Hello, plastic pills listeners, We're back trying this again.
We're back in our country. You're back in our country. Actually, Eric is not.
Eric is not in our country.
I'm in a foreign land speaking of gooning. And you can answer this or not. Do you have to do you have to sign in with your I D to watch porn in Britain. Oh that's right, yeah, or you haven't. I there's like i D laws here.
No, you can't look at anything without doing some kind of I think it's either you have to upload your like driver's license or take a photograph of yourself and like give it to AI and it will like judge your age based on your like the I think there's a couple of methods I think. But yeah, it's this like UK wide policy where like yeah, progress, he's like strictly controlled here and you have to do the age verification.
Kind of thing.
So so people are like screw that. So gooning is extra hard here. No, not really. I was on the bus the other day on my way to work and some person who's sitting in front of me gooning real hard, like they had an open they were fucking I guess does that qualify you're on a hinge or whatever, a dating site in the likes six thirty in the morning, just hitting hinge hard on the bus on the way to work.
That feels like coming, That is.
Having it, giving your brain a dopamine bath at like fucking six am. That is goooning in my books. I had to move away because I'm like, I'm not watching this guy. I'm kind of sitting in a seat that's like sort of raised up over, so I'm just watching this person on like just trying to crush dates. So I'm thinking, no, fuck, I've got to move to another part of the bus. I'm not watching this in the morning because I'm trying to slow my brain down.
He was not masturbating, No, not not.
Not literally, not ala Lett, but just just the more the wider version of gooning that the that that that guy proposed what's his name on.
The Daniel College so he's he's metonymically gooning, like like what Drake.
Was doing when that drone spotted him on the in the middle of the day, gambling and drinking. What was he drinking? So yeah, that was that's qualifies as gooning. Or when Kanye goes around with his naked wife at public events.
I'm going to pretend I understand those references and say, just when I thought we were done with Lacan, I found something else that I wanted to talk about.
And look, I don't want.
To be too strict about the Lacinian concept that we're introducing today, because Lacan himself.
Is not very strict about it.
He never I guess he never fully finished it. But I think it has a lot in common with other structuralists. And the term is signifying chain. Now, I think that the signifying chain will help us understand a troubled young man by the name of Nick Quines.
I think the signifying chain helps us understand all right wing discourse.
What about left wing discourse?
We use this term, he used it specifically, but discourse discourse means like whatever's happening on Twitter to us. But you're right that the signifying chain is is what discourse is largely.
I think a lot of left wing discourse too. But I think a lot of left wing discourse tries to be like full speech, not not empty speech.
Tries you but do you think that's kind of batting for the home? Batting for the home? Team over there are you.
It's a little I don't know. I'm not sure I'm super confident about that.
I think I'm not either. I'm just I'm just making simple binaries.
Making because I guess I just feel like I prefer the signifying chain of the left.
But they're both like, yeah, same, that's my chosen chain. Change chain me up.
Congrats tore On my mom. Dammy, that's good. At least that's some good left wing news.
But yeah, that should be interesting. I mean, it feels like it's more interesting to hear about than it's actually been. But yeah, maybe I haven't been I haven't been getting my fix of politics.
I haven't been following it much either. But Fuentes I have somewhat been following.
He's uh, he's on what they're calling a meteoric rise, which is a turn of phrase I never understood because meteors do not rise.
They do not I've never never heard that that. I've never noticed that. That also, Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. That's true.
They're either like going in the direction they were going, or they're falling into like a gravity going fast.
I hate inaccurate metaphors. I hate in metaphors. It don't make sense. Yeah, he's the opposite of socialism or.
Some my so Fuetes, I've been like just my own sick curiosity with like weird right wingers online. He's someone I've been I mean, I don't want to say i've been like following him, but I've been like kind of watching. I remember the first time I noticed his stuff was after the Gjacques Peterson debate. He reacted to it, and I had no idea who he was.
Oh wow, you've been on this this bit for a while.
Yeah, for a while, And I didn't know who he was. And he was like this young kid and I'm supposedly on the right, And I just remember finding it amusing that he thought that the stuff that Jacques had made more sense to him.
Wasn't he like twelve when that debate happened.
I think he was like nineteen, okay, and he was talking about how like this, how like at least was saying some stuff that made sense, But Peterson was just fixated on this fantasy of individualism.
Yeah, if I were to try to do some hegalienism, I'd say that Nick Fuentes is the alf Habong of the current right wing discourse. And I'm not committing to that, but it sounds like that's something that would be right to say.
Yeah, I think historically it overcomes, it cancels, it preserves. It's the next thing.
I guess. I guess the way that I would make sense of him and the way that he's situated in right wing discourse right now is I think there was a time when, especially like kind of neo kon conservatives in America, we're like very pro Israel. I guess. Look, the way that I see, like if we want to think about Fuentes as being some kind of rift or leading to some kind of rift, is that he flowed with racism and anti semitism in like a pretty pretty
overt ways. But I think also like the fact that he's gaining some steam, and you know, he went out he did that long interview with Tucker Carlson, which I did listen to. I don't know why, I just hate myself so I wanted to listen to them.
I watched that too, So that's where I'm getting most of my information from as well.
Yeah, and I think, like what's kind of interesting about him is I do think that, like some people who are just critical of Israel for like legitimate reasons that probably all three of us would want to be critical of Israel about, right, Like the fact that, for example, the US just gives them, you know, billions of dollars for weapons, you know, discomfort with obviously the way that they've handled more than just discomfort with the way that
they've handled like the October seventh Gaza response, So all these things that all of us would probably be critical of Israel for. It's almost like Fuentes, is you using that and then getting right wingers to be like, yeah, maybe Israel kind of sucks, like why are we paying them so much money? And that also is related to another theme I think emerging with Donald Trump of kind
of protectionism America first. It's like which was always sort of a subtext in American conservative I mean Ron Regan used to say America first, but this kind of more over America first discourse is like why would we give
money to anyone else? But that's so, you know, it's almost like he's using like kind of legitimate criticisms of Israel, but then to use those legitimate criticisms to basically be like, but maybe it's the Jews, right, it's not just like Israel, Like maybe it's actually like Jews that suck and not just Israel that sucks. Like that's kind of my sort of common sense like oversimplification of I think what's happening.
It's like use legitimate criticisms to be like, you know, my stuff about because like cause Fuentez, I think is all. I don't know enough to say for sure that he's like come out and question the Holocaust, but he's probably questioned like the numbers, and this is.
Obviously flirted with questioning it.
Yeah, he's flirted with questioning the numbers. And this is like the classic thing that I think some conservatives do is kind of like these days is you know, kind of not go all the way or at least like far right is sort of flirt with it and be like, you know, I'm not saying that they're the Holocaust didn't happen. I'm just asking questions, you know, I'm just like, well
do those numbers really make sense? And like you know, okay, yeah, I get that it's like the Israeli government, but like maybe there's something about Jews also that like is the reason. I'm just you know, asking questions here, I feel like that's sort of the move right. It's not it's not as overt as like classical kind of ku klux Klan
Nazi racism. It's more like I'm just trying to be critical and like, notice that we're giving all this money to like Israel and the Jews and banks, and it's like, you know, it's this step and I don't know if
how we can apply signifying chains to that. Whereas before, right, I think that in the past, conservatives, like even the Christian conservatives would have been like, no, like Israel good because Israel is like a partner in Western civilization and Judeo Christian values, and like fucking you know, conservative evangelicals had a huge heart on for you know, like the evangelicals because when the Jews returned to Israel, that's supposedly, you know, supposed to be when christ might come back.
And like I know Mike Huckabee is like one of those evangelical I think he's the American ambassador to Israel right now, and he's like huge pro Israel guy. And again I think that's motivated by this. So that's I feel like I see like this rift in like this isolationism like America first and like why are we giving the money? And then that can and then people can be like, yeah, Israel, why are we giving some much money?
But then like that's sort of in the background underneath being pushed towards the like why do we like the Jews kind of thing, Like that's being pushed that way, whereas the other is still more either neocon, but then also with this kind of religious evangelical drive toward like loving Israel because it's because it fits with Judeo Christian values, and maybe there's some kind of I don't know, is it is it correct to say missionic kind of like
motivation towards liking Israel, like wanting it to be maintained. So I don't know. That's sort of my summary overview of sort of how I see this, and maybe we can now start applying theory to it. Or maybe there's something I missed that you wanted to cover, because I know pills you also watched the Fuenttez Tucker discussion, so maybe there's more in there that I didn't touch on.
I did more than that.
I did homework, I did, I watched I watched three hours of Fuentes actually this week.
Oh nice, I think I know.
Exactly how theory fits with that. Like what you were saying about how Fuentas like, we're we we be questioning the allegiance with Israel, but for very different reasons. But it's essentially like the same objective critique but coming from different ways.
You know how.
In in that article like the Agency of the Letter that look on Wright near the beginning.
For listeners who are unfamiliar, Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious is an essay by about.
Yeah, oh yeah, context, we have an.
Introduced to yet it's in uh a tree.
It's about it's about how structuralism fits into psychoanalysis.
Well, he puts that.
Picture near the beginning, right, Well, I think if you're a theory fan anyway, you know you might be aware of so serves signify or signified. You have the signifier the sound image connected to a concept, and it's represents graphically. In Lakhan he puts a big S and then like a bar, and then a small S underneath it. The bar just looks basically like a bar in like a math equation like one over two, but it's big s
over little less and near the beginning. He doesn't like this sort of barred picture, so he puts the two doors, you know, the two doors, and puts ladies and gentlemen over top of it, over the bar. Like so the two doors on the bottom are identical, but you see gentlemen and ladies above it, and those are different. So you know, okay, he's talking about men's bathroom and women's bathroom, but the two bathrooms under the bar are the same,
but the two signifiers on the top are different. And he's using this to illustrate how the signifier enters into the signified, and how that there's a slippage of the signified underneath the signifier. And that is what I wanted to say applies to this. Right, we're both like there's a left wing way and a right wing way of being critical of Israel, and it shifts over time. There's a slippage there, and now the right has sort of
launched its own criticism. And you have the same situation, these two identical doors on the bottom, door on the left, door on the right, and the only difference between them is the signifier written over top of it. Right, It's like how wearing a poppy has become controversial lately. You know,
you have two identical poppies on the bottom. Well, some people are there's been these debates about like it has the right like co opted wearing poppies now and there's now this like debate around wearing a poppy and whether this expresses like some kind of political allegiance. But in the end, you just have the two identical poppies on the bottom and the only difference is the signifier written
on the top. Part's that's how And you know the slippage of the signified in the signifying chain and how the signifier enters into the signified. That's how I thought, Yeah, I realized I didn't set the context there. I just we had a power outage earlier and we'd already started talking about this, so like in my mind, context had been set right.
And context of the poppy is in Canada from World War One, there was poppies that grew on the graves and then we're supposed to wear one on November eleventh.
We wasn't it? Also the poppy fields in Flanders Fields where they fought and like is it Belgium or or did maybe.
Belgium in the Battle of World War One. Yeah, well they.
Do it in the UK too. There's the poppy and they read it over the announcements in the morning in Flanders fields. The poppies grow between the crosses row on row. It was written by John McCrae, a Canadian poet. Yeah, Canadian. I'm was sure everybody was aware of that.
Canada was part of Britain basically during World War One, right like we had to go if they started, if they declared war, we were automatically declared war.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
We did automatically independent country still, but yeah.
But I think that wasn't true during World War Two. I think world War Two we had more independence where we could have chosen not to. But I think we just did a declare war at the same time.
And we're very proud of that, which is we did right wing coded. I guess when it comes to poppy anywhere, it's for America.
Of course, it's America first.
That's why it took them years to even enenter the war.
So if you didn't catch that, Eric gave kind of a critique of so sirs signified that explains how the one meaning can like have multiple meanings depending on its place in the and here's the key term, the signifying chain. Now, we can't really abuse the signifying chain concept all that much because, like I said, it's not fully fleshed out. But what he does say about it is that it's made of signifiers. And these signifiers they're they're linked together.
So you can see this when you get a term like Nick Fuentz likes to talk about, when you get the term white has a very important meaning to Nick Fuentes and then it's attached to different links for him that it may not be attached for me.
I'll just I'll say that I'm I'm.
Not in my mind all that concerned about whiteness as much as Nick Fuentes seems to be. But everyone, well I should. This is this is where it gets a little tricky. It's like, does everyone have their own signifying chain? Kind of yes, but you don't build it from scratch. It's not like you're special and unique.
No, it's socially constituted.
This is why we're bringing it into terms with like discourse, because basically, you have a you have a signifying chain that organizes your beliefs based on signifiers, and the signifiers that are most important to you. But Lecan says, like, your knowledge of these signifiers and your experience with these signifiers matters very little because actually these are pre constructed and you find yourself in them.
And yeah, you could probably change.
Like if your parents are religious and conservative, you can definitely adopt a signifying chain that is, I don't know, atheist and not conservative. However, you don't make these connections yourself. You're basically given these connections. So one thing that's really a consequence of this is that so much of speech,
I think Eric earlier called it empty speech. So much of speech when you get in a discourse which is like managed by social rules that are particular to that community, So much of speech in that context is automatic, like you don't choose what said. And part of the reason that this got set off for me was because we said after that h after mister Kirk had his little accident over there, I said, I was so frustrated because it was an exciting event, an exciting there's no moral content.
I'm not saying there's any moral excitement.
Yes, that's just it was.
It was exciting, like adding heat to a solution. It was an exciting event. But all the responses to it were so rote, like you could have predicted what everyone would have said in advance, like we condemned violence, blah blah blah blah blah. This is part of the signifying chain when you get this automatic type of space.
Well, and it's the same thing I think with like the kind of lefty Twitter verse. I think it was also predictable to see that there would be like a bunch of woke leftists would be like, I'm glad he's dead. He got what he deserved. Like that was also its own kind of automatic response, I think, right. I mean like I was nod and like, and I guess I was also thinking about, yeah, okay, so it's okay, So
it's like an automatic response. I was also just kind of thinking about what what is like what is like a conservative like signifying chain of like and I guess it's like things that I was like, try, So there's two things I was trying to disentangle because I guess there's like one sense in of it in which like you think, like one concept kind of like leads to another, like for you might say like family, and then that makes you think about values, and that makes you think
about like morality, and then Christian and like I don't know, like law and order, freedom, patriotism, troops, like I don't know, just like things that like would lead you to other concepts.
But then it seems like there's another sense if I'm remembering this correctly, in like a Lacanian point where there's like in sentences, there's like a there's like a retroactive meaning where like where like as you're saying hearing the words or hearing a sentence, it's like meaning isn't Maybe it's a point about meaning like that that it's not to side it into like the end word of a sentence. And I thought that that also had to do with
signifying change. Do you guys know what I'm talking about? I don't know. I feel like this is maybe maybe I'm getting two things mixed up.
No, that's right.
It's because the idea of the chain is these links is it's not a closed system, which is a different view of language or meaning is that you can have closed systems, but this one is because there's links in
a chain, you can always continue to add to it. Yeah, so then because you can add to it, then the meanings can change, and that's how you kind of explain the evolution of discourses, which, to bring it back to our current topic, FWENT is getting attacked by the other conservatives on the grounds of changing one of the signifiers it shows, it shows evolution, right.
Yeah, because I guess beforehand, right like in the sense that kind of Mike Huckabee evangelical sense, like maybe Israel Jews would have been a associated with like ally or like democracy, or like Western civilization, or like shared biblical values or something, right like, maybe those would have been kind of like like concepts. And then maybe now.
You know, I checked, I checked the n gram you know, the Google history of word use. Oh yeah, Judeo Christian was only used like one time prior.
To nineteen forty eight. That's it was by Nietzsche too.
Oh that's funny, I was.
But yeah, it's like Judeo Christian emerged with the state of Israel to say, you know, that's weird we have a shared history, because if you know anything about history, the Jews and Christians, they they didn't they didn't see themselves as on the same team until relatively recently.
Yeah, exactly exactly, So I guess that would have been maybe some kind of see and then now I guess like the fund tes, the gropers, and obviously this is you know, just bringing to the four something that's of existed in the background, where like the concept of Israel is maybe now try like the it's being fought over, like what that means or like what you know, maybe jew and Israel are like you know, makes some fuentestyle conservatives think of like deep state or like elite or
like globalist right globalist is another one of these conservative pejorative terms, and like you know, like yeah, I don't know, like it's you know, trying to shift that meaning in that chain to from like biblical ally to like you know, foreign parasite and then and then it's it's also maybe interesting to think like what what would like a left wing kind of pro Palestinian, like how would their signifying chain about Israel be organized? Right, it would obviously be different.
It would be I mean, maybe there'd be some shared but it would probably be more like genocide. You know, it would be like genocide and like colonialism. I feel like colonialism.
Yeah, true, we'd have to spend so much time like I I like, uh, watching reading the transcripts because the transcripts. They don't let you get seduced in the personality of like Tucker and Fuentes. Instead, you can just like see the words and you can see what actually connects to another word.
So Tucker Robot read it exactly.
Oh, that's a good point.
Like like chat GPT, its functions making signifying change. That's why it's like largely accurate, but then suddenly inaccurate on certain on certain discourses, because it's basically associating words that have been associated.
But yeah, I.
Think contrary to to some critiques, I don't. I don't really think from my limited experience, I don't think Nick Fuentes is either a Nazi or a white supremacist. I think he's best described as like white identity politics, whatever you call that, I tend to agree, because yeah, he he literally says explicitly like identity politics is a bad word,
uh in that signifying chain. But he says everyone else is allowed to do is identity politics except white men, and white men are getting screwed by three The three groups is feminism, immigrants, and Jews, And every every one of those groups is allowed to do identity politics except white men. And then when white men do it, then it's chauvinist and racist. And to that, I gotta say, I gotta say, like, uh, they did they do they did do that. Identity politics is for everyone except white men.
You know that the whin does rallying cry is, hey, let's get all the white men together and advocate for what benefits us, because we're getting screwed too. Everyone's just saying have male privilege, white privilege, but we're not because we're getting screwed to. So if we can get a handle on the immigrants and the women go back to the kitchen, and we get rid of the Jews that control America, then we can have our we can have our day again.
Finally, that's the core.
I mean, yes, that is the core. I agree. I mean, I think there's like a bunch of arguments for why his concern about identity politics. I mean, he's like right in a certain like very basic level, but I guess the purpose of identity politics. And look, I'm being critical of identity politics. Obviously anyone who's been listening for any
period of time would know that. But obviously there's a difference, like when you think about the fact that identity politics emerges specifically to address issues of disadvantage to those on account of those identity kind of characteristics. So I feel like it just wouldn't make sense to have identity politics
for white people. And now what does exist and I think continues to exist and has always existed in terms of like celebrating because you know, that's one thing Fwentees might say, it's like, you can't celebrate being white, but people celebrate being Irish and Italian and all the time. Right, there's fucking Saint Patty's Day that's like an an identity politics day. That's like, that's like a kind of white
identity politics day. So I mean, I quimble, I quibble with the way that he frames up, but of course, like I kind of know what he's talking about. But it was funny though, like okay, so like but then on the on the idea, like is he actually a white supremacist. I mean, it's hard to tell, but he what he does do, is he And there was actually a bit of a disagreement between him, him and Tucker.
I don't know if you caught it, Pills, but it's when I think Tucker's like, well, I just judge people based on their individuality, right, And then initially fwent has kind of agreed. He's like, well, yeah, of course, but then he started to say, but like Jews are different, They're you know, they were as a group, they and Tucker's kind of like, well, like, I don't know, like I know plenty of Jews who like disagree with Israel
and that like that's just seems wrong. So like Tucker did kind of or sorry, I'm Fuentes did kind of want to go a bit further and suggests that there is something intrinsic in Jews that makes them want to only worry about their own kind, which strikes me as definite, definitionally.
Racist, right in the sense of like in that interview, I lost my power went out, so I lost my tab. But I think he specifically said it's not genetic, which is like not laudable, but it exists, exists.
Well, he says it's not genetic, but he also but he also still but he still thinks there's like value and and like there's value utility in generalizing about Jews, right, uh, and and like but yes, he does think that the cause is maybe social, but it seems to be like a very strong social cause. And that also, I mean, that seems just clearly wrong to me.
But I liked the CON's concept here of that sliding of the signified under the signifier under the chain of signifiers, because it's just so typical that that a concept like identity politics gets its sort of right wing articulation. It was already laid out in advance, and now it seems in retrospects like inevitable that identity politics would see its right wing articulation, even though it was like the leftist thing in the eighties and nineties with political correctness and
identity politics. But then it's easy to forget that identity politics goes all the way back to questions of national identity which emerged in the modern era groups in the tribe versus the end of visual and individualism. You have the right and left wing articulations of all those things. I mean, the chain of signifiers is always outrunning the meaning that it generates.
Well, I find it funny that Nick Fuentez is catching all this flak from the right wing because literally, if you line up their chains, I think the only signifier that they disagree about is.
Either Jew or Israel. I'm not sure are maybe both, but.
When it comes to when it comes to like immigrants or women, like there's no difference between Nick Quentez and Matt Walsh except Nick quent As is funny. The only thing they disagree about is is the jew one. But if you want to map out what a signifying chain like this look like, I try it so I can. I can tell you what I came up with, which is just it's not exactly a line. It's not linear as much as it is a web. Symbolic web is one of the other experimental terms that he tried.
To describe what this is.
But I started with white because obviously that's important, and white not just the race like race is one one direction of the chain, I guess, but you can also go to white as clean, you know, white as snow, or white as purity, or white from the laundry detergent commercials, stain free. It gets your whites white again. But all of these actually eventually link up when, for example, immigrants are described as dirty, or when they're described in terms
of infection. You know, you go from white to clean, to purity to health, and then you get all the opposites, so white as opposed to dark as opposed to sickness, as opposed to dirty, and you can see the way that both both the anti or the the antagonisms between those line up or they're applied to people in the real world. Right, So you get the symbolic chain of clean to white to peer just tracks perfectly with racist racist tropes. Enlightenment, the European Enlightenment versus the heart of
darkness or the dark continent. Right, So, once you start with a symbolic chain, you can it doesn't have to be automatic, but it seems to be to be pretty automatic.
And you saw that with.
Just like the straight up, straight up racism against against Mom Dannie for being I think they're saying he's dirty for eating with his hands. We can get into that too, but like he's a terrorist and Sharia law and he's and he's dirty because he eats with his hands, which I.
Don't know, we could.
Since it's a discussion on the symbolic order, we could go all into that too, Like we have a whole symbolic order that determines which things it's polite to eat with your hands and which thing is not, Like pizza, chicken wings, ice cream cones, those are all acceptable things to eat with your hands. Rice, everyone are the Of course it's Twitter, so we could take it with a grain of salt. But Twitter freaks out that he's eating rice with his hands. Look at look at this barbarian.
He's not one of us.
All of those, all of those contradictory meanings. Yeah, they just coexist.
In this, in this symbolic But then, what do you do with what do you do with dirty? You have to clean purge bleach. I found I don't know if I want to read this, because it's okay, I'll read I'll read it. I can't say I don't know if I want to. I found a tweet from an account named Pericles two thousand likes. So this is not a This is not a cherry pick, he says zooran mom.
Donnie eating with his hands despite there being forks in front of him, reminds me of the residence of Sodom and good or demanded demanding to rape the male angels despite a lot offering them his virgin daughters instead. Jesus which is which is a fascinating tweet because it associates women with utensils with forks and brown, brown people who eat with their hands to rapists who should be purged with fire.
As they say, reveals a lot more about the author than it does anything else.
Also, is he applying implying that, like using utensils is more natural, like heterosexuality is natural, like wanting to rape a virgin woman is more natural than a man. There's a lot in there miracles.
And then imagine if that account were a bot too, it would also be like it wouldn't even be shocking, It wouldn't be shocking that some weirdo said that, or that a bot has just sort of algorithmically assembled those words. And I don't think it would make a difference because that's the language that's out there. That's the language that's
out there. Those are those are the word associations, right, we internalize the other, as we established we we internalize the other of language, and and AI does that too, just differently, but it does it.
So of course it's aesthetically, that's that's pretty it's a pretty good metaphor. I mean, morally it's it's repugnant, abhorrent, but aesthetically it's I don't think an AI could have done that one.
Yeah, maybe I don't know. I don't know that that like being named after this like Western Greek hero and then going straight to I think the sexist biblical narrative that it reminded him of. I don't, I can't, but I know I could see AI putting that together. Can building that out of you know, engagement with with weirdos in the comment sections.
It could be it's the the point of that was the purgation part, right, the he's like the people in Sodom and Gomora that got Sodom and Gomor got they got meteorited, they got hit with fire from falling from the sky and burned up.
So there's again the the.
Dirty or urged that it's a meteoric and the biblical account.
And the extraordinary absence subtext besides the racism and the sexism is the socialism too, because of course being capitalist is also baked into that cake.
On the good side, Yeah, you ultimately get a whole side of divisions of all the good things and all the bad things. And there's very little like to speak of signifying chains being automatic. It's it's pretty noticeable when someone breaks the code of their community because they get that gets blown up like, oh you you were.
Against this group of people. Now you're not a real leftist.
But at the core of this, this whole thing that I drew out very scientifically, by the way, is that.
White, white equals good.
And that doesn't necessarily, it doesn't necessarily correspond with the white as race, but it often does, right. It's often recruited for that purpose, just like white is sinless and the the bride wears white at the wedding because she's pure, that kind of thing.
Yeah, that's an interesting one.
Oh, I can apply this. I was gonna apply that to Fuintez.
Yeah, yeah, do that in order to say why he's not a Nazi, because the Nazi, the Nazi rhetorica wrote Jews, it's very dehumanized, dehumanizing. It uses insect metaphors and rodent raphors, spiders, rats and and that. Really like that dehumanizing stuff Fuentes in the in the three hours.
That I've listened to him.
Okay, there might be there's probably examples that I don't know about, but at least in his current iteration, I don't find that he dehumanizes the Jews. He doesn't think that they're dirty or maybe evil. But more more than anything, I think he believes that they are rivals.
They are rivals to.
White people in America, and they have their tribe and in order to combat them, and it's mainly Jewish billionaires like Akman is it Acmen and Ellison, the guy who bought TikTok. They we we need our own tribe in order to be able to combat them.
So he does I said he was in a white supremacist I don't. He doesn't.
He does dehumanize immigrants and blacks, but the Jews, it seems like he has a begrudging respect for them because they're able to keep their tribe together.
So well, well, yeah, it's interesting because I think Jijiak has pointed out how a lot of Nazi rhetoric was a strange contradiction of like dehumanizing via like mentioning rodent or insect, but then also like talking about them as like an evil for like an evil kind of calculated like hiding in plain sight, you know, can compose as a German and be successful like a German while sort of infiltrating society, which obviously, but it's is like not flattering in a certain sense, but is also like not
dehumanizing in the same way as a rodent. There's like a weird contradiction where they're like both dirty and unhuman while also kind of like scheming and like effective.
It's that that enemy paradox is like respecting your enemy, Like if they hate their enemy, they also acknowledge that their enemy is something to be respected.
Yeah, exactly, some kind of.
Paradoxical like respect mixed in with the hatred, but that makes the hatred all the more virulent.
But look like all these efforts to sort of just you know, want to reductively label any sort of like reaction y right wing, right wing figure as a Nazi is like also something that I'm sympathetic to being is a little over is a little too much of a simplification. But then I think what's also kind of fascinating to analyze here is like the pushback from people like Ben Shapiro right, who are furious, who are trying to excommunicate
in a way trying to excommunicate Tucker. And actually, like one of the most interesting parts, I don't know if few degree pills of that Fuentes interview with Tucker was sort of hearing the origin story of how initially Fuentez was sort of falling into a Ben Shapiro crowd, and he himself was also you know, not necessarily initially in America first worried about Jews, but was more of like a Marco Rubio, or maybe not Marco rub it might
have been Ted Cruz. He was like a Ted Cruz Republican and he sort of fell into like a Ben Shapiro crowd. And one of Ben Shapiro's people was like, you got to see this Nick Flentez guy just did this debate with this liberal student at I think it
was Boston University. But then as soon as Shapiro noticed that, like he was asking questions about Israel according to Fuentez at least in the interview, you know, he started to tweet about Fuentez as being like a dangerous person that shouldn't be shouldn't be followed, right, and then like and in a way at the time, Fuentt has had like no followers, and Shapiro the analogy I think that came up in the in the episode was like, oh, he like tried to squish you like a bug before you
could get any followers. Right, smother in the crib, Yeah, exactly, smother in the crib before you, but it didn't work. So that was kind of an interesting part of it.
But I guess the problem, the reason it's catching on so much is because like what he says is true,
and it's not like Jews. Individual Jews are are helping the case any like the Larry Ellison thing, We're gonna yeah, because you've I've heard people like Shapiro say, oh, it's just the age old trope, like he's accusing Jews of doing dual loyalty, but like Jews are doing that, and I don't mean the Jews, I mean specific there are particular jew Larry Ellison said in public, there is no greater honor than sending the IDF millions of dollars of it,
like just for fun. He said, for two thousand years, this is an American. For two thousand years, we were a stateless people. But now we have a country we can call our own. Through all of the perilous times since Israel's founding, we have called them the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home. And then he buys TikTok like that's that's not a dual loyalty trope.
That is a dual loyalty.
Example, definitely agree.
Yeah, and if they did, like if he didn't have all this evidence at the moment, like he wouldn't be he wouldn't be catching on like he is.
But he can.
He wants to run. He wants to run. I think he wants to be a political leader if he could be. He wants political power. I feel like he said it in several interviews and including I think the Tucker one. I thought he said like, I want political power. I want it.
Six million people saw it.
Million The.
Attention brokers have given him the shot and he's got Look at some of his categories hate, swede and alcohol, porn is destroying men, toxic feminism.
Yea, how about that porn part? Did you did? Did you did you clock? That part? Pills? Because they're reminded me.
Of what when Tucker asked what is porn?
Yeah, he was like what is it? He's like what It's like, come on, man.
His rhetorical questions have just gone too far.
Yeah yeah, yeah. And then but then they started getting into some stuff that I feel like remind me of the of the gooner discussion. But anyway, not to but it's just like which again like this is the weird thing I feel like about uh figures like this is like they will say some things like I mean a lot of what they say has like a grain of truth to it, right and then and then like that's how.
I mean, it's more, it's more than a grain, you know. Yeah, I will say I think he has a demonstrably fact checkably false world picture.
Though yes, yes, but it's not it's not that off.
But like there are Jews in America who are on board with the foreign policy of America as it's existed until like the last two years. But the Nick Fuentes his world picture doesn't have Chevron or Exxon or Halliburton or Pfizer or DuPont, Like he thinks the Iraq War was caused by Jews, and he thinks that America is run by Larry Ellison and Bill Ackman, which are two
billionaires that love Israel and are Jewish. But what about the Koch brothers and the Waltash or the white like, what about all the white ones, all.
The Christian billionaires, all the like?
In his In his world picture, America is just this horde of resources. Immigrants are taking a bunch of them and then the rest of them are being sent to Israel, which is just a false picture. Like it's the wealthy as a class in America who control most of this horde of wealth that is America. And that's a material fact.
It's not speculative the conspiracy theories.
But that and then and then like there are things that happen that make you that, Like I I see why people are tempted right by which, like you said, mentioned like Larry Ellison, but then also the way the media like like kind of elements within Trump's orbit, right, like trying to deport that like student who at a student visa because they wrote a piece being critical of Israel. Right, It's like when those little things happen, you're just like
what the fuck is going on here? Like I could see why people would be tempted to buy into a conspiracy theory because it's like you're not going to have like you know, you'd never see like a lobby I don't know, like like an Armenian lobby that if you see someone denying the Armenian genocide, they're going to get deported if they're like not a student, right, Like no one cares about that, But that doesn't happen, right, it's just like an Israel adjacent or you know, because there's
a bunch of intermingled interests in military and financial interests at play here. And yeah, there probably are like some really which you know, Israel adjacent Jews who you know, do have an interest in trying to pay a lot of money to preserve Israel's image as best as possible. And that can look a little creepy, right, and that can like invite a certain kind of conspiracism that ends up being counterproductive. Those actions can end up being counterproductive.
I mean it is.
It is on another level with Israel, like if for both parties and universities.
I don't know how it happened.
But it's it's on another level, like anti Semitism is its own special kind of racism, Like there's more than a grain of truth to it.
But it's like anti Zionism is anti Semitism.
You should have expected this. You guys made this happen. Yeah, and I don't mean the Jews, you guys. I mean I mean the political establishment.
Yeah, we have to keep saying that. We do have to keep saying that. I mean, it's it's uncomfortable to like to point out these observations because it can be used as ammunition, right for real anti Semites, Like I think Nick fuent has I don't think it's it's outside. I don't think it's it's it's over. It's an exaggeration to say that Nick Fuentez is an anti Semite. I think he probably is.
He says his best friend's Jewish, So yeah.
Okay, yeah, yeah, massive generalizations.
If we're gonna suddenly decide that this guy is evil, Israel's the only thing that differentiates him from prager U or Charlie Kirk or Matt Walsh. He has exactly the same opinion on everything else, except that.
I do think that like making generalizations about an entire people is kind of like racist. And I think, regardless of if he thinks it's caused by culture, he's doing it. He talks about the Jews having plans like that is anti Semitism. But but I take your point, like I
understand what you're saying. I just do think it's and look, I'm not someone who likes to throw around isms and accuse people, but I just feel like the evidence to say that he's some kind of anti might it's pretty fucking strong regardless of.
I'm not even gonna defend that I think he is.
But it's like it's fine, It's everyone else is fine with the entire conservative movement being racist when it's Muslims. Yeah, it's like we have this, they have a special signify, special protection of racism that's not allowed, you know.
Yeah, yeah, And it's interesting the overlap. But and then you know, because there's people like Candice Owens too, who is a black Conservative who's used to work for Ben Shapiro and now has gone hard against Israel. But like, I don't know, it's that's that's what's really interesting about like internally in the conservative movement, because when it comes to left and right like whatever progressives, it's pretty obvious that the reasons that they're critical of Israel are really
different than the reasons that like A Fuentes or others. Although, but although there's obviously a bit of overlap, but I don't know, I like, I feel skeptical that Fuentees really
cares that much about the Palestinians. I just I mean, maybe I'm wrong about that, but I but I I just feel like he maybe doesn't care But then when you get to someone like Candace OANs, at least the way that she talks about these things in my limited but not nothing observation of her, it's it's kind of gets interesting because.
It's clearly a moral position.
Yeah, her perspective seems a bit more moral. I mean, she talks all the time about like children being killed, and like her Christian values make her be outraged about that.
But then that seems a bit closer to the I guess progressive position than it is to like the we're wasting all this money on Israel and like the Jews are trying to steal like and control our government, and seems more like a humanitarian Christian If we take Candace Owans out of her word, which some may not unreasonably not want to.
Well, I don't even know if she knows what her words are. She's she's a couple.
She also thinks that the president, that the French president's wife is actually a man.
So despite having pictures of her and her supposed brother that she replaced or vice versa. Anyway, Yeah, leftists are hostile to the idea of an ethno state, right. Yeah, and Nick Wentes is not. He just wants to be in charge of the or he wants an Ethno state here.
Yeah, he wants a white Ethno state probably, although he's a little bit of evasive about that.
Yeah, it's hard to know if that's what he wants, or if he just wants like white people to be winning, or.
If he just wants to be like an edgelord like and kind of if he just wants to be sort of provocative.
Yeah, that's a whole nother like can of worms that I find it very difficult to interpret zoomers with, like whether you can say, well, they believe something else, but they're saying this performatively as as something that contradicts what they believe. Yeah, exactly, Well he is this is a question and maybe it's a plan for future study or or something like that. But Nick invokes often Catholicism and the Catholic Church and he says, because I'm a Catholic, I love everybody, which sounds.
Well. That was that was also interesting. Yeah, that was also kind of an.
So you got to dehumanize people.
There was an interesting thing going on there too, because that was I think related to the conversation that him and Tucker were having where Tucker was like, well, I don't hate a cool group of people. I just like judge people on an individual basis. And Tucker claims, that's what my Christianity commits me to, is to just judge
people on their individual merits. And that was sort of interesting he was It felt like he was putting fwent Has on the spot because fwent Has also invokes Catholicism all the time, but does seem to want to judge a whole people based on them as a category.
So this is, yeah, this is what I mean, is a question because another point about signifying change, they can't be contradictory. You can only contradict or they can only appear contradictory if you're observing them from the outside. But obviously, what what I think Christianity is, or what a what better yet, what a what a historian or an archaeologists believes Christianity to be is going to be very different from the place that it occupies in a right wing ideologues system.
Of course, American American Christian right wingers have a long history of supporting things that seem quite anti Jesus, like well, I loved al frankens Old, the Gospel of supply side Jesus his his joke gospel to make fun of American Christian conservatives where there's like a part in it when when his disciples are following supply side Jesus around and he's like, He's like, Jesus, shouldn't you heal the lepers?
And He's like, that would just make them lazy. He's like, leprosy is a is a is a problem of personal responsibility. If I was to heal the lepers, there'd be no incentive to avoid leprosy.
Yeah, yeah, it's a moral failing. That's very medieval.
Many many such examples. But if you're trying to map out the signifying chain here, is Catholicism like part of it centrally or is it kind of an exogenous like hmm thing that he just said. I can't figure that out because it doesn't make sense to me. And knowing what I know about Grouper's I can't imagine that these guys are in church on Sunday morning. And if they are, yeah, maybe I'm the one who's out of touch. But this doesn't seem like the crystological or papist. This is the
other thing. Why do American right wing Catholics never mention anything that the pope says because the pope is not on board with their shit over here.
Yeah, he's definitely not. And he's American too, And.
I thought that was all the whole thing of their religion is what does the pope say anyway?
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know how central the Catholicism, because Catholicism, with its many, many, many thousands of years advanced symbolism and its symbolic chain or signifying chain that doesn't seem to get much use from Fuentes as I see it. He just kind of declares, you know, I love everybody, but I love white people the most.
Yeah, exactly.
Again, it's hard to tell in the environment, like if he's popular because people agree with him or because he's norm deviant enough. He's the first guy on the scene with a different signifying chain than the establishment authorized signifying chain that doesn't seem to be working for people.
Exactly very much anymore.
Yeah.
I guess the way that he appropriates these these images and symbols and signs and the and the derry to which they resonate with with an audience, and how his popularity is is yeah, the the official discourse on those
things is insufficient. The fact that there's residence with a huge audience, and that they never mentioned what the Pope actually says, but they claim to do things in the name of Catholicism, which is obviously just This is the suppleness of signifiers and semiotics is they can be freely appropriated. There's no there's no commitment to any previous meaning that they have. You can simply resignify and if it catches on,
you know, it shows, it shows something. I don't know what it is, because you don't.
You know the.
Again that the owl of Minerva always flies at night, you know, at dusk, you know, you know, looking back, you know, oh yeah, it was bound to go that way, But when you're on the brink of it, you don't.
You don't know.
Oh, start with Egel and with Hegel. So by my uninformed Hagel take is like, if you if you let the white boys into identity politics, then we'll have tried all the versions of identity politics. So what's left after that? Class politics? Because class is not an identity. Class is a fact of your relation to the means of production. So maybe this, maybe Nick is going to conclude the ideal dialectic in history, so we could finally recognize our position in the material historical dialectic.
It's really hard to imagine what white identity politics would look like racism, Yeah, other than just racism, other than exactly exactly, because I was just trying to think. It's like, yeah, you have to say that you're oppressed by I guess other races. So that's I don't know. I mean, obviously that's maybe like being overly reductive about what identity politics is. But it seems like it kind of is that right, It's like different races talking about how they're being oppressed
in a unique way. And then and I guess like white people doing that does seem to me to only lead to racism, and yeah, then maybe that'll lead to class politics. Yeah, hopefully, I.
Think run away.
But Webdas is against our Women are the ones who are oppressing men because they oh yeah, they nag at them and they take positions of authority when God didn't give them one.
Oh yeah, he's he's extremely sexist. Actually that's something.
He for sure is This is this is interesting.
I wrote, I forgot my book over there, but I on the signifying chain. I was writing it while I was listening to him, like what words does he say and then connect them to other words, and one of them was he connects Jews to women because they're both nags. So his in his view, you have women, you have women and Jews both trying to tell real white men what they can and can't say, like, oh, you can't
make jokes about Hitler, I think was the topic. But just like women tell men that they can't make sexist jokes, Jews tell white men that they can't make Holocaust jokes.
Which of course you should be able to do.
So both of them are nags in deciding what's appropriate. So we need to overthrow the Guino Semitic hierarchy.
Yeah, it's it's so strange that this populist appeal, this like us versus them thing, but with enormous numbers. It's like, oh, yeah, it's white versus like other races. Like again, huge numbers.
There's a lot of grapers that aren't white. That's another thing that I find hard to understand. And Fuentes is like what a quarter Hispanic too, it's.
Hard Mexican and also friends with Kanye West famously now.
Yeah, I had dinner with Trump and Kanye.
I see that.
I see that marked up.
We could say, look at all the contradictions, but again, in a signifying chain, they're not logical contradictions.
See see Friend of the Show j Reg's video. I think it was like the political right meta update, and he argues that there's such thing as a post racial fascism.
Oh did you see Nick Fuent has responded to for that.
No, I didn't, because j Ra j Ray correctly pointed out Friend of the Show that all these uh, all these fascists are no longer white, and that I think Nick Fuente.
Is it's something like, yeah, that's just something that Jews tell you.
As if to prove the point.
That's so weird, that's so weird.
That's good times good, going to end it on all right, Signifying chains pops up a lot in like structuralism, which I think we need structuralism. Everybody just dismissed because post structuralism, but you got to remember that post structuralists are still like eighty percent structuralist. We threw the we threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Unfortunately, well that that is such an interesting story that the main structuralists got translated into English after the post structuralists, so we were getting translations of like Dari Da before we got translations of like grimass right. Oh who the fuck is grimas right? Yeah, exactly right, like the structuralists cut translated way later and given a lot less attention. By the time the Anglo world was reading structuralism at all, it was post structuralism and it was like, oh yeah,
structuralism was dead on arrival. That that itself is an whole interesting story about how it hit the English speaking world in this weird order that killed structuralism before it even took off.
Speaking of which we missed that, Uh what was it the I had? Continental philosophy is unserious thing.
Maybe we have to read that next week.
Yeah, I'd like that.
Another another one. They keep trying to kill us, but we were not. We're not dead, all right, we'll end it on that note. Thanks guys, thanks for listening.
Yeah, we'll goon you later.
I think you need to re listen to what that episode to find out what gooning is.
Eric, Yes, it's I'm appropriating the term. I'm gooning out boys.
I gotta go goon to my signifying chains.
I'm gonna go goon in the kitchen with my roommates.
Oh did you see my new vape? By the way, we're at the end, but my vape is now it's just a dowel. It's a piece of wood that I suck on.
Oh literally, yeah, Oh, there's not actually anything in it.
No, it's just a piece of wood.
It's just too it's just to us your oral fixation.
The substance itself.
What am I displacing. It's a metonomy, it's a autonomy for a vape.
Yeah, I think I see a merchantilizing opportunity. Slap a pill on that.
Yeah.
They are selling like air air as instead of a way to quit vapes. They just sell flavored air.
You should sell you should sell plastic pills.
The pills trying the best method of quitting smoking.
Just suck on a piece of wood. You'll be fine.
Pills would Yeah,