 So I'm thinking about Michael Anton's famous essay, the Flight 93 election, and I remember how compelling I found it when I first read it in 2016, and I thought, yeah, this really captures the stakes. And now in retrospect, I think, my God, how foolish was I? Our country's survivability was not at stake, like America was not at stake in 2016 between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Like I gave in to hysteria, like this idea that America was a plane that was going to crash into the ground if it voted for Hillary Clinton is absolutely insane. So I think Trump made a better president than Hillary Clinton would have, but the contrast is not that dramatic. One, Donald Trump's a very bad leader. He's never exemplified much leadership abilities, and he's never shown himself to be some kind of great CEO. So he wasn't able to accomplish very much because he was a complete amateur and a buffoon and quite childish, narcissistic, nihilistic, and simply not very competent. And Loponius Maximus says he won't allow Yoko Ono to break us up. Loponius has an amazing story. He went to space on, I think, the Starship Enterprise, and he was abused by William Shatner, and so thoughts and prayers going out to Loponius Maximus. But I'm thinking when I was less competent at life back in 2016, I was more excited about the Trump train, and much of my enthusiasm seems quite misguided and childish. And the idea that this was the Flight 93 election, it's so tempting, these dramatic perspectives that just suck you in. It's like, yes, the Flight 93 election. But speaking from the perspective of October 2021, 2016 election was not the Flight 93 election. It was nothing like the Flight 93 election. It was just another election between two people who were moderately different. Now, I don't want to go the Kurdish-Yavin route and say it makes absolutely no difference, you know, who's president of the United States. Of course, it makes a difference. So we're not in Afghanistan today is because of Joe Biden following on from Donald Trump's policies. So there are many different aspects of government policies where a president can make a tremendous difference, not just in intervention, but in setting a particular kind of tone. Real reason why, Mr. Ford, is we're tired of being represented by spineless salos. The GOP is worse than zero because of false hope that they will do something. Yeah, this is a really nice pen. I think I spent like $15 for two of these, and it just feels so good. Just running roughshod over our values only radicalizes us. Okay, so I could be wrong about this, Wojak Woz, but here's my sneaking suspicion, and I was much more amenable to your perspective between, say, 2013 and 2018. But now, I think the reason that you feel like the Democrats are running roughshod over your values is radicalizing you. It's because your life doesn't work. I didn't know your life. I didn't know you personally. I didn't know you may be making six figures. But I suspect in all likelihood, your life doesn't work. You are unable to run your own life, therefore, you are frustrated and you want to become distracted by politics and by this idea that there's some kind of American Caesar out there. So I don't know you, but I'm suspecting that in your own life, you are incredibly passive. I don't know you, but I suspect you're not moving ahead in your own life. You're not moving ahead in your career. You're not moving ahead with your education. You're not moving ahead with your profession. You're not moving ahead with marriage and family. You're not moving ahead in your career. You're not getting new skills. You're not getting, you know, substantial, making a substantial, aggressive, assertive control of your own life. And therefore, the more passive you are in your own life, the more radical you become in your politics. And I think that's, that's certainly true of myself. So between say 2013, 2014, 2015 and 20, those three years, I was fairly passive in my own life. And my therapist said to me, do you think you're so radical in your politics because you're so passive in your own life? Like I was just meandering along in low paying like 18 hour, $18 an hour work. And, and I wasn't looking for a better job. And I wasn't making the decisions and the choices and getting the education and developing the skills and getting into a better mindset so that I could take charge of my own life. So I was incredibly passive in my own life. I wasn't living up to my adult responsibilities in my own life. I was just a total loser in my own life out of $50,000 in credit content. And how was I spending my spare time thinking about the future direction of the United States and how those Democrats are running rough shot over our values. I was a passive pussy in my own life. And instead I was in my fantasy life about what we need in American politics. It's like we need an American Caesar. We need a Donald Trump. We need a strong leader. We need to take back our country. So the more wussified and passive and pussy I was in my own life, then the more radical I get in my politics. Then when I started to make some concrete steps to taking back control of my own life in the last half of 2015 and more so in 2016, 2017, 2018 became much more assertive in my own life. The less need I had to fantasize about radical politics, the less need I had to get obsessed with what's going on with the presidency and the Senate and the Congress, things I can do absolutely nothing about. And the less need I had for radical solutions. So I think much of the American rights desire for a Caesar comes from their failures in their own life. Like they can't stay sober in their own life. They're not moving ahead in their own life. They're not being assertive in their own life. They're not getting a woman, getting married, having kids, moving ahead in a career, getting new job skills, earning a good income, being a responsible, upstanding member of your community that other people look to. And when you're failing in your own life, then it's like most of the posters on 4chan, right? They seem to have all these fantasies about the greater world because they don't want to look, take a hard look at themselves. So they take a hard look at everyone else. They take everybody else's inventory and see what's wrong with America and with our political process and our culture and with Hollywood and the Jews and our elites. And so people become obsessed over all sorts of things that they can't do anything about rather than getting interested in their own life and moving ahead in their own life. So this is not true for everyone. Randy says, I'm making 150,000 a year. I'm not even 30 yet. I have a wife who's going to give birth to our first child and they'll be more right wing. So exactly not everyone fits that scenario, but it does seem the overwhelming majority of people that I interact with on YouTube and online or even in real life or into really radical politics are failing in real life. And so the way they solve that failure is by living in a fantasy world about what we really need in the wider world. And so I think a lot of the American rights yearning for a Caesar is a reflection of an inability to be competent in this world, in this life, in this country, in this democratic process. America has a share of problems, but it's far and away the most powerful country in the world. So under trajectory to even increase its relative level of power compared to other countries over the next 50 years. And if you think America is some kind of hellscape that we can only be saved by a Caesar, by a dictator, I think that's delusional. So rather than becoming more competent with our current political process, our current economic process, it's so easy to just get lost in a fantasy world. So I remember 2016 came along, Michael Anton wrote the Flight 93 election, and it was like so exciting, so invigorating. And I was like, wow, this is great. Anton's great. He's really put it on the line and he's provided this elaborate philosophical justification for his perspective. And yeah, this is the most important election ever. We're just America's on a knife edge. You know, we could just totally collapse. And now five years later, this essay looks really stupid. And people like Michael Anton and people like Angelo Codavia, the late Angelo Codavia, and many of other Donald Trump's enablers, they set the grounds for the January 6 Capitol Hill riots, which could have gone far worse than they did. The people who were rioting and taking over Capitol Hill weren't very competent. If they were more competent, they could have been far more evil. Like they could have delivered far more disruption. But people like Michael Anton and people like Donald Trump and people like Angelo Codavia, they set the stage for the Capitol Hill riots. They were enablers of the Capitol Hill riots because they've essentially been trying to set the stage for an American civil war. And so because these people in their own ways have not gotten it done in real life, like the Trump administration was not a very effective administration. Like whether you like the administration or not can't claim that it was a particularly effective administration. Now I don't think it was awful either. I don't think Trump's like one of our 20 worst presidents. I think he's probably our best president for the past 50 years, but he was not particularly competent. So I'm looking at Jacob Siegel, who writes a lot of interesting things. Got an essay here, The Triumph of America's ruling class, late Angelo Codavia warned that secrecy was the key to power. Well, secrecy is a component of power. Knowledge is power and secret knowledge is going to be more powerful than the knowledge that it's easy to get. But the main reason that people have power is because they are competent because they have resources because they get along with other people. They form coalitions and they work effectively with others. The American alternative right fell apart because its members were far more interested in feuding with each other than in pursuing a coherent political direction. So Jacob Siegel writes here about Angelo Codavia. America is caught in a revolutionary spiral. I don't think so. We certainly got our share of problems, but life goes on. Most people are terribly political. We're not caught in a revolutionary spiral. An oligarchy composed of a small number of corporate and government rulers may be in control. Well, it's an oligarchy that all sorts of people can join. Like founder of Facebook, right? He was not an oligarchal king or power. Mark Zuckerberg, he made himself powerful by inventing technology that billions of people wanted to use. Elon Musk came out of nowhere developing technology that millions of people wanted to use. Jeff Bezos and Amazon became powerful because they produced products and technology that people wanted to use. So this is not a closed oligarchy. I live in and around Hollywood and I'm struck by how incredibly open Hollywood is. I wrote a book on movie producers. I faxed out interview requests and about 25% of the people I sent requests to answered them and gave me interviews. People who were showrunners for major network TV shows talked to me. I was Hustler magazine's asshole of the month. Hollywood is incredibly open. America is still an incredibly open country if you've got particular skills and you're competent and you're able to get along with others. An oligarchy composed of a small number of corporate and government rulers where anyone can join that supposed oligarchy if they've got the talent. They've got the skill. Maybe in control. Well, I don't know how much in control are they. I'm able to say pretty much everything I want to say. I'm able to do pretty much everything I want to do. I don't feel smothered by our ruling regime. But they face opposition from rednecks clutching at guns and guard working class peasants of color resistant to poly gender empowerment doctrines and vaccine mandates. Well, the right wing in America has become steadily lower brow as the left wing has become more steadily high brow. So it used to be a majority of college graduates voted Republican. Now overwhelmingly college graduates vote for the Democratic party. So Democratic parties become substantially more intellectual and the Republican party has become substantially anti intellectual. And I'm not someone who thinks that intellectual automatically equals good or that intellectual automatically equals bad. Right. There's a time and a place for the intellect, but just value free basis. Democratic parties become substantially more intellectual. Republicans have become substantially more anti intellectual vaccine mandates. I don't think Ford is coping right now. The country's on the path of becoming a hellhole, says Lepodius. Well, it's going to be a hellhole. That's going to be the most powerful country in the world. Even more than we are now. The future is built in the United States of America, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York. That's where the future is being created vaccine mandates makes sense for the same reason that non-discrimination policies make sense for employers. The same reason that employers may have employees take sexual harassment classes or racial discrimination classes to avoid liability. That's a prime driver for vaccine mandates by companies. They want to avoid liability. They don't want to get sued when people catch COVID in the workplace. Workplaces instituting vaccine mandates seems to simply be acting in self-interest to reduce your legal liability. A lot of these awful things that people on the ride are decrying about overly intrusive government bureaucrats, overly intrusive university bureaucrats trying to micromanage students' lives are simply reactions to legal liability. You really want to change the system. Crying about critical race theory and vaccine mandates is not going to do it. What you want to do is change the legal system so that employers and universities carry as much legal liability if they're not intensively intruding into the lives of students and their employees. About half of the US population so far refused to comply with vaccines. I think that number is going to steadily drop in the days ahead. The legal liability of a third party is not my problem. No, but if you want to understand why third parties act the way they do, you've got multiple alternatives. You can just say, oh, they're crazy. So you don't have to put yourself into other people's shoes. You don't have to exert your empathy to see what the world looks like from someone else's perspective. You can just say, oh, they're crazy. Or you can say, oh, they're just demons. Or it's just, oh, it's just completely incomprehensible why third parties are acting the way they do. That's not my preferred approach. 40 wants to understand. This is 40 university. We're here to understand. This is a safe space where we just try to understand where other people are coming from rather than just pronouncing apocalyptic judgments. Why do I think about going bored? I think it's fine. Do it. Absolutely. Do it. I shave all my hair off every three months. Fine then. I'll sue my company if I catch the flu. Well, you may sue your company and you may lose and it may turn your life upside down. So I know people have launched lawsuits and you never know what's going to come out of a lawsuit. So for some people who launch a lawsuit, absolutely destroys their lives. So you really don't want to get into unnecessary lawsuits. Laponia says, I'm talking about quality of life, bro, not projecting power around the world. Bro, what's wrong with you? Don't you make enough money to have good quality of life? Like, what's the matter? I thought you made a good panacea. If you make a good living, I don't understand how you don't have a good quality of life. Now allow your income to discriminate for you so that you don't have to. Mark Cuban is an idiot and part of the oligarchy. Come on, man. Well, he made a lot of money. He obviously is not such an idiot that he didn't make billions of dollars. Musk has developed nothing. Well, he's developed the most valuable car company in America perhaps the world. So I suspect that he has done some things. Will murder be legal in North America? No. Speak on lawsuits, bro. Yeah, lawsuits can turn your life upside down. I have been sued five times and I didn't lose any of the lawsuits. My insurance company settled on one. The others, I won. But you don't want the loss of sleep. You don't want the aggravation. You never know what's going to come out in the discovery process. You don't know what's going to come out when you get deposed. You can be absolutely humiliated. It does not add to your quality of life to be in litigation. How does a lawsuit ruin your life? Well, most people worry about it. I was sued over libel. So I sued five times for libel when I was a more adventurous blogger. So it's a source of worry. And then there are all sorts of downsides. So for example, in one lawsuit, I had to reveal a source and I refused to reveal my source. So then the court started sanctioning me $50 a day and I couldn't afford that. So all sorts of things can come out of the discovery process. It can be incredibly embarrassing, but can turn your life upside down, that make you look like a total fool. And yeah, it can suck all your back, not just your bank account, but then people can attach your income. They can go take a third of your salary on an ongoing basis. They can hunt you down. You don't want to make unnecessary enemies. You don't want to be unnecessary litigation. You really want to do everything you can to try to have the best possible relationship that you can with everybody in your life, around your life that you encounter. You don't want to get into unnecessary litigation. There may be a tiny percentage of people who thrive on being in litigation, but for most people it's a nightmare. Or if it's not a nightmare, it's just an extra heavy burden. Why would you want to walk around with a burden? So good values make for a better quality of life. They give you the right priorities and they teach you how to be grateful. Yeah. And having unnecessary drama, unnecessary litigation, unnecessary conflict, and making unnecessary enemies and getting into unnecessary feuds, these are not components of the good life. Okay. Jacob Siegel, he wrote the Greg Paul Gottfried profile a few years ago. So the rednecks can't influence policies of Amazon and the Pentagon. Yeah. One dentist is going to be more effective for your political, social, or cultural, or religious program than a hundred skinhead high school dropouts. But locally, they still have the power to refuse orders from the managerial genoceries to carry out the oligarchy's bidding. Well, they have varying degrees of power. So not being vaccinated can be made increasingly uncomfortable so that you become strongly incentivized to get a vaccine even though you don't want to. So people with power can make life quite unpleasant. So in general, the strong take what they want and the weak endure what they must. Why would you want to be weak? Right? Why would you want to be in a position where you have to endure what you must? All right? The strong take what they want, the weak endure what they must. I would rather be strong. So Angelo Kodavia says the oligarchy demands complete submission. Again, this is like overly dramatic. I don't think it's particularly applicable to the United States of America. So there are some things where you have to submit in any group, right? You want to belong to any group. There'll always be areas where you need to submit. If you're taking any medical intervention for any reason other than your health, you're a weak, weak man. Okay. So most people aren't independently wealthy like you, Loponius. So for a lot of jobs, you have to get the vaccine. For a lot of jobs, you have to do all sorts of things you are not otherwise do. For a lot of jobs, you have to go through mandatory sexual harassment training or racial diversity training. And that's just the price of holding certain jobs. The more prestigious the job, the more likely you are to get canceled, the more vulnerable you are to get, get canceled. So Angelo Kodavia argued that the oligarchy demands complete submission. The locals refuse each party grants itself greater license than what is permitted to defeat the other and the country spirals towards revolutionary violence. I don't think we're spiraling towards revolutionary violence. Yeah, we'll have outbreaks here and there, but is it really a more dangerous situation than when the weatherman underground was setting off hundreds of bombs around the United States? So Angelo Kodavia described our current situation as the cause of a war. I don't think we're in the cause of a war. Most people aren't as focused on politics as we are. There's an interesting article on Vox, which is the left-wing website, the anti-American right. Rooting against Olympians, scoffing at Capitol Police, broaching civil war, meet today's conservative movement. So I think this is the more anti-social end of the American right. So generally speaking, being a conservative means you support law and order. So why would you support law and order? But you don't support it on Capitol Hill. That's insane. I support law and order. So when I saw the rioting on Capitol Hill January 6th, I was instinctively opposed. And I really don't like the beating of police officers. And this widespread perspective by many people on the distant right of F the police, I think that's heinous. I have no time for this attitude of F the police or this childish attitude of F authority in general, right? That's an incredibly self-destructive anti-social perspective. There is no way that you can have any community or functioning government without authority, without law and order, and without police. So Olympics are typically a boom time for jingoism. Patriotic fervor heightens among Americans. This year, we've seen an unlikely faction of Americans reading against our athletes conservatives. Well, when athletes take left-wing positions, makes sense that conservatives would not cheer for those athletes. So Randy Lenz says, it's not true that you need authority and law and order. Okay, give me examples of states and cities that don't have law and order, that don't have authority, that don't have armed police ready to crack down and imprison people and take them out if necessary. I don't know anyone in the political right who says F the police. Well, I had about half a dozen members of my chat saying F the police about a month ago, and yeah, I just banned them. Randy, do you live in America? Imagine all the communities that existed as subsets to a larger polity and were hostile toward the central authority. Yeah, it's not going to work. So give me examples of functioning states where you don't have law and order, where you don't have armed police, they're willing to take people down. You can't come up with examples. Who started F the police? Well, I suspect it's a left-wing orientation, but now I just noticed many people on the distant right. So what advice would you give to an average 20-year-old? You seem very optimistic. I could use your optimism. Yes, you've got to learn how to connect with other people. So do you feel like a pariah? Do you feel like a social outcast? There is no success, and there's no happiness as long as you feel like a pariah in a social outcast. So you need to do whatever you need to do to learn to connect normally with other people and to move out and away and graduate from feelings of pariodom and feeling like an outcast. So, you know, Google, I feel like a social pariah. Google, I feel like a social outcast and learn about disconnection and learn about connection with other people. There is no good life available to one as long as you're feeling like a pariah and feeling like an outcast. Most conservatives support law enforcement. Yes, without law and order, the thugs rule over the week. That's not freedom. Yeah, Beaked Alaska that noted right-wing intellectuals said F the police. Wait, I thought he said we love our police. We love our costs. We love our law enforcement. We love our military too because they're important. So we've got I noticed after Trump lost the 2020 election, I just noticed this widespread despair on the right, which was, I think, primarily an example of a lack of maturity. So right now, Donald Trump has got to be the favorite to win in 2024. Republicans are very well situated to do well in the 2022 elections. So Republicans are really in good shape. But after the 2020 presidential defeat, there's just such widespread despair among conservatives, which I saw primarily as a reflection of simply a lack of maturity. So with many conservatives, they simply see no role and no place for themselves in America right now. And I think that's a delusion. It's just childish because you didn't get your way with the presidential election. And it's like, oh, there's no role for me. There's no place for me in America. So what's striking about right-wing thought is how increasingly anti-American it is and how anti-intellectual it is. And how despairing it is. And I just don't think there's an empirical basis for this. So in Trump, much of Trump's campaign was painting a picture of America on the verge of collapse. And I don't think that was based in reality. And in Ohio, Senate candidate G.D. Vance warns that Americans have lost every single major cultural institution in this country. I think that's exaggerated. So the right is correct that it's been consistently losing the culture war. But that doesn't mean you just give up. I mean, but that's where the anti-Americanism comes from. The right feeling we consistently losing the culture war. And then this is seeping into the right's rhetoric towards law enforcement. So Tucker Carson laughed at one police officer's claim to experience psychological trauma after the January 6 attack. I don't know what Officer Michael Fanone went through. Host Laura Ingram gave out mock acting awards to police officers implying that their experiences were faked or invented. So what happened on January 6 was awful. And the beating of police was real. And there were various police officers who had rational reasons to genuinely be in fear for their life from the barf on January 6. So this increasing willingness to attack police by these Fox News hosts, and then many you take their cues from Fox News hosts is a strong argument about a lack of maturity and lack of wisdom on the right and a lack of responsibility. So many leading Republican politicians have invented this version of events in which, you know, the January 6 writers were patriots. They're just a bunch of political prisoners. And that's how Speaker Nancy Pelosi was responsible for the January 6 violence. This is this is insane. So what is the intellectual home of the anti-American right? According to this box article, it's the Claremont Institute. It's a think tank based in Southern California affiliated with Hillsdale College. So it's the most radically pro Trump of any major right wing intellectual institutions. It's most willing to defend the false claim of a stolen election in 2020. And Claremont's output in the past year has been astonishingly radical, openly calling for regime change and rebellion. So Claremont Patriots increasingly appear to actively hate America and their fellow citizens. That's historian John Joshua Tate writing in the Bulwark. Michael Anton talked to Curtis Yavin. So Curtis Yavin is a big believer in dictatorship. And again, I just think it's childish. It's an inability to deal with the messy reality of electoral politics and instead retreat to a fantasy world where some strong man comes along and takes care of the country's problems. So Curtis Yavin in this podcast muses about an American strong man and American Caesar and how Trump could just seize authoritarian control of the US government by turning the National Guard and the FBI into his personal stormtroopers. I mean, this is just childish fantasy. So this is why the left views this type of politics as fairly similar to fascism. So it's a pining for a strong man to come around and take care of all your problems. So Curtis Yavin and Michael Anton no longer recognize America. They see this theocratic oligarchy in control operating a cadre of progressive priests. And I think it's I think it's childish. So for one Claremont writer, most people living in the United States today are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the time. And if Trump voters don't band together and wage a counterrevolution against these citizen aliens, then the victory of the progressive tyranny will be assured. There's a little over hyperbolic there. And this Claremont writer Glenn Elmer says violence will be a part of the struggle. Learn some useful skills, stay healthy, get strong, strong people are harder to kill. Remember how after Trump lost the 2020 election, many of these hysterics on the right said that Trump voters were going to be put into reeducation camps, that millions of them were going to get fired. Trump voters were going to get hunted down. None of that happened. So Angelo Codavilla wrote in the Claremont review of books, we have a government clinging to an illusion of legitimacy. And that a half century progressives rule have just abused and demolished American society. So Codavilla wrote the war on poverty enriched its managers expanded the underclass that voted for them. Civil rights movement ended up entitling a class of diversity managers to promote their friends and ruin their opponents. There is no end to what the left can do because there are so little the conservatives can do to fight back. Now there is some truth to that analysis, but it's hyperbolic, overly emotional, overly dramatic and vastly overstated. So when you consistently overstate people in the middle distrust you. You lose people who are open-minded. So why is Claremont become the center of anti-American right-wing thinking? Dr. Tate says it's because of their sacralized view of American history as an ideal regime. I don't view American history as inherently sacred. America is the logical product when you combine its geography with its demographics. What then emerged can largely be counter for by its geography and its demographics.