 So one of the threads that I think it's important to understand is the conservatives themselves saying we're not conservatives anymore. And I noticed this in the last few weeks, there were a number of articles around this theme. It was brought up in a number of different places, but there was one article that I think kind of summarized the arguments really, really well. And it's in the Federalist, the Federalist, let me just find the author for you. It's in the Federalist website, the Federalist is being, you know, pre-Trump, the Federalist really was a place, as its name suggests, which was a place where pro-founding fathers, pro-classical liberal, you could call them, pro-American revolution, pro-American constitution, Republicans found a voice. This was the place they did a long interview with me before, you know, maybe early in the Trump administration. There was some really good writers there, there was some very, it was a very, very good, very good publication. And I didn't agree with a lot of it, as I don't agree with conservatives, but basically they were coming at it from what I think is the right perspective or the right attitude for conservatives. But since Trump, basically what this has become, they've completely shifted, moved away from the founding fathers, moved away from any kind of that line of conservatism, moved away from any conception of free markets or liberty, moved away from the Constitution and Declaration of Rights, and moved towards this territory of populism and territory of the new right of some kind of new conservatism, new ideology for the right, which is far more statist. And I think he's a, this is a senior editor at the Federalist, his name is John Daniel Davidson, John Daniel Davidson. This is an article written on October 20th, about 10 days ago, on the Federalist website and it's called, we need to stop calling ourselves conservatives. They always should have never called themselves conservatives, but I found the argument fascinating because it's wrong in so many different dimensions about what conservatives were, what conservative, what the problem is today, and where we're heading into the future. The whole thing is just such a mishmash, but it gives you again insight into the way people on the right are thinking about politics today. And I think this is really important. I think we need to understand. We need to understand the way the right is thinking about politics and what the right wants to achieve through politics. And Davidson here just lays it out. He tells us exactly what to achieve. And he also tells us exactly what they're not interested in by not even talking about it. We'll get to that. So here's Davidson. He says, conservatives have long defined their politics in terms of what they wish to conserve or preserve. True. Enough. Individual rights, family values, religious freedom, and so on. Conservatives we are told want to preserve the rich traditions and civilization and achievement of the past, pass them on to the next generation and defend them from the left. Yes. I mean, this is what they want. They have no real philosophical foundation. They have no real way to ground us. They have no real way to defend this at the same time as defending progress, at the same time as defending moving forward, at the same time as defending the ideas of liberty and growth and progress and maybe even to some extent a change of understanding of certain aspects of the world around us. No, they want to preserve the past. What about the past? Well they pick and choose. Do they want to preserve slavery? No, no, no, not that, right? What exactly do they want to preserve about the past? Do you have Crow laws? Not that. So they want to preserve what they want to preserve. They pick and choose what they want to preserve. The one thing that you as always united conservatives is the guiding principle for the preservation is defined by some religious category, some religion and tradition. Which tradition? They pick and choose based on their currencies in the moment. And they did, I know I ended a video, I think it was 1969, calling conservatives bankrupt, conservatism an obituary for an idea, she called it. I mean, she basically thought conservatives were dead back then, it didn't make any sense. It was a horrible defense of liberty, a horrible defense of capitalism. She predicted conservatives would be an absolute unmitigated disaster that they would fail. And she was right. I mean, they had a little uptick of a victory with Reagan, and then since then it's basically the one disaster after another, and today, even on the right, even the right wants to give up on conservatism. Why? Well, Davidson continues to say, quote, in an earlier era, this made sense. There was much to conserve. After all, what, but now he says there's nothing to conserve. We have to be honest, we failed, conservatives failed. After all, he says, what have conservatives succeeded in conserving? In my lifetime, they have lost much marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years. The First Amendment, I'm not exactly sure what's been lost in the First Amendment. If anything, the First Amendment today legally is more protected than at any point in American history. So this is just, this is one of those points where in an effort to fight the left, one of the things the right does is make the world out to be much, much, much worse than it actually is. And this is something Republicans are very good at. Donald Trump is very good at. I always campaign if he runs a 2024 will all be about Sodom and Gomorrah. The world is falling apart, there's crime everywhere, people are dying everywhere. The world, you know, the First Amendment is lost, everything in America is falling apart. We are a failed state on every aspect and I'm here to fix that. So he will return to the winning strategy of 2016 that didn't work in 2020 because in 2020 couldn't quite make that argument because he was president, but he can come back to it in 2024 because you'll say Biden did it in the last four years. But the First Amendment from a legal perspective, happy to be contradicted by any legal scholars out there. But the First Amendment, first amendment, actual freedom of speech and our freedom of religion, freedom of religion practices, as people understand it, is better protected today than it has ever been, ever been. He continues all the things the conservatives have lost. Any semblance of control over our borders, all right, a fundamental distinction between men and women and especially of late the basic rule of law. Now here does he mean an increase in crime rates? Again, I will remind you as bad as things are today and in some places they're really bad, they're much, much better than what they were under Reagan and Bush, Bush 1. So 80s and early 90s. So we're conservatives then complaining about the disappearance of the basic rule of law and blaming that on the left. You see how they manipulate, they throw things out. It doesn't matter. Truth, this is the thing. Truth doesn't matter in politics and it doesn't matter for the left. It's never matter for the left and it doesn't matter for the right. It may be a never matter for the right. Maybe I'm naive thinking there was a better right once, but it doesn't matter for the right today. It just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to Trump, but it doesn't matter to any of these new right, what they want to give you a sense right now of the world is falling apart, conservatism have lost. The most important issues of the day are who can marry whom. The distinction between men and women as articulated by some people and immigration and what limitations they might be on speech and private platforms. These are the only issues that matter. Notice there's nothing here about taxes, regulations, tariffs, free trade, entrepreneurship, innovation, technology. We'll get to technology in a minute. Nothing about any of those things because they don't care. Economics, they don't care. They just don't care. Economic liberty, they don't care. So conservatism has failed. It has failed. It has failed to preserve the things that it claimed they wanted to preserve that were good. To preserve the vision of the Fanny Fathers, failed. Preserve the concept of individual rights, failed. Conserve any semblance of economic freedom, failed. So on all the important things they fail, and yes, they've also failed on some of these others from their perspective. Although again, First Amendment's no basic rule of law, somewhat. He says it's too late for conservators. Conservatives should just give up the title of conservatism, the idea of conservatism. Because Western civilization is dying or on the verge of death. It's just, conservatives will not save it. And I agree with him. Conservatives will not save Western civilization. It's too late for you. There's nothing for you to conserve. Indeed, the reason Western civilization is dying is because of you. You, who had the job of conserving it, never knew what it was about. Never understood the principles. Never understood what individual rights meant. Never properly understood the role of government. Try to base it and ground it on the principles of religion, on the principles of the dark ages. Try to base and ground it ultimately in statism, in tradition and in religion. You, you conservatives who claim to be the defenders of this country, claim to be the defenders of Americanism, you have indeed failed. You have been a disaster and it's your fault. The left always hated America. Since the 1850 progressives hated America, the progressives came to dominate. And you were supposed to be the anti-progressives. You were supposed to be the people who stood up to the progressives. You were supposed to be the people who were going to protect Americanism from the left. And you failed. And you failed because you're conservatives. You failed because of your focus on tradition, on your focus on religion, on your antagonism or unwillingness to defend markets, unwillingness to champion progress, real progress. You progress, you conservatives, you are the enemy of Western civilization. The founding fathers were not conservatives. They were radical revolutionaries. And that's what's needed, but the right kind of radical revolutionaries because a fear that what we're getting, what we're going to get are the wrong kind of radical revolutionaries. Listen to this hyperbolic. Listen to this just insane kind of way to try. Now, I think we, people on the show, understand the sense in which Western civilization died. Understand the sense in which the left is destroying America. Understand the sense in which the vision of the founding fathers is being destroyed. But I want to give you a sense of, again, more of how they think about it, how the way today thinks about these things, not how we think about it, how they think about it. Here's the things that are so disturbing to the right. Again, not a word of individual rights, not a word about economic liberty. I'm going to read you this paragraph, quote, to talk in our family values, which we radicals for capitalism never did, is to assume that there are enough Americans able and willing to marry and raise children together for something like family values to matter in the public discourse, much less in the halls of power. So now they're trying to convince you that there's just no families out there, that families are gone, that nobody is getting married, and if they're all getting married, they get immediately divorced. So there's no families. We shouldn't even talk about family values because families are gone. That's how much they want you to be scared. He continues. To talk about defending religious freedom is to misapprehend that the real risk today is widespread irreligion, which will leave so few religious Americans in coming generations that the government and large corporations will inevitably and easily prosecute them. So what do conservatives, what really makes them afraid is their traditional family is falling apart. It's that people are less religious. That's what makes them afraid. That's what worries them. That's what undermines, that's why they think Western civilization is dying and ending. Good riddance to religion and family values? What the hell are those? Family is a good thing. For those of you who choose to have them, who said there has to be one type of family? Is our history of the human race so wonderful, so fantastic, so beautiful, so amazing? Don't we want to preserve it at all costs? Conserve it at all costs? Should we go back to the Middle Ages? There were lots of families in the Middle Ages. Is that what's valuable about Western civilization? Do they even know what Western civilization is? The answer is simple. No, no, no. They think Western civilization is the Judeo-Christian tradition. That's it. Whatever the hell that is. Going back to the Old Testament. The Old Testament is pretty brutal, not Western at all. Western civilization is the Renaissance, the Enlightenment. Western civilization is the negation of Christianity. Western civilization is the recognition of reason as man's means of survival, of man's means of knowledge, and the individual as the important model and political entity. Reason, individualism. Reason, individualism. That, in essence, is Western civilization. All the rest. All right. Let's see. Now, here's the funny part, right? I think the conservative project has failed because it never had a philosophy because it relies on religion. It relies on faith. It relies on this Mophis thing called tradition because it cannot defend the Founding Fathers because it has no philosophy consistent with the Founding Fathers. It doesn't understand the Founding Fathers. Indeed, it thinks the Founding Fathers are crazy because the Founding Fathers were men of the Enlightenment. The Founding Fathers were men of reason, which these guys can't comprehend. They can't understand. They can't even get it. But this is not why they think the conservative project has failed. Here's why they think the conservative project has failed. Quote, the conservative project failed because it didn't take into account the revolutionary principle of technology and its intrinsic connection to the tedious of sheer profit. But so it doesn't fail because it didn't recognize how powerful technology was going to get and that it's motivated by profit and how evil that is. Quote, conservatives, he says, were too obsessed with left-wing revolutionary politics and missed the real threat. Real threat wasn't. Real threat was not left-wing revolutionary politics. The real threat was Silicon Valley. The real threat was progress. The real threat was technology. I mean, this is beautiful and missed the real threat, which was technological change so swift and powerful. It fundamentally reordered society, swept tradition aside and unleashed a moral relativism that rendered the conservative project obsolete. They really believe this shit and they take themselves seriously. They really think that it's technology that unleashed moral relativism. They don't think it's ideas and they don't think it's their weakness in presenting a morally relativistic view of religion that led to all this. This is so weak. This is so... I mean, moral relativism is unleashed because there's nobody to defend objectivity. The only alternative to moral relativism is faith, religion. Just believe because she attends commandments. God told me this is true. The only alternative to moral relativism as conservatives have presented it is religion. Well, religion is barbaric. It's primitive. It's old. It's going to die at some point and instead of coming up, instead of advocating for, instead of coalescing around a philosophy to present an alternative to moral relativism, instead of coalescing a lot of philosophy that presents an objective morality grounded in reason, grounded in reality, what do conservatives do? Religion, religion, religion, religion. That's their standard. Right? That's a standard that is dead. It's obsolete. It's gone. And yes, conservative project is obsolete not because of technology, but because of religion. I continue quoting. Instead of questioning these technologies, asking whether they would contribute to human flourishing, conservatives asking whether they contribute to human flourishing, conservatives acquiescing to the inevitability and focused instead of narrow issues. The result is being the transformation of society within the span of one single life, human lifespan. They have no... This guy has no concept of history, no concept of the evolution of ideas, no concept of how these things actually happen. One human lifespan, the world is going to hell. That is such nonsense. And with it, the wholesale destruction, wholesale destruction of our traditions and looming implosion of Western civilization, all caused by technology. Not by a lack of ideas, not by inability to defend Western civilization because you don't know what it stands for, what it represents, who Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Hamilton actually were. You're the Federalist magazine, after all. You think you know who these people were, but no. We're not going to defend that tradition. We're just going to defend family values. What were Thomas Jefferson's family values? Oh, Alexander Hamilton. Didn't he have that famous affair? Anyway. So the solution is one of these new rate advocates claims is to quote, enact a serious program of technological development to build a future that supports human flourishing. So what do we need? We need central planners to develop technology that will increase human flourishing because we know technology today doesn't. The iPhone, the iPhone, it destroys human flourishing. It's just, it's, we need a Steve Jobs of the right to bring out good technology that will actually support. So he says, first thing, Republicans need to stop thinking of themselves. I mean, no, they need to stop thinking of themselves as conservatives. They need to think of themselves as radicals, restorationalists, and counter-revolutionaries. I'm not sure what exactly they want to restore. Maybe the Middle Ages. We need a revolution, he says. He says, we need a break from the past and forge a new political identity. He says, forget those market-obsessed libertarians. Forget the foreign policy neocons. All that's finished. Donald Trump shaken it all up. I mean, he says the election of Donald Trump in 2016 held it a populist wave in the end of Republican politics because we knew it, and now we are in uncharted waters, right? And he says, we need to talk. We need to figure out what our agenda should be. I mean, there's some like Sahaba Maori and Glenn and Papin and Adrian Vermeure, advocates of a conservatism that is comfortable with big government and in fact sees it as necessary not only for the common good, but to attain what I'm recently called the private tyranny of woke corporations empowered by unrestrained market forces. Conservative Catholics, he argues, should today claim ownership of a pro-worker, even pro-union, I did a show on this, political agenda that once belonged to the left and which produced generations of democratic voting Catholic workers. Indeed, he says, a willingness to embrace government power has been a topic of fruitful debate on the new right in recent years, as it should be. However, uncomfortable traditional small government conservatives might be with a Maori's argument, it is more or less true. Need to forget about small government. Need to forget about limited government. We need to start wielding power and we need to start liking it. We need to stop compromising with the left, he says, and we need to use political party to get our way. He writes, conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about small government. The government will have to become in the hands of conservatives an instrument of renewal in American life and in some cases a blunt instrument indeed. You guys aren't afraid of these people? I am. Quote, to stop big tech, for example, will require using antitrust powers to break up the larger Silicon Valley firms. To stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve the republic funds. To stop the disintegration of family might require, this is an interesting one, reversing the travesty of no-fault divorce. You shouldn't be allowed to divorce. You have to have fault. No-fault divorce combined with generous subsidies, generous subsidies for families with small children. Conservatives need not to shy away from making these arguments because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free market to small government. It is time to clear our minds of Kent. C-A-N-T, not K-A-N-T. I wish it was K-A-N-T. That would be an achievement. In other words, he says, will the government power will mean a dramatic expansion of the criminal code? It will now be enough, for example, to reach an accommodation with the abortion regime, to agree on reasonable limits on when unborn human life can be snuffed out with impunity. He says, he says, basically abortion now comes the real fight in state houses across the country to outlaw completely the barbaric practice of killing unborn from conception. Now, these people are not about viability. These people are not about the third trimester. These people are anti-life. They're anti-life, human life. They want to snuff out. They want to snuff out the life of the mother. They want to snuff out the choices that you make. They want to destroy your capacity to control your life, your body. They want to outlaw completely all abortions for any reason from conception. This is the goal. This is what they want. Nothing should have this will satisfy them. He says, Republicans need to prepare themselves. If they want to stay in office, it better have an answer ready when they are asked, what reasonable limits to abortion restrictions would they support? The answer is none. Conservatives need to get comfortable saying and reply to people like French, David French. The drag queen story hour should be outlawed. The parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse. The doctors who perform so-called gender affirming interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical license revoked. And the teachers who expose their children, their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired, but be criminally prosecuted, criminally prosecuted for talking about sex. This is what it's come to. This is what hatred of the left has done to the mind of conservatives. They want to criminalize your behavior. He doesn't mention here that what he'd really like to criminalize is gay sex. What he'd really like to criminalize is much, I believe, of our secular lives. How is he going to do this, by the way? I find this interesting. The majority of Americans don't agree with him. How is he going to wield this power? Well, he's going to have to wield it using authoritarian measures. He's going to have to wield it using quote non-democratic measures. He's going to have to wield it by being an authoritarian because the American people don't believe in this. The American people believe there should be some limits to abortion, but not total. The American people don't think the parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse. We still think that parents are responsible. I mean, I think that parents that force their kids to go to church every Sunday. Anyway, I won't go there. To those who are, he says, I'm continuing to quote, to those who are either power corrupts and that once the right seizes power, it too will be corrupted. As far as I can tell, it really is. They certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go away of Cincinnati's? Notice relinquish power. So he's saying they shouldn't relinquish power. They shouldn't should not relinquish power until they have saved the country and built rebuild institutions. In other words, he's saying it doesn't matter what the voters want. It doesn't matter what the elections say. We need to save the country and rebuild our institutions. Therefore, we need to hold on to power as long as that takes. And only when we are done with that will we consider relinquishing power. He says it is a fair question and we should attend to it with care after we've won the war. All right, there you have it, guys. That is the right. That is the right in its most naked, obvious, anti-individual rights, anti-individualism, anti-progress, anti-liberty, anti-freedom, you know, pure form. It's right there in front of you. You want to continue supporting the right? Based on what? Your fantasy that maybe they'll do the right thing once they get into power? Your delusion that they are better than the left? You want to give the right the power to decide when they're going to send parents to jail because of what parents, how parents interact with their kids, what parents tell their kids, what shows parents tell, take their shows to what movies they allow them to watch? Will there be a religious police, a children's police screening what shows we show our children off of Netflix? Well, the fact that I told my kids about sex when they asked where babies came from, when they were very young, I assume that will be illegal now. What's the limit? What movies okay? What movies are not? Is Bambi 2 Pro environmentalism? Is Dumbo 2 Pro taking acid? For those of you who remember the scene from Dumbo where Dumbo takes acid. Where? Once you give government that kind of power? Once you give anybody left or right that kind of power to send parents to jail for what? For what we tell our kids? For our own views? This is, this is the nightmare. The real nightmare we're all living through. A left that wants to force our kids to go to drag queen show library reading and a right that wants to put parents in prison for sending their kids. Imagine what this right, this new right wants to do to drag queens. Imagine what they want to do to anybody who's a little different, anybody who's not a abiding Christian, to anybody who doesn't believe in their traditional values, to anybody who I don't know doesn't want to form a family the way they view family, to anybody who doesn't want to worship at the feet of Jesus Christ on a cross. That great time to be talking about Iran with these theocrats, theocrats on the verge of taking over the political right in America. I mean, not anymore the kind of moral majority, soft moral majority, we just care about abortion and a couple of other things. Now, now they want power to control you and control the way you educate your kids and control everything about your life just like the left. No difference. And indeed, what is worse here? Who's going to be more efficient at it? All right. Now I'm pissed off. All right. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. 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