The Cultural Marxism Myth with A.J.A. Woods

Where did the "Cultural Marxism" talking point actually originate? How did obscure 20th-century sectarian group battles evolve into the foundation of today's right-wing culture wars? In this episode of Varn Vlog, we sit down with Dr. A.J.A. Woods to dissect the bizarre, interconnected history of political paranoia, conspiracy culture, and the weaponization of critical theory.

 Dr. Woods—a PhD graduate from the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism—joins the show to trace the genealogical lineages outlined in his book, The Cultural Marxist Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West. Together, we map how legitimate left-wing internal critiques of figures like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno were absorbed, rebranded, and mainlined into mainstream conservative media by the LaRouche movement, William S. Lind, and eventually Andrew Breitbart.

We pull back the curtain on how these highly elaborate historical myths function as porous, left-right feedback loops. From the "Plato vs. Aristotle" secret histories of the 1970s to contemporary discussions surrounding "wokeness," Alexander Dugin, James Lindsay, and Jordan Peterson, we unpack how social media algorithms flatten intellectual nuances to spawn a new generation of conspiratorial thinking.

Finally, we address the "Radical Chic" commodity of theory in academia, the historical distortion of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and why the left's fixation on policing external myths often comes at the expense of addressing its own structural organizing failures.

✨ Check out Dr. A.J.A. Woods' work and grab his book to explore the full intellectual history of modern political myths!

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

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Welcome And What’s At Stake

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello. Welcome to Barn Blogger. And I'm here with AJA Woods, who is a PhD holder from the Center of the Study of Critical Theory and Criticism at Western University Canada. You're currently living back in your assuming home country of England. I will not let my anti-English bias influence our conversation today.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Don't worry, I'm I I'll let my bias, uh my anti-English bias influence it though.

C. Derick Varn 1:23

Well, it's it's one of the stranger bits of solidarity I tend to have with English leftists, is we both don't like English. Mine is purely abstract, actually. I just it comes from I think it honestly comes from the left of 20 years ago, which was so dominated by British Trotskyist organizations that uh filled in the niche for the for the Maoist and old Trotskyist ones in America mostly they didn't really die, but they were like just a bunch of 70-year-olds by the end of the 1980s. So I'm gonna preface this because I think this conversation might be a little bit more informal than maybe people are used to. With you, I don't know, people are used to me, I just talk. But uh and I know each other, which I did not realize. Uh we we met in Boise, uh I guess almost eight years ago.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

Eight years ago, yeah. It's coming up to the decade, yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 2:38

And you reminded me when I reached out to you to ask you on the show that we had had a conversation about the topics of your book. Haha, we are gonna plug it. The Cultural Marxist Conspiracy, Why the Right Brains the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West. Although, even at the time, I was already complaining to you about people not being able to tell the difference between right-wing conspiracies about the about the Frankfurt School and left-wing criticisms of the Frankfurt School. And I say this as a person who people will probably accuse of splitting the baby on Gabriel Rockhill's book, for example. But I knew about most of the relations to the OSS and whatnot in the book. What I didn't know from the Rock Hill book was how much the State Department was involved with Marcusa in particular, and that is pretty well documented in his book. So, you know, when I talk about people using on the left using cultural Marxist conspiracy theories, I am not necessarily implicating Gabriel Rockhill, but I am implicating a lot of his fans.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

I mean, I I come on to like a a number of Twitter exchanges talking about the uh the the Frankfurt School or Marcusa. I just find that a lot of kind of Rock Hill stands are totally sort of illiterate about what was going on historically at the time, not only just in the uh in the left more broadly, like in the world, but also just like in the United States, where a lot of the exit accusations about you know Marcusa being much more implicated than the CIA came from.

C. Derick Varn 4:33

Yeah, well, this is this is interesting because you and I have talked about cultural Marxism before. And in fact, way back in the day, I think I recorded this episode more than a decade ago. I was sitting down with the Moxahu and recorded an episode where I responded to a Paul Gottfried article on what cultural Marxism was, and then went through the history and mentioned people like William S. Lind and the Radical the Radical Traditionalist movement, and that was also back before everybody and their brother knew that Richard Spencer wrote his master thesis on Odorno, although I knew that because I talked to Spencer about it once before he got famous.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

Um do you remember what what was what he wrote in the master's thesis? Because I remember trying to access it once, but I had no luck with luck with it.

C. Derick Varn 5:31

Not a ton. I mean, it's it's basically a smarter version of cultural Marxist theory, and he gets it from Paul Gottfried, who was of course Marcusa's student. So while while Spencer was writing on Adorno, uh Godfrey was writing a lot on Marcusa. And Godfried's been interesting.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

I don't I uh he I believe he comes up in your book, but not yeah, yeah, but bits and bits and pieces, largely. Because I mean, like him and Lind have had multiple disagreements over the years because they are, I mean, they're they're they're close friends, and they they often have the argument about whether like political correctness is Marxism or not, really, because in like the strange death of Marxism, Paul Gottfried is more is more along the lines of like, well, look, the Frankfurt school are bad, but they're liberals, but then they're not Marxists. And whereas Lind is much more adamant that you you should really call the Frankfurt school Marxists because many Americans will then be more turned off by political correctness.

C. Derick Varn 6:43

But it's interesting that even Lind basically thinks that is a public relations issue, not an issue of facticity.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 6:53

When I first encountered these cultural Marxist conspiracies on the left were weirdly people around what is now the Revolutionary Communist Party or the Revolutionary Communist International, what used to be the international Marxist tendency, and that is the tendency of the inheritors of Ted Grant and really Alan Woods, oh yeah, to also use cultural Marxist conspiracies around the Firefox School to blame them for postmodernism, which they didn't blame for the degeneration of left-wing thought. Now, from my perspective, this is all backwards. If you're gonna complain about the degeneration of left-wing thought, you have to complain about the degeneration of left-wing conditions, not like not like these theorists that just poison the well. And if I have a critique of Rock Hill, it's that he over-concludes that the problems of Western Marxism come from a bunch of academics, and I'm like, I'm not sure how actually influential Marcusa was on sectarian Marxism outside of the SDS. He was influential on the SDS, though.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, no, I mean I was uh uh I was going to say that I mean, yeah, I mean it's it's it's I mean it depends on which faction you are kind of talking about as well, because even the the the weather undergrounds, the the the influence there is more like the the influence there is obviously more like we we can't organize within you know sort of the industrial American working class because they're they're compromised and also the the the institutions like sort of uh trade unions are no longer agobi as so radical because they're so complicit with imperialism. And what what what what you get when you look at the sort of more Marcuse-influenced segments of SDS is actually a position about the possibility for revolution in the United States. It's actually quite similar to Rock Hill, because it's almost sort of quite equivalent to like the labor aristocracy thesis.

C. Derick Varn 9:10

Yeah, this is I guess this kind of brings us. We kind of have to tell a story here before I go off on uh on my connections to this. Because you when you and I first talked about this, we talked about the fact that I was in the circles of these people. I was not a member of the alt-right, but I was a member of its paleoconservative slash paleo-libertarian predecessor, and was freaked out when I started seeing the radical traditionalist movement and the paleoconservative movement blending on the internet. And I saw this 10 years before anyone was talking about it. So there was a spade of books after the first Trump uh election about the alt-right, and I found that most of them, including one that I was partially responsible for publishing, which was Kill on Normies by Angela Nagel, which I even critiqued at the time, seemed to treat this stuff as having no history. That it just emerged from internet forums, you

Right Wing Myth Vs Left Critique

C. Derick Varn 10:17

know, in the late and the late aughts, early aught teens. And I'm like, no, this has been going on for four decades, and there's been an active attempt to build both a conspiracy culture that feeds into it, and also uh like a grand theory that the paleoconservatives in particular had this weird shadow respect for classical Marxism, although they hated it. And the smarter ones, you know, with the people who were often influential at things like talkie mag and the American conservative, not Breitbart, which is really where the stuff takes off, would talk about Marxism in this weird, like was it like wasn't things better before the cultural Marxists took away our real enemy, which was a better enemy, and you would like get this weird degeneration. And the other thing you would get, and this is interesting because Trumpism has kind of confounded these tendencies. Was these people also would tie this into uh Trotskyism, which interesting, like get Rockill and company kind of don't, and say that really this was also like the origins of neoconservatism, aka the France for school, aka Jews, and that it was really just Jewfication, for lack of a better word, of Marxism. That some of them even went so far, such as Carrie Bolton on the on the European Unite, to actually claim that like Stalin was their guy, um which was just weird resurrection of some truly bizarre shit like Francis Yaquiism. This is all kind of tangential to your book, but I wanted to talk about the element of your book that I didn't really know myself, even though I knew about LaRouchites, because uh, when I was in the actually, when I was in the conservative movement, I knew some former George Bush supporting former neocons who got liquidated in like I mean, one of my friends literally got he's now a leftist, but he was at the time he was a kind of George Bush neoconservative who got liquidated in bare sterns and then like started and got radicalized. But the first thing he got radicalized towards was LaRouchism, so I knew about it. Later on, he drops it and becomes just more of a standard Marxist, but but and we weren't the only people in the left-wing circuits that I moved in who had connections like that. The the late Paul Schelter had had had flirtations with the with radical traditionalism as well. And so I bring this up because I think the lines between the the cultural Marxist conspiracies on the right, which I think are much more influential, and this conspiracies on the left are this interesting porous feedback loop because, as you point out in your book, the initial paleoconservative attacks are actually based off of rebrandings of LaRouche and SDS attacks on Marcusa. And then that's what leads to you know this expansion. And it starts off with people like Paul, you know, not with Lynn and Gottfried, who have relatively sane, if false, claims to like Adorno invented the Beatles, Adorno, you know, it basically uh becomes Judeo Bolshevism again, but I think it's important to realize that its origins, despite what some liberals may say, was not just picking up Judeo Bolshevism and attaching it to the Friendfurt School. So uh can you talk about that?

SPEAKER_00 14:21

Yeah, I mean uh what's I mean the the La Rushites, as I mentioned in the book, really start off as like a faction within the uh New York um Students for a Democratic Society chapter largely around Colombia. They have a kind of they organize around this particular idea of I mean they're they're taking ideas from from Lenin's what what is to be done, you know. The way to do revolution is to for form you know more tightly centralized organization with other revolutionary intelligentsia to take Marxist consciousness from without to to the working class. What what what the the issue is as as this group develops is uh essentially the LaRouche wants to operate more as the unquestioned like cult leader of this group. They have kind of uh sectarian fights with uh other student-left groups at the time, uh not only rhetorically but also physically. I mean, uh there's a lot that I don't talk about in the book. Well, I mean, I mean, even before you get to the numchucks, I mean you listen to these accounts of like these SDS meetings in the late 60s and late 70s, and they're pushing people up against the wall and sort of yet screaming at people in people's faces. And so there is all that there's a kind of like bubbling tension that is always threatening to uh turn into violence. They have a big sp- I mean this is even like a complicated episode in itself, but they have a disagreement with the the rest of the New York SDS about the the the teacher strike in in the late 60s between unionized teachers in a certain in a certain neighborhood and black parents who want to have more community control over their children's education. This is around the time that the Ford Foundation were kind of experimenting with the idea of community control as a way to kind of recoup the sort of more radical, radical initiatives of the time. There are some good pieces on Jacobin about this, but uh the this split within the New York SDS is largely what causes LaRouche to go on a kind of trajectory outside of the left and more towards the uh the right later on. Uh as we talked about in the 70s, they uh LaRouche becomes ever more paranoid, starts to think that not only is the CIA, KGB, and MI5 brainwashing his followers to assassinate him, but that they are that that through the mass media they are trying to brainwash people to prepare them for a global genocide, uh including members of the the the what was then you know the the the post-new left, like the weather underground. And uh where the Frankfurt School enters into this is the idea that you know Marcusa is part of a larger counterintelligence apparatus to turn people like Mark Rudd of the Weather Underground, Angela Davis of who is then the leader of the of the Communist Party, and other kind of uh post-new left radical groups to sort of uh form a kind of a fascist movement to sort of stage a larger takeover of not only the United States but also the world. And and because of this sort of turn towards a kind of more paranoid politics, they uh okay they isolate themselves on the left and decide that if they're going to try and get more supporters, more donations, they're going to try and form links with the right. And one of the first successful links that they make is with the Liberty Lobby Group, which is led by uh Willis Carto. I mean, to to go back to Francis Parker Jockie, I mean, we'll Willis Cato is the kind of inheritor of uh of Jockie's thought in the United States. And later on, he goes on to form connections with Linz, you know, two decades after having this cooperation with the LaRouche movement. So, I mean, you you see these kind of recurrent figures of people, people who are sort of organizing on the left and organizing on the right, sort of sharing ideas and having that having that continuity over time. And then when the LaRouche movement gets into the 80s, uh the they kind of you know suit up a bit and and try to become much more respectable. I mean, there there are other ideas within the LaRouche movement that we can really cover, but around that time they were interested in sort of recruiting people who were into the sciences, and they had this idea that had this group called the Fusion Energy Foundation that was interested in the ideas of kind of uh defense in space that would sort of end up resembling Reagan's Star Wars program.

SPEAKER_02 19:39

Which they would then take credit for, right?

SPEAKER_00 19:41

Which they would then take credit for, yeah, yeah, which they uh despite the fact that they had nothing to do with. But this actually led for them to kind of have closer links with the the CIA, the NSC, and also the Reagan administration. Uh to incre th they started to kind of change their branding as an organization from saying, you know, we are we are Leninists, we are the Lenin, we are, you know, revolutionary intellectuals, to actually presenting

Pre Internet Roots Of The Story

SPEAKER_00 20:07

themselves as not Republicans as in the Republican Party, but kind of Republicans as in the sort of believer of but believers in the Republic as set down by Plato. They said that they were part of a secret elite of thinkers that's sort of had a continuous line since the days of Plato, and they were opposed to people, I mean they were opposed to the a counter-elite that was apparently inspired by Aristotle. And by the time you by the time you get to the 90s, you that they are sort of participating in sort of more kind of conservative and right-wing polemics around political correctness, which is where you sort of then get the entry point of these narratives about the Frankfurt school into the what what would be into the paleo-conservative circles and what would become the kind of radical traditionalist movement.

C. Derick Varn 21:06

Well, this is actually really interesting to me because how porous these lines are is actually really underunderstood. Think about Paul Picconi over there at Telers Magazine, which for a long time saw itself as explicitly the inheritors and regulators of the Frankfurt School of Thought for a whole lot of the quote-unquote left. But they also had ties to a lot of let's just say maverick people like Christopher Lash, but then people who convert to the right for other reasons, such as such as Eugene Genevaze, the former Emery professor who went from a Marxist analysis of slaves, although it was kind of weird and a little bit pro-confederate even back then, to in through being a supporter of Eurocommunism and to being a supporter of neo-confederatism by the 90s and odds. And the LaRouche seemed to be the model for it, but the other thing that does. Occur to me is ironically given that what I just said about neoconservatives, um, and I think Sean KB pointed this out on this records interview that the LaRusite mythology, while way more elaborate than the Leo Straussian mythology, actually sounds a lot like it about like we're secret inheritors of a secret tradition of Plato. And while I am not accusing Dominica Lacerdo of being a conspiracy theorist, one of the interesting things that I've seen about the Western Marxist stuff is they also have a trans historical narrative about like for Lacerdo, it's Christianity. For this inspires Carlos Garrito over at the Midwestern Marx to claim that like it's probably Parmenides, and there's this ideologic, this ideological mistake in Western culture that leads to ultra-leftism, blah blah blah blah blah. And I find it funny that these myths that really are uh very right-wing coded keep on showing up on the left exactly through this lens. It it is it is often legitimate critiques of of well, how legitimate I can get into, but like we we do know that, for example, Odorno is a complicated figure, but like Horkheimer basically supports the Vietnam War. Makusa doesn't, interestingly enough. And the what what Rockit will say about the Marcusa problem with the OSS is yeah, sure, we admit that Sweezy and Baron were also working for the OSS. There's a whole lot of communists working for the OSS during the Popular Front, many of them good Marxist, Leninists, and members of the CPUSA. That the issue is that Marcusa stayed on with the State Department after the Red Scare kicked in. And I find this interesting because we have to parse the fact that there's some legitimate stuff to be worried about there, but even Rock Hill doesn't necessarily convince me that that this was that like the CA was telling him exactly how to write the one-dimensional man and and those books. Like when you did like these right-wing, and it's mostly right-wing conspiracy theorists that used to tell me this, and I would go and verify it, and some of the stuff they claim was true. Was like William Buckley had CAA ties, Florian Steinem had CAA ties, Terrence Fucking McKenna had CAA ties, Dennis Leary had CAA ties. You go through them, and they would they would take these true statements, combine it with this LaRoucheite stuff, then we can come back to the nature of this myth, and then concoct this thing where really secret Marxists had taken over everything, but had done it all through the cultural turn. Allah, some strange reading of Gramsci, which I also find interesting that they impute to the Frankfurt School, because Frank School hardly ever talk about Gramsci.

SPEAKER_00 26:16

There are some weird like uh attempts to try and link the Frankfurt School and Gramsci. I mean, one of my favorites is uh uh uh James Lindsay. And I think that he he tried to prove he tried to prove that I mean Lukash and Gramsci met each other, that's that's indisputable. But he also tried to prove that sort of Hawkheimer was hanging around at the same time, and because of that, that's what inspired that because of somehow meeting Gramsci that inspired him to write traditional and critical theory. I mean, it obviously can't be proved, but I mean it it's it's there are these attempts to try and fold Gramsci into the Frankfurt School despite the fact that you know Gramsci was you know much more involved in sort of yeah in party party matters than many members of the Frankfurt school. But I mean also to go on what what you're saying about the CIA being everywhere. I mean the LaRouchites in their critiques of you know the Weather Underground being a proto-fascist organization, which I mean it it's sort of based on uh on an idea that you know that it's a kind of uh petty bourgeois adventurism that you know can can maybe later on you know sort of become you know the the the the street fighting faction of of a fascist party, but that they're making these accusations about the that the CIA, and there are plenty of CIA people in the Weather Underground, it's just that they were there to spy on the members in the Weather Underground, as it was just sort of uncovered by the church committee, right?

C. Derick Varn 27:47

I mean well, I think about like the number of CIA members in the Avakian RCP, because I've read you know, I I helped publish a whole book on that, which has been declassified, you know, after the church commission got so much of the the COINTELPROPAL's declassified. And I'm like, okay, so you know, when we look at these CIA handlers, it it becomes a problem. Another issue that they would talk about is all the funding lines, but it's a that's another thing Rockhilta talks about, and they're real, but what we don't know, and I we really don't know this, it's like with the Congress of Cultural Freedom, Christopher Lash outed it as a CAA front through speculation about its relationship to James Burnham as early as

LaRouche Emerges From SDS

C. Derick Varn 28:37

the late 1960s, but in the 50s, we don't know who knew what because there's so many Marxists who get sucked up in those Congress for Cultural Freedom things, it's not just a partisan review, and and one of the things that your book had me thinking about is like and it's hard to parse now because under Trump somehow neoconservatism and paleoconservatism, two dire enemies, have now merged into some one one hybrid weird beast. Um, but for people who don't know the history, like on the right, although the Rush lights were weird during the Iraq war, because that's like where what side they were on was actually kind of strange. But on the right, a lot of these cultural Marxist conspiracy people were actually anti-war, uh anti-Iraq war because they saw it as basically a bunch of crypto trots who were inspired by the Frankfurt School and then got sucked up by Leo Strauss starting a war only in the benefit of Israel. But to today that's you can't really make that argument because the distinctions between the paleoconservatives and the neoconservatives are I mean, the neoconservatives are kind of split into two factions, uh, the ones willing to join with the Trumpists, and the ones who are willing to more or less become Democrats. I find this interesting because the way in which these cultural Marxist conspiracies just branched out into so many other ones. And I mean it it's uh it's interesting to me because I do think like I said, a lot of Rock Hills fans are guilty of the uh guilty of what I'm about to say, even though I don't think Gabriel actually necessarily is. Gabriel blames the CAA for funding for quote funding and influencing Western Marxism as an intellectual project in academia, but he doesn't actually say the CAA brought it about. Like he doesn't think the CAA brought about the Frankfurt School, you know, he thinks that they were collaborators in some way. But if you go on Facebook or X and look at any comments on that, on when anyone criticizes Rock Hill, you will immediately see people just start claiming Western Marxism is a CA conspiracy, which isn't even what what Rock Hill's arguing. And I find it I find it it really does look like a return of that LaRouchite stuff, and the fact that so many people in that orbit, like I mentioned Midwestern Marx, have become MAGA communists or weird, like right-left hybrids, which is something that paleoconservatives and radical traditionalist have always aimed for. Like I pointed out that I was reading your book this morning, and I was thinking about William Lynn and how there's still this, like when if you look at Duganism and its attempt to like influence a lot of anti-imperialism, and Dugan is explicit. I I pointed out in For Political Theory, where he says verbatim that they intend to use Marxism as a fifth column, like he just says it straight up, he says it in print, it's not hidden. But if you look at like how this all ties into this, there's these weird lipstick traces that you start finding. So one of the things that people don't really talk that much about because Dugan seems so anti-neoconservative because he hates Atlanticism, that that people don't realize that his multipolarity is fundamentally based off of Samuel Huntington's class of civilization thesis. In fact, it's one of the it's one of the things he says explicitly. And I saw your eyes puck up because then that ties him directly to William S. Lynd, which is where that theory really comes from, before before Huntington stole it and wrote a book about it at a conference that's held secretly. Not well, not secretly, but it's a it's a very elite conference held by scholars at the Stanford Institute. I actually know I knew a scholar who went to it. And he basically just stole William Lynde's theory and being academically respectable at that conference.

SPEAKER_00 33:16

Because before then, I mean uh William Lynd was basically arguing the clash of civilizations thesis, but he was doing it in kind of like military theory journals, which like only people who were like at military colleges were reading, whereas Huntington took it straight to like foreign policy, foreign policy magazine, I should say, and uh it became a hit.

C. Derick Varn 33:38

Right, still one of the most rev books in all of acad in all of academia, wildly, because it's really sloppy. But I remember like looking at its list of civilizations and just like Japan civilization.

SPEAKER_00 33:52

I'm like, okay, like I mean, we we could probably get to this, but this is exactly what what happens in Lynn's novel Victoria, which is basically like a a fictionalized rendition of like what will happen in the clash of civilizations if it happens exactly how I think about it. And there's a scene where like the the uh the the character well actually the there's a character in it that is supposed to be William Lynn's, but the the uh it the the protagonist goes to Japan and has a conversation with people over there, and and the the the the Japanese characters are like we we won't have individuality, we we only have the collective, and then the protagonist writes some haiku at the end to prove how like indiv uh the western individual is superior to sort of like quote unquote Asiatic collectivism.

C. Derick Varn 34:49

Yeah, that old Connard it is it's interesting how these ideas don't go away and how influential they are. I mean with LaRouche, LaRouche is LaRoucheism is wild because there's this weird obsession with the British that sometimes seems like it's a proxy for the Jews, and I mean almost explicitly, and it's sometimes surprised you didn't like it because if you're anti-English bias, right? Exactly. But sometimes it feels like you know, just a rant I had on Tuesday, um where I'm like blaming the queen for everything. Um no, I mean it it is it is interesting, like what it does, and it was also interesting with LaRouchism, they maintain an one of the fascinating weirdnesses about LaRouchism is they critique the cultural Marxist and claim to basically be Marxist, but also if you really get into their theory on the inside, they also claim that Marx is actually a product of the evil British flesh, maybe the Jews, too, and that this is still part of the Aristotelian war against Plato. In that there is a real sense in which like Aristotelianism is really influential on Marxism, and you do have to actually kind of admit that because Marxist categories really come from Aristotle via the discussions around and Adam Smith.

SPEAKER_00 36:35

And well, I mean, we really when it comes to like the LaRouchites, it is I mean, the underneath all of the like the weird, like this has been like a thousand years of conspiracy, it is just like that like idealism versus empiricism. This is sort of like a debate between two philosophical viewpoints.

Paranoia Turns Into A Strategy

SPEAKER_00 36:57

What what's weird about LaRouchism is that they sort of have all of this weird baggage about you know how like you know Henry Kissinger is secret secretly gay, and that's part of the conspiracy. And you know, w w William F. Buckley fucks his dog. And so they kind of get distracted in all of these kinds of like weird sort of conspiratorial assertions instead of I don't know, being what they essentially are, which are is sort of like actually quite talented grad students. I mean, basically, all of most of the original founders of the LaRouche movement are kind of like classicists or like sort of philosophers, and they accidentally became part of like this political organization that sort of I don't know, rubbed their egos in a certain way, and uh were a certain were essentially like you you are you you are the smartest people not only in the room but also in the kind of in the universe almost.

C. Derick Varn 37:51

Well, this lets me ask you like maybe we should focus down on the LaRouche ties before I get into because we're going back and forth. Yeah, yeah. No, that's me, that's not you. I wanted to I wanted to think about like one of the things that you look at with LaRouche is the way this organization becomes more and more conspiracy conspiratorial. Originally, they're just extremely rigorous, kind of weird sporotskyists who are willing to engage in conspiratorial slander of people they disagree with for ideological reasons. But and you see that across the sectarian left, particularly in this time period. I mean, the SDS was always trying to stamp down on it internally, but also not kick anyone out. And the only people they ever kicked out were the LaRouchists, yeah, were the LaRouchites, like, because they basically had a we'll get over the sectarianism of the old I mean kind of sounds like stuff today in the DSA, to be quite frank. I always think the DSA has a lot of SDS roots, and Harrington comes out of that, and I know the DSA is like, we're not Harringtonites anymore. I'm like, I yeah, I know, I get it, but that's not my point. I suppose, like, when you look at this, though, with with LaRoucheites, it's how much more elaborate they get, and they have this issue that when even when I read, like when I read the earlier LaRouche text, they didn't seem that crazy to me if you used to sectarian Trotskyist and Maoist text. Like, and then you keep going, and they get weirder, and you start having this insistence on the importance of European classical music, and you have this like weird stuff about Kant and Plato, and like hyper idealism coming up, and then you have like the the like we're Marxist, aha, no, we're not anymore, like secret stuff, and it why do they go so much further into their weirdness and need these conspiracy theories? And because I I think we see this again. I think we're seeing I think we're seeing another time period that's gonna generate a lot of this.

SPEAKER_00 40:08

Oh, yeah. I mean, part of it is I mean, just uh maybe even just sort of be a classic gram shin here, it often tends to be of how kind of organizations are built and how they operate. I think with certainly coming out of the the period of the late 60s where there are a bunch of different groups in the SDS who believes that the right way to go was essentially just to do Leninism again instead of but but a particular type of Leninism that wasn't kind of very responsive to the political situation of the time. I think that the way that they were uh building organizations meant that it was quite easy for someone like LaRouche to construct an organization that was just sort of built around the protection and the promotion of his own his own thoughts, and because of that, because of that kind of uh personalization of power within an organization, you you get a uh well you then get tempted or maybe drawn towards forms of historical explanation that are sort of more personalist, I guess, and that kind of leans in towards more conspiratorial thinking. But also, I mean uh that then on top of that, you I mean, in in the 1970s, you see a big rise of like conspiracy culture. I mean, that the the the that there is there are segment uh sections of you know one of the best works on the early life of the LaRouche movement by Kevin Coogan, who wrote under the pseudonym uh Hilosoic Hedgehog, that when LaRouche believed that there were people out to brain people out to assassinate him, that his own followers had been brainwashed to betray him, you know, he'd been watching films like The Parallax View or you know, like episodes of like cop procedurals that featured like heavy conspiratorial elements. And so there is this like this genuine this general turn towards the more conspiratorial over the course of the 70s that is felt quite palpably, not only just in the culture, but also in just like what's happening in the news. I mean, we we mentioned it before, like but what there's a church commission that happens in the 70s, there's Watergate that happens in the 70s, and so like the there is a sense in which like conspiratorial explanations become more plausible. And what I mean, what what what one of the ways that we're see what one of the ways that we're seeing it now is you know uh the the whole Epstein stuff. I mean, uh the the we're getting to the point where like even in sort of White House sort of investigation, uh or maybe the congressional investigation of people comparing you know what happens with happened with Epstein to uh to Petergate. So even with these sort of stories of of conspiracy in the sense that power is now sort of wrapped up with particular people, there is a sort of more leaning towards kind of conspiratorial explanations. I think that's where the well, that's where the repetition is, and it has to do potentially with the sort of like the crisis of like uh the crisis of uh the crisis of particular dominant ideologies and the the the uh the sense that particular you know uh the the classes who are supposed to sort of uh run everything are losing people's confidence, not only material not only materially, but sort of also ideologically as well.

C. Derick Varn 44:00

Well, this does it just answers me to like uh an element of Gramsci that I think is underexplored, which is his attempt to deal with subjective and conductive issues amongst the ruling classes, because one of the things that Gramsci is concerned about, and this is from Lennon, this is straight up from Lennon. He's trying to flesh it out, is that the subjective and can and objective conditions on the revolutionary side is not just about the ideologies around the revolutionary classes, you know, for Lenin, that's primarily the working class, the secondary maybe the peasantry, depending on the top period Lenin's talking. Um the what is what is clear. Here is though, is like there's they are picking up this cons this concern from Gramsci about the decayed leadership class, and one of the things that classical Leninists would have offered during this time period is the 70s had an objective economic crisis and a subjective ideological crisis, but they never melded into a movement of any kind. And in fact, the classical Leninist thing, which unfortunately I also see being abandoned a lot by Marxists today, I literally wrote a letter to Compact Magazine about this. Is that conspiracism muddled this process in some key ways and was actually an offset from it? Because even though conspiracies are real, and like you know, Lenin wrote about the uh you know the secret police all the time, that it becomes over-explanatory for what is going on and actually can be used to as a way of of saving elements of capitalism, which is what both the Judea Bolsheviks and William Lynn slash who else uh used to do this stuff uh of these old uh guard guy who wrote Leviathan and his enemies, uh Sam Francis and these like people who were quasi-right nationalists. I mean, like Lynde is interesting because he's smart and for those people don't know, and he's also and funny, yeah. No, he's hilarious, actually. Lind Lynde is fascinating because he does seem to pick he does seem to have picked up on this this stuff from LaRouche. Although do you know how directly he was influenced?

SPEAKER_00 46:30

Okay, so like this is basically. I mean, I I've I have a friend, Ian Gardner, shout out, proper lad, and he managed to talk to a lot of the people who were in my book. I mean, but but but by the time I started seriously researching this, I mean uh I got a lot of like requests to have interviews rebuffed because they could just Google my name and see that you know exactly who I who I was and what my motivation was. But he he was able to get the get get interviews with these people, like Michael Minnesino, who is in the LaRouche

Courting The Right And Liberty Lobby

SPEAKER_00 47:07

movement. He got like an interview with William S. Lind and a whole bunch of sort of LaRouchites and people who are around it in that area. And what you found out was that a guy called Raymond V. Ryan, who was friends with William S. Lind, got like sent a copy of one of these LaRouche magazines, which the LaRouche movement were doing all the time. And basically, there are classic Trotskyists of like setting up different front groups and then sending and then just doing then printing out a whole bunch of newspapers and magazines and sending them out to everyone. And yeah, Raymond V Rain was sort of kind of compelled by this idea, and he ends up writing what is called it's a document called Critical Theory Colon, a special research report, and that was written in 1996, and it's completely lost. Like my my my friend Ian has like spoken to Raymond Vrain's daughter, and apparently just all of his paper, all of his papers, all of his books just sort of either got thrown out or sold as sold sold elsewhere, but it is kind of quoted in various other documents, but but apparently, I think on an episode of The Next Revolution, which was the TV show that William S. Lee Lind hosted that was run by the new right think tank Free Congress Foundation and was basically the precursor to Fox News. I mean, you know, everyone who worked on national empowerment television ended up working for Fox News. He mentioned how he basically got all of these ideas about the Frankfurt School from Raymond Rain, who got them from uh from the LaRouchites. But for for Lynn's, I mean, he he his clever, he was clever enough to like basically strip the basic narrative, basic elements of all of like the weird LaRouchite points, and just sort of to keep things keep the kind of more plausible narrative about the Frankfurt school, which then informed his like version of cultural Marxism. So, I mean, I th as I write in the book, I mean that what's kind of almost underwhelming about it is that it's just all coincidence. It's just sort of like a mate of William S. Lind happened to get a magazine one day, and he sort of found one of the articles semi-convincing, and he wrote something about it, which then uh Lynde was like, Well, that this seems very similar to what I'm writing about at the moment. Because then before, but before then, he sort of was using terms like well, originally his term was cultural radicalism. That was the term he used for all of the different trends that he would uh uh eventually associate with cultural Marxism. Then uh early in the 90s, he starts using the phrase social and cultural Marxism, but without any sort of reference to the Frankfurt School. And then when he's starting to write about the Frankfurt School, he just sort of cuts it straight to cultural Marxism, which is a much sort of catchier name. And I, as he's sort of admitted in interviews, a kind of much more effective, like delegitimizing tool for like sort of turning people off political correctness or turning people off Black Lives Matter. But even then, I'm like even when I hear that, I think that that's just sort of placing too much, I don't know, maybe too much emphasis in the power of words. Because I mean, I think that the people who get uh who receive messages about cultural Marxism are probably like not that keen on political correctness to begin with. Whereas for William Lind, he's sort of like, well, what will turn people off political correctness is if they think it's cultural Marxism. Whereas I think that people people are drawn to the idea of cultural Marxism because in a certain way they don't necessarily like things like political correctness with things that are associated with political correctness or with wokeness. Because I mean it is still, I mean, we even though there are several several members in the White House administration now who are you know have you know used these narrative used these stories about the Frankfurt School, it's still kind of rare to kind of encounter talk about cultural Marxism more broadly in the comparison to like to wokeness. And really, I think the people who pay most attention to like uses of cultural Marxism in political discourse are left-wing people because we have had a lot of discussions among ourselves about you know how the narrative of cultural Marxism is wrong and uh and and its associations with various sort of much more reactionary figures or much more sort of extra extreme figures like Anders Bravic. And it's it it reminds me I I'll wrap up in just a second, it reminds me of a poll that I saw just before the 2020 election. Uh I mean it's an opinion poll, so the questionable accuracy, but it it it says that 94% of Democrats knew what QAnon was, and 8% of Republicans knew what QAnon was. And my sort of you know, but uh uh but uh on the notepad reasoning of this is because the I mean it the the the left is more eager to sort of pounce on conspiracy theories that the that the the right are speaking about and sort of report back to our own rather than actually maybe spend that time focusing on the kind of reactionary or ineffective pro you know issues with our with our own ideas or our own ideas of organizing our own talking points, right?

C. Derick Varn 53:13

Well, yeah, this this this reminds me, for example, when people learned about Alexander Dugan. You had left you had certain leftists and a lot of liberals all of a sudden discovering what was a real attempt to do some left-wing capture. I do want to say that like the the Duganists explicitly tried to create a a red-brown pipeline, like that's not a secret, but this became something that like leftists through at each other. I remember everybody, including even like Donald Parkinson, who wrote a whole treatise on the problems of LaRouchism, got accused of being red brown during this time period. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:52

Well, yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 53:55

And then weirdly, you started seeing for for a brief period that it has come back down, but through people like Caleb Moppen, this attempt to to actually do a left-right hybrid formation, which kind of all liquidated into the Center for Political Innovation and then later on into whatever the fuck MAGA communism is and the ACP, which I guess is an actual organization. And a funny thing is, if you like look at Lurcism, the ACP runs in a lot of the same conspiracies and then will look like they're like doing standard Marxist-Leninist defensism, but then like once you get into their actual beliefs and whatnot, all of a sudden you discover that their key documents reference Carl Schmitt and those types way more than anything Marx and Marxian. And I think that's that's an interesting problem that we have to deal with. One of the things though that I find so fascinating about this, when we talk about this like left, white, left, right shuffle on these conspiracy theories, is like how crazy it gets after the Tea Party. Because the two things that really happen is the Tea Party really likes Cold War rhetoric but applied in very strange ways, like using Mark Rudd and people around the weather underground, like happened to teach a class that Obama took as this proof of cultural Marxism really being the core of Obamaism and this, that, and the other. And this is concurrent to what you read a lot about in your book, Breitbart trying to do what American conservative the American Conservative and Talkie Mag could not do, probably because they were too opposed to the GOP of the of the aughts, but which was to mainstream that into the GOP because American Conservative alienated too many conservatives by being uh like rapidly anti-Iraq war. Take mag had too many ties to explicit right nationalist or you know, national review types. Breitbart Andrew Breitbart managed to take a lot of those talking points and strip them of their like occidental review and whatnot of you know past and mainline them for normal conservatives in a way that other people had tried,

How CIA Claims Get Distorted

C. Derick Varn 56:27

like uh John Darbysher tried at the National Review, but he got booted for being a racist because of it. Breitbart, which was happening at the same time, somehow managed to avoid all those racial nationalist accusations for a while and was never, you know. I mean, it really is the the ideological glue that takes what you know the Tea Party's rebellion against, which initially people forget was actually against the Bush administration, then it bled over into it bled over into anti-Obama stuff, and then according to its founders, got Astroturfed, but took this astroturf new movement that kind of looked kind of smelt like a moral majority movement, and then got all these radical traditionalists and paleoconservative talking points into it. And now it's like you see these things come come out, and you you'll see like James Lindsay or Michael Levin or something open their mouth. And even Paul Gottfried and some of the people who you know codified this reading of history will go. I mean, although Gottfried, like you said, thought this was really just liberalism, will go in and say, This is ridiculous, like you you have you have taken this like way too far, this is dumb, you're embarrassing us. Um and so it's like what do you make of that like tendency? Because it does seem to have not just grown, but when we talk about Lynn or even maybe less the LaRouchites, but Lynn's conspiracies sound perfectly fucking plausible, like they do. I was convinced of them in my 20s, to be quite honest with you. That there have been these liberalizing Marxists who had who had given up on Marxism because the the working class revolution didn't happen, and they gave us Frankfurt school post-Marxism, post-structuralism, and look at the left and the aughts, it's embarrassing and cringe. Yeah, of and so I mean we didn't use those words, but that's what wait until you see the left in the 2020s. It's embarrassing and cringe, and and I mean, for me, one of the ironies of this is their respect for classical Marxism, ironically imposing it to cultural Marxism, actually actually started getting me to study Marxism and realizing how bullshit the conspiracy was, including reading Adorno and Gramsci and going, Oh, you guys are just stealing their ideas.

SPEAKER_02 59:12

Like, like you are talking about like cultural Marxist conspiracies, but your theory for change is culture industry and cultural hegemony, like and that's still true.

C. Derick Varn 59:24

You see this in Mark Rufo, you see this, although Mark Rufo's funny because you can tell him Matt. Oh, you mean uh uh Chris Rufo? Chris Rufo, not Mark Rufo, yeah. Chris Ruffo, yeah. You see this in Christopher Rufo, you see this in I remember listening to the conservatives plus Nina Power, who I mean, probably we should just call it conservative, over at Compact talking to Shell to I forget which Jeffrey it was, and they were just parroting like the most vulgar forms of Gramsci, ironically, which was the same form of Gramsci I was taught by liberals who were misconstruing him in the 1980s. Oh, yeah, who were totally removing him from his from his original context, and we we need to give the the late Assad hater a lot of credit for for actually demystifying Gramsci in English because Gramsci is one of these people who is cited all the time and yet no one's ever fucking actually read but like three things by him and they don't even realize that the prison notebooks are in code. And I still don't think they're completely translated. Like I think we only have some of them, like yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:37

I mean, yeah, no, we uh but before Joseph Buliec died, he got to I think notebook eight, and those are all the draft notebooks, those are all the notebooks where Gramsci is still just taking notes. That's before he even sort of tries to work those notes into a more kind of like coherent plan for an essay. So we'll when we get that classic like selections from prison uh from the prison notebooks that comes out in the early 70s. That that is I don't know, it's a real bastardization of the prison notebooks, but it makes it seem more like the way it the very way it's printed, right? Just makes it seem more complete and more finished than it's it actually is. I mean it's it's kind of like I mean just imagine people, you know, uh a couple of decades after uh after your death, just sort of going through you know the things that you jotted down on a legal pad or something. That is I mean, yeah, I I mean he he clearly had like very I mean when you read his letters, of course, like he had like a very clear research plan. Well, no, he had a number of very clear research plans that become became more refined over the years, but yeah, nothing in the prison notebooks is sort of like him going, oh, this is my definitive statement, or this is my final statement, or this is kind of like a work of political theory that I want to put out there. Because see, he he was, I mean, yeah but before then, I mean, he was kind of more of more like agitational writer. There was one of the letters from Grampshin in prison where he's asked whether he wants to have the articles that he had written that he'd written in sort of various new newspapers into volumes, and his response was like, No, those are all those are it makes no sense to collect them into like an essay collection because they're not sort of theoretical statements, they are sort of interventions as as an organizer or that uh almost. I think when we are reading prison notebooks, you've got to catch on to I mean you've you've got to try and strike out for through strike away through what Guido Ligori, who's one of the best Italian gramshi scholars, through the pathways of this thought. I mean, it it is never kind of uh the the kind of concepts that we've sort of frozen from the texts sort of I mean to to borrow, I mean, what what I think is maybe one of the the better ideas from Gabriel Rockell's work, is that the the the the they are kind of commodities in the theory industry of like these are the these are terms that we we can use that sort of signal a kind of radical chic. But what when you use those concepts from Gramsci, people often forget that for for him those were concepts in movement. They were the concepts themselves weren't ideas, they were sort of a a way into his his method or a way into his thinking. Sorry, man. I feel like that's like a a tangent on Gramsci. But I mean I uh I should mention that this book has sort of grew out of my dissertation where the what were the first two chapters were me doing like were essentially kind of doing a reading of Gramsci and what it means to sort of study what it means, what it means to sort of use his approach to intellectual practices as a way to sort of talk about intellectual history, the intellectual history of ideas that he used in political praxis. Like I see cultural Marxism being used. And so sort of strike striking that line between uh the sort of philological research that's coming out Italy at the moment about like what Gramsci was sort of thinking through at the time when he was writing the prison notebooks, with what is sort of necessary now, and like trying to think in a Gramscian way about what what what what is happening and the histories that sort of have fed into the the conflicts that we have now. And I I don't necessarily know the answer, but like this is like the the the the whole kind of premise of my book that's completely cut out because at the same time I don't know necessarily if everyone who's reading this book wants to have like a hundred pages of sort of exegesis of the prison notebooks before they start reading about LaRouche.

C. Derick Varn 1:05:24

Yeah, I mean I think it's I think that's important though, because understanding what Gramsci was actually on about makes a lot of these claims particularly ludicrous. And then the other the other thing is just a historical. I mean, Gramsci is a is a figure filled with historical ambiguity because the ultra-left of Italy wants to distance themselves from them, even though Bordiga didn't actually have a nearly as hostile a relationship to Gramsci as is assumed from his like Leon's thesis

Dugan Multipolarity And Huntington Echoes

C. Derick Varn 1:05:57

stuff. He literally like hung out with them on the prison island, apparently. And like it apparently it is recorded that he even talked about trying to break Gramsci off the island, and then he gets he he gets sent out into the public and Gramsci doesn't, and Gramsci dies before anything happens. But also, like Tagliati, whose name I am undoubtedly mispronouncing, also has this myth around Gramsci, says Gramsci is not the founder of the of the Italian Communist Party, but he is the first general secretary of the Italian Communist Party, and they use that fact to write Bordega out of the history. And so he's already a figure that is contested in the history of Marxism. He's also, you know, some. That everybody claims because you know, like Rosa Luxemburg, he dies before a lot of splits are completely hardened. But like while Gramsci goes through with the Bolshevisation of the of the Italian Communist Party, which is really a different Italian Communist Party. The other thing is the Italian Communist Party goes into clandestine mode, and even in like most official histories, the first Italian Communist Party and the second Italian Communist Party, even though Tagliati is the is the through line and a claim to the lineage of Gramsci as the through line, they aren't the same party. Like because the the the elements that came together in the late 30s in the popular front really weren't the same elements that brought together the first Italian Communist Party. And this even shows up in a lot of like abbreviations, they abbreviate them differently. I bring all this up though because that makes Gramsci like an ideal figure for first liberals because they can recast them in terms of and my lineage there is this comes out of like the late 60s recasting of Gramsci in terms of the of the formal commentary and aligned parties turning to Eurocommunism, and so Gramsci becomes a way to justify that that switch and becomes a kind of bridge to post-Marxism.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:14

But it is a i and then we'll say the topic of Chantal Mouf's first book, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:08:19

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Um which you know, my pet Nora Chantel Mouf literally just wrote Paplet with Daniel Tut that it's basically MUFism bad. Like, but I think this is why I've been so grateful for Assad Hayder because he goes back and goes into what we do know about Gramsci in a lot more nuanced ways, and we realize that, like, so you have a Eurocommunist reconception of Gramsci, which affects a liberal reconception of Grammy, which is also picked on by the both the LaRussites and William Lynn as this mechanism explaining, you know, somehow how the Frankfurt School is variant. Now, I do think the Frankfurt School is variant from from both Bolshevism and quote unquote classical Marxism, but but I ironically, if you actually read Gramsci and his stuff about cultural hegemony, that's already in Lenin. He's just trying to work it out more. Like, like that's that's in Lenin.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:18

Lenin writes about hegemony, like no, as he I even Gramsci's theory for the intellectuals, which I mean, a lot of people sort of say, Oh no, it's all about the distinction between traditional organic intellectuals. That they also never mentioned that that distinction is totally provisional in Gramsci's work, and it's not like those are like two separate concepts. It's all it's all about like a spectrum of organic the Italian word is organic organitista or something along those lines. But yeah, I mean he he's basically trying to sort of resolve what he saw as maybe a kind of limitation of uh of Lenin's ideas of the intelligent uh intelligentsia of like how how how are you sort of then fight fighting for proletarian self-emancipation if your whole vision of revolution revolves around the ideas of the party of intellectuals coming to essentially swoop in and save uh save the working class. And I mean his approach to intellectuals is just sort of continuing what what Lenin wrote, but sort of improving upon it. I mean, Gramsci is a total Leninist, and I think that the the sort of narrative that Lind and others spin about sort of Gramsci and Lukash totally breaking with I guess the um breaking with the tradition of Marxism after the Bolshevik Revolution is sort of misplaced. Because I mean even in the the sort of the famous piece that Gramsci writes of sort of against capital, where you know he is he's he's observing that you know Russia is the the place where people didn't have according to sort of second international theories that that that's not where the revolution should take place. Where what was my what was my point here? Uh that that's not where the revolution should take place. He is specifically aligning himself with with Lenin, with Bolshevism, and that's what Linz says that him and the Frankfurt School are totally trying to break away from, which is why he says that he doesn't use the phrase cultural Bolshevism. There's a 1990s interview where he's with the American free press, which is sort of associated with Liberty Lobby, who are sort of more cat a more neo-Nazi group, and he gets asked why he uses the term cultural Marxism rather than cultural Bolshevism. And you can tell that Lind doesn't actually, or maybe is pretending not to know the way that cultural Bolshevism was used, or the meaning of cultural Bolshevism, because he says that you know but Bolshevism is all about having like this sort of frontal assault on the state, whereas like cultural Marxism is this sort of uh you know more gradualist thesis about sort of taking over a uh taking over a society. So to wrap this thought up, uh this is kind of why I I uh uh in the book I say that it's maybe too simplistic to say that cultural Marxism is just a sort of a taking of cultural Bolshevism and rebranding it as another term, because I mean because for the the person William S. Lind who you know came up with this term and associated with the Frankfurt School, he didn't really demonstrate an awareness of it. But when he encounters you know the the people on further to the right who are familiar with this history, they're able to take it on and put it into their forums, you know, put put it into places like Metapedia, where they're able to present the two ideas as synonyms.

C. Derick Varn 1:13:24

Yeah, I mean this stuff about Metapedia and this stuff in the early arts where there is a deliberate recombining of Judeo-Bolshevism and cultural Marxism, which the which I will it to give some of these William Lyndon and Paul Gottfried and some of these other paleoconservatives credit, with the exception of people like Joel Sobrin, who actually always linked the two, they did actually try to move away from that. What is fascinating to me though is what they have actually ended up doing is combining all these theories in a rib mirage of where Judeo-Bolshevism is back on the table, even when people like Richard Spencer were critical of it. Like, if you think about I remember reading Richard Spencer or Greg Johnson of countercurrents, which is a different there's two countercurrents, one is extremely right wing, one is not, but uh one is Trotskist, they're not the same thing, but of of countercurrents, and they had this like very strange splitting the baby on anti-Semitism of like of like we have to like we can't really blame everything on Western all the problems of Western culture on the Jews, and then if we do that, we also have to exclude so much of Western culture, blah blah blah. And they basically get laughed out of the room later on.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:43

But that was actually early on kind of the default uh alt-right stance, was like what I'm and so sorry if I can just interrupt, but I'm I just wanted to mention that in like the I I talked about this in the book, but the the the 2002 Holocaust denial conference that Lett Linz goes to that's picked up by the Southern Poverty Law Center, where he he he's offering this theory of uh of cultural Marxism, and as part of his typical spiel about sort of why the Frankfurt School had to leave Germany in the Nazi period, he does say that some members of the Frankfurt School were Jewish. What happens immediately after that when you read the report on the conference? Is that this guy called do you know E. Michael Jones? Yeah, I know of E. Michael Jones. Yeah, he he stands up immediately afterwards. He starts sort of starts berating Lind for not being tough enough on Jewish people and you know how Jews uh you know uh are basically came to the United States and tried to sort of persecute Catholics, which is his whole uh his whole thing. And so there is that kind of like there is that angle of people like William S. Lynn or William S. Spencer trying to get away from these sort of more anti-Semitic things, and that's that that that has been sort of continuous throughout throughout the hit the history of this.

C. Derick Varn 1:16:09

Yeah, I remember this when when when Jordan Peterson like is because you know, you and I met to talk about this uh in Boise. Yeah, uh-huh. And we were talking about Peterson's use of neo-Marxism, and I was like, Well, it's basically a weird mixture of Judeo-Bolshevism and cultural Marxist conspiracies,

Why Conspiracy Thinking Spreads

C. Derick Varn 1:16:27

but cleaned up of all the anti-Semic implications of either one, right? Anti-Semitic implications of either of either theory. But when you even were in paleoconservative Ron Paul world, like they were not nearly as quiet about that, like they were very clearly beginning to relink the two ideas, even though they were separate. And I remember like this is one of the things that horrified me is hitting a Joe Sobrin article and a Solchanesian article being shared by some somebody on loop rock or rock tom, basically just raving about how the Jews calls Bolshevism and then they call cultural Marxism, and then they owe us an apology, blah blah blah blah blah. If they weren't, even though it wasn't like you know, quite as as anti-Semitic as you might later get.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:22

Well, I I do think about one of like one of the last Charlie Kirk broadcasts where he's talking about the Palestinian protests and saying, you know, uh Jewish people are like the number top number one donors of this sort of like quasi-mark of these quasi-Marxist ideas. And so they are now sort of reaping what they've so what they've sown when it comes to pro-Palestinian protests, with the implication being that Palestinian solidarity is anti-Semitic. But I mean then on top of that, there is the the the whole kind of I mean the to link it back to stuff that we've talked about earlier, is what the motivations are for you know people like the LaRushites, people like the paleoconservatives to be anti-war in certain in certain contexts as well.

C. Derick Varn 1:18:17

Which means you can tie this also, you can somehow, I mean, the the real leap is to do the Frankfurt School, uh, Congress of Cultural Freedom, partisan review, partisan review, Leo Strauss, Leo Strauss to Commentary Magazine, Commentary Magazine to the Reagan administration. Oh, those are the guys who beat us out in Reagan fusionism because Buchanan was originally part of Pat Buchanan, was originally part of that. But you know, by the 80s, when be both Buchanan and Robinson lose the nomination for the GOP president against, I believe, Herbert George Herbert Walker Bush. Or is it in 92? I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:58

It's 92, it's it's 92 because he has 92, not 88. He delivers a great speech at the RNC, uh took to Bush, where he talks about that that that Clinton, the most thing he knows about foreign policy is having breakfast at the International House of Pat Pancakes. That's where that line comes from. Yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:19:18

Well, what's funny about that is like I'm I I'm glad I'm talking to Scholar because I'm pulling from this from my memory as a child because I I remember following the stuff. And you know, by the odds, you have these Ron Paul is seen as the like way to clean a lot of this that doesn't work out so well. And their ties to, you know, I mean, remind to remind people about the ties to Trumpism here, Pat Buchanan ran against Trump for the reform party for 2000 for the reform party, and Trump was supposedly the more moderate of the two at the time, uh, and quote unquote the less racist one. I had a I had a never Trump friend of mine who used to like harass me about it, and then I realized he supported Trump in the reform party debates in 2000. And I realized, like, oh, he was fighting with himself, not me. But the there is direct links to all this. The other thing is Breitbart, I think we need to talk about the function of Breitbart to normalize the biggest.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:28

Oh, yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:20:29

Because we we we talked about it a little bit, but like Breitbart takes these conspiracies that also rhyme with the party talking points in the late aughts against Obama, and he does this thing that ties them all together, but strips them of any association with explicit right nationalism somehow and also makes them dumber in a way that makes them also more likely to be more popular.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:58

Well, he's I mean, I like I talk about in the book that how I mean to talk about you know, sort of uh real bastardized interpretation of Gramsci, like Breitbart is like a son of Rush Limbaugh, and Limbaugh is sort of uh saying, you know, what we really need to do as conservatives, as people on the right in America, is to sort of follow what what what Gramsci advised us to do and sort of really like get engaged in sort of cultural struggle. And I think that Andrew Breitbart is just sort of one of those. I mean, I didn't always want to like have I didn't necessarily want to subscribe to like a great man of history thesis, but I think that at certain points in history there are people who are kind of quite talented and quite talented who who managed to perform a function within certain political movements or are able to sort of fit into what is happening at the time to achieve something. And then I think with Andrew Bright by himself himself, I think that he was the he was like the pro. I mean, not the pro I mean one of the first conservative social media influences. So he was able to sort of start, he he he was riding the beginning of the wave to the sort of media landscape that we see today that's based on a kind of uh on various kinds of technologies, various kinds of platforms that have been rewarded or cultivated or built on you know where capital is right now. And I think that you know, I think Breitbart was just sort of you know kind of premonition of uh Chris Rufo or in like all these sort of sort of you know people on Twitch Twitter who are able to get kind of messages out there to be shared, even if they are not kind of right, but they are sort of successful in a way. What is kind of like a counterpoint to this is like where what where then do you put Nick Fuentes? Because Nick Fuentes is kind of like a crossover of Andrew Braitbart and Richard Spencer, right?

C. Derick Varn 1:23:22

Right, but without the without the the European new right baggage that Richard has. Because you don't have to read a bunch of obscure European books about racism to RB R be confluent in whatever the fuck Dugan's talking about to understand Fuentes, which you kind of did. I mean, this is one of the things about the about the alt-right, both as its own movement and as part of Radex, and even the neo-reactionary movement, which which got conflated with it, but actually was separate, but still complained about it, still used the same conspiracies. I mean, one of the things about Yarvin and Land is they're also doing the whole like somehow liberalism is just Marxism thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:07

Which interestingly, and the first thing I ever wrote about cultural Marxism, and we talked about this at the Boise conference, is I was doing, I mean, you know, I was much much more of a conventional sort of academic PhD student at the point at the time. So I was doing like this sort of compare and contrast between like the paleoconservative idea of the cultural Marxism and the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary idea of the cathedral. And back in the back in back back in the olden days, back in 2018, there were very distinct ideas, and there were neoreactionary pieces talking about how cultural Marxism was a stupid idea because it suggests that the only thing that's gone wrong with American society was happened in the 1950s or 1960s. Whereas for neo-reactionaries, what's wrong with what's wrong with the American founding is that it's sort of more is the idea of democracy itself, whereas really for them it a country should be run more like a corporation. But what's happened in in the time was especially in the time of the the Trump second uh the second Trump administration is that all of these distinctions are now kind of irrelevant. And I think that's not that's not just because of like some of the kind of some of the compromises that people on the on the right have made to try and secure more influence within the Trump administration,

Lind’s Pipeline From LaRouche

SPEAKER_00 1:25:38

but also a kind of byproduct of sort of social media itself where a lot of these different subcultures or these different narratives end up becoming conflated with one another, and there are not no longer there's no longer the kind of intellectual effort put into trying to distinguish them. I don't know if that's true, but I mean it's something that I'm that that just sort of it's off the dome. It's off the dome.

C. Derick Varn 1:26:05

No, well, I I I think that I think that's an interesting problem because when you also look at like people like a Rome McIntyre, who are like JD Vance and that they were just standard neoconservative Republicans in the aughts until after COVID, they've been actively going back and trying to retie this into elite theory with James Burnham, cultural Marxist conspiracies, giving it a gloss with the Lester McIntyre who who never would have continenced cultural Marxism conspiracy, even when he even in its conservative term.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:41

Yeah, yeah. But he did write one of his first books was a critique of Marcusa, of course. Right, yes. Which was more which is a pretty classic critique of sort of Marcusa from the left, really. Yeah. Which rhymes in strange ways with sort of like um Gabriel Rockwell's critique of you know, Marcusa was maybe was too pessimistic about socialist projects or the revolutionary potential of the working class in the United States at the time. Although that's incredibly debatable, and I think that there are people at the time like you know, Baron Swiss, who also came to the same conclusions.

C. Derick Varn 1:27:31

Yeah. I mean what what I find fascinating about this though is like okay, if you take these ideological lineages, then you would also be surprised to learn what what McIntyre thought about Stalin. Because he he does turn on on official MLm after uh after 52. I find this all very fascinating though, because there is a way, what I mentioned earlier, there is a way which this theory has gotten dumber. I think Jordan Peterson is like after Breitbart is the biggest mass popularizer of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:21

But sorry to sorry to interrupt you. He's not in the kind of because he's getting like a totally his idea is from a completely different place, but I think that the ideas of postmodern neo Marxism then creates the conditions for ideas about cultural Marxism to that to uh to take place or to grow in popularity. But I will I will always dispute the degree. to which sort of cultural Jordan Peterson was kind of like consciously or even inadvertent like promoting this idea of cultural Marxism because really the Frankfurt school is kind of absent from his ideas. And what he's drawing on is really kind of like Randian or sort of more libertarian kind of anti-Marxism that is at least in its lineage separate from the kinds of ideas about cultural Marxism that not only I talk about in the book but that that that there are. But I mean I think it all it comes back to the thing we were talking about earlier is it in like the the the the the time of social media or the time of the conservative influencer where these distinctions start to no longer matter as much. And so Jordan Peterson's not is not like a a cultural Marxism guy but the way that he talks about Marxism means that he produces a whole generation of anti-cultural Marxism guys.

C. Derick Varn 1:29:53

Well I I think I think I would agree with you. I mean like one of the things that we both said at the Boise conference is Peterson actually didn't really know what he was talking about and wasn't picking up on the William but also wasn't picking up on the William Lind vaguely LaRouche parts of the conspiracy and was freaked out when he learned about Judea Bolshevism so he started further hedging his postmodern neo-Marxism categories to to also like Lind and Godfrey and other people and spent Richard Spencer moving away from explicit anti-Semitism and also for and getting all of those weird suits. Yeah that's true but I do think you're right as in the age of the conservative influencer when you look at like the Drudge report which didn't do this cultural Marxist stuff it was his own weird thing and as a now out of the loop because they went they were not they were Trump skeptics and still kind of are what you see here is this this grand this grand co like coalescing of all these things and then it ends up in Alex Jones world and more standard conspiracy places at the same time as you have it being worked out with people like Arun McIntyre tying it in because I do think to McIntyre is picking up on Peterson and then tying all these other things into it to try to popularize a kind of synthesis of what is standard old school Republican with with like actually explicitly post-fascist movements like like radical traditionalism and stuff like that. And your work is interesting in that you weren't the only people who ties all this together because there's a lot of work right now by Sedgwick et al. on radical traditionalism and like its influence on like fourth positionism and national Bolshevism but it doesn't go into the more normal paleoconservative overlap and there really was I mean like like Pat Buchanan andor occultism depending on which way you entered was used as a gateway drug into this stuff. Yeah there was a time when like the the American conservative while it was well people like Kevin Phillips were pushing this anti-Bush line over there and Rod Dreyer was beginning to come up over there you also had them employ at one point Richard Spencer as their cultural editor and and uh Paul Gottfried never stopped you know both talking to them and also talking to explicit white nationalists which was weird because Paul Godfrey's Jewish and but this was really a thing going on and what I found so strange about this if you remember the the way that you know certain kinds of intellectual anti-fascism was going in at the end of the Trump administration is people weren't paying attention for this obvious stuff and they were looking at stuff like order of nine angles and like the most fringe dangerous but fringy elements of all this and like not looking at the stuff that like you all you have to do is read the text and you can see the direct lineage like William Lynn I mean William Lynn just ends up being like one of these secret because it's not just class civilization it's not just cultural Marxism he is also one of the primary thinkers on fourth generation warfare and honestly he's brilliant on that stuff he really is like when John Dolan came up with Gary Becker as his voice for war nerd for his paleoconservative war war critic voice I'm pretty sure he was basing it off of William Land you know partially anyway I mean I've never asked John if he was but I mean what do you make of this now because the the one thing that's brought this all back into prominence is there's a certain kind of Marxist Leninism some people call it neo-Stalinism I don't because that's confusing actually that has adopted this to some degree some some of it has stayed in the traditional normal Marxist Leninist milieu and they blonde onto Dominico Lacerdo and Gabriel Rockhill but I want to point out and this is not because

Tea Party To Breitbart Mainstreaming

C. Derick Varn 1:34:27

I like our Lacerda and Rockill very much but that the claims made in that milieu are more than the actual claims made by Rockhill are yes yeah totally and then from there you see this all over MAGA communism and then you start seeing this pop up on the right and there does seem to be a way in which this over like you know my critique of Rockill isn't that he's necessarily wrong about the Frankfurt school it's just to me it doesn't explain that much like I'm like yeah I'm like I'm like the problems of the SDS were not just because Makuzik gave speeches there.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:05

And the problems of sectarian Marxism in the 70s has a lot more to do with the Sino-Soviet split than it does what a few professors were doing whether or not they had ties to CAA or not and and also just the organizational problems within those different groups too right oh yeah I mean like the SDS is a I can't think of an organization which would have been more easy for feds to to to integrate and other weirdos I mean like like you know sorry just to interrupt but also the right was struggling with this the same problem at the same time of like you have like the big split within young Americans for freedom between people who are like we are we are libertarians who want to smoke breed and listen to to to to rock music and then the more so traditionalists are sort of like we just want to make the we just want America to be Catholic. And so at the end of this decade there's just like this weird kind of splitism within like the the political movements on both spectrum on both sides of the political spectrum are in the country. And I think it just maybe speaks to less like the the influence of you know particular academics and more about you sort of how what what what the hurdles were to organize a kind of mass organization at the time with all of the different kind of tendencies going on which is something that Rock Hill just doesn't wrestle with which is kind of which is one of my main frustrations with the book because it is a kind of I mean I didn't talk about this in my own book but I it's something I'm thinking about more about sort of like this idea of sort of genealogy without a history it's actually quite easy to establish a genealogy of particular ideas.

C. Derick Varn 1:37:03

It's how you sort of blend that with what was going on historically at the same time is where the real struggle comes in yeah I think this is this is the issue that I have with with with um with with Rock Hill too or a lot of people who talk about like how we need to do parapolitics on the left because I'm like well one we're supposed to be scientific and we have to make conspiracies happen we talk about them but you know we don't do we don't just invent speculative narratives without a whole shit ton of evidence. Like when you're talking about the secret police like trying to infiltrate the the the Bolsheviks and then promoting you know second international Marxist and revisionists like Werner Sonbart who became a Nazi anyway which the Ukraina I'm probably mispronounced that but that the secret the Zara secret police did we know they did like but we don't and Lenin never did as I I actually said in in a letter never said that this was why the second international failed and that the ideas in revisionist Marxism were because the secret police were were prompting them and that he was just saying they were popularizing them because they would distract from Bolshevik power which was probably true. And I feel this is also the case like if you're if you're saying the CAA was pushing certain western Marxist ideas because they were Soviet critical I'd be like yeah of course they were if you say the CAA invented western Marxism in a lab and explains every failure of the Western left because they weren't I don't know pro-China enough I'm not sure even what they want us to be because the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. And also this narrative gives us no answer to the Sino-Soviet split. And in fact one of the things I point out is I think this is partly a way to get around those problems that you can just make the Sino-Soviet split disappear.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:56

Yeah and and but I do think we have this this issue with with like this left white one of the issue the issues that I've talked to to Donald Parkinson about a lot is initially he was super dismissive of Red Brown accusations because of like if you remember the book against fascist creep who is that author Alexander Reed Jones no Alexander Alexander Jones Alexander Reed Ross yeah yeah right uh imagine alex jones writing for a k press that would be a warning right yeah yeah yeah but that's kind of what it was because Alex because um because Alexander Reed Ross starts off with some true statements about rep brown associations with this stuff like cultural Marxism with the Rouche yeah yeah no it's a super under it's a super underwhelming book because they get in like everybody becomes more spurious right right it's like at the at by the end of the book I'm like I think he implicated me um like you know I go around talking about like how weirdly attempts at Reb Brownism were actually my way out of the right one of the many there's a bunch of reasons I got out of the right but like it's like that freaking out about what what radical traditionalism was really code for when I realized it and also the right with even the the paleolibertarian answer to the economic downturn was was absurd in 2007 from 2005 to 2007 and that's what got me out of it like those three things together but I have talked a lot about like I the ironic thing for Reb Brownism for me is like yeah it's real but it actually led me to Marxism and I'm weird because most fish seem to go in the other part of that stream.

C. Derick Varn 1:40:51

And I I find this this very hard to talk about with people because on one hand you know when it comes to cultural Marxism I I remember you and I talked about this and Boise and I said one of the hard problems with it is like there are things that these right wingers are saying that's true that the cultural turnders happen in the 60s that it has an influence on the SDS and thus on the the broader left although it is wild to me to try to link it to people like Angela Davis because Angela Davis in the 70s not in the 90s or odds when we think about her being basically a Democrat is like a really confrontational figurehead after Gus Hall and the CPUSA and the new communist movement is actually responding largely against the kind of softness of the new left we tend to see them as like the same thing but I was like no the new left was like Marxian it's in it's as influenced by like by like C right Mills and oh yeah it's Hidley yeah yeah yeah yeah and like all these like and Stanton Lynn and all these people who were like Marx adjacent and because they were in the Midwest didn't get red scared out of uh and blacklisted weirdly but they weren't like die hard Marxist in any like they were mostly like Marx friendly ish civil rights people and which is essentially in a way what Marcusa was in America. Yeah he was he's well he's like the mal friendly version of that which is also funny because the other thing about the Frankfurt school is if you read the Marcusa Adorno letters they don't agree on very much the New Left like at all I mean one of the other ways even Paul Godfrey talks about Paul Godfrey talks about this so I'll give him credit for that is that the Frankfurt school did not get along well with the actual New Left even if the even if the Frankfurt school was highly inspirational towards it.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:04

You know there's the famous Adorno of freaking out in con cops and protesters his defense of the traditional apolitical university there's uh Horkheimer's like outright defense of the Vietnam War go ahead well no but there's also like Adorno's I mean Adorno wanted to speak to a bunch of socialist societies and new left groups and would always be like in dialogue with these people because they were also like his students at the same time it's just like I and I think Marcusa was also strangely an advocate of that like her apolitical university position. He just felt in the United States that the the American university was too complicit in like imperialist wars to too complicit within I mean I ironically the security states and with the CIA and things like that. And there was one there's one story that I don't know if you uh you know you've listened to the this wreckage interview so you may know this anecdote that I got from Douglas Kellner who knew Marcusa who was sort of walking around Columbia University with Marcusa in the late 60s and had had the encounter with some weather underground people who said Marcusa come sit with us and talk through this thing we're trying to figure

Gramsci Misreadings And Theory Industry

SPEAKER_00 1:44:27

out and they were then they were thinking about sort of like vandalizing the office of this professor who was found to have links with the Pentagon and Marcus was totally uh opposed to it he was like well I I don't want you know you should do these sort of kinds of actions at the university but if you want to blow up a bank then I'm totally fine with it and then a a week or two later there was the news that you know people have set fire to a Bank of America over in California and the degree to which that's influenced by Marcusa is debatable but I I like to think that that is sort of you know Marcuse's influence action I mean Marcuse is also weird it's it's weird to come after him as super critical of uh of all of actually existing socialism given his his break with a lot of the Frankfurt school over the Vietnam War which he was very sympathetic to the Viet Cong and also his explicit flirtations with Maoism which are you know I mean he even dedicates a book to both Ho Chi Minh and Adorno together that is by uh that's edited by Paul Bryant but that that that is a book that's sort of written by explicit Marcusians. So what's so ironic about the whole uh Rockhill thing is that all of the Marcusians are the people who supported these third world struggles whereas the people who um were like Marcus as a CI agent is entirely compromised were the people who rejected those struggles.

C. Derick Varn 1:46:02

Right I mean a lot of those are Trotsky's yeah yeah yeah yeah exactly like explicitly this is one of the funny things is that I'm like I'm like some of these weird conspiracy theories come out of Trotsky land and my favorite amusement park yeah uh with lots of people's it's it's weird Mao land's also pretty strange though but they get all muddled in the 70s kind of on the left because people start I mean one of the things that happens in the 70s after church commission is everybody accuses everybody else of being a fed uh often except the actual feds like no one accused Ioki and the and the black panthers of being a fed when it came out in the in the late aughts that he mostly he most definitely fucking was uh for those of you who don't know that he was like famous in the Bay Area as being the guy who was gun running for the Panthers but also apparently he was doing it under the auspices of the CIA or no of the FBI it was the FBI but still he was an informant and I find all this stuff kind of amusing today because I'm like in some ways I think the issue with with the with the conspiracy theories is in a weird way they're not paranoid enough um to quote G-Shack on one of his times where I actually think he made some sense. And that they're too simple and you're not dealing with the fact that like no there's like 55 factions trying to fight over influence over these left wingers and the CIA is of course one of them and these academics are being funded probably I mean like I do think it is it is interesting to note who the CIA was willing to funnel money to and who they weren't and who was willing to accept it after a certain point and who wasn't but we talk about the Congress of Cultural Freedom like I mentioned Lash outed what that was in the 60s but no one before the 60s seems to have known the extent of central intelligence agency involvement in the Congress of Cultural Freedom Burnham was not you know Burnham was not as obvious a figure at that time period and his relationship to Trotskyism was also a little bit vaguer and but I also find it ironic that one of the things about this left is Burnhamite categories have been naturalized into like the discourse so PMC is is from John and Barbara Ehrenreich but it's an attempt to do yeah manager Burnhamite managerial theory on the left and this is another way in which these people tie this in together because one thing you will see in the modern cultural commentariat on the right is complaining about the Frankfurt school as the godfathers of the PMC which they will use to John and Barbara Ehrenreich because a lot of leftists are familiar with it and have used it in their own critiques. But but but they never read they never read part two of the essay no everyone always reads part one they never read part two where we can say come to conclusions that Barbara and John Ehrenreich were like no actually this is a wrong solution to the problem so everyone ignores the part two and everyone just sort of focuses on the part where they're like uh the the the that this class is a problem for left-wing organizing right and later on they they miss the part two which is oh it is being proletarianized and there are divisions within it um some of which are becoming more and more proletarian weirdly the only there's only two people really pick up on that Gerber winnant and then strangely Christian parenty christian parenty actually talks bizarrely about the the the proletarianization of the petit bourgeoisie being why the PMC is actually partially proletarian has divided interest but then what he does is he combines that with right wing administrative state critique to go and say but they're still protected because the administrative state protects him and as a as a fateful inrogue to the proletariat yes returning us ironically from a son of a well much Michael Parenti was actually a Marxist is actually and I don't mean this as like gatekeeper of Marxism I mean even himself is a little bit up for debate because he never joined a Marxist organization he never like he never even said he endorsed Marxism.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:41

He was just defending the Soviet Union yeah no I mean joining a Marxist Organization is when you really learn to hate Marxists, which sort of brings us back to sort of cultural Marxism.

C. Derick Varn 1:50:53

Well, this is the this is the other thing, is like this this appeal, this is really appealing to ex-Marxists who have gone through some organization and been like, This is super fucking annoying. I mean, they're not the only group that does that. There's another group that I may or may not have been involved with at one point that I think does the same thing. But there's you know, as I always tell people, like, look, I'm in the DSA, but let me tell you that as a 55-year-old man who's been on the left since like 2007, back when that was an old, also back in that part of the period of the left where being 27 actually made you old in the movement. No, you go ahead, sorry. No, no, I think that's just fair. What would you about to say?

SPEAKER_00 1:51:39

Oh no, is it it was also the period where um the there were only two socialists in the high school. There's one like me who's sort of more like a I like Tony Ben, and I'm sort of like a a laborer in a certain way, and the other one who's got the the hat with the the the the uh the Soviet insignia on uh the hammer and the sickle on it, and his constant yell yelling about sending people to the gulag. Yeah, but I don't think people in the people around now understand how just sort of like weird, or it's just sort of like you it's just sort of rare it was to sort of encounter socialists, whereas something in the post sort of Corbyn and Bernie area era, I think that there is sort of now this and it's sort of popular socialism that is still kind of like ineffective in a way.

C. Derick Varn 1:52:31

Oh, yeah, I I think well, one of the things is now, I mean, in the case of like the DSA, like you have an organization that has like feeding our cats. People to the right of the progressive caucus in some ways, doing this, that, and the other, and then in the DSA, and then like Marxist Leninist caucuses, in addition to like almost every Trotskyist organization, like except for except for the RCI slash formerly MIT liquidated into the DSA and became something else. They all became like they became different caucuses and this, that and the other. And that's why I've called the DSA like when people go to the workers' movement, like it's more the clearinghouse of sex, and I say that even in it, like it's just where everybody's at now. And that was like the SDS in the 70s, oh yeah, which I do think is its equivalent organization, except the SDS was not as much as I complain about the some of the poor organizations organizing in the DSA, it's got nothing on the on the SDS as being a disorganized clusterfuck. But I mean, I think when you know you go through those organizations and you deal with like how annoying particularly college students are, and the one you know, one of the critiques that I think cultural Marxism mass is that the the new the the left, particularly the new left dependence on students because for ideological reasons, but also because they were free labor. Like students didn't have students are committed, they're they're committed in school.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:12

It's not like they have infinite amounts of time, but they don't have families and other responsibilities that eat their their leisure time in the same way, and so they are and also rent was cheaper, they things that sustain us for cheaper, you could get pick up jobs almost like that, right? Like it's a completely different context to to what we have now.

C. Derick Varn 1:54:33

Well, it's funny when people are like now trying to do 70 style stalting today, and I'm like, that didn't work when the job market was right open and no one did background checks. I don't know what you think it's gonna do when they can just look your name up and see it that you're in KeyWiki.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:50

Um it's almost crazy that Mark Brudd ended up becoming like a maths teacher.

Peterson And Influencer Era Blending

SPEAKER_00 1:54:57

Like, yes, Mark Brudd, I mean, technically, uh I like Mark Frudd, and I like I like his memoir and that all that sort of stuff. I'm kind of like a weather underground stan, but like the fact that he was able to come become a maths teacher absolutely ludicrous. The would the job market in a capitalist society should make sure that they present people uh prevent people who are like obviously terrorists from teaching kids maths, um, because what they're gonna teach them the maths to make a bomb.

C. Derick Varn 1:55:32

I mean, maybe. I mean it it is it is, I mean, it's also funny how much uh like all those people ended up as academics, like the the education project being so tied into and uh yeah, I'm not uh you you're you're you're a soft weather the groundstand. I I am not a but I am notorious for being like what do they do, like spread STIs and blow themselves up?

Joseph Sciortino 1:55:56

Like oh sign me up, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:56:01

But I was like, they're one of the only groups I know of that has a bombing campaign whose whose main casualty is themselves.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:08

Well no to in the defense of the weather underground, that's because they did turn away from bombings that would have human casualties later on.

C. Derick Varn 1:56:20

They weren't big on despite their actionism, they actually weren't that big on killing people.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:26

So and prairie fire is still kind of like an interesting document to read about for from the time. I mean, I'm not I'm not gonna like try to recreate what they were doing, but uh this I mean it was certainly like what when you're when you were in STS at the time, it was one of the possible avenues.

C. Derick Varn 1:56:50

The other one was becoming a Baba Bakianite or becoming a Draperite or Hal Draperite Trotskyist. Those are the ones.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:59

And at least with the weather underground, you're able to have like you're able to be like on the top 10 FBI most wanted list, right? It comes with a certain degree of like street cred. Whereas I don't think that unfortunately people aren't making you know documentaries about the Draker rights or the Avachian the Avachian disciples.

C. Derick Varn 1:57:21

Although there's there is a body count with the event with both of them getting killed and then getting in gunfights that that exist for the Avachianites.

SPEAKER_00 1:57:30

Well in a very coins brothers way, I think.

unknown 1:57:35

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:57:37

I find all this, you know, uh you know, I will say this one of the greatest gifts of the Avacuanites from the SES, though, is a bunch of like California Democrats with with like radical street cred from the 70s who just became normal neoliberals and the aunts and aunt teens, like Gene Kwan, the former mayor of Oaklift. Because I was like, yeah, not only was she associated with Maoist, she was associated with the most radical Maoist faction in California, and she just became an Army Democrat. So Van Jones was not the first, he was in a long tradition. And I guess okay, this is this is I think one of the areas to get back to the subject of your book. I think this is why. Oh, yeah, my book. I got I keep on forgetting about the book. Yeah, um by the book. But why these cultural Marxist conspiracies have so much catchway with leftists and formal leftists. I mean, I really do think that it's because they they see this history and they're like, look at the SDS, look at these radical Maoists, and then like by the time I'm a kid during Occupy, or I you know, I was in my 30s, I wasn't a kid, but like these people are like key figures in the Democratic Party. Fucking Robert Reich has SDS slash Bobavaki and I ties. Like it's just crazy to know that.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:59

Like, okay, could can I can I go on about Robert Reich for a second? Yeah, go ahead. Him and William Lind went to college together, and William Lind fucking hated his guts. Like that William Lind was the editor of the Conservative Student Society magazine, and there's a whole issue devoted to how much they fucking hated Robert Reich. And what's even more ironic is that William Lind and Robin Robert Reich ended up working together for Gary Hart on Capitol Hill, and I just keep on keep on thinking like what was that office environment like of just these two guys who fucking hate each each other as students, just sort of being office buddies or being office collaborators or things like that.

C. Derick Varn 1:59:50

And so that's it's also everything you need to know about the Clinton administration because Gary Hard is the Clinton administration's like founding father in a lot of ways of the Democrats.

SPEAKER_00 2:00:00

Yeah, yeah. No, he's he's one of those, yeah, no one of those sort of inspirations for the Democrats of the leisure class. What is that? The Democratic Leadership Committee that that that Clinton was part of, and so it's it's kind of it's kind of totally understandable that William S. Lind was like a staffer for for Graham Hart, and part of that whole sort of turn towards the the right that had happened sort of from Goldwater onwards, but also weirdly, we give him the grounds, we give Lynn the grounds to say, like, look at people like Robert Reich, yeah, the Marxist just entered our society culturally and took over the Democratic Party.

C. Derick Varn 2:00:46

I mean, even though he's working with them in the same administration, and by the way, when people like this is way more common than people really like Tom Holman and Gangino and all these people who were actually even part of the Obama administration, it's just like because well, Bovino, excuse me, not Gonjino. I'm like, they were they were they were Obama porn, these guys, like the like the whole like political apparatus being somewhat depoliticized most of the time means that these people are often working together under democratic administrations because the reactionaries tend to be in the military. And I find it fascinating because it does seem to be this real core, and I I I like what your book does in kind of proving. I mean, we can talk about the more crazy ends of this, like Adorno as a secret beetle, or yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:40

We we which admittedly the the one article of mine that gets the most comments out of all of them is the is the article where I'm talking about the the Adorno as Beatles, as the the secret songwriter of the Beatles. There is something in like the the conspiracy subculture that's sort of obviously tied to Info Wars and all of those different other kinds of subcultures, too, that is really committed to this idea of Adorno as the person who is like really sort of inventing not only what what one author calls Beatle music rock, but also punk rock.

C. Derick Varn 2:02:20

Yeah, you know, punk rock, which historically was famous for doing stuff like where you're splasticus on their and 70s, anyway, and has like punk rock being associated with the left wing is like a weird post-80s phenomenon. It's like it's not even all that true of the uh of the initial punk rock moment.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:42

And and there's a lot of debates about that in the UK too, but because I mean, like the classical opposition between the sex pistols and the clash, oh yeah, and how and and how people in conservative magazines will then sort of very recently say say things like turf is the new punk rock, you know, so sort of being transphobic as punk and and will write those articles. Well, the clash weren't really punk because they were they that they didn't have the same kind of uh history as the Sex Pistols, despite you know, you know the Sex Pistols largely being a sort of kind of marketing operation in a way, uh right.

C. Derick Varn 2:03:21

And really only having working class street put because they hired a psychopath to be their basis. I mean, I think this is actually somewhat interesting to think about about the way the right works on this, though. Because they're both denouncing the cult. I mean, we see this in two ways. One is something that Daniel Bell, a conservative, I may add, said in the 1950s that there's this weird valorization in in conservative circles of family values while also promoting reforms to Fortis capitalism, which undermined the family. And he started, I mean, he was talking about this as early as the late 50s.

SPEAKER_00 2:04:02

Um he was also he was also at the book launch party of the authoritarian personality from the Frankfurt School.

C. Derick Varn 2:04:10

Yeah, that's uh that's a correspondent, yeah, yeah, yeah. But at the same token, today when you hear these people complain about like what's killing the family, and I'm like, I don't know. I mean, I think it's become really obvious under Trump in a way that can't be denied because you had like Josh Harley and those people talking about family supportive policies, and then as soon as you get into office, they they gut everything to funnel stuff into mil into the military-industrial complex on a scale that we haven't seen since World War II, actually. And is the opposite of what they were promising, you know, with Holly and to some degree, even Marjorie Taylor Green and those people. So it's become a little bit obvious that that populist appeal doesn't really work. I mean, one of the things I one of the things I find funny, actually, uh the way in which the right mirrors the left in a different way is whenever they get all bonapartists and attach themselves to a singular figure. If that figure gets two terms, you're almost always gonna deal with the fact he's gonna betray everything he said he's supported by you. And I'm like, that also happens to us. I mean, not so much in America, uh, but like because like you

MAGA Communism And Left Feedback Loops

C. Derick Varn 2:05:27

know, they don't even get that far. But like Mitterrand and France are you know Milibank. I also I mean, I I don't know what Corbin would have been like as a leader, although our party is not a good indication of what his actual politics would have ended up looking like.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:49

It's not our party, it's your party, which is the most confusing name because uh everyone is sort of saying your party, and I'm like, Well, my party, well, I I'm actually part of anti-capitalist resistance, and that's not really a party, that's more of a group, and so it just becomes very confusing in conversations. But it was voted for but voted for by uh most of the people at conference. So yeah, your party is not only just the most confusing name, but also an opportunity to show that the the failure of Corbinism wasn't this necessarily the fact that he was attacked by the right-wing press, and actually there was limitations of the project Corbinism within the Labour Party itself. Yeah, and apparently also outside of it.

C. Derick Varn 2:06:36

So I I find yeah, yeah, I I agree with you on that, by the way. I I have always been on well, I am controversially on uh Corbinism also in power would have hit hard walls because what he was promising would be really hard to do in the current economic environment, and I don't know how he was really planning on I don't know how you re-industrialize an island that was priorly industrialized due to being an empire. Like, I don't know, it's hard to do, particularly when you're not an imperialist.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:11

So and also there's a little there's a lot of faith placed in the in the green transition to be that re-industrializing force when it actually won't. And reckoning with that is actually quite important, I think. And it will we'll no, I I I agree. And will also lead to problems for Zach Polansky, who is now like on the the Corbin 2.0. I I yeah, I mean I think that you know that although it is a sign of well, I mean I mean okay, but basically a lot of not only British politics but also British socialist organizing is now wrapped around the imperative to try to try to keep the right out. And I think that the example of what has happened on the American left about trying to keep Trump out shows that if that is your main objective, then it's just gonna actually create problems down the line and actually not leads to the building of a uh sustainable and sort of reliable organization for forcing historical change.

C. Derick Varn 2:08:39

Well, I would do on that. I think that the the problem that you have is like you you end up with a populist or at best a popular front coalition that also is as soon as it attains powers at war with itself, yeah. Yeah, uh, because it doesn't have any real programmatic unity to tie it together beyond the opposition. So the moment that you win, your your your modus operandi for any unity immediately falls apart. And and that I don't know why it seems to always favor the right wing of labor or the democrats or the social democrats or forever, but somehow it seems to structurally always favor the right wing of that uh when that happens. I mean, like I can't think of an example when it favors the left wing of that and falling out, so um like I just it it's something that I think about, but I do think about this, you know. We've been talking a lot today about I want to go back to the right wing element of this because we've been talking a lot today about how these get a lot of former leftists. Like, I do like when you look at, for example, post-left Marxism, which I'm gonna be very specific because it's like the third form of post-leftism that has existed, and is really not that Marxist, but also very different from the anarchist post-left of the 1990s, which was also given to right-wing infiltration. Troy Southgate, the former National Front leader, got into like somehow got into the California anarchist scene, but through post-left anarchism, but in general, post-leftism has also picked up on a lot of these cultural Marxist conspiracy theories and also done, even tied them to weirder stuff, which is like tying them to uh French ultra-left negationism and stuff like that, which is which has led to some truly bizarre scenarios where you meet people who are like Dalin adjacent, but also believe in negationism, which by the way, its original logic was to negate the need for the popular front by saying the Holocaust either was inevitable or or didn't happen, depending on which version of it you take up. And that has moved all kinds of ultra-leftists to the right before. I mean, the what when people look at this and they always go, Trotskyist are where this comes from, because that's the other form of culture of Marxism, is it's all Trotskyist fault, and they all the the reality is yeah, but the reality is when you get when you like see like David Horowitz, for example, he was a malice. Like he was a malice with ties to the Panthers, and thinks with I'm not sure. I've actually looked at the evidence and I can't say he thinks that somebody in the Panthers executed somebody he he he put there who got murdered, and that was his beginning of becoming a rabid white-wing lunatic. Or if you look at the case of France, like I think a lot of the post 68 French right, they're almost all Maoist, former Maoist. I mean, even people like Bernard Levy, which is nuts. So, you know, but let's talk about the right-wing appeal to this because we talked about like what Breitbart did. We talked about the way that the Breitbart was able to merge this into the Tea Party and then get that out into conservative ponditry. Now it's ubiquitous. I mean, it is it is almost weirdly like the alt-right is interesting because Trumpism basically killed it, but a lot of its ideas were actually liquidated into Trumpism. Yeah, well, even if it as a movement was killed by Trump one, ironically. What do you make of like what do you make of that? I mean, I I kind of find it interesting. I think that's part of why Frontez is trying to pivot away from Trump now, is because I mean, part of it might be sincere, it's hard to know. Because that that that man is trolling on a level that most of us don't. Even comprehend. Um, because sometimes I'm like, wait, is he trolling himself? I don't know. And he also does he also does the thing that a lot of these people and the cultural Marxists do, and I'm not saying he does that actually as much, because he'd just rather blame the Jews outright. Uh, it doesn't need any cultural Marxist baggage for that. But what he does this thing where he sounds reasonable or brings up true things in the beginning, and then bait and switch, and all of a sudden you're down like a rabbit hole where like the Western culture has been under assault since I don't know, forever. Probably because of Jews. And you know, I mean, I I I haven't heard this, but he might even complain about Hadrian not killing enough Jews or something. So, like, like because they go back that far. Um, I find this interesting to deal with today because I do think your book is timely, and I again I don't think this is Rock Hill. I want to be very clear, I don't think this is Gabriel Rock Hill with Dominicola Certo, primarily. We're in a moment where reality is so openly corrupt and there's so many actual conspiracies that are just like happening in broad fucking daylight, and not just in the US, by the way. I mean, the Epstein Files is a truly transnational affair. That, however, it's leading to widespread rapid paranoia and a declining of demands for evidence because so much of evidence is obscured and so much corruption seems obvious. That you just seem people like there are leftists right now who make a living doing parapolitical stuff where they claim that everything, including the Charlie Kirk assassination, is identical to Israel, and then you have leftists who are sharing Professor Zheng, who is literally doing Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy talk. Like the cleaned up of I mean, he brings he does the Candace Owens thing of bringing the flank the francist,

Assassinations And The New Paranoia

C. Derick Varn 2:14:57

but I was like, I now I'm seeing some leftists take seriously stuff that is explicitly post-fascist conspiracy thing. Yeah, not just through cultural Marxism talk or LaRouchism or MAGA communism of any of that, but also because they're like, oh, this is just Clio dynamics. No, but no, Peter Turchin is not Professor Jang, and and this and that, and I I'm seeing this being ubiquitous, so I'm thinking we're going to see a lot more cultural Marxism conspiracies. And I also think we're going to see a lot of this, a lot of people even trying to break down. I think there's going to be a new form of opportunism where like people try to grow them on these conspiracy chains because they're also super lucrative right now in a way that they haven't been. I mean, like, yeah, you used to be you could support like one Alex Jones becoming a millionaire this way, but like right now, it seems like it's the main way to get media variety and attention. If you look at like in America, the top podcasts are all basic. I mean, Tucker Carlson isn't really, but he kind of is because he's also one of these cultural Marxist conspiracy guys, but like Candace Owens is doing just straight up like batshit conspiracy monger and and stuff that makes early Alex Jones look kind of tame, which is which is impressive.

SPEAKER_00 2:16:26

Yeah. No, I often feel kind of nostalgic for the conspiracy culture of the early 2000s because this is when like I got onto the internet, and like you know, it was also the Bohemian growth stuff, and sort of like all like the the elites do all these sort of weird satanic rituals, and you know, they're hiding things in Area 51. And again, uh now is sort of like did you know that Erica Kirk cheated on Charlie Kirk before they got married and after they got married as well? And it's I mean, there was this sort of weird porousness between I guess celebrity gossip culture and celebrity gossip culture and conspiracy culture, right?

C. Derick Varn 2:17:13

Even like Raelians, like um are reptilians, excuse me, not Raylians, but yeah, conspira like because you have in Candace Owens, you have a collapsing of that, or like, and even there's even leftists who I've broken with who who who said, Oh, we don't have a reason to disbelieve this, so we're gonna start pushing that Charlie Kirk was killed by Massad as a way to oppose Israel. And I'm like, that's absurd. Like, if you if you think that Taylor Robinson's the one who did it, there's no way. Like the what you you think that they did that that Mossad happened to find the one former libertarian kid who fell in love with their trans roommate a year ago and was totally apolitical, but happened to be happened to be a hunter from southern Utah where you train at 200 yard 200 yards on regular and just happened to have a hunting rifle. And by the way, that mauser they use, which I which I was able to call what it was from the bullet, with it was like, Oh, you have to be a sniper. That's not a sniper rifle, it is just a it is just a rifle-barreled hunter rifle. You don't know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 2:18:22

Yeah, yeah. I remember listening to the This Is Revolution broadcast after the Charlie Cook killing, and you were possibly the only person who was actually kind of accurately describing what had probably happened. Because it was sort of like it's it's Utah. These kids are taught how to hunt from a very early age. That's actually quite an easy shot. Uh yeah, it's not that hard of a shot. It just takes one person to sort of like think Charlie Kirk is a dick and to like end up shooting him, right?

C. Derick Varn 2:18:56

And and uh I mean there are weirdnesses about the story, I'm not gonna lie, but I'm just but I I have been like it's fairly easy to explain a 200-yard shot for people who are used to hunting in the desert in specific with rifled with with you know properly rifled caliber guns. Yeah, that's not that hard. I can make it like and I I am I I got tower guard training. I've never seen I've never seen a sniper rifle, like a true sniper rifle, in my life. I've just been trained on a regular old fucking high caliber bolt action. And and you know, it's just I think it's a problem that both the left and the right, I mean the right, it's actually more embarrassing when they say this shit because I'm like, you guys are supposed to know guns. Like that's your thing. But you know, it was it's been weird, and it's been weird watching leftists and rightists pick up the same talking points from literally Candace Owens. It's been bizarre because I'm like, wait, why are we trying to save the reputation of Charlie Kirk? Like, I just I just don't I don't see how we it's such a weird thing, and what's also weird is it's also become culturally not relevant already, somehow. But we say this the day after there may or may not have been an assassination attempt on the president yesterday, yesterday. I say may not because they did someone got a gun into the White House correspondence dinner lobby and got killed. We don't know, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:20:33

But I mean that I I mean it's a it's a it's a mark of the times that at this point was sort of like, well, it's another assassination, yeah, another assassination attempt.

C. Derick Varn 2:20:47

Yeah, although I will say a lot of people grew up in the one time period in American history where there wasn't a lot of assassinations attempts. Because if you like look at anything before Reagan's assassination attempt back, you're like, there's like an assassination attempt, like every every couple of months.

SPEAKER_00 2:21:04

Yeah, yeah. No, it's actually quite normal for you guys to have a presidential assassination attempt.

SPEAKER_02 2:21:09

Yeah, it's like it's an American tradition, weirdly.

C. Derick Varn 2:21:13

Um you know, like it didn't happen to Isaac, it didn't happen to the World War II presidents, although it did happen to FDR before World War II. Um it and it but like from from basically JFK Ford and also from Wilson backwards until you get to like Lincoln, it's super common. Um so it's it's interesting, but yeah, it's crazy that with the what the that what we're depending on how you count with Trump, this is the third or fourth attempt. The ideologies of the people out to get Trump are like all over the place. I'm not gonna say that none of them are leftists, but like it's a lot less than you would have thought. So I bring this up because you know what I promise you, there are a lot of people who went off about conspiracy cultures around the first the Trump assassination over the summer of 2024, and that was become very common on like blue, what we colloquially call blue mega, our democrat to make America great again in the world, which we also didn't uh blue and on after they all came up with conspiracies about how that was plant. And I'm like, there's no way unless he didn't get hit in the ear, there's no way to to to be precise enough to at that distance with the with with an AR, not a rifle barrel gun or a sniper rifle, to just grace someone's ear on purpose. That like that's way too because the exact the exact head trajectory is so precise. And yet you saw that pretty common. And I guess my point is, do you think we're gonna see a lot more of this since I think we're seeing conspiracy like mainstream American culture right now is conspiracy culture, period. And it kind of has been for a long time. Like you think about it in the 1990s before you I don't know if you know about American television, it was all conspiracy shit all the time, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:23:28

It's just it wasn't politicized, so yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:23:31

No, no, don't worry. I have uh I have my my partner grew up in America in the 90s, well, and the 80s too, so uh she's more than familiar with how conspiratorial American culture was. She also grew up in the Michigan militia and knew Timothy McVeigh, but that's like a whole different episode.

C. Derick Varn 2:23:49

Um, funnily enough, my my wife grew up around that. But yeah, and I I grew up around the actual third clan being a thing that was actually for my life.

SPEAKER_00 2:24:04

Not hell, yeah. I mean, just sort of like okay, that's interesting, that's what I meant.

C. Derick Varn 2:24:08

Not sort of like like well, the c like in the 90s and aughts the clan was actually bigger in the Midwest, but in the 80s it was still a major thing in the South. The thing is, though, like it was the third clan, which the second clan was like some weird racist, vaguely terrorist LL multi-level marketing scheme. The first clan was just like a post-war terror organization, and then the third clan is weird because it's not really either the first or the second clan, but it's like a quasi-neo-Nazi organization that really came into being in the 70s and went back to being mostly racial because the second clan was actually weirdly, specifically anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic, as much or more than it was. I mean, it was also anti-black, but believe it or not, that wasn't its primary concern. Whereas the first clan was just basically a lynching terror organization. Anyway, the reasons why I break this up is like David Duke was like a real political viability in like the 80s and 90s in the Southeast.

SPEAKER_00 2:25:16

In 92, he

Cultural Christianity As Discipline Tool

SPEAKER_00 2:25:17

was one of the Republican antics, right? He ran against Bush and Buchanan.

C. Derick Varn 2:25:23

Bush, Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and David Duke. If you think about that, you're like, no wonder Bush won. Holy shit. But the other thing that it it also brings out is like this idea that the GOP being full of these like far, far right reactionaries being new, that's not true. That's a post-Reagan phenomenon, maybe even a post-Goldwater phenomenon. Even though Goldwater didn't like these guys, it's probably a post-Gold Water phenomenon, to be honest.

SPEAKER_00 2:25:50

No, I totally agree. Like everything we have you read interviews with Goldwater in the 70s, and he comes out seeming quite moderate in the context of his time. And then if you I mean, oh yeah, if yeah, you you see that even now. I mean, like, I remember, I mean, the the anecdotal example I have of is when Liz Trust, the UK prime minister, put forward this like severely sort of neoliberal mini budget, and Chancellor, which is sort of the main economic position in the British government, got replaced by Jeremy Hunt, and he was presented as this sort of moderate conservative, which was very funny for me because like when I was a when when I was a teenager and I was like participating in like student protests in the early 2010s, Jeremy Hunt's like this absolutely rabid neoliberal, this rabid sort of right-wing figure, and so it's like very common for people in right-wing parties after a uh before a right-wig shift to then eventually position themselves as the more moderate voice in the party. I think this is what happened to Goldwater, because a lot of the people who supported Goldwater and was really fighting for his presidential campaign ended up just sort of getting radically more gradually more radical over the course of the 60s and the 70s to the point where they end up forming the new right. And I feel like we are jumping, but we are jumping back and forward in in my book, but this is like the point of recording is like two and a half hours in. So if you're here, you are really uh real vanhead, which is uh which is what I did consider myself. Um like if you're a real vanhead, thank you for coming along with the uh on this journey and uh stay stay with us.

C. Derick Varn 2:27:52

Yeah, yeah, I I would I mean we can start wrapping it down, but I do think it's interesting to note this element of like conservative fusionism has always had this element of of people who are often the initiators being more moderate figures. I I will say that people try to do this with Reagan, but to do it with Reagan, they have to ignore huge parts of like liberals were really doing this against Trump. I remember that, like going back and quoting Reagan against him, but then like ignoring other crazy shit Reagan believed because Reagan Reagan gets a clean up from everybody historically, and it's I'm like now he believes some really nutty shit, and his like stuff about AIDS is real hard to forget. Basically, if he ever coop hadn't undermined him, he would have just let everybody die. And I think that's like really you know, so I I do I want to be careful what saying watching prior conservatives, but I do think what's interesting is like when like Sam Tannenhouse went off about like how Goldwater would find the Bush administration insanely radical, and we're you know, and today people talk about the Bush administration as moderate compared to Trump, and I'm like, Well, there's a right-wing just drift that happens because Goldwater wasn't a bircher, but in making alliances with them, which he did through people like Phyllis Safferty, the birchers really came to dominate the the movement conservatism in a lot of ways, which means conspiracy culture was always just a scratch away, and it wasn't like the William S. Lynn nice cultural Marxism, it was Judeo Bolshevism outright.

SPEAKER_00 2:29:38

Yeah, I'm gonna say this and also what's kind of interesting about the LaRouche right-wing turn is that some of the more influential figures within the organization were reading butcherite literature and sort of linking it with SDS's critiques of corporate liberalism, and so they were trying to find a way to fuse those two critiques of one, a study of you know, essentially the the security state that formed in the post-war era, um, that was also quite markedly anti-communist, with a critique of that society that was also anti-communist in its same way, but in a conspiratorial sense of sort of saying, you know, Eisenhower is part of a secret plan to turn to overthrow the American Republic. And it is sort of points of convergence between the left and the right are often there around like a critique of establishment liberalism, um, but coming at from two different directions, and there were just certain there are certain organizations at certain moments that end up landing on that ground and really running with it.

C. Derick Varn 2:31:05

Yeah, that's uh that is a crazy place to end up being because what you end up having is this weird like hybrid of the far right conspiracy culture with elements of the left conspiracy culture, and frankly, the left's conspiracy culture is more viable. And what what is interesting about that though is like that's not that doesn't begin with LaRouche, like the Birchers explicitly modeled themselves and what they view like it's actually a clarity of Leninist democratic centralism, it's what they thought it was, not what it actually was. But they modeled themselves as Leninists, like one of the weird things you see, and and I think you see this in Chris Rufo Rufru to some degree, although he's moving away from it now because I think he's getting tired.

SPEAKER_00 2:31:55

Well, no, he he he's a hipster pretending to be a conservative. That is my that is my thesis about Chris Rufo till the day I but isn't that a shit ton of millennial conservatives?

C. Derick Varn 2:32:04

Is there basically I mean they even dress like hipsters, they all look like Brooklyn boys from from uh 2008.

SPEAKER_00 2:32:11

Um but the thing is that they're desperate to keep but maintain their their taste in music, their their taste in film, their taste in art, but they have to move in these conservative circles where they have to sort of shed that, and that's not really who they are, and they kind of like are bored of hanging out with conservatives and just sort of want to hang out with leftists, I think. And this is sort of what I find you see this in Times Rare, too. Yeah, yeah. Oh, totally, yeah, yeah, entirely.

C. Derick Varn 2:32:44

Half of them are all are like former leftists who still miss the hip coolness of being a leftist in Brooklyn but want the reactionary politics to somehow meld with that, and it only kind of sort of works. But go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 2:32:57

Yeah, I mean, I I I think this is the total undercurrent of like Chris Ruffo's work, which in a way kind of echoes William F.

C. Derick Varn 2:33:08

Buckley's stuff because they just want to kind of be invited to the the liberal the dinner party of liberals, and they are desperate for the approval of liberals, but they can't get it because they are the nasty conservative, yeah, and and so you know they they get tired of it, but the conspiracy culture stuff seems to overlap with them in some strange way, and the one of the things I tell you that I always find interesting, I don't always believe the liberal refrain that every confession, I mean every accusation is a confession, because I think historically that's actually not normally true. It does seem to be kind of true for the Trump administration, but with a lot of these what's interesting with a lot of these like Gramsciai interpretations of paleoconservatism conservatism is they want to do what they think the cultural Marxists did, like their obsession with the their obsession with the university at a time when the university is becoming the becoming less and less culturally relevant in the United States. Yeah, that is totally them thinking that's how you know if they can only pull off what they think the new left did. And my point is like the new left didn't actually pull that off. Uh huh. So it one of the ironies about this is like it really is a confession of what they want to do, like they really want a conspiracy of cultural leads to like come home and and drive culture and move politics that way. And that's you know, when they say culture, like all politics is downstream of culture, like which Bright Bart said, Oh, he, although I don't think he's aware. it comes from I think is actually older than that.

SPEAKER_00 2:34:50

Well it's from Limbar. Yeah. I think in a in a secured way. Yeah. But who's actually talking about you know what Gramsci thought he would uh had that's what he was doing. Right. So we'll we'll we have the sort of Limba version of Gramsci

Universities As A False Battlefield

SPEAKER_00 2:35:07

happening right now.

SPEAKER_02 2:35:09

Right.

C. Derick Varn 2:35:10

And it's just crazy because the one thing I would say is like well Gramsci didn't like I'm not saying Gramsci wouldn't work if we actually did what he said but whatever the Euro communist liberal slash liberal interpretation of Gramsci was sure as hell it worked for us.

SPEAKER_00 2:35:25

Like it's not like uh yeah you continue you yeah you finished the point.

C. Derick Varn 2:35:33

No I just find I find it interesting that in some ways I'm glad that they're obsessed with this stuff because it gives them bad strategies.

SPEAKER_00 2:35:40

Yeah for that well it also ends up being like Rockhill strategy too. I mean like there is that clip from like the sort of right wing investigators of like oh here is this scary Marxist professor saying this thing. And what what Rockhill says is that we should use the universities as a base of operations to spread our ideas but also set up like para academic institutions. And I remember watching that and going well this is just like new left shit. This is exactly what they wrote about in like the Port of Huron statement and it it failed and it is representative of the kind of Western Marxism that he he critiques. And and even when even when you get to like a little conclusion of who paid the pipers of of Western Marxism there is no kind of strategy or no kind of identification of the agent of social change which to compare it to like the original sort of like debates about Marcusa being a CIA agent and its impact on the left it was originally it was actually kind of a proxy warf about different types of strategy of how to organize right and what is absent in like Rockhill is kind of like what the strategy is or what the what the what real the the real revolutionary subject is and so you're left with sort of what is kind of like a left-wing canon wars argument of like we shouldn't read Adorno and Marcus or we should just leave read Lenin and Thomas and Caro instead which is fine but it's it's essentially like Rockill setting us a different syllabus and and and and and that's sort of sort of kind of what the right ends up doing of this sort of while we we should read not just Gramsci but like you know sort of uh a a right wing version of Grampshire through through limb but we should do what it's all just sort of a recommendation for uh reading recommendations I guess.

C. Derick Varn 2:37:46

Right and this is true and they've been trying to do this for a long time. I mean like one of the things I can tell you about Reagan movement conservatism that actually came out of the Birchers but really was pushed by the Reagan administration is they would have everyone read Solas Kolinsky as like the primary enemy but also as their model for good community organizing. Oh yeah they were still making a kalinsky references which is another thing because Obama's you know coming through the university when he comes through because he's taught by a former new leftist and like and he worked under an sky model and I'm just like oh so Alkalinski who made us all liberal somehow you know it's just I find it I find it very interesting because on one hand it's flat I mean one of the hands it's flattering the leftist because like oh if we could actually pulled off a conspiracy of this caliber what else could we have done it actually why would we have stopped with the culture if we could have got away with this like like oh if you think we I mean one of the things I remember is like everyone tell me how radical the universities are they were the most radical hostile place I've ever worked they were leftist but like if you were actual particularly in the odds if you were an actual Marxist like when I like I had converted like I had converted to Marxism by the end of my graduate school right and I was a fucking pariah like even more than when I was a conservative which was also bad for for graduate school but there well I mean even being in a quote unquote cultural Marxist department right like I went to the school the the the the center for the study of theory and criticism like this is a cultural Marxist school.

SPEAKER_00 2:39:33

And and if you did any political work like people would look down on you right like you're not supposed to be doing that you're supposed to be reading books you're supposed to be actually doing like the the work of becoming a scholar and and so the so the idea that sort of in any way that critical theory radicalizes people and becoming activists is kind of untrue but what when you look when you look at the places that are supposed to be like the the purest critical theory centers. I mean we'll where it comes down to I mean but cultural Marxism is essentially a theory of like like there are no issues in the world the only issues that are produced by and the only social antagonisms the any sort of political conflicts are produced by the fact that people are exposed to this theory this theory from the Frankfurt school which gets it totally the wrong way around the the the the the the fact that people are maybe sometimes drawn to the work of the Frankfurt school or drawn to the work of people who are influenced by the critical theory tradition is because they are facing sort of problems in their daily life and that sometimes they have the opportunities to I think come to a more holistic explanation about what causes them well you know I really want to pick up on this a little bit there's I mean there's two places I kind of wanted to end the thing off maybe we'll do both but one of them is this point is off like I remember basically going like seeing that Rockhill clip that was picked up by Canary Mission and going like he just wants to do the lone march of the academy again but like more Marxist Linney this time except that you forget that it was Marxist Lincy in the 70s like a lot of those people became Maoist before they went and became just lame Democratic Party adjacent academics and you know the other thing I found interesting is like like for all the complaints about Trotsky and all that I'll give I'll give Rockill this he doesn't tie it into anti-Trotsky conspiracies but then I'm like why aren't you talking about what the sectarian groups were doing and how they related to these theorists are not not just mentioning that these theorists existed and may have taken and probably did take money downstream of intelligence operations like I I do think like you do actually have to do the the proving that it isn't just the the court and it's this weird thing that I find like I'm okay so I'll put it to you this way I I I feel the when I'm arguing about Gabriel Rockhill I often feel the same way as when I'm talking to people about China which is ironic given Abraham Rockill's concerns but when I talk to people who are outside of of Marxist circles and say stupid shit about China I am like I sound like the most China defensive person on the but when I talk about like have they achieved socialism yet and I'm like they don't even claim that I don't know what you're doing.

C. Derick Varn 2:42:49

I mean they kind of claimed it in the 1982 constitution but then like read every Politburo speech after after like 96 it's always like we're pushing out the necessary social reforms to achieve the first you know the socialism truly and I think now is 2050. Like and I'm like you know you you're you're carrying more water than even they carry and so I similar with Rockill when I talk to people who just want to condemn him as a conspiracy theorist I'm like he's not that no I'm totally not but I do think he's weirdly like it's I don't want to say he's idealist because it's overabused but maybe a little bit in so much that he really seems to think it's about the ideas consumed and not the material conditions in which they in which they are consumed in just like you say and I've thought about this in terms of like the other popular thing that cultural Marxism would sometimes get tied on and this was from the Alan Woods types that they would like talk about cultural Marxism and postmodernism and like blame it for the degeneration of the left and I would be like well why did post Marxism emerge that Eurocommunism in the first place and if you read like Baudrillard's the divine left where he's just ranting about how the communists aren't different aren't differentiating themselves from Mentorron as Minterron's betraying them like oh this is a response to people who feel burned by these communist parties not doing what they promised they'd do and then coming up with a theory that somehow like abandons Marxism in some weird ass way I mean it it and that seems to be driving what is happening more than the other way around it's not that the post-Marxist and post-structuralists came in and ruined Marxism it's that because Marxism was in disarray these ideas had some purchase at all and that that's always been my response to Rock Hillites and I've even talked to Colin Baudell who's Rockhill student and like his defender and I'm like I'm not I'm not saying and I've talked to Daniel Todd about this too I was like I'm not saying that everything Rockill's saying is false. I'm not saying that Western Marxist academics weren't often influenced by the CIA and we definitely should be interested even if they weren't the the origins of the ideas why they were promoting them. But at the same token like this explains

Material Conditions And Police Repression

C. Derick Varn 2:45:18

so little to me about like what actually happened in the 70s because if there weren't these other organizational and material problems like if the march back into the factories hadn't failed if the students as a as a new revolutionary subject hadn't failed all radicals in the professions that strategy which is like the PMC strategy right yeah that that failed our our just normal old sectarian Marxist Leninism didn't do that well either like because it wasn't like they completely went away in fact they had a rebirth after the new left ironically the CPUSA's highest growth rate after the Popular Front and they hit their height of like think between 80 and 90k I've seen two different numbers there in uh 48 and then they dropped down by the by five years into the red scare to 5000 their biggest growth rate again is like 73 to 76 like during the Angela Davis period that we're talking about like then they got back up probably to 20k again and they might be that big now it's no one knows because the CPOSA is not open about its numbers um it used to be but it's not now um no one knows like but at the same token like if if the issue is all this cultural Marxism why is the height of a lot of these Marxist windows orgs actually after that not before it I mean like if you look at the second heights because because the other thing is you can't say the re like the reason why Marxism got sm like smashed in the 60s wasn't academics it was blacklisting like it was the it was the third red scare or the fourth red scare or the second red scare depending on how you count I didn't have I also I also people just being turned off by like going to protests or things like that and being like heavily repressed repressed by the police. Oh yeah yeah that's you know and I think that the constituency that at that point the left mobilization was drawing from the degree to which you could go to a protest and still feel safe was was very limited in comparison to what it felt like earlier on in the 60s oh yeah that was that was because the police repression was up and also like leaders were being killed I mean just straight up I mean like another thing that we miss is like how many left assassinations were in the 60s i mean like we know about Hampton and and stuff like that but like there was a ton of them oh yeah some of them were right wingers going after leftists some of them were usually local police being called in by the feds and the local police doing the actual shooting because the feds tended not to do that. It's always unclear to me when I read the the papers if the feds are actually mad that the local police did it sometimes they seem like they are and sometimes they seem like they set it up because they're like well the local yokels will do the dirty work because they're dumb but there's so much of that in the 70s I mean a lot of people did get disappeared and and then when you look at that in the terms of the 80s and like not so much in America where it was although you did have stuff like the move bombing where they literally bombed a fucking neighborhood but if you look at what was happening like outside of the outside of Western Europe and the United States I mean people were being disappeared in mass so you know when we talk about this you know you know like I mentioned earlier also like I don't know maybe maybe the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese were at war and it was a proxy war between China and the Soviet Union and then maybe that was really fucking stuff up for people I don't know like like seems like that would be a big deal and it's I think this is just gets glossed over in these debates about like cultural Marxism or the Frankfurt school and so like I said like when I'm talking to people who just hate Rock Hill I always want to be like he's not really a conspiracy theorist there is proof about what I'm saying. But when I'm talking to people who are like his fans and like it explains everything and Western Marxism was all say invention it was all cooked at Langley and I was like that's not even what he says but on the right okay let's it let's just say I I want to talk about James Lindsay and Michael Lewin and all this because because the contemporary and and we I mentioned McIntyre who's maybe the smartest of the of the bunch but even like like critical theories out of Coulette for example which was not explicitly cultural Marxist but was like James Lindsay 1.0 what James Lindsay does is take all this stuff and then he adds it with Eric von Kuhnlinton's who was this German yeah yeah I'm aware who was the emitizing the eschaton guy and he combines cultural Marxism with the with that and then McGee's thesis about Hegel being a hermetic and like now not only are we all cultural Marxists we're also all Gnostics and this is like a great spiritual battle which is also weird because James Lindsay's a fucking new atheist or at least he was I've had uh and less and less by the day like he is sort of presenting himself as a sort of Christian conservative more and more but that's partially because of I mean there are some people who explain it as that because of his sponsorship but largely coming from from Christian conservatives I well I always thought this was interesting because you see this with Peterson too where Peterson is like promoting hardcore Christian values but if you ask him if he believes in God he gives him this postmodern gobberty gook that makes makes no sense.

SPEAKER_00 2:51:23

Well it's the whole cultural Christianity uh uh turn how a lot of conservatives have now expressed sort of at least conservative sympathies if not conservative have expressed christian sympathies if not christian beliefs and we've had this whole debate in in England about like you know whether church attendance is increasing among young people or not and what and America subjectively not yeah but go ahead well no and one one person who was part of this debate put it quite succinctly is that I I would rather that people didn't turn to conspira uh didn't turn to Christianity because it's good but rather because it's true. And she's really picking up on the point that now Christianity is trying to be implemented as like a disciplining mechanism of sort of right now it will just live the the the live these certain ways rather than you're actually you know forgiven by you know Christ's sacrifice for you which is what you know Christianity is in a way entirely about but but but also it's also not to entirely loop it back to the subject of my book but like it's very Lauritian because Laurushian is like no what Christianity is all about is because you're created by God you should be like morally good.

C. Derick Varn 2:52:56

It's not like you are a sinner and that Jesus has like taken that sacrifice upon himself and that no Lauritian is a Platonist heretic actually I mean seriously I mean like like one of the things I have actually told and I I started at the Boise conference you might remember this I started telling people to be like why don't you hold these people to Orthodox Christian standards to prove that they are full of this yeah yeah yeah like and it I was talking to a postmodern Christian who like doesn't even really believe in God and Rollins is a good guy like but he was like but that's not what I'm concerned with and I'm like but like I'm like but my point is they're claiming to believe in something that they clearly don't and it's easy to hit him on this and show you know I mean how little this is and yeah we have the same debates on church attendance and young people except the stats really do back up that like Gen Z is the least religious or oh yeah no yeah any argument about church revival is just not backed up by like even on the ground statistics no they they seem to be you you they seem to be vibes based off social media for duked algorithms and then like then also when you like look at what they're actually doing and saying you're like these people don't know anything about like I I you have trag casts who don't know a single thing about the Catholic tradition like I know more than they do and it's deeply embarrassing to actual traditional Christians and so I find this interesting I I I also so I feel that like cultural Marxism is a way to like have your cake and eat it too for these people can be like oh look at the Marxist war in the church and all this cultural liberalism but like we're not really going to create a society where people go back to church though like I mean like I mean if you look at like what like and liberals freak out and I really do think there's like almost a feedback loop because liberals freak out about Christian nationalism and and like the cases of Hegsef that's real at the same time it's like but outside of these weirdos it's actually a very dying tradition whereas when I was growing up in the 1980s it was so default you didn't even bring it up like uh so yeah I find these quite fascinating and it's kind of a big problem for us to to deal with in any coherent way we've been going almost for we had not almost we now hit three hours and I I I knew that you and I talked and might go this way because we're both obsessed with a lot of the same shit and and for me this was a lived reality that got out of it apparently for your partner maybe was too so I uh I mean seriously I could I could go for another hour to be fair but I could I don't know how you how your listeners feel about that but I find this this topic to be really interesting because we're at a point I guess I've been bringing up with like Professor have you followed this Professor Jang stuff like and it um like I've been too busy to follow it but like I it is on my it seems to be it it posits itself as a political and even looked vaguely leftist at first because of predictions about the Iran war and Trump. But it weirdly Daniel Tutt wrote an article where you pointed out that like this guy seems to have been boosted in the algorithm as soon as TikTok got bought out and he was unheard of before that. And it also seems like another one of these issues where like they're speaking about Palestinian issues and stuff in a way that appeals to leftist but then you realize that he's like blaming The Freemasons and the Frank, this weird Joseph Frank conspiracy shit's wild. Like it, like it seems I can't find an origin of it before Candace

Algorithm Boosted Conspiracy Entrepreneurs

C. Derick Varn 2:56:57

Owens. But he's repeating that. There's like basic Judeo-Bolshevik stuff that somehow the the bank. I mean, he's doing the whole the the bank. He doesn't say the Jews, he says the bankers, but the bankers are the people who put Marx and Lenin up to it to create both capitalism as we know it and communism, which is it's classic. That's classic Judeo Bolshevism. Like that's straight up like what the Nazis said. And people are beginning to catch on to it as like right-wing-ass conspiracy theories because he didn't appear in some shows with Alexander Dugan and stuff like that. But in at first, it was just considered like apolitical. And I find right now that one of the things about modern influencer and internet culture is like I meet people on the left who get temporarily sucked into these things all the time. So how do we deal with that now? Because it does seem like like, you know, my concerns like I mentioned, my concerns with Lacerdo and Rock Hill are often less about, although I have problems with Lacerdo beyond this, less about Lacerdo and Rock Hill, and a lot more about like dumb uses of them by their fandom. But I am concerned this just a general milieu now, and like your book is coming out at a time where like like conspiracism's like the dominant mode of all politics in in at least in America. I don't know if it's as bad in the UK. I suspect it probably is because it's it was it's it's as bad in Australia, and I'm always like, why the fuck are you getting our weird shit?

SPEAKER_02 2:58:35

You're not even in the same hemisphere as us.

SPEAKER_00 2:58:38

Well, I mean the answer to that is that there's a like a weird weeboo culture in the United Kingdom about the United States, and there are lots of um English people who would rather be American, and unfortunately, I count myself among them, and so they they were more than willing to sort of absorb like things from American politics and American culture. Uh, what was the other thing I was going to uh talk about? Because I think that we've touched on a number of things. Oh, yes, the it was a lot of people sort of responding to my book saying, Oh, this should have been published in 2016.

C. Derick Varn 2:59:20

And like when Kill Out Normies was was high.

SPEAKER_00 2:59:23

Well, that wasn't that was like yeah, yeah, and I think that it would have been less interesting then because it would have obviously ignored a lot of the historical things that I'm able to cover in the book that was sort of overlooked at the time, and then I mean it was just fandom culture, fandom culture. There's something about fandom that that's something about fandom culture there that is sort of very important in all of this, but I'm sort of now losing the thread of it.

C. Derick Varn 3:00:06

No, no, that's that that's fair. I think the fandom issue is is interesting. Because I actually think conspiracy culture has always worked off of fandom logic, and the internet works off of fandom logic. Like if you like go back and like go into like like conspiracy culture and the battles between like the guy who worked who wrote Hold a Pale Horse, I can't remember his name, and then the Gary something, yeah. It was a Gary, who's a major influence on Alex Jones, but also like hated him. What was his name? Because I actually read this in the 90s. I think Bill Cooper, who also had ties to McVeigh. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:00:51

I mean, I'm thinking of Gary Allen, who wrote An Untead Call it Conspiracy, which is like a more of a Birch right thing, right?

C. Derick Varn 3:00:58

Yeah, and and and uh yes, also what what what you see with uh what was Jones's initial brilliance was the combined Gary Allen Bercher conspiracy conspiracism with the Bill Cooper Neo-patriot conspiracism, which is Coast to Coast AM generic conspiracy culture, which was not like if you go back and listen to to uh to coast to coast, it was not oh actually a coast to coast a m what was it called actually so like what yeah because art because what what what Jones did was to politicize all that and tie Bertrand conspiracies, Art Bell conspiracy, and and the Cooper Patriot Movement conspiracies all together, but Cooper hated Jones and this William Slid was involved in all this too, by the way, because he seemed to be everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 3:02:23

But go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is the classic thing that we've been talking about of sort of like everyone that people assume who are all on the right together completely hate each other. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it uh and these are the things that in the histories are important to bear in mind, but it's also kind of like fascinating of how they end up hating each other rather than liking each other.

C. Derick Varn 3:02:50

It's often minor differences of conspiracy theories, but also sometimes people feel like with Cooper, it was principal, but other times it's like someone stealing your monetary base. And I hate to say it, but it's like similar things happened and left influencer dumb all the time.

SPEAKER_00 3:03:06

Well, I was thinking about like what what will the what would Lissade think about Rock Hill?

C. Derick Varn 3:03:13

Uh yeah, or the fact that like Rock Hill has clearly broken with with with people he was initially sympathetic to, like the Midwestern Marx group, who he thinks are right-wing, you know, balloonies. I know he thinks that because I've talked to students about it, but uh, but he was initially like working with them and publishing with them. Yeah, totally. So, you know, these things happen, and I think one of the things I've pointed out to people who always want to say, well, the left needs to answer these conspiracy and parapolitic stuff with more conspiracies is I'm like, if you thought we split a lot on ideological issues, wait until you introduce us debating conspiracy unknowns and how much splitting we're gonna do over that because the right splits over that in ways that makes the left splitting look mild, but liberals don't believe it. Because one of the things that I will give rightists, they're actually better at popular frontism than leftists because they hate each other, but they will drop it in public to get something done, and we won't, but they do hate each other in ways that like make some of our internal hate seem very mild, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:04:27

Well, I mean with you to get back to the Candace Owen things, if like um her beef with the rest of the group is not only just about Israel, but also just because she wants to seem like Charlie's BFF more than anyone else.

C. Derick Varn 3:04:44

Right. It's I mean it's it's like a debate over it's it's a debate over the legacy of this scenario. And I mean, we're seeing this all over MAGA world, and I think leftists and liberals don't know what to do with it because you also have like Margley Taylor Green sounding progressive and like hanging out with like talking about supporting Rokana doing some kind of weird inquest, even though she's no longer in office to do anything at the same time period, at the same token, like she's also still promoting Nick Fuentes. Like, and I'm just like like I don't think I I think left-wingers have a very and particularly liberal influence one in America, have a very hard time dealing with this kind of level of like like who's your enemy, who's a conspiracist in any given that like like well they they kind of all are, and just because they might agree with you tactically, and you should maybe even take advantage of that tactically, you should never be fooled that these people are on your side, unless they say they are. I mean, uh there's also ways of going too far, like the people who like don't want to do make any hay out of like Tucker tonning on Trump over the war, and I'm like, that's actually objectively a good thing, and they're I'm like that doesn't mean Tucker's on our side, don't be dumb. It just means that this coalition is splintering and you could take advantage of that. I want to ask you though, do you think these cultural Marxist conspiracies have a lot more leg life? Like, I don't know, like one of the things I've been wondering. I was talking to the Cold War cinema people yesterday, and we were talking about what we don't know if like all these Cold War conspiracy theories are gonna last a whole lot longer after at least Gen X ages out of major political importance. What do you make of that? Because I I I I go back and forth on whether or not it's gonna go away.

SPEAKER_00 3:06:41

It depends on whether we really grow out of the post-60s moment. I think that a lot of the debates in the United States at least are revolving around like splits or conflicts that really emerge from that period, and it's it's a matter of whether we are now entering or whether we're now in a new period that will shape the sorts of political organizations, the sort of political discussions we have for decades to come. And I don't know if it's necessarily easy to reduce that to like to generations itself.

Will Cultural Marxism Ever Die

SPEAKER_00 3:07:28

But yeah, I mean it's hard to it's a hard question to answer because it is like a question about it's a question about whether the institutions in our society will ultimately change. Cultural Marxism has had its longevity because we still have universities, we still have kind of media companies, we still have certain groups in the way that they were formed in the post-war era, and they are sort of being deconstructed or being sold off in different ways, but they are still kind of the same. Um, so it's a question of whether that changes, but also then you introduce other complicating factors into that, like the the international spread of the cultural Marxism thesis, the countries where the Frankfurt school never visited the Frankfurt School's ideas have never really become like a very prominent part of the the syllabi. Um that's not just like the UK, that is that that is India, that is Australia, that's Brazil, Argentina, I mean all all over the place where like cultural Marxism still sort of maintains kind of kind of resonance. And I mean, goodness knows whether that will continue to develop or it will die off. I mean, because we are in, I mean, uh certainly with the Iran uh Iran war going on in a very transitional period. But I will say that I mean, ever since 2019, I mean ever since the Boise conference, to be honest with you, I have been saying, you know, it's gonna stop developing now, so I can I can confidently say this is the this is the end point of it. I mean, it could just continue. I mean, I it depends on what happens historically, but we're we're we are still stuck in a way of organizing society where the cultural Marxism idea remains a relevant explanation for what has happened. I don't know whether I I I don't know what future conspiracy theories would look like.

SPEAKER_02 3:10:00

Yeah, I don't either.

C. Derick Varn 3:10:01

I mean, part of the problem is uh oh, I I have to I guess maybe this is the two places to end up on it. What are the trends that started happening in the in the late Greco, which is the European U Right Organization in France? Yeah, yeah. Is Goulam Fay started this stuff on basically of Turism that was also aimed at Islamism, and so he started talking about Islamo-Bolshevism as opposed to Islamo fascism, and and what we've seen in this new high weird hybrid moment with with Trump is you got like Roy Chip in Texas

Islamo Leftism Replaces Old Targets

C. Derick Varn 3:10:47

explicitly doing calling Mamdani an Islamo-Marxist or Islamo-Bolshevik or whatever, and it is on cultural Marxist slash Judeo-Bolshevik lines, but instead of Jews, it's Islamist. And what I find interesting is like while Alain de Benoit rejected this, this was a big like division in the in the French New Right, that this had a precursor in France. That like there were some in the French New Right who thought they could join up with like the French version of neoconservative anti-Islamism, but instead of it branding it Islamo fascism, it's branding it islamo-Bolshevism. And if you look at the way that this administration, whether or not you think they're fascist, and we that is an infinite debate that I'm actually not all that concerned about. As I've talked with uh about recently, I agree with Timothy Snyder. Even if they were a fascist, they're so greedy they fuck it up. So they their outright grifting actually prevents their fascist stuff from working. Um so you know, maybe with maybe that's a small weird ass blessing. But nonetheless, even if you think they are fascist, they've they've softened their rhetoric towards they've made explicit fascistic references more than once. I don't know if they do it just to fuck with liberals, but like they've done it a lot. And so it makes sense to me that they can't scream Islamo fascism, also that's too associated with the Bush administration, the people they supposedly hate. But they're going to try to bring back those neoconservative talking points by tying it into cultural Marxism and replacing Jews with Muslims. Umwhat ironically, because you know, the because MAGA, MAGA, it's MAGA itself is also split about whether or not it's pro or anti-Jewish, uh Steve, Toko Carlson, etc. I mean, this is like you go on X, you can watch this fight going back and forth forever, as right wingers, you know, you know, calling each other this and that. And we're also in a moment where, like, as Sean brought up on your show, but I've also noted the Israeli state is saying Greta Thunberg is a bigger anti-Semite than Nick Fuentes. Which I just feel like is an insult to Nick Fuentes, to be completely fair. So so do you feel like that's where we see this might might be going as Islamo-Bolshevist conspiracies and replacing Islamo fascism? Or do you see like because that does seem where it might have some sticking power, but it it is it it it also in this weird way ties it back to I mean, like in this weird way, it's like like a marriage of neoconservatism and paleoconservatism in a way that could only happen under Trump. So, what do you make about that?

SPEAKER_00 3:13:52

Yeah, I mean, like the the funny thing is that some of the uses of cultural Marxism that I see in the UK today are are people who are on the right and are saying, listen, we shouldn't blame Muslims for our problems. The the problem is the Jews, and it is the Jewish Frankfurt school that ultimately produced the issues we see today. And so there is this little kind of strange tension between wanting to make cultural Marxism well, an anti-Semitic idea, right? But like in certain countries where there are there is a tradition of demonizing and delegitimizing like Muslim involvement in civil society, there is this turn towards the the the idea of Islamo-leftism, or I mean because it is a it is certainly a French idea of Islamo-Gauchism, I think uh is the way you said I think I butchered it. But you see that in the UK with the current successes of the Green Party, but also the founding of the of your party, where a number of sort of Muslim members of parliament were sort of reduced to this idea of the Gaza independence, despite the fact that their programs are actually broader than that. And it is sort of an attempt to well not deal with the fact that in the communities where people who can be called Islamo-leftists are represented there, but there are real issues, right? And uh and it's part of like not only this sort of attempt to discredit the pro-Palestinian solidarity movement, but also an attempt to discredit any kind of social democratic politics. Um which is what cultural Marxism that that was the function of cultural Marxism as an idea of the kind of relatively mild liberal measures of affirmative action or political correctness are actually sort of Marxist ideas, and that's why we shouldn't believe in them or shouldn't pursue them, rather than whether they can actually have a successful effect.

C. Derick Varn 3:16:26

Which was part of the butchers, too. The butchers would accuse every civil rights activist of being Marxist, like yeah, sometimes they were which wasn't necessarily wrong, right?

SPEAKER_00 3:16:37

You know, I I don't I think butchers kind of go right of just sort of going, Well, you're a Marxist, but I mean that the the issue of the butchers is they never went further and sort of like were asking about whether the social problems that these activists were dealing with were actual social problems. And this is what we continue to have with cultural Marxism and Islamaleftism.

C. Derick Varn 3:17:04

Yeah, I mean it's if you can talk about that, you don't have to talk about the fact that like Mamdani is popular no matter like, even if I don't think he's like radical enough or whatever, because he's actually tried to address issues. I mean, yes, the the the issue of Israel was made so important because of both Adams and Cuomo, but and the and the specific history of New York, but also like the mayor of New York doesn't really set any international policy except for like four for like who a city invests in. That's like really the limit. And I find this kind of wild that we've ended up here because it does seem like in the American context, it is a weird bridge that you can rent all those like Islamo-fascist conspiracy theories from the neoconservatives over to this cultural Marxism stuff because they didn't care about that, but while also condemning the founders of neoconservatism as being secretly cultural Marxists at the same time, it's it's wild where it's at now. I mean, we can make fun of the easy, obvious stuff, like somehow the guy who hates jazz would have been the guy who wrote the music for the Beatles when he was really into Showberg. Um, that's Adorno, by the way, for my listeners. But it's wild for me to like posit these other things. Well, we've been going for three and a half hours, so I am gonna let you go. Uh, it's late in the UK. But where can people find your work, uh AJ?

SPEAKER_00 3:18:36

Uh they can find it at like Versailles Books, so you can just sort of search the cultural Marxism conspiracy. You can buy it there. I mean, if you're in the UK, please order. From either resident music in Brighton or City Books in Brighton or even Camp Town Books in Brighton because those are my local bookshops and record shops that I really love. And then on top of that, you can also find my work, um, the anti-capitalist resistance websites, which I

Where To Find The Book

SPEAKER_00 3:19:07

often write for. And if you live in Brighton, please come to anti-capitalist resistance events. Apparently, we're really cool and easygoing, which I don't know if it's necessarily a commendation, but come hang out with us, is what I will essentially say. All right.

C. Derick Varn 3:19:27

And for those of my listeners in the US, you can find the book. If you want to be more ethical about where you order it, you can get it from Powell's or Red Emma's, where they exist, or any of those places. It is also available from Verso directly. And if you want none of those, yes, you can go to the obvious big box stores and or big giant evil corporations.

SPEAKER_00 3:19:52

I think it is available. I bet Target has listed it. So if you want to go to uh uh Target, it is uh is a possibility, which you know, I guess is minimally evil.

C. Derick Varn 3:20:08

I don't sometime gonna find out that Powell's is like secretly funding genocide somewhere, and even no one exists or something, and I'm gonna have to go bad about that. But sorry, Powells. That's that I I I don't think that's true, guys. I've just it just feels like I can't, whatever people are like suggest an ethical place to buy a book, and I'm like, I don't know, man. Like, I try.

SPEAKER_00 3:20:28

Why the heck do I used to spend a lot of time in Pows because I used to live in Portland? I lived in Portland for a couple of years, so but I have Powell. The Powell's Cafe was one of my favorite places to hang out because it's a great bookstore.

C. Derick Varn 3:20:42

It's a giant bookstore. I I will say there are two bookstores that I tell people that you kind of need to go into if you ever get a chance, and one's the strand in New York, uh-huh, and the other one is Powell's and Portland. As far as I'm concerned, it's the only reason to go to Portland. I don't actually feel that way, but I kind of do. There are great Rose Gardens.

SPEAKER_02 3:21:03

That's true, there are, and there's some cool cafes, there's a couple of dive bars.

C. Derick Varn 3:21:08

But were you living in Portland when we met?

SPEAKER_00 3:21:12

Is that what I'm I know? I was living in London, Commer, Ontario, at that point, but um it was about a year or two after I'd left Portland. Okay. I know of certain aspects of Boise that reminded me out of it. I mean, I think that as soon as you're out west, like the the center parts of any city sort of feels somewhat the same, like there are cool dive bars and sort of cool people hanging around. Yeah. Even if it's not necessarily citywide.

C. Derick Varn 3:21:43

No, Boise, Boise is is an interesting little town, I will say. Well, I mean, it's not little, it's kind of growing game busters, but it it it it it is a weird. I mean, it's a normal progressivist city in a in a state that is the most reactionary state in the even more than Texas. Like you don't hear about Idaho as much, but Idaho is more conservative than Texas or Mississippi or Alberta or or Utah or or you know, it's it's there's parts of Idaho that I don't feel comfortable driving in at night without a gun. And so, but Boise's fine. Boise's great.

SPEAKER_00 3:22:25

And it's where Patrick's where Patrick still lives, presumably. I think I haven't spoken to him for a while.

C. Derick Varn 3:22:34

Yeah, yeah, Patrick is still out there, I think. We still talk, he's still involved in the in the show. Patrick, for those of you who don't know, used to be he was my he was when I wanted to replace me at at Pop the Left, he was my chosen successor. He also had the the unfortunate of transcribing every pop the left episode that existed before it was rebooted in 2019, uh, which is which sounds like a lot, but there's actually only 10 episodes, and us going, oh, I was kind of dumb in 2012. I mean, it it's funny because if you read those transcripts, or even like you, if people want to, I guess I'll pull up my show. If you subscribe to my Patreon, you can find all these archives, including most, although three of the original diet, the original run pop the left shows are not available anywhere. I cannot find anyone who has them archived either. But but most of them are available, and my thing you can listen to me talk about the left and the early aught teens. And what is weird about that is what we're actually talking about is the left and the aughts in the 1990s because like people still care about John Sarerson and stuff in 2012, and it is crazy how, like, two years after Occupy, everything that we talked about in those shows seems completely superfluous. Like, well, even by the time we were done, it's like none of that stuff matters anymore. We're now dealing with whatever the fuck the Burger Sanders phenomenon is. And so, yeah, so Patrick goes back to that's how we know each other. Uh, you and Patrick did a show together for a while, right?

SPEAKER_00 3:24:22

Yeah, no, but Patrick and I did the I mean, we met at the Boise conference because Boise uh Patrick was working at the time as a janitor at Boise State University. Yeah, I believe so. And he I and he managed to get along to a couple of the sessions at at the Jordan Peterson conference that both of you and I went to. And we were Patrick and I had a chat, we became Facebook friends, and we uh and he sent out a post one one day about saying we should do uh people should do a podcast about you know all of the radical

Boise Connections And Podcast History

SPEAKER_00 3:24:57

thinkers uh series that Verso does, and and like have discussions about whether they're any good or not. And we did that for basically two series, which is basically like I mean, what what would it that about like uh 22, 24 books, and then just like life got in the way, which I mean, like is what happens with a lot of podcast projects that are based on like a certain basis. I mean, if we hey even Surf Jan Stevens, who sort of wanted to do a series of albums about every state, and he managed to go through two of them, right? Yeah, yeah. So it could be that's it. Yeah, so I mean like the the radical thinker series uh podcast was this kind of like me, Patrick, Donald Parkinson, another person from Cosmonaut, whose name I'm I I'm forgetting. Was it Parker? Yeah, it was Parker, I think. Yeah, no, we were we went through a bunch of them, and like if you read my book and then re-listened to a re-listen to a lot of the conversations that we had, you can kind of hear the influence of that had because I'm sort of writing a lot of the stuff that ended up coming, uh ended up being in the book while while we were recording that podcast. So if you want to read yeah, one thing you you were interviewed twice, I think.

C. Derick Varn 3:26:23

Yeah, once for Altusaire, and once for and then once for Ultra Large, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, don't I take that back. I wasn't up to it, it's Baudrillard and a and a and Adorno to the interview for. Uh-huh. Because I was talking about how I both love and hate minima moralia, and and then I talked about like my bizarro relationship with Baudrillard, who I do not think is a right winger, but I think a lot of people who like him are. Even if they don't know it. So it is it, it was a it was a fun show. I think it's still available. I people should people should look it up and check it out. I uh uh our last our sign off, and then we really will be done. Uh I did not realize that you were the same AJ Woods as the Verso show AJ Woods until I messaged you on Out of Nowhere as if I did not know you, and you reminded me that you were the same person. And I was like, But you but you sound so much more British than you used to. I mean, you always sounded British. I knew you were British when I met you, but like you sound more British now, and then you you obviously you're back home, so it makes sense. Like, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:27:33

No, but but because at the out of time I was still kind of like the weird American Canadian AJ, whereas now I I've lived back in the UK for what like three years now. So I'm I'm I'm surrounded by these British people, and it's it's maddening. I'm like, where are some of the I mean thankfully I've married to an American, but I need I need to accumulate more Americans than Canadians in my in my inner circle while I'm living here, I think.

C. Derick Varn 3:28:01

Yeah, there's a lot of them there, even still, even though I'm like, what are you doing? The UK. I mean, to be fair, when I was saying this, the the United States also doesn't really have an economy anymore, so like it's a little bit different to make this joke now. But I uh yeah, so I didn't realize that you were the same that you were the same AJ Woods. I was just like, Oh, oh, I know the guy who wrote this book.

SPEAKER_02 3:28:26

Oh, oh, we've talked about this stuff before.

SPEAKER_00 3:28:29

What time I and some like the first engagements with this was like the sectarian review episode that you did. Oh, yeah, yes, that was for and then it's like years and years ago, like that's 2017 at that point, right?

SPEAKER_02 3:28:46

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 3:28:48

But because early on, you were the only person who had like been do like doing podcasts about this, and then the years uh yeah, the subsequent years that there was a lot more coverage of it, but you were the only person who was any on any podcast talking about this.

C. Derick Varn 3:29:04

Oh, yeah, no, because what I I remember what it was is Danny Anderson of the Sectarian Review, which was a weirdly a left-wing Christian podcast, interestingly enough.

SPEAKER_00 3:29:13

No, I I loved that podcast, it was great.

C. Derick Varn 3:29:17

He had me come on and talk about like all the buzzwords that were coming out of at the time Coolette, and I went through like the William Lynn stuff, and then even before that, somebody had asked me to go into the rational core of paleoconservative stuff for systematic redness. So I did an episode with the Moxahoo in 20, I think it was 2014, it may have been 2013, on uh what uh the rat the the the truth and lies of cultural Marxism. Like, so I did several shows on it, and you're right, nobody was talking about it. People thought it was weird to even address it. I think Martin J had done like MPR thing about the cultural Marxist conspiracies and also how sometimes they showed up on the last because he was talking about Castro blaming Adorno for something. But in general, other than that one appear appearance by Martin J on a liberal show, no one was talking about it, and I was like, we have to have an answer to this because this is I started seeing it in Brightbar. I'm like, this is showing up everywhere. I used to associate it with like Bercher circles, very uh talkie mag circles, very marginal circles, but now it's ubiquitous, and it's not just on the alt-right, it's like in the general Z guys, and it took forever to get the left to respond to it. So I'm glad you wrote the book and glad it's so well documented. Thank you for that.

SPEAKER_00 3:30:44

Yeah, no, I mean, thank you. I mean, like it was nice to hang out with someone at the conference who understood what I was talking about, and I also someone who I'm able to sort of like nerd out about like sort of the weird splits with within the right with because I think that outside of people like you and also people who sort of study it a lot, like there is a tendency to sort of conflate the right or sort of not be interested in those histories, and so be able being able to dig into that is actually really satisfying.

C. Derick Varn 3:31:15

Yeah, my favorite weird deep dive that I haven't ever gone into was like the temporary split when the alt-right split and the alt-right name actually went to a different group than Richard Spencer's group who went by radix, and only with only with Hillary Clinton used the alt-right in her list of deplorable speech did did Spencer get the alt-right back as as a as a moniker. My other favorite thing right now is a lot of people are saying that Spencer was a S a Southern Poverty Law Center plant, which I'm like, there's no evidence for that. He was a member of the National Policy Institute. If you don't know the National Policy Institute, that sounds like sounds innocuous. It's actually a neo-Nazi organization. So whatever. I mean, who knows? I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 3:32:02

We're having very similar debates in the UK here right now, of like Nigel Farage being like controlled opposition. That accusation not only comes from Elon Musk, but various people who are organizing on the right right now, and so it's actually quite fascinating to be like studying the British right because they are sort of going through a similar period to what was happening to the US right in like the first Trump administration, and it'll be interesting to see how that then feeds into like a Farage government, which I would like to say it's not inevitable, but seems actually quite likely in the next couple of years.

C. Derick Varn 3:32:48

Yeah, I was about to say I mean somehow Macron has held this held off, and maybe Melchon's gonna come from behind after the last municipal rounds, but it I've also been like, it looks like the the Le Pennite movement, although not herself because she can't run now, is gonna dominate in France. And I've also been like, it looks like reform is going to dominate in the UK because I mean the the Sturm administration's been like, I thought the SP Day and the Greens in Germany were deeply embarrassing and discrediting, but like to use an American phrase of my generation, labor has now gone

UK And US Rightward Drift

C. Derick Varn 3:33:27

hold my beer. Let's you know, overseas stuff like the un the undoing of trial by jury and and stuff that goes all the way back to the fucking Magna Carta.

SPEAKER_00 3:33:43

That no one asks for, right? Like, no, no one is saying, can you can we get rid of jury trials? There is no like organic demand for that among the British population. This is sort of something that they have done because they're fucking dorks and they're like technocrats, and they're like, Well, actually, if we get rid of this, then maybe like prosecutions can happen faster, and we can see that in like media interviews of sort of saying, Oh no, labor is tough on crime because like we've had these much more this vast increase of uh people going to prison. Without actually sort of like fixing the prison system or even like questioning what the prison system in the UK is even like.

C. Derick Varn 3:34:23

No, yeah, what we make fun of you here for is Keir Starmer kicked up something that was already done with the Tories, which is putting people in jail for social media posts. That's what we always comment on. I mean, I think it's overstated, frankly, but like you you can get Americans both left and right all honorary about free speech issues. I I do appreciate this one thing about whether the British Labour has gone, and that is it does sometimes make me feel like the British left has actually made me feel slightly better about the American left, but only slightly. And and to give my British listeners a break, I think we are as far as like you guys were really topping us off on this acceleration towards the bottom, but like in the last two years, we've we've bypassed you. We just have a lot more to fall from.

SPEAKER_00 3:35:12

So give us a second chance, we will we will catch up, I think.

C. Derick Varn 3:35:19

Well, I mean, under Farage government, it's gonna be easy, it's gonna be interesting. I mean, if if people thought that Boris Johnson was Trump-esque, wait till they see Nigel Farage. But anyway, thank you so much, AJ. Thank you for coming on. People should check out your old show, they should check out the book, they share it, you're stuffing for for uh for anti-capitalist resistance. And and you know what, they should even check out Brighton if they're ever in the UK, I guess. I hear it's lovely.

SPEAKER_00 3:35:46

Uh, it's a nice city, yeah. It's nice to be beside the seaside, as the old song goes.

C. Derick Varn 3:35:53

I'm kind of surprised that anything isn't beside the sea. But then again, as an American, I have a different scale of space.

SPEAKER_00 3:35:59

Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah. No, I do I don't I do remember being moving to Portland and being like, oh, that's sort of near the sea, but then uh having to do like the three-hour journey to the sea, uh, and going, oh, actually, no, that the America is fucking massive.

C. Derick Varn 3:36:15

Yeah, oh yeah. I mean, like, I always say I grew up on the East Coast, and I did. I grew up two and a half hours away from the ocean, which is for an American short. Because to I live in Utah now, and to get out of the we're actually weirdly, we're a very urbanized state because you can't really live in most like most of Utah is actually hostile to all life, and I'm not I'm not really exaggerating, but and because it's high plains desert, and but once you get out of the immediate valley area where there's like a cluster of seven cities, the nearest city is five hours away, and it's like Las Vegas, and then it's like and then it's Boise, and you drive to Boise, and I'm like, Yeah, and you know what? This took me longer than driving from London to the back end of Scotland would take, and I consider this nearby. So whenever I talk to Brits, I always have some reminds like we have a completely different scale of space, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:37:17

No, I and I have adapted to like the American scale over time, and it's sort of like weird to sort of turn back turn back to British mood, where actually like 50 miles makes a huge amount of difference.

C. Derick Varn 3:37:34

Yeah, I mean it it is wild to me because I've always been like, you know, the entirety of the UK is like the size of like three southern states. It's like a cluster, like Alabama, Mississippi. I don't even think it's that big.

SPEAKER_00 3:37:46

Like it's um it could fit inside Mississippi.

C. Derick Varn 3:37:49

Well, it could fit inside Texas, I know that it could no, it definitely, but like, okay, like half of Europe can fit inside Texas. Like um, I mean the other thing is I'm like, if you don't include Eastern Europe and you're only talking about Western Europe, our our country is bigger than your region. Um so anyway, uh that note, uh and those basic geobic geographic facts being disputed with. We're gonna end the show after four hours. Thank you so much, AJ.

SPEAKER_00 3:38:18

Okay, thank you very much for having me on. Yeah, all right. That was great. Thank you. Yeah, thank you.