Discussing The Total State with Auron MacIntyre

Now, on the Conversations That Matter podcast, I'm your host, John Harris, and we have with us someone who's actually been on the podcast before, returning against,

Aron McIntyre. How you doing, Aron? Doing well, thanks for having me. Well, thank you for coming on. I know you're a busy, busy guy.

You're probably doing a lot of interviews for your new book, which is what we're gonna talk about, called The Total State. How's that going?

How are sales? How's this being received so far? It's been out, what, a few weeks now? It's actually just been in its first week, but it's been going pretty well.

Went ahead and hit number two on the censorship of politics on Amazon, so that was nice.

Been, like you said, been doing a lot of press. It's been pretty wild, the amount of interviews you gotta pack in for this thing.

It's my first book, so I've never done this before, but it's been fun. Well, that's my first question for you, then, because I read the introduction, and I've been impressed by your political commentary and your social media interaction, too.

You get a lot of interaction, and I had not heard of you before. I must've heard about you a year ago or so, and it seems like your political journey, even though you were conservative, 2020 really accelerated it.

It made you realize some things, and I'm just impressed that this has come together for you in such a short period of time.

So maybe talk about that a little more with us. Did you just start reading political philosophers more?

Did you already know political philosophy and dots were connected in 2020? How did you arrive at some of the conclusions in this book?

Well, I had gone to college for political science, and I had focused in political theory when

I was there, but as you can imagine, there aren't a lot of jobs in political theory, so I ended up becoming a teacher and then a political reporter at some point.

I spent a few years working on campaign staff for some Republicans down in the

Florida area, and so I was familiar with Aristotle and Plato and some of the foundational stuff that you would expect, but it didn't really explain, especially when we started seeing what happened in 2020,

I really didn't understand some of the things that were going on. Some of it isn't Aristotle and Plato, but the kind of the classic story of the founders and the

Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the way that we were gonna have this perfectly separated government that would be limited by all of these checks and balances.

Yeah, I believe that as much as anybody. I was a good Rush Limbaugh listener, all this stuff, and then when we hit 2020, like a lot of people,

I was just blown away. I was like, okay, obviously this is not working. None of the stuff that I believed was gonna kick in and protect us when times of tyranny came, none of that happened, and the people around me who had been telling me it would happen, all the libertarians and conservatives, all of a sudden they were making excuses for why it was okay and it's not really a problem, and yeah, we could close the churches, it's just for a little, it's not a big deal.

They just seemed to find some kind of excuse for why we didn't have to worry about what was happening, and so that's really when

I started falling down the rabbit hole that you're talking about. I had already been starting to watch some

YouTube commentators who were outside of kind of the CNN, Fox News, talk radio bubble, but I started to discover this guy

Curtis Yarvin, and he had written a lot of what is often called neo -reactionary political theory, but most importantly, he had read a lot of older philosophers that aren't usually included in kind of the conservative

Edmund Burke -style canon, and so as I started to branch out and read many of those older books, it started to come together for me.

I started to realize, oh no, there's a whole explanation. A lot of people understood what was gonna happen here, and they actually predicted it, and that's why

I wanted to write the book, because I felt like it was important for people to understand, we're not just working from ground zero here. This isn't some unprecedented thing that no one ever expected.

There's actually a good bit of literature on how the government actually functions, how power in the United States really works, and why it ended up reacting the way it did in the face of something like COVID.

So let me ask you this. You have a large following on X, formerly Twitter. Was that present before you started working at the blaze and doing political commentary?

I mean, how did, just personally speaking, how did this whole political commentary thing get started for you as a job, basically?

Sure, basically, like I said, I was watching what was going on, and I was reading these books, and I was like, all right, well,

I'm a teacher and a reporter. So the one thing I do relatively well is condense things down and explain them.

So I was like, well, why don't I try just making some books? Basically, I was just, or some videos. I was just doing book reports on YouTube.

Oh, I read this book, here's what it means. Oh, I read this philosopher, here's what he's trying to say, and how I think it applies to what's going on now.

And some people were watching, but people told me, hey, you should really start putting your stuff on Twitter. That's where people actually put their stuff if they want people to find it and watch it and that kind of thing.

And so I had never used Twitter. I just jumped on and started posting, and it turned out I had a lot more people start to listen to what

I was saying on Twitter, and that fed into the YouTube, and then that fed eventually into the blaze, and so that's how

I ended up where I am now. Gotcha, so this has all come together fairly, last few years, really, for you, which is amazing to me because some people,

I think one of the recommendations for your book, one of the people who was recommending it said that you were highly influential in controlling conservative discourse.

And online, I see that actually is true. A lot of people start taking points you've made and putting them in their own words and analyzing situations, which

I think is great. So we're gonna look at the book. This is, for those who are just tuning in, this is the book.

It's called The Total State, and you can get it on Amazon. Where else? I don't know if that's where you want people going, so maybe we should just, do you want them going to your website?

Where should they go to get this? Oh, no, Amazon's fine. It's through a major publisher, so it's at all of the major outlets you would expect,

Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Target. You can pick it up at any of those places. They don't direct sales from the publisher.

It's all through these larger outlets, so anywhere people wanna pick it up is fine. Okay, cool.

Well, as we discuss this, if any of you have questions or comments, leave them in the chat box, and I'll be sure to get at least some of them to Aran.

Aran, you titled the book The Total State, and I think the obvious question is, what are we talking about? I know what the modern state is.

I know what the state is. What's the total state? Well, I think a lot of us, we think of totalitarian states, right?

We conjure up the 1984 Nazi Germany boot heel on your face, the

Soviet gulags. This is what we understand, rightly, as the manifestation of totalitarian government from a very militaristic and aggressive centralized state, and I think part of the problem that we run into in our current system is that people only recognize totalitarianism as such, like that is the only frame of reference they have for what a totalitarian government is, but what they don't realize is that slowly but surely, the

Western governments of liberal democracy have also created their own versions of soft tyranny.

They've assembled a totalitarian state not with guys at checkpoints and barbed wire and machine guns, but with digital banking and the ability to censor you online, make sure you're canceled, you can't have a home, you can't have a family, you can't maintain employment, you can't do business, you become persona non grata.

They have the ability to check where you're going and what you're doing at all times. This is really the totalitarianism that has grown up in the

United States, and the way it's done so is by moving around, creating new avenues of power from what was listed in the formal articles of the

Constitution. So Articles 1, 2, and 3 create the three formal branches of the United States government, and more and more people, and this is really great, are recognizing when it comes to the deep state, that's what a lot of people call the unelected bureaucracy in the executive branch, that the powers of the formal government have been moved out of the elected offices and into these non -elected bureaucracies.

But what they don't understand is it's not just the deep state, this power has been moved into the media, this power has been moved into academia, this power has been moved into giant corporations, it has been moved into non -government organizations, even globalist

NGOs that reach down and dictate how we should respond to something like the pandemic, even though we're supposed to be a sovereign country.

And so this state is not just the deep state, it's not just the formal state, this is the total state. Every institution inside our country has bought in to this system, they all work together, they coordinate with each other, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, and that is due to the structures that they have taken on.

It's not just that there's some guy sitting at the top of this tower, steepling his fingers and doing a maniacal laugh and handing out the orders that everyone's gonna follow, it's that the structural way that we have set up our society creates this system, enables this system.

And I wanted to explain how that was built up over time, why it's taken away so many of our freedoms and how we might possibly think about disassembling it.

You know, I follow a lot of church -related news, and I know you mentioned last time,

I think you go to a Southern Baptist Church, so the Southern Baptist Convention is gonna have their annual meeting next month, and a lot of churches meet in June, I think because of agrarian calendars and so forth, but the

PCA is another one. And these denominations seem to have the same problems at the same times.

And people have wondered, 2020 especially, why all these institutions, educational, missional, all these

Christian institutions are somehow saying the same things at the same time, and it happens to be exactly what all the other institutions secular or otherwise are saying in our country.

And this is one of the things I think you helped explain. You compare it to a religion, essentially, that is a secular religion, and why don't you explain that for us?

Because I think that would be a surprise to many people that it's a religion that's holding these different institutions together and giving them the talking points.

That's right. So like we said, in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, you have a wide amount of propaganda, right?

There's a large amount of propaganda, it's everywhere, but we understand where that comes from, right? There's a top -down, there's a pull -up bureau, there's

Joseph Goebbels, there's officials that have the actual label of head of propaganda who actually do this.

So we understand where it comes from. But like you said, in the United States, we see the same effect, but there's no official office, there's no official place where this gets done, and so we have to answer the question, why is this happening if we don't have that official centralized totalitarian mouthpiece for the government?

And the answer, like you pointed out, is actually a shared system of value. So Curtis Yarvin is a political theorist, and he calls this the cathedral.

Some people don't like that title. You can call it whatever you want. The key thing is to grasp and understand what is happening here.

So really what has happened is that we have a ruling class. First, you have to identify that every nation has a ruling class.

There's no such thing as rule by the people, that's not a real thing, that's an illusion. There are always a set of elites who actually tell you what's gonna happen in your society.

And those always share some kind of culture. So if you were living in a medieval society, you wouldn't need to explain to people why you get married or why you go to church on Sunday or why you should be checking

God's word for how to apply the law or how to teach your children or raise them, because that would all be implicit in the culture of your society.

Everyone would go to the cathedral, and the cathedral would share with people how they should live their lives.

It would become the background, the way that they spoke about everything. It would be the very firmament from which your culture rose.

And so nobody needs to go into any kind of explicit coordination on how you should run your society, because all the elites who run your society know this is how we order things.

This is the ethos that we follow, right? And the same thing is true in the modern day.

All of the academic institutions have the same ethos.

They all have the same morality. It's progressive, secular humanism, right? And anybody who wants to be a leader, anyone who wants to join the elite class in the

United States and most other Western nations must go through university. In fact, they usually have to go to specific universities.

And this means that anyone who wants to run a TV station or operate a Fortune 500 company or even run a church often has to go through a specific set of institutions that all share the same goal.

They all teach the same way to organize society. They all have the same ends in mind. And so even though you don't have some explicit, hey, by the way, the propaganda ministry just said, we're all gonna have the same goals.

We're all gonna say the same things. Here's the quick list sheet of things we should talk about today.

Even though there's not that, all of these people are plugged into these different institutions. They all read the

New York Times. They all listen to the NPR. They all do the same things. And so when they go through these thought processes, when they apply their different managerial techniques to their organizations, they keep coming to the same natural conclusions.

That if somebody errors, if somebody makes a mistake, if someone is insufficiently loyal, well, like any good religion, there's a lot of peer pressure that's there to pull people back onto the path, correct them publicly so they understand the error of their ways.

And so in this way, we see that, like you said, even especially you'll notice the larger the church is, the more likely they are to act this way.

And that's not a mistake. That's because the people who are skilled in operating these large managerial bureaucracies always have the same ends in mind, even if they're applying them to something like the shepherding of God's believers.

Yeah, so I had Kryptos on and he talked about this same dynamic, but he talked about it in terms of technique and Jacques Ellul.

And no matter who I hear talk about this, it always seems to root back into some kind of modern conception of politics, some recent development.

And I get the impression from reading you, I think it's chapter four, maybe, where you talk about foxes and lions.

And do we have in the West then a system that has, I don't know if unnatural is the word, but in a way that hasn't been done in previous times, favored the foxes, the cunning operators who know how to use the deep state administration, these kinds of things to exercise their will.

And I know that does sound kind of top down and I know it's not exactly, but is this like a modern notion?

Because in times past, it seemed like you had kings and they got to war and the lions were in charge. Absolutely, and I do love

Kryptos because he has that background in Ellul. And it's really just like seeing the elephant from a different side.

Like I'll listen to him and I'll be like, oh, I know exactly what he's talking about. I've just heard it said a different way, but I recognize exactly the kind of system that he's describing.

Yeah, I think, so here's the thing. When Vilfredo Pareto set up kind of the explanation between the foxes and the lions, he reached all the way to ancient

Greece to explain this dynamic. He said that Athens was a city ruled by foxes and Sparta was a city ruled by lions.

And ultimately both of them fell because they favored one part, one section of the ruling class over the other.

So the Spartans obviously were very martial in character. They dedicated their entire lives to becoming excellent warriors, but ultimately their inability to change and grow and create new things ended up being their doom.

And for the Athenians, they were obviously the philosophers and they wrote all the great plays.

And this is why we remember them so fondly and see them as the founders of American democracy in some ways often people will say that.

But he says, ultimately Athens falls because it's constantly infighting. It's incapable of pulling together.

It's obsession with dissecting, pull things apart. Novelty ends up leading it to become disunified and it falls prey to Sparta actually in one of many other places.

So it's not that the fox -lion dynamic is new. However, what you are noticing

I think is the level of abstraction that technique or technology allows in today's society.

What we've noticed is that of course, in most cases, the martial cast, the lions are the ones who rule early on in a society when it needs to protect its borders, define its borders, cast out enemies, maybe even forge a new frontier, right?

This is when they are on the ascent and then foxes tend to take over as the society is growing and becoming more complex and needs to solve complicated abstract problems that aren't necessarily connected to actual warfare, these kinds of things.

So this is again, a very natural cycle, but what we've gotten to is an extremity. Normally the cycle turns over at some point that the power of the foxes has to give way to the lions because the level of abstraction is too much.

They're not able to deal with the actual physical issues that are plaguing society. They start to lose their shared identity and the furtherance of their heritage.

And this thing kind of just falls over onto itself until the lions come back to the forefront.

In our case, what we had is a technology and a set of techniques, managerial techniques especially, that have allowed the foxes to extend their rule well beyond their natural part of the life cycle.

They've built large substructures that allow them to go ahead and create a vast amount of efficiency inside the system, allow them to project power and force down their manipulative understanding of the way things should be through propaganda and other means on the people.

And very importantly, they've been able to outpace the need for brave and courageous people with the idea that they can just build enough tanks or drones or missiles or planes, and that really you can just maintain a very small force that is under the sway of the foxes and will always just rely on technological superiority.

However, we are seeing that fail, right? We know that the United States military, while I'm a big fan of many people in it and they're incredibly capable, the military has lost many wars recently.

They couldn't beat goat herders in Afghanistan. And it's not because they don't have the skill in actual combat, but because our leaders are foxes and they're terrified of any real military conflict.

All of our military conflicts have to be incredibly fake, managed ways to funnel money into defense contractors.

We're not actually going in to protect anything we love or care about. And so you're starting to see the ability of foxes to maintain our society fall apart.

There's a reason that we seem to be unable to do things like maintain infrastructure or we're breaking down our logistics and the ability to like deliver food or medicine or other things at critical times.

And the reason is that our fox type leaders have lost touch with the physical, the things that the lions would usually manage.

They've suppressed the lions for so long that they've lost the ability to even really conceive of a healthy way to manage that stuff.

And it's having a very obvious impact on society. Well, let me ask you this, because you mentioned before that democracy, well, you didn't say the word democracy, but you're saying,

I guess, self -rule or thinking that the people rule. So I'm assuming that's what you're talking about, that this is sort of a facade.

And I think that would be a surprise to many people. And I'll give you an example. I was listening this morning to a podcast briefly that was talking about AI generated music and what a threat this is to the music industry.

And of course, you can look at so many other industries and see similar things happening where automation is outpacing or replacing the traditional labor markets and relationships and so forth.

And you would think that the market would come in and correct this because people want authentic music.

So they're going to reject the AI generated stuff and they're gonna start listening to artists who are authentic.

But it doesn't seem to happen, at least not in large enough numbers to make a difference. And so I'm just looking at on the ground reality, this doesn't seem to be a solution, but why is that?

Why isn't democracy or the people choosing a way out of this mess? Because ultimately we are formed by our own experiences.

We are not these rational, completely atomized individuals who all make their own decisions, have their own tastes, pick and choose things before us.

We are completely programmed and manipulated by propaganda and the illusion of choice at this point.

Look, at some point in the past in a healthy, organized society, we wouldn't have been completely our own person, but we would have been parts of communities.

As a pastor, you know that this is something that informs how people interact with each other.

When you have a community like this, when you're organized together into a shared moral vision, you have a particular language, a particular way of speaking with each other, a particular expectations in your interactions, the way you should form families, the way that you should conduct yourself in business.

All of these things create a organic identity. A lot of people are scared of the, oh, identity politics, identity politics.

Everybody has too much identity. Actually, it's the exact opposite. We have none. We have had all of our organic identity stripped away.

We've been told that you want freedom of choice and freedom of choice means removing all the unchosen bonds that make humans what they are.

So, oh, well, I don't wanna have kids because that would restrict my ability to go do stuff.

Oh, I don't wanna take care of my parents when they get old because that's gonna be a drain on my funds. Oh, I don't wanna have to take care of my neighbor because that's a big abuse of my time.

And so we've been told more and more and more to unplug ourselves from these social spheres, these social responsibilities, and we've handed them over to the state.

This is part of what made the total state what it is is that we've kept transferring all of these opposing social forces like the church, community, family, and things.

We've taken all of the power, all of the responsibility, all of the duty out of those spheres, and we've handed them over to the government.

And in some ways, that makes us feel free, right? Because, well, now I can spend all this money and all this time playing video games or traveling.

You go fishing on Saturday or Sunday, yeah. Yeah, I don't have to spend Sunday at church. That means I get an extra hour to do whatever, right?

And so you feel in some ways liberated, but actually what you're doing is you're deracinating yourself.

You're pulling yourself out of the roots that give you an identity. And when you have no identity, you don't just go build your own.

You don't just actually build yourself out from nothing. What happens is you become a easy target for social programming.

You have no organic idea of who you are. And so if an advertisement or some kind of other propaganda pours that into you, you become an easy vessel for it.

And this is what C .S. Lewis warned about in the abolition of man, that once we went ahead and ripped out all of the things, all the organs, the men without chest, the things that make us human, once we lose that organic connection to what a human is, then we are just at the mercy of these social organizers, these social scientists who wanna manipulate and turn humanity into whatever they want.

And that's why democracy ultimately, at least in this mass version, does not restrict the government.

Because when the founders built the constitution, they did create a mixed constitution, but they made a mixed constitution with the understanding that democracy was only supposed to be one half of one third of the formula that actually selects the government.

They actually didn't put that much democracy into our republic. And that's true of many republics across history, understanding that mass democracy, a mass expansion of the franchise and its ability to completely run rough shot over all other influences was super dangerous.

This is why Alexis de Tocqueville famously warned against this in Democracy in America, one of the founding pieces of political science on the country.

And so what I'm saying is, might sound radical to people's ears today, but it wouldn't have sounded radical to the founders or to any of the people who were actually aware of what went into the constitution.

We've been sold the bill of goods as I think the modern American right, that the constitution is something that it simply isn't.

The founders didn't believe that this unregulated democracy would hold all of the power in check due to the miraculous invention of the constitution.

They had a much more traditional understanding of what a society is and what holds government in check.

And it wasn't just the fact that you happen to go vote once every four years. I'm glad to hear you sort of defend the founders on this.

I've taken that line more myself because I know there is this poison pill theory that it really was the founders who started all this.

And I would love to get your opinion on, and maybe you're just gonna have a more nuanced answer here, but like, what was the date, right?

Some people say 2020, that's when it all went wrong. Others say, oh, it was when we elected Obama. Others say it was a civil rights era or the civil war era, or maybe it was actually the constitution.

So when do you see us making this transition? Obviously it was gradual, but what are some key points?

So I think what's important to recognize is that countries are never static entities.

They have a morphology. Every civilization is birth, it grows, it comes into fruition, and it dies.

And that's tough for us, because we wanna believe that like America is the one eternal empire.

And this is true of everybody. Everyone wants to think that they're the next reincarnation of Rome, this kind of thing.

But of course, even Rome went through this cycle. And so you have to understand that it's easy, and I will answer the question,

I'm not dodging it here, but it's easy to just say, oh, well, there's the one date that we stepped off the track.

And once we did that, it was over. I think it's better to understand that power has a metaphysic that it follows, and that track is undeniable across history.

It looks different if you have a different form of government. There are ways that you can contain it and keep your government or your country, your civilization in kind of a better state for longer and protect it longer.

There are ways to change this, it's not just fatalism. But I think we have to understand that over time, all governments do change and shift, and America is no different.

Even at the founding, we had our founders arguing over whether America basically should become 13 small nations that work together every once in a while for mutual protection and trade, or whether we should become some kind of mercantile

European empire. And that battle continues to this day. That is that conflict that started with kind of the

Federalists and Anti -Federalists all the way through the Civil War and up into our current day is still with us.

So I would say, obviously, the shift during the Civil War is huge.

When the answer to, you'd had the South push back in multiple situations, for instance, the attempt at the nullification crisis, and Andrew Jackson, who's often seen as a hero of the right by many conservatives, but is actually the guy who pushed for both the direct election of senators and the destruction of the state's ability to refuse federal legislation.

So that was not new, but the Civil War is obviously a huge change. I mean, Abraham Lincoln throws his opponents in jail.

He shuts down newspapers. He shuts down legislatures. He imports a large amount of Irishmen to go kill his fellow countrymen in an attempt to kind of win that war.

So obviously, that's a huge shift and the 14th Amendment fundamentally rewrites the way that the

Constitution works. But I would say that for our modern iteration, it probably comes down to FDR.

FDR, Woodrow Wilson is probably the first guy to conceive of the presidency as a managerial position.

He's a college professor and a guy who wants to apply a lot of the systems. But I think FDR, a lot of people forget that FDR just stole all the gold in the

United States. Like, we just don't talk about that. He's just like, no, you can't own gold anymore. You have to give it all to me. Like, you have to sell it to me at a cut rate.

I'm just gonna steal all your gold. And we like pretend that doesn't happen because obviously that's wildly unconstitutional, but yeah, it would be inconvenient for us to recognize that.

And so he like remakes the way the United States works through the New Deal. He sets up all these bureaucracies. He builds this infrastructure that radically changes the ability of the federal government to reach into every aspect of the nation.

And from there, that's how the Civil Rights Movement and other iterations on the same thing,

I think, continue that pattern and expand it until we get what we have today. You know, as I was reading the checks and balances part of your book where you're talking about the reason that from Montesquieu, these were essentially adopted in our system.

I was thinking about John C. Calhoun. I don't know if you mentioned him. I don't think you do in the book. Not in the book. Because I haven't quite finished it, but the concurrent majority.

And he seemed to see some of these flaws, at least early on, and thought about ways to rectify them in order to stave off what a total democracy would do.

And we're just living out, I guess, in some ways, and I don't wanna reduce it just to Calhoun, but we did not heed his warnings.

We went with Lincoln instead of Calhoun, and here we are. And it's such a mess, though.

I think people now just wonder, how do we even get ourselves out of it? If it's not through popular votes, if that mechanism is already, some people already are blackmailed on that, then what is it?

Is it a Caesarian figure rising up, like the Protestant Franco? Is it one state?

We're just gonna all go to one state and then try to secede or something, which would probably be, is that movie,

Civil War, is out? I don't think that's gonna be the way it goes, but it'll probably be bad. So you give some hope, though.

You say this is gonna come to an end, but there is gonna be a lot of hardship in getting there.

Yeah, this is gonna be an answer that nobody likes, but I think it's true, so I do my best to say it, even if it's gonna be unpopular.

I think that there is, like I said, I think we are at the outermost limits of the current way we organize society.

I think we've built the Tower of Babel, and we're all very confused about why it looks like it's tipping over. And so I think that as we continue to reach the outer extremities of how managerial society can order human beings, we're gonna see these failures.

We're gonna see the collapse of competence. We're gonna see the inability to deliver logistically the things that we need and organize people correctly.

We're gonna see a drop -off in intelligence and education and just the ability of people to do jobs that are essential to a very complicated network that is increasingly putting itself on a finer knife edge when it comes to what kind of tolerances it can take for failure.

There's very little resilience built into the system. We're sacrificing resilience for efficiency and height of production at pretty much every level.

And then instead of taking that height of production and turning it into something good, we're just burning it into political gimmies for the

Democratic Party for the left. And so we're just burning the system down for nothing. And so I think eventually,

I don't, a lot of people are like, well, we'll change. I don't think we will. I think a lot of people are gonna hold onto this thing.

I mean, if the number of people who watched 2020 happen and still pretend like, well, you just get them next time, guys.

Yeah, just vote a little harder. It's like, did we watch the same election? Are you in the same world

I am? And so that gives me a lot of doubt that we're gonna see any serious upheaval.

I think the far more likely scenario is that those things are gonna start to fail. And then people who are more competent regionally will rise.

We're already seeing this with my governor, Ron DeSantis in Florida. A lot of people have moved here.

Please stop. Things are too expensive and my roads are very full. Go away. But a lot of people are moving here.

They're using their feet to vote because they recognize that it's not enough to simply like cast your vote once every four years in California.

That's not doing you any good. It's not gonna save the Republic. You have to actually be in a community.

You have to actually live next to people who share your values. We can't just divide ourselves across entire continents anymore, entire continent anymore and pretend like that's not a problem.

And so people are shifting, they're concentrating. And I think that as guys like DeSantis or Greg Abbott or others continually tell the federal government no and nothing happens, people are gonna realize that actually it's just better to live in these states that just do what they want.

I mean, look at what happened with Greg Abbott in the border. Now there's a lot of problems with Greg Abbott in the border. I'm not saying he's doing everything right. But they told him, the federal government said, open up Eagle Pass, let our border agents come in and cut your razor wire and let illegal immigrants into the country or else.

And he's like, no. And nothing happened, right? They didn't send the National Guard.

They didn't drop the 101st in there. No tanks rolled up. He just told them no. And then that was it.

And I think that the more we see this, the more we have governors who are willing to stand up and say no and run their country.

And most importantly, this is gonna be the big thing, separate themselves from federal funding because that is the tool that the government uses to keep pushing down onto states.

You can't survive without the federal funding that we provide you. And so you have to teach your students a certain way and you have to put these diversity programs into whatever and you have to let men play women's sports and yada yada.

And so if you get to a place where you just don't care anymore and you just tell them no and your state keeps getting better and all the states that keep saying yes get worse,

I think there's just a natural shift that occurs. And nobody has to walk around and be like, the empire is over.

We formally signed some piece of paper and to see it, I think just nature takes its course at that point.

Jefferson I know talked about a natural aristocracy and I wondered if that's kind of what's happening now with people who do take stands.

I noticed there was, I forget his name, but there was a guy who went by a pseudonymous name on Twitter who was doxed yesterday.

I think you saw this probably too. Lomaz, absolutely. And Lomaz is his name, okay. And I hadn't heard of him before this doxing, but now

I have and a lot of people have who had not been exposed to him. And it seems like he's doing pretty well with it.

Like his publishing company is doing well. People see that as a sign of leadership. And now if you do take a stand against the regime, you are de facto a leader and people will follow you.

And it's a new hierarchy that seems to be arising. And I do take great encouragement from this. So if that's naturally happening in some ways, it's starting to happen at least, what can people, average

American Joes who are working blue collar jobs, what can they do? I mean, you mentioned moving perhaps.

I don't know if you're endorsing that or saying that that's just something that's happening, but should they move? Should they do other things to try to shield their families and kind of personally secede from the regime?

Absolutely. I think that, Lomaz is a college professor. So obviously he's not blue collar, but the thing that, one of the things that he did was build this passage prize and build this publishing company.

And it's not just publishing books that no one else will publish, though that's important. He's also creating a community that builds right -wing art that for the very first time in a long time is explicitly going out of its way to create patronage for those who disagree with the regime, but would like to create something new and beautiful outside of like Netflix and all this garbage.

And that's really critical because that provides, it's not just financially successful, though it is, but it also creates an idea of a different culture, a different art, a different, a vanguard that I think is essential to shift the mindset of the right, which has been stuck in this mode of cultural conservatism for far too long.

Of course, we wanna fight for our heritage and we wanna fight for our history and we need to be connected to our community.

That's what makes us who we are. But we also need to recognize that we have to leave something for our posterity.

And of course it means having posterity, but that also means making sure that we are creating something new.

We're not just reading them a few old novels and pretending like that's enough.

There needs to be a way that they can participate and pass things on to their children. And so I think that means that on just an average blue -collar level, of course, that means you have to get with people who are on the same wavelength you are.

Maybe you have to move for that, maybe you don't, right? Maybe it's just a shift in churches. Maybe it's a plugging into different communities.

I was talking to somebody, I tell people all the time, build right -wing social organizations that are not explicitly political.

Build fraternal organizations. Build, create clubs that read classic novels, things that are classic works that people don't do anymore that are kind of inherently coded as traditional right -wing things.

Build these things that are not explicitly political so they're hard for people to come after with the government, and they're hard for people to infiltrate because they're too organic.

There's no power tied to them. And that will put you in a group of people who are like -minded.

That's what you want your kids to be around. That's who you wanna do business with. And then you start building just natural bonds.

Hey, my buddy, he's part of a literary club. We should found a company together. Oh, well, we should make sure that we all live in the same community.

Oh, well, we gotta make sure that Steve's on the school board. He's the best guy in the club for education. And obviously he has our values in mind.

Just these simple bonds of organic community. Again, this is what de Tocqueville talked about in democracy in America.

He said American democracy would only survive if there was a continued social rigor, if the civic virtue, the continued participation in voluntary associations created this bond that allowed for essentially, we could call it self -government, but it's not really self -government.

It's community government. It's the reestablishment of that shared virtue that we're talking about that the left has built up at the college level that they force everyone through, that this version of religion that they have there.

But it's the re -instantiation of our faith and our heritage as not something that we just get together once every

Sunday and talk about, but something we actually live day to day and we use as a building block when it comes to who we do business with and how we create our social organization.

That's really good. And it sounds to me like the reverse of Gramsci almost with taking a relatively stable society with traditional institutions and then building up institutions to challenge that, which is what the left has done.

But you're saying all these involuntary associations that, or voluntary associations rather, that have been destroyed, do the work of actually rebuilding those things.

And then the government has less of a grip on your life. So let me ask you this, online,

I know from listening to your podcast, you're familiar with somewhat at least with the gamer world and just with right -wing meme culture, if you wanna call it that.

And I've noticed a lot of these communities that you're talking about, like for instance, a book club,

I think is one of the ones you just mentioned, these are happening and being facilitated online. And I have my reservations about that because on the one hand you have the conservatives who say, you know, we got to sort of unplug that this technology is what's destroying us.

We're entertaining ourselves to death and amusing ourselves to death. And then you have on the other side, well, this is how we get around the regime is by using technology and cultivating these online communities.

So what's your position and your advice to people who are engaged in these online chat groups and so forth?

So my buddy, Dave, the distributors, Dave Green, he is very good on this. And his strategy is this, we start online, but it is insufficient.

We have to move offline. So the online is necessary because as we said, we are now very geographically just scattered to the four winds.

The shared moral vision that we have that used to be organically centered in a community has been completely shattered.

And we can't just put that back together by like hoping and wishing, right? At some point we do have to go searching for people who do share that vision.

And unfortunately, we also have to find people who know what time it is. And you can have people next to you who believe a lot of things you believe and would like to probably share some of the principles that you share, but simply don't understand the need to go ahead and concentrate together, to share things, to work, to get into positions of power in your community, these kinds of things.

And so you do actually need to network with people online. I think that online is a tool for finding the right people, sharing a vision, networking, figuring out how you should be doing this.

But at some point that has to come offline. And so for instance, I'm going to the Old Glory Club convention here, their conference in Tennessee in June.

And they are a great organization that is building chapters across the United States fraternal organization that they're all connected, but they're all their own individual branch.

And each one of them brings like -minded people together, encourages them to participate in their local communities, serve those communities, but also create those fraternal bonds that shared aid, make themselves uncancellable, unplugged from the system, but also become critical nodes in their own communities.

And this is the kind of stuff that takes the online organization and moves it into the real world.

I have a number of friends who have actively moved from where they were and have built small communities with other people from the online community with the interest of taking over that town, taking over that small area, becoming a critical part of the political infrastructure and the business infrastructure and other things, recognizing that they need to do this, they need to organize in this way in order to go ahead and protect their community.

So I think we can start online, but it is unhealthy to stay there. The people building parasocial relationships, living entirely online, counting on all of the discord chats and the

Twitter DMs and the shared streams as their only social outlet, that is unhealthy.

And I understand the desire, I understand the impulse. There's nothing wrong to start there.

I think a lot of people do start there, but at some point you need to make the move. And the great thing is most of the people in this space are saying exactly that.

There's a reason that the right -wing bodybuilder meme is there. It's because a lot of these guys are saying, it's nice that you're listening to this.

Now go listen to it while you lift weights. Make sure you're saying hi to the pretty girl while you're there. Go to church, make sure...

And so they're plugged in, but they're also encouraging people, okay, now that you've heard this, go unplug and better yourself, become worthy, plug into something that's real.

And I think that's critical. That's good. And as far as the Old Glory Club, that's interesting. I didn't actually know they were having this thing in Tennessee.

I signed up for that. So I'm in New York, which I think I'm the only one, probably, like there's like three of us maybe.

But yeah, so if you're listening and you're in the New York area and you want to participate, let me know.

And then we'll figure something out to meet because I would love that. So totally about everything you just said.

I do wonder though, whether it's still advisable for some people to try to gain power in the current regime.

So like pursue very influential jobs in law, politics, entertainment.

This has become such a delicate balance though, because depending on which path you pursue, you may be disqualified at a lower stage if you're honest.

And so then that forces you to either be somewhat dishonest or you don't share your beliefs publicly.

And then what influence are you having? Or you just get disqualified and you go do a startup like we're talking about.

So what's your advice? Do you think that's a worthy pursuit? If people pursue it, how should they do it?

I think that entryism, which is what you're talking about there, going into the institutions is largely not an option for us.

As you pointed out, Graham, she is famous for the long march of the institutions, but that was actually his backup plan.

His first plan was actually to create the parallel institutions that we're talking about. And the reason that the long march of the institutions works for the left is that they're really counting on the fact that conservatives would leave the door open for them, that they believed in this idea of fair play and a marketplace of ideas and letting their enemies basically have a fair shot at running a begotten in these institutions.

And also because they're also a force of deconstruction. And so they can come in and deconstruct those institutions and create these handouts.

The right can't really do that. So I think that you're correct that ultimately entryism isn't a great option.

There are some people who can do it. There are some people who are still getting into critical places and that's good.

Obviously, excuse me, there's a more conservative Supreme Court than there has been a long time.

And whatever their flaws, that's obviously a huge win for the right. And that only happens because you do have conservatives in influential institutions.

So I don't think you completely abandon these as things, especially when it comes to something like law. Like, look, I would like everybody to be a rich plumber too, but we need right -wing lawyers.

Somebody has got to go to the court and make sure that they're not suing you into the ground for being a conservative.

So we can't completely abandon some of these things. But I do think that largely when I say acquire power in the system,

I am talking about that regional local focus. Maybe you're not going to go to Washington and completely take over everything.

You're probably not going to completely sway the deep state, but you could probably take over your school board. You could probably make sure that your sheriff won't enforce laws that violate the second amendment.

These are the things that significantly changed the quality of life in your area. You can make sure that you have a governor that's not going to bend the knee to COVID restriction.

And trust me, as somebody who lived through COVID in Florida, it's a much different life than somebody in New York and California. And so I do think these things matter.

And I think that it's worth pursuing power in those areas, as long as you understand that really it's about capturing the regional things and the things that matter and the things you can control, rather than hoping that just like casting a ballot for Donald Trump is going to really, you know, change this whole thing around.

You know, in the local area thing, I love that, the localism and trying to persuade people to find their group and to be influential in that.

One of the concerns I saw it in the chat, I can't find where, one of the previous comments was basically people moving into a community that they're foreigners in and then taking over that community.

And in my area, not far from where I live, there's actually a whole bunch of towns along the 17 corridor, especially where Hasidic Jewish people have immigrated in mass.

And they're doing kind of what you're saying, taking over school boards, taking over local government, changing things to benefit themselves.

They have a strong in -group preference. But the locals who were there before are pretty upset, I guess would be an understatement about what's happening.

What's your advice to people who might wanna take what you just said seriously, but then they wanna, let's all descend on this one little community in Florida next to your town and change it.

So I think that it makes sense to go ahead and get into a community that is as close as possible to what you wanna do anyway, right?

Just because that's gonna create a scenario where you're not gonna have to swim upstream the entire time.

So if you are gonna move into a community, I wouldn't move into a community that, I wouldn't try to move over to San Francisco and attempt to change the culture there.

Like you're going to be pushing too hard against that. And I do understand people's concerns as those that respect particularity and continuity of communities and those things.

We don't wanna just come in and wreck what a lot of people have. So I think it's important, like I said, to select something that is close to you as possible.

But also you need to get comfortable with having an in -group preference. Like you, like, sorry, but there's a reason that's working for that community.

And that's because it always works. And if you would like to win, rather than complain about being ruled by people who organize, then you better start organizing.

You better prefer your friends. You better punish your enemies. You better get comfortable with that. If you find that icky, yucky, bad work, then okay, get out of the way and let people who can get this done get it done because we don't have time for this.

We don't have time for people to be uncomfortable with this idea. You need to go ahead and create communities that prefer the members of that community.

That's the only way that you're gonna end up building the kind of regional power and influence that you need to push back against the totals.

Well, just a few questions before I let you go. You've been very gracious with your time and we're almost an hour in.

But Jacob asks, can Aaron smell the cigar yet? I don't know what that means. You might know what that means.

With my buddy, Nima Parvini, academic agent, that he says that the woke will be put away.

He thinks that that wildness is simply a strategy that the left has deployed, the rulers have employed.

And because it is now losing power, it's obviously creating such breakdowns and essential functions in society.

They're gonna discard it. They're gonna put it away. I disagree. I think that they've drank the

Kool -Aid, that they are now ruled by true believers at this point. And while there are probably some people who would like to see the woke put away, they will lose that battle to the woke vanguard.

And ultimately this will become the ruling ideology. And we bet a cigar on it. So I'm looking forward to smoking that in victory.

Oh, I'm totally with you on that. I remember five years ago, there was an influential Christian figure,

Phil Johnson, who I'm friends with. And he had said something about like, oh, five years, this is gonna be done.

Like there won't be any woke stuff anyway. This is just the latest fad. And here we are. And it seems like we're in such an institutional phase.

It's drilling down deep everywhere. So here's another, I don't know if this is for me or for you, literally,

I guess they want to ask the question what is a foreigner? What is a foreigner? I don't know if that's for me or you.

I'll just say someone who's outside of the community and has different ways of living. I don't know what you would say, Aron.

Yeah, it's a reasonably good, you know, medium rock band.

I don't, I'm not sure. I don't know if they're that good. Not as good as Journey. And what does

Aron wish right -wingers would understand about culture? That's a good question.

What do I wish they would understand about culture? Probably that culture is largely top -down.

It's largely dictated by elites, but that it does have a certain level of organic magic that cannot be manufactured.

So currently one of the reasons that our society feels so fake is that it really is just a bunch of completely hyper -manufactured culture, pushed down, none of it's organic, none of it's grounded in anything real.

So you can feel the elite influence, the fact that the elites are dictating our culture, but it all feels really fragile and cheap and plastic because it is, it's all just, you know, manufactured.

So I think understanding that, because a lot of times conservatives will be like, well, we should just make culture, you know, like it's something that you just set up in the workshop and, you know, you press into a mold and it rolls off the assembly line.

But really you need to understand that it's a combination of that elite influence. And if it's real and it's good, it also is grounded in an organic community.

And so that's, it's a bit of magic. And we need to plug back into the idea that there's some magic in the world and not just try to kind of autistically manufacture everything.

Do you think that conservatives are often guilty of denying that elite influence?

Because I know that I buy into the whole organic thing and I have for a long time that the government and corporations and so forth, you know, you set up the

Walmart, you drive the mom and pop stores away. This destroys culture. This is bad, right? But this idea of elites and their preferences being pushed through powerful means is kind of denied.

We don't like that as much, but you're saying that actually that's important. That's part of this. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I think if I do nothing else with this book,

I hope I shatter the illusion that we do not have a ruling class and that all of the things that have happened to us are just like the fault of the voters or something.

I hear, I'm getting a lot of this as I go on my, you know, my press tours. Well, isn't it the voters at the end of the day, they're just not going to and getting all the primaries and, you know, voting in all the base people and getting rid of the rhinos.

It's like, yeah, to some extent it would be best if they were involved in these things and we were putting, you know, better people in and, you know, that is part of the solution.

But ultimately it is that elite influence, that top -down constant pressure that dictates much of what people see in the limited choices they have.

And until we grasp that and we understand that we need to shift at the top, not just the bottom, then I think we'll be stuck in the same problem over and over again.

Yeah, I totally agree. Well, if anyone wants to check out the book, they can go to Amazon and check out

The Total State. Is there an Audible version of this coming, Aaron? So there should be. What happens is that your publisher sells off the audio book rights and then if they're going to record it and you're someone who might read it, you actually have to audition for your own book, which is a very odd thing.

But most authors aren't also like show hosts and commentators. So it makes sense. Most authors can't actually read their own works professionally.

So there's like, yeah, I have to wait until like all that gets worked out and goes through the process. So are you reading it? Maybe, I don't know.

Like I said, it'll depend. I've heard that there is going to be an audio book version, but what

I'm trying to say is I do not have the logistics or the timeline on when that will happen. So if you wanna read it, start with the physical copy.

At some point, you might hear my dulcet tones delivering it as well. Awesome, awesome. Okay, well,

I downloaded it on Kindle and I'm about halfway through it. It's a great book. Thank you for writing it. And I think this is gonna really help a lot of people.

So God bless. I wish it all the success in the world. And I'll let you get to probably your next interview on the book.