Conservative Civil War & the Future of the Right

On the Conversations That Matter podcast, I'm your host, John Harris. Happy Veterans Day to everyone out there.

I hope if you were able to, if you weren't working today or you had a break from work, that you were able to attend a

Veterans Day ceremony. This has become more important to me as my child grows up because I know as a child,

I went to these into my teens. And I think it's encouraging for older veterans, especially

Vietnam era veterans, but I think any veteran to see young children attend these things. I know that's part of the reason my parents took me when

I was younger, but also for children to understand they're part of something bigger than themselves.

They're part of a community. And that community includes men and women who have sacrificed a great deal to keep this community going that they live in.

And it was a good time in a way, also a sobering time, even though it was only a 20 minute, 25 minute ceremony, maybe 30,

I don't know. It was pretty short, but I realized something. I haven't been to a

Veterans Day event in quite some time. And I was trying to remember why that was.

How come, I think the last time I went was in my twenties. And I think there's a combination of things being disconnected to some extent, being in communities where I'm there for school and normally busy up to my eyeballs in various things, work -related things.

I don't know. I don't think I've been to one in a long time. And there's no excuse for this.

It's just Veterans Day comes and goes. And if I see veterans out in public,

I tend to try to say thank you. And it means a great deal to me to honor the country.

In Memorial Day, I know my wife and I went out and I wore my grandpa's World War II cap and stuff, but it used to be more of a habit.

And I remember it used to be that the whole community seemed to come out. It was huge, at least where I lived for both

Memorial Day and Veterans Day. I think bigger on Memorial Day because people get off for that and it's warmer. But there were still

World War II vets when I remember going out to these things. They were older. They were fading fast, but there were still some

World War II vets. And there was a big switch in just the whole feel of it from what

I remember with World War II vets. I mean, my memory goes back as far as there were

Gold Star Mothers for World War II vets. I do, I remember, I don't know. People are gonna say I'm really old, but they were really old.

But now going and seeing that the older ones are the Vietnam vets, there's a different feel to it.

And I'm still trying to digest this. I heard about veterans committing suicide from two speakers and they only had two speakers.

And the term suicide must have been mentioned about three or four times. And the call to action was to get involved with the veterans in your community to prevent them from essentially killing themselves.

And that's just a sobering thing to think about. And I think that colors maybe what

I'm gonna say on the podcast today to some extent. I really love this country. I'm not gonna play it here, but you can go on my social media channels and I put a video of me playing a song

I wrote two weeks ago that's gonna be for the album that I put out next year.

So this isn't studio quality. I already recorded it in the studio, but this is just me on my guitar and it's about American heritage.

And I just feel like something that I had, something that was even slipping away perhaps, well,

I know it was when I was growing up has left the building. It's really been slipping away.

And there's remnants of it. There's memories, there's a shell of it. There's maybe in some places the real substance of it still exists, but it's in pockets.

And I'll do everything I can to preserve those pockets. I'll do everything I can for my children so that they have at least something of the

United States I grew up in, something of the honor, understanding the sacrifice and the patriotism, a devotion to their local community, understanding why

America is the way it is, why it's been blessed so much, why it's worth defending, understanding some of the mistakes that have been made too, but having an identity, just like a family identity, having an identity in this country.

And a local identity. As many of these events are focused on local veterans.

You have volunteer firefighters, local. Actually, I think it's funny. They said

Boy Scouts. They said there was a Boy Scout troop there, but of course they don't call themselves Boy Scouts anymore.

They're scouting. And so one of the speakers said Boy Scouts anyway. So, so much for them dumping the one gender and trying to be inclusive.

They're still, that's still their reputation, but I didn't see any trail life troop, but I'm sure in other places, in other towns, they probably have trail life involved in these things.

But it's your local civic organizations. It's your American Legion. They were the ones hosting this particular one.

It's the police officers from the local community. It's politicians.

And it's really something that I think it's important because there's very few times that the community and those who are civic leaders and involved in voluntary associations get together to reaffirm the fact that they love their community, that they're involved in it.

And that's one of them. So, I mean, you have Memorial Day of July 4th. You have Veterans Day. You might have a

Christmas function or maybe a Thanksgiving function. Every town's different. Some towns have a pie baking contest and even local county fairs and stuff can function in these ways.

But it's important for communities to get together. So I was really grateful that my daughter was able to experience that for the first time and hopefully encourage some of the older folks that were there.

But a sobering reminder that the country that I remember, even though I'm not that old, is not the country that even exists now.

And I did a study or I read a study years ago when

I was in World War II class in grad school that the percentage, this is by percentage, not by numbers, but the percentage of soldiers that suffered from PTSD was actually greater in World War II than it was in Vietnam, which you would never know, right?

You wouldn't think that. And the Vietnam soldiers are known for suffering from all kinds of traumatic things, which many of them did legitimately.

I have an uncle who did. And getting hooked on drugs, these kinds of things.

But World War II veterans had that too. But there was something about the World War II veteran that seemed more positive in a way, less dark, even though they went through horrible situations.

And I think it was the fact that they were coming from a thicker society where the people around them really did value their sacrifice and really did come together to show them encouragement, more so at least, that they really did take time to honor them and that kind of thing.

And that's been slowly eroding over the course of years. And every community is different, but it's time to get that back.

I think that's the only answer, to be quite honest with you. It's not like I'm even recommending this as the only answer. I actually think that it legitimately is the only answer because it's the only answer, it's just a fact.

If you want to preserve the way of life that has been passed down to you and expand on it and return to maybe things that even preceded your own birth, then you're gonna have to get involved in local associations.

That's where the community actually lives, breathes, exists. If you look at a country or a community, any civic body as a living, breathing organism, the vital parts of that organism, the places where the lifeblood is pumping through are on the molecular level, right?

If you have a cancer go through and it destroys the body, it's going to also start on the molecular level.

And I think that's what we've been experiencing. The United States has had a cancer. We've been dying a slow death and it's been very hard to watch.

And there's many of us who are patriots who want to do something and many of us have done things to slow it down.

I think Trump was perceived as a chemotherapy to this, that he would maybe do some bad things.

I know that's how I viewed him, that he might bring in some things to the Republican Party, which we didn't want, maybe soft peddling some social issues, bringing in some coarse language and things like this, but it was necessary because we didn't have another option at that point.

And he was going to do some good things that needed to be done. And to be downstream from that 2016 election and to now be in 2025 and to see what's happened and to see how

Pandora's box has been open and to see post 2020, the lack of confidence in our institutions on just about every level.

The only place that we have, the only tool available to restore any semblance of stability exists on the local level.

And maybe that's always been where it's at. And we had too much confidence in these larger institutions anyway.

But if you're not involved somewhere, it's time to be involved. Maybe you're involved in church. That is a local civic organization as well.

Obviously with a function that exists past the civic and past the temporal, it is pointing towards an eternal focus, but it is a civic organization as well.

It has a social function that cannot be replaced. If you're involved in the fire department, if you're involved in other volunteer organizations, veterans organizations, historical organizations, organizations to help children become men and women, or write a passage of some kind.

I mean, these are all very, very important. And if our young people don't have authority figures to look up to and respect on the local level, they will find them somewhere else.

Even if it's charlatans and posers and grifters, which is what we're gonna talk about also a little bit today.

They're gonna find it in the digital fantasy world. That's already a draw. But the only way you can stave that off,

I think is on the real local level. Localism is not really an ism.

It's just a natural ordered way of life. And it's the way of life we must continue in this country if we're gonna keep it.

So that's my opening monologue. I wasn't planning on saying all that, but because I went to this Veterans Day event, I've been marinating on some of this.

And I think it will factor into some of the other things that I wanna say today. So I will get to some of the comments and questions.

I can already see them coming in. And I will get to them later on in the podcast.

If you put a question mark by the comment, it'll help me understand better which ones to focus on and which ones not to.

But we're gonna talk about the Civil War on the right today. And I'm gonna just put off some of the evangelical stuff.

I know J .D. Greer was on this podcast. People are talking about that. Is he being normalized and rehabbed?

I actually haven't listened to it yet. All I've heard is people's reactions. So I'm gonna try to. And if we have time,

I'll try to get to that tomorrow. By the way, I am gonna be taking a trip in the next few days. And so I won't be around to do as many podcasts this week as I'd like to anyway.

I do appreciate your prayers. This is not a pleasure trip. This is related to the work that I do here.

And I just came back from a trip, obviously, over the weekend. Thank you for your prayers on that as well. It was, I think, a very successful time.

I had a great time with everyone down there in the Tampa region of Florida. I enjoyed your company, the food.

The only thing I didn't enjoy were the flights. And it's because of the shutdown in part. It's also in part because of my own negligence.

I've never done this before. I have never done this. But I actually, I have so many things on my mind.

I went to the airport and I forgot my luggage. And I had to turn around, try to get a later flight.

But then every situation after that, every flight after that was delayed. It was just, it was a mess.

And I was meeting people who had eight hour or nine hour delays and just, it's crazy at the airport.

So if you're gonna travel, you might wanna take a car. But I had a great time. And so thank you for your prayers.

That's a big part of what I do is speaking to churches, encouraging churches, speaking to civic organizations.

And I hesitate to say no to those things because like I said, in the opening monologue, I believe that is where the real battle is.

And I wanna shore up those local institutions as much as I possibly can if there's, if the

Lord will use me in that effort. So thank you for that. Okay, well, since we're talking about red pills and all kinds of things in the chat,

I think I'll start, I'll start here. This podcast is not going to be as in depth as I would like a podcast about this topic to be because there's so much to talk about.

I can't cover a hundred years of history in one short podcast. I could do a series of podcasts on what

I'm about to talk about. And maybe I will, but I think, I think the, what we're doing on the

Conversations That Matter podcast, what we are doing with the patrons, walking through the

Anglo conservative tradition in literature is going to cover much of this.

We are going to get here. And it's part of rebuilding an understanding of what it is to be an

American, what it is to be involved in a local community. So there will be more extended in -depth explanations for many of the things

I'm gonna share with you, but it is necessary for me to give a crash course in what it means to be an

American conservative and specifically to focus on why it is that American conservatives have had points of division and are now fracturing.

And maybe a more accurate way to put that isn't even the way I just put it. I think that's how it's normally framed.

I actually look at it this way. It's how conservatives have been diluted, have been gatekept, have been prevented from gaining access to the mechanisms of power in the institutions that they are presumed to control.

And I think there's a lot of frustration over that. And there has been for a long time. And there's some hope right now among some that maybe this is changing.

And leave me to be the bearer of bad news. I have a very cautious optimism, but the caution is outweighing the optimism right now.

I'm gonna be honest with you. We're gonna have to get our act together and we're gonna have to get it together very fast because we have midterms coming up and we have another presidential election coming up.

And we are nowhere near where we need to be to gain the victories necessary to continue the progress that we've been making and to expand on it.

Now, some of you are so black piled right now, you're probably wondering what progress am I even talking about? We're gonna get into that in the podcast.

I'm also wanna say one last thing before I start to go through my survey here and give you my thoughts on this civil war.

I was thinking about this today. I think I heard about suicide so much from the Veterans Day celebration or remembrance that I started thinking back to a few years ago.

I've told this story before on the podcast, but I think about it every so often. I was hiking, well,

I was actually camping. Went on a little hike, but it was more of a camp out with some friends in 2021.

It was in the fall, so it was this time of year. And it was late summer, actually.

It was late summer, kind of early fall. And there was a car that pulled up to the parking lot right near where we were camping.

It was in the Catskill Mountains. It was a pretty secluded place. And I said to the other two people

I was with, maybe we should go talk to whoever that is. It's 11 p .m.,

whatever it was, between 11 and midnight. It's kind of late for someone to be pulling up. And maybe this is someone who's a threat,

I don't know. Maybe we should just go check it out. Long story short, we discussed the issue and determined that one of the guys who was with us, who was at that point in the military, was going to go and just kind of scope it out, but not engage the person.

And so they did and said, it's harmless. It's just a young man who's going for a walk.

And you could hear him. We could hear him on his cell phone. You may be wondering where this is all going.

And trust me, it does relate to what I'm going to talk about here. So we wait.

We hear the guy go off into the woods on a trail. And about, I don't know, half an hour later or so, a fire truck shows up.

Now, this is a rough path to get down. This is like four wheel drive stuff. This fire truck is going as fast as it can on this.

Lights everywhere, stops in the middle of the woods. And a frantic fire chief gets out and it's just him.

And we walk over to where this fire truck is. And he's just, he's on the phone. He's walking, pacing all around his truck.

And he says, he looks at us and he said, points at us, points at me.

And he says, gunshot wound to the head. I didn't know what he was talking about. I said, no, we're just camping here.

Well, within the next 10 minutes, police cars, fire trucks, everyone arrives.

And we didn't get much sleep. The lights were reflecting off the trees until three in the morning, at least.

What's, what happened? Well, I found out the next day what happened. The fire chief was the father of that 19 year old who had parked in the woods there and had taken his own life with a pistol.

We were the last people on earth to be near him. And it's bothered me ever.

I mean, I talked to the Lord about it. I don't think I'll ever make the same mistake again.

I will go and talk to a person if they show up at 11 o 'clock, 12 o 'clock at night in a secluded area.

And I'm, you know, if it's a similar scenario, I'm gonna talk to them. But we went the next morning to the spot where it happened.

We saw evidence of this. I looked online, this kid was a involved member of the community, volunteer, fireman, paramedic.

It appeared pretty conservative politically. I think I saw some Trump stuff. And he was going through a depressing time.

I was able to pick up that his girlfriend had broken up with him or something.

It sounded like he was on the phone with a girlfriend when he had pulled up. And I just remember weeping about this and just thinking.

And right after that, this was in 2021, I remember a military veteran from,

I believe it was the Iraq war had just lost a local political position in the election.

It was right after this and he shot himself. And I just remember thinking how many guys, especially young white guys are just killing themselves because they're depressed, because they don't see a way out.

This was right after the loss of Donald Trump at the national level, there didn't seem to be a hope.

We had just lived through a horrible ordeal and there was nothing to hope in on a political level.

And if you didn't have a strong family, you didn't have especially a faith in the

Lord Jesus Christ, what were you gonna do? What was there left to do? Where could you even throw your support?

If you wanted to preserve something for a potential family. I think a lot of us felt rejected by so many institutions that we came to trust in.

And I think there's a deep jadedness there for many, it's still there.

And there are two things that you can do with that. One is you can receive the explanations that scripture has for these things.

And you can look back in the pages of history for similar scenarios and follow the model of great men who navigated them for the good of their own people, even sacrificing themselves.

For me, I don't have to go back far. I don't have to go back farther than even my own grandparents' generation.

They lived through horrible things in the Great Depression and World War II and the Dust Bowl. And my grandmother's still alive, she's in her nineties.

I just saw her recently. She is very healthy for a woman of her age, still working in the garden.

But she, like many in her generation, saves everything because you never know when you might need it.

Because when you've experienced real poverty, real struggle, you don't forget that.

And I think there's a generation right now that have been sold a lot of lies about what their future should look like if they just follow the formula.

If they just do the very things that previous generations have done from the boomers on, they will be successful.

And then they grow up in a world where DEI pulls them back, where it seems like it's much more of a challenge to find a girlfriend.

And when they do find a girlfriend, and I'm talking about men here, it's rare to find one that has the quality and has the devotion to them like previous generations.

Now, quality girls aren't in much of a better scenario. They also are contending with men who are very broken, who have been hooked on video games, drugs, pornography, all of these things at greater levels.

And there is, I think, an overall kind of depression and malaise about these things. And some people just give up, whether it's giving up on marriage, whether it's giving up on,

I'll never buy a house, I'll never have that, or if it's just giving up on life. They give up on the dreams that they had, the dreams that they thought would come true if they just followed the formula.

I'm talking about the ones who actually are responsible. I'm not talking about those who have shirked their jobs or shirked their responsibilities completely.

I'm talking about the ones who have made an effort. It's very difficult. And I think

I need to acknowledge this. I've said, what I just said to you, I have said this kind of thing over and over, over the years on this podcast.

And I think it's important for you to hear it from me once again, because what I'm gonna share with you on the podcast today, what

I already am sharing with you, is not intended in any way, shape, or form to throw all kinds of cold water on people who are really trying to make a difference and struggling to just live life.

I wanna encourage you, you're doing the right thing. You need to keep doing the right thing. Don't give up doing the right thing.

If your reward's not on this earth, it's in heaven. But don't ever give up. If you're not married and you wanna be married, don't give up on that.

If you're wanting to have kids, don't give up on that. If you wanna have a house and it's been difficult, don't give up on that.

Circumstances change, you don't know what's right around the corner. Ultimately, it's your faith in Christ that's gonna get you through any of these things.

It's not Christianity as a system, by the way. It's not some Christian identity that's gonna get you through it.

It's the Lord Jesus Christ. That's what actual Christianity is. Listen to voices that'll encourage you, that'll help you.

Do not listen to voices that will black pill you, that will justify anger and rage that's misdirected and sinful.

Don't listen to voices that are going to take advantage of even legitimate anger and rage for the building up of their own platforms without giving you any kind of constructive advice, reminding you of the providence of God, reminding you of the things you really do have, making it sound even worse than it is.

Those voices are the path to death. We need encouragement right now.

We need to acknowledge where we're at. We need encouragement right now. Circumstances do change.

God does exist. He has put you here for such a time as this. You are within his providence.

You have meaning and purpose, and there is fulfillment in following his plan, no matter where it takes you.

So I need to say that for young men, for veterans, for anyone who's listening within the earshot of this voice, do not take the black pill.

And there are many that wanna market the black pill to you right now. And they wanna make every excuse for the disappointments that you've encounters that none of it has anything to do with you, really.

And in none of it, and this is the worst part, none of it's really within your control at all. You can't do anything.

You are helpless, because all of these other forces need to be changed first. And then once we remake all of society in a revolutionary way, then, and only then will you have a shot.

Well, we need to do things to help society change, but it's going to be a battle, and we're gonna need you for the battle.

And it's going to take place on multiple levels, the local level being one of them. And we need your sword.

I don't need your viewership. I'm here for you, okay? That's why

I make these videos. If you don't need this voice, then don't listen to it. Do whatever constructive things you need to do.

I mean, that's not something you're gonna hear from those podcasters. They want you, right? They want your money. They want your resources.

They want your time. They want your views. They want you to share. I want you to do whatever

God wants you to do in your local area. And if that has anything to do with this podcast and I can encourage you, then great.

If not, then great. You do what you know you need to do. That's the message, okay?

We can't waste any time right now. The clock is ticking. We have a different set of circumstances than we did 10 years ago, and certainly than our parents did.

And if we're going to save this country, all hands must be on deck. The civil war on the right that we're seeing right now, which is more of a fracturing on the right, is not a good thing.

And we need to do everything we can to take whatever we can of the right and build bridges where it's possible to defeat the left.

Now, I've advocated for Gates. I've advocated for standards. I've talked about those in previous podcasts. I'm not gonna go long into that.

But I firmly believe that we are on a razor's edge on a national level.

And we can't afford to blow up coalitions that have given us a winning strategy simply because of secondary differences over things.

We have some very primary things. We have a triage, right? And immigration to me is at the top of this because the

Democrats get permanent majorities if they get another four years like Biden. And we haven't made the progress in immigration that we need to so far to really change the direction of things.

And there's only one game in town for changing any direction, and that's Donald Trump's administration. So the civil war on the right is a serious thing.

We're gonna talk about that guy in a moment, but I had him on the screen. We're gonna talk about, I'm gonna play you clips from Ben Shapiro, gonna play you clips from Tucker Carlson.

We're gonna talk about a number of things. Let's start here. Conservatives have always won elections based on resistance to leftist innovations and common sense middle -class sentiments, including

Christianity, federal arrangements, and limited government. Whether it's classic liberals who have reached the helm of Republican conservative organizations or it's actual conservatives, this is the winning formula.

And Francis Schaeffer talked about this as middle -class standards and values where religion has been collectively remembered.

Sam Francis talked about this as a revolution from the middle that needed to happen. But even when establishment

Republicans win, they have to do so to cater to middle America, to people who want religion, to people who want a localist, federalist kind of arrangement and they want more control over their lives, to people who want limited government.

They have to cater to those people because they can't win without them. The Bible belt still is the anchor for the conservative cause in this country.

Now, things have changed in the last 100 years. From the mid 19th century until the early 20th century, the Republican Party was the primary progressive force in American politics.

And I'll say that again because some of you might've jumped out of your seat. Yes, the Republican Party, not the Democrats, was the primary progressive force in American politics, particularly in foreign policy.

And maybe I want to adjust that. I don't know, particularly might be too strong, but foreign policy was certainly one of those things.

Abraham Lincoln, of course, believed in interventionism. Right, that's the Civil War. William McKinley, Spanish -American

War, oversaw U .S. expansion into the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba. And what began to develop was this idea that America was on a global mission, which you can really attach back into a

Northeastern kind of city -on -the -hill ethos. In our generation,

I'm a millennial, this has been channeled into, we need to go spread democracy.

We need to nation -build. We need to give freedom to people in the Middle East who haven't experienced that.

And it'll just make a world of difference for them. Well, we've learned the lesson of that. That's what that is, though.

Post -World War II, a significant philosophical shift occurred. The Democrats became the party of the radicals, including people who were on the wrong side of the

Cold War. There were anti -communist Democrats, but more and more, they didn't really have a place to go.

And between Wilson and FDR, the Democrats, obviously Wilson being a main proponent of foreign intervention with the

League of Nations, they became the globalist party, more so than the

Republicans. But they also became the party that was winking and nodding at communists during the

Cold War. And as this took place, as the Democratic Party changed, many

Republicans were welcomed in, just like we were recently welcoming in Elon Musk and Tulsi Gabbard and other former

Democrats. The Republican Party was welcoming in former Democrats who still had some globalist inclinations, who still had some liberal think in them into their own party.

But the Republicans themselves also had a history of being interventionists.

Now, this is what's happening in elite circles, okay? So Middle America, primarily their values don't shift as fast.

Middle -class standards, Middle American values, Republican Party capitalizes on those things.

And you have the blue dog Democrats coming out and voting for the Republican, and you have Nixon gaining huge majorities and Reagan gaining huge majorities.

But during this entire time, the Republicans are keeping a number of things, they're actually expanding even some of the things that Democrats used to be known for.

And one of those things was interventionism. They embraced, they did not just become the conservative party, right?

This great switch nonsense that you hear about from the Democrat side is, there's a truth to what they're saying, but it becomes nonsense when they just say, the

Republicans became the conservative party. They actually, during this time, both parties are going in a more progressive direction and the

Republicans do so less. That's really the way to look at it. And they embrace interventionism as exemplified in the

Marshall Plan. They think that essentially we need to buy our allies through aid, through intervention and conflicts, we need to spread democracy.

And this is rooted in Wilsonian internationalism. This is something that Woodrow Wilson would have been giving a thumbs up for, but the

Republicans adopt this. And this shift marginalizes some important groups.

And it's not just in foreign policy. This also was part of the, I would say, would include the civil rights regime.

Republicans vote for this. And paleo -conservatives, Southern conservatives and libertarians within the

Republican party are essentially given the shaft. And these groups favor non -interventionism, they favor limited government, cultural traditionism, and they are effectively gatekept by the party establishment.

And who are the party establishment? I mean, I look at this as Harry Jaffa, of course you have written against a number of times, being kind of the philosophical godfather on a more political think tank level,

I would say William F. Buckley is a good example of this. I mean, they become the standard bearers for what it means to be the

Republican party, National Review, Claremont Institute, which is very influential even now.

I think they're changing, but they're still, there's still that ghost of Harry Jaffa still there.

Now, as these various more traditional and libertarian groups are gatecapped over time, there's various efforts to try to get them back into positions of leadership and that kind of thing.

And one of the biggest ones, I'm gonna give you two of them, was Mel Bradford and then Bork, Robert Bork.

So Mel Bradford, this shift happened, I think this shift was solidified, we'll put it that way.

During the Reagan administration. And I am not a hater of Ronald Reagan. I know there's a lot of haters out there,

Ronald Reagan now, I see very negative things with Ronald Reagan, I also see very positive things.

As a Californian, I can't really, I still have to have some pride in Reagan, but Reagan made some critical errors.

And one of them was this, 1981, he nominates Mel Bradford, who is probably the most prominent

Southern conservative scholar and paleoconservative intellectual. And he nominates him to the chair of the

National Endowment of the Humanities. And this had strong support from Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, strong support from Russell Kirk, probably the leading conservative intellectual of the time.

And he ends up getting the shaft because of writings that he made that were critical of Abraham Lincoln and defense of Southern traditions.

And the controversy becomes media driven, fueled by media smears, orchestrated lobbying, and Reagan, instead of standing up, caved.

And that was a cataclysmic failure. Reagan withdraws the nomination in favor of William Bennett, who is establishment friendly and a neoconservative.

And ever since then, these various elements have not regained any kind of seat at the table.

Libertarians, now libertarians have gone wacko, but the Murray Rothbard style libertarians, which

I would say is exemplified in like the Ron Paul revolution, right? These, those people, the

Southern conservatives, they have not been able to get back. Paleoconservatives, Robert Bork's another one.

Bork is this traditional originalist conservative. And he is, he was a

DC circuit court judge. He was nominated by Reagan to the Supreme Court to replace the retiring Justice Lewis Powell, 1987.

His confirmation hearings became a battleground with leading Democrats like Senator Ted Kennedy.

And it was a ferocious campaign. In fact, there actually developed a term of getting borked for getting the shaft, essentially, getting abandoned by your own people and voted down.

And it was a landslide against him. I mean, the Senate rejected him by a vote of 58 to 42, widest margin ever,

I think, for a Supreme Court nominee to be rejected. And surprisingly, the opposition also arose from within conservative ranks.

So Harry Jaffa criticizes Bork very strongly. He even writes a whole book against Bork. Guess who wrote the forward for that book against Bork?

Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, joins the critique with Harry Jaffa to drum

Bork out of respectable society. And with Bork also went a message saying, conservative traditionalists are not welcome here.

Now, many of you may never have heard of either of these. Some of you might've heard of both of them, but if you're younger, you might not be aware that this happened during the

Reagan administration. You probably are aware though of Pat Buchanan. Pat Buchanan tries to run for president in 1992 and 1996 on a platform opposing globalism and interventionism.

Ron Paul, 2008 to 2012, tries to, in those campaigns, run for president.

Neither of them win. Both of them get the shaft. And I'll add on that the religious right, essentially, in the primary in 1992 between Pat Buchanan and George H .W.

Bush decides to back George H .W. Bush for a shot at having a seat at the table, which later on Pat Buchanan saw as a mistake.

This is why you live in the world you live in. This is why conservatives that are older feel very frustrated, like real conservatives.

This is why, and I think it's important for me to explain this, why many Buchanan followers who have seen people like Sam Francis and Joe Sobran get kind of cast out of polite society kind of have a chip on their shoulder.

And I'll just say for some of them, if it's Nazis, neo -Nazis, if it's terrible barbaric people that come in and punish the establishment, they're gonna put on their sunglasses and get their popcorn because they have such a resentment against those people, against the neocon establishment in their minds, that many of them are willing to see them fall no matter who's the one that's making it happen.

You have to understand these things. And if you don't, you will have a hard time understanding why things are lining up the way they are right now in conservative circles.

So you have those failed campaigns and then Donald Trump comes along. And Donald Trump says some things that sound an awful lot like Pat Buchanan, America first.

Donald Trump starts saying even things on foreign policy that sound an awful lot like they could appeal to Ron Paul fans.

Donald Trump is sick of footing the bill for NATO. Donald Trump wants to reduce US military overreach.

Donald Trump gives a seat at the table to some of the marginalized voices.

He gives a seat to neocons, but he also allows some of these people who were gatekept from polite society to come back.

I mean, he had guys like Stephen Bannon in his first term as a chief strategist. You now have commentators like Tucker Carlson, who were very much part of the establishment, who are now maybe in a very kind of...

What word do I wanna use here? In a way that would describe someone who's new to a particular way of thinking or exploring a new way of thinking, kind of crass or crude way of approaching it.

Tucker Carlson is turning on some of the people, institutions, assumptions that he used to have.

You have people like Tulsi Gabbard, who was part of the administration now, who are not as interventionist as much at all.

You got Pete Hegseth, who's also not as much of an interventionist from what

I understand in acting as a secretary of defense. And of course you have conservative Christians like Pete Hegseth and Russ Vought in the administration.

And they have real power, real influence. And this was the hope of Donald Trump.

This is why Donald Trump was able to tap into that middle

America, middle -class vote. He was able to expand it to go after union members in Rust Belt places.

He was able to bring an economic message they resonated with, a foreign policy message they resonated with, and also gain the support of these other groups that had been gatekept out of respectability.

And that's why the institutionalists at the top, the managerialists, the elites of the

Republican Party wanted to stop him and they failed. And then the question became, are they going to be able with their power?

And this is still, I think an open question for some people. Are they able to influence him?

And the answer is yes, but to what extent? He's got to play ball with them to some extent. I think this is just a conclusion that many of us have reached paying attention to this kind of thing.

Politics is about negotiation and strategy. Donald Trump made serious inroads, but he can only go so far.

And he's got Congress to contend with, courts to contend with, donors to contend with.

And he's pushing the needle as much as he possibly can in at least the directions that we consider to be productive.

So that's where things are at right now. This is the first part of understanding why things are fracturing right now, okay?

There's a feeling among some that Donald Trump is betraying them, that Donald Trump is in favor of foreign intervention, that Donald Trump is a shill for Israel, that Donald Trump is turning his back on the

American people and not providing the economic relief that they need and these kinds of things. So whether that's true or not,

I'm not commenting on it right now. I'm just saying this is a perception and it's a problem that Donald Trump has.

Donald Trump is able to weave together various strands to create a coalition that will beat the

Democrats. But that coalition is in jeopardy. Charlie Kirk was a general in that movement that also helped, especially with the young people, to create a coalition that could win.

He's probably, I just thought about this the other day, he's probably the only one that would be able to get a debate going on the

Israel question, for example. Tucker Carlson texted Mark Levin, Mark Levin revealed the text and said,

Tucker Carlson is terrible, I'm not gonna debate him. He basically, Tucker's beyond the pale.

He's not worth debating, I don't take him seriously. He was, he insulted Tucker, right? And Tucker then insulted him and it was just, it was immature.

But I thought about this. I thought, you know, Tucker's reaching out on behalf of Turning Point USA. Why? Why is

Tucker doing it? Why isn't Turning Point USA doing it? And the answer just occurred to me immediately because there isn't someone to broker the deal anymore.

There isn't someone who has built up trust on both sides named Charlie Kirk. And so now these sides are more adrift.

You have neocons, more represented by someone like a Mark Levin. And then you have whatever Tucker Carlson is, he's in transition, but he's,

I think, represents a more of a populist instinct. And it's hard for them to even talk to each other.

Charlie was the bridge. Charlie was able, you know, I think Charlie's work was actually very productive because he was gaining within the conservative movement, within the

Republican party. He was making gains for a lot of the things that we care about, including

America First. And he himself was changing and going more in that direction.

And then he was killed. And it's, I struggle with it to some extent.

And, you know, God, why? Why now of all times, right? We needed that guy.

We needed someone who could bring various people together, who had the personality.

I mean, why did so many people come out afterward and say, Charlie thinks this, or Charlie thought that? Because Charlie was affable with all of them.

Now, cynical people would say he was a politician with them. And I've said, I think he could find the good to compliment in everyone.

And everyone took that piece of him. And he was able to kind of keep a coalition together. Coalition, those falling apart.

One of the reasons you have to understand that is because of interventionism and the gatekeeping of those three groups, paleo -conservative,

Southern conservatives and libertarians for years. There is another fracture going on though.

And when I weigh in on this one, I get a lot of pushback from some people. That's why

I wanted to talk about this second, because I wanted to acknowledge all of the things that I've said for a long time, which I don't know if there's much new that I've said already in this podcast, but I wanted you to know,

I see the other things, okay? I see the establishment versus the populist debate and all of that.

But there is something else that is worth talking about here. And I wanna separate them somewhat. And that is the conservative instincts that, like I said, have still won elections that still exist in this country, whether or not the elite follow them or are believers in them this still is part of the ethos of America and then revolutionary movements.

And there is a fight over this as well. When you start having neo -Nazi types who want the levers of control, they don't want just a place at the table, they wanna own the table.

When you have that kind of thing happening, of course, neocons are gonna freak out. Neocons are gonna freak out because they would, if they're dyed in the wool liberals, even if they're classic liberals in their minds, if they frame it that way, oftentimes they will look at any kind of traditional thinking and it's like, they only see ideology.

You start talking about ancestry and experience in a place over time, they think you're saying blood and soil, rigid, idealistic stuff.

They can't see the difference between these things. They think it's a DNA test you're after, right? And it doesn't matter to them because they are firmly committed to the proposition nation.

They think that America is fundamentally an idea and people assimilate into the idea.

They don't assimilate into an experience. It's an abstraction. And because of that, it is, even if they give lip service to Americana things, when someone actually wants to take that to the political level, when they wanna take that small town

Americana rooted society to the politics and say, I don't wanna change my small town.

I don't want 200 Haitians coming into my town. I don't want foreigners coming into my state.

I don't want to be competing economically with them. They all, for them, this is racism essentially, right?

Like you shouldn't even see those differences. Those differences can all be transcended as long as you believe in the

American creed, as long as you believe in equality, right? So they're gonna call, they're gonna gatekeep anyone and use the same kind of terms.

They're gonna call a Southern conservative who is the farthest thing from a neo -Nazi that you can be.

They'll call that person a Nazi because they have limited categories they're operating from because their own ideology.

So of course they're gonna freak out. But this is where I think a lot of people are missing it. Traditional conservatives are also going to oppose a revolutionary instinct, whether it's neo -Nazism or something else coming into their movement, especially if we're breaking new ground, especially if this is novel, if it's innovative, if it's not something that's already been normalized and it's a threat.

Conservative, the conservative instinct is to stand against that kind of thing. They do not favor revolutions.

They do not favor ideology. If they ever side with ideologues, it is to preserve a cherished way of life.

And it's in a loose coalition, right? To them, Nazism represented abstraction, managerialism, centralization.

And this is, I could just give you quote after quote. This has been true for a long time. Now, neo -Nazis haven't been a major force in American political life.

So it's not something that you're gonna, conservatives have had to talk about a lot. I pointed this out in my article for American Reformer a few years ago, conservative

Nazi hunters. They say, look, why would you talk about something that's not, let alone the main threat, it's not even a threat.

But the chessboard is changing and it's changing very fast. People are adopting new views in,

I mean, there's probably people today who woke up this morning and they thought the whole

Chemtrail conspiracy was just a conspiracy that didn't have merit. And they will go to bed tonight after watching

Tucker Carlson thinking that the government is poisoning us with aluminum because of Chemtrails.

That's how fast everything is changing. And all it takes is one podcast.

That's probably the scarier thing to me. Without any research, without, it's just, people are relying on their own intuition because they don't trust the institutions anymore.

And personalities that match what they feel inside. This is,

I'm not trying to insult anyone. I'm just saying that is how a lot of people think. Why is Candace Owens, why does she have the number one podcast

I've heard now in the world or in America, I don't know which. It's crazy to me. I see the clips of the last few days of what she's been talking about, because for some reason,

Twitter thinks I need to see that. And so I pay loose attention and I'm just, some of the things

I hear out of her mouth, I'm like, how in the world are people listening to this? This is speculative.

This isn't that interesting. This is the thoughts of one person who's claiming she has sources, but you don't know who the sources are.

I mean, this is, I'm almost embarrassed, but there's a lot of people who are thinking that's gospel truth.

And it's because of the failures of the elites. It's because whatever goodwill they had built up over time, they've crashed it all in 2020.

But let me give you a sense of what real conservatives, okay, we're talking paleo -conservatives, talking traditional conservatives,

Southern conservatives. What have they said about Nazism post -World War II? Frederick Augustus Vogt, who said this from the pages of National Review when it was still included actual conservatives back in the 50s.

The people who did most against the Nazis were not the communists, not even the socialists, but the active Christians and the conservatives, the

Jesuits, the ministers, the junkers, the colonels, the aristocrats. In other words,

Nazism is not something that can jive with Christianity. James Donoghue, who wrote

Hitler's Conservative Opponents in Bavaria, which I've cited before, he says that many believe that the new

Germany had departed from the values and traditions of which Germans had once been so proud. And that opposing national socialism by appealing to Christianity, traditional social hierarchy and private property, defending the liberty of the church because they believe the

Christian religion was true was what the Bavarians did. They were to the right of Hitler, okay?

This is very important for me to say, like, you know, I'm to the right of you because I'm a Nazi. Well, yeah, that's how the left frames it.

You're far right. There were critics who were farther to the right. They actually believed in traditional hierarchies, religion and institutions, and didn't want the innovations coming from the

Nazi party. Eric von Kuhnelt -Leiden, Nazism is an irrational mixture of biology and collectivism.

Again, this is, all these quotes are in that piece I wrote on the conservative

Nazi hunters from American Reformer. Forrest Davis, in National Review, 1956,

Nazis developed a welfare state which suppressed the individual freedom to live, think and work. They, so they wanted, they were totalitarians.

And this is, most conservatives have viewed it this way, that not, that they're both Nazism and communism, these were results of modernity, both of these things.

Eric von Kuhnelt -Leiden, again, says that Nazism, National Socialism, it is Socialism, always belonged to the left.

And that the idea that they were of the right was one of the most successful hoaxes in history. Now you might think that's a boomer con thing to say that.

Well, there was actual conservatives who said this kind of thing because they're looking at it as tradition versus modernity.

And they're saying, this is a modern movement. Russell Kirk, the Nazi and fascist parties were destructive instruments made possible by the hysteria and loneliness of the masses who enthusiastically supported them.

Though now and again, these ideologies might endeavor to disguise themselves by talk of family and tradition, that was no better than a sham.

They're true, an object was revolutionary. That quote about loneliness

I find particularly interesting. The 20th century was created by idealism, says

Roger Scruton. Communism and fascism and Nazism are all based on idealized systems. What the world should be ideally and how it isn't what it should be.

Therefore we're entitled to change it radically and take control of it in order to do so. And the immediate results is genocide as we see.

I just go on and on, Richard Weaver, the rebellion on fascism, the rebellion of the youth, the repudiation of bourgeois complacency, the attempt to renew the sense of holiness and heroism.

That's what it is. And if you read his in defense of tradition, he's constantly talking about how much he has a distaste for Nazism.

He actually, I mean, this used to be a common thing, more common for Southern conservatives. Richard Weaver compares

Lincoln to Hitler. And is it Richard Weaver?

Am I thinking, I don't think it was Richard Weaver. I wrote, I have a note here. I said Richard Weaver. I think it was Mel Bradford I'm thinking of that did that.

But I think Richard Weaver may have. But Mel Bradford compares Lincoln to Hitler. You know, Sam Francis said things against Nazism.

He lamented even the association Carl Schmitt had with Nazis. Papua Canon condemned Nazis. Like some people that neoconservatives say are

Nazis generally actually didn't like real Nazis and the real Nazi philosophy. This has been in the water for a long time.

So, you know, you can't pretend like this, these two things were always the same or that not, you know, fascism,

Nazism, these things are just, this is where conservatism ends. This is where it leaves.

This is the natural by -product or result of it. They've always been in conflict on some level.

Now you could say this, that fascist, certain fascist movements and fascism very broad term.

And most people would define it as reactionary against communism. So it's not even a term I like to use.

Nazism is a little more of a firm static definition, but you could say there were many people who wanted to keep traditional societies, look down the barrel of Bolshevism and said, not that.

I'll go with these guys over here. At least they're talking about wanting to have a country and wanting to maintain standards and wanting to regain the glory that's been lost, which are all conservative instincts.

So you could see a connection there, okay? But then once you actually get into how they think about formulizing society, it is formulas.

It is a top -down kind of abstraction. It is totalitarian.

It is anti -religious. It is, and there's gonna be people who'll argue with me about this, but I don't have time to get into details on all of that, but it really is though.

I mean, it is wanting to, it's the formation of a new kind of religion. That's what you saw develop in Germany.

And it didn't lead to good places. Obviously, it led to a lot of mass murders too. So into this whole thing, whether you agree with me or not, what

I'm describing here is accurate, okay? This is where American conservatives are, have been, the right has been, okay?

And into this, where you have traditional conservatives, they don't like innovation, they don't like modernity, that includes

Nazism, and neoconservatives have, they're jaded against neoconservatives.

In walks some guys that I appreciate. In walks Clyde Wilson, all right? Premier Southern historian.

And he writes some blogs. I noticed this in August. Hitler's new fans in the South and the alt -right. He says things like this.

Hitler was not a defender of white people. He was responsible for the death of more white people than anyone in history. Every country that he invaded, occupied, and oppressed was white.

He allied with the Japanese, the Islamists. He was crazed German imperialist to help Europe, Germany, could have provided cultural leadership rather than invasion.

He says this. I have no quarrel with the alternative, right? As long as it is attacking the evil Yankee empire.

You can see his Southern affinities. But to bring into the defense of the South ideologies and history of the Central and Eastern Europe of a century ago and revise

World War II is as irrelevant, useless, and counterproductive tangent. He says our defense of the

South needs to be positive and forward -looking. That is what our best spokespeople, our best spokesmen have always taught the agrarians,

Richard Weaver, Mel Bradford, Donald Livingston. The South is a living, long -lasting cultural reality of great beauty that has always attracted the allegiance of good people, even beyond our borders.

It is not an aggressive ideology to be fueled by old world ideals. So he says these kinds of things and he gets grief for it.

I have long loved Dr. Clyde Wilson. On a personal level, he's been very, very nice to me.

He's someone I respect intellectually. I think he's a good historian. And then it's much easier for me to read comments against myself than to read the comments made against him on Reckoning blog, that he's a sellout, that he basically, people who respected him for so long, supposedly, now got a dump on him.

What in the world is going on? And I think he's asking that question too. What in the world is going on? What is happening, right?

I'm gonna get comments on this video, probably along these lines. What is happening? This is a change. Clyde Wilson is no lover of neoconservatism.

He is no lover of foreign interventionism. He is just the opposite of that. In fact, he's debated the issue.

He did a debate in the pages of Modern Age years ago with, I think it was H .W. Crocker on this very point on imperialism.

He is one of the most anti -imperialistic people I know. And yet, he's no good anymore to a certain crowd who

I will not dignify with showing who they are. I mean, these are, some of them are nons. I mean, but I'm saying these swarms of nons, that this is getting thicker, there's an uptick in this.

And then Alan Harrelson, who's a good friend of mine, PhD, I think University of Mississippi. I've interviewed him in the past on agrarianism.

And he enters the milieu. He actually texted with me. He even asked me if I wanted to do a show with him. And I said,

I'm not really an expert. Like I think of, I have a high standard for if you're gonna be a guest on a show, you better know what you're talking about.

So I was like, to fill up an hour, but just about like Nick Fuentes, I don't think that's happening.

I've said my piece on this, but Alan said, you know what? I'm just gonna go ahead. I'm gonna make a video for my followers.

And he's a Southern agrarian conservative, traditional. Okay, no lover of foreign intervention or any of that.

And he goes after Nick Fuentes in a video for a couple of things, because he's seeing this come into his circles.

He points out how vile some of, and hateful, some of the things Nick Fuentes says are.

They are, they are vile and they are hateful. He talks about the exploitation for personal gain and how

Fuentes manipulates young men. He's getting rich off of them. I think that he doesn't bring this example up, but the best example, and this is my main issue with a guy like Nick, when

January 6th happened, there's a video of him telling people to go into the Capitol. He denies it happened.

He gets off somehow. That's a lot of speculations about that, but he gets off.

People around him go to jail, and he mocks them, several of them.

He mocks them for taking his advice. That is a dangerous person.

That is someone who doesn't care about the people that have taken his own advice who are under him.

That should jolt you out of, no matter what you think, that's a dangerous thing in any leader. Someone who does not actually care about the people under them and uses them.

So he goes after that. He thinks having an admiration for totalitarian dictators like Stalin and Hitler is not in keeping with the localist, federalist kind of conservatism that has dominated the character of the

United States, and he's right about that. He goes after Nick for his rejection of essentially what conservative founding vision is, wanting to just kind of just get rid of the

Constitution. It's in the way. He goes after the promotion of what he sees as victimhood, immaturity, and anti -establishment cultism.

He says, look, this guy, Nick, has a cult. I mean, one of the things he was texting me about, he's like, some of these guys are like incels to the point that it's part of their identity, and they think that like boomers and Jews have arranged it so that they can't get married, they can't get a house, they can't get ahead, and they're just sitting around, or they've lost their ambition because they think those conditions need to change, and then they just lash out at people who want to try to encourage them to pursue those things.

And I was like, Alan, I've experienced this firsthand. I know exactly what you're talking about. I've gotten swerved myself for that, for just saying you should take girls out on dates.

And by the way, positive announcement here. I've had several guys reach out to me and say, because of the podcast

I did on dating, they are now dating. One of them just actually messaged me two days ago, said he's in a relationship now with a girl.

And I'm just, I mean, that's why I did it, right? Sometimes you need a little encouragement, but there's a lot of guys out there that just get upset when you start trying to encourage that direction and say, hey, look, the

Jordan Peterson clean your room stuff, that's not a boomer con, terrible thing to say.

You can't say that. You just don't understand where young men are at, right? I've heard this before, right? You don't understand. They're victims.

You got to sit down and listen, shut up and listen first. I mean, it's like kind of eerie to me, the parallels between some of the things

I'm hearing now and some of the things I heard in 2020, just different victim groups, but it's not woke right, because it's not like it's for egalitarianism, but there's ideological components to this.

Alan goes after the Groyper crowd because that's the followers of Nick Fuentes, because he says they're dangerous, they're inflammatory.

They make careless statements about, joking about raping and killing. I mean, there's some of the craziest things that Nick Fuentes will say, his followers would say, well, it was a joke or something like that, right?

And it's like, virtuous people don't joke like that. Straight people don't joke like that.

Pornographic, sexual, homosexual, pornographic things. And so he just basically says, listen guys, this guy can't come into our movement.

Now, I, as an experiment, posted Dr. Alan Harrelson's video just on a few social media pages.

And the experiment was, I wanted to see, I already knew the answer. I wanted to see how many people who say they're all about neoter or netter, how many people honored it?

Because if there's anyone to honor it with, it would be Dr. Alan Harrelson. Alan is a, not only is he a successful established academic,

Alan knows Southern conservative thinking better than almost anyone I know, certainly anyone his age.

He's very knowledgeable about this. I've seen his library, I've been in his house. No one could accuse him of being a neocon, a foreign interventionist.

He basically sounds like, when he talks, like he came out of 1850 sometimes with like, or I don't know, 1870 or something.

Like he's just an old soul to quote Oliver Anthony, living in the new world with an old soul.

And I was like, if they go after Alan Harrelson, if people go after him harshly, right?

If they treat him like they would treat, so if they put him in the category of, he's a boomer con, he's a liberal or whatever, then

I'll know that this neoter stuff, what does it really mean, right?

What, and this is, I think, the wheels are falling off a lot of this and the scales are coming off of some people's eyes.

They're seeing there is a movement out there that will use these mechanisms to try to stave off criticism, but they have no problem dishing it out.

Here's a very mild thing that was said, okay? No profanity in it, but, and again, these are people that I think probably have very good qualities about them and all kinds of, they've said things on my, commented on my stuff and it's been good,

I won't say their names, but no one except your enemies who want your way of life to end are upset with Nick.

It's okay, you don't have to be this way. I think that's directed at me, right? So this is, a line is drawn.

Anyone against Nick Fuentes is an enemy. That's the line. If you have any alarm about anything he says or does or represents, you are the enemy.

Anyone who's not the antichrist and is not against my children, but instead is against my enemy is someone I can tolerate.

That's a low standard. They're not the antichrist. Well, neocons aren't the antichrist.

I guess they don't want the best for your children. I mean, does Nick? I mean, I just gave you the January 6th example.

Nick's willing to blow up the Republican party. He's willing to use whatever influence he has to prevent

Donald Trump from winning the presidency, to prevent J .D. Vance from winning the presidency. He didn't support Trump in the last two elections.

He's dangling the carrot as to whether he'll support Vance. If Vance does what he wants, otherwise he blows up the party.

What does that do for your kids? Because of his Israel issue, right?

Because that's the only issue now, apparently. It's the main one. All the other issues are so secondary.

Don't worry, a Southern conservative, all, you know, wacky letters, is here to tell you you're wrong, right?

So now we're gonna mock the idea of Southern conservatism. Does that sound traditional in any sense?

And that's a very mild, mild case, but does that sound like someone who's actually serious?

Who's thought through this? There may be some, I mean, I'm willing to give the benefit out that there's good intentions, but this is the kind of reaction, and much worse, that I'm seeing all over the place.

If you just slightly edge out and critique. You say, hey, there's some flashing red problems here.

Now, if Neoder doesn't apply to Southern conservatives, then what does it apply to? That's the question I have. If you're an enemy, if you criticize

Nick Fuentes, and you're a traditional Southern conservative, not a neocon, don't want the foreign wars and all that, then where does that make you?

We are very much in a post -truth era. Everything's tribe, not truth. And I think the right has been incapable for a long time of fending off internal threats from liberal ideology.

But now I think there's a growing resistance from another group to critiquing public standards, personal morality, and any productive answer to the problems young men face.

What practical answers has Nick Fuentes ever offered? Increasingly, I think podcasters are above criticism if they're against them, right?

If you just go after the people, the enemy of my enemy is a friend. If you go after someone

I really don't like hard, it's, that's the endearing quality. That's builds the audience. And I'm seeing this all over the place.

For example, Tucker Carlson recently did a terrible job analyzing the situation in Nigeria, terrible.

But criticism of him and how he handled the situation is viewed as almost betrayal.

You're not even allowed to talk about it. Well, the Nigeria thing is something

I've been focused on for a while because I'm friends with Judd Saul from Equipping the Persecuted. And he is the main organization in Nigeria, Christian organization, working with Nigerians to try to stop what's happening there.

And I thought about, should I even play the clip? I think I will. This is the clip from Tucker Carlson. And he has a guest who's,

I had his name and now I think I lost it, so I'll find it. But he has a guest on, he's a lawyer who has lived in Nigeria or worked in Nigeria.

And this is what they had to say. All of a sudden, it's a kind of centerpiece of the conversation. How did, what is the, you've been in and out of Nigeria for how long?

50 years. 50 years, 1975, is that correct? Yes. It's a long time. So you know

Nigeria pretty well. I do. What is the truth about what's going on?

Well, I ask because you've got credibility. You know the country and you're spending the rest of your life defending Christians around the world. Tell me what the actual truth of Christian persecution in Nigeria is.

Well, let's be very clear that the Nigerian government is populated by Christians and Muslims.

I have represented in his earlier life the National Security Advisor of Nigeria when he was a young man.

And he's a lovely individual and caring and universally respected in terms of religious issues.

Devout Muslim, but universally respected. In my adopted family in Lagos, the

Odesanya family sort of adopted me when I was a very, very young man and living there.

I sort of have a half brother there, Dapo Odesanya. That family is a totally integrated family,

Muslim, Christian. I was always teased that I was a

Joruba, which is a Jewish Yoruba. But I mean, there have always been tribal conflict.

I spoke to the foreign minister before I came here because I wanted to get clarity on the government's position.

Absolutely, let's be clear, President Tanubo's wife is a Christian pastor. This is not targeted at Christians.

There are probably an equal or more number of Muslim deaths. I am grateful to President Trump for identifying these attacks on Christians.

Believe it or not, you can blame some of this on the French, who had this - I do, I know nothing about it, but I believe you anyway.

They had a massive force in the Sahel. They armed the Toregs, which are a notoriously aggressive tribal group.

That arming has led to mass killings of Christians. The fact that when

Libya blew apart a massive amount of arms went down to Boko Haram can't be denied by anyone.

Nigeria wants to consult with the United States. Nigeria wants assistance in protecting

Christians and Muslims, protecting their populations. Nigeria feels it has not had a fair shake from Washington.

And I'm not, you know, I don't work for Nigeria. I'm not gonna go on and on. The foreign minister is a close friend who

I respect deeply. But I can tell you from my work, I was privileged to represent one of the

Nigerian states years ago, Akwaeba. We won a case actually for them.

The Nigerians would welcome American assistance with open arms. So this is unlike Ukraine, which is destroying its church, or Armenia, which is destroying its church.

Here you have a government that wants to protect its populace, doesn't have the resources.

Nobody's going to deny. Nigeria has been wracked by corruption all the years I've known it. But they want a new deal, a new relationship with Washington and in part to assist them in protecting

Christians. So when I read some of what I've been reading, you know,

I'm never gonna say that Ted Cruz isn't a brilliant man. But I'm gonna say

I might have a little more time in Nigeria than he does. And I would welcome him to speak to the foreign minister or others, because one thing

America doesn't need are more enemies. Africa is the future.

I have said it time and time again. I'm privileged to be counsel to the

Democratic Republic of the Congo. There is an incredible infrastructure of intelligence in Nigeria that we don't know anything about.

All we try to do is sanction and condemn. It is a horrible, horrible part of our policy that we sanction the hell out of everybody.

We are responsible for the consolidation of power in Moscow under Putin.

If we were not sanctioning the hell out of all these people who had moved to Europe, who knows whether Putin would still be in power.

Exactly. No, that's the truth. I know. It's so counterintuitive. No one said anything about it. But Cruz specifically, but he's all of a sudden kind of out of nowhere, deeply concerned about the plight of Christians in Nigeria, which

I want to restate. Maybe a totally valid concern, I don't know. But that's weird.

What is that? All of a sudden, everybody's concerned about people who clearly have no track record of being interested in Christians at all, including

Ted Cruz. What is going on? Where is this coming from? Well, in fact, what's interesting is they're calling it a genocide.

And a genocide, under international legal terms, requires an intent.

And certainly it's a very strange scenario where you have a government richly populated by Christians and accusing them of some form of genocide.

The president and his wife is a Christian pastor. But I mean, one thing I do understand is coordinated propaganda, and this is coordinated propaganda.

I mean, is it? Look, I can tell you that the

Nigerians have no idea where this is coming from. They've wanted

Washington's attention since the beginning of the Trump administration. There are 230 million

Nigerians who long for a strong relationship with the United States, who are being cultivated by Russia, cultivated by China, cultivated by India, but want to work with America.

And we ignore them until we condemn them for a genocide that is absolutely not a genocide, yes.

Okay, there it is. It's not a genocide. Okay, so I posted online a critique of this because, no,

I'm not from Nigeria. I've actually never been to Nigeria, but I've been supporting the foremost

Christian missionary, if you want to call him that, but he's specifically working on this issue of persecution in Nigeria for years.

I even, I texted him after this happened, and I saw him even posting Judd Saul about this video.

And I thought this contradicts everything you've told me, Judd. This is, and to see

Tucker waffling kind of like, oh, maybe Tucker, maybe Cruz's concern is correct.

I don't know, but I know when I see it, I know what propaganda is. And this is propaganda, right?

And looks like YouTube just suspended my stream, someone's saying.

I'm wondering if it's because I talked about the Nigeria issue. Okay, well, all right, that's what it is then,

I guess. Okay, well, we will continue, and you'll have to go watch on Rumble, where I am right now, and on Facebook, and on X.

I don't know if it's because I played the, I mean, that should be under fair use. I should be able to play the Tucker Carlson clip, but they're not letting me play it.

I've never had this happen before. So, interesting.

Someone, I wouldn't doubt if someone in the chat audience, you're not chatting, but someone in the audience was the one who tried to suspend it.

I don't know if it was that, or if it was, I wouldn't be surprised, I guess is what I'm saying, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was that, or if there was some automatic thing that caught it, that I'm talking about Nigeria now.

Interesting. Well, we will continue on anyway, and you can just go to X, or to Rumble, or to Facebook.

That kind of ticks me off, to be honest with you, that YouTube would allow that. So, I'm gonna tell you the truth about what's happening in Nigeria.

How does that sound? Here's the truth. The total Christian deaths, and these are estimates, because we don't know, between 2019 and 2023, according to Judd Saul's organization.

Now, he has actually a few organizations. This is truthnigeria .com, truthnigeria .com. There's been over 62 ,000 deaths in that short period of time.

This does not even include the Boko Haram killings. There's been an annual killings peak in 2023 with over 5 ,000.

There's been church attacks, 18 ,000 churches destroyed or burned between 2010 and 2023.

Not a genocide, apparently. This includes villages that were razed, and I've been in the car with Judd when he gets the call from these remote villages, saying our church was destroyed, pastor was killed,

Muslims came and just shot it up. There's been 3 .3 million Christians internally displaced.

This is primarily from the Northern states reported in the IDP crisis features, including the

UNHCR data, cross -verified with local testimonies. There's been over 4 ,000

Christian abductions in 2023, mostly school children and clergy. There's been land grabs, over 10 ,000 square kilometers of Christian farmland has been seized.

Dr. Gregory Staunton says the Nigerian government is complicit in the genocide of Christians, which is exactly what

Judd Saul has talked about on the podcast about. Now, listen, I have to be careful here too.

I can't, and Judd probably can, I don't know the boundaries exactly on this, get into exactly who's doing what and where they're doing it and that kind of thing.

What I can positively say is this, the government's not working at the very least.

The government is not the place to go to find out the truth about this at the very least. I know that from my own connections to this.

Over 90 % of the cases go unprosecuted with fewer than 50 convictions since 2015.

That's what's happening in Nigeria. What explains

Tucker doing this? I understand he's got a supposed expert who's, and this supposed expert apparently has also represented

Governor Nassir El Rufay, who oversaw the death of over 3 ,400

Christians in Nigeria, who jailed pastors for preaching. He represented that individual.

That's the guess Tucker had. I've noticed something, and it's something

I'm concerned about on certain quarters of the right. We do need to be having conversations. We do need to be having productive ones though.

And having guests on to talk about all kinds of things that you don't, that you aren't able to verify yourself.

You can't, I mean, I'll just tell you my process, okay? And I learned this, I guess, in grad school, but I think it's just common sense.

I don't even tend to do book interviews unless I've read the book or at least skimmed it, okay? I try to get a general idea for something before I have someone on to talk about something because there's a trust relationship that you and I have.

If I break that trust relationship, shame on me. If I'm a newscaster and something is in the news because it's affecting people's lives and you don't have time to research it and you're just reporting on the event, okay.

But if you're having these in -depth conversations with people about very serious things, and it affects people's lives, people in political positions are listening to you and you don't do a little homework on it first, that's not a good thing.

And I'll tell you, if you don't believe anything I just said about, go to truthnigeria .com,

check it out. But if you don't believe any of that, do you believe at least the congressional record?

Do you believe what Ted Cruz has been doing actually happened in real time in history?

Because that was the other thing that I heard. Oh, Ted Cruz and people are all of a sudden concerned about Nigeria. He never was concerned with persecuted

Christians before. Oh really? Yeah, I've critiqued Ted Cruz before but he's been doing this since 2013 when he entered the

Senate. He was focusing on things like persecution of Christians. He gave a keynote in 2014 in the

Defense of Christians Summit highlighting ISIS's targeting of Christians and Jews. He was booed for linking persecution to support for Israel.

2017, he spoke at the International Christian Concern Conference. He chairs a hearing on threats to religious liberty around the world at that same time.

In 2019 to 2020, that's when he starts pushing for Nigeria to be given a designation of protected status or concern status rather.

He praises Trump's 2020 action against Nigerian officials enforcing Sharia and blasphemy laws.

Now, we've talked about I think some of this on the podcast but we're going back years now and Ted Cruz, what is he just off the cuff spitballing?

I mean, I understand if you talk enough, you get there but the assumptions here are so inaccurate.

They ruin credibility. And that's the thing that really annoys me. When Tucker first went, see, we'll say went rogue, but really, no, really he was just went independent.

I was kind of excited about it. I was like this voice that, and I mean, still there's things

I like. I mean, I've wanted there to be voices outside of the traditional media or maybe what word would

I use there? The legacy media. And I thought, well, Tucker would be good and he does some good interviews, but then there's,

I've noticed just, I don't really watch him anymore because I saw too much of this kind of coming to positions in real time on the air without, and the assumption is always,

I think maybe it's a safe assumption in 90 % of the cases but like the government is bad, right? The elites are doing this to you.

It's okay, I get that. Like since 2020, that's the truth -telling market that focuses on that. I get it, but do a little homework, right?

Like, and I, as soon as I saw that clip, I was like, that's all wrong. I just, I know that's all wrong.

I know that you're getting the official Nigerian state kind of narrative there or you're getting the upper class narrative.

I don't know what to call it, but you're not getting the on the ground in the villages perspective of these things. We're gonna have to have

Judd Saul on. I can't really say much more. I might already be in trouble with Judd for what I said,

I don't know. But he's coming home. I think he's on flights today.

Trying to get out of there. He went viral for critiquing Tucker on this. And maybe he'll be willing to talk about what that did.

But this is crazy, guys. It's absolutely crazy to me. To see this is the kind of thing being said and there's a defensiveness about it.

So I'm someone who's traditional, more paleo conservative, definitely been very influenced by the

Southern conservatives. And I've been very critical of Ben Shapiro on many things for a long time. Doesn't mean

I'm grateful for some of the things he says, but one of the things that he said, and he said it again recently, and I'll just play the clip for you, is essentially if you get kicked out of your hometown, then that's okay.

If you get financially priced out. If you get financially priced out of a traditional job that you have and you have to go learn to code like that, okay, that's just the free market.

And he's willing to sacrifice things to this. And I've been critical of this. I've said, this isn't really even a conservative instinct.

I'm still critical of it. I'm still critical of it. Because look, I'll play you the clip here. Young person and you can't afford to live here, then maybe you should not live here.

I mean, that is a real thing. I know that we've now grown up in a society that says that you deserve to live where you grew up.

But the reality is that the history of America is almost literally the opposite of that. The history of America is you go to a place where there is opportunity.

And if the opportunities are limited here and they're not changing, then you really should try to think about other places where you have better opportunities.

Okay, my family is experiencing this right now in the here and now. My nephew or my brother, sister -in -laws, they have grown up in an area that their family goes back to this, the 1600s in this area.

And they're being priced out in real time because people from New York City are moving up. And there's local zoning boards trying to do things about it.

There's an attempt to stop this. That's where the family that you love is buried.

It's where the house that you love stands. It's where all the familiar sounds and smells and landmarks, that's where you've made a mark.

And it's something to call your own. You built it, your family built it. And now you have to go because of modern transportation, modern economy, it's a free market, right?

Now, if that happens, I think there is one kernel of truth to what Ben Shapiro is saying here.

Yes, you might have to leave and you might be forced out. And maybe it's a better opportunity financially or for your family because of circumstances that change on the ground where you are.

But to come out and to say it's modern life that says you deserve to live where you grew up.

No, that's always been an option throughout history. It's always been an assumption. If it's not where you grew up, it's close to where you grew up, it's next door.

So you have access to the things that made you who you are, the friends that you have, the relationships. I just, you don't have a stable society if people move around all the time, which is what's happening.

People need to put down roots somewhere. You need to have somewhere that people can call their own and take actual pride in it and manage it well.

People, this is the fallacy of the commons, right? When people don't manage things well, because it doesn't belong to anyone because you're just passing through anyway.

You take pride in a place when you've been there for a long time. It means something to you. This is the way naturally people have lived.

And it just, I am all for putting up as many restraints as possible in my local community right now to keep people from coming up and changing everything, making the traffic worse, putting up Airbnbs all over the place when they don't even live there and the noise pollution and the cost of living goes up.

And I'm for gatekeeping all of that because I love the area that I'm in. And I have a family connection now to it.

And it grieves me to see people who grew up in an area that have put so much into it, made it the great place it is, and they can't even live there.

And the insensitivity, like it's a math problem. That's how Ted Cruz talks about it. Okay, so why do I play that clip?

Just to beat up on Cruz? No, I play that clip to tell you I've always been this person.

I've never liked that instinct. I've always been against the proposition nation. I've always been a traditional

American, paleo conservative, Southern conservative in my thinking on these things. I've been a localist.

And so because of that, I think it means more when I come to you and I say, look, you don't have to choose between a liberal side that's, you don't have to choose between ideologies.

You don't have to go between liberalism, classic liberalism, if you will, and this more, whatever's developing now, this revolutionary kind of neo -Nazi -esque stuff.

You don't have to. You can actually just keep being a conservative. You can actually see good points where you see them in various people.

And you can say, that's a good point. You can, you don't have to endorse the whole person.

You can actually do this, right? You can also recognize character flaws and threats to the internal organization of conservative movement.

You can see the threat that there will be if we get to the next election and the party's blown up because of Israel and we haven't solved immigration.

We have 2 ,527 ,000 deportations. Actually only 527 ,000 are deportations.

There's 2 million that are self -deportations, but that's what we have so far in this administration. You know how many illegal migrants are here?

And that's just the legal migrants. The estimates go all over the place. But even if it's 20 million, let's take a lower estimate.

That's a drop in the bucket. We need time. We need to ramp this up and we need time.

There's only one game in town doing anything. It's the Trump administration. We need a unifying influence to keep the band together to keep this going because if we don't solve this, we don't have a country.

And if we're gonna blow it up over Israel, you know, I'll put it this way. I'm willing to keep the status quo going.

And we don't even have the status quo. JD Vance is saying things like, well, when it's in our interest, we'll support Israel. When it's not, we won't. I mean,

Trump, for goodness sakes, I don't think he gets credit for this, but the guy just had a peace deal in the Middle East. He's corrected

Benjamin Netanyahu. He stopped Benjamin Netanyahu from shooting missiles when he wanted to.

What other president has said that the prime minister of Israel doesn't know what the bleep he's doing? I don't think he even gets credit for how he navigated the situation with Iran.

Tucker's predictions were all off on that. And it's like, none of that happened. I'm not saying it was perfect, but I'm like, this is not the same as your previous

Republican administrations. And we're gonna say he's just a show for Israel. We should blow up the party if they don't do exactly what we want on this topic.

Look, I'm willing to go with Vance and say when it's in our interest to support, we do. When it's not, we don't.

And let's shift the conversation to center it around our interests and keep the status quo going if we have to to keep the coalition around so we can solve immigration.

That's a politically prudent survival instinct. You put

Israel as the number one thing. We should use no support for Israel or else we don't vote for Republicans and we'll let the

Democrats win. Good luck. And I think that's what's happening. That's what's developing. In a few years, if things continue as they are, you are going to have a connection between the hard left who's very against Israel and these guys on the more revolutionary right who see that as the main thing.

They will find a commonality in that and it will be the thing that draws them together. Beware of people willing to fracture the movement and destroy what progress we've made.

Beware of that. And there has been progress made. You don't need a black pill on all of this. I see some things to be very discouraged about, but I also see things to be encouraged about.

Somehow God, I believe God wanted Trump to be president. It just seems like on a razor's edge, he's the president.

We've strengthened the military. We've at least done something about immigration. We've rolled back

DEI. I'm not gonna just say those things don't matter. I think they do matter.

We need to trust in Christ as Christians. We need to put our hope there. Not Christianity as a slogan, not

Christianity as a system. We need miracles to continue existing. And it's gonna take us, it's gonna take true

Christians who know Christ to be prayer warriors, to look for those miracles. God is a God of miracles. We also need practical solutions.

And if we blow up the party over secondary things in light of the great problem immigration is right now and how this will be permanent majorities for the

Democrats and the left, if we let it, then what's the point, right?

So I don't think a 50 -year mortgage is a solution. I don't think, I have disagreements with the

Trump administration. I don't think it's wise to keep the Chinese students coming over here because it's financially better for our colleges and that kind of thing.

I think we have, we, it's hard though. He has, and I sympathize. He has limited options with Congress, with the courts.

He's only one presidential administration. He's only here for a limited amount of time.

So I'll take questions now. For those who are still listening, I've gotten canned from YouTube apparently, but I will,

I don't know. There's still people commenting though on YouTube. So I don't know if I got canned or not, but I will try to find the questions that I can.

Earl Starbucks says, Trotskyist thought, endless revolution, same idea. I don't know what that was in reference to, but left and center left, no conservatives party in the

USA. It does feel that way. It's like traditional conservatives are the ones that are constantly out of the influential positions.

Earl Starbucks, Southern conservatives rejected the, these are all from Earl Starbucks. Earl, you're, you know, you could just comment.

You don't have to give me all your money. Southern conservatives for $5 rejected the Nazis because they, the

Nazis, did not love their land and people enough, ideology and tradition cannot coexist. And then

Earl says, Dr. Clyde Wilson is a great man. God bless him. So thank you, Earl. I appreciate all that. Let's get to some of these questions.

Smog Wolf says, who owns the NGOs flooding the states with illegals? Who pushes these policies? I probably, the answer he wants is the

Jews or something like that. I would say there's, I haven't done a deep research on all these

NGOs. I think there's probably a number of globalists. Many, I'm sure are

Jewish in those upper echelons because Jewish people are high performance people and they see a benefit for themselves in liberalism.

Many of them, at least because of their history of persecution. There's also though, and this

Clyde Wilson has been foremost in trying to expose this but there's not a lot of people with popular microphones who want to talk about it.

But you can look at electoral map and see what he's talking about. The Northeastern establishment, which are

WASPs, they have been foremost in pushing these very same things. So it's a mixture of people and I would tie them together by globalist utopians.

They're ideologues. And that's the primary thing. That's the primary animating feature. Okay, someone says that I'm still on YouTube.

So we are still live on YouTube. All right, well, I guess I'll find out after what happened. Where is the

Southern conservative leadership? Says conservative Christians of Tennessee. Well, you guys, right? Have not all of those who stood up fallen since 1980, 1960.

Okay, so the idea here is the agrarians, Mel Bradford, Richard Weaver, Clyde Wilson, Don Livingston, the

Abbeville Institute. Those guys aren't as popular in political circles as others.

So where did that go? Well, you do still have the Abbeville Institute. Brian McClanahan is still talking.

Obviously I mentioned Alan Harrelson who has his own platform. There are people who understand

Southern conservatism. I even think to some extent, guys like CJ Engel have done some of the reading on this.

He lives in Tennessee now. So there are people even in Christian circles who understand some of this. But I think you're right to point out that there's not a lot of Southern conservative thinking in the sense of the agrarians, at least not on the national level.

There's been intellectuals, historians, even Eugene Genovese, he was from the Northeast. I mean, he came to admire the agrarians.

Russell Kirk came to admire the agrarians. There's something there for people who care to go back and look into it.

On a political level, really what we're talking about is Jeffersonianism. Jeffersonianism has not been around in a pure form for a long time.

It exists in the art forms. It exists in the small town, kind of almost like Hallmark Channel stuff where you really yearn for this world that once existed, but you're supporting all the policies that ensure it never comes into existence.

So it exists in art and music and things like that. But yes, on a political level, we've been wanting to see it.

And I think people thought Trump would represent at least an avenue for Southern conservatives to once again, gain some kind of a footing.

I'll say this one last thing, an encouragement to Southerners out there and to Northerners too.

Look, Southern conservatism is, a lot of what Southerners advocated is something that was common to all

Americans at one point. Okay. And it's this Jeffersonian kind of localist instinct, this agrarian instinct, this self -sufficient local communities.

It's your farm markets. It's your support local industries, which even some hippie types have gotten involved with on a certain level.

I mean, there's pathways there, I suppose. But this independent spirit,

I think still exists within middle America. The American people still have this, even if it's just a shadow of what it was.

And even if it's just an impulse, like they haven't studied it intellectually, it's just part of how they live. And so I do think that there are politicians who do have this instinct, whether they've studied and read the people

I mentioned or not. They're not reading Forrest MacDonald. No, they're not reading actual

Southern conservatives, but they are operating in such a way that tradition has been passed down to them.

I mean, I'll give you an example from two years ago. I was down in Alabama, and I remember a local guy in Auburn telling me, they had a right -leaning guy from Michigan move down.

And basically his idea of a conservative was whatever's good for business. And so the people in Auburn, Alabama were resistant to this.

And this was on the city board, I guess, or whatever they called it, city council, I don't know, town board. But that was an example of Southern conservatism.

There was a contrast between this guy from the North who moved down and the people who they thought, whatever's good for the market for business isn't always good for our culture.

That's a Southern conservative instinct. I still think it exists. So there you go.

Let's get to some more questions here. Okay, so we already talked about NGOs. I'm looking for questions specifically that are questions for me and not others.

Let's see. Wait, John, are you defending Cruz now? Really, really, are you defending Cruz? Yeah, I'm defending, when someone lies about him, yes,

I will defend him. Doesn't mean I'm, again, I've been critical of Cruz. I even wrote in my book,

Against the Waves. I took Cruz to task for stuff he said about immigration years ago. So you see, this is the thinking, this is the thing

I can't stand. It's like you said something accurate in defense of someone, therefore you must like be on their side.

or something and everything, I'm not. I just think that you ought not lie about someone.

That's all I'm saying. And if I have to go along with a lie about someone to prove that I'm not for their philosophy and politics or something,

I'm not gonna do it. Jennifer Shotwell, why did Tucker have this guest on to downplay the reality of the situation?

Why did he make it sound like Muslims were killed at a similar rate? Tucker did not ask for numbers. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that.

I'm not gonna speculate. Besides Nigeria, Sudan, Congo, Burkina Faso, let's see areas,

Eritrea, many places where Christians are being attacked. Oh yeah, yeah. So Sudan used to be the place you talk about.

Now you talk about Nigeria, in Africa at least. And I would think that Tucker would be like, why aren't we talking about this?

You know, it's so focused on Israel and Palestine. Why aren't we focusing on this? You'd think that would be,

I don't know. Sam Jones, thank you, John, for keep speaking the truth. Thanks, Sam, appreciate it.

All right, I might end the podcast here. I'm gonna take a few more questions. Get them in now. Design Build says, so the corruption problem in Nigeria run by good people on both sides according to this reliable source, but we need to throw money in a system like what, the

UN? Well, that's a separate issue, whether we need to do that. And I am skeptical of spending our money overseas in any capacity when we have problems at home.

I do think this though, if we are going to be involved in overseas ventures, then

I would rather be involved in Nigeria than I would be in Israel, preferably.

Defending Christians against the Muslims who are the Christian Zion high numbers. And there are a number of resources there.

And one thing that Tucker's guess was right about is yes, China's over there. Other countries are trying to cultivate a relationship there.

It would be, I think in the United States interest to cultivate an economic relationship there as well.

But I would say this, I want to untangle ourselves from foreign places.

So if someone has a principled, I don't wanna get involved in these foreign conflicts and fine, but make that the argument, right?

Not misrepresenting the situation. Let's see, cosmic treason.

Fuente said, let's ban all porn. He said, even the men who view it would agree. He's 100 % right. What do Prager, Shapiro and Levin do?

Countersignal him. I would agree with Nick Fuentes on that. I wish Nick Fuentes had a mouth that matched that.

I wish he would not say things that are pornographic. I wish he wouldn't have tabs opened on his computer of transgender porn.

I wish that, I see hypocrisy there, but I think this is a winning issue with a lot of young people because their lives have been ruined by it or their friends' lives have been ruined by it.

And I think, you know, let's take it as sincerely as possible. Maybe Nick's life has been somewhat ruined by this and he'd like to see it banned.

Fine, but I'm not going to assume that other people you mentioned are against him simply because of that position.

Now, Prager U has a history and I went after him hard for essentially being okay with pornography.

So Prager's got no leg to stand on, but the others I don't know about. And I don't think that's their issue with Fuentes. You know, and that's not helpful to insinuate that kind of thing.

I mean, most of the neocon types I've heard say this kind of thing. Usually they make anti -Semitism their issue.

And if they make anything else the issue, it's the terrible things he says about women, right? More traditional conservatives,

I think, have, and I'm included in this, have made the issue more, this guy's ideological, he's grifting, perverted mind, right?

We tend to go after those things first, but it's, it would be dishonest,

I think, to say that, oh, it's just like anti -pornography and they want to preserve pornography or something. Okay, I'm going to take two more questions and then we're going to end the podcast here.

Two more comments. Marcus Ryan, it's because of all the Israel funding, John. What is, what is because of the, oh, because of the

YouTube stream. I guess, why did you feel the need to defend Cruz then? Why did you feel you had to point out

Tucker Missile? Every action has a motive, right? That's, well, yes, every action does have a motive.

I think I explained my motive. I think I explained that there's a carelessness that, and I posted a,

I explained beforehand, I posted a critique of Tucker and I got pushback.

And the pushback is, it's not people looking into the issue. It's people who are on team red or blue.

That's how I perceive it. And so I'm trying to say, these are the facts, guys. Like someone who's a hero to you or someone who you appreciate can also be wrong at times, including myself.

If I got something very wrong and it, I mean, very wrong about a genocide that's currently happening that may even impact how people think about foreign policy at high levels,

I hope there would be someone out there who would bring me to task on it. Maybe not everyone feels that way, but that's exactly how

I think of this. I think that this is what makes an opening for bad actors. If you don't do your homework, if you're just letting kind of whoever come on and talk about stuff because you have an edge, you have an ax to grind.

And that was part of my opening monologue, that there's a, there is an ax to grind. You have to understand there are people who when they realize what's happened in right -leaning circles, they have huge problems with the people who are in leadership.

And anyone who's against them, it's kind of like, I'm willing to make common cause with you, willing to legitimize you and what you say.

And I'm saying, it's not always wise to do that. Are we going to go down the Candace Owens path here and just start saying wild things?

I don't think we should. I think that's dumb. And I would add to this in closing,

I guess here, I do believe that someone like a

Nick Fuentes is the perfect kind of person for the neocons and the left.

To focus on, to make their enemy. They love someone like that, having attention, having a following, because it gives them all the moral high ground that they could ever dream of.

And years of insisting that, no, we're not Nazis. No, we're not this. Now, how do you use that argument when you have someone who has gained so much steam and following and is inheriting some of those ideas?

I think it's a terrible strategy to elevate that kind of a voice, even if he says good things at times.

I think you should consider why there's people attracted to him. I don't buy the fact that it's all because of, like what

I said at the beginning, it's just people who are depressed about life and life in the modern world, and Nick's giving them hope.

I think a lot of it is, because there's plenty of people who have done this. There's plenty of people who have been critical of Israel in more responsible ways too.

There's plenty of people who have given hope from even a Christian perspective. No, I think there's an extra added thing going on with someone like Nick.

There's a justification for your grievances, for where you are at in life. There is an anger to be channeled at the people in your life who prevented you from achieving the dreams that you think that you should have achieved, that you thought you were told that you should be achieving.

And it's a rage thing. I think that really does have a lot to do with it. I'm not saying there's no good analysis.

I'm not saying there's no good things that ever come out of a guy's mouth like that. Banning porn is a great thing.

I'm saying, I think there's a lot more to it than the simplistic explanations that I keep hearing.

It's like, well, you gotta shut up and listen to the young. That's what I've been doing for a long time. Like, what are you talking about?

No, I mean, not to toot my own horn, but I am that guy too. Like, people just assume that I've never been gatekept.

I've never been, well, you're married, you have a house and stuff. Yeah, these things didn't come easy.

And I wanna help people find the path to out. That's my goal. I wanna be as encouraging as I possibly can.

You can do this, all right? Obviously, trust the Lord is number one. Number two, you do need to work hard.

And if you are just casting blame 100 % on all the external things around you, like Jews, boomers and women, and you don't take any responsibility in this.

And anyone who tries to help you take responsibility is an enemy now. You're just on the path to defeat and ruin.

It's a dark path that you're going down. It doesn't help anything. So take responsibility of where you're at.

God puts you where you're at in his providence. Don't be angry at God for it. Take what you've been given and expand on it.

Capitalize on it. Do the best that you possibly can do. And if you're in my circles, I'm gonna do my best to encourage you and help you.

But I'm only one guy, right? So I'm calling on other men. If you're an older man, get busy.

I guess I'm an older man now, 36. Get busy, help these guys, be constructive and help them in any way you can.

Whether it's just encouragement, whether it's financial, you have a responsibility there if you want your society to continue.

Otherwise they will find voices like Nick. I do believe, I think that's a lot of it. So I don't know if I have much more to say.

I think I've beaten the dead horse on this podcast. I'm gonna try to get back to Big Eva stuff tomorrow and talking about that if we have time.

If not, towards the end of the week, I'm sure I'll have another podcast. We'll talk about Greer and some of the evangelical stuff.

But I think I needed to say this. And I know it'll upset some people, it already is. But I know that if I left some of this unsaid,

I would regret it. And there are guys who are being brave and risking things. I know about it because I've talked to people who have gone after at least the

Groyper stuff and they get death threats. I mean, it's like dealing with the left from years ago. I know guys who the police had to get involved.

So hopefully that doesn't happen with me, but I'm willing to put my neck out there.

It's like, that's fine, that's fine. My country is worth it, right? And I want a rooted traditional conservative movement that is able to band together to solve the big issues of the day, not blow up the party over secondary things and is aggressive against the right people and able also to maintain a standard.

If we don't have a standard, we don't have a movement. So there you go. That's my motive in all of this. Old Boomer John, there you go.

That's a wrap. That's right, that's a wrap. We're landing the plane, whatever other phrase I use. God bless, bye now.