Episode 16 - The Confederate Matt Walsh(ft. Atun-Shei)

Join the boys and Andrew, aka Atun-Shei, as they dive into the history of the Liz Truss of reactionary governments. 
Be in awe as our historians' expertise gets tested by dissecting slavery's strongest soldier, the infantile Matt Walsh!

Check out Andrew's work on Youtube and be on the lookout for his upcoming docu-drama "The Vampires of New Orleans"

https://www.youtube.com/atunsheifilms

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:00

Ever since I started doing history on YouTube, the channel Atun Shea Films has been a fixturer among my community members, a history educator and filmmaker with strong opinions. By all accounts, the perfect channel for me. It wasn't until relatively recently when I found out me and him had both set our sights on the Daily Wire's dumbest guy, Matt Walsh, that I actually sat down and really started watching. You might know him from series such as Witchfinder General, Checkmate Lincolnites, or General Videos on History and Debunking Myths Thereof. The Terror of Confederates, Still Fighting a War 161 Years Later. Welcome to the reaction podcast, Atun Shay, or should I say Andrew? Uh, you can call me whatever you want, baby. Sounds good.

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Away down south in the land of traitors, rattlesnakes and alligators right away. I will come away. Where cotton's king and men are chattels. Union boys will win the battles right away. I wake up away, come away, right away, I we come away. We'll all go down to Dixie, away, away. Each Dixie boy must understand that he must find his uncle stand away, away, away, away. We'll all go down to Dixie.

SPEAKER_05 2:05

Thanks for having me. Of course, of course. So before we actually get fully going, could you tell us a little bit about your background, where you're from, and what you do?

SPEAKER_02 2:14

Sure. So uh my name's Andrew Rickich. I am, as you said, I'm a filmmaker. I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts. And basically after uh you know film school, I was unemployed and, you know, had no idea what to do with my life and moved to New Orleans basically on a whim. I've been here ever since for coming up on uh oh God, 13 years now that I've been that I've lived in uh in New Orleans, Louisiana. And uh yeah, basically, you know, uh I was a sort of fell into historical education just as a day job for most of my 20s. I was a tour guide at the Gettysburg National Military Park and then uh here in the city through all the cemeteries and and the historic neighborhoods like the French Quarter. And uh, you know, after a while I kind of took kind of the the my training in in filmmaking and sort of the the skills that I'd learned in my day job in kind of public-facing historical interpretation and combined them, and that kind of became Atenche Films, which was sort of this project to talk about American history, warts and all, uh, in a cinematic and irreverent way. And then uh from there kind of got into uh you know multiple series and uh and and then kind of more seriously turned toward independent filmmaking. My first movie, The Sudbury Devil, came out uh in 2023, and uh I've got another one in production called The Vampires of New Orleans, which is gonna be fucking awesome.

SPEAKER_05 3:42

Wait, I I do have a question. Um, because I've I've watched like the promotional material and stuff for uh Vampires of New Orleans, but obviously you can't, I'm assuming, reveal too much about like everything about the movie yet, because it's gonna come out and then we're gonna watch it. But I have a question about like because you're you were saying it's it's like a kind of what do you call it, like a neorealist. Uh like I'm not a film guy, I don't know shit about film yes, but it's a docudrama.

SPEAKER_02 4:06

So it's basically it's got documentary and narrative elements.

SPEAKER_03 4:10

So is that related to like the results of Hurricane Katrina? Is it fixed in the like the modern what's the like what's the time period of the vampires in New Orleans?

SPEAKER_02 4:19

Is it I mean it's it's the whole history, you know, it's the whole history of the city, you know, from the 18th century to the present day, you know. The uh what it's it's really about is sort of the horrors of history kind of visited upon the present and how history influences us in the present, and you know, and and obviously being a vampire movie and you know, in usually pretty terrifying, violent ways. But essentially we're sort of looking at kind of we start by kind of looking at this the city and its obsession with vampires, and it's and sort of asked, okay, like where did that come from? And we examine some of the vampire legends that have kind of come out of the city. It's a bit of a mystery, and we kind of set that up at the beginning. It's like a little bit of a mystery. Like, vampires are this very Eastern European legend. So, how come this Franco-American city is culturally appropriating our beautiful Balkan legends?

SPEAKER_01 5:16

Yeah, exactly. You took my bit. I didn't think I was like, uh there's probably like many people, many people listening to this and being like, how dare this white man speak about, speak about the the ethnic culture of vampirism that comes from the Balkans. He is also from the Balkans, and I am not proud of uh how I guess like exceptionally uh racialized of a POV I have towards people because the second I'm not gonna say his last name, but the second I saw his last name, I'm I I I literally was like, You one of us, brother. And he's like, or yes, like unironically, he is, he actually is. I I checked all the all the cards. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:01

So it's cultural appreciation, not appropriation, because he's he's basically, you know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:08

Of course, man. God bless exactly. That's why that is why we give uh stamp of approval. Also, Vladzepers Dracul was a hero, anti-imperialist hero, okay? Vladzep.

SPEAKER_02 6:19

Oh, oh, absolutely. An anti-imperialist hero. And you know, Pierre, uh Peter Plogovitz, the uh original Serbian vampire, also a hero in this household. Uh, but yeah, uh, you know, how how does uh how does how does this sort of end up in a Franco-American city? And so, you know, we kind of dig into it and we sort of like, all right, where did this exactly come from? And the results are surprising, and they say a lot about kind of how the city sees itself, how it sells itself to the world as a tourist destination, and how it consistently refuses to, like most of America and most of America, most of the South and most of America, frankly, how it refuses to engage with the true horrors and the true consequences and implications of its actual history by basically kind of inventing fairy tales to to, you know, kind of yeah, instead. Um, and then sort of shot through with that kind of investigation is uh a fucking awesome vampire movie.

SPEAKER_03 7:21

Yeah, and I just love the the city of New Orleans as a setting because it is like bone old for Americans, right? And being on the swamp, being the center of commerce in blood, which was slavery, and kind of the diversity and the contradictions of the city, and just the idea of, you know, it has, I'm pretty sure like interview with a vampire is set in that kind of golf culture, right? And features New Orleans in the film because of that, you know, the nature of hate to be a lefty, but a how dare you the extractive nature of capital, right? And and that aristocratic class. Oh, yeah. And how easily a vampire and a planter they look and feel the exact same. The only question is whether they lick their lips when the blood from the lash hits them in the face. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:11

Other than that, they're exactly the same. Yeah, Mike, you're you're speaking, you're speaking our language. Uh, and it is uh, you know, there's awesome. I mean, it is, and yeah, we get into that extensively in the film, trust me.

SPEAKER_03 8:22

And there's all-I'm really excited for it. I can't wait. It sounds great.

SPEAKER_02 8:26

You know, and I mean, yeah, that's kind of, you know, you kind of think about where the Southern Gothic comes from. You know, like the Southern Gothic as a genre is, you know, there to grapple with just these ideas kind of through kind of a safe sort of lens of allegorical fiction. You know, and you look at uh and it makes perfect sense, right? Where you know, in a way, in like a fictional sort of way, you know, in the way that Anne Rice was doing with Interview with the Vampire, it makes perfect sense that you would take the vampire out of you know, the crumbling castles of Eastern Europe and put them in the the crumbling post-Civil War uh mansions of Louisiana, Mississippi, you know. I mean, it it's the story writes itself. But uh but yeah, we'll we'll you know you'll have to wait until October to get the whole effect. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 9:10

So speaking of a country refusing to reckon with its history and instead inventing fairy tales, uh Andrew, could you explain to us what the lost cause myth is?

SPEAKER_02 9:20

Yeah, absolutely. So uh basically the uh American Civil War was at rock bottom about political tensions over the institution of slavery and specifically kind of the competing sort of moneyed interests that uh and the modes of production that that both the sort of so-called you know free states and slave states had. Essentially, you know, we had two different sections of the country on two very different economic tracks. Um you know, the North, obviously, this uh rapidly industrializing bourgeois powerhouse, right? This this emerging kind of world power. And then the South was basically completely disconnected from this project. This um uh, you know, essentially the South was this kind of it was really kind of quite dated by the time of 1860. It was essentially a cash crop colony that was kind of part of this sort of liberal democracy almost sort of by accident, you know.

SPEAKER_05 10:26

It's like yeah, like a extension like out there, like a little like provincial type thing, right?

SPEAKER_02 10:31

Yes, yeah. And its uh great source of wealth, of course, by the time of the Civil War, being the cotton trade, was much more economically tied to Europe, particularly England, than it was the North. Although, of course, the North was absolutely benefited from the cotton trade and absolutely processed raw materials and also invested in slavery and benefited from slavery. But uh but the South was very much kind of doing its own thing. Like, so essentially what we've sort of what developed over the course of the early Republic period were two very different competing ideas of American nationalism. And, you know, when Abraham Lincoln was elected president, the South uh threw a hissy fit and decided that they did not want to abide by the results of the election because they thought that Lincoln was too much of an abolitionist. He wasn't, not at the time, probably privately, but certainly not in terms of his policy. And so they decided to violently break away from the United States and try to form their own country. And this was done almost entirely to preserve the institution of slavery, and even the the even the peripheral issues that the South had with the North politically kind of ultimately tied back to their mode of production and the enslaved labor that it depended on. Um and so the war happens, there's a lot of fighting, obviously, a lot of people die, it's incredibly destructive uh and gruesome and bloody. And uh essentially, over the course of the war, the Confederate high command and the Davis administration become kind of acutely aware that they're going to need European support to actually win this war. You know, the North is just too populous, too industrialized. Um, and they're looking back to the example of George Washington in the Revolutionary War, right? And how Washington was able to defeat this much larger, better equipped, better trained British army, basically by playing this kind of defensive war and then eventually by getting French help, right?

SPEAKER_03 12:32

And and Spanish as well.

SPEAKER_02 12:34

And Spanish, absolutely. Can't can't forget about uh about our boy Galvez here in New Orleans, who who took uh Pensacola from the Brits and everything. So, yeah, so that's basically what the Confederates are aiming to do, right? And uh so they start to soften their, you know, they go on a basically a bit of a PR campaign while the war is going on. I mean, as early as 1863, right, after the Emancipation Proclamation passes, which is Lincoln's uh sort of, you know, his edict, which basically says that all, you know, uh uh enslaved people who are within areas currently in rebellion, so in the Confederate South, uh are, you know, according to the United States legally, according to the United States government, are now free. So essentially this completely disrupts Confederate uh labor, right? Because they depend heavily on slave labor for their for their war effort. And essentially, wherever the Union, the United States Army goes, enslaved people flock to them to be free. And it also emboldens enslaved people who hear about the Emancipation Proclamation to start withholding their labor, even in the deep South, you know, and basically just causing trouble because they can see the writing on the wall. They know that like slavery is about to be over, and uh, and so this really kind of gums things up for the Confederacy. So the Confederacy is saying, like, okay, this slavery thing is becoming a liability. We need to soften our image internationally. So they start basically denying what they were shouting from the rooftops in 1860, which was that they seceded for slavery. And they're like, well, no, not it wasn't just about slavery. It's really, you know, we we said slavery, but it's really about like them telling us what to do. Like that's sort of what the principle kind of underlying this. So this is not in good faith, right? It's a PR campaign. But yeah, they kind of they kind of maintain this, you know, for for this the latter half of the war.

SPEAKER_03 14:19

Yeah, I was just gonna say, like, these guys were very self-consciously class conscious. Sure. And they would often make the argument to the northerners that all of the like surplus of American society was rooted in plantation slavery, chattel slavery, you know, cash crop. There's a very famous, for our European listeners who don't are not as aware of American history as we uh Americans are. Yeah, you go sit high.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Sorry, please, please, Mike.

SPEAKER_03 14:52

Go on, sorry, Mike. Yeah. There's a very famous speech called the Cotonist King speech, which was given by a Southern senator where he laid out in bold material terms the economic calculations about the surplus of you know capital that was being accumulated by Southern, you know, slavery and like the fact that they had that class of laborers in bondage and they didn't take wages. That was get that was what was building America's wealth. That was the source of the capital that was building the northern capitalists up. And that if if anything, it it was his contention, the South was being dragged down by the you know, tariffs and all the other, you know, being associated with the North was actually harming their economic position, yeah, and that the North depended upon the South. And that lie continued to be pushed and is still pushed today by libertarians about the economic basis of like tariffs or as as opposed to slavery.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

Sure, sure. Help the ignorant Americ uh uh ignorant Europeans, Asians, Africans, and so on, which is like probably like 40% of the listeners that we have here. Why was that a lie? Obviously, the uh immorality of it is uh, I hope to 100% of our listeners very, very obvious. But why was it a lie that that the expropriation of slave labor did not lead uh to a faster development of the capitalist class in the north?

SPEAKER_02 16:17

Well, no, it's it's it was an exaggeration. It was an exaggeration. Like the the king cotton idea is kind of regarded by historians today as like a bit of a conspiracy theory because the South uh like absolutely, like to some extent, uh much of the world depended on southern cotton in terms of you know their textile supply. But the south had an inflated idea of their own economic importance. And we see during the war itself and during the blockade, you know, the British they just turned to to India and Egypt for their cotton supply, right? They just find other markets. And the South is like, oh shit. You know what I mean? Like they they kind of didn't they sort of didn't really see that coming. Yeah, think that, yeah, exactly. But yeah, anyway, so so uh but yeah, great, you know, good point, Mike, and great question, you go. So basically after the war, the Confederacy loses decisively, and the essentially kind of what there becomes a need for in the demoralization of defeat is a story, is you know, what the kids call a cope, uh is some sort of mythology that valorizes the Confederate dead, that makes the cause seem romantic, and it makes the all the blood and destruction seem like it was worth it, you know?

SPEAKER_03 17:34

And well, and also don't forget the humiliation of defeat, right? Like you have to come up with an explanation that relieves that tension.

SPEAKER_02 17:42

Absolutely, yeah, yeah. So then in 1865, so right, the barrels of the guns have scarcely cooled before this guy writes a book called The Lost Cause, this guy, Edward Pollard, um, which is essentially an early kind of adambration of what will eventually become the Lost Cause myth, which is kind of just like the Confederate cause was just, you know, slavery wasn't that bad, whatever, northern aggression, we just wanted to be left alone, states' rights. You know, you kind of start to see this sort of stuff embryonically kind of appear. Former Confederate general Jubal early, also later in the 1860s, starts writing histories of his own, which really kind of further this narrative and which kind of give it a little bit more form. And then in the 1870s, we have Reconstruction kind of reaching its most violent period. And this becomes like a very key moment in the history of the South because over the course of Reconstruction, we had kind of this moment where black, you know, male, uh it's important to say that, black male Americans enter into the political the American democratic process very strongly, right? There's black senators and congresspeople, there's black lieutenant governors of southern states, there's freedmen's associations where formerly enslaved men gather to become politically active. They organize uh in favor of Republican policies and in favor of not just sort of Republican party, you know, the Party of Lincoln and the sort of northern political party, but also of their own interests and to try to sort of you know have a say in the sort of emerging multiracial democracy that the policies of Reconstruction are trying to build in the South. Um, now ex-Confederates uh cracked down hard on this by massacring black people, by rigging elections, by terrorism, schatastic and literal, the the first clan emerges during this period. And basically the first clan's entire purpose is to murder black organizers and intimidate black voters into either staying home or voting against their interests.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

Openly stated, by the way, not not even like uh, ooh, they only said it inside of closed rooms and so on. That was the whole purpose, yeah. That was the whole purpose, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:52

And the ex-Confederates, they win. They win. Reconstruction. Basically, the white people in the North are kind of too racist and too complacent and just like don't really give a shit about black people, and they kind of just let it go. They're just like, oh, whatever, let them have it. So then we enter after Reconstruction this period of Jim Crow, where uh the basically legal segregation becomes, in the white southern mind, an appropriate substitute for slavery, right? They kind of just find kind of other ways to do it. They find loopholes, sharecropping and prison labor and all this sort of stuff, just sort of, you know, becomes this kind of slavery 2.0 where they have this very strict racial caste system and they still have a lot of nostalgia for the old anti-billem life, right? It's not the same as the old anti-billem life, but it's like good enough for this new generation that they kind of feel like they start to feel kind of okay with it.

SPEAKER_03 20:42

And it's full subordination as well. Like, you know, there's no participation in the political life. There is, you know, not equal status as far as like even in the court systems. There's the laws are enforced like obviously differently based on race. Yeah. You know, there's whole sorts of systems of like basically capturing black people and forcing them into you know peonage or like literal slavery, as you mentioned, but things like loitering or you know, not having a job and things like that.

SPEAKER_05 21:12

And this is the period when the uh daughters of the Confederacy start and other organizations start like erecting all their statues, right? Or most of them. Because some of them were before, but yeah. But those were mostly in cemeteries, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:22

The 1880s and 1890s are the sort of the coalescing of the lost cause myth as an ideology. And um, and that's when you see it kind of become fully formed in in histories. And when you read many history books from that period about the Civil War, they are pretty much kind of fully bought into the Lost Cause narrative. And yeah, you start to see a lot of these advocacy organizations and a lot of these memorial organizations, like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, start to memorialize the Confederate South in ways that you know can still be felt today, like particularly the statues. And uh, so then by the Turn of the 20th century. At this point, the lost cause enters the mainstream, right? In turn of the 20th century, right? I mean, it kind of can't really emphasize enough just how racist this period was. In a lot of ways, this is like the most racist period in human history. The turn of the 20th century is when eugenics become scientifically mainstream. I mean, you know, obviously we think of like obviously like southern slavery, but yeah, obviously like very racist and stuff, like in literal enslavement is kind of, you know, without but it can always get worse. Yeah, it's kind of without, you know, uh in terms of its cruelty, it's kind of without without equal. But the 20th century, I mean, that is like the scientifically, like you have like respected scientists being just like, you know, ah, the, you know, the shape of the cranium, you know, this is like a very, yeah, eugenics, forced sterilizations, all this type of stuff. Um, just this like really vehemently white supremacist society. And of course, it's in this milieu that that fascism emerges in the 20s and 30s, right? And uh and and kind of eventually kind of the this sort of the the wave of this sort of early 20th century uh racist thought kind of breaks with the Holocaust, after which the whole world is like, oh fuck, you know.

SPEAKER_03 23:08

A lot of that Nazi ideology did look to the South for inspiration, whether it was the Nuremberg laws, whether it was, you know, laws about racial hygiene and for sterilization and eugenics for what they called idiots or you know, all of that was, you know, in many ways, you know, inspired by the American South. Yes. Right? You could say that the like roots of Nazism stretch deeply into the you know American racial caste system.

SPEAKER_02 23:37

Yeah, there's a book called Hitler's American Model that kind of pioneered some of this scholarship a few years ago. And um, and yeah, basically that sort of the one drop rule, particularly, which was a Jim Crowier law here in the South, was was actually viewed as too extreme by the Nazis. But the Nazis also took a lot of inspiration from the from Manifest Destiny and uh you know the sort of project of American colonialism for uh Lehman's realm.

SPEAKER_05 24:00

So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Genaubanost, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:03

Yeah. So basically uh then kind of so the lost cause enters the mainstream and uh and you have uh historians like Woodrow Wilson, who you know became president, really sort of cementing it into uh American historiography around that time. And it becomes the not only the dominant narrative, but like such a pervasive narrative that it's almost unquestionable, right? The only people really writing uh against this are like black people at this time. And then of course it becomes immortalized in film, right? So you have uh uh The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, two of the definitive American films that that uh one of the great American masterpieces, the great American epics, are really, you know, the sort of culturally America in the early 20th century saying, like, like, okay, here we are, world, you know, this is our, this is the beginning of like American cultural dominance in the visual arts, are these two very racist, pro-Confederate, groundbreaking, you know, masterpieces that, you know, not only kind of come at the time of America's sort of uh the height of America's industrial power, kind of approaching the height of America's industrial power and its sort of emergence as the world's pre-eminent superpower, but but it becomes this very definitive American kind of cultural century, you know, that these films kind of help usher into, you know, using the great American art form of cinema. So yeah, and then after that it becomes, you know, basically kind of unquestioned until the uh until the Civil Rights era, when uh the sort of chinks in the armor finally start to appear.

SPEAKER_05 25:35

Okay, so I I have a question then. Right now, like, because obviously that Civil Rights era, that's a long time ago. Like the Confederacy, or the sorry, the pro-Confederate kind of like or the Neo-Confederate sort of like phenomenon still is like very much alive. And the like United Daughters of the Confederacy, all those organizations, those are obviously like really old organizations that I don't know like if they're if they have even uh any power behind them anymore or if they even exist anymore, but they do. Okay, because I was gonna ask like what kind of like organizations or like you know, what kind of like powers are kind of pushing these things right now, if anything, or is it just more like a grassroots thing? Like what why are we still hearing about this today? Yeah beyond the fact that America is incredibly racist.

SPEAKER_02 26:17

Sure. I mean I think uh I mean I think that's that is essentially the the main reason. But uh, you know, essentially so you know, neoconfederate sort of uh activist groups obviously have a very long and and storied history. I mean, even the the second and third clan, you know, the the the the second and third clan come about at a time when the South has become industrialized, right? I mean, this is and this is something that's sort of an underappreciated part of like of Reconstruction history because you all you really only hear about this, ironically enough, through the lost cause perspective, but it's actually a very kind of important piece of kind of the Marxist puzzle of you know the economic history of America, which is that after the Civil War, uh you do see a lot of, you know, the South called them carpet baggers, which is a heroistic term. They basically, you know, I mean, when people it's kind of funny because people here in the in New Orleans use the term carpet bagger kind of like, you know, it's like a bit of a teasing kind of term or like a little bit of, you know, sort of a lighthearted kind of jokey term. And I always tell people, like, that's a fucking super dark thing to call somebody.

SPEAKER_05 27:21

Yeah, what does it mean?

SPEAKER_02 27:22

What's the well, so a carpet bagger, so basically is somebody, it's like a northerner who comes to the south bringing their peculiar ideas about, you know, equality and all this kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_03 27:32

In a carpet bag, you know, a literal bag. I thought it was an Arab because like carpets.

SPEAKER_02 27:37

You've had a different racist interpretation. But basically they would bring with them. None of it makes sense. That's the point. Yeah. They'd bring with them these, these, these what were called carpet bags. So they'd you know, basically like have these bags that were like made out of carbon, some sort of, you know, something they did back in the day, where they would like kind of sell wares and stuff, you know, and this became kind of a catch-all term, not only for kind of the sort of northers who came down to kind of enforce reconstruction, but also the industrialists who the northern sort of business interests who kind of came down. But I always tell people here, you know, it's like back during the days of the first clan, they'd call people a carbon bagger before they strung them up. Like this is a oh my god, they would hang, you know, like white Republicans and like by, you know, on whatever who like just were friends with black people and that was their only crime after calling them carbon baggers.

SPEAKER_05 28:20

So it's like fair with a very dark history, but painting a target on someone, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:23

Oh, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_03 28:24

I think that like one of the questions that I have for you, and it's something that I think about a lot myself, is like the project of reconstruction and its feasibility. And you know, do you have a Leninist idea that maybe we could have done it if we went farther?

SPEAKER_01 28:40

Which we disagree with. This is a centrist podcast. We have no opinions on any political issue. We love we love liberalism. It is liberalism is incredible.

SPEAKER_03 28:49

Yeah, yeah. Liberalism is great. Sorry, please. But there was an incredibly gentle way that the former Confederate treasonous rats were treated, and you know, there wasn't a lot of like executions of the leaders of the Confederacy.

SPEAKER_05 29:03

There wasn't Yeah, the fuck like Christmas like amnesty of 1868, like that's crazy to me.

SPEAKER_01 29:08

Yeah, yeah. That is so crazy to non-Americans in general.

SPEAKER_03 29:12

And like we mentioned, we mentioned the first clan, but under under President Grant, the first clan was annihilated through what was called the Force Acts, which was basically where the federal government said, we're gonna go down there with the military and we're gonna root out the clan and destroy it physically. That's so awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the clan that we think of later is actually the second or third clan, depending upon which time period you're talking about. Yeah. So there was a period where, as you mentioned, we had military force backing up reconstruction, and there was this like, you know, populist left, multiracial working class movement that existed throughout the South that was eventually overturned, as you rightly point out, by terrorism, intimidation, and just like obstinence from the South. Could that have worked had there been more commitment, more, as I say, maybe retributive Leninist property seizure, 40 acres in a mule? And I I'm I I'm not saying it as a joke because like a lot of the capital of the South remained in the families who profited from slavery, right? They kept their land, they kept their ill-gotten gains, they didn't pay reparations to the slaves. And so that created the conditions for, you know. So I wonder what you think.

SPEAKER_02 30:27

Okay. Yeah, no, no, I got you. That's a good question. I'll I'll answer that in a second. I do want to kind of finish my first point. I got sidetracked on the carpet bagger thing, but uh um, but yeah, sorry about that. But no, that's fine, that's fine. I, you know, that's that's my ADHD brain kind of going on 50 topics at one thing. Yeah. But um uh, but yeah, so so I think the sort of the the idea of kind of northern industrialists kind of coming down and interfering in in southern affairs, uh, which you know becomes kind of a part of the lost cause myth. I think it's kind of a bit of an interesting kind of piece of the Marxist puzzle of American history because, you know, uh naturally what you do see is, I mean, that does, that that does literally happen, right? Like northern industrial, northern money, northern capital pours into the South. And you know, if places like Atlanta becomes a huge textile manufacturing town. Whereas before it was, you know, I mean, the Confederates kind of tried to industrialize Atlanta during the war because it was of great strategic importance to them, but uh because it was kind of in between kind of the two theaters uh and had railroad connections. But uh, but but Atlanta was like a town of 10,000 people during the Civil War. After the Civil War, it becomes, you know, it becomes like a Lowell, Massachusetts, right? It becomes this like sprawling textile manufacturing city. Birmingham, Alabama becomes, you know, again, grows from this kind of one horse town into this great kind of like uh um, uh I think it was like coal mining, but some sort of mining city, but it becomes like a mining town. So the the South industrializes, right? So you basically have kind of the North does literally. I mean, you know, and and sort of the this is kind of the framing of the Civil War as a bourgeois revolution. You know, the bourgeoisie goes into the South and extracts wealth from it. Like that absolutely happened, right? And it's not pro-Confederate to kind of say that, you know. But this kind of creates an interesting reality going into the 20th century where you have uh a transformed South, the new South, as they call it, where kind of industrialists hold quite a lot of power in uh society. And in fact, the second and third clan uh was uh funded by many of these industrialists. And, you know, people talk about how the Klan terrorized, especially Catholics and Jews during this time, during the 20th century, as well as, of course, black people. But uh, and this was certainly the case uh all over the country, because, you know, again, we got to remember that the clan in the 20s and 30s at its height during the second clan was uh was national. I mean, Indiana uh was a huge stronghold for uh uh for the clan. You know, it was up north, it was everywhere, it was out west. Um, but uh but essentially the second and third clan really were like functionally strikebreakers. Like, and there's a great book about this called The Clan Unmasked by this guy, uh uh guy Stetson Kennedy, who was a Southern Union man and not a union as in Union and Confederacy, a Southern, you know, he was a he was as a as in Labor Union. Trade unionist. Labor Union. And he had Confederate ancestry, and he was just kind of like, you know, a sort of kind of typical Southern white dude, uh, but he was a strong union man and a strong anti-racist and an anti-fascist. So he decided to infiltrate the Klan. So he like used his impeccable kind of Southern genealogy and his kind of general, you know, his kind of cultural know-how to infiltrate the Klan and basically he exposed all their secrets to uh to the world. And yeah, and he writes about this. He's just like, you know, he basically talks about it's just like all these are a bunch of dumbasses who are just paid by industrialists to break up unions and intimidate unions.

SPEAKER_05 33:53

That will never happen again.

SPEAKER_02 33:54

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know, this is what the Klan is for, right? So that's like a very interesting kind of piece of the puzzle. But but to answer your question, Mike, about sort of, you know, the purifying fire of Reconstruction and, you know, should we have hanged all the Confederates and stuff? I mean, you know, I think it's hard to say. Honestly, I think it's very hard to say. It's kind of one of those history what ifs where it's like, it's just such a radically different timeline that I think it's kind of impossible to say whether it would have worked or not. Right. I think that ultimately what you gotta also have to remember is that the that the white North is also intensely white supremacist at this time, right? They were anti-slavery, but they were certainly white supremacist. And it's like, and you know, black senators and Congress people, I mean, that's not like it's kind of hard to imagine the the sort of public opinion in the North maybe going along with like this like incredibly punitive sort of uh, you know, policy sort of against the South. Um uh not to say that there wasn't a huge amount of anger toward the South, and there wasn't a huge amount of like, I mean, obviously they've been at war, right? So there was like a lot of um uh a lot of hatred there. But you know, what you really see after the Civil War is that like the northern public just does not have a huge amount of appetite for this like racial equality shit. Um, to the, you know, it's very easily like sacrificable to them. That said, if we were kind of, you know, if we're just sort of exercising our creativity here and kind of imagining, okay, what would what would this you know look like if we had kind of a federal government with actual backbone that you know actually did this. I mean, I don't know about you know, about kind of like Nuremberg trialing you know all the Confederates, but certainly they didn't really work that well either. Yeah, that's yeah, I was gonna say, like, you know, it's sort of uh uh it's not like you know fascism was like completely destroyed, you know, and uh Germany. But like, you know, I think certainly like you know, I mean the fact that that so few of these guys saw the inside of a prison is like kind of mind-boggling. Right.

SPEAKER_03 35:44

Yeah, there's definitely a a continuum between kill all Confederates and everybody gets everything with all their property who who led the rebellion, you know.

SPEAKER_02 35:53

I mean, certainly I think that I agree with like the sentiment that the federal government was that the leniency of the federal government and their lackluster pursuit of reconstruction ultimately I I think obviously it was not the moral decision, and it certainly allowed pro-Confederate sentiment to uh to expand, certainly. I mean, that's I think that's that's pretty unquestionable.

SPEAKER_05 36:15

Yeah, practically speaking, like when you don't actually go after them and get it like you know in black and white on paper that, you know, these guys were treat traitors or you know, these guys were guilty on this of this and this crime, uh, it allows that ambiguity to set in and like people to, you know, kind of like start to imagine maybe it wasn't so bad after all.

SPEAKER_03 36:32

Yes, absolutely. I don't even I don't even think you call it ambiguity. Like I I think if you watch or look at Neo-Confederate rhetoric today, they say they have a narrative of it was actually what the slavers said at the time, which was slavery was instructive to the black race. Sure. I mean that's yeah, some of them, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 36:49

But I mean even like the non-racist ones, like you know, like they were happier as slaves than they are with freedom. Yeah, but like even like the non-like I guess non-explicitly racist ones are also like allowed to kind of talk all kinds of about like how I guess the North was the aggressor, I guess, because they were trying to like force this like too fast on the South or whatever, when the North, you know, quote unquote had so much time to do it slowly or whatever, which uh which I think obviously is an insane perspective, because what do you want them to do? Just like, you know, the all the enslaved people to like wait a few more decades in indignity waiting for maybe the white people in the south to like vote slavery away? Like what's yeah, yeah, no, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:27

Yeah, no, it's it's an absurd, it's an absurd statement. Like that's and you know, you you hear I mean you do hear this from people today who are uh and it's such a fucking privilege.

SPEAKER_05 37:35

Yeah, and Matt Walsh says it.

SPEAKER_02 37:36

Yeah, it's such a fucking privileged, shitty fucking white people take. You know, it's just like you know, yeah, I mean it it's obviously like anybody with a moral backbone can understand that like one more second of people spent in fucking bonds is completely fucking unacceptable and like worth almost any fucking price to stop it. But yeah, just this whole like uh it should be gradual, you know. I mean, and certainly, I mean, obviously, I know I'm I'm speaking to the crowd right here, but it is a very, you know, obviously you see this with a lot of our changes in society today, you know what I mean? It's just like, well, you can't just fossil fuels, yeah, you know, that you use plastic, you know, it's like it's the same fucking like any shitty fucking bullshit where people want this, like, you know, because they're fucking frightened and they're comfortable and they're fat and happy, and it doesn't affect them, so they don't fucking care. You know, that that's what it is. And so it's like they can afford to be like, well, you know, let's not go be too hasty, you know, fucking pieces of shit.

SPEAKER_03 38:28

I do think that's like one of the things that we keep returning to on the podcast is like the institution of reaction, right? Like that these beliefs don't spring out of like the marketplace of ideas, there's a supporting framework. And when I look at the deep south, even of today, there continues to be like the Southern evangelical Protestantism, you know, the the evangelical televangelists, the the Trump supporting religion almost that continues to persist. And it has could and and those roots stretch back to the slavery church of Southern Baptism, right? Who was very was founded on the idea that slavers should be in charge of the church. That's what caused the the you know division between Northern Baptists and Southern Baptists. The Southern Baptists wanted slave owners to be more prominent within the church, and Northern Baptists did not want anybody who was a slaver to have that you know power within the church. And so we have this religion, and then it continued to support Jim Crow. It was anti-the civil rights era movement, and now it's pro-Trump. You can see the direct lineage of this supporting framework. And like we we are talking about these like issues because we're not, you know, on the left or you know, it if people who believe in human equality, they're not talking about how do we reform, you know, disrupt or otherwise change these institutions that replicate these forms of bigotry and you know defend the status quo of racial domination in the South.

SPEAKER_05 40:03

Yeah, absolutely. I um I have a question. Um I don't know if you read the uh book by uh Ty Sadul, the uh like professor of history, former brigadier general. Yeah, Robert and Meaning.

SPEAKER_02 40:14

Yeah, yeah, I read it.

SPEAKER_05 40:15

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Like I I was reading that because I'm also I've been working on like another video about Matt Walsh's video on you know the Civil War, which is obviously a dog shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's on brand. But anyways, uh so after reading that, I was like kind of feeling a little bit of like like empathy for these people who have grown up with this sort of like lost cause mythology and everything, and uh feeling like maybe you know they feel like at at a loss of identity, I guess. Is that something like you you yeah, you ever like think about? I'm I I'm sure it is.

SPEAKER_02 40:50

Sure, yeah, yeah. I mean I think uh yeah, no, it's an interesting that's an interesting book, Robert E. Lee and me. And actually he's a uh uh Ty Sadul is a confirmed Checkman Lincolnites fan. So shout out to him. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, he like tweeted about it or something a few years ago. Um but yeah, so the you know, uh yes, obviously there's like I think, and this is, you know, speaking of Czech Main Lincolnites, I mean I think this was kind of the whole project of that series, which was a demonstration and like a hope that people raised in that shitty ideology or any shitty ideology can change and can get better.

SPEAKER_05 41:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:27

Um, and and certainly I think that's you know, the South is full of people who see past the lies and see past the bullshit. It's just that, you know, to Mike's point, very few of them are in power. And obviously, you know, yeah, I mean, and and um so so yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely I think uh I think one, you know, can only can't help but feel empathy for people who are raised in the ideology and who uh see it as a core part of who they are. And we all need we all need like a story to make sense of our existence and to kind of give our lives purpose and meaning. And um, and even if that is sort of this massive chip on your shoulder of, you know, uh whatever the South will rise again. You know, I think they're kind of like, you know, and it's interesting, I feel like I've been kind of dealing with some of this tension from my own audience since releasing some of these Matt Walsh videos, which, you know, very much not the checkmate Lincolnites format of like, oh, well, there's good in everybody. The Matt Walsh videos I've been making have been just like Yeah, there's like there's no good. He's like it's he's gone. Send them to prison. Yeah, fuck these fucking people like you know, they belong in jail.

SPEAKER_03 42:35

Like, yeah, they're he's a vicious liar and dissembler and and he just fabricates bullshit. And he's stupid, but yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:42

Yeah, yeah, no, it's fucking goebulls and striker. Yeah, it's like fucking goebulls and striker on a fucking global scale, man. It's sadistic.

SPEAKER_01 42:50

There's a huge difference between me getting picked up from my village and being told, like, oh my god, now you're gonna fight for the South and be like, okay, I fucking guess. Yeah. Versus existing in the 21st century, I understand all the context and even dedicating your life for an insane amount of money, let me add. Oh, yeah, to propagandize about particular past events and reintroduce them as contextualization for modern racist movements. Like that's very different.

SPEAKER_03 43:18

I do think that Stryker received the appropriate end for what he did. And and and like I I look at the world we live in today, right? And there's obviously a continuity between the crimes of the past and the crimes of the present. Absolutely. And you know, the same people that defend slavery or the Confederacy in the South are also, and I'm gonna say something. I'm sorry for all the liberals in the audience, the genocide in Gaza, they are literally the same people. The like, you know, the Christian Zionism of America is firmly rooted in the same churches that fought segregation. Absolutely. Or firmly excuse me. FOD desegregation. And who who supported the Ku Klux Klan? Who, you know, are against solving climate change. Who are like all of these major crises are all linked into, and I hate for people, you know, I know people get tired of the omni cause idea, but all of these things are actually firmly intertwined. Yeah, I mean, it's true though.

SPEAKER_02 44:23

It's literally just that's intersectionality. Like it's yeah, it's not, you know, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 44:28

And the racial bribe is is the is the currency. That's the cultural currency of like telling a white poor Southerner why you're on the same side as Elon Musk because you're white.

SPEAKER_02 44:40

No, I mean it's it's a very similar phenomenon that you see in the Confederate South than what's happening today, frankly. I mean, with exactly that, you know, Musk defenders and billionaire and trillionaire now, Jesus fucking Christ, defenders. But um, but yeah, no, it's it's very interesting because there's there's, you know, one thing that also I think that a lot of like anti-lost cause historiography doesn't really get into, and it's sort of unfortunate, are the sort of interpersonal relations between enslaved people, uh, you know, slavers, and like, you know, uh, I guess what they would have called white trash, right? Sort of like poor white southerners before the Civil War, because there's some very interesting uh social dynamics kind of at play there. There's a book about this that was published pretty recently called Masterless Men, um, which is okay. I it kind of it's sort of, I don't know, I uh it's a great piece of scholarship, but it basically argues that the ties between poor white southerners and like enslaved people was like stronger than has been sort of traditionally portrayed, uh, which I'm not sure I like entirely agree with with all their conclusions, but it's a it's for sure worth reading. It's like an excellent, you know, it's a really cool book, a lot of cool sources in there. But one thing that's sort of interesting about kind of these interpersonal dynamics, and again, you see it in like Gone with the Wind, and you see it in Lost Cross Histories as a defense of slavery. But you know, when you think about it for five seconds, it's like, oh, that's a very interesting, complex, sort of hierarchical situation that honestly, like when you look at that from the sort of perspective of black liberation, that's like really, really interesting. But anyway, where you sort of see how enslaved people on like big plantations, people who were enslaved to like wealthy, high status families, particularly who worked kind of with the family and like raised the children and worked in the house, really looked down their noses at the poor, quote unquote, white trash of their communities. Right. And like and and they actually saw themselves as being better than the poor white people. And uh and and so that's like a very interesting dynamic. And it's like not hard to see how, you know, a poor white person hearing Confederate propaganda would just be like, they were just being like, they're gonna like free all the blacks. And and you're here saying, like, well, you know, from where I'm sitting on my poor little farmstead where I can barely feed my family, you know, the enslaved people at the plantation who work in the house have it better than me. Like they eat better than me. So like if they're free, like, oh, well, that's just like a uh of the world turned upside down. I mean, that's just completely unacceptable. Fucking end times, you know what I mean? Like that that can't be allowed to happen. So I'm gonna go fight for the South and be this enthusiastic supporter of white supremacy and slavery, even though I don't economically benefit from it. And it's very similar thing, I think, with like, you know, certainly these Musk defenders, these billionaires, these capitalist defenders who particularly I think this happens in like in the Western world, in the global north, in the Western world, in these high-income countries where there's an aristocracy of labor, you know, and I've got I've got in trouble for talking about this, but there just is. There's an aristocracy of labor. Working class people in the global north have it much, much, much, much, much better than most people in the global south. And those crumbs that they get from the capitalist class are what basically is their entire reason for defending global imperialism, for defending genocide, for dep defending the literally, unironically, hundreds of millions dead from capitalism and the fucking mountains of bodies that capitalism fucking stacks every single fucking year. It's like, well, I got my two-day shippings, two-day shipping, and I can drive my Ford F-250 and I can eat meat with every fucking meal. And so, like, actually, capitalism is great. Like, it's the same exact reasoning.

SPEAKER_05 48:22

I and also like the the uh when you're talking about the poor person in the south who doesn't want to see like, you know, the person who's you know lower than them on the on the rung get up to their point. That is also something you can see very much in the sort of voting demographics of the Nazi Party in Germany in the elections there. You can see how like the yeah, the middle class, like uh in Germany, of course, uh like disproportionately voted for for the Nazi Party, like in terms of numbers. And that you can kind of see like their motivation for voting in that uh direction or in that way being, you know, I can't let these like you know, the lefties, you know, let these guys below me get to my position because that's gonna cost me because I'm gonna have to share all my shit with those people.

SPEAKER_06 49:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 49:03

And of course, I also don't like the people at the top because I'm below them. So and the Nazis have this like sort of you know appeal to the middle class. They're going to not necessarily be the, you know, with the aristocracy and all these like big business guys. Of course, they ended up being that, but that's how they kind of like portray themselves, and and that sort of thing appeals to them. It's I think it's a recurring thing, uh, with the guys who kind of find themselves squeezed between the two two of them being like, well, I'm just gonna become a reactionary.

SPEAKER_02 49:31

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's the it's the you know, it's the way power operates and it's the way hierarchy, I think. I think there's something fundamental about the way that hierarchy operates, uh, which is why we need to destroy it completely. So, you know.

SPEAKER_01 49:44

Yeah, this show strongly disagrees with the radical opinions of uh our guest. We believe you can reform out of uh hierarchy, even maybe you shouldn't reform out of hierarchy. Yeah, maybe, yeah, maybe maybe hierarchy good, actually. Have you seen lobsters? There's lobster. What what what did that fucking old like Benzos guy say? Like lobster hierarchy is very natural. We are a centrist podcast. Just for context, Andrew, like this is a thing we do because like obviously all of us are fucking but like there's a joke in the reaction pod where we're like, no, we are centrists. That's the just the reference, so you're not weirded out. No, no, no. Inside joke thing. I got the joke that we always do. Yeah. Apologies.

SPEAKER_02 50:27

Everything I said was an elaborate joke, by the way. Yeah, exactly. We love Hitler.

SPEAKER_01 50:33

Uh we are we are European centrists.

SPEAKER_05 50:35

Hitler is amazing. I voted for three times, and I'm not even American. Yeah. Uh by the way, uh, speaking of gradual, slow progress and such, if you had the ability to do so, would you give John Brown a nuke?

SPEAKER_03 50:49

Like you had a time machine, you have to time machine in the other days. Yeah, why not? That that makes me want to like ask you a question. Like, obviously, we talk about the lost cause in this like context of you know Confederate nostalgia. It was only four years. Yeah. And I'm reminded in my in my history studies of the Revolutionary War that like over 20% of Americans were loyalists to the British Crown. Yeah. Right. So, you know, I'm a Northeasterner, so I you I, you know, Pennsylvanian, fellow Pennsylvanian. I heard, you know, I you mentioned that you worked at Gettysburg national uh uh battlefield. And so I I don't see a lot of like loyalist nostalgia, right? I don't see a lot of people marching around in red coats and and I don't see statues to, you know, uh Benedict Arnold, right? Like there it the idea of loyalism is completely annihilated in the American memory, even though the percentage of the country that was a loyalist is about the same as the percentage of the country that was a dedicated Confederate. Yeah, that's great. So what we're really talking about is there is their continual utility for the Confederate nostalgia. Yeah. Right? That is that is it continues to provide water for, as you guys were saying, like hierarchy and control, you know, a racial bribe, uh, the idea that it prevents you know solidarity, a multi, multi, you know, racial working class coalition. And so like giving John Brown a nuke is another way of saying, would you give me a nuke? Serious on the camera, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:22

Um uh no, I think that's a great that's a great point. Yeah, no, well, it's interesting about the loyalists because they, I mean, obviously a lot of the loyalists left the country. That's sort of the other sort of aspect of it. It would be like, you know, if like when a lot of the loyalists moved to to Canada, you know, Nova Scotia and all these places, it would be like if the Confederates, and you know, some of them did go to Brazil and stuff, you know, they could be Confederales of the of Latin America, right? Yeah, the Confederales, exactly. Uh, but but yeah, it would be like if like most Confederates just moved to Brazil. You know what I mean? So there's sort of an aspect of that. But no, I mean I think you're absolutely right that it's like there is a reason that these things stick around. And I think that that you that you're right on the money. I mean, it's like and and I think that like, you know, one thing that you filthy communists need to understand me and like the uh anti-racist white man who would have voted for Obama, you know, three times if I could, is yeah, yeah. Also how central race is to all this. Like, and I know it's not fashionable to say since it's not 2020 anymore, but like, you know, it really is the biggest fucking deal, like ever, in terms of like the Confederate. Like, this is like absolutely fundamental. And uh and certainly, you know, the boxes. Yeah, it takes all the boxes, and it's like, yeah, that's that's kind of just the the sort of the basic sort of function. And yeah, of course, race has like a class, you know, has a has a fun the the reason race as a modern sense exists is you know, whatever. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 53:42

The skin color is the stigma, it attaches a class identity to it, yeah, right. Yeah, like that is part, I mean, you know, I'm just quoting Martin Luther King Jr. when he's when he says that, right? Like after slavery, there wasn't an economic base granted to the newly freed slaves. The the promise of 40 acres and a mule never arose, but we did do that for whites, the peasants from Europe. I'm still quoting Martin Luther King Jr. Like came to America from, you know, say Serbia, and they were given they were given like land from just displaced indigenous populations. They were given farm agents and welfare. They were, you know, we founded our uh agricultural colleges around the country. That's something that Abraham Lincoln also did, right? After as he was freeing the slaves, he was also handing out land to white people and setting up the institutions of you know the racial wealth gap. And, you know, the the the Oregon territory was closed off to black people. So they were freed, but they were freed in the sense of being, you know, free to the winds and rains of heaven, as as M LK would put it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:51

Yeah. Thank you for quoting uh noted conservative Martin Luther King. That was that yeah, that's good.

SPEAKER_01 54:55

No, proud liberal, proud liberty.

SPEAKER_03 54:57

Proud liberal, Martin Luther King. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:00

Never talked about class, only race, 100% of the time.

SPEAKER_03 55:03

I think, I think what I'm trying to say really is race and class are one and the same in America, right? Like they are, they have been unified, and and black people and people of color were set in a position of hyper-exploitation where the very system is designed to keep them in that position, economic position. And the idea of like, you know, race and class is 100% intermixed. And like if you look at the history of the Communist Party in the US, like in the 30s, they had communists from the Black Belt in the Deep South that were on the presidential ticket. It's always been, you know, the idea of racism is a socialist idea, like, you know, describing the phenomenon we're we're talking about. That comes from the left. Yeah. Like fighting against this is a firm political, it has a context that continues to this day. Yeah, right. And the solution is, as we've always said, a multi-cl, you know, multi-racial working class movement, which I hope we're seeing the green shoots of right now. You know, as we record this, it's Tuesday, you know, June 23rd, uh, which is primary day in New York City, and we see, you know, some DSA candidates, black women, women of color running for power and trying to disrupt the kind of status quo of American politics. And hopefully we'll see some sort of movement in in that direction. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_05 56:26

Right on.

SPEAKER_03 56:26

They're gonna hit the world communism button any day.

SPEAKER_05 56:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:29

If you'd allow me, there's a certain level of like hypocrisy that usually comes from like uh uh leftist uh analysts or anti-fascists in general from, for example, Europe and I believe generally internationally. Whenever we look at uh the specific relationship between uh the modern American right and the uh Confederate movement, we like to we like to look at it and say, like, hey, the Americans have so many choices when it comes to uh uh their far right identifying with any particular past movement, or even one could say uh they have a choice to not identify with any past quote unquote right wing movement whenever they are trying to develop a new reactionary sort of sentiment or argument about the direction that the United States uh can take. The reason I'm calling it i uh semi-hypocritical is because usually then you know they say, Oh, the Americans are so exceptionalist in their view of the world and themselves, that the only old traditional way of life where our people truly uh defended uh everything that they wanted to represent in their very American exceptionalist way. They have to pick the Confederacy because they arguably have nothing else to refer back to. Exactly. But but I find it to be to be relatively hypocritical from academics or even anti-fascists from all over the world when referring to that very particular American uh experience. Because sure, yes, it is American exceptionalist, and but rarely will an American uh I mean rarely will an American successfully be able to, for example, refer to Italian fascism or Spanish fascism or or even German fascism uh while uh you know still keeping the numbers of followers as high as if he would uh when he was referring to uh, for example, Confederate racism. Uh but then again the the reason it's hypocritical is because we here in Europe and everywhere else as well do the same thing. Like like whenever we are building up a s a particular reactionary movement, it is very easy to score political points and not only also to recruit uh people that are like I g I guess passionate about certain periods of time and uh sometimes even like uh really relate to uh reactionary forces from particular periods of time, and we usually refer to uh one or the other national projects same usually, thank God, failed reactionary past as a way to bring everybody into the fault, etc. etc. The only thing I'm trying to say here uh in particular is uh to our international audience is very often again to f to finish up, we we point at the Americans who were like, why when you're building up the American right, do you have to constantly refer back to uh a failed experiment? Exactly, exact, exactly. While we like in Europe and everywhere else do the same shit.

SPEAKER_05 59:38

The Norwegians are way worse, dude. The fucking like Norwegian Nazis refer to like the fucking like Middle Ages. Like no, that's that's way worse. Yeah, it's got it's there's like zero connection in a way, it makes more sense, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 59:50

We don't even have yeah, yeah, we did the which is kind of a compliment to an extent. Yeah, yeah, to an extent is like the the further back like the reference point is, yeah, the further back the reference point is, the less fucked up shit in the rec in recent history, uh your let's say group of people, even though that's metaphysical fucking garbage, but still had that.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:11

One of the things I've noticed is that you have this uh consistent theme in your output, uh or maybe it's a principle of yours, which is uh a valid concern for the biosphere, for you know the the sixth, I guess, human level great extinction that we're facing right now from human activity. And of course I agree with you completely. When you confronted Matt Walsh's so-called history video on slavery, you connected his output to the Daily Wire's funders, the fossil fuel lobby, and you pointed that all this his culture war bullshit is a distraction. Do you think that we, as in those people that are not reactionary, aren't paying enough attention to or not bringing enough attention to climate change, the extinction, and the unsustainability of our you know, economic system?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:01

Excuse you, I'm an eco-fascist, okay? Some of us do talk about the environment. Oh God, you call me.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:09

Yeah, no, I just need to say uh preserve the environment for for the white race. Uh yeah, I mean, well, yeah, Mike. That's a sound bites. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:17

Only Aryan trees. Only Aryan trees for for Nordic uh for Nordic grass, okay?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:24

Nordic points only. Yeah, finally I found my people. Uh no, I mean it's uh yeah, man. I mean, Mike, I think it's hard to argue that anybody is I mean, I think the the left is is paying some attention to climate catastrophe and the sixth mass extinction, and and certainly that's like you know, very admirable. But I think it's hard to argue that anyone is paying nearly enough attention to what is happening with the ecological collapse that has like essentially already happened. I mean it's underway, but it's like yes, like it's happened. It's like kind of done. Uh or at least it's like, you know, we're in kind of like, okay, you know, brace for impact. We're bracing for impact right now.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:05

So wowdy coyote, we're off the cliff. You know, you know, there's dust beneath our feet, but you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:10

When it comes to the threat, when it comes to the threat, it is a state of war, which I think sure is illegal for me to even say, but it is.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:17

I mean, I I one thing that I think it's like, again, it's like hard to it's hard because people don't necessarily see it in their day-to-day lives, I think it's easy to ignore. And I also think that because people are certainly, you know, in the states and where I live, I think people are so kind of disconnected from the land and the seasons and the you know, the plants and animals that are around them. And there's you could take this to a reactionary place where it's like back to the land, and like that's not what I'm advocating for at all. But like there's there's such a thing as like plant blindness, you know what I mean? Where it's like people don't know, they like can't tell you the species of plants that grow in their neighborhood, right? They don't know which are invasive and which are native, they don't know how the ecosystem is changing around them because they don't they've they're they're blind to this stuff, they have no understanding of ecological science at all, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:03:14

Well, and that's where I'm gonna defend the state for a second. We can just simply use coercion to not allow them to use invasive plants or species. And you know what I mean? Like in America, we have a problem with invasive species because we brought over a bunch of animals that were in Shakespeare's plays.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:30

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, yeah, this yeah, all of this stuff has all of this stuff is is is our fault as humans and particularly as imperialist scum. Like it's imperialism and colonialism that that started these problems.

SPEAKER_06 1:03:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:44

But uh, but yeah, so essentially, you know, so I think because people have kind of no idea what they're even looking at when they see the changes around them or the extreme and erratic weather, you know, you can kind of be like, oh, it's like, you know, whatever, it's like fucking 5,000 degrees in London right now and be like, oh, climate change. But like Paris is like on fire, yeah. But like do you really like, you know, but but you can if you kind of know what to look for, you see these changes happening every single day. And you can just sort of look out the window and fucking see it. And people, but people don't know what they're looking at, and it's easy to ignore. And when you get your food from the fucking grocery store and you're not dependent on I mean, you are dependent on on the on the biosphere in the land. You just like don't know that you are. And again, I'm not saying that we all need to become fucking chicken farmers and like have our, you know what I mean? Like, but you know, I'm what I would love is, you know, an eco-socialist kind of solar punk future.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:31

Well, there is there's low-hanging fruit, right? Like we can make easy decisions or changes in our built environment, in our infrastructure, absolutely, and the way we, you know, do things like generating electricity that would significantly reduce impacts. Oh, absolutely. You know, the vast majority of the fossil fuel impact is from digging up the fuels. I think a lot of people don't understand the the systems that exist around us and the context of like of what like oil means when we're burning 20 billion you know, 20 million barrels of oil a day. Yeah. What that looks like as far as extraction versus you know, using solar panels, wind farms, or other alternative energy systems, and that gets us the same product at the end, and they're perfectly substitutable. Electricity out of your outlet, and the decision to go with the fossil fuel industry, the petty corruption, the venal corruption of only a few billionaires, and the level of damage that's being done that could be mitigated if we changed that with intention, yeah, and how it would improve our lives and so many other you know, positive externalities, cleaner air, less respiratory illnesses, less pollution in general. Like there's so many knock on effects, less impacts on the land itself. It is such low hanging fruit, and the irrationality of sticking to the same path is what I think is like so despairing for so many people.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:55

No, absolutely. It's uh I mean, you know, it's completely irrational, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:58

That that's why like reactionary. Commentators and content creators just to attach to the basic premise of uh the show. 99% of the time are so powerful when it comes to dissuading people from looking at this state of war that we find ourselves in when it comes to potentially preserving our environment, which is directly linked to the length of our lifespan or the lifespan of our species as a whole. That's why they're very powerful in this particular issue because you know it's it's it's very different when I'm when I'm like preaching into your ears to concentrate on the immigrant that's start or trying to annihilate your life when it's the uh ethnic minority, the one that you know believes in a different god than yours, etc. etc. While you feel like you're during peacetime, versus while there is very direct and most importantly identifiable threats coming at you from place A, place B, place C. Just to contextualize, I guess, we are living under constant uh violent bombardment. But this bombardment, due to its long-term effect on on the way uh our ecosystem works, yeah, like the slow creeping nature of it, yeah. The slow creeping nature of this bombardment allows a reactionary to uh to introduce uh alternative uh ways of viewing your particular problems because of the very very fact that you do not uh identify the extreme nature of your problem due to its slow creeping nature.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:35

And it's only gonna get worse, yeah. Yeah, because the the the climate refugees are now they're not, you know, the climate part gets dropped and it's just refugees and immigrants, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:44

I mean, there have been climate refugees. What's super scared too? Yeah, coming. I mean, you know, I mean, and there have been climate refugees coming into to Europe and America for years at this point. I mean, it's like you know, it's it's I mean, the you know, I mean, like the uh part of the rise of Donald Trump, you know, was sort of this anti-immigrant sentiment because it increased immigration from Latin America because of crop failures, because of blights, because of climatic uh, you know, uh changes brought about by human industrial activity. So like this has already happened, you know, it's already happening. It's sort of like, and and people kind of think of it as this sort of far-off future. And again, and again, like I fucking live in New Orleans, y'all. It's like this is like happening every single fucking day, you know?

SPEAKER_06 1:08:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:25

Um and you know, and actually just to sort of tie it, uh, to kind of like tie it back to the history stuff and like you kind of ask how sort of like uh, you know, that it's been kind of cropping up, sort of environmental issues have been cropping up in my content more and more. And and certainly I know that uh that it sort of there's some people out there who would like like nothing more than me to shove a fuck up about it and just be funny simple nor means. Uh but uh but this is I think the reason that I focus, and I don't think I would like focus on it to the detriment of anything else. I connected and I and I sort of included in my analysis uh ecological history and ecological issues is because I think it's like it's a greatly overlooked aspect of history. I think we focus on human society and just humanity in general, sort of to the exclusion of the rest of the life on this planet, you know, which is like at the end of the day, not biologically separate from humanity and from human society. And and sort of we look at American history in particular, like you really can't understand imperialism and American colonialism without understanding the fur trade, without understanding the meat industry, without understanding the fossil fuel industry, and how this drove extraction and how this drove expansion, and how the different land management practices of particularly colonial people and indigenous people basically characterized the entire frontier period of United States history. And I think that's like a crucial part of it that, again, even a lot of like awesome-based leftist history leaves out because they don't think about this stuff because they never think about non-human life. Like they just don't think about it. You know, it's like outside of their their uh their realm of interest. And uh, you know, and that's fine. It's not like, you know, not everything has to be this like super woke eco-socialist, you know, you know, insufferable what I mean, analysis. But like Yeah, but there's a there's a hole there that there might be like an opportunity for us, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:19

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's an opportunity for us to like actually uh you know push things there. There's there's maybe like I think more people are becoming aware we're seeing this happening more, and there's an opportunity to connect it to people's real lives with you know, like the as you mentioned, the fucking heat waves in Europe that are devastating. Luckily, I'm like literally at the edge of it in like Trondheim, Norway, so like I'm not feeling it, but like a lot of people are suffering right now. Like the elderly are like at really at risk, that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:46

Like it's it's uh the same way we all the time like, for example, now it's relatively mainstream, thank God, to contextualize economic sanctions as an act of war. So you're like, okay, bombs per month can kill 72,000 people, but sanctions can kill 50,000 people. Therefore, if you're really anti-war, you should also be anti-sanctions that the general population suffer for whether you disagree or agree, the actions of uh the particular government or the actions of the government that is pretending that those guys are bad guys, so uh we're gonna sanction them, etc. etc. In the same manner and form, it is so important, both for, for example, historical uh anti-fascist analysts or analysts of the modern reactionary movement of or modern imperialism to contextualize the actions of reaction with environmental impact in the same way, shape, and form. Yes, because sure it's not as bombastic and cinematic as people losing their arms and limbs, but in the long term, statistically, uh it does cause as much harm, if not unfortunately, even more.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:56

Yeah, no, absolutely. That's why I really liked uh of course in the like Matt Walsh video, you literally were basically saying, like, yeah, no, you got blood, the blood of like, you know, I don't know what how many people, but like you got the blood of a lot of people on your hands, Matt Walsh. Like, and of course he belongs in person. I agree.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:13

Yeah, yeah, no, well said, Hugo. Well said. I think what I'm hearing here is we can link the past to the present by giving Ted Kaczynski's ghost a nuke.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:24

By giving Ted Kaczynski das kapital.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:27

Yeah, yeah. I was gonna say, yeah, no, like giving Ted Kaczynski an education and some community.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:34

No, of course, of course, of course.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:36

It's so funny. Uh Mike, I actually was uh I've been thinking about for a while doing uh uh mainly Ted Kaczynski video. That would be so funny.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:44

Woke Ted Kaczynski would kill.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:46

You yeah, you referenced him in like a recent one, didn't you? I was memeing, but I'm not a I'm not a Ted Kaczynski memer normally.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:53

Yeah, excuse me. No, no, I know, I know, I know, I know. It's always so funny you watch the the kind of the poppy, you know, whatever true crime videos about Ted Kaczynski, and they're always just like, you know, uh his ideas were great, his methods were terrible, and my my take on it would basically be, no, his ideas sucked.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:12

I mean, uh what what I what I would say, what I would say is like I, you know, in my community on Twitch and in my streams, I'm you know an anti-Doomer, right? So maybe you and I can have a debate here because I see this as a continu like there is no point of no return. It's always a a reality of mitigation. Like we've committed so many ecological crimes that they've even been forgotten, right? In the history of our species. And and yeah, but you don't say it. Right. But like, you know, okay, a lot of failures have taken place. We're way behind the curve, but there's still going to be marginal species and marginal habitats and and cities and communities that we can actually save with action. Because I worry about the the problem of despair, right? The problem of kind of apathy where doomerism is actually liberalism, where it's like, I might as well just give in to hedonism, I might as well take the grill pill because everything's lost. And I think that that message is like obviously not what you're saying, but it's a concern of mine. Because I have a lot of people come to me and say, Why are you so optimistic? Why are you not doomer? What's the point? It's because I, you know, first of all, I believe that we can win, and I believe we will win, but also, even if it's behind the curve of what we would want ideally, it's still plausible. And when I look at some places like New Orleans, I worry about, you know, that city every single year, hurricane season comes around, and it might be the year that the hypercane hits New Orleans and levels it, you know. Florida, you know, we could have another hypercane. Yeah, if it has the wrong track, it could destroy the infrastructure of literally millions of people. You know, it's one bad season away from the consequences coming due. And so I don't know if I was rambling there. I'm sorry for rambling, but like I feel like the fight is imminent and we have to believe we can win in order to fight.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:18

No, absolutely. No, I I agree with you, Mike. I mean, it's it's interesting because people, I think, watch the videos where I bring up ecological issues and think that I'm being a doomer or think that I'm being hopeless. And uh I don't think that's true at all. First of all, like, you know, it's it's and I'm not saying this is I'm not saying this is you, but but I am like real fucking sick and tired of uh people whose entire political engagement is sitting on their couch and complaining, calling me a doomer when I fucking am like heavily involved in environmental activism and have been for years. You know what I mean? Like it's like if I if I thought there was no hope, I like would not invest a significant amount of my time, energy, and treasure into like actual IRL, you know, activism. Um but I think like kind of the way that I sort of portray these issues is I think not to be a doomer, but with an appropriate amount of grief and urgency and with an appropriate amount of gravity for what actually has happened and urgency. There is there is, I think, a bit of a problem. And I'm not saying I think both approaches work on different people, and both approaches are valuable, but I get frustrated with a lot of uh climate science communicators, with a lot of like climate activism communicators who always seem to end their you know essays or videos or whatever it is with like, but here's how you can help, but here's the good news, but here's the you know, here's how the hope and it's like you know, I always uh think of the third act of Schindler's List, right? Most harrowing Holocaust movie ever. And then Spielberg just can't fucking resist to do like the kid. And it's like, no, it's like, no, dude. Like, like, can we not just like sit in this grief for a second? Can we not just like feel this terror and this like rage for just a fucking second? Does everything have to be this like have a positive spin on it? And like, and and I think there's while there's absolutely a I think you're 1000% spot on, Mike, about how Dumerism encourages complacency. But I also think there's very much a thing called toxic positivity. And I think that that that hope without evidence, hope without just this vague, like, here's what you can do for help, also encourages complacency. It encourages an action because it's like, well, somebody's got this. There's like changes being made. And like the fact is, like, I agree. I think this is like like every tenth of a degree of warmth is like worth fighting for. Every single life is worth fighting for, right? And I mean, you look at the activism that I do, it's like, you know, I'm about saving individual lives. Like my shit is like I do small scale shit that I can actually make a difference that will actually like save somebody's life, or like shut down like a farm somewhere. You know what I mean? Like shut down one business or like stop one business from doing business with like some fucking horrible vampiric, you know, whatever factory farm or fucking oil corporation or whatever. You know, just these small manageable things. Because every one of those fights is like worth having.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:20

I mean, yeah, like John Brown wasn't, you know, intending to overthrow the entire Confederacy, right? Like, like he was he was starting one thing. One could say he was even an adventurist, yeah. Well, he was an insurrection against America.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:32

I just I know I just to be very very clear, like Yeah, it was an insurrection against America, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:37

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, of course, yeah, yeah. Before before the Confederacy, of course, yeah. Before, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:42

Yeah, yeah. Well, just let me let me just say this for our our non-American history knowers. But John Brown was uh an insurrectionist. He was a you know radical abolitionist who fought in you know conflicts in what we call bleeding Kansas, which was the like proto-Civil War where you know we had this law that passed that said you vote for whether your state will be slave or free. And that led to pro-slavery forces going into Kansas and starting to attack the anti-slavery population, which led to the abolitionists sending their own units, many of them led by John Brown, to fight back against the pro-slavery scallywags. And ultimately, the the the you know, the anti-slavery forces in a preview of the Civil War won. And John Brown, you know, coming off that triumph, he decided that he wanted to lead an insurrection against slavery and lead a like guerrilla-style war against slavery and you know, in the South. Yeah. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:45

Yes, basically stalked the stalked the, I guess, like the Civil War or the potentially Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:51

And in Harper's Ferry and now West Virginia, then Virginia. Yeah, um, he tried to seize a federal armory and you know, arm slaves and then lead to that servile insurrection. But he was ultimately, unfortunately, he failed, and he was executed by and the and the colonel that was sent, I believe, was Robert E. Lee, under the flag of the United States of America.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:14

Yeah, it was Robert E. Lee and uh and Jeb Stewart were among the officers.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:21

No, no, not cinematic universe, just cinematic universe. Ten years later, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:26

Uh but yeah, just one more thing about the about the climate stuff. I think there's sort of like uh, you know, I I I kind of I I think of uh V for Vendetta, you know, the difference between the film adaptation and the uh and the book, the Alan Moore uh graphic novel was like uh there's kind of an interesting part where whatever V like hijacks all the TVs in Britain, and in the movie he's just like, you know, hello, people of England, you too can help. Like you can rise up and and defeat this great evil, and it's like this inspiring montage, and everybody's just like, yes, I will rise up and fight. And then the book, he kind of just he turns to the people of England and he says, What the fuck is wrong with you? How could you let this happen? What the fuck, you complacent fucking assholes. Like, what the fuck? And he and like that is, I think, also sort of a bit of a key part of ecological collapse that we need to frankly fucking have with people in wealthy countries, which is just like this is kind of your fucking fault. Like you allow this to happen every single fucking day. And like, you know, and and what are we gonna fucking pretend because it's not good PR that that's like not the fucking case when it very clearly is. And I think like, you know, I don't know. I think like while, you know, I think a little bit of tough love is pretty necessary in something this fucking dire and this much of an existential fucking Oh, I believe in shame.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:43

I'm Catholic, so I I get it. There you go.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

unknown 1:21:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:49

Climate shaming, but make it sexy. To be honest and to be like the uh centrist in the room, all of you are correct. When you are pitching an idea as the local marketing guy or what in my ancient past, selling out selling nuclear missiles to children. Okay, it wasn't that bad. But genuinely, as somebody with a formal background and basically doing propaganda, be it political propaganda or selling a particular commodity, uh, very often people, even in like hardcore organizations uh that they try to pitch a particular ideological line, uh tend to tend to focus more on principle and less on practicality, which uh on paper is supposed to be like very, very, very, very good. Uh but in reality it it ignores the different uh levels and different stages of life that most of your let's call it audience might be currently in. So while you know the V for Vendetta guy in the you know the film talks through a TV screen and saying, let's all rile up, and while he in the book says, Yo, what the fuck is wrong with you? I believe that the pitch that Mike gave, the pitch that Andrew gave, the pitch that the uh movie V for Vendetta gave, the pitch that uh book V for Vendetta gave, and many, many, many other different approaches towards riling up different people with different sentiments, different backgrounds, different material conditions need to hear the better the message will be received. Absolutely. It's funnels, it's it's propaganda mechanisms, it's marketing, it's whatever the fuck you want to call it. And too many people, I'm not saying anybody in this room, quite to the contrary, I'm very proud of about the conversation that we can have. Too many people hyperfocus on what they uh ironically, due to their lived experience, consider to be something that others want to hear, which is usually something that they themselves want to hear. That's why it's it's it's it's important to bring about the message that you would want to hear towards others. But I I uh very much vehemently uh subscribe to this because it is extremely difficult to give another sort of let's say a pitch about a particular issue and hope and even encourage comrades that that that agree with you on a particular issue to also pitch it, pitch the the same goal from their particular lived experience and from their particular, let's say, yeah, some woke or whatever voice. Yeah, right? That that is how we create that is how we create a truly uh diverse multifrontal approach towards trying to inform people to go towards the the same goal to an extent, etc. etc. etc. etc. But but it we need to while we are doing it, and this is where I will agree with all of us, but specifically Andrew, especially, we as we're building a funnel, as you're building a funnel, as you're building a a pitch, doesn't matter where you whether you're selling Coca-Cola or the end of our planet. I'm sorry that it sounds like this, but it genuinely doesn't. You need to always remember who is at the top of the fucking funnel, who is oh, sorry, in this case at the bottom of the funnel, and the particular voice that is converting people from just guys that have very strong opinions to people that act, okay? People that act, people that organize, and so on. Yeah, or we all need to be quote unquote patriots of that particular part off the funnel that is converting them into that.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:33

Yeah, you gotta have strong convictions, you gotta stick to your guns. We do and keep them, yeah, keep them going down the funnel, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:39

All the time, all the time, all the time. But especially, especially inside of the funnel, there's always gonna be like certain levels of of uh let's say disagreement because not all uh pitches can uh coexist, but all pitches have to coexist with the bottom of the funnel. They have to. We all have to agree on what we want the result to be, otherwise it doesn't work. So Andrew's pitch of like maybe the the maybe our species and other species, of course, not going extinct. Uh maybe that's the bottom of the funnel that all of us are supposed to be directing people in, either from the perspective of organization, from the perspective of history, from the perspective of lived intersectionalist experience, from the perspective of oh my god, the tomato now tastes like water, or even from the perspective of like, what the fuck, man? Like, I don't want to live in an under an AC all the time.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:32

All of it should go down. Okay, so so taking it a little bit back to history, Andrew. Uh what do you think of like the sort of the fake history or like the sort of pseudo history like ecosystem on YouTube, social media, etc.? Because that's something that both me and you, you know, engage with to an extent. Like Matt Walsh, Prager U, you got like uh, you know, these like small cottage industry things like the I've got my nemesis, what a vaultist. Oh, sure. There's all these guys. Are you familiar with them? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah. So you know you know his his his deal.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:06

Or give us more niche guys, like like somebody that's like your favorite, like uh zoo animal.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:12

Uh I mean, you know, hey, look, look, look. I I funny, but yeah. What a faultist, I I you know, yeah. I always appreciate a good weirdo. I can I and I will never and you know, weirdos give life meaning, and so like in that sense, I like him a lot.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:27

Yeah, you know Elon Musk, like literally like keeps repping him, like keeps posting his podcast, and like, yeah, no, he's oh, he's Elon Musk's favorite historian.

SPEAKER_06 1:27:35

No joke.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:36

I I was I was freaking the fuck out when that was happening because I've been like talking to him since like fucking twenty nineteen or some shit, or twenty twenty one or whatever. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:44

He's one of the most influential historians on the planet, which is so bad. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:49

When you think about it, because he's influenced. You felt the same way I did when uh when Zoran was like, Hey, I like sewer socialism, and I've been like, I've been taking that for seven years.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:58

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um yeah, no, I think it's like, you know, I think YouTube is I mean, really, you know, I what I think about the ecosystem of fake history on YouTube is that like it is kind of nothing new, right? I mean, there have been whatever. I mean, you know, there well who was that fucking one Nazi Frederick that you made a fucking video about the Crusades.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:16

Oh, uh Paxtube?

SPEAKER_02 1:28:18

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like that fucking guy.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:20

You know, like there have been, you know, shitty Catholic apologists made a dude who was too anti-Semitic for his like paradox map game community, so he got kicked out of it. Like, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:30

Uh, but you know, there have been shitty Catholic apologists making pro-Crusade histories for fucking, you know, uh decades, right, in academia, or not in academia, but just in like pop history and just putting shit out in Barnes and Noble or whatever.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:41

Yeah, yeah, pop, yeah, just like self-published and shit like that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:44

Yeah, we need to do a religious holy order tier list. That video would kill. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:49

Yeah, yeah, there you go. And I'm sure that guy like has just bought like two of those fucking books on Amazon and just based his entire fucking argument on that shit. And like similar thing with Matt Walsh with, you know, I just made a video about his uh I mean, you know, he also uses fucking AI, like for sure, you know.

SPEAKER_05 1:29:07

But yes. So I mean, you know, his videos have like an AI marker now underneath them. It's awesome, like on YouTube. Yeah, yeah, you yeah. My ass.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:16

Oh, really? Oh, that's pretty funny. Oh, that's awesome. Um, well, good job. Good job, Freddie. Um, but yeah, so the but but you know, the one that he made about uh Native American history that uh that I made a video about recently. I mean, you know, he clearly just based it on one fucking book that yeah, probably fucking ChatGPT found for his research assistant because it's on speaking of Ted Jaczynski, it's on the Ted K archive uh online, which is actually, you know, it's actually a fucking awesome internet archive. It's green anarchist, it's like a critique of Ted Jaczynski and like a, you know, basically like a whole kind of ego anarchist uh sort of library uh that's fucking cool and people should check out. But yeah, clearly the fucking chat GPT just found that fucking one book that just happened to agree with, you know, that you put the prompt of just like find me a book that agrees that Native Americans are savages, you know. And then it was just like here, here's Lawrence Keeley's fucking book. Like this stuff, and and Lawrence Keeley obviously is like not nearly as bad as Walsh, right? He was just like probably kind of a conservative guy who like wrote a bit of a contrarian book in the 90s. Scholarship has obviously come a long way since then. But you know, people have been publishing that kind of shit for a very, very long time. And I think it's just a continuation of that kind of stuff. You know, I I certainly remember in five, six, seven years ago, uh, and I was very much guilty of this. I very much kind of participated in these conversations, but you know, five, six, seven years ago, there was a lot of hand-wringing among history and science communicators, among historians and scientists and academics who had kind of published uh public-facing educational outreach about like how much do we engage with this pseudo history and the pseudoscience and this like reactionary shit? Do we debate them? Do we respond to them? Do we just put out our own kind of good information and like whatever, whatever, whatever, and all this stuff? And and certainly kind of what I've kind of come to, and I think kind of my Matt Walsh videos are a good example of this, is like, it doesn't fucking matter. Like it actually like does not fucking matter. Whatever we do is not gonna have no impact, but it's gonna have a minimal impact. And the reason is that because the reason that people find these ideas appealing and increasingly appealing is is obviously because of the cost of living crisis, because of the omni crisis, because of, yes, because of systemic collapse, which always increases people's fear and their anger and their tribalism. And so they kind of reach out for these comforting narratives, this magical thinking and this authoritarian politics that offer them a sense of comfort. And really, sort of the best way to combat this misinformation is not necessarily to, you know, engage with it publicly or not, it's to improve the material conditions of the people who are falling for this stuff so that they have more trust in institutions and will actually listen to somebody with letters after their name instead of thinking that they're a stooge of the Jews or whatever. You know, so uh yeah, I mean that's that's kind of how I'm sort of thinking about it. Not to say that it's like useless to do what what Fred and what you've done and what I've done as far as sort of debunking some of this stuff. I think that can be very entertaining, energizing, and cathartic, especially for people who are kind of already on our side. And if we can kind of get them to like, yeah, just again, just like energize them and radicalize them against this stuff, that's very valuable. But I think like in terms of like, oh, should we engage with the people or not? Just like fucking Nazis have fucking access to the nuclear codes. Like whether we fucking engage with their it's like this doesn't fucking matter. Like it's like, yeah, I yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:32:41

I I no, I I completely agree with you. Like that's the position I've hold uh held the entire time. Like I've been making a bunch of these videos over time. Like, like the the actual quote unquote debunking, whatever the fuck, that has like barely any impact whatsoever. The only thing that it does is that it pumps the numbers up. And I the way I view it is that like you can use this as a means of like bringing people in potentially. So the name like Matt Walsh makes people click, they uh look at it, and then uh you can pitch them uh among the you know the stuff that they came there for, the quote-unquote debunking, which basically serves no actual practical purpose in terms of actually convincing people uh uh you know any sort of politics because it's literally just a spot playing to their preconceived notions. Uh-huh. But within that, you can teach them something else. Yeah, you can like sneak it in there. That's like that's my basically like modus or random. And I think it works like because obviously like your Matt Walsh videos have done gangbusters, and of course so have mine. And uh that brings in new ice onto like you know your your other stuff. And I think like that's like absolutely every now and then we kind of just gotta like go back to that fucking fucked up well, you know. And like and do that shit.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:52

And and draw a bunch of shit in a bucket, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:55

Yeah, yeah, like that be like, oh fuck, I gotta drink this now.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:59

All of that, but you guys also like make teachers as well. Uh what I mean by this is like I a lot of people like when you make your videos, you think you're talking to people the way like a teacher, uh you guys not, but like people think that you are talking to uh individuals that might have or hold reactionary opinions, and now you're trying to convert them. Uh you're more like uh, I don't know, professors that teach like PhD lessons to people that then go and interact with people that might have reactionary opinions, right? Yeah, teach teachers that teach it in high school or interact with people in high school, which is which is which is because like this is insanely niche. Like we forget we get like 1,500,000 views, right? But it's still like absurdly niche. What the fuck? Like a niche video about like uh Matt Walsh sharing his fucking uh baby underwear talking about uh Native Americans or or or black people, like it's a huge topic, but it is still niche. But those 1,500,000 people that watch you from Indonesia, from Germany, from Nigeria, from Argentina, from the United States, from Canada, they are the ones that later on write papers. 1% of them even write papers, make videos of their own, interact with people with their community, etc. etc. So you're yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:35:19

Yeah, I mean, I yeah, I've been contacted by people who uh who have like been motivated to look into uh historiography and like and like uh start to like understand history like you know in a deeper level and then of course start to like study this stuff. So yeah, I guess like that ha has an effect, but I I I do kind of still think like the the biggest thing is like you know, you can you can you can sneak up. That becomes a backbone. I'm telling you, I know, I know, I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah. No, I prep I appreciate how you go. Yeah, I appreciate that. You can sneak stuff in there, is what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:47

Yeah, I do feel like you got like obviously we have to show humility, so I'm gonna be the egomaniac and say that there is a reason why they're spending so much money to try to take up space on places like YouTube or Twitter or because it does matter, it does dictate discourse, it does give people kind of the sense of what the possible is. And you know, I don't buy into a lot of the idea of persuading the other side, but I do believe about you know giving form to some people's intuitions, right? About justice, about about goodness. Because I think that you know, maybe this is my lefty naive naivete, but I believe the majority of people are good hearted. And the majority oh yeah, centrist, the centrist avitate. The majority of people are good hearted. That's it's the liberal in me. Yeah, it's the liberal in me. And and and they are being given form. And like, you know, in order to preach to a choir, you need to have a congregation, right? And that is what we're building. We are building a an institution that stands against what they're spending literally billions of dollars to build, and then you make a video that gets just as many views, you are you're taking up space in the discourse, and you are actually providing you know super frustration for the other side, right? Yeah, it's why like they bought TikTok for God's sake, because they were mad that people were making videos about certain geopolitical conflicts and they couldn't control it. They're buying, you know, all sorts of of platforms and institutions because of the power of the grassroots, right? The power of our own ability to create community, to create content, to create discourse, and build alternative forms that are it's building, you know, you know, a Gramsci and I talk about this all the time, but a counter-hegemonic space, right? Where we're challenging their institutional hierarchical power by using these, you know, forms. And, you know, ultimately what I'm trying to say is bullying these guys more, putting them on the defensive, making them feel embarrassed to be fans of these people is actually good. You know, that is a that is an affirmative good. That's a good point.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:59

They watch the motherfuckers watch. That's also it's it's it's what's it called? What's it called? Sorry to put it up. It feels good, yeah. It does, but what's it called? Like when you you you're doing uh uh psychological warfare against your enemy. Yeah, it's it's psych warfare. Like, because they watch it, Matt watch blockers of videos. I'm gonna give my right ball sack that he absolutely does, and that has an effect.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:21

I did notice that like his citation is all actually cleaned up in the UFO War one, but I don't think that but I don't but I don't think that's our us. I don't think that's like I I think that's just like his intern figuring it out finally, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:34

It's hundreds of videos, but you are one of those hundreds of videos. That's the point. Yeah, the enemy notices they readjust. Sometimes they make mistakes while they readjust, okay? That's why you put T34s that are made of plastic not plastic of cardboard out in the middle of the fucking forest, th convincing the enemy that they should spend uh ten million dollars worth of uh predator missile to blow it up. Very allegory for YouTube videos, but still, it's I think it works.

SPEAKER_05 1:39:03

I'd rather Matt Walsh knottzend a predator missile to my home, but you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:07

Your sacrifice will be worth it.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:09

Yeah, yeah. Uh actually a Patriot missile is a as a ground-to-air uh interceptor missile, it wouldn't go to your home.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:15

The missile knows where it is.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:16

Okay, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:39:18

MQ D on Reaper uh with Hellfire missile, whatever the fuck. Yeah, there you go. Thank you. You're welcome.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:24

Well, actually.

SPEAKER_05 1:39:27

Okay, you got any uh more questions, Mike? Or do we want to do that?

SPEAKER_03 1:39:29

Oh yeah, I just wanted to, you know, you know, I know I thank you for giving us so much time, but just to bring it to contemporary politics, which I know you're interested in, what do you think about the way that some of the crown jewels of the civil rights movement that so many liberals and and Americans cling on to as an idea that we're a multiracial democracy, have been destroyed during this administration. And we're still like we are we haven't really reckoned with the consequences that places like New Orleans, which used to have, you know, representation or a political relevance to America because of the Voting Rights Act and and being guaranteed representation, that's been swept away by a super reactionary Supreme Court. Um and how do you think we deal with this kind of like what should our political response be if we get power again toward, you know, should we return to a liberal status quo? Should we aim for something different? And if this is outside your wheelhouse, I totally understand. But like, how do you reckon with the idea? Yeah, what do you what do you how do you reckon with the idea that we are facing this you know, second Jim Crow possibly, unless we immediately fight back?

SPEAKER_02 1:40:44

No, I I have a lot to say about it, actually. Um well this uh it's very close to home because one of the our candidates uh for uh our kind of like parish clerk, this guy named uh Calvin Duncan, uh was a he like just won in an election, a landslide. He got like 68% of the vote, and he is a formerly prisoned guy. He was in uh in prison for almost 30 years, I believe, for a crime he didn't commit and was exonerated and released. So it's a big deal. Like this black guy who is this victim of like carceral corruption and mismanagement, who like lost so much of his life uh uh to this like horrific racist system, uh getting elected to this prestigious uh position within Orleans Parish. Um and basically right after he was uh I'm gonna sort of simplify the issue here, but basically right after he was elected, Republicans in Baton Rouge attempted to eliminate his office. Oh. And it was a huge fucking deal. Right. And people were, and basically while we were sort of in the city, supporters of Calvin were just like, all right, well, he's just gonna, we're gonna swear him in anyway. And he's gonna just go to work anyway. And uh, and you know, eventually the Republicans sort of uh uh backed down to an extent, and you know, and he's kind of serving that position today. Um and I think what we see here is, you know, I mean, and there's a a petition to, you know, our fascist governor, Governor Landry, as um, you know, as a Trump fucking lapdog uh who's been canceling elections here in Louisiana left and right. And I think I think we're very much kind of ground zero. We're kind of a testing ground, it's sort of a trinity test here for I think something that will become widespread throughout the United States, um, particularly what years, 2026, particularly in 2028. I think we're gonna see it rolled out in the next two years is this sort of like gradual canceling of elections and uh uh and you know, rigging of elections to basically just overturn the will of the people and just make America, which is already a very anti-democratic place, you know, for a country that calls itself a republic, make it even more anti-democratic. And in particular, as you said, to your point, Mike, essentially kind of do this Neo Jim Crow, where in particular black people and people of color have less representation rather than more. Um so uh, and you know, and I think that this, the reason that they are doing this here in the South kind of goes back to what we initially were talking about, which is that the antebellum South is a source of incredible nostalgia for Southern white people, white men in particular. And there is, I think, a subconscious desire within the hearts of many Southern white men to return to that life. And I think what we're seeing with sort of on the backs of MAGA and Trump and this American fascism that's rearing its head is an opportunity for these people to essentially let that kink out, to basically make that fantasy a little bit more of a reality. Um and uh, you know, and and and this is again sort of the the the slaver kind of lives on this sort of ghostly half-life, one might even say this vampiric existence. Watch the vampires of New Orleans uh coming out this October, uh, that the slave owner has. So, and I think sort of the way that that we uh kind of fight against this is, I mean, we're already seeing in Louisiana the black community getting super mobilized against this. Like they understand very well that they fought and fucking bled for the voting rights that they do have, and they are like not gonna let them go without a fucking desperate fight. And I think that's very encouraging. But but no, I mean I think like a return to a liberal status quo is utterly unthinkable, at least from where I'm standing. You know, it's the the the sort of if we elect another liberal in 2028, which I don't think is very likely, that's just kicking the can down the road, right? I mean, they're just gonna platform more fascists.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:45

The systemic issues I mean we just experience it both here and in the UK. Like the, you know, we elect Biden, you elect Starmer, and the result is an even worse political condition. Same in Norway, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:57

Even worse backlash, yeah. You know, so it's the the the systemic issues that the income inequality, the ecological destruction, the ownership of our democracy by corporations persists under liberalism, and that's what's fueling the fascist movement. So I mean it's you know, I I think there is while I'm I'm not gonna sort of naively suggest that kind of revolution is right around the corner, I do think that class consciousness is increasing quite a bit here in America at least. And I have hope that at the very least we could maybe get some kind of like democratic socialist uh power structure going, whether it is sort of hijacking the power structures that already exists, whatever hijacking the Democratic Party, the conditions probably might be right for that pretty soon. Or alternate structures, parallel structures, dual power, uh just within our communities that can actually function as power structures and as sort of secondary sort of opposition governments that can actually stand against both fascism and the you know corporate capitalism of uh, you know, you know, blue MAGA and and you know the Democrats. So uh yeah, I mean that's I think is what's what's just gonna be the the way out, right? Essentially, is just a way out of this mess is to uh um is is you know to to sort of make that happen. And I think I think we can. I think we can. I think the um the conditions are right, but I do think that you know things will get worse before they get better. And uh uh we've basically got to build the infrastructure and build the power structures and build the community and the you know, fellowship, the quite quite simple kind of social connections that can take us through this dark time and and hopefully, you know, the next generation where we can sort of build the next generation a world that is a little bit better and make them a little bit more equipped to handle.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:52

Yeah, and I and I want to underline the point that you make about, you know, we exist in an online space. And so what I've kind of been thinking over the course of the last you know few years is linking the community that I have online and making it a direct connection to institutional forces that are growing for our side of the aisle, so to speak. The centrist aisle, yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, you know, whether it's DSA or or you know, some sort of uh a liberation fronts as an example, or all of this, like and encourage people to get involved. And I gotta tell you that I've been getting feedback for so many, so many people that my you know encouragement got them involved with their local organizations, and that has helped give their life more meaning, right? Like I've literally heard that from hundreds of people, you know. Very modest, very modest, so modest. By the way, it's not just me. I'm just I'm just trying to to everybody who's listening to this, I just want to encourage you because there is literally an opportunity to be at the beginning of a movement that has the opportunity to change the world. Like unironically, I believe this. That we are at a hinge point and that we will be able to look back. Oh, yeah, yeah, and you you know, it's right now. It's not a year from now, it's not six months from now, it's today, it's tomorrow, it's this weekend. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Look, get out there and and make a difference. So thank you so much for for that encouragement. We appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:22

Yeah, for sure. Well, and it's like, you know, and obviously the internet is a very, you know, the sort of people's social dependence on the internet is obviously a result of capitalist alienation and the you know spiritual vacancy of consumer culture and all this sort of stuff, and as well as just, you know, who can afford to fucking go out and get dinner with friends when you can just fucking talk to people on Discord or whatever. So I do think it is important to to uh, you know, like as people that that for some fucking ungodly reason, people out there in the world look up to to be just like, look, it's the kind of, you know, we yeah, and we have a meaning, you're absolutely right. We have a meaning crisis in our society. I mean, we've got a crisis of meaning, but meaning is really only found in like community and fellowship. That's that's it. That is kind of that's we're social animals, that's the reason we exist. And I think basically just in, and I get that too, Mike. Basically, people, you know, whatever, saying that they got inspired to whatever, joined DSA or whatever the fuck, uh, you know, tenants unions, all this sort of stuff. And I think that's so important to basically just like take this energy and this and this whatever you're feeling, the like you said, the intuition that you have, the the sort of whatever, the rage that you have, the rage against the system, the the sense of injustice that you have, and sort of let's funnel that into community and let's give that focus into the real world, which is gonna be Which gives us power. Which gives us power. Which gives us power. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:49:43

Before you go, can we do a quick, very quick rating game that we do with every guest at the end of uh each podcast episode uh that we do with the guests? Sure. Where basically we want you to rate each um of these like reactionary figures. A lightning round. Yeah, it's a lightning round. These reactions. reactionary figures for love from like one to ten like how dangerous they are like how you know how much like of how fuckable how fuckable they are yeah exactly yeah we're starting with Matt Walsh yeah exactly yeah no but uh how how yeah how like you know wide of a reach they've got etc okay I'm ready I'm starting you off with an easy one Matt Walsh oh god uh so uh wait one one from t one to ten is that the one to ten how how much how much they can uh influence people how effective they are with their audience how yeah I think probably like a seven I think probably like a seven yeah what about like um what if althis how do you feel about him oh uh yeah maybe maybe three like yeah yeah just to relevance keep in mind that just relevance yeah just to relevance yeah relevance to yeah like uh relevance reach and also like how dangerous are messages as well should probably factor into it. Okay. Sure. I actually I'm not super familiar with what altis like stuff I've I've really he's just he's just a little insane yeah he he is like actually like he he's trying to reconstruct he's going through like he's reconstructing fascism from first prince yeah yeah yeah no and I know he's gone through like some mental health issues and that's pretty much all I know about him but that also true too yeah yeah yeah that part like it isn't as funny yeah you're such a you're such a good soul yeah no but I agree with him like that that that part is like you know it there's some fucked up shit going on there but obviously the the stuff that he argues for we gotta say is messed up but anyways uh oh it's monstrous yeah yeah yeah no um what about uh Elon Musk yeah I don't think Adolf Hitler was very mentally stable like that doesn't exist what the fuck are we it's true I think I've said this like ten times on the show.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:45

That's true ashes are always clowns up until they need a therapy dump your body into the masquerade Yeah yeah exactly um uh wait sorry Freddie what was that last one Elon Musk oh Elon Musk oh man I mean you know I think uh I I th you know I I would say like a nine like I think he's pretty you know I mean fucking kind of bond villain yeah he's up there he's up there what do you what do you think in general about like I don't know if you saw the the like uh Peter Thiel Secret Society shit and like the kind of oh my god you didn't hear about this there's this Peter Thiel Secret Society called dialogue where they have all these like the fucking lamest name for the secret society I wasn't there for the lame yeah this just came out like this week so if you miss the story it's fine but like you know Ezra Klein was in it and all sorts of other shit um so okay I'll I'll give you I'll give you a pass on asking that about that but just like I guess the better way to put it is like they're all kind of like slopagarchs. I'm trying to come up with a new word for these oligarchs you know what I mean where they just put out stuff dumber than Asmongold. You know I don't know if you're familiar with him but they're just like you know white well you know we need to have the refugees from South Africa.

SPEAKER_02 1:53:02

That's Elon Musk like what do you make of the fact that they're not doing what traditional oligarchs would do in American history where they would like build a museum and say you need to love me because at least there's a marble building somewhere right there's just no regard for you know society at all and just leaning into the dumbest fever swamps in and like kind of contemptuously oh very contemptuously well I think it's like uh you know it's kind of the the living up to well you know while you look at like the the contemporary accounts of Caligula it's like they're you know they're they're probably exaggerated right because like a lot of that stuff was written by his enemies but but I think you know that impulse of just like having absolute power and going fucking crazy because your fucking mind can't handle it. That's like a very real human impulse. And I think that's what's happening with these fucking oligarchs is like and you know the AI thing is just like so apocalyptic and like so like such such like a this like neo-rapture fucking bullshit. It's just like such a fucking fairy tale and it's embarrassing that these people actually fucking believe this shit. And like it's yeah no I mean and and that's I think it's just like a it's just an overinflated sort of sense of their own importance and the fact that they are like some of the most powerful people to ever fucking exist on this planet. And it's just like gone to their heads and driven them fucking batty. Like I think that's really kind of what it is.

SPEAKER_03 1:54:21

We have to take their money for their own good. Like to help these people we have to take their money from them. We literally do.

SPEAKER_01 1:54:28

Unironically and put them in institution for their own good as well like help them like straight straight up yeah they were much more privileged back in the day like pre-internet because they could literally live in their bubble and they could be like oh I earned my money. Yeah the way the peasants live is fucking savage. Like the they're savage they don't deserve to to live the particular lifestyle that I've earned for myself. And even if you're like second generation third generation you can you can excuse away your your gap with the other because you don't get to interact with the other but but now they have to no matter how much they try to get away with it. And they have to whenever they open for example their social media app look at the perspectives of uh you know the the the woke mobs calling them out for for being the particular type of parasitic demi-humans that that they are so now they proactively back in the day back in the day bro like they didn't have to like devise entire complex ideological mechanisms to uh excuse away their super quote unquote superiority they could just ignore it but now people like Peter Thiel that are I guess to an extent intelligent enough to recognize the contradictions of their existence as billionaires they have to sit down and be like actually maybe capitalism is a meritocracy and maybe us as billionaires at the top of capitalism have earned our position there. And maybe hierarchy is the true meaning of of human organization because us as those who have earned our top level on the hierarchy of capitalism now should allow ourselves to I don't know edit our biological data blah blah blah like the bioengineering shit that Peter Thiel talks about all the time etc etc etc so there they're uh well I actually you know you go you go I gotta stop you there and just say that uh actually Palantir is a queer owned business so it is as well open AI is as well like dude global homo is dominating dude as a liberal as a liberal I have to ask you to shut your fucking mouth global homo is dominating I remember being like no no shit shit I remember being a 15 year old Balkan kid and my like at that time now he's no longer but my at that time like homophobic dad being like dude the gays they all collaborate and they run all the businesses and now you're like he was right I'm like dad shut the fuck up and now look at fucking Palature is the black Jew okay Palature is the black Jew Peter Thiel is gay open AI button leader is gay fucking uh what's it called fucking uh Facebook guy uh Facebook guy Facebook guy Zuckerberg Zuckerberg Zuckerberg is is asexual Zuckerberg basically queer that's because he can't fuck Mark Anthony or whatever the fuck we're like no uh sorry it's no uh Augusta C Story yeah gay nerds I'm ruling the world and it's not looking good I want to kill myself it's what the fuck I am andrew how where do you rate Peter the gay sorry I've just uh uh probably a fucking 10 honestly yeah he's a 10 he's a 10 and I would say like you know you go you should be condemned to serve as his blood boy for your virulent homophobia except you're a Balkan so your blood is about 30% liver enzymes that have been destroyed liver enzymes that have been made stronger motherfucker that have been made stronger he wouldn't require my liver can handle it's built different yeah don't worry about it but yeah okay so speaking of uh of gay notes Nick Quentus four or five maybe but yeah he's so gay oh my god I disagree so hard not about him being he's a fucking 8.5 man not a no no I agree with 8.5 at what oh wow okay no no he hiring the you know hiring uh what are you gonna say yeah he's an 8.5 at hiring cat boys or whatever the fuck he's joked too many like every single time I am very curious like I do want to just like read his mind for like a day just to see what like sexual thoughts like I bet he's like I bet he's like a a true pervert.

SPEAKER_03 1:58:53

I bet he is just like such a fucking like crazy look that's like a fucking cognito hazard. You may you may not know this but he was actually caught live streaming both gay porn and trans porn.

SPEAKER_02 1:59:04

I I actually was aware of that yeah but I bet it's like I bet the shit that he just like thinks of in his mind is like even more salacious and disgusting and like oh I just want to know I just like want to know what his like sexual fantasies are.

SPEAKER_01 1:59:16

Definitely streams with a butt plug like one million percent from time to time he streams with an active butt plug that he has one of the cameramen operate.

SPEAKER_02 1:59:28

This is this is just for you know we don't know I don't have any firsthand knowledge but it's not allegedly allegedly which we do not know under the legal penal code sue me motherfucker I hope you're okay okay Andrew what about uh Candace Owens or Clandaswans as we call her god uh yeah maybe six or seven yeah probably maybe six I don't think she's quite as like you know I mean I think people I don't know maybe I think she's definitely got more street cred than like out like yeah I think it's wacky you know it's like the genocide in Gaza has become such a like yeah it's become such a like a good like like you know just sort of weather vein for like oh are you just like a fucking establishment shill or are you not even if that also means you're just like a fucking Nazi that like yeah I don't know it's uh but but I don't know yeah I mean it's but at the same time like Candace alone's I was gonna say speaking of like someone who's made that the whole thing but from the right Tucker Carlson what do you uh rate him? Sure. Yeah. Yeah I mean I think uh I you know I I actually would rec rate him pretty pretty highly I think probably an eight I mean I think he's I think he like knows exactly what he's doing. I think he just like you know I don't think he actually believes anything. I think he's like purely strategic and like and and I mean he's been he's just like trying to be fucking famous for you know his entire fucking adult life and he's just doing whatever he can to like stay in the spotlight and you know and and yeah just I think he just wants fame and like you know money. It's just his thing.

SPEAKER_03 2:00:57

Did you see that today? Did you guys see that today that he said that he was leaving the Republican Party I did see that yeah. So so like obvious you know I I personally agree with you. I actually rate him higher because I feel the thing about Tucker Carlson is I think he knows how to read the room a lot better than almost any other reactionary figure. And he could see that like the contradictions between Israel and you know the kind of the the fascist right in America are coming to a head and that there's a there's an opening to there's an opening to kind of exploit where you can position yourself as like you could have both the moral high ground and be to the further right of like Donald Trump right like who you're saying like oh I'm just supporting you know I value all human life and these guys are depraved but that's why we need to like enforce America's borders and go after the Jews. I think that's kind of what he's he's leaning into a a new version of of American right politics that's similar to what we covered last week which was the John Birch Society this you know nativist isolationist and like anti-Semitic version of you know American blood and soil nationalism.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:09

Also he's realistic enough to give you fucking health care like like this guy will not blink twice and give you reformist even sometimes class consciousness I don't think American right wingers ever can do anything. Healthcare might be too much yeah yeah but you get like even reform you yeah you give you crumps yeah I can see what what was it called Obamacare by the at some point like uh Carlson care I can absolutely see him pitching no like I I'm dying on this hell this man understands no I mean contradictions if if not he I think he would do what what you know the the sort of like Hitlerite like uh you know NSDAP type of like you know quote unquote like welfare thing like some sort of like yeah some some sort that isn't actually welfare but it's like you know it has the appearance of welfare it gives the idea that you still get cash in your bank account yeah exactly I can't wait for woke tackler rights that's gonna be fucking I mean they already exist there you know there's a lot of people like out there like well meaning liberals who see him say the shit and they're like oh maybe he's got a point it's like no bro what the fuck what what no class consciousness that's to a motherfucker like that's that's the whole it's pretty depressing yeah all right well any any uh other uh reactions you guys want to bring up um or do you think we're well he's been so generous with his time so I want to thank you so much for giving us the full two hours we're we're very greedy assholes yeah we are very very greedy no sure y'all know this has been this has been very funny let's do it again since you're brilliant I would love to awesome all right well it's great meeting y'all yeah um well before you go is yeah is there anything that you want to tell our audience to buy or otherwise promote uh feel free to milk them or or prepare for coming October yeah yeah well uh yeah I mean I would just you know check out my work uh Toon Shea Films on uh on YouTube you can just search checkmate Lincoln Nights and I'll pop up um and uh yeah if you you know if you if you if you enjoyed this uh you can support me on Patreon you can support I'm sure all these degenerates on uh on Patreon as well and uh and uh and yeah and and I've got a film coming out later this year The Vampires of New Orleans it's gonna be fucking awesome it's gonna be the best work that my team and I have ever done um and it's and it's probably coming out this October let me let me know I'd love to go.

SPEAKER_05 2:04:31

Yeah me too yeah I mean go go would be harsh but for me.

SPEAKER_02 2:04:35

Oh yeah we're definitely doing a premiere here in New Orleans and and doing uh you know like we're gonna do a second line sounds great well thanks so much for coming on yeah thank you thank you thank you for your time thank you so much bye bye that was lovely god that was awesome that was a proper podcast back and forth yeah yeah yeah I yeah yeah I mean I like this is this is like I can I can vibe off this for days but oh but also like you know I I I I knew he was awesome but I didn't know he was this awesome you know