Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Yes. I just wanted to briefly say that, you know, I I'm open to anything here we get through our politics. We can talk with the objectives them, we could talk about, uh, philosophy. We can talk about history. We can talk about anything. Anybody wants I'm re I'm wide open no-holds-barred
Speaker 1 00:00:15 All right. Well,
Speaker 2 00:00:18 Well actually I don't have a question. So
Speaker 1 00:00:21 Keeping us company.
Speaker 2 00:00:23 Yeah, I just, um, just came to, uh, learn a little bit, get warmed up. I'm sure I'll have one in a little while, but, um, right now. Thanks.
Speaker 1 00:00:32 Okay. Um, well, Rob, one question I have is I was just reviewing all of the, um, photos from the gala, which I believe were we're posting if we haven't already posted to Facebook. Uh, and I saw you had a nice long talk with Palmer Luckey. What was that like?
Speaker 0 00:00:55 Oh yeah, that was fun. Um, we talked basically about so years ago, um, probably on 2016 or so the thing I did to keep me sane during the 2016 election is I edited a site for a real clear politics. I was one of their sub sites. You know, they have real clear politics at the main site. You probably hear about them because they have this, uh, pulling average that they do. That's used to sort of do the election horse race, but they also have sub sites, real clear world and real clear markets that I've worked for various times. And I was doing something called real clear future, which is about emerging technology. So of course I, this is right about the time that Palmer Luckey came out with the Oculus rift, which was the first really functional, a really attractive virtual reality headset, and then got bought out by Facebook.
Speaker 0 00:01:45 And there was also the whole calamity with him, uh, um, uh, being, you know, outed as somebody who had given money to support some pro-Trump ads. And he talked about that at the gala that, you know, to him, it was, you know, having just been bought out by Facebook, having this enormous amount of money, he thought this was just pocket change. And it became, it blew up into a big thing. People demand that he be removed from Facebook's board, et cetera. Uh, and I wrote about that at the time. So we talked a little bit about that, cause I I'd written a piece called Soviet valley, uh, talking about, you know, the culture of political conformity in Silicon valley. But mostly we talked about the VR about virtual reality and what it would take for it to really take off. And we talked about how, you know, I says the, the thing that I talked about was, you know, people talk about how there's not a lot of people own these headsets yet, or are using them.
Speaker 0 00:02:39 But at the same time you could ask how many people had a personal computer in 1982. Now this is something I remember in Palmer doesn't cause he wasn't alive at the time. But, um, you know, there was a very small number of people who had a personal computer in 1982, but it was at the point where you started to get this adoption of, you know, you had a, uh, uh, you had a core of people who are using it actively and providing an incentive and a base for people to develop apps and develop new technology and keep iterating and make it better and better and better to the point where, you know, we all now carry a supercomputer around in our pockets. Um, I'm talking to you right now on my phone, which is, you know, doing stuff I couldn't have done with the most sophisticated computer in 1982. So, um, so we talked about how basically he thinks that virtual reality is at that stage where it's, it's got that base of early adopters and people using it. And at this point it's just a matter of iteration and getting better and better stuff and more apps. And, uh, you know, it's at that, it's at the stage where it's now has the base from which to take off. So that was the main thing we talked about as the tech stuff.
Speaker 1 00:03:49 Very cool. Well, uh, as we're having a few other people filtering into the room, I want to of course welcome you. Um, where the Atlas society club on clubhouse and, um, we're here with our senior fellow, Rob Krasinski. He is also the author of the trust Sinsky letter. Um, he's, uh, a widely recognized, um, expert on objectivism and writes frequently on politics, foreign policy and culture. So, uh, we're going to record the session, uh, and also open it up to, uh, to any questions you may have. So just raise your hand and, uh, no questions are off limits J yeah.
Speaker 2 00:04:34 Uh, Rob, what do you think the, the right lessons are from the elections and what do you think the lessons that the two parties will learn? Because I assume those will be quite different. I've already had some interesting conversations with people, um, that, uh, that line up on both sides. And it seems to me, they're, they're not learning the right lessons and they're amplifying what I'll call their motivated reasoning view of how to fit a narrative. But, uh, your thoughts appreciated you.
Speaker 0 00:05:11 Yeah. That motivated reasoning and, and politics. We often call that wish casting, cause it's, it's a F it's forecasting, but, or it's, it's disguised as forecasting, but it's really just using the thing that I wish would happen is what's going to happen, but you don't necessarily have the evidence for it. Yeah. I think that the party can generally be counted on to always take the wrong lessons from events, um, because they have their own internal dynamics that, that, you know, they want to appease a certain faction. That's powerful. That is not that, that has that motivated reasoning of wanting to say, oh, well, you should adopt our agenda. And they'll push that no matter what the lesson is. So I, I wrote about the, um, so when I was at the Atlas gal, I thought, okay, I'll, you know, don't want to have that much to do I, I at my hotel before go to the event.
Speaker 0 00:05:58 And then of course we have that election just Tuesday before the gala. And, um, I ended up spending a lot of time in my hotel room before the gala tried to finish, uh, article talking about the Virginia election. Cause it turned out to be way more important than I expected it. It's not just Virginia it's elsewhere. I'll talk about that in a second. But the big thing that happened to the Virginia election is it turned into kind of a referendum on the schools and on who has control over the schools, the parents, or the bureaucrats, and, you know, Terry McAuliffe stepped into it by basically saying, uh, we don't think, I don't think parents should have control over what goes on to the school. I think that should be done by the educational bureaucracy. Now he didn't say it in those words, he kind of stumbled into it.
Speaker 0 00:06:45 Uh, he meant to be saying something slightly different, but once he got there, he couldn't get himself out. It was painful to watch that. And the reason is because, uh, you know, he cannot democratic party politician cannot come out and oppose the teacher's unions at all on anything he has to buddy up with them. So we actually brought in Randi Weingarten, the head of one of the teacher's unions. He brought her in to campaign for him, which was that the worst mistake he could possibly make. So he doubled down in this idea that basically the educational bureaucracy owns your kids. They get to decide what your kids are taught and the election within a period of a couple of weeks, it was, you know, the, the Democrat was ahead by about five points of the polls. And then that GAF happened. And within a couple of weeks, he went to being, you know, two or three points behind and losing.
Speaker 0 00:07:34 Um, and it became a referendum on critical race theory and wokeness in generals or what we used to call political correctness in the schools, in, in the public schools in Virginia and the lesson I take from the election. Now, there were other complicating factors like the pandemic and the fact that the public schools were terrible and their response to the pandemic, they basically shut down and abandoned kids for about a year. There's a lot of discussion right now about the learning loss that's coming from that that zoom school was not an adequate substitute for in-person school. And parents felt just totally abandoned by the public school systems. That was part of it. There are other complicating factors, but to the extent that that it did become something of a referendum on this sort of political correctness and wokeness, and the lesson I took from the election is if you give the public a chance to vote against wokeness, they will.
Speaker 0 00:08:28 Now that has two parts. One is they will vote against wokeness. They don't like these ideas. And you can look at the polls, these ideas, there's like 8% of the public who are these hardcore progressive Democrats, who, who are really all in on, on the latest woke or politically correct ideas and pushing all of this. And the problem is they're all on Twitter and they dominate Twitter. But as a percentage of the public, they're like 8%. Uh, so they're tremendously unpopular even with much of the democratic party base. So if you give people a chance to vote against, against them, they will do that. Now the problem is you have to give them a chance. That's the second part, that's the lesson for Republicans that I think they should take is that Trump was not on the ballot in Virginia. And, um, uh, the, the guy who won young Glen Yuncken, who won him in Virginia is, was this very sort of mild-mannered moderate.
Speaker 0 00:09:21 Re-appropriate the moderate Republican, um, you know, 10 years ago, he would have run as a Mitt Romney Republican, probably, uh, a guy who was considered sort of safe and, and frightening for the Northern Virginia suburbs. Uh, and also somebody who's really defined himself on his own terms and, uh, was not sort of defined as being, this was a vote for Trump. This was a vote for Glenn Yuncken. So because of that, I think it gave people an and he actually outperformed Trump by a good percentage, uh, from the last election. So it was clear that he was pulling over. He was basically stealing people away. He was stealing suburban the suburban voters who had moved against Trump in 2018 and 2020 elections moved back towards the Republicans in this election because they made it into a referendum on the schools and a referendum on wokeness.
Speaker 0 00:10:14 So I think that's the lesson to be taken for. Republicans is you can do very well by writing these extremely popular issues without this unpopular fragmenting front man of, of, of Trump. I don't think Republicans are going to take that are going to learn that lesson. The lesson for Democrats is you could do very well. If you put the skids onto the woke people and appeal to, you know, the moderates and the, and, and to, to normal people who don't, who are blinded by this very, this ideology held by this very small group of people. And I, I just saw a piece article today that, um, some top democratic strategists are going to go all in on the critical race theory issue, defending critical race theory, attacking the Republicans on that as if that's a winning issue. And we hit us, had an election to demonstrate that it is alluded to a losing issue. So I think it's pretty clear there, the Democrats, it's going to take them a while. At least if they ever learned this, it's going to take them a while to learn the lesson. And in the meantime, they're just going to make it worse.
Speaker 2 00:11:20 Yeah. One, one followup. Do you think there's a, a window to bring what I'll call the proper ethics of, of individualism into this conversation? Uh, that, that is in any way politically positive because you know, the, the, the, the founders and the language of the declaration and the application of that to all of these principles would strike me as, as pretty powerful and, uh, upbeat for, for most thoughts.
Speaker 0 00:11:53 Yeah. Well, um, this has been my sort of campaign that I've been working on for the last year or so, um, which is the idea of trying to form an Alliance of sort of classical liberals on the right and genuine liberals, to the extent that such thing exists on the left. You know, these sort of central left <inaudible>, uh, people like Steven Pinker and an apple bomb, and there's a whole, whole group of these people, Jonathan Rausch, I've interviewed and talked with, um, he's eligible. Okay. So there's a whole bunch of people who'd be considered liberals in the old 20th century sense, and that they are sort of pro welfare state and kind of pro big government, but they're not totalitarian and they're not, they don't have, and that they don't buy into the woke ideology. And, uh, they're, they sort of have a normal, a more normal outlook on life.
Speaker 0 00:12:47 They are liberals in some, at least some genuine sense of being pro-freedom cause you know, the, the word liberal means I, one of my long standing pet peeves is conservatives who will describe anybody on the left, you know, Bernie Sanders and what have you as a liberal and, and even pollsters will say, oh, extreme liberals, or, uh, you know, they'll categorize as extreme liberals. And there are people who aren't liberal at all, not in any sense. And if you ask the pro, well, sometimes some of them will call themselves progressives, which, which they don't deserve to do either. But if you add a lot of the far less people who ask them, whether the liberals will say, no, we hate the liberals. You know, neoliberal referring to the central left is like the worst epithet that they, they can come up with. But there's this thing that's stuck in the language to anybody who is on the left as a liberal, but it's not true.
Speaker 0 00:13:37 There is a, a faction of the left that is still liberal in the sense that they have a base commitment to the idea that freedom is good and they might be for big government, but with certain limits, you know, they're not totalitarian about it. Whereas I think that, that, I want to sort of pursue the idea of getting an Alliance where we start to work with these people where we can, and also to influence them where we can, uh, and to sort of wean them off to, to, to build up their independence from the sort of Marxist far Marxist influenced far left ideology of the woke left. Uh, so I think there's an opportunity there. Um, what I've see though, is that we have to also acknowledge that in the antiwar coalition on the right there is a fragmentation, and I'm seeing this start to come up, I'm actually writing something about this in the near future.
Speaker 0 00:14:30 Um, possibly for, well, I won't say where it's going to be because it hasn't been done yet, but, um, uh, I I'm writing something about this, this fragmented, the anti WOCA coalition that I think there's, there's two types. There are the sort of classical liberal, right, which is against wokeness because it's a liberal, because it's an assault on freedom of thought. Um, and you know, somebody Damon, I think somebody who's actually said your left wrote something very perceptive about this, about the, the problem with the, the woke ideology and the lady of conformity to the latest terminology and all that sort of thing. It's not just that some of these ideas are crazy. And the content of the ideas is that they're subject to change without notice by basically a Twitter mob decides that suddenly the words you can use without being a bad person have changed.
Speaker 0 00:15:20 And there's this, there's no public discussion. There's no process of persuasion. This is your rule by a faction or clique. Uh, it's, it's, anti-democratic in that sense, in the deepest sense. So, you know, there are those of us on the right who are, I guess, woke as them because we're we're pro Liberty. We want to have a free society. There is also a faction of the right, that is, that has sort of claims. So we're the most anti woke people, but they're anti woke because they want to impose a quote unquote nationalist, uh, solution where they basically say there's one, they just had a conference of these national conservatives, they call themselves. And one of them <inaudible> said something about how, you know, it'll include a recognition that in a country like America, that you recognition that this is a, this is a Christian majority country. And therefore that implies certain rules that basically we get to enforce this idea of Christianity as being the ruling or dominant ideology of the country or morality of the country. So there are people who aren't against wokeness because of deliberate they're against wokeness, because it puts the wrong people in charge. And they think at different factions should be in charge. And I think we're going to have to face up to that split and bring that out into the open and, um, you know, sort of make that differentiation clear in our minds.
Speaker 2 00:16:42 Great, Jay, any follow-up no, just thanks. But that, that last one seems to me to have diminishing traction. Um, uh, I know it's very concentrated, but it just does any ability to grow, uh, especially against the demographics. So maybe some of that crowd will kind of wake up to, uh, Canada that my way, but at least we, we try to go back to these, uh, ethical principles that we could all unite around anyway.
Speaker 0 00:17:15 Yeah. I think I talked about that a little bit last time. Uh, the last clubhouse, I think it was where there are sort of a chicken and egg problem. I was talking about magical thinking and there's sort of the chicken and egg problem that the nationalist conservatives have this sort of the people who sort of dream of bringing back established religion. I shouldn't even say bringing back cause we've never really had it in this country. Um, they did have a dream of having established religion and the chicken and egg problem they have is that, um, they could, they could get established religion and the government support for religion. If they can get enough, people agree with them, but the whole problem is they don't have enough people who agree with them. So they have to get, you know, you, you could get established religion. If you get enough, people agree with you and you can get enough people who agree with you if you had government support for religion, but it's this catch 22 where you can't really get started, uh, on the process.
Speaker 0 00:18:09 So I think, I think it is few tiles, but it's, it's like wokeness on the left that, like I said, this, you know, wokeness is like 8% of the population, but they're the loudest angriest, most active faction within the democratic party. So it's hard for the party to go against them. And I think the national conservatives and the religious conservatives are sort of like that within the Republican party that it's not necessarily the majority of the party. It's not necessarily, they're not necessarily going to be able to win and get their agenda, but what they can do is kind of dominate the spaces where conservatives gather and the spaces where to conservatives talk to each other and have this disproportionate impact on the party, because they're the loudest, you know, most fanatical people and that's the problem. Every political party faces. How do you keep your, how do you keep your fanatics for taking over the thing and making you unpopular?
Speaker 1 00:19:02 Thanks. I want to recognize a couple of people in the room, including professor Richard Salzman. Um, he is a senior scholar at the Atlas society and I see Nina, a friend and a supporter and yay, come on up, Richard. Right as he's making his way up. Scott, did you have a question or a comment? And again, I'm inviting the audience to go ahead and raise your hand if you'd like to ask a question of Rob.
Speaker 3 00:19:39 Yes. Thanks Jennifer. A great show also, uh, looking forward to Peter Thiel, a speech thing, uh, updated if that's gonna happen. Uh, Rob, just real quick. Um, you know, I just see, I, you know, I know I'm, I mean, I, I was pro-Trump, I'm anti woke. I don't know which category you'd put me in. I'm I'm not religious. I grew up Jewish, so I'm not looking for theocracy, but I just, you know, I just want to know what it's good take to kind of bring you back in a way to, you know, just not be, you know, at odds with the Christopher roof photos, with the James Lindsey's and where we're all just directing our fire power at the, at wokeness.
Speaker 0 00:20:25 Well, Christopher Rufo good. You mentioned him. I, I regard him. I think now he's somewhat circumspect about this, but I have strong suspicions that he is part of this nationalist kind of crowd that his big PR. Now I want to say he's done. So I want to talk about the idea of the, the, the wa the two versions of antiwar. There's, you know, there are these two different factions of wokeness on the right that they're the classical liberals versus the nationalists. And I want to say, it's not my contention that we could never work with them or benefit from what they do. I think Chris Rufo was on some great, basically what he's done is he's gone out and leaked all these documents that people send him of, you know, these, these documents where you have people saying, oh, yes, we're going to introduce critical race theory, or we're going to introduce this latest woken sanity into the schools in such and such a district.
Speaker 0 00:21:15 And he, he basically subjects that to the light of day, and that's a hugely positive thing. However, I am, I'm pretty strongly convinced. He is part of the nationalist faction that wants to say, you know, the, the solution here isn't that everybody should be free. The solution is that we should be imposing our own, uh, agenda on people. And so the thing is you could work with somebody like that and benefit from what he does, but you have to keep in mind that you and he have different goals. And, uh, you know, it's, it's so the, yes, it's, I don't want it. This is going to sound over the top. So I'm going to just acknowledge that. I don't mean this in a more literal, literal direct way, but it's a little bit like, um, you know, America allying with the Soviet union against the Nazis, right?
Speaker 0 00:22:06 So you, there's two ways to do it. One way is you can say, oh, great. These are our friends. They share our values. I mean, I think Iran testified at the house un-American activities committee about how the, uh, Roosevelt's administration basically sent instructions out to this propaganda apparatus to tell Hollywood, to make movies that would make the Soviet union look good so that we, you know, cause they're our allies. We have to make them look good. She says, well, you don't have to do that. You can say, all right, you know, it's, it's in our interest to work with them for now, but let's be honest and open about what their ultimate goal is. And that it's, you know, that it's, uh, opposite of ours. Uh, so that's sort of, I think that the, the anti woke people at Chris Rufo that's, I view that as at most, it's an Alliance of convenience at its best.
Speaker 0 00:22:54 It's an Alliance of convenience, but you, you don't take your eye off the ball and ignore the fact that a lot of these guys, aren't going to get the goods on Chris Russo. I haven't gotten this all laid out, but at some point I'm going to write about this where I, you know, they, I know that <inaudible>, I'm not sure exactly where he falls, but I know there are a lot of people in that camp whose attitude is what we need to contract woke. Ism is we need to take over the schools and then pass laws, telling the schools what they can and cannot teach and making sure it's the stuff that we like. And that's sort of the anti-liberal answer to wokeness. And that's what I'm against. I think you just need to be clear in your own mind about, you know, who stands you know, about, about the fact that we do have different goals there. Now, as to getting me back to Trump, it's not about me back anywhere. It's not about me get back anywhere. I didn't change. I wasn't going to steal a line from Reagan. I didn't leave the party, the party left me. So I sort of feel with, with Trump, I sort of feel like I'm the same, everybody else changed. So I'm just going to put that out there, but I don't want to talk the whole about Trump the whole time.
Speaker 3 00:23:59 Yeah. I don't even want to be the candidate in 2024. I'm just saying the idea of having a fighter that, you know, may even come off as somewhat populous is probably not going away anytime soon. I mean, some of it, some of what, the people that are fighting against it, they're trying to preserve like the Bush Cheney political dynasty more than they care about, you know, uh, principles.
Speaker 0 00:24:25 Well, you know, this is politics and you're probably not far off in assuming that practically nobody involved in it at the end of the day cares about principles. So I'm not going to argue too much about that. Uh, yeah, there are, there are certain, there are always different that every political party is a coalition of factions and they're always angry with each other because no one faction gets what it wants. But from that perspective, the thing that I look out from the Trump era, and I'm not going to talk about Trump, I'm just going to say from the Trump era that is troubling to me, is that it has been a bad time for the pro-free market classical liberal faction, which used to have a very important role in the conservative movement or the right in general and in the Republican having an influence on the Republican party now not enough because we always complained that we never got really what we wanted, but it used to at least be this sort of accepted, uh, accepted as one of the major factions that had to be appeased in some way.
Speaker 0 00:25:26 And the big thing that changed I've seen is the rise of this sort of nationalist slash religious faction, uh, has been tremendously empowered in the last five years. And that's what I see as the troubling sort of aspect of what you call Trump ism is that, and I think it comes from the idea that li that, that freedom, you know, what we would call liberalism and I, in the proper sense or the pro-freedom agenda of the sort of the Reagan years has been that the conservative movement is defined redefined itself around nationalism, which has, and in some cases, in the case of some of these people, very explicitly has a very collectivist sort of connotation to it, right? So it's that, you know, the good of the nation is the, is the ultimate standard for politics and not the freedom of the individual. And so that the rise of that national section is the big thing I see from the last five years that I see as the thing to worry about Richard.
Speaker 5 00:26:37 Yes. Thank you. Thanks Jack. Thank you, Robert. Um, I don't agree that the last years has seen an ascendancy of the religious, right. I think the way the evangelicals just fell head over heels for Trump was just ridiculous. Just totally ridiculous, because he had been pro-choice for years and just flip-flop right. And they knew,
Speaker 0 00:27:01 And also Richard was going to say that we also have to appreciate they been here in Virginia, not too far from Lynchburg. I appreciate the way that Jerry Falwell's university has, has been revealed as a, a, a den of sin and iniquity. You hear all the scandal there. Yeah,
Speaker 5 00:27:20 Not sure. I ever also in a, in a Q and a, during one of the, uh, uh, primaries, uh, during the primaries, Trump was asked whether he would, uh, jail doctors who performed abortions answer. Yes. I mean, I don't even think no one ever came close to doing that. And I was just waiting for them to ask whether the would be mother would be jailed since they were both, uh, in, on the murder murder unquote. Now my question is, so I, I, I think the problem is he's appealing to, and I agree with you nationalism, but also populism. So these are two isms that are totally anticapitalist. So he's part Hoover, protectionist businessmen. Uh, but then he's also part this Weimar mix where he's giving nationalism and AOC and others are giving socialism. And as Leonard Peikoff showed in Weimar Germany, the two got together eventually and said, how about national socialism?
Speaker 5 00:28:14 So we're definitely, we're definitely moving towards fascism in that regard. My question deeper at Rob is, um, I know you are interested in this. I'm interested in this for years. I have tried to behind the scenes talk to the Republican party, mostly on issues and positioning and strategy. And, um, what would you advise the Republican party as I may, I am a true blue Republican, and I think from the time of Lincoln on where there's so much to be proud of and the Democrats to just be absolutely ashamed of themselves, but nobody knows the history, but if you were just advising them, you know, you're standing in front of the upper ups of the Republican party of America, what would you advise them?
Speaker 0 00:28:56 Oh boy, I think it's the same thing. Go to advice and to, to all for, for all these years, which is grow a spine. Um, but, and I think, you know, growing up not having a spine, you know, in the old days, but the old days, I mean, you know, four or five years ago, which didn't seem that long ago, but, but, you know, sort of in the tea party movement era, I would say, you know, Ashley goes, stand up for big government for against big government, actually, you know, repeal Obamacare. I mean, the most disappointing thing about 2017 is you had a Republican president. You have Republican Republicans have the majority of both houses of Congress. And they couldn't, you know, they've been promising us for six years that they were going to repeal Obamacare and then they just couldn't, they came up with something, they call the repeal that didn't really do very much.
Speaker 0 00:29:42 And then when people realized it didn't do much, nobody wanted to vote for it and the whole thing died. So the thing is, they, there are, let me put it this way, but you, we talked about populism and this is something I'm going to take a little time on this. Cause it's something I feel strongly about, which is that there is almost like a good version of populism in the sense that free markets and classical liberalism have a whole bunch of things that would actually be popular. A whole bunch of aspects of that, uh, of, of, of our ideology that would actually be popular with the average person if we actually championed them. Uh, and so, uh, uh, I go back in history. There's a, so we're talking about the history of the democratic party. The democratic party has some, uh, good aspects of it.
Speaker 0 00:30:31 History. You just have to go way back. So I wrote a piece, a number of years back called radical New York city Democrats. And if you think radical New York city Democrats, what are you thinking? Right. You're probably thinking, okay, people who read the Jacobin, which is this communist, basically communist magazine in New York city, you know, today I radical New York city Democrat would be a communist. Well in 1835, the radical New York city Democrat radical New York city Democrats were a group called the local focus. And this was a sort of the, the laissez-faire wing of the Jacksonian Republic, a Jacksonian democratic party, and their whole campaign was you probably know about these guys because their whole camp Richard cause their whole campaign was to separate banking, was a separate the government from banking and money. And I think they sort of the movement kind of faded because they got what they wanted.
Speaker 0 00:31:24 They actually achieved their main goal and they sort of drifted off and became like free soil Republicans and a bunch of them became anti-slavery people, um, afterwards. But this was the interesting thing about the local focus to me, this whole colorful story about how they got the name, the nickname, the local focus they were named after a brand of match because they, they were, um, they tried to take over a meeting of the democratic party in New York city, which was controlled by this corrupt Tammany hall faction. And they tried to take over the meeting and that the, the establishment fashion tried to stop them by turning off the gas lights in the meeting hall. So they took their Loco Foco matches, which is this new fangled friction match and use them to light candles and continue the meetings. So they were called Boloco focus. It's very colorful story, but they were a populist party in, in, in, uh, in a certain sense of that word that they were described as a coalition of working men and reformers and their whole essence of their agenda was the idea that government interference in the economy always creates a protected class.
Speaker 0 00:32:28 It always benefits some entrenched interests and we want, they actually, the official name, the nickname was the local focus. Their official name was the equal rights party. And it was the idea that, you know, we for equal rights that everybody has the same rights and whenever government gets involved, it gives new rights to the people that's protecting and supporting and takes rights away from somebody else, which is a great argument to make a great sort of ideological perspective. So there is this, this whole constellation of issues we could be working on that would be popular, that would appeal to the common man that would, um, you know, not just, I think what happened is that by the sort of Bush era, um, that to some extent the free market wing came to should be shrunk shrink down to mean cuts and marginal tax rates because that's what our big money donors want.
Speaker 0 00:33:22 And the rest of the free market agenda got kind of lost and didn't have momentum. Uh, it was about appeasing the donor class by cutting the marginal tax rate, which is great. I I'm all in favor of cutting the marginal tax rate, but that can't be what defines your agenda when you're trying to go out and get, you know, a hundred billion, 120 million people to vote for you. So I think they sort of lost a sight of what the real ideology of pro capitalism actually implies. And the extent to which it is, it is a, a, a doctrine for the common man. It's a doctrine that should be able to appeal to everyone. I guess that's the biggest, big picture thing I would say is that, uh, the falseness of the sort of nationalist populism, which really is about creating, you know, protected classes and getting government to go in and, and help steelmakers, but then screw over everybody else.
Speaker 0 00:34:18 Um, and so the sort of tell them to ignore the false populism and go find the there's tremendously appealing agenda in being in favor of free speech against wokeness and, um, in favor of getting rid of all these barriers that get in people's way to becoming successful and, and, and happy and wealthier, uh, that they should be crusading against, but, you know, they, uh, have sort of lost sight of that agenda. I think the wider thing though, is that I don't think that going to talk to the top members of the Republican party is going to make a difference because they're politicians, they go where they see people where they see where they, they go, where they feel that the factions are, are pushing them. I think we, what we've discovered is that there's been a, an ideological neglect of the foundations of liberalism in a free society.
Speaker 0 00:35:10 The F that the act, you know, not just an economics and not just in politics, but a neglect of it, philosophically, I can think of this whole group of sort of lions that we think of as the great champions of freedom, like the Thomas soul types, who were all highly active 30 years ago. I can't think of a lot of people who I would name as their successors, uh, today. So I think that we sort of neglected the philosophical and intellectual foundations of a free society and a free markets, and that needs to be revitalized and nothing, the direction of the Republican party, the direction of politics is going to depend on us doing some of that work to, to revitalize it. And I think though that, you know, the Virginia election shows there a there's a constituency that will vote for that. Um, uh, just one small thing to add to that.
Speaker 0 00:36:03 For example, one of the things we used to sort of think of as a quixotic crusade back in the 30 years ago was school choice. Uh, the idea that, you know, you, you, you, you should have a choice of what, uh, to be able to send your kid to a private school instead of being forced in the public school system. Well, that's now become a very mainstream thing. And I think it's been propelled by this anti wokeness crusade to basically say, you should be able to choose what kind of education your kid's going to get by choosing where to send him all right, where to send your kids. And that actually has taken off. And there's been a whole bunch of states that have actually passed school choice laws. Um, they're promising to do it in Virginia. I'll believe it when they, they they've promised me many things in Virginia and not delivered. So I'll believe it when it happens. Uh, but it has, it's definitely become from this very niche sort of crazy libertarian pie in the sky idea to becoming much more mainstream. So I think that gives us the hope of this is a popular thing. If we can find ways to, to champion.
Speaker 5 00:37:03 Yeah. I would just add quickly, um, populism, you know, that populism, isn't just, what's popular. It has this very anti, it has this very anti intellectual view. The experts aren't to be trusted now, when experts mess up, like they have that's understandable, or the anti finance, you know, the farmers, the only one who creates well, all that stuff with pie. So I think the deeper problem we have here is people venerate democracy of Vox. Populi has replaced Vox day. You know, the voice of God now is the voice of the majority. And majority rule is just not, not what's necessarily true when, when you couple that with government schools that Labatt demise children, it's just zombies voting for statism. So now I think, I think it is worth trying the senior levels of the Republican party because they either give support or not to candidates. And I think what's going to happen with Trumpism is he's gonna come and go. We might not, even if he wins in 2024 runs this isn't a femoral thing. And it's, it's, we're moving toward personality politics. You know, Obama is Obama is venerated, and then Trump is venerated and, and they're both, you know, uninformed, uh, narcissistic authoritarians. And that's what we're electing now in a quote, unquote democracy is it's just per day, the, the agents and the founders were right. Democracy sucks. It really does suck. That's why,
Speaker 0 00:38:32 Um, my concern is we're going to get, you know, people are saying, well, what if we could have, have somebody who has the same policies as Trump who would give who'd be smarter about it, and I'm afraid that's going to lead us to somebody like, like, um, Josh Hawley from misery, right? Yeah. I think you'll appreciate this, Richard. I put joking
Speaker 5 00:38:52 Busting. Anti-tech calling
Speaker 0 00:38:55 Well, what his biggest thing now is we're gonna have the commerce department is going to be certifying whether you have enough domestic content, I've been joking, that that calling is to find a guy named Smit to help sponsor his bills.
Speaker 5 00:39:09 I wasn't even a law clerk for Roberts. Um, so Holly's a designer. Thanks Rob. That was great. Thank you so much. Thanks for,
Speaker 1 00:39:19 So I also want to recognize that we have professor Stephen Hicks in the room, um, and, uh, want to encourage you the rest of you, um, to raise your hand, ask the question, uh, otherwise yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 0 00:39:35 Okay. Do a quick plug assists. And Steven's here that he and I are going to be doing something tomorrow evening. I'm talking about, but we'll talk about events, politics, and current affairs events. But one of the things that we'll be talking about that I'm particularly excited about, and I'm working on an article on this right now is, um, on Thursday last Thursday, there was a, uh, a columnist for the Washington post published an article about how, uh, you know, wokeness and, and critical race theory and all this racial politics we have right now. It's ultimate ruts is Emmanuel Conte. I thought, well, if that is a fat, slow pitch, right up the middle for, for Objectivists, I don't know what is, uh, so Steven and I are going to be talking about that, get, you know, it's, for me, it's, it's, it's fun because, you know, it's usually like pulling teeth.
Speaker 0 00:40:23 And when you write about politics, it's like pulling teeth to get people to say, no, no, really the ideas of this philosopher are important. You hear me out while I talk about how, what Aristotle has to do with monetary theory, uh, you know, there's an actual connection, but you have to really work to get people to, to sit still for it even. So when you have this opportunity where somebody suddenly have a bunch of people on Twitter, who, you know, of course this is Twitter. So all the people who have their degrees in law and epidemiology on Twitter have suddenly read the critique of pure reason in the last week. Uh, so she people pronouncing on it, but it's kind of exciting to be, to have the opportunity to bring out some of these really profound, philosophical issues in response to current events.
Speaker 2 00:41:07 Rob, okay. To another question, Jack,
Speaker 1 00:41:12 Of course
Speaker 2 00:41:13 The, um, the pushback against Wolk seems to be largely from, you know, sort of people accused of white privilege and whatnot. What has been the pushback against woke from the, uh, the claimed oppressed, uh, as people who are being robbed of agency and diminish operations and same thing with transgender, with the goofiness of, of acting like there's no difference and in that whole language, um, and I'll, I'll give you one, one point Kip, uh, the charter school, uh, dropped their motto of, um, of work hard and be nice because they said it created the false impression that you could achieve in a merit society, that it was up to you. They haven't come up with a new motto yet. Maybe, maybe it'll be sit on your ass and be a prick. Maybe that'll be what they come up with.
Speaker 0 00:42:22 Uh, yeah. So, uh, that's one of the most promising things about it actually is about the resistance to woke. This is some of it's coming from the rank and file of, you know, Hispanic, black, and Hispanic parents who are looking at this and saying there was a couple of interviews. I saw exit exit poll interviews during people coming out of the voting booth and the reporter interviewing them, saying why they voted the way they did. And there were black and Hispanic parents saying, I don't want this stuff in the school for the sake of my kids. Cause it basically teaches them to not work. It teaches them to regard themselves as separate for everybody else. It is, it's a really poisonous ideology. I've also been in contact with, um, it's a nice, interesting new organization. That's got a subset called free black thought, um, which is basically, they're talking about how there's this tremendous, uh, diversity of ideas, uh, among black people and the idea of how, how condescending it is to claim that they all somehow ha must inherently back this extremely narrow idea, partisan ideology.
Speaker 0 00:43:29 Uh, and, and I think that movement is just beginning to build. And, um, you know, I remember, uh, I was, I was interviewing one of those guys, uh, Eric Smith, uh, who's very awkward about it. And, um, uh, is he sort of the front, the, the, the leader of this free black thought group and he's, he's, he's very, uh, I really liked what he has to say. Um, and he was talking about, we talked about how, you know, 30 years ago, if you want to talk about black conservatives, there was like, well, there's Shelby Steele and there's Thomas Soule and, and, and the sort of crickets chirp. And you do you know, how many people, how many of them were there? Well, there's dozens of them out there now, and they're just really starting to come up and make their voices heard. So I think that the woke, the, the worst thing that's going to happen to woke to.
Speaker 0 00:44:17 So the thing that will, I think will ultimately do wokeness is when you have, I mean, well, first of all, you can have Asians rebelling against it because they, uh, you know, because they're the ones who, who, who do work hard and be nice and are tremendously successful in the American system. And then the result of this is that, uh, it's much harder for them to get into elite schools because they're the ones who suffer, you know, uh, despite being quote unquote people of color, they're basically subordinated to other minorities, uh, because they actually do work hard and be nice and are too successful. You know, the, the worst that you can be as successful in this system, in this woke system. So they're going to rebel against it and the Hispanics are gonna rebel against it. And a lot of black parents, uh, are much more conservative than, you know, the white, upper middle class college educated book people. Uh, so I think that you're going to have a rebellion. It's going to become untenable for them to a large extent to claim, to speak on behalf of all minorities, because they don't, and that's going to become more and more obvious over time.
Speaker 1 00:45:29 So I, uh, want to, again, encourage anyone in the audience to raise your hand and ask questions. I'm also going to prime the pump a little bit with, uh, some of the questions that get submitted to us every week, uh, from our, um, almost 60,000 followers on Instagram. Uh, in addition to rod mentioned the, um, current events that he's going to be doing with Steven tomorrow. Um, I wanted to mention that we have, uh, Richard who is going to be doing our clubhouse, um, on Thursday. And, uh, I believe professor Jason Hill is doing our Instagram takeover this week. So one of the questions, um, and we get like way, way more questions than we can ever answer. And we're trying to answer them in a, just a crisp one minute video answer and it's can be difficult. Um, but one question that came up either for, for you Rob, or maybe Richard, uh, was, is the board game monopoly a fair analogy for capitalism?
Speaker 0 00:46:45 Well, okay. I'll take that off. Cause I've, you know, I've got young kids that are, well, they're not so young anymore. They're getting to be teenagers, but I have fairly recently played a game of monopoly. Let's put it that way. Uh, no, it's not a, it's not a very accurate it's again, it's a board game. It's a board games are by their nature over simplified. So it is not an analogy for, it's not even a monopolistic so much, but it's not an analogy for, um, for capitalism, because it really is about this very much. There's a limited number of assets and you're owning. This means you take away. The biggest thing that I would say is non-capitalist about the board game. Monopoly is everything. You build results in something being away from somebody else, which is the exact opposite of how the economics of capitalism works, which is everything you build is more wealth and more value that you're pumping out into the economy that benefits everybody else.
Speaker 0 00:47:43 So it's very much a zero sum game. Now, the way we played it though, was we put a modern twist on it. Cause you know, this is a number of years ago when the kids were younger and you know, of course when they start losing the game, they get really upset. So what we did is we, we did a series of mergers, uh, that, uh, when somebody started to really lose, it was clear that you're just not going to make it. We would do a merger and they would be merged into a larger conglomerate until we add these two massive conglomerates going against each other. And then we all emerged in Tim. We called it alphabet, um, or something like that. Um, but you know, th it's just a board game. It's it's bias. Nature says vast oversimplification of reality. So it's not going to be. And I think at the time it was sort of an intended, it had certain anticapitalist ideas behind it. I don't know too much about the history, but yeah, it is not a representation of capitals.
Speaker 5 00:48:33 Yeah. I have a different take. Is that okay? Okay. That's fine. I think there's some somewhat of what you're saying is true, but I think it's very capitalist. Um, it might be, it might interest people. It was invented actually by a woman, uh, Elizabeth Magie and she Rob you'll love this. She was a Georgia. She was, she believed in Henry, J Henry George. So Henry George had this view kind of Marxist, but he was a total capitalist and everything other than he said, there should be a single tax on real estate because when you buy a piece of land and then sit back and do nothing and other people build up a city around you, the value goes up and you didn't earn it. So it's it's Marxist. But also George is a very weird figure cause on everything else he said, he said, laissez-faire okay. So she was a Georgia and she invented it in the early 19 hundreds, the board game.
Speaker 5 00:49:33 I mean, and it was a patented at some point. The reason just quickly, I think the reason it's more pro capital, it does have this kind of zero sum game view, but it's really a board game about real estate, not, you know, stock markets or anything like that. Everybody knows that. Right? The reason I think it's pro capitalist is it's not just roll of the di uh, random, and then zero sum game. There is a lot of strategy involved with buying and selling and investing. And shall I get a hotel or should I do home? And you know what corner we'll, we'll re we retrieved the maximum revenues. So I'll stop there. But I just wanted to register a, um, Rob, you and I have to do a monopoly webinar. I think it will be fastened. No, I mean, it might be fascinating because it's just such a,
Speaker 0 00:50:21 The tortoise infection makes sense because the whole idea of Georgia, some is ownership of real estate gives you all power. Right?
Speaker 5 00:50:28 Right. And also the idea that you will land on park place cause you rolled for it. She would say, she would say, yes, that's the whole point you, you bought this brief of property. You didn't know, you know, would end up being Manhattan. You paid $22 and then it became Manhattan. Anyway, I'll retire that I'll stop there then. Great question by the way. Great question.
Speaker 1 00:50:48 Yeah. I thought it was cute. Um, okay. This is a question that comes up every week. Uh, I'm not sure if we can lure professor Hicks up to, to address it. Uh, and that is thoughts on Metta modernism versus postmodernism. And if you don't have thoughts, don't feel bad because every week it comes up and every week I pass on it.
Speaker 5 00:51:13 And so do I, I skip it every time. I have no idea.
Speaker 1 00:51:18 Right? We've got the expert on post-modernism. So maybe professor Hicks. Thank you. You can, uh, shed.
Speaker 6 00:51:27 Yeah. I don't want to say a whole lot about this. Um, I've had two long conversations on Facebook with advocates of Metta modernism, and both times I came away not having any idea what that modern ism is. Uh, so I, I don't think it's anything significant, except it does seem to be people who are attracted to some elements of modernism, some elements of postmodernism. And they, uh, they see it as this is too cheap, but as a catchy phrase to say, we're staking out some compromise territory. Now beyond that, my sense is that there are some people who are genuine, that they're sort of skeptical. They think modernism makes too strong claims about the powers of reason and so on. Uh, but at the same time, I think post-modernism goes too far, but I don't see any, uh, principled alternative to either modernism or, or postmodernism there. I think that's all I'll say about it right now, but, uh, that would be a good, uh, asked me anything question for a future clubhouse.
Speaker 0 00:52:37 Yeah. So I'd say Metta modernism is, is modernist expressed on Facebook, right? Because their, their parent company now was Metta.
Speaker 1 00:52:45 I see what you did there.
Speaker 6 00:52:47 Yeah. Yeah. Don't feel the need to laugh at that. That's
Speaker 1 00:52:54 Well, thank you, Steven. And I'd love to do, uh, um, because at the very least this person who keeps asking on Instagram gets questions, it gets kudos for persistence every single week. And he's tried it a couple of different ways, including, and maybe there's a better answer to, to this. Um, he asks whether there are other cultures to postmodernism aside from objectivism.
Speaker 0 00:53:29 Well, I just want, I just want to pop in and say, that might be a great thing. If you want to hear about that to tune in to what Steve and I are going to talk about tomorrow night. I know we don't have, I may have probably more time than we have left here to talk about it tomorrow. But I think that ties in really to this question about, you know, con as the root of postmodernism and you end up the root of critical race theory and, uh, and, and woke ism. I think we're going to be getting into a lot of that, of what is the ultimate philosophical root of all this and how, and what do you really need to answer it at that root?
Speaker 1 00:54:07 Excellent. Well, yes, we are coming up at the top of the hour at one thing, that's dominating the news. I don't know if any of our scholars have views or thoughts that we can fit into three or four minutes in the Kyle written house trial.
Speaker 0 00:54:25 Oh yeah. I want to say something about that. So, um, I don't want to get too much cause I'm just going to be exploded in the next couple of weeks. I mean, it might literally explode in the sense of people setting things on fire, um, in Kenosha, but this isn't. So I've written about this number of times in the past of different cases like this, and it's persistent problem that people take. One of these cases and cases of the use of force are very complicated. You have to really get into the facts. There's this whole specific body of law involving what is self-defense and what's legitimate self-defense. And what typically happens in these cases is the average observer has no knowledge of any of that. It doesn't bother again, any adults have any of that. And they make a judgment on this case, based on a few snippets, they saw in the news and their partisan preferences.
Speaker 0 00:55:13 And I've seen this go both cases. There was a case in California where a young woman was shot and killed by us, a stray bullet. And it turns out the guy who fired the gun was an illegal immigrant. And so a bunch of people on the right went nuts about how, how was it? This guy stopped being convicted of murder. And if you followed the case, there were specific facts that showed that this was this conviction, a murder, a first degree murder wasn't going to happen. It was just not backed by this. They didn't have the case to prove it. And so people, so my big thing is that individual cases in a court of law are exactly that they're individual cases. They are not symbols. They're not abstractions. They're not a, a symbol of some wider social phenomenon. So you have to look at the individual facts and you have to follow the case.
Speaker 0 00:56:00 And what's going on here, I think is what's happened. I don't want to get too much into the details. So that matters less than the method of thinking about it. But in this case, what's happened is that I think the case against Rittenhouse has kind of collapsed. I think you could make a case that it wasn't wise or prudent for him to put himself out there as a sort of vigilante defender of property without proper training or support or being part of a team or anything like that. So he put himself in a position where he was very vulnerable, but it has the, the, the case against him has really fallen apart because the guys he shot actually were rioters. They actually were violent. They actually were attacking him and he was acting in self-defense. So I think he's going to get acquitted. And then it's just going to be riots. And, you know, people are going to be very angry, but it's because they are following this method of putting their partisan preferences and their overall symbolic, uh, investment that they've made putting that, uh, they put the ideas above the facts. And, and that's the reason why, if you ever get angry about it,
Speaker 1 00:57:05 Richard,
Speaker 5 00:57:08 Yes, my own quick take on this is it begins with anarchy, which objectivism opposes. So I'm looking at this kid as a very kind of patriotic law and order kid. Uh, the media hates him for that. And he goes to Kenosha because the places in anarchy now it shifts to a self-defense, which is an objectivist principle. So to me, it's a very mixed case because on the one hand, there should not be anarchy in Kenosha. There was it wasn't Kyle Rittenhouse his fault, but the, as Ron put it vigilante as this is a reminder to the libertarians out there, you don't want anarchy. You don't want getting rid of the cops and all that bullshit. You want law and order and citizens who actually love the country. I mean, I felt the same way Kyle Rittenhouse did. I wanted to go to Kenosha and say, stop it. And I have a gun and I hope he's acquitted. I'm not sure he will be, but it's interesting to me as a mixed case of anarchy is terrible and self-defense is proper. So I'll just stop there
Speaker 1 00:58:11 And you are stopping at the perfect time because it is 1 59 at least out here on the west coast. Um, so I'm going to wrap it up and end the room price. Um, I saw your, you just raised your hand. Um, we're not going to be able to get to your question or comment today, but, uh, joining, uh, Rob Sinski and Stephen Hicks and myself tomorrow for our webinar, um, that is at 2:00 PM west coast time, 5:00 PM east coast time. And, um, this is a busy week here at the Atlas society, uh, especially for professor Hicks because he's going to be, um, joining in our current events discussion tomorrow. And, um, then, uh, right after that, uh, he is going to be, um, teaching the, uh, third in his series of courses on capitalism, uh, in Atlas intellectuals. Um, next week we have, uh, a clubhouse conversation with, uh, Richard Saltzman. Um, we have another course on capitalism, um, Steven Hicks. So just go check out the Atlas society page there, our website, you can check out the events section to keep apprised of everything that we've got going on and follow us on our various platforms. So thank you everyone. And I will see you back here on clubhouse Thursday and, uh, see you Rob and Steven tomorrow.
