TRASHFUTURE - The Sulla of Suburbia feat. Patrick Wyman

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

Patrick Wyman rejoins the gang to discuss further historical parallels - this time, we’re looking at the history of calls for an “American Caesar” to sweep away the decrepit institutions of the late Republican period… but even a cursory scratch beneath the surface reveals that there’s less to be understood about this movement from its ostensible associations with the troubles of Ancient Rome, and more to be understood by its parallels with ANOTHER modern right wing political movement that likened itself to Ancient Rome. Oh you know the one we mean. Check out Tides of History here: https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture KJB LIVE ALERT Kill James Bond are doing three nights at Conway Hall in Central London on 9th, 10th, and 11th August, and there’s also livestream tickets available if you can’t make it! Details are available here: https://www.killjamesbond.com/live MILO ALERT  Milo’s special ‘Voicemail’ is premiering on YouTube on July 10th - check it out here: https://youtu.be/x4oTP3M6ppo Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Salway, Salway, welcome to TF, your new TF. It's the free one for this week. That's right. I beat you to it. You did. So how are you doing, Centurion? I might ask. How come you're talking about so much Roman stuff, Riley? It's because we are joined by probably the most frequent repeat guest we have now had. As more unprecedented things keep happening that we want to compare to similarly unprecedented things in history, making them precedented just by a very long while. It's Patrick Wyman from Tides of History. Patrick, how's it going?

I'm doing fantastic. You know, this talk about me being your most frequent guest, I think that podcasts need to do something for their most frequent guests like a mug or maybe like a wrestling championship belt that you have to give up when you're past. My knowledge of historical precedent indicates that you're trying to establish yourself as a kind of like Janissary class within the podcast. Once you give yourself certain privileges, you know, they just become entrenched and we have like a sort of a fifth generation Wyman who has very little to do with like the study of history, but is entitled to a

mug you know from birth. Exactly. I've got some good connects in like the North West Kent local wrestling scene. Sorry, perfectly Hussain's sentence of all time. So one of the fun facts about like, it's like sort of Gravesend, Dantford, all these places. Orpington as well. Is that like, there's actually like a very thriving local wrestling scene. And a lot of like the good British local wrestlers who want to make it big in like America, they train in those places. So actually like just across like the road from my old school is a center or like it's

sort of like, it's an event space, but it's like where a lot of local wrestling used to take place. And I only found out via an Australian friend of ours that, oh no, like England is like a really big place to do local wrestling and in particular, Jillingham. Or like not Jillingham, Graves End, sorry. Yeah. So do you have access to belts? Probably.

Through these people? Yeah, so Patrick, you should come down to Graves End. We'll go have an ice cream and we'll go watch some local wrestling. I like the idea of Patrick being a Janissary as though what we've actually done is this podcast has gone to like the Pacific Northwest of the United States and then like we went into the town that you're from and you were offered up as a baby to be a frequent podcast guest converted, you were converted to podcast.

We made you become Muslim as well. Yeah. As a kind of podcast Devsherma where now he is he's living at the palace and he doesn't actually remember his Christian upbringing. OK, so this is hilarious because where I grew up, Yakima could very easily be described as the Albania of the Pacific Northwest. That is entirely appropriate. I'm just like, like the village headman is desperately trying to get ahead in the world and like offers his child up to go to go be part of the Devshirma. Like that's a lot of

bunkers in Yakima. I mean, honestly, that is a lot of tower houses. We still revere Scanderbeg. Like there's, you know, all of this is Big map of Yakima with all talks in a sofa the top Exactly. Yeah. No, we are the descendants of the Illyrians Cannot be allowed to find out about it's a new kind of Mormonism that says that there was a lost tribe of Albanians Who escaped the Ottoman Empire and then settled the Pacific Northwest? who escaped the Ottoman Empire and then settled the Pacific Northwest. I'm starting a hot new religion. Two depleted uranium plates they received from God. Yeah, this is, I mean, this is less ridiculous than a lot of what you would actually see in the place where I grew up.

Like, this is not at all, I would say this fits in pretty neatly with the the milieu in which I grew up. Like it because it really basically is upper middle class parents desperately trying to like offer up their children to any sort of institution outside central Washington that will take them. Like that's that's basically it. Here's the funny thing though. Right. We sort of we made a reference to Janissaries early on and we're going to talk so often the way and we're going to and oddly Janissaries early on and we're going to talk so often the way and we're going to and oddly Janissaries are mentioned throughout because what we are talking about is today the quest among a certain strand of right-winger to confront the

failures of the global sort of North Atlantic Empire to respond to their concerns referring to a kind of Janissary class of like journalists and academics, right? But more specifically, less about the Janissaries, let's go a little further back in time, a little bit further west, who are calling for an American Caesar. And this is largely inspired by like,

the closest the American Caesar people have ever gotten to anything that looks like a whiff of institutional power is via like is the post January 6th Republican Party that stuck with Trump and also the kind of strain of like techno of sort of specifically tech and inflected fascism that we sort of hinted at and when we sort of talked about JD Vance so you might call loosely like Tealism, Yarvanism, the Balaji Network state people, all of these. The immortal science of Tealism, Yarvanism.

Essentially. That's right. And there is this there is now this coherent strand with a political actor who, as ridiculous as he may be, off putting as he may be, the most unpopular vice presidential choice in recent memory and, weirdly, Donald Trump Jr.'s guy. They let Don Jr. make one decision and it was JD Vance. It's like, I'm going to win my dad back. He's finally going to show affection to me for the first time in my life. Well, it stands for Junior Don Vance. Yeah, I have picked this couch fucking

To be his vice presidential nominee This will make him love me because if there's two things I know about my father Donald Trump It's that he's and it's that he's a Don juniors like I need to pick the only bigger pussy than me Make my dad like me. But there is the, to nevertheless, right? All the people aside, there, this is, I would say the most this tendency has ever looked like it might make a real go at something.

And I think it's worth talking about with the parallels of like historical Caesar. What do we mean when we talk about the desire for an American Caesar, basically? Okay, so one thing I want to get out of the way right at the start, just how fucking weird these beliefs are. And I like that you said that they're coherent because they are coherent. I really think that there are coherent strands of political thought that are running through this that work as a kind of complete ideological approach to how they want the United States

to work. I think that there's actually a coherence there, which has not always been the case in kind of American right-wing political thought. But that it is so far beyond even the terminology that most Americans think about governance and that like if they are exposed to it, I think it will really freak them out. Well, because it is what the story of right wing politics that we've been talking about on this show for a very long time.

And when I say right wing politics, I don't mean like the general sort of rightward drift of everybody, but the people who self identify as right wing in both America and the state and the UK, right, has been one of getting weirder and weirder and more alienating as the space of as their as their space among normies gets taken up by a kind of liberal mass that then refuses to do anything and then creates appeal among the weirder fringe people. Right. But this is a march so far to the fringe. Right. That it is at once it is. I think it's alarming in its as you say because it's a it's a coherent fringe position and like people will vote for it. But it cannot be emphasized enough how much it is championed by boobs and weirdos and it is genuine. It is it is this undercurrent of ridiculousness. And if you want to, if you want to compare to like different eras of like incipient fascist takeovers, you also have to remember the Mussolini, Himmler, Hitler, these were freak shows too.

They were gigantic fucking dorks who were massive losers. Yeah, fascism has the kind of historical advantage of being both tragedy and farce at the same time. Yeah. When at least one of them was Italian too. Things shouldn't be forgotten. Yeah, the word that gets thrown around a lot when in overviews of this kind of political thought is esoteric.

And I think that's a really good word for it because it's it's weird. Like these guys are into weird strands of thought they're into. They are inculcated in spaces that are way outside the norms of mainstream American politics. Like this basically, you know, like one of the kind of defining things when people talk about the early modern period and the rise of like a public is spaces like coffee houses or like media, like newspapers as ways and places

in which people can talk about things and debate things and kind of formulate their ideas and bounce them off each other. Like, so we have all of these, and that's continued. That's the public sphere, right? This is Habermas, right? So this continues up into the present day where we have all these different spaces, but the spaces in which these ideas are coming to the fore are super isolated. They have their own little rules and ways of talking about things that are not broadly shared among any sort of public.

This is a very specific group of people, and there is not a lot of overlap, I would say, between them and the kind of broader political world. Like they are coming at this from a very different set of assumptions, very strange set of assumptions. Are you suggesting that most people don't get their political news from the Fappening subreddit?

I think, um, I think they're on weirder stuff, but also I, the other thing I think you bring up, right. Fappening is quite centrist. Yeah, it's centrist for them, but everyone's too old. But right. I think the, uh, the, the other thing I think you mentioned, I think it's worth bringing up before we dive into like what they've said, what they've demanded,

and start talking about like, well, these are their demands for Caesar. This is what they want their Caesar to do. What did Romans want? What did historical Caesar do? What conditions gave rise to him? I think it's worth pulling up also what you mentioned about newspapers, right?

Is that these places also aren't neutral places where public opinion gets formed. It's also a place where what is allowed to be public opinion is formed. And I think what we have seen on again, the self-identified right in the UK and the US for the last few years is a kind of a realization that partly due to the success of their own economic project,

they had to sort of burn off a lot of the people in their projects who are acceptable to the people who form public opinion, generally speaking. You had to basically get into like, like in the case of like Britain, right? They remember like all of the before this as the Brexit negotiations were happening, the Tories like just, you know, unilaterally got rid of like, you know, 30 of their MPs who were causing problems. You know, you're no longer, you're down to like regular for us.

You, we are, we are changing what is possible to talk about in this public sphere, which means we have to build opinion from outside of it and yank the newspaper or the coffee shop or the bazaar or whatever over. And you know, that also happens where it's like, all of a sudden, January 6, it's like, okay, hang Mike Pence. That's what we got to do. Right. It's good. So acceptable mainstream Republican position now because of like institutional capture. Yeah, that guy's got to get burned off. And so what we're talking about is like, we're

talking with those sort of places where public opinion gets formed. You know, they were sort of driven out and now they're back to try to to try to rest the public opinion back. Right. That's and I think that and what we're seeing is just these people are fucking freak shows, but that's their goal. Right. So I'm going to read a little bit about what like J.D. Vance and co. and his like friends have said the origins of American Caesarism as a kind of political idea. We're gonna see like what it's like what people believe who believe it and then we're going to talk a little bit about history. So the most direct

statement about like what this means comes from an interview with Vance himself in Vanity Fair. We're in a late Republican period Vance said if we're going to push back against it, we're going to have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are pretty uncomfortable with. Indeed, said another person talking here among my circle, the phrase extra constitutional had come up quite a bit. So what is what we're saying? What is sort of implied here, I think, is the American Caesar ism is about like, do away with the late Republic. So I'll ask now, right?

What is it? What is a late Republican period for like Rome look like? Okay. So I think it's important to distinguish between what a late Republican period looked like for Rome and what these people understand by the idea of a late Republic to, to, to do the comparison, right? Like this, because it's not like they have in their heads a coherent picture of the late Roman Republic and they're using that as their inspiration.

It's that they have a clear picture of what they think is wrong with present day America. And this is the historical parallel on which they've hit. Yeah. Right, so there's like the, I think that what they understand by that is a time in which the time honored channels through which people like them get to wield power have been increasingly shut off and that this is a bad state of affairs and that we need to remake the state in order to unquestionably leave the right people in positions of power and authority and that we need to remake the state in order to unquestionably leave the right

people in positions of power and authority and that what is necessary to do that is somebody who is willing and able to wield power in any way necessary. Like the the the the the that what all of these people and I know we're going to get into this later kind of the differences in the between the people who espouse that kind of generally espouse this viewpoint and there are differences. What they all share in common is the foundational belief that you have to wield power. And for them, Caesar as the kind of capstone to the late Republican or to the late Roman Republic is seen by them as the

person who is willing to wield power. But here's this is this speaks to the esoteric nature here. Like I don't think Caesar is actually what they want. They like the idea of a Caesar, but the figure that they're actually obsessed with is Sola. Yeah. Yeah. And so this is so but but you can't just go around talking about Sola because nobody knows

who the fuck Sola is. So even among this like incredibly esoteric community, but what they really want is a reactionary figure who is going to use power to set in place an order that is acceptable to them and that gives them the ability to wield power. Right? So an overarching powerful figure who will create space in which this group of people who feel that they don't wield enough power get to do more. And that society will be better because of that. That's the basic viewpoint.

Well, still had to deal with the Grekha because they went woke. I mean, that kind of is... They went woke. That is sort of the point of view though, right? Is that, you know, while the plebs have their tribunition power, and now they're, you know, the Julii, everyone went woke, and now good, honest Julii have to abide by, like, you know, Roman DEI or whatever, or I that wouldn't be a number.

Yeah, they're making goals into the Senate. Yeah, yeah. Because of work. Yeah, that's all right. And then, I guess, Sulla was it worked. Yeah, that's all right. And then, and I guess Sola was like the first. We're going to have a total ban on goals. Do we figure out what's happening?

Calling any of the Spanish emperors DEI highers. Nevermind the Thracians, man. Like that's the. Also, I love that year of the four emperors just being like, DEI. Vespasian wasn't good Italian stock. This is the kind of shit that they would be into though. Oh sure, I mean there's this weird aristocratic turn that they've taken. If you remember a few years ago, people like Tom Cotton were trying to like weld together.

Vance even still tries it sometimes, but not with as much conviction. The whole, like, oh, real labor, real working class stuff is engaged in, is a right-wing project that belongs to us, and is fundamentally interested in the same things that we're doing, it should be racist too. But now all of these guys are deeply into thinking about which Roman aristocrat they're most like, at least amongst themselves. And I think that's an interesting turn, right? They pass around memes of Sulla.

Like, these are statue guys. These are Roman bust guys. That's who they are. So just, just let's take it back, right? For listeners who don't know, can you tell us who Sulla is and what context he emerged from and according to people like him and people who supported him what problems was he solving? Okay so Sulla is the winner of Rome's first great civil war. The Roman Civil Wars with which we are most familiar in the general public

are those at the very end of the Republic that involve Caesar, Pompey, and then Brutus, basically, which end with Caesar winning, then Caesar getting assassinated, and then his adopted son, Octavian, ending the Roman Republic and founding what we understand as the Roman Empire. This is the very broad strokes. There's a lot of debatable stuff in there, but that's the broad strokes. Before that, a generation before that, there was an equally violent civil war that started with Caesar's uncle, a guy named Marius, and his eventual opponent in this becomes a guy named Sulla. Sulla eventually wins the civil war, goes to Rome, sets himself up as dictator, has executed a whole bunch of people that he finds unacceptable, puts in place what he presents as a restoration of the constitutional order, but which is in reality a deeply reactionary and conservative reimagining of Rome's political institutions. Like he does things like change the number of magistrates,

puts a strict hierarchy on the magistracies. Says that if you've been a tribune, that's the only political office that you're going to hold, which means that that's shut off as an avenue to political advancement. Which is super important because that civil war between Marius and Sulla was sort of growing off the back of

Entrenched problems of legalized inequality between patricians and plebs in right. Yeah Exactly. Also, you could call it project 25 BC This is something I've been working on quite a bit recently because I've been working on the early Roman Republic and when you work on the early Roman Republic. And when you work on the early Roman Republic, you get into all sorts of debates about what the Roman Republic actually is and how you should understand it. And the viewpoint that I find most compelling on this is from a historian named Harriet Flower, who wrote a book called Roman Republics. And her argument basically is that there is no Roman Republic. There is a succession of quite drastically different political orders that we tend to lump under the heading of

the Roman Republic. And so there's at the very beginning, there's basically chaos, nobody knows what this is. Then there is a kind of a proto-republic where you see some of the names of the magistracies that you become familiar with, like the consulship. then there's a long, then there's a patrician Republic that lasts for about a century that's dominated by the patricians. Then there is, this is the longest stage, what's called a Republic of the nobilegs. So this is what we think of as the classical Roman Republic with a Senate magistracies whose names you recognize.

So there's consuls and praetors and people like this. This is the period of Rome's greatest expansion. This carries them through the Punic Wars, the expansion of the second century BC. So to the point where Rome has become a trans-Mediterranean empire, right? This is the Republic of the Nobileis. Oh, because of woke. Yeah, that's right.

Because of woke. Should have seen their flag. Yeah, but so what happens is this lasts for about 200 years from about 367 BC. This is supposed to be the end of the conflict of the orders until 133 BC you get a succession of short-lived attempts to codify and institutionalize and essentially amorphous constitutional order that the Republic lasted this Republic of the nobile worked for about two centuries with more or less unwritten rules about how things were supposed to function Oh, it's like Britain. Yeah that honestly Yeah

that That it functioned because people understood how it was supposed to function and that they obeyed these kind of unwritten and unspoken rules about what the acceptable bounds of behavior were. Then the Grackey come in and they start agitating for all sorts of good things for the little people. And it all went to shit. I just I'm so tired of toxic Gracackeye bros posting in the hits forum. Yeah well they're sort of going around telling people that they're not allowed to like have a drink in their bin and like you know other stuff because of work.

The Magic Grain Twins. Yeah. Sorry, Magic Grain Twins. They're gonna take away your Diet Mountain Dew. And they're like, it's just like. Would the Grackeye be prepared to fire a ballista at our enemies? No, that's what it won't answer the question. Would they be prepared to fire a ballista through 10 Germans to save one child? That's the Roman trolley problem. Would you nationalize

Dormice? Yeah, there you go. Oh Jesus. They're gonna make Garham communist. Problem is, the Grakai, he sympathises with the defenders of Masada. You should think, now, you've got all these teens, you know, they're loitering around the taverna, you know, they're all drinking wine. It wouldn't have happened under Sulla, they'd have all been thrown off the Tarpaian Rock. You can genuinely find so many sources of people saying this shit would never have happened under Scylla, right? Which is so funny. My dad used to throw us off the Tarpaian Rock every night, so what's the lesson?

This is impossibly accurate. Roman's number one favorite activity is to bitch and moan about the current state of Rome and be like, you know, it wasn't like this back in the day when we had manly virtues Yeah and and this is the like when you try to draw parallels between the Roman world and the present day the the that particular vibe is the greatest parallel that you can draw the the the tendency among parallel that you can draw the the the tendency among old powerful dudes of a certain stripe to lament that they are no longer as powerful and young as they once were and that the the new folks

just don't understand how good things used to be and that we need to go back to the way things used to be if we want them to be good again. That is the fundamental impulse of kind of Roman aristocracy. And that is the single greatest lesson that modern people have drawn from the Roman world. Things used to be better and we can make them better if we go back. Yeah, it's the I think the the kind of American or Anglo American, version of the rituals used to be properly observed in this city is essentially a sort of canard to like, oh, civil rights went too far. Right? Which is we used to, it wouldn't be like, oh, we used to observe our rituals properly.

It's people knew their place. Right? And so much of, and I mean, this, when you talk about, like, I went back to back in time to like find, you know, because this is I'd say 2018 is when you first start getting calls for the American Caesar, right? Because it is in both the UK and the US. I think the the sort of the right-wing project takes on a new a newly kind a new it's any Institutionalism reaches the tipping point and then by 2018 you start to see you have them say shit shit

Like disband the FBI for instance. Yeah, exactly This again and this is something November you brought up again and again, right? Which is that exists to help them? Yes, but they cannot stand that because it has to appear to be egalitarian Right like the civil service exists like how much of the civil service for example, right? Like the civil service exists. Like how much of the civil service, for example, right? This to take you to a British example exists to like brutalize immigrants, brutalize like people like collecting benefits, how much of it exists to advance their political goals, but because they also have like a rainbow lanyard, they're like disband the whole thing. Right? I'm playing with a deck stacked for me.

He's abusing asylum seekers in a gay sort of way. So I don't like it. I have this deck stacked for me, but because it appears fair occasionally, I wish to burn it, basically. Right. And so back in America, right, you get this tendency from 2018. And specifically it's from 2018. It's from Michael Anton, a former Trump speechwriter and Giuliani staffer. Hilarious. Speech rights? He's writing that source? Antoine a former Trump speechwriter and Giuliani staffer hilarious speech.

He's writing that source. I mean, I'd say someone who wrote for Trump and then try to be this. I'm going to ignore it. I'm going to do my shark bit. He doesn't want me to do my shark bit. Should I do it? Mr. President, what I'm thinking is you should say Hannibal Lecter, really great guy. We all know Hannibal Lecter.

We know him. We love him. He's on that trolley. Beautiful guy. What happened is Trump got Sulla and Hannibal Lecter confused. Sorry. I said speechwriter for Trump. Sorry. He was...

He ate the grat guy with a nice ski ante. He was... He did strategic communications for Trump, which is the best you can do. He's a speechwriter for Giuliani. But he was the first one. Even better, who talks about American Caesar. And he also refers to like the cathedral pretty much overtly. He says, the quest for black civil rights morphed into demands for special rights and privileges for everyone but heterosexual white men, the poisonous fruits of which change have rolled over America the past few months. This is justified as

corrective, but the gap between the supposedly privileged and the supposedly subordinated doesn't change. So this woke left descendancy is managerial leftist libertarianism, in effect creating a nationwide oligarchic system devoted to implementing left-wing policies without the consent of the governed, for whom contempt mixed with hatred are the only emotions of the ruling classes. We get, uh, critarchy, corruption, electoral manipulation, weaponized quote unquote justice. Why do they all fucking talk like this, man?

Just be, like, getting so racist that you start talking like fucking Sephiroth. Yeah. Also, it's, it's critar- critarchy is, is, it's a term that if you read these guys' writing, which unfortunately I have, comes up again and again and again and again. And Critarchy, I had to look this up, I didn't know what it means. It refers to a system of rule by biblical judges in ancient Israel, which is about like the woke, like woke DEI people, basically.

And these- If you're not gay enough, they turn you into a pillar of salt. Yeah, I mean they're like trans-sanhedrin or whatever to these guys. And what comes up again, right, is that there is, deep in every American institution or Anglo-American institution, if we extend it that way, there is an egalitarian conspiracy of career bureaucrats. You can get this from Liz Truss for instance too. Yeah, this is basically Liz Truss, but Liz Truss is sort of just saying it quite directly.

Whereas these people have to dress it up in like quite, you know, florid language because again, they are also all pretending to be like, you know, Lord Byron or at least writing like the Federalist papers. Mm. Liz Trust spending 10,000 pounds of civil service money on togas. Yeah. Yeah. Soiled togas. Yeah. I think it's worthwhile to take a step back and think about kind of the basic animating assumptions here, which and the ways in which those do and don't align with kind of the broader, like, because I don't think there's any question

that there are conservative impulses buried in a lot of segments of American society, right? That there are a lot of working class white people in the United States who are extremely culturally conservative. I think that's a fair thing to say. Those impulses are all over the place. And the extent to which those impulses overlap with the animating assumptions of this project

is something I think you've got to figure out. But the basic thing here is that this is a hierarchical way of understanding the world and how politics work. And that's why they think there's a cadre of woke bureaucrats who are making decisions about this because they can't conceptualize a world in which somebody is not in charge and making decisions for other people, right? Like there's the, they are reading this model onto the world,

because it's how they think the world, A, works and B, should work, that some people are better than others and the people who are better than others should be making decisions for the people who aren't. And so they think that there is a conspiracy to keep them down because they can't conceptualize a world in which like the the bureaucrats don't aren't there to wield power and make you understand your place. Like they think that's how the world works and so that's

the the viewpoint that they take. Now, I think belief in hierarchy, and like that's the most fundamental dividing line in American politics. At the basic subconscious level is people vote one way because they think the world's hierarchical and they vote the other way because they don't. Like I think that the most basic impulses in American politics right now are between hierarchical

thinking and non-hierarchical thinking. And to the extent that this project has any appeal whatsoever, it plays on that, right? It speaks to that idea that some people are better than others and some people ought to be in charge and other people shouldn't be. Some people should know their place. If you ask the American electorate that question, do you have in charge and other people shouldn't be like some people should know their place like if you ask The American electorate that question do you have a place and should people know what their place is? You're gonna get an enormous correlation with voting patterns and increasingly

And increasing because I think these assumptions are becoming more explicit to take that back to the question of a Caesar This project then says everyone should be, and this is one of the reasons I think it's also interesting to have this conversation, right? Because whether you're talking about Caesar or Sulla, you're talking about people who like went on to fundamentally remake the state, right? And to solve lots of issues. But I wonder, were the ancient Romans who would have supported Sulla, mostly Sulla,

because we're mostly actually talking about Sulla rather ancient Romans, who would have supported mostly Sulla, because we're mostly actually talking about Sulla rather than Caesar, would they have understood their problems as real problems? Because the thing that really strikes me about this, right, because there's another quote from Rod, we're not Rodologists, we don't talk about Rod Dreher that much, but he's talking directly about our subject here, right? Where he talks about, well, who are they that American Caesar is supposed to oppose? Not a conspiracy. They don't have to be a conspiracy. The American

ruling class, which is what American neo reactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin, we'll talk about later, calls the cathedral. They run the institutions, even the woke military, which fewer and fewer normal young men want to join now. They're not even hanging out with me Rod. I can't join the armed forces. They're being gay in there. This would never have been allowed before. Especially not in the classical world. No. They're mostly on the left, but not entirely. After all, it wasn't a democratic president who invaded Iraq

and wasted blood and treasure to try to build liberal democracy in Afghanistan. That America operated as an empire under the form of liberal democracy only goes to show that history, unlike God, writes crooked with straight lines. It's the decline of empire that may coincide with the advent of strongman government. The young man who tried to kill Trump might have thought he was trying to save America from Caesar. He wasn't. It was entirely possible that in doing so and failing,

he's delivered the country into the hands of one and the revolting behavior of the American ruling class in the woke Janissaries. I can tell exactly the week long period in which this was written in which everybody thought that the Trump assassination attempt wouldn't be like meaningful. Yeah. Who spent the past 40 years marching to the institutions will have inclined us

towards welcoming him. And that's, I think, the most revealing paragraph, which is the woke Janice areas have spent 40 years marching for the American institutions. There is a conspiracy we must crush. That's an imaginary conspiracy, right? As much as it's a conspiracy, it's just culture has changed and the types of people who get those jobs are different from you and your friends and your tech buddies and so on. No, that doesn't sound plausible. It has to be like George Soros or whatever. You can't be a normal janitor these days. You have to be woke.

When you want a revolutionary government to tackle an imaginary enemy, how does that compare to say Sulla's revolutionary government of Rome? Okay, so I'll say I'll say this the first thing is if we want to try to understand late Republican Rome the part where We have the most trouble Grasping it is that I think the vibes are hard for us to recover Like what when we're when we're having these discussions, what you're describing basically is a vibe, right? Like there is a vibe in which these people think that they're being oppressed and it's mostly unspoken. Like it's it's animating their stuff, but they feel like they have to dress it up in an ideological justification

and recovering the equivalent vibe for late Republican Rome, I think, is quite difficult. Like it's hard for us to know what people were saying to each other and how those ideas were animating their actions. But I think fairly clearly the distinction is that the late Roman conflict was an elite one. It was an armed conflict for power and control of the state and resources among people who had a lot in common and were related to one another. Like basically through bike by conquering the trans Mediterranean world, this very small group of Roman elite

families became impossibly wealthy and powerful and they got into a lot of disagreements about how to properly divide the spoils of that. And it's this incredibly competitive elite environment. This is where there is not a parallel with the United States. Right? Like this is an entirely different kind of package. I think we have made the late republic much more ideological than it actually was. I think there was basically a conflict between different elite groups.

And Sulla's like remaking of the Constitution was because he was a weird little freak who wanted things to be organized. Like Sulla got into some very strange sexual stuff. And that was really what he wanted to do. But before he went off to do that and end his life and what contemporaries thought was kind of idleness, dissolution and sin, he wanted to remake the constitutional order to fit how he thought it was supposed to work. And I don't think it was overly ideological.

I think it was just that he was an organized thinker and he wanted things to be organized. And this was his understanding of how it would best be organized Like it wasn't a he was the first cracked 10x autist basically There's there's a good case for Sola as autist Yes, but that's one of the points I wanted to draw out by talking about how they talk about it which is they are drawing on a they are trying to use by like is they are drawing on a they are trying to use by like force of arms in the state, win a cultural victory by evoking a previous a previous sort of set of circumstances and

in fact, evoking many of the tropes that they used in the previous set of circumstances, which were also cultural, but to win a material victory. The goals of an American Caesar, like Project 2025, many of the economic goals were like achieved in the first Trump term, right? In fact, much of what like JD Vance wants to do is like, yeah, devalue the dollar, which is, you know, a lot of that's the Inflation Reduction Act, but without like the woke green energy stuff, right?

And it seems that many of their obsessions appear to be that there are too many DEI departments and universities, that minority rights have come up too far and that they've created an enemy, the cathedral, that is at once everywhere. And no, we know what happens. It was supposed to be in Twyter, but it moved before Elon Musk could rip it out of the walls, right? We know what happens when you finally beat the cathedral. you gain entry is you end up tearing down the Cathedral? Looking for it. There are cathedrals everywhere for those with meth to smoke

I think it's worthwhile to it's worthwhile to focus on the material aspects because like you think about who's funding this and who's Who's really deeply invested in it and it's guys like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk now increasingly, though I think he's probably He pulled his money out from under Trump, though, because he's Mr. Never going to follow through. Yeah, well, I mean, he's he's a fucking clown. And I feel like the people who actually operate in that space understand that he's a clown. Whereas Thiel is deadly serious. Like he is a weirdo, but he is deadly serious. He's being serious about the boy blood.

Yeah, I was going to say anyone is's using that much virgin blood is definitely plugged into Roman politics. If you can say anything. Yeah, no question. Yeah. But like the I think you look at the companies that Teal owns and he wants to build a new national security state that is intimately intertwined with his private enterprises. Right. And to the extent Elon Musk has been a successful businessman, it's been through what amounts of public private partnerships. And like SpaceX, I think is best understood as a public private partnership. Right.

Like that's the that's what it does. A like these guys have gotten rich off of government contracts and they may have convinced themselves that they didn't. But they like I think on some basic level, they understand where their bread is buttered and they see their best chance to continuing to be wealthy and powerful and to to enrich this other class of investors in Silicon Valley who do tech shit and are ideologically aligned with them. It's that they want a piece of that pie to like it's this is the most classically fascist thing about it is that it's corporatist. Yeah. It's a way of understanding how the state should function that sees a

fundamental role for the enrichment of the right kind of private business. So in effect really they're not harkening back to Rome. They're harkening back to Germany which harkened back to Rome. These guys were more honest when they said they wanted an American Pinochet, right? Yeah. Well, they want to do IG Farben and Messerschmitt and that's what they want is companies that are being generously subsidized by the state to perform national security functions or what are understood to be national security functions differences in the you know, the 30s that was military and that was military mass production and here it's control of the electronic infrastructure. I mean like electronic infrastructure. I sound like fucking what I but you get what I'm saying. Yeah. It's both. I mean, there's a reason why they're so upset by the idea

of the Lockheed Martin Pride Sox or whatever. Yeah. I think we could see the Silicon Valley obsession with creating electric VTOL taxis as a desire to recreate American Pinochet and the aggregate. Yeah. Yeah. Look, you can't pronounce VTOL without V2, all right?

That's right. A lot of people are going to be thrown clear of flying vehicles at some point. Oh my God. That's a fantastic reference. Thank you. Like so many sort of political projects, Red Caesarism, whatever you want to call it, Peter Teal, Elon Musk, Balaji, all of these, this group of people, this sort of Eric Schmidt even, like the radicalizing right wing

tech people who all loved Curtis Yarvin. There's not so much they're not saying yes we literally want a king. It's rather we're saying we see the remnants of the administrative state as standing in the way we've made them. We have made a huge amount of profit. The easiest way for us to make more profit is for us to have a much greater direct role in running the administrative state. And to do that, the administrative state has to be got rid of. And you know, and then going back to like

the transformation of like the conservative party and the Republican party from its like party of mass appeal to businessmen and fascists and also you know, others to like, you know, we burned off all the all the normal people who like the administrative state, right? The quote unquote normal people were now like the party of grippers who like are bound together by our ideological love of something completely fucking weird because what we actually want right is, is completely fucking weird to everybody who exist everybody who like looking at it

But crucially is less weird than be then they're being a king a more direct role for Peter Thiel in government Is what they're likely to achieve if they if they get elected and can surpass like the fact that you know They they've chosen the couch fucking guy As like the figurehead for this project I mean, you never know and I never want to be too dismissive of this stuff and say, oh, well, they don't actually want what they say they want or that they won't necessarily get what they say they want. You know, I think nobody thought that anybody was going to like, like Napoleon was going to be wearing a crown given time.

So you know, we'll see, right, which is the only thing you can ever say historically is we'll see, right, which is the only thing you can ever say historically is we'll see. But I think you're right to kind of suggest that ultimately what they're doing here is kind of incremental, right? American King is a fun concept. I mean, came closer than people imagine a few times. They already have a monarch. It's called the Burger King.

Hey, Burger King is in serious trouble right now, man. They're they're not the king is the king is not doing well. I ate at Burger King recently, and let me tell you, it's gone downhill in the last decade because of work because because of work, because because there's no respect for monarchs in this country. It's because the clowns in McDonald's keep trying to keep him down. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's worth trying to step back from it

and try to understand like who the audience is for this and what kind of support you can garner for it and what parts of this appeal to different powerful groupings within American society that wield political influence. So as you guys know, I'm a big fan of the American gentry as a fairly coherent social, political and economic group. And I think the gentry class likes this a lot because they have the luxury of what amount to luxury political beliefs. Like I think there is a lot of hatred of things like DEI and the idea that their failed children might not necessarily ascend to their

position. Like, there's, I think this is a prime group of people who are, who are well placed to receive a message that says your idiot son might not get to be just as wealthy as you because a frankly more talented person of color could get the job or get the spot in a university. Like, there's a lot of anxiety about that stuff among that class of people. And so even beyond their material benefits that they would gain from like eliminating worker protections or having to give your workers like heat breaks in the middle of

120 degree day, like they benefit materially from that, right? But I think the psychological benefit of eliminating competition for their underwhelming children and getting to wield power over their workers is those are really appealing psychological things beyond the material benefits that they would accrue from them. So like I think these, the point is the tech oligarchs can find support from a much can get mass you can you can get mass support for that essentially like gentry and up project by saying look we've already we've already agreed nothing to get better for you but we can punish the people who scare you right I mean that's this come that comes back to and all we need to do to punish the people that scare you by by the way, or who are competing with your idiot sons for like, you know, positions and you're good universities. All we need to do is get there's this one department in the government. It's full of people who are whether because they're do-gooders or whether they're cynical. They are keeping us from doing what needs to be done.

They're keeping the racism. We want to let you make your workers work in 130 degree heat for 24 hours if they choose to, of course. We want to do that for you. We also, hey, that new family that moved in that you don't like, we want to be able, we want the police to harass them more. Unfortunately, the woke police who are being made woke by this other woke government department won't do it. They won't. Finally, in America, the police are going to be allowed to be racist. They don't think the police are allowed to be racist.

They don't believe it. To sort of sound the note of caution here that it can always get worse, right? What these people want is, you know, I'm pretty transparent, right? Like, again, I think they were more honest about it previously. A lot of this stuff about Sulla, right? Nobody's thinking about like, oh, the Roman mob's going to come to my house and like put me to the sword and burn it down, right? But people are thinking about like, you know, being thrown out of the Brazilian VTOL taxi or the camps, right? Not that there aren't already kind of camps and, you know, prison industrial,

et cetera, et cetera. But like, it can always be worse. And these people, I think, often have a fairly clear idea of how they want to make it worse, that they're just not telling you. You know, what I also think of the Caesar compare, where I go to the Caesar rather than the Solo comparison, is what else I think they want is prescription. I think they want identified, they want their identified enemies

who are sort of paraded in front of them, in front of the TV. They want them, you know, ritually humiliated, stripped of their property and, you know, exiled or executed. Right? Sure. This is that that's basically what the woke vigils won't do anything about the skivvians who live on my street.

Cause your manner of havoc playing the tambourine. Once you acknowledge that it becomes somewhat more difficult to fit it into a sort of a comedy podcast right to this isn't quite a like a quite as much of a fun historical kind of comparison anymore right. So ever since like living living in Arizona like I know these people now in a way that I didn't when I lived in Los Angeles like I like when when I lived in LA I was acquainted with the kind of ideological right-wing sphere, right? Like, so the guys like, like I've read Michael Anton's shit and I've read Curtis Yarvin's

shit. I understand it. I understand that milieu, but the flip side to it, and this is where it becomes actually dangerous is that a lot of the animating vibes appeal very broadly to conservative American men especially. Like like to kind of culturally conservative. I would say the real sweet spot is like Gen X and young and old millennial white guys who live in the suburbs and who in in states like Arizona and Georgia and Texas and like a lot of places in the United States. Like I think there are millions of these guys.

Yeah. Upstate New York. Absolutely. Not even upstate New York. They probably live in Westchester County. Yeah. Ohio. Yeah. I mean, I think suburban Portland, like where I think it's especially attenuated around liberal cities where they can point to the green haired trans people that they don't like and say, look, it's all going to hell. Like that there it's this deeply kind of rock solid, conservative,

middle American, but pretty economically comfortable, who really, really who have a lot of hate in their hearts for this, for a world that they don't think has a place for them and that they don't like. And they think they should wield power or control over. And like I take it very seriously because when I when I'm coaching a soccer game and I'm surrounded by guys like this, I'm like God if you knew my politics, you would have no problem throwing me in a concentration camp. Like I there are people that I say hi to on a regular basis who I know would be perfectly happy to put a bullet in me if they,

if they thought I was trying to turn their kids trans. Right? Like this is a real thing. Like these people really exist. They really think like that. And I don't think it, it would take nearly as much as we would like to think to push them over the edge into, into supporting that kind of stuff. And as like clownish and stupid and as clearly like, who thought that like Sarah Palin would be the tragedy to JD Vance's farce?

Apparently, let's see, right? But as much as that is a ridiculous person, as much as again, like that has been exemplified by ridiculous people in the UK, like Liz Trust and so on, that's not their last go. This is just their first time they've gotten closest. What did people say about Hitler in 1923 right like the what what were they saying about Hitler in the aftermath of the Beer Hall Putsch? Very bad paintings, failed out of art school pathetic.

But this is a worthwhile thing is like when you have what these people have and what makes them dangerous is will to power. They have that in a really genuine and basic way. They understand that power is a thing that you can grab and wield and that you don't have to have the support of everybody to do that, right?

Like where their perspective I think is most valuable and enlightening for the rest of us, is that they grasp very clearly that you don't have to have the support of 80% of the population to do stuff. You don't. Crucially, you only have to get... And this is something I think that... I think a lot about the history of Anglosphere right-wing politics the scope, through the lens of the history of the New Deal.

As soon as the New Deal was announced, there was an elite conspiracy against it. This elite conspiracy was, you know, Texas oilmen, sort of Wall Street financiers and so on. This was these were that was like the alliance, right?

It was it was it was provincial and sort of financial capital together against the New Deal. There has been this slow growing fight back against this like pretty what's turning out to be like quite exceptional Period of time where or certain favored groups of like working people anyway Living standards are rising at some and even then there the the civil rights movement happened that time and so on and so on. Right. That the the reaction against the things that happened between the New Deal and the civil rights movement has been essentially to understand that power has to be taken. And when you take power you remake the state in your image a little

bit more a little bit more a little bit more. The Reagan Thatcher revolution the same thing. Right. You take power and then you remake the state in your image so that even if you lose power, even if you lose power to a Blair or a Clinton or whatever, they're forced to keep going with what you have done. And I think that the the reason again that we sort of we go back to sort of this original topic of like, isn't it weird that they're talking about Caesar when they mean Sulla? But what they really basically mean is we want to have a final corporatist, elite-driven remake of like liberal democratic institutions in the sort of global Anglosphere

in such a way that we only have to win once. You know what there's a sort of a useful parallel for that for? We could have saved ourselves a lot of time right because the the original like we can violate Godwin's law just upfront and use as shorthand we talked about this you and I really on um left on red about ecopraxia about how sometimes was kind of like with predators you're better off stereotyping right because it saves you time you don't fall into these like traps of thinking, oh, are they are they like Caesar? Are they like, so what these people want is Hitler, right? Look, to be absolutely clear about that. That's by far the best and clearest reference that I think most people will understand and

probably comes closest to the truth. I think you're absolutely right. Because we and something I've warned about and I think a lot of historians who are not in the immediate business of selling stuff to the MSNBC crowd would agree with is that it's very, it's easily possible to overfit your comparisons, your historical comparisons. And the most popular ones to do that with are the Roman Republic and the, and world immediately pre-World War II. But sometimes the fucking shoe fits like this is this is like these people.

I don't think they would ever admit it out loud, but I think they look at the relationship between Hitler and big business, the relationship between Hitler and the Prussian Prussian Junkers. And they say, yeah, that's that's right. That's correct. That's the correct way to do it. That is a replicable model for the remaking of state structures in a way that is favorable to us. It is.

What he did worked because it spoke to the deeply rooted cultural and political overlap between these groups, between these disparate groups that all want the state to be different than it is and don't like things as they are, you got to find the points of overlap and that's a viable kind of alliance of different elite groups. Oh yeah, I think you find that coalition emerging and trying to find itself amongst the tech people who, what they want out of this is that they never want to see another homeless person and they also want

infinite money. To the Peter Thiel's you might have a more esoteric articulated version of it, to the Curtis Yarvins who are busy drawing Babylonian demon sigils on the wall and stuff. To your used car dealer? And I think that's as that's as you say, that's the real hazard, right? I think a good one of the like all good Patrick episodes, we sort of got we left the notes in the dirt long ago. Sorry, No, no, that's that's good. That's that's fine. But one of the things I wanted to come

back to right, we want to talk about the danger of is to look at where they disagree. Right. Which is that. OK. Well, Curtis Yarvin and Chris Ruffo had a big public like slap fight last year because they disagreed about what's to be done with the universities. Chris Ruffo is like, oh, universities are amazing for producing elites. We need to take them over, fire all the grievance studies people, eliminate all the DEI departments. Very, very similar, by the way, to what the British government has been doing to universities in Britain for years.

And Chris Ruffo and his online buddies did that at a university in Florida. And Curtis Yarbrough was like, what are you talking about? You're never going to dismantle the master's cathedral with the master's tools. You're trying to beat apart a cathedral with the Pope's tools, right? You know, you're never gonna, you're trying to beat apart a cathedral with like the Pope stick or what have you. You're never gonna do it. It's a waste of time. It's just gonna fall apart.

It's never gonna work. Yeah, why are you trying to replicate the university a fundamentally like bourgeois and anti-fascist sort of institution, right? And you end up with like, I think it's interesting what the kind of line on these conflict is and how they're going to be resolved. I say interesting, like it's not also terrifying, right? Like as to whether, who is the Italian futurist in this scenario, right?

Yeah, who is the futurist and who's Mussolini, right? I think, and I think probably, but I think we know actually I think I think it is Jarvin who is himself the futurist. He's the one who's like imagining different kinds of states because he loves he's a computer programmer who loves corporate power. And so when he comes up with his idea of how to solve the problems of liberal democracy a system beset by problems because probably mostly because of the first word rather than the second, right, but he comes up with the issue, ways to solve those problems that are like,

okay, well we need to smash apart the administrative state until it's small enough that like Peter Thiel or someone like him is able to be king of a bunch of it. Right? And which is, and when I talked earlier about like, that's not what they're likely to actually do. Right. Because that's so that's like that's so many steps removed that's they also they like a big state. They want that they want the state to be the

to do stuff for them. Well it's the sort of like the pendulum of like federal law enforcement and the rights conception right. But it bounces back and forth between like Ruby Ridge and like having your enemies arrested. But, but, but they, but Yarvin talks in these sort of very fantastic, almost like art, like artful terms. He also is very keen to cite all of his high minded sources. He's like, oh, well, Bithas says in the constellation of whatever, right? Whereas Rufo's like, what are you talking about with your, like, you're theorizing about like patchwork government? I went in and stole a university, you know?

I think that ultimately it's like, you know, Yarvinism is going to end up being the like, Yarvin's the Marinetti. They're going to airbrush him out of all the photos. He's, you know what he is, like, if you, if you transpose this into, into Maoism, he's a right deviationist. What I think is really interesting about this is what Jarvin wants essentially is the Holy Roman Empire in the sense that he wants a patchwork of different kinds of states that make it really hard for an overarching government to dominate them. Now, who benefits in a situation

like that? It's the holders of local and regional power and anybody who builds institutions that link them that are not state institutions. So the Holy Roman Empire is really, really hard to explain as a thing because it was these overlapping networks of different things. But who, but what you can say is who it's good for and who it's good for our elite groups who have access to broad interlinked networks that cross an enormous geographic and economic space but who are not bound by higher laws. You can do what the fuck you want to do if you're a rich burger of Nuremberg, you can bring lawsuits against the emperor.

That's fine. You can do that. Imagine a rich burger. Or if you're a minor lord, your rights and privileges in your small corner of the world are really well protected. It's a system that's full of checks and balances that protect the authority of people who think they ought to be in charge. And I think that's what, if you're trying to point

to what an idealized society looks like for this kind of theorist, that's it. It's one where the people who are supposed to be in charge and who are supposed to wield power over others are allowed to do so without interference from people who don't from people They don't think ought to be able to do that. They want American Charlemagne Well, the tension I guess becomes then do you do that by by fighting the administrative state or do it? Do you do it by populating the administrative state and I'll tell you it's gonna be a lot easier for them to just populate the administrative

State they almost don't need it, they almost going back to like, they don't need, they barely need a Red Caesar. They barely need like a Sulla. What they really just need is all of their party political people, loyal in all of those institutions, and they eliminate then the term limits for them, and there you go. Which is well advanced, you know, as we know.

That project that project is well advanced and it's like this way of selling it like the JD Vance way of selling it is weird and off putting. But will even if it doesn't work, that goal stays the same. Peter Thiel's interest stays the same. Peter Thiel stays able to try and advance essentially, as you you say, November, American Hitler project again and again and again and again. And he doesn't have to succeed more than one time. And even if he doesn't, quote unquote, succeed, he's still succeeding because even the act of interfering in these elections and or exerting your influence in these elections is pulling things in the direction that you want them to.

The fact that JD Vance is now a national political figure and is saying these things to audiences of people who are listening, whether they're all of them are agreeing with them or not means that those ideas are now out there. They are part of the political discourse. It's like the, for all, the idea of the Overton window, right, is actually useful for this because

things that were once completely beyond the pale, like explicit anti-democracy is now back in American mainstream political conversation in a way that it hasn't been since, I don't know, Jesus, the late 19th century, the early 20th century. Like Lindbergh at the latest maybe? Yeah. And that brings us, I think, all the way back around to what we mentioned at the very beginning with with opinion forming and then the right wing the explicit like stated party right wing going off into the wilderness and then

coming back to like you know like like step nomads come back into the settled cities of popular opinion and then take them over and change it. Because like the, you can see what is now allowed to be decent opinion, heavily air quotes around that. In the UK, in the US, we've seen it be influenced by the right going off, reforming itself, coming back and just stating the new terms of discussion before. Yeah, and that kind of ability that they have to like hack liberal brains, right? To be like, oh, I, serious grown up politics is when we compromise and when I kind of like

admit the thought into my mind, right? Yeah, we're going to compromise on Hitler. We're going to have a hurtler. But for a certain kind of lib, and especially one who's literate enough to let's say run the op-ed department at a newspaper the if you can reference Janus Aries and Caesar then You're speaking the correct language to have your ideas heard more broadly if you could like so the esoteric stuff Which is mostly a turn-off for for the vast majority of people and for anybody who knows enough to understand what these are references to is perfectly suited to kind of a half smart like op-ed like person that you're pitching op-eds to.

That's perfectly like it works great for that as a rhetorical strategy. So I think that that brings it back around nicely towards the beginning where I think in summary we can say the American Caesar talk. Well it's interesting to like talk about who are they really talking about? Who do they mean? What kind of problems were they solving? What kind of problems do they think they were solving? Really it's more about the echoes are with 19, as you say,

November, right? Your first instincts when you're thinking about this kind of stuff, it's often true without trying to follow their train of logic. Instead, just be like, no, they're just doing what the Nazis did, which is compare themselves to late Republican role. That's all that's happening. If it steps like a goose, you know? Yeah, exactly. So the American Caesar really is just what American Hitler would have said if he was trying to make the same case. Well, we can do the 1950s in reverse.

Finally America can send some Nazis back to Germany. That's exciting. I don't know, we need someone to teach us how to make burgers, but we don't have any as well as some of these distasteful American Nazis. Anyway, anyway, I think that's brought it back to a nice circular place. So, uh, chilling portent of things to come. Oh yeah. We accidentally talked about this on our comedy show.

Let's make the next one nice and light. What do we say? The last line of defense at a sort of federal level is one former prosecutor. Great. I mean, I thought we'd mostly be talking about like diet Mountain Dew and like comparing it to the full fat Mountain Dew you get in Europe where the sugar content actually isn't that dissimilar. So most of my talking points were about that and I'm sorry I didn't get to use them. Genuinely, you're kind of right in that if there is hope to be found here, it's that

many people find this weird and alienating, and would prefer that we just keep on with the kind of patrician stuff. It's really weird watching this, because there's an extent to it, watching this from a place where there is an audience for the underlying ideas. There are plenty of normal looking suburbanites who are perfectly fine with the idea of hurting people that they find distasteful. That is a perfectly acceptable thing in the social circles that surround me. You can put a number on it even.

Like, it splits about however your county or whatever voted for Trump vs. Biden, right? Yeah, fairly closely. Yeah, but I think that there are a lot of people, I think especially women, to whom this stuff is extremely off-putting. There are a lot of well-educated suburban women with kids who are, who are not like, who have some conservative impulses, but who are deeply turned off by the idea of being mean and nasty and the idea that people should know their place in large part because they know their husbands and they think their husbands are dumbasses, right? Like to be really and truly like they're the smart ones in

the relationship and the idea that like their husbands are better than them is fucking nonsense and they know it. And so like that's like, that is a swing, that is a block that exists throughout the suburban United States where you can be like, look, that is a block that exists throughout the suburban United States where you can be like, look, that guy sounds just like your husband. You think your husband's an idiot. You know he's an idiot. Like you want that guy to be in charge. Like that's a, that's a viable campaign strategy. I, I, uh, to be completely honest. FAO campaign headquarters, Kamala Harris. I think there is something to be said and I'll make this point really quick because

I like Patrick kind of really sort of nailed it, which is like, even if this very weird political project kind of fails, be it in November or even just like in the sort of past, you know, in the next few months, the sort of underlying sentiment, which I see it in the UK as well, especially like in light of like recent news stories and everything, where there not only seems to be like a much greater tolerance for sort of quite an art, like quite just really random acts of violence, but also like you can see there is like this kind of political energy to it as well, even the way in which like right wing political parties like react to that. And so I do wonder whether it's like, okay, well, electorally speaking, voters might be

turned off by the weird stuff that Vance says and Trump tries to kind of... I don't know how it's going to work out, but maybe it'll be that they lose because of that, because Vance can't stop being weird. But that underlying sentiment is still going to be there and it only requires the right set of circumstances to really leverage more acts of spontaneous violence in a way that kind of serves the sort of tea lights who believe these very weird things very convincingly but may never sort of run for public office because they know that they're weird.

Mm-hmm. I think like violence is a turnoff for a huge portion of the American electorate. Open racism is a huge turnoff for a huge portion of the American electorate. Open racism is a huge turnoff for a huge portion of the American electorate. And I think that eventually these kind of right wing freaks will find the right standard bearer and the right set of circumstances. But I'm not convinced that this is it. Like the I think Vance is too weird. Trump is Trump is Trump.

And there is just a hard ceiling at this specific point in time on how much support these people can get, because the cons to them are so overwhelmingly obvious. It's why they've done so well with the Supreme Court, right? Because they're completely unaccountable and sequestered. And they're all weird anyway. True. And also when you think about it, like the institutions of American, like liberal democracy such as it is, survived a Trump presidency, which sounded apocalyptic. And I didn't think they would. I was wrong about that.

You know, you know what? I, along with Donald Trump, underestimated Mark Milley and Gina Haspel and those are the last people on earth I want to be handing it to. Yeah. Well, I guess it comes back to questions really not of who does what or who is meritorious, but ultimately how strong are your institutions? Yeah. And how strong are the instincts of the people manning those institutions? Right? Like, after January 6th, when Mark Milley was sort of like... I think a lot about the thing he said to the troops and the cops who were going to be guarding the Biden inauguration, where he said that the Nazis aren't coming in, right? Someone

who is in that position, who is able to make the instinctive leap that, like, oh, these people are Nazis and this is the way you should think of them and therefore like treat them accordingly. That's useful. That's sort of, that's healthy. And I think that's, if there's a lesson you can take from this is that like, that's a sort of useful instinct to like inculcating yourself, whether you are chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or podcast listener, right? The more both. Yeah. But look, if you're listening... Anyway, anyway, look.

I'm sorry people keep drawing you as like gay and trans. Be more like Mark Milley. That's the lesson. In some ways. Yeah. In that one very... Narrowly defined. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Not the haircut? Not the haircut, not the like history of service with the special forces in South America. Not those things. Hey, don't let the Nazis in here. We're supposed to let them into other state capitol buildings. Not ours. If you go to Argentina, you see a Nazi, you leave him alone.

Here in the United States. At least in this very specific context. This colonial violence will not return to the Metropole on my watch. That's right. I think that's all we've got time for today. But Patrick, I always love having you on the show. I like having these conversations a great deal. So thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you. I really appreciate it. Talking to you guys is just my favorite thing in the world. Thank you so much. Yeah, and we of, have a Patreon. There is a bonus episode, I believe, on this week. We will be talking in detail about what happened at CrowdStrike and also maybe some funny news stories in a startup or something like that.

More Diet Mountain Dew content. Yeah, that's right. That's it. And you can also check out Tides of History, of course. Of course. Absolutely. Anywhere Fine podcasts are downloaded. Milo's got his Edinburgh show. Edinburgh show, please check that out. And my special voicemail, which is on YouTube now. And then November is going to be down with Kill James Bond by the time this is out.

August 9th, 10th and 11th in London. You can still buy tickets to killjamesbond.com slash live. Yes. And Mark Milley is organizing the security, so don't even try anything. All right, all right. I think that's everything we will see you all later everybody