Awesome. Awesome. I view it as a sequel to understanding conspiracy theories. It's written that way. And yeah, as you pointed out, the book starts with sort of a genealogy of this like anti-conspiracy polemic.

it's called actually the first chapter is called an abbreviated genealogy because honestly if we really put our thinking hats on it probably you know we can look much further into the past to to figure out how we got to where we are today but the very recent history very recent past is certainly enough history to kind of understand the climate that we're in now and so yeah I did single out Karl Popper and I singled out Richard Hofstadter for two I think very important reasons. I was kind of imagined myself having to do a rebuttal when I talk about my books or offer some of my arguments. And one of those, like my imaginary interlocutor is, you know, well, why pick on Carl Popper? Why pick on Richard Hofstad? What makes them so important? And there's

really two reasons, one for each. The first reason being that Carl Popper is basically the philosopher of the open society. He's the philosopher of the great replacement. And he's also, because of his, a lot of his intellectual work dealt with epistemology and things like that, he is also kind of like the philosopher for the anti-conspiracy theory point of view. And there's two really important works that he wrote that I critique in the book. obviously the first is the open society and its enemies and it's like a seven or

800 book basically it's it's it's it's like the be all and end all of of liberal democracy apology right that's kind of what you it's a 700 800 page book justifying why open societies which is to say liberal democracies are superior and preferable to closed societies And he gives several examples of what constitutes a closed society. NSDAP, Germany, Soviet Russia, fascist Europe, whether we're looking at Spain or Italy or Romania, or really any of the countries where there was a fascist movement. But he even goes way back into human history. The original closed society was Plato.

Plato's Republic is basically the, if the open society and its enemies is the apotheosis of liberal democracy, then Plato's Republic is really the apotheosis, the intellectual apotheosis of, you know, nativist, authoritarian, ethnically and culturally heterogeneous states. that's what Popper, and again, maybe some context on Popper, he was from Central Europe, he was from a well-educated, high-cultured bourgeois, I want to say Lutheran family. I think Richard Hofstadter came from a Lutheran family, so maybe Popper wasn't. But anyway, they were upper-class, Jewish, ethnically Jewish living in Europe, and Popper in particular saw both sides of that authoritarian coin. He was a communist in his youth. He almost died at a communist rally. And then he was sometime later, obviously persecuted or felt the heat of the German Reich on his heels. And he fled Europe and he sought sanctuary basically in, you know, what we tend to think of as the Atlantis states, England, the United States, I think even New Zealand. And so,

And so that experience informed his philosophy about the superiority of liberal democracies. And as a kind of secondhand to that work, in the mid-50s, he published a very, very short essay, like three pages, called the conspiracy theory of society. And basically, this was his anti-conspiracy polemic. He compares, in that short essay, he basically compares conspiracy theory epistemology to something like Homer or Homeric thinking, where that you've got this Mount Olympus of deities that are really pulling all the strings and more than just pulling all the strings. They were specifically moving people into place and positioning them to take important roles. So he basically says, you know, when you abandon God, you elevate man into this theistic state. And so men become these supreme agents capable of all kinds of unexpected, unanticipated, shadowy conduct. And what's interesting there is that is immediately, you know, I think of Rizard Lagucco, his book,

The Demon and Democracy, where he compares democracy and communism and just shows how, how parallel they are in having to sell themselves. And all that does is it sounds like he's selling, he's doing his best to sell liberal democracy while either hiding or not understanding that in order for liberal democracy to continue, a conspiracy does have to happen. But it's not one continuous conspiracy. It's one conspiracy takes over and that gets supplanted by another conspiracy and another, and it's just on down the line and you have,

you just have competing conspiracies the whole time. Yeah. What's a chain of conspiracy, like a never-ending chain of conspiracy, Well, what Popper says is different. He actually says that things that we don't like. Basically, he argues we attribute outcomes that we don't like to conspiratorial origins. What he claims is really happening is that there are simply unexpected consequences. Sort of like that old line, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Like the road to conspiratorial thinking is paved with unintended consequences. And he says things like, you know, economic depressions, military conflicts, societal collapse, the whole list. These are all things that come about as a consequence of other political actions that are being undertaken. And that a social theorist's responsibility is to trace those lines and figure out the causality, right? But ultimately, there's never a conspiracy.

man does not replace God everything can be understood empirically through proper social theory proper social theorizing and so that's why I chose Carl Popper because he has such a monumental legacy and the more you dig into it actually the the kind of creepier it gets a lot of the I will say a lot but some of the most well-known names in the contemporary society, people who are strong advocates of not only liberal democracy, but also like the censorship regime, and using state power to prosecute political minorities, which is something that Karl Popper advocated for. you find that a lot of the really relevant people today were also connected to Carl Popper. Cass Sunstein was a student of Carl Popper. George Soros was a student of Carl Popper. I think Richard Hofstadter may also have been at one point affiliated with him.

So he, beyond his own works, Carl Popper was a mentor to or had close relationships with basically anyone who's ever had a, bugaboo about nativism. So he was a really obvious example to pick. Richard Hofstadter, on the other hand, I think if I had to guess, is kind of a name that not many people think of anymore. He died somewhat early on, but he had a very successful career as an academic historian and public intellectual in the mid-20th century. Many of his, several of his books won Pulitzer surprises. So he was really, really Crem de la Crem. The Age of Reform was a Pulitzer Prize winning book. I believe that the paranoid style of American politics was another Pulitzer-winning essay. And in both of those works, Carl Popper, excuse me, Richard Hofstadter, basically

takes aim at populists, rural types, middle, you know, flyover, middle America, what San Francis would describe as middle American radicals, the kinds of people who probably donated to the John Birch Society, the kinds of people who probably supported the Tea Party, the kinds of people who became MAGA. Basically, in those two works, he's going after populism, and in particular, he's going after what he calls the paranoid style in American politics. And Richard Hofstadter also has his own legacy, uh, of influencing academics to write anti-conspiracy polemics. Um, and his most famous essay was the paranoid style in American politics. Basically, he, he uses Freudian psychoanalysis as a, in an artful way. That's his own word, by the way. I'll give you this, the second sort of

two A to why I chose these guys. But it, it's because of they tell them themselves. basically in their works. They tell them themselves repeatedly. So it makes for a good learning exercise. This is a running theme with a certain group of people. They can't help themselves. Yeah. And in particular, Popper and Hofstad are like at the top of the mountain of just letting you know exactly what's on their mind.

That's how you can, at least for me, it's like if you want to present an argument and you want to present people as, as, as, spearheads or figureheads of a certain movement or whatever. I mean, you don't want to leave the audience feeling like you arbitrarily picked these people or whatever. So, I mean, it was really great that in both cases, they just telling themselves. So in the essay, Paranoid style in American politics, he's talking about Barry Goldwater. He coins this term pseudo-conservatism. And he talks about the paranoid style. So he says he uses paranoid in an artful way, appropriating it from psychoanalysis and psychology. I think he says something like in the way that a historian of art would describe a certain period as Baroque or whatever, he wanted to use paranoid style

in that same way. So which is like a way of saying you're not doing it academically, you're not doing it empirically, you're kind of literally bastardizing language to serve a partisan end? Like, if you read between the lines, he's basically saying, I'm taking this term that has a very specific meaning and application. I'm taking it outside of its discipline, and I'm plopping it in a completely different discipline in an informal way just because, you know? And there's like, so much of that today. So much of that today. I don't know if you saw, and I hate to even and talk about this person because it just gives him attention. But Joel Berry from the Babylon B,

he said there is going, he said very soon progressives are going to start embracing white identity. It's like, square peg round hole, man. What the hell are you doing? Yeah. Yeah. And it seemed, you know, and then obviously the most obvious one is, um, The main woke, right guy.

What the hell is the name? James Lindsay. I mean, he's... How could you forget? He has nothing, is he's incoherent at this point. It's gotten to the point where they can't make, they know that they've lost. They know that neoliberalism is dying. They know that the open society is falling apart, what they love the most.

And they're doing every, and it's, this isn't. right after World War II, when you have a couple of Jews who are basically advocating the open society because they don't want to go back to what it was just, you know, 10 years ago. And, you know, they need a society that they can blend in in. And, yeah, I mean, we're past that at this point. And especially since October 2023, which I think is like literally a changing of the age. Like we're in a new age, you know. I totally agree.

So Hofstadter, basically, and there's a couple of this, I don't want to spoil all of the really, really juicy bits of it, but there's so many, like, telling on yourself moments. Some of them, like, they weren't obvious at the time, but there's one passage where he talks about, there's a famous French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. He was sort of like a, he was a structuralist, he's a feminist. Basically, he was like your average, like, shit-lib French intellectual, had all of the bad, you know, positions, political positions. Like a precursor to post-modernist or something like that? Yeah, basically one generation earlier than that, sort of overlapping into that movement getting its legs off the ground. But there's a famous Lacanian line that I think most people, most readers in this sphere, have kind of come across one way or another, it gets quoted a lot, he says, you know, if you're

paranoid, if you fear that your wife is cheating on you, even if she is, you're still paranoid and it's illegitimate to have that fear. So, so your wife is cheating on you, you're suspicious that she's cheating on you, you're pathological. So like Hofstadter takes that and he uses it in the context of a fluoridization in the water supply. He says you know, if, even if

it came out to be true at some point in the future, that the government was putting, contaminating the water supply for expressly political, even socialist reasons. That's still exemplary of the

paranoid style. And then, lo and behold decades later, that's basically exactly what happened. And that's like only the tip of the iceberg basically in terms of contaminating the food supply, the water supply, the soil, the air, everything that we kind of consume and are just moving through even passively. Like we all know, we all have the receipts on that. It's not a mystery. It's basically pretty much an open and shut case. It did happen. It happened for expressly political reasons. People still want it to happen. RFK Jr. as he was being sworn in as head of HHS basically said, we're going to take the

fluoride out of the water. So it's like, oh, but you're still a crank if you think that. You're still a crazy person if any of that troubles you in any way. So to my imaginary interlocutor who doesn't see any reason to specifically target these two people as being progenitors of this way of thinking, that's why. That's kind of my rebuttal. I was going to say before, there's like a 2A aspect to that or like, you know, like a tertiary aspect to that. And it's it's entirely the way in which these academics basically told you what the final outcome of their preferred political program would be. Towards the end of the open society and his enemies, Popper basically says, you know, if we followed this open society policy to,

its final conclusion, then it's not only conceivable, I'm paraphrasing, by the way, just for the audience at home, it's not only conceivable, but highly likely that you would have mass scale, a demographic replacement, you know, that it would so rupture the health and stability and coherency of an area, but the open society is still better, so we have to do it. So these are two guys who basically laid out a sort of series of justifications for liberal democracy. They also issued a series of polemics against people who are skeptical of liberal democracy. And they also kind of spilled the beans on what's wrong with their preferred political program. So it's very difficult for me to find a better example of,

the kinds of thing I'm trying to communicate to the audience, which is all of these kinds of things, racialism, conspiracism, anti-liberalism are inexorably tied to one another. And it's not for arbitrary reasons. It's for like first principles, political theory, and also just like, I was going to say urban planning, not urban planning, but like. basically like state craft and and social engineer social engineering right yeah yeah like your demographic construction things like that let's just social engineering is more succinct so um i started with them uh and the more i read them and the more i do this kind of writing

i just feel uh like vindicated in that decision because they just keep proving to be relevant over and over again. Before we move on to the next one, the term conspiracy theorist. Carl Popper used that term, I believe it was 1957. And then there's this, it's been revealed that the CIA was using that like had said oh that's the term we need to use against uh against people who are talking about the jfk is that is that right or is it uh or should we be looking to popper for that i you know um i've heard that i've heard that basically all of my life i've never independently researched that i've kind of taken it at face value because i've heard other and i've seen other you know well-regarded researchers make that claim before, I would say, I would say this, that there's more

than one road to critiquing liberal democracy. And I do think it comes down to sort of your specialization. I think people who are more into, who are more like wonks and more into political culture and more into the nitty gritty of institutions and and the ways they sort of like octopus tentacles get involved have their have their their tentacles in every other pot because obviously the CIA has a long a long history of social engineering I'm actually just now reading this great book who paid the piper which is basically it's by francis stoner saunders and is talking about the CIA during the Cold War and their anti-communist initiatives and how people like James Burnham were, you know, in effect, you know, whether explicitly

or implicitly doing Cold War, culture war stuff on behalf of America against the communists. I've kind of always known that. It was kind of obvious. If you work at, if you were working at National Review when he worked there, you were tied to the CIA in some way. Yeah. So, well, naively, I actually didn't know that. I was very late to the James Burnham train. Everyone was reading him during COVID and earlier. And I picked him up like two years ago. And my head was, my hat was blown off my head. I was like, wow, this is great. And then like a week later, someone was like, yeah, but Burnham was the spook. I'm like, wait, what? So. Yeah, but that doesn't, but the thing, the thing about it is, that doesn't bother me. Because, you know, when I think about the first two books that he wrote, when he wrote the managerial revolution, he wrote Machiavellians, I, I can't be 100% sure he was spooked up at that point. He was, you know, possibly, but still, it doesn't mean that he was writing those books for any other, any other intention than because he, that's the book he wanted to write at the time. Yeah. In particular, the managerial revolution seems like a relatively non-ideological kind of academic work.

But anyway, I think there's probably multiple roads you can take, and for people who are, you know, as they say on the internet, like theory cells, who are into the philosophical tradition, I don't think, you know, focusing on Karl Popper versus focusing on the CIA, that there's any obstacle or that there's any hurdles or that they're not congruent with one another. This just happens to be the road that I took. And so I think there's legitimacy to both. I mean, obviously the CIA is involved in political assassinations, regime change, coups. So if anything, I think what is worth extracting out of this is sort of the, if you want to say, multidisciplinary or multifactorial, multi-personnel. engine behind liberal democracy that it that you can come at it from the popular culture space you can come at it from the academic space you can come at it from the intelligence services space and basically it all leads you to the same thing um that you've got political conflict rivalry

subterfuge all the kinds of things that people like carl popper told you don't actually happen and are not really relevant in understanding um political, anything related to politics. Let's jump forward to Jonathan Haidt. You talk about his book, The Righteous Mind. Height is one of those people that really gets pushed by a lot of the people who call themselves classical liberals, the people who want to return to the 90s, the golden age of the 90s.

But one of the things that you point out is that their, his ideas, his ideas, you know, about psychological, about how he misrepresents political differences between people who have, I think the terminology you used was broader moral palate, or what he used is broader moral palette and liberals, six intuitions versus liberals, versus liberals have three. So can you talk a little bit about how height continues this, how he explains how this continues and moves forward from, you know, from World War II and the post-war consensus. Yeah. So I think a friend of yours, Astral Flight, made this really great observation to me.

I didn't even realize it that Jonathan Haidt was kind of like the Jordan Peterson before there was a Jordan Peterson. Five or six years before Jordan Peterson got into political commentary and political culture, you had Jonathan Haidt as this sort of centrist, And I say none of this with invective or hatred, I actually think pretty out. Of all of the people who've done the IDW centrist, we just need to get a long thing. I really do look at Jonathan Haidt as being like the most honest and really the most competent person to try that out. But I would just say, like, it's really remarkable if you want to compare the public intellectuals of, say, today or the last 10 years compared to 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. It's really startling.

The issue I had with Jonathan Haidt was that his, and this is really the same issue with Jordan Peterson, even though it doesn't seem that way with Peterson, is they're actually very narrow-minded, I hesitate to say uneducated, but they are ignorant, really, of other disciplines beyond their own. Jordan Peterson, if you want to know about psychology, probably is one of the best living educators of psychology. And this has always been apparent when it comes to philosophy, history, political theory, he's basically indistinguishable from like your grandpa sitting at the, actually your grandpa at Thanksgiving dinner probably knows more than Jordan Peterson. But same thing with Jonathan Haidt, very good, very astute as a sociologist, as a anthropologically-minded person, obviously is a PhD of social psychology. But the big glaring hole in his theory of the moral foundations, as applied to the political binary, is this actually politically ignorant. So the Heights Moral Foundation's theory says that there are six elementary moral foundations theory says that there are six elementary moral foundations or intuitions, care, fairness, liberty, sanctity, authority. There's a sixth one that I'm actually blanking on at the moment. And his research demonstrated that conservatives were more in

touch with all six than liberals were. And he gives the example of the John Kerry campaign. back in 2004 and the rhetoric that was on the campaign trail and he basically said that Democrats were unable to access rhetoric that touched on moral intuitions like authority, sanctity, purity, purity would have been the sixth one, right? That these are kind of like classically conservative moral intuitions. They have to do with, they're inexorably bound up with, like the church and religion. They're inexorably bound up with the military hierarchy and the state. They are inexorably bound up with with the family and a paternal sort of view of the world.

And so Haidt says, well, this is really a big problem. Democrats are losing these elections. They're losing the culture war. They're not really able to communicate to all Americans. So he embarked on this research project to develop a way to help liberals expand their moral palette. Now, there's a couple of problems with that. First, and what I think the biggest problem is, is that his research actually demonstrates that liberals can access other moral intuitions. It's just that when they apply those moral intuitions, they're applied different. When a conservative Bible-thumping Rust Beltor practices sanctity, they're thinking about Christ, they're thinking about God, they're thinking about the church, they're thinking about the beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, their pastor. But when, and this is according to height, when liberal, secular, secular humanist types think in terms of sanctity,

well they think about the environment they think about pollution and climate change they think about sort of these very novel untraditional outside of the box ways of applying these basic moral intuitions you know what was the old liberal maxim you know think globally act locally that kind of describe the problems are the way liberals think is in this fundamentally non-parochial way So that tells us, one, that liberals don't have a problem accessing these moral intuitions. It's just they apply them differently. So to me, the first problem that arises out of that is it tells us something about the populations themselves and the kinds of social worlds that they occupy. I extrapolate from that that we really have two completely different populations living side by side.

as though they were actually one people. You know, when we hear in the, whatever you want to say, the Trump right, the online right, the dissident right, radical right, whatever. I mean, a lot of us, if not most of us, are here because we have certain foundational concerns about our kin, about the folk, about the race, about homogeneity and a coherent national identity.

This sort of issue in Heights theory, rising betrays the fact that we don't have a coherent national identity and that homogeneity is not just an issue in terms of racial characteristics or religious affiliation, but actually there are other ways in which people are or aren't alike. And that's meaningful in terms of how you organize your polity. So basically the punchline of that essay is there's two different political economies. This goes back to James Burnham. There are two different political economies operating in this country. And while they're not necessarily opposed to one another, they are in conflict. You have the classical liberal political economy, bourgeois

entrepreneurial capitalism, which even though that was critical in displacing the old aristocratic order and the monarchy and things we think of as even more based and conservative, and hierarchical and all these kinds of things. But relative to, like, modernity, where we are now, you know, that's pretty, it's pretty, they were still deeply devout religious people. They were still deeply patriarchal. These were not people who, comparable today, anyway, who thought, like, we will literally burn through all of our social capital

if it will earn more money or help us achieve some kind of cockamamie political agenda. you had this bourgeois entrepreneurial liberalism, and then what comes after that, as James Burnham said, is managerialism, managerialism, the technocracy, the cult of expertise, credentialism, socialism, you know, the welfare state, all of these things, which are built on bourgeois entrepreneurialism, but also in a way sort of parasitize bourgeois capitalism. That's kind of what, like, one of the stories of the recent. and Trump victory with Vance as his VP is like we're trying to put the managerial revolution back in the box a little bit here. Burnham says that, you know, managerialism emerged because

well, actually St. Francis says this expanding on James Burnham, that nation states were growing so rapidly, both demographically and in terms of like their geographical territories. And so you had this dual problem of mass and scale. They're getting larger. They're also getting more complicated. So if you're like an early 20th century robber baron, a capitalist, well, while it might have been possible for you in 1850 or 1900 or even 1950 to literally micromanage everything and understand a good example, this is maybe Walt Disney trying

to put together snow white. He was intimately involved in every aspect of that production. down to the finest detail. And then if you look at what Disney is doing today, like the people who bankroll it have no control what's happening, no idea what's even happening in terms of casting and like CGI and whatever. So things were getting so large and kind of complicated that you had a new class of people emerge.

And these were the managers. Technically minded, technically skilled people, usually with a college education, usually living in an urban or suburban setting, who are not capitalists in the sense that they have large reserves of money that they can allocate and spend and whatever and that they are captains of industry. But they have very narrowly defined, highly skilled roles that put them, I think the quote from San Francis is, they literally put their hands on the levers of these industries.

So as San Francis said, you know, the change in the kind of people who became in charge of things also became, or rather he says, the change in the class of people also became a change in the kind of people. So we went from capitalists to managers, but also we're dealing with a different demographic of people. You know, a lot of, you know, Ellis Islanders, you know, are getting into these positions. A lot of newer immigrant Americans are getting into these positions. To your audience, I'm bringing this to a conclusion here, if it seems like a crazy digression, we could say in a sort of loose way that the liberal, democratic, liberal, progressive liberals, Democrats, socialists, these kinds of people, you know, in terms of Heights Moral Foundation, the threes versus the sixes, these are people who basically live in a completely different economy. then the conservative person, a conservative person, even today, still lives in a farm, works on a farm, or runs their own business, or comes from a family that does that. You know, they tend, you know, statistically we know this.

You know, they tend not to go to college. They tend not to complete their degrees. They tend not to read as much. The divide, what Jonathan Haidt treats as psychological differences between liberals and conservatives really is a demographic difference. It's an economical difference. So it's not that liberals are out of touch with the authority moral intuition or the sanctity moral intuition. It's that they are basically siloed into a completely different style of life.

And so they apply these moral intuitions to the world in wildly different ways. They even apply the same moral intuitions differently. Jonathan Haidt points out that for conservatives, fairness has more to do with like proportionality, for example, compared to liberals where it's about like distributing to everyone. You know, everyone gets a piece of the pie, but conservatives say, well, that doesn't sound fair. Like, why does the guy who does nothing have as much say as I do? Hence the proportionality, right? Okay, well, this goes into like one of the old debates like equity versus equality. Are we trying to give everyone an opportunity?

or are we trying to give everyone an outcome? These are mentality differences that arise out of different economic social organizations. So I know I just threw a whole bunch at you. Maybe I'll take a pause there and let you pick apart from that. No. I mean, I think that that's, it's something that's been covered on this, on the show, endlessly managerialism versus rule by experts or, You know, roll by Otterk.

So the next thing I wanted to move on to was just touch on this, you know, as quick as we can, because I really want to talk about Aululul a little bit, get into Aulul and condomin. The idea that unconscious group dynamics and not individual brainwashing drive shifts in culture and how the American myth of individualism, you know, as a noble lie obscures, how social forces shape behavior. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah. So I came into contact with the work of a German, very well- celebrated German psychologist. His name is Gerd.

I'm probably butchering it. He has a name, like, straight out of German folklore, and he looks like, like, you know, like the most German man on Earth. A Gerr de Gigerenser, or Gerr Digerenzer, I have no idea how you would say it. Oh, I have no clue. I look. No, no idea. He's a psychologist and, well, a little bit of context. One thing that's really interesting to me about the last 20 years of psychology publishing, popular publishing, academic publishing, is that since the turn of the century,

there has been an extreme focus on irrationality, on what's sometimes called choice architecture, a decision-making, basically cognition, but in terms of our capacity to choose, what are the actual cognitive mechanisms that are responsible for a decision-making process? When do they go right? When do they go wrong?

What are their limitations? This stretches all the way back to the, really the early 20th century. I want to say Herbert Spencer maybe. I could be mixing up some of my names. But in the early to mid-ish 1960s, you had what was called the probabilistic revolution in the social sciences, what basically refers to statisticians gained a lot of influence in academic psychological research. And so there became this heavy focus on quantitative sort of mathematical reasoning to understand and explain social behavior. And one of the people that was at the start of that was Daniel Kahneman.

Now let's just table that now, just to give some context for the audience. So Gerger-Gigerenser is working sort of in this milieu, but he's coming at it from a different point of view. Actually, he's kind of like hearkening back to the very earliest theorists, theoreticians in this statistical revolution, he's basically saying that there's, and this is contrasting to the Daniel Kahnemans of the world, basically saying that there's a type of logic that humans engage in, that you could say is intrinsic to our decision-making process. It's not arbitrary. It's actually evolutionary, and it's not only evolutionary, it's

environmentally bound, right? So in other words, thinking of human cognition, we need to think of it as something that developed within a context. We need to think of it as something that developed according to certain evolutionary pressures and limitations, selection pressures, for example. So he, and again, I won't spill all the beans. I'll leave some for your, you know, your audience if they want to read it. I hope you do. Pick it up at Antelope Hill. publishing. He basically says that there are three rules of human social organization, more or less, and there's actually no getting around them. You can't break them. You can't refine them. They are fine-tuned over countless generations of evolution. So when I read that,

my first thought was and you know getting involved in all this radical politics stuff I'm kind of a neo fight still I've only since like 2014 2015 really been thinking this way and one of the like the kind of the thoughts that are or just like repeating questions I've always had it's actually the subtitle of the essay that you referenced you know how did things get this bad you know we're always constantly asking herself like why are people like this how do things get this way what you know Or we play the historical revision game, you know, would things be different if, you know, group X won this war as opposed to group Y? Or, you know, if this president won this election or this, you know, and we're always asking ourselves, like, why are people like this? How did things get

this way? The point of my essay is to say that there's a profoundly evolutionary reason for people to become conformist. Because conformism is effectively an evolutionary mechanism, or at least for us, it's this sort of thing we've accumulated, that helps us to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty, catastrophe, risk, danger. You can't know everything. It's impossible to know everything. It's impossible to account for everything. And really all we can do is just, you know, look to the person to our left and right and do what they're doing. And this is like deeply encoded into us. And so it's very common for people to think like, well, it's what the universities did.

It was brainwashing through media. It was brainwashing through Hollywood. It was brainwashing through the universities and the academics. And I'm not saying that that's wrong. I'm not saying that that didn't play a role. What I'm saying is that before you ever read Foucault in freshman year of college, before you ever turned on the TV and saw some subliminal licentious thing getting beamed into your brain, you were conforming to the social dynamics in your home, at the park, in the

classroom, at the lunch table. And these are the things we need to think about in terms of why and how people adopt certain political beliefs. And the real point of that I was trying to drive home in that essay, maybe I'm kind of a bleeding heart here. You tell me if you agree or disagree. The point I was trying to drive home is that we want to have actually empathy. It's going to sound like a libt hard moment. We want to actually have a sort of like patience and compassion for people because it's very common for us who are sort of like initiated and know a little bit about this to get angry and bitter and like, man, like you should know better or you got duped or you were brainwashed by the race communists or the woke mind virus.

actually most people have no idea consciously in an intellectual way about what's happening around them they're just simply imitating what the people around them are doing they are simply using the same solutions that have worked for the people around them in a sort of unthinking unconscious way because it's actually too mentally taxing cognitively demanding and socially punishing ostracizing to get into the weeds on everyone of these individual issues, whether we're talking about LGBT or we're thinking about tariffs or the immigration policy or whatever, most people don't think. There is no actual, rational, cognitive, sort of deliberative process going on. It's just simply people going along and getting

along. And when I read his book in the wild, actually I bought a bunch of his books and read a bunch of his papers around that time when I was writing this, it gave me a profound, actually it felt like I was being like liberated, liberated by like this sort of anger at other people. Like, why aren't you taking up this challenge like I'm taking it up? Why aren't you trying to decode all of the bullshit and why aren't you willing to ostracize yourself from your friends and your family in the name of the truth? Because that's not actually what the kinds of foundational social dynamics we've evolved to function with, that's not how they operate, which isn't to say that they're like deviant or pathological. It just means that,

you know, people like you and me are like a different breed of person, basically. And if we're getting in front of an audience, whether it's you and your podcast or me and my blog or whatever, or somebody at like a rally or a pub, you actually have to have like some heart for the people in front of you, the people who are gathered around. you because they don't actually know better. And most of the time people treat that as a sort of insult or a smear or they say it in a pejorative and condescending way in the same way that I don't know any better when it comes to physics or mechanical engineering doesn't make me like a loser or a cuck servitive or a dweeb

or whatever. It just means I don't have that specialization. I would need to rely on like a well-meaning expert. I think in the point of that essay, people believe and act the way they do far less for deliberative conscious reasons than they do for invisible social dynamics that bind and tether people together. That was another really long-winded answer, so I apologize. I don't want to be a pet aunt, but I think when using the term empathy, we have to be able to separate what's known as effective empathy and cognitive empathy.

Cognitive empathy is the ability to see another person's perspective. Effective empathy is the more dangerous one, and I think it's what's taken over a large amount of the left and progressivism, which is being able to understand one's another person's, emotions, but also sharing them with them, trying to share their experience. I don't have any interest in that. Understanding is a much different thing than actually seeking to put myself and to try to feel exactly what they're feeling.

I think that leads us down the path of the... where you, that what's become the meme of how, you know, most people who would be right-wing care about the people most around them, and then out here, it's the people, yeah, the heat map. And I think the, we have to be careful of that. Understanding where people are coming from is one thing. real, that section of empathy, which has become the most popular, where they want you to share and feel what other people are feeling, I have no interest in that. I have enough, I have enough of my own problems. Yeah. I give three examples in that essay, and they all are examples of

cognitive empathy. So I'm glad you made that distinction. I mean, affective empathy, that's the sort of, again, I don't say this in a really negative way, but it's kind of how we've ended up in this squishy, womanly schoolmarm kind of mentality where it's like, well, how would you feel if that happened to you? It's like, well, I would feel bad. So then don't judge them so harshly. It's like, that's not constructive. But one of the examples I give, if I can remember, one of one of Grinzer's um one of his three rules is basically the default rule that if there's no other solution then you do what everyone else has done previously and i give the example of you know somebody a young man who enlists in the u.s military in 2002 or 2003 and they did that

for rule one do what other people around you do And so if you're a young man and you're watching TV and all of the men in your family are like this is fucking a travesty, we need to go to war, we need to defend America. You think, yes, it's a travesty. I need to go to war. I need to defend America. Maybe 10 other guys from your high school classroom did that. And you're like, I'm going to do that. And then you go and it's awful. And you come back and you're a fucking mess. and you look around at your other peers, other guys who you enlisted with, and they're developing drug problems,

or they kill themselves. And what do you do? You develop a drug problem, and you kill yourself. And, like, that's the, this is, like, a very sort of, like, bleak way of applying it, but it gave me a greater understanding. It's like, how does that happen? Does it happen because we didn't give them enough education? Did it happen because they didn't have enough socialization time?

Did it happen? Like all of these were not trying to understand the real problem types of explanations. It's like, no, he did it for like the three basic rules of social organization. You do what everyone else does. If there's no other solution, you do the solution that everyone else has been using. And if you're a young guy who enlisted in the military, well, you see a lot of your peers falling apart completely. and maybe killing themselves. Or another example I use is like a freshman-aged college girl.

You know, how do they all fall into, or how does so many of them fall into this, like, destructive, licentious, borderline, pornographic, sexual behavior? Because they looked around what the people around them were doing, and they defaulted back to the same type of social behavior that most of the people around them were engaging it. And I think if you can understand the degree to which just about everybody you know is engaged in some kind of like mimesis, then it really does deemphasize the extent to which you think of them as a competent, individually, rationally minded person. Now, they may also be those things, but we are, most of the time, we are that in a very limited capacity. You go to the hospital, your physician is giving you all of these scans and using all of this, you know, $50,000 words, and they're flexing their upper learning degrees at you. And you're like, wow, this guy's really smart.

And then they turn around and then they watch Bill Maher. And you're like, what? Then they vote for Kamala Harris or whatever. You're like, wait, I thought you were like a thinking person. you realize actually this that type of demanding deliberative cognitive function you know if there was a big pie chart how much of your life you're you know you're actually engaged in that it's a tiny sliver of the pie most of the rest of it is I mean why did that guy end up in medical school in the first place because you looked to his left and his right and that's what the people around

and were doing or because someone from on high their father their mother their grandfather said you're going to do this. And so they did it. It wasn't a deliberative, individualistic process of rational choice. It was an unconscious, evolutionarily informed social process. So all that to say, I agree with you. We have to be careful about the E word. And my essay does skew on the cognitive empathy, not the affective empathy.

So I appreciate you bringing that up. No problem. Let's move on to Connemon, because you've already mentioned him, Daniel Conneman. He basically portrays human cognition as inherently flawed. How does that bolster a move towards technocracy? And, yeah, I mean, you mentioned a little too. So, I mean, whichever direction you want to take that. Yeah, Conneman, I remember both when the Jonathan Haidt book and the Daniel Connman book came out.

They came out within the few years of each other, and they were some of the biggest. I mean, the podcast circuit of 10, 15 years ago was like those two guys. Like every talk show, every podcast. And it's actually really, really difficult to overstate how influential Daniel Kahneman has been on social science research, but also the general intellectual culture. So Daniel Kahnem, an Israeli psychologist, who was in the IDF, he died, like last year, I think, killed himself. It's probably interesting. It's probably not totally meaningless to point out that he signed himself up for like one of these end-of-life self-terminating things. I don't know exactly.

I don't know if he went to Denmark or wherever in those countries that they have. Switzerland. So his partner, Amos Tversky, I'm probably butchering these names because I'm not as really. They had been research partners since the 50s or the 60s. They were part of, they actually originated what's called the heuristics and biases research program. So to your listening audience, you know, if you ever took an introduction to psychology class

at any point when you were in college, there was probably a section on cognitive of psychology, and a lot of it probably had to do with this idea of heuristics and biases. And basically, the heuristics and biases program says that human, and this, Gerd Gigerenser accepts this, by the way. He just sort of takes a different conclusion from the same general idea. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were basically perpetuating this line of research. They were both, you know, mathematically-minded statistical thinkers. So they both perpetuated through their research and their public advocacy, their intellectual work, the idea that human cognition is sort of a, it's based on like maybe a handful of mechanisms or principles, if you want to say.

and we don't necessarily have an immediate ability to activate those mechanisms or principles that kind of seem to have a life of their own and they work in the background and somehow magically we draw inferences and conclusions and and answers to things you know like when I was a kid growing up my dad would always say to me you know like if you've ever got a problem you don't know the answer to you know stop thinking about it for a while and a couple of hours later you know poof it'll hit you and i was like well that's kind of crazy and that would happen maybe you go to sleep and the answer comes to you in a dream or you're trying to remember the name of some actor and it hits you a week later it's like what happened in my brain

that i went from really forcefully trying to think about this to not and then suddenly the answer comes Well, this is the basic idea of deliberative executive cognition. There are a handful of mechanisms and principles that operate somewhere, kind of nebulously, in the mind or within human consciousness, that help us to think and make choices and make calculations. There's a sort of a rudimentary brain calculator in there that is running all these programs and calculations, and we don't really. really get to ever put our hands directly on it, but that's how the brain works. Now, Canaman, and I'm basically, by the way, for your audience's benefit, I'm giving like a very stripped away version of that story. But the important thing to take away from it is that Canaman and Dversky basically argued that this is an inexorably flawed evolutionary process

that leads us to basically make a lot of errors. That human cognition is barely better than a coin flip. And so their academic work was about helping experts become better decision makers by providing them with all of this statistically informed psychological research. Which, by the way, is also what Gigerenser did. But the difference between Kahneman and Tversky versus Gigerensors, Gigorenzer's idea was that these he didn't use the word biases.

He just talked about them in terms of heuristics are like it doesn't get better than that. Like if you're telling me that evolution over millennia formed our brain to work in this way, then it probably did it really well because just about everything else about us works really, really well. But you have to understand the context that the mind is developing in. You have to understand the context, the kinds of choices we have been forced to make throughout human history to understand how the brain arrives at those conclusions. And obviously we're living in this sort of like fairy tale Disneyland world that's completely removed from like primary evolutionary selection pressures and can, you know, Gigerenser's argument is basically we've got this finely tuned cognitive organ that now has to deal with a wildly unpredictable, unstable, information-rich environment, which is a, you know,

historically a unique circumstance that we've really never, there's very little precedent for in the past. And so when humans make mistakes, it's because we are, we have evolved in these niches, these tightly bound ecological niches, to produce certain types of solutions and to think about information in a particular way. We don't live in that world. If you want to zoom out and say, you know, the world of scarcity versus the world of abundance, right? In the world of scarcity, there's limited resources. There's also limited information. There's limited choices to me. But in a world of abundance, such as the one that we live in, to the extent that you could say it's a world of abundance, well, you see things like, well, there's a great study that got published some years ago. I'll ask you, actually, there's a magical number, after which once presented with this number, a number of options, humans actually are not able to make a meaningful choice. Do you know what that number is? I don't know

I think it's about a dozen between six and 12 I was going to say six yeah yeah so like you go trying to buy a car you see like three dozen cars on the lot it's like well meaningfully

how do I know which is the right car for me or you go shopping for clothing like me you go down the mail the aisle and you see like 30 gazillion racks of jeans and you're like I just need a fucking pair of pants, man. Like, I don't even know what I'm looking at.

You know, this abundant information-rich environment is not something we're really evolutionarily adapted to. For Gigerenzor, that's not a fundamental problem with human cognition. For Kahneman, it is. And so Kahneman, the thing that's even more interesting about Kahneman, about not just his academic research program, but also his affiliations, if you read his book, thinking fast and slow, which he won a Nobel Prize for, Nobel Prize in Behavioral Economy. He's talking about his good friend, Cass Sunstein.

My good friend, Cass Sunstein, whose judgment I trust so well, who at the same time that Kahneman... I mean, I mean, Kahneman, like, was literally born in mandatory Palestine in, like, the 30s. Yes. Went to Paris. His parents escaped Paris because, you know, the evil Nazis came to power. Or he, they moved back to Palestine like right before, before it became Israel. I mean, this is, you want to talk about having your child, like having your life, your life's attitude set up for you right from the, from the start.

Yeah. It's a very charmed life. So, you know, there's so much to say about kind of. And it's actually the one essay I'm the most proud of because it really gets to a lot of things that have bothered me over the course of my life. I'll just say this. All throughout Kahneman's kind of portraying himself as on the side of like Joe Schmo. Here's all this research showing that you're kind of a dummy, but don't worry, you know, you're my dummy and I'm going to make sure nothing bad happens to you. So he has this sort of libertarian ethic about him where he talks

about the need for sort of paternalism because people are so dumb and can't think straight and can't make decisions for themselves, that means that they are easy prey for other people who would want, you know, demagogues, people who would want to manipulate them, what have you. And he treats, he views his research as basically a way to help Joe Schmo navigate this world of complexity that he's just too much of a dumb, Gentile Rube to, to navigate on his own. And he keeps talking about, it's just really funny the way he keeps talking to people like Cass Sunstein, you know, my good friend, Cass Sunstein. with his tremendous work. Meanwhile, at the same time, Cannonman's writing that book,

Cass Sunstein is writing his, a series of white papers with people like Adrian Vermeel on conspiracy theories, on cognitive infiltration, on like the OG misinformation, like his whole idea of cognitive infiltration, Cass Sunstein, that is, was literally, we're going to go into spaces where people are generating novel explanations for political and social crises, and we're going to fuck it up by deliberately throwing in pants on, on, you know, a head, retarded, uh, counter conspiracy theories. So it's a really, really dangerous situation. I'll put, I'll put a bow in it real quick. Did you just describe right wing Twitter or what? I mean, that was one of his big bugaboo is, was the internet. It's basically,

you know, his essay on conspiracy theories was directly about 9-11. and the Israel conspiracies. He says, we're in this, this is like 2008, 2009. So not like at the birth of the internet or even the birth of like, you know, AOL, within 10 years of it. And he's basically saying it's a really big problem that all of, he doesn't say this, but I'm editorializing a little bit. Kass Sunstein is basically saying to people, it's a problem that these dumb Gentile rubs are looking at Israel the wrong way. And we need to figure out a solution to discourage them from doing that. And if we can't discourage them, we have to make the information economy so contaminated and unreliable that no social transformation can come as a result of that.

And so that's the reason I wrote about Kahneman is because the basic conclusion of his research is that humans need a class of credentialed technological experts. to do the thinking for them. And you mentioned Elul. Illul, famous French sociologist, probably published like 100 books. He might be one of the most prolific writers of all time. He was a Christian. He was an anarchist. And he was French.

That was the worst part about him. He basically argued all the way back in the 1960s that there's this encroaching metaphysics. physical problem in human society is called technique. This is actually very complicated, his definition of technique, so I won't really get into it here on the show with you. I give a lot of time in the essay explaining it in a lot of different perspectives. So it's definitely comprehensive in the book. But basically, he says that, you know, technique is this, to put it very simply, is this sort of efficiency mechanism that... throughout different periods of human history was subordinated to some other aspect of human social

life. He says, you know, in the Greek and Roman times, or the Roman times, that technique was subordinated to statecraft. And that in the medieval times, that technique was subordinated to the aims of the church and sort of theological thinking, that, you know, what technique looked like in the mid-ages was, you know, theologians debating sort of the minutia of like Christian metaphysics, you know, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, that kind of thing. But at some point in the last couple of hundred years, technique has become unmoored from other social forces or other social domains. of human life. Technique is no longer just something you do to build a better bridge or to build a

better government or to build a better cathedral or to build a better love for God. It's actually its own good. It's an own end that is sort of like colonizing every other social space. And if you look at the world around you, it seems like every endeavor that people are engaged in is kind of subordinated to this idea of more efficiency, more productivity, more conformity. People complain about the algorithm online. It's kind of a way of talking about the problem of technique. People want to talk about the rapaciousness of capital. And even Illul gives, there's a whole section in the technological society where he basically

says, like, even in the early generations of sort of like, Weberian, you know, wasp capitalism, that it was still pretty much kind of confined to economic logic and economic concerns. And at some point after that, it became its own thing. Daniel Kahneman, the people involved in this heuristics and research program, contemporary technocrats, are really people who have become like the physical embodiment of the this principle of technique where, you know, we don't even care about a nation state or a community. All of these things are inefficient. They don't, they don't grow or progress on their own. There's something that Jacques Allul says that I consider to be a really profound thing.

He says people who are kind of hypnotized by the magic of tech. technique, if you talk to them and express trepidation about, like, the direction of technological progress, they will treat you as an enemy of mankind. Like, what, you're not, you don't want to go to Mars, you don't want to replace your eyeballs with glass computers, you don't want to be able to erase Down syndrome from the, from the human you know, DNA, like whatever thing we can achieve through technological progress, if you are an advocate of that, then your enemy are the Luddites and, you know, like the spiritually Amish, people who have some skepticism at the idea that we can just keep innovating and progressing

and making everything more technical. Just as an idea, or as an example for your audience, It's like, I love heavy metal, but I really don't like a lot of heavy metal from the last 20 years. And it's really taking me my whole life to figure out why. If you compare Black Sabbath and Tony Iommi to, I don't know, one of the guitar players from Lamb of God or Trivium or some death metal band, like literally Tony Iommi grew up in like bombed out Birmingham, like around the factories. And the sound of heavy metal was the sound of industrial technological society. But Tony Iommi never, like, he still used that sound to write melodies and things that sort of resonate with the human spirit in our ears and are pleasing to hear. But you listen to a band like Musuga. I recently started listening to Mushugger, that song, Bleed.

The first time I heard it, I was like, wow, that sounds like an airplane engine. like that's such a crazy sound to make on guitar so i bought the whole album and every single song is like we're literally going to recreate the sound you know what the inside of your washing machine sounds like and it's like guitar and guitar music was whereas in the era of black sabbath it's like we're sort of imitating industrial society to produce music it's like and now today it's like we're sort of using music to recreate technological society it's less pleasing to listen to it's more technically demanding the guys you know the james headfield has a much more aggressive rhythm hand than tony iommi has had but i mean is every metallic a riff as great as every black sabbath riff and then

you know 20 30 years later is who's ever headlining ozfest now are they really better than pantera was in 1994, they may be better performers. The music may be more on the cutting edge, let's say, of a particular genre, but it's also like nobody buys those records anymore. Nobody goes to those concerts. If you want to see Lamb of God, you've got to see them like on a big festival tour with the same seven or eight other bands that nobody will pay to see on their own tickets. Anyway, the point I'm making is that technique sucks and it ruins good things. let's uh okay so you you have an addendum that i i don't even want to touch it i want people to read that on their own because you know that's where you know if we start talking about that here

we're going to be um we'll start getting into um maybe having to couch some language um especially talking about certain groups and things like that Um, let's finish up talking about this. Let's talk about, um, let me ask this question. If babies are born racist, what's, that means we're just racist, right? Let's talk about Paul Bloom. Yeah. So let me tell you a short story. Back when I was a, uh, a university lecturer. Um, obviously I'm from New York. I taught in New York, very racially, you know, multicultural, diverse in every sense of the word. So whether it. it was Midtown Manhattan or South Brooklyn or the Bronx or Nassau or Queens, whatever,

I had to teach the same material. And one of the chapters was on human development from, you know, infancy till cradle to the grave, human psychology. And at the time I was teaching, around the time I had finished graduate school, Paul Bloom had published a series of studies. that were, well, there were 60 Minutes segments on it. He wrote New York Times bestselling books about it. Basically, he developed a very unique set of research methodologies by which he claimed you could get infants under 12 months old to demonstrate complex social cognitive behavior.

things that according to the psychological dogma of previous generations really didn't show up until like four, five, six, seven years old. According to Paul Bloom, it was present in babies as young as three months old. Basically what he would do is a kind of rudimentary friend enemy distinction test. So infants would, and they would, and they, there were multiple iterations of this. I won't get into all the minutia of it. But one such example was infants would basically watch sort of a play of two dolls interacting with one another, or three dolls interacting with one another, where, you know, the two dolls are maybe

in conflict over something, and then a third doll comes over and helps one. Maybe in a different iteration, a third doll comes over and hurts another one. Basically, the infants were were, they were measuring the responses of these infants to either aggressive or cooperative social behavior between complete strangers. So, you know, generally the outcome of the study was that babies tend to like the helpers more than they like the kind of antisocial, obstructive ones. They like neutral people more than they like hurtful people. they like helpful people more than they like neutral people.

And so I would show this 60-minute clip to my students. And invariably, Paul Bloom would try to scale up the findings of this research. Okay, so tier one is infants have a preference for pro-social behavior over antisocial behavior. Okay, so in Paul Bloom's world, that means there's a sort of rudimentary faculty there, pretty much from birth, where infants can make a friend-enemy distinction. And with each subsequent iteration of this experiment, they would fold in other social conflicts, including racism. And again, around the same time,

there was a whole bunch of studies based on what are called looking time research methodologies, basically how long does an infant stare at something and how, in particular, do they maintain their gaze or do they look away and get bored and seek other kinds of stimulation? So at the same time, Paul Bloom is doing this research, there's other research showing that, well, infants have a sort of racial preference. You know, white babies are going to look at a white face longer and more intently than they'll look at a black face or a yellow face or a red face or a brown face and so on and so forth. And so basically Paul Bloom's making this argument that we are much more cognitively complex at an earlier stage in human development. That would be part one.

That part two, we have an innate preference for pro-social or what's sometimes called u-social behavior. And three, that's part of that preference is kinship preference. we have a bias towards people that look like us, so on and so forth. And I would show this, to go back to the story time, I would show this to my students. The students would be, you know, as young as fresh out of high school, as old as, like, in their 50s and 60s trying to get another degree because the economy was totally shit 10, 15 years ago. So, you know, black, white, Arab, Jewish, Christian, whatever. And routinely, the two things I always observed, it doesn't matter where I taught it, doesn't matter who I taught it, too. One, they were amazed at the idea that we have that sort of cognitive sophistication that early on, so amazement.

But there was also a sort of horror at the idea of implicating. infants in the sort of nasty prejudices and social evils that adults get messed up. My class would be like, okay, sure, maybe I'm racist, but not like 24-week-old Timmy. He can't be racist. That's wrong. And so my students had this sort of innate sense that you shouldn't talk about infants that way, that you shouldn't responsibilize infants that way. And that kind of sat with me for a long time.

And the point of the essay that I basically make is there's a really, really heavy presumption that Paul Bloom is making, that whether it's wrong or correct, the whole theory, his whole model kind of falls apart. And the basic presumption he makes is that kinship is a moral phenomenon as opposed to any other kind of cognitive phenomenon. In other words, is it necessarily, is there a moral dimension to kinship preference? I think that's an open question. I think it's a presumption that you're making that the behavior or the type of categorization that the infant is doing is necessarily moral as opposed to social, as opposed to some other facet of social sorting would be the technical phrase, some other type of cognitive sort of. Really, the only way you can seemingly, the only way you can define the only way you can define

those behaviors as moral is if you have a problem with those kinds of behaviors. If you see an issue with an individual identifying with someone that they're genetically related to, as opposed, and showing preference for someone that they're genetically related to over somebody else. And there's an excerpt in that essay from a New York Times piece that Paul Bloom wrote that, Again, like the way we started our conversation, basically gives away the whole game. He says, oh, geez, I can probably pull. It's probably worth pulling up the exact quote, if you'll just bear with me for like half a second. Sure.

Here we go. all right i'm not going to waste your time basically he says there are there are there are key differences in the ways that infants develop morally and the problem is not that they have those tendencies is that they differ from how we would like them to be so basically he's saying we need to social engineer kinship preference out of infants and if we can demonstrate that they show kinship preference as early as two, three months, then that's really as early as the social engineering program ought to start. And that was what my students were intrinsically picking up on in the classroom. They were recognizing that if you are treating this novel cognitive psychology

experiment as a pretext for a sort of rigorous disciplinary educational program, almost none of never said that, but the horror that they all saw in treating an infant like something you can mold was written all over their face. And that's really the big issue with Paul Bloom's body of work. And that's what I'm focusing in that essay is that, look, it's an open question whether or not there's a utility and a benefit to studying moral and social development in infants. But if you're doing that with the express intention of trying to effectively derail cognitive development, infant cognitive development, then there's neither a moral nor even a scientific justification for doing so. I chose Paul Bloom's essay because it's actually, or his book, because it's actually one of the worst books I've ever read in my entire life from an academic, you know, Ivy League educated. researcher, there's no citations, which, by the way, that doesn't bust my balls that there's

no citations in it. But if you're like an Ivy League person, you're a department chair of universities, you're on sick. Like, that's what you're supposed to do. Like, that's just like the bare minimum. And there's just non-sequitur after non-sequitur after non-sequitur. And it's almost, again, not to get too naughty and anti-Semitic here, but like you're reading that that book of his is like getting into the mind of a Jewish propagandist because he's just telling you he's he's demonstrating to you why his own logic doesn't really make sense you're getting to see the weaknesses in their worldview and there's a few other things he cites in there in terms of like anti-racist race science that uh that i think probably your audience would really

enjoy so that's yeah that's what's up with Paul Blum Yeah, it goes back to that. I mean, at this point, it's been attributed to so many people. It's apocryphal that give me a child before they're two, three years old, and I'll own their mind for the rest of their life. I'll mold their mind for the rest of their lives. Yeah, I mean, that's all I hear. And also what I hear is I don't want this kid to grow up to be baby Hitler,

so we need to make sure of that. So please let me have access to that mind so that it'll never think to turn its gaze upon me. There's in that book, I like, it really, I was thunderstruck. They're peppered all throughout the book. His book is called Just Babies Origins of Good and Evil, you know, a little bit of a punny title. Like they're just babies, but also just in the sense of like justice and all that. kind of thing um peppered all throughout the book are mentions of basically like collective violence against other groups and like in the first two or three pages he mentions the showa

and all with with only there's one exception all throughout the book all of his examples of like evil racism evil group conflict it's always anti-jewish pogrom stuff throughout the book and like you just can't help but read it and think like there's an agenda here this actually isn't science this isn't social theorizing this is just as I said in our last conversation like this is just like a racial polemic like you are wearing the and this is a concept I introduce in that essay it's not my own concept but I've kind of put my own flavor on it back in the 60s, you know, there used to be this talk of ethnoscience as a way to talk about, like, you know, some African guy in the bushes, you know, doing like witchcraft voodoo. And basically there was an attempt to try to make, you know, non-industrial societies and their rudimentary, like, knowledge power, make it.

on an equal footing to, you know, Western civilization. But I twist that a little bit and I say, okay, let's accept the premise that different groups practice the scientific method differently. That's basically what this concept of ethnoscience is trying to say, well, when people like Paul Bloom tried to do the scientific method, it's actually not about like objectivity, empiricism, science, knowledge. It's racial self-defense. And that's particularly egregious when you are making infants the object of your racial self-defense.

Yeah, and I think if people pick up the book and read the addendum, they'll get that. I think you wrap that up where basically a lot of the writers that you're covering, you know, most of the writers that you're covering, that's what they're doing. it's basically all of their work is in defense of their own self-interest yeah which is why i think is an important book i'm certainly not the first person to bark up this treat but i do think i did it pretty comprehensively and i i tried to go after as many like central figures as possible are there other people other you know besides daniel coneman who are worth interrogating yes and i hope that somebody reads this and thinks well i'll plug that hole I mean, this book is like very much in the vein of like a Kevin McDonald type of writing, right?

So, you know, I don't think I'm necessarily trailblazing, but I do think, you know, with regard to Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Haidt, you know, these are two people who I think because of their recency, there's such a lack of skepticism towards their work. It's easy to look, you know, 50 years, 100 years in the past and say, oh, well, Carl Popper kind of, or Theodore Herzl or whoever, kind of like, you know, their shit's all fucked up, pardon my language. Like, it's obvious. But you're, you know, when it's in our lifetime and you're growing up and maturing whatever and you're seeing this work, you know, for a whole bunch of reasons, people don't put their scrutinizing lenses on. And even in the right, Jonathan Heights's work is cited pretty much uncritically. And to me, like his ideas have always been on their face wrong. Same thing with Daniel Kahneman, like the idea that evolution over whatever, thousands of years, millions of years, tens of millions of years would create something

like us that is like a 50-50 coin flip in terms of the shit going on between our ears as it has any positive utility like that's so obviously wrong and the thing that's so like to me um kind of characteristic of someone like a daniel canaman is that they develop all this language and they develop all these concepts that you can't like test or apply in the real world or that don't actually reduce confusion, but they actually create more confusion. So like one of the big concepts of Daniel Kahneman, and this is a tangent, I apologize, as he talks about the human consciousness basically being broken up into two systems, system one and system two, hence the title of his book, thinking fast and

slow. One is faster. One is slower. One's more prejudicial. One is more conservative and reserved. One is more irrational. And then if you ask yourself, well, where is system one in the brain or in the body? You can't point to it. It's not an actual thing that corresponds to like a material or social reality. Is that one hemisphere versus another? something. Right. Right, right. Even with Freud, and there's lots of bad things you can say about Freud, but his tripartite model of the mind, more or less kind of corresponds to the major areas of the brain, prefrontal cortex, midbrain, hind brain. There's a sort of analogical thing happening there. But with Kahneman, it's like I'm just making, it's literally wordcraft. It's just word wizardry. And then, you know, the title of the book, intolerant, interpret. is a very specifically intended title. Like, you need to hear those kinds of things and immediately disregard them. Like, part of the problem that a lot of us have for one reason or another is we're just

uncritically accepting what's happening. And you can actually be like a jerk, like a disagreeable jerk from the outset and be right about, like the whole affair. And that's what I'm encouraging people to do. I'm encouraging people to be a disagreeable jerk to basically fight, like just don't accept the premise. And that pertains to like our political activism. Like I don't need to entertain the prospect that the United States of America is a, you know,

giant job fair for the whole rest of the world. I don't have to accept the premise that our ancestors were bad. people and we need to be punished for it. I don't need to accept that we should encourage people to forego family formation so because reasons because reasons that like on their face don't even stand up to scrutiny anymore. You know, one of the things that was mentioned is just the the myth of the individual, you know, coming from a libertarian background, the first thing somebody does when they become a libertarian, which is the most individualistic ideology out there, quote unquote political ideology out there is, they're like,

oh, wow, I'm an individual. I need to find other people who consider themselves to be individuals. There's a fucking political party in this country of radical individuals. I mean, if that doesn't tell you that individuality and radical individualism is just a myth that as soon as somebody finds, oh, I'm embracing this, but oh, I want to hang out with other people who are radical individuals, too. It's like, that doesn't make any sense. What are you talking about? You know, and people should, you know, once you start going down the rabbit hole of, you know, who preached libertarian. And where that came from and, you know, maybe look at some of the names.

Yeah, yeah, may start seeing some similarities there, too, to what we're talking about. Yeah. Which is, again, it's a fine line that we have to walk because I, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think you would flat out reject anything associated with individuality. Like, we are our own people. I mean, this is why I emphasize... We're individuals within a group. Yeah.

Which is why I emphasize people like Gerd Gigorenzer in my book as sort of an antidote to that. Yes, you are you, Peter R. Canonas, and there is no other Peter Arcanonas, and you are in critical ways very different from everyone around you. But at the end of the day, we're a collective, we're a sort of hive organism. We exist in physical spaces, in proximity to other people that we all depend on, even in ways that we can't possibly fathom. So those are kind of the major take-homes of my book. Yeah. All right. And remind everybody again where they can find the book.

Antelopehill Publishing.com. It's also on Amazon. If you like the way this stuff sounds, you can pick up my old books in Imperium Press. and I maintain a blog, janeal.substack.com, where I basically continue the same type of writing. So, Pete, I really appreciate it. You're a total gentleman. And to your audience, buy my book. Yeah, and a reminder, you get 5% off of if you go buy his books at Antelope Hill and any other of the great books in Antelope Hill.

If you use code PQ, all one word at checkout. I cover shipping most of the time. So, yeah, I've, my library is on the other side of the room. And if I were to start pulling out the amount of books from Antelope Hill, it'd be quite the pile. So head on over there. Thank you, Josh. Really appreciate it. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano show.

Josh Neal is back. Josh, how you done? I am nasely congested. And that makes me very much like the. the gentleman we're about to talk about today. So I'm feeling, I'm feeling sympathetico with the subject matter. Okay, so we're going to talk about Freud here. We're going to talk specifically.

We're going to read an article that Leringenio wrote back in 2019 and included in one of his books. So if we're talking about Freud, is there anything that gives you, like, have you ever been what's your credibility to be able to talk about Freud? Well, the graduate school I went to was a heavily psychodynamic, psychoanalytic program. Most of the people, most of the faculty in the psychology, the grad program had had that background. And so that was most of, I mean, most of the classes I took were from a Freudian perspective. I'm not a Freudian myself, and most of my career, if you want to call it that, what I took from Freud was sort of like a contrarian point of view,

which is to say there's a couple of, like, to the extent that people know about Freud, they tend to land on one of a few perspectives. One conventional perspective is that, well, he wasn't doing real science, so all of it is junk. If you're in this milieu, one perspective is, well, he was Jewish, so it's all junk. Or if you're like sort of like a left winger, then he's sort of unimpeachable in a lot of ways. I fall somewhere in the middle. I think his work is very instructive as an insight into the Jewish, not just the Jewish mind, but like Jewish communal living. Because as we're going to see with his essay, most of his work, you could say his work is heavily autobiographical.

The concept he develops are a direct result of his own experience. And he prefigured, he prefigured like the sort of modern preoccupation with, with like trauma, which is unfortunate because I think it was, it's now like sort of a trite observation to make that a large amount of psychological dysfunction, even social dysfunction is due to disruption of the home, the domestic circumstance early. in a child's life, whether we're talking about like homosexuality or, you know, aberrant sexualities in general, they're, just statistically, they're the result of dysfunction in the home life early on in a kid's life. I also think he's interesting just for his like sort of anthropological work, which also kind of you have to take into view what what Loren argues in this book to kind of understand his anthropological work. His whole idea of like the

the sons ganging up to kill the father takes a different tone when you consider his own personal autobiography and what his work was about but also like some of his anthropological work like his book

from Moses to monotheism you know he's treated as a subversive especially few people who get into stuff his his relatives were up to like Edward Bernays and they there's maybe you could say he was an equal opportunity subversive because he undermined the Jewish claim to being the first monotheistic people so I think he was an interesting uh he had an

interesting career but what's more interesting is is the is the stuff beneath the surface which we're obviously going to get into today all right so I'm going to start reading stop me at any time, just stop me. Don't be, you know, don't hesitate to stop me. It's not, I'm not going to be insulted or anything like that. And yeah, so this is the title of it, the chapter in the book that this is included in is different, but the title when he wrote it and it was put on Un's review was Freud's sexual abuse and Benet Bereth. So I'll start reading, stop me whenever. In the last few years, there have been lots of news, reports, documentary films, and articles about sexual abuse of children in Orthodox Jewish communities.

In March 2017, for instance, Heretz reported that the Israeli police arrested 22 ultra-Orthodox Jews for sex crimes against minors and women, and in July 2019, the Times of Israel reported that the Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman was alleged to have improperly intervened to aid at least 10 sex offenders from Israel's ultra-an Orthodox community. In 2015, Jewish Attorney Michael Lescher wrote sex abuse, shonda, and concealment in Orthodox Jewish communities to document, quoting. The dismal history of how far too many of those cases have been assiduously concealed, both from the public and from the police, how influential rabbis and community leaders have sided with the alleged abusers against their victims, how victims and witnesses of sexual abuse have been pressured, even threatened, not to turn to secular law,

enforcement for help, how autonomous Jewish patrols displacing the role of official police in some large and heavily religious Jewish neighborhoods have played an inglorious part in the history of cover-ups, how some Jewish communities have even succeeded in manipulating law enforcement officials to protect suspected abusers. This reminds me of the story of how Freud, having stumbled upon the widespread reality of child abuse among his mostly Jewish clientele, covered it up with the theory that all little girls desire their father's penises and all little boys dream of screwing their mothers and named his theory after a Gentile myth.

Just to, not that this is Frank. Well, just the bit about how the Jewish community will aggressively, not even self-police, but more of like, do. to run interference between themselves and the larger community. There was an article like 10 years ago in the New York Times that was talking about the tendency for the rabbinical Orthodox Jews to ostracize members of their community

if they brought stories of sexual abuse to the broader Gentile public. so I wish I could pull that up I just there's um I don't know I'm not finding it now but yeah it's just it's it's remarkable I hesitate to say exactly that that sexual abuse or sexual violence is like sort of intrinsic to the to the it's like Jewish social milieu but it's hard to argue otherwise all right uh two Freud's assault on truth. The story has been told by Jeffrey Masson in the Assault on Truth, Freud's suppression of the seduction theory. In 1895 and 1896, Freud listening to his neurotic and hysterical patients became convinced that most of them had suffered from traumatic sexual abuse in their

childhood. The traumatic origin of hysteria, and overused diagnosis in these days, had already been discussed by neurologists, including Jean-Martin-Charkot, whose conferences Freud had attended in Paris, and Hermann Oppenheim, who published in Berlin in 1889, a treatise on traumatic neurosis. Neuroses. Yet psychological traumas of sexual nature were rarely discussed openly. On the other hand, there were medical publications known to Freud, documenting the frequency of violence on children, including sexual assaults, but they focused on the fact that physical consequences. In April 1896, confident to have made a major breakthrough in psychiatry, Freud presented

his findings to the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna, his first major public address to his peers. His lecture met with total silence. According to Masan, Freud was urged never to publish it, lest his reputation be damaged beyond repair. He found himself isolated. nevertheless published his paper, the ideology of hysteria? Are you familiar with that term?

Actually, I'm not. I think it's just an orthodox pronunciation of ideology, just to say the origin of hysteria. Freud's conclusions are drawn from 18 case studies, six men and 12 women, all of which he claims bear his general thesis. This is quoting. I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria, there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood, but which can be reproduced through the work of psychoanalysis in spite of the intervening decades. I believe that this is an important finding, the discovery of a kaputnili in neuropathology. Sexual experiences and

childhood consisting in stimulation of the genitals, coitus-like acts, and so on, must therefore be recognized in the last analysis as being the traumas which lead to a hysterical reaction to events at puberty and to the development of hysterical symptoms. Yeah, just the idea, that's the UK spelling of ideology, and that phrase Caputnili is also just saying the origin of neuropathology. Okay. Freud suggests that this conclusion applies. not only to hysteria, but to most neuroses. Among other remarks, he suggests that children who aggress sexually other children do so

as a result of having been sexually abused themselves. Quote, children cannot find their way to acts of sexual aggression unless they have been seduced previously. However, one year after this article, Freud decided that he had made a mistake in believing his patients. He determined that what he had taken as repressed memories of sexual abuse were, in fact, fantasies. For the rest of his life, he would keep telling how he overcame his era and discovered that these fantasies were intended to cover up the auto-erotic activity of the first years of childhood, to embellish it and raise it to a higher plane. And now, from behind the fantasies, the whole range of a child's sexual-like came to life.

The history of, this is from the history of the psychoanalytic movement 1919. Yeah, and just to clarify, I mean, there's a lot of sort of unorthodox language and spelling of common terms in the English language. Like fantasy with a pH is not meant to be synonymous with fantasy with an F. Fantasy with the pH is, and this is something that other psychoanalyst picked up. later like Melanie Klein, but it's basically a sort of mental representation of the wishes and desires of the individual. So it's not quite, it's not a fantasy with an F, it's a fantasy with a PH. It's connected to sort of unconscious mental processes and the way that they they generate this, they generate wish fulfillments.

It's tied to Freud's idea of the wish fulfillment, but also frustrated wishes. So that's just generally what the pH is supposed to denote. From the standpoint of Freud's earlier theory, which he euphemistically called the seduction theory, his new theory of spontaneous infantile sexual fantasies can be seen as a projection, not unlike sex offenders' tendency to blame their victims. The patients themselves are now accused of both sexual passion and murderous fantasies towards their parents. By repressing these self-generated impulses, says Freudian orthodoxy,

they have created their own neuroses, which may, in hysterics, take the form of false memories of abuse. 35 years later, Freud's most gifted disciple, once president of the International Psychoanalytic Association stumbled on the same realization that Freud had shared in the ideology of hysteria. Sandor Ferengi wrote in his diary in July 1932 that the Oedipus Complex could well be the result of real acts on the part of adults, namely violent passions directed toward the children who then develop a fixation, not from desire, as Freud maintained, but from fear. My mother and father will kill me.

if I don't love them, and identify with their wishes. Overcoming his apprehension of Freud's reaction, Ferensi dared present his conclusions before the 12th International Psychoanalytic Congress in a lecture titled Confusion of Tongues between the Adults and the Children. His paper contains a number of important ideas confirmed by later research, such as the victim's psychological identification with the aggressor or introjection. The aggressor disappears, as external reality and becomes intra-psychic instead of extra-psychic, so that even the guilt feelings

of the aggressor are interjected. Forency hypothesized that helplessness caused the victim to empathize with the aggressor, a process today known as Stockholm Syndrome. Yeah, I mean, that's what introjection basically refers to. It's the internalizing, making a mental model of some authority. the internalizing of the characteristics or habits or mentalities of some authority figure. Now, that takes a very different context,

you know, the difference between like internalizing a teacher or a schoolmaster or a parent or an older sibling as opposed to internalizing the attitudes and dispositions of an abusive, of an abuser. I mean, that also, there's a lot of Freudian concepts, not to like get way ahead of where we're at already, but there's a lot of Freudian concepts that take on a different character. If you view them as being sort of compensatory responses to extreme trauma, extreme sexual violence, like repetition, compulsion is another example.

repetition compulsion in like the orthodox Freudian worldview is the tendency of an individual to repeat some some action, usually a dysfunctional action, until they gain mastery over it and then can integrate that aspect of themselves into the larger psychological world. But when you think about the habit or the tendency of like sex abuse, victims to engage in repetitive sexual dysfunction to like volunteer themselves into pornography or prostitution or go from one disastrous sexually violent situation to another disastrous sexually violent situation it they never get to a point of mastery and and it's sort of like dispels the whole idea of the cleaned up interpretation of what that is supposed to

express. It makes more sense in the context of, as we're going to see a little bit later on, that individual has a split internally and they don't have the only frame of reference they have is this violent, chaotic, traumatic, traumatic aggressor of personality. extreme adversity, especially fear of death, may also trigger a premature development for which Ferensi uses the metaphor of a fruit that ripens or becomes sweet prematurely when injured by the beak of a bird or of the premature ripening of a wormy fruit. Shock can cause a part of the person to mature suddenly, not only emotionally but intellectually

as well. Such traumatic maturation happens at the expense of psychological integration, and Forency brings in the notion of a personality split. Quote, there can be no shock, no fright without traces of a personality split. In his personal diary reflecting on a patient who cannot remember having been raped, but dreams of it ceaselessly, Forency writes, I know from other analyses that a part of our being can die, and while the remaining part of our self may survive the trauma, it awakens with a gap in its memory. Actually, it is a gap in the personality, because not only is the memory of the struggle to the death effaced, but all other associatively linked memories disappear, perhaps

forever. The observation is consistent with the findings of French medical doctor and psychologist Pierre Jeunet, whose work has long been overshadowed by Freudian psychology, but has generated increased interest since the 1980s. Jeunay theorized, the first model of disassociative identity disorders, now included in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. In Les Nevroses, Genet wrote, Justice Synthesis and Association are the great characteristics of all normal psychological operations, so disassociation is the essential characteristic of all diseases of the mind. Disassociation accounts for the evolution of traumatic memories composed of psychological, sensory,

effective, and cognitive experiences, which Chenet calls Idaefece. These fragmented aspects of the experience do not allow a real memory to integrate the biography of the subject, and instead develop into separate psychic entities which nevertheless interfere with the main personality. In the most severe cases, it can develop into schizophrenia or multiple personalities. Forency's lecture, confusion of tongues, met with the same disapproval from members of the psychoanalytic association of Freud's ideology of hysteria had met with the Viennese psychiatrist.

Forency was ostracized by Freud and his sectarian disciples, and his paper was never translated in English for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, as was customary. He died a few years later, a broken man. Section 3. The Hidden Faults of the Father This story raises two questions. First, what is it that made Freud change his mind in the first place and made him shun French's work 30 years later? Secondly, and more importantly, why was Freud's theory so successful, despite being long-proven scientifically flawed and its therapeutic value

baseless? On the first question, Massan shares his conviction that what Freud had uncovered in 1896, that in many instances, children are the victims of sexual violence and abuse within their families, becomes such a liability that he literally had to banish it from his consciousness. This theory has been challenged, and Massan has been criticized for exaggerating the negative reaction to Freud's seduction theory. All that can be said with confidence is that his paper didn't bring him the instant fame he expected. That's actually, that's the first time I actually ever heard that. I thought the only story I'd ever heard was that he had presented this idea of sexual violence as the precursor to psychological dysfunction and that he was basically threatened with losing his career for proposing something that was so shocking to the senses of bourgeois European society.

I guess if you, I would have to see, you know, I tried to click that link there. I think that's a dead link. So I don't know if you can actually find the source that he's claiming. But it would be interesting to find other accounts. Certainly if he's self-censored out of a sort of inability to leapfrog his career, that would be a lot more damning than simply he thought that he was going to be shut out of the discipline and out of the academic system for proposing something that was so barbaric and shocking. That, again, that would also put a very different spin on, because Freud

also, the thing that's like you would not really get this from just reading the Freudian auvoir, so to speak, he was intensely self-conscious about his work. He was intensely self-conscious about the sort of the psychoanalysis as a sort of universal system of interpretation. Like, that was one of his grander ambitions was not just that it would be a therapeutic intervention. Or, you know, his ambition wasn't just that he was advancing a science of the human nervous system. he later again I invoked like from from Moses to monotheism he invoked his own system as a as a as a medium for literary criticism for historical analysis for sociology so he thought it was a way a revolutionary way to look at everything not just the human psyche and not just medicine so on the one hand he does have this reputation as like an intentionally self-conscious sort of career-minded person, even his relationship with Carl Jung, it was to an extent, a sort of opportunistic way to present his ideas to Gentile society by having them come

through the mouth of a Gentile speaker. So I guess maybe it's not a stretch to argue that he self-censored out of a frustration with the lack of positive reception, but the common explanation, going all the way back to Stefan Malianu, Stefan Malian who did a video about this like 10 or 15 years ago that the reason

he pivoted from the seduction theory to this sort of if you want to say victim-blaming account of mental illness was basically because he had been threatened by his peers in the in the discipline.

So I guess that's up for debate. Mason takes other factors into account. He believes that Freud was influenced by the wacky or what the hell is that word? Oderhineurologist William Fleiss, unhappy inventor of the nasal reflex neuroses with whom Freud had developed a very peculiar emotional bond. incidentally, Fleiss's son would later write on sexual abuse and hint of his own abuse by his father. Misan is the editor of the unexigated version of Freud's letters to Flyce. Freud destroyed Foyd destroyed, but failed to have his own letters destroyed, which provide unique information on the way Freud elaborated his theories.

Yet at the end of the fascinating investigation, Misan amiss that the full explanation for Freud's sudden conversion alludes him. Additional insight has been supplied by two books published almost simultaneously, 1979, one in French and one in German, both translated in English in 1982, Marie Balmari, Freud and the Hidden Faults of the Father, and Marianne Kroll, Freud and his father. Both draw extensively from Freud's letters to Fleiss,

which document how Freud was led to his theoretical about face by his introspective self-analysis. Valmari and Kroll point out that Freud undertook this self-analysis just after the death of his father Jacob. On November 2nd, 1896, 10 days after his father's death, Freud writes a flese about a dream he had the night before his funeral, and which appeared a sign saying, you are requested to close the eyes, which he interpreted as referring to one's duty to the dead. Yet on February 11, 1896, after mentioning that forced oral sex on children can result in neurotic symptoms, He adds, ultimately my own father was one of those perverts and is responsible for the hysteria of my brother, all of whose symptoms are identifications, and those of several younger sisters. The frequency of this circumstance often makes me wonder.

The following summer, he went through a depressive episode and wrote on July 7th, I still do not know what has been happening to me. Something from the deepest depths of my own neurosis set itself against any advance in the understanding of the neurosis. neuroses, and you have somehow been involved in it. Soon after, September 21st, he announced to his friend, I want to confide in you immediately the great secret that has been slowly dawning on me in the last few months. I no longer believe in my neurotica, his seduction theory. He gave his one explanation, the surprise that in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse. In the next letter, October 3rd, he wrote confidently that in the case of his own neuroses, the old man plays no active part. Finally, October 15th, he referred to the

Oedipus story, quoting, A single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found in my own case, too, the phenomenon of being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood. Balmari and Krull independently built a strong case that Freud backed off from a theory which tarnished the ideal image of the father he was grieving. After his father's death, Freud felt constrained by a mandate that he was unable to resist, and hence, dutiful son that he was, took the guilt upon his own shoulders with help of his Oedipus theory. Balmari and Krull bring in the equation a recent biographical discovery of Jacob Freud's

less than perfect behavior, the forgotten second wife named Rebecca, who mysteriously disappears, possibly by suicide, at the time of Jacob's marriage with his third wife, the beautiful Amelia Nathanson, half his age, an already pregnant of Sigmund, a fact Jacob tried to conceal by falsifying Sigmund's date of birth. In light of post-Froidian developments in transgenerational depth psychology, it is possible that Freud had from an early age an intuitive sense of a hidden fault of the father linked to his own identity, which may have combined with memories of his father's sexual abuse on himself and his brothers and sisters. During his self-analysis at the age of 40, the whole thing came knocking at the door of his

consciousness, but he finally surrenders to the self-conscious imperative to close the eyes, to cover up the menacing truth of his father's faults. Freud invents of the Oedipus complex, changing children, charging children themselves as polymorphous perversion. while Mary points out that in his personal identification with his hero Oedipus, who solved the riddle of the sphinx, Freud truncated the myth. According to Greek tragedians, Oedipus's father, Laeus, was cursed by the gods for seducing a young teenage boy

and leading to his suicide. Then, frightened by the oracle's prophecy that he would be killed by his own son if he conceived one, Laus had his newborn son abandoned in the forest, ankles pierced by the middle with iron spikes, Euripides, the Phoenician maidens. Thus, in the complete myth, Oedipus's predestination to kill his father and marry his mother is not determined by his own impulses, but by the faults of his own father. For Balmary, Freud's ignorance of this part of the myth reveals and symbolizes his own blind spot, his failure to discover the secret guilt of the father, both of his own father, both of his own father. father, and by consequence, the fathers of his neurotic and hysterical patience. Got anything there?

No, no, no, I'm just following them once. Keep going. All right, here we go. Part four. The dark emotional powers of Jewishness. Neither Masan nor Balmari deal with the Jewish aspect of this issue. Marion Kroll hints that the... father's mandate to close the eyes was a question of filial piety on which ultimately the entire

Jewish tradition is based. But although Jewish herself, she does not insist on that aspect. For an interesting reflection on the Jewish hidden background of the Oedipus Complex, we can turn to the very stimulating book of John Murray Cuddehy, the ordeal of civility. The author points out that Freud had been fascinated by Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex from his adolescence. When he saw it played in 1885, it made again a deep and mysterious impression on him. Twelve years later, he wrote to Flaise that he found with his new theory of universal repressed wishes of incest and parasite the explanation for the gripping power of Oedipus Rex. In other words, comments Cuddehy, Freud proposes a theory to explain the play's power over him and to make

intelligible why he should identify so deeply with its hero Oedipus. It is, in the the course of that effort that the core of the theory of psychoanalysis is born. But then Cudah he suggests that Freud failed to see the real origin of his fascination with Oedipus Rex. What had resonated deeply in him from the time he first read Oedipus Rex was not so much the general plot of the play, the hero killing his father and marrying his mother, as a circumstances in which Oedipus killed his father, coming down a narrow road. Edipus was rudely ordered so step aside by the herald of the king, then was struck on the head by the king himself. In rage, Oedipus slew the king, his herald and the rest of his retinue except one.

This story, not acted but narrated in the play, bears an uncanny resemblance with another story that had made a lasting impression on Freud a few years earlier, as he explained in the interpretation of dreams. This is a story of a father, this is a story that his father, a Stettel Jew from Moravia, where Sigmund was born, Moravia, where Sigmund was born, had told him when he was 10 or 12 years old. Quoting, to show how much better things were now than they had been in his days. When I was a young man, he said, I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace. I was well-dressed and had a new cap on my head.

A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted, Jiu, get off the pavement. And what did you do, I asked. I went into the roadway and picked up my cap, was his quiet reply. That struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding a little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another which befitted my feelings better, the scene in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barka, made his boy swear before the household altered to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time, Hannibal has had a place in my fantasies.

Freud, Cuddehy argues, had experienced shame of his father, and to be ashamed of a father is a kind of moral parasite. Quoting, Freud presumably experienced not only this rage and shame, but guilt about the rage and shame. He quickly censored these unacceptable feelings, unacceptable to a dutiful son, ostensibly proud of his father. He repressed them. Years later, he encounters Sophocles tragedy, and it lays a spell on him. Still later after his father's death, he rationalized the spell with a universal theory that discharged him from further inquiry into his own family's story. But the ID fix, that Oedipus was to become for Freud, Cuddaughey maintains, hinges on a small detail, small but structurally indispensable of the action of the story, that Freud never mentions in all the countless times he retells the legend, a social insult, a discourtesy on the road, stemming from someone in a position of social superiority. King Leus to the unknown wayfarer, Oedipus,

just as a Christian in Freiburg, who forced Jacob Freud into the gutter. According to Cuddehy, the supposedly universal Oedipus complex that Freud thought he discovered was in reality the veil of characteristically was the veil of a characteristically Jewish complex of his time.

Again, I was just going to say, because in his book, Totem and Tavu, Freud is basically trying to, again, create like an originary scene for how societies sort of organize themselves. And the basic idea is this idea, the myth of the primal horde, which, to put it really, really simplistically is it describes the symbolic murder of the father by the sons. And I'm just, I'd never looked at the, because it's been like many, many, many years since I read some of these books. Certainly before I ever took on like this kind of framework to, to think about them, I'm sitting here just wondering now what the implications of his anthropological

explanation would be, you know, in the context of this Jewish persecution, the weakness of his own father, the way his own parental sort of, by that way the ID fixate means fetish. So the way his own sort of fetishized parental relations are informing his his theorizing. I'm going to mull that one a little bit more, but yeah, you can continue. even if we judge that um i already read that one um or did i don't think you did okay even if we i'm sorry you know that's yeah even if we judging that's right yeah even if we judge that that thesis overstrained it is questionable how the fantasies with ph of avenging and killing the father could merge we can appreciate how cutahy draws attention to the fact that freud's father the father whom

he felt compelled to exculpate, but toward whom he nevertheless experienced a murder wish, was a Jewish father recently immigrated from Yiddish land into the heart of European civilization. Freud's disciple and first biographer Ernest Jones remarks that Freud felt himself to be Jewish to the core, and evidently it meant a great deal to him. Books dealing specifically with Freud's Jewishness, such as Moysha Gracer, dual allegiance, Freud is a modern Jew, Sunny Press 1994, can rely on several statements made by Freud himself, either in private correspondence or in Jewish environment. In the preface for the Hebrew translation of totem and taboo, for example, asking himself rhetorically, what is Jewish in his work? Freud answered a very

great deal and probably its very essence. In a speech prepared for delivery at the Benet-Brith Lodge in Vienna in 1926, Freud explained his motivation for joining 30 years earlier in 1897. Quoting, whenever I have experienced feelings of national exultation, I have tried to suppress them as disastrous and unfair, frightened by the warning example of those nations among which we Jews live. But there remained enough to make the attraction of Judaism and the Jews irresistible. Many dark emotional powers, all the stronger, the less they could be expressed in words, as well as the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the familiarity of the same psychological structure. So I became one of you. The statement is an excellent. I was just going to say that sounds very much like the ordeal of civility hypothesis right there, that trying to become, stepping out of the schedel, stepping out of their sort of tight-knit, borderline, incestuous little world, and suddenly they're confronted with, you know, the technological modernity.

of European society, I don't know if this is Cudahy's argument because I've actually never read the ordeal of civility, but that could, if we wanted to take a more cynical approach to explaining why he has gone through these changes in his psychological theory, I mean, it could be that he wanted to, in the same way he wanted to absolve his father, he also wanted to absolve his people of their own dysfunction, their ugliness, the violence that their community sort of harbors that in bringing Jewish society to Gentile society, he wanted to sort of make their dysfunction like not a particular dysfunction? I mean, I don't know, would we say that his theorizing, the universalizing of this theory is a way to whitewash particularly Jewish

dysfunction? Is it a way to help integrate Jews into Gentile society by saying, well, all of this expressly Jewish dysfunction is actually sort of a universal human tendency? I don't know, but that sentence, so I became one of you, is very telling to me. Well, what I think is interesting here is that he says that he joined the B'nai Brith in 1897, which is, I believe it says a year his father died. I believe it says that earlier in the article. So he's, it seems like if he's joining the Beney Brith at that point, he's embracing his Judaism as his father is passing. And, you know, I don't know what. His dad dies on November 2nd, 1896, or 10 days before that.

And then the next year he joins the B'nai Brith, which is, I assume, to be around other Jews or even to find a replace his father in some way by finding somebody who, you know, in a leadership role in Judaism. I don't know, just theorizing. Yeah. The statement is an excellent illustration of what Kudahee calls the ordeal of civility. The struggle of every Jew who wishes to assimilate yet feels unable to overcome the dark emotional powers of his ancestral Jewishness, with its implicit imperative not to assimilate. Jewishness has much to do with what Yvonne Bosermenegi calls those invisible loyalties that combine a person to his ancestors by an irresistible system of values.

obligations, and debts. The question is to what extent Freud's psychoanalytical theory is the result of Freud's surrender to those dark emotional powers. We must take Freud seriously when he tells us in the interpretation of dreams that his own Jewishness took the form of an identification with Hannibal and the fantasy of taking vengeance on the Romans. He went on to say, quoting, I myself had walked in Hannibal's footsteps. Hannibal, with whom I had achieved this point of similarity, had been my favorite hero during my years at the gymnasium. Moreover, when I finally came to realize the consequences of belonging to an alien race

and was forced by the anti-Semitic feeling among my classmates to take a definite stand, the figure of the Semitic commander assumed still greater proportions in my imagination. Hannibal and Rome symbolized in my youthful eyes to struggle between the tenacity, of the Jews and the organization of the Catholic Church. The significance for our emotional life, which the anti-Semitic movement has since assumed helped to fix the thoughts and impressions of those early days. Thus, the desire to go to Rome has in my dream life become the mask and symbol for a number of warmly cherished wishes, for whose realization one had to work with the tenacity and

single-mindedness of the Punic General, though their fulfillment at times seemed as remote as Hannibal's lifelong wish to enter Rome. The significance of this public confession printed in 1899 for all the world to read cannot be overstated. Here Freud names as a driving force for his life the fantasy of entering Rome, the Christian world, and destroying it to avenge the Phoenicians, the Jews. If Freud was deeply influenced by his Jewish background, so were the other founding members of the psychoanalytical movement. Dennis Klein writes, in Jewish origins of the psychoanalytic analytical movement, quoting. From its beginning in 1902 to 1906, all 17 members were Jewish.

The full significance of this number lies again in the way they viewed themselves, for the analysts were aware of their Jewishness and frequently maintained the sense of Jewish purpose and solidarity. This feeling of positive Jewish pride formed the matrix of the movement in the psychoanalytical circle. As a spur to renewed independence, it tightened the bond among the members and powered their self-image of a redemptive elite. The exception is Carl Jung, who Freud named President of the International Psycho-analytic Association in 1910, precisely does the deflect the reproach that psychoanalysis was a Jewish science.

Interestingly, Jung is the only member who never subscribed to Freud's theory of infantile sexuality. In response to a letter by Carl Abraham, who complained that Jung seems to be reverting to his former spiritual, intellectualistic inclinations. Freud explained, it is really easier for you than it is for Jung to follow my ideas for, you stand nearer to my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship. Freud asked Abraham not to antagonize Jung because it was only by his appearance on the scene that psychoanalysis escaped the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair. In contrast to Jung, Abraham was the most zealot supporter of Freud's theory.

of infantile sexuality. In the history of the soco-analytical movement 1919, Freud wrote that the last word in the question of traumatic ideology was later unsaid by Abraham when he drew attention to the fact that just the peculiar nature of a child's sexual constitution enables it to provoke sexual experiences of a peculiar kind, that is to say, traumas, self-inflicted traumas, so to speak. Freud was referring to a 19017 paper by Abraham, the experiencing of sexual trauma as a form of sexual activity. It is perhaps significant that Abraham, son of an Orthodox rabbi, was also the most ethnocentric of Freud's disciples.

He wrote in 1913, an essay on neurotic exogamy, diagnosing Jewish men who say they could never marry a Jewess with a neurosis resulting from disappointed, incestuous love. I was wondered why, yeah, not to interrupt too much, I always wondered why, I mean, because that basically Jung's rejection of the seduction theory, really his rejection of Freud's sort of like, if you want to say fixation on childhood sexuality was the wedge that drove them apart. and the further that as that sort of disagreement became more pronounced, then Freud started to more aggressively attack Carl Jung privately and publicly, even taking out full-page and newspaper ads, saying that he was basically undermining him in his career. I've always wondered why Jung didn't take up that,

explanation of Freud's and I just wonder if that speaks to like a fundamentally different sort of I don't know if you want to say just cultural hygiene between Gentiles and Jews that it's like less credulous to like a Gentile

of well upbringing to believe that there's rampant sexual violence going on I don't know Jung was famously sort of sort of had his own sexual hangups or maybe not hangups per se but we'll put it this way he he brought pleasure into his private practice quite a bit in fact for it traumatized him for romancing his his patients and Carl Jung would even like when he was giving speaking engagements, he would travel with his wife and his family and his

mistress. So he had his own sort of sexual, I guess if you want to say, sexual identity related issues, but it was never clear to me why he took such a conflict with Freud on that point. I mean, I don't know, just wondering out loud. well here's a question for you and i don't know if you know this or not um you know basically the beginning of this and and through the beginning it seems to imply that there may have been a problem with uh parents fathers molesting their their children in in the jewish community and that it still happens through today um back then do you know how do you know how do you know how Was that just common?

Was that just something that was, you know, was done by more than just, you know, Jews? There were a lot of cultures that engaged in that? I certainly couldn't point to, like, empirical proof of that. I mean, I think it's probably not just a problem in, like, the Jewish community. But, I mean, the type of dysfunction that Carl Jung, I mean, there was not a lack of sort of friction between him and his father, but it was of an entirely different nature. Jung's father, I think, was, I don't remember, I don't think he killed himself, but he was sort of like a faith. He was a pastor, but he also had his own sort of personality conflicts.

Yeah, I don't know. think I have an answer to that question. I don't think it's a strictly Jewish phenomenon. I think what is unique to the Jewish community and clearly has been for a long time is, like, circumcision is effectively part of their tradition and has been for a very long time. And do we have to get specific into a kind of, you know, overly narrow idea that sexual violence, I mean, to me, circumcision is a kind of sexual violence. the rabbi cleaning the aftermath of that with his mouth. This is basically a violation, whether we want to talk in more overt terms or in a sort of,

to borrow Freudian word, a sort of sublimated religious excuse for engaging in the same kind of territorial behavior. It's no matter what way you want to look at it, there's something intrinsic to their community that produces that sort of dysfunction. But, I mean, I don't think it's, if we just wanted to talk about the problem of incest more generally or like familial sexual violence more generally, I think it's out there.

What's it? I did my own show on my substack, EBL, on the work of George Batai recently. And one of the questions that we had sort of raised, George Pottai was a French, well, he was a seminary student, and then he became sort of a, sort of your stereotypical kind of French pervert philosopher. And he carried on this tradition that you see a lot during Freud's time and after, where there's this extreme preoccupation with incest as a sort of foundational. anthropological, psychological question to be answered about human nature. And some of the most obvious examples of intellectuals who broached that question were Freud, but also Levi Strauss, who was also Jewish. And there were a number of Jewish intellectuals at that time who, in their

social theorizing, were wondering about the foundational role incest plays what it tells us about human nature. They weren't all Jews who did that. George Batai was not Jewish, but he was also very heavily influenced by Levi Strauss. And, you know, that to me is like sort of an indication that there's that there's an overrepresentation of this problem in that community, but I don't think by any stretch of the imagination, they were the only ones to uniquely deal with that. Okay. New section. Denial projection inversion. I suggest if Freud's abandon of the seduction theory and its cover up by the Oedipus complex were motivated half unconsciously at least by Freud's loyalty, not only to his father, but to his Jewish community. In the 1890s, Freud's clientele was drawn exclusively from the Jewish middle class. Imagine if Freud's seduction theory had earned him the recognition he craved for, Although he disguised the identity of his patients in his case studies, it would not have been long before his work was attacked, not just as Jewish science, but as evidence of the depravity of Jewish Moors. However, I don't think Freud's reasoned consciousness is, I don't think Freud reasoned consciously in this manner.

As he was turning a blind eye in the incestuous sexuality of his patient's family, his blindness was not fake but psychologically constrained. It is the blindness that characterizes Jewishness. At the core, Jewishness is the conviction, deeply internalized from the earliest age of the superiority of Jews over non-Jews, chosenness. Anything contradicting this superiority creates a cognitive dissonance which is overcome by denial. Denial means projection. To protect the dirty secret of child abuse in Jewish families, including his own, Freud projected an imaginary reprimand, infest infantile perversion on all mankind. Projection in turn means inversion.

Freud's close disciple, Otto Rank, claimed that Jews had a more primitive and therefore more healthy sexuality than Gentiles. Freudians and Freudo-Marxists have systematically denounced Christian civilization as suffering from sexual repression. According to Wilhelm Reich, anti-Semitism is itself a symptom of sexual frustration and could be cured by sexual liberation, the mass psychology of fascism 1934, an improvement from Leo Pinsker's theory that Judeophobia was a hereditary and incurable disease transmitted for 2,000 years. In order to understand the psychological background of the Rikian messian messian

mission to cure the Christian West, and in order to see more clearly the projective nature of the psychoanalytical theory of repression, it is helpful to know that the personal story of Wilhelm Reich, which reads as a caricature of Freud. At 10 years old, when he realized that his mother was having an affair with his tutor, the young Wilhelm thought of blackmailing his mother into having sex with him. Eventually, he confided in his father about his mother's adultery. In 1910, after a period of beatings from his father, his mother committed suicide, in which Reich blamed himself.

One of the most puzzling aspects of Jewish relationship with their host nations is its ambival. pattern on biblical history. Within Jewish thinking, saving the nations and destroying them are not two sides of the same coin, but one in the same, because what nations are supposed to be cured of is their very identity, their gods in biblical terms. According to Andrew Hines, author of Jews in the American soul, Jews have shaped American ideas about the mind and soul with the preoccupation to purge the evils they associated with Christian civilization. It really started with Freud. In September 1909, invited to give a series of lectures in New England, Freud jokingly asked his companion, Sandor Ferensi and Carl Jung, don't they know we're bringing them the plague? An extraordinary statement for a medical doctor pretending to have found a cure for neurosis and a prophetic one.

Freudianism became a justification for a sexual liberation that can be seen in retrospect as a massive sexual abuse of the youth. I don't want to rebut this too strongly. It's just worth pointing out that Reich was a critic of Freud. And that Reich, they met in 1919, Reich did try to get to some degree into Freud's inner circle, have access to his clientele. And he took up some of Freud's theorizing. But certainly by the end of his career, he was sort of an antagonist to Freud. Freud? And I think there's, I don't want to sound like I'm trying to do apologetics here,

because I'm not really a Freudian. I think he's an interesting person in, you know, intellectual history. But there's, there's sort of a difference between Freud and then Freudianism that followed after him. And there's a lot of people who took up Freud as a kind of revolutionary figure, it took his ideas as a vehicle for like anti-Christian, anti-Gentile, anti-Western polemics. I mean, as Laurent Grainot mentions earlier in the passage that you read, you know, a lot of the post-Marxist tradition was a blend of Freud and Marx, and it was taking up some of those ideas that really were compatible as a sort of, like, radical communist

polemic against, you know, the inherited tradition of Western society. But Reich in particular used this sort of freewheeling sexuality as a, as a, as a foundation of this theorizing it was a it was a foundation of his polemic against christian sexual morality um i don't know that i read into freud that as much although some of those quotes i had not heard that about the plague before so that's the first time i'm hearing that you're telling me for the first time um it's that is telling and and i i think it's undeniable that he had a conscious self-concept as a Jewish man interfacing with Gentile society, but sometimes I feel that he gets tarred a little bit too much.

Just a thought. Just for those who are watching, there's a picture here of Sigmund's grandson, Sir Clement Freud, claiming he is a British MP pedophiles. rape a suspected murder of three-year-old girl. If you go to Wikipedia, all of these allegations were made after his death. And I don't think anything could be proven, but two or three women gave very similar accounts. So I know people who are watching this are going to be like, hey, what's that? What's that? So all I can say is Clement Freud has a Wikipedia page, and I'm sure if you want to go down a rabbit hole.

Part six. Benet Brith and the Road to Fame. By a stunning coincidence, Freud was initiated into the recently founded Benet Brith in September 1897, precisely the time of his conversion to the dogma of infantile sexuality. Dennis Klein writes in chapter three of his book, the book, The Prefiguring of the Psychoanalytical Movement, Freud and the Bonae Brith, that after the bitter disappointment of being denied professorship, Freud filled through the Bonae Brith the professional as well as the social vacuum in his life. He was a very active member attending almost every meeting during the first decade, his most productive years. He recruited at least three members, and in 1901 was a founding father of a second

lodge in Vienna, the Harmony Lodge. The same year, he gave a talk on goals and purposes of the Beney Broth Society. Freud often presented his work to the Beney Brith before publishing it. In this respect, writes Klein, the Viennese B'A Brith Lodge was a precursor of the movement of psychoanalysis. After his death in 1939, the Benay-Brith of Vienna continued relentlessly, the support granted during his lifetime to the famous brother. To what extent were the Ben-A-Brith Masonic meetings influential in Freud's swing from the seduction theory to the Oedipus theory? No one can say. However, we can hold as fairly certain that Freud's membership in the Ben-A-Brit was influential as becoming one of the major intellectual stars and gurus of modernity. As a scientist,

Freud was a failure, duped by his own unconscious and unrealistic confidence that he could solve the human enigma by self-analysis alone. He was also an imposter who, in his published case studies, invented cures when there was none, as investigations and as the real biographies of his patients have shown. True, he was sometimes insightful, but the hagiographic image of Freud as the discoverer of the unconscious is totally unwarranted, as Henri Ellenberger has shown known in his classic study, the discovery of the unconscious. Quoting, throughout the 19th century, there existed a well-rounded system of dynamic psychiatry, the basic features of the first dynamic psychiatry were the use of hypnosis

is an approach to the unconscious mind, the interest in certain specific conditions called magnetic diseases, the concept of a dual model of the mind with a conscious and an unconscious ego, the belief in the psychogenesis of many emotional and physical conditions, and the use of specific psychotherapeutic procedures. The therapeutic channel was seen as being the rapport between hypnotist and patient. The cultural impact of the first dynamic psychiatry was far greater than is generally believed. It could easily be argued that in matters to psychology, every sensible thing that Freud said had been said before him and that almost everything he said hadn't been said before has been

proven wrong. So why did Freud become famous? The long answer is that Freud benefited from the same kind of communication networking that produced many other Jewish intellectual, quote-unquote, geniuses, and made French novelist Andrei Gide comment in 1914 in his diary about this tendency to constantly emphasize the Jew, this predisposition to recognizing in him talent, even genius. The shorter answer to the question above is, B'nai Brith. I will not suggest that the B'nai Brit supported Freud's Oedipus theory because they saw his. its potential for the moral corruption of the West. Nor do I suggest that the Bé, Brith, and Freud conspired to ruin Western civilization with a pestilential idea of infantile sexuality.

But I do suggest that had Freud maintained his earlier conviction in the reality of the abuses suffered by the Jewish parents, he would not have received as much support. Probably none. To clarify this point is it appropriate to recall a memorable demonstration of power by the B'nai Brith, which has an obvious relevance to Freud's intellectual biography. In 1913, the B'nai Breath created the Anti-Defamation League to save the life and reputation of Leo Frank, the wealthy young president of the Atlanta chapter of the B'nai Brith, who was convicted of the rape and murder of Mary Fagan, a 13-year-old girl working in his pencil factory.

The evidence for Frank's guilt was overwhelming, but tremendous financial resources were deployed for his legal defense, including false testimonies, and an intense publicity was orchestrated in the news media, with the New York Times devoting enormous coverage to this case. I quote from Ron Unz's article. Quoting, for almost two years to nearly limitless funds deployed by Frank supporters covered the cost of 13 separate appeals on the state and federal levels, including to the U.S. Supreme Court, while the national media was used to endlessly vilify Georgia's system of justice in the harshest possible terms. Naturally, this soon generated a local reaction, and during this period, outraged Georgians began denouncing the wealthy Jews who were spending such enormous sums to

subvert the local criminal justice system. All appeals were ultimately rejected, and Frank's execution date for the rape and murder of the young girl finally drew near, but just days before he was scheduled to leave office. Georgia's outgoing governor commuted Frank's sentence, provoking an enormous storm of popular protests, especially since he was legal partner, Frank's chief defense lawyer, an obvious conflict of interest. A few weeks later, a group of Georgia citizens stormed Frank's prison farm, abducting and hanging him, with Frank becoming the first and only Jew lynched in American history.

Thanks to the mobilization of the Jewish power elite, as one man, Leo Frank had been turned from a convicted pedophile and child murder into a martyr of anti-Semitism. We don't know what Freud thought of this case, but there is an obvious resonance between his assault on truth and the B'nai Brits. If young Mary Fagan had visited a Freudian psychoanalyst before her atrocious death and complained of her boss's sexual overtures, she probably would have been told about her own penis envy. Had she protested, she would have been told that her protest proved her sexual repression.

Exactly as happened to Freud's patients, Dora, Ida Bauer by her real name, an 18-year-old girl suffering from hysterical symptoms. I will say this, the KKK up until this point really had no, the Jewish question, wasn't really on their radar. This basically was a turn in their organization. And actually, at that point, their organization had weakened, and this kind of woke them up. so yeah we see the uh what happens when when jewish power and money goes to protect their own people doing who've done something wrong or being accused of doing something wrong how other people just go wait a minute um you know let's start asking some questions about this so all right part seven

the Isaac complex. The son's repressed wish to murder his father is perhaps Freud's most fertile intuition. The problem is with Freud's abuse of generalization. Only the neurotic son of a destructive and manipulative father has a repressed wish to kill the father. Freud discovered this impulse

in himself and confounding his own self-analysis for a scientific quest of universal laws, he projected it on all mankind. But the fact that Freud's Jewish disciples all discovered the same impulse and that Freudianism became so widely accepted by Jews suggest that Freud's generalization was not without merit. It only suffered from the tendency of Jewish intellectuals

to project Jewish issues on all mankind. The child's repress wish to kill his father is not universally human, but may be characteristically Jewish. For the Jewish father is the guardian of Jewishness and the representative of the Jewish God, and every Jew aspires in the depth of his soul to free himself from Yahweh, the archetypal abusive and castrating father.

As Philip Brought's character, Smilesberger, says in Operation Shilock, to appeal to a crazy violent father, and for 3,000 years, that is what is to be a crazy Jew. And so the secret wish to murder the Jewish father is also a secret wish for the death of the Jewish God. It is therefore identical with the so-called Jewish self-patred that Theodore Lessing saw as affecting every Jew without exception. There is not a single man of Jewish blood in whom cannot be detected, at least the beginning of Jewish soul. self-hatred. This also begs the, makes me wonder, again, like,

thinking of his book from Moses to monotheism, if we're taking this point of view that Laurent is putting forth here, I mean, maybe there's a vested interest in Freud wanting to

complicate or problematize the Jewish view of themselves as being the first, and only authentic monotheistic people. I mean, I do think in that book he talked about Yahweh as being a volcanic god. I mean, these are sort of things that like contemporary, comparative religious scholars sort of look at. Certainly it's something anti-Semites look at and say, hmm, this is a particularistic god with a specific origin that reflects a aspect of the Jewish psyche.

and maybe it's not, you know, the one true loving God of the Bible, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it's certainly interesting to turn the psychoanalysis back on the psychoanalyst. That's always a fun game to play. We're almost done here, so I guess we're going to finish this up. Alrighty. By choosing a Greek myth as a metaphor for his theory, Freud was projecting on Gentiles a Jewish problem. Had he recognized the Jewish overtone of the complex, he might have called it the Isaac complex, since Isaac is the son that Abraham was willing to slaughter. The expression Isaac complex has actually been used by French heterodox psychoanalyst Jean-Pierre Fresco, who defines it as the overall consequences of the son's psyche of a father perceived as psychologically menacing, destroying, or murderous.

Fresco calls such a father Abramac. He draws his insight from a reading of Franz Kafka's autobiographical and posthumously published letter to the father, in which Kafka describes the devastating effect on his personality of a father whose means of education were abuse, threats, irony, spiteful laughter, and oddly enough self-pity. Kafka also wrote to his father, My writing was all about you. All I did there, after all, was to bemoaned what I could. could not be moan upon your breast. Kafka's major novels refer autobiographically to his relationship with his father and its deleterious psychic consequences.

The metamorphosis tells of Gregor Sams' transformation into a repulsive insect chased and killed by his father, whose incestuous violence is suggested in the scene where the father attacks his son from behind with a cane, tapping his feet and pushing out sibilants like a wild man. After the death of Gregor appears his sister Greta, his double in the other sex, the homosexualized son. In the verdict, George, anagram of Gregor, has just become engaged with Frida Brandenfeld, same initials as Felice Bauer, the woman who Kafka had just started dating, and announces it to his father. The father opposes a terrible prohibition to this project of marriage accompanied by extreme narcissistic violence.

The paternal prohibition of emancipation through marriage is linked to an incestuous domination that becomes clear when George submissively proposes to the father to exchange beds. Fresco also finds a psychic trace of the father in Kafka's novel The Trial, whose narrator Joseph Kaye was arrested without knowing who slandered him, nor who will judge him. According to Fresco, this incomprehensible and omnipotent slanderer accuser judge is the palimpsest of an archaic abrahamic father unconsciously interjected as an archaic and sadistic superego and turned into an inner prosecutor. I find it significant that Kafka, by his own omission, drew his inspiration from his

experience as a son of a psychopathic father, while his Jewish literary critics consider him quintessentially Jewish. By common consent, said Harold Bloom, Kafka is not only the strongest modern Jewish writer, but the Jewish writer. Hence, Israel's long, decade-long legal battle to secure his autographed manuscripts as national treasure. Who is right of Kafka and his critics? Does his genius come from being Jewish or from having a psychopathic father? Obviously, it is impossible to distinguish the two factors because the psychopathic father happens to be Jewish. he is, in Fresco's terms, the typical Abramic father, but are not all Jewish fathers

Abramic in the measures of their Jewishness? Is not the Jewish god a psychopathic father, and the psychopathic father of a Jewish god? Kafka perceived his sadistic father as a cruel divinity whose laws were totally arbitrary and yet unquestionable, just like the Jewish god. For me as a child, everything you called out to me was positively a heavenly commandment, he wrote in his letter to the father. From your armchair, you ruled the world. Your opinion was correct. Every other was mad, wild, masuga, not normal.

Your self-confidence, indeed, was so great that you had no need to be consistent at all, and yet never ceased to be right. Quoting, hence the world was for me divided into three parts, one in which I, the slave, lived under laws that had been invented only for me in which I could, I did not know why, never completely comply with. Then a second world, which is infinitely remote from mine, in which you lived, concerned with government with the issuing of orders and the annoyance about their not being obeyed, and finally a third world which everybody else lived happily and free from orders and from having to obey. I was continually in disgrace. Either I obeyed your

orders, and that was a disgrace for they applied, after all, only to me, or I was defiant, and this was a disgrace, too, for how could I presume to defy you? And I could not obey because I did not, for instance, have your strength, your appetite, your skill. Although you expected it of me as a matter of course, this was the greatest disgrace of all. I mean, as I was reading this section right here, the quoted section, I was just thinking of E. Michael Jones, Jewish revolutionary spirit where I mean he's just basically he's revolting against everything around him and all he wants to do is just be it seems like just be a solo man where the only the only person he has to answer to is himself I don't know yeah that that

that sort of radical individualistic streak does seem to be kind of characteristically Jewish Yeah, and it's been pushed upon us, upon this culture, upon America, and, you know, what used to be the West for 100 years now. It's a, you know, it's seen as a virtue. And if you go against that individualism, you're a communist, which is ironic considering where both of those ideas came from. Right. All right, part eight, and this is the last part. The trauma of eight-day circumcision. After all, the Abrahamic father is the executioner of the commandment given to Abraham.

As soon as he is eight days old, every one of your males, generation after generation, must be circumstized. Had Freud preserved his original insight into the psychological damage of sexual abuse on children, he might have eventually reflected on the impact of neonatal circumcision. but he has been rather discreet on the subject, though he didn't have his own sons circumcised. He broaches in his later books, but only in the context of anthropological speculations. In new introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, he speculated that during the human family's primeval period, castration used to be carried out by a jealous and cruel father upon growing boys, and a circumcision which so frequently plays a part in puberty rights among primitive

people is a clearly recognizable relic of it. Freud went further in Moses and monotheism. Circumcision is the symbolic substitute of castration, a punishment which the primeval father dealt his sons long ago out of an awfulness of his power, and whosoever accepted this symbol showed by so doing that he was ready to submit to his father's will, although it was at the cost of a painful sacrifice. Interestingly, Freud originally got that idea from Sandor Ferenci, who had written an article that greatly impressed Freud, that circumcision is a means of inspiring terror, a symbol of castration by the father. But we note that in the above quotations, Freud isn't referring to Jewish circumcision of eight-day children, only to circumcision of adolescent boys. given the Jewish undercurrent of Freud's intellectual biography, it is reasonable to assume that his inability to deal with the issue of Jewish neonatal circumcision is connected to his refusal to face the devastating reality of child abuse.

Isn't the first abuse suffered by every Jewish male that part of his parents and kin's circumcision on the eighth day? It physically impresses on every Jew and on all Jews collectively the traumatic domination of Yahweh and his covenant. The psychological impact of neonatal circumcision performed without anesthesia and causing unbearable pain has been studied by Professor Ronald Goldman, author of Circumcision, The Hidden Trauma. His research shows a disturbance in the mother-child bonding process after the ritual. Testimonyes from Mothers Who Observe Circumcision show that the mother's guilt is also part of the equation. Here is one from Elizabeth Pickard Ginsburg. I don't feel I can recover from it.

We had this beautiful baby boy in seven beautiful days, and this beautiful rhythm starting, and it was like something had been shattered. When he was first born, there was a tie with my young one, my newborn. And when the circumcision happened, in order to allow it, I had to cut off the bond. I had to cut off my natural instincts, and in doing so, I cut off a lot of feelings towards Jesse. I cut it off to repress the pain and to repress the natural instinct to stop the circumcision. The unnatural incestuous wish that Freud and his Jewish male disciples, is discovered in their repressed unconscious could perhaps be explained as a result of the inhibition

in mother-child bonding caused by the trauma of neonatal circumcision. A trauma cause at this age has little chance to ever be brought back into consciousness and be healed. More research is perhaps needed on the possible link between Jewish circumcision and the fact that, according to the 1906 Jewish encyclopedia, that the Jews are more subject to diseases of the nervous system than the other races and peoples among which they dwell. Research done by sociologist Leo Stroll in 1962 show that the rate of neuroses and character disorders among Jews was about three times higher, three times as high among Catholics and Protestants. In the future of an illusion, Sigmund Freud describes religion, meaning essentially Christianity, as a universal

obsessional neurosis, which has for believers the merit that their acceptance of the universal neuroses spares them the task of constructing a personal one. With a similar approach, Judaism can be described as a collective sociopathy. That does not mean that the Jews are sociopaths, but rather that in proportion to the degree of their identification as Jews, they are victims of a sociopathic mindset patterned from the Tanakh, marked in their flesh, impressed dramatically in their subconscious by circumcision, and fuel by their elites with the paranoia of anti-Semitism. The difference between collective sociopathy and individual sociopathy is the same as between collective neurosis and individual neurosis according to Freud.

Participation in a collective sociopathic mentality allows members of the community to channel sociopathic tendencies toward the outside of the community and to maintain inside a high degree of sociability. So I'm thinking, especially in the light of those last two sections, if you look at a lot of, if you look at some of the other like classic Freudian concepts, some of his defense mechanisms, even his tripartite model of human consciousness, the id, the ego, the super ego, it does, I mean, this is one of the reasons going through my education, but also just reflecting on it throughout my life, I never really considered myself a Freudian was because I never felt in my own experience as a thinking person, any identification with or recognition of some of these things that he treated as sort of paramount to the human experience.

So, you know, the idea of a super ego as this sort of crushing mental tyrant urging you into conformity, I mean, that sounds a lot more like how Lauren Goyanaut talks about the relationship that Jewish men, Jews in particular, feel towards Yahweh and the desire to overthrow the father to set themselves up as a sort of. authoritarian god of one type or another, I mean, that is what the superego is and his conception, and that's sort of what, you know, a certain, like, anti-Semitic reading of the god of the old Bible looks like. I don't know too many Gentiles my whole life who really necessarily had a problem with, like, I mean, there's an extent to which, you know, nobody likes to be told what to do. do, and at some point in life, we're all, like, shaking our fist against the man or whatever, but this sort of, like, deep-seated, for lack of a better word, pathological relationship with

authority or conformity, I mean, most of the guy, I mean, I grew up middle class for the most part, so most of the people I knew, like, never had a problem with conformity so long as the nature of the authority was acceptable or justifiable. And you see a certain streak in like these more radical Jewish intellectuals where there literally is no standard that they will subject themselves to. And many Jewish philosophies are entirely based on this idea that I am my own measure. And how dare you? This is almost like, like, is his name Dave Portnoy from Barstool Sports?

It's like, he's like almost a good representation of this like, fuck you, there is literally no standard I will accept because that standard is external to myself. And that is so dysfunctional. And Lorenz says at the end, sociopathic, I mean, you literally can't build a society. You can't build a community around a type of masculine, psychology that simply categorically rejects any other responsibility to beyond itself.

I have some other thoughts. I don't know if you want to respond to that. No, keep going. So, I mean, the other thing that Freud is well known for putting forth are this sort of comprehensive list of defense mechanisms some of which like frankly never made sense to me

part of the reason why I struggled to really embrace my career as a psychologist because it was like some of these are supposed to be foundational ideas and it's like I don't really see them reflected in other people I don't really see them in myself so like for example

reaction formation and sublimation these are psychological defense mechanisms that actually make a lot more sense if you're assuming that it's a sort of group outsider group strategy in a hostile society. So the idea of reaction formation is that you behave in a way that is the opposite of how you feel, or is the opposite of your natural inclination. And maybe if you are sort of like, maybe like Freud potentially was, where you just simply Bristol at the norms and the expectations that the society around you expects you to conform to, that you have to go through this sort of tortured psychological transformation

where you're taking your native sort of, again, if we want to invoke E. Michael Jones, If you have a sort of like radical transgressive impulse, but you necessarily have to function in a society that will not tolerate that. And I don't know about you. I didn't go around as a kid, like necessarily feeling like I had to flip everyone the bird and flip over every table and pissing everyone's Cheerios. I mean, I had youthful vigor. I think every young man growing up has like a certain like desire to. impress themselves upon the environment around them but to the degree where you like are constantly like foaming at the mouth with like i i can't be the way they want me to be i refuse to do anything

they want me to do i hate them and yet i've got to uh i've got to abide by them anyway like reaction formation where you've got there's a fundamental uh dissonance between your behaviors and your actual internal experience, that doesn't, I feel like you don't really see that. Some of the places you do see that are, frankly, like, pathological work environments. You know, like, you see them, really, you kind of only see them in this sort of post-Jewish privilege world where everything is sort of remade and reformed to conform to a sort of Jewish morality that, I mean, yeah, when I go to my, if I have my office job and I hate my DEI boss and I have to smile at him, even though I'm cursing under my breath, like you don't,

I mean, that's, that makes sense, but then, again, it's like the same framework. Like, you are an outsider, you are sort of a marginalized person in this existing ecosystem, and you've got to find a way to navigate it. is another one, channeling unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable activities. I mean, doesn't that describe Tikon Olam? It's like, I got into this argument with this Jewish woman on Twitter the other day. She's like one of these, not to get all inside baseball, Twitter, micro communities on you and your audience, but she was part of this like Higalian e-girl thing that was like a very minor social media thing

a year ago. And she's an ethnically Jewish woman, but a devout Christian. And over the course of this conversation, she's basically, you know, she's being provoked because she's, she put up this post where she said how much she hates German people and that she confused, considers them a inferior people. And she prays to God for forgiveness. And she prays that the Germans prays, to God for forgiveness too. It's like, okay, if you have these sort of tortured reactions to the world around you that you are trying to make acceptable to those around you, like, isn't that like, isn't that what Tikhon Olam was? Because she was basically saying, like, I'm a really good Christian because I want to bring about this Christian eschatology. And isn't that really the same

thing is Tickon Olem, isn't there no difference between Christ coming back to Earth and also I'm going to destroy all your icons and overturn all of your world orders? It's like, actually, I think there is a fundamental difference between what the return of Christ means versus I'm literally going to destroy every representation of Gentile society that exists around you. when you look at these, you know, the history of Jewish intellectuals driving civil rights legislation or DEI or woke or whatever, what are they doing if not masking their sort of radical transgressive spirit via a, masking it with this sort of like liberal Christian morality or this liberal enlightenment value system. It's actually difficult to look at some of these Freudian ideas and not see them as dressed up vehicles for basically Jewish impulses.

Well, it's, if you believe in, you know, the authoritarian personality, the book from 1914 and 1950 commissioned by the American Jewish Committee put out by Adorno and the Frankfurt School, which basically lays out how to destroy Anglo society so that they'll never be fascism again. All of this makes sense, because if Jews are going to be safe and no longer persecuted, you're either going to have to turn the population into, like, instill Jewish values, those Jewish values, you know, of basically chaos of rebellion against everything that historically Anglo-Europeans held dear. You're either going to have to do that, or you're going to have to figure out a way to sedate them,

you know, with pornography and basically attack everything. And then, you know, in the end, if they start fighting back, then you make it, you make anti-Semitism illegal. You start, you know, persecuting people who are, you know, starting to ask a Jewish question. And, I mean, I think that's like the last hundred years is pretty much a picture of that, of Tika Molan, basically destroying. seeking to destroy Western culture so that Jews can fit in so that they can blend in.

So basically now everybody is, everybody has, is carrying their ideals, but also, you know, they don't seem as the outsider anymore because that's been the problem, you know, that was the problem in Russia. The problem in Russia was it was like, you know, you had gigantic diaspora German, you know, in the 17-1800s, you had German populations in Ukraine, and they were thriving. And they, you know, the czars, leadership loved them. But then you had this other group that just stuck out like a sore thumb because they were so different than everyone else.

And whenever you tried to deal with them, it was like, no, we have to remain different. And then when laws were changed and the Stettel was broken, the Stettel system was, broken up. It was just this reaction of trying to push back against that, trying to keep your traditions, but also this group of people who are escaping from their traditions and they're like, okay, now I can do anything I want. And in order for me to be able to do anything I want, I have to basically create a world where people can do anything they want. I mean, that's what it seems like to me. Of all the reading I've done, you know, 200 years together, Jews in the economic life by Sambart, Shah Hoc's, Jewish history, Jewish religion, you Gentiles,

Maurice Samuels, it just basically seems like the, it's like we were this people, we were these people who've always been on the outside. We are always going to be on the outside. So we have to create a society that looks like us so that we're no longer, you know, we're no longer persecuted, we're no longer seen as the outsider. And then you throw into the fact that they get their own country and they have nuclear weapons and then that's a whole different discussion. It's sort of like an impossible mission to set out upon. Because as, as Laurent mentions, towards the end of this essay, the sort of self-persecuting tendency within Jewish society, I mean, we're living now in the most Judaized version of the United States that has ever existed.

And the sense of these people as being persecuted seems like it's more pronounced, certainly more pronounced than in my 40 years on this planet, my 25 years odd as a thinking adult aware of global dynamics. I mean, they didn't have this same, oh, my God, we're on the precipice of Hitler, too, attitude in the 1990s. They didn't have it in the 2000s. It only started to creep up in the 2010s now that we're halfway through this decade. Even with them.

Because we have the internet and we have. cameras on our phones and information can be sent, you know, can be sent instantaneously and their people are watching them basically incinerate populations. Yeah. It's like, I mean, how is that not going? And then, you know, and that would be bad enough if it was just this country 6,000 miles away. But then you have people who are claiming this to be the same as those people over there that are doing it in your own country who are defending it and calling you evil and calling you an anti-Semite and basically saying that you you've given up your right to exist anymore if you criticize this if you say that it's evil if you say that how can you do this what is it

inside of you that allows you to do this and it's just information that's a thing that changed In the 1990s, you know, they could go into Gaza or the West Bank and they could do what they did. And the world only knew what the New York Times and what, you know, a couple cable news outlets and the local news told them. But now everybody can see it. And it's exposed, you know, and it's basically, it's like they're back in Russia. They're back in Russia where they're amongst people who, you know, it's like my, you know, my mother's family. came from, it's from Galicia. They're, you know, Hungarians and Polacks who were around them in Galicia. And like, they came here in like 1910 and 1911. And, you know, I'm growing up and I'm like,

why is my grandmother, well, yeah, that's my, I'm talking about my great-grandparents. And I'm thinking, why is my grandmother hate Jewish people so much? And it's like, oh. Yeah. Because they, because they lived in, they lived in basically what was pale settlement at the time and they got to see the way that they acted and they got to see how revolutionary they were and they got to see them assassinate like public officials and everyone knew who was doing it and that's what's happening now it was like back then they couldn't hide it because you know they were in one section and they stood out like a sore thumb and now everyone can see what they're doing because we have the internet and it's blasted everywhere and they start their own telegram channels and post videos of them doing it like the 72

virgins channel that was run by IDF by unit 8200 and they were advertising what they were doing so let the world know and it's like okay okay yeah how well how do we how are we supposed to deal with that I mean and if you ask questions it's like okay why are you doing this why You know, why are you saying that, you know, every time a baby dies, there was a terrorist hiding behind them? It's like, I mean, how do you, you can't rational, I can't rationalize, you know, a terrorist in this country hiding under, you know, a building in downtown New York and dropping a bomb on that building to get, to get one terrorist.

I don't see how that could, I don't see how you can do that. but oh everybody in that building is evil what what i mean you talk about i mean this goes beyond gaslighting this goes to yeah holy fuck do you think do you think i'm i mean how fucking low i you know what what do you think my IQ is i mean you think i'm fucking stupid yeah i must not be as extremely online as i thought because i've never heard of this chance channel you mentioned, and now I'm looking at a Jerusalem post article about it, and holy Christ, that is, that's, that's, it's hard to. They were uploading their own fucking atrocities.

Yeah. I can't imagine that, that level of, of barbarism, which is funny because we're told that they are the outpost of Western democracy in the Middle East, and that's, that's barbarism that makes, you know, uh, what they did to Gaddafi look like, uh, you know, an elementary school beat down, you know, like you're in the backyard and you got roughed up behind the, the fucking slide or whatever. Like that's, that's like child's play compared to the stuff that's on there. Um, just to go back, the section, or the, the excerpt you read about the woman, um, expressing guilt over circumcising her son. Uh, I mean,

again, it's just the persecution is coming from inside the house is really, I think, the punchline of this essay. Whatever we want to say about Freud's genuine intentions or his genuine malice or not, maybe he was totally unconscious, maybe there was no malice whatsoever, maybe he just was a wacky guy with a weird sense of humor and would from time to time say really, you know, self-condemning things to his peers and whatever, just the nature of that community and they're, like you said, their need to separate themselves out from every other population. They do that through barbarism.

They do that through terrorism. And, you know, the sort of tragedy, I say this, trying to be, you know, a little bit careful with my language here. I mean, the tragedy of it is that they are still human and that they obviously are tortured by these things they do to themselves, that they, like, on the one hand, they want to do it, and they seem to consciously understand the purpose of circumcising themselves, of doing the Brits, of doing all these things that they do, these ritualistic ways of marking their identity and cohering their community. like they understand the role that it functions, and they seem to understand the brutality of it, but they nonetheless carry the toll of those consequences, and then they're out in the world amongst us, you know? And that's what makes sort of these Freudian defense mechanisms

kind of so significant, because if you, you know, imagine yourself in the shoes of somebody who brutalized their infant son because it was part of their religion and part of their identity to do that, and they had been doing it for countless generations, and they know that it's brutalizing, and the only way they can cope with it is to sort of become like this cold, distant tyrant to their own children, and then you're the child that grows up like that you grow up basically cattle prod you know within seven days of being born and it's worse than that go ahead it's worse than that okay so not only are you brought up that way you're also brought up

being told that everybody wants to kill you that historically everybody has wanted to kill you and you're told that you're God's chosen, that we are the special people. Now, I'm not going to pretend like I've read, you know, papers and books on narcissism. But to me, all of those things combined seem to create, like the greatest army of super narcissists that have ever walked the planet. Complex narcissists, too.

because when you think about, so just, I mean, to put a little bit of technical, technical language on you, I mean, there are multiple kinds of narcissists. And there's, and it's interesting, I mean, on the one hand, you have like the categorical personality disorder of narcissism, but there's like grandiose narcissists, which is to say overt narcissist, that's. it's like the kind of stereotype that we all have in our mind of like the guy who gets out in front of the crowd to be the big man. You know, that's what we all tend to think of as narcissists. But then there's communal narcissists, there's antagonistic narcissists, there are malignant narcissists, covert narcissists. And it seems like in any given moment, an afflicted Jewish person.

person can kind of like oscillate between all of them they are the grandstanding moralizer or the grandstanding like i am a superhero but then there's also like the like jonathan greenblatt type of shrinking back where anything you do anything you say is an attack on me makes me feel small fake makes me feel like you're being punitive um the the type of narcissist where you know like the social worker or the community organizer or the social justice activist where they're masking their narcissism in this kind of grand almost Christ-like manner of being everything to everyone. I mean, they seem to like hit every flavor of narcissism imaginable. And that almost, I mean, this is one of the things where if you want to get

racist about your psychology. You have to take a step back and say like, okay, is narcissists a racial type before it's even a psychological type? And if it's a racial type, then how do you even categorize narcissism as a sort of general psychological tendency when it looks different from one group to the next? And even within one group, it looks different. based on the context like when you sort of generalize narcissism to to like the whole of the human species like the most common ones are like the timid you know i'm i feel bad about myself and my narcissism is a is a cope versus the sort of like strong narcissistic type where it's it's a it's a word i'm looking for sort of an intractable personality style that

always shows up in every situation that they're in. It's like those are the most common types of narcissism that you see in the world. And maybe you could say that's a sort of general tendency speaking to whether people either have inflated sense of self-worth, deflated sense of self-worth. But Jews have this sort of like complex narcissism that is that, again, it defies generalizing to a,

to the less. level of a universal human condition. Let's leave it there. Please promote. You have books. You have, yes, please promote. Yeah, well, again, thanks for having me on. I love talking to you.

I wish I had more to offer during the essay. I was just really wrapped up in getting through that with you. Definitely thought-provoking when we got to the end of it. But check me out on Antelopehill Publishing.com for my new book, Intolerant Interpretations. Check out Imperium Press for my two previous books, American extremist and understanding conspiracy theories. On Substack, I haven't published anything in a while, and I might not for a while, because I'm busy doing a lot of shows like with you. J.Neil.com, and on Twitter or X, still J. Neal. Thank you so much, Pete. It's a pleasure.

Hope your audience enjoys. Appreciate it, Josh. Yeah, man. Thank you.