The Tucker Carlson Show - Auron MacIntyre: The American Empire Is Racing Towards Collapse. Here’s How to Prevent It.

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

Go to war in some faraway country for no obvious reason, slaughter a bunch of peasants, and then import their relatives into your cities and put them on welfare. That’s been the US government’s main occupation for 60 years. Auron MacIntyre explains how it works. (00:00) The Founding Fathers Would Not Approve of America’s Current Foreign Policy (13:13) Can a Multicultural Society Really Exist? (29:39) What Is a Heritage American? (48:00) What Are the Costs of Scaling Back an Empire? How the Boomer Generation Kickstarted the Destruction of America Auron MacIntyre is a columnist, lecturer, and author focusing on the application of political theory. He is the host of the Auron MacIntyre Show podcast on The Blaze. Paid partnerships with: Levels: Get 2 free months on annual membership at https://Levels.Link/Tucker SimpliSafe: Visit https://simplisafe.com/TUCKER to claim 50% off & your first month free! Masa Chips: Get 25% off with code TUCKER at https://masachips.com/tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So I feel like the Trump administration is finally figuring out that allying yourself with Benjamin Netanyahu, while there's definitely some overlap in interests, and I don't think any of this is personal, but when you form an unbreakable alliance with any foreign country, you're likely to get hurt, and American interests are likely to get hurt. And I think it's dawning on them that, you know,

if another country, I don't know, decides to move 2 million people by force in the biggest internment mass migration since the Second World War. You don't want to have to take credit for that. Are you surprised? Not really. Obviously, this is a terrible situation in the Middle East, and you can sit around and say, oh, you know, Israel should have been formed when way. Palestine should look at right, right, exactly.

But the truth is, at the end of the day, these two peoples are completely incompatible, and one of them is going to try to remove the other. That's a really ugly thing. Nobody should ultimately think that's positive. But if you look throughout history, The solution most nations have to this issue is ethnic cleansing. That's just what happens throughout history. Again, you don't have to judge it one way and another.

You just have to look at history and know that's how these things tend to get resolved. And it's ugly business for anyone. And why should we involve ourselves on either side of that? I just don't understand how that would ever serve America. Well, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. Of course this is going to happen. And it's done in me slowly.

It's like, wait, but what about the two million or however many are still alive? People in Palestinians and Gaza. Like, well, we'll just move them somewhere else. What? No one's tried that in 80 years. It didn't work then. Now everyone has an iPhone. and it's going to be on video. It's totally immoral and disgusting, but it's also, as you just

pointed out, inevitable. Again, it's messy, but it's a historical reality. And if we deny that, then we're going to end up getting caught in this never-ending cycle. The only reason this really hasn't happened, again, one direction or other either. It's not that I think the Palestinians probably wouldn't have a similar solution if they were in the Israelis' shoes. But the only reason this hasn't happened is there has kind of been this international consensus to involve ourselves in what otherwise would be a natural process throughout history. And so that's why we find ourselves stuck here over and over again. This is never going to get solved through diplomacy. You're never going to work out the ways in which you find it. No, it's going to end with one

group displacing the other. That's just going to happen. And it's just not our problems. There's no reason we should have our money, our treasure, our people, or more importantly, our moral worth tied up to any of this. But that's kind of the American way, isn't it? I mean, historically, and you've taught history, that the United States forms unbreakable alliances with countries that share its values. That's what we're told. Is that true? No, and that's the most hilarious thing is like over and over again, we hear this. Oh, don't you care about America? Don't you care about American values? Actually, if we look at what the founders said about foreign

policy, it's radically different. George Washington, in his farewell address, was very clear about the way we should approach foreign alliances. He said, basically, you shouldn't have them. You can have commercial relationships. You should trade with other nations, be friendly as possible. But he says very explicitly, never, ever have a favored nation or a nation that you hate, because either way, it makes you a slave to that nation. And a free nation should be free of foreign influence. He very clearly says that foreign influence is the death of any given republic. And so he says, be very careful about making some nation your favorite nation, because the natural dynamic, that will happen. And I promise, I'm not making any of this up. I'm not like, you know,

tailoring this in some way to the current environment. So this to be clear, this is, this is Washington's farewell address. Right. Which is, quote, there's one line from it, don't make foreign alliances or something that, you know, everyone's kind of familiar with. But does he goes on about it? Oh, for several pages. And he explains exactly the dynamic it's going to happen. He says, you're going to associate this favored nation with your own nation. You're going to conflate its interests, whether you're with its own interests. And not only will that happen, the different leaders of political factions inside your nation will start vying for favorability with the favored nation, you know, showing themselves to be the true ally while you're the one

who is deceiving everyone and you are actually betraying our true ally. And he says it's even going to get worse because the real patriots that point out that you are favoring that nation instead of the interests of the real country you live in, those people will be now denounced as traitors. No way. Yes, it says very clearly. And so he's warned us about everything that we'd- Washington wrote that?

Yeah, 100%. Washington said the people who stand up and say, wait a second, nothing against that other country, but our country's interest should be the main focus of the U.S. government. That guy will be denounced as like a tool of Qatar. Right. And this is a document. This is a document that every school child used to have to learn.

This is what in every history class you would go. This is one of our core documents along with the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address. But we never go over this anymore. And I don't think that's any kind of strange coincidence. It very clearly contradicts everything about our current foreign policy. And that's what the founders actually believed. That's so prescient. It's almost spooky.

It's absolutely amazing. When you go back and read the words, you would think he's speaking. exactly to the situation we're in now. And of course, you can see this with many places. You can see this Israel, but you can also see it with Ukraine. Oh, for sure. And it's so strange that the right learned this lesson with Ukraine, right? We all learned that actually this deep state will send us to war. And they don't care about the boys in Appalachia or Texas. And it's not about defending America. We all recognize that when the Biden administration was calling us, you know, Putin puppets because we didn't want to send blood and treasure to Ukraine. But all of a sudden, we have a similar

situation where Israel where we might need to involve ourselves. And we forget all of the lessons we learn. We forget all of the foreign policy that we were actually supposed to be following if we're following the American tradition. That's amazing. When did that fall out of the curriculum, do you think? It's a great question. I have never had it as something when I was a history teacher that was required reading. I went through it because I thought it was something important for students to understand. But as a necessary part or mandatory part of the curriculum, it was never there. Maybe a short excerpt. I mean, it's only a third. 30-page thing, but we're not allowed to have students actually look at any kind of primary sources

anymore. Because one of the nasty things that happens when you look at old books that were written before, say, 1945, is you determine that the world is actually very different. And that there's something very radical and modern that's happened. That's why we don't read primary sources, because then we might actually know some history. Anything written pre-second war has a completely different tone that you can feel, even if they're not saying, even if the document itself doesn't say anything that is particularly radical to the modern sensibility. The way that it's written, the sort of freedom of expression, you realize how much censorship and self-censorship exists post-war when you read it. I mean, it's like read a Lothrop's daughtered book,

for example. It's amazing that people wrote stuff like that. It's also the amount of historical context. Everyone knew the language of the old world. They understood that they were connected to chain of tradition. And everything that they spoke about was deeply seated in that context. If you go back and read Hobbes' Leviathan, even though he's making an argument for secular government, nine-tenths of it is couched in biblical language. It's nothing but biblical references. And he makes casual references to very complex theological issues that he assumes everyone is familiar with. And this is the exact same thing you see with the founders, whether it be in the federalist papers or Washington's farewell address. These are men who are deeply built into a very specific tradition

and understand everything about the world inside of that. And we just don't see that anymore. Now, when we look at history, it's all these little blocks of carefully managed narrative. It has no connection to the actual lives lived by our ancestors. Well, I don't think we have ancestors as a nation, right? I mean, what percentage of the population has an ancestor fought in the Civil War? Increasingly, very few.

And that's actually a huge problem as we face these issues. coming with deportations. A lot of people are asking, okay, we understand mass deportations for illegals. We get that. But what about legal immigrants? How does that work? Who is an American, ultimately, right? And that's really going to be the question of our age. We're transitioning from a moment where identity globally was very ideological, right? You're either communist or you're capitalist, with one empire or another, your first world or second world. That was shattered, right? That paradigm was shattered after the end of the Cold War. And instead, we all had to turn back inward and stop having this global ideological struggle and ask, okay, now that that's gone, who are we as peoples

again? And that struggle to understand national identity, I think, is seeping through everything, including our ability to understand our own traditions and understand how our constitution work and what our values actually are, not just what's being handed to us by the news, media, or an educational system. So we're understanding ourselves in a very very, different way. And where does that shake out? Like, what is identity post- ideology? Well, the most traditional understanding of identity is a collection of many different factors, including language, religion, people, place, heritage, tradition, folkways, history. These things were all the different aspects that made up human society until we needed to create these

supernatural organizations run by managerial elites that didn't have any connection. to these individual places. And that's why we see over and over again our different world governments desperately trying to erode the particular nature of peoples. If you look at the UK right now, they're completely destroying any free speech tradition.

They're completely destroying any Anglo understanding of rights. And they're all doing it in the name of creating this multicultural society that England never had in the first place. And so you see these elites who are destroying the nature and quality of their people. They're actively replacing the people in their nation because if they do that, then those barriers to the power that previously existed

that were tied to the tradition will be gone. We did an interview with a woman called Casey Means. She's a Stanford educated surgeon and really one of the most remarkable people I have ever met. In the interview, she explained how the food that we eat, produced by huge food companies, big food, in conjunction with pharma, is destroying our health, making this a weak and sick country. The levels of chronic disease are beyond belief. What Casey means who we've not stopped thinking about ever since is the co-founder of a healthcare technology company called Levels,

and we are proud to announce today that we are partnering with Levels, and by Proud, I mean sincerely proud. Levels is a really interesting company and a great product. It gives you insight into what's going on inside your body, your metabolic health. It helps you understand how the food that you're eating, the things that you're doing every single day are affecting your body in real time.

And you don't think about it. You have no idea what you're putting in your mouth and you've no idea what it's doing to your body. But over time, you feel weak and tired and spacey and over an even longer period of time, you can get really sick. So it's worth knowing what the food you eat is doing to you. The Levels app works with something called a continuous glucose monitor, a CGM.

You can get one as part of the plan or you can bring your own. It doesn't matter. But the bottom line is big tech, big pharma, and big food combined together to form an incredibly malevolent force, pumping you full of garbage, unhealthy food with artificial sugars, and hurting you and hurting the entire country. So with levels, you'll be able to see immediately what all this is doing to you. You get access to real-time personalized data, and it's a critical step to changing your behavior. Those of us who like Oreos can tell you firsthand.

This isn't talking to your doctor in an annual physical, looking backwards about things you did in the past. This is up to the second information on how your body is responding to different foods and activities, the things that give you stress, your sleep, et cetera, et cetera. It's easy to use. It gives you powerful, personalized health data, and you can make much better choices about how you feel. And over time, it'll have a huge effect. Right now, you can get an additional two free months. when you go to levels.link slash Tucker. That's levels.

dot link slash Tucker. This is the beginning of what we hope will be a long and happy partnership with Levels and Dr. Casey means. Can't, I mean, so many questions. I can imagine a multiracial society. I certainly want to. I don't understand what a multicultural society is.

How can you have a multicultural society? Because society is culture. So how can. many exist in one society. Well, this is, I think, a real problem with our really modern and vulgar use of race. Race is a macro category. Ethnos is a more organic microcategory, right? And so when we think about different ethnicities in Europe, there are many, right?

The difference between an Italian and a Swede is rather large. However, there's this vast. Right. It's huge. Vast. Right. But there's this macro core, you know, category. of white or European. And that means something, but it really only means things in a highly

racialized society. So it used to be that in America, we had black Americans, and they had a specific ethnic identity because they had basically been shorn of their previous ethnic identity. They didn't have a connection to their tribe, to their peoples, to their history. And so they had an ethnogenesis. They formed an ethnos in the United States. But the white population, the European descendants, were ones that had different European ethnos backgrounds. They had Germanic backgrounds. They have English backgrounds. Irish, all these, right? And so, you know, those different identities were distinct and we even had different neighborhoods, entire states that were settled by very different peoples, even though they're of European descent. But as we

have racialized, as we have become only interested in those macro categories, all of those separate white ethnosis that once existed have been pulled into a single identity. Or separate black for that matter. Right. Yeah, the ones that existed previously. Yeah. Washington, D.C. is the, I think, think the largest population of Ethiopians and Eritreans who are black, asked them what they think of local black people. Right. Right. They've, I don't know that they've any income.

They don't seem to. Right. So, but why would you want to erase all of those very real differences? Like, why, why pretend that Swedes are the same as Sicilians? Because eventually, each one of those particular cultures creates a high level of resistance to both standardization and scale. of managerial power, but most importantly, to government power. Because people's with particular traditions and identities aren't going to just go along with whatever the government says. They have

real, organic, deeply seated understandings of who they are. We can just look at COVID, right? Who are all the people that actually resisted during COVID? Orthodox Jews, the Amish. The religious, people with high degrees of individual transcendent identities, right? This is my group, my practice of my religion, the people I go to church with, the people my community, they are more important than whatever the state believes. And the only thing that can push back against that, it's not abstract principle. It's not words in a constitution. The words in the constitution only restrict the government if they reflect particular understandings of peoples and the way that they live their lives. And that's why those communities were more resilient.

Because even if there was no paper constitution to protect them, their real beliefs, their real identity actually resisted the state? So your thesis is, we see the world becoming homogenized, and there's something in us, normal people, I think, that find that very distressing, very distressing. And that's why we seek out places that are different, because we understand that the actual diversity of peoples is somehow important. We can feel that. And it's certainly interesting.

But there are huge forces pushing against it, leveling forces. Everyone's the same, same attitude, same sports, same food. And your thesis is that's on purpose. That's not natural. And it's a paragraph by governments. Well, I think the better way to understand this is by a managerial class. They're certainly part of the government. But a big change has happened, especially after the Industrial Revolution.

We used to have statesmen, right? And these were people who had to make very real and decisive decisions. They had to use a lot of. wisdom, you know, to be very prudent, they had to use discernment. We were very reliant on their ability to lead. What has happened over time is that we've found that that is a very inconsistent way to produce results. And so the best way is to remove human agency from decision making. And when we do that, we can increase the level of scale at which we can produce results in government and business and weapons manufacturing and everything else. And so ultimately, if we can

go ahead and abstract the human condition. If we can create a set of parameters by which people always have to act, then that allows us to create a situation in which we're producing bigger and better results without needing any to understand any particular culture or people or rely in any type of human prudence or decision making. This is what everyone gets very angry about when they call any kind of bureaucracy, right? They're stuck in a phone tree, and there's no one who can make a decision. There's no one who can overrule the machine. Every, even real person they're talking to is kind of talking like a robot. And that allows the call center to handle more calls than they would if each individual person was actually making decisions and

helping people. But in the end, it actually destroys the whole purpose of the call center. It only exists to serve itself. And that's what's happened with our managerial elite. They now only exist to serve their power. They now only exist to serve their global network. It involves, of course, governments, but involves NGOs and banks and educational institutes. and media institutions. This is an entire class of people with the same interest set that are all working constantly

to ensure that their power grows and the agency of individual people in their actual homelands is reduced. One of the core beliefs about economics, I think that most people have because it's just intuitive, is that in order to receive a reward, you have to provide a service.

Like doing something useful, moving the ball forward, feeding people, giving them shelter, educating their children, allowing them to go to heaven or whatever. But you have to be adding something in order to take something. And what I'm struck by with the group you're describing is how little they add. And I wonder if that, I wonder if there's like kind of any precedent for that in human history.

Well, there is quite a bit, right? So pretty much every government is at some level a thief, right? That's how kind of all governments start at some level. They're taking some percentage of what people make, what they do. and they're gathering it to themselves and hoarding it for themselves. But as you say, there used to be some kind of service provided. They're protecting your livelihood. They're ensuring no one invades you.

They protect you from criminals, right? Like there is some kind of transaction that is occurring here. But over time, the more you control the market, the more you don't have to offer the product, right? This is why we hate monopolies because they create scenarios in which you don't have to be reactive to the needs of the people. You don't have to keep providing because you're the only game in town. And more and more people understand that the only way they can interact, not just in their country, but globally, is with these managerial apparatuses. You have to work inside that framework.

And so they continue to run in this race thinking that it's going to get them somewhere, but it's really the only thing available to them at this point. And so we are seeing in many different places around the world, people are pushing back against the managerial elite. You hear people like J.D. Vance or Vivek Ramoswamy talking about the administrative state. and the need to dismantle the deep state, all of these things. We see people in the UK understanding that ultimately their government and not some foreign enemy is actually the most hostile thing to them. So there is pushback coming. We are seeing this to rise up.

But the system is vast and powerful and extremely wealthy. And all of this is very difficult for people to do, especially because they've been trained for the most part to not even recognize that they are ruled, that there is a ruling class. Right? It's all popular sovereignty. It's all democracy. The people have chosen this. You voted for it somewhere.

And so it's actually not the leader's fault. It's not the guy making billions of dollars fault. It's not the guy who's buying his fifth home's fault. No, it's your neighbor. It's the guy who runs the plumbing with a MAGA hat. It's his fault. He voted wrong. And he's the reason you're poor.

I mean, that's such a perfect description of what's happening. And an organization at a certain scale always exists for its own self-perpetuation. Is that true, do you think? That's right. Yeah. There's a historian Robert Conquest, and he has three laws of power. Yeah, absolutely. And his third law is that at the end, an organization, a bureaucratic organization,

is just going to look like it's operated by a cabal of its enemies, because it eventually turns into an organization that only serves the members of the organization and not the actual purpose it was stated for. And so every one of these managers, everyone who's disassociated from both the people you're serving and the original organization itself is just going to turn every piece of the organization into their own little power grab, their own little fiefdom, where they can secure more. And that's why we see the managers exploding in every form of business, whether it's consulting. If you look at public education where my experience came from, you know, you have a thousand more administrators than you do teachers because the incentive is not to actually educate students or actually serve the public that you were created to serve.

it's to perpetuate your existence inside that system. So what does it mean to be safe in your own home? For a long time, that meant good locks and maybe an alarm system. That was enough, but they're not enough. And you know that because the news is filled with stories to people who thought they were protected and fell victim anyway. SimplySafe can help prevent you from becoming the next victim. Instead of just responding after somebody comes into your home and intruder enters, SimplySafe can stop them from ever getting in in the first place.

It's proactive. and just react. It stops the problem before it starts. Simply saves cameras and live monitoring agents detects suspicious activity. And if somebody is lurking around your house, agents engage in real time. They activate spotlights. They can call the cops to get the intruder away from your house and prevent them from coming in. Not all security systems do that. The difference is enormous. That's why our team, along with four million other people in this country, trust simply safe. Monitoring plans start for about a dollar a day. They include a 60-day money-back guarantee, visit simplysafe.com slash Tucker to claim 50% off a new system

with professional monitoring and your first month is free. That's simplysafe.com slash Tucker. There is no safe like SimplySafe. So the system as one of its core imperatives has got to divide the population. It feels that way. It doesn't, a lot of the, I mean, I'm coming to this slowly, but a lot of the ugliest things that the system does, inspiring race hatred, for example, I never have understood why you'd want to do that. Why would you want to do that? But they're doing it and have been for 60 years. Is that a long term? Is that can you continue doing that? Not forever, but it's a classic power strategy. So we need to understand that one of the things that power always wants to do is centralize and expand its reach. I think that's

pretty obvious to a lot of people. But this guy, Bertrand de Juvenal, came up with this metaphysics of power. And his understanding was that what we would think of as the middle class, right, the Koolocks. They're entrenched in society because they own a piece of the tradition. They own a piece of the land. They have actual communities. They have resilience. They have the ability to push back against the government. And so if you have this middle class, they're in the way of your power as a leader. Oh, yes. And so what do you do? Well, you take your high, your high, your ruling class, and you pair them with a low class from outside of society. And that high and low versus the middle is the way that you break apart society because you promise the new voters or the

new participants that you will give them whatever the Kulaks have. It's all their fault, the middle class. They're the ones who are keeping you back. They're the racists. They're the sexes. And if you just defeat them, we'll just give you all their stuff. And this is the wedge that is continuously used. The large amount of our government right now is just a wealth transfer between heritage Americans and the new political class that's being moved into rural society. That's just the dynamic we're seeing. And this happened in Rome. This has happened many, many times over. You can see many historical examples. So the H-1B thing is just to, so the enemy is what you call heritage Americans. What are those? Heritage Americans are those

that are actually tied. You could find their last names in the Civil War registry. Like they have a tie to the history and to the land. And, you know, Samuel Huntington is a guy. who I really like, he wrote the Clash of Civilizations and Who Are We? And, you know, I think won his debate with Francis Fukuyama pretty decisively. But, you know, he said in Who Are We? His book about American identity, the core of American identity is the Anglo-Protestant spirit. And he's a man of the center left, you know, as a Harvard professor.

This is a guy who's not, you know, he's not, oh, you can only be an Anglo or a Protestant to be part of America. But he says, even the Catholics and Jews in America take on. this Anglo-Protestant affect in some way. And so you have to have this majority culture for people to assimilate too. And so when we're talking about a heritage American, we're either talking about someone who is tied specifically that tradition or someone who has come here and has been here for generations,

but understands that they are conforming to that way of being, that that that's the core of society. And what is that way? Can you describe the Anglo-Protestant worldview? I mean, obviously we could spend entire books on that and that has been done. Well, it's almost never mentioned. It's true. Yeah.

Which I think is interesting because those are the people who founded the country and set up every system that we're benefiting from now, from, you know, our economic and political systems or have been benefiting from, maybe not anymore. But those are the founders. It was 100% Anglo-Protists, like 100%. Right. So, I don't, why don't we ever mention that culture? Because we're very terrified of the idea. that ideas are particular to cultures and peoples. That sounds very scary in old world. It's true. Of course it's true. It's obviously true. And we know that because now we laugh

whenever we try to export democracy to Afghanistan or something, right? I know it from traveling a lot. I go to different countries and I don't hate their cultures or ideas at all. I don't have to live under them. I'm just visiting. I think they're really interesting. But they're very different because the people are different, inherently different. Yes. And when you change the people, you change the culture, which is why our Western governments are so busy trying to replace those populations. Yeah, when you change the population, you change the country. You change the country and you change the principles that it's going to be founded on. You know, we look at the Declaration of Independence and it says, we hold these truths to be self-evident. If you go to Afghanistan, are the truths

of the Constitution self-evident to them? No. Of course not. Because when they said self-evident, they meant to people in our tradition, to us, to the people who dissented us, who share our values, who speak our language, who speak, you know, the type of heritage that we understand, that's where that comes from. Again, it doesn't mean that other people can't be grafted into that and absorb that, but the idea of a purely propositional nation that is in no way tied to a culture or a people, but is entirely a collection of abstract things agreed to in some social contract before society even begin is just ridiculous.

And it's not the way the Constitution was even understood when it was written. our founder said very famously that the Constitution is for immoral and religious people that had a particular understanding of how we would have to live our lives and what that would look like if we were going to be able to live under the Republic that they erected. All true. I interrupted you with my outburst of rage.

When I asked you what exactly are the presupposition? What's the nature of this? Anglo-Protestine culture that founded this country. I think this is where people get a lot of the ideas of a decent amount of individualism. This has always been a key part of it. Also, restrained government. The idea that government would be limited is something tied to the Magna Carta, right? Like, yes, they had a, you know, became a constitutional monarchy, but, you know, we can see a

direct line from what the English were doing with their set of government in the way that we understand, you know, our society. The idea that free speech is something sacred, that the individual, you know, individual conscience and the practice of religion is something that needs to be maintained. These are all core values that when you actually look in other societies, they don't look the same. Free speech in Germany does not look the same. There's no Slavic society, and I love Slavic societies, just being honest. They're great, but they don't see free speech as a foundation on God-given right.

They just don't. And they're whiter than I am. So it's not, it is like, it's much, that is to your very smart point, about lumping all these different, very distinct cultures into the white group eliminates differences that we should be thinking about. Yeah, absolutely. Even inside European cultures, vastly different traditions. Closer, perhaps, than, say, someone in Eastern Asia, but still very, very different from

place to place. And the fact that we've just kind of melted that all down into this binary or between a couple few races as if that's like the complete understanding of who people's are and how they live their lives is just silly. And again, I think that serves the purpose of really just melting down culture in general, right? Like it looks like race is very divisive identity politics, right, which to some degree it is. But the reason it feels so divisive, the reason it feels so unnatural is it's thoroughly unrooted from actual organic ways of being. It's completely removed from the things that make your life better when you have a holistic identity. It's just

this rough collection of hatred for people who happen to have a different skin color, which doesn't get you anywhere good. Smart. So smart. Can you have a continent-sized country with hundreds of millions of people in it with completely distinct cultures

with totally different assumptions about things like natural rights? To some extent, if you want to operate as an empire, and I think this is the crossroads that America is at. We, if you talk to Americans, you know, the Democrat side will say, well, we're a democracy. And then Republicans will say, well, no, of course not. We're a republic.

That's very different. If you ask them what the difference is, they won't be able to really explain it to. No, no, they never can. There's a representative. They get all huffy, but they have no idea what they're going. Yeah. And the real difference is that republics have self-government because the body politic sees itself as being a necessary participant on a regular basis, that the individual seems

themselves as needing to cultivate a certain amount of virtue and individuality that allows for a level of self-governance that otherwise doesn't exist. And so the fact that the Republican type of government requires this type of virtue means it has to stay relatively small. And this isn't something I just made up. You can see this in Aristotle or Machiavelli or the founding fathers. They understood that scale was a very dangerous component of government forms. And that if you created this vast empire, even a continent-sized empire, much less a world empire, that was going to radically change the way that you had to govern. And we have continued to expand our imperial ambitions as the United States, but have never addressed the impact it's been having on our

governance. And this is why so many people feel like the people they elect don't run the government. Of course they don't, because you don't live in a republic anymore. You live in an empire. And the empire has a large amount of machinery that hums right under the surface, and it's kind of constantly serving its own interests on a regular basis. Some people will call this the deep state. I wrote a book called the total state because I think that really encapsulates a far wider understanding of the manager elite and the power they hold. They're not just in the unelected bureaucracy, but they're in the media. They're in financial institutions. They're in education, all of these different things that manipulate our public opinion. And really,

the ability to manipulate public opinion has become the one skill necessary to govern at this point because we switch from this idea that we have a people, a specific people ruled in a particular way through virtue in a republic and instead have understood that just the mass will is the only thing that matters. And what's great at manipulating the mass will? Mass media. You may have noticed this is a great country with bad food. Our food supply is rotten. It didn't used to be this way. Take chips, for example. You may recall a time when crushing a bag of chips didn't make you feel hungover, like you couldn't get out of bed the next day. And the change, of course, is chemicals.

There's all kinds of crap they're putting in this food that should not be in your body, seed oils, for example. Now even one serving of your standard American chip brand can make you feel bloated, fat, totally passive, and out of it. But there is a better way. It's called masa chips. They're delicious. Got a whole garage full of them.

They're healthy. They taste great, and they have three simple ingredients, corn, salt, and 100% grass-fed beef tallow. No garbage, no seed oils. What a relief, and you feel the difference when you eat them, as we often do. Snacking on masa chips is not like eating the garbage that you buy convenience stores. You feel satisfied, light, energetic, not sluggish, tens of thousands of happy people eat masa chips. It's endorsed by people who understand health. it's well worth a try. Go to MASAchips.com slash Tucker. Use the code Tucker for 25% off your first order.

That's MasaChips.com Tucker. Code Tucker for 25% off your first order, highly recommended. So the idea that media would be a bulwark against government overreach, that it would be a sort of watchdog acting on behalf of the population, they're too busy to know what their government is doing. The media is going to do it for them. that whole notion is like absurd. The media is a participant in this system. And what's funny is, again, if you look at the American tradition, if you just look at the people writing inside of the American tradition, they describe exactly this process and how it was going to take place.

John C. Calhoun, you know, vice president in the United States, you know, served in multiple cabinets. This is a guy who laid out in one of his treaties that ultimately the American media would not serve as any kind of. check some kind of, you know, fourth estate and instead would be used by political parties to manipulate the opinion of people creating a winner-take-all situation in any given election. You have a situation where all political parties are suddenly incentivized to basically burn down the country, take as much as they can for themselves, and in prison or otherwise deny their

opponents' access to the ballot box because otherwise they'll lose this giant Leviathan they built. And again, he's, I think he wrote this in the 1850s, the 1840s, you know, it's really released after his death. But again, we can just look at the people who were part of the American tradition and they recognize that this is the function media was going to play from the beginning. It does seem like we're moving toward dictatorship. And I'm not pointing at any one political leader or party even. I think the Democrats are much more eager for dictatorship than the Republicans generally, but I'm not even. been making that point. I'm just saying people's faith in democracy, whatever that is, has been badly shaken. And I just don't think you can govern in the way that our government

currently governs forever. Do you think that's inevitable? Yeah, I do. I think Caesarism is a natural life cycle of any civilization. When you get to the oligarchic stage. Caesarism is it? That's so smart. Yeah, this is got, you know, Oswald Spangler talked about the life cycles of civilizations. And after the age of money power, after the age of oligarchy, the only thing that can cut through the Gordian nod of this vast sprawling bureaucracy built on money is a strongman. That's what he predicts in any given age. Obviously, that's not the Anglo understanding, right? It's definitely not the way that you want to see. Let me speak for all Anglos when I say, we're very opposed to that. Right. But if you aren't careful, if you don't understand how and why

money powers come to dominate your society and created this rule of the oligarchs people will cry out for that the only thing more powerful than money is violence right so that's just kind of that simple yes so if you reach a stage where money determines everything which is where we definitely are now we are in the in the age of oligarchs and the people want some say there's kind of like no other option is there no and that that's why you see them fall behind you know leaders like this very very easily, right? And so you have a very precarious situation right now. We're at a very important crossroads in the United States. It's very rare that a nation decides to scale back its empire voluntarily. It doesn't happen very often. And we have to consider whether we think that's worth

avoiding the current track we're on, because there is a cost to scaling down empire, to be clear, you know, being the world hegemon has amazing benefits for you in theory. It has more benefits for you're ruling class, and eventually it's going to destroy your population. But in the short term, the benefits. Is that always true? The empire always destroys the population. I believe that to be the case. It can be longer. It can be shorter. But over time, we see this over and over again. Again, we can look at the classic example of Rome. It continues to expand its borders. A guy like Hadrian tries to pin it back inside. But eventually, they end up just giving citizenship to everyone. Kerkal expands it to the entire empire in the hopes that this will eventually bring the identity of the

empire back and get people to fight for it. And instead, what happens is they just keep importing Gauls until Gauls more or less just take over the empire. You know, they take over every important aspect of it. So again, a pattern that we see over and over again, it's very hard for empires not to do that. Why were they so successful within the empire? Well, they were the only people who weren't tamed anymore. I was but to say. So what was the testosterone thing? Yeah, it really is. We need to import our own barbarians to fight off the barbarians because the people themselves are no longer willing to fight. And this is, is a key aspect of republics again. No, just like, it's all, it just, this record is on repeat. It's

crazy. If you go back to the federal papers, you can see Hamilton telling people, look, I know you're scared about standing armies because we all know that standing armies are a detriment to free republics. So if you want us to not have a standing army, you need to turn over control of all of your different militias to us so that we can protect the United States without it. It was understood that being part of Republic meant being a soldier. Service actually did guarantee citizenship. It was the idea that your willingness to stand and defend what was yours was what made you a citizen worthy of contributing and voting and being part of the body politic.

Again, Aristotle said the citizen is he who is armed. Machiavelli said, you should never have mercenaries. You should never have paid standing armies instead. you should always have a militia. This is a core part of your identity as a republic. And the minute the people are no longer willing to fight and have to contract their fighting out somewhere else, you know the republic is done.

So the republic is done. The country's not done. The republic just becomes an empire. Right. That's what you're saying. So then what's, and we're there. So what's the life cycle of empire typically? A lot of people think it's very short.

Some people will cite the 250, year mark. But the one thing that is for sure is that these complex systems always reach a point of marginal utility that is just collapsing. They can no longer squeeze enough power, enough wealth, enough influence out of increasing one more rank of the complexity of their societies, conquering one more area, adding one more complex system. And so you're just waiting for the Tower of Babel to fall. I think this is honestly a very deeply biblical pattern that repeats itself over and over again. We try to unite all of humanity under these imperial ambitions. And in our hubris, we're scattered back to our natural state as

peoples. But the process is always brutal. So there's no happy ending for empire. There's those that, you know, can walk away to some extent. But you look at what the British have done. Yes, they in some to extent pass their empire on to us. But what does that cost them? Almost everything. Right. Well, everything. Yeah. Yeah. It looks like they lost a war. The most degraded people in the world. Right. And so, you know, the question is, is there a happy escape? And I'm not sure what the answer to that question is. I think to some degree, the answer is a return to a localism that can actually reinvigorate the communities that cultivate virtue and create Republican governance in the first place. But do we have the will to do that voluntarily? Do we have the will to walk away from the centralization of power? don't think that we do. Okay. So you said this is the moment, which is without many precedents in

history, where we are voluntarily trying to scale back the empire clear that. That's what Trump's election was about. Right. And there are cost to that. What are the costs? Well, a large amount of that is going to be global influence, right? If we're not in charge of an area, someone else might be. And And that also means that we're not imposing our standards and our understandings on the way that global commerce and all of these things should be affected. We're not controlling the diplomatic situation or the military deployment of foreign nations through our influence. And that can have large economic impacts. I mean, our entire dollar is based on being the global reserve currency. Withdrawing away from something like that is devastating.

We are deeply dependent on this global system. We are as dependent on it as the system. is on us at this point. And so untangling, it is very messy business. A lot of the things that we'd have to sacrifice cheap labor, global, you know, the global hegemony, the idea that we don't constantly have the ability to reach in and affect every international situation and dictate its outcome. Those are things our elites are unwilling to do. And we've already seen that in a place like Ukraine, right? Whereas we just came off of COVID. It's very clear that the ruling class had spent a large amount of their capital deceiving the world,

and yet they immediately went right back into another conflict because, well, Russia is not allowed to conduct any business without the United States being involved in it. Now, if I was Ukrainian, I'd hate Russia. I have no particular love for what's happening there. But the idea that we would immediately jump in and try to dictate the terms of that conflict is a hubris that can only be tied to the idea that, as the global empire,

we have the right to tell you somewhere in the middle of, you know, Eastern Europe, how we should actually be conducting a war like this. So what's the model for a society? So clearly this isn't working. It's chilling your description of this historical pattern, which clearly we're reliving yet again. But if you could start from scratch, like what is the ideal form of government? What is the ideal nation? Can you have a nation this big? Can it stay sovereign? Can it stay focused on its own people? I mean, is that possible? Well, the key, I think, is really understanding that this shouldn't be ideological.

One of my favorite thinkers, Joseph Demastra, said that every people gets the government that they deserve, that ultimately there is a correct form of governance, but it is different for different peoples. And so we can't look at one exact, abstract idea of how government should run and say, we'll just force that down on everybody. Again, we've seen the failure of that with liberal democracy across the world. And so the key is really the organic cultivation of the way that your people live. Again, the Anglo-Protestant understanding of authority is very radically different than, say, the Chinese, one throughout history. And so what would be the correct way for us to live is very different from the Chinese.

And that's okay. They don't have to live in their system and they don't have to live in ours. We don't have to impose that artificially. But we definitely don't have that view in this country. So in Arkansas, I was reading, because I know one of the people involved, the Attorney General of Arkansas, Tim Griffin, who's a perfectly nice guy, but he's like considering bringing charges against some group, building some, like, housing development, and that's all white. And that's, like, a threat somehow to everyone else.

There's no allegation they've done anything against anyone. just yet another indicator that are, like, core beliefs as a country, circa 2025 anyway, are that, you know, everyone has to live in exactly the same way, whether they want to or not. Well, this is a huge part of the Civil Rights Act, right? The Civil Rights Act itself is the end of freedom of association, which was a basic understanding of... Are you a racist? Oh, of course. You can't have, you can't hold in any of the opinions of our...

our founders without being racist. We all know that. But, but, you know, one of the key understandings is that people had the right to associate as they please. Now, I would never frequent a place that's, you know, refusing to serve a black American. No. Like, that's not my principles. But I should have the choice whether or not I should do that. A business owner should have the right to decide whether I should do that. And let's be honest, this is 2025 in America. We're not getting Jim Crow back. That's, yeah, unless, and this is the funniest thing about conservatives. They'll say, oh, of course America isn't racist. And they say, well, we can get rid of the Civil Rights Act then, right? Because we don't need a giant government bureaucracy that

intervenes in every aspect of society, giving it a blank check for a large government power. You're conservative. You'd want to get rid of that. And they say, oh, no, no, of course not. What if someone somewhere is racist, right? So we have to keep this giant Soviet-level mind-control bureau that works across our entire society and warps every incentive from housing to employment to education. We have to maintain that. Why won't? Because if we're honest, most conservative politicians actually believe what liberals believe that somewhere in the heart of America is just this giant pile of KKK members waiting to conquer the United States. And not just conservative or Republican lawmakers, but a lot of the opinion merchants out there on the so-called

right turn out to have none of the core assumptions that I have of it. Maybe I'm like super liberal. I always think of myself as the most right-wing person in the world. But I don't seem to have any in common with them at all. I didn't know that until the second Trump term. Do you know I'm talking about? Oh, yeah. And it's been rather hilarious. I'm pretty new to this. You've been doing this for a long time. But I've been 35 years, not too long. But no, you were like teaching school five years ago, right? Yeah, yeah, I've only been doing this for like three years. And so, yeah, it's been very eye-opening to interact with different personalities. Don't give me wrong. There are very sincere people. I want to warm people because everyone runs out there

and just says, oh, this person's a grifter, he's a grifter. They're all selling their opinion. But, you know, there are very principled people or very passionate people, but there are also a large amount of people who are in no way conservative, no way Republican, no way right wing, and make their living operating inside of these organizations.

Even some famous ones. It's interesting. Who is, I mean, I think we can say the majority of people in general are afraid, just they're afraid all the time. You know, secular people are all afraid all the time. So I'm not attacking anyone. I feel sorry for everyone involved.

But I think the majority of people on the internet giving their opinions are kind of fake on some level. But there are some real ones. Who are the real ones? Who are the real ones? That's, you know, I guess personally, I spend a lot more time in spheres that are off the beaten path. Yeah. And so I think that there are some, you know, people out there that maybe don't have massive, you know, fan base. or, you know, big voices in influential halls of power,

but are speaking some of the most important truths out there today. Well, I think you're one of them, and that's one of the reasons, that's the main reason I wanted to meet you and have this conversation because as much as I hate technology and electricity and all that stuff, and I'm like, I'm pretty, pretty Kaczynskied on all that modernity business. I do think the best thing about the modern world is the Internet and the fact that people who, you know, don't have any connections to anything can succeed on the basis of the strength of their wisdom

and of their opinions. And I just think you're a perfect example. So you were, you worked for the blaze. And, um, but you're very widely read on the internet. How did you get here? Like, how did you do that? Was this something that you planned? Not at all. I mean, I've always been very interested in politics. I got a political side and scree in college. And I, worked on a few campaigns, but there just wasn't much going on there. And so I ended up falling into being a local reporter for a while. I covered news and crime or politics and crime. And then I worked as a teacher, you know, for a long time. But when COVID struck... High school teacher. A high school teacher. Public school, yeah. And when COVID hit, you know,

I had all the opinions you'd expect from a talk radio conservative listening to Dennis Prager and Sean Hannity and these guys. And then when I watch, you know, the churches were closed and the strip clubs were open and you couldn't go see a dying loved one in the hospital but Democrats could riot in the streets and burn down your neighborhood and nobody did anything, right?

Like this is, I've been told my whole life by conservatives this is what the Second Amendment's for, right? Like the government has closed the churches, guys, that we are across the Rubicon. And I thought I was going crazy because all of the people who had been spouting all of this, my whole life were like, well, no, you're probably fine.

We've got to figure out how to work. And I just realized, okay, the Constitution is not stopping any of this. So I need to understand why. And so I started reading a lot of political theory outside of the mainstream. I read this guy, Curtis Jarvin. He just started writing under his real name. Used to be Minchin's Smolbug. And he had a bunch of other authors that I needed to understand.

And the more I read that, the more I wanted to share what was going on. It's been your spare time. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's kind of how I started tweeting and putting out material and writing. So it's just pure citizen. Like you don't really know anybody. You're just reading this stuff and coming to your own conclusions.

And then you start tweeting them out. And the next thing you know, you're doing it full time and you have a big following. Yeah, I think it's a situation where there are a lot of really important thinkers. And, you know, to be clear, I'm just standing on the shoulder of giants, guys like Samuel Francis and Joe Sobrin and Pat Buchanan and Paul Godfried, who were sitting in the wilderness for decades and decades. And that's why I think the conservative movement was so important. intellectually impoverished for so long, we forced all of our brightest minds into the wilderness because they kept saying things that didn't jive with kind of a neo-con agenda, and they had to be driven from polite society.

And nobody said anything. And at the center of so much of that was William F. Buckley, Jr., who, you know, I think had good qualities for sure. I'm not, you know, it was awfully nice to me, I will say. So I don't hate the guy or anything, but in retrospect, I mean, he really served one meaningful role in his life, which was to keep a certain variety of, nationalism out of the conservative canon yeah i think we can see this over and over again i mean you even think of a guy like russell kirk right wrote the conservative mind one of the intellectual

giants uh defining the movement and more or less got canceled because he had made one too many jokes about the capital of the united states being in tel Aviv you know like that that's all it took for you to get shoved off you know you can have this monumental uh career and this critical position and you can, you know, no longer be allowed in polite society, no longer get invited to the right dinners if you have, you know, the wrong opinions. It feels like things are changing fast. Do you feel that? Absolutely.

Where are they going? They're going to go to a lot of interesting places. As you pointed out, the, you know, the news sphere and more importantly, the narrative sphere, has disintermediated, right? We're no longer completely reliant on a couple news channels and a couple big newspapers. And, you know, at first, the right really like this, because it meant that they could get around, you know, the left-wing control of all of these critical centers. But now people on the right are getting panicked because their narratives are also breaking down.

They can no longer, you can't use the National Review and a couple of a couple of things in D.C. To kind of dictate how people understand the world. I don't even criticize National Review. I feel, you know, it's like so I don't think people even know what it is, do they? No one my age at this point, no. No. So their panic, like Megan McCain's all upset. people are saying things are just she's never heard before um but i feel like people like that are

irrelevant now or maybe i'm just hoping that's true no i think that's increasingly the case again i can't think of anyone who isn't paid in the beltway uh who is under 50 who cares what any of those people think right and so i think we're really going through a generational switch i think the in the tail end of the boomer generation is still very much tied to the conservative institutions they've had that, you know, cultural foxhole mentality for a long time and they see those people as their champions. But I think everyone behind them recognizes that, hey, I followed these, you know, platitudes for decades and they never did anything for me. And you know what I want to conserve? The ability of my family to have children. Ah, amen. Amen. I completely agree. I've reduced my whole

life down to that. That's it. That's my worldview. Can my kids have kids and live in this beautiful place called America. Will it still be beautiful? You know, will it be all low-income housing? No. You know what I mean? I think more and more, the message that we don't live in an economic zone, but an actual nation, is really resonating with people. Yes. We successfully somehow turned the right wing into the party of just disposable culture, disposable identities, disposable people. Who cares if, you know, the trade policy revolutionizes your town and gets rid of

all the jobs and everyone gets hooked on drugs, at least the free market one, right? No, I don't care. I care about my neighbor. I care about my family. I care about the community that we've built for generations. I shouldn't have to pick up my entire life and the many, many generations of social fabric that exists there to go move somewhere else every time you decide it's slightly cheaper to make something in China. That's not the way, that's not a conservative way to understand our society. And I think that's why you're seeing all of these institutions lose their power because ultimately what people really care about preserving is the American people, the American way of life, the tradition and existence of the people around them.

And I don't think you can sell them the idea that like infinite foreign labor is worth taking a bunch of cruises at the end of your life and then making sure your kids can't own a home. Like those things are no longer something that actually sells to, I think, the coming generations. No, I think they're rejecting it with real hostility. Yeah. Did they believe in democracy? Do they believe the current system can ever improve the country? I think at this point, democracy is just a shibboleth. I don't think it really means a whole lot to people.

No. It's, you know, what is our democracy? It's throwing the major candidate of the Republican Party in jail. That's democracy. That's how we protect our democracy, right? What does that phrase even mean at this point? I think people are ready for a government that cares about them, elites that care about them, elites who know that they're ruling and know that they have an obligation to a specific group and are no longer just, you know, using these people as pieces of exchange. So it sounds like what you think, not to put words in your mouth, but what you think is being rejected or going away is a fundamentally theoretical understanding of politics in the world that is just not satisfying. In the end, it doesn't serve anybody except for the people peddling the lie. What we're going to be staring down or living through is an understanding of the world that's like much more practical and real. Like, are you improving my life if you're not, leave. Yeah, again, this is where we understand that the core, the foundation of politics is really patronage. What can you, the ruling class, those in charge, what kind of life can you provide for us? What can you protect? What are you doing? A very direct relationship, not abstractly, are you signing a piece of paper, a treaty somewhere in Western Europe that will theoretically secure my right? No. Can the person next to me have children? Can the guy down the street take his kids to church, send them to school without worrying about whether they'll be shot? Is that an option? Because that matters to me way more than the idea that you're defending democracy in Ukraine.

Exactly. But I remember watching Biden, who obviously was, you know, an elderly man. It didn't have his full faculties and all that. But I still detected, like, sincerity on his face when he talked about Zelensky and his hero. and how he was Churchill, and this is the fight of our lives, you know, democracy once again triumphs over darkness. He really seemed to mean it. I thought that was real, like the emotion coming out. Do you remember any of these pressers? I still think the boomer brain always reverts to some, to the most tired cliche. Why is that? Well, I think they came into the world at a time where America more or less conquered the world. And when, When America conquered the world, we received all the benefits of empire. And so they think of themselves.

And we started as a country rejected empire, right? That's our entire foundation. We led a revolution against an empire because we had the right to be governed by our peers, by those elites that are part of our society and not across an ocean. And so it's a very hard story to tell yourself that you conquer the world in the name of freedom, right? And so I think for there's a lot of cognitive dissonance there And that requires a very cartoon Marvel movie-esque understanding of the world We're Captain America, we fought for freedom

Exactly. And but that's going away. That's going away with that generation. It is going away. I mean, I do think there's something about, and I always beat up on the boomers, there are a lot of great ones, wonderful people. But, you know, broad strokes here, this really was the first generation in history,

to have basically every part of their life dictated by popular culture. I mean, it's the television generation, really, right? And regional differences just went away during those years, 1946, 1964. And they kind of lost the capacity to think critically or something. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Again, I think it's because it's disembodied. As you say, the radio and then the television, you know, the train and then the automobile, these things collapsed the space inside of America that used to be regional, had specific understandings in ways of life. And when that happened, like you said,

the only way to have a singular culture was through this kind of mass media projection. And so, yeah, I think, you know, people make the joke, but, you know, the old person screaming at their television with the news is a, you know, it's a stereotype for a reason because that's the only way

they understood how to absorb the wider culture. Yes, no, it's right. and I saw it with Republicans with Reagan. I'm not against Reagan or anything. Don't agree with everything, but I don't hate Reagan. But, I mean, they get so, and there are former colleagues of mine at TV channels who are like they talk about them and they just repeat the same eight phrases, Mr. Gorbachev, Tared on this wall, or whatever. And they're kind of carried away in a sincere way. Like, they seem to experience life in the shallowest possible way.

does this do you feel what I'm saying sure and you know a lot of that is the medium itself there's statesmanship doesn't sell in sound bites right that that yeah that that's not really how that works to be thoughtful to be deliberate to have that level of prudence requires deliberation and time and you can't sell that you know in between ads and so that's harder and harder for political voices to really show it's easier to just repeat the slogans and we can hate people for that but I don't think we should because I think ultimately that's human nature. Oh, I agree. I don't hate them.

I just don't want them in power at all. And I just want people to remember that so much of what they hear is misleading, but what they experience is the truth. That is the truth. And if your children are addicted to drugs or your nephew dies of an OD and your kids can't get married and the best they can hope for is to work at some freaking bank, like that's not the life that you want for your family. That's reality.

And it's nothing to do with bombing Iran or democracy or some nonsense like that. Like, how are your kids doing? I just think it's important to notice the world around you. Well, it's so amazing because so many people got angry with the, with the Zoran Mamdani in New York, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they, oh, the socialist is winning. How could a socialist win? It's like, I don't know, guys.

Have you looked at the fact that the average first-time homebuyer thing is now 38 years old? Have you understood the fact that no one you know, can get a decent job without going $100,000 in debt for a degree that objectively taught them nothing and they're actually just doing any learning they actually do on the job anyway. If you've built a society that shows people your system doesn't work. Now, I think there is a much better way than communism. Well, I agree. But you have to show, though.

You can't just sit there and obstinately say, no, we're the system ride or die. We don't care if you're homeless. We don't care if you can't have children. We don't care if you're going to live the rest of your life in your mom's basement. That's your fault. There's nothing around the system ever. There's no reason to look at any of this. And I think, again, we're really seeing that shift, right?

We're seeing that mentality shift in the younger conservative core. They truly understand, like, if I don't fix this soon, then I'm never having a future. I'm never having children. Like, my bloodline will end. My religion will fade because it's no longer practice. My community will collapse. I don't have time to sit around here. My bloodline will end.

my religion will fade and my community will collapse. Those are the things that you are programmed by nature, in fact, in my view by God, to care about. That's what matters. Absolutely. And the idea that we almost never talk about any of this, that any discussion on any of these ideas is completely deeply forbidden. Then what are you trying to do to our society? I think it becomes pretty clear. Well, of course, they're trying to eliminate it. Right. And that would include like my whole family. So, no, I, how radical are young people getting? More radical by the day. And, you know, I'll say this.

After COVID, my idea that we're going to have some kind of revolution really faded pretty quickly. Yeah, I know. I don't think we're going to have some, you know, 1776 revival here. I don't think that's going to be what happens. I think what's going to happen is. 1789? I think what's more likely. Could I hope not?

Let's hope not. Yeah. I don't want to go on the guillotine either. But I think more and more what's going to happen is people are going to check out. We're already seeing this, right? We hear people, men walking away from the workforce, walking away from forming families. We're going to keep eating out the center of what actually holds our society up. We think it's abstract ideas.

What it actually is is young men going out working, forming families, finding worthy women, creating families, building societies together. That's what actually holds these things up. And it's all going to haul out from the center. and you can't import foreigners fast enough to solve this problem for you. And so what we're going to end up with is if we don't take radical action, I don't think it's some kind of armed rebellion. What we're going to see is a society that falls apart from the inside

because it loses its capacity. It loses its ability to do complex tasks to coordinate all the things that require this vast empire to function. And when those things start dropping out, then we're really going to be up a creek. Well, we're there. Yeah, we're already started. You can't fly across the country right now with a single stop and get their runtime. It's not, you know, or the whole air, I know nobody seems to care, but like our air traffic system is like collapsed.

Have you flown on a plane that's been on time recently? This was the getting here is probably the first time in a long time. Right. Anything with a connecting flight is possible. And this is just the competency crisis because we're, we're specifically checking out all the capable people from our society while we're simultaneously importing a bunch of people who have not had that ability and are going to be automated out of existence. for most of the jobs we're hiring them for anyway. And in no way are we cultivating a set of people who are ready to face the challenges

of a complicated world that we're existing in. Yeah. So, I mean, I do disagree with you on one point when you say that there will be no rebellion, there'll be no violence in response to all of this. I think there already is a lot of violence, but it's self-harm. So like, and you see this in formerly England, now the UK. But, you know, people are not fighting

the government. They're not killing the tyrants. They're killing themselves. Yeah. Well, that's the beauty of importing factionalism into your society. The factions can fight each other and not you. Right, but I'm saying the native population, the indigenous population of that island is decided to just kill itself. Yes. And then that's been the horrible tragedy is it either resigns itself to something terrible or like you said, they just turn on each other. They never blame the people in charge. But again, that's the beauty of democracy. There's always another level of which there's another voter, there's someone else, some other

faction, you just didn't, you know, select the correct people. It's never actually the people who are benefiting, making money, you know, off of your misery. So democracy is like a perfect way to dodge responsibility for crimes, is what you're saying? It's an incredible pressure release valve when done. And again, I do think that small-scale Republican government can work. We have seen that work. I think that was initially the intention of the United States and how it operated, but mass democracy, the idea that, I mean, look what they're doing in the UK. They just unilaterally

expanded the franchise to 16 year olds. Why? What's the purpose for doing that? Pakistanis. Well, the younger population coming through. Also, they know they can control those people easier. This is a younger population who's going to be more susceptible to mass media and manipulation.

It's going to increase their control over that country. It's not a democracy, or more properly labeled, a Republic in the sense of a smaller group of people, all who have a serious investment in society and have a proven track record of taking care of their community. Instead, it's just literally anyone with a telephone or a television. That's all that matters. So democracy's come to the end is what you're saying. We will continue to have elections. We will continue to go through it,

but it's increasingly a ghost dance. It's increasingly a dead form of something that actually doesn't impact our society. Are you familiar with the ghost dance? Yes, I am. Okay. So one of the saddest stories in American history. Yeah, this is how you got the massacre. Can you tell it? Sure, of course. So there was this idea, of course, for many Indian tribes that they were communing with spirits when they went through a particular dance that this was going to bring the power of their ancestors and there was going to help them to reclaim their land. This was at the end of the Indian Wars. This is after they lost. Yeah, this is after the Indians had lost. The majority had been forced on reservations and you know continually over and over again but the idea is they could

reconnect with the spirit of their society by going through this ritual and their their ancestors would protect them and they actually all gathered together mainly the Lakota tribe and when the U.S. Army was sent to respond to this gathering this is you know they perform the ghost dance thinking that this would protect them from the bullets of the soldiers and instead you got the massacre and wounded knee and this is in many ways what we are doing with liberal democracy and I now. We keep going through the motions. Oh, well, you know, there's a democracy. We vote. We do this, and this will change society. This will fundamentally change the way things work. But over and over, we just keep running into these hail of bullets. Because the thing we're using, the power that we're

trying to leverage, the power of the republic that existed at the founding, it's no longer connected to the actual rules here. We're people turning a stealing wheel or mashing a gas pedal on a car without an engine. And at this point, the question of the Trump administration is, Can you make America work like a Republican again? Is that even possible anymore? I think they're trying. I think they're actually trying by stripping away much of the bureaucracy, attempting to take direct action whenever possible to improve the lives of Americans. But they're running into every possible barrier you can imagine legal, cultural, everything. And so I think that they're going to have to overcome a massive barrier if they want to attempt to return to that system. And I'm not sure that they can. So if democracy is as kind of desicated and useless and fake, as you described, then, you know, nothing that fake can last. It's going to be replaced by a new system will that system be? And what will we call it? You know, there's a lot of people, and I think there's probably some truth to this, who think that we're all converging on the Chinese system.

That ultimately, the thing that allows for hegemon's to operate, globe-spanning, or at least large regional powers to operate at the scale, we're looking at. in an advanced society like our own is a kind of soft totalitarianism. Requires it, is what you're saying. You can't actually run a country this big unless you're totalitarian. This is a systems issue. And again, we like to, some things are virtue issues, some things are principal issues, but some things are just system issues. Can you describe what that means?

When we're looking at different political forms, they have limitations. And like we said, with a republic and the Republican tradition, everyone from Aristotle to our founding fathers recognize that scale is an issue. and that if you try to run your large empire as a republic, you're going to run into issues very quickly. It's going to start to come apart. The same is true when we get to these vast empires. They have to be run in a specific way. If you want to control the opinions of people, if you want to leverage popular opinion and a particular understanding,

if you want to use the economies of scale that you need in those type of societies, there's only so many ways you can operate and one of them is the Chinese system. And that seems to be one of the most successful ones at this time. again, I wouldn't want to live under it. It's not our way of being, but it is one that our global elites seem to be settling on as the model. Of course. Where your prison is invisible, but no less real. You don't have to take anyone to the gulag. They just can't get a job or a house or a wife. We don't need to put people in concentration caps anymore. You still might, but you don't need to do that anymore to be tyrannical. We can debank you. We can ensure that no one can ever hear your voice again, that you're never allowed in polite society, that there's a camera watching

you 24-7 that will destroy your life if you step off the reservation. We don't need the trains anymore. What's interesting is that everybody seems on board with the center leadership class. Like, you imagine the Republicans get in power and they'll make it absolutely impossible for digital currency to become real, Central Bank digital currency. They're already taking steps. Republicans in Congress laying the found work, you know, the basis for that. The basis for that now. So is there any escape from it? Not for a while. And I think this is also why we see all of our governments rushing towards artificial intelligence as well, right? Because this is another way to manage populations in a vast society, algorithms that can constantly screen everything you're doing

and everything you're saying and every opinion that you have and every piece of media you consume and what library books, if you're even checking out a library book at this point if that even exists. These are things that are all critical and AI can do these tasks at scale. at a high level of rapidity. And so I think that all of our technology is increasingly, a lot of people have said that American technological revolution will free us from this. But honestly, every piece of technology that, as we understand it right now, is most usefully deployed by the regime as a way to control people as a way to exert their power.

I don't think anyone's pretending otherwise. For all the talk of how, you know, AI is going to change the future, which clearly it will, there's almost no description of the upside for the average person. Like no one even bothers to tell the guy making 100 grand year how this is going to make his life better. And it's even worse because it starts abstracting away people's understanding of reality. Your epistemology is fundamentally broken when you rely on an AI search engine to bring you the truth. And as somebody who is teaching high school not that long ago, I've already seen it with just the dumber versions of Google. No children have any context for any decision they're making.

They don't, again, as we talked about, they don't have a link to history, they don't have a link to tradition. they don't have religion that informs anything. All the knowledge they have is what's delivered to them digitally in that search. That's what they believe to be authoritative in every area. And so when you see that over and over again, you realize the individual is going to have no decision-making power because they don't even have organic experiences in real life to draw knowledge from. All they have is the digital world that's been served to them through AI.

So if you're older like me, you imagine censorship is a threat to speech, right? So there are all kinds of things that are true that are being said now in the internet right now that are like an actual threat to the way things are. So they have to be shut down. I mean, I'm just operating in that assumption. And they will be shut down. But they won't be censored. They'll be overwhelmed by AI. That's my guess.

One of the things you can do is just flood the zone. You can flood the signal so that there's no way to pick out the truth from the vast amount of information that's flowing over you. Or you can curate the environment properly through AI on a consistent. system basis to where people don't even realize that the environment's being curated in the first place. Either way, as you say, you don't have to do hard censorship. The information's out there somewhere if you're one of those radical extremists

who is thinking for yourself and looking into any of this stuff. But for the vast majority of people who are never going to put that kind of effort into it, that's not the way they're going to see the world. That's not how they're going to receive information. So to the form of government we're getting, you believe it's most likely we wind up with some

kind of Chinese form of government. where there's a president and a legislative body, but underneath at all, the regime maintains power through technology, a social credit system of some sort, where you do the well of the regime where you just can't live. You don't get executed, but you just, no one would choose that. Only a tenth of one percent of the population really rebels against you, and then the, you know, the really bad ones you kill,

but the rest you just like let live in obscurity. I mean, I don't think that's coming. I think that's here, right? How does that not describe the society we have currently where people are regularly debanked, where they do have their entire lives destroyed by the social credit system on a regular basis? We haven't formalized many of these things in the United States yet, but we've been building this type of soft power for generations. It's very clear that this is how our oligarchy intends to rule us and does rule us on a regular basis.

Again, I don't think it's as severe as it is in China. I think we have more time before we get past the point of no return. But I think we're well into our era of being ruled by this kind of technocratic, you know, omnipresent state. Then I don't, so here's the contradiction at the heart of your description. If you're saying that the ruling bureaucratic class maintains power by sowing chaos and division in the society anarcho tyranny. But if they have so much control, why do they need to do that? Why not have an orderly, I mean, The upside of a totalitarian society is order.

I mean, it's not worth it. It's always bad, right? Or it's a violation of my principles. But at least there was no crime in the Soviet Union or less, right? Well, I think the reason that they create the chaos is that this allows them ultimately to avoid the formation and any of the bonds that would push back against them. Of course. Right. But if their technological superiority is so profound, if you can't buy a plane ticket, if you disagree with them and we're clearly moving towards.

that than TSA you know George W. Bush does not get as much as he's reviled and he is he's not reviled enough create TSA sorry I'm a prisoner to my outrage um but if they have they already have all this power which they do the tyrants why not have an orderly society too well there's still as you point out not entirely in control of the scenario we're not quite there yet right There's still a good amount. I mean, Americans, whether they deployed them or not during COVID, are still in control of a vast amount of guns. There's still a ghost of federalism in our system. There is a level of obstruction that can be brought by, you know, localities and states and these kind of things. There is still a narrative factor involved also in our political formula. A political formula is the way in which your rulers justify their power. In China, their political narrative is very different. But the United States, it is built on this idea of,

We are a free society. We are a society that, at the very least, allows you every libertine desire that you have, right? As much sodomy as you want. Right, exactly. Yeah. Not the right to live where you want next to the people you want to. No right to form a religious community, but lots, freedom of sodomy, for sure. Yeah.

Freedom to purchase a small child, if you'd like. However, you know, that. And some are availing themselves of the opportunity. Some conservatives. However, if that's what you want to call. Dave Rubin's conservative? Like, what is conservative about Dave Rubin? He left the left, right?

Which is kind of the classic. I don't need to leave the left. It seems squarely there to me. I mean, this is the line we hear over and over again that, well, I jumped away from the identity politics stuff, except, you know, when it attacked any of my identitiesies, you know, that kind of thing. Dave Rubin seemed, and Barry Weiss, too, seem like the main purveyors of identity politics in the world that I live in. Oh, they left the left. There is one type of identity politics That is resoundly celebrated on the right

Not by me I don't like identity politics I don't either But there is one that is sacred Tough shit You know I'm against it So All identity politics

So I mean When I start lecturing about how you're not allowed To criticize Northern Europeans Or something Episcopalians Then you'll know that I'm every bit as bad As Dave Rubin But I'm not there yet

Anyway At some point when the regime decides actually we're against crime And we do have to have real borders And like I don't know We care about drugs and we don't want the society to like collapse completely That's when you'll know they have complete totalitarian control Or they recognize that the utility of destroying the country is coming to an end That's what I'm saying

That's what I'm saying. Because at that point, they'll feel like, okay, we own this completely, so why racket it's our house now? Yes. And this is how you, you know, again, this is the classic principle of actually how you get a king, right? Because they're generally generationally invested in the well-being of the land they're ruling, the people they're ruling. And they have the power to control the outcomes there. So if you actually care about that, if you're actually going to benefit, why not invest your control and actually producing a better population? I completely agree. I mean, feudalism is so much better than what we have now, because at least in feudalism, the leader is vested in the prosperity of the people he rules. Right. You know, if all your serfs die, you starve. Yeah, there's a true incentive to care for those people. Now, again, there is also, that also exists in a republic if properly managed.

But as we've noted, we're well beyond the requirements that even our founders laid out for a functional Republican government. And so what options are left? As we said, at this scale, empire is more or less the only option. And then the question is, you know, do you want some kind of autocracy? Do you want some kind of disembodied ruling counsel? You know, those really quickly become your options when you're entering into that kind of society. Can I ask what?

So you've said that the options are the empire continues to expand or we pull back the empire. Right. What about status quo, which is always my preferred option anyway, just in life? Why does the empire need to keep acquiring and controlling? Why isn't it enough to say, we're this awesome empire, we're great, we're awesome? And we don't need to manage every little thing. but we're, you know, we're in control over hemisphere and, like, Japan and South Korea. And that's just great.

Why do we need to control Yemen, too? It's the natural hubris, I think, of any elites. Again, I think there are large incentives of scale when it comes to the managerial elite. But then, again, as we've discussed, there's also, I think, a lot of people who, when you're the global hegemon, they want to influence the United States and use it for their own purposes. And so if you've got this thousand pound gorilla in the room, you want it fighting your enemies, right? And so there's a high degree of investment by different powers and peoples in wielding the United States as a weapon, not for the interests of our people or what would benefit us or even our empire, but what would benefit those individuals and the nations that they're associated with. And again, this is why Washington warns so much about the factionalism, because this is what's going to create those different incentives inside your elites to stop serving the people and start serving the favored nation or the outside.

huh when will we know that our old system is completely gone i don't think we will for a long time if you think about the way that rome transitioned of course it started as a kingdom it became a republic if this sounds familiar it's because it's the same cycle we were on and then it became an empire and when it became an empire no one started calling octavian or augustus the emperor he just assembled the different powers of the principate and the senate stuck around for many generations they still had influence. There were many Roman emperors who had to listen to the Senate and the men who were there. They didn't disappear. But over time, we slowly say the way that Rome operated shifted. More and more power got moved into the emperors' hands less and less sat with the people

and even with the aristocracy eventually. And I think you'll see something very similar with the United States. No one's going to come by and hit a gong and declare that, you know, and the United States has fallen, the empire is over. We'll probably just see a similar change over time. But in Rome, one of the hallmarks of this evolution was the declining power of the legislative branch. Was that, I mean, we definitely see that here. For sure. And again, you know, the Senate existed had had influence. But yes, more and more, it was very clear that that's not where decisions were made. And this is, again, very common in complex societies, larger bureaucratic societies come with it. Because to manage all of this area to all these peoples, all this scale, you need a high degree of expertise. And the people in the legislative branch simply don't have it.

So what happens is all of the legislative decisions get moved into the executive side, which is, again, what we've seen in the United States, because it contains all of these different organizations with all these experts that can operate all the mechanisms of scale that the congressmen simply don't understand, right? And so it turns out that all of our legislation is just written by a bunch of legislative age and a bunch of lobbyists and foreign influence. while the actual stuff gets done inside of the executive branch. But even then, in our system, we've seen that the executive has trouble even controlling his own branch. The entire first Trump presidency was defined by his inability to wrangle the executive branch and bring it to heel. And that was obviously their intention this time when they went in, which is why guys like J.D. Vance were talking about the importance of dismantling the administrative state. They knew that at the end, that was the biggest barrier to run in the country for the will of the people. Is there any hope of reform?

I am skeptical, and I hate saying that because I love my country. It's the only place I've ever lived. I'm never going anywhere else. I'm never running away. This is my home. These are my people. And I'm never abandoning it. I'm, but I always say I'm short on the American regime, but I'm long on the American people.

Will we have exactly the United States as we understand it in 2050, 100 years? I'm doubtful. But will the American people still be strong? Will they still be resilient? And will their way of life live on? That's what we're fighting for at this point. And that's achievable. I think that is.

Could you imagine a country where people were allowed to kind of live according to their own customs in different regions? Yeah. And we've seen this again. This is a classic model of, you know, even the American understanding originally was federalist, right? This is how we overcame so many of our different cultures or understandings, even when we were simply a few colonies. Because we knew that actually those states have. their own way of doing things. And we didn't need to reach in and manipulate them at every given time. But unfortunately, the story of the United States is the story of the erosion of those rights,

right? We've destroyed the 10th Amendment. The 14th Amendment completely, in corporation doctrine, radically changed the way that we understand the different rights of our states, obviously the civil war and the inability of a state to leave, had its own implications for how a region can be governed. So there are, you know, even in our own history, real examples of how we can have individual customs and individual ways of being even inside our society. But, you know, we're much more like each other as Americans than we are different people. So there's still overlap there. You don't have to have radically different ways of life. But, you know, you are allowed a certain amount of freedom. You don't have to have the central government constantly dictating everything.

But technology makes it easier for the central government. I mean, Yeah, 1956 Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Central High School in Little Rock to enforce Brown versus Board. And that wouldn't have happened, you know, 50 years before because how would you get the 101st airborne to Little Rock? You couldn't just put them on a plane. Right. And but now, you know, almost anything is possible from Washington with technology. So, I mean, do you think there will be places if you have like a different few of things or, you know, You want to live near people like you?

Will that be allowed? Again, it's going to depend on how powerful the central government is able to, or how long a powerful central government is able to maintain control. I think that all of the things we're talking about, all the technology, all the logistics, they require competence managing complexity, right? Yeah. The very thing we're losing. No, that's right.

And so all of these impositions by the central government on our way of life require them to be able to coordinate these actions. And even though the technology is going to get more advanced, will we be able to regularly apply it? Will we be able to maintain it? Will you actually be able to deliver that power and control on a consistent basis? That's going to be the question, I think, that determines that. I mean, I lived in a tyrannical city most of my life,

but the people running at Washington, D.C., at the local level, were so stupid that you could kind of do whatever you want and corrupt, and some nice, by the way, but just dumb. So, like, you know, everything was against the law, but you could do whatever you wanted to do. And that was kind of great. Yeah, there is a certain level at which a third world kleptocracy is freer than the society we're in right now. That's the argument I used to make a dinner in D.C. to my neighbors and they really hated it.

But I always say, you know, you can do it ever you want here, like whatever you want, except I guess to be Donald Trump. But short of that, you could do it. every one. And interesting, do you, I notice that there is this, still to this moment, this desire to like kill the whites. I think it's so weird. I think it's like almost like the official policy or it's certainly the mindset of

so many in power across the world. And I don't really understand what that is. It's majority white countries that are being targeted. for mass migration. And it's only those countries. And I'm not saying this as some sort of crazy white partisan. I am white, but I'm not like obsessed with being white or anything. But I just notice it.

And I think it's really evil, but I don't really know where that comes from. Where does that come from? Well, a large amount of it comes from the narrative that we tell ourselves. So post the World War II and especially post the civil rights revolution, the purpose of the United States is to remove any differences between outcomes for different races. And any differences that show themselves that manifest between races can only be de facto evidence of racism. This is literally the law of the land. Most people don't understand that after Griggs v. Duke Power, we have this idea called disparate impact.

And this disparate impact doctrine says that if there are any outcomes that are different between groups, even if you didn't intend to be racist, you must be racist. That's the only explanation. So, like, for instance, the Sheets gas station chain started running background checks, criminal background checks on their employees, which makes perfect sense. You don't want someone who's a felon running your gas station, right? But they lost a case against the federal government and had to settle this massive fine because more minorities were being selected by the background checks and removed because they had more criminal records.

And even though that's just an objective fact uncovered by the Sheets Gas Gas, station using that standard, it's still racist. It's still their intention, whether they had it or not, whether or not they had the intention, they are still guilty of racism. And so therefore, they have to get rid of this policy. This is the way we see our entire society. You have to, in some way, assume that whites have held down other groups inside your society. That's the only explanation for why they might be in one position and those other minorities might be in another. And so you have to destroy those people. You have to, all you your hatred is justifiable, because at the end of the day, those people probably, you know, they have some sympathy with Nazis or they're somehow related to mid-century Germans. Like, that's the conclusion we seem to draw over and over again, and that gives a blank check to people to treat many people in America and other European nations as less than human. And boy, are they. There was this kind of amazing case in Cincinnati recently where this white couple,

there's video of it, we're at some jazz festival. got surrounded by a group of black people who just who beat them unconscious i don't know the context of it i'm sure there's a lot i don't understand but from the video looks like what happens a lot in this country was they were beaten up because they were white very common and the stats prove it um but it's the fat that fact is suppressed every single person knows it happens in prisons it happens in schools it happens in parks it happens at jazz festivals but what's so and it's obviously awful as it would be you know that all that violence is awful racial discrimination is awful whatever but what I find

interesting is that the authorities are like angry when you pointed out and there's this video of this kind of fat middle aged police chief or person posing as a police chief in Cincinnati we don't have any police chiefs who seem like they could actually be beat cops I noticed they're all

like pathetic and this woman is she's angry and she's lecturing you know when you talk about this it's disinformation and like there's no mention at all that these people seem to be targeted for the race. Even if they weren't, even it was a colorblind crime, if they're lying unconscious on the ground, she's not mad about that.

She's mad that someone might be talking about white people getting hurt. What is that? So there's a lot of reasons behind that, but the most shocking one to your audience will be the community relations services. So if they're not familiar with this organization, it's statutorily required by the Civil Rights Act. And its job, in theory, is to go out and smooth over race relations in the United States. Whether there's going to be a hotspot, you deploy the community relations service, the

CRS, to that hotspot, and you try to calm the tensions between different communities. In reality, what the CRS actually does is goes in and tells white victim families that they need to put out specific statements. They coach them through particular narratives. They are often provided with written statements to go out and talk to the media about it. And you'll see this pattern over and over again, right? Usually it's an elderly father figure, if the father isn't available. Yes. They come out.

They tell a story about how their child was great, the one that was killed, and that ultimately we should be focusing on the greatness of that child and that person who was killed, and not the violence that occurred. We don't want to create division by focusing on the crime itself. And please respect my family at this time by focusing on the mourning victim and not on why this happened, what actually took place. Let's not focusing on those e-stails. None of that is an accident.

That was a department created by the government. They walked the entire, they stage managed the entire Trayvon Martin incident. These people have been involved in a lot of different. But they're targeting a specific group and that group is whites. Yes. And I just think it's bonkers that that could happen in our country and no one mentions it. And it's just so sinister. Again, if it was happening to Malaysians, I'd be like, come on, what are we doing?

Yeah. This is happening to the majority, the quickly disappearing majority in this country. And again, I think they're given this blank check because ultimately whiteness is this inherent evil, that any, that any, again, any disparity can only exist because white people did it to you and you're constantly a victim of it. And so any violence you bring against them is allowed. And this is what creates that anarcho tyranny dynamic because especially the Democratic Party, but to some extent, even the Republican Party, has created a blank check for certain. groups inside our society to wield violence as they see fit. And the police and, you know, for instance, that police chief, she's not there to prevent the violence against that white couple. Of course not. She's there to prevent you from preventing violence against that

white couple. That's the actual purpose she serves. On whose behalf? Well, again, I think it's not a mistake. It's definitely not a mistake. It's everywhere. And it's in every country. It's in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, UK, US, every one of those countries is exactly the same policy or a species of it and exactly the same attitudes and all of them are enforced by force. And I think it is that these ruling elites find that it generates a wedge inside their societies that allows them maintain power. It creates this disruptive effect that keeps effective communities from forming that would push back against totalitarian control. It allows them to raid these people and take their wealth and transfer it to new constituents who are easier to

control. I think it serves both narrative and ideological interests, but also just raw power and financial interests as well. Man, that's dark. What are the signs of hope that you see in the United States? I think there are many signs of hope that I actually see. I know we talked about a lot of bad stuff here today, but I think there are several big ones. First is that more and more people who describe themselves as conservative or right-wing care more about their families and care more about their communities than they care about ideology and that that is starting to sink in. I think we're also seeing a big shift, especially on the right, when it comes to the idea of perpetual war and foreign policy, that we don't constantly need to be at war, that we don't

constantly need to be the world's policemen. We certainly don't need to be doing that on the behest of any foreign nation that the purpose of the United States government and any of its institutions, the military should only be the well-being of our people. I think we're also seeing a willingness to adjust and look at the economy. Used to be that the right would never look at, you know, something like tariffs or any kind of economic policy that would violate the Bible of Milton Friedman. But actually, when we see the results of it, they're harming our communities. And more and more people are willing to say, no, conservatism is conserving my community, not some abstract commitment to a policy that is harming my neighbor. And I see more and more young people

looking at religion as a way forward, which to me is the most important thing. You do see that. Yeah. I don't think it's everyone. Well, it's never going to be. No. But those people who create intentional communities, religious communities, they're the people who are going to make it through the other side of this. They're the people who are going to be passing down their values. They're the people who are going to draw strength from a tradition and a transcendent truth that others don't have.

And so I see more and more young people yearning for that. And I think that that is a huge spark of hope. So you see people forming young people having grown up in this, not just people from subcultures, not just the Amish or the Orthodox or other highly committed religious communities, but you see people who just sort of grew up in America

deciding I'm going to join an intentional religious community? Yeah, I do. And I see more people forming, you know, realizing they need to move near people who have shared values with them. I know certain people, you know, living in the Ridge Runner community in Tennessee and other examples where they recognize that not only am I, you know, need to be more serious about my religion and forming these communities, it's no longer sufficient for me to talk about them abstractly online.

I need to actually physically live in a community. with people who share these ideas. Again, it's small amounts of people right now. It's still forming. It's still at its genesis. But I think it is expanding, and I think it increasingly will be the successful societies in the United States.

Amazing. Would you consider joining one? Yeah, I think I would. And one of the main reasons I have not done something like this is I have lived where I've lived for a very long time. And I think that you have a certain duty when you have that history and you've already built that community to work to save your community.

community first. Eventually, there is probably a panic button where, okay, I've got to get my family out of here because things are too bad or too difficult. Luckily, I live in a community that's nowhere near that issue. And because I've lived there for so long, I would rather build that up and invest in that rather than shred that and try to build it somewhere else. But for many people, they don't even have that already. And so for them, the moving is the easy decision. But what if you got a job in private equity in Woodside? Would you go? Well, the beauty now is that even if you have one of these jobs, it's all remote, right? There's no reason for

us to have to live like this anymore. We don't have to cram ourselves into these horrific urban areas to pursue certain career options at this point. That's one of the few upsides of the technological downside we've been talking about. You can actually just puck up and move across the country

and live somewhere else and work in a different field. You don't have to be geographically locked into your particular industry. Of people under 30, how many do you know who have like liberal like circa 2020 liberal attitudes

no they're radicalizing in one direction or the other right that's what we're seeing is the mass polarization either they're getting very right wing or very left wing and what is I know what right wing looks like and I approve in general but what does left wing look like

you're seeing a lot more people deeply invest in kind of the trans or poly amy relationships. They completely throw off old social structures. They detach from any form of religion that's going to try them to any tradition. You see them get economically radical. Again, this is why Mom Donny is more successful than he would be otherwise. And you see them really getting aggressively attacking the idea of any kind of classic American or European-connected identity. That becomes a very passionate part of who they are.

Really? So what is, so it's a South Asian identity? Like, what is the identity if it's not tied to a specific? It's this really abstract progressivism. It's this really, they'll pull out maybe tribal culture, you know, they'll do some land acknowledgement or talk about the ancient peoples of some African tribe. But ultimately, it really is this hypermodern, progressive, completely derastinated existence where your identity is highly malleable. It can be changed from day to. Today, maybe today I'm male and female. I'm married to you. Now and now I've got three other girlfriends that we're all involved together. Our children don't really belong to anybody. You know, it's all the nightmare stuff that the right wing has been tried so much. Yeah. Yeah. That's a very old path. Yes. Actually. That's the Alistair Crowley path, who did not die happy, I will say. It seems like if we're going to have violence and unfortunately I suspect that we might, we've gone so long with no violence, really 160 years, which is amazing.

for any society. France can't say that. UK can't say that. We can say that. But that may change. And if there is violence, it seems like it's going to come from that group to me. Well, it will come from that group for a couple of reasons. One, you know, up to this point, they basically had a free hand to do so, right? What is Antifa except a group of state shock troops deployed against the youth wing in the Democratic Party, of course. Yeah, it's their brown shirts. Right. And so that that's exactly what we see over and over again. And it's only going to get worse because not only do these people feel morally justified, they also thought that they would never face any consequences. They were right. And they were right. And so they, yeah, if violence is going to come from anywhere, it's going to come from the people who have a blank

check to do it. How will you respond to that? I mean, direct to violence against, you know, family or probably, I will end it immediately. Of course. That's our duty. And that's, I think, intentionally why people are forming communities where they are moving to places where they know they can trust their neighbor to stand by them when a mob comes. Do I live in an area where my sheriff is going to arrest me for stopping a mob from attacking my family? Those are the decisions that people are making right now. I live in Florida where a lot of people moved after COVID and in no small part because they wanted to live in a state where they were next to the people who would stand against government tyranny in one way or another when it came. And that's just as true of violence. You never stop violence just by

yourself. If that kind of thing comes, you're going to need a community to stand with you. On that hopeful note, thank you. Thank you. We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people. While you're here, do us a favor. Hit follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter. Telling the truth always you will not miss it if you follow us on spotify and hit the bell we appreciate thanks for watching