Hello, everyone. This is Kampot. Welcome to a very special episode of Tech Wars. Right now, we're very lucky to have two very special guests on. We have, on the one hand, Nick Land, Accelerationist Master, Dark Enlightenment Chief, coming to us from the Orient. And on the other hand, we have Richard Spencer. You all know him. You all have opinions about him. he was big day for him just on CNN I guess they're going to make him the chief correspondent of something but we're going to just dive right in and just first of all thanks for both of you guys being here okay great yeah thanks for inviting me thank you for coming on Tech Wars
so we had talked about doing a little bit of show have you guys ever spoken before? no i don't know oh that's that's incredible this is the first ever uh i think we wanted to delve into some controversial topics today regarding uh ethnostates um right now we have uh all this controversy going on with uh trump's latest round of quote-unquote racism, of calling out the four minority congresswomen and saying that they should leave. And, you know, we have Omar there, who's Somalian in Minnesota.
And do you think that these four, that Trump is right about these four, that are these people real Americans or is there something more than just a legal citizenship that, you know, entails being a part of a national community? Sure. Should I start with that one more? I'll jump in here. Well, look, of course, they're all citizens and many of them were born in the United States. And, you know, whatever we might want to say about it, post-1965, these are Americans. What the exact intentions were of people like LBJ or Teddy Kennedy or a hard-to-seller,
the fact is this is the kind of national community that was created. The 1965 Act was directly related to the Civil Rights Act of a year earlier. And it was an attempt to bring non-discrimination and family reunification as the paradigm, as the logic, you could say, of immigration. So we shouldn't ultimately be surprised that these people are Americans. Now, are they very different from a historic American or that... Can you say that one more time? You just slipped out there for a second. The day or even stretches back to the founding. Can you say that one more time? You just broke up there just for one second
so everyone can hear what you said. Sure. Are they different to the... Sure, sure. are Christian, you could say. Of course they are. And we are in a situation of permanent revolution. I think there's actually a party, a political party in Mexico called the Institutional Revolution Party, something of that nature. And I always found that kind of dialectical tension delightful. I think we, current America is in an institutionalized revolution where, you know, Ilhan Omar is both declared to be the ultimate American, but then at the same time, she's still a refugee and a Jim Crow America.
And we have, that is this tension that takes place in contemporary discourse. So, again, Trump is obviously getting at something. He's getting at a general angst among his voters and saying, go back to your country. But in another level, he's being exceedingly naive. I mean, at some level, this is his country. That brings up a couple of points that we can jump off here. First of all, do you think that before this new compromise that you talk about, was the identity of America, was it just like WASP? do you think? And also, this would maybe be a question for Nick,
is do you believe that a national community can have an abstract root or origin? Can you found a national community in a conglomerate of identities which are synthesized in an idea, or must it have a biological basis of some kind or another basis that maybe you can identify? I'll be real quick, and then I'll hand the baton over to Nick. So again, this is a huge topic, and certainly books have and more books should be written on the subject.
But America is a funny country. And I actually disagree with people like Peter Brimelow. I mean, I respectfully disagree when they try to make America just like another European nation state. It's not. It is fundamentally different. America never had an immigration policy until 1924. It had a naturalization policy since 1790. And that was a racialized naturalization policy. Basically, it imagined the country as a frontier, and if you're white and of good character, and you get here and you can survive, you become a citizen. I mean, it was a very different concept from European states that had notions of sovereignty and subjecthood and et cetera.
So it is a different place. And then there's also this, there's an ideological component to the United States in which it is quite a bit like the Soviet Union of old, in the words of Irving Kristol. Again, a man I disagree with on so many things, but I think he actually was honest when he said that infamous statement. America was defined as a shining city on a hill, a promised land, even before early Americans set foot on North America. Winthrop gave his lecture on Christian charity actually while he was on the boat. So America was at that point still a kind of idea.
And the early America was a mix of heady Enlightenment idealism from the founding fathers and a kind of puritanical messianic notion as well. So it was a fundamentally different place. It was a kind of proposition nation, an experiment. I think liberals and conservatives are mainstream conservatives are actually more correct than nationalists like Peter Vermelow and et cetera when they observe that. So America was a different place. I think America probably was a kind of nation in a way between 1924 and 1965, although it had imperial obligations around the world.
So America has always been a funny thing. And I think we can know what something is and we can understand its origins by looking at its outcome. And so when we see America now as this global platform for economic opportunity and as a neoliberal empire, not like an empire of old, but this new kind of empire, we can lament that all we want. But I think at some level we have to be honest and say, well, when we look at its outcome, we can actually understand its origins. We can understand its own ideological core.
Okay, so Nick, I mean, going back to the question I posed to you, and off of just what Richard said, do you think that America's foundation in a national identity that is more ideological is valid? valid or like i had asked before uh is you know is there a more firm basis that must be constituted from and something race ethnicity something of that nature um well the first thing i feel like i really have to say how much of what richard spencer just said makes a lot of sense to me i
I think, I mean, obviously America is exceptional in this specific sense that it's a weird historical experimental process without any strong analogs. And to sort of try and model it on these much more tightly defined nation states of the kind that you'll find in Europe is obviously not really going to work. And I think in terms of that, going right back to the start, I mean, this original question, was Trump right in his comment about the four horsemen of the woke apocalypse?
I think the question this raises is like, to what extent is America still, the American nation, the union, a viable social project? and I think everyone still feels, almost everyone still feels they have to go through the motion of pretending that you know that we're in some kind of Lincolnian moment and we can believe in this thing that the union is supposed to be long after it has been through a whole you know several catastrophic phase changes on this line I don't think anyone really understands
and so there's a certain unreality in the whole in the kind of the way that the mainstream wants to define this controversy for sort of obviously party political advantage necessarily has a massive unreality about it as if it's about some realistic prospect of preserving or taking over a politically viable national project of which I just don't think such a thing any longer exists. It clearly doesn't exist. So, yes, without going on too long, I mean, just quickly on your latest, more specific
question about yeah I think it's it's a bit too okay I'll say something first thing about that is about diversity you know regime diversity and to say I just do not think there's a universal or should be a universal answer about what a nation should be I mean that seems to me already to have gone badly wrong and and to have a whole inevitable set of failures that will correspond to whatever success it has in other respects. But more specifically, do I think that a nation can be fully propositional?
I think that the zone of discussion that everyone is being drawn into on this is really about a thick notion of ethnicity you know I mean I think as they say given a range of diversity this is not true for everyone you know I think that there are definitely going to be nations that are much more like blood and soil type nations. But I think the Anglosphere countries definitely cannot. They just are ethnically incapable. They're ethnically blocked from being blood and soil countries.
They're in a much more complicated zone of thick ethnicity. And I think that the thick ethnicity is much closer to biological realities and such like than a pure proposition nation, of course. But it's equally, it's not, it's not disconnected. It's tied up really with a culture. Can a nation preserve a culture? And a certain extreme liberal experiment, which is to say that, you know, that question should really be ruled out of court or treated as non-serious. Of course, there's no problem with Anglosphere cultures preserving themselves under conditions of massive indiscriminate demographic inundation by totally different cultures.
I think that that has reached a crisis point. And, you know, it's specifically a crisis in liberalism, a crisis in libertarianism, a crisis in all of those areas where there has been an attachment to these basic traditions of sort of Anglo cultural and political inclination to do with restraints on government, to do with free markets, to do with social liberalism generally. And those things obviously looking deeply threatened in an environment where there is just no attempt to preserve ethnic continuity whatsoever. And I think a really good pointage on this was in Kaufman's White Shift book where he talks about ethno-traditional conservatism.
You know, ethno-traditional conservatism isn't straightforward sort of blood and soil nationalism of European type, but it's equally not the kind of extreme Northwest European liberal negligence about ethnic identity that has obviously been dominant and which I think is now really in a state of absolute turmoil and uncertainty. I generally agree with what both of you just said, and it raises the question in my mind, and I'll say my opinion about this, is that I feel like the whole idea of a blood and soil nation itself is kind of an illusion.
especially for so many uh nationalists that uh are more beholden to that that sort of concept because it always seems like it is primarily a cultural project to always uh synthesize different local and ethnic communities um through a culture first before any sort of physical like objective nation can arise so i don't do you is there is there any possibility for anything to not be a propositional sort of nation as nick nick said nick framed it well no that's interesting
i mean i think it's worth asking whether nations can be non-propositional at this point in time just in the sense that nations need legitimacy. And that is something different than power. There needs to be a kind of magical or theological component to what they are and why they should exist. They can't just simply be a garrison state. And at this point in human consciousness, we seem to need to define government in terms of freedom, democracy, liberty, equality, diversity, just some kind of magic, basically, because those words are magical. You know, they don't it can mean lots of different things. They can end the conversation with a single word.
They can open doors like, you know, open sesame or something like that. And so I think that that question of legitimacy in the 21st century is definitely one. To go back just a little bit earlier when you were talking about, you know, any kind of nation state has to synthesize cultures. I'm reminded of this Twitter exchange I had with Lauren Southern back in the fall of 2017. And Lauren had gone over to Europe and had become infatuated with identitarians and so on. And she was going over there and going on boats and all this kind of stuff.
And I noted that she was basically saying, well, in America, we want limited government. But actually, in Europe, it's different. I want France to be France. And I just, I really reacted strongly to that in a couple of different ways. First off, it treated Europe in a way that many Americans and Canadians, in her case, treat Europe, which is as basically a big museum. that is a kind of tourism union where we can go and, you know, eat pasta and visit the Louvre and ride on a gondola, something like that. And this notion that they could have ethnicity, you know, whereas we couldn't, I thought was also very wrong.
There were many local ethnicities that were or regional dialects and identities that were in a way crushed or amalgamated into the creation of Frenchness. So the nation state in that sense is a project. And there are identities and dialects and so on that exist across different borders of these nation states. And so I don't again, I don't I don't like the museum fetishization of Europe, but but I also don't like this fetishization of the nation state as like this is the basic identity or something. These nation states are, you know, were created by liberal international community after world wars.
They come and go and so on. I don't I don't you know, again, I don't deny that there is a a historical concept of Deutsch that that is German. But that's actually something that's both much bigger and much smaller than the current German nation state and more complicated than the way that the current German nation state understands itself as this liberal democracy where, you know, Hitler will never come to power again, which seems to be how they seek their legitimacy. And so these questions are much bigger. In terms of the ethnostate question itself, I'll just mention that, first off,
I've been asked this a million times now, and it's, you want to turn America into a nation state? And my answer is always, no, I don't. I don't think that's actually possible. What I want now is to change consciousness among, first off, people who have ears to hear, but more generally among white people in North America. And my concept of an ethnostate will certainly come after America. It's a way of looking way out ahead. Ethnostates, in one definition of the word, certainly exist now. Finland is more or less an ethnostate. There is actually some fractures and diversity in there, but it is more or less an ethnostate.
Sweden was one, more or less. I don't think that kind of little nation state that's basically in the shadow of the NATO empire is really something that we should aspire to. One thing I would say to kind of give the devil its due, because I don't want this to seem like I'm just this anti-American bigot who thinks America is always wrong or whatever. America has had aspiration. And I think that is a good thing, that notion that, you know, whether it's we are the best or everyone should want to be like us, we have a special place in this world. I think that is a very natural thing for, you could say, Anglos to feel or you could say Aryans to feel.
And I think it can be a very good thing. It's something I think we'll feel anyway, whether it's bad or good. And I don't think the kind of petty nation state that we see in Europe that are basically just, you know, pursuing an end of history lifestyle with retirement and consumption and, you know, a generous welfare state in the shadow of NATO, therefore in the shadow of another empire. I don't think that's something we should aspire to. I think those states are equally as decadent, as problematic as the United States is. They're just problematic in a very different way. And the ethnostate for me is something that would come afterward.
And it's something that would, I guess you could say, could be like America in terms of its aspiration, its geopolitical aspiration. but would have but would obviously be founded on a different source of legitimacy than, you know, Puritanism and enlightened humanism. So it's a kind of it's a it's a thing that's out there. It's something that would come after. And I think we would probably all in this panel agree that whether it's the Western welfare state, social democracy in Europe, whether it's the United States or Canada or Australia, that all of these places are reaching crisis points.
All of these places are at a point where the legitimacy is being questioned, that people are seeking out a kind of new form of legitimacy for the governments. So this isn't the, you know, the legitimacy doesn't come from, you know, limited government and leave it to beaver America. The legitimacy is coming from, no, America is inherently and always has been multicultural and diverse and et cetera. And so all of these countries are in crisis. And I think there will be an after. We're kind of at the end of something, not at the beginning of something. So just a couple things off of that. I wanted to go back to what you said about the museum idea of Europe. And I think this is a really important point. Because even if you take something like Britishness, I mean, that's not a natural concept, really.
I mean that's a modern concept that comes post-Glorious Revolution, post-1688, post-Act of Union, and it was very much a cultural project to create a British identity that could put together Scotland with England. and the same thing is also true of Germany I mean at the time in the 18th century I mean there was no Germany and it could have been really anything I mean the idea of Germanists extended all over Eastern Europe and into Switzerland and into Denmark and Austria and that was a whole specific cultural project to create a German identity.
So this raises a few questions about what you were saying about the end of this current state in the future and also what Nick was saying about the difference between Europe and America is that I do think all of these European states are also propositional nations, as the term Nick used, but not maybe to the same extent. I mean, they're very much going under the same immigration crises that we are experiencing in America, but there is something different. And what is that X factor that is making it hard for them to assimilate, do you think, Nick?
Well, I mean, I agree with an awful lot that both of you are saying, but I'm just slightly worried that there's a tendency to sort of universalize this question. Because it seems to me like it's absolutely correct to say there's no such thing as a nation that does not have a propositional element. But there's absolutely clearly a spectrum, you know, in the sense that I think probably people agree that America lies at one end of that spectrum. And at the other end of that spectrum, there are definitely a bunch of states that are very, very close to being not at all propositional nations. Like, I mean, even when we're talking about Europe, it's really important to, you know, separate the difficult cases, which are the ones we've been looking at.
You know, Germany and France and Britain all have relatively complex ethnic composition from, say, Poland or Slovakia or the Czech Republic or Croatia. I mean, these countries are not, you know, tormented by the same integral complexity, I don't think at all. You know, there's no need to engage in the same difficult sort of political rigmarole over time in order to synthesize this complicated national identity. identity. I mean, I think Croats know who Croats are and Hungarians know who Hungarians are to a degree that just is not the case, you know, with the French or the Germans or Brits, let alone
with the Americans, you know, and obviously a big case of this would be like Japan. I mean, Japan, you know, there's some very slight marginal complexity there, but basically the Japan has an extremely uncomplicated ethnic identity and is fully aware of that. And because of that, I don't think, you know, to get to Richard's point about the need for these kind of supplementary ideological legitimations, it's much less complicated for Japan to do that. You know, Japan has a bunch of difficulties because of the legacy of the war and these kind of things. But basically, Japan doesn't have to say, you know, we stand for a whole bunch of things to the same degree that Brits or Americans do.
They just say, look, we're running Japan. And the Japanese agree, and they think that's a good thing. So I think we just need to be sort of more differential in the way that we're approaching this. And I think really the focus of our discussion should be about the English-speaking countries and maybe especially America rather than pretending that there's some universal narrative about nations and ethnicity that can just be spread all over the world and is going to be suitable to all these different cases. And this, I guess, goes right into the idea of whiteness, which is such a thorny issue.
And it's something that, I mean, when Richard, you talk about, you know, the future and wanting to create, you know, awareness or consciousness among whites. I mean, that's something that it's hard because I feel like it's a whiteness is a concept without really a propositional content, so to speak. is that that's actually an interesting i i that's an interesting critique because uh the the critique that i usually get is that oh whiteness is it's too amorphous and actually we're actually just irish and german and so on and i think that actually falls into the same traps that i was
talking about before which is that no those concepts are actually problematic and uh and that And then I would usually answer that whether we like it or not, we are white in the sense that whether you're Slovenian or Russian or Irish or Italian, you're being discriminated against as a white person when you apply to Harvard or attempted work at Google or something like that. That's just such a completely negative – I agree. I think your critique is more interesting because you basically say that there actually needs to be an aspirational proposition to it, that it's not so much that we're a people and we're under attack.
I think there obviously there's something to that and that can be a source of something. But it actually has to be aspirational and bigger. And I think that's a very good critique. And I think that's something that we should be working on because we need to take a few things for granted. First off, the the the world is becoming globalized. That's the biggest cliche, but it's a cliche because it's true. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche talked about this homogeneous European man. And he was talking about the age of train travel and telegraphs. You know, these now rudimentary technologies.
But he was saying that, you know, each of these Europeans comes from somewhere, but they're becoming more universalized, you can say, in terms of habits and dress and thought and language and religion as well. as the wars of religion, intramural Christian wars are fading into memory and people can't remember what they're even about. We're kind of embracing a generic Christianity or at this point a generic liberalism. And so I do think we have to understand ourselves not as part of nations, but actually as a global community. And there are clearly differences to our experience,
But I think that these differences are overshadowed by the similarities of our experience. And I do think that one of the challenges for us is to have an aspirational project. you know when when Herzl imagined the notion of a Jewish state it it it was both about kind of democratic socialism at some level it was you know about you know we'll escape anti-semitism we're going to have a five-day work week and all these nice things but it was also idealistic and about the creation of a kind of new peoplehood. And I think that is a project for white people in the 21st century.
As these older things, all of these things that the right always goes back to, blood and soil, good old America, Americana, leave it to beaver, whatever, all of those things are fading and they are going into the dustbin. And I don't say that as a liberal who delights in that. I say that as a realist just looking at our situation and that we actually do need a kind of aspirational global legitimacy for the white race. and this is something that a lot of conservatives don't like conservatives like to react to stuff and get mad at the latest liberal outrage and so on i actually think that we need to be more idealistic
more outlandish you could say in how we think of ourselves because i don't even know if whiteness can be a concept that can be used to even create like a global community of of nation states or a global world um it just this is the problem that i have with uh some of these movements i guess identity europa is defunct now or i don't i don't know but with that that kind of thing um it's like there's no it's just so empty. It's like reaching towards a presumed idea of whiteness that doesn't really exist. I agree. I mean, I think it does have to be a search, but we do need something in the sense
that America, and not just as small-town America, but America as an ideal, captured people's imagination. We need, you know, that is now fading, that's in crisis, that that's, is lacking legitimacy. We need something like that. I, you know, I, I, I agree with another critique of identitarianism, which is kind of like, well, what does it even mean to be an American identitarian at this point? Does that mean that you, you know, want to stand firm for the strip mall and chain yourself to your local smoothie king when it gets bulldozed
to install a larger multiplex movie theater. You know, it's kind of like, what are you defending exactly? You know, if you go to Plano, Texas, I mean, again, I grew up in Dallas and I grew up kind of in a very, in a well-to-do community. And it was a community. I can remember riding my all summer for three. The summer felt like like three years and not three months. And I would just ride my bike around. I knew everyone in the neighborhood and we'd play football and baseball. And, you know, it was amazing. It was leave it to be. I shouldn't I shouldn't I shouldn't say that that that term was such derision. But, you know, imagine calling yourself an identitarian and living in Plano or these places.
You know, what are you defending? Applebee's? You know, I mean, what is your culture? And so I think identity has to be a search. It has to be a kind of future directed thing and not a past directed. in in the in the present and and in the recent past we grew up in the end of history uh you know we we grew up with the internet we grew up with television we we grew up with uh the commercialization of all culture etc uh we we grew up where you're you're just an individual consuming unit And for us, you know, identity is actually a destination and not a foundation.
And so I think a lot of identitarian thinking maybe has to be flipped on its head because it's wrong. If we start where we are and we defend where we are, we're simply defending the crisis. We're defending the thing that's dying. We're defending the thing that's actually made us sick. and we need to actually start seeing identity as an aspiration or a destination. And I'm not so 100% sure that I agree with you. In particular, this point is that what is the role of universality in moving forward? Because I feel like I got criticized recently for saying that I was a black nationalist
and someone thought I was being ironic. But I would consider myself unironically a black nationalist and that I believe that a lot of these minority communities, even if they don't have physical analog states, is that they have to undergo that same sort of nationalism that something like Germany did, is that they have to be nationalists. But with the Enlightenment and following the Enlightenment with like so-called white people is that, I mean, we've proceeded beyond that point in some way, I feel, where, you know, we have universalized so many of our ideas and values to such an extent that it seems incredibly parochial in a way to go back and try to then appeal to something much
smaller and more specific and much, much more local. And then we get into this idea of the end history and maybe i think you know nick might have some things to say about this is that i mean we have these futurist ideologies of something like communism which really is completely based in universality and universal ideals as a substitute for anything previous in terms of blood and soil national identity ethnic identity race any of those concepts and so So, I mean, Nick, do you think that universe, that sort of communist or, you know, postmodern futurist idea, is there any possibility there that that can be the basis of a functioning global, you know, world nation or something?
No. Oh, I mean, the thought is absolutely repulsive, even were it possible. And I would, of course, say no. you know I think that if there's anything to be opposed it's that I mean you know I've now definitely peeled away from my major sort of agreement with a lot of this in the sense that I just really don't I think where Richard is going with this is just really not right in the sense that, you know, whiteness is, as everyone started off saying, I think it's as a political thing. It's an artifact of leftist race politics. It's completely understandable why it's everywhere now.
It's everywhere because of the fact that the left is on this massive offensive about it. And that does sort of push people together. But as something that is some functional unity, you know, a political platform, a basis for some kind of large scale political institutions, I just don't see any of that being plausible. I mean, you know, the people, at least a third of white people immediately need to be triaged as being the enemy. You know, it's not it's not people of color. It's not. I don't think even whatever Jews or, you know, certain Mexican immigrants.
These are not the people who are launching this yihad against whiteness. It's white people who are doing that. I agree. And the notion that they're all going to be brought together in some kind of great white brotherhood, I just think is completely unrealistic. And even, you know, in addition to that, I think it's like there's a great impoverishment in doing that in terms of the amount of experimental potential that there is in all these different ethnic trends within, you know, some umbrella notion of whiteness. I mean, I'm really interested to see Hungary doing what it's doing now, Poland doing what it's doing now. I don't want them to do the same thing that I want England or America to do.
I mean, I don't think there's any advantage from other than having kind of cordial, friendly, supportive interactions. I don't see why we would want to kind of pour them all back into some giant pot under the label of whiteness. I'd much rather see Hungarians defending Hungarian-ness than being brought into that kind of coalition. But they can't. Obviously, they can't. Because Hungary is a small nation. I mean, even Viktor Orban himself in an interview, he was saying, you know, I don't know why these people outside Hungary are looking to us as a savior or something.
We're just a little country kind of navigating where we are. They will, Hungary vis-a-vis, let's just call it the end of history as a placeholder for liberalism, multiculturalism, mass immigration, etc. Hungary will lose that battle. And it will also easily lose battles against arguably even worse forces like the potential of Chinese imperialism, etc. I think that the prediction you've got there is obviously an important one, because it doesn't seem to me at all obvious they're going to lose. I mean, whether they win or lose will obviously depend on a lot of contextual factors. You know, I obviously recognize that in terms of the apparatus for hard sovereignty, especially like military deterrence capability, they are limited.
but I mean the fact that they've been able to go as far as they've gone seems to me to suggest that the capacity of these larger imperial multicultural imperial structures to suppress what is happening in these places is not by any means omnipotent I mean of course right you know that he just but the EU would have squashed what was happening in these places it would have stopped what's now happening in Italy it has significantly failed to do that I mean the the tendencies that are evident in these places seem to me to be cascading rather than being on the back foot and in recession so you know one of course I can see scenarios that would result in some kind of imperial suppression of
of Hungary in the name of this kind of multicultural empire that it is by no means to me an inevitable an inevitable scenario and it certainly doesn't seem to be something that is strongly predicted by the the dominant trends that we're seeing I'm well I think first of all I just wanted to say that Nick you have this essay Disintegration that was just recently published, and you, I think it's really great, but it does sort of signal kind of a shift for you, and part of a longer process, I feel like it goes neatly with the more specific topics that we're discussing about nations, and especially
about these smaller Eastern European nations and Poland versus the EU. I mean, do you think that your position has changed a lot on this over the years? I mean, is this a new model that you're developing? How many years are we talking, really? I mean, I think that this is the great attraction of the mold bug patchwork model is exactly this. You know, it's the fact that you do not have to impose homogenous, universalized political schemes on everybody, but instead you seek an environment that encourages regime diversity.
experimentation you know allows a whole bunch of things that you you abominate to happen and a whole bunch of things that you feel sympathetic to to happen and you know there is not a single universal master narrative dominating these things so in that respect i don't i don't think it's a big departure i think it's like implicit in the whole uh trend that's been happening for at least whatever it is now, like a decade maybe. Okay, and go ahead. I think there will be large imperial blocks, and the question is, are we going to lead them or are we not? And I think there might certainly be moments, transitionary moments of disintegration.
But I think there's a – I don't know. There's just a very natural tendency throughout history, ancient history, of course. But in particular, in our current mode of mass communications, of being everywhere, of the need for military structures that can control nuclear weapons, et cetera, for there to be big blocks. I think that's those are going to be the fissures of of the world geopolitically. And the real question is whether they're good or not. I think that Poland or Hungary, we're using these as paradigms for countries that are based and that we generally like.
And I, of course, wish them the best. You know, Viktor Orban put me in jail, but I would still vote for him. that that's the level of my sympathy towards towards his project but I'm also realistic about his project and I I'm willing to see its limits the second the EU is a weird thing it's a kind of bureaucracy in search of a nation a bureaucracy in search of a state It doesn't – it has a regulatory kind of economic foreign policy, you could say, but that's obviously not a military one. It is – it does have some legitimacy, but I agree that its legitimacy is kind of vacuous or hokey, you could even say.
I mean it is a – it's not a real thing at the moment. It's a big bureaucracy. It's very real in terms of its bureaucratic and cost and so on. But it is not a real state. In terms of our discussion here, its legitimacy is clearly in recession. I mean, I don't think of all the big transfers we're seeing. You don't think the EU is? I mean, there was definitely, I mean, even just taking Brexit as one indicator, I mean, yeah, which is huge. So so obviously the the the number of in fact that this this exit suffix that is being applied to all kinds of things now, like maybe sometimes a bit tentatively.
But the the notion that actually pulling apart from the year is the is the way to go is something that's very recent. Well, they don't really want to go there. I mean, I think the British people obviously voted to, you know, out of they didn't want refugees and immigration. And so they voted against the EU in terms of what the EU actually does in terms of free travel between states. I think most British people want that in the EU began as a kind of, you know, conspiracy. coal and and and and farming interest creating an economic zone so i i think it now
over the course of time it certainly gained more legitimacy it's become a kind of thing in the sense that earlier it was a an economic agreement between uh elites so you know looking over the long durée of, say, 60 years, it certainly gained legitimacy. And I think the Brexit thing, the fact that it just is always unresolved, the fact that people didn't really understand what they were voting for, I think in a way adds to the legitimacy and the duration of Of the European Union. I don't think it's going anywhere and I don't think Britain will ever exit the European Union
Well, that's obviously another very interesting prediction I My I would again Bet it's entirely in the other direction. I think Britain will definitely leave and be followed by a Succession of other countries at whatever on whatever schedule but yeah I mean this is obviously a big this is a big interesting point of controversy is really about even just in sort of cynical functional terms the value of these really large imperial scale geopolitical superstructures how how robust they are how desirable they are how whether they could be actually turned to advantage of political forces with which one
had some sympathy. And clearly, in all those cases, I'm much more skeptical. Right. I'm much more naive and Pollyannish about those things. But yeah, I so I would say this in terms of the based Poland under based Hungary meme. If those countries ever challenge the military power on the continent, which is not the European Union, which is NATO, or you could say Washington, then they would be crushed. But why would they ever challenge it? I mean, in what respect are you even imagining that? Well, I'm saying, if they were to actually want to be
independent countries, I mean, it's advantageous for them to live in the shadow of the United States. Yeah, which is what it is. I mean, you know, the military power in Europe is like, largely, there's Britain, France has a non negligible military, the German military is a joke. No one else is even in the game. And as you say, it's like America. There is NATO. So I mean, this is not a particularly I mean, if for some reason, America decided it was going through military main force to crush the sort of ethnic independence of of Hungary and Poland of course it could do that but I don't find that a particularly plausible storyline I mean I just
there's no reason for the US to do that the US I think once a kind of based Poland as this you know, ethnocentric, badass country on its border, because obviously NATO is about the Russian empire and confronting that. And I mean, when Donald Trump visited Poland in 2017 and said, oh, America loves Poland and we're all, we love the European-ness and the West and all that kind of stuff. He probably said the West as opposed to European. That came at the same day that new missiles were being installed in Poland. So, you know, ideology was following the geopolitical designs of Washington. So I don't think that it's going to happen. I'm just saying that we need to
be realistic about the so-called independence of those countries. And keep in mind that there actually have been, you could say, Americanized laws that have been installed in Poland due to the fact that it is Washington's pawn. Um, there were, you know, it is illegal to criticize the Holocaust, um, and other things. And yeah, whatever you think about that matter, I don't want to talk about it on this podcast, but, um, the, the, the fact is, uh, that, that is a clear kind of camel's knows under the tent that, you know, along with this, the fact that you're, you're under our
umbrella, you're going to have to play by our rules. And if any of those countries truly wanted to be independent, they would be undermined, if not directly opposed by the US. So the question really is who's in charge of these big nuclear power superstructures and you know who's in charge of europe um i i want i want europeans like us to be in charge and and just to go back real quickly to your comment which i completely agree with which is you know one-third of whites or total psychotic leftist, which is sadly true. I mean, I get that, but I don't think we're ever going to
live in a homogeneous ideological community. I think there always is going to be a left of some kind. There's always going to be conflict and discussion. And I think we want to kind of depoliticize this and in the sense of becoming top dog so that these discussions are happening in our shadow so i don't want to i richard do you do you have a time constraint do you need to get going i do i'm gonna have to leave in just a couple of minutes but i would i would mention this um i really i'm very happy that we had um this great conversation there's going to be a lot i I would just like to say I want you guys to come back.
I mean, I feel like this is a great conversation that we're having. I feel like we're just getting started. Would you guys be willing to maybe do like a part two or something? I am. Sure. That would be excellent. I think that we're getting in a very productive and interesting discussion here. And, you know, there's a lot more that we can talk about than I want to ask you guys. but thanks so much for both of you guys coming on. We'll do something to schedule a part two to this. This is great. Everyone go out there, read Nick's latest essay, Disintegration, on Jacobite. It's really great. Everyone follow both Richard Spencer, Nick Land on Twitter. Check out all their stuff. Thanks so much for both of you guys being on.
Yeah, thank you so much. This was a great conversation. Yeah, and thanks for hosting it. It's been great. Yes, yeah, thanks both. I will go read your disintegration essay today. So this is going to be fun. Okay. Till next time. Thanks so much, guys. Have a great day. Till next time. See you guys.