The Pete Quiñones Show - *Throwback* Where Do Rights Come From? w/ C.Jay Engel

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

61 MinutesPG-13C.Jay Engel is a writer and ONE of the hosts of the Contra Mundum podcast.C.Jay joined Pete to discuss where "rights" come from and whether "rights" are the regime's best weapon against its enemies.Contra MundumC.Jay's SubstackC.Jay's TwitterPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on Twitter

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There are air to on courthewagon. Full of nismal in the Airgrid, Pongaii. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingiano show.

Returning, C.J. Engel. How you doing, C.J.? Doing good, Pete. Thanks. So, let's see how many people we can really trigger today. Let's do it.

Let's talk about rights. All right. What rights? What is that? I don't even know what that is anymore. I used to hear about it all the time. There's always, like a qualifier is behind it.

But once you start getting down to it and thinking about it, it's like, well, what's anybody talking about? So when you hear the term rights, what do you think? I think about subversion. Like, that's the first thing I hear is like, rights, there's a historical aspect to our heritage that includes rights rhetoric. There's been a place for that. But I think if you're still talking about rights in 2024,

you don't realize that the entire tapestry that sustained us for hundreds of years has been completely burned to the ground and now rights are a mechanism by which the regime can instill its own totalitarian vision on Heritage America and the Heritage West. So I really think that when we hear rights, we need to think about them occupying us culturally, morally, spiritually. in every aspect of our society, rights has always been, or not always been, but in the last several decades, it's been the justification by which it burns us to the ground. One can argue that that has nothing to do with rights. Rights, you know, it's like anarchy.

Anarchy just means without rulers, bro. You know, you just have to understand. You have to be able to, if you don't know Greek or Latin, don't even use the word. Yeah. But when it comes to rights, people are going to say, well, the fact that rights are being used improperly doesn't make it, doesn't mean that rights need to be thrown away or negated. They'll never make that same argument about the state. They always want the state to go away. But rights, I mean, how do we live without rights? Yeah, I think the best way to approach politics is that phrase, the purpose of a system is what it does. And rights were something that once sustained us and now something that's leveraged against us. So if you think about that paradigm, right, like we've all been sharing, you know, the Wikipedia entry, the purpose of a system is what it does. And when you address politics and you try to interpret the means by which they're justifying their own regime behavior and their own regime objectives,

that's where politics lies. So rights is something that we have to interpret within the context of our own political dynamics. You know, when we sit there and we blueprint out the ideal society or how society should actually function in some utopian situation, we're actually deviating from the purpose of politics. The purpose of politics is to leverage and weaponize our own interests based on what we can do and based on what we want to see to protect ourselves from our enemies. and push back against it. And right now, our enemies are the ones that set the framing. They set the

rhetorical dynamics. And they're the ones that set, you know, they're the ones that define everything. They control the institutions. They control political theory. And they're the ones that are weaponizing words like rights for their own purposes. So I don't think we, I mean, we can sit there and we can talk about the historical nature of rights. But we also have to understand that rights were born within a specific political and cultural, even ethnic context. And to rip those out and apply, to today, I think it undermines our own ability to act politically and to think in a realistic way. So, like, well, I'm sure we'll get into, like, people like Burnham and the Machiavellians and people like that. But when you understand the particularistic nature of political rhetoric,

you understand that you can't rely on idealized and universalized paradigms in order to protect yourself from our political enemies. What I've been told by people who are a lot smarter than I am is that there's this thing called natural rights and that natural rights are just inherent. They cannot be in no way, shape, or form can you argue against them because they just stand up to nature. They're a part of, there is natural as breathing. If we don't have, if we don't breathe, we die. If we don't have natural rights, we die. Yeah, I think that's sort of a, that, that's, that world has basically been liquidated.

And I think that natural rights were something that came out of a specific context. And there's no justification or rational. I mean, you don't look out in nature and see rights. You have to realize that when we talk about rights, we're actually talking about something that was rooted in a social situation. Like, I love this phrase, Paul Gottfried uses it in several places socially situated. And you'll notice that there's all these other civilizations out there. There's all these other cultures out there. And none of them seem to have picked up on what we call natural rights.

And so this idea that there's this nature out there and that as individual human beings, we can look out and we can discover these things. It's actually not something that's universally applicable, but it's actually something that's much more culturally contextual. That's something that came out of our own struggle in our own. historical context. And so I would distinguish between inherited rights and natural rights. And I think that natural rights cannot be, you know, rationally sustained. I think that inherited rights are something that can be within specific contexts, you know, and then you have the question of what

happens once our inheritance has been completely decimated, you know, and then, you know, what is the role for rights then? So a lot of like, if you look at the rhetoric of, of the neo-conservatives and the neoliberals and, you know, and the people in the 80s and 90s, and they've totally a adopted this paradigm of natural rights. And you begin to learn that the rights that are suddenly, you know, permanent and natural and universal are all of these things that are actually undermining our own culture. And so now, like, suddenly, you know, there's transsexual rights.

And, you know, there's like squatters rights. And there's all these things that are supposedly natural. And somehow they're being, these rights, these natural rights are facilitating our own destruction. And so at some point, the right wing has to. to come to our point where it's like, look, we can sit all day in the backroom of an office and talk about natural rights or we can act politically and we can work out the details later because if we don't protect ourselves, natural rights is going to be this mechanism of complete and utter

decimation of everything that we hold dear. Well, we can definitely get to Schmidt later on, but let's get through these rights. So the one that immediately, comes to mind after natural rights is God-given rights. And I remember one of the first times that I was really shook to my core as a libertarian was when a famous libertarian, I'm not going to say who it was, said that he was a universalist, that he believed that libertarianism was for everyone on the planet. And even as I would call myself a lalbert at that time, I was like, well, that's just not true. I mean, the aboriginals in Australia are not going to understand what we're talking about.

You have countries in this world with an average IQ under 70, which basically makes them functionally retarded. They're not even equipped to stand trial in this country. How are they going to understand these things when, you know, they're, seem to be their whole thing seems to be violence and huffing gasoline. And it also, I think the thing that when I hear God-given rights, what I hear is, I hear universalism. I hear that, you know, anyone from any country, that border down between Mexico and Texas is an imaginary line. And if everybody has the same rights, as I do. If everybody's entitled to the same things I am, then anybody should be able to come over

that border and do whatever they want. As long as it doesn't hurt, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else or damaged their property or body. Yeah, it's like that meme, you know, the guy's like, with the complete chaos, destruction of civilization in the background, he's like, but how does this affect you personally? You know what I mean? So, I mean, that's, that's kind of, and this is, this is the trick. This is exactly how rights rhetoric is being leveraged. weaponized is a good word to destroy us. And so yeah, I think that that's actually, I think this is one of the problems I have with libertarianism. There are decent libertarians out there who are trying to make the case for borders. But I actually think if you're going to talk about rights in a

universalistic way, I don't think you can get over the fact that there are individuals around the world that have these rights and there's nothing you can do politically within your own borders to stop it. I think that is a natural implication of rights thinking. And so I think that, you know, they can come up with exceptions about that. They can come up with the fact that we are, you know, in a political situation where the, it's existential and we have to ignore some of those abstract concepts. But what they're doing when they say those is they're admitting that there are more important things than rights, that there are things like identity, cultural stability, cultural integrity and our own, you know, the continuity of our heritage that provide the garden

or the context through which we could have something like rights. And if you have a garden or a context, a political context in which we can use rights rhetoric, what you've done is you've, you've basically admitted that rights are socially situated. They're contextual and they're politically derived rather than universal. So I don't hold to this view. We can talk about the idea of a God-given right, in my view, because I don't think that rights are actually just generated by the state as some sort of like fiat, raw bureaucratic decision, which is much more of like the utilitarian, you know, like liberal, not classical liberal, but like 20th century managerial liberalism. That's sort of their conception of rights. So I can speak of rights as God-given.

The difference is, is I don't think they're imputed from on high to all individuals equally, in a universal sense, which is how I conceive of something like natural rights, that might be more of a Jean-Jacques Rousseau or some sort of enlightenment conception of rights, I think of them as mediated through history. And when they're mediated through history, they're mediated through a cultural context. This is why I agree with, you know, you know how influenced I am by Paul Gottfried. He does take, like, the Joseph de Maistra and Edmund Burke line that rights are something that are discovered organically in society, and there's a certain historical dynamic between the state and that society, and they uncover and define and implement something that can be called rights, but all of those things are bound and contextualized within a given political order. So Englishmen had rights and that they were rights by virtue of the fact that they were born Englishmen, and they inherited the work and the discoveries of their fathers.

And Frenchmen have similar rights because they're all European, but the French rights are distinct from the English tradition. And so you have all of these socially situated rights that are inherited. The problem is when you absolutize or universalize these rights, you're going to get the liquidation of rights. You're going to get the liquidation of your heritage. And in pursuit of some sort of abstract and universalistic world in which every individual can be conceived of as being a God-Givision, and rights bearer, you actually destroy society and civilization itself, and you wake up to find yourself subject to a managerial regime that hates you. Ready for huge savings?

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Full of Nis more in Ergaret Pongahy. Well, when it comes to individual rights, when you make rights universal, that basically, that means that every single

individual is derasinated from any possible culture, heritage that they have. And what it basically does is it means that no matter what culture or heritage somebody came from, they have the same individual rights as you do. And that means that there's no problem with inviting them into your polity. And it doesn't matter what, it doesn't matter if you don't believe that. that, you know, touching a female you don't know in public is wrong, and they believe in their

culture says it's perfectly fine. The individual rights, the only thing that's going to matter at that point now is that individual female and that it's getting touched and that individual who's doing the touching, this has nothing to do with culture. This just has to do with, hey, don't touch her. And what happens is you basically have to write that down on paper. And as soon as you write something down on paper, in my opinion, if you're not just formalizing it because this is something that the culture, you know, this is something that the culture accepts without question,

hey, we're just going to formalize this. We know we agree on this and everything. If you have to write it down on paper to say, hey, you're not allowed to do this, you've basically invited people into a culture, into a heritage that are now disrupting it. And basically everybody's going to become an individual. And you have what? New York? You have a big city.

You have the New York City subway system. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's this idea that is goofy. Like, so, okay, so at first you have this idea of a propositional nation where as long as is everybody a sense to these like abstract propositions about what rights are, then we can get along as a country. As it turns out, though, not only does this ignore the fact that culture is more

foundational and fundamental than just these mere abstractions, but the fact of the matter is that all these people coming here, they couldn't articulate a single proposition if they wanted to, if they were paid to do it, if they were given a welfare check to do it. So this idea that like even propositionalism, you know, as goofy as it was, it fails just by consideration of the fact that there's like intellectual differences that stem from different cultures. And you have this worldwide phenomenon where all these people are supposed to be individuals and culture is just something that holds you back in society. And if they can just be free to come here and intermingle with each other, we can have this growing prosperous society. But the fact of the

matter is that cultural actually matters more than formulations of rights do. And that's been proven. I think you have to be a very nefarious individual to deny that today. Like when you think of the people that are pushing for more and more just completely unhinged levels of immigration, what they're doing is they're just denying the reality that's staring in the face. And the reality that staring them in the face is that culture does matter more than abstract formulations of rights. And when you try to build a society on abstractions, you're going to get New York. You're going to get chaos in the subways. And you're going to get people that are forced to flee their homeland, their regions where they – look, I live in California.

I've witnessed – it's in the 70s, my grandfather was going door to door warning about what would happen if immigration got out of control in Oakland. And, you know, he used to tell me, you know, stories of the fact that people thought he was nuts, you know, that every individual should be treated equally, that we should get to know the person first before we make, you know, prejudices about their culture. And if anyone knows anything about Oakland or Stockton here in Northern California, they know how completely unbearable it is. And, you know, so everybody left. And they call that white flight, but they're looking out for their own safety. There's that great tweet by the Vidaire, what's his name, James Vidaer on Twitter, where he just said, like all of modern life, all of current present life is structured around us trying to abandon the consequences of the civil rights movement. And you just begin to realize that culture is more fundamental than abstract formulations of rights and the consequences of ignoring that fact are basically, it's built into the cake. you're not allowed to admit it today, but people really are having to make very specific

political, life-changing decisions because we've ignored the fact that rights cannot be conceived of as individualized and universalized without there being very serious cultural consequences. Well, yeah, you have people nowadays who will say, oh, why are you, if you're a right-winger, why are you leaving the city? Why would you leave New York? You have to stay there and fight for it. If somebody, if somebody comes into your neighborhood and, you know, starts causing trouble, you and your friends should go out there and you should beat the crap out of them and kick them out. Because you don't want to give up the cities. You're giving up your culture. You're going to leave and you're going to give up your culture. And I'm like, what's, what's left there? What do you,

what kind of culture can you really build in a city anymore? I mean, there was a time for that. And then when you say, well, there was a time for that, you can't do it. Well, the reason we can't do it is because everyone left. Everyone is scared. And I'm like, but yeah, the cities were forced, integrated at one point, and that's what created the suburbs. All the good people fled to the suburbs. Why? Because they didn't want to get killed. They didn't want violence against them. So, oh, well, you should be fighting. They should have fought, and they should have kept those people out. What? I mean, you'll hear this from people on the right now. You know, I mean, it's very easy to pick on people, people on the left because they're so on the left and libertarians, same thing. Because they're, they just, they're not even in the game. Yeah, especially libertarians. And the left has power. So they just, they don't care. They want to see you punished. But you have people on the right now who are just arguing, well, why did you leave the city? Why did you leave the Bronx, Pete? would you want to leave the Bronx to what you see you can have a better life somewhere else?

I mean, it's literally like almost the question that you get asked at that point is like, yeah? Oh, and well, we need to stay in this. How are you going to take over? How are you going to do this? Yeah, it's funny because like there's just complete ignorance. And I consider this like a conservative problem more than a right wing problem. and you would agree with that, obviously.

But like these conservatives, they're still operating on this idea that power is somehow downstream from like our ability to build a culture. And that power is downstream for culture that if we can stay in the cities or stay in these like- Yeah, they believe that Andrew Breitbart thing, which is completely wrong. Yeah. Which is completely reversed. Right, exactly.

So like if we just stay put and we, you know, continue to, you know, teach our kids or whatever, just within our house, within our neighborhood, you know, we'll, we could play a long game on that. It's like, no, this entire culture has been massaged and engineered and planned. This cultural degradation has been completely planned by power. And this is one of the things if you treat, if you try to address the, the power that's there creating cultural around you, if you try to address that by adhering to rights theory, you're going to get squished like a bug.

Because, like, I mean, even people like, you know, like Mises and other like liberals understood the fact that power is stronger than your philosophic formulations, right? Like, it doesn't matter what you believe. It doesn't matter, you know, how tightly knit and nuanced your description of, you know, rights are, individual rights. all of that is nothing in the face of a gun, in face of economic power, in the face of them being able to shut down your resources and close your bank account. They don't care about your rights.

Their rights is something that they leverage in order to subdue you. That's what the whole transsexual rights movement it's about. It's about humiliation. It's about erasing heritage America. And it's about undermining the legacy of Americans who used to have a culturally inherited basis of rights. I mean, that was that, I mean, the, the American experiment was basically this context and concept of inherited rights, something that we received from our forefathers. And the minute we abandon that for natural rights, well, you get the entire third world, because why not? Everybody

has equal rights. You don't have a right to the quality of your neighborhood. All you have is the right to your bedroom. Well, it turns out that the neighborhood is controlled by those in power, and they do want bad things for you. And you're not allowed to fight back, though, because you've already agreed that you have in universal individual rights. This is, I'm sorry to keep like monologing here, but this is, they do this all the time and people fall for it all the time. You're not allowed to do anything about your neighborhood or about your community and your locality because you've already adopted a framework that prevents you from acting politically. Right. And the cope is, and you hear this cope from conservatives and libertarians, well,

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I mean, what do you, I guess because it hasn't happened to them personally yet, where it's like, well, okay, you have rights. Okay, the DA just arrested you for, the DA just arrested you for protecting your home from intruders, from, you know, from a, you know, a push in or a, you know, a home invasion. Okay. How are your rights doing? Well, they still exist, though. Okay.

Okay. They exist. It's like, when they shut your bank account down and take all your money for saying the wrong thing. And, you know, you're just like, my rights are going to be pissed when they hear about this, you know? Well, or if they hear about somebody having their bank account taken or being put on the no-fly list, well, they were a racist. Oh, so you're just a leftist. So you've just adopted. you've just adopted the regime's religion.

Yeah. That's it. You're making excuses for the regime. I mean, isn't it amazing that most of the people who would bring up their rights and make these arguments pretty much are, they're not a threat to the regime. The reason why no one's coming after them is because they're not a threat to the regime. They're actually helping the regime. Yeah, that's a really good point. And people need to talk about that more.

There's this sort of like, and it's the same thing. with those who cite like the Constitution, there's this sort of pigeonholing where they, your enemies don't care about rights, obviously. They don't care about the Constitution or limited government or any of the things that you do. So what they do is they leverage the things that you talk about against you and then they ignore it when it comes to them. And so what that tells you is that power is at the top and all the cultural things are downstream from power. That power is the thing that you need to have in order to address abuses of power. If you're, if you're completely dissatisfied as we all should be with the way the culture is moving and with the way, you know,

the political, you know, the managerial state is continuing to develop. The solution there is to acquire power and confront the other power base with your own power. Not to stand there like, like that, like you, you imagine yourself as, as, what's that picture of the tank with the guy standing in front of the tank, you know? The two animals were. Yeah, exactly. And it's like you're sitting there reading, you know, the bill of rights or something, and they've got like a cannon against you.

It's like, I wonder who's going to win that war. So I don't think that the right need should continue to focus on rights. What they can do, I think, is they can use rights as sort of a like a like a signal or a rallying cry that say, look, these are our rights as heritage Americans, right? We're making a cultural statement that these are our right as children. of those who came before. We're the posterity that the founding fathers were referring to in the creation of their documents. And we have rights that we're going to assert with power against other factions of power that are using rights to get in the third world, to get in all of these

like culturally humiliating sexual degeneracy, all these things that the regime is doing, it's using rights to do so. And I think what we need to do is we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, should counter signal that. Like actually, no, we don't care about trans rights. What we care about is my right, for instance, to discriminate against trans. That's much more of a heritage right that we have is the right to make discriminatory decisions about who we associate with. These are things that we should be talking about, not these abstract universal rights that apply to all people in all places. And therefore, we have no political mechanism of opposing those who are coming to destroy our way of life.

Well, the rights of freedom of association is great, and so you realize that conservatives and libertarians have just basically ingested everything, every line and narrative from the civil rights era. So it's like, you know, if you, I'm sorry, if you do not have the right to be racist, you do not have rights. Well, that's what I'm, yeah, that's what I'm talking. That's how they pigeonhole you, right? So you have this conception of rights and it prevents you from acting politically.

And they know that. So they're going to use this rhetoric of rights against you. And then they're going to use that rhetoric of rights in order to facilitate your enemies into power. And so this is how the Constitution is used like this all the time. Obviously, those in power don't care about the Constitution. But if somebody like Trump gets up and he says that, you know what, on day one, I'm going to make this exact. executive decision that's going to round up all the illegals and send them home. It's like, oh, you know, you, that's a betrayal of the Constitution. You know, so they always are using the conservatives' own priorities and, you know, framing against them. And the right is so bad about countering that with its own. I mean, we should be countering that all the time with our own, you know, complex of ideas. The left is just a master at using our own language against us. And we fall for it. single year. The GOP is a master at falling for rights rhetoric. They just literally cannot

cope with the fact that power has its own rules. Power has its own way of doing things, and no claim to abstract universal rights is going to help you in your situation. Where did this allergy to power on the right, not on the right, but let's say conservatism and libertarianism. Where did this allergy? Where did this power is, immoral. Where did this come from? I mean, it could have only come from the left. It could only come from your enemy because it has to come from your enemy. And if you, and whoever's telling you that, if they're like standing next to you and they're like, hey, we're on the same side, your enemy's standing right next to you. Because the person who's telling you power is immoral and to use power

is immoral, they're clearly not on your side. Yeah, no, the question of where it came from is interesting, because I think there were aspects of that way of thinking that were present. Like, you know, when you talk about things like the Declaration of Independence, okay, a good example of this would be someone like Thomas Payne, right? He had this mentality. And like, I agree with Gottfried again, who would think that like if Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Thomas Payne could have seen where it all would have come, they never would have opened their mouths about it all, right? they would have been horrified. So I do agree with that too, but there's just, when you treat these principles as some sort of absolutized thing that you can never abandon or never push to the side in order to fight politically, what you're doing is you're basically digging yourself a deeper grave.

Every time you open your mouth about rights in the face of an attack, you're basically digging your grave another foot deeper. So I think that there were aspects of rights rhetoric that were there at the beginning. And I think if history has shown us anything over the last 250 years, it's that we never should have gone down that path at all. We should have stuck with Joseph Demestra and Ned Burt's conception of inherited rights. Her rights are something that we receive as a people. And we're a people who's rooted in a particular past. And therefore there's boundaries on us as a people.

And we have to differentiate between insiders and outsiders. I mean, this is what it means to protect the integrity and stability of a culture, is to treat rights as something that belongs to you and your kin or you and your nation, or, you know, however the political boundaries might work, you know, within a given context. But if you begin to absolutize things, what you're going to do is you're going to tear down the very metaphysical boundaries that defined you as a people. In the very beginning, you mentioned Burnham. and the, I'm reminded, especially when you read like Suicide of the West, of what he talks about ideologies.

And how, where did this come from? Where did this ideology as religion, ideology as identity, ideology as, and all basically an ideology is, and San Francis said this properly, is something that's created, in a lab, and as soon as it's introduced to reality, it gets, you know, he gets shots of pieces. Where did this idea of ideology come from? Because ideology is probably the one, one of the greatest tools that, and Burnham talks about this too, that those in power use against you. They give you an ideology. They put you inside of a box. And if they put you inside of a box that says power is immoral, they're in charge. They can do whatever they want. They're they can trample all over whatever rights you think you have. So, I mean, it seems to me ideology has a lot to do with this, too.

Yeah, no, I agree. I think, I really think, you know, we talk about it on the right all the time, and, you know, my own side kind of cliche, but I do think that the Enlightenment was the source of this type of thinking. I think there were certain, I think, I think the essence, of the political enlightenment was taking ideas that were inherited and absolutizing them. I think that's basically what the Enlightenment political project did, is it took things that as Western peoples we had been given, we had been bequeathed by those our forebearers, and it took those things, these treasures that belonged to our heritage, and it made them something that could be graspable by the world.

And it's hard to sort out, you know, what aspect of that was nefarious, you know, like, because obviously the elite take advantage of this and obviously the elite don't really care about rights. But they do leverage this type of thinking. So it's like, you know, there's like that debate between Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried over whether the elite actually believe their own myths. And Sam Francis believes that historically they don't believe it. They're just basically written to control the masses. whereas, you know, Paul believed that, you know, they were true believers, the people pushing the ideas. I think that now in the 21st century, Paul Gottfried is basically right. They believe their own crap, you know, they believe everything they're pushing.

But I do think that historically, like in the 19th century, people really did recognize the power, like in progressivism, like Woodrow Wilson. They did recognize the power of having some sort of. myth that they could use to rationalize their own pursuit of power. I think that's a very important aspect of the story. So where it all came from, you know, you could say the Enlightenment and things like that, but I think in the progressive movement, you begin to really see in managerialism this usage of abstractions and these, like, utopian visions of how a just society should be organized and structured. And you see that as sort of the veil under which they can have their economic interests fulfilled, their political objectives fulfilled, their foreign policy objectives

fulfilled. And so ideology is a very powerful, I mean, even in the making of Christendom, like, look at Constantine. Like, you know, whether you agree with it or not, I tend to think it's great, but Constantine basically advanced an ideology of Christianity in order to justify his power expansion. That's just how power moves. Power controls ideology. It writes ideology for its own purposes, and we on the right need to be aware of that because our elites have their own ideology and whether or not they believe it, the fact of the matter is that they are weaponizing the masses to act on behalf of their objectives and interests using the rhetoric of ideology. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28,

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Kosh Farage. I think something people miss from the managerial system is that the managers know, as you've already mentioned, know how to manipulate your rights, know how to use them against you, what you think are your rights. But also, I think that most people who, when they first start hearing about managerialism, they start seeing it, they think about them managing. the way the governments run, war policy, the economy, things like that. I don't think that they, the one thing that they don't notice, especially with progressivism,

is they don't understand how they've managed to what you believe is what they want you to believe. Yeah. It's, I mean, you're a thought criminal. If you say something like you said earlier, you say, I don't. care about trans rights. You are, you've just become an enemy of progressivism because you're going to have conservatives, you're going to have libertarians who are going to be like, well, no, they're individuals and they have rights too. And if they're being attacked, we need to extend, we need to maybe even extend more rights to them. Maybe we need to do something special like we did with the

Civil Rights Act. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, that's, I think, couching it in terms of a religion. There is an obvious connection between ideology and religion. They're essentially the same thing. Ideology might be described as a secularization of religion. You know, like Philip Reef has his, you know, first world, second world, third world paradigms. And, you know, this as, as you become like a secularized society,

you still need something to unify society on. You can't actually have this individualized, de-rational de-rassinated a society you have to have something that binds everybody and this new paradigm is this obsession with um sort of like like like um the rights given to um like all kinds of people that have nefarious interests and and whose very presence will undermine the stability and integrity of of everything that you hold dear so rights is very ideological and therefore it's very religious in an anti-religious age, ideology replaces that. And I think the state knows that. There's always been, I mean, Murray Rothbard talks about this. There's always been a cozy relationship between

religion and the state. And today, when, you know, religion is supposedly on the down swing, you have the connection between ideology and the state. So the state needs ideology and it uses it to push its own regime-laden interests. One of the arguments I was making for a while, and then I realized how wrong I was, I was saying that people who have a tendency to be all about rights, they also sound money people. And I've made the argument that the richer off of like inflate, because of inflation, things like that, that societies become, the more decadent they become. And then somebody said, well, how does that explain? Weimar. Weimar did inflate, but it wasn't a rich society. And then it all occurred to me. It's like, well, what do we, what's the one thing that Weimar didn't have? What's the one thing we don't have? We don't have culture. Their culture was destroyed in Weimar. Culture is destroyed now. I mean, you can get culture at the most local level. I mean, culture basically now, if you find somebody who is culture, it's their family. It's their family who's doing it. It's their family who's keeping them together, their church, their, their, their, faith. But people don't realize that you, how much culture matters and bringing culture back

to rights is like you're saying, your rights are inherited. So if your rights are inherited, you're inheriting it through your culture. So when you look at, when you look at something now and you're like, well, I don't know, it seems like I don't have any rights or I do have rights because there are natural rights and they're universal, but nobody, I can't. I can't declare them and they're not protecting me from anything. And then you go back to something like, Why Marr? And it's like, well, what rights did people have there? I mean, people were being robbed, beaten, and stolen from all the time.

And they had no right to step up and say, what's happening to my country? Well, why? Because there's no culture. There is nothing. Those safety nets. Everybody wants to talk about safety nets. Like, you know, having a million dollars in the bank is a safety net or something like that. Having land is a safety net. No, the safety net.

net is your culture. Yeah. It's the rights that you get because you've brought your culture forward from the previous generation. Yeah. No, I agree. In fact, like a good example of this would be like if you had like during COVID, you had like a bunch of libertarians living in the city and they are like masters at libertarian theory, right? And and suddenly like COVID comes along and the governor issues, these policies about, you know, what what you have to do as a, as a city, they are going to laugh in your face when you quote your favorite, you know, rights philosopher. If you quit like Nozik or something, like they're just going to laugh at you.

Whereas where I live and presumably, you know, wherever you live, if the governor, Governor Newsom mandated something and told the sheriffs, you know, what to do, the sheriffs would basically tell them to piss off. because not because they believed in rights, but because they understand that, you know, the cultural cohesion and stability rests on the continuity of how we actually live our life as free people. It has nothing to do with rights.

So the life, the rights are actually protected by the culture, the way that we do things here, like that meme of the Italian, like we don't do that here. Like, you know, like, I'm not, I'm not quoting my rights. I didn't, the sheriffs aren't justifying, you know, their decisions based on natural rights. they're justifying it based on the fact that we don't do that here. Like, that's culture.

And culture is much more sustaining and powerful as a mechanism against arbitrary power than rights rhetoric could ever be. Yeah, when I was running around Alabama looking for a place to live and I would go to certain towns, I would always stop off in certain businesses and ask, you know, well, you know, Governor Ivy did a mask mandate for a while. What did you guys do? And more than one city was like, well, our sheriff just told us to ignore it. They weren't going to, or told one restaurant how to get around it and everything. So, yeah, and why were they able to do that? Because there's a culture there.

Yeah. There's a culture there. There's people, you know, I talk about all the time how, I mean, I was just before we started this interview, I was visiting a couple friends of mine whose families have been here for 200 years. I mean, that's culture. They're not, if I would have brought some new kind of, you know, wanting to change the culture or some new kind of thinking here, I wouldn't be accepted. If I came up with something that was out of bounds, I wouldn't be accepted. But when you go to, but if you, you know, but the people with power, people who are willing to use power can actually come into a situation like I'm in right now.

and they can start moving things. They can start going behind people's back. They can start manipulating people and start changing things. I don't want to do that. I don't want, I understand the importance of culture. They don't. They only understand the importance of manipulation. And the reason they're allowed to do that is because there are people who are not willing to use power to keep people like that out.

And have you seen those, like, Twitter or TikTok videos of, like, like the third world, like African or Haiti or whatever, they're basically squatters. They're just going from place to place, just literally abusing the squatters rights laws and stuff like that just to crash wherever they want to and break in. Because, I mean, that's the meaning of anarcho tyranny. They can do whatever they want.

The law is on their side and they have the right to do it. And it doesn't matter like how you argue about property rights and the relationship that you have with the meaning of ownership. and like all these, like all these concepts, the fact of the matter is that you're inviting these individuals in who couldn't care less about your rights. They couldn't care less about your property. They couldn't care less about like the meaning of ownership and the authority to dispense with with your property and the way you see fit.

Like all of these like libertarian concepts, the fact of the matter is that these, these barbarians who have no conception of rights, they're the ones that are being fueled because they allegedly have rights to undermine our own safety and liberty. So it's like they're using rights rhetoric to get these people into a situation where your own rights rhetoric has no authority in the face of the managerial anarcho tyranny model that's being foisted upon us. Well, you've already talked a little bit about it. So let's get into it. So we can end up talking about this is, you know, where do you specifically see rights coming from? And how do you recommend we go forward in using it?

Yeah. I think history is the most powerful argument that we have. I think that when you conceive of rights, like, you know, I'm a Christian and people want to source rights and something beyond the bureaucratic state. and I do two. I conceive of rights as coming from God as mediated through history. So that makes me a historicist. Rights are something that are discovered and defined and implemented within the historical process. So you can claim they come from God.

Other people don't claim that. They may not have that same ultimate conception that I do, but I do believe in the mediation of history. I do believe in the mediation of our forefathers. I do believe that these rights are inherited. You can talk in terms of transcendent principles, principles that exist beyond just legislation or something like that. But the very fact of the matter is they have to be made concrete by human hands, by the hands of those in power who have the authority to define what rights are. I mean, you can talk about abstractions all day, but until they're made concrete, until they're written,

into the political legal apparatus of a society, they're actually just meaningless. And they have no bearing on whether or not they're applicable or whether or not you can grasp them, whether or not you can claim them. So I think that rights are something that we can use in time, but they can never be universalized. We could use the rhetoric of rights.

Like we can talk about the fact that we have rights as Westerners, as inheritors of European traditions, as rights as Americans to protect our heritage, to protect our way of life. Like, so for instance, if Abbott, you know, in Texas actually had any, if he was actually brave enough, he could cite actual nullification, secessionary decentralized law that are on the books to protect the rights as Texans against invaders. Like these are rights that Texans have inherited from political dynamics that came place, that came into place before. But these are much more powerful arguments than abstract rights.

I mean, that's what Texas should be doing. That's what all border states should be doing. Obviously, California is not going to do it. But other states should be doing it. These are rights that are on the books. These are rights that have precedent. And these are rooted rights in our experience as Americans. And so I don't have a problem with using rights to our advantage sometimes, but the minute they're absolutized, they're going to be abused. I have no, I have no particular interest in defending the rights of Indians from from Southeast Asia and their their you know alleged rights to come in here and have a great life that means nothing to me I talk about my rights as an American to continue on in the things that I've been given I think that's a

much more powerful way to talk about rights. What about those people who would say if you're looking at your rights historically that you know at one time not very long ago American the American heritage, rights heritage, was that you could own another person. And that it only, those, that right was only taken away after a war was fought, doesn't specifically have to be because I know the war wasn't fought to free the slaves. Thank you very much. You can save the emails. But someone will say that. So, you know, why should we even take those rights seriously? If you're, if the heritage that you're, you're talking about actually had people who, owns people at one point. Yeah, because we don't base rights on perfection. We base rights on who we are.

And so within those particular, you know, dynamic political situations, they had to work that out for themselves within their own context. And we have to do this. We can do the same thing today. Like if someone wants to make the case for slavery, that's a conversation we can have. I don't think anyone's interested in that. But the fact of the matter is that unless you root it in something, in some, something more realistic, you know, like in the realist sense, you're actually not going to gain any ground at all. So those things that are viewed from modernity as being like particularly evil in the past, I don't think taint your culture enough to unwind it. In fact, I think it's actually more dangerous to think that way, just because when, you know, a bad thing or bad situation

as perceived, you know, from our own vantage point took place, I don't think in that sense you can describe a culture as like in the Bible that had that verse about like a little leavening the whole bread. Like I think that's a very abusive and subversive way to talk about culture. And so it's sort of meaningless to me because we live in 24 and we're facing the liquidation of our culture. And the idea that I have to sit here and like apologize and take into account how something completely distant from our own situation took place before. you know, I'm no longer allowed to stand on the shoulders of my fathers. And I just think that's a completely felicious way of arguing. And honestly, the only people that can make that argument and make it work

for people who've taken power and control the narrative. Yeah, this is another thing people will say. Like, you know, who decides? You know, then who decides what rights? Well, people in power decide. That's why politics is important. You want your guys that are going to defend your conception, of your interests, you want them to be setting the pace of things. And you want them to be pushing

away those who are actually fighting for their interests. Like you had that clip of, what's her name, Elon Omar, you know, she was fighting for their rights and identity as Somalians, right? It's like every culture is allowed to do that here in America except for heritage Americans. And I think that the reason they do that is because they can, it's a rallying point. They see them as a part of something greater than themselves. That's what the whole like black power movement was about. All cultures do this. It's just that we've been so deracinated that we're not allowed to do this,

but I think that this is the only possible solution is, you know, thinking in terms of group interests. That's what politics is. It's the clash of group interests. I think once one understands Schmidt's concept of friend, enemy, and politics, it's you realize just important how power how important power is because if you don't have power your enemy has it and I think what you've said before I don't know if it's on this show or I've heard you say it on someone else's show is politics never stops yeah you just it is continual

and if you if you're sitting there and you're saying I'm above all of this you're just you're You're ruled. You're just ruled. Yeah. You're ruled. That's it. Whoever's in power is ruling over you. You can be the big, you know, you can be the biggest, um, you can be the biggest rebel talking

crap about it. You can do it. I moved to where I moved because I wanted it, I wanted to get away from this, but it's not like I'm dropping that. It's not like I'm not still seeking to, if I'm not seeking power for myself, I'm not seeking to try to get other people power who agree with me, you know, my friend. To get my friends, you know, what is, what did Machiavelli say, you know, politics is rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies. I want my friends in power because, one, I want them to reward me, leave me alone.

That would be, I'll be fine enough. But I also want them to punish these people over here. You have to. Because if you don't punish these people over here, they're going to come back. And people just don't get that. They think, oh, that's immoral. No, it's politics. It is life.

And that is why you sit there and you're like, oh, I'm dropping out. I'm not playing this game anymore. And I'm just going to talk. I'm going to talk. You know, it's like getting into, it's like I think I heard John Doyle say this recently. You know, if you walk out of a bar and we man from jackass starts a fight with you,

you're just going to slap him aside or kick him. And if he keeps on, you'll beat the crap out of him. But if you walk out of a bar and Shaquille O'Neal starts a fight with you, you're like, hey man, hey man. I just want to be left alone. Don't you just want to be left alone? You immediately go into this rationale where you're the loser, you know you're the loser, and now you're just playing the victim instead of figuring out, okay, do I have a gun in my car?

Do I have, how do I fight back against this? Yeah, where are my friends? Yeah. Yeah, where are my people here to back me up? And you're just waiting to be ruled. And if you're sitting there and you're like, well, this is immoral. I mean, I would say the most immoral thing on the planet, is to believe that you have all of the answers for making society more peaceful for your people

and not doing everything possible to implement them. I think that's the most immoral thing you can do, especially if you're just sitting there watching the world turns of shit. No, for sure. I agree with that. And I think you referenced that the politics is sort of eternal. Not sort of eternal. It is eternal.

It's constant. It's ever changing and it's ever present. but I talked about that in that essay that we talked about last time, the triumph of the political. And there's this idea that's sort of built into the American psyche in the 20th century that we're sort of above politics and that we can politicize. We can basically neutralize the public space and privatize all of those, like the clash of the friends and enemies.

We can just privatize those decisions. We don't have to make them. Well, that's sort of a denial of the human experience. The human experience is a, clash of peoples who are, whose existence is mutually exclusive. I think that's the essence of political life. And this is the thing that Carl Schmidt talks about is, you know, he defined liberalism as the attempt to depoliticized society, the attempt to transcend politics and the attempt

to look for these absolute universal rules that could govern a peaceful society and that politics itself can be banished, that there is no more politics because we can just come to the table on mutually acceptable terms, and we can debate our way out of these things. So that liberalism becomes this, you know, this magnificent debating society. And he just thought this was incredibly dangerous because what would happen is you would end up shoving politics in under the ground, like into the water. Like when you're trying to like sink a big beach ball, like, you know, you're trying to push it under the water, it would pop up out of nowhere and it would surprise you. And the other thing

that's going to happen when you do that is those who are not interested in depolitization are going to have no confrontation. They're going to have no enemies when they march through the institutions and seize power. So liberalism is incredibly dangerous because it denies, you know, the, just the reality of the human experience. The human life is built on the context of mutually exclusive warring groups, that there are friends who you can ally with in order to protect your survival, and there are enemies out there that want you destroyed because they have their own priorities and objectives, and they're working on behalf of their own vision for the way things should be and on behalf of their friends. And if you don't confront that with power,

you're basically just walking into a battle and laying down your sword. Yeah. And not being able to understand. that there are people out there who are smart enough to politicize private society. And they can look at people, I've heard you talk about this recently, Schmidt, and once you get past a friend and enemy, and you realize, okay, well, if you embrace Schmidt, you have a way to fight the left. But then you have someone like Antonio Gramsci who's like, well, we're just going to radicalize private business, private institutions, churches.

And well, then all the liberals, they're not going to have anything to say about that because it's a private company, bro. They can do whatever they want. Exactly. Exactly. This is where rights rhetoric really begins to break down. Because when you have someone like Gramsci, who's, by the way, like he's a now. nasty leftist, but he's incredibly insightful because he's picking apart exactly the way that culture, civil societies, what he calls it, is structured and it's relation to the state.

When you have people that are marching through the private institutions and your entire mentality is it's private, there's nothing I can do about this because they have X, Y, and Z rights, what you're doing is you're giving momentum, you're allowing for those in society who seek your destruction to weaponize the very thing that you're preaching. They're weaponizing it in order to take power. They don't have an endgame where everything is private and voluntary. They don't have this volunteerist mindset at all. But what they're doing is they're leveraging your own commitment to property rights against you. A good example of this is like the, you know, the expansion of like pornography. You know, like these people they, they, they get it.

into the ads, into the social media, into public billboards, things are pornographic, because they're trying to humiliate and undermine and desensitize people on behalf of their cultural revolution. E. Michael Jones talks about this all the time. These are private rights-oriented mechanisms of political transformation. That's exactly what they're doing. Or like the creation of like subversive like music like there's that book I forget who wrote Saunders or something about like the the cultural Cold War

and how much private money was expended into the cultural institutions to radicalize them, de-Christianize them and basically become outposts for regime interests and but there's nothing a liberal what can a libertarian say against that? It's private money going into private institutions producing you know

private goods and services for the market. There's like, well, the state can't do anything about that, can it? It's like, so they are weaponizing our own rhetoric and our own commitments against us. That's another reason why it's so dangerous to have this absolutist and universalist approach to rights. It's because they've politicized the private aspect of rights and there's nothing that a libertarian or a liberal who, you know, holds true to his own, you know, starting point, his own, you know, fundamental axioms can do about it. So that's another, that's another key way that the left has been able to neuter, neutralize their own enemy and march through the institutions in this way because the right, or not the right,

but the conservatives basically refuse to see this and they refuse to take political action against it. Yeah. No, let's end it right there. And keep writing. about rights, keep doing that paper because you know the more you write, it's so much easier to work out ideas on paper than it probably is anywhere else. For sure. Yeah, no, for sure. So yes, C.J. ingle.com and then at contra mordor on Twitter, you can find me. But I do. I have a, we already talked about it. I have a post, an article pending that I've mostly written and haven't quite finished up yet. But I think that we need to talk about rights, how to use it and how not to use it.

Yeah. Thank you. CJ. Appreciate it. Thanks, Pete.