Episode 1368: Recognizing The Time w/ J. Burden and Christopher Sandbatch

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I've sort of started to realize that like we'll see the appellation Neo Kon get thrown around and underneath it, there's not really any understanding of what exactly a neokon is. We'll see, so there there. In short, my answer is not necessarily going to be that there's something about right wing philosophy that causes this. I think there's something about philosophy in general that causes this that left wing organizations

are able to combat with a rigid institutional history. They have much better formal mechanisms, for they have much better formal mechanisms for knowledge transfer than the right wing does, which sort of leaves us out in the cold to have to sort of like rebuild from scratch every three or four years. And I think that's probably really what happened, really, really what what what the big thing that? Because I

mean when you actually boil that, boil it down. The philosophies aren't that different, especially in the mainstream, Like Carl Schmidt is every bit as influential on the left as he is on the right. What they do better, and even like even just the university structure if now the public school system of the university structure USA, their whole institutional flow chart prevents them from being able to go rogue

the same way right wingers can. So right wingers can just go we could just go rogue and decide that they're going to do it all from scratch their own way, and you end up you end up with like everybody thinks they're a vanguardist, but like they're the only thing you know, six hundred vanguards do is fight with the other vanguards to see who's the one true vanguard.

outdoor cats. Right people who have already said selected out of doing the normal thing, so they've already gotten over that hurdle of I don't care about, you know, certain social consequences. I don't care about, you know, this sort of herd mentality. I'm going to do my own thing. And while I think it is one hundred percent true that there are in a broad sense, like certain value alignments,

in my mind it's incredibly tribal. And I think one of the things that the left has been very successful at, particularly in the last sixty years, is taking disparate groups and aligning them against a perceived common enemy. So a classic example, right is like, you know, black folks in the lgbtqnit. Right, if you ever talk to a black guy, he doesn't tend to like you know, a list being queer. Right, they don't normally you know, get along. Well, you look

into the claims of transgenocide. We understand put that in scare quotes, right, what that tends to be. But nonetheless, they are part of the same voting coalition. Right, they're they're welded into one thing, and the right has you know, an equal.

there is no institution to bind those things together. And Sandy, I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, because honestly, I've not been around this for nearly as long as you have, but as someone who has, you know, been around for enough time to see a generation shift and to see certain patterns repeat themselves. I think another element of this is that there is a there is an overlap of politics as an inner painment product and politics as politics, and those are two separate circles on the

Venn diagram. And I think there are many people who enjoy politics as entertainment and justify that as power politics, in the same way that many guys justify their gun collecting hobby or their ham radio obsession as prepping for the end of the world.

been around for a while. But you're also you're not a great example of these like sort of younger kids that I'm talking about, because you have some you have particular you have been subjected to particular knowledge transfer mechanisms via your you know, your connections with some older people that have sort of like giving you like more of a roadmap to work with than say, you know somebody who just you know, somebody who's just a little bit disoriented.

And but you know, this is this is true. The question of politics and politics is as you know, I call them. That's really what I would call capital p politics and small pe politics. And I don't mean to degrade the idea of using politics as like sort of entertainment because it's face it, it's pretty entertaining and it's I mean, as a as a you know, native of the Deep Southerner, I would tell you that politics is

our native form of entertainment. And whenever we say politics, we're not We're talking about everything from election of the congressmen to like what are the strange secrets behind the in the closets of the family that opened the new general store down the road, and why should we go there instead of the old general store that we've always gone to. Politics is very intrinsically ethnically deep Southern thing, and so we, you know, we sort of take to

it like a fish to water. But politics as entertainment versus politics is the real thing if we actually separate those things out. Unfortunately, we have to arrive at the conclusion that about half a percent of the people who are involved commenting in places like Twitter, about half a percent of them are actually involved in real politics. And those people aren't the ones that you think they are.

I mean, I have a really because I have a background working in real politics and that sort of thing I tend to collect in my follower list and in my substack subscriber list. People that I happen to know through real life conversations and that sort of thing are serious political players. And they are usually people who have like relatively nondescript three hundred follower accounts that tweet once a month, you know, because because one.

ontology thing. But one of the things that we you know, ontology is such as a system for how you know things, the system for how you get how you become made legible in the world, how you position yourself in the world. And you know, to get it, probably don't have to get into the philosophy. It's a Hydigerian. It's a Hydigerian inheritance via Carl Schmidt and Ryan Hart Coslin and through

Anglo American philosophy through a man named who Quin. But they are also ontologies are now used in data systems like Twitter. Twitter has an ontology that backs it, so does YouTube, so does Spotify. And what these ontologies are are there are ways of connecting nodes and in you know, that's what you are as a user of any of these technologies. You're a node in a network, and how you are able to interact with the larger structure that you're a part of is one of these are called

constraints that are placed on the ontology. And one of the things the left does very well that we don't do is and this they have some unique advantages. They have some unique structural advantages in the nature of the way they organize, and they have some institutional advantages. But one thing the left does much better than the right is constructing ontologies of their networks and systems such that Jadavius does not have to be exposed as often to

the transgressions of his fellow left wing coalition groups. So like Jadavius can live his entire life and the third third word of New Orleans concerned about mostly black issues, okay, and he can be told on one hand that like, uh, these the transgender issues, or you know, they're going to help us do this, and he understands that, but he's it's framed for him in such a way that he only understands it in it only he only understands it in terms of So this is what not bitching about

Trannis gets me politically. Whereas on the right wing we have an openness problem. You talked about you talked about disagreeableness. If you go back to the original alt right right, probably the things that we had in common the most was that on a personality score test, we would have rated as we would have rated both high end openness

and high end disagreeability. And that creates a really interesting situation because we all want to share all of the things that we think about everything, and we also disagree with all of the things that we think about everything. And then, you know, structurally, it's also true that you know from a right wing or a conservative perspective that you know left wing issues. Left wing interests are relatively slurred together, the relatively diffuse, the relatively abstract, and the

relatively broad. You know, easily go, we're gonna do class for We're gonna do you know, we're gonna eat the rich, We're gonna do very broad strokes things that people in Los Angeles, people in Nashville, people in New York City can all in terms of what we call a minimal ontological commitment, they can all get behind. You know, to

be a left winger, you gotta be mad. And this is what Coastal like is this Rehinehart coastl is my favorite historian, is a student of Karl from that so what he would have called the space of experience, So the space of experience shared by leftist is relatively broad, diffuse,

and it's easy to latch onto. You gotta hate millionaires, you gotta you gotta you know, be on board with this concept of liberation and transmitted through this thing called the space of experience into what coast Like called the Reinhart what Rhinehart coast Like called the horizon of expectation, which is like the things that you can see yourself actionably doing in the future. There is this generalized enemy

that is presented before you. That is the that is the opposition to everything that you is, the blocker to everything that you need done. And that shakes out as that is the what was termed the hierarchical, the hierarchical, patriarchal, straight white man. He represents literally all of the things that you know, this shared coalition has in common that has named the enemy. Whereas on the right we're all

very open. And you also have this problem where like, you know, a potato farmer in Idaho and a sweet potato farmer in Georgia are going to have very distinct interests that aren't first of all, aren't easy to reconcile, and second of all the task of reconciling them is made much more difficult by the fact that they will be exposed one hundred percent to one another with no governing upper ontology to determine how they should behave towards one another. That was a lot at once.

almost constantly, right, you know, there's like no way to escape from it. So it was sort of interesting, right, It was interesting to watch them have to deal with it because you realize it's like what Ivy League institutions, what do you have, Well, you have a lot of rich Jewish folks, and you have a lot of like ninety five IQ left wing social activists, you know, just kind of them together. You know, we sort of see

that that fracture. I think another part of it, and what enables them to sort of sidestep this issue is they've got a gravy train, right, Like they could just simply use money to solve these problems. You use money to apportion rewards to two groups at once. Another moment where we could have seen fracture but didn't quite was at the tail end of Biden when we started to see large populations of Hispanic immigrants hit places like Chicago,

right where all of a sudden there's competition for gibs. Now, that's interesting from kind of a forensic standpoint, you know,

it's like a political nerds. But as far as from our perspective on the right, I think that that's a big problem is that it's really difficult to do the kind of like block and tackle patronage of politics when like, you know, your resources are basically like a you know, you could maybe in cash by like a certified pre owned Honda Civic, right, Like, that's kind of the money you've got to throw around. Yeah, that does not That does not a patronage network, mate.

lot of money. It's like almost it's almost to the point where I don't even like to talk about the money issue, because there is and I you know, I've been my entirel because that's you know, got you know, formal political career as well. I have spent my entire political career working with what, in instances I know, tend to one resource disparity. So I almost tend to just write that off. But I mean, you're right, I mean

that's there too. You can't you can't make a patrin engine network with you really can't make a Patrick's network with the with the resources that are currently available to the right wing unless you go to Israel.

full tenfoil hat there. But I think that that further that further complicates this, right because if we already say well there's basically half a percent that's doing real politics instead of politics as entertainment, that means that in that ninety nine point five percent, they are competing for a

separate resource as well. Right, They're not competing for power, They're competing for clicks basically, and the way you go about securing power, in the way you go about securing if we can use a kind of like gross internet term of yesteryear, but like clout right those are two separate gains, and I think that there is a cope in much the same way you know that your you know your gun collection is going to save you from

the end of the world. But I think that there is this line many people like to tell themselves, which is, oh, I can look at my substack and I see you know names in the admin or I see names at blah blah blah company, you know Tucker's writers, whatever, And in many people's heads, you know myself included, that becomes I have a seat at the table. I am influential when I think quite often that means you are an

entertainment product enjoyed by someone who has a job. And I don't mean to be overly dismissive in that, like it's certainly better than not having those people on your email list. But at the same time, I think that that does not, you know, a political movement, make.

Essentially what happens is that you know the concept of power becomes divorced from what it actually is, and in you know, sort of democratic systems, you can sort of build what we would call a simulacrum of power based on attention. And that's where, you know, that's the basis of the you know, the sort of the attention economy.

And then if you look at that, you can easily get the idea that someone who is good at farming attention in the attention economy, like you know I. And this is beautiful because Twitter puts a fucking number on that for everybody to see how good am I at farming attention? I am ten point nine thousand, ten point nine thousand followers good, And if you want to ratio it, I'm about three. I'm about three to one as good at attracting attention as I am, you know, as I

am you know, dispersing attention. That's an attention economy and it's easy to if you if you get the idea that power follows attention, which I've already dispatched this idea. It does not arguably power, but there's arguably no correlation between popularity and power. Like Russell Brand is a very powerful person. I mean, he's a very popular person. But only anybody who's going to make the mistake in the year twenty twenty six thinking he has any kind of

power or whatever. But you can get this idea that people who attract attension by extension must be also powerful, and that's the basis of the influencer politics concept. And it just doesn't map. It doesn't work. And I think the rights trapped in an influent because we because we are we're stuck in these on top We're largely trapped in these ontologies of like social media networks and that sort of thing where it's easy to look at my number.

I'm Samdy's got ten point nine thousand followers. I have three hundred. He's what, I don't know how many, what like thirty times as popular as me, thirty times as powerful as me. But it's not the case at all, Like this is like relatively impoverished dude living a hovel in New Orleans. I don't have any real power whatsoever. I know lots of people that do, and they usually have no interest in popularity whatsoever. You know, power and

popularity are not the same thing. And that's a thing that I think, that's a thing that I think the right wing has not internalized. We think we had an internalized it better ten years ago than we do now. Is that address what you were talking about?

the Unions. It was me, you and proud and mid term Biden was a very similar thing right where it felt like there.

after a while. It's a difficult thing to hold together. But yeah, continue, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

with random women. That. Yeah, like I'm summarizing it and kind of flip it way because like you've heard that conversation had like eighty times, right, and it sort of becomes this big blow up, you know, it takes over the timeline for two days, we're all mad at wife, guys or degenerates or whatever, and then we just put it back on the shelf and it comes out again.

This kind of current political fracture, in my mind, feels more fundament You did a episode a while back with John Fieldhouse and Martyr maid Darryl Cooper about the video of a paradigm shift, that there's sort of a and obviously the author was was in a scientific sense, but we can apply this easily to politics, that there's sort of an existing order that you know, sort of dominates

the field. You can look at the period of time from you know, FDR to you civil rights revolution, from the Civil Rights Revolution to now these sort of periods where the state of play is relatively contained and then due to you know, due to deaths, due to simply, you know, changing in material conditions, that framework, that paradigm no longer matches up with reality and something new must

be born. And so in my mind, I think that both we and the Libtards made a mistake in assuming Trump was the start of something new instead of the end of something old.

what had been. It was the first time both knew both parties transitioned out of what had been the governing you know, sort of two party pharadigm since FDR, which was the it was the New Deal coalition. So this is really the first time there is a the first time there is a concerted conservative movement in Congress to oppose what became the progressive movement after they abandoned like sort of FDR economics.

talking about Jews. Oh we're talking about sunning your balls, right, the kind of like background radiation disagreements that you know, this group of highly disagreeable, open people are getting into, yes and no. I think some of it is simply like it's what we do, right when things get boring. Things are boring, so it's time to cannibalize each other. But more fundamentally, it does feel as if something is

sort of coming to an end. And I'm curious, Sandy, how significant do you think the the kind of recent of primaries in Indiana is Do you think that that's you know, just kind of noise, or do you think there's actually something there to it?

commerce types are on a pretty significant losing streak. And I do feel like that is a that seems to be much like the blue dog Democrats, something that is going extinct, at least in deep red areas.

they're gonna die hard. Okay, They're gonna hold on to that. They're gonna they're gonna hold on to that whole concept of Trump is the new thing until it goes down in flames. But what we are in fact seeing is the first major party realignment since nineteen seventy four, the first major party realignment since nineteen seventy four. I've been talking about this for almost four years now, where it's like, you know, even if you say could take and this is the way that you know, this is the way

the Civil War happened. Actually, you know, just just do a lesson within a lesson, the real the real take home message, how did the Civil War happen? People? Say, well, it was over slavery, and why do they say it was over slavery? But when you really look at everything, there were, if you look at the previous thirty years

of American history, there were a whole bundle of issues. Okay, there was a terriff issue, the governance of the Western territories issue, the senatorial representation issue, and one by one these issues were solved, okay, which and each time one of these issues was solved, one of the ways that the solution was got to was by slought, was by slopping off more and more, you know, more and more weight, more and more, so that the slavery question bore more

and more weight in terms of determining what you're a lot, how you were, how you were aligned, how you were ontologically visible within this particular party system. And as these issues started to you know, as these other issues that were distributing this weight started to you know, started to collapse on one another started to be solved, so they

you know, you take them off the board. All of a sudden, the slavery issue is bearing so much weight that and there's nowhere else, there's nowhere else to shift weight. So the whole thing just snapped, we're sort of seeing that happen right now. What are the classes since nineteen seventy four? The characterization I did this about a year and a half ago. I characterized the different party systems.

The party system that we're coming out of. Its primary characterization is people like hearing this, But structurally it's true, is broad bipartisan consensus around the issue of privatizing government functions. Okay, So the difference between you know, what happened what nineteen seventy four to the present and what came before that was that, you know, Republicans were in favor of you know, the private economy, and the Democrats were in favor largely

of like massive public regulation. And you could say, well, Democrats still want to do a lot more regulation. Go look up somebody like Huey Long or right, pat Men if you want to you know, you want to start, yeah, fdr, if you want to see what real government regulation looks like.

The Democrats that came after nineteen seventy four are infamous because they were you know, they were willing, they were willing to take money, They were willing to take money from and represent the interests of private banks, which is something that was totally unheard of in the Democrat Party before nights again.

we've seen these chips getting taken off the table. Abortion is solved. I mean abortion, that's not a political issue, and hard loight, hardliner Catholics are going to disagree with me. But from the perspective of American political economy, we've decided we're kicking that question back down to the states. The tenth the tenth Amendment can handle it. You know. Over and over, these touchstone issues that simultaneous have been solved.

But the NGOs and the organizations that were spun up to act as interest groups for them still have shitloads of money that they have to spend on activism for these for these causes are causing incredible share in the actual political space. And as a result, what we're seeing is, you know, Donald Trump is here and this whole political system is crashing down. The Civil Rights Act, I mean,

the Voting Rights Act has been gutted finally. Okay, So like now there's this this you know, this dampening hole that was preventing political dynamics, particularly in the Southern region from uh, you know, from reshifting. However it's going through that's suddenly gone and it's going to explode. Like you know, you know when you first crack open an oil, well, it just shoots up the top. There's not really a good way to predict what's going to happen in the

next six years. And when you're talking about dampening and there's like foreboding idea that something is different here, that you know, something is going to have to change and causing a lot of this strife online. You know, it's like one of these like these articles that I've been you know that you know, we've been dealing with in

the OGC. You know, these two factions. This is real stuff. Actually, you know, I don't want to paper over I don't want to paper over the idea that there's like, you're not real politics, so that nothing ever happens the American electric the American electorate is currently less determined, more dynamic,

and more uncertain than it ever has been before. Okay, And my personal belief is that in the year twenty twenty eight, the United States is going to have the most important election in its history since eighteen ninety six, with the difference being that in eighteen ninety six, the election that occurred was largely based on domestic issues. It was largely over the question of whether or not we're

going to coin silver in addition to coining gold. We elected the government that ended up initiating the you know, initiating the reformation of the American state into an empire. They didn't know what were doing in eighteen ninety six when they went to the polls and elected the ninety

fifth Congress. But we do, in fact understand that the American political consensus is at an all time low right now, and whatever direction we take in whatever direction we take in twenty twenty eight is going to be the decisive one is going to be the decisive turn of the twenty first century. We're going to get a new party alignment out of us, you know, And so this is one of the one of the this is like one of the reasons I've been writing with there's no Trump

coal issue anymore. It doesn't exist.

the limitation of what I can touch right now? And from there from the bottom up as where is where the really I mean, I think it's what we're doing is we're fighting a top down imposition of the new political alignment with the attempt to actually take advantage of these liberations from these constraints of the Voting Rights Act on and so forth, the shibbolts of the most recent party system, and we're attempting to democratically, whether you like

this or not, build up the new alignment from you know, from the from from the ground up. And that's sort of again, that's a lot I'm doing a lot of talking and hopping all over the place. But that's that's.

know politics right now, well, national politics or local politics. No, it's it's going to be relationships. It's going to be figuring out who you are. And if you're still in that political if you're still striving toward that political or you're seeing that political as being the answer the way out of this, you've basically missed it.

themselves from the instability of the public sphere. So always, in all cases, if you are looking to the abstract political to save, you know, to achieve your aims, to get whatever you want to do, whatever it is you want to do, you're already missing the point. Because the point is what you do is you look at the people around you. Who do you know? Who do you trust? Who's name do you you know? Who's who's in your phone, who's in your who's in your cell phone contacts? Is

the real name? Those are the people who you can actually meet and you can actually do things with on a trustful basis rather than an untrust rather than a

contract basis. You know what I mean, and you know and and if you ever, if you were just like you can get you can do this as simply as like like like grow some bacteri, you know, like grow bacteria in a jar in your house, like just you know, like just like rub a cute tip between your toes and stick it in some sugar water and just let it sit for a day, and you'll watch bacteria start to grow and you'll quickly realize that there's different kinds

of bacteria, but bacteria that clump up and stick together do better than the ones that don't. And so like in in moments when political vacuums occur, when and we do we like trumpet Trump has destroyed the existing political order, like you know, like straits of horror moves, Like there's been three assassination attempts. Now we don't even look up anymore.

Straits of horror moves are blocked. And that was like, that was one of the great chivaluth One of the great chivaliths of the last party system is that you know, line must go up. We can't, you know, we can't afford to let these straits. We can't afford to let these straits get blocked. You know, they're blocked now. So like what were we gonna do? All of these things that the last party system rested on, All the things that the ideology of the party system, the assumptions of the

party system rested on, are gone. So there's this giant vacuum, which means everything is up for grabs. Actually, you know, the crown is in the gutter for whoever will pick it up, and the people who are gonna pick it up are gonna be the people who are looking at the ground and not at the sky. You know what I mean.

fact currently. But that is another element where the compromises that were necessary in an era where there were a great many purple states are no longer necessary when many of the previous live issues have been kicked down to the state levels and more and more states are strong Republican or strong Democrat. Obviously, politics still goes on their states that are toss ups, but it does really focus

us on a number of issues. And Sandy, I'm curious, what is the modern day in your in your mind, what is the modern day version of slavery, Like not in a literal sense, like where do modern slaves live, but like, what is that sort of core defining issue that sort of sort of occupies the like I guess the kind of like moral weight.

It's being hoarded up by the class of people who live on, you know, live on the basis of exchange of capital. You know, I would even go so far as to say that if you're like living on, if you're living on, you're living on cash. You know, there's a really interesting thing that you know, every time you, every time you every time you convert a Treasury bill into cash, what you're doing is you're shorting the American economy.

You know, you're you're you're making a bet that this dollar is like having this one dollar in my head. You're it's an implicit bet that you know, at at the term of this the end of this Treasury bills, like you know, maturity curve, that the US Government's not gonna have the money to pay because we know what it is, and like slavery, is this position where you're constantly being forced to make this bad bet over and

over and over again. This is the difference between being a wealthy person and being a non wealthy person is having, you know, not being able to accrue capital assets.

but I don't mean it in that way. This is like, what are we going to do with this economic situation that we have created, where you know, our social mores tell us one thing, which is that men should be the single provider of a household, and women have this like you know seven inch cock one hundred and fifty thousand dollars six, you know, six to one aspirational idea

of what that should be their husband. Yet we have a political arrangement where there is consensus among the elite, you know, consensus among the elite that that same very same demographic of people are the people that should be shut out. And at the very same time, you know, these intermediate make work jobs because is a lot with

the administrative states. You know, we took a lot of lessons from fascism in the sense and kind of dumb lessons from fascism in the sense that you know, one of the things that Nazis did was they stimulated the economy by hiring, like hiring shitloads of government workers that didn't do anything but like type up requisition documents and send them to other offices whose like sole purpose was to read the requisition documents. And people got paid on

both sides to do that. It's the majority, And this is the thing I'm writing about, is we we live in a we live in a government, we live in a country. We live in a communist country where we live in a communist country that operates under this notion of like sort of free enterprises, you know, and you know as such is where it's like, okay, the idea of being your own operator, opening your own business is

the bow ideal of being an America. And yet we live in a country that's functionally made it illegal to do that. And uh, you know, the situation is reaching critical at this point. I read an articles is the average for the average person in the United States can't afford to date anymore. That's the this is odd. This is obviously the defining issue of the political moment. You get it, and you can tell it is by how

little anybody wants to talk about it. You know, you can look on Twitter and there's people that are willing to talk about it. But in the mainstream world is the you can almost always find what the defining issue of a political moment is by the what's the thing that no one is talking about? And the thing that no one's talking about is that Americans can't afford to live anymore.

people or that this issue gets solved. Okay, so that it's me that's that's the existential issue of the time, And it's actually just the slavery question again, you know, it's the same issue that it's I always considered that this thing about American history is that certain things never go away, and the slavery question is one of them. It just gets it just it just acquires different dress, you know.

one of those guys. But point is right, Uh, that's at least part of it. But so you have this kind of hysterical pearl clutching analysis about are a Muslims in charge of New York City, the place where nine to eleven happened. It's like, all right, okay, come on, understand. But on the other hand, there's a pretty interesting shift of effectively what they call like burn it down voters, right, people who are basically in the position of like, well,

I'm kind of screwed. I can't afford to live, so whatever, you know, let's flip the table if we can. Because you saw, you know, a shift and there were people who you know, have basically gone from you know, in kind of an odd you know, kind of like analog to you know, the politics of one hundred years ago, I guess ninety years ago. Right who have basically flip fought from you know, like MAGA to the left right kind of back and forth. It's not a huge trend,

but it has emerged. And it feels as if like the common thread between those two is not these kind of high minded arguments about like socialism or private property. Those issues feel dead, they're not living anymore. It is basically, can you at least lie to me and tell me you'll fix it, you know, can you make some sort of claim on this issue. And it's been interesting. I had a conversation with an older conservative prominent figure maybe

three four months ago. He's in his mid eighties, and he was saying, you know, I think that the country is so politically divided that no one's opinion changes because of the economy anymore. And I think that is a locally true statement. It's probably true for people his age, maybe people a little bit younger, but in both parties we've seen a strong generational breakdown. I mentioned earlier the

Israel gaza protests of two years ago. Obviously there is a similar breakdown happening on the right over the Iranian War. Both of these issues are approximately over our relationship to Israel. Now, that is a very important thing. I don't want to discard that. But functionally, what we are seeing is a generational breakdown. We are seeing the kind of old way

of being and the people it make sense for. To go back to your comment, Sandy, basically people who have the majority of their wealth and well being in the market right, that is where they support themselves from versus wage earners. And on either the left or the right, the kind of generational ladder has been broken. Israel, like I said, is the proximate cause that's still a very

live issue. I'm not trying to minimize it. But more functionally, it feels as if both major political blocks in America are sort of breaking down because effectively that the paradigm which made sense for those people has encountered such a high degree of kind of inherent contradictions that it is falling apart at the seams. Yeah, Sandy, do you read the telegram musings of our mutual friend George Bagbee.

definition anecdotes. You know, the people who waste twenty thousand dollars on a one week cruise up the Mississippi are probably not your most frugal individuals. And that's certainly true, yea.

But the interplay between the issues that these people are concerned about, you know, when they're talking about, like you know, they really feel passionately about, you know, putting Native Americans on currency and they really feel passionate about these kind of issues that to you know, anyone under the age of fifty just seem completely and totally irrelevant.

And Sandy, I've been talking in writing about the so called like woke right for like a year and a half now because I think it's a really interesting and when I say siop, I don't mean it was designed by the CIA, but it is a narrative that exists

to sell something to you. Now, functionally, what it is morphed into is this line being fed to the conservative movement, to a large portion of kind of evangelical America that basically says, your kids, anyone under thirty has been infiltrated by the so called woke right and the woke right, because of its name, are basically the same thing as the woke left. You hate them, you have to cut.

Sandy Pte, you and I have heard conversations confirming this right that any number of legacy institutions are basically undergoing a massive kind of internacing knife fight again nominally over Israel, and Israel is one hundred percent part of it. I'm not trying to minimize it. But it's sort of like Israel and the cost of living have become slavery for the modern times. There's an ironic as well as a literal reading of that. We'll get into.

want to attention to them in their old age. But one of them was the man who invented super packs. You know, like worked directly for this guy, and it gave me a lot of time spent in expensive restaurants, the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond. Listening to these guys talk, okay, And they all had affiliations Pritage Foundation, Kato, Claremont, the organizations that really became the nation intellectual elite of this fledgling organized conservative movement. And I think there is a

civil war there right now. But I don't think the civil war is going to resolve itself the way I faction wants it to, because of the obliteration, the obliteration, the obliterating uncertainty of you know, sort of what comes after Trump, and the fact that neither none of these organizations are because they organizations, they're largely the First of all, the first of all, they look out for themselves, and second of all, they look towards steering the American political current.

And I think that first that first impulse is going to get in the way of their ability to do the second. And I think, at least for the right, the only thing that's the way forward is that the conservative movement, what is conservative America, what is right wing America, is going to have to undergo like something of a transvaluation.

But really I would suggest that this involves something more along the lines of growing up, you know, you know what I mean, Like these these two or three institutions that have kept it owing through the first generation of its life. Their legitimacy is sputtering, and it's like they're you know, they're they're not doing well. And while they're still massively influential within a certain segment of the right wing, that segment of the right wing is getting smaller because

they're all dying. I think these organizations are fucked, and I think that the you know, the task before right wing America right now is to figure out not so much how to infiltrate, not so much how to cozy up to an infiltrate Heritage Foundation and CATO and Claremont and so on and so forth. And I say this some of my you know, some of my closest associates, some of the people that I really trust and I

really respect. With Matthew Peterson, for example, someone that I respect immensely is you know, he's a Publius fellow at Claremont. But I think I don't think maybe not these institutions won't go away totally, but they're going to They're going to have to transfer, they're gonna have to transform fundamentally because the movement that's grown up around them can no longer really afford to constrain itself to the issues that they guide, that they that they use as their guide.

And so what we're you know, what we're actually what we're really looking at, and it's just gonna happen over the course of the next four years is an actual total changing of the guard. And it's like I said, everything is up for grabs, you know, I don't know

how much. I don't know how much. I mean, if you're already, if you're already drawing a paycheck from one of these institutions, then there, then they're the outcome is important for you, But for the rest of it is I don't think they're where we should be looking anymore.

Everything that we didn't get that we wanted out of Trump is not so much a failure of the Trump administration so much as it is a failure of our ability to understand what the limitations of politic of political control actually are and the way and is with a way the current government sits, or at least our fascination with, you know what, pure executive power, because I actually think what's going to happen in the next phase of the of the American political system is going to actually the

relations and the power balance between the branches of government is probably going to shift back towards the legislature. Either it's going to do so gently or it's going to do so violently. And it's hard to tell at this

point which way it's going to go. But my thought actually is that MAGA and I'm sitting here looking at an article that I've written and I'm going to publish in the next serisode where I called MAGA a failed movement, but not a failed movement because it failed to achieve anything, but because its conditions for victory were beyond what was

actually possible. And I think what we're if there's a if there's a really clever thing that we could be looking at from now on as we could be looking at Congress's power of the purse, and we could be eyeballing that because Congress is power of the purse. Is where institution built is the only that or gay for pay with Silicon Valley venture capitalists are look to me as though they're the only mechanisms for you know, actually

funding institution building in the United States right now. So what we're going to start to see is networks of networks of dudes, primarily dudes that can manage to scrape together enough capital to outlay enough capital to bring in more capital and start to grow these new nest eggs. And how they choose to interface with one another is

going to be the determining factor. I can't really render a prediction as to what it's going to look like because you know, sand Duchism and Jeffersonianism and Calhounitism are all entwined around this one assumption, and the assumption is that it's not actually our job to predict where it's going to go. It's our job to make it go where we want it to go. That's also something we share with Marx the philosophers of the PASTI only interpreted history.

The point, however, is to change it from the twelve pecs on Fluyerbach. But that's I mean, if that's what I think. I mean. I think there's a tendency to want to say there's a reformation around the local and I think that's sometimes useful, sometimes not because people will tend to interpret that as being like go out and run for dogcatcher or something like that. I don't think that actually really helps very much. But I think groups like and I'll like ill, nay, I'll name drop one.

I think groups like the OGC are actually the future, and they will be how we end viduals choose to order their institutional and their social affiliations, and how those bodies a creep and interface with one another and start to actually, you know, produce this new ontological world. I call it the graph world. This is the thing that I'm working on over in my substack. That is, I mean, it's fundamentally unpredictable, but I think that that is the

way the future works. And the reason what you do, I was like, the reason I don't say push down to locals is because you know, OGC is a national organization. You know, how is the how what is you know, OGC is one of it's going to provide because I think for the average unaffiliated person, yes, straight back down to local, what can you see all around you is

what you've got. But how can you voluntarily enter? How can you voluntarily enter these associations with larger, larger groups that expand individual agency and how people choose to go about doing that is what the future of the is, what the future of you know, sort of politics in America is, And that comports relatively well with my assessment that the House of Representatives is going to be the thunderdome of the next of the sort of of of

the next political alignment, because the House of Representatives is very mutable and you can you can get networks of people into the House of Representatives rather than just want, you know, single absolutist paradigms. That was a long maybe not even very satisfactory, Anthor, but you brought san Batjeohn, So that's what.

amount of I guess you would say swing seats. That might be the language for it, which creates an interesting dynamic as well. Right if we're looking at the at the House of Representatives, was.

their you know, get their maybe get their wives. I would more recommend themselves on the school board. And that would be because I mean, we we don't know where this is going. But we do have a kind of an idea where it's going. It's going to go to chaos for a while, and the best way to mitigate chaos is to be in control of the levers that can beat back chaos.

tends to follow capital. And like the thing I would always always over and over and over and over again, what especially young white men in America need to be doing is getting the level of getting the capital resources available to them higher than they are right now because we have this. I mean, that's the fundamental unsolvable question.

And like Paul Fahrenheit, I was talking to Paul Fahnheit about this, and he was telling me he thinks that a lot of young men have looked towards politics as a way to express agency, specifically because the capital problem is so bad. And I thought about it and I was like, yeah, that makes sense to me, you know, And I don't. I mean, honestly, I don't know. I don't know the best way how to solve this. But my gut reaction is that you know, if you.

grab the fucking money is the number one. And like everybody, maybe we all look up in like two years or something like that and we reassess the political situation on the ground. It's going to continue to get bad. And I you know, like you know, like like Burton was talking about how like migration across the country. I've been on all four coasts of this country this year. It's bad. Like life in America is bad, right now, and yeah, you can look, but what are you going to do

with the sheriff's position right now? Is like Mike Wlas, what are you going to do with the state legislator position? State legislative position the Southern states? And at least it's going to nitch you about twenty six grand a year and it's going to cost you enough.

the money, get everything that you can do. And that is the kind of thing, the kind of pay where you become the patron and then people start looking to people start looking to you as the leader because if things are getting bad, and you know, we don't know what the gape of horror moves, what's going on with the gape of horror moves at this point, so you know,

who knows what the hell is going to happen? And it could just be that simple that somebody who has a farm and is growing and is growing food and can store it and can do we'll be able to feed people. But not only that, it's a whole lot easier to do if you have if you put yourself into a position where you control the bag.

And it's yeah, it's it's uh, whoever is most successful and most successful is going to be determined by who can aggregate enough resources to then be responsible for who puts research, who for who disperses resources. And that's the

you need to be. You need to be getting your There's a tendency to want to look at politics also and be like, well, if I get elected, if I get elected, to like get elected to a local government or statemom or something like that, I can I can point the money Spigott but that only really works the federal level because like state politics actually runs on like

skin type budgets most of the time. The State of Louisiana, we're like seventy four million dollars under, but you know over budget, you know forty million to that is just the city of New Orleans. And it's like getting elected dog catcher in city in New Orleans are gonna do anything for you right now. But if you can manage to, if you can manage to open a profitable business that brings money into New Orleans from elsewhere, then you're going

to become very fucking powerful right now. And then this is a yeah, if I were looking so again, I could bring it down to local. But it's like one of these things where one of the great American one

of the great American characteristics classically is mobility. And like we used to talk about dudes moving, We used to talk about dudes moving to where land was cheap, and I would instead of saying that, I would like, dude, look for places where you and your friends can impact the economy immediately and go there, or where's your shortest ramp to affecting the local economy, to affecting your own economic status. Go there, start, you know, go there, figure

out something with your buddies. And I can't tell you what to do because, first of all, not very good at doing it myself, and second because it's going to be very different depending on you know, depending on which place it is. That's obviously to me the best route to go. You know, I see, I see people were successful at it all the time, and I'm like, wow, that's I wish I had that ability. I am. I am myself. I am myself a permanent member of the intella,

of the of the intellectual class. The only the only thing I can do better than the average intellectual is grow okra. So they wouldn't be growing okra for one of you motherfuckers.

In my mind, the smart move now is to sort of hold your cards right, not to say that you don't talk about anything, you know, you make your position known, but wasting all of your resources now over something that I think is ultimately kind of fleeting as far as kind of political conversation, I think is particularly wise. I think Sandy's advice is well considered.

to be? And I don't hear when you're arguing over like I think, as Sandy talked about it, the let let me get his words right, when you get the million crowns project or the taxonomy can produce you know, uh, Charlie's taxonomy, the you that you're looking at what exists now. And I think Sandy did a pretty good job of talking about if you're talking about politics, you're talking about basically latching onto what is the present, and what is

the present is not is failing? Is if Trump's election, if Trump's two getting elected twice is people are ready for something different and trying to watching him in the second in the second term basically keep doing what has been done for one hundred years with some tweaks here and tweaks there, and yes, thank you for the border being closed. Can we close the northern one?

We're always this is you know, there's essentially there's there's two basic arguments here, and one of them is is that we can participate associatively with this collapsing system and hopefully that going to position as well enough in the next thing that we can legentically move through it, you know.

And Charlie's thing, on the other hand, is that, well, what we need to do is find the right arrangement of things that have already happened, and then we can figure out what's going to you know, what's going to move, how we're going to move forward from there, and how

we should arrange ourselves from here. But you know, like not seem to leave of all people has this concept of the you know, the triplet of historical opacity, which sort of boils down to history is only useful in so far history is only useful right up to the point where it's not and what we're actually faced with right now is this curious objective Fisher Ciciro with the past, where like whatever comes next, actually any association with the

past is necessarily a liability. So what the best thing you could be doing right now is building your own damn thing according to how you want to do it, and the arrangement of things. The arrangement of things will in the natural progress of time, shake itself out for you right now instead of like figuring out what you know based on the last ten goals, what the next nine to ten goal? What goals number nine to ten are going to be? You're worrying about what we want

our perfect society to look like. We need to be really concerned about what can we do in the next two months? What can we do in the next six months with the resources that we have? Now? What message do we want people to see that? You know, what is what is our what is our demonstrated action and

demonstrated motivations of this action? And in terms of doing so, you're you know, your only real collaborators can be people that you have fit networking with that you're they are not They're not biblically what are referred to as the strangers. So you know, so like your own in group is going to be the group with whom you conspire to

produce the outcomes that you want. And I don't know whether I don't know whether determining how much determining how much of ourselves we have to sacrifice to gain legitimacy within the current collapsing system, I don't know how much utility that is. And I also don't know how much utility trying to come up with exactly the schema that's going to that's going to be, you know, the silver bullet for the future is is is the right way to go? The right way to go is is like, Okay,

get up and go do something? Is the best thing to do. And it's sort of like where I'm sort of driving at whenever you look at like I think, you know, I hate I hate to name drop groups over and over again. I think that the group exit group. I think they're doing very They're doing a very good job.

I think OGC is doing a very good job. I usually I actually don't even mind that OGC is like bickering at one another, because to me, this is sort of kind of healthy as long as there's some sort of synthesis that comes out of it, that's it's fine, This is exactly what you know needs to be happening. But this idea that we this idea that we need to like worry about the MAGA coalition or worry about the right, or worry about Twitter and online politics and everything.

Now that's all poof's gone. That was the you know, that was the political or that was the political and the real arrangement of the last decade. But we're absolutely seeing the collapse of it's legitimacy right now, and everybody needs to keep keep their eye on the ball.

Was mad that other people can see the disagreements. Okay, then we need to have a way for the disagreements to not be seen, you know.