Jonathan Kieperman (Lomez)
Appearances
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences about how these events and these characters and these people, what society wishes were true about these people. So my thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right-wing art.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Well, you know, I'm seeing your face across from me on the screen, and I'm reminded of watching Blogging Heads, like, from, you know, 10, maybe even 15 years ago. So, we've come a long way since Blogging Heads.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I suppose. Yeah. But I'll say this. Like, I think it depends. You know, I understand your point that it's highly reductive to just simply say if I like it, therefore, it's right wing art or if it tells the truth. Tells the truth is what you're saying. But OK, so what I mean by that, though, is a point of clarification is there are certain at least modern left wing premises that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
that support their worldview and their political agenda that I think are belied by someone telling the truth about the world. And here's an example of this. The left sort of takes as a foundational principle of its politics, the idea of equality.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
that there's a kind of flattening of people and that through carefully managed social engineering, we can produce a society that either levels out any kind of natural hierarchy
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
or produce a system that somehow can wrangle these natural, almost supernatural sort of entropic forces that, you know, are constantly creating chaos and constantly requiring our maintenance and management and authority to deal with.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So that's what I was looking for.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yeah, I think that's right. I wouldn't contest that basic summary I don't want to overdo like how we're thinking about this word vitality for the purposes of this conversation. It's enough to say it's something like, you know, a thymus, OK, spiritedness, a self-will, a liveness or or a.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Also, I want to say that there's a certain kind of eroticism to vitality that's very important and has often been missing from sort of the conservative view of the world. And I think that's a mistake. I think you're leaving something very important on the table by not –
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
grappling with this notion of eroticism and what that means and why it might be valuable, especially, and here's the premise we're starting from. And I think, Ross, we share this view that we're reaching this phase, whether it's cyclical or there's sort of this longer term linear path of kind of civilizational exhaustion, decay, decadence. That's a word I know you've used a lot.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And this all requires rebirth. And the process of rebirth is not gentle. It can be violent and difficult. So I would say that vitality serves these two basic functions right now and why it's valuable for us to take on board. One, it attracts young people. Young people, I think men in particular, women too, though, are naturally attracted to this sort of notion of vitality.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
They see it, they know it, and they want to be around it. The right has failed for a long time to attract young people. This is finally changing over the last few years. It's also... a way of overcoming a kind of defeatism of this sort of idea that things are past the point of saving, that we can't do anything, that all there is left for us in the 21st century is to, on the one hand, merely manage
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
playing out this end of history period. This sense of vitality, I think, offers something else. It offers the human subject the opportunity to advance positively and affirmatively into the future. So that's my defense of vitalism.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yes.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Okay, so I wrote this essay called What is the Long House for First Things Magazine. So you can answer the question. Yes. I would encourage anybody who wants to know the precise details to go read that article because I spell out what I mean by it. And here I'm going to talk and
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Sort of maybe more vague terms, but it's essentially an explanation and exploration of what I perceive as a kind of over feminization of society. And I don't mean that that is it's explicitly women who are taking over society because often the long house is managed by men. And in some cases, it's better managed by men or more sort of severely and strictly managed by men.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
social management that is distinct from a kind of male or masculine coded social management and group dynamics. Maybe a phrase is like a regime of maternal surveillance is a phrase I've used before that preferences, for example, inclusion,
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Conflict avoidance, consensus, safety, and these kinds of priorities supersede things like truth finding and competition and the kinds of violent often, and I don't mean necessarily physically violent, but it can be that, but a kind of combativeness that That better characterizes a kind of masculine way of thinking about ideas.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And again, you know why this gets back to certain other things we've talked about is the longhouse is essentially flattening. It's horizontal, whereas masculine way of doing things in this model is hierarchical. It's vertical. And what a more combative style of discourse, for example, does is help establish those hierarchies and where the value of ideas are relative to one another.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
The longhouse doesn't allow for that because it's more interested in making sure everybody's feelings are maintained and nobody's offended.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yeah. So this this comes from Bronze Age pervert, Bronze Age mindset, which is one of the great texts of the 21st century. And I encourage all the New York Times listeners to read it. It's very important if you actually want to understand this stuff.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So he talks about the longhouse and he's got his own take on it. I borrowed the term and actually why I think the term is so valuable is because it is a kind of empty signifier. I don't mean to tie it to this sort of historical context. It's an evocative image. It's this big, long, okay, literal house that we're all stuck inside of. And you're constrained in how you can behave, how you can act.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And I think it's hostile towards men in particular having a kind of freedom of assembly with one another.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Well, and that can probably be the most sort of salient example of this, precisely because it's where you would at least expect this kind of long housed cultural framing to take root is the military. And actually, Pete Hegg says has talked about this explicitly, is this integration of women into the military? We don't need to get into the politics of that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Suffice to say, though, that these traditionally male spaces, you know, sort of our martial culture has been now open to women. And this introduces new norms. It just has to in order for it to work. And this is going to necessarily sort of change and I would argue degrade the culture of masculinity that preceded it.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yeah, I mean, it's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. And I do think over the last however many decades, there have been a number of changes in the workplace. that can be attributed to women, very talented women taking on leadership roles and succeeding in those roles and therefore introducing more women into the workplace based on that success.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I think it's perfectly fine for me to concede to that. The point I'm making is that by introducing this new distribution of personnel into public life, it has an effect on how these institutions are run and the norms that these institutions run on. And then it becomes an empirical question. Have they changed for the better or have they changed for the worse?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And I think most people look around at the various institutions, whether it's media, whether it's academia, whether it's the corporate boardrooms that have found themselves in all sorts of spasms over DEI stuff over the last decade. Are they more efficient or are they less efficient? Are they working properly?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
My argument would be that very self-evidently, the institutions in which all of these changes have occurred are now performing worse than they used to. That is at least in part attributable to this change in norms. And this change in norms, in turn, is attributable to this change in personnel. All right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yeah, I mean, my belief is that there's actual tremendous amount of synchronicity between these two sort of modes of operating in the world. And it's not just my belief. You know, my favorite author and actually passage press comes from the book Forest Passage by Ernst Junger. There's a great book of letters between Junger and Martin Heidegger.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And Junger's view actually is that none of this, this kind of vitalism, none of this is sustainable without religion and actually Christianity specifically.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And that our idea of poetics and sort of the inscrutable forces of the universe against which our individual will is being tested at all times and which a kind of vitalist view of the world is insisting we're constantly pushing against all has to be sort of live inside of this framework of Christianity. So I don't think these things are incompatible.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Those are the highlights. That all tracks and covers ground well enough for us to get started on this conversation. But, you know, I do want to point out that in 2020, when we first were having this dialogue and debate over the election, you also had something of a pseudonym. And, you know, I was arguing as much with Ross Douthat as I was Italics Ross.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yeah. I mean, your concern is that it's merely being sort of like cynically operationalized.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Okay. You know, I have a somewhat idiosyncratic view of Donald Trump as a kind of – A man out of time. And so I wrote this article or essay called Aeneas in Washington. And the idea was that Donald Trump has revived or assumed really this kind of mythic stature. He's a mythic hero. Specifically, I have this concept. It's not my concept, but I've applied it to Trump of retro causality.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Trump has this strange ability, in my view, to sort of reconstitute the past. How we understand Trump and his life before he entered politics is not a sort of strict linear thing that is unchanging in time, actually. Over the last five years in particular.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So since he lost the 2020 election, this interim period where he was beset by these lawsuits and he was threatened with prison time and he was shot at and nearly killed.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
We can look back at his past and see a new narrative about his life that suggests the possibility of this kind of rebirth from this civilizational exhaustion that I think is really the sort of core description of our present moment now. In this essay, I also point out this concept called charisma hunger. And there was a sociologist from the middle 20th century, Eric Erickson, quite prominent.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And he had this idea that in the modern world, and this has a lot to do with actually the loss of sort of religious conviction and religious life, that we were in search of these values. figures, these heroes. I'm very aware of the possibility that I am succumbing to this charisma hunger that Ericsson identified decades ago.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And Italics Ross, you had written at least one column, maybe two. in which you sort of made the case for why Trump might be a superior choice to lead the country despite, you know, the sort of the amount of chaos that we'd have to endure under his leadership.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Nonetheless, I do think, and I think the people's reaction to Trump, their impression of him, I saw for the other day, did you see this wrestler who won the NCAA title? And he's draped in the American flag, this gladiator. And he gives this great big hug to Donald Trump.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And in so many ways, Trump is this kind of great father of the American people or certain segment of the American people who have embraced him. And he's not just a politician. He's not just a president. He's not just a TV star. And to my mind, that speaks to this mythical character.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yeah, I mean, I think that's fair. And I'd also say for others who share your view here in this conflict between your sort of religious convictions and what Trump might represent, this is squarely within our sort of civil religious tradition.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I mean, if you think about the way that for most of our history, really up until like the Obama years, we thought about our founding figures and the way that they're presented in art. And the way they're written about in our sort of political and sort of civil religious texts, they are quite explicitly sort of divinely guided.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I mean, the hand of God is like reaching down and moving Thomas Jefferson, who also was not, you know. religious in any meaningful respect, and George Washington and John Adams, et cetera, and sort of placing them, you know, the hand of fate is on top of them.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And I was trying, if I remember the whole episode correctly, to sort of get italics Ross closer to the surface of, you know, the real Ross, the underlying Ross. So we all are trafficking in certain kinds of multi identities, I guess.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And so it's not these these things like to imagine that Trump is reviving that tradition or is is now occupying that same role is not in contradiction to this long tradition of civil religion that we've had previously. It might require more proof for you. You might need to see better evidence.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
First, let me start by saying I don't think actually Adolf Hitler was a great artist. I think he was actually deficient and technically deficient in certain ways that are very obvious when you look at his painting. Technically.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yes. So this is actually this is a really interesting question. And of course, it's worth addressing. And I think all the things you said can simultaneously be true. And I think there's a fourth point I want to add here, which is sort of historically contextual. We started this conversation by trying to.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
think back to where this current sort of moment of our cultural, social, intellectual, ideological path began. And we identified somewhere in the 2010s. Now, everything I'm about to talk about has precursors, but something else happens here around like 2012. And maybe you identify the Trayvon Martin case into 2013, 2014.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Certainly there's the Michael Brown hands up, don't shoot, Black Lives Matter. Simultaneously that we have a kind of a discussion happening in this country around immigration and what would happen to this country if we started allowing people in from all over the world. Is everybody the same from everywhere?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And if we're going to have a sort of pluralistic democracy, what does that look like in a future where it's not a non-white, predominantly white country? These are legitimate things to think about. A lot of people didn't want us having these conversations previously. But then what happens in 2013, 14 and then scales up over the course of the 2010s is this insistence.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And again, I think this is important coming from the left that we have our moment of racial reckoning. OK, so a bunch of people then are being asked to have a difficult conversation about race and the prevailing view that
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
which is taken on by the New York Times, by academia by and large, is that any differences and outcomes among people can be ascribed to this infinitely amorphous, non-falsifiable, infinitely pervasive thing called systemic racism. And this is, if not intentionally, de facto the fault of the white population in the country. So the question then is, is that true?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Are we allowed to look at the actual causes of why these discrepancies exist? And it just is the case that when you look at these differences, they are not attributable to white racism. You can actually identify causes. So I think a lot of young people online who are finding themselves getting the short end of the stick on these this new regime. Right. of DEI are reacting to it in kind.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And so a lot of this kind of racialized conversation is a response, is an answer to the insistence that all of these differences are white people's fault. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
OK, well, that's in theory.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
No. So this is a very easy question for me to answer. And the answer is yes, I would publish it on the assumption that it has a kind of literary value that is independent from these objections you have to these racial caricatures. So have you seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The movie, yes. Yeah, the movie. Okay. Yes.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
There's this great moment in Who Framed Roger Rabbit where Roger is handcuffed to the detective and And this is causing them all sorts of problems. And the detective is trying to saw the handcuffs off. And Roger at one point just slips out of the handcuffs in this sight gag. You know, it's funny. And the detective very angrily says to him, you're telling me you could do that at any time?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And Roger Rabbit says to him, no, only when it's funny. And the upshot of this anecdote is that if it's funny, okay, and funny here now is a stand-in for has artistic value independent of the thing happening, then it's worth preserving and worth participating in. So this Tintin book or Tantan, I don't know. Tantan is the like snobby French way of saying it.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Real Americans. You know, I'm a vulgar populist, you know, Trump supporters.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yeah. So the operating question for me as a publisher is, is it funny? And again, does it have value? Does it have artistic merit? Then there's also the archival thing. You know, the archival function is very important for a publisher. These are important texts. They tell us something not just about who we were, but in turn about who we are.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And simply forgetting that these things existed does nobody any good at all. I don't think we need to protect people from that kind of offense. The other point, which is, aren't these sort of views bad, though? And so we should disarm on these questions, if I understand what you're putting to me. And I would say maybe kind of.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
It depends because these views do have consequences that we need to properly address. And the only way to address them is by being honest about causes. So if we're talking about, for example, crime rates and we see like uneven incarceration rates and our answer is, well, there's over-policing. And then our solution to that is we get rid of police.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Well, that has a that creates an increase in crime. And no, as long as disarming on these questions and not being honest about these questions allows for these kinds of social pathologies to sort of rule over how we function in life, I think is bad. And we need to be honest about them. Right. And it's not yet. But what?
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
No, not necessarily. I think there are publishers who are already filling that niche, so it's not my responsibility to do that. But also, if you're the kind of person who's interested in that content, it's been there and you can go find it. And I'm glad you can. I think actually these things are important for us to be able to discuss and...
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I would say this to your concern about these racial taboos in particular, actually don't treat them any different than any other kind of political or social taboo. There's some added maybe vitriol or sharpness to some of these memes we're seeing now. But that's that's mostly because this is a topic of conversation, a category of conversation that has been entirely verboten. For a while now.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
OK, let's let's call it at least several decades. And the problem with this particular topic, in my view, is it starts with the supposition that it's firstly a moral question and any decent person, morally decent person already agrees with these basic sort of anti-racist premises. Right. So to even raise the questions, it's a mark against your character.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And we can't even get to the point where we're having the policy debate. And what that creates then is this environment in which people who want to have this debate have to – Figure out a way to talk about it and get through these filters.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And I think the kind of abrasive meme making that you're identifying when it comes to racial questions is a function of the manner in which this part of the discursive landscape has been previously closed off. And if we open it back up and allow for sober conversation, then it'll lose the power to sort of carry these memes. They just won't be as interesting or funny because they're not as taboo.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yeah, it's a good question when that might have happened. There certainly was a shift. But what's probably happening here is just the same old cycle of leftist excess that we've seen periodically over the course of American history, at least going back, to Second World War and probably even before that, there's a kind of decade of sort of leftism that takes hold, creates a kind of counterculture.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Okay, but yeah, I would just ask, what exactly are you worried about? So let me start with this. First of all, lies are brittle. Ultimately, they fall apart. Truth is durable, okay? And to build anything that's lasting, it has to rest on top of truth. And so we have to start there. That's my view. Okay.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And in order to discover truth, we need to be willing to test our assumptions about everything and continuously test those assumptions. And if we don't continuously test those assumptions, we not just forget what we believe, we forget why we believe those things. Okay.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And I think this is actually something the left has fallen in the trap of the left has kind of forgotten how to make the argument for their own beliefs because they've denied anybody who objects to their underlying assumptions about the world. I think it would be a mistake for us.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
to erect a kind of discursive force field around certain categories of questions in an effort to preclude the kind of discomfort. And again, this concern that you're articulating to me is very vague. I don't actually know what you're worried about. I mean, people have been questioning these narratives for a long time. You know, David Irving has been challenging the Holocaust for a long time.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Is like it better to not have those conversations? I don't think it is. I think we should just let it out. It can exist in the world.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
There's a period of pushback. And we saw this, like, for example, with the original neocons in the 70s. We see the cycle then play out again in the 90s with political correctness, another basically 10-year cycle. And then all we're just seeing is this same pattern emerge in the mid-2010s. I identify 2014 as this inflection point.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So I mean, I understand where the concern is coming from, I guess. I think it's I think it's unfounded. I don't think it actually will materialize into something real and something we'll have to worry about. And I think actually the alternative presents a much worse possibility.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And I think we saw some of that with the great awokening or, you know, this sort of post George Floyd's 2020 sort of impulse to not just blame white people for this kind of subordinate position of people of color per se, but then make actual policy choices or institutional choices to try to, you know, level that by harming white people. And so.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
What I'd say here is the reason that was bad was not because it pointed to racial discrepancies, but because it was wrong. It didn't pass the test of evidence. The question is not just is the discrepancy exists. The question is why. And if we. don't allow ourselves to have an honest conversation about that, what fills the vacuum is the most incendiary and most harmful explanations.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So it's actually, in my view, incumbent on people in positions of prominence who can look at these questions soberly, who can evaluate the evidence and make frank statements about the explanations for these disparities. All right, let's take a quick break.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yeah, I do. I actually think it's going to be a full-scale vibe shift. Full-scale, like Reagan-era level or bigger? Yeah, I do think it very well could be Reagan-era level. Now, I was alive, but I was too young to sort of remember what the Reagan era was like. You are absorbing his charisma sort of from the cradle.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
That was the year of Michael Brown and Ferguson and the kind of rise of BLM. It's also this interesting period where the Academy, at least, and I think probably this is happening within... newspapers and media is coming out of this interesting transition into the digital age and out of the recession. And there's like new incentives kind of driving the content.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
But, you know, I've watched enough John Hughes movies, okay, to sort of understand how that expresses itself in popular culture. And I think we're going to have precisely the same kind of vibe shift that infiltrates these mainstream sort of media forms. Here's an example.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
You know, I sit around with my family every once in a while and we watch American Idol and Carrie Underwood, who sang at the inauguration, is one of the judges on American Idol. Right. Just the mere fact that this massive pop star who has one of the biggest platforms in pop music is simultaneously affiliating herself with the Trump administration is enough to suggest that.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
that there is something meaningful and enduring and sort of broad about this vibe shift. You also have, I believe it's Larry Ellison's son who just bought Paramount Pictures. He is a kind of conservative. You know, they're gonna be doing these sort of
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
top gun esque films that sort of really embrace a kind of patriotic zeal I guess you could say now I warned at the beginning that it would be a mistake for conservatives to simply adopt a kind of nostalgia and sort of sentimental patriotism so. I don't hope that that is all there is, but that's a perfect place for that kind of ethos and aesthetic to exist in these like big blockbuster movies.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And I suspect they will. People are certainly exhausted by wokeness. So it's not just that the right and this sort of right coded art is ascendant. It's as much to do with the fact that like Snow White, this new Snow White release is is very unpopular. People don't want this stuff anymore. And so there's going to be a natural opening for newer, more, let's just say, vitalist kind of art.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Yeah. What do you recommend? This is good. You put this question. I'm not going to hide the ball from the audience. You put this question to me earlier this morning. Why I wanted I wanted a good answer. Right. You know, when you ask it suddenly, they're like, oh, the God.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I'm not going to say The Godfather, although I did have difficulty sort of spontaneously coming up with a good answer. What one book sort of encapsulates what I'm trying to accomplish with this? So the thing I've thought long and hard about and what I saw when I was a lecturer at UCI, there's been this kind of severing of a sort of. Continuity between the past and the present.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And I think it's an intentional severing. And these kids like they just they're not well read. They don't really know anything. I mean, I spent half my classes just teaching like Wikipedia tier history just so we can have enough context to have the conversation about the actual stuff we're talking about. So one thing that I would definitely I think is much needed is to.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Re-establish a kind of continuity, sort of a literary, intellectual, cultural continuity with the past. So the book I would choose for this is Moby Dick. And it's a very obvious cliche choice, but it's a thing that kind of everybody from all ages, if you're an American, this is a book you just should know.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I think Moby Dick is sort of essentially American and in particular represents a kind of East Coast American founding. And it's this, you know, man against nature and God. And there's also the sort of chaos of. the plurality of the, you know, the cast, okay? And it's very American in that way. It's sort of this industrious, pluralistic, you know, almost democracy on the boat.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And what happens there is that a bunch of conservatives and especially sort of younger conservatives who are frozen out of the conservative movement are frozen out of mainstream politics, are frozen out of
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So it's also transcendence through conquest, okay, which is a very American idea. And then my counterpoint to that, which I think is a nice coda, is No Country for Old Men would be the movie. Moby Dick is conquest, and it's the Atlantic,
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And now Cormac McCarthy and No Country for Old Men, the film in particular, the Coen brothers film is the border, the terminus of the West, the border with Mexico, the sort of it's also late epic. It's it's the exhaustion of American conquest. And there's this force at the center of the book, this inscrutable, mysterious, supernatural force It's not in Moby Dick. It's the thing they're chasing.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
It's the whale in No Country for Old Men. It's evil. It's chasing them. That has come right to now fate is coming to exact its payback for what America has become. So it's America at the end, at this moment of civilizational exhaustion. And it's precisely this. this point that we need to escape out of.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And this is my hope for the future is how do we take the sort of metaphysics of no country for old men and create some kind of rebirth to our national identity, our national character, our sort of inner primordial being and find that life force that it can once again extend beyond these borders.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
You know, the kinds of professions where they might have a platform to express new ideas that might regenerate conservatism, go online and go underground and start developing a unique and sort of native style of discourse all our own.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And as that cycle of progressivism just naturally exhausts itself, which it always does, and it takes new form each time, but it kind of always follows the same plot. What we're seeing now is the emergence of this conservative ideology. You know, some people counter elite or counter cultural force simply emerging in place of where the progressives have vacated.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And, you know, we could come up with all sorts of likes.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
OK, so, yes. So what what are we trying to do? So we're trying to revive what is a genuine right wing cultural and ideological. I hate the word movement because it's it's not quite that. But but a right wing that can form an enduring and meaningful counterweight to.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
A dominant left and a dominant sort of progressive march that we've seen taking place over the course of, let's just say, the post-war period, certainly from, you know, the 90s and the end of the Cold War up until now. And the premise there is. is that the conservatism that came before, I was recently looking at a picture online of a book called Young Guns featuring Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
I am familiar with this cover. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy. Yeah, Kevin McCarthy. Okay, so that's the image. of the sort of failed conservative movement that what this new set of figures and cultural texts are trying to replace.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Oh, yeah. No, that's absolutely right. I think you hit the primary people, the primary figures, and you're capturing what the sort of zeitgeist is here, for lack of a better term. And it's still sort of being developed. And I'd be lying to you if I said that I had some intentional project here or some intentional aesthetic that I was trying to cultivate with this. But
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So the idea is that the future is discovered. OK, we're not going to be able to predict ahead of time what this new sort of culture will look like. It is throwing these ingredients out there based on a kind of shared understanding at the highest level of abstraction, some kind of alignment that at least for now is Is defined in opposition of both the left.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
OK, and like wokeness, which is easy, but it's also defined in some sense in opposition to the conservatism that has come before. Not because it's antagonistic towards that kind of conservatism per se, but that that kind of conservatism is. Right.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And so, you know, and this is a lot of the frustration that people have had with the right is any time anyone on the conservative side goes to make some kind of art or do culture. It's just bad. And the left is right about this. You know, there's been, at least for my lifetime, this critique that the right can't do art, that the right can't do culture.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
It's not it's not historically true, but at least right in the last 30, 40 years. OK, so it's I think partly it's fear of the unknown. It's a lack of tolerance for artistic. license and the messiness and chaos of what is entailed by the creative process.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
And, you know, it's just the case that if you are going to embark on a new cultural project, you have to have some amount of of taste for offense and. Okay, I'll say this. There's probably three aspects to why conservative art is bad or has been bad. And this is reductive, of course, but this might help sort of frame things. It's moralistic. Okay, it's much too moralistic. It's didactic.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
It's always trying to tell you a self-consciously conservative message. It's overly sentimental. And then there's also this nostalgia thing. It's always looking backwards. And conservative art is always looking to the past because it's familiar. It's something that's already been established. It's something for which they already know what they're supposed to like, what's good and what's not good.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
So there's no risk in trying anything new. And then the third thing I'll say here is that it's grievance-oriented. And this comes in two forms. It's either we're owning the libs or here's a story about all of the ways the libs are making our lives unbearable.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Sure. No country for old men as an example. But but it's not self-consciously right wing. Right. Right. Absolutely. You know, the Coen brothers would call themselves on the right. And I don't even know if Cormac McCarthy would who wrote the book it's based on. But to my mind, it is precisely right wing art or, you know, David Lynch.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
Pretty much everything David Lynch touches, I think, has a certain kind of right wing coding to it. Certainly his major works.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
You know, okay, because I like it, it's good, and therefore I want it to share my sort of political preferences. But beyond that, you know, and this is where there would be some points of disagreement. By the way, I'd also call something like Girls, the TV show Girls, is a right-wing... Oh, yeah. Well, well, that now you're just pandering to me because that was my that was my view.
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive
All right. So then so then we might share the premise here that what constitutes, quote unquote, right wing art, which is, by the way, some labeling we're grafting onto this thing after the fact. And so it's actually like a very flimsy kind of labeling. But
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
Suddenly, these whiz kids come along, and they're going to turn off that spigot. So, you know, they're angry for a lot of reasons, and now they're impotently lashing out at these kids. Frankly, I think it's beautiful what these kids are doing. I am so happy to see them, and we need to support them at all costs.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
Charlie, the easy answer there is no, at least not in its current form. It's great to be here, by the way. But this question of USAID and what we've seen over the last week since Marco Rubio at the State Department has taken control and tried to make transparent some of the funding schemes going on there has really got me and I think a lot of people really heated because it's very clear that
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
that what USAID is doing is the exact opposite of what is in the interest of the United States and the American people. And USAID really is a kind of perfect microcosm of both the stupidity and the malice
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
of the unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats who run our State Department and use our tax dollars, the money that we make and that should be helping our people and supporting our interests, instead goes to spreading this international ideology
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
What we might just call international wokeism for the benefit of their own pockets and of their own interests, which again are entirely divorced from the interests of the American people. So, you know, I'm really glad that this is now out there, that this is a discussion we're having and what was previously so opaque. about some of this funding and this waste is now open for everyone to see.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
I want to thank, by the way, Data Republican, a great account on Twitter, also put together a tool at datarepublican.com where you can go and search this stuff for yourself. So I encourage you to go to datarepublican.com. Type in USAID to the grant search tool and see what comes up. I just did this, okay? And here's just one small sample of something I found.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
$30 million going to an organization called Creative Associates International. What does Creative Associates International do? They fund women in the Guatemalan highlands to stitch their own ponchos. They also fund vague community organizing efforts in Burkina Faso.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
I dare anyone listening this to explain to me why that money being spent on ponchos in the Guatemalan highland is more appropriate than spending that money to fix up, let's say, the floods in North Carolina or the fires that just devastated our people in California.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
Yeah, so this is right. And I think, you know, this requires a kind of deep dive into the history of the State Department and some of our globalist policies. What some people like our friend Darren Beattie, who's now at the Department of State, has called the global American empire, which is really an offshoot of the neocons going back to the Iraq war.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
in this idea that we could spread democracy across the world. And we would do that by force initially. It turns out that you can't just march an army into a place like Iraq or Afghanistan and turn it into a liberal democracy.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
So over the last decade, that strategy has transmogrified now and we use a kind of soft power and we use this kind of ideology of wokeness to impose the interests of this global American empire on the rest of the world. A lot of this is represented in things like LGBTQI plus initiatives, things like environmental justice initiatives.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
you see words like Latinx politics popping up all over the place when you search for this stuff. Our friend Josh Howerton, he's a great account on Twitter.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
He mentioned, for example, he found that a lot of Christian organizations and religious organizations around the world, this money is dangled over their head and they only get access to it so long as they allow for and accept the leftist activist views on things like LGBT TB issues and trans issues. Otherwise, this money disappears.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
So it's a way to sort of force this ideology onto the rest of the world. A quick history lesson here. OK, I'm reminded of Tacitus, who writing about the Roman Empire and quoting. A leader of the Britons describing the wrath and devastation of the Roman Imperial Army had the quote, they make a desert and they call it peace.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
And you might say something like this about the global American empire, which is we raise a pride flag and we call it peace.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
GAE, the Global American Empire.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
So, you know, the divide here is very simple. There is the ideology of the global American empire. This is what we call globalist, broadly speaking. And then the other foreign policy option that we have is a nationalist ideology. American first foreign policy. USAID has been operating on the globalist foreign policy ideology for the last several decades.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, our patriots now in charge of our government are reasserting a foreign policy that prefers and supports the interests of the American people over the rest of the world. And part of this now is going to be revising how we spend our money and returning that money to the American people.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
Yeah, I mean, this is typical of what we see from the left now. So first of all, these kids are the perfect embodiment of what we talk about when we talk about meritocracy. They are the best. These are the people we want running our systems and running our government. We don't want to scare away these people. from public service. We need them.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
If we're going to fix this country, we need these kids. We need their brainpower. We need their talents. And so the left, why are they so angry about this? One is they're out of ideas. Okay. They can't argue against the kinds of things these kids are doing. They know there's waste, but they don't want to admit to it. And so what do they do? They threaten, they ostracize.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
They are like cornered animals gnashing their teeth. And, you know, frankly, I think it's largely impotent, although they do want to do damage. They want to prevent these kids from being able to get jobs in the future, et cetera.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
And so we have to make sure as you know, if we're on the right here that we protect these people, we make sure when they get out of government that they have a place to land on their feet. So that's number one. The other thing, too, here that's going on is for a long time, I think the left has felt entitled to this kind of young talent.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
The left has always assumed that young, bright people are going to join their side. But there's been a vibe shift. OK, this is palpable here. And we see it with kids like this. They don't want to join the left. They don't want to engage in this woke ideology that, frankly, has probably made them suffer quite a bit over the course of their young lives.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Defunding the Globalist American Empire + The Fall of Bud Light
And now they are on the right and they are doing what we want them to do. And so this is something that the left is very afraid of, that there's going to be this massive shift. Well, it's too late. It's already happened. The other thing here is. What these kids are doing is sorting through all the waste in our government and getting rid of it. The left also feels entitled to that money.