 All right, so this conference was held on last weekend. And some of the keynote speakers were Peter Thiel, as I mentioned. You had some people I respect and admire, like Glenn Lowry, spoke. And then people I despise, politicians I despise, like Josh Hawley. I'll read you some of Josh Hawley's comments in a minute. Josh Hawley is, I still think of this group of the nationals, conservatives, the most dangerous man on the right in terms of political ambition and in terms of his charisma and in terms of his charisma, I still think he is likely to run for president and maybe one day will become one of the leaders. So Josh Hawley was one of the keynote speakers. Of course, you can't just have one politician. You have two other senators, Marco Rubio, who's basically sold to the devil completely. Any respect I used to have a long time ago for Marco Rubio has gone completely out. He's finished from my perspective. And Ted Cruz, who's an interesting case, will get to Ted Cruz in a minute because his talk at the National Conservatives was quite interesting and different. And let me see if I can find some of the other. Oh, well, Douglas Murray was on one of the big panels, Sohob Amari, who I've talked about on this show in the past. Joram Khazoni, of course, did a number of things. And Dave Rubin. Dave Rubin was there doing a number of panels and actually being one of the commentators on some of the sessions on the future of conservatism. Who knew Dave Rubin would land up being a conservative? It's not the path I expected. Not the path I expected, but. And then let's see, JD Vance. For those of you who don't know, JD Vance is running for the Senate in Ohio. He is Trump's candidate in Ohio. He is being funded massively by Peter Thiel. And, yes, JD Vance was the closing keynote speaker, I think to a large extent, in an effort to support to support his ambitions. Peter Thiel is funding two candidates. One in Arizona, Blake Masters, who is actually an employee of Peter Thiel's, or has been, and he's running for the Senate in Arizona, in a Republican primary, and in Ohio, JD Vance. Those are the two candidates. I think Peter Thiel has given each $10 million, if I'm not mistaken. So this is real money. And both of them have a real shot at winning. They are two national conservatives that, you know, with everything that entails. So what is national conservatism? Well, I mean, even among national conservatism, there is a debate, a infighting, disagreement, conflict about what it actually means, what it actually represents. But what it is clear that it is, it's a rejection of classical liberalism. It's a rejection of the idea of individual rights. It's a rejection, indeed, of the idea of individualism. This is why Yoram Chazzoni has agreed to debate, or proposed to debate, conservatism versus individualism. Because national conservatives views the conservative project as an anti-individualistic project, an anti-individualism project. They view conservatism as a project that is inherently collectivist. Collectivist centered around the nation, the community, and as we'll see from many of them, certainly the Catholics among them around religion. This is the problem that they have. So the two countries in Europe, Europe is always something that American intellectuals always admire from afar. Europe is this place that is, I don't know, it has a certain mystique about it, it has history, it has intellectuals. When it comes to ideas, it is typically, not always, but typically at the forefront of ideas. And the left admire certain countries in Europe. You've often heard Bernie Sanders talk about Scandinavia to the Scandinavian chagrin. You often had Obama and others talk about France and talk about other countries in Europe and what they like about it. The countries that the national conservatives admire the most are Hungary and Poland. Poland, not accidentally, is a committed Catholic country, very much a Catholic country, has preserved its Catholicism in spite of its decades under communism. Hungary has elevated religion. I don't know how religious people really are. I think they're more, I don't know how Catholic they are. I think they're more Eastern conservative, but they might be Catholic. I think they were more influenced by the Byzantine form of Christianity than the church in Rome, but maybe some of you know more about religion in Hungary. But Hungary is definitely another source of great admiration for the national conservatives. And we'll get to that, and maybe we'll have an opportunity to talk about more of that later. And if not later, suddenly in future shows. This is going to be this whole national conservative thing. Hungary and Poland and generally what I'll call the new right is an ongoing theme. And we will continue to discuss it on the show. I'm a huge opponent of the nationalism in Hungary and the nationalism in Poland, again, because of the rejection of individualism because the elevation of the state of nationalism above the individual. So I reject both of those countries in terms of their politics. But the national conservatives love them, but this is the challenge they face. Both Hungary, certainly Hungary and Poland have a certain ethnic identity. They have a certain shared history. The Hungarians come from an ancient tribe that you can date back centuries. It has a long history, a long history of tribes coming from the steeps and settling in the valleys around Budapest and basically the Hungarian people, as they see it from a ethnic genetic perspective, although once you study the genes, things get a lot more murky. But they have this shared history that goes back a very long time. And there's a unity. There's a traditional basis for a nation and for, quote, solidarity within that nation. They all come. They're all family members in some remote way. The Poles, it's similar. The Poles are much more ethnically mixed. What's the difference between Poles and Ukrainians? What's the difference between Poles and Lithuanians? It is less clear. But again, Poland has a particular identity, an historic identity, an identity based in ethnicity, based in tribalism. Indeed, after World War II, one of the things the Poles did is they kicked out all the Germans. Given what Germany had done to them, it's understandable. But the Germans who had lived in Poland for centuries, I think, were kicked out. Were kicked out. Let's see, we've got, Alex says, hungry. We've got 39% Catholics, 11% Protestants, 3.5 other Christian. And I guess the rest consider themselves atheists, which is not surprising. Hungry has a much more liberal, in the classical liberal, well, sort of Poland. But hungry, I think, was more secular country before communism, and certainly after post-communism. The Poland-Poland hung onto its Catholicism through the communist years. And then Pope Paul, I think we enforced that, John Paul, whatever the third, whatever he was, John Paul, we enforced that Catholicism in the Polish nation. But there's an ethnic group, there's a tribe, there's a religion associated with it. There's some homogeneity. And you can draw certain borders, they're somewhat arbitrary, but they approximate some kind of historical claim that these tribes have to the space. The challenge the national conservatives have is what unites America. Now, I hate the nationalism of Hungary and Poland partially because of its tribal ethnic racist, if you will, origins. Because it is so centered on history and on homogeneity and on a bloodline, on a tribe, on collectivism. But again, the national conservatives would love to have something like that, that this is what they strive for, this is what they'd love to have. So the challenge for them is what unites America? America does not have a shared history that goes back centuries. America does not have a shared ethnic identity, quite the contrary. Like it or not, America is a melting pot of lots of different ethnicities. It has Brits, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Irish, I said Brits already, French, Spaniards. It has Jews from all of Europe. It has a lot of Russians, Ukrainians. It has Italians from all parts of Italy, from Northern Italy, but many, many from Southern Italy, Sicily, and places like that. It has people from Latin America. It has American Indians. It has Asians of all different types of Asians. And then, of course, it has Africans. America is this mishmash ethnically. It has, from the perspective of the national conservatives, no unifying factor that they can understand. It doesn't have one ethnic core. It doesn't have one shared history. And to the extent that it has a shared history, it's a very young history. And young is kind of not interesting. They want ancient as one of the writers about national conservatives to write. Nationalism requires a national culture. How do you get a national culture? If you don't have this, in their mind, shared history, shared ethnicity, and importantly, shared religion, that's the big problem that they face. Because he writes, nationalism requires a national culture which requires a national religion. But we don't have a national religion in America. And the founding fathers made sure that we wouldn't have a national religion in America. You could say, Christian. But even Christian is what? Is it Catholic, as many of these intellectuals are? Is it the thousand different Protestant sects that are out there? Is there a religious identity, as this country arguably becomes more secular? What unifies it? What creates the unit that establishes for them the nation? And this is a challenge, a serious challenge, that they face. How do we define that? And they're arguing about this. Many of the Catholics are what you call the integrationalists. And they really do want something somewhat resembling a theocracy. And the Catholicism has become the religion of the intelligentsia, of the right. If you think about it, the president of the United States right now, the speaker of the house, six of nine supreme court justices, six of nine are Catholic. A seventh was raised Catholic. Number of prominent writers and many, many of intellectuals on the right are Catholic. And Deneen, who is probably one of the dominant thinkers on the right right now, one of the most visible of them one of the most influential, writes the Catholicism as a tradition that gives you resources for how to think outside of liberal categories. And when he says liberal, think not just liberal left, liberal classical liberal. And he says that these Catholic intellectuals of the right don't have a political home. This is how he describes this. And this is we'll soon get into the economics. He says Catholics are often left-wing on economic issues and right-wing on social issues. And you tell me, he writes, which party now represents that position? Left-wing on economic issues. This is them writing, not me. And right-wing on social issues. Now I can't think of a worse combination. Can you? That's the worst of all worlds. The purpose of government, according to these Catholics, is to secure the common good. In order to do this, they go back to the Catholic social tradition, the encyclical of Leo XIII and Pope Pius XI, where the popes argued that individual liberty doesn't help, the workers secure living wage, that capitalism indeed has impoverished the workers, it failureized workers' associations, unions, and urged government to intervene to balance the economy. This is who these Catholics of the right admire. Maybe the most important thinker among these Catholics is a professor at Harvard, a law professor at Harvard by the name of Vermeul, I might be pronouncing it right, V-E-R-M-E-U-L-E, who is a convert to Catholicism. And he has written that we need to replace originalism, place religionism, originalism, or textualism, with what he calls common good constitutionalism, where he, quote, quote, we read into the majestic generalities and ambiguities of the Constitution to create an illiberal, illiberal, anti-liberal, legalism founded on, quote, substantive moral principles that conduce to the common good. He also believes in a strong administrative state, i.e., a strong bureaucracy, a strong alphabet agency, soup agencies. And this administrative state should have a great deal of discretion in steering the ship of bureaucracy. And they are in a strategic position to bring about these common good policies and to destroy the liberal policies that exist out there in the world. Yeah, Cook in the chat says, Vermeul thinks speech controls in China are good. Yes, he also thinks, by the way, vaccine mandates are good because it's for the common good. He's a big supporter of vaccine mandates. And in order to support what he calls substantive moral principles, the state should be allowed to intervene in areas like health care, guns, and the environment to promote human flourishing, which should take priority over things like commerce or the right to be armed. So he's anti-second amendment as well. According to the abortion, of course, would be illegal. But as I said, he is a big supporter or a supporter of vaccine mandates. Another convert to Catholicism, Amari, is one of Vermeul's biggest allies. And he's urged conservatives to approach the Cultural War quote with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square reordered to the common good and ultimately the highest good, highest good being God. And of course, he urges people to use political power in order to achieve this common good, in order to reorder society, in order to achieve this highest of all goods. He said that Hungary and Poland have offered an example of something that looks different. I guess this is a different nationalist conservative. This is a guy named Goldman. And they're thrilled by this. They like Orban, right? Because he has made it impossible for the left to really be active in this country. He's destroyed the free press. He is destroying the capacity of the left to dominate the universities. And while accepting tons of money from the European Union, by trying to milk the European Union for as many subsidies and goodies as he can, he stands up to them on primarily social issues here and there. Of course, all of these people oppose the idea of individual rights. To quote one of them, there is nothing natural about individual rights. There is no such thing as a rights-bearing individual. These are conservatives. That, by the way, is a quote from a Polish. So this guy, this is funny. This is Legutko. He is a member of the ruling law and justice party in Poland and is in the European Union. And I met him. I met him. And when I mentioned to him, we were at a cocktail party and we were talking. And I knew kind of who he was. And I had just given a rousing talk about individual rights, which he didn't attend, because I think he knew what I was going to say. When I told him that I believed in that I was an advocate of individual rights, he looked at me with utter disdain. And basically, you know, all kind of that garbage and walked away. That wouldn't have anything to do with me. This is the alternative to the left, guys. And all of these people, of course, admired and supported by people like Tucker Carlson and by Josh Hawley, certainly by many on the right who are trying to become the heirs to Donald Trump and to give Donald Trump's ideas kind of an intellectual heir. So if you look at, so that's kind of an introduction to international conservatism, a lot of their energy, a lot of their focus, a lot of their time is really dedicated to attacking the left. That is their focus. That's where their real energy really is. It's to attacking wokeness. It's to attacking every little aspect of the left they go after. And they spend almost all their resources in doing that. One of the reasons people always ask, why don't you do more on CRT? Why don't you do more? Because all these guys are doing it. And I'm not like them. And they do a pretty good job ridiculing CRT and ridiculing these other things. But it's it's it bores me because everybody else is doing it. And it's easy to just be against. It's easy to be anti. It's easy to slam the opposition. What are you for? 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 iranbrookshow.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. Also, if you'd like to see The Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content. And of course, subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.