The Josh Neal Episodes

few weeks called Understanding Conspiracy Theories. But yeah, for people who don't know me, I've been i would say, in the radical righte with my name and face out there since twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen. I made the switch. I think, like for a lot of people I know, we were hardcore Trumpists, like very libertarian, but like on that cusp of well what used to be called the liberty, like the libertarian to a right pipeline. And so I was

one of those guys. And when when the Seria strikes happened, that's when I started to look away from Trump and start looking to other things. And then in twenty seventeen, obviously that was the ault right. So for people who don't know me, that's my background.

great guy. But I got docked as a result of getting involved with a lot of those people. And I had already I came into the alt right because I have a background in psychology, maybe you guessed from the title of the book, and I went you know, I didn't go to the doctoral direction because the kinds of questions I was interested in were more political and philosophical than like strictly speaking about mental health or whatever social

science research I guess on today. So I was already working on some stuff observations I had over the years. But it was really like getting into the radical right was like having the veil pulled away from your eyes entirely so, and then getting docked as a result of that kind of made me have to confront some kind of realities. Like when I got into it, I was like, oh, well, Nazis, that's not a real thing. That's just like a libtard fantasy.

And you know, by and large it's not you know, it's not like there's a well organized, politically active machine that has political, cultural material resources, things like that. Obviously that's not happening, but nonetheless there are people who espouse those views, and they range from totally harmless, tepid, you know, contributing members of society who just want the trains to run on time, and on the other end are actual degenerates.

People you wouldn't want to associate yourself with. The reality. I think, as most people probably know, is that really is an extreme, heavily ostracized minority, not just by polite society, but even in these kinds of circles. You know, I do think we do a really good job of self policing, maybe to our detriment, because obviously the left doesn't do

that at all. They just set their freaks loose. So when I came out of that, I felt like I had some unique things to say about what was wrong with American politics, left right and center, and so I kind of wrote the book imagining I'm holding someone's hand through a red pill process a very you know, not like cutesy memes and gifts like this is a little

bit more. You're gonna have to take some breaks, You have to go back to the corner and have them you know, fucking whatever those things in boxing that they put when you get when you start developing the mouses, they put that huge fucking like think or compress on your head like this is a red pill like that,

but you'll need the compress and everything. So it starts off talking about media control, myth the mythological narrativizing as the framework people should be thinking about rather than like ideology or so on and so forth. And so I carry people through this, you know, here's what's you know, here's what myth is. Here's like how this kind of psychological framework is influencing your decision making, so on and so forth. And I give actual lots of citations to that.

And then obviously going of the media. You know, this is because the basic thesis of the book is it's not an original idea. I just really kind of beat the hell out of it over the course of the book. Is that the liberal establishment is genuinely where political violence originates from. Whether it's you know, forced integration by gun by military, whether it's Antifa in the streets, which is not so much a thing right now, whether it's journalists going after you wait, oh yes, right, just yeah, I

don't want to speak too soon, knock on wood. So getting people to think, which is very easy if you're talking to conservatives, because they already hate the government, and they hated the government for like one hundred and fifty three hundred years. The Americans have just always hated the government, and so it's very easy to be like, well, here's here's this persecutory framework, but you have to adjust some of the variables because obviously Connink runs on his own

persecutory framework and it's false, as we all know. So that's the basic thesis, and then I try to explain how that is, and in some cases it's talking about literally I was writing this during twenty twenty, so every week i'm like kind of pseudo like like almost like a historian of it, like an ancient Roman historian, like there were this many black people on the street this day,

and they busted this many heads or whatever. So it's half like okay, philosophical analysis, but also half like detailing the actual political violence that was happening at that time. I actually think it made it even more impactful because it's like here's theoretical stuff, here's some nice sise sources and citations. And then also, here's the video of a black guy stomping on someone's head until they're bleeding all over the place. Obviously that's not what's in the book.

And then taking these people, you know, well, here's what's wrong with the left wing in America, here's what's wrong with the centrism, liberalism it kind of informally, and then what's wrong with the right, And a lot of it relies very heavily on kind of classical psychoanalytic theories, but it's not all psychoanalysis, and as Mike likes to say,

the book does take Freud back for the right. So I mean, if you have if you're allergic to or sensitive to Freud, and obviously I understand why people would be. It's very much like a different spin on kind of a familiar story.

around and see exactly what's happening out here. But one of the things that I really been looking at lately is individualism. And I think it's hard to miss that this was. Individualism was a big part of the founding of this country. You can see it in the founding documents. People will argue that, sure, you know there was individual people talked about individual rights, but there was collectives and everything.

Well sure, okay, yeah, there were collectives and everything, but everything always moves left, it seems, so you you sort of knew that it wasn't going to last anyone who you could look at you you know things, things don't get better until they get really, really, really really bad. And so there's a section in the book where you talk about is after the narrative, part about the narrative,

it where it's individualism, anarchism, and I think sociopathy. So can we get a little bit into you know, like what you see as when it comes to individualism, is that what you see is that is that what you see this society and this culture being all about.

considerations and obligations and duties and belongingness and embeddedness. That is the background of all this cool, sexy enlightenment liberal stuff that we started doing over the last couple hundred years. There was a story in the news not too long ago, maybe a couple of years ago, someone was trying to get Immanuel count canceled because they found his like private correspondences where he just talks about racism and hating women

and stuff like that. And it's like, none of these people it was just a foregone conclusion that that that whatever they theorized was occurring in a homogeneous European Christian context. So same thing with being an individual. You still had responsibilities and obligations and duties and and and other things. Your individualism was still curtailed by larger social forces, the church, the different political organizations, so and so forth at that time,

and so you still had to fit in society. But today it's really the opposite. Society is now increasingly bending to accommodate the most extreme individual people who can collectivize and then create this political edifice that that makes the rest of us conform to them. Where I work, you know, I had to accommodate a gender, non whatever kind of person, and you know that's their individualism kind of like having

this warping effect on the social fields around them. Like, well, suddenly the rest of us are caught in your madness, And that's just part of the equation you said before you kind of like hinted at the moldbug line about you know, Cthulhu always swimming left. I think that's obviously because technology has this corrosive effect on social norms and morera's the ultimate consequence or outcome of which is this kind of radical liberation from all this social embeddedness going on.

So today, to be an individual is I mean, I'm not the first person to say this. Your audience hopefully very well understands this. To be an individual today is unlike any probably any kind of person that has ever

existed in human history. To the point I remember I for a short spell, I was a teacher, the university teacher, and I remember telling my students like ten years ago, like because the hot question I would always get day one, like intro psychology classes, like okay, professor deets, what's up with all these trans folks?

just going to keep bringing new manifestations of this. So with regards to the title of that section, Individualism and Sociopathy, the argument I make said, effectively, to be like an entrepreneur, you know, the Fu Coodian self entrepreneur, to be this neoliberal person, to be an American you know extensive air quotes, is to be this radically self constructed person with like

no predecessor, no context, no pretext. It's solipsism. I mean, it's every nasty word you've ever heard in a philosophy class, but ultimately it's pathological.

That's Atlanticist philosophy. Turn of the twentieth century. American and Englishmen are looking out at the world and they're seeing what we've come to inherit and they're like, oh my god, what what the hell do we do about all this?

And I think there was some kind of attempt to shepherd in a new vision of the individual that could, you know, protect the white race, to protect white people, to protect America, to protect England, the British Isles, to protect political sovereignty in European nations, so on, to protect the Constitution. I mean, these these things are all synonymous, really,

It's not like they're separate things. If you want to protect the Constitution, if you want to say of America, if you want to do the North I almost had Norman Rockwell, if you to the George Lincoln Rockwell thing, Well, it's all the same thing. But uh yeah, So as far as that post war aspect of that, I look at the post war order, and this is an argument

I'm making my upcoming book. There was a slur that was very common at that time used by effectively the radical right whenever they would talk about the liberal consensus, you know, they'd talk about, well, that's that's what they

would call them. It was this consensus view, and it had a kind of derogatory uh kind of like proto libtard, like if you were the consensus, your your you were brainwashed, you were just spouting kind of like this new fangled liberal social ideology that had no popularity really or history

prior to the Second World War. So this consensus was the meeting of you know, the dying Atlantis sist Empire and this surge of European migration into the West, of a very particular type of European from Russia, maybe the Pale somewhere over there, and they met in the middle.

The West had to be saved. We you know, the whole European experiment, like twentieth century is like this great tragedy of us, just like figuring out new ways to just roast each other, and by the middle of the twentieth century, how many of us are left, not a

lot of the good ones. So it's this waning Western empire that's bringing in a lot of this well as we know now ex Bolshevist you know, or descended from Bolshevist types who came in wanted to find a place in America, and they found flattering ways to reinforce the waning American liberal ideology in a way that made sense post you know, San Francis to speak, to invoke him one more time, post this managerial revolution, this mass managerial revolution.

So you know, there's a lot of ideas and concepts that emerged at that time that are not necessarily related. Maybe if you tried to do a genealogy and try to connect these things, like Glenn Beck on Fox News with his whiteboard, maybe you couldn't do that. But nonetheless they're all talking about the same goal. I invoked Fuko before the Entrepreneur of the Self, his idea of neoliberalism.

This is the new American economic policy post World War Two, which the major emphasis of which was about this internal kind of psychic development that was supposed to be this you know, essential to unlocking this American economic engine to fulfilling you know, the old American idea, but in a new way, uh, in this new technocratic society. And so my inherited wisdom. You know, I'm a little bit younger than you. I'm still in my thirties. I had my

birthday earlier this week. The things I was told growing up, that we're good pieces of advice, follow your dreams, do it makes you happy. This is like the head smashed in, you know, inherited version of of like the Fucodian ideas, like you can liberate yourself and you can be anything that you want, and all of this is like a

radical political act, but it's also American and bubblah. So I think it's specifically and obviously the purpose of this consensus being, you know, how do we manage the existing populations while we get this new migratory program in place. So I feel like that individualism not to get like crazy tinfoil hat is not like an intentional thing that was done, like we're going to ameliorate or we're gonna

anesthetize people while we start moving infinity Africans around. I think it was kind of a natural development, but the consequences obviously for us have been terrible.

It's what the military is now. I mean, if you go to the Navy's website, it will say that they are there to protect the the you know, the sea lanes for commerce in the world, you know, so that

it can move. And yeah, so I was thinking you were One of the things that you had mentioned was how even with the individualism of the old, of the previous to what we're dealing with now, when you had church, when you had family structure, when you had a lot of things to keep you grounded, to keep you as part of a tight knit I think our our reno

return to the strong gods something like that. Yeah, and that's that's what That's what I was thinking the whole time, was the goal of crushing you know, like the Italian American society and mutual aid societies, churches, and the family is to turn everybody into this radical kind of monetary instrument.

of shit. I'm trying to answer them as I'm listening to you, like, there's always been an economic component of society. So fundamentally, how is this different, right, Because that's probably what someone who's listening to you and disagrees with you and me might say, And it's the fundamentally, it's a

qualitative difference more than anything else. One of the things I was thinking of that I think is a really good example of what you're talking about, a contempt a modern phenomenon is exactly how the red pill manisphere or community has ended up like this year, where if you listen to or read people in these communities talk about specifically, men talk about, you know, why they fail with women, or why feminism sucks, or why the world has given

them a raw deal, so on and so forth. Is they start talking about, like they roll out their laundry list of things that they expect the woman to bring, because it's a it's a tit for tat, you know, I want to solve the free loader problem. You know, all of these things where well she doesn't you know, if she doesn't cook and do this and that and have one hundred and seventy thousand dollars or four or

one k and blah blah blah blah. It's like, for one thing, it's very feminine because like the whole transactional thing was like trying to solve the native sexual inequalities between men and women and trying to solve like all of these complex social problems fertility, pair bonding, alleviating tribal conflicts, ameliorating tribal conflicts, so on and so forth.

qualitative difference. But now that it's also I was going to say this before, it's also much more egotistical, and

we might as well say egotistical pejoratively egotism. I mean we might as well say when I really, when I talk about individualism in the book, it's probably better to say egotism and extreme radical egotism, which is all about, well, ultimately like you're not really interfacing with direct reality because you're interfacing first with this buffer of your own self aggrandizing bullshit, which the contemporary version of individualism is just

like constantly throwing It's like a guy just always throwing gasoline on the fire so you can come up with ever more insane cope, like this guy Will Stancil on Twitter. I don't know if you've been watching him. It's like it's like we're going on a full business week of this and all you're watching is just egotism.

distrust of large groups. We have distrust of things that we can't see, smell, taste, touch, hold a cant accountable, so on and so forth, for better or for worse, and gosh, I don't know where my brain is today. But anyway, So the point about anarchism, right, so it's it's a little tougher for conservatives, or maybe it's a little easier for conservatives. That's what I was getting at.

But nonetheless, like political anarchism, it's it's distinct from individualism, and that I think it is more specifically about kind of you know, the Ed Dutton mutational loads, spiteful, mutant, sexual, deviant situation. Like at bottom, it seems to me that anarchism politically is just about protection of I don't know what words I can use on your show. I don't care the common pizza types. Right, So it's like it's effectively like a political organization for pedophiles. I don't think

there's anything more meaningful to anarchism about that. But then again again it's like, well, how do you even have like a political block of pedophiles be party participating in your democratic society. Well, I think that you have this

continual radical liberation. I don't know if individualism is related to this, but certainly the criminal as being elevated, you know, into a higher moral position than you know, people who enforced the law or people who simply follow the law might not be related to individualism per se, but it's you know, this cascading decay of American society.

disint turning nuns and priests. But when you look at a society where basically the people in charge are off doing whatever they're doing, like you were just mentioning, but they're allowing they can only get away with that, doing what they're doing by unleashing the worst dregs of society upon the good people and telling the good people they

can't protect themselves from the dregs of society. And then if the drugs of society do something really horrible, they don't even just like this cop that just these cops that got jumped in New York a couple of days ago, and they were the people who did it. Migrants illegals were released on wind, noobail. It's all a tool, and it's anarchy for some and not for others, and definitely not the kind of anarchy that anarcho capital, a narcho capitalist one, at least most of them.

on the normal social institutions around us. That's really what anarchism tends to be a lot of times. It's it's that like lack of conformism, like that thoughtless conformism. I just go to church because it's because it's there, and I just love Jesus because that's what I do. Right

like this, you're not even contemplating on it. But as far as like individualism and like what are the political consequences of that, well, I think by and large, I think the two biggest outcomes are depoliticization, right, because what if you're an egotist. The kind of persuasive filter that ultimately matters is like, oh, does this titillate me, does this interest me? Does this speak to me? Does this have an immediate application to my my life world as

I perceive it? Whereas like, really political action is like extroverted. It's about looking at other people, looking at the problems of other people in society. It's fundamentally, I mean, real politics is extraversion. I don't want I don't want to use psychiatric language and abuse it that way. You know

what I mean, You're not in an agreement. So on one hand it's it's depoliticization, and then obviously on the other hand it's like it's extreme, well not just identity politics you could say would be part of it, maybe counterintuitively, but also like single issue voting, like all this wacky stuff like I only care about voting laws or whatever.

I mean, as opposed to like nationalist folkish politics, where it's like, well, everything is a political question, everything has to be addressed politically, and we're going to have a vehicle to put people in those places to do that, right, like the individuals who are part of the collective and see them as selves as such and then can function

as individuals in service of the collective. You know, that's like again part of maybe that's why it's better to say egotism, because ultimately being an individual is a good thing. It's who we are, it's our tradition. We couldn't really abandon it if we tried, and so fundamentally, what's different is this profoundly psychological dimension to modern life. You have

to have justifications for everything. You know, everything's personalized. You're encouraged to make everything your self, and that for a lot of people that means they're politics too, which is not always a good thing.

It's the meme of Rome falling, and you know the guy saying, oh, how does this affect me personally?

the nas bole thing was popular. And the reason why like people like Keith Woods and whoever are constantly fighting these accusations of communism is because I think the the aspect of Western political society, which is kind of kind of like libertarians, but not not strictly limited to them. The kinds that think of well, they think of America. What makes America great is its economy. So ultimately there's

this extreme economic preference or privilege over privileging. But they look at like Adam Smith, and they look at how we solved the issues of property in the Western canon as being like definitive to who we are. And you know, I have a different temperament I actually, I mean outside of like toothbrushes and things like that, I kind of don't care so much about property. You kind of figured those things out, like I don't know, maybe because I in another life I was a musician.

have terrorism there. So anyway, but then what did I what do you find when you go into his tweets open borders, free trade, and then you know, well, do you feel the same way about Israel. I mean, so it's like these libertarian types, they're just oh, well, yeah, if I say we shouldn't have open borders, that means that I worship the border patrol, and that means that I'm a boot liquor whatever did I.

define what is mine. I mean, ultimately, in a folkish setting, these questions answered themselves right, Like my if I leave my shirt at my brother's place, like there's not going to be World War three because my property, he's holding my property. It's like it's whatever, I'll see him next week.

It's not the end of the world. Because I think also there's a certain assumption in a folkish, nationalistic America first society of like, hey man, I love you, you know, like we're related to each other, we come from the same place, probably even literally, but metaphorically, you know, in terms of the grand myth man myths that animate our lives, like we're the same and these types of nerdish economic questions which do need to be solved and at complex societies,

obviously you need to think about those kinds of things. But it's a fixation. It has a lot to do with paranoia, I think all of Once we start highlighting these psychological factors, the types of people become very clear who they are.

social and psychopath. Here, sociopath should be understood as an individual with an impoverished social feeling, often exhibited by the following characteristics impulsivity, weak ego defenses, narcissism, irresponsibility, callousness, and attachment related anxiety.

the social unit we call the family. Children grow up with fewer resources. Also think of like the crazy psychiatry fads and child rearing fads over the last hundred years. Each one's kind of like perverse and dysfunctional in his own unique way from the one that came before it. So like, for example, like kids don't sleep with their parents. You know, you don't nurse the children, you don't you

intentionally ignore the children. And some of these have caveats like it's appropriate at certain times, under certain conditions for certain people, et cetera, et cetera. But that's not how America works, that's not how marketing works. And an idea is brought to people and we try to do this one size fits all thing, which is not good. You

get people with these attachment related disorders. Fundamentally, what that means is while they didn't spend a lot of physical time with mom and dad, they are on a hormonal, neurological probably other levels, malnourished, underdeveloped, and there's a very limited window that infants and small children have to get

these resources, especially when it comes to social development. It's really like age five, age six, and the trend over the last fifteen years is to shove as many screens and images and highly stimulating things at ever younger children, so they're not socializing with people anyway. Then they go through a crazy education system that's racially diverse, and blah blah blah blah blah. What do you have. You have people who don't know how to develop relationships, who don't

actually on the structural level of their brain. They can't look at you and see you as a person with a soul like that. They need to respect the dignity of like all of these things that are kind of I think second nature to people who maybe are older, grew up with a different way of life, had more like put in more rounds interacting with people. So you have this mass like phenomenon of kind of like an artificial sociopathy. People are constantly to invoke the transactional thing

from earlier. They're constantly looking at other people as means to some other end. They are in a fundamentally exploitative mode of social interaction, and they are themselves very distressed and suffering. Often to the point of some kind of addiction or otherwise impairment, fixation, fetish, what have you? Sex, politics, food, tattoos, all of the above the thing. And I'll close it off on this. I've got gab fever all night. I apologize, Like,

like I said, I'm a younger guy. I turned thirty eight. It was very common still is, but when I was younger, like normal millennial discourse is is this kind of neurotic of like am I normal? Can you? Can you affirm that I'm normal? Are you secretly a sociopath? This paranoia of like what laundry list of mental disorders do you have? How quickly can I find it out? And then what

are we going to do about it? You know? For some people will be like, let me find out so I can avoid you, and for other people it's like, let me find out so that I can never get away from you, right Like anyway, point being the sociopathy like is just the norm almost.

anything else. Like you are atomized. You're one node, but all of the circuitry around you has been like smashed with ambers, so you can't plug into the larger network. And that's very pernicious. I mean, ultimately, with that like type of lot, the question like how does this affect you personally? Like that is a persecutor's logic. That is, someone who that's friend enemy stuff like I don't talk to you or my brother or my friend or my

neighbor like that. I get involved because I realized that we're part of the same thing, and there's not really a conflict or a contradiction between him as an individual and the social ecology that he's plugged into like this is a big problem with libertarians too, collectivism. Collectivism is like one of these still remaining boogie words in politics, and they only really see it with libertarians. But it's like it's again, it's it has to do with egotism, right,

because there are always collectives. The type of social activity is ultimately a collectivist activity. So I mean all this spoils down to that. Jefferson Lee would say, as nationalists, the economic or the the the unit of society is actually the nation itself, the people, right. But in neoliberal society, it's just you, not even your kids, not even your grandparents unless they want to blame you for things, shame you for things.

vote for that. If it's a vote for war, everyone is going to you know, there's going to be very few people who are going to to abstain or even say no. It's always issues that where it's like, oh, well it's like to like to financial systems or the two competing financial systems. Well, no, we're not going to cut taxes now. Yes, we're going to cut taxes now.

It always seems to be like the things that do cause the most control or cause the most damage to the system and the people financially and bodily, war sending kids off to war for nothing. Those are right down the middle. Okay, everything's good, we've given you the you're allowed to fight about this here. But it's the whole elite theory thing too. You do have some people who get together, five hundred and thirty five of them, and then you know, stretch it out a little bit from there,

who agree on things. But when everyone is a radical individual, when everybody's a neoliberal individual, getting groups to get together to possibly push back or to even supplant what's existing makes it impossible. It's like they it's like they designed the perfect system. If it was a hydrae, you wouldn't even know where to start cutting off heads because yeah, yeah, yeah,

so yeah. The individualism thing also is a great tool for them because there hundred and fifty million people can't organize against what is essentially probably what two thousand.

factors into my ultimate kind of analytical process. Not to say it's unimportant, because it's you know it, it's explicitly on a psychological battlefield that what you just said is being waged, right, is by putting you into just your body and blocking off all of the literally social resources that make us who we are, Like just on the small level, or been like with the group friends and then the chat ended or the friend group fell apart, or maybe you just like checked out for a little

while and you felt like dumber or like less sharp or less on your less like you normally are, because actually you're like plugged, You're like plugged into the Avengers. Like Okay, now I have plus fifteen IQ points because the guy next to me is a super genius and I've absorbed all of his knowledge, right, So, like, so much of what makes us great, even as individuals, are

the relations that we have. And to impose this program of individualism is to impose this program of ultimately kind of psychologism, which makes us all prisoners of our own fears and anxieties, except for those of you know, people in the audience who are extroverts and not neurotic. You know, I hate you. I hope you have a great life, but I hate you the rest of us. You know, it's it's this I'm imagining, like the guy on the train throwing the coal into the into the oven or whatever.

Like you've just got it. It's just endless coal. You can just kind of keep like psychologically, you just have continual resources to harm yourself because life is difficult. Being in the body is weird. Nobody gets it right, But we all come from crazy circumstances. And there's a criminal, exploitative class at the top of everything. So it's not exactly you know, rosy pictures, rainbows things like that. However,

there's no devil an angel. I just do like to emphasize that, you know, this is a program of containment. These are the parameters through which that gets achieved. And so yeah, like if you can't get a couple of people together to flyer or rally or protest or pass around some kind of petition, I mean those first barriers,

and they're the most important bearers. A lot of the times are fundamentally psychological, Like seeing myself as a unit with Peter r. Kenonia's right, Like that's a psychological hurdle that you have to clear, not expecting. There's the joke about like you know the guy who like meets hangs out with his cousin from like Norway or Denmark and then gets a venmo for like seventy eight cents because of half of the coffee you drink on the way

to work together. Like that kind of like tit for tat am I going to get everything out of Peter that Peter is getting out of me. Like that's not a normal response. If we're a family of folk, we think, okay, we're gonna work all this out together. So yeah, I feel like I'm repeating myself a little bit, but I'll leave it a bet.

I say, this is someone who suffers it. Right, Like, if you want to again, on psychological terms, what is acophobia, it's high trade openness. Right, you are a novelty oriented person. You buy your temperament, experience lower levels of disgust at unfamiliar or things that would typically that trigger discust. Right, feel less discussed, You're more inclined to experiment, try new things. You're more novelty seeking. You're probably less neurotic neurotic, meaning

the intensity of negative emotions that you experienced. Like sometimes we think of neuroticism as just like self attacking, but it's more like how hot does the engine get when you're stressed? And if you're very neurotic, well, it gets very hot, very quickly, and it takes you a very long time or maybe never to totally decompress, not literally never. That would be like a very extreme case. Comorbidity is up to you, huh, but a certain type. But it's

also of the condition that we've inherited. Especially I want to emphasize this, it's technologically facilitated. It is absolutely like you would not see the kind of Jesus Christ get me if there was not an ease of the ability to get the fuck out of town. So, you know, travel being the way that it is, these things encourage psychological tendencies that have pros and con You know, I love Peter Gabriel's album that's also his like I'm a

third worldist, you know, screw Whitey album. But it's great and he's has a great ensemble of musicians and he's playing this kind of world style and it's interesting and it's cool, but you can't live there and uh yeah,

I mean the flip side, I guess is auchophelia. And this might be like the conservative disease of too much veneration of tradition and too much kind of well to be crass boot licking, right, like the extreme like a peliac is effectively the boot licker, and the extreme likegophobic, is going to be the you know, the race trader or just just the trader.

continuing a tradition and continuing continue well a legacy. And I think it's really interesting to find out that when you start talking about that to people and you're like, you know, it's not too late to start do that. Now, find a plot of land, find something, start building, you know, start living, you know, as Thomas seven seven seven says, start living historically and teaching, you know, teaching your progeny

how to do that. And the amount of pushback that you can get from get from talking like that is just you know, what if I want my kid, what if my kid meets somebody you know from another state, you know, and they want to get married with someone from another state, Well, he or she can move there, you know, could move there if you have ten if you have ten acres, if you have twenty acres, Why

would you want him to go buy a house. Just build a house on the property and you know, stay there and you know, build something and build a legacy of some sort when you when you look at Monticello and Mount Vernon in places like that, I mean, those were supposed to be legacies, and now they're museums. And I think Monticello is now the museums awoke of some sort.

And I don't think that's aichophelia. I think that's just the way people have lived and kept order within society for hundreds and hundreds of years until until we this technological revolution, but also this individual revolution.

or humorously enough, is like the opposite. You know, the thing that they're instituting is very much what they're accusing us of trying to promote. I would just say one thing. I mean again, it's also part of the political program. If you de industrialize major parts of the country, it becomes a less attractive place to live. And what happens to the people there. They get fat, they become addicts, they die early, They beat the shit out of their

kids and their wives, They fucking kill people. They turned the local law enforcement into just bullshit, They turned the court system into everything decays, and young people grew up, and that young people who naturally have an inclination to explore and persevere and test boundaries and are very much bored with the familiar. Actually, in the climate that we're in, what else are they supposed to feel when they look at the town they grew up in and know people

either leave or they die. That's you know, that's that's a political program. And that's also something I think people don't understand all that. Well.

But the I'm talking to a friend of mine and saying how important family is, like, well, my parents were shiit my you know, my mother, my mother was a piece of shit. And it's like, well, why why do you think there was some kind of external circumstance. Do you think they grew up in a in a society that gave them this mentality that just poison their food, did all this stuff to them that made them become become like that? You know, it can all start with you, And I mean that's yeah.

to understand them in a more human way. I look back on my parent parents, and of all the things I'm dissatisfied with now as an adult, I think back, well, when they were my age, well, they probably thought the whole world was like constantly on the precipice of nuclear abomination, you know, like they row They really thought that right for decades, they really thought that it was a real thing. And before that everyone they knew had fucking pieces of

them blown off in Vietnam or Korea or w W two. Uh. And before that, maybe they grew up poor, and maybe their parents lived through the there lived through the Great Depression. Maybe they were immigrants and they came here and they had all kinds of like generally speaking, you know, like when when lefties talked about how awful and brutish and violent and terrible history has been, they're right, it's it's a it's a rough go.

One hundred years ago, there was no there was no idea of let kids be kids. Oh don't you know, don't give little timmy too much homework. There was that idea did not exist. Turn of the century. Twentieth century British psychiatry was telling parents just short of beat your kids, it's good for them.

read your substacle about it that UNS picked up. I was, you come at it from a completely different angle than most people. Most people are like here, You're coming at it from actually a historical angle and comparing it to something that's happened in the past. So what was what was your reaction the first time you heard the term woke right?

where the culture was moving. And you know, I wasn't alt right or a nationalist or anything until after basically Election Day twenty sixteen, but I was online and I followed all the memes. I followed all the stuff that kind of trickled upwards to YouTube and like Stefan Molyneux and people like that and or Scott Adams, and so

I remember the anti SJW moment. I guess some people who were plugged into gamer gate would say, you know, it had something to do with that too, And so I remember, like for a couple of years, like twenty ten to twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, like social justice, social justice sat, social justice Warrior. And then the moment that there was the Trump right came in and was starting to really be effective pushing back against all of the

crazy late Obama era politics. Suddenly that got turned around on people like me who were just like, you know, I thought I was just being like a rational, normal person, like enormy with like my head on a swivel. But now suddenly it's like, oh, now we're going to turn this this rhetoric back around on you, because now we've got to control you, like like we've scapegoaded all these people who are not out and now you're the problem,

and so we're gonna throw it at you. So it made me think of when SJW was was turned on

the right wing. And so my first thought after that, or my second thought, I guess, was just like, Okay, this is just a slur, Like this is very obviously a smear to again kind of go after the harder wing of the Trump right, but also to go after like real nationalists, real identitarians, or real conservatives, real Christians, basically people with a spine and the backbone who are willing to call a spade a spade and I'm not going to play euphemistic word games and step around the

thorny issues. So those were my first thoughts, and then I also kind of thought it wouldn't stick. But he but James Lindsay has like really like a dog with a bone, he just keeps He's kept putting it back out there to the point where he starts building like

a coalition with that the triggeronometry people. And then when that I guess this would have been a week ago, maybe a week in a day, when that clip went on Twitter, like there's a light bulb moment, I was like, Oh, this is because he actually explained what he meant by woke right. He gave this whole sort of counter narrative against our worldview. And I was like, oh, I know what you're doing now, Like you're actually trying to put

forth this other worldview and this this is familiar. I've seen this movie before.

that's what I saw. It's like, okay, so this is like IDW adjacent you know, intellectual dork web people adjacent who And the first thing I thought was Lindsey, he's just grasping because he's kind of irrelevant. He's blown his load on what he does. Okay, you explain to a bunch of people who are too you know, are too offended by Paul Gottfried to go read what he wrote twenty five years ago where he could tell you exactly what this whole woke stuff is. And he was a

prophet back then, and he's writing two right wingers. But you know, right wingers always want the approval of the left. They don't want the approval of anybody to their right, because you know that those are just Nazis. But yeah, that was the thing that it was. These the those left, the left left me people. You cannot entertain them, you cannot give them the time of day, you cannot platform them. They will always stab you in the back I don't

how the fuck people don't know this. I did that with somebody with like one specific person in the past, one specific person I did that with in my libertarian days, and I learned deleted all those episodes, repented, and it's like, it's not going to happen if I have a leftist on, It's going to be a leftist who's not here to talk about leftism or rightism. They're an expert on like Ukraine or something like that. You know, So, isn't it weird? Isn't it weird that it's the left left? The left

left us? Guys?

need you anymore. So these are not agency. These are not people with agency, Like they didn't come to this Eureka moment where they suddenly realized that that they were, you know, on the wrong side of history or whatever. So and they also like don't have any self reflective ability either. They just they think that they were always in the right and you know, they were always morally correct, not politically right, and that the left just got too wacky.

But really what happened was the left, you know left progressive liberal is and had somewhere else who wanted to go, had scheduled to keep up with We got to get to the next stop. We have to wage the next battle in the culture war. And and now you know, the left left me. Those people are now just they're the latest scapegoats. And that's kind of what like the same thing with the SJW thing. It's like, Okay, clearly

Trump comes in, the political culture is different. We need somebody to hold the bag for us, and we'll dump it on BuzzFeed, We'll dump it on Vox, will dump it on blue haired crazies, We'll dump it on people that are not useful to us anymore. And that's the same thing with woke. It's like, okays, as people are saying on Twitter, you know, woke was defeated at the ballot box. I don't asterisk asterisk, I don't totally condone that statement, but just for the sake of conversation, you know,

things are different and some people have to go. The regime has to kind of cut some dead weight in order to pivot whatever is going to happen over the next four years. It has to do something different, and that means getting rid of things that don't work anymore. And so this woke left thing is just it's now a scapegoat that lots of people in the establishment are, whether cynically or honestly or whatever, are willing to dispose of and maybe even look at a little bit critically,

so they can sacrifice that. Now you can call the new enemies, which is people like us, people who put Trump in office, people who liked Project twenty twenty five, so on and so forth, people who are supporting Daniel Penny. By the way, he just beat another count today. So we need to be dealt with, and they've got this convenient tool. Just as a final thought, is I kind of admire the way that the system really can repurpose everything that happens, Like they can turn a bad thing

into a good thing. So like Woke was this horse that they rode into or wrote in, you know, rode into power on and then it became something that was not feasible for them anymore or problematic, but it still has a use for them. It's still so it's still a cudgel they can beat us with. So I just I think there's something kind of darkly funny about that. But yeah, those are my thoughts.

you're going somewhere with it. If it's not like you're seizing power and saying stop, this is who we are. We're we're tradcath we're you know, right, we're right wingers, where national socialists, whatever the fuck it is. If you're not if you're not taking power to say this is where if you're looking at a path going forward, you're a liberal. You're trying, you're trying to move in a direction to make things better and better and better. No,

there's already some that's not the goal of politics. That should be like your personal life. That should be your church life. Maybe your church wants to has goals, but your politics can't have goals. Your politics have to be something that stays in one place and protects you so that you and it's not trying to move you anywhere. Because if it's trying to move you somewhere, you have

to go with it. If you don't go with it, if you decide to go with it, now you're on the path of it going left or right or everywhere, and you're basically screwed.

the post war consensus. And James Lindsay on his recent Trigonometry appearance, and this I considered to be a major own goal, like a crazy faux pas. He went ahead and he basically spilled the beans on our worldview, and he said it in half the time it takes us to say it. He said it maybe more articulately than a lot of us can say it. He named a lot of the players involved. I mean, he showed all

of the receipts. It was really kind of impressive. It's like if you wanted the elevator pitch for the radical right or the nationalist right, like you could clip out that section. And he talks about how well the woke right believes in this thing called the post the kooky post war consensus, this crazy idea of a post war consensus. And I had been reading about Richard Hofstadter, who was a celebrated historian throughout the forties and fifties. He's a

New Yorker like me. He's from Buffalo, ethnically Jewish, but American, and he was an avowed American liberal. In his youth. He was a Marxist. Like a lot of people at that time, he was a Marxist. I believe he may

have even been affiliated with the American Communist Party. And like a lot of people of his ilk at that time, when communism in Russia changed moved in a more Stalinist direction, people like hof Staddard said, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is the left leaving me kind of thing, like whoa pumped the brakes, dude, we don't want to do this.

And you know, my suspicion, which I think is born out historically, has a lot to do with the fact that Stalin moved Russia into a more kind of ethnic, sort of nationalistic, sort of traditional culture due to moving into a wartime footing, due to all kinds of things that were happening. So it wasn't Bolshevism anymore. It wasn't Leninism anymore. It wasn't what the kinds of things that

people like cough stat Are saw in it. It wasn't that intensely liberalizing political force that it was early on, because when Lenin came in, and I'm not a historian, I don't really have the greatest understanding of Soviet Russia, but you know, some of the things that Lenin and the Bolsheviks did when they first came in was liberalize a lot of things abortion, marriage laws, you know, sexuality, sexual sexual ethics, things that look a lot like what

liberalism has done here and around the world is what happened there. And so obviously people like cof Status saw that and they said, hey, that's great. Stalin comes in, changes the direction of things more religious, more ethnic, more chauvinistic, more chest thumping. You know, he's a Georgian bank robber. Stalin so's he's a strong man. And that didn't appeal to people like cough Statter, so opstat are pivots, dis his communists passed, and disavows his history, his historic material

history history. I forget what the phrase is. The Marxist kind of genealogical method, historical materialism.

Charles A. Beard basically kind of put forth his own, if you want to say, like I say this, very very loosely, sort of his own American spin on what people might think of as a kind of Marxist historiography. Because he emphasized economic class a conflict, not using Marxist language, not on Marxist terms, not without other Marxist baggage, he's often been confused or interpreted as a Marxist historian. As

far as I can tell, that's not the case. But anyway, Hofstadter comes in and he makes some alterations, adjustments to this Beardy and hypothesis, and as a result, he's kind of given he's branded as the new face of consensus history, and he's looking at things like educational reform over the course of American history. He's looking at things like the emergence of populist parties over the course of American history.

He's looking at things like gun rights, the gun culture in the United States, and as is relevant to this essay in the nineteen sixties, he's looking at what he called pseudo conservatism, which would have been at that time, the Barry Goldwater presidential candidacy, the John Birch Society, it would have been McCarthy and the Red Scares. And he's

calling this pseudo conservatism. It's his way of sort of smearing the most populist wing of the American right at his time, in the same way that James Lindsay is doing today with this idea of the woke right. And he's basically saying that, well, you have this group of people who are engaging in a sort of analysis of power relations, but they're doing it because they're parochial, backwoods

yokels who are paranoid and mentally ill. And that was the essay Paranoid style and American politics, talking about the John Birch Society, talking about Barry Goldwater, talking about all of this kind of aggressive conservative energy that was developing at that time. Of course, they needed to do something with They didn't want that to become hegemonic in the United States. When I say they, I mean the progressive Liberals,

other factions in the United States at that time. So that eventually got published a year later in a collection of essays, and I just it just looks that there's a couple of things in the way that Hofstadter presented his case that was just very similar to me as to how James Lindsay presented his picture of the woke right. In both cases, they're they're they're presenting the narrative from

the point of view of their opposition. In the case of James Lindsay, he's walking us through the development of the post war consensus. He's walking us through Bill Buckley in the National Review, kicking out the real conservatives. He's he's he's name dropping all of these intellectuals who are black listed from kind of academia and the popular culture, like Karl Schmidt. But then at the very end of it, after basically laying out all the facts and laying out

all the receipts, he just says, but it's woke. But all of this truth okay, okay, okay, okay, but it's woke. Now forget about it, which is basically what Hofstadter did. He's talking about the ethnic replacement of German Irish Catholics and Anglo Saxon Protestants. He's talking about well, he's talking about the John Birch Society and the resistance against communists.

He's talking about Robert Welch in the Birch Society, he's talking about McCarthy, and he's laying out these facts and an at the very end of it, we have at the pivotal moment where you have to either say, like, they're right, we should do X as a result of this, he says, but they're paranoid, and so we can swipe it under the rug and it's illegitimate and it doesn't matter. And they're all creat kooks and they're all parochial. They've got their their pitchforks and their torches and they don't

really know anything. And there's some really really remarkable things he says in the book, Like he uses the example, I don't know if you're one of these people that gets into this kind of stuff. But he brings up floride in the water supply.

the same thing. He's like, even if the government put fluoride in the water supply as a form of social control, political control, and they were doing it to buttress a larger socialist agenda, you would be crazy for thinking of that. And now you read that in twenty twenty four, and it's like we've for like twenty years or more, we're reading all of these reports about, well, that's what happened,

and that's why it happened. It's like, not only did they put fluoride in the water supply, but they did it for this kind of biopolitical demographic control along the way towards rolling out this comprehensive socialist agenda. It's just like that's really really crazy to read after the fact.

present it as a conspiracy theory. Yet like all the people he's mentioning are writing that they're doing these things, are writing these that these things have happened, are saying there is a postwar consensus, are bragging about the fact that they've changed the the social and political habits of the American public, and that I think the thing with Lindsay is is that he realizes he's losing and that

and that his classical liberalism. I remember he had this tweet and I think it's the tweet that got me blocked because he said, the only thing that can defeat the left, the woke on the left is classical liberalism. And classical liberalism hasn't even gotten started yet. And my comment was, so what you're saying is real classical liberalism has ever been tried, and you know, and this was at a time when he was attacking Paul Gottfried as woke, and Paul Gottfried said on my show and like, people

didn't hear it. People said, no, Paul said this. I'm like, go back and listen to what he said. Paul Godfrey said, the only thing that is going to defeat this left authoritarianism is right wing authoritarianism. And I agree with him that that is the only thing that reverses the post war consensus is to the one thing that actually that

they were actually fighting against. That the whole war had the whole world had to go war against you know, back back in time when the post war consensus was in the in the in the in the the mid war years between the wars, when it was starting to formulate and people were literally fighting back. I mean, you had new political movements rising to fight against it. And I think Lindsey just realizes it. I think he's in

a panic. I think he's in a complete panic that he knows that people are just falling away that Like you say what you want about mega people, I think mega people right now at this point want change and they don't care how it get it. They don't care if you know Trump has to become an article to president. They just want change. And I think that's what scares the crap out of these people is they know that eventually this is coming for them.

you're able to go out and do things again. I did a lot of going out, I think probably like a lot of people did, like let me get some air, and just talking to people, business owners, whether it's like local bars, restaurants, whatever, people who had to close businesses, people who kept their businesses open stream cost to them and their families and their financial security and things like that.

And to a person, everyone is saying things like, well, I won't repeat what they said on air, but they were saying things like I don't care what has to happen. I do not care what has to happen, but it has to happen. These are the kinds of things that they were saying. And just to your point, like we've almost I say this again with a little bit of an asterisk, we've almost been able to have kind of any other political option presented to us, but something like

a strong conservative executive. We've had all these flavors of right liberalism, libertarianism, paleo libertarianism, conservatism, paleo military or minoritarianism, whatever, all these flavors on the left of different brands of socialist communist, light communists, you know, diet communism, communism, thunder whatever,

like mango communism, like boiler plate neoliberalism. We have had every kind of personality, every flavor, every color, but the one thing we haven't been able to have, and it's also the one thing that we had to fight a ten year culture war, almost ten decade long culture war just to be able to get is something like right wing authoritarianism. So yeah, the thing like getting on Paul Gottfried's case and calling him woke, it's like he's probably like one of the best bridges from like the genesis

of woke to us that exists. Like he studied under Herbert Marcuse, you know, he was thrown out by these old school communist left wing anti anti family types, anti capitalist types, anti you know, anti everything good effectively, and he's documenting it for decades and decades he's documenting it. So just yeah, James Lendsy is definitely shitting his pants.

The thing that I the thing I've also kind of come to realize about his whole position is this, and it makes me think he's I guess there's two you can always play this game of does he know what he's doing or does he not know what he's doing? I'm you know, I'm not going to put on my mind reader hat, but just taking what he says at face value, his worldview only makes sense if you don't interrogate it, if you don't think about it, if you don't really ask any questions, then it sort of works.

But the moment you start picking pulling at threads, it really doesn't make any sense at all. So there's the definition that James Lendsay gives for woke. I'm actually, uh, I'm going to read it from my essay. What does

woke mean? Woke up to a structural politics that marginalizes people like me and we need to band together inside colidarity in order to be able to create a powerful enough oppressed coalition to flip over the power structure by putting ourselves at the center and claiming power for ourselves. So he's saying, is that what it means? Actually, there was there was an even better quote, actually to awaken

a critical consciousness of the power structure. So that's that's actually I tweeted that at him and then he blocked me. So woke is to come to a critical consciousness of the power structure you that is such a thin or or or kind of like widely applicable definition as to fundamentally not have any real meaning. And it's why he's waging this like weeks long jihad with people, Like what are you even talking about? How can you call these

people woke? Because if you think about something, you're being critical and everything has the structure, so you're becoming aware of the structure. So one, like he's he's basically saying, you have to be unconscious. You have to not think about things. We want this like illiterate unconscious liberalism where we just float around in the world and we don't

really pay attention to what's going on nineties liberalism. Basically, he wants to go back to a time where things are kind of like you're like embryotic, like you're in your mom's belly and things are warm and gushy and you feel good and you don't have to worry about anything. One that's not the world we live in anymore. Two that's not a good world to live in at all.

Like imagine being this like brilliant academic mathematician. You've got all these prizes and awards, and you're telling people that you want them to not be critical thinkers. Like that's not even that doesn't even follow from the kind of nineties liberalism that we lived through that I grew up in, where it's like be a critical thinker, like you know, baby Josh in elementary school, like grow up to be a critical thinker, like everyone saying critical thinking is good,

build your critical thinking skills. And now here here's James lindsay, like critical thinking is bad, don't do it. It's like, that's kind of ridiculous. But also like by that own definition, coming to a critical consciousness of power structures, like he is woke by his own definition. How can you reverse engineer this Marxist revolution without coming to a critical consciousness

of the power structures that produced woke Marxism? Right, he wants to talk about Franz Finon and all of these other people, Like you have to think and deliberate and research and work and and be critically. You have to critique the power structure. You have to come to an awareness of the institutions and networks that created this. So this is one of the reasons why I say that

is that it's predominantly a smear. It's it's what I called regime polemics, because he's basically working for the system to come up with a larger bad to to beat us with.

I don't know, you don't really have anything. You can't join the discussion. You're not in the discussion anymore. Classical liberalism has been so i mean just marginalized, and it's just so dead in the water that the people who are arguing for it, they justin arguing for it, they contradict their own their own assertions about other groups. And it's you're he's some great intellectual because he wrote a

bunch of fake papers and got them. I mean, come on, come on, and then you then you completely rewrote the

Communist Manifesto. The only thing you left in there that would jump out at anybody was something about a specter, and I can that's the way I write, where I'll I'll borrow a really famous kind of line from somewhere and rearrange it to make it and and if I'm reading that, I'm just like, oh, okay, So because I read that thing, and I'm like, if I didn't know this was supposed to be the Communist Manifesto, I wouldn't have known it. Because I've read the Communist Manifesto many times.

I didn't see it in that. All I saw was him using some kind of device where he's picking the most famous line out of it and then using it, which is a device I use, but I don't use it to fool people. I use it because it's like, oh look how smart I am.

uttered the magic words. It's just like Hitler that therefore your bad, right, Like it's it's the same type of psychology, it's the same type of like way logical, you know, way of analyzing this that whole episode. By the way, I'm glad you brought it up, because I'd kind of forgotten about it. Tell me if you had this feeling. There were two real problems I had with that. It was the Christian Reformer, who's that the name of the website that.

Like I kind of know, like I have some idea of how things get published and like what that review process is like and how extensive it is, Like does it really prove that that they like that by publishing this kind of mishmashed paper, that it actually reflects like they actually are co signed, Like the act of publishing obviously is a sort of endorsement. But knowing that, like it's the Internet, things move fast and quick. It's a

shoe string operation. They don't have all this, they don't have a whole team of editors, they don't have people who it is their job to just do that forty to fifty hours a week. They see something, it comes through in their email, they probably look at it real quick and they say, okay, we'll publish it on Wednesday

at three pm, thanks for your submission. Like does that prove that they are secret Marxists or does it prove that in a fast moving technological economy where you are part of the alternative media and there's maybe I don't want to say anything bad about the American Reformer, I don't know them, but just as an example, like maybe you don't have the most strenuous submission review process. Maybe there's a couple of things you look for and then

you just publish it. It's like, actually, all you've really done is demonstrate that the economy around publishing is probably not as rigorous as it ought to be, right, Like this is not an actually ideological point that you're making. This is like sort of like a banal business failure of the business world in the Internet age. Like there's so many things that were goofy about it, and like it's just funny to me, Like every time he's tried to slam the you know, big comical acme hammer down

on us. It's like it bounces back and hits him in the face, like you know, it's like wildly Coyote and the road Runner. It's like he he runs into the tunnel painted onto the brit wall and bounces off of it. He's just it's it's just to your point, and I'll leaven hear what I'm done. It does really reek of a guy who's desperate and like kind of shitting his pants and in a full blown panic.

the woke. And he goes in there and tells them some stories about how all of this came from Karl Marx and it's all Marxism, so you better be scared and because you know that's really dangerous stuff and everything, even though it's you know, it's like it I mean, it is in practice and it is in thought, but it's like, I mean, he's never going to talk about the fact that liberalism has no gatekeeping mechanisms that allows anything to come you know, Oh, well, you're just going

to have the marketplace of ideas and you're going to come in there. And if you have the marketplace of ideas and you're a classical liberal, well, classical liberals are not about Schmidtian you know, Schmidtian exceptions and Schmidtian friend enemy. So I don't care if a communist gets a job at the local university and then another one, and then

another one and then another one. I mean, he knows that this is that liberalism has as much to do with the takeover, with this postliberal you know, this post war con says, I mean the post wark and sens this is liberal. It is liberalism in its final form. And well, I mean maybe not its final form. I mean it could get worse. So he gets a left pure left wing authoritarianism. But what we're seeing now is is liberalism. It is we're going down this path and

we're there's an endpoint. There's an endpoint, but we just can't get there. We can't. We just took we took a rite. We got to get back on the path. What do we gotta do to get pack? And then all these other things just sneak in. He just he knows, he knows. I'm convinced. He just knows that this classical liberalism that he totes because he can't call it what he really wants to is which he's a leftist. He has said that he would rather the woke left wind

than than like the West become TRADCAF. Again he's actually oh yeah, oh yeah, he said that. Yeah, I can, I can pull up the screenshots of it. Yeah. Yeah, he would rather the woke left wind. Like someone said, well, you know what if it has become TRADCAF. He goes that, we're not. I don't want that. I would rather the left one. Yeah, he's he's not a friend to right wingers, but right wingers are such fucking pussies that they like, they have no problem. They're reaching left, well, reaching left

and punching right. And that's what they've been trained to do by the post war consensus. And that's exactly what he that's what he's he does, and he's taught a bunch of people to do. And unfortunately a lot of Evangelical Christianity has just rische. Even a lot of Evangelical Christianity is quote quote we lose down here quote, which means we can't do anything love our enemies. Never says

anywhere to love God's enemies. And these are the kind of people who in nineteen thirty six in Spain, while while priests and nuns are being executed in the streets, people would say, no, that's the way it's supposed to be, because you know, I mean, we can't fight back. We have to love our enemies.

the hell's going on? Like always, people who either are really not part of that conversation or their message is not really a hyper illiterate message, like in the case of Ashley Saint Clair are like, but like, don't you think like some of this is like worth considering? Like the most milk toast, tepid thing like I think Mike either Sargon or Mike Cernovich were both like, yes, but his criticisms of capitalism were accurate, Okay, which is one

line of rebuttal that you could take. And I think Ashley Saint Clair was like, yeah, but don't you think there's any room at all to criticize the system that we're in. It's like, you won't even allow for the possibility of self reflection. That's how you know you're the bad guy. Dude, Like you won't look like dack cool, you won't look into the mirror. That's how we know you're the bad guy. You have no reflection. We know

you're the bad guy. I'm inclined to think and this is maybe armchair psychoanalyzing, and just because of these are things I've seen pop up on Twitter in the last few days, I'm inclined to think that he gets you know, nobody, nobody blow up my DMS or send me an affidavit or anything. I'm inclined to think he gets up to some weird purp stuff. You know, somebody posted a picture of him taking a selfie, like in the nude, with like a potted plant precariously positioned where his genitals are.

It's like, so you put that on the internet, man, like there is something wrong with you. And the thing about like even his social media personality, it says something to me like this is kind of a dysfunctional person because he's on triggernometry and he starts off, you know, Constantine kiss and asks him what is the woke right and James Lindsay starts kind of apologetically like, gee, you know, maybe I've used woke to liberally. It might not be

the best word. So he's like a kind of human being a little bit the start of that interview, and then you watch him on Twitter and he posts like he's a fourteen year old.

year is this. The they were saying, Oh, well, he's like really into like Ted Kazinski and everything like that. I'm like, and they're like, oh, that means he's a leftist. That's what the Jews from Libs of TikTok said, So, oh that means he's a leftist. I'm like, have you read Ted Kazinski. The whole first thirty seven parts of

that is him completely shitting on the left. And then he explains why technological society, why what it's done to our psyche and what has done to us and what has done to our nature, And to argue against that, you're retarded. So it's like, you can what the post war consensus says is, oh, we're gonna sneak all this Marxism in here, in this socialism here, and basically you know, and Marxism in a way, we're going to strip away family. We're gonna we want you to become the liberal, the

post war consensus man and woman and everything. But if you agree at all where you say, well, I think marx and the German ideology made some really good points about what's happening to society, Well then you're a Marxist. It's like, wait a minute, but you're promoting you're promoting shit that's almost almost literally Marxist, and we have it in our society and we've pointed it out. And what now. So you can't even win with these people because it's like you can't. You they can have it one way,

but they can have it both ways. You can't.

pieces aren't in play, what's hypocritical, what isn't. Just kind of go back to the parallel between Hofstadder and James Lindsay, between woke right and the paranoid style, you know, one of these other things, and I think it's exemple it demonstrates what you're just talking about, is the way things that there's kind of self evidently farcical or hypocritical are used in this polemical, pejorative way. So one of the key arguments that Lindsay puts forward is that the woke

right behaves just like the woke left. Like this is kind of like this is one half of his entire argument. He says there's an ideological component. He says that there's a practical component, and the practical component is how we behave we behave the same as the woke left. We use social media the same way we believe in an oppressed oppress or dialectic the same way. I'm gonna actually try to pull up some of the examples he use,

is here, sure? So yeah, He says that they create an illusion that there's support for one thing and distaste for another. He says that you know, both are highly invested in identity politics, and he says that ultimately, what what what else can you call this but woke? And so therefore there's this complete you know what he's what he thinks he's done, is eliminated any difference between Pete

Canonas and Josh Neil Versus. I look Slava, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio Cortes, uh Man Jail, whether he's our anarchist or not or whatever, like, actually there's still are There still are fundamental differences, even if you can point to superficial similarities. So this is another thing that there's a there's a very telling passage in the paranoid style of of in American politics where to dispel the to kind

of like defang this what he calls pseudo conservatism. He points to the rivalries of right wing conspiratorial groups and shows how that they are identical to their opposition. So he talks about the KKK, and he says, well, you know, they wore priestly uniforms, just like the Catholics, and they had this strict hierarchical structure, just like the Catholics. So actually their rivalry is kind of like this petty envy

and it's totally illegitimate and they're just paranoid. Never mind the fact that the KKK were made up of a specific group of people from a specific place, operating under a specific political pretext with a very particular set of goals for themselves. And you know, the Catholic Church is the Catholic Church like not the same thing, right or that.

He uses the example of the John Birch Society versus is you know, this communist spook, and he says, isn't it really remarkable that they both fight a zero sum ideological war. It's like, okay, so they're both really committed to the ideas that they have. Therefore, there's no difference at all between you know, mom and pop from down the street who give their one hundred dollars every month to the John Birch Society and communist organizers who are

like burning down houses and whatever. He also gives the example of Christians Christian anti communists versus communists, and the exact phrase here, just let me pull it up. It's so goofy one second, okay, So he says, you know, Christian anti communists were intellectually and spiritually vigorous like their Communist foes. They admired the vigor of their Communist opponents and they tried to emulate it. And that's how we

know that there's no actual rivalry here. That the right wingers are just parented by the way, there's never any actual kind of antagonization or examination of the left wing people on that side of the Communists are just like kind of unimpeachable to Richard hobs.

he doesn't. He's the same thing with Carl Popper, not to get off on a tangent, although I guess with Carl Popper later on in his career he did become more critical of communism. But Carl Popper's another again architect of the post war consensus. Literally the Open Society Foundation is based on the title of his book, and he was a mentor of George Soros.

how bad nationalists are. It's like, guy, you were with the communists and you almost got killed by them, and you can't even give me a sentence about how bad that is. And again I'm being a little bit hyperbolic because he does talk about marks in the open society and his enemies, but most of that book is spent slagging nativism. It's spent slagging the closed society, which would be, you know, a nation that protects his borders and has law and order and has a you know, vaguely authoritarian,

hierarchical political structure. So I mean, these guys just telling themselves, it's remarkable.

get like the amount of likes. He's lucky to get ten percent of the likes of like a meme account just posting a meme. But when he posts about stuff like this, he may get like double that. And all that tells you is that no one's buying this. The only people who are really going along with it are people who are so bought into his worldview. And let's face it, yeah, I was talking about this with a

friend of mine on his show this afternoon. Is that a lot of people who get into a quote unquote movement, they're just looking for God. They're looking for their God. And if somebody is like really into oh, classical liberalism and anti woke, James Lindsay can become their God really quick. If you're really into like free market economics, Ludwig von Mises can become your or got really quickly, and that's

just basically what we're seeing. I mean, I don't know really if you had to guess, do you think James Lindsay has any kind of influence on the incoming Trump regime?

No one who's realistic, no one who understands how the administrative state works, how the post war consensus works, is really expecting an insane amount of success. But I mean, is he going to be for that? How does he help that? How does he help like say Doze say this Doge outfit does start dismantling the managerial estate, managerial state. That's what he's fighting for. So why is he complaining

about what? Is he expecting them to invite them in there so he can tell them everything that they're doing wrong, because we have to keep doing We just have to go back to the nineties. Bro I heard was so Amari? And which one is so Habo Mari? He's the one? Is he Claremont?

just need to go back to twenty eleven? What we need to go back to ab the ending of Barack Obama's first term. But these people are retarded, and I'm fully convinced. I become convinced of this more than I the longer I do this. These people are just trying to keep a job. There's just they're just saying the things that they need to stay in their job. If

they were to deviate one bit, they'd get fired. They'd have to go somewhere else, they'd have to Why would you change your opinions on Why would you all of a sudden become a Karl Schmidt fan? You know when you've been when you've been a John Locke, when you've been promoting lockey in philosophy your whole life, especially if you're making your living off of it, you're cutting your income off. That's why Lindsay. That's why Lindsay's acting the

way he is is because he's his income. He's seeing his potential downfall and more than that, not being invited to be on the stage anymore. And he's one of those people who can't take that.

He was previously the editor of Commentary, and I do think he was like a Claremont fellow or something. But yeah, I mean, yeah, it's not surprising that these people would want to go back to the period when their sinecure first opened up. Like, yeah, I want to go back to ten years ago when you open the floodgates and gave me, you know, a lifetime job at gay Boy Inc. Or whatever, you know, like publishing bullshit dot com. Like yes, please, I want to go back to that time so that

I can have that job. I don't know that I have anything else to say on that point other than when you asked, like, what influence would James Lindsay have on the incoming Trump administration? I immediately thought of that really weird anti Saint Michael bit He was on like, so imagine you're Donald Trump, Like you can't even get a tweet out the front door with that James lindsay, like, excuse me, this is really a big problem and you

need to stop doing it. It's like, Okay, this guy is trying to like kick forty million people out the front door, and you're raising a stink over at Tweet like, yeah, you don't actually have a place here, and uh and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

say about the subject matter. But yeah, I came into nationalism through the conspiracy content if you want to stay online. You know, I read all the Jim Mars books I read. You know, I listened to Alex Jones. I watched his

documentaries on the police State. I listened to Coast to Coast I watched I was a young person, a very young person, when loose change and Zeitgeist were like the thing on the internets, and it was really harrowing, honestly to like develop a content like to be I'm a man hormonally and like mentally, at the same time you're being hit with this incredible technology called the Internet and all of the information we have available to the human species. So you know, I'm and of course I grew up

with nine to eleven. Like I remember the day the towers hit. I was sitting in my sophomore biology class with the cute redhead teacher at my Catholic high school and being pulled out of the classroom thinking that my father was dead. You know. So like these are all deeply like and there's hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people with the story just like that. So it's not my pity story that I'm saying to your audience. Lots of people have stories like that. I Yeah, I

grew up in New York City. That was the formation of my consciousness. I remember when you could go on an airplane and it was nice, And I remember a couple of years later when you went on an airplane and a morbidly obese Haitian person grabbed yours Like I lived through that. Okay, So the Patriot Act and everything that followed from that. So the idea of of and now we're living in this moment where conspiracy theories are kind of like a thing you can cash in on.

It's like a career. You can be an all media guy with a TikTok account doing the whole you know, your your blurry face in front of like a text scroll going isn't this look at this and this kind ofct and here and here. It's like you can do that as a career. And fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, if you did that, you were a pariah, you were medicated,

you were kicked out of polite society. So it took me coming into this nationalist community learning a few new things that mainstream conspiracy culture from ten years ago didn't let you in on. People like Michael Collins Piper, like if I had known about Michael as Piper fifteen years ago, it would have saved me a lot of trouble. I didn't learn about him until like two and a half years ago, and it's like, oh, well, this guy. It's not like the skeleton key that literally unlocks everything, but

it clears up a lot of stuff. So I think the thing that's really that at my selling point for the book is the the there's a neutral way to think about conspiracy theories because we're now in this point where people of a certain age like that is who

their identity is. It's like I just am a conspiracy theorist, right, And there's it's very difficult to think clearly because there's sort there's sort of this heuristic in the conspiracy theory community where because you had this skepticism about things that happened in the past, you have this sort of like gnostic pure knowledge of everything that's happening now and conspiracy Oh it's this is a false flag, just like what I saw ten years ago. There are heuristics that work,

and then they are heuristics that don't work. And so like what I was trying to do with this book was try to establish Okay, really, what is a conspiracy theory? How does it work? Why is everyone today in this hyper vigilant, paranoid, neurotic mindset where there is a conspiracy lurking or i should say, an illegitimate conspiracy lurking behind every door. Ten years ago, if you were a liberal Democrat, the big bad and it actually has been the same

conspiracy theory for the last ten years. The big conspiracy was Russia, Russian bots, Russian hacking coutin Donald Trump got urinated on by a prostitute in a Russian hotel, and that's the blackmail they've got. Sorry to be lewde with you and your audience, but you know, maybe if you've got young people in your audience, they didn't know that that happened. If you were going through the first Trump campaign, like that was the October surprise and we're all just

sitting here like are you kidding me? So the basic punchline here is a conspiracy theory effectively is a folk

account of history. It's you and me trying to figure out what's actually happening, without the benefit of a PhD, without the benefit of a Walter Cronkite, without the benefit of some expert or authority, a regime a James Lindsay, a regime approved personality who can disseminate a coherent narrative to us so that we can go back to sleep and then go to work and then pet you know, a little Pete junior on the head and send them off to soccer practice, you know, the things that make

our day to day life livable. So what you really have is that this folk history and then regime history, and there's this tension between the two. So I talk a lot about that. I bring in a lot of Marshall mccluan to talk about how the Internet has created this unique paranoid culture. That gentleman he was on Joe Rogan.

He popularized the phrase mass formation psychosis. You know, that's been one of these phrases to explain kind of why everyone is so crazy and why everyone is so distrusting of the things that they see and the people that they live around. I don't think we actually need novel language. I don't think we need, if anything, this book does very similarly what my first book did, which was like take the psychology out of it, take the psychiatry out

of it. Because as I make the point with the you know, Jim, Lindsay and Hofstad are the psychology that's been used to make sense of our political life has made it worse because it isn't a psychological problem. Intrinsically, it's a political problem. It's a social, cultural, civilizational, historical problem. We're dealing with real things, not just artifacts of the mind, and we need to be able to treat it that way.

So that was probably a little incoherent. But it's a great book, and I hope your audience loves it.

attacking the guests. It's wild. But the thing I love about it is Pierce is just so even I'm here to tell here to tell my story, I'm here to answer all these ridiculous claims that have been made and everything. But yeah, there's some there's some good stuff out there, and yeah, Turner Diaries and Hunter, those are good books to check out, you know, and there some compelling writing. To say the least.

and my new book. It goes back to the John Birch society in effect, where you have or between Buckley and the National Review and the Real Rights, or between Buchanan and the Conservative inc. There's this tension between the mainstream post war consensus right and then the more principled hardline nationalists, and that has always existed. This is why there wasn't alt right. This is why James Lindsay complains in that interview with Constantine kissing. Well, they don't even

actually attack the left, who supposed their real enemy. All they ever do is attack the conservatives because conservative inc. Is a proximately our biggest threat, because our message. We have to squeeze our message through this very narrow funnel to get half or a quarter or a third of our ideas out in this very domesticated way, because conservative inc. Is the problem. What did Nixon say, right a thousand times? The media is the enemy. Conservative inc. Is the enemy.

So that's you know, that says it all right there.

starts to get into start tearing apart. It seems like you're trying to tear apart like the basis behind these conspiracy theories, where they came from, and basically how they grew and specifically you know, it's really easy to say, oh, the president's head exploded, and you know it looks like it came from the front, but you know they're saying it came from the back. But no, it goes much deeper than that. When when when you start getting into

conspiracy theories. So you know the first part of your new book you specifically talk about Richard Hofstetter and Carl Popper, So jump in there and start talking to you know, if you can start to start there and take us down the road of where we're at where where we came from to get to where we are now.

are today. But the very recent history, very recent past, is certainly enough history to kind of understand the climate that we're in now. And so yeah, I did single out Carl Popper and I singled out Richard Hofstadter for two I think very important reasons. I was kind of imagine myself having to do a robot when I talk about my books or offer some of my arguments, and one of those, like my imaginary interlocutor is, you know, well, why pick on Carl Popper, why pick on Richard Hofstadter?

What makes them so important? And there's really two reasons, one for each. The first reason being that Carl Popper is basically the philosopher of the open society. He's the philosopher of the great replacement. And he's also because of his a lot of his intellectual work dealt with epistemology and things like that, he's also kind of like the philosopher for the anti conspiracy theory point of view. And there's two really important works that he wrote that I

critique in the book. Obviously. The first is The Open Society and Its Enemies, and it's like a seven or eight hundred book. Basically, it's like the be all and end all of liberal democracy apology, right, that's kind of what it's a seven hundred, eight hundred page book justifying why open societies, which is to say, liberal democracies are

superior and preferable to closed societies. And he gives several examples of what constitutes a closed society NSDAP Germany, Soviet Russia, Fascist Europe, whether we're looking at Spain or Italy or Romania or really any of the countries where there was a fascist movement. But he even goes way back into

human history. The original closed society was Plato. Plato's republic is basically the if the open society and its enemies is the apotheosis of liberal democracy, then Plato's republic is really the apotheosis, the intellectual apotheosis of you know, nativist, authoritarian, ethnically and culturally heterogeneous states. That's what Popper. And again maybe some context on Popper. He was from Central Europe. He was from a well educated, high cultured bourgeois I

want to say, Lutheran family. I think Richard Hofstadder came from a Lutheran family, so maybe Popper wasn't. But anyway, they were upper class Jewish, ethnically Jewish living in Europe, and Popper in particular saw both sides of that authoritarian coin.

He was a Communist in his youth, he almost died at a Communist rally, and then he was some time later obviously persecuted or felt the heat of the German Reich on his heels, and he fled Europe and he sought sanctuary basically in what we tend to think of as the Atlanticist states, England, the United States, I think

even New Zealand. And so that experience informed his philosophy about the superiority of liberal democracies, and as a kind of second hand to that work, in the mid fifties, he published a very very short essay like three pages called The Conspiracy Theory of Society, and basically this was

his anti conspiracy polemic. He compares in that short essay, he basically compares conspiracy theory epistemology to something like homer or Homeric thinking, where that you've got this olympus of deities that are really pulling all the strings, and more than just pulling all the strings, they're specifically moving people

into place and positioning them to take important roles. So he basically says, you know, when you abandon, when you abandon God, you elevate man into this theistic state, and so men become these supreme agents, capable of all kinds of unexpected, unanticipated, shadowy conduct.

not one continuous conspiracy. It's one conspiracy takes over and that gets supplanted by another conspiracy and another, and it's just not on down the line and you have you just have competing conspiracies the all time.

the road to conspiratorial thinking is paved with unintended consequences. So, and he says things like you know, economic depressions, military conflicts, societal collapse, the whole list are. These are all things that come about as a consequence of other political actions that are being undertaken, and that a social theorist's responsibility is to trace those lines and figure out the causality. Right, But ultimately it's never a conspiracy. Man does not replace God.

Everything can be understood empirically through proper social theory, social proper social theorizing. And so that's why I chose Carl Popper, because he has such a monumental legacy, and the more you dig into it, actually the kind of creepier it gets.

A lot of the I will say a lot, but some of the most well known names in the contemporary society, people who are strong advocates of not only liberal democracy, but also like the censorship regime and using state power to prosecute political minorities, which is something that Carl Popper advocated for. You find that a lot of the really relevant people today were also connected to Carl Popper. Cass Sunstein was a student of Carl Popper. George Soros was

a student of Karl Popper. I think Richard Hofstadter may also have been at one point affiliated with him, So he beyond his own works, Carl Popper was a mentor to, or had close relationships with basically anyone who's ever had a bugaboo about nativism, so he was a really obvious example to pick. Richard Hofstadter, on the other hand, I think, if I had to guess, it's kind of a name that not many people think anymore. He died somewhat early on, but he had a very successful career as an academic

historian and public intellectual in the mid twentieth century. Many of his several of his books won Politic Serprizes, so he was really really creme de la creme. The Age of Reform was a Politz Serprise winning book. I believe that The Paranoid Style and American Politics was another Politz Surprise winning essay, and in both of those works, Carl Popper,

excuse me. Richard Hofstadter basically takes aim at populists, rural types middle you know, flyover Middle America with San Francis would describe as Middle American radicals, the kinds of people who probably donated to the John Birch Society, the kinds of people who probably supported the Tea Party, the kinds of people who became maga. Basically, in those two works, he's going after populism and in particular he's going after

what he calls the paranoid style in American politics. And Richard Hofstadter also has his own legacy of influencing academics to write anti conspiracy polemics, and his most famous essay was the Paranoid Style and American Politics. Basically he uses Freudian psychoanalysis as a in an artful way. That's his own word. By the way, I'll give you this the second sort of two a to why I chose these guys.

But it's because of they tell them themselves basically in their works they tell him themselves repeatedly, so it makes for a good learning.

they just telling themselves. So in the essay of Paranoid Style in American Politics, he's talking about Barry Goldwater. He coins this term pseudo conservatism, and he talks about the paranoid style. So he says he uses paranoid in an artful way, appropriating it from psychoanalysis and psychology. I think he says something like in the way that a historian of art would describe a certain period as barok or whatever,

he wanted to use paranoid style in that same way. So, which is like a way of saying, you're not doing it academically, you're not doing it empirically, you're kind of

literally bastardizing language to serve a partisan end. Like if you read between the lines, he's basically saying, I'm taking this term that has a very specific meaning and application, I'm taking it outside of his discipline, and I'm plopping it in a completely different discipline in an informal way, just because you know, and there's.

you forget, he has nothing is he's incoherent. At this point, it's gotten to the point where they they can't make They know that they've lost, They know that neoliberalism is dying, they know that the open society is falling apart what they love the most, and they're doing every and it's this isn't right after World War Two when you have a couple of Jews who are basically advocating the open society because they don't want to go back to what it was just you know, ten years ago, and you know,

they need a society that they can blend in in. And yeah, I mean we're past that at this point, and especially especially since October twenty twenty three, which I think is like literally a changing of the age like that, like we're in a new age now.

He's sort of like a he's a structuralist, he's a feminist. Basically, he's like your average like shit lib French intellectual had all of the bad uh you know positions, political positions.

still paranoid and it's illegitimate to have that fear. So so your wife is cheating on you, you're suspicious that she's cheating on you. You're pathological. So look like Hofstadter takes that and he uses it in the context of floridization in the water supply. He says, you know, if even if it came out to be true at some point in the future that the government was putting contaminating the water supply for expressly political, even socialist reasons, you would

that's still exemplary of the p aid style. And then lo and behold, decades later, that's basically exactly what happened. And that's like only the tip of the iceberg basically in terms of contaminating the food supply, the water supply, the soil, the air, everything that we kind of consume and are just moving through even passively. Like we all know, we all have the receipts on that. It's not a mystery. There's it's basically pretty much an open and shutcase. It

did happen, It happened for expressly political reasons. Still people still want it to happen. RFK junior, as he was being sworn in as head of HHS, basically said we're going to take the floride out of the water. So it's like, oh, but you're still a crank if you think that, You're still a crazy person if any of

that troubles you in any way. So to my imaginary interlocutor who doesn't see any reason to specifically target these two people as being progenitors of this way of thinking, that's why that's kind of my rebuttal I was gonna say before, there's like a two A aspect to that, or like you know, like a tertiary aspect to that, and it's it's entirely the way in which these these academics basically told you what the final outcome of their

preferred political program would be. Towards the end of the Open Society and its enemies, Popper basically says, you know, if we followed this open society policy to its final conclusion, then it's not only conceivable, I'm paraphrasing, by the way, just for the audience at home, it's not only conceivable but highly likely that you would have mass scale a

demographic replacement. You know that it would so rupture the health and stability and coherency of an area, but the open society is still better, so we have to do it. So these are two guys who basically laid out a sort of series of justifications for liberal democracy. They also issued a series of polemics against people who are skeptical of liberal democracy, and they also kind of spilled the

beans on what's wrong with their preferred political program. So it's very difficult for me to find a better example of the kind of thing I'm trying to communicate to the audience, which is all of these kinds of things racialism, conspiracism, anti liberalism are inexorably tied to one another. And it's not for arbitrary reasons. It's for like first principles political theory. And also just like I was gonna say, urban planning, not urban planning, but like like basically like state craft and.

sort of your specialization. I think people who are more into who are more like wonks and more into political culture and more into the nitty gritty of institutions and and and the ways they sort of like octopus tentacles get involved. Have there have their their tentacles in every other pot because obviously the CIA has a long, a

long history of social engineering. I'm actually just now reading this great book Who Paid the Piper, which is basically it's by H. Francis Stoner Saunders, and is talking about the CIA during the Cold War and they're anti Communist initiatives and how people like James Burnham were, you know, in effect, you know, whether explicitly or implicitly, doing Cold War culture war stuff on behalf of America against the Communists.

This just happens to be the road that I took, and so I think there's legitimacy to both. I mean, obviously the CIA is involved in political assassinations regime change coups, so we're if anything, I think what is worth extracting out of this is sort of the if you want to say, multidisciplinary or multi factorial, multi personnel engine behind

liberal democracy. That you can come at it from the popular culture space, you can come at it from the academic space, you can come at it from the intelligence services space, and basically it all leads you to the same thing that you've got political conflict, right, valry, subterfuge, All the kinds of things that people like Carl Popper told you don't actually have them and are not really relevant in understanding political anything related to politics.

age of the nineties. But you know, one of the things that you point out is that they're his ideas about psychological about how he misrepresents political differences between people who have I think the terminology you use was broader moral palette or what he used is broader moral palette and liberals six and tuitions versus versus liberals have three.

So can you talk a little bit about how Height continues this how he explains how this continues and moves forward from you know, from World War Two and the post war consensus.

need to get along thing. I really do look at Jonathan Height as being like the most honest and really the most competent person to try that out. But I would just say, like, it's really remarkable if you want to compare the public intellectuals of say today or the last ten years compared to twenty thirty, forty, fifty, sixty

years ago, it's really startling. The issue I had with Jonathan Hite was that his and this is really the same issue with Jordan Peterson, even though it doesn't seem that way with Peterson is they're actually very narrow minded. I hesitate to say uneducated, but they are ignorant really of other disciplines beyond their own. Jordan Peterson, if you want to know about psychology, probably is one of the

best living educators of psychology. But when and this has always been a parent when it comes to philosophy, history, political theory, he's basically indistinguishable from like your grandpa sitting at the actually your grandpa at the Thanksgiving dinner probably knows more than Jordan Peerson. But same thing with Jonathan Hyde.

Very good, very astute as a sociologist, as a anthropologically minded person, obviously as a PhD of social psychology, But the big glaring hole in his theory of the moral foundations as applied to the political binary is actually politically ignorant. So the John so the Heights moral foundations theory says that there are six elementary moral foundations or intuitions care, fairness, liberty, sanctity, authority, there's a sixth one that I'm actually blanking on at

the moment. And his research demonstrated that conservatives were more in touch with all six than liberals were. And he gives the example of the John Kerry campaign back in two thousand and four and the rhetoric that was on the campaign trail, and he basically said that Democrats were unable to access rhetoric that touched on moral intuitions like authority, sanctity, purity, purity would have been the sixth one, right, that these

are kind of like classically conservative moral intuitions. They have to do with They're they're inexorably bound up with like the church and religion. They're inexorably bound up with the military, hierarchy and the state. They are inexorably bilt bound up with the family and a paternal sort of view of the world. And so Height says, well, this is really a big problem. Democrats are losing these elections, they're losing the culture war, They're not really able to communicate to

all Americans. So he embarked on this research project to develop a way to help liberals expand their moral palate. There's a couple of problems with that. First, and what I think the biggest problem is is that his research actually demonstrates that liberals can access other moral intuitions. It's just that when they apply those moral intuitions, they're applied differently.

When a conservative Bible thumping rust belter practices sanctity, they're thinking about Christ, they're thinking about God, they're thinking about the Church. They're thinking about the Beatitudes, the Ten Commandments,

they're pastor. But this is according to Height. When secular humanist types think in terms of sanctity, well, they think about the environment, They think about pollution and climate change, they think about sort of these very novel, untraditional, outside of the box ways of applying these basic moral intuitions. You know, what was the old liberal maxim, you know, think globally, act locally. That kind of describes the problems are the way liberals think is in this fundamentally non

parochial way. So that tells us one that liberals don't have a problem accessing these moral intuitions, it's just they apply them differently. So to me, the first problem that arises out of that is it tells us something about the populations themselves and the kinds of social worlds that they occupy. I extrapolate from that that we really have two completely different populations living side by side as though

they were actually one people. You know, when we are we here in the whatever you want to say, the Trump right, the online right, student right, radical right right, whatever, I mean, A lot of us, if not most of us, are here because we have certain foundational concerns about our kin, about the folk, about the race, about homogeneity and a

coherent national identity. This sort of issue in Heights. Theorizing betrays the fact that we don't have a coherent national identity, and that homogeneity is not just an issue in terms of racial characteristics or religious affiliation, but actually there are other ways in which people are or aren't alike, and that's meaningful in terms of how you organize your polity. So basically the punchline of that essay is there's two

different political economies. This goes back to James Burnham. There are two different political economies operating in this country, and while they're not necessarily opposed to one another, they are

in conflict. You have the classical liberal political economy bourgeois entrepreneurial capitalism, which, even though that was critical in displacing the old aristocratic order and the monarchy and things we think of as even more based and conservative and hierarchical and all these kinds of things, but relative to like modernity where we are now. You know, that's pretty, it's pretty. They were still deeply devout religious people. They were still

deeply patriarchal. These were not people who who comparable today anyway, who thought like we will literally burn through all of our social capital if it will earn more money or help us achieve some kind of kakamamie political agenda. You had this bourgeois entrepreneurial liberalism, and then what comes after that,

as James Burnham said, is managerialism. Managerialism, the tech technocracy, the cult of expertise, credentialism, socialism, you know, the welfare state, all of these things which are built on bourgeois entrepreneurialism but also in a way sort of parasitize bourgeois capitalism. That's kind of like one of the stories of the recent Trump victory with Vance as his VP, is like we're trying to put the managerial revolution back in the

box a little bit here. Burnham says that, you know, managerialism emerged because actually San Francis says this, expanding on James Burnham, that nation states were growing so rapidly both demographically in terms of like their geographical territories, and so you had this dual problem of mass and scale. They're

getting larger, they're also getting more complicated. So if you're a you know, if you're like an early twentieth century robber baron, a capitalist, well you while it might have been possible for you in eighteen fifty or nineteen hundred or even nineteen fifty to literally micromanage everything and understand A good example of this is maybe Walt Disney trying to put together Snow White. He was intimately involved in every aspect of that production down to the finest detail.

And then if you look at what Disney's doing today, like the people who bankroll it have no control what's happening, no idea, what's even happening in terms of casting and

like CGI and whatever. So things were getting so large and kind of complicated that you had a new class of people emerge, and these were the managers, technically minded, technically skilled people usually with a college education, usually living in an urban or suburban setting, who are not capitalists in the sense that they have large reserves of money that they can allocate and spend and whatever captains of industry, but they have very narrowly defined highly skilled roles that

put them. I think the quote from San Francis is they literally put their hands on the levers of of these industries. So as San Francis said, you know, the change in the kind of people who became in charge of things also became rather, he says, the change in the class of people also became a change in the kind of people. So we went from capitalists to managers. But also we're dealing with a different demographic of people.

You know, a lot of you know, Ellis Islanders, you know, are getting into these positions, a lot of newer immigrant Americans are getting into these positions. To your audience, I'm

bringing this to a conclusion here. If it seems like a crazy digression, we could say, in a sort of loose way that the liberal democratic, you know, liberal progressive liberals, democrats, socialists, these kinds of people, you know, in terms of heights, moral foundation, the threes versus the sixes, these are people who basically live in a completely different economy than the

conservative person. The conservative person even today still lives in a farm, works on a farm, or runs their own business, or comes from a family that does that. You know, they tend you know statistically, we know this. You know, they tend not to go to college, they tend not to complete their degrees, they tend not to read as much. The divide what Jonathan Hite treats as psychological differences between liberals and conservatives really is a demographic difference. It's an

economical difference. So it's not that liberals are out of touch with the authority moral intuition or the sanctity moral intuition. It's that they are basically into a completely different style of life, and so they apply these moral intuitions to the world in wildly different ways. They even apply the

same moral intuitions differently. Jonathan Hype points out that for conservatives, fairness has more to do with like proportionality, for example, compared to liberals, where it's about like distributing to everyone. Now everyone gets a piece of the pie. But conservatives say, well that doesn't sound fair, Like why does the guy who does nothing have as much, say as I do? Hence the proportionality right, Okay, well there's an opportunity. This goes into like one of the old debates like equity

versus equality? Are we trying to give everyone an opportunity? Or are we trying to give everyone an outcome? Like these are mentality differences that arise out of different economic social organizations. So I know, I just throw a whole bunch atch you. Maybe I'll take a pause there and let you pick apart from that.

culture and how the American myth of individualism, you know, as a noble as a noble lie, obscures how social forces shape behavior. Talk a little bit about that.

capacity to choose. What are the actual cognitive mechanisms that are responsible for a decision making process, When do they go right, when do they go wrong? What are their limitations? This stretches all the way back to the really the early twentieth century. I want to say, Herbert Spencer. Maybe I could be mixing up some of my names, but in the early to midish nineteen sixties you had what

was called the probabilistic revolution in the social sciences. What basically refers to statisticians gained a lot of influence in academic psychological research. And so there became this quantitive intent, heavy focus on quantitative sort of mathematical reasoning to understand and explain social behavior. And one of the people that was at the start of that was Daniel Koneman. Now let's just table that now, just to give some context

for the audience. So Gert Gigorenzer is working sort of in this milieu, but he's coming at it from a different point of view. One of the actually he's kind of like hearkening back to the very earliest the theorists theoreticians in this statistical revolution. He's basically saying that there's and this this is contrasting to the Daniel Connomans of the world, basically saying that there's a type of logic that humans engage in that you could say is intrinsic

to our decision making process. It's not arbitrary, it's actually evolutionary. And it's not only evolutionary, it's environmentally bound. Right, So in other words, thinking of human cognition, we need to think of it as something that developed within a context. We need to think of it as something that developed according to certain evolutionary pressures and limitations selection pressures, for example. So he and again, I won't spill all the beans.

I'll leave some for your you know, your audience, if they want to read it. I hope you do. Get up an Anaal up Hill Publishing. He basically says that there are three rules of human social organization, more or less, and and there's actually no getting around them. There's no you can't break them, you can't refine them. They are fine tuned over countless generations of evolution. So when I read that, my first thought was, and you know, it's

getting involved in all this radical politics stuff. I'm kind of a neophyte still. I've only since like twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen really been thinking this way. And one of the like the kind one of the thoughts that are or just like repeating questions I've always had, is actually the subtitle of the essay that you referenced, you know, how did things get this bad? You know, we're always constantly asking ourselves, like why are people like this? How

do things get this way? Would you know or we play the historical revision game? You know, would think be different if you know Group X won this war as opposed to group why, or you know, if this president won this election or this, and we're we're always asking ourselves like, why are people like this? How did things

get this way? The point of my essay is to say that there's a profoundly evolutionary reason for people to become conformist, because conformism is effectively an evolutionary mechanism, or at least for us, it's this sort of thing we've accumulated that helps us to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty, catastrophe, risk, danger. You can't know everything, it's impossible to know everything, it's impossible to account for everything. And really all we can do is just, you know, look to the person to

our left and right and do what they're doing. And this is like deeply encoded into us. And so it's very common for people to think like, well, it's it's what the universe did. It was brainwashing through media, it was brainwashing through Hollywood, it was brainwashing through the universities and the academics. And I'm not saying that that's wrong.

I'm not saying that that didn't play a role. What I'm saying is that before you ever read fucuou in freshman year of college, before you ever turned on the TV and saw some subliminal, licentious thing getting beamed into your brain. You were conforming to the social dynamics in your home, at the park, in the classroom, at the lunch table. And these are the things we need to think about in terms of why and how people adopt certain political beliefs. And the real point of that I

was trying to drive home in that essay. Maybe I'm kind of a bleeding heart here. You tell me if

you agree or disagree. The point I was trying to drive home is that we want to have actually empathy because like a libtard moment, we want to actually have a sort of like patience and compassion for people, because it's very common for us who are sort of like initiated and know a little bit about this, to get angry and bitter and like man, like you should know better, or you got duped, or you were brainwashed by the

by the race communists or the woke mind virus. Actually, most people have no idea consciously in an intellectual way about what's happening around them. They're just simply imitating what

the people around them are doing. They are simply using the same solutions that have worked for the people around them in a sort of unthinking, unconscious way, because it's actually too mentally taxing, cognitively demanding, and socially punishing, ostracizing to get into the weeds on every one of these individual issues, whether we're talking about LGBT or we're thinking

about tariffs or the immigration policy or whatever. Most people don't think there is no actual rational, cognitive, sort of deliberative process going on. It's just simply people going along

and getting along. And when I read his book in the Wild, actually I bought a bunch of his books and read a bunch of his papers around that time when I was writing this, it gave me a profound Actually it felt like I was being like liberated, liberated by like this sort of anger at other people, like why aren't you taking up this challenge like I'm taking it up. Why aren't you trying to decode all of

the bullshit? And why aren't you willing to ostracize yourself from your friends and your family in the name of the truth. Because that's not actually what the kinds of foundational social dynamics we've evolved to function with. That's not how they operate. Which isn't to say that they're like deviant or pathological. It just means that you know, people like you and me are like a different breed of

person basically. And if we're getting in front of an audience, whether it's you and your podcast or me and my blog or whatever, or somebody at like a rally or a pub, you actually have to have like some heart for the people in front of you, the people who are gathered around you, because they don't actually know better.

And most of the time people treat that as a sort of insult or a smear, or they say in a pejorative and condescending way in the same way that I don't know any better when it comes to physics or mechanical engineering. Doesn't make me like a loser or a conservative or a dueb or whatever. It just means I don't have that specialization. I would need to rely

on a well meaning expert. I think, to the point of that essay, people believe and act the way they do far less for deliberative, conscious reasons than they do for invisible social dynamics that mind and tether people together. That was another really long winded answer, So I apologize.

share their experience. I don't have any interest in that. Understanding is a much different thing than actually seeking to seeking to put myself and to try to feel exactly what they're feeling. I think that leads that leads us down the path of the where you that what's become the meme of how you know, most people who would be right wing care about the people most around them, and then out here it's the people, yeah, the heat map, and I think the we have to be careful of that.

Understanding where people are coming from is one thing real that that section of empathy which has become the most popular, where you're trying where they want you to share and feel what other people are feeling. I have no interest in that. I have enough I have enough of my own problems.

It's like, that's not constructive. But one of the examples I give, if I can remember, one of Gigrinser's one of his three rules is basically the default rule that if there's no other solution, then you do what everyone else has done previously. And I give the example of somebody, a young man who enlists in the US military in two thousand and two or two thousand and three, and they did that for rule one, do what other people

around you do. And so if you're a young man and you're watching TV and all of the men in your family are like, this is fucking a travesty. We need to go to war, we need to defend America. You think, yes, it's a travesty. I need to go to war. I need to defend America. Maybe maybe ten other guys from your high school classroom did that, and

you're like, I'm gonna do that. And then you go and it's awful and you come back and you're a fucking mess and you look around at your other peers, other guys who you enlisted with, and they're developing drug problems or they kill themselves, and what do you do? You develop a drug problem and you kill yourself, and like that's the default. This is like a very sort of like bleak way of applying it, but it gave me a greater understanding. It's like, how does that happen?

Does it happen because we didn't give them enough education? Did it happen because they didn't have enough socialization time? Did it happen because like all of these were not trying to understand the real problem types of explanations. It's like, no, he did it for like the three basic rules of social organization. You do what everyone else does. If there's no other solution, you do the solution that everyone else has been using. And if you're a young guy who

enlisted in the military. Well, you see a lot of your peers falling apart completely and maybe killing themselves. Or another example I use is like a freshman aged college girl. You know, how do they all fall into or how does so many of them fall into this like destructive, licentious, borderline pornographic sexual behavior because they looked around what the people around them were doing, and they defaulted back to the same type of social behavior that most of the

people around them were engaging it. And I think if you can understand the degree to which just about everybody you know is engage aged in some kind of like mimesis, then it really does de emphasize the extent to which you think of them as a competent, individually, rationally minded person. Now, they may also be those things, but we are most of the time we are that in a very limited capacity.

You go to the hospital, your physician is giving you all these scans and using all of this large, you know, fifty thousand dollars words, and they're flexing their upper learning degrees at you, and you're like, Wow, this guy's really smart. And then they turn around and then they watch Bill Maher and what then they vote for Kamala Harris or whatever. You're like, Wait, I thought you were like a thinking person. You realize actually this that type of demanding, deliberative cognitive function.

You know, if there was a big pie chart, how much of your life you're you know, you're actually engaged in that. It's a tiny sliver of the pie. Most of the rest of it is. I mean, why did that guy end up in medical school in the first place. Because he looked to his left and his right and that's what the people around him were doing. Or because someone from on high their their father, their mother, their grandfather said you're going to do this, and so they

did it. It wasn't a deliberative, individualistic process of rational choice. It was unconscious, evolutionarily informed social process. So all that to say, I agree with you. We have to be careful about the E word, and my essay does skew on the cognitive empathy and not the affective empathy. So I appreciate you bringing that up.

general intellectual culture. So Daniel Conoman's Israeli psychologist who was in the idea. If he died, like last year, I think killed himself, it's probably interesting. It's probably not totally meaningless to out that he signed himself up for like one of these you know, end of life self terminating things. I don't know exactly. I don't know if you went to Denmark or wherever in those countries they have. So his partner, Amos Tversky. I'm probably butchering these names because

I'm not Israeli. They had been research partners since the fifties of the sixties they were part of. They actually originated what's called the Heuristics and Biases research program. So to your listening audience, you know, if you ever took a psych instruction to psychology class at any point when you were in college, there was probably a section on cognitive psychology, and a lot of it probably had to

do with this idea of heuristics and biases. And basically the Heuristics and Biases program says that human and this ger Gigorinzer accepts this, by the way, he just sort of takes a different conclusion from the same general idea. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Uh, we're basically perpetuating this

line of research. They were both you know, mathematically minded, statistical thinkers, so they both perpetuated through their research and their public advocacy, their intellectual work, the idea that human cognition is sort of a it's based on it like maybe a handful of mechanisms or principles, if you want to say, and we don't necessarily have an immediate ability to activate those mechanisms or principles. They kind of seem

to have a life of their own. Uh, and they work in the background, and somehow magically we draw inferences and conclusions and and and and answers to things. You know, Like when I as a kid growing up, my dad would always say to me, you know, like, you know, if you've ever got a problem you don't know the answer to, you know, stop thinking about it for a while, and a couple of hours later, you know, poof, it'll hit you. And I was like, well, that's kind of crazy,

and that would happen. Maybe you go to sleep and the answer comes to you in a dream, or you're trying to remember the name of some actor and it hits you a week later. It's like, what happened in my brain that I went from really forcedly trying to think about this to not and then suddenly the answer comes. Well,

this is the basic idea of deliberative executive cognition. There are a handful of mechanisms and principles that operate somewhere kind of nebulously in the mind or within human consciousness that help us to think and make choices and make calculations. There's a sort of a rudimentary brain calculator in there that is running all these these programs and calculations, and we don't really get to ever put our hands directly

on it. But that's how the brain works now, Caiman, and I'm basically, by the way, for your audience's benefit, I'm giving like a very stripped away version of that story.

But the important thing to take away from it is that Caniman and Versky basically argued that this is an inexorably flawed evolutionary process that leads us to basically make a lot of errors, that human cognition is barely better than a coin flip, and so their academic work was about helping experts become better decision makers by providing them with all of this statistically informed psychological research, which, by

the way, is also what Gigorenzer did. But the difference between Caniman and Tversky versus gigaenzers Gigorenzer's idea was that these heuristics and he didn't use the word biases, he just talked about them in terms of heuristics, are like

it doesn't get better than that. Like, if you're telling me that evolution over millennia formed our brain to work in this way, then it probably did it really well because just about everything else about us works really really well, but you have to understand the context that the mind is developing it. You have to understand the context the kinds of choices we have been forced to make throughout human history to understand how the brain arrives at those conclusions.

And obviously we're living in this sort of like fairy tale Disneyland world that's completely removed from like primary evolutionary selection pressures, and can you know, Gigorenzer's argument is, basically, we've got this finely tuned cognitive organ that now has to deal with a wildly unpredictable, unstable, information rich environment, which is a you know, historically a unique circumstance that we've really never there's a very little precedent for it

in the past. And so when humans make mistakes, it's because we are We have evolved in these niches, these tightly bound ecological niches, to produce certain types of solutions and to think about information in a particular way. We don't live in that world if you want to think, if you want to zoom out and say, you know, the world of scarcity versus the world of abundance. Right in the world of scarcity, there's limited resources there's also

limited information, there's limited choices to me. But in a world of abundance, such as as the one that we live in, to the extent that you could say it's a world of abundance, well, you see things like, well, there's a great study that got published some years ago. I'll ask you, actually, there's a magical number after which, once presented with this number a number of options, humans actually are not able to make a meaningful choice. Do you know what that number is?

For gigaenz are, that's not a fundamental problem with human cognition for Kaniman it is and so Canaman. The thing that's even more interesting about Caneman about not just his academic research program, but also his affiliations. If you read his book Thinking Fast and Slow, which you won a Nobel Prize for Nobel Prize and Behavioral Economy, he's talking about his good friend cast SUNS team. My gread friend cast SUNS team whose judgment I trust so well. Who at the same time that.

to make sure nothing Dad happens to you. So he has this sort of libertarian ethic about him where he talks about the need for sort of paternalism because people are so dumb and can't think straight and can't make decisions for themselves. That means that they are at they are easy prey for other people who would want, you know, demagogues,

people who'd want to manipulate them, what have you. And he treats he views his research as basically a way to help Joshmo navigate this world of complexity that he's just too much of a dumb gentile group to navigate on his own. And he keeps talking about it's just really funny the way he keeps talking about people like Cass Sunstein. You know, my good friend Cass Sunstein with

his tremendous work. Meanwhile, at the same time Canman's writing that book, Cass Sunstein is writing his a series of white papers with people like Adrian Vermule on conspiracy theories, on cognitive infiltration, on like the og misinformation, like his

whole idea of cognitive infiltration, Cass Sunstein. That is was literally, we're going to go into spaces where people are generating novel explanations for political and social crises, and we're going to fuck it up by deliberately throwing in pants on on you know, ahead retarded counter conspiracy theories. So it's a really really dangerous situation. I'll put it. I'll put a bone it real quick, just like you.

I'm editorializing a little bit. Cass Snstein is basically saying to people, it's a problem that these dumb, gentile rubs are looking at Israel the wrong way, and we need to figure out a solution to discourage them from doing that. And if we can't discourage them, we have to make the information economy so contaminated and unreliable that no social

transformation can come as a result of that. And so that's the reason I wrote about Knoman is because the basic conclusion of his research is that humans need a class of credentialed technological experts to do the thinking for them. And you mentioned elul Eluill, famous French sociologist, probably published like one hundred books. He might be one of the one of the most prolific writers of all time. He's a Christian, he was an anarchist, and he was French.

That was the worst part about him. He basically argued all the way back in the nineteen sixties that there's this encroaching metaphysical problem in human society is called technique. This is very actually very complicated his definition of technique. So I won't really get into it here on the show with you. I give a lot of time in the essay explaining it in a lot of different perspectives.

So it's definitely comprehensive in the book, but basically he says that, you know, technique is this, to put it very simply, is this sort of efficiency mechanism that throughout different periods of human history was subordinated to some other

aspect of human social life. He says, you know, in the Roman in the Greek and Roman times or the Roman times, that technique was subordinated to state craft, and that in the Medieval times that technique was subordinated to the aims of the Church and sort of theological thinking. That you know, what technique looked like in the Mid Ages was you know, theologians debating sort of the minutia

of like Christian metaphysics. You know, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, that kind of thing. But at some point in the last couple of hundred years, technique has become unmoored from other social forces or other social domains of human life. Technique is no longer just something you do to build a better bridge, or to build a better government, or to build a better cathedral, or to build a better love for God. It's actually

its own good, its own end. That sort of like colonizing every other social space, and if you look at the world around you, it seems like every endeavor that people are engaged in is kind of subordinated to this idea of more efficiency, more productivity, more conformity. If people complain about the algorithm online, it's kind of a way

of talking about the problem of technique. People want to talk about the rapaciousness of capital, and even ilul gives there's a whole section in the technological society where it basically says like even in the early generations of sort of like Thebarian, you know, wasp capitalism, that it was still pretty much kind of confined to economic logic and economic concerns, and at some point after that it became

its own thing. Daniel Kahneman, the people involved in this heuristics and research program, contemporary technocrats are really people who have become like the physical embodiment of this principle of technique, where you know, we don't even care about a nation state or a community. All of these things are inefficient, you know, they they don't they don't grow or progress on their own. There's something that Jacque Olleuwell says that

I consider to be a really profound thing. He says people who are kind of hypnotized by the magic of technique. If you talk to them and express trepidation, trepidation about like the direction of technological progress, they will treat you as an enemy of mankind. Like what you're not. You don't want to go to Mars. You don't want to replace your eyeballs with glass computers. You don't want to be able to erase down syndrome from the from the from the human uh, you know, DNA, like whatever thing

we can achieve through technological progress. If you are an advocate of that, then your enemy are the Ludites and you know, like the spiritually Amish people who have some skepticism at the idea that we can just keep innovating and progressing and making everything more technical. Just as an idea or as in a example for your audience, Like I love heavy metal, but I really don't like a lot of heavy metal from the last twenty years, and it's really taken me my whole life to figure out why.

If you compare Black Sabbath and Tony Iomi to I don't know, the one of the guitar players from Lamb of God or Trivium or some death metal band, like literally, Tony Iomi grew up in like bombed out Birmingham, like around the factories, and the sound of heavy metal was the sound of industrial, technological society. But Tony Iomi never like he still used that sound to write melodies and things that sort of resonate with the human spirit and our ears and are pleasing to hear. But you listen

to a band like My Sugar. I recently started listening to My Sugar. That song bleed. The first time I heard it, I was like, Wow, that sounds like an airplane engine. That's such a crazy sound to make on guitar. So I bought the whole album, and every single song is like we're literally going to recreate the sound you know, what the inside of your washing machine sounds like. And it's like guitar and guitar music was, whereas in the era of Black Sabbath, it's like we're sort of imitating

industrial society to produce music. It's like and now today it's like we're sort of using music to recreate technological society. It's less pleasing to listen to, it's more technically demanding. The guys, you know, James Headfield has a much more aggressive rhythmhand than Tony Iomi has had. But I mean, is every Metallica riff as great as every Black Sabbath riff? And then you know, twenty thirty years later, is who's ever headlining oz Fest? Now? Are they really better than

Pantera was in nineteen ninety four? They may be better performers, the music may be more on the hunting edge, let's say, of a particular genre. But it's also like nobody buys those records anymore. Nobody goes to those concerts. If you want to see a Lamb of God, you've got to see them like on a big festival tour with the same seven or eight other bands that nobody will pay to see on their own ticket. Anyway, the point I'm making is that technique sucks and it ruins good things.

Let me talk about Paul Bloom.

And at the time I was teaching, or around the time I had finished graduate school, Paul Bloom had published a series of studies that were, oh there were sixty minutes segments on it. He got he wrote, you know,

New York Times bestselling books about it. Basically, he developed a very unique set of research methodologies by which he claimed you could get infants under twelve months old to demonstrate complex social cognitive behavior, things that, according to the psychological dogma of previous generations, really didn't show up until like four five six seven years old. According to Paul Bloom,

it was present in babies as young as three months old. Basically, what he would do is a kind of rudimentary friend enemy distinction test, so they were so infants would and there are multiple iterations of this. I won't get into all the minutia of it, but one such example was infants would base the watch sort of a play of two dolls interacting with one another, or three dolls interacting with one another, where you know, the two dolls are maybe in conflict over something, and then a third doll

comes over and helps one. Maybe in a different iteration, a third doll comes over and hurts another one. Basically, the infants were They're measuring the responses of these infants to either aggressive or cooperative social behavior between complete strangers. So you know, generally, the outcome of the study was that babies tend to like the helpers more than they like the kind of anti social obstructive ones. They like neutral people more than they liked hurtful people. They like

helpful people more than they like neutral people. And so I would show the sixty minutes clip to students, and invariably Paul Bloom would would try to scale up the findings of this research. Okay, So Tier one is infants

have a preference for pro social behavior over anti social behavior. Okay, So in Paul Bloom's world, that means there's a sort of rudimentary faculty there pretty much from birth, where infants can make a friend enemy distinction, And with each subsequent iteration of this experiment, they would fold in other social conflicts, including racism. And again, around the same time, there was a whole bunch of studies based on what are called

looking time research. Methodology is basically, how long does an infant stare at something, and how in particular do they maintain their gaze or do they look away and get bored and seek other kinds of stimulation. So at the same time Paul Bloom is doing this research, there's other research showing that, well, infants have a sort of racial preference.

You know, white babies are going to look at a white face longer and more intently than they'll look at a black face or a yellow face, or a red face or a brown face, and so on and so forth. And basically Paul blooms making this argument that we are much more cognitively complex at an earlier stage and human human development. That would be part one. That part two, we have an innate preference for pro social or what's sometimes called you social behavior. And three that part of

that preference is kinship preference. We have a bias towards people that look like us, so on and so forth. And I would show this, to go back to the

story time. I would show this to my students. The students would be you know, as young as fresh out of high school, as old as as like in their fifties and sixties, trying to get another degree because the economy was totally shit ten fifteen years ago, so you know, black, white, Arab, Jewish, Christian, whatever, And routinely the two things I always observed, doesn't matter where I taught it doesn't matter who I taught it to. One, they were amazed at the idea that we have that

sort of cognitive sophistication that early on, so amazement. But there was also a sort of horror at the idea of implicating infants in the sort of nasty prejudices and social evils that adults get messed up in. You know, my class would be like, Okay, sure, maybe I'm racist, but not like twenty four week old Timmy, he can't

be racist. That's you know, that's wrong. And so my students had this sort of innate sense that you shouldn't talk about infants that way, that you shouldn't responsibilize infants that way, and that kind of sat with me for a long time. And the point of the essay that I basically make is there's a really really heavy presumption that Paul Bloom is making that, whether it's wrong or correct, the whole theory, his whole model kind of falls apart.

And the basic presumption he makes is that kinship is a moral phenomenon as opposed to any other kind of cognitive phenomenon. In other words, is it necessarily is there a moral dimension to kinship preference. I think that's an

open question. I think it's a presumption that you're making that the behavior or the type of categorization that the infant is doing is necessarily moral as opposed to social, as opposed to some other facet of social sorting would be the technical phrase, some other type of cognitive sort of Really, the only way you can, seemingly, the only way you can define those behaviors as moral is if you have a problem with those kinds of behaviors if

you see an issue with an individual identifying with someone that they're genetically related to as opposed and showing preference for someone that they are genetically related to over somebody else. And there's a there's an excerpt in that essay from a New York Times piece that that Paul Bloom wrote that again, like the way we started our conversation basically gives away the whole game. He says, oh, jeez, I can probably pull it's probably worth pulling up the exact quote.

If you'll just bear with me for like half a second.

early as the social engineering program ought to start. And that was what my students were intrinsically picking up on in the classroom. They were recognizing that if you are treating this novel cognitive psychology experiment as a pretext for a sort of rigorous disciplinary educational program. Almost none of them ever said that, but the horror that they all saw in treating an infant like like something you can

mold was written all over their face. And that's really the big issue with Paul Blum's body of work, And that's what I'm focusing on in that essay is that, Look, it's an open question whether or not there's a utility and a benefit to studying moral and social development and infants. But if you're doing that with the express intention of trying to effectively derail cognitive development infant cognitive development, then there's really there's neither a moral nor even a scientific

justification for doing so. I chose Paul Bloom's essay because it's actually or his book, because it's actually one of the worst books I've ever read in my entire life. From an academic, you know, ivy league educated researcher. There's no citations, which, by the way, like that doesn't bust my balls that there's no citations in it. But if you're like an Ivy League person, you're a department chair of universities, you're on sick like that's what you're supposed

to do. Like that's this just like the bare minimum, and it's just non sequitor after non sequader after nonsequitur and and it's it's it's almost again not to get too naughty and anti semitic here, but like you're reading that book of his is like getting into the mind of a Jewish propagandist because he's just telling you he's he's demonstrating to you why his own logic doesn't really make sense. You're getting to see the weaknesses in their worldview.

And there's a few other things he cites in there in terms of like anti racist race science that I think probably your audience would really enjoy it. So that's yeah, that's what's up with Paul Blue.

to make sure of that. So please let me have access to that mind so that it'll never think to turn its gaze upon me.

all that kind of thing. Peppered all throughout the book are mentions of basically like collective violence against other groups, and like in the first two or three pages he mentions the show and all with only there's one exception. All throughout the book, all of his examples of like evil racism, evil group conflict. It's always anti Jewish pogrim stuff throughout the book, and like you just can't help but read it and think, like there's an agenda here.

This actually isn't science, this isn't social theorizing. This is just as I said in our last conversation, like this is just like a racial polemic, like you are wearing the And this is a concept I introduce in that essay. It's not my own concept, but I've kind of put

my own flavor on it. Back in the sixties, you know, there used to be this talk of ethnoscience as a way to talk about like, you know, uh, some African guy in the bushes, you know, doing like witchcraft, voodoo and and and basically there was there was an attempt to try to make you know, non industrial societies and their rudimentary like knowledge power, make it on an equal footing to you know, Western civilization. But I twist that a little bit, and I say, Okay, let's accept the

premise that different groups practice the scientific method differently. That's basically what this concept of ethnoscience is trying to say. Well, when when people like Paul Bloom tried to do the scientific method, it's actually not about like objectivity, empiricism, uh, science knowledge, It's it's racial self defense. And that's particularly egregious when you are making in defense the object of your racial self defense.

in the vein of like a Kevin McDonald type of writing. Right. So, you know, I don't think I'm necessarily trailblazing, but I do think, you know, with regard to Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Hyde, you know, these are two people who I think, because of their recency, there's such a lack of skepticism

towards their work. It's easy to look you know, fifty years, one hundred years in the past and say, oh, well, Carl Popper kind of or Theodore Herzel or whoever kind of like, you know, their shit's all fucked up part of my language, Like it's obvious, but you're you know, when it's in our lifetime and you're growing up and maturing whatever, and you're seeing this work. You know, for a whole bunch of reasons, people don't put their their

scrutinizing lenses on. And even in the right Jonathan Jonathan Height's work is cited pretty much uncritically, and to me, like his ideas have always been on their face wrong. Same thing with Daniel Connoman, like the idea that evolution over whatever thousands of years, millions of years, tens of millions of years would create something like us that is like a fifty to fifty coin flip in terms of the shit going on between our ears, as it has

any positive utility, Like that's so obviously wrong. And the thing that's so like to me kind of characteristic of someone like a Daniel Connoman is that they develop all this language, and they develop all these concepts that you can't like test or apply in the real world or that don't actually reduce confusion, but they actually create more confusion. So like there's like one of the big concepts of Daniel Connoman, and this is a tangent I apologize this.

He talks about the human consciousness basically being broken up into two systems, system one and symptom system two. Hence the title of his book thinking Fast and Slow. One is faster, one is slower. One's more prejudicial, one is more conservative and reserved. One is more rational, one is more irrational. And then if you ask yourself, well, where is System one in the brain or in the body,

or you can't point to it. It's not an actual thing that corresponds to like a material or social reality chemisphere.

it's it's literally word craft, it's just word wizardry. And and then you know, the title of the book, Intolerant Interpretations is a very specifically intended title, like you need to hear those kinds of things and immediately disregard them. Like part of the problem that a lot of us have, for one reason or another is we're just uncritically accepting what's happening. And you can actually be like a like a jerk, like a disagreeable jerk from the outset and

be right about like the whole affair. And that's that's what I'm That's what I'm encouraging people to do. I'm encouraging people to be a disagreeable jerk to basically fight, like like just don't accept the premise and and that that that pertains to like our political activism, Like I don't need to entertain the prospect that the United States of America is a you know, giant job fair for the whole rest of the world. I don't have to accept the premise that our ancestors were bad people and

we need to be punished for it. I don't need to accept that we should encourage people to forego family formation so because reasons, because reasons that like on their face don't even stand up to scrutiny anymore.

in this country of radical individuals. I mean, if that doesn't tell you that that individuality and radical individualism is just a myth that as soon as somebody finds, oh I'm embracing this, but oh I want to hang out with other people who who are radical individuals too. It's like that doesn't make any sense. What are you talking about?

You know, and you know, people should you know, once you start going down the rabbit hole of you know, who preached libertarianism and where that came from, and you know, maybe look at some of the names. Yeah, yeah, yeah, may start seeing some similarities there too to what we're talking about.

Josh Neil is back. Josh, how you doing.

I'm not a Freudian myself, and most of my career, if you want to call it that, what I took from Freud was sort of like a a contrarian point of view, which is to say, there's a there's a couple of like to the extent that people know about Freud, they tend to land on a couple on one of a few perspectives. One conventional perspective is that, well, he wasn't doing real science, so all of it is junk if you're in this milieu. One perspective as well, he

was Jewish, so it's all junk. Or if you're like sort of like a like a left winger, then he's sort of unimpeachable in a lot of ways. I fall somewhere in the middle. I think his work is very instructive as an insight into the Jewish not just the Jewish mind, but like Jewish communal living, because as we're going to see with this essay, most of his work.

You could say his work is heavily autobiographical. The concept he develops are a direct result of his own experience, and he prefigured, he prefigured like the sort of modern preoccupation with with like trauma, which is unfortunate because I think it was it was, it's an it's now like sort of a trite observation to make that a large amount of psychological dysfunction, even social dysfunction, is due to disruption of of the home, the domestic circumstance early in

a child's life. Whether we're talking about like homosexuality or you know, aberrant sexualities in general, they're just statistically, they're they're the result of dysfunction in the home life early on in the kid's life. I also think he's interesting just for his like sort of anthropological work, which also kind of you have to take him into view what what Lourentz argues in this book to kind of understand

his anthropological work. His his whole idea of like the the son's ganging up to kill the father, takes a different tone when you consider his own personal autobiography and and and what his work was about but also like some of his anthropological work, like his book From Moses

to Monotheism. You know, he's treated as a subversive, especially people who get into stuff his his relatives were up to, like Edward Burnet's and they there's maybe you could say he was an equal opportunity subversive because he undermined the Jewish claim to being the first monotheistic people. So I think he was an interesting He had an introst in career. But what's more interesting is the stuff beneath the surface, which we're obviously going to get into today.

I'll start reading stop Me whenever. In the last few years, there I've been lots of news reports, documentary films, and articles about sexual abuse of children in Orthodox Jewish communities in March twenty seventeen, for instance, Haretz reported that the Israeli police arrested twenty two ultra Orthodox Jews for sex crimes against miners and women, and in July twenty nineteen, Times of Israel reported that the Deputy Health Minister Jakov

Litzmann was alleged to have improperly intervened to aid at least ten sex offenders from Israel's ultra Orthodox community. In twenty fifteen, Jewish attorney Michael Lescher wrote Sex Abuse Shanda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities to document, quoting the dismal history of how far too many of those cases have been assiduously concealed, both from the public and from the police. How influential rabbis and community leaders have sided

with the alleged abusers against their victims. How victims and witnesses of sexual abuse have been pressured even threatened, not to turn to secular law enforcement for help. How autonomous Jewish patrols, displacing the role of official police in some large and heavily religious Jewish neighborhoods, have played an inglorious part in the history of cover ups. How some Jewish communities have even succeeded in manipulating law enforcement officials to

protect suspects did abusers. This reminds me of the story of how Freud, having stumbled upon the widespread reality of child abuse among his mostly Jewish clientsele, covered it up with the theory that all little girls desire their father's penises and all little boys dream of screwing their mothers, and named his theory after a gentile myth.

wish I could pull that up. I just there's I don't know, I'm not finding it now, but yeah, it's just it's remarkable. I hesitate to say exactly that that sexual abuse or sexual violence is like sort of intrinsic to the Jewish social milieu, but it's hard to argue otherwise.

from traumatic sexual abuse in their childhood. The traumatic origin of hysteria and overused diagnosis in these days had already been discussed by neurologists, including Jean Martin Charcaut, whose conferences Freud had attended in Paris, and Hermann Oppenheim, who published in Berlin in eighteen eighty nine a treatise on traumatic neurosis Neuroses, Yet psychological traumas of sexual nature were rarely

discussed openly. On the other hand, there were medical publications known to Freud documenting the frequency of violence on children, including sexual assaults, but they focused on the physical consequences. In April eighteen ninety six, confident to have made a major breakthrough in psychiatry, Freud presented his findings to the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna, his first major public address to his peers. His lecture met with total silence.

According to Masan, Freud was urged never to publish it lest his reputation be damaged beyond repair. He found himself isolated, but nevertheless published his paper The Ideology of Hysteria. Are you familiar with that term?

an important finding. The discovery of a caputnilli kaputneli in neuropathology. Sexual experiences in childhood consisting in stimulation of the genitals, coitus like acts and so on, must therefore be recognized in the last analysis as being the traumas which lead to a hysterical reaction to events at puberty and to the development of hysterical symptoms. Yeah.

his patients. He determined that what he was taken at, what he had taken as repressed memories of sexual abuse, were in fact fantasies. For the rest of his life he would keep telling how he overcame his era and discovered that these fantasies were intended to cover up the auto erotic activity of the first years of childhood, to embellish it and raise it to a higher plane. And now from behind the fantasies, the whole range of a

child's sexual light came to light. The This is from the history of the psychoanalytic movement in nineteen nineteen.

with a pH. It's it's connected to sort of unconscious mental processes in the way that they they generate this, they generate wish fulfillments. That's tied to Freud's idea of the wish fulfillment but also frustrated wishes. So that's just generally what the pH is supposed to denote.

take the form of false memories of abuse. Thirty five years later, Freud's most gifted disciple, once president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, stumbled on the same realization that Freud

had shared in the Ideology of Hysteria. Sandor Freji wrote in his diary in July nineteen thirty two that the Oedipus complex could well be the result of real acts on the part of adults, namely violent passions directed toward the children, who then develop a fixation not from desire, as Freud maintained, but from fear my mother and father will kill me if I don't love them and identify

with their wishes. Becoming his apprehension of Freud's reaction, Florenci dared present his conclusions before the twelfth International Psychoanalytic Conference of Congress in electrotitled Confusion of Tongues between the Adults and the Children. His paper contains a number of important ideas confirmed by later research, such as the victim's psychological

identification with the aggressor or introjection. The aggressor disappears as external reality and becomes intrapsychic instead of extra psychic, so that even the guilt feelings of the aggressor are introjected. Farensi hypothesized that helplessness caused the victim to empathize with the aggressor, a process today known as Stockholm syndrome.

I mean that also there's a lot of Freudian concepts, not to like get way ahead of where we're at already. But there's a lot of Freudian concepts that take on a different character if you view them as being sort of compensatory responses to extreme trauma, extreme sexual violence, Like

repetition compulsion is another example. Repetition compulsion, in like the orthodox Freudian worldview, is the tendency of an individual to repeat some action, usually aunctional action, until they gain mastery over it and then can integrate that aspect of themselves

into the larger psychological world. But when you think about the habit or the tendency of like sex abuse victims to engage in repetitive sexual dysfunction, to like volunteer themselves into pornography or prostitution, or go from one one disastrous sexually violent situation to another disastrous sexually violent situation. It they never get to a point of mastery, and it's sort of like dispels the whole idea of the of the like the claim, the cleaned up interpretation of what

that is supposed to express. It makes more sense in the context of as we're going to see a little bit later on, that individual has a split internally and they don't have the only frame of reference they have is this violent, chaotic, traumatic aggressor personality.

as well. Such traumatic maturation happens at the expense of psychological integration, and Ferensi brings in the notion of a personality split quote there can be no shock, no fright without traces of a personality split. In his personal diary, reflecting on a patient who cannot remember having been raped but dreams of it ceaselessly French, he writes, I know from other analyzes that a part of our being can die, and while the remaining part of our self may survive

the trauma, it awakens with a gap in its memory. Actually, it is a gap in the personality because not only as the memory of the struggle to the death effaced, but all other associations associatively linked memories disappear, perhaps forever. The observation is consistent with the findings of French medical doctor and psychologist Pierre Janet, whose work has long been

overshadowed by Freudian psychology but has generated increased interest. In the nineteen eighties, Janet theorized the first model of disassociative identity disorders, now included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In Les Nevrosis, Janet wrote, justice, synthesis, and association are the great characterists of all normal psychological operations, so disassociation is the essential characteristic of all diseases of

the mind. Disassociation accounts for the evolution of traumatic memories composed of psychological, sensory, effective, and cognitive experiences, which Shanez calls ide fise. These fragmented aspects of the experience do not allow a real memory to integrate the biography of the subject, and instead develop into separate psychic entities which nevertheless interfere with the main personality. In the most severe cases,

it can develop into schizophrenia or multiple personalities. Parensi's lecture Confusion of Tongues met with the same disapproval from members of the Psychoanalytic Association of Freud's ideology of hysteria had met with the Viennese psychiatrists. Farensi was ostracized by Freud and his secretarian disciples, and his paper was never translated into English for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, as was customary. He died a few years later a broken man. Section three,

The Hidden Fault of the Father. This story raises two questions. First, what is it that made Freud change his mind in the first place and made him shun ferencies work thirty years later? Secondly, and more importantly, why was Freud's theory so successful despite being long proven scientifically flawed and its

therapeutic value baseless. On the first question, Massan shares his conviction that what Freud had uncovered in eighteen ninety six that in many instances children are the victims of sexual violence and abuse within their families, becomes such a liability that he literally had to banish it from his consciousness. This theory has been challenged, and Massan has been criticized

for exaggerating the negative reactions to Freud's seduction theory. All that can be said with confidence is that his paper didn't bring him the instant fame he expected.

So I don't know if you can actually find the source that he's claiming, but it would be interesting to find other accounts. Certainly, if he self censored out of a sort of inability to leap frog his career, that would be a lot more damning than simply he thought that he was going to be shut out of the discipline and out of you know, the academic system for

proposing something that was so like barbaric and shocking. That again, that would also put a very different spin on because Freud also the thing that's like you would not really get this from just reading the Freudian ouvoir, so to speak. He was intensely self conscious about his work. He was intensely self conscious about the sort of the psychoanalysis as a sort of universal system of interpretation, Like that was

one of his grand or ambitions. Was not just that it would be a therapeutic intervention or you know, his ambition wasn't just that he was advancing a science of the human nervous system. He later again I invoked, like from from Moses to Monotheism, he invoked his own system as a as a as a as a medium for literary criticism, for historical analysis, for sociology. So he thought it was a way, a revolutionary way to look at everything,

not just the human psyche and not just medicine. So on the one hand, he does have this reputation is like an intentionally self conscious, sort of career minded person. Even his even his relationship with Carl Jung, it was to an extent a sort of opportunistic way to present his ideas to gentile society by having them come through

the mouth of a gentile speaker. So I guess maybe it's not a stretch to to argue that that he self censored out of a frustration with the lack of positive reception, but the common explanation going all the way back to Stefan Malianews. Stefan Maliannu did a video about this, like ten or fifteen years ago, that the reason he pivoted from the seduction theory to this sort of if you want to say, victim blaming account of mental illness, was basically because he had been threatened by his peers

in the in the discipline. So I guess that's up for debate.

letters to Flie. Freud destroyed Fleiss's letters, but failed to have his own letters destroyed, which provide unique information on the way Freud elaborated his theories. Yet, at the end of the fascinating investigation, Massan and miss that the full

explanation for Freud's sudden conversion eludes him. Additional insight has been supplied by two books published almost simultaneously nineteen seventy nine, one in French and one in German, both translated in English in nineteen eighty two, Marie Balmari Freud and the Hidden Faults of the Father and Marianne Krohll Freud and his father both draw extensively from Freud's letters to Fleiss, which document how Freud was led to his theoretical about

face by his introspective self analysis. Balmari and Krohl point out that Freud undertook this self analysis just after the death of his father, Jacob. On November second, eighteen ninety six, ten days after his father's death, Freud writes a flice about a dream he had the night before his funeral, in which appeared a sign saying you are requested to close the eyes, which he interpreted as referring to one's

duty to the dead. Yet, on February eleventh, eighteen ninety six, after mentioning that forced oral sex on children can result in neurotic symptoms, he adds, ultimately my own father was one of those perverts, and is responsible for the hystery of my brother, all of whose symptoms are identifications, and those of several younger sisters. The frequency of this circumstance often makes me wonder. The following summer, he went through a depressive episode and wrote on July seventh, I still

do not know what has been happening to me. Something from the deepest depths of my own neurosis set itself against any advance in the understanding of the neuroses, and you have somehow been involved in it. Soon after September twenty first, he announced to his friend, I want to confide in you immediately the great secret that has been slowly dawning on me in the last few months. I

no longer believe in my neurotica his seduction theory. He gave his one explanation, the surprise that in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse. In the next letter, October third, he wrote confidently that in the case of his own neuroses, the old man plays no active part. Finally, October fifteenth, he referred to the Oedipus story, quoting a single idea

of general value dawned on me. I have found in my own case too, the phenomenon of being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood. Balmari and Krall independently build a strong case that Freud backed off from a theory which tarnished the ideal image of the father he was grieving. After his father's death, Freud felt constrained by a mandate that he was unable to resist, and hence dutiful son that he was took the guilt

upon his own shoulders. With help of his Oedipus theory, Balmari and Krall bring in the equation a recent biographical discovery of Jacob Freud's less than perfect behavior, the forgotten second wife named Rebecca, who mysteriously disappears, possibly by suicide, at the time of Jacob's marriage with his third wife, the beautiful Amelia Nathanson, his half his age and already pregnant of Sigmund. Of fact, Jacob tried to conceal by

falsifying Sigmund's state of birth. In light of post Freudian developments in transgenerational depth psychology, it is possible that Freud had from early age an intuitive sense of a hidden fault to the father linked to his own identity, which may have combined with memories of his father's sexual abuse

on himself and his brothers and sisters. During his self analysis at the age of forty, the whole thing came knocking at the door of his consciousness, but he finally surrenders to the self conscious imperative to close the eye to cover up the menacing truth of his father's faults. Freud invents of the Oedipus complex, changing children charging children themselves as polymorphous perversion, while Mary points out that in his personal identification with his hero Oedipus, who solved the

riddle of the Sphinx, Freud truncated the myth. According to Greek tragedians, Oedipus's father, Lais, was cursed by the gods for seducing a young teenage boy and leading to his suicide. Then, frightened by the oracle's prophecy that he would be killed by his own son if he conceived one, conceived one, Lais had his newborn son abandoned in the forest ankles pierced by the middle by the middle with iron spikes,

Euripides the Phoenician maidens. Thus, in the complete myth Oedipus, Oedipus's predestination to kill his father and marry his mother is not determined by his own impulses, but by the faults of his own father. For Balmari, Freud's ignorance of this part of the myth reveals and symbolizes his own blind spot, his failure to discover the secret guilts of the father, both of his own father and by consequence, the fathers of his neurotic and hysterical patience. Got anything there, No, no, no,

I'm just following them. Let's keep going, All right, here we go, Part four, The dark emotional powers of Jewishness. Neither Massan nor BALMII deal with the Jewish aspect of this issue. Marion Kroll hints that the father's mandates to close the eyes was a question of filial piety, on which ultimately the entire Jewish tradition is based, but although

Jewish herself, she does not insist on that aspect. For an interesting reflection on the Jewish hidden background of the Oedipus complex, we can turn to the very stimulating Book of John Murray Cutahee The Ordeal of Civility. The author points out that Freud had been fascinated by Sophocles Sophocles's play Oedipus Rex from his adolescence. When he saw it played in eighteen eighty five, it made again a deep

and mysterious impression on him. Twelve years later he wrote to Flices that he found, with his new theory of universal repressed wishes of incest and parricide, the explanation for the gripping power of Oedipus Rex. In other words, comments Cuta, he Freud proposes a theory to explain the play's power over him and to make intelligible why he should identify so deeply with its hero Oedipus. It is in the course of that effort that the core of the theory

of psychoanalysis is born. But then cute, he suggests that, but then cute. He suggests that Freud failed to see the real origin of his fascination with Oedipus Rex. What had resonated deeply in him from the time he first read Oedipus Rex was not so much the general plot of the play, the hero killing his father and marrying his mother as the circumstances in which Oedipus killed his father. Coming down a narrow road, Oedipus was rudely ordered to step aside by the herald of the king, then was

struck on the head by the king himself. Enraged, Oedipus slew the king, his herald and the rest of his retinue except one. This story, not acted but narrated in the play, bears an uncanny resemblance with another story that had made a lasting impression on Freud a few years earlier. As he explained in the Interpretation of Dreams, this is the story of a father. This is a story that his father, a stead old Jew from Morovia, where Sigmund

was born. Moravia, where Sigmund was born, had told him when he was ten or twelve years old, quoting to show how much better things were now than they had been in his days. When I was a young man, he said, I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets to your birthplace. I was well dressed and had a new kap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow, knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted, jew, get off the pavement. And what did you do? I asked, I

went into the roadway and picked up my cap. Was his quiet reply that struck me as unheeric conduct than the part of the big strong man who was holding a little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another which befitted my feelings better, the scene in which Hannibal's father, hamilkar Barka made his boy swear before the household altered to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time, Hannibal has had a place in my fantasies.

Freud cut he argues, had experienced shame, had experienced shame of his father, and to be ashamed of a father is a kind of moral parricide. Quoting Freud, presumably experienced not only this rage and shame, but guilt about the rage and shame. He quickly censored these unacceptable feelings. Unacceptable to a dutiful son, ostensibly proud of his father, he repressed them. Years later, he encounters Sophocle's tragedy and it

lays a spell on him. Still later, after his father's death, he rationalized the spell with a universal theory that discharged

him from further inquiry into his own family story. But the idea fix which that Oedipus was to become for Freud cut he maintains, hinges on a small detail, small but structurally indispensable of the action of the story that Freud never mentions in all the countless times he retells the legend a social insult, a discourtesy on the road stemming from someone in a position of social superiority, King Laius to the unknown wayfarer Oedipus, just as a Christian

in Freiburg who forced Jacob Freud into the gutter. According to kutahe the supposedly universal Oedipus complex that Freud thought he discovered was in reality the veil of characteristically was the veil of a characteristically Jewish complex of his time.

of organize themselves. And the basic idea is this idea, the myth of the primal Horde, which, to put it really, really simplistically is describes this symbolic murder of the father by the sons, And I'm just I've never looked at the because it's been like many, many, many years since I read some of these books, certainly before I ever took on like this kind of framework to think about them.

I'm sitting here just wondering now with the implications of his anti pological explanation would be, you know, in the context of this Jewish persecution, the weakness of his own father, the way his own parental sort of by the way that id fix means fetish, so the way his own sort of fetishized parental relations are informing his his hys theorizing. I'm gonna mallel that one a little bit more, but yeah, you can.

into the heart of European civilization. Freud's disciple and first biographer, Ernest Jones remarks that Freud felt himself to be Jewish to the core, and evidently it met a great deal to him. Books dealing specifically with Freud's Jewishness, such as Moishe gracer Dual Allegiance Freud as a Modern Jew Sunny Press nineteen ninety four, can rely on several statements made by Freud himself, either in private correspondence or in Jewish environment.

In the preface for the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo, for example, asking himself rhetorically, what is Jewish in his work? Freud answered, A very great deal and probably its very essence. In a speech prepared for delivery at the Benet Breath Lodge in Vienna in nineteen twenty six, Freud explained his motivation for joining thirty years earlier in eighteen ninety seven.

Whenever I have experienced feelings of national exultation, I've tried to suppress them as disastrous and unfair, frightened by the warning example of those nations among which we Jews live, but there remained enough to make the attraction of Judaism and the Jews irresistible. Many dark emotional powers all the stronger the less they could be expressed in words, as well as the clear consciousness of an inner identity, the familiarity of the same psychological structure. So I became one

of you. The statement is actually excellent.

I don't know if this is kind of his argument, because I've actually never read The Ordeal of Civility, But that could if we wanted to take a more cynical approach to to explaining why he has gone through these changes in his psychological theory. I mean, it could be that he wanted to in the same way he wanted to absolve his father. He also wanted to absolve his people of their own dysfunction, their ugliness, the violence that

their community sort of harbors. That in bringing bringing Jewish society to gentile society, he wanted to sort of make their dysfunction like not a particular dysfunction. I mean, I don't know if is he would we say that his theorizing, the universalizing of his theory is a way to whitewash, particularly particularly Jewish dysfunction. Is it a way to help integrate Jews into gentile society by saying, well, all this expressly Jewish dysfunction is actually sort of a universal human tendency.

I don't know, but that sentence, so I became one of you is very telling to me.

I believe it says that earlier in the article. So he's it seems like if he's joining the Bene Breath at that point, he's embracing his Judaism as his father is passing, and I don't know what his dad dies on November two, eighteen ninety six or ten days before that, and then the next year he joins the ben a breath, which is I assume to be around, be around other Jews, or even to find a replace his father in some way by finding somebody who you know, in a leadership

role in Judaism. I don't know, just there as yeah. The statement is an excellent illustration of what cut he calls the ordeal of civility, The struggle of every Jew who wishes to assimilate yet feels unable to overcome the dark emotional powers of his ancestral Jewishness, with its implicit imperative not to assimilate. Jewishness has much to do with what Ivan Menagi calls those invisible loyalties. They combined a person to his ancestors by an irresistible system of values, obligations,

and debts. The question is to what extent freud psychoanalytical theory is the result of Freud's surrender to those dark emotional to those dark emotional powers. We must fikee Freud seriously when he tells us in the Interpretation of Dreams that his own Jewishness took the form of an identification with Hannibal and the fantasy of taking vengeance on the Romans. He went on to say, quoting I myself had walked

in Hannibal's footsteps. Hannibal, with whom I had achieved this point of similarity, had been my favorite hero during my years at the Gymnasium. Moreover, when I finally came to realize the consequences of belonging to an alien race and was forced by the anti Semitic feeling among my classmates to take a definite stand, the figure of the Semitic

commander assumed still greater proportions in my imagination. Hannibal and Rome symbolized in my youthful eyes to struggle between the tenacity of the Jews and the organization of the Catholic Church. The significance for our emotional life which the Antisemitic movement has since assumed, helped to fix the thoughts and impressions

of those early days. Thus, the desire to go to Rome has in my dream life become the mask and bimble for a number of warmly cherished wishes, for whose realization one had to work with the tenacity and single mindedness of the Punic general. Though their fulfillment at times seemed as remote as Hannibal's lifelong wish to enter Rome. The significance of this public confession, printed in eighteen ninety nine for all the world to read, cannot be overstated.

Here Freud names as a driving force for his life the fantasy of entering Rome, the Christian world and destroying it to avenge the Phoenicians the Jews. If Freud was deeply influenced by his Jewish background, so were the other founding members of the Psychoanalytical movement. Dennis Klein writes in Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytical Movement, quoting from its beginning in nineteen oh two to nineteen oh six, all seventeen members were Jewish. The full significance of this number lies

again in the way they viewed themselves. For the analysts were aware of their Jewishness and frequently maintained the sense of Jewish purpose and solidarity. This feeling of positive Jewish pride formed the matrix of the movement in the psychoanalytical

circle as a spirits are renewed independence. It tightened the bond among the members and powered their self image of a redemptive elite The exception is Carl Jung, whom Freud named president of the International psycho Analytical Association in nineteen ten, precisely is to deflect the reproach that psychoanalysis was a Jewish science. Interestingly, Jung is the only member who never

subscribed to Freud's theory of infantile sexuality. In response to a letter by Karl Abraham, who complained that Jung seems to be reverting to his former spiritualistic inclinations, Freud explained, it is really easier for you than it is for Jung to follow my ideas, for you stand nearer to my intellectual constitution because of racial kinship. Freud asked Abraham not to antagonize Jung because it was only by his appearance on the scene a psychoanalysis escaped the danger of

becoming a Jewish national affair. In contrast to Young, Abraham was the most zealous supporter of Freud's theory of infantile sexuality in the history of the socho analytical movement. In nineteen nineteen, Freud wrote that the last word in the question of traumatic etiology was later on said by Abraham when he drew attention to the fact that just the peculiar nature of a child's sexual constitution enables it to provoke sexual experiences of a peculiar kind, that is to say,

traumas self inflicted traumas, so to speak. Freud was referring to a nineteen oh seventeen paper by Abraham, the experiencing of sexual trauma as a form of sexual activity. It is perhaps significant that Abraham, son of an Orthodox rabbi, was also the most ethnocentric of Freud's disciples. He wrote in nineteen thirteen an essay on neurotic exogamy, diagnosing Jewish men who say they could never marry a Jewish us with a neurosis resulting from disappointed incestuous love.

And the further that uh as that as that that sort of disagreement became more pronounced than Freud started to more aggressively attack Carl Jung privately and publicly, even taking out full page of newspaper ads saying that he was

basically undermining him in his career. I've always wondered why Jung didn't take up that that explanation of Freud's and I just wonder if that speaks to like a fundamentally different sort of I don't know, if you want to say just cultural hygiene between gentiles and Jews, that it's like less credulous to like a gentile of well upbringing to believe that there's rampant sexual violence going on.

if you want to say sexual identity related issues. But it was never clear to me why why he took such a conflict with Freud on that point. I mean, I don't know, just wondering out that. Well, here's a question for you, and I don't know if you know this or not. You know, basically the beginning of this and through the beginning, it seems to imply that there may have been a problem with parents, fathers molesting their children in the Jewish community, and that it still happens through today.

sort of personality conflicts. Yeah, I don't think I have an answer to that. Question. I don't think it's a strictly Jewish phenomenon. I think what is unique to the Jewish community, and it clearly has been for a long time, is like circumcision is effectively part of their tradition and has been for a very long time. And do we have to get specific into a kind of, you know, all overly narrow idea that that sexual violence. I mean that to me, circumcision is a kind of sexual violence.

The rabbi cleaning the aftermath of that with his mouth. This is basically a violation, whether we want to talk in more overt terms or in a sort of to borrow Freudian word, a sort of sublimated religious excuse for engaging in the same kind of territorial behavior. It's no matter what way you want to look at it, there's something intrinsic to their community that produces that sort of dysfunction.

But I mean, I don't think it's if we just wanted to talk about the problem of incest more generally, or like familial sexual violence more generally. I think is out there, what's it? What's kind of I did my own show on my substack ebl on the work of George Patai recently, and one of the questions that we

had sort of raised. George Pattai was a French well, he was a seminary student, and then he became sort of a sort of your stereotypical kind of French pervert philosopher, and he carried on this tradition that you see a lot during Freud's time and after, where there's this extreme preoccupation with incest as a sort of foundational anthropological, psychological

question to be answered about human nature. And some of the most obvious examples of intellectuals who approached that question were Freud, but also Levi Strauss, who was also Jewish, and there were a number of Jewish intellectuals at that time who in their social theorizing were wondering about the foundational rule incest place what it tells us about human nature. And they weren't all Jews. He did that. George Batie was not Jewish, but he was also very heavily influenced

by Levi Strauss. And you know, that to me is like sort of an indication that there's an overrepresentation of this problem in that community. But I don't think by any stretch of the imagination they were the only ones.

the recognition he craved for. Although he disguised the identity of his patients and his case studies, it would not have been long before his work was attacked not just as Jewish science, but as evidence of the depravity of Jewish mores. However, I don't think Freud's consciousness. I don't think Freud reasoned consciously in this manner. As he was turning a blind eye in the incestuous sexuality of his patient's family, his blindness was not fake, but psychologically constrained.

It is the blindness that characterizes Jewishness. At the core, Jewishness is the conviction deeply internalized from the earliest age of the superiority of Jews over non Jews chosenness. Anything contradicting this superiority creates a cognitive dissonance which is overcome by denial. Denial means projection. To protect the dirty secret of child abuse and Jewish families, including his own, Freud projected an imaginary, repressed, infantile perversion on all mankind. Projection,

in turn, means inversion. Freud's close disciple Otto Rank claimed the Jews had a more primitive and therefore more healthy sexuality than Gentiles. Freudians and Freudo Marxists have systematically denounced Christian civilization as suffering from sexual repression. According to Wilhelm Reich, anti Semitism is itself a symptom of sexual frustration and

could be cured by sexual liberation. The Mass Psychology of Fascism nineteen thirty four, an improvement from Leo Pinsker's theory that judaeophobia was a hereditary and incurable disease transmitted for two thousand years. In order to understand the psychological background of the Reichean Messianic mission to cure the Christian West, and in order to see more clearly the projective nature

of the psychoanalytical theory of repression. It is helpful to know that the personal story of Wilhelm Reich, which reads as a caricature of Freud's. At ten years old, when he realized that his mother was having an affair with his tutor, the young Wilhelm thought of blackmailing his mother into having sex with him. Eventually, he confided in his father, that is, about his mother's adultery. In nineteen ten, after a period of beatings from his father, his mother committed suicide,

in which Reich blamed himself. One of the most puzzling aspects of Jewish relationship with their host nations is its ambivalence pattern on Biblical history. Within Jewish thinking, saving the nations and destroying them are not two sides of the same coin, but one and the same, because what nations are supposed to be cured of is their very identity,

their gods in biblical terms. According to Andrew Hines, author of Jews in the American Soul, Jews have shaped American ideas about the mind and soul with the preoccupation to purge the evils they associated with Christian civilization. It really started with Freud and September nineteen oh nine, invited to give a series of lectures in New England, Freud jokingly asked his companion Sandor Ferenci and Carl Jung, don't they

know we're bringing them the plague? An extraordinary statement for a medical doctor pretending to have found a cure for neurosis and a prophetic one. Freudianism became a justification for a sexual liberation that can be seen in retrospect as a massive sexual abuse of the youth.

not really a Freudian. I think he's an interesting person in in you know, intellectual history, but there's there's a sort of a difference between Freud and then Freudianism that followed after him. And there's a lot of people who took up Freud as a kind of revolutionary figure. It took his ideas as a as a vehicle for like anti Christian, anti gentile, anti you know, Western polemics. I mean, as Lourene Greynatt mentions earlier in the passage that you read.

You know, a lot of the post Marxist tradition was a blend of Freud and Marx UH, and it was taking up some of those ideas that really were compatible, compatible as a sort of like radical communist polemic against uh, you know, the the inherited tradition of Western society. But Reich in particular used this sort of free wheeling sexuality as as a as a foundation of his theorizing. It was a it was a foundation of his polemic against

Christian sexual morality. I don't know that I read into Freud that as much, although some of those quotes I had not heard that about the plague before. So that's the first time I'm hearing that, you tell me for the first time. It's that is telling. And I think it's undeniable that he had a conscious self concept as a Jewish and interfacing with gentile society. But sometimes I feel that he gets tarred a little bit too much. Just a thought.

going to be like, Hey, what's that? What's that? So all I can say is Clement Freud has a Wikipedia page, and I'm sure if you want to go go down a rabbit hole, all right? Part six. But a Brith and the Roads of Fame by a Stuning CoInc and Freud was initiated into the recently founded Bene Brith in September eighteen ninety seven, precisely the time of his conversion

to the dogma of infantile sexuality. Dennis Klein writes in chapter three of his book the Book The Prefiguring of the Psychoanalytical movement Freud in the bene Breth that after the bitter disappointment of being denied professorship, Freud filled through the bena Breth the professional as well as the social vacuum. In his life. He was a very active member, attending almost every meeting. During the first decade his most productive years.

He recruited at least three members, and in nineteen oh one was a founding father of a second lodge in Vienna, the Harmony Lodge. The same year he gave a talk on goals and purposes of the bene Breath Society. Freud often presented his work to the benea Breath before publishing it. In this respect, writes Klient, the Viennase bene Brith Lodge

was a precursor of the movement of psychoanalysis. After his death in nineteen thirty nine, the bene Breth of Vienna continued relentlessly the support granted during his lifetime to the famous brother. To what extent where the bene Breath Masonic meetings influential in Freud swing from the seduction theory to the Oedipus theory. No one can say. However, we can hold as fairly certain that Freud's membership in Nay Birth was influential as becoming one of the major intellectual stars

and gurus of modernity. As a scientist, Freud was a failure, duped by his own unconscious and unrealistic confidence that he

could solve the human enigma by self analysis alone. He was also an impostor who, in his published case studies, invented cures when there was none as investigations, as the real biographies of his patients have shown true, he was sometimes insightful, but the hagiographic image of Freud as a discoverer of the unconscious is totally unwarranted, as Henri Ellenberger has shown in his classic study The Discovery of the Unconscious,

quoting throughout the nineteenth century, there existed a well rounded

system of dynamic psychiatry. The basic features of the first dynamic psychiatry were the use of hypnosis as an approach to the unconscious mind, the interest in certain specific conditions called magnetic diseases, the concept of a dual model of the mind with a conscience with a conscious and an unconscious ego, the belief in the psychogenesis of many emotional and physical conditions, and the use of specific psychotherapeutic procedures.

The therapeutic channel was seen as being the rapport between hypnotists and patient. The cultural impact of the first dynamic psychiatry was far greater than is generally believed. It could easily be argued that in matters of psychology, every sensible thing that Freud said had been said before him, and that almost everything he said hadn't been said before has

been proven wrong. So why did Freud become famous? The long answer is that Freud benefited from the same kind of communication networking that produced many other Jewish intellectual quote unquote geniuses and made French novelists. Andre Guide comment in nineteen fourteen in his diary about this tendency to constantly emphasize the jew This predisposition to recognizing in him talent, even genius. The shorter answers to the question above is

bene Breth. I will not suggest that the bene brit supported Freud's Oedipus theory because they saw its potential for the moral corruption of the West. Nor do I suggest that the bena Breth and Freud conspired to ruin Western civilization with at pest elential idea of infantile sexuality. But I do suggest that had Freud maintained his earlier conviction in the reality of the abuses suffered by the Jewish parents,

he would not received as much support, probably none. To clarify this point, is it appropriate to recall a memorable demonstration of power by the Bene Breth, which has an obvious relevance to Freud's intelectual biography. In nineteen thirteen, the Bene Birth created the antidefamation lead to save the life and reputation of Leo Frank, the wealthy young president of the Atlanta chapter of the Bena Brith, who was convicted of the rape and murder of Mary Fagan, a thirteen

year old girl work in his pencil factory. The evidence for Frank's guilt was overwhelming, but tremendous financial resources were deployed for his legal defense, including false testimonies. An intense publicity was orchestrated in the news media, with the New

York Times devoting enormous coverage to this case. I quote from ron Uns's article, quoting for almost two years to nearly limitless, funds deployed by Frank's supporters covered the cost of thirteen separate appeals on the state and federal levels, including to the US Supreme Court, while the national media was used to endlessly vilify Georgia's system of justice in

the harsher's possible terms. Naturally, this soon generated a local reaction, and during this period, outraged Georgians began denouncing the wealthy Jews who were spending such enormous sums today subvert the

local criminal justice system. All appeals were ultimately rejected, and Frank's execution date for the rape and murder of the young girl finally drew near, But just days before he was scheduled to leave office, Georgia's outgoing governor commuted Frank's sentence, provoking an enormous storm of popular protests, especially since he was legal partner of Frank's chief defense lawyer and obvious

conflict of interest. A few weeks later, a group of Georgia citizens stormed Frank's prison farm, abducting and hanging him, with Frank becoming the first and only Jew lynched in American history. Thanks to the mobilization of the Jewish power elite, as one man, Leo Frank had been turned from a convicted pedophile and child murder into a martyr of antisemitism. We don't know what Freud thought of this case, but there is an obvious residence between his assaults on truth

and the Benet Brits. If young Mary Fagan had visited a Freudian psychoanalyst before her atrocious death and complained of her boss's sexual overtures, she probably would have been told about her own penis envy. Had she protested, she would have been told that her protest proved her sexual repression. Exactly has happened to Freud's patience. Dora at a bower by her real name, an eighteen year old girls suffering

from hysterical symptoms. I will say this, the KKK up until this point really had no the Jewish question wasn't really on their radar. This basically was a turn in their organization. And actually at that point their organization had weakened and this kind of woke them up. So yeah, we see the Uh what happens when when Jewish power and money goes to protect their own people doing who've done something wrong or being accused of doing something wrong?

How other people just go wait a minute, let's start asking some questions about this. So all right, part seven the Isaac complex. The son's repressed wish to murder his father is perhaps Freud's most fertile intuition. The problem is with Freud's abuse of generalization. Only the neurotic son of a destructive and manipulative father has a repressed wish to kill the father. Freud discovered this impulse in himself and confounding his own self analysis for a scientific quest of

universal laws, he projected it on all mankind. But the fact that Freud's Jewish disciples all discovered the same impulse, and that Freudian has and became so widely accepted by Jews, suggest that Freud's generalization was not without merit. It only suffered from the tendency of Jewish intellectuals to protect to preject Jewish issues on all mankind. The child's repress wish to kill his father is not universally human, but maybe

character Jewish. For the Jewish father is the guardian of Jewishness and the representative of the Jewish God, and every Jewish buyer is in the depth of his soul to free himself from Yahweh, the archetypal abuse of incastrating father. As Philip Brought's character Smilesberger says, in Operation Shylock to appeal to a crazy, violent father, and for three thousand years,

that is what is to be a crazy Jew. And so the secret wish to murder the Jewish Father is also a secret wish for the death of the Jewish God. It is therefore identical with the so called Jewish self hatred that Theodore Lessing saw as affecting every Jew without exception. There is not a single man of Jewish blood in whom cannot be detected at least the beginning of Jewish self hatred.

like contemporary comparative religious scholars sort of look at. Certainly it's something anti Semites look at and say, hmm, this is a particularistic god with the specific origin that reflects an aspect of the Jewish psyche. And maybe it's not, you know, the one true loving God of the Bible. Blah blah blah. I mean, it's certainly interesting to turn the psychoanalysis back on the psychoanalyst. That's always a fun game to play.

is the son that Abraham was willing to slaughter. The expression The expression Isaac complex has actually been used by French heterodox psychoanalyst Jean Pierre Fresco, who defines it as the overall consequences of the son's psyche of a father perceived as as psychologically menacing, destroying, or murderous. Fresco calls

such a father a Brahmic. He draws his insight from a reading of Frantz Kofka's autobiographical and posthumously published Letter to the Father, in which Kafka describes the devastating effect on his personality of a father whose means of education were abuse, threats, irony, spiteful laughter, and oddly enough, self pity. Kafka also wrote to his father, my writing was all about you. All I did there after all was to be moan what I could not be moaned upon your breast.

Kafka's major novels refer autobiographically to his relationship with his father and its deletarious psychic consequences. The Metamorphosis tells of Gregor Sams's transformation into a repulsive insect, chased and killed by his father, whose incestuous violence is suggested in the scene where the father attacks his son from behind with a cane, tapping his feet and pushing out sibilants like

a wild man. After the death of Gregor appears his sister Greta, his double in the other sex, the homosexualized son in the Verdict, George, anagram of Gregor, has just become engaged with Frieda Brandenfeld same initials as Felice Bauer, the woman who Kafka had just started dating, and announces it to his father. The father opposes a terrible prohibition to this project of marriage, accompanied by extreme narcissistic biolence.

The paternal prohibition of emancipation through marriage is linked to an incestuous domination that becomes clear when George submissively proposes to the father to exchange beds. Fresco also finds a psychic trace of the father in Kofgo's novel The Trial, whose narrator Joseph Kay was arrested without knowing who slandered

him nor who will judge him. According to Fresco, this incomprehensible and omnipotent slanderer accuser judge is the palympicist, the polympicist of an archaic Abrahamic father, unconsciously introjected as an archaic and sadistic super ego and turned into an inner prosecutor.

I find it significant that Kafka, by his own omission, drew his inspiration from his experience as the son of a psychopathic father, while whose Jewish literary critics consider him quintessentially Jewish, by common consents that Harold Kafka is not only the strongest modern Jewish writer, but the Jewish writer. Hence Israel's long decade long legal battle to secure his autograph manuscripts as national treasure. Who is right of Kafka and his critics? Does his genius come from being Jewish

or from having a psychopathic father? Obviously it is impossible to distinguish the two factors. Because the psychopathic father happens to be Jewish, he is, in Fresco's terms, the typical a Brahmic father. But are not all Jewish fathers of Brahmik in the measures of their jewishness? Is not the Jewish God a psychopathic father, and the psychopathic father of a Jewish god. Kafka perceived his sadistic father as a cruel divinity whose laws were totally arbitrary and yet unquestionable,

just like the Jewish God. For me, as a child, everything you called out to me was positively a heavenly commandment, he wrote in his Letters to the Father. From your armchair, you ruled the world. Your opinion was correct. Every other was mad, wild with sugar, not normal. Your self confidence, indeed was so great that you had no need to be consistent at all, and yet never ceased to be right, quoting Hence the world was for me divided into three parts.

One in which I, the slave, lived under laws that had been invented only for me, and which I could I did not know why never completely comply with. Then a second world which was infinitely remote from mine, in which you lived, concerned with government, with the issuing of orders and the annoyance about their not being obeyed. And finally, a third world, which everybody else lived happily and free from orders and from having to obey. I was continually

in disgrace. Either I obeyed your orders, and that was a disgrace, for they applied, after all, only to me. Or I was defiant, and this was a disgrace too, for how could I presume to defy you? And I could not obey because I did not, for instance, have your strength, your appetite, your skill, although you expected it of me as a matter of course. This was the greatest disgrace of all. I mean, this is I was, as I was reading this section right here, the quoted section, I was just thinking of.

the executioner of the commandment given to Abraham. As soon as he is eight days old, every one of your male's generation after generation must be circumcised. Had Freud preserved his original insight into the psychological damage of sexual abuse on children, he might have eventually reflected on the impact of neonatal circumcision, but he has been rather discrete on the subject. Though he didn't have his own sons circumcised, he broaches in his later books, but only in the

context of anthropological speculations. In New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, he speculated that during the human family's primeval period, castration used to be carried out by a jealous and cruel father upon growing boys, and that circumcision, which so frequently plays a part in puberty rights among primitive people, is

a clearly recognizable relic of it. Freud went further in Moses and Monotheism, circumcision is the symbolic substitute of castration, a punishment which the primeval father dealt his sons long ago out of an awfulness of his power. And whosoever accepted this symbol showed by so doing that he was ready to submit to his father's will, although it was

at the cost of a painful sacrifice. Interestingly, Freud originally got that idea from Sandor Ferenci, who had written an article that greatly impressed Freud, that circumcision as a means of inspiring terror a symbol of castration by the father. We note that in the above quotations, Freud isn't referring to Jewish circ circumcision of eight day children, only to circumcision of adolescent boys. Given the Jewish undercurrent of Freud's

intellectual biography. It is reasonable to assume that his inability to deal with the issue of Jewish neonatal circumcision is connected to his refusal to face the devastating reality of child abuse. Isn't the first abuse suffered by every Jewish male that part of his parents and kin's circumcision on the eighth day, It physically impresses on every Jew and on all Jews collectively, the traumatic domination of Yahweh and

his covenants. The psychological impact of neonatal circumcision performed without anesthesia and causing unbearable pain has been studied by Professor Ronald Goldman, author of Circumcision The Hidden Trauma. His research shows a disturbance in the mother child bonding process after the ritual. Testimonies from mothers who observe circumcisions show that the mother's guilt is also part of the equation. Here is from Elizabeth Pickard Ginsburg. I don't feel I can

recover from it. We had this beautiful baby boy in seven beautiful days, and this beautiful rhythm starting, and it was like something had been shattered. When he was first born. There was a tie with my young one, my newborn, and when the circumcision happened, in order to allow it, I had to cut off the bond. I had to cut off my natural instincts, and in doing so, I cut off a lot of feelings towards Jesse. I cut it off to repress the pain and to repress the

natural instinct to stop the circumcision. The unnatural, incestuous wish that Freud and his Jewish male disciples discovered in their repressed unconscious could perhaps be explained as a result of the inhibition in mother child bonding caused by the trauma of neonatal circumcision, a trauma cause at this age has little chance to ever be brought back into consciousness and

be healed. More research is perhaps needed on the possible link between Jewish circumcision and the fact that, according to the nineteen oh six Uish Encyclopedia, that the Jews are more subject to diseases of the nervous system than the other races and peoples among which they dwell. Research done by sociologists Leo Stroll in nineteen sixty two show that the rate of neuroses and character disorders among Jews was about three times higher three times as high among Catholics

and Protestants. In the Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud describes religion, meaning essentially Christianity, as universal obsessional neurosis, which has for believers the merit that their acceptance of the universal neuroses spares them the task of constructing a personal one. With a similar approach, Judaism can be described as a

collective sociopathy. That does not mean that the Jews are sociopaths, but rather that, in proportion to the degree of their identification as Jews, they are victims of a sociopathic mindset patterned from the Tanak marked in their flesh, impressed traumatically in their subconscious by circumcision, and fuel by their elites with the paranoia of anti Semitism. The difference between collective sociopathy and individual sociopathy is the same as between collective

neurosis and individual neurosis. According to Freud, participation in a collective sociopathic mentality allows members of the community to channel sociopathic tendencies towards the outside of the community and to maintain inside a high degree of associability.

human consciousness, to d the ego, the super egos. I mean, this is one of the reasons, going through my education, but also just reflecting on it throughout my life, I never really considered myself a Freudian was because I never felt in my own experience as a thinking person any identification with or recognition of some of these things that he treated as sort of paramount to the human experience. So, you know, the idea of a super ego as this

sort of crushing mental tyrant, urging you into conformity. I mean, that sounds a lot more like how Lourent Goynott talks about the relationship that Jewish men, Jews in particular, feel towards Yahweh and the desire to overthrow the Father, to set themselves up as a sort of authoritarian guy of

one type or another. I mean, that is what the super ego is and his conception, and that's sort of what you know, a certain like anti Semitic reading of the God of the Old Bible looks like and I don't know too many gentiles my whole life who really necessarily had a problem with like I mean, there's an extent to which, you know, nobody likes to be told what to do, and at some point in life we're all like shaking our fist against the man or whatever. But this sort of like deep seated, for lack of

a better word, pathological relationship with authority or conformity. I mean, most of the guy I mean, I grew up middle class for the most part, so most of the people I knew like never had a problem with conformity so long as the nature of the authority was acceptable or justifiable.

And you see a certain and streak in like these more radical Jewish intellectuals, where there there literally is no standard that they will subject themselves to and and many Jewish philosophies are entirely based on this idea that I am my own measure and how dare you? This is almost like like is his name, Dave Portnoy from Barstool Sports.

It's like he's like almost a good representation of this, Like fuck you, there is literally no standard I will accept because that standard is external to myself and that is so dysfunctional. Uh and and Lorenz says at the end, sociopathic. I mean you literally can't build a society. You can't build a community around a type of masculine psychology that simply categorically rejects any other and any other responsibility to beyond itself. I have some other thoughts. I don't know

if you want to respond to that. No, keep going, So I mean the other thing that so, the other thing that Freud is well known for putting forth are this sort of comprehensive list of defense mechanisms, some of which, like frankly like never made sense to me. Part of the reason why I struggled to really embrace my career as a psychologists because it was like, some of these these are supposed to be foundational ideas, and it's like I don't really see them reflected in other people. I

don't really see them in myself. So, like, for example, reaction formation and sublimation. These are psychological defense mechanisms that actually make a lot more sense if you're assuming that it's a sort of group outsider group strategy in a hostile society. So the idea of reaction formation is that you behave in a way that is the opposite of how you feel, or is the opposite of your natural inclination.

And maybe if you are sort of like maybe like Freud potentially was, where you just simply bristol at the norms and the expectations that the society around you expects you to conform to, that you have to go through this sort of tortured psychological transformation where you're taking your native sort of again, if we want to invoke e. Michael Jones, if you have a sort of like radical transgressive impulse, but you necessarily have to function in a

society that will not tolerate that. And I don't know about you. I didn't go around as a kid like necessarily feeling like I had to flip everyone the bird and flip over every table and piss in everyone's cheerios. I mean I had youthful vigor. I think every young man growing up has like a certain like desire to impress themselves upon the environment around them. But to the degree where you like are constantly like foaming at the mouth with like I can't be the way they want

me to be. I refuse to do anything they want me to do. I hate them, and yet I've got to I've got to abide by them anyway, like reaction formation, where you've got a there's a fundamental dissonance between your behaviors and your actual internal experience. That doesn't I feel

like you don't really see that. Some of the places you do see that are frankly like pathological work environments, you know, the like you see them really you kind of only see them in this sort of post Jewish privileged world where everything is sort of remade and reformed to conform to a sort of Jewish morality. That I mean, yeah, when I go to my if I have my office job and I hate my deiboss, and I have to smile at him even though I'm cursing under my breath,

like you don't. I mean, that's that makes sense. But then again, it's like the same framework, like you are an outsider. You are sort of a marginalized person in this existing ecosystem, and you've got to find a way to navigate it. Sublimation is another one, channeling unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable activities. I mean, doesn't that describe tikon Oleum. It's like it's like I got into this argument with

this Jewish woman on Twitter the other day. She's like one of these not to get all inside baseball Twitter micro communities on you and your audience. But she was part of this like Hegelian egirl thing that was like a very minor social media thing a year ago. And

she's an ethnically Jewish woman but a devout Christian. And over the course of this conversation, she's basically you know, she's being provoked because she's she's she put up this post where she said how much she hates German people and that she confused considers them a inferior people, and she prays to God for forgiveness and she prais it

the Germans prayer to God for forgiveness too. It's like, Okay, if you have these sort of tortured reactions to the world around you that you are trying to make acceptable to those around you, like, isn't that like isn't that

what Tikon Olham was? Because she's basically saying, like, I'm a really good Christian because I want to bring about this Christian eschatology, And isn't that really the same thing as Tikon Olham Isn't there no difference between Christ coming back to Earth and also I'm going to destroy all your icons and overturn all of your world orders. It's like, actually, I think there is a fundamental difference between what the return of Christ means versus I'm literally going to destroy

every representation of gentile society that exists around you. When you look at these, you know, the history of Jewish intellectuals driving civil rights legislation or DEI or woke or whatever. What are they doing if not masking their sort of radical transgressive spirit via a asking it with this sort of like liberal Christian morality or this liberal Enlightenment value systems.

It's actually difficult to look at some of these Freudian ideas and not see them as dressed up vehicles for basically Jewish impulses.

safe and no longer persecuted. You're either going to have to turn the population into Jews, like instill Jewish values, those Jewish values, you know of basically chaos of rebellion against everything that historically Anglo Europeans held deer. You're either going to have to do that or you're going to have to figure out a way to sedate them, you know, with pornography and and basically attack everything. And then you know, in the end, if they start fighting back, then you

make it. You make antisemitism illegal, You start you know, persecuting people who are you know, starting to ask the Jewish question. And I mean, I think that's like the last hundred years is pretty much a picture of that of tkamol On basically destroying seeking to destroy Western culture so that Jews can fit in, so that they can blend in. So basically now everybody is, everybody has is carrying their ideals. But also you know, they don't seem

as the outsider anymore, because that's been the problem. You know, that was the problem in Russia. The problem in Russia was it was like you had gigantic diaspora German you know, in the in the seventeen eighteen hundreds, you had German populations in Ukraine and they were thriving and they you know,

the Czar's leadership loved them. But then you had this other group that just stuck out like a sore thumb because they were so different than everyone else, and whenever you tried to deal with them, it was like, no,

we have to remain different. And then when laws were changed and the stettle was broken, the schettle system was broken up, it was just this reaction of trying to push back against that, trying to trying to keep your traditions, but also this group of people who are escaping from their traditions and they're like, Okay, now I can do anything I want. And in order for me to be able to do anything I want, I have to basically create a world where people can do anything they want.

I mean, that's that's what it seems like to me. That's of all the reading I've done, you know, two hundred years together, Jews in the Economic Life by Sombart Shahaks, Jewish History, Jewish Religion, You Gentiles, Maurice Samuels, it just basically seems like the it's like we were this people were these people who've always been on the outside. We

are always going to be on the outside. So we have to create a society that looks like us, so that we're no longer you know, we're no longer persecuted, we're no longer seen as the outsider. And then you throw into the fact that they get their own country and they have nuclear weapons, and then that's a whole different discussion.

thinking adult aware of global dynamics. I mean, they didn't have this same oh my god, we're on the precipice of Hitler two attitude in the nineteen nineties. They didn't have it in the two thousands. It only started to creep up in the twenty tens, now that we're halfway through this decade.

is that not going? And then, you know, and that would be bad enough if it was just this country six thousand miles away, but then you have people who are claiming this to be the same as those people over there that are doing it in your own country, who are defending it and calling you evil and calling you an anti Semite and basically saying that you you've given up your right to exist anymore if you criticize this, if you say that it's evil, if you say that,

how can you do this? What is it inside of you that allows you to do this? And it's just information. That's the thing that changed in the nineteen nineties. You know, they could they could go into Gaza or the West Bank and they could do what they did, and the world only knew what The New York Times and what you know, a couple a couple cable news outlets and the local news told them. But now that everybody can see it and it's exposed, you know, and it's basically

it's like they're back in Russia. They're back in Russia where they're amongst people who you know, it's like my you know, my mother's family came from is from Galicia. They're you know, Hungarian Hungarians and pollocks who were around them in Galicia, and like they came here in like nineteen ten and nineteen eleven, and and you know, I'm growing up and I'm like, why is my grandmother, well that's what I'm talking about, my great grandparents, And I'm thinking,

why is my grandmother hate Jewish people so much? And it's like, oh yeah, because they because they lived in they lived in basically what was Pale Settlement at the time, and they got to see the way that they acted, and they got to see how revolutionary they were, and they got to see them assassinate like public officials and everyone knew who was doing it. And that's what's happening now. It was like back then they couldn't hide it because you know, they were in one section and they stood

out like a sore thumb. And now everyone can see what they're doing because we have the Internet and it's blasted everywhere, and they start their own telegram channels and post videos of them doing it, like the seventy two Virgins channel that was run by IDF by Unit eighty two hundred, and they were advertised what they were doing, so let the world know. And it's like, okay, yeah, well how do we how are we supposed to deal with that? I mean, and if you ask questions, it's like, okay,

why are you doing this? Why you know, why are you saying that? You know every time a baby dies there was a terrorist hiding behind them. Yeah, It's like, I mean, how do you You can't rational I can't rationalize. You know, a terrorist in this country hiding under, you know, a building in downtown New York and dropping a bomb on that building to get to get one terrorist. I don't see how that can. I don't see how you can do that. But oh everybody in that building is evil?

What I mean you talk about? I mean, this goes beyond gas lighting, This goes to Holy fuck. Do you think do you think I'm I mean, how fucking low you?

on there. Just to go back the section or the excerpt you've read about the woman expressing guilt over circumcising her son, I mean again, it's it's just the persecution is coming from inside the house, is really I think the punchline of this essay. Whatever we want to say about Freud's genuine intentions or his genuine malice or not. Maybe he was totally unconscious, Maybe there was no malice whatsoever.

Maybe he just was a wacky guy with a weird sense of humor and which from time to time say really condemned, you know, self condemning things to his peers and whatever. Just the nature of that community. And they're, like you said, their their need to separate themselves out from every other population. Uh, they do that through barbarism, they do that through terrorism. And you know, the sort of tragedy say this trying to be you know, a

little bit careful with my language here. I mean, the tragedy of it is that they are still human and that they obviously are tortured by these things they do

to themselves that they like. On the one hand, they want to do it, and they seem to consciously understand the purpose of circumcising themselves, of doing the brits, of doing all these things that they do, these ritualistic ways of marking their identity and cohering their community, like they understand the role that it functions, and they sort they seem to understand the brutality of it, but they nonetheless

carry the toll of those consequences. And then they're out in the world amongst us, you know, and and and That's what makes sort of these Freudian defense mechanisms kind of so significant, because if you, you know, imagine yourself in the shoes of somebody who brutalized their infant son because it was part of their their religion and part of their identity to do that, and they had been doing it for countless generations, and they know that it's brutalizing,

and the only way they can cope with it is to sort of become like this cold, distant tyrant to their own children. And then you're the child that grows up like that. You grow up basically cattle prod you know, within seven days of being born, and it's your parents go ahead.

overt narcissists. That's like the kind of stereotype that we all have in our mind of like the guy who gets out in front of the crowd to be the big man, you know, That's what we all tend to think of as narcissists. But then there's communal narcissists. There's antagonistic narcissists. There are malignant narcissists, covert narcissists, and it seems like in any given moment, an afflicted Jewish person

can kind of like oscillate between all of them. They are the grand standing moralizer or the grand standing like I am a superhero. But then there's also like the like Jonathan Green Black type of shrinking back, where anything you do, anything you say is an attack on me makes me feel small, makes me feel like you're being punitive.

The type of narcissists where you know, like the social worker or the community organizer or the you know, social justice activist, where they're masking their narcissism in this kind of grand, almost christlike manner of being everything to everyone.

I mean, they they seem to like hit every flavor of narcissism imaginable and that almost I mean, this is one of the things where if you want to get racist about your psychology, you have to take a step back and say, like, Okay, is narcissist a racial type

before it's even a psychological type. And if it's a racial type, then how do you even categorize narcissism as a sort of general psychological tendency when it looks different from one group to the next, and even within one group, it looks different based on the context, Like when you sort of generalize narcissism to to like the whole of the human species, Like the most common ones are like the timid you know, I'm I feel bad about myself and my narcissism is a is a cope versus the

sort of like strong narcissistic type where it's patholo, it's a it's a the word I'm looking for, sort of intractable personality style that always shows up in every situation.

American Extremist and Understanding Conspiracy Theories. On Substack, I haven't published anything in a while, and I might not for a while because I'm busy doing a lot of shows like with you Janeel dot substack dot com and on Twitter or x. Still, Janeel, thank you so much.