0:00

Marshall here. Welcome back to the

0:02

realignment.

0:08

Quick note before I get into the episode.

0:11

Today kicks off this month's daily

0:13

episode series I really enjoyed

0:15

recording during the episodes at the start of Russia's

0:18

invasion of Ukraine. Doing so helped

0:20

me think through the biggest mode of the year

0:22

So with this series, I hope to do the same

0:24

on a bigger scope looking back on twenty

0:26

twenty two. There are always

0:28

gonna be too many episodes this month

0:31

anyone person to listen to, so here's how I'd best

0:33

recommend you go through this series.

0:35

Pretty almost like a buffet, pick

0:37

and choose the episodes and topics that are

0:39

most of interest. to you. Three

0:42

quick requests. Number one, this

0:44

was the year we started monetizing the

0:46

podcast with SuperCast. putting

0:48

a lot of work into these daily episodes

0:50

of the next few weeks. So if this or

0:52

any other episode, I do particularly

0:54

resonates with you, I'd really appreciate

0:56

it if you went to realignment dot supercast

0:59

dot com or click the link in the show

1:01

notes to support the show. helping

1:03

us wrap a great twenty twenty

1:05

two. To keep up with everything

1:08

I am putting out, this is the second request,

1:10

Definitely check out the sub stack, which goes out

1:13

every Friday, including today. My

1:15

goal is to start adding transcripts of episodes.

1:17

It's been something people really asked for lately,

1:19

so those will be linked there as well. You can

1:21

find the link to the Substack and the show notes.

1:23

That's not least. If you enjoy this

1:25

earning episode, share it with friend and

1:27

leave us a five star rating on Apple

1:29

Podcasts. And now on to the episode

1:32

today I'm speaking with Noah Smith, e com

1:34

blogger and writer of the No Opinion

1:36

substack. We cover

1:38

line this episode, but the primary theme

1:41

is that twenty twenty two marked

1:43

the actual end of the twenty

1:45

ten's decade, much of the same way that the

1:47

quote unquote sixties didn't actually

1:49

begin on January first nineteen sixty

1:52

and didn't even end until

1:54

the nineteen seventy three and nineteen seventy four period

1:56

that marked the end of the Vietnam War

1:58

and Richard Nixon's in his telling,

2:01

the twenty tens were all about upheaval,

2:04

Popular revolt,

2:05

reacted to the world that came out

2:07

of the two thousand and eight financial crisis, then

2:10

obviously, Brexit and Trump's

2:12

election in twenty sixteen. Instead,

2:14

the 2020s will be defined

2:16

by exhaustion. Oh, and the feeling that

2:18

almost nothing is actually happening.

2:21

We talk through what this means, how the

2:23

rest of the twenty twenties would be more like the nineteen

2:25

seventies, why that actually bodes

2:27

really well for the 2030s and 2030s.

2:30

Let me know how you are enjoying the series if

2:32

there's any other topics I should cover. A huge

2:34

thank you, of course, to Link in network for

2:36

supporting the podcast work and helping

2:38

us bring you all this great content.

2:54

Noah Welcome

2:56

to the realignment. Hey.

2:58

Thanks for having me on.

2:59

Yeah. Really glad to chat with you. This

3:01

is the first of my

3:04

end of the year wrap up episodes, kind

3:06

of going over themes, that have

3:08

been of interested folks, and I think that you are not

3:10

only one of my favorite substackers, but I think you do

3:12

a great job of hitting just the

3:14

broad general topics I'd love to do in

3:16

episode count just for reflecting back

3:18

on your work then. Let's

3:20

start here.

3:22

Reading you,

3:23

I get the sense that we're going to kind of think

3:25

of the twenty tens as

3:28

this long decade that may have

3:30

just ended. Like, the twenty tens is

3:32

going from you know,

3:34

twenty ten post financial crisis to

3:36

the tech crash. Republicans

3:39

kind of play me out in the midterms. So

3:41

I'd love to hear what you would articulate

3:44

the twenty's tens as. Like this moment of

3:46

unrest, you kind of refer to it as. How should we

3:48

understand them? Right. Well,

3:50

so I think

3:51

you know, eras in America don't really line

3:53

up with decades exactly. We just like to say

3:55

that. And

3:55

so I think we've had three eras this century

3:58

so far. And we're starting on the fourth

3:59

right now in the first era with the Jordan W.

4:02

Bush era, with the war on terror in the

4:04

Iraq War, and the build out of

4:06

the early internet and, like, live journal.

4:08

It's a live journal era. Right?

4:10

Of the and that all ended and and where

4:12

everyone made a bunch of money in real estate.

4:14

That all ended in the great recession. financial

4:16

crisis, Lehman, all that stuff. And

4:18

the election of Obama, you

4:20

know, created this other era. So

4:22

I'd say that there were this

4:24

There was this interim era of the

4:26

first Obama term. It was this very

4:28

short era where

4:29

we were just dealing with the great recession. We killed

4:31

Assad and Laden's that was done.

4:33

we we, you know, pretty much pulled

4:35

out of Iraq. And

4:36

so there was this, like, little

4:38

calm period

4:40

you know, the late twenty ten's and

4:42

early or late two thousand and early

4:44

twenty ten's, you know, where we were just

4:46

sort of catching our breath and dealing with this with the

4:48

great recession.

4:49

And then

4:50

by twenty thirteen, growth had been

4:53

restored. We were climbing back out of the greater

4:55

session. And in fact, it was going pretty fast

4:57

and, you know, the for once, the people

4:59

at the bottom of the distribution were were starting

5:01

to benefit in twenty thirteen.

5:03

And so Suddenly,

5:05

grocers are stored, and then we

5:07

immediately but then we got the

5:09

smartphone, we got social media,

5:12

in the early twenty tenth. And

5:14

you had this event, you've heard of the

5:16

eternal September, have you ever heard of that one?

5:18

No.

5:19

So the back in the back in the ancient days, and

5:21

this is this is before my time, but then

5:23

every September AOL would give out a whole

5:25

bunch of free Internet subscriptions

5:28

to random people. Mhmm. And so all these

5:30

random people would show up on, like, IRC or

5:32

whatever. Just talking about nobody

5:34

knew knows what and They called it the September

5:36

event and at some point it just never stopped because

5:39

enough normal people got to the Internet were just

5:41

normal people took over the Internet. As they will take

5:43

over anything eventually, And so

5:44

when the normal people took over all the social

5:47

media

5:47

because they all got smartphones and we

5:50

got Twitter and, you know, updated

5:52

Facebook and whatever, And so

5:53

when they when they took over,

5:55

you

5:55

got mass politics transposing

5:57

itself onto social media,

5:59

and

5:59

that was a big factor behind unrest.

6:02

you

6:02

had the end of the great recession. So suddenly,

6:04

you know, just like dealing with immediate

6:07

economic pain wasn't as big of a problem,

6:09

but people were still pissed. So,

6:10

like, you you no longer have the need of,

6:12

like, well, let's put

6:13

aside our differences and just focus on getting out

6:15

of this recession. But at the same point, people were still mad

6:17

because they lost their nest eggs, the housing crash, And

6:19

so you had a lot of, you know, long simmering

6:22

things bubbling with the

6:23

to the surface, especially

6:25

because you couldn't have, like, you know, CBS

6:27

news sort of keep a lid on

6:29

unrest by presenting their, like like,

6:31

nice, moderate, center lefty picture of the

6:33

world. And so various extremists

6:36

took over. You know, you had like

6:39

literal thoughts. He's on Twitter

6:41

and he's fighting with, you know, like,

6:43

the the crazy anarchist

6:45

that I, you know, would like to go to punk shows

6:47

with, we're suddenly, like, on Twitter yelling about

6:49

how we need anarchy. And,

6:51

like,

6:52

Anyway, you just got and and there were all these

6:54

issues that were sort of

6:56

festering in America. You know,

6:58

we'd become this much more diverse country,

7:00

but yet hadn't sort of recognized it in popular

7:02

culture yet.

7:03

And, you

7:04

know, women had become half the workforce

7:06

and we're increasing their presence in management, but we're

7:08

still getting constantly harassed at work.

7:10

And so

7:10

you had all these sort of long standing issues that

7:12

I think, like, anger over

7:14

that really, really

7:16

really

7:17

bubbled over in the in the twenty

7:20

ten, starting around twenty fourteen, I

7:22

would say, was

7:22

really when. And so we've got this

7:25

the long twenty ten's we could

7:27

expand to have everything from the great

7:29

recession to, like, you know, now basically,

7:32

whereas the the short twenty tens,

7:34

I would say, were just twenty

7:36

fourteen through the beginning of twenty twenty

7:38

one. And

7:40

then that's yeah. Well, something

7:42

I wanna just this is a total side note, but

7:44

I think you kind of explained something that I'd never really

7:46

thought of before. Your explanation

7:49

of the eternal September and

7:51

social media becomes normally fight in twenty

7:53

fourteen. This is just green. That's why social

7:55

media will never be cool ever again because

7:57

all of us are basically pining for this

7:59

world of two thousand nine,

8:01

two thousand eleven, two thousand twelve where our

8:03

parents weren't on Facebook, where it was

8:05

just this, like, very specific Post

8:08

high school post college

8:10

space, much as a hobbyist in the

8:12

nineteen eighties would probably love an l o chat

8:14

room, didn't find them quite as compelling the same

8:16

way in nineteen ninety five. Is that kind of explaining

8:19

people's dissatisfaction from a

8:21

nostalgia perspective on social media?

8:23

Maybe so, but I think that that

8:25

there's an internal process of weirdos

8:27

trying to outrun normies,

8:29

and so now the weirdos are on

8:31

Discord. you

8:32

know,

8:33

Discord is where everything's happening now.

8:35

Like, you get in people's Discord, you can talk

8:38

to people. People speak freely.

8:40

People, you know, like,

8:42

just It's it's that's

8:44

where ideas are being incubated. That's where

8:46

true opinions are being expressed.

8:48

Twitter is more and more ghost

8:50

town.

8:50

a facebook A Facebook utter

8:52

ghost time. Right? It's like old

8:55

Facebook is what? Like, you know, twenty years

8:57

ago was like chain email

8:59

forwards. of,

8:59

you know, like, your your conservative

9:02

grandma, like, forwarding you things about how,

9:04

like, black helicopters or whatever, blah

9:06

blah blah. That's that's

9:08

what Facebook is now. It's utter dead zone.

9:10

It's some

9:11

no. The the you know, there's always new

9:13

spaces the the normies are always

9:15

or the weirdos are always trying to outrun the

9:17

normies. And

9:18

so I think that, you know, get on

9:20

discord. That's where the weirdos are now. And couple

9:22

years, it'll be somewhere else. I don't know. You know,

9:24

obviously, signal groups are a thing.

9:26

Sub

9:28

edits are still pretty weird. Like Reddit

9:30

has not. community moderation

9:33

works on Reddit so they haven't cracked down

9:35

centrally as much on weirdos. They did

9:37

some like they banned like,

9:39

a a few subreddits. Right? But

9:41

people would just reform somewhere else. So, like, I

9:43

don't know, there's

9:45

I think

9:46

they banned incels. You

9:47

know, they they ban

9:50

themselves.

9:50

But then, like but they they still

9:52

a lot a a fair amount of of

9:54

weirdos on on Reddit. I don't know about

9:56

Mastodon. That's that's something. But,

9:59

yeah,

9:59

discord.

10:01

That'll I I think what

10:03

Twitter was the unique one. not

10:05

Facebook. Like, everyone talks about Facebook

10:07

all the time, but it was Twitter

10:09

where all the journalists were all the time, all the

10:11

academics were all the time, and all the politicians were all

10:13

the time. and they were stuck

10:15

in a room with skits

10:18

of teenagers who would say the wildest

10:20

shit from behind anonymous accounts

10:22

and that would be someone that you had to take seriously.

10:25

Right? There

10:26

was this guy

10:27

the

10:28

who got

10:30

quote, docs to and now we doxing

10:32

used to mean releasing people to address,

10:34

like, on or and personal info onto the

10:37

Internet. Now it just means revealing that

10:39

identity behind a Sedona's account. Right?

10:41

So,

10:41

doxing has been defied a little down,

10:43

but some some

10:45

kid got docs of the day his

10:47

Twitter handle was, like, city of freaks

10:49

or something. And he was just, like, you know, just

10:51

some college kid and he was,

10:53

like, writing

10:55

stuff like, you know, if

10:57

I were president, I'd throw Taiwan to the

10:59

walls or some, you know, sort of just little

11:02

Jackass, shit like that. And so but

11:04

the point is that he had, I don't know, a

11:06

lot of followers. He just, like, posted

11:08

so many takes from behind the

11:10

Sedanamus account that and no one knew, you know,

11:12

on the Internet, no one knows your dog.

11:14

Hey. Hey. because on the Internet, no one knew

11:16

that this is just some smart me ass college kid. I

11:18

mean, we can tell that he was a college kid.

11:20

But, like, But, you know, it it

11:22

gives this sort of leveling effect, this

11:24

respectability on

11:25

on Twitter because you

11:27

don't know who anybody is. And so if you just have

11:29

a hundred thousand followers, you're more expected than some

11:31

expert

11:32

university professor with ten thousand

11:35

followers. If you're just some

11:37

shmucky kid with a hundred thousand followers, right,

11:39

you're you're ahead.

11:40

and so that's who

11:41

politicians listen to. And so politicians got

11:43

it

11:44

into their heads that all these radical things were

11:47

normal because

11:49

kids like that,

11:50

and foreign agents,

11:52

and kids from other

11:54

countries, you know, some random board, Serbian,

11:56

teenager. I would like to say that your average Your

11:58

average like American All Right

11:59

Fascist is some like, you know, bored

12:02

Serbian fourteen year old from behind an

12:04

anonymous account.

12:05

That's who we gave influence

12:07

our media That's who was those

12:09

became our emperors. The Randos the

12:11

Randos shit posters on Twitter specifically,

12:13

not Facebook, not any chat

12:16

app, not not Reddit. but

12:17

Twitter specifically

12:20

absolutely

12:20

elevated the,

12:22

you

12:22

know, the biggest

12:23

dipshits on the planet.

12:25

And it's

12:26

still doing that. I don't know if Elon

12:28

Musk's chaos will be enough to, like, destroy

12:30

that. But Twitter is still elevating all

12:32

the dipshits and It's

12:34

just, you know, the main hope is for Twitter to become

12:36

a ghost town

12:37

and for, you

12:38

know, journalists and politicians and

12:41

academics to go on to platforms

12:43

where they're put more in contact

12:45

with

12:45

reasonable people and

12:47

not just some shmucky kid just,

12:49

you know, like,

12:51

into saying, let's prototype one of the wolves because

12:54

he can't get a date in real life or whatever.

12:56

Sears what I'm wondering, why are we kind

12:58

of And this

12:59

is where the I think this is why the

13:01

vibe shift New York Magazine piece

13:03

resonated so much. I can't quite articulate why

13:05

it feels like this long twenty

13:07

ten's period is over, but it

13:09

really feels like it's over. I think your post

13:11

midterms piece where you said,

13:13

look, I'm just kind of like a basic center

13:15

left normie who wants stability

13:17

and predictability in

13:20

politics, it feels so weird that that's where

13:22

everything ended. After all

13:24

the upheaval of Trump, after

13:26

the

13:27

Liberal Ward order coming to an

13:29

end. I've kind of ended up ended up where you

13:31

are, but it feels

13:32

kind of frustrated that it seems we've kind of just

13:34

circled back to where things

13:36

are. At least from kind of what do we want as a

13:38

society perspective. So here's what I'm curious to hear from

13:40

you. What did we learn?

13:42

from this twenty ten's period of a

13:44

people with, what are the actual long term

13:47

takeaways beyond Twitter being full of dip

13:49

ships?

13:49

Yeah. Alright. I

13:51

I think you're right. I think that it

13:53

it's funny that this idea about the VIBE

13:55

shift came from this

13:57

random. I don't even remember who's Vogue

13:59

or something. Some some writer was drawn to

14:01

deadline and wrote this insanely rapid article

14:03

about like fashion, about other as

14:05

a vibe shift in fashion, people just took

14:07

this concept of the vibe shift and absolutely ran

14:09

with it everywhere, and it became

14:11

the the universal language for the twenty

14:13

tens are over. Yeah. It

14:15

just from this one random article, everybody

14:18

starts talking about vibes because everyone could feel that

14:20

the twenty tens are ending. And

14:22

the and So what

14:23

the hell? Where are we now?

14:26

Mac,

14:26

what what what did we actually? because the

14:28

what do we Up on up on an

14:31

an upheaval should lead you

14:33

to conclusions. We've had

14:35

eight years to think through it. Like, what what have you what

14:37

have you learned? What have

14:39

I learned? I have learned that

14:41

America

14:44

that the daily life

14:46

daily life

14:46

in America pisses

14:48

people off more than I realized. People

14:51

Americans are more pissed off by their daily

14:53

interactions that I realize. You

14:56

find that every time you see someone who

14:58

just like, you

14:59

the know,

15:01

make some big dramatic statement

15:03

about society and it turns out they're just pissed

15:05

about some person who just dumped them

15:06

and they're like twenty four. Like,

15:09

you

15:09

see very vividly

15:11

that

15:12

people have all kinds of

15:14

of problems and you

15:18

know,

15:18

people have relationship problems, people

15:20

are, you know, have shitty bosses.

15:22

People are ignored at

15:24

work, their contributions are ignored and passed

15:26

over in favor of, you know, like,

15:29

belowvailing

15:29

self promoters or whatever. And

15:31

all these things and people get microaggressions,

15:33

you know, just people like sensitive and

15:36

rude and blah blah

15:37

blah whatever on the street and the store at

15:40

work, you know.

15:41

and i'm And all the

15:43

little things

15:45

have created a lot more stress in

15:47

America than I realized.

15:49

America

15:49

needs to chill. We

15:51

we took on too much stress in our

15:53

lives.

15:54

we ignored

15:56

economists would say we ignored transaction

15:58

costs. You know, we

15:59

ignored the fact that, like, all

16:01

the things

16:02

we're expected to do to live this perfectly optimized

16:05

twenty ten life. Right? To

16:07

be these twenty ten era super

16:09

people who could just manage everything

16:11

you

16:11

know,

16:12

nobody could. Everybody was having to

16:14

cut corners and everybody was was getting

16:17

ground down

16:17

by that stress of,

16:19

you know, little things.

16:23

Social costs, you know,

16:26

like

16:26

women at work who would have their

16:28

coworkers just to them unknowingly about sex

16:30

because the guys actually wanna hit on

16:32

them, but, you know, don't think they should. So

16:34

instead they just, like, inappropriately talk about sex

16:36

too much. That was, like, it's a

16:38

little transaction cost my wife and a

16:40

little thing people had to put up with.

16:42

And then, like, you know,

16:44

I know, Susan Fowler,

16:47

the I know

16:48

her. She wrote the big Uber,

16:51

like, I quit Uber manifesto

16:54

because basically people

16:56

didn't

16:56

value her contributions at work. And then at the same

16:58

time, where, you know, all her male

17:00

cokers have tried to talk to her about sex all the time in his

17:02

ear too. And so, like, I get that,

17:04

you know, and and you

17:06

don't think about that all the time. You don't

17:08

think about other people's

17:10

every day trivails.

17:13

Until, on

17:15

Twitter, they're getting a mob to yell in your face. And

17:17

so now I think we're all a little bit more

17:19

aware of the daily shit that our fellow Americans have to

17:22

put up with. It's very easy to forget about

17:24

that daily shit because we're focusing on our own

17:26

daily shit. Mhmm. And now but

17:28

now I think we've remembered So

17:30

it's in some ways, I think that's a good good change

17:32

that's brought us closer together as a society

17:34

even if the way it brought us closer together

17:36

is having everyone screaming at it.

17:38

But, like, Anyone

17:40

who's had a family knows that sometimes people

17:42

screaming at each other is how people

17:44

become aware of each other's

17:46

issues and concerns. And so

17:48

maybe ultimately will make us more like a

17:50

family done in this country and

17:52

less just like, you

17:54

know, atomized

17:55

eyes

17:57

bunch of just people trying to,

17:59

like, optimize our own

17:59

little corner of the of the of the country of

18:02

the world. You

18:03

know? I don't know. Look, what what I'm thinking of this

18:05

twenty ten's period

18:07

second half, it's really just defined by

18:09

a response to the

18:13

personal and, like, systemic shock that

18:15

is Donald Trump's

18:17

victory in in twenty sixteen. So I'd like

18:19

to go over a couple of

18:21

those responses. to that twenty sixteen

18:23

win you've written about these. Let

18:25

let's start with a topic near and dear to the

18:27

to the podcast heart like the

18:29

new write. you know, the new

18:31

right is a response to

18:33

Trump in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen,

18:35

like this effort to

18:37

in good faith and bad faith ways focused more on the

18:40

good faith at least for a second, to

18:42

turn that into a practical political

18:45

project. that mers forward. Let's just start reflect your

18:47

broad thoughts. You wrote a post on this. We'll link all

18:49

these in the show notes. But, you know, what were your

18:51

thoughts about the new rite of the response? Yeah.

18:53

That that was the most

18:56

that post and possibly because

18:58

I I you know, that

19:00

post lost me seventy subscribers

19:02

from my blog. That's the most Exactly. That's the

19:04

most ever wrote. That's a more than decent

19:07

amount. That's more than

19:08

decent amount? That's right.

19:10

oh damn

19:11

So that was yeah. I

19:14

took a pay

19:17

cut from that post. I didn't have

19:19

it. Never. So then but, you know, I

19:21

was right. So Yeah. Why did

19:23

you why did you argue? I don't I don't say

19:25

things for money. I say things for

19:27

Oh, well, what I argued is that the the

19:29

so called national conservatives, you know,

19:32

the the Blake Masters and

19:34

Doctor Oz and Josh

19:36

Holly types, have no economic

19:38

program. Like, there it's just

19:40

it's all culture backlash. It's all just

19:43

like, And then the cultural backlash

19:45

that they're doing makes it impossible to have an

19:47

economic program either. It's like, if

19:48

you hate

19:49

immigrants

19:50

and, you know, and you like

19:53

hate education education,

19:55

like And you hate all

19:57

this and you hate cities. What's

19:59

left in our economy? Like, that's what our economy's base

20:02

immigrants, education, cities. Like, those are the engines,

20:04

the power are

20:05

a car economy. You

20:06

just, like, you kick away those supports

20:08

and, like,

20:09

where's the you know,

20:11

like your your

20:14

beloved, like, you know, blue collar factory

20:16

worker in Ohio. obviously,

20:18

white guy in, like, a small town Ohio

20:20

that, like,

20:20

you think about as, like, this quintessential

20:23

american, if you're on this new right,

20:24

where's that guy's money gonna come from if, like, our

20:27

high-tech industries collapse and are, like,

20:29

big cities, donut people and our our

20:31

universities aren't pumping out, like, in

20:33

invasions and you know, we don't have

20:35

like, you know, young workers to, like,

20:37

pay into the Social Security system. And all

20:39

that, like, the

20:40

whole structure we built will just collapse from

20:42

just these these right wing guys coming up and

20:44

just kicking every part of it. You know, and

20:46

I translate real quick because IIA

20:49

hundred percent see why you lost. That

20:50

post actually gained me as a

20:53

subscriber. So, like, the math is

20:55

complicated here. Yeah. But but I would

20:57

have decided I I wanna I'm thirty at

20:59

loss seventy, so I think I I lost

21:01

forty. Okay. I I wanna translate real

21:03

quick because I think I wanna have people

21:05

understand, like, what you're saying here. So when you're talking about this

21:07

three planck, hey, immigrants,

21:09

you mean not just

21:12

reducing undocumented immigration, not just

21:14

opposing a path for the citizenship by by

21:16

saying explicitly lower legal

21:19

immigration ever from having it lower to

21:21

actually be zero or even net

21:23

negative. Secondly, your point about

21:25

hating cities just really like And

21:28

this is where it gets harder to be charitable, which it's

21:30

very directly like American politics

21:32

is organized around, like, these coastal elites

21:35

who have, like, structured economy in a way that benefits

21:37

them to everyone else. And then finally, if education,

21:39

by hates education, you mean

21:42

the the broad critique of

21:44

PMCs. professional managerial

21:46

class or, like, once again, organize society.

21:49

Right? These are the three segments

21:51

of the yuppies,

21:53

the Henry's, pick your pick your

21:55

poison. So knowing

21:57

that those are the three areas, what what do you mean by

21:59

they don't have an economic program? because I

22:01

think even new right listed were saying, no, I have

22:03

an academic program. Like, I

22:05

want a family to support.

22:07

I want a single breadwinner to

22:09

support a family like back during x period

22:11

in American history. Why is that

22:13

not an economic program? Like with a

22:15

That's not an object. It's an object but it's

22:17

not like a program. Right. Exactly. That's exactly what I mean. So,

22:19

like, I want a magic rainbow pony that can fly

22:22

through space and, like, you know, shoot, like,

22:24

ringbows out of its butt. But,

22:26

like,

22:26

that's not happening.

22:29

Like, you know, so

22:31

so Trump and Scott Walker

22:33

thought they were getting it, like, okay, so

22:35

we want factories to come back to

22:37

America, so we're gonna take, you know, we know all these

22:39

factories have moved to China and Foxconn is the

22:41

biggest company, the most factories. China, so

22:43

we're gonna take Foxconn.

22:44

We're gonna say, hey Foxconn build a giant factory

22:46

in rural Wisconsin, which is a place that we like, full

22:48

of the kind of people we like.

22:50

And then we're gonna get back to those good blue

22:52

collar jobs in the single breadwinner

22:54

you know, whatever blah blah blah blah.

22:56

And Fox sounds like, okay, sure. We'll

22:58

take your incentive money that you're giving to us. And then,

23:00

actually, guys, we can't really build this factory.

23:03

Sorry, bye. because Foxconn are are

23:05

a bunch of assholes. That's how they make their money. They're

23:07

assholes. As you can see, with the people

23:09

now rebelling, if the Foxconn plant

23:11

like Nobody likes Foxconn.

23:13

And so they're you know,

23:15

they'll just take whatever money they can get. Like,

23:17

you know, there there

23:19

are there are really good Taiwanese companies

23:22

that we want that are now

23:23

building actual factories in America. Thanks,

23:26

Biden. Like

23:26

a TSMC, which is like fuck kind

23:28

of all just based like, treating workers like shit. So why wouldn't

23:30

they treat our governments like shit too?

23:33

So then it was it was

23:35

utter fantasy and the whole thing collapsed and it

23:37

was just a giant boondoggle, most

23:40

expensive, you know, in corporate

23:42

incentives we've ever dished out for absolutely

23:44

nothing. That was supposed to be like flagship thing. It was gonna

23:46

lead to this renaissance. It

23:48

was absolute castle in the sky bullshit

23:51

vaporware. It was utter ransomware.

23:54

Nothing like that ever happened because

23:56

these guys don't understand the industrial structure

23:58

of America at all. They don't

24:00

understand America's place in global supply chains and what our

24:02

comparative advantages, what we're good

24:04

at, where we provide value, how we make

24:06

money, and where we could make money, and where

24:08

we are missing

24:10

out on value. They didn't understand any of that. They

24:12

were like,

24:12

we like,

24:13

you know, white guys in their Wisconsin. That's

24:15

who we like. We want them to have jobs. We

24:17

remember the days of industry. And so we're just

24:19

gonna, like, we're gonna, like, magic that

24:21

into happening, and there was there was nothing. So that's

24:23

what I meant by no economic program. You

24:25

can have goals i.

24:27

e. your goal can just be some imaginary utopia, you just

24:29

make up. But, you

24:31

know, like, how

24:32

are you gonna get there? I mean, you know, that's,

24:34

like, Even even

24:36

the communists had ideas for how to get to the goal.

24:38

They they didn't succeed, but they

24:40

had you know, the easier plan had

24:43

they had the plan. There

24:45

was no right. Exactly. Like Trump didn't even have a

24:47

five year plan. He had nothing he had nothing except

24:50

anger. It was a pure reactionary

24:52

just the word reactionary

24:55

really applies very well to this whole thing because he was just

24:57

really just kicking against, you know,

24:59

the

24:59

way America was going. If

25:01

you wanna change the way America is, you've

25:03

gotta be smart about it, you've gotta

25:06

understand where it is now, how

25:08

about here? why it is that

25:10

way? You know, and then you can maybe

25:12

think about how it could change.

25:14

But instead of just like, I'm gonna

25:16

kick it. that was that was their whole approach to just kick it,

25:18

kick it, kick it. And that's

25:20

like, you know, just yell at it

25:22

and just you know, it

25:23

didn't do

25:24

anything.

25:26

Well, by China, China policy,

25:28

the biggest failure. So so China policy

25:30

is a little different. So Trump

25:32

did

25:33

kick at China

25:35

in way that

25:37

it turns out that kicking at China

25:40

is not helpful for America, but

25:42

it is harmful to

25:44

China. And so Trump's

25:46

China policy in terms of

25:48

tariffs was better than you think because it

25:50

it cost Americans like a tiny amount of

25:52

money and all the Libertarians were saying like, oh

25:54

look at all this money that it's costing

25:57

us. you know, a customer consumers, and then you look at

25:59

it like a rounding

25:59

error. Right? It's like

26:01

a dollar twelve

26:02

a year or something. Like, no one gives

26:05

a shit. And so am I allowed to say shit. Am I allowed to say bad

26:07

words in this podcast? You've you've crossed the line

26:09

already. So we're all right. Oh, okay. So

26:11

we're not you're not it did spy. You

26:13

dispense with decorum, and we could say --

26:16

The Friday episode. -- anything worse.

26:18

Fair enough. Alright. Gotcha. And so so

26:20

but but the tariffs did harm China, which we

26:22

can see by looking night lights in

26:25

industries, like nighttime lighting, which is

26:27

like, you know, factory workers working night, warehouse

26:29

workers working

26:30

night. office

26:31

people. We can look at night

26:33

lights in areas that were that

26:36

had industries that were hidden more and less

26:38

by tariffs. we can see that China's

26:40

economy was harmed a bit. So if you

26:42

think this is war, China,

26:44

you have decided to be our enemy, so you

26:46

have decided to kick us. So guess what? You're getting kicked

26:48

right now, then in that sense, the kick

26:50

just kick it approach was somewhat effective and

26:52

Biden actually kept the China tariffs.

26:55

because Biden is kicking China as well.

26:58

And the the sort of policy consensus

27:00

of like pro China, which held all up

27:02

until Trump, has now

27:04

given way to a bipartisan

27:06

consensus that China needs a kicking.

27:08

And it that's mostly

27:10

mostly driven by Xi Jinping

27:12

taking

27:12

power in China and turning it in

27:14

a dramatically more anti American and sort

27:16

of aggressive direction.

27:18

But we can

27:19

get that later. So it the

27:21

other policies that that Trump did

27:24

with regards to China, which were

27:26

CFIUS, which is the investment

27:29

in restrictions on

27:31

Chinese investment into the US. So

27:33

China will try to buy this company that

27:35

has a strategic technology so they can

27:37

extract the IP and then just sell off the company or whatever. CFIUS

27:39

really reduced that a lot. So that was actually good.

27:41

And the other thing was export

27:43

controls which a lot of people including

27:45

myself worried about at the time saying we can't

27:48

sell high-tech equipment to Huawei.

27:50

Right? Huawei is this

27:50

company that makes telecom stuff

27:53

that

27:53

could be used like controlled global telecoms and we're like,

27:55

we'll screw that. We're not letting that happen.

27:57

So we're gonna use

27:59

our

27:59

leverage over your high-tech supplier

28:02

from America and Europe to, like, stop

28:04

you from getting the tech you need. And that basically

28:06

kicked Huawei's ass. Like, why did you worry

28:08

why did you worry about that initially?

28:10

Oh, I worried because, like, it

28:12

really does deprive US companies of a

28:14

lot of market. So

28:16

I worried that

28:18

you

28:18

know, US semiconductor equipment makers

28:21

will will suffer because they were

28:23

selling a lot of equipment to China.

28:26

And so under export controls, they will they

28:28

will suffer. And I was worried

28:30

that what would happen, it

28:32

was is that only United States

28:34

would do the export controls and that Japan

28:36

and Europe would continue to sell

28:38

their equipment to China. China's semiconductor

28:41

industry would grow anyway just with Japan,

28:43

Japanese and European equipment, instead of

28:44

American. That has changed

28:46

now. So what happened now is

28:48

the Ukraine war. Mhmm. And the

28:50

Ukraine war crystallized global

28:54

understanding that we were just looking

28:56

at some like

28:58

industrial, reshoring,

29:00

manufacturing, jostling,

29:02

blah, blah, blah, that

29:04

wasn't

29:04

what's really going on actually going on

29:06

as a global struggle for power between

29:08

two opposed blocks.

29:10

Russian China versus, like,

29:12

you know, America, East Asia, like

29:14

Rich East Asia, and and

29:17

Europe. And hopefully, India, you know,

29:19

joining that. And that's

29:20

really the the breakdown. And

29:21

the

29:23

people in Japan and Europe who make

29:25

the advanced other who who

29:28

are the other makers of advanced

29:30

equipment here Understood that

29:32

and the Russia sanctions

29:34

gave us sort of like the

29:36

overarching authority. Say, okay, look,

29:38

guys. now we're gonna do much more stringent export

29:40

controls. We're gonna just dunk on

29:42

the entire Chinese semiconductor industry.

29:44

So Biden has rolled out these really

29:47

severe export controls. to go

29:49

well beyond anything Trump ever did to basically just

29:51

strangle the Chinese semiconductor industry.

29:53

And so far, it

29:56

is looking effective. I will it'll you

29:58

know, I mean, China will try

29:59

very hard to find ways around

30:01

it, but we will continue more

30:03

controls and solidifying that regime,

30:05

and we may extend the export controls

30:07

to other areas of high-tech manufacturing,

30:10

such

30:10

as high-tech engines,

30:12

which

30:12

are another thing where,

30:14

like, we have a real technological

30:17

edge software, obviously

30:20

AI stuff.

30:21

maybe stuff having to have electric cars that I

30:24

think there there's not nothing we can

30:25

do.

30:26

But economic

30:27

warfare has

30:29

replaced sort of,

30:30

you know, reassuring

30:33

as the the reason for a lot of these

30:35

things. Trump

30:35

was talking about brain manufacturing

30:38

back Now we're like, okay. Well, maybe we'll bring manufacturing

30:40

back. What we're really gonna do is pump and

30:42

chime. Here's

30:43

a here's another

30:44

so let's hit another

30:47

section of the ideological spectrum, another

30:49

response to twenty sixteen going back to

30:51

the original prompt was Democratic Socialism.

30:54

Bernie

30:55

DSA, a

30:56

revitalized Leftism that's

30:59

very critical of the

31:01

Obama era in a way that one

31:03

wouldn't have expected, let's say, circa twenty thirteen. What

31:05

were your thoughts about the

31:08

left during this period?

31:10

So

31:14

I I have a pretty negative view of

31:17

this

31:18

movement. I'm noticing a theme. I'm

31:20

noticing a theme here. Right.

31:22

So, like, you know, my basically,

31:24

we had three three unrest

31:26

crystallized into three movements in

31:29

America. And I

31:29

would say that

31:32

there was

31:32

the what do I call the woke,

31:34

if

31:34

you wanna use that word, the woke for the rest

31:36

of movement, which

31:38

I think has its ups and downs. But I think it did lots

31:40

of important things. and then in

31:42

some cases, like, went too far and made

31:45

mistakes, etcetera.

31:46

And and you had

31:48

the alt right

31:50

movement. the new right, which is now called the new right.

31:53

Right? So

31:53

it's like, I think

31:54

alt right reminds me of alt rock from,

31:56

like, you know, late nineties.

31:58

it

31:59

definitely wasn't alts. It was definitely the most radio

32:01

friendly boring shit you ever have planned.

32:03

And

32:05

yeah. So,

32:06

like,

32:07

the the

32:08

new right, which I have

32:10

a very negative view of.

32:13

And and then the socialist left,

32:15

which I Also very negative view of, they're not as negative

32:17

as the as

32:20

the new right. The new right is

32:22

the most I just I don't see anything good about

32:24

that. Like, that's

32:25

just garbage fire. Well, wait, wait,

32:27

wait, wait, wait, push you on this though.

32:30

I mean, It seems like the new right is

32:32

at its best when it's critiquing

32:34

the Republican status quo of twenty fifteen.

32:36

Right. Like, the new right is at its best when

32:38

it says, wait, it was absolutely insane.

32:40

that Jack Bush was still defending the war

32:42

in Iraq in twenty fifteen.

32:45

I think the NRA had very, I think,

32:47

accurate and fair critiques to make of the

32:49

Republican establishment? Well,

32:52

so those

32:54

critiques

32:54

came on, like so the Republican establishment

32:58

establishment conservatism had a disastrous

33:00

decade in the twenty texts.

33:01

There were three pillars of

33:03

the conservative movement that came out of the seventies,

33:05

the nineteen seventies. And

33:07

those were, number

33:09

one, economical they say

33:11

fair, you know, get the government drown the

33:13

government in bathtub. Right? that

33:15

that idea. Get the government off our backs,

33:17

low

33:17

taxes, deregulation, all that

33:20

stuff.

33:20

Pillar two, conservative

33:22

Christianity. Killer three,

33:25

what we might call Neoconservatism of this

33:27

muscular sort of like swaggering

33:30

interventionism. that started

33:32

becoming popular and replacing old

33:34

isolation that had been the hallmark of the

33:36

Republican Party. you

33:38

know, earlier years. So those

33:40

all failed

33:40

dramatically. There were three big failures. The

33:42

first failure, the great recession.

33:45

Right?

33:46

Not first in order, but, like, you know, the first

33:49

in order I said them. The the

33:51

great recession was like showing that

33:53

Laysay fear, you know, deregulation finance industry

33:55

to blew everything up and tax cuts to new

33:56

shit. And so that was

33:59

that was sort of the the

34:01

economic failure. culturally, conservative

34:03

Christianity really hitched itself

34:06

to,

34:07

like, coming down

34:09

on the gays. More majority, like,

34:10

you know, the movements. Right.

34:12

So much of it came came down

34:15

to anti gay. Those conservative

34:18

Christianity had gained a

34:19

lot of sympathy. It,

34:22

you know, anti abortion sentiment actually

34:24

rose. as a result of that.

34:26

And and is one reason why

34:28

the backlash toward dobs although there is a backlash

34:30

isn't quite as big as it would have been in

34:32

in you know, ninety eighty

34:34

five or something. And

34:35

so, you

34:37

know,

34:38

divorce

34:39

is is down.

34:41

like, people, you know, the the sort

34:43

of yeah. There was a big backlash against

34:45

divorce, against casual sex. Like, now, you

34:47

know, lefties are are starting to have think of

34:49

their own reasons for people not to have a bunch of

34:51

casual sex. Right? And, you know, and it's

34:54

and it's not going well on

34:56

that front. So Sorry. What are you I'm I'm not I'm not subject

34:58

to that corner of Twitter. Like, what are you referring to?

35:00

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, no. They're

35:02

just, like, young

35:04

people are just, you know, having a lot less sex

35:06

and they're coming out with a lot of there's

35:08

a lot of, like,

35:09

really goofy, politicized rhetoric about, like,

35:11

why essentially ever particular

35:14

instance of people having sex is

35:16

bad. You

35:16

know, like

35:17

actually hugging someone after sex is

35:19

love bombing, you shouldn't do that. It's

35:21

just just creating all these terminologies that you

35:23

like you can then yell at people over.

35:25

It's basically it's it's tumbler

35:27

culture gone mad.

35:29

It's very much the

35:30

sort of leftist junior anti sex leagues

35:32

in nineteen eighty four.

35:34

It

35:34

is really stupid

35:35

and it's basically come with

35:37

political reasons to hate every sort of intimacy or

35:39

every sort of romantic relationship.

35:41

It sucks.

35:42

And so I'm glad I'm not

35:44

you know, a twenty four year old right now,

35:46

try not big. That would that would be

35:47

very

35:48

hard to navigate. Right?

35:52

Anyway, we

35:52

could that's a distraction, but but

35:55

conservative

35:55

Christianity made a lot of had had the

35:57

potential to make a lot of inroads, and it did make a lot of

35:59

inroads, and

35:59

then a glowing roads animate dead

36:02

they bet they

36:02

then they just went they went crazy on the

36:03

anti gay thing. They just they were

36:06

like gay marriages where we're gonna draw this line in

36:08

the stand. They could have been pro

36:10

gay marriage. They could have been pro marriage. Pro

36:12

traditional values to saying, like, well, gays,

36:14

you better get married. You better get married. You better

36:16

get married.

36:18

Right. And then instead, they were just like they were just like, okay, no.

36:20

You marriages between a man and a woman, blah

36:22

blah, we're gonna draw this line in the sand. And then,

36:24

you know, the Liberals were just able to say love

36:28

is love. why are you restricting people's freedoms? And

36:30

then that just America's love of

36:32

freedom and individual choice,

36:34

you know, with combined with the fact that,

36:36

like, gay people getting there.

36:38

It obviously doesn't hurt anyone in the universe

36:40

at all. Like, it's the least

36:42

harmful, least offensive thing you could

36:45

ever imagine. Like,

36:46

liberals

36:47

just won that. So that was the second big

36:49

failure of traditional conservatism, the third big failure

36:51

of course in

36:53

Iraq. And that was big. And Iraq

36:55

were, which by the way, we won We

36:58

we defeated all

37:01

opponents and established Iraq as

37:03

a proxy state under our defact

37:05

took control, killing every single opponent,

37:07

and yet it was still this giant debacle

37:09

that everyone hated, proving that

37:12

winning wars doesn't mean

37:14

it doesn't make wars worth fighting in the

37:16

first place. That's the correct lesson from Iraq,

37:18

but very few people seemed to have learned

37:20

this lesson. But but

37:21

Iraq was everyone agreed that

37:22

Iraq were sucked, and we lied to get

37:24

into it. And it it was, you know, didn't get

37:26

us anything, and it was just this

37:29

debacle

37:30

and made everyone hate us in the world justifiably.

37:32

And so,

37:34

you know, made us the bad

37:36

guys. And And so

37:38

the three pillars of the Reaganite conservatism

37:41

all

37:41

failed one after another

37:43

in the two thousands

37:44

decade. And in

37:46

so so you had

37:48

the new right arise partially as

37:50

a response to that failure. What else can we

37:52

do? So they decided to

37:53

come in and do stuff that was

37:56

even worse on all of

37:58

these fronts.

37:59

the

37:59

So on

38:00

okay. So

38:03

on On economics, they replaced

38:05

this libertarian program

38:08

with

38:08

nothing nothing,

38:11

very loud nothing. you

38:12

know, and and just hapless

38:14

slailing on economics. It is

38:16

good that, you know, Republicans stop trying to

38:19

attack Social Security. Like Trump is like, okay, we're not gonna do

38:21

that. That was a tactical decision, and that was good. That

38:24

they stopped trying to attack

38:26

Social Security.

38:28

But then there

38:29

was basically no economic program that they

38:32

replaced with.

38:32

And then on on social

38:35

cultural stuff, now you've got sort

38:37

of this anti trans backlash going

38:38

on, but or

38:40

call it what you

38:41

will. You can have

38:43

names that are more

38:43

favorable to the to the back batch

38:46

than that. backlash against

38:48

radical gender ideology, whatever you

38:50

want. This so that's clear on now, but then

38:52

the cultural social cultural thing

38:54

that they replaced the anti gay thing with was

38:56

anti immigration. That was

38:58

their new. They just took, like,

39:00

instead of a cultural conservatism not

39:02

focused on finding an out group

39:04

to hate. they decided that our group is actually just

39:06

immigrants. And so

39:07

that was really

39:08

bad. That was that

39:10

was, you know,

39:12

even worse

39:13

because, like,

39:15

you know, the anti

39:17

gay thing was kinda doomed. the

39:20

anti immigrant thing,

39:23

that

39:23

that

39:25

unleashed classic,

39:26

like,

39:27

you know, racism

39:28

one point o on

39:30

America again. Right? You didn't

39:32

have didn't have

39:33

subtle you

39:35

know, disguised second order dog

39:37

whistling racism. You just had

39:39

people like, this is a white Christian nation

39:41

and we, you know,

39:43

like, if you know, if any

39:43

of your family, like, you

39:46

know,

39:46

were were illegal immigrants were gonna deport

39:48

you even if you're a citizen and,

39:51

you know, all the stuff, retroactive stripping of

39:53

birthright citizenship is what Steven Miller wanted

39:55

to do. And so you just

39:57

had this this this hatred and that

39:59

with that came all kinds of racism. You know, you had,

40:01

like, if you just, you know, you had

40:04

antisemitism came back. That

40:06

was part of the new right. is

40:08

antisemitism. Do you suck? Look at, you know, look

40:11

at

40:11

now they've got Nick Foote

40:13

days in Kanye West. just

40:15

talking about how much Jews suck. And so you've had you've had

40:18

synagogue shootings, all that kind of

40:20

stuff.

40:20

That's real

40:21

bad.

40:22

That's like I'm not gonna downplay how bad the anti

40:24

gay stuff was like the eighties was, but I don't

40:26

wanna downplay that because that was bad.

40:29

like But like the

40:30

you know, the the the stuff they replace that with after it failed was even worse

40:32

and was not tied to any sort

40:34

of like Christian cultural

40:37

project. So that the thing about

40:39

conservative Christian and he there was something positive. There was a

40:42

lot of negative stuff to it

40:44

that ultimately was

40:47

it downfall, but had of stuff go to church. You

40:49

know, the mega church movement,

40:51

the evangelical revival, go

40:54

to church, get married all, you know, like, traditional values

40:56

and all this stuff. There was a way to

40:58

live in that culture. You

41:01

know, there was in in nineteen ninety two, you could

41:03

go to church and you

41:06

could,

41:07

you know, like,

41:10

you

41:10

know, there was

41:11

Christian singles chat. I remember Christian

41:13

singles chat. I used to troll it

41:15

as like a thirteen year old by pretending to be

41:17

a caveman and Christian and singles

41:20

check. That was my that was my

41:22

brilliant innovation with caveman

41:24

trolling, so I'd just be like, you know,

41:26

like, we must hunt

41:29

mama. Where

41:31

is, you know, where where

41:33

is meat cave? Yeah. So Like,

41:35

that was my that was my

41:37

absurdist trolling. I would go ahead and do that. And Christian Singles

41:39

chat, and the poor Christian Singles sort of, like, wood is

41:41

going on in his chat room. Like, what?

41:43

Not a good introduction to the

41:45

Internet. Like, why? Like, why

41:48

is the weather came in here? It's

41:50

so I was like, grier, odd.

41:54

But anyway, that that there was a life you could live. Like, it felt

41:56

like in the eighties and nineties,

41:58

like the conservative Christian

42:02

life was

42:02

a life you could live. And there was even music about

42:04

it. Even up to

42:06

the the early two thousands, there was there was music

42:08

about living this conservative life.

42:11

There

42:11

was,

42:12

like, this this

42:14

this song

42:16

about, like, I'm trying to remember it was,

42:18

like, about chicken

42:20

fry and a cold beer and a Friday

42:22

night. And, like, there, you

42:24

know, is this, like, rural,

42:28

conservative, blue collar Christian

42:30

ideal. And you could and that was

42:32

attractive to people like the the person who

42:34

loves that song and still incessantly plays it

42:37

You mean, wagon. This is wagon wheel. Is that

42:39

what that song is called? I think this is

42:41

wagon wheel. Chicken from band.

42:44

Cold

42:44

beer on a Friday don't

42:46

like it. Yeah. This is yeah. This is wagon wheel. And so then

42:48

back check the audience if I get that

42:50

wrong. Okay. But Hold on.

42:52

Now now I'm gonna look it pull

42:54

on But it's been a while since

42:56

twenty ten's frat parties, so that's where Oh, man.

42:59

About gold.

43:01

No. It's it's

43:02

chicken fried by the Zac Brown

43:04

Vam. Okay. Disaster -- It was

43:06

right. -- two thousand five.

43:09

And that is the that is the

43:11

the song.

43:12

And and and

43:14

that was that

43:14

that culture was already on the

43:15

way out, but that was you know, my friend who

43:18

loves that, she's yeah, she's born in

43:20

China. Her dad is like a famous

43:22

China scholar from

43:24

China. damn And

43:26

absolutely, like, she came over when she was, like, you know,

43:28

five or six or something and, like, she

43:30

loves that. She was, hey, you know, she

43:32

that that idea of this this

43:35

rural conservative life is so attractive there. You know, she doesn't vote for Republicans,

43:37

but she but that's, like, directed her.

43:39

And and that was The

43:42

new

43:42

right has nothing that attractive.

43:44

Like,

43:45

how are you gonna,

43:47

like, go

43:47

be like a snarky alt right

43:49

troll and go hang out

43:51

with, like, Nick fluent is? Like,

43:53

that's your life. You're gonna, like, go to, like,

43:55

the alt right and meetups is a No.

43:57

There's no future in that. That's not

43:59

a way to live. You can

44:01

join the Proud Boys. There's nothing there. That's that's,

44:03

like, that's not a way

44:06

to live. not

44:08

gonna

44:08

like, your your romantic life

44:10

is gonna suck, your social life is gonna

44:12

you're gonna meet all these chaos

44:14

people, like it's

44:15

it's because, you know, you're gonna spend all

44:17

your time as like a griper posting

44:19

frog memes on the Internet, like,

44:22

you know, in in defense of

44:24

Western civilization. that's like the

44:26

lamest hobby you could possibly

44:28

have.

44:28

It's like you would

44:30

you would have so much of a better

44:32

life being like an obsessive k pop stamp.

44:35

than than living that alt right

44:37

life. There's nothing attractive. There's no

44:39

there's no culture there. There's

44:41

no gathering place. There's

44:43

no church. to it.

44:43

Right? Like, the

44:44

thing about conservative Christianity was you

44:46

could go to church. That was the

44:49

institution. All right, the new

44:51

right has no church. No

44:54

church except online shit posting, the church

44:56

of shit posting. And

44:57

that's that's an empty

44:58

life that will leave people

45:00

called empty. And so that's Now

45:02

that in terms of foreign policy, so so that's the second way in

45:04

which the, like, the new right has replaced

45:06

the failures of the old conservatism they replaced

45:09

with just like Jack's ship. And

45:12

then there's foreign policy, which the new

45:14

rights foreign policy is just, like, suck up

45:16

the Vladimir Putin. Like, you

45:20

know,

45:20

encouraging fascist

45:22

empires to conquer the world

45:24

is worse

45:24

than the Iraq world.

45:27

That's

45:27

worse. Yes. It

45:29

is bad. The Iraq War was

45:31

really bad. A lot of innocent

45:33

people who didn't have to die.

45:35

and it it rightfully

45:38

tarnished our image as a nation.

45:40

But

45:41

Vladimir Putin is

45:43

worse than that. Why? Why is letter of even worse than

45:45

that? Because Vladimir

45:46

Putin

45:48

is

45:50

interested

45:51

in conquest.

45:52

He

45:53

is interested in destroying the the norm

45:54

of fixed international borders that was created

45:56

at the end of World War

45:59

two. and returning the world to a world in which

46:02

large empires basically

46:04

conquer up until they stop being

46:06

able to conquer. They They're basically

46:09

they gobble up territory in people until they hit their

46:11

limits and fight each other at the

46:13

edges of their empires. It's the

46:16

world of the European Empire's book from pre world war one

46:18

that Vladimir Putin wants to bring

46:20

back. And if you look at the rhetoric,

46:24

it's

46:24

all that. You know, they're talking about how all the pundits

46:26

on Russian TV

46:27

are talking about after Ukraine, they'll take the

46:29

Baltics, and then Poland eventually we'll conquer

46:31

until we get

46:34

stopped. And that sort of and and then this

46:36

this Chinese academic wrote

46:38

this this paper about the new world order

46:40

when he's, like,

46:42

nation, like, nations

46:44

are like tigers eyeing their prey. We

46:46

do not want a world of nations like tigers

46:48

eyeing their prey. And in fact, the reason the

46:50

reason the Iraq War was so bad

46:53

is because

46:54

it

46:56

was

46:56

a big country, us, you

46:58

know,

46:58

acting like an empire

47:01

the and and invading another

47:03

country who hadn't threatened us and hadn't attacked us and blah blah

47:05

just because we felt like it. As we're in

47:07

a poopy mood from nine

47:10

eleven, and because George Bush wanted something to prop up his presidency,

47:12

because of other reasons people wanted oil.

47:15

I don't know.

47:18

We broke

47:19

that norm. We broke

47:21

the fixed border norm that

47:23

says, do not invade place.

47:25

We've broken it in small ways before we invaded

47:27

like Granada or something. It's like under

47:29

Reagan. The norm

47:31

mostly helped, right,

47:33

even in Vietnam. we

47:34

were supporting one side in a Vietnamese civil war.

47:37

Basically, that, you know, maybe we maybe

47:39

we picked the wrong side to

47:41

support. We did. and, you

47:43

know, we did some brutal things in Vietnam

47:45

in support of of our chosen side.

47:47

But at the end of the day, we were invited in

47:49

by that government support them in

47:51

the civil war, and we had been an ally with them. And blah blah, we didn't break that

47:54

norm. And

47:56

and you know, Russia broke the

47:59

Soviet Union broke in Afghanistan and paid

48:01

for it.

48:02

And

48:04

and we broke it in Iraq.

48:06

That

48:06

was really bad. But

48:08

but

48:09

but opened the door

48:11

to Putin. But understanding why

48:13

the Iraq war is bad,

48:16

You have to understand why the thing we opened we opened

48:18

the gates so that the great evil from the ancient

48:20

times could return to our world blah

48:22

blah. Right? It's like and

48:25

the great evil is just unrestrained

48:27

imperialist conquest. So it seems

48:28

the critic of the new rat

48:30

at a foreign policy is that and

48:33

this would be my editorializing it'd be that the new right has a

48:35

good post op critique

48:37

of decisions that

48:40

The Bush administration made in two thousand three. does not

48:43

have a sufficient moral

48:45

or good morale frame

48:48

response to flattener Putin.

48:50

And something I wanna I wanna get your thoughts on

48:52

this because I'm free more Xi Jinping. More Xi Jinping. More Xi

48:54

Jinping is something I wanna make clear for a second. I'm

48:56

gonna just make this prediction here. The funniest

48:58

thing I see on Twitter is you

49:00

see people on the new rights say it's

49:02

a huge mistake for us to back

49:04

Ukraine. We need to focus all of

49:06

our attention. on China,

49:08

Taiwan. But if you actually

49:10

look at the arguments that a lot of

49:12

folks in the new era are using to attack

49:15

back in Ukraine. They obviously apply

49:17

just as much to

49:20

Taiwan and to China. And

49:22

the funny when you talk to a lot of people, like, on

49:24

background, they'll be, yeah, like, we wouldn't actually

49:26

support back in Taiwan in an actual conflict. So -- Right.

49:28

-- now is it just like this is a this is

49:30

a weed that I I get so frustrate when

49:33

I see the whole like. stopped being realistic. We have to choose. We

49:35

need to focus on Asia when that

49:36

entire political coalition on the

49:40

right. wouldn't stand two seconds, I think given the current

49:44

circumstances. I agree. That's absolutely

49:45

right.

49:46

And so the

49:48

The reason those guys

49:51

want to quote unquote focus on China, they

49:53

don't want to actually do anything

49:55

against China. The

49:58

the progressives are absolutely

49:59

right. They have absolutely pegged the new right and

50:02

why the new right cares about China. It's

50:04

just so they can they

50:05

can take their internal search for

50:07

an out to punch down on and and

50:10

vacations in America. That's

50:12

what it is.

50:13

unique ages in America

50:15

the Jeff? Yeah,

50:16

absolutely. And immigrants, I mean, no.

50:18

I like, immigrants

50:19

I haven't I haven't seen the

50:21

Asians in

50:22

America part. Absolutely.

50:23

I mean, like, look at

50:25

any wax. And and so by the way, it's not

50:27

just, you know, it's not Chinese Americans. All. It

50:30

by just Chinese Americans, by any

50:32

stretch of imagination. It's a lot of

50:34

energy focused on Indian Americans

50:36

who, you

50:36

know, have

50:37

no

50:38

relation to chime at all.

50:40

But so so look at Amy Wax and the people

50:42

in the Claremont and Steward have been talking about how Asians

50:44

are taking over early, and it's bad, and

50:46

it's blah, blah, and these countries

50:49

Asian countries suck and how we don't want, you

50:51

know, like, just constantly complaining about and

50:54

they

50:54

they were complaining about you

50:56

know, like Chinese Americans before and now they're complaining about

50:58

Indian people, you know.

51:00

And so that's definitely

51:04

definitely looking

51:05

for an immigrant group to backlash against.

51:08

So, you know, everyone talks

51:10

about Trump,

51:10

you know, putting kids in cages

51:12

and saying Mexicans are rapists and all

51:14

that stuff. but I think Trump realized pretty quickly

51:17

that you don't wanna alienate

51:20

Hispanics. And you saw Trump actually

51:22

gain a bit with

51:23

Hispanics. And Those gains are are

51:25

more moderate than sometimes portrayed, but they are real, and they have

51:27

persisted in the post Trump

51:30

era. We see Hispanics voting a little bit

51:32

more Republican.

51:34

Maybe by, like, just, you know, six or seven percent shift, but

51:37

that's, like, it's real. And it

51:39

could and it could

51:40

continue. And

51:41

so I think that

51:43

the i think that And and

51:45

there was the the shooting, you know, a guy in Texas, you know, Paso, just like shot

51:47

up a bunch of, like, random

51:49

Mexican people. That's

51:52

pretty

51:52

that's pretty I think

51:54

that was absolutely

51:56

inspired by anti immigrant rhetoric, but

51:58

I think that the anti

52:00

immigrant Stuff has focused

52:02

more and more on Asian people for a number

52:04

of reasons. Number one, because

52:06

Hispanic immigration really trail

52:08

off. Like,

52:10

there's a lot of Hispanic people who are

52:12

here, who can't who are immigrants,

52:14

but they didn't come here recent. The

52:16

the average, like, length of time that a

52:18

Hispanic immigrant has been in America is

52:20

going up and up because just far

52:23

fewer are coming. And that's actually been true since two thousand seven.

52:25

There was a giant drop off around two thousand seven

52:27

in immigration from Mexico specifically,

52:30

and all the, like, Caravans of the

52:32

border and a lot of the Central

52:34

American asylum seekers were like one

52:36

tenth of the amount that dropped off from Mexico.

52:38

Like Mexico was always

52:40

the baby. and Mexico really dropped off in terms of

52:42

immigration. And so what that meant

52:44

is that

52:44

the the lion's share of

52:46

immigration is

52:47

coming in from Asia.

52:49

So if you're gonna be anti immigrant,

52:52

you you're gonna have to be anti Asian at

52:54

this point. So then

52:56

I'd

52:56

love to hear in our last, like,

52:59

ten minutes or so. I'd like to

53:01

hear a quick articulation from you

53:03

on your critique of the

53:05

of the progressives more. as a response to

53:07

twenty sixteen. But then, like, let's just finish up with, you you you

53:09

were to re suppose just sort of talking about,

53:11

like, the next steps, like, the next stages, like,

53:14

we focused this episode of,

53:16

like, understanding talking through the

53:18

long twenty tens. But what do you think

53:20

the twenty twenties

53:22

looks like? Well,

53:22

I I this this is interesting. I I get to make

53:25

predictions. I think it's gonna be a decade

53:27

of exhaustion like the seventies, culturally.

53:30

We are

53:31

going to Maybe try a counterparty road bike. I have never seen a guest. I interview

53:33

a lot of people. I do, like, two hundred of

53:35

these a year. You got

53:38

very excited at the

53:40

word prediction. People hate prediction. And,

53:42

normally, like, about asking you to

53:43

make a prediction, maybe give me like,

53:46

why why did

53:46

you get excited at making a prediction?

53:49

because I already

53:50

have some. There we go.

53:51

Okay. So you've done Okay. So that's the actual one.

53:54

That's the predictions I've already made. Okay.

53:56

There we go. So I have this big I

53:58

have this I I love big bold predictions.

54:00

Yeah.

54:00

Not not necessarily

54:01

because they're

54:02

vague and easy to say, I got right. I will say if

54:04

I got them wrong. And

54:06

I I think I'm pretty, you know, harsh on my on my

54:08

own predictions. But because

54:10

I

54:11

like it, that's

54:12

the name of the I I wanna

54:15

make these big predictions. And if I get

54:16

it wrong, I will I will take absolute responsibility for

54:18

that. I've gotten a couple of things wrong. I

54:20

wrote a post about what I got wrong. and

54:23

I

54:23

could go on about what I got wrong. But I want

54:25

but I've got all of

54:27

these. Great. Xi Jinping's

54:30

fundamental incompetence. I got that

54:32

right. When everybody was saying Xi Jinping's like a

54:34

master of everything, like

54:35

he's, you know,

54:36

he's in control of everything. He's so good at

54:38

what he does and blah blah. under him, China shall rise.

54:40

I was like, no. This is an old boomer dad

54:42

who, you know, is just like, why

54:44

can't we make real things anymore? Why do

54:46

we have to have these Internet companies

54:49

and, like, that was who I saw him as and I was

54:51

right about that.

54:52

He's he's just

54:53

flailing and, like, he's very

54:55

good at at consolidating power

54:57

around himself and sort

55:00

of,

55:00

you know, riding a herd on the

55:02

Chinese Communist Party as an organization. But

55:04

he's bad at making actual consequential decisions

55:07

and, you know, he's very bad at this. He rounds himself with cronies, and he's

55:09

not a smart guy to begin with. He's sort of

55:12

like, I think of him as AII

55:14

sometimes describe him as a a Trump

55:16

type figure, but really he's like type figure. That's who

55:18

he is. He's the he is the

55:21

Chinese George W Bush. And

55:23

Which

55:23

is which is worse.

55:26

Which is more of a, like, character

55:28

definition. Is it worse to be the

55:30

Chinese George w Bush? or

55:33

of a Chinese Trump. Bush did

55:34

more to speak like to advance American decline. Right?

55:37

Whereas Trump did

55:38

more to advance social divisions.

55:42

Okay.

55:42

Trump tore our country apart. Bush kicked

55:44

off our country into garbage can. How's

55:47

that? Yeah. Bush did you see our

55:49

country? Trump divided our country. And

55:51

in hand, Xi Jinping is not dividing

55:54

Chinese society so much as he's just weakening it with

55:56

bad decisions. Iraq war is a

55:58

bad decision, lack of financial regulation was a

55:59

bad decision. focusing on

56:01

tax cuts as a way of boosting growth is a

56:03

bad decision, and she is just making bad in

56:06

fact, I think she is in

56:08

always worse than Bush. We'll does Taiwan. We'll

56:10

see if he makes that mistake. if

56:12

he make that mistake You know,

56:15

wouldn't advise it, but I wouldn't advise any of this shit that

56:17

he's done. So so Xi Jinping

56:19

dumb. I got that right. And

56:22

by here, here's this big here's a

56:24

big prediction. unrest is going to subside.

56:26

In America, popular

56:27

unrest. This is the VIBE shift.

56:29

This is

56:30

what I think people are feeling the start

56:34

of. is that unrest has peaked. You see, you saw in the

56:36

midterms, Republicans did fine.

56:38

Election deniers did not do fine.

56:41

Mhmm. The

56:42

Republicans losses were mostly attributable to Trump

56:46

allied

56:46

dipshit election

56:47

deniers

56:48

who just focused already on

56:50

the vibe. Carrie Lake did not read that people were actually trying to

56:53

elect a person who's in the weird fights

56:55

with the media. Like Masters. Right.

56:58

these people, even Lauren Bobbert almost lost.

57:00

And so, like, so the election deniers

57:02

really took a pounding. It's because people are

57:04

tired of this shit. Like, at this

57:07

point, we realized there's no future in that.

57:09

There's no you know,

57:10

people were willing like some Republicans

57:12

were willing to along with it in twenty

57:15

twenty when it seemed like, you know, Trump might

57:17

be able to pull a a repeat of Bush versus Gore

57:19

and somehow stay in power with, like,

57:21

legal, national nations and supreme court decision and stuff like

57:23

that. But at

57:26

this point, they see that it's just straight up arsonism,

57:28

trashing of democracy. It's

57:30

just it's just lighting fire

57:31

to democracy. It's just a

57:33

dumpster fire. And and people don't want it, but,

57:35

like, a few people want it because there's still some people who are

57:37

very extreme who just read too much online and

57:40

who are getting these fights too much and

57:42

these people

57:44

I

57:45

think as unrest cools among

57:47

the general populace, among

57:49

the extremists who

57:51

are still just always

57:53

online and in these, like, extreme groups will get more and more because

57:55

the the moderate people who are in

57:57

those extremist groups will

57:59

drop out. the

58:00

more moderate people drop out and drop out. It's like evaporation when, like,

58:03

the hottest particles leave, so you the

58:05

the wet

58:06

are you dead what remains gets

58:08

colder, Here are the moderate

58:10

people leave, so the crazy people get

58:12

crazier.

58:13

And so in the seventies,

58:15

you saw crazy actually,

58:17

the the hard core of the craziness be more severe than

58:19

in the sixties. You had the

58:21

simeonese

58:22

liberation army. You

58:25

had two peoples tried to

58:27

shoot Gerald Ford within a month's period of time in

58:29

nineteen seventy six. Crazy

58:32

like,

58:32

craving like massive

58:34

shootouts between these leftist groups and police,

58:36

you know, murders and jailbreaks and terrorism

58:38

and all this stuff in the seventies.

58:40

You had but people were

58:42

just like, okay. I'll

58:44

still wear bell bottoms

58:45

and grow on my hair, but, like,

58:47

I realized there's not really gonna

58:49

be a revelers. That was,

58:51

like, your average, you know, boomer in

58:53

the seventies. And then by the eighties, they cut their hair, and

58:55

then they all when you got corporate jobs, and then you got

58:57

the big chill. Right? You've

59:00

seen the big chill.

59:01

Right? About all these, like, formerly

59:04

revolutionary boomers turning into, like,

59:06

corporate yuppies? Yes. And, like,

59:08

trying to reconcile themselves with their

59:10

corporate yuppiehood. It's a it's a great movie and people hate it because it shows

59:12

the the ebbing of this revolutionary energy of

59:14

a generation. We're gonna get the same thing with

59:16

the millennials.

59:18

Right? The millennials are aging in the middle age now. Like,

59:20

you know,

59:20

I am a

59:21

millennial. I am

59:24

middle aged.

59:24

And and and an

59:27

increasing majority of the millennials are middle

59:29

aged now. And so they're gonna

59:30

get maybe a little later than the boomers

59:32

but they're gonna get families and houses and

59:35

jobs and pensions and stock market blah blah

59:37

blah. And, like, you

59:40

know, that

59:41

will temper their their fire for

59:43

like, you know,

59:44

going and and fighting

59:47

the cops.

59:48

Which

59:50

political side is advantaged by this exhaustion you're

59:52

describing, or not even side like

59:54

which figures or categories of figures are

59:56

best set up for an

59:58

exhausted America. Well,

59:59

of course,

59:59

center left normie lives.

1:00:02

Yes. For the win, liberal

1:00:04

suburban. Why mom? That's

1:00:06

he's gonna win. It's It's always it's yeah.

1:00:08

The the wine moms, the liberal

1:00:10

suburban

1:00:10

wine mom, is the is the,

1:00:12

you know, emperor

1:00:13

of this country

1:00:15

politically. whoever the suburban wine mom will win.

1:00:18

In America, these were these were soccer

1:00:20

moms under Bush -- Yes. --

1:00:22

likewise, after

1:00:24

nine eleven, Two thousand two midterms, Bush captures, the

1:00:26

secure oh, it was security security

1:00:28

mom. Security mom.

1:00:30

And now after the pandemic

1:00:32

and everyone's so stressed out and everyone's

1:00:34

just like sitting alone drinking at

1:00:36

home, their wine moms. But

1:00:38

but they're the

1:00:40

same people they're just suburban moms. They're not, you know,

1:00:42

like, they're I

1:00:44

I don't know even know that they're they're mostly white

1:00:46

anymore. I'd say probably maybe a minority.

1:00:49

of of white people, but they're they're just it's

1:00:51

it's a type. It's middle class. Middle

1:00:53

class moms are like the those

1:00:55

are the most important factor.

1:00:58

And

1:00:58

so that middle class liberal normie, why

1:01:01

moms are gonna win. And so

1:01:02

but then also,

1:01:05

the

1:01:05

Ron santas conservatives

1:01:08

DeSantis Conservatives are going to come back and because the

1:01:10

unrest unleashed a lot of cultural

1:01:12

weird ass shit, such as the

1:01:14

people as the people who who

1:01:16

the, like, young people who go online and try to, like,

1:01:18

you know, say a bunch

1:01:19

of crazy, like, anti sex stuff.

1:01:22

And that's weird.

1:01:24

But, like, there's a

1:01:26

lot

1:01:26

of weird stuff. If you go to DSA meetings,

1:01:28

you'll encounter the weird stuff.

1:01:30

And

1:01:31

and that's gonna

1:01:32

backlash.

1:01:34

the need for,

1:01:35

like, every local school board and

1:01:37

city council to, like, you

1:01:39

know, begin

1:01:42

there like meetings with, like, a land acknowledgment and,

1:01:44

like, a profession that this country was founded

1:01:46

on racism. I mean,

1:01:49

i mean

1:01:50

Like, I get what

1:01:51

you're saying, Elizabeth, also that's silly.

1:01:53

So Time place manner.

1:01:56

Yeah. Exactly. Time place

1:01:58

manner. Like, Like, unless you're

1:01:59

gonna Are you gonna give your land back

1:02:02

to Native Americans? No,

1:02:04

then shut up. Because, like, we

1:02:06

actually can

1:02:07

do that. Canada has done it. We've done

1:02:10

it in certain areas, the

1:02:12

Supreme Court is mandating

1:02:12

returning a lot of land to the

1:02:15

Native Americans in Oklahoma

1:02:17

which

1:02:17

I think is great. You know, I'm a supporter of

1:02:19

that, and I like that. But but shut up with

1:02:21

the, like, yes, we recognize we're on native land,

1:02:23

but we're not gonna do anything about it. Like,

1:02:26

shut up. there's gonna be a general backlash against that. And I think that

1:02:28

and, you know, a lot of other stuff that's much

1:02:30

crazier than that. That was just like a funny

1:02:32

honey

1:02:33

example. a lot of backlash against stuff that's crazier than

1:02:36

that on the left. And I

1:02:37

think that that's gonna power the

1:02:39

DeSantis Conservatives. So I think that

1:02:41

we're gonna get A

1:02:44

big question is,

1:02:44

what will be the foreign policy of

1:02:47

the San Francisco conservatives? Will they

1:02:48

stand up

1:02:49

to, like, Russia and China

1:02:51

in actuality? Or

1:02:54

will they mere

1:02:54

will they embrace the isolationists like head

1:02:56

and the sand approach of the Trumpists? That's

1:02:58

an open question.

1:02:59

I don't know because there's still a lot of Republicans

1:03:01

who wanna kick Putin's ass.

1:03:03

I think

1:03:03

the midterms probably I think it was an open

1:03:06

question. My suspicion is the

1:03:08

midterms pushed them more in the

1:03:10

standup to China and Russia

1:03:12

column. I hope so. I hope that's right.

1:03:14

No. That

1:03:14

that's optimistic. And I hope

1:03:16

so. And so I think that if they can recapture

1:03:18

if they can recapture

1:03:19

the things that actually

1:03:21

worked about Reaganism, then they can they can rebuild

1:03:23

a conservative movement. I

1:03:26

think some of that a lot of that's gonna

1:03:28

be stuff progresses really

1:03:30

don't like. you know,

1:03:32

progressives are gonna absolutely

1:03:34

howl and raise hell about

1:03:36

like, you know, like

1:03:38

kicking trans women off women

1:03:40

sports teams. stuff,

1:03:40

which is happening now in athletic organizations, and it's

1:03:42

kinda quiet. But, like, if that's happening

1:03:44

and that that is

1:03:46

that that is going to going

1:03:48

to for professors are gonna say, this this denies the existence of

1:03:50

trans people and will lead to, you know,

1:03:52

massive death and blah blah and

1:03:56

conservatives are probably

1:03:58

gonna be able to win with that.

1:04:00

And

1:04:00

so, yeah, I'm

1:04:01

being dispassionate. I'm not saying what I would

1:04:03

like. Right? I'm not saying

1:04:04

a lot of kick, trans women are gonna swerve them.

1:04:06

I'm saying, I

1:04:07

think that conservatives are gonna make some headway

1:04:09

with this. They're

1:04:10

gonna, you know, standing up to Putin, standing

1:04:12

up to evil empires is a lot

1:04:14

more fruitful than becoming an evil empire.

1:04:16

ourselves.

1:04:17

Right? It's like the the Iraq war was a

1:04:19

was a was a disaster, but standing up

1:04:21

to the

1:04:21

Soviet Union in the eighties was

1:04:23

a a big win.

1:04:26

but

1:04:26

for the Republican Party as well. They're gonna

1:04:28

rediscover that. And and that

1:04:30

that actually does work. In terms

1:04:34

of economics, I

1:04:34

don't know what they're gonna do. I have things

1:04:37

that I would suggest to them,

1:04:38

but then

1:04:40

I think that's that's too

1:04:42

complicated and boring to go into right now. But I

1:04:44

think eventually, they'll the the DeSantis

1:04:46

Conservatives will come up with an economic program that

1:04:48

makes more sense than, like, some

1:04:50

crazy,

1:04:50

like, you know,

1:04:52

I don't know, like,

1:04:53

white working class single breadwinner factory

1:04:55

in rural Wisconsin, nostalgia,

1:04:57

bellowing bullshit.

1:04:58

They

1:05:00

will come up to something better than that. And they'll

1:05:02

just it'll take it'll take till the end

1:05:04

of the decade. I I think around late

1:05:08

2020s is when you're gonna see the

1:05:10

the real conservative

1:05:11

resurgence resurgence

1:05:13

in this country.

1:05:14

So for the last then, that mean just been conceiving

1:05:17

of the 2020s as kind of

1:05:19

like a reshuffling, almost kind

1:05:22

of lost decade. This isn't the decade if you're looking

1:05:24

for big things. Do do you think the twenty

1:05:26

thirties then look different? If

1:05:28

if people

1:05:30

are exhausted, are people just

1:05:32

gonna basically rest rest

1:05:34

up for the next six or seven years and

1:05:36

then something happens in the 2030s. How do you

1:05:38

think about that? I

1:05:39

think so. I I just got a a book about the

1:05:41

the nineteen seventies and

1:05:43

the title of the book is it

1:05:45

seemed like nothing happened.

1:05:48

Okay?

1:05:48

Plenty did happen, but

1:05:50

it seemed like nothing happened because America

1:05:52

was so exhausted. After

1:05:55

after Watergate, nineteen seventy

1:05:57

three was the end of the long And after that, we had

1:05:59

this time

1:05:59

until nineteen eighty until the

1:06:02

conservative resurgence when

1:06:04

it felt like there was nothing happening in American

1:06:06

politics, we had Ford and Carter, these, like, gray, old, nobody

1:06:10

presidents.

1:06:10

We had,

1:06:11

you know, social

1:06:13

movements sort of left over from the

1:06:15

sixties slowly petering out. We

1:06:17

had the slow you

1:06:18

know, underground rise of conservatism. We had all this stuff

1:06:21

and it seemed like the sixties got

1:06:23

people primed for

1:06:23

expectations of revolutions and

1:06:26

social upheaval. that

1:06:28

didn't ultimately pan out, the

1:06:30

sixties were the

1:06:31

big change. But they got

1:06:33

people thinking there would be an even bigger change in

1:06:35

the seventies and there just wasn't. of

1:06:37

people got exhausted. We hit the end of

1:06:39

our of our, you know, little

1:06:41

energy bar in a video game girl. Like,

1:06:43

so twenty fourteen body cams,

1:06:45

like with BLM, That's

1:06:47

the big change.

1:06:49

But twenty twenty fever

1:06:52

dreams that are just crazy

1:06:54

in retrospect. One thing people don't one thing people don't know, by the

1:06:56

way, is that

1:06:56

the the sixties riots, which were

1:06:58

a hell of a lot more

1:07:02

like, you know, destructive and combative than the

1:07:04

than than the Floyd

1:07:06

protests at their height, like

1:07:09

like this just Cities

1:07:10

really did burn in the sixties. Yeah. Like, city centers

1:07:12

burned to the ground. Like, there was

1:07:14

massive like, there were just hundreds

1:07:17

of deaths all over the place. National guard brought

1:07:19

in just shooting random random

1:07:22

people. That stuff

1:07:22

was all over police

1:07:26

violence. That's all sparked by police violence, and that's not just unique

1:07:28

to America. Riot and giant protests tend

1:07:30

to be sparked by police

1:07:32

violence everywhere.

1:07:34

So body cams are big. Twitter is big, but it's a very, very old reason

1:07:37

to for unrest. It's a very it's

1:07:39

it's the spark. It's

1:07:40

not

1:07:42

there's under there's the Tinder and the Spark. Right? There's the underlying reason,

1:07:44

which I think

1:07:45

was this,

1:07:46

like, respect

1:07:48

disconnect in

1:07:48

America's society in many,

1:07:52

many ways. But then and and just, you know, police abuses, of

1:07:54

course, had had built up over the

1:07:56

years. Police killings

1:07:57

went, like, down

1:07:58

and down through the nineties, and then, like, went

1:08:00

up massively in the two

1:08:02

thousands. People don't even

1:08:03

know that. The

1:08:04

police militarized up in the two thousands

1:08:06

with, like, their surplus war and terror

1:08:08

gear, and then they just they got super, super

1:08:10

nazi in, like, the two thousands and twenty

1:08:12

trends. And, like, you know, that's

1:08:14

that was

1:08:14

a big factor that led to BLM. you

1:08:17

know, if police killings had kept declining like they did in the nineties, maybe you wouldn't have that. I don't

1:08:19

know. So but

1:08:21

then but yeah.

1:08:24

So it's

1:08:25

yeah Police,

1:08:26

anti police stuff is always that the spark

1:08:29

that lights the unrest at the

1:08:31

beginning. But then

1:08:31

the other in the in

1:08:33

the in

1:08:34

the explosion of an arrest, all the

1:08:36

stuff bubbles to the surface, all

1:08:38

the stuff people

1:08:39

are mad about,

1:08:40

and then exhaustion, and then

1:08:43

it goes, then it settles, and now we're in the exhaustion period. And

1:08:45

we will be exhausted, but in this

1:08:47

decade, we'll be planted the

1:08:50

seeds of highly transformative decades

1:08:52

in the twenty thirties and forties, I

1:08:54

think. Those will be very transformative decades.

1:08:56

Right now, people are building

1:08:58

the technologies that will affect you

1:09:01

know, technology

1:09:01

changes everything. Like, the technology of the Internet and social media and the smartphone

1:09:03

and all that stuff was what enabled

1:09:06

this age of unrest to

1:09:08

happen? Right?

1:09:09

That's where it all happened on

1:09:12

these technologies. But then those technologies were built off stuff that was

1:09:14

conceived in the seventies. All the networking and,

1:09:15

like, you know, the networking

1:09:18

i'm like you know satellite communications, all this stuff

1:09:20

that, like, was all conceived in, like, the

1:09:22

seventies and and and and eighties,

1:09:25

and a you you

1:09:26

know, as partly through defense stuff. I don't know. We

1:09:28

are now going

1:09:29

to build the technologies that

1:09:32

will define

1:09:34

those later decades. and we are now going to

1:09:36

incubate

1:09:38

new subcultures

1:09:40

of social movements that

1:09:42

will flower in those later decades.

1:09:44

So

1:09:44

we're doing sort of the groundwork.

1:09:47

Even as we're exhausted, we'll be slowly doing the groundwork just as, you know, the

1:09:51

the nineteen seventies You

1:09:53

could see the genesis of hip hop

1:09:55

culture. You could see the genesis of, like, punk and, like,

1:09:57

you

1:09:57

know,

1:09:58

anarchists and

1:09:59

and crunchy hippies

1:10:03

and all this stuff. Even jealables too. Even

1:10:05

jealables? Absolutely

1:10:05

the conservative revolution, you

1:10:08

know, with

1:10:10

really, you know, Billy Graham.

1:10:12

Well, it's stuff really. The seventies incubated

1:10:14

the cultures, the define the next few

1:10:16

decades. And I think now, while

1:10:19

it

1:10:19

looks like it will look like nothing's

1:10:21

happening, but a lot of important stuff will be happening

1:10:23

in a subterranean way.

1:10:26

really well said,

1:10:27

Noah, that's an excellent place to leave

1:10:29

it. This is really great. Could you shout

1:10:32

out your sub stack where people

1:10:34

should go, check out your work. Hopefully, you know, you'd send a few

1:10:36

of the subscribers who weren't lost.

1:10:38

Oh, really? Yeah. Through the I

1:10:41

know. Right? Who listens to the

1:10:43

end of podcast? Oh, man. Noah

1:10:44

opinion. It's called N0AHPDINI0N

1:10:48

It's not noah opinion. There's

1:10:50

no o in the middle. It's

1:10:54

just N0AHPINI0N Just google that. You'll find the sub stack. You can sign up. free

1:10:56

email list. More than half of

1:10:58

what I write is free. Maybe

1:11:03

two thirds is free. So so you

1:11:05

know? Yeah. Good show.

1:11:07

Thank you for joining

1:11:09

me on realignment. Thanks a lot,

1:11:12

man.

1:11:14

Hope you enjoyed

1:11:18

this episode. learn something like this of mission or

1:11:20

wanna access our subscriber exclusive q

1:11:22

and a, bonus episode to

1:11:25

more, go to realignment

1:11:27

dot supercast dot com, and

1:11:29

subscribe to our five dollar a

1:11:31

month, fifty dollar a year, or five hundred for lifetime membership, rates, c

1:11:35

wall