Against Conservatives w/ Bugman Hegel: The J. Burden Show Ep. 427

well as the political environment. On Twitter, I have a mix of topics. I cover. I used to cover a lot more of kind of esoteric history. I covered a lot more about Hegel, kind of the hermetic influences on the Protestant Reformation, some stuff about Kabbola, how Kabla had influenced certain Protestant schism movements, the Moravians and the Atabaptists. But nowadays I'm really busy, So I just I just kind of do some like a surface level of political commentary.

And that's kind of the long and short of it.

any number of reasons. But it's sort of interesting that that you know, idea of you know, getting in the real world, you know, quote unquote uh really never seems to pan out, to be perfectly honest, and that track of education, you know, from undergrad to your graduate degree post grad all that it's like this this treadmill to make you more and more of an obnoxious progressive hall monitor.

You know, it's kind of like chasing gold stars. And so you mentioned, of course, right that you know law school was non representative, right, it was very much one opinion. So what was it like being a sort of a dissident in that in that space, if you will.

So there's a couple of big scandals with uh, like people got suspended from the sports teams for let's say, throwing tortillas at a date auction and things like that. I thought they were outrageous, but I kind of kept more to myself. It like, it wasn't really in my face because of the program I was in so I was like, you know, I'm just want to get this over with. And then law school, it was it was more unavoidable because this stuff was integral to the coursework itself.

Like in criminal law, you're talking about different types, different theories for justice, like you have retributive justice, you have rehabilitative justice, and then you have punitive justice. And there was obviously a clear preference among U with that particular professor, like for rehabilitative justice. And for those who don't know, that's basically where the point of incarceration is rehabilitation of

criminals as opposed to protecting the public from them. And a lot of our problems in criminal justice dim from the back of the fact that the rehabilitative justice school is kind of the overarching trend we have been consistently heading to really since the night late night, And really I was being successively radicalized in the right wing direction, and it was really something that happened to me after I graduated law school and moved to Houston for a

job that really kind of like just blew the whole thing up my face, because, like I was, I had been in Houston for less than a week starting my new job, and I got burglarized about four days after I moved there at two am, and it was just like I just started kind of looking into like the political environment of the city of Houston, and it was just kind of one of the first times where like my politics kind of or like the opposition to my politics viscerally interacted with me. And I was just like,

this is not working. Like I'm a young new grad and I'm being I'm just having all these things like throw it in my face by no fault to my own. And I talked to like Boom or family members, and they just kind of treat it as like the cost of doing business, like the cost of existing. And I

was like, why why are we accepting this? Like why why is this something that we are going to put up with as a society that like like kind of people who go out of their way to be lawbiding, productive citizens are just effectively at the whims of any petty criminal that should choose to victimize them. It was just an incoherent frame of mind.

There is one of kind of this cluster of different ideas that have effectively been in academia since the late fifties to early sixties. And there's not a new experiment, right, this is this that we have tried this before with predictable results, and you know, look like, of course it produces bad results. You get broken into and you know, your apartment in Houston. But similarly, it just kind of bothers me that by alling to power, they get to

sort of play pretend as radicals. Right. Play pretend is if they've come up with this great new idea that was old by the time my grandparents were going through school. It's you know, not the primary objection to it, but very much something that kind of rubs me the wrong way, if you see what I'm getting at.

and they do that through this like having this like platonic ideal that man is infinitely malleable and you can infinitely mold man by altering the conditions. It's it's almost Faustian to the degree because like it allows you to like this iterative infinitely overcoming the bounds of my bounds

to my conditions. And I believe kind of this like blink slate egalitarianism is residual of that where like not even biology is a constraint for us, and you kind of see this developing in like I know, like transhumanism is kind of a buzzword, but transhumanism just in terms of let's say, widening human cognitive capacity through things like neuralink and like exploring the final Frontier, which is Elon

Musk's entire project. And so I think this kind of blink slate egalitarianism is just another facet of this, of this kind of Faucian concept that you can terrorform literally everything, including like humankind individually and as groups.

makes Supreme Court justices. So if we just jam a bunch of our people, you know, people we decide that we want through that door, well will just produce you know, similarly august figures, and by sort of passing through the magic door, they will become the same thing. You see this as well, honestly, probably more clearly in public school system, right, the idea is simply like the piece of paper is

the signifier. And so if you can simply increase the number of people or the sort of people getting something. They can be molded into that sort of idealized form. It's very much related to the sort of magic dirt fallacy you see with immigration, where if we simply take the entire world and stick them into a place that was nice ten years ago, well they will enjoy the benefits of that place being nice, and it become the

same sort of people. Weirdly enough, this kind of reminds me of the and there's no polite term for this, but the we'll go Friedman's schools after the American Civil War, where effectively you had basic you know, Massachusetts wasps coming down to the reconstructive South in designed to basically eradicate what was black culture at the time and turn them

into progressive white people. Right. And it's funny because, weirdly enough, a lot of the kind of like Nation of Islam black separatist types make this exact same point, one of very few points of agreement I have with those guys. But effectively it's the same project, right. It's this idea that we can, through education and training, turn this culture into something like us. It's sort of this bizarre kind of progressive imperialism, if that term makes sense to.

out there. But the kind of issue or what I see with Protestantism, especially especially kind of the more apocalyptic types, they like to compress the transcendent and the inminet and basically flatten that difference. And so therefore the idea is like this, we have to pure, imminently purify the world in order for skistological project to proceeed. And you see this kind of with the Social Gospel movement and Raush

and Bush back in the eighteen fifties. And like the Social Gospel and Raush and Bush were really deprogenitors of a lot of the the Northeast social justice initial initiatives. They were the kind of inspiration behind the whole house. They're the inspiration behind a lot of a lot of the civil civil rights movements. You have a lot of

progressive progressive Protestants participating and encouraging civil rights movements. And part of this is I think, I think it is specifically a type of I guess a apocalyptic strain that is especially unique to evangelicalism, where the mot the mode of thinking is that purification of the world is necessary.

And so obviously you have to look at the frame of which one is purifying the world, Like if if you think the world will be pure given certain precepts, you are going to follow those precepts to their logical conclusion. And so if that kind of delivery method is combined with these pre extant, uh aggressive precepts, that that kind of religion is going to pull these precepts to their

logical conclusion, which ends up being blank slade galitarianism. Part of purifying the world is this absolute state of equality. And that's why the Social Gospel where they were an integral movement with the Christian socialists, and you kind of see the Protestant influence on the Fabian society, and there's all these kind of overlapping strands that kind of point to this weird imanitizing, almost quasi apocalyptic mode of thinking

about politics and human society. I mean, I don't know if you're familiar with Eric Boglin, but it's Eric Boglin's famous line of iminitizing the esketon. And that's kind of what at least the evangelical strain of Prosantism has has ushered in.

effectively the perfectibility of man. So in a cultural sense, you see the output of this kind of tragic understanding of human nature and things like Southern Gothic literature, right, the idea that man is at his core deeply flawed, but there is nobility to be found in how you manage that flaw. Right. Whereas you know the concept of you know, the city on a Hill, which I believe was initially coined by oh, shoot, what was his name?

He was one of the initial pilgrims. I can't quite remember, right, but this idea of setting up a new novel and perfected society is something you can sort of bring the city of God into being in the world. The idea that, in much the same way talking about education, that you

can fundamentally change what a man is. And actually, if we're gonna I realized mold Bug has become sort of unfashionable recently, but he has a series of essays on Quakers, and he particularly talks about the idea of prison, you know, not simply as like a dungeon, we throw you before, we either let you go or peel your skin off

and set you on fire. You know, this was more common before they came around, and the idea in that was basically that, you know, prison was a sort of like state and judicial form of purgatory or you could

sort of you know, work off your sins. And so in the early days of these reformatory prism prisons are what they call them is they have these sort of like comedically like sissify and jobs, you know, like they just have a box with a paddle full of sand and they just make you turn this wheel for hours

on end, and that was your prison sentence. And okay, maybe that's better than just you know, eating you know, mac and cheese and you know, getting in you know, shive fights with Mexicans or whatever we do in our prisons now. But you still you have that idea that, you know, the point of criminal justice is not to avenge the wrong, punished the guilty, but it is to produce a measurable like a moral improvement and change in

the criminal himself. It sort of becomes this social engineering project, and that same idea is scaled up, of course, the idea that you can do that to an entire society, which becomes there is a moral duty to do that too, cultures who are not as enlightened as you are, that you can you know, wage a massive war or you know, with your own society, or the idea that democracy needs

to be exported to the world. It's this sort of belief in both the perfectibility of man and also in your personal moral duty to expand that system as far as possible. Again, it's that same sort of kind of progressive imperialism mentioned earlier.

things that exist independent of the society. And to that extent, like if you've sent that content of the institution to the civilization is like civilization is just a thing that exists and people happen to inhabit civilization. Whereas I think my perspective and probably probably it is probably close to your perspective, Like civilization is not independent of the people that comprisee it. Civilization is an extension of the Ethnos. It's not something that you can interchange. It is mutually

dependent upon the Ethnos. And when we had this kind of.

a certain time. It has no power in and of itself and this idea and exactly what you just mentioned is why when I very rarely decide to post to social media on Twitter at least, I very afflic get into the dumbest arguments in the world with both constitutional conservatives, you know, for the idea that you know, a constitution does not have the ability to enforce or create a culture, which in my mind is demonstrably true. Right does America

look like it did in seventeen seventy seven? I rest my point, but also right with the an caps who believe, you know, that no state should be allowed to regulate you know, who lives in a certain area and simply culture is not a factor. But at the same time, right these these even something is as kind of liberal as the conception of human rights, you know, the rights enumerated to you, you know, by God or the state, depending on your view of it. Those are highly cultural.

Those are effectively Anglo conceptions, right. The other cultures do not conceptualize things in such a way. And sorry, I'll kick it back to you, but I think that's what makes Demeaster's work so interesting is because he is addressing that very very early, right, you know, briefly after the revolution, you know, the idea that you can create a sort of formalized description or a set of rules that will guide culture. And clearly that doesn't work. But excuse me, I interrupted you.

soft a soft belly. And we we kind of have this concept in the Orthodox Church with it where it's called like economia, where the priest has leave to kind of grant you, let's say a little bit of latitude on certain things, given the circumstances of your situation. And I think that that that concept is applicable to civilization.

But it's only and that like basically libertarianism on the in on the inside of society, whereas a hard shell facing the outside of society, that type of like kind of free market, free association where you kind of let let society run on its own substrates is only possible if you maintain the integrity of the society from the inside facing the outside.

into it. Clearly that is is not the case. And you know, as regards this kind of mix of you know, authoritarian and libertarianism, it's like, well, to be honest, it's it's freedom to do what because you know, even when you look at the constitutional conservative types they hold up you know, the era of the American founding, the kind of first American republic or if they don't know a whole lot about history, kind of the first and second you know, pre Lincoln as this example of you know,

maximal freedom. And it's like, well, well, sure like from a certain perspective, you have quite a lot of freedom. You don't really have to pay a lot in taxes. You know, no one can say, you know, no one can tell you not to you know, drop gamer words or you know where you can live. But at the same time, like your other forms of kind of modern freedoms are radically restricted. You have George Washington, for example, you know, executing soldiers for sodomy. There were blasphemy laws.

You know, if you slept with another man's wife, you might well end up in a duel and get shot or lynched. So again, right, it is freedom to do what and that is highly cultural, culturally contextual, and also that depends on a certain certain common cultural understanding of

what is and is not acceptable. And in a multicultural society, like there's a reason that you know when you can look at Aristotle, right, this leads to tyranny because there is no common cultural understanding for that small l libertarian

amount of social freedom. And again I'll reference them twice, which will said chatting to just an absolute fit of rage is mold Budd makes this exact point where he talks about speaking to libertarians, where he says, you know, the libertarian's mistake is he thinks that he can bring about and capistan by acting as if it were already the case, by acting as sort of an agorist, and his point is, no, if you were a libertarian in

the current moment, you should be a fascist. You know, you should advocate for, you know, the harshest police state in the world, because you know, once you have that, once you have that, you know, that perfect security, that perfect you know, assurance of punishment of wrongdoers, then that spontaneous order quote unquote can occur, but does not come out of Somalia. You know, it does not come out of you know, a lawless, decentralized society. It's plainly not

the case. And so hey, we we've been been talking a lot about these of critiques of liberalism, these critiques of progressive liberalism, and one of the things that I can't stop talking about is many of these defenders of liberalism look at that, look at that attack on the idea of neutral institutions, look at that, attacks on ideas of secularism, and they say, well, that's exactly what that, in scare quotes woke left does. Therefore, because you criticize liberalism,

you are woke. Therefore the woke right is born a subject I cannot stop writing long articles on. So I assume everyone listening to this is sick to hear me talk about it, but I'm curious to get your thoughts on that term.

as if it were already in Capistan. Classical liberals and libertarians they want to implement their policies as society exists, and that requires this having this kind of platonic ideal of what society currently is and then pretending as if

that's the actual way it is. And so the classical liberals they deny this, but they still operate on the basis of this kind of blank slatism, this type of almost like dialectical evolution of society where we're all poor, we're all pulled towards this ultimate constitution idea, and if anything, whenever we stray from that idea, that's because that's not because of the actual society or constitution itself. That's just because that's just how it works. That's just a temporary setback,

and we cannot lose faith in the ultimate project. And and it's about to be this kind of this kind of like self referential, self referential idea where like great real classical liberalism hasn't been tried, like it's the ideal project hasn't been achieved. But they and they and they point to this era of society. I don't even really know what area era of society they American society they point to to kind of justify this point. It's always kind of some ambiguous pleading to the founders or the

Federal's papers. But then you have you have other founders who directly refute their kind of concept that of American society is this kind of uh, let's say, put potentially multicultural like utopia. I can't remember. I think it was I think it was James Monroe who who it was it was to Toke Folle and then James Monroe who were speaking of the constitution specifically for white Anglo Saxon Protestants. And then so it's this like degree of cherry picking,

trade picking. The founders they want to idolize, and then even then what words of the founders they want to idolize. And it's absolutely a deification of the founding. Right in order in order to have this type of fealty to this classical liberal idea, you have to you have to you have to kind of elevate the Constitution to a sacred document one and two, you have to deify the founders. The Constitution and its processional nature is therefore infallible. The

Constitutional conventions are comparable to the Nicean Councils. They're given this staff of infallibility. It is the American founding myth. And if you call that into question, that all of a sudden that you are a heretic. And that's how they treat you, like the woke word, attaching woke to these kind of like political categories, all that is a

synonym for you've committed a heresy. And obviously some heretics are worse than others, are more destructive, but they're effectively tranching anyone with the woke label as an equally destructive heretic and making no distinction between quote unquote heresies.

our time. But you know, I don't view that as you know, affecting other things we could or couldn't take from it. You know, it's not a sainted figure. You're simply a man, a cringe atheist, but you know, impressive in other ways. But the reason that the constitutional conservative position is especially ridiculous is that they truly are the progressives of yesteryear, and so they have to hold that, you know, simultaneously, are all of these founders sainted figures?

But also they were so ahead of their time they could see into the future, and what they actually meant was something in between, you know, kind of like Ronald Reagan and you know Bill Clinton's Democratic Party platform. That's what they really meant. It's this idea that because they are infallible, and this is what I think they must you know, have all along, you've been in accordance with

exactly what I think. And the progressive types run rings about them on this issue because it's it's plainly clear by again the standards of the modern left that all these men were horrifically racist, again in scare quotes, by the standards of the day. But it's because of simultaneously that kind of like deification where they must be perfect, and also the problem of deep down effectively just being progressive.

And so in a way i'd almost I wouldn't agree with it, but I almost respect the position more if it were. Yes, they were, and it's awesome. You know, I want to literally, to quote Alex Jones, you know,

seventeen seventy six will commence again, warts and all. But it's not that, you know, it's this sort of ten tactical invocation where you know, it is sort of bringing these figures kind of like we're casting yourself as a you know, strict constitutionalist doing exactly what you know, the sounding document said, while also kind of twisting them to

meet modern standards. I am, you know, a Protestant, albeit you know, not a particularly uh when you read enough to meister right, it kind of throws you for a loop. But to me it reminds me very much of the Catholic critiques of Soul's scriptura, the idea that you know, scripture is you know, entirely preminent. You know, it's this for this literalist interpretation, because you see a sort of echo in that in the you know, constitutional liter literalists.

Excuse me, it's light here, and in both cases, I maybe I shouldn't say that, but I in both of those I see a certain degree of cope because again, as we see both, you know, in the example of scripture and in law, what matters is not what's written on the page. What matters is who interprets it right,

And that becomes the Schmidtian question, right, who decides? And so to me, that's what one of the many things I find frustrating is about these you know, constitutional conservative types that we could consider, you know, their their ancestors to be right, or their predecessors to be successors, excuse me, to be the sort of you know, good classical liberals,

the IDW types who still kind of run around. But ultimately there is that law right, that that fundamental misunderstanding that you know, the law as written actually matters, and I think that there is a theological route to that, but I'll kick it back to you.

of different schools the constitutional interpretation. There's originalism, purposivism, and textualism. Right, Anton Scalia was a different different Conservative judges of the Court like, they typically plead to the thing called originalism, where it's like interpreting the Constitution from the lens of the founder, or the lens in the perspective or the historical president of the time that was originally written in And so these makes the kind of jewel berrys joel

Berry's retort to the distributists even more interesting and kind of incoherent, because if you actually look at the perspectives of the founders at the time that the Constitution was written, and we interpret the Constitution from that lens, what do we think the new kind of prevailing sets of precedent would be if we were actually originalist, Well, there would be no civil rights framework, there would be there would be none of this kind of this kind of progressive

what have you read into the Constitution. And so it's like by the very fact that you can have and this is kind of Socrates. By Socrates preferred the spoken word the written word. When things get put into writing, there is a effectively a barrier between the person writing and the person reading it. And you can interpret interpret the same sentence and obviously how many different ways. And

that's effectively how how the judiciary works. You can read almost anything you want that's politically expedient into the Constitution.

You can try to put bounds on it by these different interpretive schools, but effectively you're still just doing the same thing because any like and this is kind of like the problem with doing quote unquote history even from an originalist interpretation, you're still a modern person trying to understand the historical context of the founders, and so therefore you are still there's still multiple points of mediation, like or points of distance, points of error between you and

the founders. And so this type of this entire type of frame that the Constitution works as long as we as long as we defer back to the Founders is ridiculous on its face, and it's it's incoherent because it's like, sure, we can extrapolate the mentalities of the Founders, but there's many Founders and they came from many different schools of thought. So it's what motivation behind the Constitution, even from an originalist perspective, are we pursuing? And so this is the

entire problem with this deification of the Constitution. The Constitution it has to run on a substrate, and that substrate is the people itself. And so when you had this idea that like, and I've seen Joe Barry tweet that I don't remember off off the top of my head, but it was like, it'd be preferential to have like

browns compared to the woke, right. I cannot remember the quote, but that was the general sentiment I remember, And it's like, okay, so then you don't actually respect like the milieu of the founders because that would have been incomprehensible to the founders.

But even being I believe it was Monroe or Madison, I don't remember, but I remember like reading this quote from one of the founders that was effectively like it is entirely possible that we will have a Mohammedan as president of the United States, and he expresses of woe the day that occurs. But within this framework, that is entirely possible. So it was not a foregone conclusion when the Framers wrote the Institution that this our current situation

was a possibility. In fact, it was thrown out there as a possibility. And so like from that perspective, your view of the Constitution as a success or a failure just depends on your ability to reckon with the acceptability of being replaced or being subjucated, subjugated by by foreign cultures, foreign peoples in your own nation, do you have such little legions to your nation or culture that that is

an acceptable proposition? And for people and for constitual conservatives, people like Joe Berry, if they are truly originalist or they are truly differing back to the Founders, it must be an acceptable proposition because that is what the founders viewed as a potential, inevitable and evitability of the document that they created.

was no longer able to produce political miracles anymore. And so you know, there's several subsequent generations who believed in it less, you know, they didn't hold to the same kind of sacred strictures of you know, impartiality or into the belief in you know, the rule of law, democratic norms. Right as someone might say, because to be perfectly honest, I don't actually care about the Constitution one way or the other. Right, there's stuff and I like their stuff,

and I don't. And when it helps me, right, when there's court case going and you know, a strict literalist interpretation of the Constitution gets me what I want, then great. If not, who cares? And what Mitchell has done it Resmussen is basically go through and ask people in our rough age demographic number of questions and basically he's found that it's like almost sixty percent that basically want a

dictator and look like I'm not a populist. You know, I don't believe that there's some magic significance in a lot of people wanting something, but I think it is an interesting sort of trailing indicator of the decline of liberalism per se, right, the decline of the belief in these institutions, the belief in you know, these sort of kind of lies that we've laid out earlier. And you know, among that sixty percent, and who knows, I might be wrong on that number. I saw it on Twitter several

days ago, so forgive me on that. But I'm not naive enough to assume that you know, every one of those people is you know, reading through their you know, the kind of required reading list of you know, right wing reactionaries. Not at all. But I do think, you know, you see a sort of a political belief already dead, kind of dead on its feet, because you know, ultimately all these things we're talking about, like that that phrasing of the woke right is basically everyone who isn't a

liberal is woke. But that basically just means everyone, and so effectively, the only people who still believe in that system like fully and truly are effectively like loser conservatives if you see what I'm getting at there.

us a global superpower. And so just from a pragmatic, like power based perspective, liberalism has put us on top. But at what costs, And that cost is kind of this this cultural and historical sense of identity, sense of place,

sense of belonging. And but we've gotten to the point where I believe, quote unquote history is accelerate, is accelerating there there there are more and more asymmetries popping up, and you kind of on the student loan point, like one of these main a symmetries is oftentimes I see and just as a caveat, I don't have any student loans like this is not from a motivated perspective. In fact, i'd be just from what I've seen, I should be

disincentivized from advocating for student loans dischargeable and bankruptcy. But from like a pragmatic perspective, it does not. There is a fundamental asymmetry introduced when you prevent when you prevent student loans from being dischargeable bankruptcy, and that is obviously it allows for an unfettered ballooning of university budgets because if something cannot be discharged, you're even from let's say the libertarian visa's perspective, when you when you institute or

regulation like that, you're introducing an inherent market. And official should see and we have seen that. You've seen if you've seen the called the cost of college graphs, like after two thousand and two, after there was a blanket

ban on dischargeability of student loans. Since two thousand and two, uh, the cost of college has let's say, rapidly increased compared to all other all other categories of analysis on the CPI, and so the asymmetry here created is an asymmetry in preference to institutions and corporations effectively at the direct expense

of the average citizen of the country. And and not to like, uh, not to crap all over the boomers too much, but the people you hear kind of this list meme where it's like luxury boomer communism, it's luxury boomer communism the at the spins of the rest of society.

And so there's an acceleration of these asymmetries, and it almost seems to be I don't know if that's kind of, let's say, an emergent phenomenon, or if the asymmetries are the point, because we know in certain and certain strains of Marxism the entire kind of mo is acceleration of the contradictions, and so a widening, widening asymmetries are effectively an acceleration of the contradiction. So it creates societal unrest.

But what's confusing, too is despite all of these increasingly large asymmetries, you if you look around, you like, our economy is not that bad. Like people aren't I mean,

outside of let's say New York. Instantly, people aren't necessarily starving in the streets, like on mass scale, like poverty, like poverty now is much lower compared to the nineteen twenties or the nineteen fifties, And so it's like you have this degree of let's say, like cognitive dissonance where you look around and things are not that bad, but

you feel this kind of sense of civilizational foreboding. And I think that that that's a degree that that dissonance is created because of these increasingly large asymmetries where society just does not seem to break or move regardless of how large these asymmetries become. And so I think, I think that's like creating a sense of unease because there there is clearly like a mechanistic a mechanistic contradiction happening here.

And I think what going going in the future is going Who has power in the future is just going to depend on who capitalizes on this dissonance.

this has been one of the really interesting things. Like, I'm not a huge voter, not a huge democracy guy per se, but you do have this sort of critical mass of primarily young white men who swung hard for Trump and have very quickly abandoned him in a relatively short amount of time. And at least according to Mitchell right that that was effectively a protest vote. Right, of

this is not working for us. You can look at educational data, you can look at any sort of other method of you know, kind of tracking achievement, and the young people wouldever constitute that to be are not doing very well.

past the fifty percent mark. And so at the same time we were both seeing a sort of ideological shift, you know, where the boomers who have the kind of current or not the current, but the kind of dying version of the American Republic, you know, like the FDR regime and then the kind of you know Patch put in in sixty four. They believe that more than almost anyone else, their children slightly less, their grandchildren even less. You see this on both the left and the right.

You know, more and more people on the left are describing themselves as socialists. You know, they're rejecting albeit not at a fundamental level, right, but they are rejecting the kind of stricters of liberalism. So you have this both this kind of incredible economic and achievement on the ease that you were talking about, mixed with a sort of political shift. I think it's a very interesting and sort of exciting time to be in the discourse as it's described.

But why would you go to the mat right, alienate potential allies for the sake of a group of people that hate you? University professors, we understand their politics broadly speaking, and to me, setting aside any kind of principle of argument, just on a pure patronage level analysis, there's a very clear answer, which is take resources from your enemies to buy yourself new friends.

upstanding correct way of doing politics. I mean, I'm not the biggest fan of Trump, but I do think that the the people who cried about him, you know, shattering democratic norms again in scare quotes, they weren't entirely wrong, and it was less that he shattered them and more realized that had become they had sort of ossified and become guardrails, right, and within that box you would never win. Albeit you know, he is far from you know, the

sort of genuine reformer, you know, restructuring needed. But I think that that's another kind of interesting, interesting symptom I guess of that. So sorry, I threw a bunch at you. Heygil, I'll give you a chance to respond.

to usurp the institutions. The entire kind of woods Stock generation was, let's just say was was anti institution in the sense that they thought that there is an old way of doing things that they they should personally take the mantle and overturn. They weren't necessarily anti institution, and that they wanted to abolish the institutions, but they wanted they wanted to take them, they wanted to seize them.

And I think if we contrast this two let's just say, the conservative way of approaching that tends to be parallelism instead of instead of let's say, sieging the institutions, like doing what is necessary at whatever costs to get those institutions back, the conservatives would rather see them even if there is still a degree of deference for them, and create parallel ones. And these parallel ones, I mean you so to kind of site redeemed Zuomer. I don't know

if you're familiar with him. He's like, he's a Presbyterian, the PCUSA church, and he specifically chose to to join the more let's say, the original, the original branch the Presterian Church, despite the fact that they allow female priests or whatever pastors, and despite the fact that they endorse

in certain in certain churches LGBTQ stuff. His idea was that consistently within the history of prostism, it has been Protestants leaving the established institutions and creating their own institutions when the other institutions become more liberal. So the reason why I joined the pc USA church because I'm trying to retake the institution from the inside. He's like a to for lack of a better term or phrase, like a one man kind of in reconquiste conserve entist if

you will. Yeah, And I like the idea behind that, But the problem is it's just, for some reason, the position of the conservative American is just not geared towards that idea of retaking institutions. It's always parallelism. Let's create our parallel institutions. The problem is that you're giving You're just freely giving the reins uninhibited to the progressive cause

of all these historical institutions. You're just giving them these culture making apparatuses and just hoping and hoping and praying that your parallel institution ends up being successful and ends up having similar cultural weight, which it almost never does. So and I tried to interrogate this where it's like, why is this kind of the base impulse of the

American right? Why is parallelism the base impulse? I don't understand why we were have been perpetually in this frame of parallelism as opposed to the kind of left wing frame where it's like, if you have a problem with the institutions, let's capture them. And I'm hopeful that with

gen Z, like the seven percent ras musem poll. I'm hopeful that that's changing and we're getting a bit more of an energetic propulsion on the right that that is enough to recapture some of the institutions that's opposed to just default to this parallelism. But I don't really see a lot of historical precedent for the right recapturing an

integral institution once it has been culturally infiltrated. There's there's flight oscillations like we'll get it back for a little bit, or will exert some influence, but like it just ultimately reverts that base state of kind of progressivism. And so I don't know, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how we can kind of create that propulsion for recapture as compared to parallelism.

white flight. The idea is, you know, okay, well I can't have my culture here, so I'll go make my own. And I think a large part of that is you could look at it's kind of like ebagenetic almost. But also I think that the problem for conservatives with that sort of entry is that the force which effectively the progressives are aligned with entropy, and so you know, there's

sort of a certain gravity to what they do. You know, it is much more difficult to you know, deprogressive ize something than it is to you know, to make it more kind of leftist. And so to me, I guess I see, you know, parallelism as a entirely rational short to medium term strategy because of the sort of power imbalance there that you know, if this is sort of

a fifty to fifty struggle, then fair enough. But I don't necessarily see how with one guy and I made this point to redeemed Sumer and I am now blocked on the interne locked on Twitter.

own thing is incorrect. But to me, you know, when I look at you know, the boards my friends from South Africa, you know, I think of an article written by I think it's Ernst Roots or Ernst ven Zeel, one of the Ernsts you know, wrote this article where

he compared it to you know, digging a trench. And this was an article that was very impactful on me shortly before I entered, you know, the kind of internet world, you know, living after school, and you know, one of many kind of you know, godless progressive American urban centers. And his point was there is a time for retreat tactically, but you do not do that, to retreat forever. You retreat, to dig a trench, to make something defensible, to make

something you can fight for. And to me, you know, the answer is neither, you know, progressivism or entryism as one universal strategy. This gets back to our point about like the Constitution or any particular law. It's like, well, there is a time for each And in my mind I completely understand, you know, the rationale that says, look like, you know, I am barred from you know, certain jobs, I'm barred from a certain place. I must you know,

support my family. So there's an element of retreat to that, right, find something. But once you were there, right, that institution, that thing that you were building, that thing that you were making, must be defended. And you know, I see this in my own religious community. I see it in you know, in others, and so to me, I guess I may disagree with you on parallelism because I think that it is entirely rational in the short to mid term. It's not an eternal strategy, but I mean, hell, you

can even look at uh, you know, arn't. Younger makes a very similar point in the Forest Passage and umswell both right that you know, when faced with kind of a you know, a toutalitarian system or a totalizing system, is one might more accurately say that a direct you know, head on, full frontal assault, you'll be squished like a buck. But I'll give it back to you. I guess that's kind of my thoughts on it, at least initially.

think we can compartmental life. It's like there's no such thing I think as discrete kind of parallelism, and that's attempted, but you're still under the shadow of these institutions, like and that was a very real consequence in Art's Younger's life, like his his kind of antagonism to the Nazi regime got his son killed in Italy, and so and that's kind of I don't necessarily disagree with you that it may be a good tactical decision in the short term,

but ultimately it has to be a tactical decision positioning yourself to ultimately confront the main institutions itself. And it seems like that just that seems to not be the case, Like like the just from deferring back to redeemed Zumer situation, the I believe it's p USA as opposed to pc USA. I can't remember the other Presbyterian branch, but they are not necessarily directly antagonistic or trying to poach members of

pc USA. They're kind of they're kind of in this mode of I just want to be left alone, just do not subvert this new institution I've created, And that's kind of been the conservative, like like the conservative conservative kind of mentality, I just want to be left alone, and the progressive mentalities I want to consume all things, like I want everything to be under my thumb. And so it's kind of when you have that, when you have those two kind of like fundamentally opposite dispositions, one

is going to prevail. And like I said, I think parallelism is a completely rational, pragmatic decision. The problem is, I do not think it is sustainable when you when your enemy is held bent on subsubing every single institution

created in parallel or not. And Eric Hoffer has this really good quote where he said, the kind of benefit of the leftist, so the progressive, is that people who lack things, or who think they lack things, are willing to fight and die for that which they do not have, but people who have are not willing to fight and

die for that which they already possess. And so the entire progressive mode of operation, because it's just like devouring, it's this desire to devour, a desire to pull society, and this idolized direction that has not yet been obtained. They can frame and they can exist in this mentality where no matter how much they achieve or how many institutions they capture, it's still not enough. They do not have that kind of critical threshold that they desire to

completely terrorform society. And so whereas conservatives there are let's say, more willing to be content, more willing to be contented with what they have or what they can't create, and so there isn't this kind of drive that is extant among the progressives to capture that which they think they do not have, because they think what they have is sufficient.

And so that's kind of my my view. And like the critical flaw of like discrete parallelism as a as a governing strategy is it's doomed to fail just just by virtue of who the enemy is in position to who we are, or like what motivates us but obviously, like you said, like the progressive position is inclined toward entropy, order takes it like order takes a lot more energy injected into the system to actually like for thisstem to actually order itself. If the progressive kind of the progressive

directionality is always in tropic, there's not. It's kind of effortless. It's an effortless, effortless march, whereas going against that requires an asymmetric amount of energy to be expended, which makes the parallels I'm totally understandable on an individual act or perspective, but as like, if we kind of scale out and look at the course of history, it's going to be a doomed a doomed strategy. I fear.

but I got a mortgage, guys, what can I say? Also, you can check out our sponsor, Axious Remote Fitness Coaching. JD's a good business man, he's a good friend. You should support him. And look, I've gone to enough of these events I met you guys. Some of you could use some personal training, so check out JD's work for that. Again, buck Man Hegel, it was great speaking to you.