 From war across the globe, to regulating speech, to printing trillions of dollars, the American regime accepts no limits on its power. As Ludwig von Mises understood, the state will take as much power as the people will let it. And in recent years, the American regime has clearly concluded that it can get away with unilaterally adopting vast new powers. Join me, Michael Rectenwald, along with Ted Galen-Carpenter, Karen Kwokowski, and Jonathan Newman for a Mises Institute event in Nashville, Tennessee dedicated to this siege of power and one of Ron Paul's favorite lines, truth is treason in the empire of lies. This event is not for those content with the comfortable narrative peddled by the corporate press, but for those interested in understanding the true face of the American regime. Come and meet up with like-minded individuals from around the country to freely engage in conversations that could get you kicked off of most social media platforms. Tickets begin at $95. Get yours at Mises.org slash Nashville 23. Use promo code RECT23, that's R-E-K-T-23, for $45 off your $95 ticket or a $50 ticket cost. Thank you. You're welcome to RECT, the Michael Rectenwald podcast, a production of the Mises Institute. My guest today is Paul Godfried. Paul is the editor of Chronicles, a magazine of American culture. He is also a professor of humanities emeritus at Elizabeth Town College, where he taught for 25 years. He is a Guggenheim recipient and a Yale PhD. He is an historian of the American right and the author of 14 books, most recently anti-fascism, the course of a crusade and revisions and dissents. Hello, Paul, and welcome to RECT. Well, thank you for having me on your program. My pleasure. It's great to have you here. I consider you a fountainhead of knowledge, and I plan to pick your brain as much as possible today because you have so much knowledge that people need to put in context what's happening today in terms of the left, I think, and in terms of the right. So let me just start off with asking you a question I've been wondering. In your elite pedigree, you know, a PhD from Yale, et cetera, how did you become a conservative, let alone a paleo conservative? I mean, how did you not end up as a standard-issued liberal elitist? I was never on the left since I was about, I think, about 15 years old when I was briefly a Marxist-Leninist, and then I think a visit to the near Coliseum and an exhibit of Soviet technology and Soviet appliances soured me on the Communist experiment. Even then, by the way, I was a Republican. I was never a Democrat. I was a Republican even when I was a self-described Marxist for about six months. I've been on the right ever since. I think one of the defining experiences was when I was a freshman in college, we had to read two works, and I think we may have different views of these works sort of given the fact perhaps I'm intellectually less interested or less committed to the notion of human rights or individual rights or natural rights. We had to read Locke and then Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and I thought that Locke was describing something to which I could not even relate people coming out of a state of nature, forming civil society, sort of creating their own social construct, whereas Burke's view of the continuity of generations of prejudice, as he understood it as the basis of an ethical thought, all made sense to me. From that time on, I sort of thought of myself as some kind of Burkeian conservative. I also studied classics and taught classical Greek and very impressed by Aristotle's politics and Nicomécan ethics, and later I wrote in Hegel, we've been a fan of German philosophy, and particularly his philosophy of right and the organic nature of right had a great influence on me. I've never sort of leaned left, although as people know, Herbert Marcuse was my professor, and I was very impressed by his knowledge of German philosophy and liked him personally. I found his politics absolutely abhorrent, but admired him as a scholar nonetheless. The thing I could imagine myself being least of all, I suppose, is sort of a left of center Democrat, certainly now, but even back in the 1960s and 1970s. Although I didn't much like him, I voted for Goldwater in 1964 because I despised Johnson in his great society. So I mean, my paleoconservative or quintessentially conservative views are not something that I came by yesterday. I have held these views since I was probably a teenager. Wow, that's great. Yeah, Burke is just, when I read Reflections on the Revolution in France, that was absolutely, well, first of all, it's one of the most beautiful pieces of writing in the English language as far as essays go. And yeah, his organism is very striking. And we read that in a course on the rationality and its discontents regarding the, you know, the Enlightenment. And I found it to be very convincing and everybody else hated the essay because I was in a classroom full of leftists. So why don't you tell us, for those who don't know somehow, what paleoconservativism is? Well, I think there are two different strains of paleoconservativism, something which is often not appreciated. I think there are the small government strict constitutionalist paleoconservatives, some of whom, you know, probably are associated with the Mises Institute and the right for us. There are also the populist paleoconservatives who have emerged particularly since the 1990s. But I think what all of them have in common is the belief that the United States took a wrong turn, probably, you know, sometime in the 1950s, 1960s, possibly much earlier, and that what we see as the administrative state today is a monstrosity, that we have to find some way of ending. And I think there's also a kind of uncompromising position that we take. We do not believe that a wrong turn was taken five minutes ago, we believe was taken a long time ago. Now, of course, some of these paleoconservatives, you know, have these sort of whimsical reactionary tendencies that will tell you that, you know, it started with the fall of the Byzantine Empire or something like that. But certainly I think looking at the United States in the 19th and 20th century, I think certain fateful wrong turns were taken, the effects of which we are living with. And we certainly reject the paleoconservative positions that the United States essentially sound. We have, like, the greatest government that ever existed and it's functioning and it's getting better, you know, every day in every way, except for some minor problems, some kinks that have to be removed, like having the Democrats rather than Mitt Romney as our president or Nikki Haley as our president. I think we understand that the problems that we face, social problems, political problems are much more deeply rooted than so-called mainstream conservatives, national review, neo-conservatives are willing to recognize. And the question then becomes how can we address them, sort of, given our limited power and limited resources? And that is a question we're going to have to deal with. I have to say that sort of looking at this, I have sort of moved, which I know is, you know, probably Michael's position toward decentralized government. I can see absolutely no other way out of our situation because there's no way that right and left can live together in the United States anymore. I mean, there are assumptions about human nature, government, freedom are so diametrically opposed that the differences that separated the North and the South in the Civil War, you know, however disastrous the result was, seem almost small by comparison to what separates right and left. I mean, the left thinks it's perfectly okay for government to change the gender of school children without even telling their parents, this is fine, you know. Why would you object unless you were Nazi? They, you know, they find nothing wrong with riots in the street as long as they're carried out by Black Lives Matter and the rioters, you know, are associated with the Democratic Party. I think these differences are fundamental, and I see absolutely no way that they can be bridged. Yeah, I think decentralization is the only answer, and how that comes about is another question. Whether these totalitarians let us out now, I don't think we're asking for permission, but really they are totalitarian and they, totalitarians tend to not let you out of their systems. No, I think you're absolutely right, they, you know, authoritarians would let you out of their system, you know, the sort of the traditional strongman dictatorship, you know, that you found in Latin American countries or maybe, you know, for a while in Spain or somewhere, they don't care if you leave. Totalitarians will not let you out of the system because they want total control, and I think Hannah Arendt's model does work. I mean, these are people who will use terror or any means to control you, and that thing gets basically what the left in the United States has become. Yes, absolutely. I've been saying this since 2016 when I sensed it rather viscerally, and this is really what made my turn not only possible, but really almost inevitable. Now, you recently edited a volume which I'm reading and I'm finding excellent Paleo-Conservative Anthology. It's a fascinating book. The first essay after your introduction is by one, David Azarad. In that essay, Azarad discusses what Paleo-Conservatives might teach the Establishment Conservatives or Conservative Inc. If you might recap that, but I think more importantly, tell us what Paleo-Conservativism might teach libertarians, especially those of the Rothbardian variety. Yeah. I think for one thing, the Paleo-Conservatives, unlike the sort of radical individualist libertarians, have a sense of community. I mean, they understand the communal organic basis for social relationships, even a free market society. I mean, you cannot operate unless there are certain tacit assumptions among the members of society, and unless they share a common ethic. Otherwise, it's just not going to work. By the way, you mentioned Rothbard. I think Rothbard, by the end of his life, fully understood that. I think he definitely moved in a Paleo-Conservative direction, which was quite different from the direction in which he was moving back in the 1950s or 1960s when he formed alliances within the left. So I think he understood the social and cultural and historical preconditions for a free society. And that is certainly something Paleo-Conservatives can teach libertarians. One thing libertarians can teach Paleo-Conservatives is how to be less isolated. I think libertarians have much more of a presence on the right than Paleo-Conservatives. Paleo-Conservatives do not have anything comparable to the Mises Institute, for instance. And I think we have, as I point out in my essay, we have been divided in the past. We are still dealing with the effects of that. And I think there's almost a kind of radical individualism about Paleo-Conservatives. Each one has his own Paleo-Conservatism, and they historically have fought with each other a great deal. So we can learn from libertarians, despite their individual ethics, you know, how to cooperate as a group. So there's a bit of excessive Protestantism about it, really. This kind of constant fissures. Speaking of Azerad, in recent essays, one of which you cite in a recent article of your own, he takes some shots at libertarians, suggesting that they must be effectively left behind by what he calls the new right. This new right must embrace the levers of the state, he argues. What do you think about that? Yeah, again, I think there is division within the Paleo-Conservative camp. And I think some of the populists have not abandoned the hope that they can gain control of the state and use it for their good. This was, by the way, Sam Francis' position. It was not my position because I have much more pessimistic about the possibility of gaining control of this. I have no idea how it's going to happen. But I think that some of the, well, I see the status Paleo-Conservatives believe that, you know, the Trump Revolution, in a sense, prefigured a right that would, you know, be able to somehow take over the state and make it serve a conservative working class base or something like this. I, you know, I wish them good luck. I just don't think it's possible. Yeah, it doesn't seem to be, even within a remote realm of possibility, and especially with what we're dealing with now, which I'd like to sort of jump to. Who is the ruling class today? If I don't ask you this, I will kick myself. Who is the ruling elite? And what is their ethos? What is their ideology? And what elite did they replace? Yeah, I think the elite that was there a while ago, it was actually, I think, really formative for the United States were waspatricians. America's in England, in English, or Northern European Protestant society, you know, in its conception, and it was the upper class waspatricians north and south, even though they fought a civil war. But these were the groups that were pretty much in charge. And once the late unpleasantness was open over these, you know, these these groups start cooperating again, as they had before the civil war. And these people are now, of course, there is going to be a plutocratic class that becomes important with the rise of of industrialization and high finance in the United States, particularly after the civil war. But I think these groups become pretty much integrated into the older aristocracy. In the south, it's interesting how Sephardic Jews get integrated into this, you know, the sort of Protestant patrician within a generation or two. Of course, many of them do land up becoming up to ship aliens. But this this ruling class can absorb people, which I think is one of its strengths. It could also be snotty and supercilious, but it absorbed groups of as did, you know, the English aristocracy over a long period of time. I think what happened was this class became de classe, I think they they lost, you know, there was a grand dé classement, they sort of lost their their power and their influence. And then then they were replaced by a number of groups, Eastern European Jews, blacks are maybe more marginal, I think, to this to the replacement groups, to some extent, ethnic Catholics, you know, running political machines. But the the wasp aristocracy would never be restored. I mean, they came back, they came back like the Bush family. You know, they really did not have that much influence. They just sort of had to had to fit in. I think I think now what you have are elites that sort of coalesce. They come together and they cooperate. What one is a political elite, right? They run the administrative state, they run the surveillance state. They have lawyers who work for them, right, judges that they appoint. And they are sort of able to use the administrative state and their manipulation of the Constitution to gain and hold power. And they have a lot of it. OK, they also cooperate with a corporate capitalist class, which now is largely woke and woke ideology is the state religion, which they've all taken over. And there there's, of course, the media, which sort of has its own aristocracy. And in my book on multiculturalism, I speak of the media as the priesthood as the priesthood of the managerial class. They are the ones who inculcate the state religion, which is now wokeism. And they are they're the ones who reject Christianity or whatever went there before, you know, in which they want to remove so they can replace with wokeism. I think, though, there are fissures within this ruling class or the groups that form the ruling class. I really wonder how much does the FBI have in common with LGBT? Right. So how does that connect with globalists, then? Are they globalists or are they in cahoots with these globalists? Or are they, you know, I think they are in cahoots with the globalists. And, you know, certainly the core of the world corporate capitalist, you know, a part of the globalist class, there's no problem. And, you know, people like Joe Biden or at least whoever is handlers feel very comfortable going to Davos and to associating with the globalists. These people have absolutely no interest in preserving a nation state in the face of the United States and a global order is exactly what they want. You know, and although I think they hope to see the American globalist elites controlling this global this global society. Yeah. But but, you know, again, I think they face the problems. If you let all these these nutcases loose, I mean, the BLM, the Antifa, if you have all these crime in the city, open borders, how can you run the economy, even a woke economy? So I one of the things I've argued is that at some point you're going to see something like the Night of the Long Knives in Nazi Germany to refer to other to tell a more brutal totalitarian society. And I think there will be some kind of reckoning that the more rational elements within this within this totalitarian elite whatever holds them together, they're going to turn against the less rational, the more riotous elements and the people who are the total the total social lunatics, the transgender groups and so forth. Yeah. Now, how did they come to use these? You know, I see I see these ground troops, these leftist ground troops as the foot soldiers of these globalists, right, like Antifa and BLM. And these are foot soldiers. So what are they doing for them? I mean, what what is their function? Well, their function is to break up the traditional society. Yeah. Right. And to destroy the enemies of the globalists. Right. I mean, and of course, they're not the only ones working to do this. You also have the, you know, the the FBI going after Latin mass Catholics and other people who are standing in their way. But they have they use this disorder and confusion in order to take to take further power for themselves. However, the, you know, the point can be reached where it has, in the case of the brown shirts, whom I think they do resemble, they simply become a nuisance, you know, and they may have to be eliminated. Yeah, same thing happened in after the Cultural Revolution in China. They had to get rid of these red guards because they unleashed them. And then they needed to try to get the the genie back in the bottle because it was you couldn't have a stable social order of any kind with these people running rampant across the countryside. Now, speaking of wokeness per se, you've argued in an essay that it's not Marxist style. Now, James Lindsay and and take it for what he's worth called you an idiot for that. And I don't know if you're aware of that, but that was on Twitter. Once Twitter, you know that I've argued that wokeness is Maoist, I think. What is it in your estimation? Well, I think that I have to point out for the sake of fairness, there are elements of the left that go into wokeness, you know, it is definitely not a movement of the right. And you're right. I mean, they do resemble Maoist in the violence, the Cultural Revolution, all these in the they also, of course, resemble Nazis in what they're doing. But, you know, all totalitarian movements that engage in violence seem to be doing this seem to be going to the same stage that the totalitarian left in the United States is. Another thing that I think makes them definitely of the left they do have a globalist egalitarian vision of some kind mixed in with their hate and their nihilism. Which they share with the Nazis. Yeah. So I mean, there are some of these Nazi elements that I think are very, very much present, very salient in the in wokeness. They are not as rational as the Marxist, for one thing. I mean, the Marxist have a certain view if they think that's, you know, they're teaching some kind of socialist science, right. Yeah. Yeah. So it's the other is more specific shaft and socialist science. They're giving you, of course, it's not science. But they said that, you know, they think they're influenced by the enlightenment. They're rationalists and so forth. Right. And they run orderly societies. I mean, they're brutal societies, but they're orderly. Like they have clean streets, people who make all the noise that the Antifa would be, you know, would be put in a concentration camp in a communist country. But the the the the thing that is similar, if you look at the people who become wokesters in the United States or in Europe, many of them were formerly communist, right? Like the East German Al-Qaeda of the people who were the communist rulers, they go, they all become woke. They go into West German politics and they take over LGBT feminism, stuff they weren't doing in East Germany. In the United States, you find, you know, people who were pro-Marxist someone like Jerry Nadler or some of these other these other leftists. Bernie Sanders starts out as a communist. Right. They all become woke in the end. That's because there is some kind of overlapping leftist temperament. Yeah. Or even worldview, which allows them to go from traditional Marxism to wokeism. So in terms of their mind, there was very definitely a consistency, even if I point out, you know, the the contradictions between traditional Marxism and wokeism. Yeah, they they share this oppressor, oppressed dyad of that comes out of Marxism or that Marxism appropriates from somewhere. I mean, but they are more Rousseauian, I would argue, in terms of their leftism and in the way that they are primitive in a way. They're they're primitivists almost. So there is that. So, you know, on with on with this bit about wokeness, what's the function of it? I always look for what function something like this ideology serves. What what do you think you may have touched on this already? But what's the function of wokeness? Yeah, we sort of like looking for a rational function of what is an utterly irrational ideology. Yeah, but I think you're right. I mean, it is functional for those who want to take power because it destroys all the groups who might stand in their way. Yeah. Right. I mean, you have to destroy Christianity because it offers an alternative worldview. Right. And it was there before you can borrow from Christianity, but, you know, take over the idea of the suffering just or some apocalyptic end to history, but you can selectively use Christianity if you have to destroy it. It also appeals to groups that hate white Christian society or male white Christian. That's why you get all the feminists in there, right? So so the I think what really holds it together is hate. More than racism, hate is very important. Yeah, people, you know, this is why I'm always bringing up Carl Schmidt, you know, that the enemy determines alliances, determines who your friends are. And this is certainly true of wokeness. I think more than traditional Marxism, it is hatred in the enemy that keep these people together. Yeah, I remember speaking this as to a relative who was a leftist and saying that, you know, Trump is very dangerous because he wants to impose a Christian theocracy on the United States. And I mean, this might sound absurd to you, but somebody lets me hate Christianity and thinks it's the enemy and identifies it with the white people or something. The fact that Trump does not support maximal demands for unconditional rights to abortion makes him a Christian theocrat, a dangerous Christian theocrat. So there are people with lots of people that think this way. And of course, my view is that you cannot live in the same society that we can't live in the same society with people who think this way. How do these people imagine that there's still some beleaguered group that they, you know, this is, I think, endemic to leftism, right? There's the sense of of being beleaguered, no matter whether you're actually living under a leftist totalitarian system or not. They still manage to figure themselves as beleaguered and underdogs. It's incredible. Yeah, this is common, by the way, to both the left and fascism. OK, in fact, neither would have argued or has argued that, you know, they're on their way that they're in power. They're never in power. They're always like, you know, Mussolini, like in the middle, you know, of his rule would say that, you know, we proletariat nations are being oppressed or something. This is what you hear from the left all the time. They're beleaguered. They never have power in Germany. The AfD, which is like the Republican Party here, has become a neo-Nazi party, you know, for the government and for the media, because they need a left, a right wing enemy. Even if it's an imaginary one to struggle against, to show that they're always being beleaguered and they're always being pushed in the corner by, you know, an ever-present Nazi danger. So this I think you're right. This is very much endemic to the left, as well as to the fascist. You know, that they're always struggling against an enemy who always has the upper hand, even even when the left is in power. Yeah, even when you have them in jail, or close to jail, as in the case of Trump, who I think they used as a foil in effect to unite the entire left, whatever it is, behind the establishment. Right. Isn't this what function that Trump served to make the left who otherwise would oppose, say, the military industrial complex or the alphabet agencies and, you know, all these and the whole corporate establishment. Now they have and big tech being a major part of that, of course. They've got these leftists completely aligned on their side thanks to Trump as a Trump, the foil Trump. Yeah, you know, that is absolutely true. And, you know, you see people with all this power and so forth claiming to be revolutionary. You know, this reminds me of once visiting Hungary when it was a communist country and visiting the Academy of Historical Science. And I was introduced to the man who was the head of this. And I think we ended up speaking in German and Hungarian was ragged by then, but I know German well. And we were talking about how the revolution is struggling. And then he left and got into a fancy car and was driven by a chauffeur. And he was out of, you know, talking about how we, the working class, have to struggle against these plutocrats. Yeah, it's incredible. It's, you know, we talked about this already, I think. But, you know, I think this phrase, this label, I should say, it's very interesting, middle American radicals. And throughout the anthology, you know, a paleoconservative anthology in which you edited, I see this phrase come up and I find it to be a really good, a really good moniker for describing what I would call and which is misunderstood entirely, I think, by the left of the establishment itself or purposefully mischaracterized. But it's not really conservative necessarily, especially under the current context, this middle American radicals. For example, Pedro Gonzales says they must replace the ruling elite. This is the group that must do it. What do you make of this group, the middle American radicals? Isn't this what they call the magma, right? Isn't this the same contingent? Yeah, I think I think the two certainly overlap, although, you know, one was developed by Sam Francis back in the 1980s. I think one has to make a distinction at the end of the day between conservatism and the right, which I'm always doing in my work and I'm an act as a neo-fascist or something for doing this. But I think conservatism belongs to an earlier age, and it comes out of the French Revolution. You see this in the 19th century. It's part of what continues to be the ancien régime. It's the people who defend a traditional hierarchical society in Europe and established church and so forth. And America, you do have conservatives, whether they're southern landowners or northern sort of Yankee patricians and so forth. There are various aristocracies and, you know, even at people like Henry Adams, like, you know, referring to the old class and being very unhappy with the plutocrats who have moved into New England. But I think the right is something else. The right is post-conservative. This is what I've argued. And the right is there because they're struggling against leftist totalitarianism at the end of the day. And the left is inherently totalitarian. I think with anyone like this, I do not believe in democratic socialism. The left is by its nature totalitarian. Right. It wants to reconstruct the human race. That's what it's about. And it's made war on the past. And the right is a reaction against this. And in America, what, you know, Sam Francis described as middle American radicals are the people who are, you know, standing in the breach. They're the ones who are opposing this this takeover by the totalitarian left. Right. And, you know, as I pointed out years ago, that they may not be to your taste. They do not have my musical taste. They didn't study classical Greek or, you know, Reed Hagel in German or anything like that. But they're decent people, you know, and they understand what's wrong. And that's the most that we can ask for, you know, at this point in time. How do we connect them? Or is there a connection between this middle American right and what we might call paleo libertarianism? Or really, this let's talk about paleo libertarianism. So what would that be? And, you know, I consider myself that effectively. And and so what's the connection between these middle American radicals or paleo conservatives? Some some brand at least some segment, as you said, there's a populist thread or prong of paleo conservatism. And I think that populist thread really, you know, connects to this middle American radical contingent. How do how do these groups connect like the paleo libertarianism? You know, I think the Rothbardian, the Rothbardian populist right, you know, as you call it. Right. Well, I think we all share the same view of what's wrong. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, going back to Karl Schmidt, we all have the same fine build or concept of the enemy. Well, you know, exactly what we oppose and we all oppose it. That the same thing. The question is, you know, what are the alternatives that we have? And I'd say at the end of the day, paleo conservatives, paleo libertarians, middle American radicals all have to accept the same solution, which is radical decentralization. I do not see that you can then debate whether you want more or less government, more or less welfare, more or less market economics. Right. You have to find some way to deal with the totalitarian left. Yeah, that is the first thing. Right. And then we can all choose, you know, our alternate paths to freedom, dignity and whatever. Yes. So I think I think I think we all agree on the problem and we all agree, at least in the near term or the middle term, what has to be done in order to to address the problem. So some some might be paleo libertarian anarchists and some might be minarchists and others might be theocrats. But the question is decentralization. And I think this is where libertarianism can come in as a fear, you know, with this theoretical understanding of the necessity for letting people do what they will and allowing different types of decentralization, different types of modes of decentralizing. Is that makes sense to you? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, the I think decentralization has to come first. Yeah. And then then we can worry about, you know, what kind of economic system we have, we have more or less free enterprise. Indeed. Now, you've written recently in an article in Chronicles magazine about how the Democratic Party became the party of grievance groups. In that article, you argue that the Democratic Party is not making its constituents woke, but rather that it is the woke activists who have made the Democratic Party woke. Now, why is this an important distinction? And could it be used to explain, at least in part, the party's treatment of RFK Junior, who is in some ways at least an old school Democrat, according to working class? Yeah, that's true. It's exactly why they're treating him that way. He has the same views as the Kennedys. In the 1960s, these issues. Yeah, therefore, you know, he's put himself the right of both parties. Seems to be pushing anti-diluvian positions. He's he wants to limit abortion. He's very unhappy with abortion, but then he's scared, you know, that he's going to turn off Democrat and Republican voters by taking that that position. Yeah, I think I think there is a difference between saying that, you know, the Democratic Party is corrupting people and saying that the Democratic Party is a home for people who are morally corrupted to start with. Because then the question becomes, you know, how did how do the Republicans appeal to them? And you see this on Fox News, right? We have more black homosexuals than you do. Here we have a transgendered Republican. What you do is you compete for the same people by doing the same thing. And I thought that because, you know, if only you can get to the change party. I mean, the party affiliation is as I suppose, from their perspective, the problem. And for me, it's, you know, what the hell do you do when half the population is crazy? You know, that's much more of a problem than, you know, trying to get people to move from one political party to the other. Yeah, so it's important to explain that. Well, this goes to the point that politics, at least at this level, is downstream from culture that you're looking at how how this culture has shaped these people. And then they have in turn shaped these parties, in particular, in this case, the Democratic Party primarily, but after all, even the Republican Party who are competing for the same totemic groups or, you know, totem constituents and the token, I should say token token members of these various so-called beleaguered classes. And so it really shows that something has to give with the culture. But as you said, we're not going to be able to live with these people. No, no, to me, one of the remarkable examples of how the sort of leftist world culture takes people over is what happened to American blacks. I grew up in the 1950s in a northern industrial town, probably not all the different from Pittsburgh, where you grew up. And most blacks, most blacks had been Republicans until the second Roosevelt election in 1936, where they switched from they switched from Republican to Democratic. But there, you know, their their living habits were quite conservative. They two parent families, most of them were Baptist. But it was very low crime growing up among blacks in the 1950s. They they were not a grievance group, as far as I remember. Now they hate white people. Right. They're, you know, black black black criminals are wrecking their own neighborhoods, wrecking cities. And they're obviously being encouraged by Democratic politicians. Republican response seems to be something like, you know, these people are going to vote for us if we can tear down more Confederate monuments or ban Confederate flags, you know, or talk about how bad the Democrats were, because they were segregationists, you know, in 1940 or 1950. Or this is all nonsense. You're not going to get those votes by doing that. The question is, why have these people been turned around like that? You know, why have they gone from being perfectly decent Christian people to being crazy radicals? Yeah. And I mean, you have to. And this, I think, is in many ways indicative of what has happened to American moral, social culture and during my lifetime. And you're going to have to deal with this problem. If you can't, but before even dealing with this problem, you may have to find some way of separating, because you do not want to live in a society, you know, in which appeasing these groups of radicals becomes, you know, what one of the main one of the main objectives of the of the political class of the social order. Yeah, that's crazy. But I lay this because this has to go back to some subversive elites who who have effectively militarized made made into militants and made into. Radicals by this elite. I mean, they have subverted these people's values in effect. I agree. Yeah. I mean, I think I think it's a leech that are responsible and that obviously feed black hate against whites. I mean, they do this all the time. Of course, believing they're insulated from it, because, you know, these the black radicals will strike out against some poor Korean shopkeepers somewhere. There's not going to them. Right. Exactly. And that's that takes us to the topic of immigration. I think, you know, I want to know why I mean, I think it's pretty clear given everything we've talked about already. Why is this rolling elite hell bent on unfettered immigration? Well, I mean, for a number of reasons, first of all, we get cheap labor if they if they come in. Right. You don't pay as much for workers. Another thing is you can create your own electorate. Right. You get enough of these people and you're going to win every election. I think this is I think this is what this is what they're they're thinking about. Another point I would make is that one of the things that helps to increase your power is to create confusion, social confusion. Right. Well, you see in New York City, you know, the Biden's handlers are not unhappy. May or may, may or may be Mayor Adams doesn't like we sing right now or some other big scene. But, you know, the the ruling class doesn't care. And, you know, these the more confusion you have, the better because the easier it is to control the population. Yes, this goes to Sam Francis's and our attorney and our coach here any exactly. Well, is there anything else you would like to add? We're coming to pretty much the end of our podcast. How do people find your work? Where might they? Where might they how? How do they get connected to Chronicles magazine? How might they get a copy, etc., etc.? Well, it's easy to get a subscription to Chronicles. You just go online, you know, and we have a campaign now to increase subscription because we're trying to move up, move up our numbers. And I think we've been sort of successful in the last few months, but I hope we'll be more successful in the future. I should point out my own books are probably not read as often as they should be. Yeah. As the conservative movement kicked me out sometime in the 1980s for resisting the neoconservative takeover, they never let me back in, as most people know. But, you know, some of my books are prescient, like the book on multiculturalism, the one I wrote on mass democracy in the managerial state. They're 20 or 25 years old, but I think they can still be read, one might say almost sort of as fresh interpretations of these problems. Yeah. So I do recommend my books for those who have not read them. Yeah, I agree with that. And I've been plumbing your books a bit myself. I find that they have, they unlock some of the secrets of what we're dealing with right now, particularly this idea of the managerial class and how they're connected to this contemporary regime. I find that to be an important point. Yeah, one of the arguments that makes the managerial class is there with the creation of the modern welfare state. Right. But the ideology that it embraces will change, right? I mean, so Wokeness is a relatively new ideology that has been taken over by the men and it is without doubt the most destructive, socially destructive. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Paul, it's been a pleasure and I think very informative for our listeners and hope to have you back someday. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.