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The rise of the 'woke right', with James Lindsay
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When classical liberals and conservatives took the fight to the ‘woke left’, many made the mistake of thinking that victory would automatically mark a return to classical liberal and conservative principles. Whilst the battle is not over, it is now clear that it won’t be that simple. In fact, perhaps the greatest achievement of the ‘woke left’ has been its role in the creation of a ‘woke right’.
To discuss the troubling phenomenon that has been the talk of Twitter in recent months, Will is joined by author, podcaster, and professional troublemaker, James Lindsay.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Background
00:00:20
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. For people watching on YouTube, unfortunately, this is not my home library that I've upgraded.
00:00:33
Speaker
We are recording on location from Melbourne, Australia.
Understanding Woke Ideologies
00:00:37
Speaker
ah One of the... Most sad and illiberal phenomena of recent times has been rise of the woke left, this peculiar brand of illiberal progressivism which has compelled the institutions and the people who work and live within them to abide by a particular moral code.
00:01:02
Speaker
One of the mistakes that many people on the right, myself included, made was that by pushing against this thoroughly liberal movement, we would see a return to the classical liberalism that I very strongly believe in personally, and the conservatism strand of right-wing thinking, which I have a deep intellectual respect for.
00:01:27
Speaker
That hasn't automatically been the case. In fact, something which we are now seeing come to light is a new form of wokeism, except this wokeism doesn't come from the traditional left. It comes from the right.
Guest Introduction: Dr. James Lindsay
00:01:39
Speaker
It raises very interesting questions as to what does the future not just of the left look like, but the future of the right and politics more generally No one has done more to bring this new form of wokeism to our attention than author, podcaster, and professional troublemaker, Dr. James Lindsay.
00:01:59
Speaker
James, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. So many people still to this day, despite the term woke, having been in the parlance for some time now, will say things like, well, woke just means kindness and compassion.
00:02:16
Speaker
Or they'll say now that woke is just a ah right-wing slur. So before we get to the woke right stuff, let's just get some some basics out of the way What do you mean when you use the term woke and how has it how has it emerged on the left and and what are its characteristics on the on the old left?
Defining 'Woke' and Critical Consciousness
00:02:38
Speaker
Okay, so woke is a concept that I have spent a lot of time with. A lot of people, i'll just to very briefly summarize my history, ah kind of discovered the woke problem. I was involved rather embarrassingly in the new atheism movement a little over a decade ago.
00:02:56
Speaker
in the U.S. s and it got taken over by these Wokies. And so we called them social justice warriors back then. People did not call them woke yet, but I was examining the phenomenon at least by 2013, by 2016 and 17. I was looking at it some detail to try to write what became known as a grievance studies affair papers, which are hoax papers that Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, and I sent off to I won't go into the details, but lots of academic journals on the woke left, right?
00:03:27
Speaker
Feminist studies, gender studies, race studies, sexuality studies, all these studies. And then i continued my question. Sorry to interrupt. we've We've had both Helen and Peter on the show. So for anyone who wants to understand the grievance studies affair better, I encourage them to go back and listen to those episodes.
00:03:44
Speaker
So go on. Then I continue my studies. I'm not going to bore you with all the details. All I'm going to say is that I've been studying the concept of woke for 12, at least maybe a little longer, 12 years for certain.
00:03:55
Speaker
And so I've been trying to figure out in this whole time, how do we pin down what this thing is? Right. Is it just social justice warriors? Well, what what makes them social justice warriors? Is it, remember when we called it the regressive left? What does that mean?
00:04:09
Speaker
And then, you know, all of these different aspects and ways that people have talked about Jordan Peterson called a postmodern neo-Marxism, and it's a very complicated idea that's actually very correct. and I started off arguing against Peterson, actually, on that and was wrong. And so Peterson had it right. It is a form of neo-Marxist thinking that has gone postmodern. That's the thing on the left that we called it.
00:04:31
Speaker
So anyway. but what javascript quicklyly why Why did you have a problem with that categorization initially? I thought it was postmodern, but not neo-Marxist. So I thought that the neo-Marxism part was incorrect and I was dead wrong. It's at the it's actually at the center of it.
00:04:44
Speaker
And so what I've concluded over the course of this decade of study of this phenomenon of woke, mostly looking at the left almost the entire time, is, and this is by reading thousands of pieces of their literature, published papers, stupid articles,
00:05:01
Speaker
books, you know, both contemporary and historical, including Karl Marx, going back, you know, into the 19th century and and even Rousseau in the 18th century. So lots of old literature, lots of new literature.
00:05:14
Speaker
What I finally coalesced on is a very simple definition for woke that's unfortunately technical, but it's very easy to say woke means having critical consciousness.
Marxist Roots and Critical Theories
00:05:24
Speaker
So that's the whole story.
00:05:26
Speaker
What is critical consciousness is the harder story. But I brought up the whole decade of study to say that I really seriously considered this issue. I've written literally over a million words on the issue. i have spoken all over the world, including in your country.
00:05:41
Speaker
in 11 countries, actually, in something like three national parliaments, in the EU parliament at Oxford, all over the United States, in 45 of our 50 states.
00:05:52
Speaker
This has been, you know, something that I've been pretty well recognized for understanding. And i boiled it down to woke means having a critical consciousness. so Critical consciousness means that you see the world split into oppressor versus oppressed.
00:06:07
Speaker
There's a huge conspiracy being orchestrated mostly unintentionally by the oppressors because they benefit from the arrangement of society, and the oppressed are the victims of that system.
00:06:19
Speaker
Notice I haven't said what the system's based on. I haven't said anything except that there is an oppressor group who is working mostly unwittingly in concert to oppress another group who mostly don't even know they're oppressed.
00:06:33
Speaker
So critical consciousness is awakening people to the belief that society works in this intrinsic conflict. And that the oppressed group in particular needs to have a consciousness of their re oppression, that's the critical consciousness, so that they can band together and fight against it.
00:06:52
Speaker
Karl Marx explained it in the first paragraph of the chapter first chapter of the Communist Manifesto by saying that all of history is the conflict of contending classes,
00:07:03
Speaker
Those can be summarized in a word as a oppressor versus oppressed. And this fight is sometimes open and sometimes hidden, but it's always going on. And then it always ends up in one of two states, which is the revolutionary reconstitution of the society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
00:07:22
Speaker
So believing that history works that way and that there are two sides, oppressor and oppressed, and that the oppressed side is intrinsically good, and understands the situation by virtue of their re oppression, and has to band together as a class to overthrow the class that's oppressing them, is being woke.
00:07:42
Speaker
Notice again, i have at no point said anything whatsoever about what the contents of that belief are. Now, Karl Marx believed it was economic oppression by the bourgeoisie in his day, but before that, it was the feudal lords, and before that, it was the slaveholders, and they oppressed in his day the proletariat working class, but before that, it was like the feudal lords oppressed their serfs, and before that, it was that the slaveholders oppressed their slaves,
00:08:11
Speaker
And that history progresses through different stages of the suppression dynamic. But at his day, it was going to be the the the capitalist production class and the bourgeoisie, which was like the middle class city slicker.
00:08:24
Speaker
Bourgeoisie actually means in in rough English, city slicker. it In German, it's burgerlicher or something like this, which actually means like person who lives in the city.
00:08:35
Speaker
And so it's it's city slicker. And then the proletariat means the workers. So this is the intrinsic conflict. He says it's not farmers, it's workers, factory workers in particular. And so what he says is that this is the intrinsic conflict. And there's this, you know, we're going to unite the proletariat, give them class consciousness of their circumstances, have them seize the means of production from the bourgeoisie, overthrow the society.
00:08:59
Speaker
And blah, blah, blah. Stateless, classless, communist utopia is at the end of that road. OK, so that's the idea. Well, if you switch out and say, well I don't want it to be about economic class. Maybe race is the really deciding factor.
00:09:12
Speaker
You get a thing you could call race Marxism, but its actual name is critical race theory. So you get a critical theory, which has a critical consciousness about race that explains that Some people came along and decided the white race is better than all the other white races. They established an ideology, not capitalism now, but white supremacy that is to their own benefit, and it marginalizes and exploits and alienates all of the people of color.
00:09:38
Speaker
And you have the exact same idea that people of color now have to come together, understand their oppression with a critical race consciousness. Ideally, you'll awaken a consciousness also in the white people where they're filled with guilt.
00:09:49
Speaker
And you're going to seize the means of cultural production by overthrowing the the oppressor class of white people and seize the property of being central in society, which they call whiteness, that white people allegedly gave to themselves.
00:10:04
Speaker
And we can repeat this again and again and again through the leftist theories. Queer theory says some people declared themselves to be normal and established a kind of cultural property where they're normal and everybody else is a weirdo, a deviant, a pervert, or a queer compared to normal.
00:10:20
Speaker
And this is a system of oppression. So all of the different factions of people who are the outsiders or the others, have especially who are marginalized due to their so-called gender identity or their sexual practices or not. They don't have to be, by the way, marginalized in the definition. They can just feel marginalized and they're all oppressed and they need to band together and do all this disruptive activism to disrupt the idea of normalcy and legitimacy and dominance in order to unmake that system of oppression. It's the same exact model.
00:10:49
Speaker
Doesn't matter which thing you want, class, race, sex, sexuality there. Actually, sex would be the motif with feminism. The men declared that they're the superior sex. They set up patriarchy. They enforce it with misogyny. The women need to band together and come up to a way of seizing control of the means of producing society to liberate women from the oppressive patriarchal system. It's the same exact model again and again and again.
Social Justice and Egalitarianism
00:11:12
Speaker
And waking up to believing that the world works this way, that there is a conspiracy of the oppressor group to oppress the oppressed group is woke. Now, what made it woke on the left is that they pursued something called social justice. That's a mysterious enough term that we've all heard a million times.
00:11:31
Speaker
Another way to describe social justice is radical egalitarianism. In other words, egalitarianism means everybody's going to be equal. Radical means you're going to rip up every aspect of the system and replace it with a new one. That's radical is roots. You're going rip up the society we have by the roots, put in new roots,
00:11:49
Speaker
In order to come out with a new system that is perfectly egalitarian, what the Soviets called it actual equality, being the real goal of the Soviet program, fat that just go you ravin nestfo or something like that.
00:12:02
Speaker
ral vennis I don't know, I don't speak Russian. Somebody who speaks to Russian can say, James is an idiot, but I know how to spell it. and so anyway we're big We're big in Moscow, mate, so I'll forward the letters.
00:12:13
Speaker
So at any rate, this is a real thing. I didn't make that. just butchered the Russian to point out that this is a real program the Soviets really used and a real name that I just can't say. So at any rate, this but the left was obsessed with this radical egalitarianism.
00:12:29
Speaker
And so what they've become woke to, and this is what everybody's familiar with, what they've become woke to is seeing where society is not equal.
Wokeism vs. Classical Liberalism
00:12:37
Speaker
Right. So, oh, yeah. In the constant, you know, the Declaration of Independence in the United States says all men are created equal. That's what we believe.
00:12:45
Speaker
But first of all, they're not. What about people who are stronger or bigger or smaller or faster or weaker? And then second of all, look, if everybody's created equal and the system is so fair, why are there some rich people and some poor people? Why are black people on average doing worse than white people? That's called an inequity.
00:13:00
Speaker
We don't have economic equality or even actual equality. So something must be wrong. The system must be a fraud. The elite dominant power groups must be rigging the system to their own advantage.
00:13:13
Speaker
And thinking about it that way, rather than, you know, there are a lot of forces that go into how society ah shakes out Some of them are discrimination, but not all of them are discrimination.
00:13:25
Speaker
So that's a normal way to think about it. A woke to think about it is there's a grand conspiracy by the people in the elite power identities to keep everybody else out and keep them down. And what they're obsessed with. The patriarchy, for example.
00:13:37
Speaker
Like the patriarchy. That's right. And as leftist, what they're ah obsessed with is inequality. But this that that's what we're all familiar with, right? So a lot of people think woke means being obsessed with this inequity in society and wanting to correct it and force everybody to be equal through all these weird speech codes and policies and DEI and everything else.
00:14:00
Speaker
Hiring, you know, we called it affirmative action in the U.S. don't know what it's called in Australia, probably the same thing and are similar. And so at any rate, that's what we all think of as woke. So the term as you've introduced, woke right, is really confusing because my argument is that it is on the right, but also that it's woke.
00:14:21
Speaker
But remember how I defined woke in the first place. It was a conspiracy theory about oppressor groups oppressing oppressed groups in society and what the oppressed groups should do. And at no point does it say who those groups are, what the point of their nature of the oppression is,
00:14:39
Speaker
or So who they are, what the nature of the oppression is, or or what it's actually based on. Right. So it could have been class. It could have been race. It could have been sex. it could have been sexuality. Or it could have been something that excludes the true conservatives from the center of politics, like a liberal consensus against radical right fascism.
00:14:59
Speaker
And this is where we can get to the woke right. So let's start. so So to make it tangible for people, when you look at that conspiracy on the woke left and the way they look at it, they'd be looking at something like the patriarchy.
00:15:12
Speaker
To then take what's emerging on the woke right, it would be the Jews, for example, as one particular group. But there's also the manosphere. If you bring up feminism and the patriarchy, so the the feminists are saying there's a patriarchy and it's bad. And then there's this weird manosphere. That's what they call it on the Internet.
00:15:32
Speaker
And what it's saying is actually patriarchy was good. Or it could be the Jews have orchestrated everything in society. Or the globalists, perhaps. globalists, perhaps. seloallist perhaps That's right. That's right. That's right.
00:15:43
Speaker
And so you see the same conspiracy theory, right? But i want I like that example of the feminist versus the manosphere because what you get is a sense of it's the exact same thing but just pointed the other way, right? Feminists said there's a patriarchy.
00:15:58
Speaker
And patriarchy means bad, right? And so we've got to fight it. And then the manosphere says there's a patriarchy and patriarchy means good. So we have to keep it. And so in a sense, there they've adopted the same thing. There's these two intrinsic classes of society and the left wants it to be radically equal. So they hate the hierarchy.
00:16:19
Speaker
Then the right believes that the hierarchy is what makes it work. So they want to keep and enforce the hierarchy. but So I was listening to Andrew Doyle try and explain this phenomena on a podcast the other day. And he said, well, in some respects, this is ah new manifestation of a story which is as old as time, which is a story of freedom against authoritarianism.
00:16:40
Speaker
And that story has played out on the left and the right. Now, we've had left-wing and right-wing authoritarians throughout history. We've had left-wing and right-wing freedom fighters throughout history. And really, the woke struggle is really a push for some sort of a liberal control of the way people think and act.
00:16:59
Speaker
And the push against woke is a push for classical liberalism or, you know, freedom or however you want to frame it. And and again, that is not, yeah, that is not, that is politically agnostic in some respects.
00:17:09
Speaker
Do you have sympathy for that sort of characterisation? Yeah, that's not bad. There's another story that has to get added, but that is essentially correct. So what you have is freedom loving people and then people who think that if you let people have freedom, they'll do something wrong with it and they want to control. So they we become authoritarian.
00:17:27
Speaker
Right. And there are two manifestations, like I said, of how people can be met authoritarian. Right. One is that they think people use their freedom to screw other people out of their opportunities, so they want radical equality.
00:17:39
Speaker
The other is that people use their freedom to demand tolerance for the intolerable. Therefore, what we need is a rigid hierarchy that stamps that out. And that defines the so-called left and right of this authoritarian view.
00:17:52
Speaker
They were actually throughout history. I didn't this. said We don't have to use word woke anywhere that throughout history. We've seen both examples, whether it's a Jacobins on the left, whether it's people object to calling the Nazis on the right for a lot of good reasons.
00:18:04
Speaker
But they were rigidly hierarchical, whereas the Jacobins were rigidly anti-hierarchical. So if we use that understanding, should there be a grand hierarchy of society and leadership? The fascists said yes, and the communists said no.
00:18:17
Speaker
yeah And so we can see how the the distinction works. But this these are both as authoritarian because what they both hated was that if there are too many people who are free, too many people will make the wrong decisions, and too many people will lead us into whatever terrible thing they think is happening, either inequality or degeneracy being the two modes.
00:18:38
Speaker
So yes, he's right.
Authoritarianism: Left and Right
00:18:40
Speaker
The second story that has to be added to this It's a story of action and reaction. So what you'll see also that people call this the pendulum swinging, but it's not quite like that. What you'll see is that these authoritarians on one side or the other, and for ah very large set of reasons, it's more often the left than the right.
00:19:01
Speaker
But these authoritarians will come and provoke and try to get their way and try to establish their authoritarian system, often through a lot of lies and a lot of manipulation and eventually a lot of violence.
00:19:14
Speaker
And the things start to fall apart. And so the authoritarians on the other side arise up and say, the only way we can stop this is by doing the other thing. And it has it does swing both ways. Right. So take the example of Spain, just to very simplify what went on.
00:19:28
Speaker
You had the pendulum, you had the Marxists come in in the 1920s and try to make Spain a Marxist country. Then you had the fascist Franco arise with a radical kind of right-wing ordering system, and he was going to drive out the communists. So it swung from it got swung to the left, then it swung back to the right.
00:19:47
Speaker
And then what happened next? Well, Franco dies. a lot of things went wrong under Franco's system and the entire country lurched heavily to the left. And we have socialists in charge to this day. Actually, yeah Spain's almost in the control of communists now, from what I understand from my Spanish friends.
00:20:03
Speaker
So you see the pendulum is swung back and forth, back and forth. So you get this action reaction story that each side is the reaction to the other side. So fascism is an interesting, important point of departure to talk about here, because fascism was explicitly organized on purpose by Benito Mussolini openly as being an anti-communist endeavor.
00:20:28
Speaker
So it saw the communist threat and it was like, we're going to be the answer. So it is explicitly this pendulum swing to right-wing authoritarianism to try to stop left-wing authoritarianism.
00:20:39
Speaker
And it turns out that what I already described is the only essential difference between fascism and communism, which is why people get upset when you say that fascists are on the right if they're actually traditional conservatives, because they see the leftism, the authoritarian control, the desire for ultimate progress in society, the lack of freedom and all of the other things.
00:21:01
Speaker
And the the the story is that they said that they're going to react against communism. But the way that they did this is they see the anti-hierarchy, they they pick up the methods of communism, they see the anti-hierarchy of communism, and they say, we're going to use similar methods, but we're going to have very pro-hierarchy.
00:21:20
Speaker
So Mussolini says we're going to establish an identity in the nation of Italy. It's going to be the national Italian identity, and we're all going to fight for that. We're going to bind together. That's what fascism means, bind together in the name of the national identity.
00:21:35
Speaker
And we're going to, I mean, the fact if you read the doctrine of fascism, which he wrote, it's very clear that hear this is ah he says openly that it's a totalitarian system and it's a spirit it defines the entire spiritual life of all the people and so on.
00:21:48
Speaker
Hitler was a little different. He said, well, actually, Mussolini's got the right idea, except that it's located in the race. It's racial purity. And people try to argue right now on the Internet. That's not true. I urge them to go read Mein Kampf for them themselves. He says it.
00:22:03
Speaker
Over and over and over and over and over again. It is very clear. So it's now it's the race. The nation will be based on the race, not just on Italian identity, but it'll be the German master race, the Arian race.
00:22:15
Speaker
And then Franco did something softer and lighter. He said, we're going to find it in Spanish culture i cultural identity, which he tied to the Catholic Church and Catholic identity, which is no dig at Catholics. It's just what Franco did.
00:22:27
Speaker
so in the the commonality the The commonality is they are ah consciously identifying the tactics of communism and then applying it for their own their own ends. And they are identified, which includes identifying a a group identity in the nation for Mussolini and the nation as a race for Hitler and as a nation, as a culture for so for Franco in Spain.
00:22:51
Speaker
So you got the identity politics, the group collectivism, the anti-freedom is baked right in. And what they're doing, though, is they're saying that the communists are coming in and removing our hierarchy. So we're going to establish the hierarchy very rigidly because the communists believe at the deepest level, and this is a bit heavy, but I want to cover it.
00:23:12
Speaker
The communists believe at the deepest level that all of humanity has been alienated from its true state of freedom before we worried about private property. And so their goal is to return people to not worrying about private property. That's where Karl Marx says communism can be summarized in a single sentence, abolish private property.
00:23:31
Speaker
Okay. Well, the fascists did not believe this. They did not believe that humanity has been alienated. They believe that the rightful inheritors of their of of a people, of a nation, have been alienated primarily by Marxists and stupid liberals.
00:23:48
Speaker
So what they think is the society became too tolerant. It became too not hierarchical or anti-hierarchical. And that everything was a golden era when we could, you know, bash all the bad people who weren't on the program.
00:24:03
Speaker
So they established instead of a ideal of a... completely radically egalitarian society. It is a completely rigidly defined authoritarian society that's going to force people to have the right values and therefore recover the lost golden age and then therefore recover the inheritance that they should have had if the society hadn't become too tolerant.
00:24:27
Speaker
Some people may, their mind may go to, you know, acronyms like Make America Great Again as having an echo there, and we will get to that, and and the extent to which that is a historical parallel.
00:24:42
Speaker
So that's the historical and philosophical underpinnings of this conversation. I want to make it tangible. Give me, you know, let's take names. Give me a few famous names on the right you would now associate with Woke Wright and some of the arguments that they make, which are now which are now being adopted as Woke Wright arguments.
Woke Right Figures and Revisionist History
00:25:01
Speaker
Okay. so the just to disclaim before I get into this, most of the names of people who are pushing woke right vigorously are not well-known names. they're mostly It's mostly covert movement still.
00:25:13
Speaker
It's early in its revolutionary ambitions, which mostly target MAGA in the United States, not the United States overall. There are some prominent figures who support and dabble in but also adopt the overall mentality of woke right that are very prominent. The most famous of them is, of course, Tucker Carlson, which I get in a lot of trouble for naming him. How is he woke? He's just a nice guy.
00:25:36
Speaker
No, it turns out that Tucker Carlson has adopted the core belief of right thinking, which informs the rest of the critical consciousness of woke, which is, as it's phrased in this book that I have, it's called, the title of the book is Critical Constructivism, A Primer.
00:25:53
Speaker
It is by a man named Joe Kincheloe. Anybody who wants to read it can go read it. I call it the book of woke because it is the most clear articulation, as written in 2005, articulation of what the woke philosophy is by an insider.
00:26:06
Speaker
It's very academic and technical, but you're welcome to read it and understand. And an exact quote from him is that critical constructivists prefer subjugated knowledges.
00:26:18
Speaker
So there's this belief that the ruling elites who are corrupt and illegitimate, the bourgeoisie, if you want, the white supremacists and CRT, whatever it is, have decided certain knowledge is forbidden and they've subjugated it or marginalized it.
00:26:33
Speaker
So what is necessary as a corrective is to prefer other ways of knowing. Everybody's heard this phrase now. Of course, you're going to have a ton of that in Australia with with with that with indigenous knowledges with with with your indigenous peoples. I'm not all sure even what words I'm allowed to use anymore.
00:26:51
Speaker
I almost went to the New Zealand example because I worked in New Zealand earlier. Aboriginals is fine, yeah. Okay. So they've got the Maori and there's this whole thing happening in New Zealand right now over there for your Kiwi friends where they're trying to install Mauturanga Maori, which is Maori ways of knowing as equal to science. And this is similar to what happened in South Africa a decade ago, which has been a disaster, obviously.
00:27:13
Speaker
So other ways of knowing we're all familiar with. outsider, marginalized or subjugated knowledge. the The power structure has said certain things are not allowed to be talked about.
00:27:24
Speaker
Right. And that's Tucker's whole shtick now. We're not allowed to talk about this, but let's talk about how the Jews control everything or whatever it happens. but he doesn't i don't think he said explicitly that, but we're not like Candace Owens certainly has.
00:27:36
Speaker
For sure. Candace Owens is another a perfect example. That forbidden outsider knowledge that criticizes the existing structure is the hallmark of woke thinking. So Tucker and Candace both engage in that significantly.
00:27:50
Speaker
That puts them firmly in the woke camp, to use the technical word, epistemologically. The worldview follows from that. So the way of thinking and knowing about the world that they have is that there are certain facts that we're not allowed to know.
00:28:06
Speaker
that are secret knowledge. An independent observer probably would never find these things all by themselves. They have to be directed and they criticize the existing power structure when they're articulated and they don't want you to know that. That's woke thinking.
00:28:23
Speaker
So Tucker and Candace have built their brands over the last few years off of basically this. In particular, you know, whether it's For example, with Tucker Carlson, he sat down with a country singer named John Rich, and they did a long exploration of the concept in theology called dispensationalism and concluded that it was secret that the dispensational...
00:28:45
Speaker
The dispensational approach was caused by this Jewish-funded interpretation of the Bible called the Schofield Bible. So was all a Jewish plot to get Christians to like Israel. So you have the conspiracy theory element, and you've got the they don't want you to know this element.
00:28:59
Speaker
And this is a dominant power structure. Dispensationalism is the most probably influential sect. of thought within evangelical Christianity over the last hundred years in the United States. They don't want you to know it. It's very powerful and it's keeping an important truth away from you that the the Jews secretly control things.
00:29:15
Speaker
And so this is woke thinking. Whether he adheres to some other, you know, hyper nationalist program like the fascists did or not, It's kind of beside the point.
00:29:26
Speaker
He may or he may not. But the fact of the matter is that that way of thinking that the hidden outsider knowledge, which he then will platform by bringing, you know, Christian nationalists like Andrew Isker or Francoists like Charles Haywood and so on onto his long form podcast and just let them articulate the views without much pushback or challenge.
00:29:48
Speaker
Usually not just us. Asking questions, that sort of mentality. I'm just asking questions because I'm not allowed to talk about this because of the power structure. That's woke. That's woke behavior.
00:29:59
Speaker
There's another really good example, which I think brings this to life. And Tucker has engaged in this this whole debate. And that is the, was Winston Churchill really the bad guy? That's right. Topic. So you heard this after World War II from the left. He was a racist.
00:30:13
Speaker
He was a colonialist. And that has continued on the left. And we've now heard this warped manifestation of Winston Churchill was actually the bad guy on the woke right. How has that played out? Explain that to me to as a way of making this this real.
00:30:28
Speaker
No, that's actually almost a perfect example because it feeds into being able to articulate what the woke right conspiracy theory is. So the the very, very long and very, very short of the thing that you're talking about for people who haven't heard it is that the there there is a character named Daryl Cooper.
00:30:47
Speaker
He's been on Tucker Carlson. He's been on Joe Rogan. And certainly it seems that these guys have agreed with him. So he's not nobody, even if you haven't heard of him. And he's articulating an alternative history of World War II.
00:30:59
Speaker
It seems like it's largely a rehashing of one of his heroes, who's a discredited historicist named David Irving. But at any rate, the claim is that Hitler had much more gentle ambitions than he actually did.
00:31:12
Speaker
It was never about the Jews, blah, blah, blah. And that the West, whether it's Churchill or or FDR, and Stalin and the communist East teamed up in order to try to drive Hitler out because Hitler was a true threat to the communist and liberal order.
00:31:29
Speaker
So they wanted to get rid of him. So they initiate the actual war, which may not have even happened had it not been for Churchill deciding to intervene and then Stalin and then the United States getting involved.
00:31:41
Speaker
And that because the war got so desperate, that's why Hitler had to commit what atrocities he did, thus making Winston Churchill the primary villain of World War II possibly speaking, because sometimes he he speaks out of both sides of his mouth about that.
00:31:54
Speaker
Yes, I mean it. No, I don't mean it. OK, so I will point out also that Mr. Cooper, who we're talking about, has repeatedly expressed in one form or another, but I'll quote an exact tweet of his from a couple of years ago.
00:32:08
Speaker
Democracy is the disease. Tyranny is the cure. So obviously, neither Tucker Carlson nor Joe Rogan wanted to ask him about his views on democracy being a disease and tyranny being a cure.
00:32:19
Speaker
or his and but that they've allowed him to peddle his revisionist World War II history. Now, this gives us the conspiracy theory, right? It's not white supremacy or and capitalist bourgeoisie.
00:32:30
Speaker
It turns out that, although those actually will tie in, the woke right broadest conspiracy theory is that following World War II, the entire Western alliance conspired both now in inside of nations and outside of nations internationally,
00:32:45
Speaker
to rearrange factors so that fascism would never happen again. So lots of conservative, as they phrase it, ideas got taken off the table. You couldn't be conservative and be a nationalist, by which they actually mean hyper-nationalist or ultra-nationalist.
00:33:01
Speaker
I don't know that there's a difference between those two fancy words. You're not allowed to be an ultra-nationalist. You're not allowed to be racialist. You're not allowed to be fascist, actually, itself.
00:33:12
Speaker
You're not allowed to articulate a lot of staunch, intolerant, group-oriented conservative positions as ah right-wing positions, not conservative positions. They distinguish between those. They say openly, we are not conservatives because they think conservatism is weak.
00:33:27
Speaker
They are right-wingers or radical right-wing revolutionaries, to quote another one of them. And so This conspiracy theory is what the whole World War II revisionism from Cooper...
00:33:38
Speaker
through Tucker and Joe Rogan is about. It's about creating a historical narrative that the we were told a giant lie about World War II, that the lie actually hides the fact that the liberals in America and Britain were teaming up with the communists in Soviet Union in order to squeeze out the only effective way to stop communism so that communism would eventually take everything over, thus making them villains.
00:34:04
Speaker
And in response to the calamity of World War II, which they then had actually orchestrated, they set up a system to exclude true conservative or true right-wing thought from the table, including, most importantly, hyper-nationalism and racism and fascism.
00:34:21
Speaker
So I don't know why they considered those things true conservative right-wing thought, but that's where we are. And so that is their primary conspiracy theory. So people like them, which for Tucker Carlson does not mean a fascist, it does not mean a Nazi,
00:34:35
Speaker
I am not calling him either of those. He is a Pat Buchananite paleoconservative and something closer to a hypernationalist as a result. And so it's for him, it's hypernationalism. So the, then that like Mussolini actually.
00:34:50
Speaker
So the idea is that nationalist identity has been taken off the table so that people aren't allowed to love their countries correctly. And then everything is just going to fall to the left. And this has been a massive conspiracy to keep the power of the right quelled so that the left would eventually win.
00:35:05
Speaker
That's their actual view. But there you have your oppressors, which are the broad liberal order and the oppressed group, which are the nationalist or sometimes fascist true right that had been suppressed by this. And now we have a calamity because they weren't allowed to speak up. And we've lost our inheritance as a country because the left has been able to run roughshod over it as a result.
00:35:26
Speaker
And it was probably all planned from the beginning. So there you see the conspiracy theory that makes the whole damn thing woke And yes, Tucker Carlson is participating in this. And yes, Candace Owens is participating in this, even without having to get into less famous figures like R.N. McIntyre, who express very radical fascist philosophers like Carl Schmitt and Julius Evola and Thomas Carlyle in their articulations of what's going on in the world, even without acknowledging that Daryl Smith says that tyranny is the cure for what's wrong with the world, which puts him pretty firmly in the fascist camp, actually.
00:36:01
Speaker
I want to still man a couple of the arguments against the woke right concept. Before I do, the interesting thing about that Daryl Cooper conversation, which has then subsequently been picked up on Rogan with Douglas Murray and with Dave Smith, is that there is this feature that comes up with some of these woke right thinkers, which is that just asking questions thing.
00:36:24
Speaker
And then when genuine facts or expertise is presented, there's It is, you're you're one of the elite, you know, this sort of focus on expertise is, impressive may not quite be the right word, and and you heard this play out between Murray and Dave Smith on Rogan. How does that sort of skepticism of knowledge, expertise, that sort of thing play into to to this piece?
00:36:47
Speaker
Well, mean, first of all, these people obviously care about expertise as a concept because you have Tucker Carlson saying that Daryl Cooper is the most important and honest historian in America today.
00:36:57
Speaker
So he obviously thinks that Daryl Cooper has some kind of expertise in history to tell the story. But what you see is the actual scapegoating of expertise, because we all know after COVID-19, after COVID,
00:37:10
Speaker
all of the massive political things that have just happened over the last decade and so on that we've been lied to by our experts quite a lot, by all of the racial justice experts, that there's a lot of fake experts out there, public health, racial justice, blah, blah, blah, blah blah right? Queer experts, that's like not a thing.
00:37:27
Speaker
But we've all had to suffer the experts. We don't know what a woman is. We know when the kid is trans. We know all this stuff because of the experts, the experts. So what they're actually, they care about the concept of expertise, right?
00:37:37
Speaker
Right. But what they're doing is signaling that there is an enemy class in the same way that that Mao signaled that the revisionists were an enemy class. and So the the revisionists had to be corrected and and excluded and all this. So that the the word that that they're using in place that is experts.
00:37:55
Speaker
So what they're actually saying is that there's this kind of like boogeyman expert, but we actually care about knowing things. That's why Daryl Cooper reads so many books. But there's this boogeyman thing that the experts and the experts have lied to us and the experts are bad.
00:38:08
Speaker
So they can then classify somebody like Douglas for doing so much to due diligence on Israel in that particular podcast debate with Dave Smith. The story is that that the Douglas Murray spent 18 months living in Israel trying to since October 7th, 23, trying to catalog what's going on and wrote a very powerful book.
00:38:28
Speaker
explaining what's going on in the war coming from the radical Muslims so and Hamas against Israel. And it's he was going on to try to talk about that book and got asked to debate Dave Smith as a condition of appearing there.
00:38:41
Speaker
Dave Smith is a comedian who is very Israel skeptical, although he has Jewish heritage. So that they technically say that he's not criticizing Jews or something like this. It's very confusing.
00:38:53
Speaker
But at any rate, Douglas had a position of having done a lot of due diligence on the issue, and it turned into a really ugly fight and debate in front of millions of people on the Joe Rogan platform where Dave Smith disagreed with him and Douglas disagreed.
00:39:10
Speaker
pointed out, you don't have the expertise to talk about this in an informed way.
Illiberal Tactics and Risks
00:39:14
Speaker
And Joe, you shouldn't be having people to come on and talk about this in an informed way who are not informed. And they considered this, the the the the woke right erupted, considering this a form of illegitimate gatekeeping and said that that makes Douglas Murray an elitist.
00:39:29
Speaker
And he's appealing to expertise when we just learned that expertise is fake, even though They obviously care about expertise. They are trying to talk to people who are informed on the issues, which is what expertise would mean.
00:39:41
Speaker
And so what it is is that they, it this is ah the the woke idea, right? They know when the expertise is real, when it agrees with them, and when it is not real, when it disagrees with them. If you think that's not woke, Why don't you just go talk to anybody who's pushing the transgender ideology about any piece of science?
00:39:57
Speaker
I guarantee you, if you find an academic paper that says that transgender makes, you know, positive health outcomes, they're going to say that's science and it's good. And if you find a single academic paper that says, like the cast review or whatever, that no, it doesn't. It actually has all these problems. They'll say that's fake science.
00:40:14
Speaker
If it agrees with them, it's real expertise. If it disagrees with them, it's false expertise. That's another woke signature move. And this is what you're actually seeing in that debate and with this squabble over expertise, in my opinion.
00:40:27
Speaker
couple of of, to still man out a couple of arguments against the woke right conceptually. First is, comes from, say, someone like a Chris Ruffo. Very clever guy. American academic thinker, now prominent voice in this space, said something, and again I'm going to oversimplify, along the lines of classical liberalism is weak. It has allowed the march through the institutions from the woke left. So this is why the woke left have so successfully captured the media, on the political sphere, the academia, most most notably and and probably first.
00:41:02
Speaker
And as a result of that, you need to adopt illiberal tactics in response to be able to get the form of or to get some sort of liberalism back into the institutions. The ends will justify the means.
00:41:15
Speaker
this kind of This was why i it popped into my mind when you were talking about the historical underpinning of of fascism in response to communism earlier. I'm not suggesting, by the way, that that this is... this Same, but there are there are echoes there.
00:41:29
Speaker
How do you respond to someone like Chris Rufo that says, you know, look, classical liberalism is great. Love the principles, but the fact the matter is it has been unsuccessful. And a result of that, the woke left have captured all of the institutions we hold dear. We need to play dirty effectively in order to respond to that.
00:41:45
Speaker
Well, at this point, almost always respond to things like this biblically first, and it's very clear in the good book that it says, do not answer evil with evil, but bless. So believing that your enemies fight dirty, so you therefore have to fight dirty is basically the...
00:42:00
Speaker
underlying theme of virtually every major morality tale ever. Harry Potter is a very good example. You get made fun of for bringing this up. But the fact of the matter is that the Death Eaters run around casting their green light curse that kills everybody, that the Avada Kedavra murder curse, and that the good guys can't use it back.
00:42:17
Speaker
So the bad guys can kill you and you can't kill them back. Right. So this obviously gives a imbalance of power. And therefore, you know, maybe it would be better And, you know, Harry attempts it and even uses some of it in the last book to try to, you know, accomplish good means.
00:42:32
Speaker
The problem is, is that when you adopt bad tactics, bad methods in order to achieve good ends, you have two intrinsic issues. Number one is that you have to corrode yourself when Harry Potter, for to use the metaphor in the fifth book, tries to cast the the pain curse, Cruciatus curse on Bellatrix. Is it Bellatrix?
00:42:52
Speaker
Yeah, probably like something like Lestrange. Is that her name? I forget. she It doesn't work. And he says, she says to him, laughs at him, mocks him and says, you have to really mean it. You have to want to hurt the person.
00:43:02
Speaker
In other words, you have to corrode your own soul in order to do it. The Avada Kedavra curse rips your soul, it says in the book. That's the point of the Horcrux thing. So you have to corrode yourself to use the enemy's weapons, first of all. So you're already compromising yourself. This is why the Bible says, do not answer evil with evil.
00:43:20
Speaker
It's a very, very clear and important principle, but it does hold the righteous to a higher standard, which, P.S., being at a higher standard is what makes them righteous in the first place. And faith means believing that righteousness will overcome evil.
00:43:32
Speaker
And so you have to have that faith to drive out the fear that it won't do that. The fear is that it won't do that. You have to have the faith that it will do that. And so you must hold yourself to righteousness. The second is more practical rather than this kind of like spiritual soul stuff.
00:43:47
Speaker
The second is more practical is if you are willing to suspend the principles that protect people from illiberalism, which is, in a sense, protect them from arbitrary power, what on earth is going to stop somebody from using arbitrary power against you later?
00:44:04
Speaker
And how on earth are you going to get if the end if the means are are the sorry, the ends are supposed to justify the means and the means are are that you throw away liberalism in this case, how in the world is the end supposed to be get back to liberalism? Imagine that you had this situation where you have, this is actually the the philosophy of Carl Schmitt, who many of the woke right follow.
00:44:26
Speaker
And they he had this idea called the state of exception and the unbound executive. So there's an emergency state in the situation in the country. The sovereign has to be able to exempt himself from the rules and become unbound from the law to do what he's got to do. P.S. By the way, this is what they did to us during COVID.
00:44:42
Speaker
Emergency use authorization. It was never actually approved. They just approved it through emergency use to suspend the actual rules and laws. Did we get our freedom back from taking the vaccines, guys? No, we did not. No, it doesn't work that way.
00:44:57
Speaker
But imagine we had this. So President Trump, let's imagine, has this crisis to deal with. There's all this woke left in Harvard and he can't get rid of it. And the court says he can only go so far, or maybe it's the illegals because the court is actually telling him there's only so much he can do, right? He has to follow due process of law.
00:45:12
Speaker
And Trump says, nope, I'm going to ignore the court. We're going to get rid of due process of law. And the legal theory is this legal theory of the total state from Carl Schmitt that says we have to unbind the executive because of this state of exception, this emergency situation.
00:45:26
Speaker
OK, so now there's no due process because we have to get rid of the illegals. And then somebody comes along and tells Trump it's time to put due process back. And Trump says, i don't want to arrest you.
00:45:37
Speaker
And you say, but I need due process. so I have due process of law. And Trump says, no, you don't, because we're in a state of exception. So you don't have it. So the problem is that once you're willing to compromise on the fundamental bedrock rights, it's very hard. It's not impossible.
00:45:53
Speaker
George Washington When he finished his second term of president into the first president of the United States,
Trump and the Woke Right
00:46:00
Speaker
willingly stepped down from power and did not continue into a third term, even though he was unanimously wanted to be in that position.
00:46:07
Speaker
It is possible for the ultra rare, ultra moral, ultra righteous leader to eschew power at its zenith, but almost nobody can do it. So if that becomes your rule, you are guaranteed to slide into tyranny.
00:46:23
Speaker
So eventually, if you're going to use the the ends justify the means logic here, you are always going, you you either are going to be extremely lucky because you happen to have just the right guy at just the right time.
00:46:35
Speaker
And who knows if you don't and if they don't change their mind because power is corrupting. And if not, you're on a slippery slope. And once you start eroding those freedoms, you're not going to get them back. Yeah. And again, I think to your point, this is a story that has played out time and again throughout history.
00:46:50
Speaker
You mentioned Trump in that answer. And there's another argument against the woke right argument, a counter argument against the woke right argument. And that is that the focus on the left is on identity.
00:47:03
Speaker
But the focus on the right is really more of a unique personality cult around the extraordinary political figure that is Donald Trump. And if he was to change his particular focus and to change the pit or pivot marker in some way, you know in the same way that people say if he was to shoot up a group of people on Fifth Avenue, they would turn a blind eye or they would follow him regardless.
00:47:25
Speaker
They would change their particular positions on a whole range of issues. probably Ukraine and Russia being a good example of, I can see a world in which Trump says make America great again is really by stamping their authority over Europe and becoming interventionist in that conflict.
00:47:42
Speaker
I can see a world in which that happens. To what extent is woke right really just a Trump personality cult as opposed to a mirror of the identity politics of the left? Virtually zero. It is absolutely true to be distinguishing that there is a personality cult around Trump that identifies with the theme MAGA.
00:47:59
Speaker
And there is the, you know, deep question that we kind of alluded to earlier around MAGA. I don't want to get bogged down in this. Does Make America Great Again evoke the same kind of energy if, say, Hitler had said, make Germany great again, right?
00:48:12
Speaker
And the answer is yes and no and mostly no, because it depends on what you're actually leaning into. Is it make America great again by any means? Nope, it's absolutely not. It's make America great again in its founding principles. Hitler viewed Germany as a nation of a race of people And that that race had to be preserved and elevated.
00:48:31
Speaker
And that's how Germany was going to be improved. The United States does not see itself and never has seen itself in that regard. And so what it regards, and this is a tangent, by the way, what it sees itself as is a set of principles, which are American classical liberalism and common sense that will be adhered to.
00:48:48
Speaker
And so the idea in America is that America will be great when we adhere to those founding principles, not when we favor a particular identity or race or nation. But the fact of the matter is ah it's it's exactly wrong. that That argument is exactly wrong. There is a cult of personality around Trump, no doubt.
00:49:04
Speaker
I don't know if he's still in the position where he could shoot somebody on the Fifth Avenue he and be fine. If people don't know, the Trump Tower is on Fifth Avenue in New York City, by the way. But that there is a strong cult of personality. the got People love the guy. Everything he does is right.
00:49:17
Speaker
There's a huge political cult around him right now where you'll see a lot of people where he does things that maybe deserve criticism and nobody will say anything. That's its own problem. But this isn't Woke Wright. Woke Wright, in fact, mostly doesn't like Trump and has already articulated that it doesn't particularly like Trump. The Woke Wright view of Trump is, in fact, that he's an imperfect vessel who will do some of their bidding But ultimately, that they need a true right wing tyrant to come into the position in order to get the job done.
00:49:44
Speaker
So they'll use him while they have him, but he's not good enough. And you're already seeing whether it's Russell Brand recently questioning whether or not Trump is actually going to deliver on his campaign promises that he's not doing enough, whether it's um kind of open criticisms of Trump as to whether or not he's controlled by the Jews, which are rife on social media.
00:50:03
Speaker
There are a lot of people in the woke right who have already set many stages and many tables ready to dump Trump the second he doesn't do what they want him to. So I think what we'll see, if that were ever to come to pass that kind of a moment, is we'll see a lot of clarity between the MAGA, not even MAGA, the Trump personality cult being one thing that does overlap with this woke right that mostly doesn't like Trump and would turn on him in a heartbeat.
Nationalism and Foreign Influence
00:50:31
Speaker
So this is a much more radical phenomenon. They see conservatives. This is their own words. They see they say Joel Webin, not very famous, except in kind of these things online. He's a pastor, strong Christian nationalist, radical.
00:50:46
Speaker
And he put on on X the other day. In all caps, one of the not was in all caps, we are not conservatives. I've seen them post again that they are radical revolutionary right wingers. I've seen the clarification that they are right wing and not conservative hundreds of times at this point, that they are a true right and that conservatism is weak.
00:51:08
Speaker
They actually see Trump largely, if not as Jewish controlled, as a basically 90s Democrat Fast forwarded through the woke period, who's not at all a right winger in the way that they need him to be or want him to be.
00:51:22
Speaker
So, no, this that that's that's not the case. This is much more radical and dangerous than that. And Trump is just as expendable and usable as anyone else to this radical movement. The way that you've just explained it there is that the people who are fighting for this are ideological and they're principled in their own walkway, perhaps, but principled.
00:51:41
Speaker
But I've also heard you say and in at times before that they may be elements that is just highly transactional. And that goes to the involvement of foreign governments and the extent to which certain people and potentially certain people that are very well known maybe just on the payroll of foreign governments who are looking to destabilize America and the West.
00:52:02
Speaker
Explain that to me. I think that there are actually likely to be a lot of, we'll just use the general word, plants. within the woke right wing of MAGA.
00:52:12
Speaker
And why is very simple. First of all, Donald Trump is president of the United States. Second of all, MAGA presents a serious threat to certain enemies of the American project and the American nation.
00:52:27
Speaker
So there are tons of incentives, for example, The CCP and Russia both openly favored Kamala Harris in the previous election. They did not get Kamala Harris in the previous election. So what are they going to do?
00:52:38
Speaker
You think they're going to sit on their heels while the guy that they think is less likely to represent their own national interests You know, is in office? No, of course not. Not if they can. The Chinese spend $16 billion dollars a year in influence campaigns against the United States. $16 billion dollars a year is a military budget.
00:52:55
Speaker
So of course they're going to do things. So it would be very easy for them to throw money around, to create social media, you know, um phenomena like, you know, bots and all the different kind of, you know, trolls and everything else.
00:53:06
Speaker
artificial amplification and suppression of people's posts, which they all have the capacity to do against the algorithm, it would be very much in their interest to this. It's not hard to imagine China or Russia doing this.
00:53:18
Speaker
And then you have this situation of the Islamic states that also have this kind of vested interest in tearing America apart or tearing the West apart, as they've stated, you know, the great, say what is it, the great Satan is America.
00:53:30
Speaker
Because they've been at and and in some sense a semi-declared war against the United States for a long time. They have every reason to want to participate in this as well. And then you have likely to be true, the deep state, which is likely an international deep state involving intelligence actors across different ah parts of the globe. You have entities like the United Nations, which command fairly tremendous resources that Trump is trying to back out of and possibly even defund.
00:53:57
Speaker
There are lots of reasons why people would want to undermine President Trump around the world, in other words, right? The Democrats would also like to undermine President Trump. So there's an old saying that I've come across a number of times in the radical literature that is, dress like a Republican so you can talk like an anarchist.
00:54:15
Speaker
Why on earth would we think that i the the most frustrating naivety in MAGA that I can think of and the conservative movement I can think of is that they are all conspiracy theorists now.
00:54:26
Speaker
and So they believe everything in the world is infiltrated except MAGA. They think somehow if you've got the red hat on, you're pure, right? No, of course there are Democrat plants trying to mislead people into doing radicalism that makes the Republicans look bad.
00:54:39
Speaker
Of course there are going to be deep state plants who want to undermine what's going on And then of course there are going to be foreign actors who are going to manipulate all of the situation. And it will generate a principled stance and a lot of the people who are in the kind of the following halo or the the wake of that that the agitation and activism.
00:55:00
Speaker
But there's a strong reason to believe, like the evidence that keeps coming out, that these things are not all organic, that there are lots of very powerful and wealthy entities that are pushing this.
00:55:10
Speaker
And those are external entities. There are also internal entities or people who are committed to whatever their agendas are. I mentioned Charles Haywood earlier as being interviewed by Tucker Carlson. He's a very wealthy financier who he's very radically right.
00:55:25
Speaker
He wants a radical right wing thing to happen in the United States. So he's funding a lot of this. Then we have these characters in the kind of tech bro billionaire set, whether it's Peter Thiel or Marc Andreessen, possibly Elon Musk to certain degrees.
00:55:38
Speaker
And there's, you know, a handful of others. They have their own agendas. Like Peter Thiel has an agenda In addition to whatever his beliefs are about America, and what in addition to whatever his philosophical beliefs are, and I'm accusing him of absolutely nothing beyond business as business here, has an agenda to see Palantir technologies advanced.
00:55:56
Speaker
So if he can create circumstances in which a government exists, which is contracting with Palatir, could benefit from Palatir services, that's in his business interests to do. So there's even those kinds of interests without having to invoke the idea that anybody wants to complete the singularity and take us off into some weird tech tyranny.
00:56:16
Speaker
There's just tons of interests that suggest that this right-wing radicalism is all benefited or benefiting certain people who have agendas against possibly President Trump.
00:56:28
Speaker
I understand that on the internal side and how you know billionaires will spend money to promote their own interests. you know We've seen that throughout history. I think something which people struggle with in terms of the covert side and the the foreign national side is you've said that that this he is, in some respects, an ultra-nationalist movement.
00:56:49
Speaker
And so for that ultra-nationalist movement then to be, you know, say taking money from Qatar or taking money from China or taking money from Russia, you know, or those particular types of online influencers taking the digital paper bag to undermine that nation is it goes against that kind of feeling of nationalism.
00:57:07
Speaker
Is it just that everyone has their price or is there something I'm missing? Well, it is. there Almost everyone has their price, but there's also you already said it. They have you openly already articulated that they have the idea that the ends justify the means.
00:57:19
Speaker
So what they want is to advance American nationalism at any cost. So if somebody is going to come along, first of all, a lot of these foreign entities operate through shell operations. Russia, for instance, was funding division operations in conservative politics in America and MAGA through Tenant Media, which was a Canadian owned company.
00:57:39
Speaker
Right. So they often operate through the shell organizations. But even so, somebody comes along and says, we want to give you a lot of money to be able to promote your particular idea. You have to understand that the nationalist line, they can actually have an alignment or what what would what's called interest convergence here.
00:57:55
Speaker
The nationalist line actually can serve the ultimate goal of undermining America. If they can radicalize or awaken middle America to turn away from MAGA all of a sudden because they're terrified that it's taking roads of ultra-nationalism or fascism, then what's going to happen in the midterms? Well, the Democrats are going to get a whole bunch of seats in Congress and Trump is neutered.
00:58:18
Speaker
You're going to have a majority probably possibly in both the House and Senate, in which case Trump is not at just getting impeached on some pretext. He's probably getting convicted and thrown out of the office, which has never happened in the U.S., with the exception of with Richard Nixon.
00:58:32
Speaker
And so you have like a real risk at the midterms if all you have to do is get MAGA to be scary enough to middle middle of America. And ultra-nationalism will do that. so So Qatar can say, hey, you know what?
00:58:46
Speaker
We're all about America being American nationalist. We're going to be Qatari nationalist. Every country should be nationalist. So they can appeal to the principle that each country should be nationalist on its own terms.
00:58:57
Speaker
And we love this idea of nationalism. It's underfunded. It's controlled by a giant global plot for internationalism. We'll give you money. Push nationalism in America. You benefit. We benefit. But what actually happens is the real the real operation is to scare the crap out of normie America so that Trump loses in twenty six and twenty eight.
Defending Classical Liberalism
00:59:16
Speaker
Just about at time, but it indulges me one final question that I think is it a very important one for the sensible, freedom-loving people who are listening to this or or watching this.
00:59:26
Speaker
And that is that classical liberalism, I think, is under assault, both from the left and from the right in in the world today. I noticed on a tweet recently, you said you don't actually use the term classical liberal for yourself as much anymore, but run run with me here.
00:59:41
Speaker
We are seeing in the UK where I live this creeping, maybe stop creeping now, it's charging assault on free speech, people being locked up for tweets, you're seeing hate speech laws in Australia, you're seeing all manner of civil liberties across the rest which are under attack, and you can see...
00:59:58
Speaker
if you not agree, why this sort of woke right has grown ah out of, in some in some ways, a frustration with that that assault. So how can sensible people, was going to say on the right, but just sensible people, full stop, make the arguments for classical liberalism, make the arguments for you know it's its separate but related strand of conservatism on the right,
01:00:22
Speaker
How can it make those sensible old arguments better in a way which resonate and which can drive back against wokeism without resorting to the same tactics that wokeism adopts?
01:00:35
Speaker
Sure. So i'll I'll actually say three things. First, it's kind of a strategic thing, just very quickly. Then I said on a tweet that I've backed away from the word classical liberal. It's merely because the word liberal is so polluted. Nobody knows what it means anymore.
01:00:48
Speaker
So I find it unproductive to to to describe myself as liberal. I still the same values, identical values. And so I said instead that I was I believe in something like American common sense or something like this, not common sense. This is something else.
01:01:01
Speaker
American realism. So the appeal to let's find out what's true. I believe the world actually exists. It's not constructed or whatever. You know, I believe in that. But American carries the entire classical liberal program with it because that's what we were founded in.
01:01:15
Speaker
So my values didn't change. It's just that the word liberal is too complicated now. It's been really polluted by people on both sides for way too long. It's too hard to have a conversation with that word. So let's break down to what is actually underneath it.
01:01:28
Speaker
Secondly, there's a logical piece of advice and a marketing piece of advice that I'm i'm going to offer to answer your specific question of what can people do. So number one, if you want to articulate the arguments of classical liberalism or traditional conservatism, which, by the way, we're talking about people like John Locke and Thomas Paine, and we're talking about Thomas Jefferson, Madison, and so on, Montesquieu, and we could go on down the list of the classical liberals.
01:01:54
Speaker
And if you want to articulate classical or traditional conservatism, which is overwhelmingly Edmund Burke, You have to know them first. You actually have to know these arguments. You're going to have to do homework. You're going to have to study them. You aren't just going to be able to come out and be like, rights.
01:02:09
Speaker
I want my rights. so You're going to have to articulate, like they did, why those rights matter, right? So you're going to have to be able to understand what are the rights, On what assumptions do we think that we should have rights of life, liberty, and property, for example, being inalienable?
01:02:24
Speaker
Why is individualism absolutely crucial? Why should we think of ourselves in terms of individuals who happen to belong to groups, not as groups with individuals in them? These arguments have to actually be known to be articulated. And then you have to go just on the practical side. So you have to practice articulating them, run up against the walls, in other words, have the debates, and then reformulate and try to make the arguments better. Go back to what you're trying to understand.
01:02:50
Speaker
The magic of classical liberal knowledge production is that you're not committed like to ah to any particular person's entire body of thought because there's some guru or some priest. If you read John Locke and he says something stupid like the blank slate, which is incorrect, you are not obligated to accept that in order to build out you know why it is that individual rights still matter.
01:03:11
Speaker
But you have to understand those arguments. I won't do those here because that's the whole show. And then the third thing I'll say is this marketing piece. It is not going to be enough just to know the arguments and be familiar with them and actually understand them, but that's massively lacking. It is a necessary but insufficient condition.
01:03:28
Speaker
You're actually going to have to make the appeal for these values. And that means you have to engage people. This sounds woke, but it's not because it is not. It's just marketing. You're going to have to engage people at their emotions.
01:03:40
Speaker
You don't have to spin some wild conspiracy theory. You don't have to try to get some huge collectivist movement. But if you want people to understand and and value individual liberties and their individual opportunities as such,
01:03:53
Speaker
You have to make the case for why they should, and that's going to have to hit them in story and in emotion. You're going to have to tell stories, as many people have indicated, of the fight for for liberty, whether that's in the UK, like you're talking about Gladstone or whether that's in North Churchill.
01:04:09
Speaker
or whether that's in the U.S. with all of the various stories, you know, we have of our founding or since, you're going to have to articulate why that matters to people. And largely, there's an easy vector for the way that argument goes, which is imagine what happens when you don't have those values, right? So here's the position you're in.
01:04:30
Speaker
If we decide to install a tyranny of any kind, even if it's supposedly temporary, in order to overcome our challenges from the woke left now, First of all, what if the woke left takes back over that tyranny and you have even fewer protections than you do now in their next round?
01:04:46
Speaker
But secondly, more importantly, what happens if the thing they install is not totally in alignment with you and you say no and they put you in jail for it? Right. You say i was with you on nine out of ten things, but that tenth thing is too far and they imprison you for it because you don't have your civil liberties any longer.
01:05:05
Speaker
The fight has to be elsewhere. That's an emotional appeal that's actually got a name. In the literature, it's called reactance. It's very important for people to understand how that works. But you have to be able to make the the sales pitch that comes from a place of knowledge and being able to defend the the worldview.
01:05:20
Speaker
And then you're going to have to go out and make that pitch again and again and again and engage people to feel inspired that their liberty matters and that it doesn't actually steal from them something essential that a tyrant can somehow fill in better.
01:05:34
Speaker
And it's going to be a challenge because we have a very, very beaten down people. We have a very bad situation, particularly in UK and Australia, where the government is in very high levels of control. You do not have the U.S. Constitution on your side. Canada is similar.
01:05:52
Speaker
You do not have the U.S. Constitution on your side, which secures these liberty so many of these liberties so explicitly in law. So you have a slightly different and slightly harder fight. But the the question you've got to face at the end of the day, if you're going to use tyranny to fight tyranny, is if you are in step with this tyranny, nine pieces out of 10, but you disagree on the tenth Are you going to keep your mouth shut and swallow it?
01:06:16
Speaker
What if it becomes intolerable? And what do you think is going to happen to you when you say no? And so we this is the essential question of all of the classical liberal systems is that classical liberalism enables people to say no and to bring the case and make the argument, which they sometimes win and they sometimes lose.
Conclusion and Future Discussions
01:06:37
Speaker
Well, there is a very, very big fight ahead of us in the UK and Australia and in some way in the US as well. And I think um that is well worth a follow-up conversation, James. When, or where, sorry, can people read and hear more of your thoughts?
01:06:51
Speaker
So my most, you know, long form productive place my website, newdiscourses.com. That is newdiscourses.com. And the podcast that I produce there is called the New Discourses Podcast. So that's pretty easy to remember if you remember newdiscourses.com.
01:07:07
Speaker
You can also find it there. It is at new discourses on social media. But if you want me personally separate from the brand, I am at conceptual James everywhere on social media, except for Facebook, which banned me forever for making a joke about Canada.
01:07:22
Speaker
A link to all of those is in the show notes. James, fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for coming on fire at will. Yeah, thank you. Such a pleasure.