I saw men with tattoo yesterday walk shirtless on street. I've never seen something like this because I don't know if I stick in my mind, but what I mean is he had chubby torso and he walked shirtless proudly. Also tattoo girlfriend, he had this and it was right on his belly. This is what I mean. I'd never seen this before. Like a stomach chub dormant, a wheel of some kind. It wasn't like a Buddhist Dharma wheel but it was large like that and his girlfriend also awed with bags of potato on her thighs that type you know cellulite and many tattoos and is this what people do now? I'd never seen it looked like his stomach had been either split opener like bullseye on Big Belly. They have specialized hog fat adornments proudly displays

and now I have city renewal proposals. I would say you are not allowed to walk on street if your obesity may cause a public disturbance or something like that. It's obvious that Mr. Bukele, the Punic brother, he has certain plans also for, but he doesn't go far enough. I'd say if you emit certain smells, it isn't just if you're homeless, if you emit certain smells, if you, with your shirt off, are liable through ugliness to cause public disturbance, this should be not allowed. And there are myths now in Central America about Mr. Bukele, the Punic brother. Yes, he set his country right with police forces, but what about beautifying it in this way? But anyways, there are myths in Central America that the American continent was first discovered

and settled by definitions and not by the Italians. And I think it's because a lot of Middle Easterners there, they're called Turcos, but many are are Palestinian and Lebanese, not just El Salvador, but Honduras and all those countries are like this. They run the local trade in the same way that many Lebanese do in West African nations. I'm sorry, this is long show, long episode, I hope you don't mind if I don't use power voice throughout, but they like such We Was Kang stories in Central America that they think, does that give them legitimacy? I don't know what is the point of this, by the way, but humans be like that. White nationalists sometimes also talk about ancient, supposedly, salutian culture. This is a culture, I think, in the south-southeast United States.

They say it represents settlement of America from Europe in prehistoric times, perhaps along the rim of ice sheet that they walked along that ice sheet to United States or Americas or something like that and then Kennewick man who admittedly his face does look like Captain Picard but I don't see the connection of why you think because even if it's from the same side of the world what has that to do with you why matters who was there first in any case I do wish that if people needed moral legitimacy for settlement and colonization Why not invoke maybe arguments of John Locke on this? Because I think it's a pretty strong argument in modern context, at least about mixing the land with your labor, and this is what allows you perhaps some moral right to it.

Or otherwise simply invoke the right of conquest. It would be better than these lying debates like Palestinians and Israelis about who was there first, when that land actually rightly belongs, if you want to go there, it belongs to the Byzantine emperor or otherwise to the House of Hohenstaufen and their legitimate heirs. I think the King of Spain claims rulership of Jerusalem now, by the way. I also think the House of Two Sicilies has a claim. Why Two Sicilies is interesting today. I will continue to talk Renaissance Italy, but that's later on this episode. I want to address this matter of the individual. Where does European and generally Western feeling for the individual come from? Because I think a lot of this talk is confused by not only internet meme arguments, but academic memes.

In other words, academics, professors over the last few decades who actually do want to trace every modern problem back to John Locke or to Hobbes as the inventors of Anglo-individualist liberalism or such thing. And I think it's misunderstanding this of many things. But yes, the House of Two Sicilies, Prince Pedro, Duke of Calabria, you know, the Calabreses, they are I think found in Brooklyn, Bronx, similar I think the Ndraguetas from that part of Italy, but similar type of mafia Italians that made their way to the United States. So you think maybe they look like Al Pacino or like some people from the Sopranos with, I like Tony Soprano, but his nephew with that kind of rat face that many people around the Mediterranean have, I don't like that face.

But I need to say that a guy named Pedro, Duke of Calabria, who you might expect to look like that does not at all as this family live in Madrid also by the way as much does of this older nobility but they are all blonde it's very funny as I may have said a few episodes back many of the old European noble families have been marrying Scandinavian women every other generation so the old Roman noble families now even they're all blond and then also not exactly the same, but if you look at the Aga Khan, His Excellency, the Ismail Imam, which is hereditary position by the blood of Ali, hereditary position, these same people who were the assassins, you read Bernard Lewis' book, Assassin's Good Book, but you look at

the Aga Khan, the current one versus his grandfather and great-grandfather, it's very funny progression, he looks like an Englishman, were Magyars, originally Asian. No one knows. They were riding savage cannibal tribe riders from Central Asia when they first broke into Europe a thousand years ago. That's another stupid argument. The Magyars versus the Rubenians, who was first in Transylvania as if it matters who was there a thousand years ago as opposed. But that doesn't mean necessarily, by the way, they were Asian looking at that time because I mean the Magyars, a thousand years ago, there had already been, well before the year 1000, there had been mixing for centuries before the year 900 between Turkoid, Altaic,

Ugric, and other tribes on the steppe with the Scythians, who had been there since, let's say, 700 BC, who were European looking apparently. So you know, anyway, this is all very interesting. But to go back to tattoos, I think the Scythians were tattooed, right? That's why a friend said that the Jamaicans are the current heirs of ancient Aryan style. Why? Because they have tattoos, because they smoke weed, much like Herodotus said the Scythians put weed on rocks and inhale the fumes. They smoked ganja and goat curry. they make goat curry in Jamaica, and that is another Aryan tradition. So I'm wondering, is he right? Are they the heirs of the ancient Scythians, the modern Jamaicans? I don't know, but I was high repulsed to see that man on the street with the wheel tattoo on his

fat belly displaying it, and I assumed these were tourists. I'm in a tropical location now, I will not say where, but the natives don't use much tattoo here from what I can see. but I'd never seen that putting it right on Chubby Belly as a proud adornment and when I first went for example to Brazil that was more than 20 years ago everyone had that too already pretty much then it's not a recent fad adoption in United States there in certain countries it was always a fashion but it was not happening in Brazil like it is in United States now it was not a sleeve style This is episode 153, Caribbean Rhythms, yes, but it was not sleeve style, it was seen as a slight adornment, like a sexy adornment on either men or women, adornment to a nice

natural physique, they would have maybe a discreet tattoo on their leg or such, or on upper shoulder, but regardless, I'm not complaining about tattoos as such, you know, people especially online find some of the most absurd things to obsess about, and tattoos, many are obsessed online. Look, you'll see if I go on this rant now in opening passage segment, because there are many leaders now, so-called, on the right, including in Europe. And I mean real, I don't mean just online leaders who are not really leaders, I mean political leaders like Zemur, Eric Zemur and Thierry Baudet and other famous European politicians, prominent ones and also some in the United States who are in my view making a huge mistake by embracing the whole, what they may see as the whole barrel of dissident beliefs,

which is a big mistake because it's a circumstantial thing why these things are associated that exist mostly online among a small vocal worldwide audience, whereas if you try the same within any one country, you'll be actually a super minority, you'll get destroyed politically in any election, or even if you're not a politician for election, you will get destroyed in any public argument. There are maybe 70,000 of us worldwide, and I think that's an exaggeration maybe, an optimistic level let's say, but much fewer than that even. We just have outsized influence and then other ancillary groups pick up these certain arguments that are made and mix them all together. But anyway, look, tattoos, yes, do you need to denounce tattoos?

My point is does Zemur, for example, actually need to comment on classic city design or traditional architecture, walkable city street urbanism? I believe he's done this. Do you need to do this, Mr. Eric Zemur? Is it possible that you might have people in France who actually like modern art and modern architecture who might even like driving or taking a taxi, but they don't want Congoids quaffing jinkum in their back alleys? And maybe you should build coalition on that one thing. Maybe that what politicians should do now instead of – but as for tattoos, yes, you see denunciations of tattoos every day, and really I mean to say, do you have nothing better than to focus? It's a ship that sailed. Many frogs now even have tattoos.

And there's also, I think, a self-righteous kind of mockish pseudo-feminist vibe to all of this, as in, how can the pure defenseless women just sully the pure bodies, their temples, Their pure bodies are temples and they're sullied by tattoos because they were mentally corrupted by evil people. I mean, please give me a break with this, you know. Focus if you want to anything like that, focus on public obesity instead please. But just for whatever reason, for me personally that fat man with the real bullseye tattoo on his belly, I can't get it out of my mind. It's shocking and humiliating to have to see that on the street and gentle mens like Mr. Bukele as well as mayors in other parts of the third world who can have authoritarian powers should put city edicts.

You cannot, you have to shower at least every other day, you have to wash your clothes once a week, there are some homeless in certain cities, they smell from a block away. Welcome Caribbean Rhythms again episode 153 and yes I will talk Renaissance Italy and their development of the individual but let me continue with this now. They're related in a way, you know, if being an individual means anything, it means being or trying to be unique, to set yourself apart in some way from your neighbors, from others around you. That's the naive meaning of it, right? And you see in Florence, already by the 1390s, even by then that people start abandoning customary case to national dress and they go about dressing in their own particular

styles as they wished, which at that time had been entirely a new thing, actually I think it's a new thing even now, but there was not even any prevailing fashion of dress for the men at least in Florence of that time, each trying to stake out his own new way and so on, mostly. But is that the case now for tattoos or other fashion? Consider that for a moment. How many people getting tattoos genuinely think they're trying to be an individual? I don't think so. I think I have to tell you. shocking instead the homogeneity and conformity I see in certain countries now where Brooklyn style, Brooklyn, the United States pseudo hipster style is taken over and everyone looks the same and considers me a freak for dress. I do dress the unusual way. Even when it's very cold, I wear

shorts outside. I just spent my first temperate zone autumn in Europe. I was in, I won't say which European country, but I was there for October, November, part of December. I had not experienced that change of season in some years. I missed the smell. It's a wonderful smell in Europe when spring comes and when autumn comes. I was very glad to do that. But people, as soon as the weather changes a little bit, they look at you like you're a freak if you wear, you know, rugby shorts and so on. I dress in my own way. I think it looks fine because you mix rugby shorts with a collared shirt and in a certain way it can work, but Brooklyn's style on the other hand is the perfect fit for this universal uniform of the faggot at the end of history.

It requires nothing of you to wear Brooklyn dress code. Jeans, black or gray sneakers, black or gray t-shirt, a beard. I've been in places where there would be three or four guys in a group. I don't know if they are tourists or local. They were going out or such. They were not homos. You would expect homos. Tattoos have always been very conformist. When one of them picks a style, they can be in a group, they can all look like twins decked out by their mommy when they're five years old, you know, all dressed the same. But these guys were not homos, but every single one had same haircut, same beard, same outfit with only slight color variation, and the tattoos are actually uniform as well. I mean, let's not say the swastika, but even anything slightly.

I asked in my book, where's the last time a rule-breaking hipster supposedly rule-breaking when they wore a Hitler mustache? Have you seen that on the street? You can even argue it away. This is not like Hitler. This is like Alfredo Stroessner as a dictator of Paraguay for, what was it, 30 years, and He was a United States ally. I'm perfectly justified to have his mustache. It's not Hitler. It's Alfredo Strösner. Well, I used to do that years ago. I walked on the street with Hitler mustache. People were afraid to talk to me. But the Brooklyn outfit is perfectly the form. Why? Because it requires nothing of you. A potbelly is actually expected. The beard hides half of your face. So your weak jaw and chubby face and your soyjack expression can actually meld into

a kind of sea of half-masks that everybody else also has, all the other men, that falsely advertise an emphasis on masculinity at the expense of common humanity. And if you live in a dangerous place, you won't be singled out necessarily, except by random, because this uniform helps you, right? It's basically modest man-herd camouflage. That's another one of its functions. You don't even have to have money, and money is one of the lowest forms of achieving distinction and flashing distinction. But this Brooklyn thing I mention is the perfect poverty uniform of the erased male. And yet I'm told by trads, by traditionalists, that actually we live in this wild hedonistic time, of untrammeled self-expression, and that the assertion of egotistic individuality

at the expense of the common good is killing the world. But I don't see it. Tattoos, just to pick on this one, are irrelevant for many reasons now, so it has zero predictive power if you have a tattoo or not, unless you have a big belly and you have a bullseye Buddhist Dharma wheel right in the center of it. As a man, I've never seen, it's bizarre. It's more bizarre than if you see a man with, let's say, a tiny Chinese tattoo on the lower back, which, you know, okay, you know, women have that, but I, I mean, imagine, and this guy was not a homo, but he had this, anyway, you can meet frogs and otherwise good people, apolitical good people in general who have tattoos. And on the other hand, you can meet soy jack worthless people full of malice who do not have tattoos. It means nothing now.

It's become a general practice for years, so I need to say, why not find something else to obsess over? Oh yes, it's degenerate. Yeah, this word degenerate. Just keep repeating this word degenerate until you win. Have panels with OnlyFans whores to denounce them for being degenerate. And that, you know, is the new right wing style. So you see, this is the new right wing. Forget the fact that these whores are being promoted under the guise of opposing them. For those of you who don't keep up with the happenings, it's not just on Twitter. There's a whole style of right-wing so-called traditionalist pundit or influencer who appears on these panels, whether it's YouTube or Twitter. They have four or five whores from OnlyFans and they talk to them in this reasonable voice

about their morality and then they blow up at them and, oh no, how could you do that? You introduce love and do you believe, is this a good pass for, I don't know, criticism of the left or whatever they have in mind, but actually you can imagine people who do this up probably trading affiliate fees in exchange for that is this what you want I'm telling you this whole face fag thing this is what I'm talking about I have to make this rant I'm sorry in opening a segment the whole face fag thing is a disaster face fags are cancer whether it's people holding panels of whores like this to supposedly denounce them while actually promoting them or or face fags like Sebastian Gorka, I assume other people from the Trump administration,

ex-Trump administration, who are doing a minstrel show, playing a performance for what they imagine is a captive MAGA audience, who then they can sell a mug to or such. They do this grab bag of things that non-say and then try to build a social media marketing following it on the basis of that. And naive people on the right who want to feel like they're getting a pat on the head, they think it's great, for example, that Eva, whatever, you know, the Dutch girl, she was on Tucker Carlson's show and so on, and supposedly it's great for us that she's promoting a rightist ideas and I think it's a disaster, right, or the whole Andrew Tate thing, you know. There's going, these people are so unpleasant and so stupid that a reaction against them

from the left is inevitable and it's likely to be successful given what the so-called right wing has become with these people, right? When you consider these personages I've mentioned, I'm sorry, Eva, Andrew Tate or the others, just in the context of the tattoo thing, right? And you have to oppose tattoos because that's the party line and not opposing tattoos is is neo-liberal, individualist, hyper-sexualist, hyper-capitalism, degeneracy, or these other taboo words that they've picked up on to counter the left's taboo words of racism and such or white whatever, white privilege, you know, you have to, in this case, in the case of Eva, you have to support the Dutch farmer protests, you know, you have to support Russia

and China because Dugin said so, he criticizes Western degeneracy, Alexander Dugin. You have to check off all the boxes. And this is the way of the face fag, and it affects even people who aren't technically face fags like Eric Zemur, right? He's not a face fag. A face fag doesn't refer as such to somebody who uses face in public as opposed to being anonymous. You don't have to be anonymous. But somebody face fag refers to someone who tries to insert himself or herself as the face of the frogs, the face of the anonymous online writers or posters and so on, who is motivated by media attention that was fixated on the online right, where they then get a glint in the eye and think, how can I make public media TV or political or pundit career

on this by saying I am the face of this movement, right, because they're all anonymous. So I'm the face of it because look at me, I'm special, I'm an academic, I wear a suit or I'm a girl with a hot face or whatever. And the problems with that, aside from the fact that many are not very bright and they usually distort our views to begin with, many of which views cannot be said in public yet actually. And when you try, you compromise the truth and you also compromise political life. You compromise both. The only person who could walk that line well was Trump. He did it perfectly, but all the other ones I'm talking about can't do it. But the problem with, aside from that, is that as publicizer of ideas, not their own,

these people can only make it in the public eye by positioning themselves in what is already a crowded market of positions where most positions have been staked out. And so this then is a type of competition that encourages a stupid kind of minstrel performance, a performance in front of a leftist media establishment, meant only to promote the performer's social media standing, their profile, instead of any actual political goals. So what do I mean? I take the girl, Eva, I've mentioned, right, she made it as the face of the farmer protests in Holland. I think they were protesting, I don't know, nitrogen regulations. the regulations are bad, it would make their life as farmers hard or impossible in some cases, it might even be a worthy cause, I don't know, but that particular matter,

rightful or not, and by the way, I personally am a lot more environmentalist than many on the so-called right, as is most of old frog twitter, us, the old Bolsheviks, the people who are posting 2013, 14, 15, and so on, we are a lot more environmentalist than the face fags around right now, for whom the environment isn't so much a concern. The whole focus, for example, on xenoestrogens, which are much worse for you, I'm afraid, than seed oils, but no one really wants to touch xenoestrogens for all kinds of reasons, actually. The xenoestrogen lobby, by the way, which is really the chemical industry lobby, is much stronger than the seed oil lobby. And if you talk against xenoestrogens, you will be much more attacked, as I have been since basically my book came out.

That's a topic for maybe an article or another episode of why the Koch network in particular, and now certain others too, but they fixated on me. But if you're We're focused on xenoestrogens, by the way, and on that type of pollution. Eating meat is also a bit ambiguous because these types of substances concentrate in animal fats. But look, that's topic for another time. But that particular matter of the farmers in Holland who are opposed by environmentalists in Holland and so on, but it's got nothing as such to do with migration restriction is my point. And in my opinion, migration restriction should be the number one political matter to resolve in both Europe and America now, and actually since the mid-2010s or so.

And it's reaching such a pitch in the United States, which under the Biden administration, you see the crisis at the border now, eight million people I think it's led through to where even relatively cucked GOP governors like Governor Texas, or otherwise, I think It was the BlackRock, I don't know if it was the BlackRock CEO, but someone like that. People were surprised when at Davos, he spoke against what's going on at the American border. It's becoming so crazy that maybe, yes, you could build a wide coalition against busted borders in the United States and Europe now. But in Eva's mind, and that of other face fags, these very different things that have nothing has such to do with each other, the farmers, the vaccines or whatever, they're

all associated because all of them are supposedly plans of a monolithic globalist neoliberal establishment, be they composed of demons who drink child blood or not, okay? But actually the associations of these, let's say these two things, the farmers and migration is very destructive for the cause of migration restriction, which you should, if you want to resolve it, you should want to attract people who may not agree with you on all kinds of other things, whether it's the environment, or Russia versus Ukraine, or LGBT type matters and so forth. But because of the dynamic, what I'm saying, of the cancerous face fag minstrel show performer, who has no actual ideas or positions of his own. His position is as co-lator to take these things from online and present himself as the face of them

and the tendency is then to associate these things into a supposed complete program, where again, you check off all the boxes so that Eric Zemur, for example, sabotaged himself. Could he have won? I don't know, probably not. But instead of beating on the migration point, as he should have, he also had to get involved in COVID and vaccine things and many others, you know. And Bode in Belgium does the same, they all do the same. You know, you have to denounce gays or trannies because degenerate, or you have to denounce tattoos. You have to support trad wife Eva. Are you clapping along, comrade? You know, you have to be against seed oils. Have you denounced seed oils today? Did you denounce tattoos that are sullying the pure bodies of saintly pure women today?

Did you denounce highways and drivable cities? Didn't you know that's also part of the grab bag, by the way? If you're against, you know, if you're against the Sudanese being allowed to fondle your sister on the street or a Gambian taking a shit on city street in broad daylight, why surely you must also denounce modern architecture. Tell me what sense that makes, or drivable cities. You have to denounce drivable cities because, you know, living in a Yemenite or Cambodian village made of red clay with no drivable streets and living by traditional fishing methods and where to enter your naturally non-air-conditioned room, you have to slide into a tunnel and slide above your neighbor's multi-generational family one room longhouse. Excuse me, townhouse, okay?

Did you denounce hedonism today, comrade? You don't live with your great-grandmother by the polenta ball, you're an individualist hedonist. Check off all the boxes. These face fags have to get their statistics up, you know, they've got to get their numbers up. They have to justify making the next TV appearance. You have serious media careers of serious child actors and minstrel performers and softcore porn exhibitionists dancing for thousands of retarded clapping seals online. Comrade, you have to make sure you denounce today on their behalf to make their career. We must denounce. I have to tell you this idiocy. And I feel a little bit responsible, right, although I'm not. But I was with like ten guys on a small forum many years ago, more than ten years ago, and

I decided we all – well, about ten – I went on Twitter in 2013. We all decided to go on Twitter as a mass media communications device, but my purpose was not to encourage a guy who goes around saying that, oh, he's a traditionalist orthodox, and he's also into tanning, and he's also against seed oils, and did you buy his chips today? You know, and you go into airports and ask women they don't know, are you planning on having kids, and what is your ideology and such to some extent that, I don't know, you know, that kind of banalization gives me some cover, but on the other hand, I hate it so much. And this is not why we went to speak to a mass audience. I guess some is inevitable though, but face fags are cancer and the grab bag idiotic ideology developed

on so-called dissident right and now melding into dissident left with this pathetic railing against degeneracy and individualism is worthless. And to a large extent, I see it as being encouraged by Russophiles into Dugan and so on. I despise all of it. And if you think it's compatible with my book or what I say, you don't understand anything about me. I remember, I praised once in... I don't remember if it was an article or something, but I praised an eight-lane highway that goes through the center of Buenos Aires. It's called Libertador Avenue. I think about eight lanes, it's very broad, it's huge. But it's right by two nice neighborhoods, Palermo and Recoleta, and it has parks on both sides. And it's actually a real pleasure to walk alongside it at night or at dusk.

It's a great example of how you can have a big highway-sized thing in the middle of a city. It's both drivable and walkable. I love it. I love Buenos Aires' huge broad boulevards. They're copied, obviously, from Madrid's Grand Avenues. But when I said this once online, I was assaulted in replies by morons who accused me of being funded by Peter Thiel, and that's why I was supposedly saying this. You see, Peter Thiel really cares, somehow they pass this to each other, that Thiel is trying to destroy walkable cities and promote driving, I don't understand. Obviously, there's no basis for what they believe other than this telephone game where they convince each other that you are contradicting, introducing the party line where we're all

supposed to clap at undrivable cities with narrow lanes designed for horses and not admire anything in modern city design or it means you're a subverter, you know. I didn't properly denude, so of course I must be paid by Peter Thiel to promote this degeneracy of being able to call a taxi, you know. So you see what I mean. What has any of this to do with migration restriction? I don't know. I suppose when it's online in this way, you may wonder why I spend time railing against it in this segment. When it's online in this way, it can be something to laugh at, something amusing to be dismissed and maybe not deserving of ranting against it, but it's infected prospects of politicians like Zimur who, I don't know if he's in any chat rooms, but they go online, they get carried

away by the excitement of being online and brain poison and then they mistakenly believe they can sell this whole package in an individual nation. It never works and it makes the cause of what's really important, whether it's migration restriction or not getting involved in a new war somewhere, it makes it completely into a stupid cause by association with these other things. Why are you muddying the waters in this way, somebody could say. The woman against whom Zimur ran, Le Pen, was not brain poisoned by internet but made similar mistake before he did in the previous election cycle in France by not focusing on migration restriction and instead she again the criticism of neoliberal individualism and we have to support working class communal socialism and so on.

So the French people overwhelmingly rejected that in favor of Macron, you know. And it was not because of her position on migration restriction. I'm talking about Le Pen now in previous elections. It was because she muddied the waters in a very similar process to what I'm talking about now. In the retarded telephone game I'm talking about now, these people have also talked themselves into supporting Millet's opposition in Argentina, Javier Millet's opposition, the incumbent Peronist government there, because that government invoked the same kind of wholesome socialist family values, working folk, anti-neoliberal language that you might find, again, Dugin and his followers also like that. So you can forget the fact that the Peronists, along with their allies like Sinn Fein in

Ireland or the Basque nationalists, which are socialist nationalism, they all support brown nationalism only and they all support mass migration, they all support red terror. But forget about that because, again, they invoke the language of this dissident grab bag of ideologies I keep talking about, so then therefore you have to support them. If you don't, you're a subverter on the side of evil lock and Anglo-liberalism or whatever, You see so anyway enough of this I mentioned Peter Thiel when I come back I will talk about Thiel talk about me now on some interviews And I thought it's interesting to discuss this the way certain people talk about what I am doing a certain Criticism they make of me from the point of view of religion and of Christianity

regarding of what are alternatives for the future, but related actually to No discussion of individualism and everything I talk about on this show, I will be right back. But yes, I am concerned in general on the condition of the right and in general condition of opposition to the left, which includes not just the hard right or the alt-right, call it what you want, but of course traditional conservatives who are completely bankrupt and have been since at least, well they've been for decades in fact, but they were exposed in a very bad way when Trump came along in 2016. And then there are centrists, liberals of various kinds who are anti-woke, but fundamentally they have no energy. The only energy was with the online right, the hard right, and they are in a very bad

way now as we have been replaced by moronic face fags like mr. Tate and Ava the girl and quite a few others like that who are so unpleasant and so stupid that it will lead again I'm afraid it will lead to a reaction a reaction from the left in the next five years or even before they will be successful I think be successful unfortunately but doesn't need to happen we'll see look Peter Thiel who is not he was not like any of the people I've talked about so far he's a good man and he's very smart and he gave a talk recently I think in December in honor of Roger Scruton I think it was at Oxford this speech and he brings me up in context of revival of antiquity actually on topic of this series, he talks about Renaissance Italy, or he mentions it in this passage, so I think it's good.

I'll play it now. It's a couple of minute clip, and then I'll play it now for you. One moment. The Romulus, the Bible, already at the beginning in Genesis, takes the side of Abel. Of course, there's some sense in which the entire biblical tradition is from the point of view of the victim. The Jews, the normal way the story of Exodus would be written would be from the point of view of the Egyptians, who were these troublemakers and they got removed. It would be like the Oedipus myth, where you get rid of Oedipus, or something like that. And then of course there is something like this in the Christian story itself, where it is a sort of inversion of perspectives, and this elevation of victimhood, this idea

that this is central. Shirley was one of the key pieces of it. I think it's sort of the late Nietzsche when he was sort of going mad, sort of had this ink, it was always, you know, we need to go back to the strong classical world where, you know, the victims don't complain and all this stuff is, you know, is sort of healthy and robust. But he sort of had some sense this was not the way History was going and sort of the sort of in his towards his madness was sort of God of the Jews You have one sort of has sense that the 20th century. We're about to go, you know into overdrive on victimology and things of the sort and And if I had to sort of differentiate maybe You know if I had asked it has asked question, how is the Christian view different from let's say the neo-pagan?

pagan view, or the woke ultra-Christian view, something like that. I find a lot that's extremely tempting in a classical neo-pagan thing, I don't know, there's Bronze Age pervert, or all these sort of online people where it's, why can't we just forget about the history and just move on, or go back to nature, where nature as as a word, it does not occur once in the Old Testament. And, you know, nature is bared red in tooth and claw, but if you take your bearings from nature, if you set nature as a standard, then there's nothing that's really naturally evil, nothing that's naturally morally wrong. And that is sort of always the, let's say the right-wing, pre-Christian, neo-pagan, I don't know, Nietzschean, Renaissance humanism, all these different versions,

temptation to sort of go back to that. And then on the other side, I would say something like the, let's say the woke liberal, you know, post-Christian, maybe ultra-Christian temptation is that we are going to be more Christian than the Christians. We are going to, we're going to, you know, the poor shall inherit the earth and we're gonna have a communist revolution and we're gonna accelerate the process and we'll make it happen even faster. we're gonna accelerate the history even more. Amen. Yes, it's nice to be mentioned in such company and on such important matters. I think maybe Peter Thiel is knowingly dumbing down Nietzsche some for his audience. I don't think the late Nietzsche especially saying those things exactly and even in the Antichrist,

actually, there is one of the most beautiful profiles of Jesus given anywhere. But in his rejection of biblical morality and his attempt to reevaluate it in terms of a revived antiquity of sorts and more on this in a moment because it's very much something of sorts, not exactly that, but in that Nietzsche was consistent throughout his life. It's not just the late Nietzsche and the idea that there were three periods to Nietzsche's thought, for example, is more a construct of scholars who don't read him. It's just not true that toward the end of his life as he was approaching insanity, which which was probably because of a congenital disorder by the way, but it's not the case that his views radically changed.

One of these earliest essays, it's called On the Greek State, published when he was before 30 years old, I think, or rather it was never published, but it was intended as the preface to another book. I think he wrote it when he was 28. But it's one of the most, if you want to use this word, most fascistic things Nietzsche ever wrote, and he was quite young. It was not, scholars claims that he had a young period, a middle period where he was a kind of enlightenment liberal and then he turned crazy right wing in his late life but it's not quite true and nor is the understanding of scholars of the enlightenment as something necessarily left wing through. Well that's a topic for another time but Hitler, if I may, understood himself as an heir of the Enlightenment, not as a critic of it.

That's something that's swept under the rug by many different parties today. Certainly, the left doesn't like that, but anyway, it's not so much that Nietzsche insisted we need to go back to the Greeks and such. In fact, he was consistent throughout his life that any straightforward return is impossible, in any way, in fact. He even says, regarding the art of writing, forget politics or any such thing. But he says, we have a lot more to learn from the Romans than the Greeks in terms of writing. The Greeks are too alien to us to be good teachers of writing. But Peter Thiel hints at that as well, that Nietzsche knew any uncomplicated return was impossible. But it's more than just that Nietzsche despaired of ever possibly returning to ancient spirit

or such is that I don't think he ever even wanted this in the first place. Nietzsche very much understands himself as the heir of a Christian civilization, or what he calls in his earlier years an Alexandrian scientific civilization that had run its course and what would come after would include a great deal of the spiritual and intellectual legacy of Christianity but transfigured. And it was on this basis that a limited and actually much different version of ancient Hellenism or of the spirit of ancient Hellenism could maybe be revived. But in all that follows on this segment, let me say that I'm not attacking Peter Thiel and I think his comments in that lecture and I heard now elsewhere he says similar things about me and it's very kind.

Sometimes people forget how radioactive I am in normal fag world and it's brave on his part to mention me at all. And he speaks in good faith, but others who speak like him don't speak in good faith. And I'm talking about the normal fact conservatives, the neo-Reaganite so-called, the religious establishment conservatives who still populate the Washington, D.C. intellectual circuit, I am told, and who still have sinecures and will have sinecures in the years to come at places like National Review, First Things, many such magazines and now there's Compact which is I think very similar too but they don't speak in good faith or at least with good intentions when they use arguments similar to what Thiel hinted at in what you just heard.

And so my hostility to them though and what I'm about to say should not be confused with my feelings for Thiel who I do not think he's a conservative or a conservative cock what I call because, yeah, the two of them are quite different. But the general shape, the argument they both make is the same. These two say in some vague way that they believe in revelation. You hear this word revelation or somehow that what's in the Bible or the Christian religion makes return to pagan antiquity impossible. And I think in making these kinds of claims, they distort both what I and others like me But they're also very vague just about how Christianity or any other modern religion stops an ancient spirit from reasserting itself. How it does. How.

Well, Thiel can write more on this if he wants or have someone do it for him. It seems, though an important matter, maybe he should write on this. He refers to the way in which Christian revelation has unfolded in history. But I don't really know what this means or how it would stop ancient spirit or morality from returning in full, even assuming that's what I or Nietzsche am unambiguously arguing for. But how does it stop it? Did it cause, did Christianity cause a biological change in man? And how did it do that? And if it was not a biological change, then what kind of irreversible change did it cause? You can say it was a spiritual change, but then you have to be more specific, I think, what kind of change is that?

Nietzsche, for example, does talk about that and even Schopenhauer indirectly, maybe. But what is it? And if it's a spiritual change, why can't there be a different spiritual change? The thing is, I'm not a revivalist of antiquity on any naive grounds. But if you are a leader of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, they already took account of the changes caused by Christianity to the spirit of men. I'll address that briefly in a moment what that means according to them. But yes, Peter Thiel, okay, well-intentioned, and if he's interested in matters and truly believes in it, and I'm not sure he does, you know. Again, most people who mention me have to distance themselves somehow from me in public. I don't blame them.

So maybe that's why he was saying that, but if not, then he should write about it. But the religious conservatives, the moral majority people, the worshippers of Reagan, who you invoke the name of Reagan as a slogan, they are, whether well-intentioned or not, they are dumb. They're ideological. try to use actually similar language, but again, it's unclear, for example, there is an article, I'll give you an example, and I don't like to give boosts to people who attack me, and maybe not so well known, and actually this is a stupid article, and you should only read it if you want to read stupidity, but I'm using it as an example, not just of of attacks on me, but as a stock example of this argument you may encounter semi-frequently

if you make the arguments about Hellenism or Nietzsche or Renaissance of antiquity, you will hear this argument often. No, no, you can't do that because Christianity or the Bible, okay? So I'll give you this one example, although I prefer not to. It's a stupid article that attacks me. It's called The Impossible Bronze Age Mindset. I don't actually know what magazine it is, the American Reformer or New Reformer or some kind of Christcock magazine, you know. If you want to read this article, it's a good example of Christcock moralism passing for thought. And as far as I can tell, it insists, it uses this phrase that thou shalt not, that you shalt not of the Old Testament, that commandment that makes it impossible to go back to ancient

paganism, that somehow the feeling of guilt and so on prevents that return or revival of ancient paganism, although again, not really explain how. I mean, is the guilt, if it's the argument that there's a feeling of guilt, is that inborn by blood? And if it's not, why can't it be argued away or simply dismissed as itself a mythical or psychological relic? I've personally met many people without any sense of guilt, including by the way many outwardly religious people. But I myself grew up in a very secular communist country, and I was not taught about things like guilt in this way. And no doubt the argument will be made that I was still somehow taught Christian guilt in some secondary sublimated or spiritualized way.

But again, you'd have to spell out how this works, what the specifics of it are. You can even say in a communist regime, which by the way I was hardly a partisan to I hated it from since I can remember, but you can say that the communist regime somehow to embody the secularized Christianity. But again, you have to make that specific gift to deal with the fact that if a communist state can somehow sublimate or transfigure Christianity in that direction, why would it not be possible to sublimate spiritual habits or tendencies? And again, it's not clear what these are to begin with from all these criticisms, but why would it not be possible to do so in a very different direction than communism does? But yes, insistence on the fact that the Bible say you shall not, which also every other

religion also does, by the way, as many consist of prohibitions, or to insist on the irreversibility of the feeling of guilt, when again that's not obvious at all from day to day life and seems something more assertive than imagined and real. Some of the biggest pieces of shit I've met by the way are the outwardly religious people who use religion more to convince themselves that they must be good, that they must be on the side of God, therefore they can do no bad. And so I think they use religion more to give themselves cover from possible feelings of guilt or perception of guilt and to confront the guilt of existence weighing upon them, if that's really what's meant here. But I don't know what these Christ, Cox and Judeans mean.

Are they referring to God, the creator of the world and his design of a moral world order with the idea of sin as a transgression of that? Because before I comment on this, I should add, as happens in many of these articles, the arguments that follow and look In relation to what people think my intentions regarding antiquity are, many people keep saying the historical fact of Christianity somehow makes that replay of antiquity or revival of antiquity impossible again. That's why I'm talking about all this. I'm sorry to talk about some irrelevant article, but as in many of such arguments, these articles bring up a cautionary tale, either a historical event or a book to attack me. In this case, the book this article brings up is something called The Secret History.

I have not read this book. It's apparently a novel, and it's a cautionary tale. It's about a classics professor who wants to reenact Dionysian rites, maybe, or who teaches his students about these ancient rites in an ecstatic manner, and during one such rite that they try to reenact, somebody gets killed, and then one of the characters cannot deal with emotions of guilt from this, again, supposed reenactment of a pagan sacrifice, and so the novel ends badly for all. And this is supposed to be proof that you can't reenact antiquity. I don't know. Have I ever called for pagan reenactment revivals? And even so, an author's moralistic novel, what exactly is this supposed to establish? No one who has read my book can think that I've ever argued for such things,

let alone the unsavory implication regarding violence, but no one can point to where I anywhere hint at reenacting ancient rituals from books or to gods from old books and so on. There is another stupid and dishonest line in this article about how supposedly Christianity or Judaism, you know, the Bible, you see, taught those dirty backward Greeks and Romans that time is irreversible. This is another argument you may hear. I don't know. I don't see much evidence for ancient Greeks or Romans thinking that time was reversible or that you could simply have events repeat, you know, any more than, by the way, medieval Christians also did. To some extent, all peoples before modern age believed in some version of astrology.

So in the Renaissance and in Middle Ages, astrological superstitions were very powerful. And maybe in that sense, you can believe that events can repeat if that's, I don't even think that's what the writer means. But such beliefs had been common throughout Christendom and also for the Jews as well by the way, astrological beliefs. So the article, what I think it does when he brings up this idea of time being irreversible to say that you can't go back to an earlier spiritual condition of mankind or whatever, But it confuses the idea of cyclical time for the claim that time is reversible, right, which the two are not the same thing, the same things. For example, cyclical time is something described by a few authors in antiquity.

There are some references to, for example, a great year or other such things, where an age ends and then another age begins. And so sometimes there is a conflagration or some other disaster, and an age ends, and then it's forgotten and mankind begins anew, but it's never quite a repetition. And this view of history, again not time, but it's distinct from linear history in which history progresses in a line to an end of times, which is a view of time or rather history often associated with Christianity and Judaism, but that's not quite the whole story of that either. For those interested in these matters, I recommend a book by Karl Lovith called Meaning in History. The medieval Christian didn't live with an understanding of so-called linear time history in this sense.

He did not believe in a progress in history yet. He believed he lived in a kind of mythical haze and ahistorical time, understood himself as living actually in the same world in which the Emperor Constantine had lived. And he was supposed to live in humble expectation that the end of the world, the second coming and the judgment of the world was imminent, or even if it was remote, but in any case could come at any time, regardless of what men did or did not do. I'm sorry to go too far into this, but even in ancient Christianity had the same problem, because Jesus was expected to return during the lifetimes of the first Christians. And he never did. And then he was supposed to return in the year 1000, and he never did.

And I'm being a little bit vulgar here, but there are parallels in my mind to this Q thing that go on with Trump, where there are always cope stories about why it didn't work out. And basically, the whole structure of Christianity and Judaism is to constantly come up with cope stories for why the end of the world isn't coming, why the prophecies in their holy books aren't coming true, why God's plan didn't work out as was claimed. And that's basically the history of these religions, I'm sorry to say. And Jews believed much the same about their messiahs and so on. They could come tomorrow or next week. In any case, that was the belief and the hope that a Christian or a Jew had in the Middle Ages. The whole idea again of linear time history, that was developed later through a rather

maybe heretical doctrine of a man called Joachim of Flores, he's a medieval Italian theologian. Again, I believe this is another Christian Jewish cope for why the Bible didn't come true. But Joachim of Flores, a medieval Italian theologian, and he believed in, I cannot spell out his whole views here, but there's a chapter on him if you're interested in this Karl Loveth book, meaning in history. He believed in, there are three ages, I think with the the last age being the age of the Holy Spirit, and he argued for the idea that there isn't just the end of time that will come unexpectedly, but that there are progressive dispensations in time, in history, progressive on the path to a final end in time, meaning that prior

to this theological innovation, and even for a long while thereafter, there was no sense even in the Christian world of a linear historical time in the sense of historical progress, of a progression of successive events to a final end or purpose of history as believed by many in modern times. And from that point of view, it's easy to understand how the main views of our age, whether it's Whittish liberalism, which believes in a linear progress from ancient Greece to our own of the triumph of reason, a belief in progress, as also communism and socialism, and as also varieties of Hegelianism, how these views you can think, you can see quite directly that a kind of Christianity maybe that's been secularized, although Loveth actually

calls Marxism secularized Judaism, and in that sense you can argue that these ideologies, please call them what you want. Even in being atheist, they end up being quasi-Christian, or as Nietzsche says, and Peter Thiel hinted in his speech, Rousseau as the father of the modern left being more Christian than the Christians. But that's not the same thing, to go back to this stupid article attack on me, that's not the same thing as the irreversibility of time. And it's disingenuous to confuse these two concepts. It's this idea in linear history with a purpose at the end is rather a delusional mythological belief that ultimately requires faith of some kind to believe again in time progressing to a promised end or even to improvement.

And I would dispute that it's something that once you realize what a delusion it is and why it is a delusion, I would dispute that you cannot escape it. Yes, it may be an inheritance of, I wouldn't even say of original Christianity or Judaism or of the Bible, but of certain modifications through which they went in medieval times. But I take these things too seriously, you know, I take these things too seriously. Most of this argument made against me in this particular article I'm talking about, most of it depends on an absurd reading of a man called Gadamer, we don't need to talk about But the article claims actually that you can never leave a traditional civilization that you were born in you can only deny it But you can't surpass it or go back to another one, which would actually make

conversion impossible right if you are born in a tradition and trapped within that horizon of ideas and Spiritual habits and you cannot leave it and see the world in an entirely new way How did all those ancient pagans convert to Christianity then? or to Judaism for that matter, because Judaism was also a proselytizing religion at the time. The supposed unity of Judaism is a complete mythology, but anyway... But then also what about Hindus in India and Shintoist Buddhists in Japan? Are we forgetting about them? Are you denying the veracity of their conversion if they do convert to Christianity, for example? For that matter, can they live in the modern world, never having converted, by the way? Do they not believe in the irreversibility of time?

Do they commit blood sacrifices without guilt? What's the argument here? Lurking behind all this is the true problem, I think, of unbelief. I simply don't believe that Christians or Jews or Muslims or anyone else today actually believes. They try to get themselves to believe, which is why some write articles like this that I'm talking about now, but that's a different thing. I think God is truly dead. That's a statement of fact, actually, not of preference. I don't know anyone and haven't heard of anyone who believes today with the innocence and full beliefs that a Christian in the Middle Ages had. It's pretty much all make-believe and these are dead religions in my opinion. And whether it's stupid articles like I've been talking now or Ross Dowsett claiming

He's an integralist, and I had some argument with him online about, I forget exactly what he said, but I think he brought up World War II as a might-makes-right struggle to show that the secular-right opponents of Christianity were defeated by history, and therefore that Christianity is correct. Of course, I don't know how that works with respect to Stalinism or communism, because for the time that Stalinism and communism had defeated Christianity in the Soviet Union and many of its satellites, and arguably still in China now, for those 70 years was God giving dominion to secular communist atheism by that argument. I don't know. When you say the Soviet Union fell, well, yeah, but it was there for 70 years, so how could you have known that it would fall?

I mean, you don't know how history will turn out. Maybe these states now in the West will also fall, and they are hardly Christian states in any case. Many of them are quite secular themselves now. So I don't understand this argument. Did God give a judgment on Christian Europe with the Thirty Years War? Because that is actually an old liberal argument regarding why Christianity had to go into the private sphere and why Europe had to secularize. It was a devastating war for all of Europe. You see, these conservatives, they make quite strange arguments. I'm sorry if I repeat myself from past episodes. I don't remember if I ever addressed that. But I believe all these religions are make-believe at this point.

People going through motions, they don't have genuineness of belief, but let me not dwell on that. Let me read from an article by my friend the bureaucrat where he talks about the neo-Reaganites. In other words, these people I'm bringing up here, what motivates them without me commenting on, yes, actually, there may be occasionally an individual here or there with mystical enthusiasm, but I don't believe that they have, let's say if you see visions, if you see a ghost at night, if an angel visits you, let's say you believe it's an angel, I don't believe that this justifies the edifice of organized religion and rational theology as it's existed for centuries. But anyway, that's a bigger discussion. Let me read the bureaucrat regarding these particular attacks on me and what I'm talking

about on this segment and in part on this show, this claim that somehow revival of antiquity is impossible because somehow the Bible gets in the way of that and what changes did the Bible effect in man to do that. Anyway, I read from the bureaucrat now. This is from his substack. You should all subscribe to the City Bureaucrats sub-stack. The latest slate of BAP articles from conservative writers reflects both of these analyses, in my opinion. The popularity of BAP's sophist persona and the anti-Christian ideas that can be attributed to Nietzsche threaten comfortable religious apparatchiks, but they also present a favorable opportunity for apparatchiks to legitimize their station and hide the history of failure and betrayals that mark the institutions they represent.

In the context of Reaganism, this means it allows them to use the religious conservatism leg to minimize the other legs of the Reaganist ideological stool. He's referring here to a three-legged Reaganist stool based on foreign policy interventionism, free market capitalism, so-called, and showy religious conservatism. I would call it phariseism, but call it what you want." And he's saying, I think correctly, the religious conservatives of this, or rather the Reaganites have used religious conservatism to mask the fact that free markets dogma led to economic ruin for large sections of America, actually economic decline for America in general, offshoring of American industry, destruction of American industry and so on, decline in living standards.

Right now there is a surpassing of opioid deaths in the United States of what alcohol deaths were in Russia during its period of decline in the 1990s. So I'm sorry for all the articles you're seeing. I don't buy it. I don't see where the articles you're seeing claiming American boosterism or that the American empire is on strong legs or doing well. It's done okay through the foundering of certain of its critics like Trump in recent years, but a society with declining living expectation, right, is circling the drain. That was a feature of Russian life in 1990s during period of deep Russian decline, and American life expectancy is doing the same now, it is declining. But anyway, so that's the economic stool of the Reagan consensus.

And then the third is foreign policy intervention, I don't need to go there, 20, 30 years of failed wars, complete bankrupt of American conservatism during the Bush years. And so they use religious screaming and religious sphericism to mask their failures on the other fronts and the bureaucrat is right. I interjected. Let me continue reading. Although couched in the rhetoric of religious condemnation arising from a conflict between Christianity and Nietzsche and vitalism or paganism, these articles essentially are defenses of the political regime of Reaganism, which to be sure includes a form of religiosity, albeit a generalized one, subordinate to political interests, sometimes known as the civil religion.

Reaganism was of course blindsided and bulldozed in 2016 by internet culture and Trump's coalition of downscaled and forgotten Americans. Thus it is appropriate to classify authors like Butler and Ehret as neo-Reagans. He's talking about two particular articles who attack me on grounds I've discussed in this segment. Ehret is the one that I'm talking about here. I continue reading. I should add that I don't have a problem with Reagan himself. By all accounts, the late president's miraculous total victory had the same energy as the 2016 election and even promised similar reforms like protectionism and immigration control. What I oppose in Reaganism and neo-Reaganism is the vague set of platitudes that institutional

conservatives developed to exploit Reagan's popularity without implementing his views, and which can be summarised in terms of the triune structure Eret described in his article. Again the three stools of foreign policy, interventionalism, free market, economics and religious conservatism, I would call it Pharisaism in this case because there is very little evidence of genuine belief but whatever I keep reading now. Each of Eret and Butler's criticisms of that presents a parade of horribles flowing from the adoption of Nietzschean views to prove the necessity of sometimes Christian, sometimes Judeo-Christian beliefs and values. The Parade of Horribles is an essential tool of the assaulted intellectual because it allows

him to position himself and his institution as morally superior to his opponent while neglecting the obligation to refute the propositions that supposedly entailed the Parade of Horribles in the first place. The author can then keep the discourse at the level of tribal or team-based conflict between the good and the bad, the Christian and the pagan, and so forth, which is where the cynical partisan thrives. So you know, yes, this is how I feel about it. The pretense is that somehow I'm picking, you see, these old books, their teachings, and whether it's from Nietzsche or from ancient authors like Plutarch or Euripides or whatever, and that I'm trying to get my audience to reenact the ideas and concepts, the rituals

and values in those books and so on, and to be against Christ or against Aristotle or whatever. But what people liked about my book was that, you know, yes, I occasionally may mention an old author or a name like Heraclitus, but I never, it's a book about your and my experience of this world in front of us now, how it makes you feel, why it makes you feel. I give anecdotes and switch back and forth and argue direct from many what I thought outward vivid examples, to show problem of entrapped life, which isn't particular to any time or religion. And the purpose of going to antiquity isn't to replay it, but to show what in some brief periods of antiquity, life that is not entrapped, what it looks like. That's also why I'm doing this series on Renaissance, by the way.

It's not about historical reenactment anyway, unless you are claiming that human biology has changed, and by all means feel free to do so, that's an argument, but you'd have to make concrete specific that as well. But unless you're saying biology has changed, actually men's experience of the world in front of him, his desires, his wants, his spirit, will be more or less the same as in antiquity or the possibilities of his spirit. And you'd have to argue against the examples of Christians through the ages who professed Christian belief in Revelation. You can keep using that word, but they behave in ways very similar to ancient men at times. And you know, nobody needs to know Nietzsche or Plutarch, you don't need to know their names or Heraclitus or any such things.

To understand the things and the experiences I talk about in my book, which are experiences understandable to any man as a man, not recipes for the enacting, oh, you've read this concept from Aristotle or such, you've read about a ritual in an old book, we replay that because you want to feel Dionysian or something, it's absurd, right? But aside from the general tendency to bring everything into a discussion of texts, and how texts supposedly translate into life, which is the rabbinic, to some extent also the Christgak mode of argument, and very congenial, right, it's very congenial to pundit wannabes, because then all you have to do is, you don't have to talk about life as it is in front of you now, and its strange ambiguities and what actually is that psychologically or otherwise

motivates men to act as they do, no, then you can pretend to trace it all to an idea or an abstract concept you read about in Locke. Get your mind gears running, I write another book report on Locke to show you why transsexualism and therefore I've disproven woke because I've disproven Locke and so, furthermore, it is though, besides this general intellectual and pundit tendency, it's also, as the bureaucrat it's the intellectual and PR consultant mode, right? Which team do you stand on? Are you Locke or are you for Aquinas? Are you for Christ or are you for Nietzsche? You know, and in this way, they hope to reanimate the corpse of conservatism for another 20 to 30 final years of dithering and of sinecures, of course. Just oppose the pagans online and the neo-pagan BAP

and you know, it reminds me, After I did the most recent episode, I had people in my mentions criticizing me for praising the Medici family and talking about them at all. I was informed that the Medici are merchants. I was told, you above all should not glorify the merchants because I mean, and Bap, don't you know that you are introducing Nietzschean dogma principles from his books by praising a merchant family. After all, he criticized the English and commercial shopkeeper English style, so you cannot praise merchants and bankers you have to praise warriors in the medic you were not warriors qed you know i mean it's the stupidity many of us have to deal with who talk about i am introducing principles you see

but anyway regarding the spiritual change perhaps actually affected by christianity since we're talking to this nietzsche actually mentions it plenty it includes such things as the scholarly and the scientific spirit which of course existed in some way in the ancient world but nietzsche since these people bring him up, he shows at times of the specifically modern obsession with habits for intellectual cleanliness, for the search for the truth despite everything else, the truth above all for certainty, the lust for certainty and many other such things, how in different ways and for different scholars and scientists they were a kind of spiritual inheritance from Christianity actually. But he also adds this joke that after 2,000 years of training for truth, this spiritual

function also denies itself the right to believe in the original lie. So I will not go further into this for now. I don't want to offend Christian friends and such, but it's just one sense in which Nietzsche is fully aware of how Christianity, not Revelation or the Bible, but Christianity as it was actually practiced as it existed, how it changed European men and mankind therefore, but also how this change in some way supersedes itself in our time for sure. If there is to be a reevaluation of modern values, it will be done, for example, on a scientific basis, which the Renaissance Italians also in some way understood, with antiquity only serving as the example of scientific or other inquiry, as well as what life unfettered by an Asiatic, censorious priestly superstition looks like.

Not a reenactment, but a revival of spirit or possibilities of mindset, if you will, on a scientific basis which itself is an inheritance of Christian scholarly and spiritual discipline, self-abnegation in search for the truth and only the truth, and so on. So this is just one big way in which I answer what Peter Thiel brought up in the clip I played and which is brought up in much less well-intentioned way by many other conservatives. Now I mean the argument he said, but as for Christians who are genuine in their desire to believe and not merely to use it for political ends or even actually what the Conservekak and Reganite does for a political career, they know well that I've long celebrated many famous Christian heroes who embodied ancient mindset in a way for example, I don't think

anyone has celebrated the conquistadores the way I have or Conradin of Hohenstaufen or many other excellent gentlemen of Christendom like Cesare Borgia, Frederick II Hohenstaufen or Sigismondo Malatesta, a famous Christian statesman who I'll mention maybe later on this episode. He's a condottiere general and ruler of the state of Rimini. Actually I'll have more on him to say on later episodes, but I will be right back. And I'm back. One of my favorite recent drinks for energy is to mix collagen, hydrolyzed collagen, with high-grade cocoa. you can find something like Criollo Cocoa or Arriba Cocoa varieties. These are original heirloom cocoa from Peru and Ecuador for very strong body health good feel. But even so

I have to say I cannot use power voice on this episode. I am rather low energy. You will forgive. But this episode end up being mostly about the foolishness of conservatives and dissidents and such, they don't need to be foolish, but as my friend the bureaucrat says, the right is mostly a powerless literary movement. And that's also what they are when so many try to blame problems of our time, whether it's wokeness or open borders or other aspects of leftism. And they try to blame these on individualism or liberal individualism. I went to very leftist American high school and I spent time in leftist academia and in both places modernity was excoriated because of its individualism. And if they didn't use the word liberal, which they did sometimes, but they often used the

word neoliberal and they were using it to refer specifically to Reagan and Thatcher who were demons to them. And this place was basically, had the full package of wokeness in late 1990s, already by the way. And wokeness existed, I mean, in full, not like its origin or something, where does it come from, civil rights or lock or whatever. It existed as it does now in all of its claims and its aggression. But it existed in academia and other parts of America, even in the early 1990s, which is why Camille Paglia's essays from that time ring so accurate still. You can read her essay Academy in the Hour of the Wolf which I link to again on my Twitter account and it's included I think in full in her collection called Sex Art in American Culture where that collection

as also another one called Vamps and Tramps, they include articles on what you'll immediately recognized as wokeness, whether it's the date rape insanity of that time or the race thing. And you can see what she said there and the types of claims presented even at that time, which also attacked individualism in the name of the community and many such things. But anyway, many friends of mine, and I don't mean to say that this is then an entirely wrong thing because many friends of mine do the same. For example, Nick Sallow, he was a guest on this show, Caribbean Rhythms, I think episode 12, but others do it and he does it too, other traditionalists especially, where you can see the case come from, the case against so-called liberal individualism, how it can be claimed

with some plausibility, well, liberal individualism coming from Locke elevated the claims of the the individual so that, for example, you are no longer to condemn gays or trannies because they have every right to self-actualization as long as they are not hurting anyone else, you know, the arguments and so forth. That then the state must step in to protect them from the majority who are prejudiced and might harm them. Although this part actually is a bit harder to base on Lockean individual grounds. After all, the right to free association also exists on those grounds. And in early America as well, including after the revolution, there was a right to free association. And so as Mollbug rightly point out in a recent essay, it is this right to free association

that is in practice denied by current wokeness and by the left for some time. And conservatives do not dare to argue for it. So private associations, companies, such things, homeowners associations, would be allowed to discriminate against anyone for any reason whatsoever, whereas the woke regime, since even a long time ago, since the era of busing minorities to white schools, it's a kind of forced integration. But anyway, I'm getting carried away on tangent. Yes, to go back to the case against Lockean individualism, so-called, you can see what let's say the modern dissident case comes from in the sense that by promoting free-market economics and capitalism, this destroys somehow the bonds of traditional ways of life, small

communities, local economies, so the claim goes. It allows corporations, for example, large corporations or employers to bring in armies of low-paid workers from abroad and and thereby achieve Marx's dark vision, the popularization of the proletariat, which was not possible maybe in his time. It becomes possible now because of mass migration, furthermore because of the Lockean belief in the blank slate where abilities and inclinations are understood to be not inborn, but everything is learned. That means you can bring in migrants from anywhere. People can become interchangeable until, well, you find out eventually they're not. And for all these reasons, I mean, it's plausible to construct this case against Lockean individualism.

I think this all is a bit misunderstanding of Locke, who was in fact very strong, for example, on national sovereignty. And there is no necessary opposition between nationalism and liberalism, or else somebody like Cavour would have been impossible, right? Is Cavour a nationalist? He's the man who created the nation of Italy, right? that he was a liberal monarchist, very much an anglophile liberal. Liberal nationalism was very much a thing in the 19th century. And I repeat that actually Locke is excoriated today by the left and almost all the rabid supporters of wokeism in schools, they dislike Locke as well, as they dislike capitalism and individualism. So I don't really buy this case that opposing Locke is necessarily how to solve any of the

problems pressing on us now, even if he should be the ultimate origin of the problem, or that he is so in some conceptual way, how does addressing this origin do anything for you today? But a word on this. I myself don't like Locke as such. Nietzsche considers Locke to be an insult to the meaning of philosophy, as many of the other English thinkers he has contempt for also. And when Nietzsche attacks the English, so-called, and their plebeian ideas, or their commercial society of liberalism, he has in mind Locke, and a tendency also in English thought, aside from Locke, not just in Locke, a tendency I will describe in a moment. Because Lockean and Hobbesian individualism is to begin with anti-individual, a teaching

like the blank slate, it denies inborn differences between human beings can very easily become anti-individual. You can see how that goes. Individualism in this sense is a claim that actually individuals are equal in some crucial and decisive way. And if they're equal in that way, then they become interchangeable. For example, in regards to rights, they're equal in that way. This is very much opposed to, let's say, Homeric particular individuals seeking distinction and everlasting fame, sometimes by killing each other or destroying their cities, despoiling their corpses, taking their women. When Nietzsche refers to the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims, this is essence of modern liberalism or the Lockean English kind, which Nietzsche says leads to herd animalization.

It's a nice passage. I will read from Beyond Good and Evil, last chapter, Natural History of Morals, very important chapter. And the last section reads thus, regarding now socialism, not specifically liberalism, but I'll show you why in a second I read it. The overall degeneration of man down to what nowadays shows up in socialist fools and flatheads as their man of the future, as their ideal. This degeneration and diminution of man to a perfect herd animal or as they say to an animal of free society, this bestialization of man into a dwarf animal of equal rights and claims is possible, no doubt about that. Anyone who has once thought this possibility through to its conclusion understands one more horror than other people do, and perhaps a new task as well.

But now see also what he says in Twilight of the Idols, what he says about liberalism. For instance, liberal institutions straight away cease from being liberal the moment they are soundly established. Once this is attained, no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions. One knows, of course, what they bring about. They undermine the will to power. They are the leveling of mountain and valley exalted to a morality. They make people small, cowardly, and pleasure-loving. By means of them, the gregarious animal invariably triumphs. Liberalism, or in plain English, the transformation of mankind into cattle, herd animalization. The same institutions, so long as they are fought for, produce quite other results.

Then indeed they promote the cause of freedom quite powerfully. Regarded more closely, it is war which produces these results, war in favor of liberal institutions, which as war allows the illiberal instincts to subsist. For war trains men to be free," end quote, end reading. So yes, you see this. Liberalism established is actually same thing as socialism in the end, the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims. You see this straight away, actually, if you ever talk to a socialist or a communist about the end state they prefer, they still believe in the so-called free society, the type of society they see as the eventual pinnacle of progress, and this is actually also same thing as individualism of the English kind, which actually is about erasing the individual,

what makes him distinct from others in the crucial regard, where inevitably his claims and expansion interferes, must interfere in that of another's, that's just inevitable given the limited and finite nature of matter and the fact that, for example, if distinction and fame, and not the stupid word status, but if the drive for fame, not to touch the matter of, let's say, beautiful women or more generally, the access to beautiful lovers. But if these are the aims, then these things are always by definition in short supply. So there cannot be equal rights and claims where it actually ultimately matters in the end. tendency in English thought, going as I said well beyond Locke, to pretend that the individual,

the abstract individual who is actually not an individual because he's an egalitarian abstraction, equated and interchangeable with others, but where the abstract individual seeking his own self-interest actually benefits the whole. And it is this falsehood that I think is gross, you see, whether Locke himself or other economists make this case or whether bunglers like Herbert Spencer do, the Social Darwinists, really the Social Darwinists are gross people because of their lie that ultimately the competition or struggle of individuals must be good for society as a whole, for the community or whatever you want to call it. That's their signature belief, by the way, not that one individual becomes supreme over another. It's that it's good for society. This is the repulsive lie.

The interests of the few and the great are not those of the many, and they're not those of the whole either. It's doubtful that there is a whole or that there is a common good at all. The common good might be a fiction, at least considered from this regard, that there's some kind of unity of interest between the great and the few on one side and the many on the other. The interests of the few and many are always at odds and can never be reconciled, I think ultimately not, attempts to do so are disgusting lies. And if you want to be self-righteous and to engage in poetic pomp about, you know, people who talk of salutary constitutions, harmonize these interests, and many other such what I call these political necessities, they are fictions and hypocrisies that political

men have to engage in maybe, yes, you allow them that, you look the other way. But I'm not a political man. I like to speak the truth. I don't have to talk in this pious way or common good, and we have to harmonize the interests. The two interests cannot be reconciled, which is actually why in English individualism, I mean theoretically the kind in the thought of men like Locke or Herbert Spencer, and I make no claim about the Anglos themselves as a people, who can be a quite adventurous people, in particular individuals that have existed, explorers, adventurers and such. But the tradition of English political thought is disgusting for just this reason that it hijacks the language of the individual for actually collective

and communitarian ends under the lie that the two are brought somehow secret harmony. But in fact, that's only possible with the redefinition of the individual in a very conscripted egalitarian sphere and a redefinition of his desires perhaps as the base desire for safety or for comfort corresponding respectively to Hobbes and Locke. And then the corollary to all this is to deem pathological the aristocrats' vainglory, his desire for fame and power, his desire to best his rivals and so on. But that's precisely the meaning of Italian Renaissance development of the individual as distinct from communal or corporate life that had existed previously in the Middle Ages. And that Italian Renaissance individual is a glorious thing.

The individual in this sense is a rebirth of the Greek and Roman drive to distinction fame and excellence, and it led not to a society of shop clerks, litigious about their penny-pinching and comforts, or to what exists now, squabbling, balkanized minority groups or insecure individuals, insisting about their rights and asking for a pat on the head from teacher for recognition. It led no not to that, but to an artistic philosophical flourishing like the world hadn't seen since remote antiquity, and has not seen in such full sense since that time, a tropical outburst of amazing larger-than-life personalities that determine the aspirations of Europe for centuries to come. Crazy people, crazy statesmen, as well as wild geniuses of science, architecture,

painting, exploration, and even humor. Yes, humor and satire being indispensable companions of this very real world flourishing of actual distinct individuals, as opposed to the ideological or theoretical plebeian individualism of the English thinkers. And I will be right back to give an outline of this Renaissance variety. Yes, by the year 1400 or so, Florence no longer even had fashion national style. Every man dressed as he pleased. And small things like this, I repeat, indicate what development of individual means. If it means anything, it's that he's different from others, unique, hopefully that this uniqueness is significant or interesting, or bears something of personal mark, personal individual developed character, somehow bears stamp of it.

And you see also somehow larger than life characters already exist in Italy by the 1200s, whereas before and also in North Europe not so much are recorded, but around that time or even in some cases 1100s there are popular stories about great jurists even and such. in the Middle Ages, man was generally conscious of himself as a member of a collective, whether a family, a race, a corporation, a people, a faction even, and so on. All this obscurity of individual consciousness made possible by a mythic delusion, a veil that hung over the individual and the state and made objective consideration of both impossible. in the words of Borchardt, the veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish preposition, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues.

And this veil dissolved first in Italy and primarily because of political developments there. Again, its effects were visible even in individuals not otherwise notable in history. There are always mention of great kings and such, But I talk here, for example, of a great writer, a great artist and so on, who were mostly anonymous before the 1200s and such, but thereafter you start to see excitement, especially in Italy, about their sparkling personalities, because they become unafraid to seem and be different from their neighbours, to assert their own unique sphere and such. Even merchants, yes. Nietzsche again has very beautiful passage on justice regarding Genoa. I may have read it to you before, and if I repeat, if you remember it now while I repeat it, I apologize.

But it's such a nice passage. It gives such good local color of Italian Renaissance way, of Italian Renaissance spirit. I must read it for you now. Genoa, I have looked upon this city, its villas and pleasure grounds, and the wide circuit of its inhabited heights and slopes, for a considerable time. In the end I must say that I see countenances out of past generations. This district is strewn with the images of bold and autocratic men. They have lived and have wanted to live on. They say so with their houses, built and decorated for centuries and not for the passing hour. They were well disposed to life, however ill-disposed they may have often been towards themselves. I always see the builder, how he casts his eye on all that is built around him far and

near and likewise on the city, the sea, and the chain of mountains. How he expresses power and conquest with his gaze. All this he wishes to fit into his plan and in the end make it his property by its becoming a portion of the same. The whole district is overgrown with this superb, insatiable egoism of the desire to possess and exploit. Individualism, yes, the real individualism, I interjected to say that. And as these men, when abroad recognized no frontiers and in their thirst for the new, placed a new world besides the old, so also at home everyone rose up against everyone else and devised some mode of expressing his superiority and of placing between himself and his neighbour his personal illimitableness, everyone one for himself his home once more

by overpowering it with his architectural thoughts and by transforming it into a delightful site for his race. When we consider the mode of building cities in the north, the law, the general delight in legality and obedience, this impose upon us. We thereby divine the propensity to equality and submission which must have ruled in those builders of the north. Here however, on turning every corner you find a man by himself, who knows the sea, knows adventure, and knows the Orient. A man who is averse to law and to neighbor, as if it bored him to have to do with them. A man who scans all that is already old and established with envious glances. With a wonderful craftiness of fantasy he would like, at least in thought, to establish

all this anew, to lay his hand upon it and introduce his meaning into it, if only for the passing hour of a sunny afternoon, when for once his insatiable and melancholy soul feels satiety, and when only what is his own and nothing strange may show itself to his eye." Yes, isn't that beautiful? And it appears in everything you read about that period, exactly that, this desire, even of men not known to history now, of what you might call middling men of history, maybe be a great merchant whose name has not come down, but to distinguish themselves against their neighbor. Genoa, yes, a place of commerce, by the way, Nietzsche, the critic of commerce indeed, not quite. Excuse for tangent, but it's worth remarking how anyone can think that someone who believes

in places like Renaissance Florence in Genoa or Archaic Greece, which was also a heavily commercial society where men went on ships around the Mediterranean exploring, looking for markets, for colonies and such. How can you think somebody like that has some absolute principle against commerce? It's simply that economic life is not that important as such to him or to me, and that it's rather the subordination of all life to the economic sphere, whether it be capitalist or socialist. That's what's destructive of human flourishing and greatness. I am just tired of academic commie critics of consumerism and so on. What What does that mean consumerism? Hankering after brands may be a bad life for sure, but so is only having one brand that you wait in bread lines for.

I come from a socialist dictatorship that many of these East Bloc countries had anthems about the production of tonnage of butter per year and this kind of thing. Do you think that is materialist, if you want to use that word? They were hardly spiritual places, you know, but both these systems are subordination of life to economics. That doesn't mean I support any kind of ideological capitalism or such anyway. I simply think in the realm of economics, which I was never very interested in by why not be mercenary in one country, this or that policy can work in this and that aspect of life. In another, a socialist policy might be appropriate. Who cares? Nietzsche's objection, as well as the radical right's objection in general, the people

who actually followed him, it wasn't to commercial life as such, or even to capitalism as such, but again to the liberal ideology that come out of people like Locke, which is fundamentally egalitarian, law-abiding. But Genoese or Corinthian or Athenian commercialism is a big part of life in those cities, as banking and lawyering were in Florence, by the way. Among the developments that led to the freeing of the individual in the sense you just heard, the stirring up of egotistic desires were the facts of despotism in the Italian states. The tyrant and his entourage knew they had possibly only a short period to enjoy themselves in power, to assert themselves in such states, they needed and it called for an overwhelming

reserve of will and self-definition, of course, and when you have one tyrant set himself up in a small state, it inspires others elsewhere to do the same, and then their character qualities by which they do that become, let's say, widespread in society also as they are emulated by other men, but in Republican states also the faction that is in power at any one time knew it possibly only had a short time to make use of it. And so it is political instability and political turnover, political opportunity that allows and fosters in part this drive to competitive individuals. For most people not being in power actually then meant considerable freedom in private life. cities was an active, let's say, civil society, a real private society, not what goes by the

name now with NGOs and so forth, but a real society unmolested by, which for the most part the despot and the government were not interested in controlling, although in some places like Frederick II, Hohenstaufen's Naples, and a few other states that followed him, there was intense almost totalitarian control over the subjects, that's actually when passports, Things like passports were introduced first, probably in Frederick II, Hohenstaufen state in the 1200s. But in all cases, otherwise the tyrant or prospective tyrant's personality and individuality were fostered by this system of high political turnover. There was also widespread, as Nietzsche hints, disrespect for the law, and as I will show on future episodes, disrespect for religion, atheism, very widespread, which it is not

Not now, by the way, I don't care what people say, neither the United States nor really Europe are atheist societies. Imagine a politician, a leader in the United States, expressing atheism openly, or not just atheism, you know, this kind of watered-down ethical atheism that the new atheists like Sam Harris have, but open contempt for religion, blasphemous contempt for religion. I know that evangelical gentlemen and religious people in the United States talk about their persecution but I don't see it so much. But I leave that for a future episode, they are not persecuted. Cowtowing to religion is routine in American public life and also in some cases in European life also. And no, you do not live in a Nietzschean society, there are no large statues of Nietzsche overlooking

cities that are respected. But anyway, yes, in most cases, there was also a private society, I mean, most states were not like the ones I described, they were not totalitarian, there was a vibrant private society left alone by state power, which, unlike in other states in the Mediterranean, there were also cities with a private commercial life. But in Italy the Catholic Church was not identical with the state, which it was both in the Byzantine Empire with the Orthodox Church and also for the Muslims. And so this church not pretending to be a state led to further freedom for self-definition and free thought and so on. And Burckhardt comments that it was above all experience of exile that promoted highly

individualized nature, most maybe traditionalists and reactionaries who hear what I'm about to read will not like it. But I actually don't think cosmopolitanism is a bad thing, by the way, and I don't even think the left or the liberals are cosmopolitans. When it comes to it, they're really all parochial yokels. Let me read this. But it is banishment above all that either wears the exile out or develops whatever is greatest in him. In all our most populous cities we see a crowd of people who have left their homes of their own free will, but the man takes his virtues with him wherever he goes. And in fact they were by no means only men who had been formally exiled, but thousands who had left their native cities voluntarily because they had found the political or economic

condition intolerable. The Florentine emigrants at Ferrara, the Lucchese in Venice, etc. formed whole colonies by themselves. The cosmopolitanism that grew up in the most gifted exiles is one of the highest stages of individualism. Dante, as we have already said, finds a new home in the language and culture of Italy but goes beyond even this in the words, my country is the whole world. And when returned to Florence was offered him on unworthy conditions, he wrote back, Can I not behold the light of the sun and the stars everywhere? Everywhere meditate on the noblest truths without appearing ingloriously and shamefully before the city and the people. Even my bread will not fail me. The artists exert no less defiantly in their freedom from the constraints of fixed residence.

Only he who has learned everything, says Ghiberti, is nowhere a stranger. Robbed of his fortune and without friends, he is yet the citizen of every country and can fearlessly despise the changes of fortune. In the same strain, an exiled humanist writes, wherever a learned man fixes his seat, there is his home. An acute and practiced eye might be able to trace, step by step, the increase in the number of complete men during the 15th century, whether they strove consciously toward the harmonious development of their spiritual and material existence is hard to say, but several of them attained it so far as is possible given the imperfection of all that is earthly. If we forgo the attempt to estimate the share that fortune, character and talent had in

the life of Lorenzo the Magnificent, then let us look at personalities such as that of Ariosto, especially as is shown in his satires. How harmoniously are expressed the pride of the man and the poet, the irony with which he treats his own enjoyments, the most delicate satire and the deepest good will. When this impulse to the highest individual development was combined with a powerful and varied nature that had mastered all the elements of the culture of the age, then there arose the all-sided man, L'Uomo Universale. Yes, do you like this? You know, at least a small part of that I will not speak to the more developed aspects of what Burkhardt was talking about, but I can confirm a small part of that I am on almost

lifelong exile, and certainly off and on for the last maybe 15 years, and completely so for the last five or six years, I've been outside any country and constantly moving. And whether it has actually helped me to be truly unique, I leave that to others to decide. But I can tell you, and I can tell you also from having observed other expats and exiles and talk to them, when you're alone in a country that you don't know, it forces you into many It forces you into a certain frame of mind where you have to know what you are eventually. You can't rely anymore on friends or family or what you thought about yourself in the eyes of others, playing a role for them or not. That's all spent out when you're by yourself in an entirely new place with mostly new customs.

I say mostly now because so much is homogenized in the world. But still, anyway, all these political experiences, this new kind of city life. It was this that led to actually great sparkling individual men you may know of from Renaissance, like you may have heard Leon Battista Alberti, the so-called Renaissance man, the universal man, the all-sided man, the man who tried to develop his inward power in as many natural directions as possible and not limit himself to one specialty or profession. Alberti excelled in his use of gymnastics, supposedly he was able to jump over other men's heads and to throw a coin to the top of a cathedral roof. And he studied many things, canon, law, music, poetry. Then he turned to mathematics and physics.

He studied trades of all craftsmen from potters to cobblers to carpenters and then he had books on architecture and art that, as far as I know, they are still red, still important things in those fields. He wrote Latin, indistinguishable from ancient authors, where people thought they were ancient books that were found and many such things. His writings still survive and are read, but I say, why limit yourself to one thing? You see what means then the inward development of the individual, the feeling that you can do everything, that you should do everything, as opposed to, as in Plato's Republic, where You are limited. Individuality is on purpose erased in that. You are limited to your caste and your guild and your one specialty and similarly with

medieval guilds and corporate group existence. But here the individual feels that he must impose himself on various areas in which his nature leads him and imprint himself on all such ventures with his particular character. Man can do all if he wills. a line that comes from Renaissance men, literally Renaissance era men, Leon Battista Alberti. It does not come from 19th century German philosophers of will or might makes right or such, it comes from an artist. And that sentiment was common, repeated by all the great men of the Renaissance. Men can do all if he wills. It's funny, Pico della Mirandola read the Talmud, by the way, since people are talking about this online now. I find that funny, it was said in, I forget what I read, that Pico della Mirandola knowledge

of the Talmud was as good as any famous rabbis of that time. That's interesting, they studied Arabic literature as well, some of them. They learned Arabic just to do that. But yes, and the outward or societal reflection of this highly developed individuality was the thirst for fame, and the approval and celebration, society-wide of seeking fame, It wasn't seen as something shameful, you know, and it wasn't just celebrity because it was lust for everlasting fame. But every man of that time basically sought fame. And even when very famous men like Petrarch, who he precedes this time somewhat, but by the 1300s, this cult of individuality and fame and strong personalities and fascination for strong personalities was already present in Italy.

Petrarch and Dante also being famous they condemn fame and they talk about the shortcomings of fame but even in so doing they concede the great desire they have for it as Tacitus did also in similar passage and the Greco-Roman cult of fame this ancient burning desire for everlasting renown is reborn actually I think more or less accurately and in full in the the Renaissance, it was not stopped by biblical teaching, it was not seen even necessarily as conflicting that and was less faithfully passed down to Europe later and to our own time but it was passed down. But when I say less faithfully that it's never been so such innocent burning desire for immortal fame as the men of the Renaissance had for glory where men now of course still seek celebrity

but anyway they had the cult of saints for example before the coming of this competition for fame there was in Europe throughout Europe the cult of saints and especially in Italy you can still see this of course if you go to Catholic locations there will be relics of saints, the jaw of this saint, the bones of some other saint. But Italians of this time started to do it also for authors and poets and painters, writers and scholars and so on. Even in the 1200s, actually, and in the late 1100s, it was already somewhat starting, because not just of saints, but the famous secular man. It had been done a couple of times for jurists, which is funny. They worshiped lawyers, but apparently they admired just a couple of jurists because of the income these had received.

They'd become very rich and they got respect from kings and such for their knowledge of the law. So they became famous wise men of their time and so on. But this small beginnings was nothing compared to the later cult of fame of starting already in late 1300s and 1400s, 1500s where houses of famous men in the, if you had grown up in a house you became a famous writer or painter later and these became sites of pilgrimage and exhibition of pride for their native cities, you know, or their tombs did also and their relics and so on. In one church, an enterprising man actually moved the candles from the crucifix to hear, I'll read so you get more of the local color and the names and so on. It's such a strange thing, I think, for people to, you know, especially the kinds of people

who admire the past now, right? Reactionaries, but they're going to be the ones who are the most moralistic of saying, oh no, how could you want fame or celebrities? That is, it's shallow. No, you have to want to, you have to serve your community with duty and serve of God, but that's not really the attitude of Renaissance, but I'll read for you now. It is most remarkable how seriously Florentines, even in the 14th century, excuse me, long before the building of Santa Croce, labored to make their cathedral a pantheon. Accorso, Dante, Petrarch Boccaccio, and the Juris Zenobi della Strada were to have had magnificent tombs there. Late in the 15th century, Lorenzo the Magnificent applied in person to the Spolettans, asking

them to give up the corpse of the painter Fra Filippo Lippi for the cathedral and received the answer that they had none too many ornaments to the city, especially in the shape of distinguished people for which reason they begged him to spare them. The people of Spoleto asked to keep the remains of this Florentine painter as a pilgrimage site and in fact he, Lorenzo the Magnificent, had to content himself with erecting a cenotaph in the painter's name. And even Dante, in spite of all the applications to which Boccaccio urged the Florentines with bitter emphasis, he remained sleeping tranquilly in San Francesco at Ravenna, among ancient tombs of emperors and vaults of saints, in more honorable company than you, O Florence, could offer him."

In the words of Boccaccio, he was mad that the Florentines could not bring back the corpse of Dante. Even at that time, a remarkable man remained unpunished when he took the candles from the altar on which the crucifix stood and set them by the grave with the words, take them, you are more worthy of them than he, the crucified one. You know, and this man, I'm not reading anymore, but this man remained unpunished. This was not seen as blasphemous, or at least not taken seriously as blaspheming. This same cult led to revival of art of biography, which you may know from ancient authors, you know, like Plutarch, or it's not just Plutarch, there's Plutarch, there's Cornelius Nepos, there's Diogenes Lertius, all the American founders read Plutarch, parallel lives, short

biographies of great men of antiquity, but this same format was reborn in Renaissance again out of intense interest in particular personality and individuality, which I think this is the best way to read, to learn history, by the way, through reading biographies, because You see the time expressed concretely and through the character of a man covered, colored both by the virtues and vices of his time and by his own innate powers. It's the best way to learn history, I think, through reading biographies. But the desire of scholars and writers from Italy of this time to make themselves immortal through fame, and to believe that they could achieve this kind of immortality, this was big motivation for them that largely worked.

They were promising, in other words, to other great men of the time, whether kings, priests, popes and such, promising in the same way that an ancient bard would promise a warlord, I will eulogize you in poetry and your deeds will become known to all time. In the same way this cult of scholars and writers, Italian ones in particular of the time, they promised various people around Europe the same and it worked. It worked in the sense that many of them are still read, many of the Italian authors of that time, and in some cases they made promises but they weren't carried out, but the nature of the promises shows you their attitude. For example, you may remember on a recent episode, this writer Poliziano promised the

King of Portugal, I will make you eternally famous for the voyages of Vasco da Gama to Africa and India in the manner of an ancient bard. He didn't end up doing that, the Portuguese poet ended up later doing that, but you can see the way it worked and why they thought they would achieve immortality for themselves reason for whatever author they would write about. There are even cases where a woman was desired by a poet and the woman decided to be difficult in the hopes that the poet, by trying to court her through his poetry and to entreat her further, would make her immortal to history. It's funny. I forget the name of the poet who did this. It may may have been Boccaccio, I don't know, but he wondered if he should instead attack her,

if he should blame her in poetry instead and make her look bad and entice her in that way. He was using game on her, you see. But remember, many of you live in the continent America. I live there too, I guess. I'm American, yes, but American, named after a Florentine travel writer discovered by a Genoese explorer. But I mean, the domination of Europe by Italian In literature, because of this outburst of creative individuality and overwhelming personalities, it lasted a long time after the Renaissance, as you can see. An inevitable accompaniment of this kind of strong, vivid personality, also an accompaniment of the lust for fame and distinction is humor. Its wit, its satire, this is what Burckhardt calls its corrective parody.

You need strong personalities to be around in order to be able to satirize and lampoon them, you know. Satire had barely existed before, hardly does exist in most traditional societies. It exists in a way, of course, humans always joke, but it exists as kind of typecast jokes about types and guilds and cases and such. But you need actually vivid individual men with characteristic virtues and flaws to be able to really mock and lampoon them for even maybe exaggerated features of their face to become widely known. This happened already in ancient Greece. You see caustic humor from great comics. Aristophanes famously attacks all kinds of pompous and not pompous public figures but in Florence especially this dries became insane. Florentines basically invented stand-up comedy. They

were in high demand in other cities and at courts across Europe. Basically you You can read about Florentine dwarves, but not just dwarves, Florentine burlesque performers and basically people going around to different cities giving stand-up comedy routines. Florence became famous as a city of acerbic tongues. They were constantly engaging in public ridicule against each other, constant satiric, parodic chatter and such. Actually a little bit of it was directed to, let's say, the medieval world that had preceded them. The comedy of this man Pulci, he wrote somewhat atheistic satirical text called Morgante. Okay, you can look this up, Pulci. But in it he lampoons along with a few others like him, they lampooned medieval chivalry and things of this type.

But most of the humor was actually about public figures, great men, writers of the day. And it was mostly the scholars and writers attacking each other. The artists of the time, the painters lived in relative cooperation, harmony with each other. They may have had occasional rivalries and problems, but they didn't engage. They were not the market or the producers of this constant malicious even satire and parody of each other. That's interesting that artists and painters as craftsmen lived in relative harmony but scholars and writers were basically at each other's throats with their pens. But apparently there were also constant prank jokes. Some prank jokes were very violent and cruel even, which must have made life in Florence, if not dangerous, then maybe very annoying at

times. Just imagine living in a place of constantly hyper-aware, chattering people, constantly engaging in verbal, invective, parody, insults, hyper-aware, hyper-intelligent public. And later, you know, wit, you can say wit of this kind, a spirit of this kind became codified in manuals of courtiers, both by the Italians and the French, teaching people which kinds of jokes were civil and tasteful to make it court and which kinds instead were boorish and ruined, common and polite feeling and such. But I was thinking, reading about this, imagine how absurd the idea of humor is for example among races, to be blunt, races and peoples that are homogenous. I'm sorry, am I being rude, but if you go to Thailand, you've got China, it's not that

there's no humor at all, right, Vietnam or whatever, Central America for sure, everybody's Yeah, most of Africa, South America, it's just how can I put this? You look at the people in the eye, they all look the same. It's a dull look in the eye in all these countries that even if some of them in some countries I mentioned should score well on tests or be able to be a good office clerk or such, there is a dull conformity, homogeneity, a lack of development of individual characters. So everyone pretty much looks the same, has same hair, same eyes, same gait, same everything. Same look in the eye. Even the facial expressions are very uniform. And in such an environment, not only is there no genius and no great art, but also satire and wit become mostly impossible.

I mean, who is there to lampoon? Satire is the counterpart of individuality and of the drive to excellence and distinction. And imagine Chinese satire, I mean, it's, you know, You don't need to throw out the idea of the value of the individual, you see, to preserve Western nationalism or European nationalism or call it what you want. In fact, just on these grounds, you can exclude not only people who scored low on IQ tests because they're dumbasses, you can exclude most of Asia and other large parts of the world simply from what I've just said now. They are unable to take part actually in a truly individual culture of seeking distinction and of its happy counterpart of satire and wit. Of course, most of the West is

debased now too, but that's not, you see, it can be re-established on that and other races can be excused. That's I'm not racist, I'm anti-racist, I'm liberal and so on, but I'm saying if you want you could use this kind of highly individual culture because I just having traveled a lot and to read again about the culture of Florence and to be reminded what the similar culture of ancient Athens was like you know the rest of the world has absolutely no place to start with in such a completely fish out of water in in such a place you know but also a wit and humor though is not always a happy counterpart. I should say that often it can be a brutal tool in the hands of the envious or in the hands of people who have a sharp tongue and perceptive brain

but a low spirit. One such creature, many, many such, many more people can use parody, wit and so on than can be Michelangelo. And most great men of the time, great painters, mines, when they were attacked and parodied, they learned to ignore it. I mean, you can't fight satire against yourself, it's better to just ignore it. But to give you an example of how powerful the wielders of satire as a weapon could be, there's a famous man of the 1500s called Pietro Aretino, I think lived mid-1500s, and mostly under the protection of Venice, he was not from Venice, I forget, I think he was Roman, but I forget where he was from, but he lived in Venice, and his satiric mind and writing became so feared that he was courted and paid by kings and dukes

across Europe to at least try to get him not to attack them. And he frequently mocked kings, prelates at the Vatican, many other such, in a mercenary way for pay, so much so you can call him the world's first journalist, maybe the world's first PR man. But yes, he was an Italian satirist, a product of this highly individualized culture that was feared by political men across Europe for the whole time that he was alive for his, let's say, biting wit, his malicious wit. But otherwise, pranks is thankfully, pranks, humor, satire, all of it is, I say thankfully, a huge part of this whole epoch. That's what makes it so fun to know and read about. And even, for example, in the Vatican, the priests, many of them were famous scholars in their own good minds, in their own right,

and many had frustrated ambitions, so they're constantly sniping at each other in funny ways, sometimes not so funny, but had the pope being of a similar character playing pranks on them. The pranks were sometimes very elaborate and cruel. Pope Leo X basically humiliated the man by calling a fake public festival in his honor just to mock his vanity. So actually the description, again for, so you get local color, I'll read for you this event of Pope Leo X's prank. In Pope Leo X, the genuine Florentine love of jesters showed itself strikingly. This prince, whose taste for the most refined intellectual pleasures was insatiable, endured, by prince he means pope, endured and desired at his table a number of witty buffoons and merry andrews, among them two monks and a cripple.

At public feasts he treated them with deliberate scorn as parasites, setting before them monkeys and crows in the place of savory meats. Indeed, Leo showed a peculiar fondness for the burla. It was characteristic of his nature, sometimes to treat his own favorite pursuits, music and poetry, ironically, parodying them with his factotum, Cardinal Bibiena. Neither of them found it beneath his dignity to fool an honest old secretary till he thought himself a master of the art of music. The Improvisatore, Baraballo of Gaetar, was brought so far by Leo's flattery that he applied in all seriousness for the poet's coronation on the Capitol. On the feast day of Saints Cosmas and Damia, the patrons of the House of Medici, he was

first compelled, adorned with laurel and purple, to amuse the papal guests with his recitations, And at last, when all were ready to split with laughter to mount a gold-harnessed elephant in the court of the Vatican, sent as a present to Rome by Emmanuel the Great of Portugal, while the Pope looked down from above through his eyeglass, but the animal was so terrified by the noise of the trumpets and kettle-drums and the cheers of the crowd, there was no getting him over the bridge of Sant'Angelo. The parody of what is solemn or sublime, which we meet here in the form of a procession, had already taken an important place in poetry. It was naturally compelled to choose victims of another kind than those of Aristophanes who introduced the great tragedians into his plays.

But the same maturity of culture that at a certain period produced parody among the Greeks did the same in Italy. By the close of the 14th century, the lovelord wailings of Petrarch's sonnets and others of the same kind were parodied and the solemn air of his form of verse was ridiculed in lines of mystic twaddle. Yes, so here you see both literary and real-world prank parody. Do you like this? It's a culture after my taste. You bring an elephant with gold harness to make a vain idiot try to mount it. As the ancient Greeks all became actors, the Italians of the Renaissance all became stand-up comics and pranksters. I like this very much. I'll say something in closing because next time I'll return to talk about the dark side,

The dark side of highly developed individuality, which is in egotism, the cruelty of the tyrant. Very often in disinterested cruelty, well beyond the bounds of what could be needed for utilitarian ends, the enjoyment in cruel displays, such as you see in the hands of Cesare Borgia or Sigismondo Malatesta. But think away from that for a moment. That's dark side of egotism and individuality. Think of David Lynch anyway, right? Of most directors working now, I can think of Lynch as, right here, such a personal touch. There are others too, but maybe you don't know them or whatever. I like Leo Skaraks. You like this. He stopped making movies for whatever reason. Gaspar Noé is another one. Very personal touch. You can always recognize, right away, that's him. But I like Lynch.

You see it in all his movies. The mood is immediate. Even a few seconds of a Lynch movie can make you feel, yes, that's him, I recognize. His personality imprinted on his work, and it takes great will, a great self-definition, unique character to do this, and of course, one of stock examples of individual characters taking its claim in the world is the fact that among the Renaissance Italians who developed paintings so well, everyone knows Renaissance paintings, you start to have just this in the beginning, in other words, artists signing their work with their own name, or being known for it, being famous for it, and in any case having a very unique style that you can recognize them by, whereas the Byzantine art out of which this developed, it's often formulaic

and typecast, it's ritualized religious art, and individual expression is not so much a thing and even when it's very well made or even when there is occasionally a personal touch, it's attributed to basically a non, you know, Luke the Monk made this as a rumor or something like that. And even when it's well made, the figures depicted do not have strong marked individual character on their faces as you might find in a Raphael painting or such. Whereas here, later I mean in Italian Renaissance, as in Lynch, the touch of the auteur, the creator imprinting his own character this very clear but why am I saying this right my point is my point is why is this bad why would people on the right who oppose certain bad aspects

of the left and such why would you focus on attacking individualism and many of the people who do this by the way are resentful traditionalists who and the reactionaries who want to actually lump in the Renaissance which they resent for rejecting religiosity and dogmatism and for rejecting priests for looking down on the priestly order of the Middle Ages but they want to lump this in together with Locke and later English liberalism or with Mill and then somehow to blame both of these for current problems and yes for this word degeneracy and when I think of the problems now are caused by neither in fact foreign to both of them but this aspect I've emphasized in particular the resurrection of the ancient drive for personal distinction the development of individual

character and desire to stamp your own character on a creation, the desire for freedom, the corresponding use of wit and humor. Why would you seek to attack these things and to falsely blame them for, I mean, for what? Who is all this supposed to be directed to? In what way does any of this correspond to the experience of an intelligent young person? Women as well I would say, but mainly let's say intelligent young men in high school is is told constantly that he must subsume his individuality, both in schools and in movies and social media and so on, subsume himself for the good of the community, and where also his very race is attacked biologically. And why is it attacked? It's as an inappropriate construct of the criminal or pathological drive for supremacy.

That's how whiteness is understood. It's bad because it's fundamentally exploitative or that's how it's understood. And that to atone for this he must give up his personality, his drive for distinction, for excellence, he must make way for crippled and disadvantaged others and find satisfaction only in this and so forth, you see. I have to think that most traditionalists and dissidents are retards. In particular, how stupid to try to tie criticism of the left and of the woke to this weak and and stupid criticism of individuality, as if the last few years especially did not take place, where the pandemic, right, in the name of the well-being of the old and sick, the freedom and development of two years, in most cases, that's more than 10% of their lives were stolen from the young.

And now you have imbecile dissidents, many of who supported the lockdowns and many other coercion of that time, in the name, and I will never forget this, the Integralists and the others, These are the Catholic reactionaries, but also the Douganists, the Eugene-During types. They're not quite the same as Douganists, but this kind of wholesome socialist reactionary and so on. Maybe they should delete what they wrote. Maybe they can try that. They should delete the things they actually said during the pandemic, where you had the Catholic integralists in English newspapers talk about the lockdowns necessary, the name of the common good in the name for the good of the herd, the individual must be, you know, in the name of that, they supported this tyranny,

that will not be forgotten, especially by the young who are most of all hurt by it. And my point is, after these events, you have retards puffing themselves up to say, no, we are against individuality, against freedom, it's evil, stop talking about freedom, we're about the state and duty, we are statists, we're for duty, we're for community, we don't want to be degenerate, do you? And this idiocy is part of why the right always loses. Yes, because here, a wonderful opportunity. But see, they want the left to have a claim to enjoyment, to freedom, to humor, to individuality. An entirely undeserved claim at this point, which the left has lost and will not regain anytime soon. But it's despite the stupid efforts of most of the left's opponents. And so these people, I think, must be ignored.

I, for one, have always been for freedom of the best. And my concept of the long house became clear and vivid and true to all who doubted it, not so much because of the excesses of feminism and so on actually, but because of what happened, especially during the pandemic, which makes now what I was saying in my book of 2018 undeniable. I look forward to the young one day putting all these old faggots on trial, but until then, and regardless, I will continue speaking my gospel of freedom and presenting my tablets of hatred for all mankind to them. And they will embrace me and love me as the new Moses riding on a donkey. Until next time, Bap out.