The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 526. Trump, Musk, Kennedy: the Dawn of Transparency | Michael Shellenberger

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Jordan Peterson sits down with journalist, bestselling author, and founder of Public.News, Michael Shellenberger. They discuss the key moments that ushered in rapid transparency for the U.S., from the Twitter files to Donald Trump taking the white house. They also explore how new generations can take political responsibility for the future of the West, the need to rebuild trust in public institutions, and how to make every desert bloom. Michael Shellenberger is the founder of Public, the C.B.R. Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin, and the bestselling author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities (HarperCollins 2021) and Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (HarperCollins 2020). He is a Time Magazine "Hero of the Environment," Green Book Award winner, Dao Journalism Prize-winner, and Founder of Civilization Works. Michael has broken major stories, including on the Twitter Files, for which he won the 2023 Dao Award for journalism; the Censorship Industrial Complex; San Francisco’s cash incentives for homelessness; the “Amazon Forest are the lungs of the world” myth; climate pseudoscience; climate anxiety; the U.S. government support for fracking; and forest management, climate change, and California’s fires. This episode was filmed on January 14th, 2025  | Links | For Michael Shellenberger: On X https://x.com/shellenberger?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Public.News on Substack https://www.public.news/ Michael On Substack https://substack.com/@shellenberger Preorder Michael’s upcoming book “Pathocracy” https://www.buffalostreetbooks.com/book/9780063421578 

If you don't shoulder your political obligation, then the tyrants will take the right to do so out of your hands and use it against you. I think the last 12 years, we should think of it as a woke reign of terror. I mean, really, it starts with Black Lives Matter, ends with the election of President Trump. We discover, thanks to the Twitter files, the existence of this elaborate censorship industrial complex

complete with government-run disinformation efforts efforts how much of government spending is wasted? You know, it's classic Elon. It was chaos. It was contradictory The only natural resource is trust, you know, Jordan. I'm filled with a lot of optimism You need to get married you need to have some children your family has to be an integrated part of your community You have to serve your state and your nation. If everyone can cooperate and compete, then every desert can bloom. Hi everybody. I had the opportunity to speak today to Michael Schellenberger who's a, well he was a Democrat at one point, like so many people, and has turned more to the, well I wouldn't say conservative side exactly.

He's turned to whatever this new emergent side is that's signified by the union, let's say, of Trump and Musk and JD Vance and Mehmet Oz and Robert Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, etc., etc., whatever that is. And I've had Michael on as a guest a couple of times on the show. He's a journalist. He broke the Twitter files. Elon Musk gave him access to the Twitter back end to delineate what had been occurring before Musk purchased the platform. And Michael was also instrumental in breaking the WPATH files. And WPATH is why you could call it an organization, but it's more like a cabal of perversion and

incompetence, I would say. And WPATH put themselves forward as a scientific consultation group that established gender-affirming care as the standard of care, a standard that was immediately adopted by the lackeys and bootlickers at the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, et cetera, ad nauseum forever. And so Michael's a pretty useful journalist

and he's been assessing Elon Musk's work at Doge, He's been assessing Elon Musk's work at Doge deconstructing USAID, for example. And I wanted to talk to Michael about his views on Musk's efforts, on Musk himself, let's say, on this strange collaboration between Musk and Trump and the other people that we mentioned, and about, I suppose, his deeper insights, if any, and likely, on just exactly how to understand what's going on, how to understand this rise of new conservative

or new traditionalist populism, how to understand the threat that's being posed to Europe in terms of mass migration and the globalist utopians, how to understand the philosophical and spiritual basis of this revolution in governance that we see manifesting itself before us, to understand the role that technological transformation is playing, for example, in facilitating Elon Musk's ability to do his sleuthing and uncovering work, well, it's all part of the attempt to get to the bottom of things and the bottom's a long way down and so it's down the rabbit hole we go with Michael Schellenberger. Well, Michael, it's good to see you again. It's been about 10 months since we spoke so it seems like a lot longer ago than that but I guess that's because, well, the world keeps turning upside down and spinning so it's disconcerting.

I'm very curious, we're going to talk a fair bit about USAID today and government corruption, fraud, waste, which are hard to disentangle. And I want to dive right into that. But I'm also curious, what else you think is particularly germane that we might touch on today. Well, I mean, look, Jordan, I think it's a huge moment. You know, we obviously had a massively historic election that also signified a change in the media environment, of which you've been a really fundamental part. I think we saw today Vice President JD Vance gave a major speech at the Munich Security

Summit in Munich, Germany, where he very strongly articulated what I think you could argue is the new national conservative case, which included grave concerns around losing Europe to mass migration. It included a strong defense of free speech. And this is now the second time that I think he has intimated, this time I think he was softer than the first time, that Europe's move towards totalitarianism, particularly this mass censorship that they want to impose on our social media companies and on us, on our voice in Europe, that that

was not only unacceptable, but that it puts our alliance in danger. He specifically said it puts NATO in danger. So I think the Europeans today got a sense of the depth of which America cares about free speech, that free speech for us is a must have, not a nice to have. In Europe, it feels like it may be more like a nice to have. And I think you finally got administration that's just saying, hey, we're not going to tolerate this censorship and totalitarianism that you're imposing on our companies and attempting to impose on our people. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's address that right away.

Did he meet with Schultz or did he keep him on the sidelines? That is a good question. I am not sure. He did. I believe he did say at the beginning of the speech that they had met, but I don't, the audience should check on that. He, it was a second strong, he actually gave a prior speech as well that was also strong, but yeah, this is, this was a big speech.

He, you know, of course there was an assault, you know, by a terrorist in Germany, I believe less than 48 hours ago, very dramatic moment. I don't have the latest in terms of deaths and injuries, but it was, and he opens with that. He expressed his, of course, great concern and sympathy for the Germans, and then pivoted right away to saying,

look, you've got a big mass migration problem, and we have it too, and we've got to have, we've got to get control of our countries. And I think he also said, and I think he really spoke for Americans this way, certainly for me, which is that we actually really love Europe. Like, Americans really care about Europe, like not just as a tourist destination, we care about it as an idea, as the birthplace of the enlightenment. I mean, for us Americans, Europe is where our ideas that our country was founded on were born, but they were never fully realized

until you got to the United States and until you had Thomas Jefferson, us insist against Alexandra Hamilton that we were gonna have a bill of rights. And that the first thing was gonna be free speech and that we weren't gonna mess around about it, that this was number one, that we didn't wanna have a country without having this guarantee. And like I said, I just

think I don't think Europeans understand the depth of our commitment to that, that really when they start threatening our free speech rights, as they've been increasingly doing, they need to know that they are threatening their security. That it really makes us, we're tired. America is tired. Like we're very, very tired. It's upsetting to go 20 years of hearing stories of veterans, almost all of whom appear to have PTSD in some way, the combat ones. The struggles they have, I mean, I was with a veteran

who lost friends in Afghanistan the day that Biden pulled out, which was a disgrace. So America is tired. We love Europe, we believe in Europe, but they're testing our patience. And I think we finally have an administration that can communicate the depth of our concern around their push towards censorship. And they're really, they pioneered it. They developed it. A lot of it was, you know, we've certainly done our part to bring it there, but, you know, they are the Western Europe is currently the greatest threat to free speech

in the West. And I think they need to understand that's a big problem when it comes to US-European relations. Yeah, well, we should differentiate this a bit too. I spent a lot of time traveling in Europe in recent years. And I've made it a point in all of the countries I visited, and that's most European countries, east and west, to meet with thought leaders, politicians, journalists, actors in all the countries that I've gone to,

at dinners and lunches. And I've come to a number of realizations as a consequence. The first is very much akin to what you're describing, which is, like, what the hell's going on in France and Germany and the UK, the Netherlands, Western Europe, let's say, Western Europe. That's a consequence, in my opinion, fundamentally of Brussels, the European Union, the pernicious effect of Davos, the globalist utopians, the apocalypse mongers, the people who tell you that the future is a miserable and wretched place unless you

give us all the power. But that's not Europe, that's Western Europe. Now the Eastern Europeans, they're a different bunch, you know, and well, we could walk through them to some degree. Let's start with Hungary because that's a country that's been absolutely pilloried by the legacy media in the press, in the Western press. And, you know, that Orban has been described as, you know, shoulder to shoulder with, of course, Adolf Hitler, because, you know, he's the guy you drag out when you don't have anything else to say.

And I've been to Hungary a number of times, and Hungary has a very sophisticated family policy, pro-family policy, and it's been quite effective. They've knocked their abortion rate down 38% with no increase in policing, so to speak. It's part of a cultural shift. They've knocked their divorce rate down substantively. They've increased the proportion of women who are participating in the workforce at the same time. They've slowed the decline in the birth rate. And my experience in Budapest in particular,

where I got to know the Hungarian president, that's not Orban, the previous president, and she was the author of the Hungarian, or one of the authors of the Hungarian pro-family policies. And I also saw Budapest rebuilding itself. The goal of the Orban administration is to make Budapest into the most beautiful city in Europe. And they have some real geographic advantages there.

It's built along the river and it's very beautiful already. And then Poland, Poland has a thriving economy. They don't have an immigration issue. And the Eastern Europeans are incredibly, incredibly dedicated supporters of the Western tradition and the US in particular, not least because they remember what it was like to spend 75 years under the thumb

of the Soviet totalitarians. So even the left-wingers in Eastern Europe aren't completely out of their minds, you know, like they are in Germany in particular, right? So it would be useful for the, and maybe this is already happening, but it would be useful for the Trump administration people to differentiate between the Western Europeans, the Eastern, you know, the European Union types, the globalists, the WEF, and the Eastern Europeans who are, like I thought the last few times that I went through Europe that the salvation of Europe would be Eastern Europe, surprisingly enough, like who would have ever guessed that was gonna be the case. So, and the free speech issue, thing is, you know,

we still don't understand free speech properly because you know, you said that if the Europeans keep undermining free speech and that battle's being played out in the virtual world particularly with regards likely to X say more than anything else That their security is going to be undermined and you are thinking about them compromising their relationship with the US but what's necessary to understand is that you do undermine your security by interfering with free speech because there's no difference between free speech and creative and corrective thought. Those are the same thing. And so any culture that clamps down on the right to free speech, which isn't just another

hedonistic privilege, they interfere with the, literally interfere with the mechanism that keeps their country honest and innovative. So it's a disaster. That's right. Well, of course, it's happening at a moment when I think Europe has started to at least comprehend just how behind it is on technology. The speech that JD Vance gave a couple of days ago was on AI, at least ostensibly on AI, and how the framing that they want, the Trump administration wants, is of AI as possibility, as potential, as innovation, not as apocalypse, repression, you know, the sort of the European approach to try to gain control over the technology.

Yeah, good luck. the sort of the European approach to try to gain control over the technology. Yeah, good luck. Yeah, I mean, so look, America is, I mean, it sounds so corny, but I mean, America's back in just a big way. I mean, you've just got a character there in the White House that is they are moving faster than anybody. I mean, I was just there talking to folks,

you know, it was various places and everybody's surprised at how fast they're moving. And of course, Elon has accelerated that, the number of things that are happening. The thing that we were ostensibly going to talk about today, for example, not to, we don't have to go to it right away, but just the whole reason there's a debate in the United States right now about the United States Agency for International Development, USAID is simply because Elon was seeking to basically gain access to the computer systems, the servers, the buildings themselves that these agencies occupy. And that was the agency that wouldn't give them access, it wouldn't give them clearance. So that was when Trump just, they just shut it down.

They just were like, if we can't get, we were the democratically elected, he's the democratically elected president of the United States who has full authority, according to article two of the US constitution, over every single executive branch agency, and that includes agency of international development, when they are refusing access to the representative of the president of the United States,

who happens to be our greatest technologist, they just were like, fine, if you're going to play that, you know, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. And the stupid prize they got was that they got shut down, including pulling back all of their people. And I only mentioned it to say, what you're seeing them bringing into government, which none of us could have imagined, is first of all, this awareness that you can't really reform institutions. People talk about that, but really you have to just shut them down and build something fresh. That's the only way you can get the old guard out and you have to have new leadership and a new constitution or a new set of rules.

But also that you don't really know what's going on until you move fast and break things. And so like this is something that I experienced too, which is like, you just have to go out there and sort of do things in the world to figure out what is the federal government. You sort of think you know what the federal government is because we have lists of agencies and employees and whatever. But we saw with the US Agency for International Development, we didn't know what they were doing. And what we discovered is that they were part of the blowback of US counterterrorism, counterinsurgency,

counterpopulism that was pushed abroad with the Arab Spring and then the color revolutions in Eastern Europe and came back. And that those characters that led the censorship, disinformation, lawfare, and other dirty tricks that they used for regime change abroad, brought those tactics and strategies to the United States and weaponized them against Trump, MAGA, Republicans. And again, you play stupid games, win stupid prizes, and that's what they got.

And so when they broke open AID, suddenly it was available for all of us to see, and there's been some very good research and scholarship by some of our allies on what was going on there and making sense of it. And so we've been in a process of sense making as a country for about whatever it's been, a week, a week and a half about what exactly is this agency doing? How did it become so deranged that it would use the weapons of regime change against our own democratically elected president from 2016 to 2020, including many of us suspect but can't yet prove in January 6th. How did that happen?

And then the subsequent question is, what do we do now? I mean, Jordan, after we've spent billions of dollars creating this elaborate foreign policy establishment, otherwise known as the blob, which includes many academic journals, academic divisions of universities, whole think tanks, parts of the federal government. Nobody has theorized what comes now. Nobody has theorized what happens if the United States shuts down its main agency for soft power. That's what USAID was, Agency for National Development.

It was just a mechanism of soft power alongside the CIA. It was really supposed to be State Department, AID, CIA, all supposed to be run by the National Security Council, all supposed to be run by the President of the United States. What happens when that's not there anymore? And I think there's some real questions. I mean, I'm fairly anti-interventionist, anti-imperialist, have been really for all my adult life, but there's a real vacuum that does get created. The critics of what they've done are not wrong

in being concerned about, well, what happens when Russia and China move into those places? And maybe that's fine. I mean, let the Chinese get involved in trying to build nations in Africa. But I do think it raises some existential questions about what is the United States? What is the United States in the world?

Because we are entering, as you mentioned, 75 to 80 years of Pax Americana, where the United States has been holding together a global system. And people talk about multipolarity, but China and Russia are not the United States. We are still the center of action. We have all the talent, we have the AI, we have all the energy. We remain the most secure country in the world, not just because of our nuclear weapons and military, but also because we're protected on both coastlines by huge bodies of water.

So, I mean, United States is still arguably the big superpower. Obviously, China is a superpower, but it's not playing anything. You can't even imagine China playing anything close to the role of the United States played after World War II. So, we're in a moment of, you know, we're just trying to figure out what's going on. I think everybody's trying to figure out what's going on and much less, we've got to spend some time figuring out what do we want the United States to be? And JD Vance and Trump are further along in that thinking than anybody, but honestly, it's not like,

it's not like there's a consensus even within the Republican party about what the United States is role in the world should be in this post-Pax Americana, post post-Cold War period? Okay, well, let's take a bunch of that apart. Well, the first thing is, I was talking with some people well-placed in the administration recently who are convinced that Musk has the possibility

of finding like a trillion dollars worth of waste and fraud in the next four weeks. Now, we should just outline what's happened. Like I've watched the Democrats respond to Musk's group of teenagers, teenage engineers with contempt, you know. And this is so 1960s, this mode of thinking And this is so 1960s, this mode of thinking, because Musk doesn't have 15, 20, 100 teenage engineers.

He has, let's say, 20 to 100 teenage engineers with the most computing power that the world has ever seen at their fingertips, and they know how to use it. And there are some seriously smart computer engineers. I was just at a lab in Palo Alto that's doing things that are so science fiction-like you can't even imagine it. And they're inventing revolutionary machines as a byproduct of the revolution in technology that they're pursuing.

And these, and all this is augmented by AI, and Musk is on top of that. And so he's really inserted the 21st century into the 19th century in DC. And of course people don't know what hit them because no one knows what's hitting any of us and his ability to insert himself into these hidden systems is absolutely revolutionary. You know, it's a mythological trope, an ancient mythological trope, that it's the evil brother of the rightful king who is one of the prime enemies of the state. It's the evil brother of the righteous king and it's the goddess of chaos.

Those are the two enemies. It's the social structure pathologized or the natural world rebelling. Right, so historic enemies. Well, the evil brother of the king is camouflage and corruption. And what happens as a system develops is that it accretes predators and parasites. That's a biological metaphor. And if the load gets too heavy, the system collapses. And the antidote to that, the Egyptians had figured this out, the ancient Egyptians, the

antidote to that was clear, honest speech and careful attention. The Egyptians actually had a god who specified that, signified that, that was Horus, and he was the defeater, the eternal enemy of the evil king. And Musk is playing that role with his engineers. He's in there finding out, like, how much of government spending is wasted? Well, you don't know. Why do you not know? Well, because the government itself doesn't even

have the internal mechanisms to track its own behavior. I'll give you an example of this. So I worked for social services as a consultant in Alberta 40 years ago, and oddly enough, I was hired as a junior consultant. I had demonstrated a certain amount of competence in my summer internship and I was hired to duplicate an audit of the social services department that had been commissioned by a major auditing house. I think it was Price Waterhouse and they had charged the government a fortune for that the year before and the Assistant Deputy Minister asked me to update it, which was a pretty weird request. But I thought, well, what the hell, I'll give it a shot. And so I went through the audit kind of line by line and then called the relevant people

who were involved to get a financial update so that it was current. And the first thing I found out was the government had no idea where it was spending its money and all the numbers were estimates that could have been off by a factor of 10. So and the puncher, the clincher for me was the punchline, was that social services literally had no idea what proportion of the money they spent went to the end recipients. So old people, welfare recipients, etc.

Because it's the social safety net branch of the Alberta government. They had no idea. And of course, you know that the typical charity spends 90% of its money running itself. That's if it's well run. And I was reading a book at that time by a man named John Gall. It's a great book, it's a cult classic called System Antics. Trying to make sense of this, it's great title, System Antics, very smart. And one of his maxims, his axioms was, the name of the system is not what the system

does. And so his analytical approach to the analysis of a system was, don't assume that anyone knows what it does. That's the first thing you have to find out. Now that's what Musk is doing. It's called USAID and that's its camouflage, you might say. It's like, we're out there making the world safe and productive for the desperately poor. Well, no one can oppose that.

Well, but then the questioning starts. Which poor people? How much money and how? And the answer to all those questions is something like, we don't know. Or we don't want you to know. Right. And then, well, hasn't there also been revelations that the treasury department had a policy to not question its invoices? Right. Because they- You couldn't imagine a more insane policy, right? Right.

What that means is that if you set up a shell company, what it appears to mean is that if you set up a shell company, what it appears to mean is that if you set up a shell company and you sent professional looking invoices to the federal government, that they would pay them without question forever, no matter how much they cost, just so you wouldn't complain. So, okay, so Musk is in there with this

incredibly sophisticated technology, rapidly tracking down spending. So the first question is like, what the hell are these agencies actually doing? And it's not like anyone knows, not thoroughly. Then the next question of course is, how much of it is waste? Okay, so the management literature indicates management and literature on productivity and creativity.

There's two indications from that literature that are germane. The first is that 65% of managers in private companies add negative net value to their companies. Wow. That's profitable, well-run private companies, right? 65%. And then you might ask, well, how can a company survive?

And the answer to that is the square root of the number of people engaged in a given domain of effort do half the work. So if you have 10,000 employees, 100 of them do half the work. And so that means that Musk didn't do what he did with Twitter, let's say, and fire 85% of the people. And all that happens is profit margins go up and everything runs more efficiently. And so will Elon find a trillion dollars worth of waste in the next four weeks?

It's like, I guess we'll see. And then what? Well, then that brings the question that you raised. It's like, well, now we have to rethink this from first principles. And like my sense, you tell me what you think about this. I know this woman named Magat Wade, and Magat's quite the interesting character, very charismatic, entrepreneurially oriented African, and a very fierce advocate of free markets. And her belief, and many people believe this, is that foreign aid is actually counterproductive

to the countries in question for like 50 different reasons, partly because it's not that easy to help people and it's a lot easier to do harm with stupid money than good. It's harder to do good with money than it is to invest it wisely. I mean, and those are kind of the same thing. So you can just make a case that the whole idea of foreign aid is based on a 17th century model that presumes that we have to stop the world's incompetent people from starving. And like we're just not there anymore. The only reason that people ever starve in the world now is for political reasons.

There's plenty of everything to go around. So what's the point of foreign aid and how should it be distributed, if it should be distributed at all? And then, you know, so, and you, you know, you asked what will be the new role of the United States? Example? That would be good. Forthright defender of free speech and the free market?

At ARC, you're going to ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, you know, our answer to this, because I think it's an answer to the question you posed, is that we need a rethinking of, a rethinking on a more conscious level of the principles that have made the West free and productive. And we need to reorient ourselves in alignment with those principles. And that's mostly a cultural endeavor rather than a political endeavor. So well, okay, that's an information dump. And so I'm curious about your take on it. Yeah, well, there's a lot there.

I mean, I think to start with, we say, we hear a lot waste, fraud and abuse as though they're kind of all equal. Waste is inevitable to any system. You try to reduce it, but they're, one of the things we find is that you can waste more energy trying to any system. Just try to reduce it, but they're one of the things we find is that you can waste more energy trying to reduce waste. It's often why when you go to these studies of like buildings and whatever, there's a high level of energy efficiency. You can always get more

efficiency out of a building and they always go, well, if we put more energy and time into reducing the efficiency, yeah, but then you wouldn't be running your business anymore, right? So there's like, you can waste time trying to deal with the waste. Then there's fraud. That's bad. That shows not just a kind of, you know, I think people tend to think of fraud like, oh, the police haven't done a good enough job or the police are corrupted. It represents a weakening and corruption of the body of the system that you're actually, as you said before, it's not, there's always parasites, there's always viruses. When the host becomes vulnerable and weakened and old and prone to disease is when you're prone to fraud.

And then you get the worst of them all by far, which is abuse, by which is abuse of power. And we are coming out of a period of extreme abuse of power. And we are coming out of a period of extreme abuse of powers. I mean, we can debate the period of time that's relevant. I think the last 12 years, we should think of it as a woke reign of terror, meaning a period of great fear, certainly universities, media, wokeism. I mean, it really it starts with Black Lives Matter, ends with the election

of President Trump in 2024. That was a period of abuse of power, every single major institution, medical power, educational power, media power, political power. And what gets revealed when, when Elon and Trump break open the, the US government as we see this new, new agency that was always there in their peripheral vision, everybody sort of knew about, but you kind of forgot about,

USAID, Agency for International Development. And what opens up is a bunch of things that you had forgotten, but are important to remember. The first is that human economic development, prosperity growth comes from within. It comes from the core values of within, namely delayed gratification, hard work, saving on principle, waiting to get married until you can afford your own home and sustain your own family, which means

you know, healthy sublimation, that those things are the recipe. Integration. Integration, not sublimation. Integration, okay, thank you. Well, I think, well, it's an important distinction, and I've been thinking about this a lot, because like you could think of sublimation as self-control

and you could think about it as a variant of the Freudian superego that inhibits, you know, but there's a power dynamic presumption there, which is that the way that you obtain control over your own impulses is by using something akin to force. And that's not a good metaphor because what someone who's successful on the sex and aggression side has done is integrate those, they've subdued them. They've put them in their place and they've become an integral part of their personality, but they're not ruling. Right?

So someone who's integrated his shadow, so to speak, isn't someone who's castrated and weak. It's someone who's fully capable of being aggressive at the drop of a hat but doesn't or devotes it towards stalwart defense of the perimeter, let's say. And with regard to sexuality, well, here's a funny statistic that I think is just so hilarious that it's emblematic of the times. The people who have the most sex are religious married couples. Now, you know, but that just says everything, doesn't it? Because the promise of the sexual revolution was hedonistic, narcissistic, extended adolescence at best, was that if we just got rid of the Freudian super ego and all the power-mad

sensors, let's say, and prudes, everybody would be having sex all the time with everyone and wouldn't the world be wonderful? And the truth of the matter is that sex is a lot more fragile than anyone thought and there's a lot of ways to destroy it and very few ways to foster its development. And it turns out that long-term committed monogamous marriages are the answer to that and also the answer that sustains civilization itself. Because it's also predicated on this sophisticated integration towards a future end. There's something else you pointed to

that's of unbelievably critical importance and people don't understand this at all, although Adam Smith understood it. Now, we have this idea that one of the main sources of our wealth is natural resource, and I don't even like the concept of natural resource. I think it's a disguised form of Marxist presumption that wealth is just laying around for the taking, you know, and that some people get to the wealth first and that's how they get rich.

It's like Japan doesn't have any natural resources and it's rich. And there's also a phenomena that you know about, I imagine, called the resource curse, which is the repeated empirical observation that there's, if anything, a slight negative correlation between national prosperity and the presence of natural resources. Well, why? Well, easy money corrupts. That's one reason. But there's a deeper reason. The deeper reason is, the only natural resource is trust. And trust is dependent on honesty. And the reason that trust is the only natural resource is because if I can take you at your word, we can cooperate. And I don't have to worry about the snakes in your head. All I have to know is you'll do what you said you'll do.

That means we can make a contract. Not only that we can make one that we'll both understand it and we'll both keep it. And that means that we can cooperate. And if everyone's like that, then everyone can cooperate or even compete fairly. And if everyone can cooperate and compete, then every desert can bloom. And Japan is a great example of that. And so, you know, Venezuela and Argentina, great counter examples. The Congo. Yeah, I mean, I think that that picture that you're

describing is the same one that Harvey Mansfield lays out in his wonderful book, Manliness, where he has three levels of masculinity. The first is weak men who are incapable of defending themselves and others, manly men who are strong men who look down on the weak men, but will also abuse their power. And then the gentleman who has the power of the manly man, but keeps it in reserve to protect his family, his bride, his children, his family, his nation, civilization, but he's not going to abuse his power. So we've seen a regression where civilization was created by gentlemen, as you said. They became gentlemen. In the process of creating civilization, they become gentlemen, or in the process of becoming gentlemen, they create civilization, which is to say a society based on universal rules, on the view of humans as all equal under first God and then equal under the law, and that

everybody has these fundamental inalienable human rights. This is the basis of what we call Western civilization, and it's a civilization of gentlemen. Well, we've seen a mass derangement, you know, over the last 12 years, but particularly with the election of Trump, you saw a derangement occurring in every institution. What happens with USAID is, and within the intelligence communities and the foreign policy establishment is a massive derangement and abuse of power where the gentlemen stop being gentlemen, they become aggressive manly men, and they decide that they know what's best and they can't stand all this democracy, which they dismiss as populism, and they decide that they know what's best and they can't stand all this democracy, which they

call pop, they dismiss as populism and they describe populism as its opposite. They just, they project onto populism, totalitarianism, and in the name of preventing totalitarianism, create a censorship industrial complex, which had, which was, which was already, we know, was international. US, UK, US, Brazil, US, Europe, Canada involved in it, particularly the Five Eyes, all coming out of the intelligence community because they're the ones that had run the censorship and disinformation operations, again, in Arab Spring and then the color revolutions. They turn all that back on the United States, First with the Russiagate conspiracy theory, this idea that Trump is secretly controlled

through a sex blackmail operation by Putin. Second, through the dismissal of COVID origins, then you see it with the Hunter Biden laptop, an elaborate conspiracy theory that the laptop is a Russian information operation, as opposed to which they knew it was not because the FBI had the laptop seven months earlier and used basically Jedi mind trick brainwashing to pre-bunk or program the journalists and the social media companies into thinking that a future story

about Hunter Biden and Burisma would be a Russian hack and leak operation and spreading disinformation in advance, programming people and then demanding censorship on the basis of it. And I think we're going to find out a lot more about January 6th as well as a kind of construction rather than something organic. A clear decision was made at a minimum to not provide adequate security. We know that for sure because the Capitol Police Chief has written a whole book on it. And so you look at that series of events and you also look at what the U.S. security state had

done in places like Brazil and the Philippines and other parts of the world. And of course, this goes back decades. And it's a clear counter-populist effort run by these deep state organizations run by people who had lost their minds, you know, who have all the rational abilities, but they had lost it. They had Trump derangement syndrome and turned their enormous powers, their incredible psychological, sociological, political, technological powers against their own people to undermine democracy and attack free speech. and attack free speech. Okay, so let's go back to the first part of that, that declamation. You talked about weak men and strong men.

And so I wanna just put a little twist on that. And gentlemen, yeah. Yeah, gentlemen, yes, yes, yes. There's three levels, there's three categories. I wanna put a twist on that, exactly, okay. So let's look at what constitutes weak. All right. So if you look at the way that human beings

develop neurobiologically, what you see is that from birth to the age of three, human beings are basically, you could conceptualize them as, you could conceptualize the baby and the toddler as a sequence of instinctive drives. Now drive isn't exactly a good metaphor because these systems aren't deterministic. They're more like personalities than they are like drives. But you come into the world with a set of motivations intact and a set of emotions operative. And so the motivations are orientations of aim, let's say, towards physical contact, towards play, towards physical gratification, towards hunger, thirst,

temperature regulation, the basic subsystems that orient you so that you don't collapse physically let's say. And the emotional systems are basically positive emotion that attracts you to things and negative emotion that freezes you or causes you to retreat. Now, an immature person who is a weak person, let's say, because we're gonna equate those, an immature person is someone who's still dominated

by those systems. And so a two-year-old moves from the domination of one motivational system to another. And it isn't until they're about three that they can start to integrate with other people. That's when they start to learn to play. Okay, so now the reason I'm saying that is because we can associate that weakness that you described. Weak and immature are the same, and they're the same as hedonistic, and they're the same as present-oriented, and they're the same as unable to delay gratification, and they're

the same as narcissistic and narrowly self-centered. That's all the same, and like a variant of that would be criminal as well. Okay, now one way of controlling that is with power. And that's the strong man that you're describing, literally the strong man. The strong man is someone who controls the hedonists with an iron fist. And then if you look at the postmodernists, the postmodern neo-Marxists, they would say, that's the whole playing field. There's just power, there's just hedonism, there's nothing else. But that gentleman that you described, that's that integration that we were talking about earlier. That's civilized integration. And it is the basis of, it's the basis of mental health, I believe, which is quite a

radical claim. Like you cannot, and I think you see this, for example, in the data that show that liberal progressive young women who are like fragmented and hedonistic and immature, they're rife with mental illness, depression and anxiety. They're dominated by negative emotion and have very little hope. And it's because they're not integrated. And so, the men that you described as gentlemen are actually integrated and mature.

And their ethos isn't weak hedonism or power. Their ethos, this is something I really want to develop at Arc and in the next book I'm writing, their ethos is one of voluntary self-sacrifice. Right, and that it's voluntary, so the voluntary sacrifice is present to future, right? So you sacrifice the present to the future, that's control of delay of gratification. And you satisfy and you sacrifice your

subjugation to your own whims to communal stability and productivity, right? That's what happens. Kids start to learn to do that at the age of three when they develop friendships, they learn to delay gratification, they learn to take turns and to have friends, which is very much akin to delay gratification. And that's voluntary self-sacrifice, that is the foundation of civilization.

That's central to the Christian ethos, for example, and it's laid out in the Old Testament writings as well, the ethos of sacrifice, let's say. And so I think we're at the point where we can actually understand this. And my sense is that a return to first principles is going to involve a conscious understanding, a conscious understanding this time of the ethos on which our civilization is founded. And I'm curious about your ideas about that. See, because I can't see how it can be any other way. Like, to be civilized means to be social, reciprocal, right? And to be social means you're not selfish. But then you might ask, well, what does selfish

means? Well, it means you're not governed by your immediate whims. Well, then what are you governed by? You're governed by an impulse to integrate yourself internally with the future and with other people. And that's deeply enough embedded in human beings, so I don't think there's any difference between that and the instinct to develop and mature. And that's part of that hero's journey path, right? That's the pathway to maturation that produces that gentlemanly behavior upon which civilization is founded. And I can't see, how would you argue against that? You could do what Foucault does and say, well, there's nothing but power. It's like, well, Foucault believed that because he wanted to rape little boys in graveyards

and have that be okay. You know, I mean, he thought of power as the ultimate deity because he was trying to justify his own pathology. And there's plenty of that on the progressive and hedonistic side of the conceptual world. Yeah, no, I mean, I think we're, this really, I mean, this is why I was so excited to talk to you, Jordan, because I think, well, we talked last time also about narcissism and nihilism and things since that, since it's almost been a year and we've been working on our book still on this, on, on that gets at these issues. I think we have a better picture of what's happened.

And you, first of all, when you have your civil, your liberal democratic civilization with respect for human dignity and human equality and free speech threatened, you get more grounded. I mean, I've been, I was concerned around the ways in which the most civilized people, the elites have been undermining civilization since my, this is really my first and second book both on the environment and homelessness, undermining for example, the security of a city, you know, the security of a city, you know, making cities dangerous again. We, you know, we just saw in Los Angeles,

I had always, we'd been, I'd been writing about defunding the police for years. We just learned in Los Angeles that they had been defunding the fire department. That's how far the degradation of civilization had gone. And I knew as soon as it happened that there would be voices right away who would say that there was nothing

that could have been done about it because humans were doomed by climate change. How could we possibly protect ourselves from a fire? I mean, who could ever imagine there being fires in the most fiery part of the United States, right? Like, I mean, it's insane. So will we, but I think we have a better picture now, Jordan, too, where you get this really precious, I mean, just this tiny moment of this thing we call the enlightenment.

Of course, it comes out of 1500 years of Christianity, but we get this period really 17th century, 18th century, really, 18th century, where there've been all these wars and everyone's, Hobbes and everybody's tired of them. And they're like, we have to have order. You have to have civilization. And then Locke comes in and amends that and says,

you also have to protect the citizenry from each other. But you have still a picture of what it means to be a citizen, right? And it is tied to this idea of being a gentleman. And we're also trying to teach this at University of Austin. But it's a picture that a citizen, it's not just something, yes,

you're a citizen by fact of being born in that nation. Yes, but there was this older idea of the citizen, which came from older Europe, which was that to be a citizen was something that was a privilege and an honor. And it had came with some intense responsibilities. And you're in service. So you sort of say, what is it the gentleman is in service

of civilization, of peace, of prosperity, of freedom, of reproduction, continuing the civilization, continuing there's a picture of an evolution of human consciousness. As we've talked about before, that gets into trouble when the stories that Christians had told start to get challenged by Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin. We get to the crisis of meaning. We get to nihilism, the death of God.

We had two first bad waves of a totalitarian nihilistic response to the death of God in fascism and communism. response to the death of God in fascism and communism. They get repressed and we push away, but then we get this thing we call wokeism and it develops and develops after the fall of communism, really starting in the late, in the early nineties. And then fully comes to, it's just deranged, mad power with the woke reign of terror,

exercising this just wanton aggression and nihilism. I think you can make a case, and I think this is the appropriate case, and I think it can easily be documented historically and mythologically that when the integrating ethos collapses, that's equivalent to the death of God. And the reason for that, specifically in the West, is because, well, here's a way of thinking about it. There's no doubt that the passion of Christ is an archetypal representation of voluntary self-sacrifice.

I don't think that would come as a shock to anyone to say that. But when you understand that the ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice is the antidote to power and hedonism, then that takes on a new light, because then you might say, well, what happens if you kill God, so to speak, in the Nietzschean sense? And at least in the Christian West, what that means is you remove from the central place the insistence that the drama of self-sacrifice is the altar of the divine, let's say. And that has cascading consequences. Now, you outlined to some degree the enlightenment reasons for that. It's like part of what's happened is that the rational mind did a very bad job of distinguishing

mythological and narrative reality from objective reality, right? They're not simply the same. Sam Harris racked himself up on those shoals to some degree. You know, Sam, one of the admirable things about Sam Harris is that Sam became convinced very early of the reality of evil. And his response to that being a rationalist and scientifically minded was that we would have to ground our morality in objective fact.

And that's almost right. morality in objective fact and That's almost right like it's almost right because we do need a transcendental grounding for our morality But it's not to be found exactly where Sam was looking and I think there are complex technical reasons for that but The consequence of the rise of the Enlightenment and this this is something that, you know, this is the time that people like Steven Pinker, too, identify as the birthplace of the modern state. They think of that reaction of rationality against the superstitions of the underlying religious ethos as the moment of clarity that freed the West, but they don't take into account

the fact that the deposing of that central icon produces the rise of both power, that's the communists and the fascists that you described, and this nihilistic hedonism, which is equivalent to disintegration and degeneration. Now Nietzsche knew that was going to happen. He knew that. He laid that out very, very clearly, and so did Dostoevsky, and it certainly did happen. Maybe we fought off the fascists to some degree on the communist and the Nazi side, but we fell prey to the nihilistic hedonists starting in the 1960s, and

they're in a power dynamic dance anyways with the... because if you're a hedonist, you have to use power, eh? And the reason for that is that if I'm a hedonist and it's all about me, why the hell would you associate with me? Because if it's all about me, it's certainly not about you. And that means that to gratify myself in the moment, I have to use force. And so there's this, you see this dynamic, by the way, extremely brilliantly portrayed in the movie, Cabaret, right? It shows the degeneration of the Weimar state into this gender fluid hedonism and all the while the same party, what would you say, the same people possessed by the spirit of Dionysius are just inviting the Nazis in because they want the heavy handed

fist of authority to impose some order. Right? Right. So then the question is, well, what's the alternative to that? Right? And the postmodernists, the neo-Marxists say, well, there's nothing but power. But that's not true. That's not true. It's deeply not true. That mature integrated ethos that you identified, let's say, with the students that you want to produce at the University of Austin. That's our aim at Peterson Academy as well, you know? So yeah, and at Ralston.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think that there was this forgetting, there was a hubris that we didn't need these thousands of years of inherited virtues and values. The hidden is a manifest, the feeling of power is the sort of the ultimate hedonistic thrill. And as you said, it's empty and it's also completely free of all of the wisdom of these past traditions.

I mean, every wisdom tradition, I think by definition, has in it that lesson of the wisdom of these past traditions. I mean, every wisdom tradition, I think by definition has in it that lesson of the line between good and evil runs through the hearts of all men. Be careful when fighting with monsters that you not become one. You see the speck in your neighbor's eye. Beware of the attractions of power. Right, there's always an all the true wisdom traditions

are always emphasizing our mortality, warning of hubris, emphasizing humility and honesty and these really simple basic virtues. And yes, do they change over time? Of course, but yet they also mean the same thing. That all gets forgotten. And so you forgot. And so you get this kind of secular

post-Cold War establishment. And I mean, you know, just exactly what it sounds like. A media, university, foreign policy, intelligence community. Cause remember the intelligence community is full of very intelligent people. And they just, they're the children of light. Just what exactly would Reinhold Niebuhr warned against in his famous lectures from the 1940s

that liberals imagine they're children of light, they can do no harm, we're just going to go into these countries and help them, just going to go in there and help them, then we're going to help them decide who to get elected. And you got married to some of the darker forces, which was the CIA and starting to try to control who gets elected in Italy and then in Greece and you go all the way from the 40s on. And you know, it has a huge moral victory with the fall of communism. The US foreign policy and being trying to have this huge moral victory. We then have 9-11 and a kind of, you know, an early sense of moral righteousness and

then it descends into the horrors of Iraq. And then frankly, we went and overthrew a bunch of governments in the Middle East surreptitiously, Eastern Europe. And it was a maniacal, I think it was just a power trip, as we would say, these guys are getting off on their power. And so that when Trump gets elected, I mean, they just couldn't, they just couldn't allow a nationalist

and populist to just rule. They just couldn't allow it. They had to invent this elaborate story about how he was Hitler and it was fascism. And it was, and there was going to be, you know, this was just like, I mean, it was insane. There was like no evidence to support any of it. It was a complete projection of their own totalitarian fantasies on Trump. And I mean, it's just out of Shakespeare. It's out of Greek tragedy, Jordan, where of course, I mean, I think everybody on the right in the United States right now is secretly, they won't say it, but they're secretly happy

that Trump lost in 2020 because he comes into much more power now than he would have had in 2020, capable of eliminating, you know, basically our most important, you know, intelligence cutout, our most important, you know, basically our most important, you know, intelligence cutout, our most important, you know, covert, overt, you know, regime change agency. Hopefully much more authority and hopefully much more authority and wisdom. And with the moral authority that comes from popular vote. Yeah, and hope well is hope.

We'll hope. Well, it kind of looks like it to me. Like it doesn't look to me like the new version of Trump is the same man we had eight years ago. Like there's a hardness about his gaze, first of all, like that. What would you say? I don't want to call it clowny. Like there was an element of Trump that was huckstery, you know,

and that's a deep tradition in the US. Well, like Colonel, was it Tom Parker, the guy who ran Elvis? You know, the huckster salesman is a pretty deep American archetype, and there was a fair bit of that about, there was a fair bit of that, that was part of the drama of Trump. But he's got a seriousness of intent that wasn't there before that I think you get from being tried in the fire. And then, you know, I was concerned about his narcissism because Trump is very extroverted

and he's very disagreeable. And those are the predictors of narcissism as pathology. Like not everybody who's extroverted and disagreeable is narcissistic, but that's the tilt but you know, I've watched him Share the stage for example with Elon Musk and if he was genuinely Narcissistic he would be jealous of Musk He wouldn't share the stage with him like because you know, you might say well if you're a narcissist and your president That's good enough. But that's not you. That just means you don't know anything about the clinical world,

because nothing is enough for a narcissist. Like, there's no filling that hole, because it's all about them. And that's the more you make it all about you, the deeper the hole. And yet Musk, you know, Trump has been, he pulled in Kennedy, you know, and Kennedy and Musk, I would say, and Tulsi, but even of those three, Kennedy and Musk were probably the only people in the United States who could really give Trump

a run for his money in terms of implicit fame and influence. And yet he invited them along and they agreed to to play and so far it seems to be working. And you know, JD Vance is also an interesting choice because Vance is smart and competent and dynamic and he's not the sort of weak vice president that a narcissist would be attracted to. That's right. Yep. No, I mean, look, it's an incredible story. It's an incredible story arc.

I just don't think Trump really believed in God until he almost died from a bullet. All of which remains mysterious, unsolved. You have maybe the greatest innovator in American history, you know, working to reform government. You know, you have these incredible story arcs with Tulsi and Bobby coming from the left, even the radical left really, if you're being honest, coming to this place, which, you know,

to kind of even get at that story arc of our villains in the story, you know, the characters who have get that story arc of our villains in this story, you know, the characters who have been abusing power in the ways that we've been looking at, these are people who forgot what America was. I mean, the United States has never been very reluctant to do foreign entanglements. I mean, the rise of the media industrial complex, of the kind of mass media complex, it's so recent, it's a hundred years old in the United States. It sort of gets created by US elites in order to persuade young men to go fight in World

War I. That was when we really start with government propaganda. By the time you get after, you know, World War II, of course, it just goes on steroids, you get out after World War II, but the media is very controlled after World War II, all the way through the rise of social media. But you have the people running those foreign policy institutions, Jordan. I mean, and I mean the whole foreign policy establishment,

just think big, the elites, let's just say all of them, they forgot what America was about. They forgot that like literally free speech is number one, literally and figuratively. You don't mess with that. That is the third rail of American life. If you start to step on someone else's free speech rights in the United States, this is a country that defends the...

As far as I can tell, I can't find another country that allows Nazis to march in neighborhoods of Holocaust survivors. That is US law from Supreme Court from the Brandenburg decision in the 1960s reinforced in the Skokie decision. That's how seriously we take that. These guys went and messed with the First Amendment. They then went and tried to incarcerate

their political opponent, making up just phony thing after phony thing about him misstating, him misdescribing the payment to the porn star, and that that was somehow five felonies, or that somehow he had some papers, you know, even though he's the only person that can declassify, I mean, that can sort of declassify documents, somehow he took some papers to his house and it merited an FBI raid

on the house of a former president? These are bonkers behaviors. You look at them in retrospect, that is a kind of madness. These are people that forgot what the United States was, and they had got conditioned to thinking that their power, they thought that they were the United States. They thought that in their narcissism and their nihilism and power, but they forgot

that like, you just go back to that period of 1776, the founders of our country were hardcore. They were hardcore in their demand for democracy and free speech. Our establishment forgot it. They turned on their own people. They became swept up in their power, their narcissism, their elitism, their nihilism. And I mean, I love this. I mean, I'm in a great mood.

I mean, this is, by the way, I also want to say we're headed to arc. We have seen the complete destruction of the World Economic Forum. It has no legitimacy. It's embarrassing for world leaders to go there. It's run by a cartoon character villain, a character who's literally in Joe Rogan's toilet. Like you go to do a Joe Rogan podcast, he's in the toilet. That's how seriously in the pop culture mind, he is a ridiculous villain.

World economic forum, because I know you founded ARC in part, I'm sure you had a lot of motivations, but it's certainly in part as a counterweight to, you're not the counterweight, ARC is not the counterweight anymore. ARC is the main event for intellectual life in the West oriented around a continuation and first of all, a celebration of human specialness,

a continuation of Western civilization as the best and only way to help all humans achieve their internal potential. It's this, I mean, so for me, what a year for ARC. I mean, and it's a moment to kind of, I think you look back, it's not January, but you knew that Janice faced, you look back, you look forward, we're clearly entering a new era, you know, and it's not totally clear what it is at all. And look at what we've got on our table. We're coming to a new era.

It's a new media ecosystem. You get elected in different ways. It's social media and podcasting. You have to be able to sit. In 1960, you had to be able to be handsome on television. That's what the television was a revolution about. The podcasting revolution is you must be able to sit for three hours with Joe Rogan and answer questions.

And if you are unable to do that as Kamala Harris was, you can't be president. Okay, so you've got to have some intellectual fortitude and stamina. And then we've got this massive technological question in front of us in terms of AI. We have two wars that are about to be wound down, need to be wound down, big questions

around NATO, existential questions around our commitment to NATO. So I can't think of a kind of more important, I mean, I think it was pressing it to set up ARC. I think ARC has so much gravity as a center for this. It is the twilight, it's not even the twilight of the idols. We are in the, you know, we are zero dark 30 of the idols and I think we're coming to daybreak. You know, a new dawn is coming but we can, it's still very dark.

We're morally obliged to presume that the future is a welcoming and abundant place. That's a moral obligation. Once you're not naive, once you're not naive and you've passed through the valley of nihilism, your moral obligation is to sustain your faith in the future. There's no difference between that faith in civilization, there's no difference between that and faith in the spirit of life itself, right? And we should also point out too, that that commitment to free speech, you know, there's, if you cease to interpret freedom of speech as a hedonistic freedom,

which is the freedom to say what you want for your own purposes, you can see it as a reflection of the particularly Christian insistence, although not only Christian insistence that the Word is the divine mechanism by which the cosmos itself is sustained. And at minimum, there's something deeply psychologically true about that, is that we cast ourselves, and our families, and our societies, we cast them into being. Especially the being that's good with truthful, forthright, honest, merciful, and just speech. And you can't touch that because that is the dynamic principle that keeps the land of promise alive. And so, understanding the metaphysical assumptions upon which the freedom of speech is predicated

is, I think, it's now crucial and it is shocking to us at Ark how rapidly things have pivoted. And we're also praying that, you know, we don't fall prey to the same power mad tendencies that typified the WEF. Now, you see, you talked about the betrayal of the elites. We should delve into that a little bit, you know, because there's a very interesting dynamic going on in the US and in Europe with regards to so-called populism. See, and populism isn't populism, it's rebellion of the sane and grounded, although inarticulate, working class against their elite betters,

so to speak, or at least the elites who think they're better. Now, the reason they think they're better is because they worship the intellect, you know, and that's one of the potential dangers of so-called meritocracy. You know, when you go to a place like Harvard, let's say, even when it's functioning, the implicit assumption is now you're among the better people. And the thing is, it's true that you're among the smarter people,

but there's no correlation, for example, between IQ and conscientiousness, like zero. The correlation is literally zero. There's no indication at all that intelligence and wisdom or intelligence and morality are the same thing at all. Partly because if you're intelligent you can do crooked things faster, right? So that's not a moral, there's nothing implicitly moral about that.

Now, it's in the interest of the Luciferian intellects to assume that moral superiority. And in fact, that's like the nature of the Luciferian is to assume moral superiority, but there's a usurping element of it too. And so the problem with the intelligent, let's say, and the self-satisfied simultaneously is the problem, the eternal problem of pride.

You know, you're blessed by God, at least so to speak, because your IQ is three standard deviations above the mean. And instead of being grateful for that and attempting to use it in service, you worship it and presume that you're ordained by the powers that be to rule the world. And look at where then the revolution comes from. I mean, certainly there's been, I think that you can argue there's been some return to some spirituality, there's been some return to,

some appreciation of marriage, but the real revolution is around the nation state and binding us together as a nation. That is what did it and what is doing it around the world. And nationalism in its modern form, I'll say, there's a debate about how long it goes back, but nationalism in its modern form is fundamentally democratic because what is nationalism?

If I follow Leah Greenfield's definition, nationalism is a common people, I mean, a common citizen bound by a sense of equality. That we're all, you might be rich, I might be poor, you might be smart, I might be dumb, we're all Americans. Or we're all British, and that comes with entailments. There are consequences of your national identity, but it is fundamentally democratic.

Once you're a citizen, you have a say, you have a vote. And so what got eroded with the snobbery, the elitism, the hubris, the pride, the arrogance of our elites, and this is out of Toynbee, and this is how civilizations fail, the creative class or the elites in a civilization start to identify with the elites in a different civilization and also sympathize and want to bring in the working people of another nation. Well, that's exactly what we saw happen in these Western

countries where the allegiances between with other elites, you know, mediated by organizations like the World Economic Forum or the United Nations or any one of these elitist organizations. And so you've seen this beautiful populist nationalist backlash to it that says no, we have a national, we have thousands of years or hundreds of years of a national tradition that's special that hands us a set of virtues and values that have sustained us and our families and our societies. And no, it wasn't all oppressive. It wasn't all colonialist or patriarchal or like it was a powerful predicated. Yeah. It wasn't all just based on might makes right. It was also based on a very strong sense of principles created by gentlemen in

a civilized way. Yes, hence the end of slavery. Yes. Incredible. So, okay, so the way that we've dealt with that at Ark is by turning to the Catholic social doctrine, although it's much older than Catholicism itself, of subsidiarity. And so, in the story of Exodus, there's the emergence of civilization as an alternative to the tyranny of the pharaoh and the slavery of the Hebrews.

So imagine tyranny and slavery as two poles. You might say, well, is there an alternative to that? That's the same dichotomy as power and hedonistic immaturity. It's the same thing. Okay, is there an alternative? Well, the alternative that's laid out in the book of Exodus, this is what's revealed to Moses, is subsidiary organization. And so, with, appropriately organized society. You don't need a tyrant and you're not a slave.

But what does it mean? There's you, you're married. You're married with a family. Your family is, are responsible citizens of your town. Your town is responsible agent in the running of the state. The state is a responsible agent in relationship to the nation. Like there are levels of responsibility that are so to speak external to you but that also define your identity. Your identity isn't something you

carry around in your head like the liberal psychoanalysts, let's say, presume, the liberal psychologists for that matter. It's your placement in a functional hierarchy of responsibility, but that's also where you find the meaning of your life. And so the hope of Arc is that we remind people of their subsidiary responsibility. You don't want a tyrant, you don't want a tyrant? You don't want to be a slave. So what do you have to do?

Well, you have to take up that responsibility on your own. And that's also the adventure of your life. You need to get married. You need to have some children. Your family has to be an integrated part of your community. You have to serve your state and your nation and all of that under the divine, all of that under whatever is at the top of the transcendent hierarchy values. And we've pointed to that already. That's at minimum,

that's the principle of voluntary self-sacrifice. And I believe, and I think this is part of being in this post-Enlightenment age, partly a consequence of being wherever the hell we are now, that we can make all that conscious and really understand it. And then, well, I've watched people, you know, who have made this conscious. I've talked to so many young men who were disoriented or attracted by power, let's say, you know, that kind of toxic masculinity that's exemplified perhaps by Andrew Tate. Instead, they take on their responsibility. They find a woman, they get married, they have children, they start to act in a adventurous and entrepreneurial manner, and they're standing up straight and they're looking forward and away we bloody well go.

And it's a pride that they've earned. Yeah, it's the pride of the gentleman that they've earned. Andrew Tate's not a gentleman. I think that's fair to say. And the world isn't power and hedonism. That's an imp, a sadly impoverished and spiritually shallow and existentially doomed viewpoint. And we can dispense with it. We're done. Yeah. I mean, it is, I think to your point of we've, we now know that the greatest pleasures come from delaying gratification and that hedonism is actually a poor strategy to gain pleasure, that happiness is something that comes as a side effect in pursuing, pursuing your bliss in the words of the Greatest of Campbell or at least in life's purpose, living a meaningful life. And so what got stripped out of this globalist WEF vision was a vision that had just stripped every nation of its core meanings. It had basically not just disregarded,

it had started, they had all turned on their own incredible traditions as somehow as evil, that these incredible national traditions, and I'm with you on the subsidiarity concept, by the way, I love that. I want the French to be the most French, I love France. I don't want France to be like some universal monoculture, which by the way, it's so ironic.

I mean, it's a whole other stories. How do you- We're really wrestling that with in Canada. We're really wrestling with that in Canada. Yes. Well, I hope that this prodding that the president's doing is- I hope that the prodding is actually inspiring

a healthy response from Canada to say, because I think the question goes to Canada goes, great, under the Trudeau vision that Canada is just part of this global monoculture, well then who cares if you become part of the United States? That's just one step in towards becoming part of a global government. I mean, it's a soullessness that got exposed,

that creeped in. And you realize, like when you get down to what is a nation, it's got a. And you realize that our country, like when you get down to what is a nation, it's got a soul, it's got a culture, it's got a set of traditions, it's got a set of values, and they're meaningful, and they give life's meaning, they give something to aspire to. And so to just go in, denigrate them,

as has been done for decades, as just slavery and oppression and these singularities of singularity, it's all just, the modernity and civilization just culminated in the Holocaust and the atomic bomb and climate apocalypse. I just think we have, I think that the great thing that's occurred is at least in the United States, I think that is now repudiated and that the left isn't going to find, Democrats aren't going to find any success there. I think you're going to see a victory by AFD in Germany this month.

It won't probably be first, but they're going to make a huge victory. It looks like Nigel Farage's party is coming very strong, certainly in France. So I think we could be seeing a re- and I don't think it's as, I think the funny way it's manifesting is that it's very moderate actually, you know, like this rebalancing. I mean, they can call it radical, but what was radical, the extremist, was what the establishment was pursuing

in the name of countering populism, in the name of countering the return of democracy. So, you know, Jordan, I'm filled with a lot of optimism. I mean, just the executive orders, last time I was here with you, we were dealing with the sterilization and mutilation of children. I mean, that's where things got.

The elites got to the point where they said, no, no, we're gonna go ahead and sterilize and mutilate your children. And look, here's a peer-reviewed science article telling you that it's good. I mean, that is how far things went. And to see it snap back and the way that it snapped back, I can't help but be filled with a sense of optimism.

I do think it's, I don't think we have a lot of visibility still in terms of what comes next, but I mean, I'm also, I think what I'm also getting in the conversation is the sense that you do have to have this faith. You do have to affirm human life. You do have to affirm human life. You have to say humans are good. There's something special about us on this earth. It's a beautiful earth.

There's a lot of wonderful other species, but there's something special about humankind. We have a specific responsibility. Human Western liberal democratic civilization has been the high point in that. And that really the alternative is just might makes right. It's the Hobbesian world. And we don't want to go, I think the American people have said, we don't want to go back to that. We don't want to go live in a world where every president gets put into prison by the next president or where

committees of experts decide what the truth is. So for me, it's just, you know, I just kind of look at it and I go, it's a completely open plane now. And, you know, we're not seeing these reactionary totalitarian forces able to even respond to what's been happening. Well, amen to that. And I guess this will be released after the second Alliance

for Responsible Citizenship Conference. We have 4,200 people attending, by the way, so it's maxed out. Yes, three times as big as the previous convention. A thousand people from the general public this time included in the offerings. Last time we did a public talk afterward that had about 12,000 people, so that was our public offering then. It was really good talking to you. And for everybody watching this thing,

we're gonna continue this conversation for another 30 minutes on the DataWire side. And I think we'll delve there again, return more to the political. I'd like to pick Michael's brain about Musk, for example, because I know Michael knows him to some degree and I know him to some degree. And that gives us a chance to piece things together together but we can talk more about, well, I'd like to hear more about

your thoughts about USAID for example, especially given that you did move to the more, it's not the conservative side, it's whatever the hell side Trump and Musk make now along with J.D. Vance and Tulsi Gabbard and Kennedy. I don't know how to conceptualize that. But I'm also curious about your misgivings and where you see being a keen observer of the new political developments, where you see the risk for the victors, let's say. And so we'll talk about that on the Daily Wire side. Yeah, so everybody who's watching and listening, you can join us there. Thanks a lot, Michael. We'll see you in a couple of days. And thanks to the film crew here in Toronto.

Where are you? I'm in Austin for a few more hours and then I can fly to London. I see, okay, okay. So well, thanks to the film crew in Austin and to the Daily Wire for making this conversation possible. See you soon. Well, in a few minutes, but in person,

we'll see you in London. Sounds great, but in person. We'll see you in London. Sounds great. See you soon.