Toward a Right-Wing Environmentalism

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The following is the transcript of an interview with Greg Johnson that was conducted on The Current Year Report in late June of 2017. The original audio is here ^[2]. The transcription was made by James B. and Tyler Harding.

LL: Good afternoon, everybody. It is episode six of season three of The Current Year Report, and today we have a very special guest. We’re joined by Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents. Hello, sir!

GJ: Hello, thank you for having me on.

LL: Thank you for joining us today. Our main purpose today is going to be something more removed from current events than usual. We’re going to discuss, basically, a Right-wing approach to environmentalism—and, without further ado, we have a treat that should get us started here.

GJ: Hmm.

SS: From the great Paul Joseph Watson: “Who else is celebrating Trump pulling out of the Paris agreement by having the heating on full blast and running the taps all night?” Now in the pre-show, we had a small discussion about this, so Greg, go ahead, you have “space to destroy,” as it were.

GJ: Well, what gets me about this is that it’s a beautiful illustration of an essentially reactionary stance, because a reactionary is a person who literally always lets the enemy set the agenda and then merely reacts to it by negating it in some way. So, the Left is evil, the Left wants the Paris agreement and the Kyoto accords and environmental regulation; therefore, “logically,” we must oppose all these things by running the heat at full blast and leaving the taps on – namely, doing things that are flagrantly wasteful of resources. And I just think that’s a childish, asinine attitude.

Years ago, there was an attempt by the Mayor of New York to tax large sugary sodas. People would be consuming a gallon at a time, or half a gallon at a time, of things like Coke, or Mountain Dew, which are laced with corn sweetener and are really, really bad for your health. So suddenly it became a crusade of the Right wing to defend unhealthy eating habits and drinking habits. And again, this is just essentially reactionary and essentially allows the Left to always set the agenda, and the Right just becomes a bunch of contrarian crybabies, putting up some kind of resistance—but in the end they never win, and they never win because they never stop being reactionaries and start actually setting the agenda and asking what the right thing to do is.

LL: Yes, like taking some kind of political cartoon created by the Left of the Right-wing and then deciding, “Yeah, I’m going to become that person.” And I think it’s no wonder that this doesn’t lead to anything. He even made a follow-up tweet to this one saying that he actually did that, and didn’t just tweet about it. So yeah, that’s basically how you become a joke instead of an actual serious commentator.

GJ: Right, but to be clear, Watson has done many good videos, but this mentality that’s on display here is really one of the reasons why the Right has been losing and will always lose. Because it simply does not set the agenda; it simply reacts—and chooses its positions oftentimes by living down to the caricatures of the Right that are created by our enemies. And of course, our enemies are going to create a script for us, at the end of which we always lose, right?

LL: Yes, this is what happens as long as we don’t actually start moving the Overton window, as far as I understand it.

GJ: Right.

LL: But looking at the whole Paris climate deal, it is I would say definitely reasonable to oppose it, because what it was about was to a degree deindustrialization, to a degree basically paying the Third World to be allowed to produce—so that was kind of the Breitbart take on it, and it’s fairly accurate; but at the same time, when we have Left-wing deindustrialization and Third-Worldism on the one hand, and Paul Joseph Watson autism on the other, where does the Alt Right fall, what is the Alt-Right approach to the environment, if there is one, to begin with?

GJ: Well, there is one, and I think when we stop taking our bearings simply by opposing what the Left does, and actually ask ourselves what the right thing to do is, we have to conclude that there really are environmental problems, and collective action is needed to solve those problems. Within a society, collective action on the part of the state is needed to solve those problems, and globally, collective action by intergovernmental agreements and treaties is also called for.

However, we’ve got to get the problem right: I am convinced that the global warming “issue” is largely a hoax. I simply don’t believe it. I think it’s possible that we are having terrible catastrophic effect on the environment—in fact I am sure that’s true. I do not think human-caused global warming is the issue. I have read some literature on this. I read especially a book by a former teacher of mine, one of my very favorite teachers, about global warming, and I was deeply disappointed in it, and basically I came to conclude that it’s kind of a religious movement.

Now, the opposition to global warming is kind of an apocalyptic quasi-Protestant movement in its moral tone, and it’s largely subservient to a Left agenda. The book that this woman wrote, for instance, is entirely anti-capitalist; it doesn’t breathe a word about the destructiveness of socialist economies to the environment, which is an obvious truth, and so I just think that what happened after the collapse of Communism, and really before the collapse of Communism, starting in the 1960s, is the Left, the New Left, rebranded itself, in terms of Third-Worldism and radical environmentalism simply as tools to attack capitalism—and that’s all it really is.

And I think that at the commanding heights of this are people who just tell lies; they’re engaged in pious fraud; they have created a worldview that’s essentially false, because they think that it’s a tool for achieving moral goods; essentially, it works like a religion. Not all religions can be true, right? Logically, not all religions can be true. And what that means is that most religions, if not all of them, are created by people who are telling lies because they think that somehow it’s going to make the world a better place, or because it’s going to give them personal power, prestige, and influence, and then they convince people, they gaslight people; into thinking that this is true, and that “Something’s got to be done!”

And I do believe that the global warming hysteria is basically a religious movement that has been created as a vehicle for the destruction of capitalism and also for the destruction of white people, and if you look at things like the Kyoto agreement and the Paris agreement—basically, they don’t actually deal with the causes of global warming, if it actually exists—they simply unilaterally cripple the First World economies. They don’t limit India or China, or the Third World in general, which are the main causes of environmental destruction, because really the main problem with the environment is human population growth—and human populations are not all equal; some people are worth more than others.

Some people contribute more to the world than others, and others are a net negative. And unless we address that issue, we’re never going to solve the problem. Really, we don’t need any more Africans; we don’t need any more Indians; we don’t need any more Chinese. And therefore, unilaterally limiting the power of the West, and not limiting population and economic activity in those parts of the world, is just simply going to destroy the environment, and it’s also going to destroy the West. It’s going to destroy white people.

So how do we deal with environmental problems? Obviously, the best way to deal with environmental problems is to innovate our way out of them, and lead our way out of them, and the people who have the capacity to innovate their way out of environmental problems are white people. And therefore any kind of policies that unilaterally cripple white nations—economically, technologically, and so forth—are actually objectively contributing to environmental apocalypse. And I do think that we are facing serious environmental problems—but the global warming religion, and generally the ecological hysteria of the Left, is not designed to fix those problems; it’s actually going to worsen those problems, because their real agenda is essentially to destroy whites, to cripple white nations.

LL: And it seems to be quite the anti-Western drive to a lot of these things, especially when it comes to population, because—as far as I’m aware, back when the whole environmentalism thing got big—I think a big focus was actually on population growth in the Third World, which has since then, conveniently, been dropped. If we look at it now, they’re talking about carbon footprints of things like having a kid as a Westerner. I’ve actually seen articles essentially telling young white millennials in America that it’s irresponsible for them to have children, while not a single word was said about population growth in the Third World—and we look at the actual data and we see, like when Live Aid was a thing in 1984, Ethiopia’s population was 39 million people, and today it is over 100 million—and they’re still poor, so basically, all that accomplished nothing other than taking this whole misery and lifting it to a whole new level.

GJ: Exactly. Africa is basically in a Malthusian trap where every bit of additional resources is simply consumed by a swarming, locust-like increase in population, and so they will never actually progress; they will never accumulate capital; they will never accumulate technology; they’re not capable of that. Their reproductive strategy is high fertility and low investment. That’s what their brains and bodies are wired for, as a race.

Now, I think that—and I’ve written an article on this, called “Why Environmentalists Should Have Large Families ^[3]”—voluntary birth control is inherently dysgenic. If birth control is up to the individual to use or not use, which individuals will limit their fertility? Obviously, people who think ahead, who have low time preferences, who have a sense of the future, and people who are responsible—people who think about ethical considerations, people who care about the planet, people who care about children, people who care about future generations. Those people will limit their fertility. But the people who don’t think ahead, because they’re not intelligent, or because they simply don’t care, they’re the ones who are impulsive, who are irresponsible, they aren’t going to limit their fertility, and they are therefore going to increase as a percentage of the population, because many of these attitudes are heritable. And that means that the irresponsible people are going to inherit the Earth, if environmentalists and environmentally-conscious people limit their fertility.

The only eugenic and ecologically sound form of population control is involuntary population control, where it is forced upon people, and where you have incentives for high-quality people to have larger families, and low-quality people to have smaller families. That has to be imposed by force, and by force I mean things like setting up systems of incentives (that’s the soft form of it), but eventually, in some cases, you might simply want to say, “Look, you can’t have any kids.” For instance, if people run afoul of the law, and if they’re of low genetic quality, or whatever, I think it would be sound social policy simply to say, “Okay, part of your punishment for being a drug addict is sterilization. We’ll knock a year off your sentence if you get sterilized.” Things like that. The state has to get involved. There have to be collective policies to ensure that birth control and family planning are not dysgenic and ecologically destructive.

LL: Well, looking at China, it’s one case where this sort of thing was actually put in place with the one-child policy. I think also Indonesia, or some other country recently changed the law so that people who molest children were also going to be sterilized at the very least—and it makes one think about just how bad it was looking for China that a Communist government, out of all things, was the one to introduce these policies. So, do you think this sort of thing will naturally come about at some point in the future in those countries once they basically realize they’re steadily going towards hitting a wall big time? Or does that have to be something that happens after things have already collapsed, as a rebuilding effort?

GJ: Well, unfortunately, history shows that people don’t learn from reason; they learn from bitter experience, they learn from mistakes, if they learn at all. People learn mostly from suffering. There’s a whole genre called tragedy, in which people sit in an audience and contemplate on stage what happens when people make bad decisions. And of course, history is just a larger form of tragedy. You look at it and you see, “Oh my god, this isn’t going to end well!” And then you keep reading, and reading until the end of the Roman Empire. And then you read about another phase in the life of civilization. And you conclude that, “Uh oh, this isn’t going to end well.” People seldom listen to reason; people seldom listen to far-sighted, intelligent, wise people. They just don’t. There are all kinds of situations where by pursuing selfish agendas and short-sighted agendas, the common good is destroyed, or things are just allowed to drift until things are destroyed. It’s an unfortunate pattern, and it underscores the necessity of rule by the wise, rule by elites. The right kind of elites.

LL: Well, yeah, that’s kind of the classical aristocracy.

GJ: Yes, exactly.

LL: Which brings me to a concept Guillaume Faye has developed, a sort of two-tier world economy: You basically take the First World and allow it to develop, allow it to unleash its potential, while at the same time, strictly separating it from the so-called “developing world” that never seems to actually develop—and just leave it as it is, allowing them to live according to their traditional lifestyles, because developing them to the standard of First World countries is simply not feasible in any way—and, well, does that sound like a sustainable model to you, or do you think it can be done in a better way?

GJ: Yes, yes, I support that model.

I had two experiences that were quite formative: Both of them happened after I spent a month in India in 2004, and I returned to the United States; and the first experience was, I was walking around an IKEA store in the east Bay, in Emeryville, which is near Berkeley, and when you go downstairs in an IKEA store after you go through all the showrooms, you go into this area of rooms where they have all the stuff you can take off the shelves, and the warehouse area, and so forth, and I just contemplated this vast hall of merchandise, and I thought, “There is simply no way that seven billion people on this planet can consume at the level of the First World without completely destroying the planet.”

And the next experience was similar, at a Costco store, a few miles away—when I turned and wandered down an aisle, and realized I was in an entire aisle of disposable picnic supplies—paper plates, disposable plastic forks, and other stuff. And it was chilling, because I realized that behind every pallet of these disposable items, there was an entire warehouse full of just those items. And behind that was a factory, making those items, and behind that were supply chains encompassing the whole globe, moving those resources around and then moving the finished products around, from warehouse to Costco, and into your shopping cart. And again, the sense that this simply cannot be sustained on a global level without destroying the world, just hit me.

So yes, we do need to have a two-tier world economy; we need to have a developed First World—and by the First World what I mean is Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of East Asia, places like Japan, Korea, and China—they have the capacity to do that as well—and the less developed parts of the world need to be, basically, contained. We need to stop feeding them; we need to stop increasing their populations or allowing their populations to increase; we need to basically exercise a certain benevolent control over these people, just like we exercise benevolent control over wildlife. We need to be benevolent caretakers of the less developed, and the people who can’t develop, the people who simply propagate in large numbers like locusts, and destroy the environment. So, that really should be the model for the future; I think Faye is entirely correct about that.

LL: Yeah, and when we talk about these things, it’s basically another form of this often-propagated global approach—are global solutions to local problems, in a way, also falling into this cosmopolitan trap? Because one thing that comes to mind here is Carl Schmitt saying that, “Whoever speaks of humanity wishes to betray you.” Are we proceeding at a risk of falling into this sort of thinking here?

GJ: Yes and no, because the view that I have really is not cosmopolitanism in the sense that he’s talking about. Cosmopolitan in that sense posits that the natural political order would be a global political order in which there is no enmity, in which there is no “us” or “them.” The view that I have is that enmity is an irreducible fact, that there is always going to be an “us” and a “them,” and that we therefore need to recognize that there will not be a single global polity. The closest thing to a global polity will be some sort of alliance of First World powers, both East and West—to deal with global environmental issues, because there really are global problems that do require global solutions, and this alliance will then keep in check the rest of the world’s population and resource consumption. So I think that that recognizes there’s going to be an “us” versus “them,” and there’s also going to be an “us” versus “them” on smaller levels. There’s also going to be Europe versus East Asia, and there will also be distinct interests and distinct identities within the European world as well, and none of those will go away. So I’m a political realist in that sense.

I do think, however, that because there are global problems, there will have to be some global solutions. But there will never be a single global political order; I think that’s a utopian impossibility, and frankly, the Left, the globalists actually tip their hand, because even though they posit a world in which there will be no enemies, we are the enemies of that world, and they recognize that. They’re for a world without any hate, except they hate us, and they hate us passionately, because they know that we don’t believe in their vision. So there’s always going to be an “us” versus “them,” even in the global one-world economy, or global one-world society. There will be a subordinate group of people who will be constantly policed, attacked, and monitored, and those will be the people like us, who don’t believe in that vision.

LL: Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it’s kind of inevitable that if you have something, it’s not just scale; you’re going to need, at least in some way, some sort of global approaches to it. Yeah, as long as we avoid globalism, that should be at least somewhat feasible, but . . .

GJ: We’ve got to be realistic, but we’ve also got to be responsible—and by responsible I mean recognize that there are global problems, and therefore, there need to be some kind of global solutions, and that means the cooperation of the more advanced societies and races to solve these problems.

I think one thing that would be wonderful is a planetary defense network. You should look up the Shoemaker-Levy comet. The Shoemaker-Levy comet crashed onto the surface of Jupiter and created an enormous disturbance there. If that comet had crashed onto the Earth, it would have produced a mass extinction like that which killed off the dinosaurs. And that would have been the end of it. We wouldn’t be having this conversation.

We really do need some kind of global planetary defense network. And one of the things that I really like about “big government,” when it’s properly used, is the ability to mobilize intelligent people, creative people, in massive research and development projects. We need a thousand Manhattan projects; we need a thousand space programs; we need to have a War against Cancer; we need to have a War against Alzheimer’s; we need to have a War against Autism; and we need to have global planetary defense against big rocks and balls of snow falling out of the sky and obliterating us. That is something that we should be able to get a global consensus around.

And there are other global problems as well. If the population of Africa goes to 4 billion in this century, as it is projected to do, that is a global problem. And it requires global solutions. It requires cooperation and intervention from the advanced societies and races into the affairs of the Africans. So yeah, we’ve got to be politically realistic, and that means there is not going to be a one-world government, and if there were an attempt to create a one-world government, it would be no utopia. But we have to be responsible when dealing with the fact that there are collective problems that require collective solutions.

LL: Yeah, looking at the issue of African population, just this morning I read in the newspaper some supposed expert from some party predicting that if African populations continued to grow and with climate change continuing at its current rate, we might see ten million Africans coming into Europe by the end of the twenty-first century.

GJ: Ten million? That’s wildly optimistic. Probably three or four hundred million.

LL: Well, oh dear . . . I mean, it’s not hard to imagine that this would have catastrophic effects, and it’s funny because that is now sinking in even with the very governments that have enabled mass immigration until this point. It is the German government that’s now spearheading what they’re calling a “Marshall Plan” for Africa, which is supposed to be a sort of giant investment program into various African countries in an attempt to raise their living standards, and essentially keep young people there in their country and employed in that country, which they are hoping will reduce fertility rates. And it’s funny, because that is a thing that they would never outright admit as a goal, but at the same time they are talking about population growth as a problem, so that’s beyond heavily implied; I think it’s even sinking in with mainstream politicians at this point.

GJ: Right. I think one reason why global warming is the way that things are being phrased is simply because it is a race-neutral formulation of the problem. It doesn’t talk about global population, really, and therefore it doesn’t open the can of worms of asking where is the population growth coming from, and really, which people do we need more of and which people do we need less of? I think, in part, it’s attractive because of the anti-racist agenda—just like on the Right, any kind of civic nationalist scheme that is race-neutral is attractive to people, because then they just don’t have to talk about race or human population.

LL: It seems like it. But at the same time, one other thing that came to mind is that I’m more on the so-called “reactionary” side of the Right. The Traditionalists, that sort of people—a lot of them seem to have this idea that, essentially, the Industrial Revolution itself wasn’t such a good thing—and there seems to be this sort of narrative, which is also being pushed by the environmentalist sort of crowd, that essentially, more so than everyone else, it is European man who is incapable of living in harmony with nature; and that this raises the question: is that true? And to what extent can European man be reconciled with nature, while at the same time satisfying his desire to create and to go above and beyond what he sees before his eyes?

GJ: Well, there is plenty of evidence that non-European men have had catastrophic environmental effects, the Sahara Desert being one. There was a time when the Sahara Desert was grasslands, and it is hypothesized, very plausibly, that it became desert through overgrazing of nomadic peoples and their herds. And that is the main process by which the desert is spreading. Wherever the desert doesn’t exist yet, there is a great deal of overgrazing by nomadic peoples or settled peoples that have herds, and that is causing the desert to expand.

So I don’t believe for a minute that European man is solely responsible for environmental catastrophes. We are, however, the only race that seems to care about stopping and fixing environmental catastrophes. And so I’m not going to point my finger at white people as the main cause of this problem, although, yes, because we have created more science and technology, because we have created productive economies, we’ve done more harm—that’s true. But that’s really blaming us for our virtues. Every race makes a mess of things. Every race makes a mess of things to the extent that it has the ability. We have greater ability to mess things up because we’re more intelligent and inventive, and therefore we’ve got more problems on our plate.

However, we’re the people who can also solve those problems, and are working to solve those problems. And that, I think, counts very much in our favor. So I am not a white guilt advocate in this area. I think that to the extent that we have created more problems than other people, that’s because of our virtues, not our flaws, and to the extent that we are going to work our way out of these problems, it is going to be by intensifying those virtues, meaning that we are going to have to invent our way out of these problems that we have invented our way into.

Now, one of the things that we’re going to have to do is rediscover our sense of collectivism, our sense of the necessity of having some kind of wise oversight over society, the collective pursuit of the common good, both in a particular society and of the race as a whole, and of the planet as a whole. But that’s something of which we have a rich tradition. I think that with capitalism and modernity, we have strayed very, very far into liberalism, which is basically just the idea that there’s either no common good, or if there is a common good, we don’t need to worry about it—things will magically work out just by being selfish and short-sighted. I think that those are just bogus, absurd notions. Or the idea that if we try to pursue the common good, we’ll only create horror, tyranny, and dictatorship, and so we just can’t afford to try. All of that is nonsense, all of that is just liberal/libertarian nonsense.

We have a long history of being able to exercise wise government, and we have to go back to doing that, and I think that’s one of the things that we are learning today, and I think that’s one of the things that the New Right is pushing forward: a rediscovery of the idea of the common good, and therefore of the bankruptcy of all forms of liberalism. Because liberalism basically is premised on the denial that there is a common good, or that it matters, or that we can pursue it collectively, or that we have to pursue it collectively, because there’s just the magic of the invisible hand. They approach it from all kinds of different angles, but their common target is always the notion that we can’t pursue the collective good of society, or the race, or the planet, and that’s simply false. And so I think that we have a great deal of hope in my book. We will invent and organize our way out of these problems, and we simply have to.

LL: On the libertarian topic, you gave a speech, “Heidegger and Ethnic Nationalism ^[4],” at the London Forum, and you touched on the kind of Randian libertarianism in The Fountainhead. Were you talking about that? Where the main character sees everything natural as the potential for something, like a product, just primary material for some great project.

GJ: Tools, resources, yeah, exactly.

LL: So, on two fronts, the kind of liberal/libertarian way of thinking is screwing us, both ways.

GJ: Right, because first of all, it looks at the world simply as an arena for our projects and as resources for our consumption, and second, because it decouples us from any sense of responsibility towards the whole, namely the whole of society, or the race, or the planet. And between those two wheels, basically, between that hammer and that anvil, any kind of environmental responsibility, or responsibility to history and to tradition and society—all of that is crushed, and part of our mission is to bring that back, bring back a sense of the whole and a sense of our rootedness in the whole, and a sense that there are limits to human action—that the world isn’t just our oyster, it isn’t just a pile of resources for us to produce and consume.

One of the reasons why we have this idea that life is all about getting and spending and accumulating, is that we have become deracinated, we have lost any sense of identity rooted in the past, rooted in traditions, rooted in ethnicity, and therefore we’ve fallen into this world of nihilism, where we don’t have any source of meaning, except the things that we consume, basically. We’ve become hedonists. And we don’t have any sense of measure, of limits—and therefore everything becomes gigantic. Everything becomes unbounded. There’s a huge aisle of picnic plates and disposable forks fed by entire warehouses full of picnic plates, and, you know, another warehouse full of disposable forks. And it just goes on, and on, and on, without measure—until we have a standing room-only world, where basically everything is consumed by this great locust swarm of humanity.

Then there will just be a field of bones, a desert full of bones. But some of those bones will have had very long numbers of zeroes in their bank accounts before the lights went out forever. And that’s the end that is really hypothesized by this mad, technological consumerist liberal society. It really is eventually going to lead to a world that’s devoid of all life.

LL: Yeah, I think that might be the end result of that sort of thinking, and I think we see a lot of that manifested already just in the way modern cities function. I mean, they are far from self-sustaining—the biggest cities have never in history been self-sustaining—but you look at modern cities, and you realize that if the supply chain shut down for one or two days, we would be seeing chaos in the streets; we would be seeing riots; we would be seeing violence and the breakdown of the social order. Meanwhile, the countryside probably wouldn’t even notice, because they are still producing, and they are still somewhat connected to their immediate natural environment. So we’re kind of putting ourselves in this situation where we’ve created something, but at the same time forgotten where it was originally rooted, and as such, the further we move away from it, the less and less stable it becomes.

GJ: Yes. Again, I had an experience that was epiphanic. The light came down from above, and I realized something. This was about 2002 or 2003; I think it was 2003. A friend and I drove from the Bay Area through the Central Valley of California, down to Los Angeles—and there was a point where we came through this little mountain range that separates the Central Valley of California from Southern California, and we were entering the greater Los Angeles area, and there was this vista before us—I saw power lines, giant power lines, converging towards Los Angeles; roads and highways, filled with cars and trucks, moving towards Los Angeles; giant water pipes all converging on this megalopolis. And I realized, my God, it’s like some giant octopus that’s just battened on to the state of California, with its tentacles reaching out in all directions, pulling resources into its beak at the center. And I thought, this is a profoundly unnatural and unsustainable form of life. It’s very, very fragile, and it’s dependent upon constant technological innovation—and yet the entire premise of society today is anti-elitist, egalitarian, and dysgenic.

We have a world that is increasingly requiring technological Hail Marys to save us. And yet we are doing everything that we can to undermine that through egalitarian education schemes—where you can’t teach math and science anymore, because the brown people can’t assimilate that, so everybody’s got to fill in little quizzes about black and brown pop singers instead.

SS: Re-engineering math, for, what was it, “common core,” basically – “We can’t get some people to do math properly, so what we’ll do is we’ll have to make everybody learn a new kind of math, in the hopes they all end up in the same place,” and would you look at that? The result was still the same.

GJ: Yeah, we’re simply undermining our capacity to sustain the civilization. And it’s therefore not sustainable. It will crash. It will crash, and it will take a lot of good things with it, unfortunately. And, again, this is why I feel a great sense of urgency to stop this—we have to fight this. And we’re not just fighting for our own nations and our own people, we really are fighting for the whole planet.

When I get up in the morning, I say, “Okay,” as I sit down in front of the computer, “what can I do today to save the world?” And when you think of yourself doing that, yeah, it sounds sort of grandiose, I suppose. But I sincerely believe that the world is threatened; almost all the trends are going in the wrong direction; there are some signs of hope on the Right, in dissident circles and so forth. But still, the great political trends are all moving in the wrong direction, and we have to stop this. And if we don’t stop this, the world is going to be ruined. And we’re saving the planet.

So whenever someone says something snippy or snarky to you on the Internet, and you get angry and think, “Screw this, I just want to quit”—remember that we’re saving the world. Whenever you are flying off to go to some movement event, and you’re in some horrible long line at an airport, and it’s hot, and it’s humid, and it’s chaotic, and you just want to go back home and crawl into bed, tell yourself, “No, we’re saving the world. We’ve got to do this. We’re saving the world.” It makes it a lot easier. And the greater the sense of mission people have, the more it will draw out of them, in terms of creativity, energy, work, and self-sacrifice.

This is why the Left always beats the Right when the Right is defined simply in bourgeois terms, because the bourgeoisie are basically always just about comfort and security and long, comfortable lives. And the Left, simply by holding that in contempt, has been able to mobilize throughout its history much greater commitment and moral strength; even though it’s directed at evil ends, they’re still more morally righteous—they have conviction, they have intensity.

You know, I was recently celebrating the birthday of W. B. Yeats, and his great poem is “The Second Coming.” I wrote an essay years ago called “Yeats’ Pagan Second Coming ^[5],” and there’s a great line in “The Second Coming” where he says “the best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.” That disparity alone is enough to destroy any civilization, because the worst will always be testing the boundaries; they will always be trying to create disorder; they will always be trying to get their way—and if the best people lack the conviction to oppose them, the worst will run amok. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” as Yeats said, “the blood-dimmed tide” is going to be loosed on the world, and everything innocent is going to be drowned.

And so we have to recognize that if there is a disparity of intensity and moral certitude between the people who stand for order and the people who stand for chaos, the chaos will win out. And so the Right—the guardians of order, and everything good in this world, and the world itself—has to throw aside this bourgeois ethics of being comfortable and secure and having a long life—in the middle of a wasteland, right? And we have to gin up a new sense of passion, intensity, and willingness to sacrifice ourselves for some greater good, and we have to oppose that to the Left and beat the Left. And that’s really the moral core of the New Right project.

LL: Yeah, I think the focus on comfort is probably a product of our living standard. I’ve always said that people are not going to change their voting patterns, even their fundamental values, or in many cases, non-values—until they can’t go about their daily lives any more the way they do, until they can’t come home from work and watch TV anymore, because, I don’t know, their living room is no longer there—to dramatize it a little bit.

But yeah, what you say about this intensity of values, also seeing that a lot in the contrast between Islam and the West, where the contemporary West is a lot of the time just completely devoid of any sort of conviction, because basically every time anyone invokes European values, it’s just in order to further push European self-destruction. And then it’s just the usual smears of politics, whereas Islam is convinced that it will dominate the world. So that shows you who’s on the initiative and who isn’t.

GJ: I agree.

LL: And, I think I had this idea of Right-wing environmentalism where I could come from, because another impression I’ve gotten is that the Left simply has no concept of beauty. They do not realize, they do not know beauty, and if they know it, they often enough despise it. We’ve seen that with fat acceptance, and all these fundamentally repulsive things that they’re pushing, whereas a Right-wing environmentalism, I think, should be greatly focused on beauty. I mean, if we look back on history, we’ve had this before. We’ve had Ansel Adams, a very important photographer of the ‘20s to ‘40s, whom I very much admire—he was an environmentalist, and of course, not in the way of, “We need to ship food to Africa,” or build solar panels, in I-don’t-know-nowhere in India, but he was the sort of environmentalist who looked at his land and said, “This is beautiful, we must preserve it.” And I would say, Theodore Roosevelt as well—the creation of the National Parks in the United States, that wasn’t out of a drive of, “Carbon dioxide is killing this,” but more of a thing of, “This is our country, this is our home, and we must preserve it.” And do you agree that this is a sort of approach we could take?

GJ: I think that’s a very good point, and I do think that the Right is fundamentally attuned to the aesthetic—and thus to aesthetic hierarchies—and the Left is anti-hierarchy. The Left is basically a giant coalition of botched, deformed, ugly, misshapen, psychologically screwed-up people who want to overthrow all criteria by which they are forced to feel bad about themselves, and institute new criteria where they’re able to feel good about themselves. And so, instead of encouraging fat people to get healthy, we simply have to overthrow standards of health and beauty so fat people can feel good about themselves. It’s disgusting, it’s horrible, it’s basically the transvaluation of values that Nietzsche talked about throughout history.

Will to Power is a phenomenon, in all beings, even the botched and misshapen. Even people like that want to feel good about themselves, and so when they get up in the morning, and they look in the mirror, they have to tell lies to feel good about themselves. And that really is the driving force of the Left. The Left is driven by a lot of people who are simply at war against all standards of beauty, health, and quality, because those make them feel bad about themselves. And you simply cannot allow those kinds of motives to gain any power or influence, or they will overthrow all that’s good, holy, and beautiful.

Which means, for us, that every environmentalist who thinks of himself as a Leftist, but is responding to beauty—who loves beauty, who loves the beauty of nature and thinks cities are ugly—they’re secretly on our side; they don’t even know it yet—but we have to bring them around. Everybody who still believes that there are hierarchies of beauty and value is secretly on our side. They just don’t know it yet. And we have to bring them around, and we have to show them that the Left that they think is on their side, is actually overthrowing everything that they hold dear.

LL: I mean, you can’t have beauty without hierarchy.

GJ: Yeah, you can’t have beauty without ugliness. Ugliness is where beauty doesn’t exist, or hasn’t fully actualized itself. So, we cannot believe that something is beautiful or good without at the same time judging other things to be ugly or bad. And the Left is at war with that—which means that the Left is at war with all values, and with reality itself. It’s essentially a nihilistic movement that basically would destroy all of civilization just so a few botched, fat, blue-haired women who can’t stop overeating can feel good about themselves for the short span of their lives before the world goes to hell.

LL: Yeah, and it’s funny, though. When you have Leftists who admire the beauty of nature, and then wish to preserve it—but since at the same time, very often they don’t have any clue of how it works, other than a sort of romanticized idea. When you have people protesting not only fox hunting—when we were in London for the Forum, and on the way back, we saw a big protest against Theresa May overturning the fox hunting ban, and not just that—but also calling for a ban on all hunting, without realizing that, yeah, we live in the sort of environment where there is no self-regulation any more due to centuries, even millennia, of humans managing the land, and yet at the same time they still think that if you magically take humans out of it, you’re going to have a situation where everyone is basically singing “Kumbaya,” and the trees and things are going to be fine again. And so, maybe, in a way, they’re also just fundamentally anti-civilization—but as you just said, that’s the outcome of it; it kind of always ends there.

GJ: Yeah, yeah, it never ends well. Of course, the people who are opposed to fox hunting would throw you in jail or physically assault you if you said, “What about the human predators that we have imported into our country, who are grooming and raping English girls?” They are all for saving foxes, but they will not talk about stopping human hunters, human predators, from preying on their own people. It’s a fundamentally sick group of people, and we have to make them well.

Some of these people basically have healthy instincts; they’ve just been miseducated, and intimidated, and turned into fools who hold wildly contradictory views that have been engineered to eventually destroy them as a people. This is why I love these perennial memes of the sweaty liberal superhero who’s confronting two buttons and doesn’t know which one to pick, because they always confront them with the contradictions of their thinking. Eventually, some of those sweaty liberal superheroes are going to drop out and join our side when they’re confronted with enough of these memes. It’s already happening; it really is.

SS: It’s why you don’t see that many, when Leftists try and do these sort of intellectual-like [memes]. But when they do, the sweaty guy with two buttons meme [against] the Right, there are very few situations other than where they think there’s a contradiction—but where there isn’t, because they’ve assumed certain parts of the politics.

GJ: Exactly, exactly.

SS: There’s really not that many they can do.

GJ: No, you’re right. Liberal memes suck—to put it colloquially. They really suck. Because they cannot step aside from their beliefs far enough to actually really say something that’s funny. And this is a tremendous change in the whole dynamic of the Left and the Right. The mainstream Right, of course, is still in a crouched position, as the Left beats on it with batons; they’re hopelessly cowering and cucked and worthless. They’re spineless. They’re ball-less. They’re a joke.

But the Alt Right, the New Right, the “far Right”—the “chan Right,” the “meme Right”—they’re on the attack. And one of the things that’s so true about the cucked Right is that they have no sense of humor. And they have no sense of humor because they have an ingrained inferiority complex. You only laugh at the things to which you feel superior. And we have a New Right that feels overwhelming contempt for the weakness, degeneracy, and illogic of the Left, and that’s why we have such hilarious memes deconstructing and mocking these people, and they come out hundreds to the day. Somebody needs to have a giant meme library someday. If I had a lot of money, I’d create a Website and pay somebody just to catalog all these memes, because this is cataloging the history of the revolution that’s going on, that’s going on all over the world.

SS: Someone in a darkened room somewhere, just poring over, creating photo albums of Pepe, the rare Pepe . . . make it become real.

GJ: Exactly, there will be a library in the capital of every European nation, where scribes pore over the great Pepe manuscript. There’ll be an entire room full of volumes of Pepes, bound in vellum. It will be the great museum of the history of the revolution . . .

Whereas the Left today is not able to laugh—and that’s a change. They still snark, and sneer, and they think they’re funny. They think they’re laughing—but they’re cracking, they’re crumbling. Their moral certitude is crumbling, and you can see that by the fact that they’re not laughing as much anymore—and when they do laugh, it’s lame. It’s broken. We’re breaking them; we’re breaking their sense of moral superiority, and we can see it in the patheticness of their humor, and eventually they are going to be in the cowed, “Don’t beat me anymore” position that the Right is in, and that’s the position that they need to stay in for all eternity.

Orwell said, “Imagine a world where there’s a boot stomping on a human face forever”; that’s the world of the party in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The world that I want is one where the Left is down on its knees, holding its hands over its head, crouching like it’s being beaten by a nightstick for all eternity. That’s the subordinate position they need to be in, because there will always be a Left, because there will always be botched people who want to overthrow all standards to feel good about themselves. We’ll never be without these people, but they need to be boxed in, marginalized, and constantly under attack. And that’s a picture of utopia for me, and we’re going to get there, and I can already see the change.

Before political change happens, spiritual changes happen; moral changes happen, cultural changes happen. And one of the most crucial changes is that we have gained a sense of our own superiority, and our own righteousness, and the ability to look down on these people and laugh like the gods on Olympus laugh at mere mortals. Whereas the Left is losing it; they’re losing their minds; they’re losing their composure; they’re losing their sense of superiority; we’re cracking them; we’re breaking them; and they’re going to crumble. I don’t know when, but it’ll be within my lifetime. It could happen very, very quickly. At the beginning of 1989, all the smart people in the West believed Communism would be around for a long, long time—and at the end of the year, it had cracked and crumbled and was basically gone.

People don’t know, a lot of times, when a great structure is hollow and rotten and will be blown over by the first strong wind. I think that the multicultural, multiracial, liberal system is fundamentally hollowing out. People are withdrawing their consent from it; they go along with it publicly because they’re intimidated; they’re confused; they don’t have any alternatives. But it’s hollowing out like a great big tree, and there’ll be a storm; there’ll be a shock; there’ll be some kind of crisis, and it will crash to the ground, and we will realize that it is hollow and empty, and there will be a new order that will take its place. It’s going to happen, and I’m going to be around to enjoy it—and you guys will, too. You’ll be around to build a new world.

LL: Well, that’s certainly a perspective . . .

SS: More optimistic than I am, normally . . .

LL: We tend to be rather blackpilled about the future that awaits us.

GJ: Well, here are some white pills . . . Take two a day with food, but keep consuming these white pills . . .

LL: Looking at some of the people who are now contributing to this Right-wing movement, some of them actually came over from the far Left; some of them were socialists; some of them were even these typical teenage Marxists who now say that they realized the problems they identified are real, but it wasn’t the Left that had the solutions for them . . . Is there a chance that it’s more likely that in the future, the Right is going to attract more former Leftists . . .?

GJ: I think it will, because not everybody on the Left is a bad person. A lot of them are sincere people who have just been miseducated. They are sincere people who want to be good; they’re upwardly mobile people who want to have all the right opinions . . .

You know, they’re not all horrible people. I know Leftists who are decent, honorable people; they’ve just been misled. They’re plugged into the Matrix. And we have to unplug them; we have to give them that red pill. And we’re doing more and more of it—we’re having great success—so yes, some people from the Left are coming over, and this is good, because the Left has a history of winning, and the Right doesn’t. And so I think that that’s to our benefit. We need some of these people who know how to fight.

I have some friends who are supporters of Counter-Currents who were radical environmentalists when they were younger—radical Left-wing environmentalists—and now they’re radical Right-wing environmentalists. And they realize that if you want to save the snail darter, and the condor, and the tiger, the first species you have to save is the white species—the white race. If you save our species, we’ll save all the rest. If you don’t save us, all the rest are going to be food—they’re just going to be bones strewn around in that desert scenario which is the end of all life on Earth.

So yeah, these people come to us, and they have that moral superiority and that passionate intensity, but this time it’s the passionate intensity of the best people, rather than the worst. And if we have more of that passionate intensity on the side of what’s good and holy, we’re going to win—and the trends are all moving in the right direction, so—here, have another white pill.

LL: That comes in handy. So you’ve been on what you’ve called your “European Listening Tour”—is there a main lesson or a main thing that you have learned, if you were to sum it up in a single sentence?

GJ: The European scene, the European movement, is infinitely more mature than what we have in North America, and that’s why I’m here: to listen and learn. People in Europe have been doing this for a very long time. They’ve been doing it under restrictions of freedom of speech that we don’t suffer from, and yet they accomplish more than we do, even though we have the First Amendment on our side; and I’m just trying to learn the secrets, and I’m trying to learn why a country like Hungary or a country like Poland is so healthy compared to a country like America or Great Britain, and I’m learning a lot.

One of the reasons why I think these Eastern European countries like Poland or Hungary are so healthy, is that they don’t have a bourgeoisie, really. Practically the entire population of these countries descends from peasants and workers. The bourgeoisie in Eastern Europe were largely Germans and Jews, and by the end of the Second World War, they were all gone. And then they had Communism, and then Communism left—and you had a society like in Hungary, where the vast majority of the political elite are people who descend from peasants, and they’re just healthier—they have healthier attitudes and a deeper sense of identity. The same is true with Poland. Yeah, you’ve got some middle-class and professional types, but even those people, if you go a little bit further back in their biographies, you find that they’re more rooted, they’re literally more rooted, they were racinated, they come from peasant or worker stock, and that’s good—because the bourgeois mentality is inherently liberal and inherently globalizing; it’s anti-identity and anti-national. So that’s one thing I’m getting a sense of in this part of the world.

I’m in Hungary right now. I was in Poland last year, and really enjoyed that. I’ve been learning a lot. I’ve been learning about how to organize things, how to increase levels of operational security; how to get more out of people by asking more, by appealing to their idealism. I met people in Europe who are basically revolutionary ascetics. They live in a little room with stacks of books around them, and they work odd jobs, and then they take lots of time off from work, they don’t spend a lot of money, and if they do spend money, they spend it on books or travel for the movement, and basically they commit every spare hour that they have, every spare waking hour that they have to the cause. It’s a level of commitment that we seldom see in the United States or Canada, and I’m here, basically, to recharge in the healthier atmosphere and to learn as much as I can, and to bring what I can back, and try and help the movement out in North America, and I’m humbled, all the time—I’m humbled by the fact that these people are so far ahead of us, and I’m humbled by the fact that they’re willing to sit down and listen to me talk to them in a foreign language, where I could not sit down and listen to them in their own tongue. It’s a humbling experience, and it’s an inspiring experience.

LL: And it’s refreshing to hear such a perspective from outside of Europe that is not the usual, “Omigod I can’t even” when looking at such movements in Europe. Especially like Poland, which for us here on this show, has also been a continuous white pill – one of the few, basically just the whole Polish self-confidence, which I think has also a lot to do with the fact that they were subject to full, outright Marxism rather than just the cultural branch that has affected much of us in Europe. I mean, even in Germany we see this sort of thing, where the West has always gotten this liberal democracy full-on multiculturalism package; meanwhile, the East did not, they had this Marxist system that essentially— Well, I don’t need to tell anyone this stuff about what Communism did behind the Iron Curtain, but yeah, that was a difference, and once the Wall came down and once Germany was reunited, it was a really stark contrast for some people, and still today, people in East Germany are a lot more reluctant to accept mass immigration, to accept institutionalized Leftism, all this sort of stuff. And it’s funny how they’re being vilified for it as well, because they were rightfully praised as the heroes of democracies, for bringing down the oppressive government—but now, twenty-five years later, we are calling them basically the equivalent of what rednecks are being viewed as in popular culture in America, just because they see what is happening in Western Germany, and because they don’t want it.

GJ: Yeah, I spent some time in Saxony, and also I was in Halle, in 2006, and the atmosphere there was totally healthy compared to what I had experienced in, say, Bavaria. It was interesting. There was a different atmosphere; it was palpable. And I want to get back to that part of Germany, because I love Leipzig; I love Dresden; I love that whole area. It’s a remarkable part of Germany. My favorite part of Germany is still Bavaria, and I have this terrible habit. If I go to Germany, I want to go to Munich. I have to tell myself, “No, you need to branch out a bit and see more of Germany, because it’s a wonderful place.”

Last year, I went to Berlin for the first time, and much to my surprise, I really loved Berlin. And it seemed so much more German than I’d feared it would be. Berlin still seems like a German city, whereas Paris does not seem like a French city, and London does not feel like an English city anymore. Whereas Berlin still felt very, very German, and I really liked being there, I have to say. In fact, I started thinking, “I could really get comfortable living here.” And that sort of blew my mind, because I never thought that Berlin would ever feel that way. I just thought it would be a melancholy place full of a few patched-up ruins and a lot of ugly modern buildings. And there’s a lot of parts of Berlin that are like that—but still, it felt like a German city, and still a great German city, so even in its fallen state, it’s still healthier than Paris or London. And I think part of that was the fact that it was encapsulated by the East, and parts of Berlin that I visited were former East German areas, and the people there were really very healthy, I felt. There was this part of Berlin that’s an NPD stronghold, and I’m blanking out the name of it, but it was quite a beautiful area. So I still envy Germany in many ways, even though it’s got a terrible, suicidal government, and a terrible mentality that’s been forced upon the people of the West.

LL: Well, that is not an assessment of Berlin that I was expecting, to be honest, because to me, it’s always the poz load in Germany once you go to Berlin. You go there to realize you don’t want your part of Germany to become that way. But it’s also kind of relieving to hear that at least in comparison, it is still recognizably German. I definitely agree with you on Paris, I’ve been there, and like I’ve been saying, if you have any people you know who are on the fence about politics and about immigration and stuff, and they are traveling—send them to Paris, and they will come back redpilled.

GJ: A friend of mine took his mother-in-law to Paris recently, and that was the exact effect that had on her. She was so horrified; she did not feel like she was in a First World society! It was very depressing to her, because she’d never been there before, and realized that she’d never be able to visit Paris—not really.

LL: No, it’s gone. Yeah, it’s gone, basically.

SS: A friend of mine was mugged by three Eritreans thirty seconds after getting off the train, at the Gare de Nord, which is pretty bad even by French standards . . .

LL: It’s Gare du Northeast Africa . . .

SS: Right, yet there are parts of London that feel like London should look . . .

GJ: When I went to the London Forum and the Jonathan Bowden Dinner, I wound up at Gatwick, which is a horrible experience. I hope never to go back to that airport again—not that Heathrow is any great shakes, either, but Gatwick was horrifying, and it was a hot, humid day, and I had all this luggage to lug around, and it was just seething chaos and long queues and things like that. I finally got on the express train from Gatwick into the city, to Victoria, and I felt it was modern and fast and cool and pleasant, and then I had to go through Victoria Station, where I finally got into a cab, and the cab was taking me to my rendezvous point. One thing that I learned was that the London Forum people have such high OPSEC they didn’t even tell me where my hotel was. I didn’t need to know; they just told me to meet somebody, meet a guy wearing a trenchcoat with a flower in his lapel at a certain location, and he would take me to the hotel.

So once I was in a cab, and it was air-conditioned, and I knew I was almost to safety—the sheer majesty, the sheer splendor of Central London just bombarded me. It is a magnificent city, and as a friend of mine who lives there said, “Look, if you ever despair of the crowds on the sidewalk, just look up, and look at the buildings, and they’re still magnificent, and it’s like looking back into the past.” Another friend who was there said, “Isn’t it interesting? All the modern buildings look older and sadder than the buildings built in the nineteenth century.”

SS: That’s totally right, and it’s lovely. It’s difficult to put it into words, but you’ve said it there. It’s the first time I’ve ever been to St. Paul’s Cathedral in my entire life, and I don’t think it was technically open for viewing, but we went in there—and you look up, and you just think, well, there it is, that’s what we’re fighting for, to a great extent. And you’re right, all of these buildings, like the Shard is, are owned by Qataris, of course—they’re all owned by what are effectively occupying foreign forces, and that’s really indicative of the situation we’re in, where even our terrible buildings are owned by other people because we’ve sold them away.

GJ: Yeah, yeah.

LL: I think this “looking up” thing is something that London as a city just kind of gives off as a feeling; because I remember, when I was standing there with Millennial Woes talking after his speech, he also basically said the same thing—that you could see the crowds, but then you look up and see the buildings, and it’s like a completely different place.

GJ: Yeah, yeah.

LL: And at least they’re still that.

GJ: And you have to visit the British Museum. Unfortunately, as is my pattern, it was the first place I visited in London, and so every time I go back to London I spend more time there. I finally had to tear myself away to go to the National Gallery, and I said, “My God, I need three days just to go through the National Gallery!” I’ve been to the Tate Britain, which is a magnificent museum, but the National Gallery in London is one of the world’s great museums, and it is a profoundly inspiring collection of great European art. Really, really worth several days of just lingering and looking and soaking it all up. And again, just like when I left Berlin, I thought, “I could live here for a while”—I started thinking, “You know, I can do my job anywhere, I could take a laptop and hole up, get a little room in Central London and just spend all my time sponging up everything that’s great in this former capital of one of the world’s great empires” . . . and then a few days later, the London Bridge attack happened, after I was safely out of the country, and I thought, “It’s just madness”—it’s so sad, I don’t know if I’ll ever set foot back in London again, honestly.

It’s just so sad, and, some day, if Eurabia happens, Londonistan happens, all those beautiful things in those galleries, all those beautiful churches—they’re going to get the ISIS treatment. You know, when I was walking around the Assyrian gallery at the British Museum, which is one of my favorite galleries there—because I do think Assyrian art is truly magnificent, and it is actually the only art of a Semitic people that is truly accomplished and inspired, the only visual art that any Semitic race has ever created that’s truly refined—anyway, as I was walking around, I said to this friend I was with—I think it might have been Millennial Woes, actually—whenever somebody talks about, “Oh, the horrible imperialism of taking all of these things to Paris and to London . . . ” All we need to show them are the ISIS videos at the Mosul museum. Nope, we can’t leave any of these treasures for these savages to destroy; we need to keep them safe here, and of course we need to keep the savages out to keep them safe.

LL: Yeah, the Bridge thing was quite the shock.

GJ: Well, yeah, it was a shock, but it shouldn’t shock us—we should be used to this. Yeah, it still shocked me, because it was so close to the time that we were there. It just made me feel all the more vulnerable. I was on London Bridge not long before that. I was in Westminster not long before that. I had walked in those places where those attacks happened. It’s not something foreign to me, and it shouldn’t be foreign to anybody, yet everybody has this idea, “Oh, it’ll never happen to me.”

LL: Yeah, it’s the sort of thing that, as long as you just see it on TV, it can’t be that bad. And I know the sort of feeling, because last year when I was in Berlin, around December—literally not even a week after the truck attack happened at my favorite Christmas market, where I always go and eat something, and just be there and enjoy the atmosphere—and that really hit home, and I thought that would have been the point where a lot more people kept waking up—but well, here we are.

GJ: You can’t have nice things anymore with multiculturalism. You can’t have your Christmas markets; you can’t have your Mardi Gras celebrations; you can’t have your New Year’s Eve anymore; you can’t have those nice things.

LL: Can’t even leave your door unlocked.

GJ: No, no. Women can’t walk around in the streets.

LL: Which, honestly, is one of the reasons I wouldn’t want to live in those big cities.

GJ: Women can’t walk around alone. Shariah is being imposed simply by the existence of these fikki-fikki rapey kebab types wandering through our cities. We’re losing our freedoms; we’re losing our customs; we’re losing our public spaces; and of course, liberalism doesn’t even have a vocabulary anymore to defend that. “Well, you can go hide in your home and consume Internet porn and watch propaganda pumped in on your cable TV—what’s the matter, goy? Whadda you got to object to?”

Liberalism cannot preserve a common culture and common spaces. It just ends up trashing them by importing peoples who are not compatible, who are not a good fit, and who will destroy it, and that’s what ends up happening. So all of these beautiful public places in Paris are now being trashed, and they’re full of loafing migrants and beggars, and overseeing them all are policemen and soldiers with machine guns to keep the jihadis down. France is stretched to the breaking point to contain all these problems, and they’re still inviting more problems in.

Macron is not going to be able to solve any of these things, because he’s not making the right decisions and will not make the right decisions. A friend of mine described Macron not as far-Right or far-Left. Those categories don’t apply anymore. He’s far-globalist. And far-globalism is going to destroy every country that adopts it, and Macron is going to continue pushing the far-globalist agenda, and it will destroy France even more.

I was not terribly blackpilled by the defeat of Marine Le Pen, because I knew she was probably going to lose. The fact that she got more than a third of the votes is a tremendously encouraging thing; and in a different kind of parliamentary setup, like the one circa early 1933, would have been enough to get her into power. So I honestly think that things are going to keep getting worse, and if the Front National doesn’t get in and fix things, it will be some other party with some other leader.

I really do think it’s time to question whether or not the Front National is the standard-bearer for the people of France, or if some other party needs to come along, and I do think that it’s also a time to question whether or not it’s going to be a Le Pen who leads it, and whether it’s going to be a female Le Pen who leads it. I honestly think that France might not be ready for a female Right-wing leader; they might need a man. Of course, within the context of France today, which is a devirilized society, it is possible, as a friend of mine pointed out, for women to say things that men feel intimidated to say, and that’s one of the advantages of Marine Le Pen and Marion Le Pen; they can say things that men fear to say. But of course, I don’t think we’re ever going to get out of a situation like that by keeping in place the devirilization that only allows women to speak about certain problems openly. France isn’t going to be saved if they have to stay within that framework of rules, right?

And one of the great fallacies of every mainstreaming and cuckservative kind of movement—and I’m not saying that’s what the Front National is—but just as a general rule, is that they always try to win within the framework established by the Left, and the Left has established a framework in which they are doomed to lose. So you’ve got to take a step back, and you’ve got to screw up your courage and challenge the frame that they have put on everything. And once we start doing that—and that’s what the New Right does, that’s what the Alt Right does—then we can start moving things in our direction. But you cannot win by playing by rules created by the enemy and designed to destroy you. And you cannot win within institutions and parties that are probably controlled by one’s enemies, and which are designed to fail—which I believe is the truth about the Republican Party. I do not believe that the Republican Party and the conservative movement are designed to win. I think they are designed to fail, and to waste time, and to run out the clock, and to waste all the potential dissenting energy that that party has in America. And so I do believe that we will have to have some other mechanism eventually for saving America, and Making It Great Again.

LL: Well, they’re kind of undoing themselves, at least demographically. You look at statistics of who votes for bigger government and who doesn’t, and at the same time you get people who support amnesty, but yeah, that’s another story. And well, I’m glad that you are at least somewhat optimistic about France, because frankly, I’m falling into my blackpill patterns again, because France just seems . . . I mean, I think my trip to Paris contributes to that—but I have little hope that this whole situation in France can be resolved without at least some kind of major permanent damage . . .

GJ: Oh, I think that there will be some major permanent damage, but I think that it will be resolved in the right way. France has a long and glorious history of pusillanimous paralyzed republics being overthrown and replaced by charismatic political leaders—that, I think, is something that will happen. France doesn’t do democracy very well; you get party paralysis and pusillanimity and drift and a failure to deal with the problems: a failure to serve the common good. A very, very high percentage of French voters polled believe that democracy has failed and that they need a strongman. I think they’re right.

LL: That’s the way it’s been in the past, hasn’t it? De Gaulle was, at least, some kind of strongman.

GJ: Yeah, yeah—and Pétain. Pétain was a strongman; he brought an end to an ignominious, nearly seven-decade run of the Third Republic, and even though the country was divided—partially occupied, and defeated in war—and there were all kinds of privations and rationing and so forth, the French national spirit was very, very high under the old Marshall. I think that France is inherently a society that needs some kind of strong, charismatic, and kingly figure to serve the common good, and that parliamentary democracy just doesn’t work there.

LL: Yeah, I mean either way, they’re probably going to be the canary in the coal mine for much of Western Europe. Sweden as well, although their problem is similar, but in some ways also different.

GJ: Yeah, yeah. Honestly, some peoples are more capable of parliamentary democracy and liberalism than others, because they are more collectivist. I think the countries in Northern Europe, especially in Scandinavia, actually can have functioning liberal democracies if they’re not corrupted from the very top, because basically there’s not so much distinction in the parties and their agendas, and people are generally more public-minded and collectivist. That’s certainly true in Sweden, and the trouble is, though, that once the controlling heights of a society like that are taken over by enemies, then it’s very, very hard to dislodge them. Because people don’t want to go against authority.

Whereas I think a country like France, it’s more of a Latin, Catholic country; it’s more chaotic and factionalized in its normal day-to-day political activities, and therefore it needs something like a strongman to weld it together, because it’s more chaotic and individualist than more Northern European societies that are more collectivist by nature. So the great problem of politics is always unity—diversity has never been a strength in politics, and political philosophy throughout the ages has never regarded diversity as a source of strength. It’s always been a problem that needs to be solved, and it can be solved either by having such a strong, informal consensus in society and a strong collectivist mentality, and a strong inclination to get along and work together; or, if that’s lacking, it needs to be solved by forcing people to work together, clamping down, creating a strong state, a strong centralized state.

LL: Basically Singapore.

GJ: Yeah, Singapore is a great example. So one way or the other, unity has to be achieved, and I think some societies are more capable of being parliamentary democracies because they’re not so individualistic and they don’t disagree so fundamentally on most policies, whereas places that have a stronger kind of chaotic form of individualism need a stronger state. It really just depends on cultural differences, and it really does vary from one place to another in Europe, and certainly between Europe and other parts of the world, and this is why there’s never going to be a one-size-fits-all political solution—not for Europe, and certainly not for the globe.

LL: Good point. I mean we’re already seeing this failing on a smaller scale—the EU, for example, this great experiment of European unification is also coming apart at the seams, especially when they actually tried this one-size-fits-all approach—I mean with the currency—that’s a spectacular failure.

GJ: Yeah.

LL: And yes, it’s always paradoxical when these “champions for democracy” always try to claim they’re champions for diversity because, yeah, it just doesn’t work, and I think that’s something we’re going to learn the hard way—and I would say this, or the next decade, at the very least—something I fully expect to happen is the formation of Muslim Brotherhood sub-parties. I think that’s going to become a big thing.

GJ: I agree, I think everybody should read Houellebecq’s Submission novel, I think it’s brilliant.

SS: I have it on my shelf above me, yeah.

GJ: It needs to be read. You need to pull it off your shelf and read it. It’s the best French political novel since The Camp of the Saints—and maybe I don’t have any authority to speak on that matter, because I haven’t read any other French political novels, but it sounds like a good blurb. It’s a fantastic novel, and it’s almost up there in Camp of the Saints territory in terms of its deep analysis of rot, decay, and decadence, and it’s also very good as a cautionary tale about certain forms of Traditionalism on the Right, because one of the great villains is a former Right-wing Traditionalist who becomes a Muslim convert and a minister in the new Muslim government. I think it’s really worth looking at, and it was obvious that Houellebecq is intimately, extensively familiar with the Rightist scene in Europe, intellectually and politically. So yeah, it’s a really, really important work, and I wrote a pretty extensive review of it at Counter Currents ^[6], so look that up too, I highly recommend that review. I’m kind of proud of it, to be honest.

LL: The book itself is still on my reading list. Camp of the Saints is something that I did read, I think I read like two-thirds of it, but then stopped because honestly it was just too dark, too misanthropic for my taste. I mean, I see this sort of stuff on TV every day.

GJ: Yeah, yeah, it was written as prophecy, and now it reads like history. Now it reads like the daily news.

LL: Reads like an understatement in some parts—I mean, eight hundred thousand coming to Europe?

GJ: Yeah, if only.

LL: Yeah, two million?

GJ: Yeah, if only, exactly. But in terms of its analysis of the nihilism, the rot, at the core of European society that causes it to collapse in the face of even eight hundred thousand of these wretches from the Ganges, it’s very, very insightful. It’s brilliant. I’m going to write an essay on it. I’ve been meaning to write something up on it, and I’ve been musing over it and sitting on it. I reread it about a year and a half ago—while I was in Budapest, actually—and it really made a strong impression on me again, a much stronger impression than it made the first time. The first time I read it, it was just, “Oh, what a depressing dystopia,” and the second time I read it, I thought, “Oh, what a depressing dystopia, and what a penetrating analysis of the rot that’s causing this dystopia.” It’s a truly great work. I’d love to visit the guy and speak to him before he dies. He’s pretty up there; I think he’s in his 90s now.

LL: Oh, he’s still alive? I didn’t know that.

GJ: I believe so. Last I checked. I’ve been trying to get ahold of him, and I let it drop because I couldn’t get any connections, any answers, and so I need to try that again, because I want to give him the third H. P. Lovecraft Prize for Literature, which is one of the things I created through Counter-Currents a few years ago. Someday I’m going to give it to Houellebecq, because certainly he deserves it, too.

LL: Yeah, I think intellectually the French are definitely on the forefront of the New Right; I mean, they basically created it, and that’s a lot of stuff that still needs to be translated.

GJ: I agree, and there’s a lot of great stuff that’s going on in Germany today, too, so you guys are doing quite well.

LL: Yeah, just yesterday we had a really big protest of the Identitarian movement. It made the news internationally, even. I wish I could have gone, but there were reasons why I couldn’t go. Hopefully I will be there next year. Did you follow this, or do you follow the identitarians in general?

GJ: I don’t follow day-to-day identitarian events, but I do follow in more general terms what they’re up to. The identitarians have been sagging and flagging in France a bit, but it’s a brilliant idea—it’s so simple. What could be more simple than “France should be for the French; Germany should be for the Germans; these other people have to go.” It’s a simple statement, and you know that you’re getting close to a rhetorically unassailable position when the first question that people ask you is not, “Why do you believe these horrible things?” Instead, they ask, “Why not?” Yeah, why not? Why not, France for the France?” Why not? Why shouldn’t a people have a homeland of its own? Why shouldn’t a family have a home of its own? If you can get your ideology down to very, very simple views that are, once stated, responded to by the question, “Why not?” then you’re on the brink of winning.

So I like how light the identitarian position is, ideologically—it’s very, very simple, but very, very compelling. And I think that it’s really in some ways the way forward. There was a tweet that I put out there a while back when the Mayor of Cologne said, “We need to have safe spaces for women for Mardi Gras,” and I tweeted back, “Why can’t all of Germany be a safe space for women?” Well, when you ask that question, the natural answer is, “Why not have all of Germany be a safe space for women? Why not?” So anyway, I think the identitarians are in a very strong position rhetorically, ideologically, and I think that they are doing great things to mobilize people, and mobilize young people to get young, idealistic people working away. So yeah, I’m a big supporter of the idea of it.

I don’t follow all the details, because there’s just too much going on. And that’s another great thing about the European scene. Just in a small country like Hungary—and Hungary’s population has now dipped below ten million, and of those ten million maybe nine hundred thousand of them live abroad—so this isn’t a huge country at all—and yet the Rightist scene in Hungary is so huge that there are so many journals, publishers, Webzines, and real-world organizations that the people in Hungary can’t keep up with it all. There’s so much going on, which means that the whole scene is kind of insular, because there’s so much to read in their native tongue, and their native tongue is so different from any other language in Europe that it’s kind of hard to break into the scene and realize how huge and rich it is until you get on the ground. And you realize that even the people who are familiar with it are constantly discovering new things. That’s an amazing situation to be in. Now, in the United States I’m discovering new things every day, too, so it’s a great problem to have. There’s just too much stuff to keep up with, but that’s another white pill for you. That’s another reason to think that things are going well.

LL: True, well, yeah, I’ve been getting that feeling as well, especially with podcasts. I don’t even have the time anymore to listen to every podcast I’m interested in. We’ve definitely been picking up on content there.

GJ: Yeah, I am definitely not a podcast person. But my friend Charlie Krafft is a big pod-person because he spends his day painting porcelain, and he has stuff on in the background that he listens to, whereas I spend my time writing and editing, and I just can’t be listening to people talk and do that because it’s distracting. But even the pod-people I know, the people who consume a lot of this content, literally can’t consume it all; there’s not enough hours in the day for them to listen to all the really good stuff that’s out there. And again, that’s a great problem to have. YouTube is a whole world unto itself now; it’s truly remarkable.

Well, we’ve been talking for getting on to two hours. I really have enjoyed this. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to you and to speak to your audience, and I hope that if you’re new to this podcast, or you’re new to Greg Johnson and Counter-Currents.com, that you’ll visit my Website. I’m very, very proud of it. I think it’s really the best English-language New Right metapolitical Website out there, and we generally have new content five days a week, often two or three things a day, five days a week. So check in on Monday, or check in whatever day this podcast appears.

LL: Yeah, thank you for coming on, and yeah, hopefully we will hear from each other.

GJ: Oh yeah, and well, let’s hope this is just, as I like to say, the first conversation of many.