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Editor’s Note:
This is the transcript by V.S. of Greg Johnson’s interview with Vox Day on his new book Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America co-authored with John Red Eagle. To listen to the audio in a player, click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.” To subscribe to our podcasts, click here.
Greg Johnson: I’m Greg Johnson. Welcome to Counter-Currents Radio. My guest today is Vox Day. Vox, welcome back!
Vox Day: Thanks! It’s a bit of a surprise to be back already, but then again it was a bit of a surprise to get a second book out so quick.
GJ: Well, that’s exactly what I was going to say. It was back in September that I reviewed your last book, SJWs Always Lie, and we recorded an interview after that, and it is amazing that we’re doing it again. I feel kind of ashamed at how much more quickly you bring out these really excellent books.
So, the new volume is called Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America. It’s co-authored with John Red Eagle. Before we go ahead with the interview I’m just going to give everyone out there listening some marching orders. I want you to pause this broadcast for a second, go to Amazon.com, go to the Kindle store, and buy a copy of Cuckservative, because I know you’ll like it and I want you to get started right away. So, we’ll wait.
We’re back. So, Vox, let’s talk about this new book, Cuckservative. I was really honored to find out that the first interview we did, the transcript of that, appears as an appendix to the book.
I understand that you have a co-author and, since in effect you’re going to be speaking for him too, can you tell us a little bit about your co-author, John Red Eagle. Who is he?
VD: He is someone who is a . . . I guess you could say he’s a fan of mine. We got to know each other a bit through the blog, and the fact that we both happened to be of American Indian descent was something that we happened to have in common. It was something that we just chatted a bit about. We’re from different tribes, different parts of the USA, but he is very libertarian and he’s done some other writing as well. So, we started talking about it and this was right when the whole “cuckservative” thing started. It was around the time not very long after SJWs had come out.
We were talking and I said, “We really should do a book on this” and he said, “I was thinking the same thing.” I’m in the middle of writing the second volume in my Arts of Dark and Light series, which are these 850 page epic fantasy novels, and my readers have been waiting for my second book for a while, so I was thinking, “Oh man, I can’t take the time off. I can’t take six months off and do another book.” And so Red Eagle said, “Look, why don’t we do it together. I’m a faster writer than you are. You do the outline, I’ll do the first draft, and then you can fix it up and so forth.” But what we actually ended up doing after we did the outline was that there were certain parts that were much more naturally in his wheelhouse, stuff that was more related to history and politics, and then there was stuff that I was more interested in, such as the economics and military stuff. So, it was a division of labor that ended up working incredibly well and I still cannot believe we wrote the entire book from start to finish in two months. I’m very, very pleased with how well it turned out in terms of the quality.
GJ: I was wondering how you guys collaborated, because as I was reading it I’m very attentive to matters of style, and I did not intuit that there was one chapter that was written by you and another that was written by him. There seemed to be a kind of uniformity of style throughout, so I was curious as to how you guys worked on it.
VD: I mean, we’ve definitely got different styles. For example, anyone who’s read my stuff knows perfectly well that the economics chapter was largely mine.
GJ: Right.
VD: The funny thing is that you could really tell when you saw the drafts, because Red Eagle loves tables. He had these huge tables and I was just looking at these and going, “Yeah, this is not going to work on an ebook.” So, I converted them. Some of them I converted into text, some of them I converted into the charts that are in the book.
But where you can usually tell the difference stylistically is that he is more of a story-teller than I am whereas I am more of an analyst and so when there’s these convoluted analogies about a married couple or whatever you can be sure that that’s him.
GJ: OK. I thought those analogies were very effective, by the way.
VD: Yeah, he’s a very good writer. In some ways, I would say that he’s probably a better writer than I am.
GJ: Well, I think there’s a certain amount of your patented snark, your cutting humor in there that I saw throughout, so I thought, “You know, this all sounds like Vox Day to me.”
VD: Well, that’s the thing. Red Eagle is actually snarkier than I am. I was actually toning him down throughout the whole thing. If we had actually come out with the first draft and put that out it would have been even more offensive.
GJ: OK. I wasn’t offended. Sometimes you just have to take off the gloves with people who are this ridiculous. It’s a very entertaining read.
VD: Well, there’s taking off the gloves and then there’s like sticking the knife in the jugular vein.
GJ: Right. Exactly. So, let’s just go through chapter by chapter, because there are good points in every chapter and we can kind of hit the highlights.
The first is called “The Myth of the Melting Pot.”
VD: Well, the melting pot mythology is something that every American is familiar with. It’s something that we hear all the time. It’s one of the most rhetorical phrases along with “nation of immigrants” and all that sort of thing and I was really startled when maybe two or three years ago I ended up looking it up. I have no idea why.
I was just kind of curious. How did this whole melting pot thing really get going? Because, if you think about it, whenever you hear “melting pot” you always hear it in the context of Ellis Island, but Ellis Island was more than 200 years after the country was originally colonized. And so, it just didn’t make sense to me. A lot of times when I go digging into things it’s because there’s this sense of something being wrong, something not adding up.
So, I looked into it and it turned out that the whole concept of the melting pot is totally foreign to America. It has nothing to do with America except that it’s a British Zionist Jew’s Romantic idea of what America was. It was Israel Zangwill. He wrote a play called The Melting Pot back in 1907. So, he wrote this play and it ended up being very popular. It was on Broadway and everything and it was this whole idea of how America was the melting pot, the crucible that took all the races of Europe and turn them into a new race called the American.
There are a couple of points we thought were interesting there. First of all, the melting pot was something that was only ever conceived as something that was transforming various European nations into the American race. There was no question of anything to do with the Asian races, the African races, etc.
Secondly, it was not an American tradition. Again, this was just a literary concept that somebody who didn’t know very much about America had come up with. Now, it was popular. Theodore Roosevelt, in particular, thought it was a great image and so forth. And it is. It’s effective theater, but that’s all it is: theater. It’s a fictional concept. It doesn’t actually explain anything. It doesn’t explain what happened then; it doesn’t explain what’s happened since; it doesn’t explain what’s happening now. So, for those Americans who talk about it like it’s a real thing they might as well be talking about Zeus.
GJ: Right. Well, it’s a description of assimilation, I guess. One of the things that strikes me as ironic when people talk about the melting pot today is we’re not even trying to assimilate foreigners anymore, right? We’re not demanding that they change their language and customs and live up to American standards. We’re catering to them. They’re assimilating us.
VD: Even though it’s a fiction, yeah, we don’t even hold to the fiction.
GJ: Right.
VD: Except the pro-immigrationists use it as a rhetorical tool to influence the uninformed and the thoughtless.
GJ: Right. It really did refer simply to Europeans who are not all that different in their underlying stock and had a common civilizational tradition even if they spoke different languages, and so it was certainly possible for that to happen and it was happening throughout American history. There were small groups of Dutch and Swedes in the colonial era who sort of mixed in with the Anglo stock and then the Germans and later Irish and Italians and so forth. But yeah, you can’t mix radically heterogeneous types together, and even if you could there comes a point when people say, “Well, wait a second. There are certain elements of our identity that we don’t want to lose.” Yeah, just because it would make it easier for us to function in society doesn’t mean that we want to lose our identity.
I remember in the 19th century and 20th century that was the ideology that was used to justify taking American Indian children away from their families and raising them in schools where they would be taught English to basically deracinate them.
VD: Exactly, and to a certain extent both Red Eagle and I were obviously effected by that. Neither one of us speaks more than a few words of our tribal tongues, but it doesn’t change the fact that . . . I can remember going off to college and my mother warning me about drinking. She was like, “Remember, we’re kinda susceptible to that.” And at the time I didn’t really know what she was talking about. I thought she was trying to come up with some excuse to keep me from partying. But yeah, that’s a real legitimate issue for American Indians.
GJ: Right.
VD: So, we can pretend that these things don’t matter all we like, but science is finding out more and more about human genetics and the various complicated interrelations of nature and nurture.
It’s kind of funny, because we get into discussion on the blog all the time between – there aren’t really any blank slatists on the blog – but there are people who are a little more heavily on the side of nurture than nature and one thing that I say to both sides is that if you’re saying it’s just culture, you’re not saying anything at all, because culture is a blend of nature and nurture that cannot be extricated. You will never be able to look at a culture and say, “Well, these parts are on the basis solely of the influence in which the kids are raised and these parts are because of the genetics and the capabilities of those particular people.” The genetics influence the nurturing, which then in turn influence the genetics.
GJ: Right.
VD: I think people can go too far on the other side on the side of nature as well. In addition to the whole differences between averages and outliers, you’ve also got the fact that you can influence the genetics of a population group by how you treat them and how you incentivize them.
GJ: Oh yes, eugenics or dysgenics. Culture influences genes and genes influence culture. There are certain reasons though why in one part of Germany people are Catholic and right next door across the river they’re Protestant. The explanation for that is going to be historical. There’s probably not a gene that explains that.
VD: It’s religious cleansing.
GJ: Yeah.
VD: In Switzerland, each different canton is either Catholic or Protestant and they forcibly swapped populations. If you were Catholic in a Protestant canton at a certain time, you were informed that you would move.
GJ: Right.
VD: And, of course, being Swiss, I’m sure they did.
GJ: Yeah, in a very orderly fashion. There’s definitely a dimension to culture that’s genetically determined, although you can’t explain all culture in terms of genes, and genes are also influenced by culture by influencing who people breed, who breeds, how often, right?
One of the things that strikes me about people who want to emphasize culture is they’re desperate to do that because, of course, culture, they think, is malleable. It’s certainly more malleable than genes, but when you actually look at culture, it’s very difficult to change a person’s culture. It’s your second nature. There’s your first nature, which is your genetic nature, and then your culture is your second nature, and the idea that, “Well, it’s cultural. We can simply change everything and everything can be moved in the direction of equality or whatever” doesn’t really take into account how difficult that really is and how destructive you have to be to have, like Mao did, the cultural revolution.
VD: Right.
GJ: It was one of the great horrors of human history when he tried to break with the culture of the past.
VD: And it didn’t work very well either.
GJ: No.
VD: To me, what’s kind of amazing if you look at Russia today, they had 70 years of militant atheism. They literally had the League of the Militant Godless running things over there. They were trying to do their best to stamp out the Christian church, the Orthodox Church, and yet it’s 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and you’ve got Putin practically talking as if he’s a medieval Catholic monarch, except Orthodox style.
GJ: Right.
VD: That shows how deep into the cultural heart the various traditions and identifications are buried.
GJ: Right. It is interesting, though, looking at Eastern Europe. Poland is so intensely Catholic. You go to the Czech Republic and they’re almost entirely atheists or the Baltic states and religion has almost disappeared there.
The second chapter is “The Magic Dirt” and that really speaks to what we’re already talking about. It’s the idea that you can take people from any old place and as long as they come to new lands, new circumstances, they’re going to be changed. America is magic dirt, and if we bring everybody to America, we don’t even have to try to assimilate them anymore apparently. It’s just going to magically happen. They’re going to become Americans.
I loved your example of going north and south of the Rio Grande. The dirt is pretty much the same, but the people are very different.
VD: The interesting thing is that the name of the town is even the same. It’s Nogales, Mexico versus Nogales, Arizona and yet the difference in practically every societal measure of civilization, whether you’re talking about per capita income, whether you’re talking about literacy rates, whether you’re talking about probably number of flushing toilets, there’s a massive, massive difference between American culture on the north side of the border and the Mexican culture on the south side.
There is a difference in the genetics, because Arizona was maybe 15-20% Mexican whereas on the Mexican side it was probably nearly 100%, and the cultures are just fundamentally different.
When you drive from the north of Italy to the south of Italy, Northern Italy is fairly dirty, but it’s all functional. They talk about it like, “In the north, we work.” You’re driving down in the southern part of Italy, not even particularly far south, we’re talking like around Rome, and it’s amazing just how bad the roads are. They can’t bother to fix them. And we’re not talking about a northern climate with the water leaking in and then freezing. They just don’t do fundamental maintenance and that’s part of the culture.
One of the things I note in the book is that this is not a judgmental statement. I like Southern Italian culture. I’ve had some of the best times of my life down in the south of Italy hanging out with Italians who are just having a good time. That’s what they like to do. Just get together in a big group and drink some good wine and talk and enjoy life. And that’s a good thing. The problem is it doesn’t really . . . You’re not going to get to the moon that way.
GJ: So, that brings us to the third chapter really, which is a really, I thought, well written, concise discussion of DNA and breaking the blank slate model. You and your co-author take a strong stance on this. It’s not all nurture. We’re not blank slates. We come into the world with innate genetic potential, and this can’t be ignored anymore by politics. The idea that race is a social construct doesn’t fly.
VD: Absolutely. There’s way too much evidence and the thing that’s really shocking is how much of the evidence back from the sort of 19th-century racialist science, we tend to think of it as being pseudo-science, but some of it was actually quite good, and some of it is definitely being confirmed by some of the more precise and accurate science that’s being performed today. So, I think it’s absolutely and utterly foolish.
I don’t even see what the blank-slatists are going to do, because the science there is vastly more settled than any of the climate science or any of the social science stuff that they are constantly citing. This is hard science, hard biology. It’s not just butter-collecting and surveys and asking people how they feel. This is real objective stuff that you can, if you’ve got the proper equipment, go out and replicate yourself.
GJ: It is kind of shocking how academia can just sort of cordon off this very well documented and well proved biological science about human genetic differences and just proceed as if it doesn’t exist and doesn’t matter.
VD: And it matters greatly. The thing that I think is really going to scare a lot of people . . . A number of people have told me it really kind of changed their thinking on immigration was the section that deals with the way that immigration has caused the average IQ in numerous Western societies to drop. I think the Danes may have been the first ones to discover it. They intelligence test all of their soldiers in order to assign them to proper categories, and what they found was that the IQ of the average recruit had dropped 1.5 IQ points, and this has happened in a fairly rapid period of time. In fact, in Britain, the average IQ of 14-year-olds dropped 2 whole points in something like 22 years.
So, it’s not just your perception. You know, when you watch TV it’s not just your perception that things are a little more stupid than they used to be. They’re literally having to aim at a lower common denominator than before because people literally are not as intelligent as they were in 1980 or 1960.
It may actually be worse, but we calculated that based on the changing racial demographics that the average IQ of Americans has dropped from very close to 100 in 1960 to about 96 today.
GJ: Yeah, that’s tremendous. There’s an article at the Counter-Currents website by Marian Van Court, who is a eugenics writer, and I can’t really grab the data off the top of my head right now, but I think her argument was that even a 3% drop in average IQ in society can lead to enormous increases in all kinds of measures of social pathology: crime, illegitimacy, accidents even. There’s a kind of multiplier effect that a small decrease in average IQ leads to large increases in certain measurable social bads that we would like to avoid.
This is very well established. The numbers add up. You can crunch through this, and you can see how it works.
One of the things that I really found sobering about Richard Lynn’s book called IQ and Global Inequality – I edited that book in the proofing stages, so I went through it very carefully – was that he talks about how we know there are other factors that determine human well-being, but when you actually look at statistics it’s as if IQ is the only one that really matters. You can proceed as if it’s the only thing because it has such powerful predictive ability to basically track all kinds of indexes of social well-being or social decay. It’s very sobering when you start seeing that, yeah, our societies are becoming dumber, and we’re going to lose things.
VD: There’s a new book by a guy named Garrett Jones. I haven’t read it yet, but I want to. It’s called Hive Mind and he’s an economist and he basically says that your nation’s IQ matters much more than your own. It’s basically a variant of what you’re saying. That establishes what your society is going to be. The people that make the difference in society are not the smartest people. They’re not the rocket scientists.
I was really surprised. Somebody did a study and they actually went and measured the IQs of what we tend to consider the intellectual class, and their IQs were shockingly low. I mean, we’re talking 125 or so. What they found was that the really smart people basically are not terribly influential in society, because they can’t even talk to people.
What they call the communication cap is considered to be about 30 IQ points and I’ve found that to be relatively true. In fact, it’s kind of a joke on the blog about how I will write something and then the sort of mid-range people get it, and then they will explain it to the people who are kind of more on the average level, because the average folks frequently have no freaking idea what I’m even talking about, and I don’t understand why they’re not following, so I can’t explain it to them. Because it’s a community that’s been around for 13 years this is not a problem. We all have a way of dealing with it, but these communication gaps are real.
Let’s say you take the people who are starting the companies and leading the country and so forth. If you’re dealing with people who instead of being over a standard deviation above the average, if you’re suddenly dealing with people who are more around the 115 range you’re suddenly dealing with a different quality of thought. Also, I think that it’s strongly correlated . . . I’m not entirely sure, but if I recall correctly, time preferences are something that can also be correlated with intelligence, and to me that’s almost more important, because it doesn’t matter how smart you are if you can’t see beyond tomorrow. If you don’t have the self-discipline to not eat all the food you’ve got, you’re going to get yourself in trouble. If you’re really smart maybe you can figure out a way to keep getting yourself out of problems, but the most successful societies are the ones that just keep plugging away, the ones who plan for tomorrow, the ones who put off for tomorrow, who prepare, who plant, and so for me it’s very important to look at the intelligence factor and I do understand that that is the most useful predictor.
But I think it would be very interesting if it was possible to study whether time preferences or intelligence were really the most important factor.
GJ: Yeah, that is an interesting question. It clearly is the case that great civilizations are characterized by long time horizons, and one of the things that I think is a very valuable critique of democracy is that it simply shortens time horizons. When you had dynasties that were thinking in terms of grand strategies stretching over centuries, and they believed that their own blood would be around to benefit from their decisions, I think people were more prudent than politicians in democratic societies.
I remember I lived in Atlanta for a while, and every ten years or so Atlanta would have a terrible snowstorm, and everything would shut down, civilization would grind to a halt, businesses would grind to a halt, it would cost enormous amounts of money to the economy, and they never had a plan to deal with it, they never had the equipment to deal with it, etc. Somebody pointed out to me that their mayors are elected in four year cycles and they might get elected once or something, but chances are they’re not going to have to deal with it and so they’re not planning for it. This is why I think Frank Herbert was such a genius when he wrote Dune thinking, “What kind of civilization would actually go out and colonize the stars, which requires great lengths of time?” They would have to have a far greater time horizon, and it would be more of a feudal aristocratic society rather than a democratic one. It makes sense.
And we got to the moon, but we haven’t been there recently, and I think that’s because we’re just more democratic, and more of our people are easily pandered to, low time preference people, and politicians are going to do really well. They don’t have to do anything glorious or think about the future. They just have to hand out free cell phones.
VD: In fairness, one thing that I think we should keep in mind is that we did discover that there are a bunch of rocks on the moon, too. So, that might have played a role.
But yeah, it is very discouraging when you look at it that way. Like I said, so many people who have read the book have said that to them the really shocking part was how it’s fine and all in theory to talk about how wonderful it is that you can get different types of ethnic food and so forth. Of course, the number of people who can actually understand economics at all is trivial and so it’s very easy to just say, “Oh yes, it’s good for the economy” and who’s going to know any better? But it’s very easy for people to understand that, guess what, we’re more stupid than we used to be, because frankly we kind of see a lot of signs of it all over the place.
GJ: Yeah, and one of the things that’s so flattering about the progressive mentality is that it teaches us that we are entitled to believe that we are superior to Plato and Aristotle and Darwin simply because we were born later in time.
VD: Right.
GJ: We’re more with it. We’re plugged in. We have Facebook. Did Plato have Facebook? We’ve got all this computing power at our fingertips and so forth, and the fact of the matter is though that on average we are getting dumber. We can’t continue doing that forever and expect to keep this wonderful technology improving. We would like to be going to the stars, but we’re actually more likely going back to the Stone Age in terms of our genetic decay.
VD: Oh, without question. I think it’s very frustrating to see we’re doing this so unnecessarily. There’s no good reason for it. There’s no reason that we needed to go this way and yet we have.
GJ: Why has the Left done this to us, and why do these damn conservatives just enable them and follow them along like their shadow?
VD: Well, the Left is much easier to understand, because to be a Leftist almost by definition you have to not understand the link between actions and consequences. Practically every Leftist that I talk to does not, on a fundamental level, grasp the connection between actions and consequences. You know that famous New Yorker cartoon where it says, “And then a miracle happens”?
GJ: Right. Yeah.
VD: Every single plan that you talk about with the Left-wing, they never think through anything.
We were having a bit of a debate with some folks that favor gun control and disarmament, and I said, “Look, it’s not going to happen. Do you not understand that there’s a statistically significant minority who possesses weapons who is willing to kill you or die themselves rather than give up their weapons? Are you genuinely prepared to fight a civil war?” They’re not prepared for that. They’re not even thinking of that!
GJ: Right.
VD: They just think that you magically pass a law, and then everyone will turn their weapons in, and then the problem goes away.
In fairness, they have seen examples like that work. For example, in Australia or to a certain extent in Britain. And yet, those countries have seen increases in the rate of gun violence and so forth while the US’s gun violence has dropped in half even though the population has grown.
There is no other way to understand it than to accept the fact that they do not understand the consequences. They do not understand the link between their actions and the consequences of them.
GJ: Right. One of my favorite lines in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is “You’ll do something, Mr. Reardon!” You’ll figure out how to make our regulations work. The liberal proposes and the businessman or the conservative or the cuckservative disposes and tries to make it all work, tries to enable them. They can’t be bothered with the details, and they can’t even be bothered to know whether it’s possible or not.
VD: Right. Well, they’re the idea folks. I mean, if you think about it, that’s actually how they think of themselves. They think, “I’m the idea person. I have the idea, and I don’t need to figure out how to make it work. You figure out how to make it work.” Of course, the reality is that it doesn’t work that way.
It’s so funny too, because one thing that’s hard, I think, for people on the Right to understand is, “How do these people have a superiority complex when they can’t even tie their shoes?” But that’s the whole reason that they’re Left-wing in the first place is that they are in emotional denial of reality, and so reversing their feelings of inadequacy and claiming superiority on that basis is nothing for them. The idea that immigration is good for the economy, that’s nothing for them. They can justify that without even blinking.
GJ: Right.
VD: But the one thing that does seem to penetrate a little bit through their thick skulls is . . . For the Left, intelligence is a fetish. It’s the one thing that they really, really value highly, because otherwise you’re just the same as everyone else, and so it’s possible that might be the one way to reach the Left on the immigration issue. How are you going to get your shiny, sexy, secular utopia if people can’t even tie their shoes?
GJ: Right. Well, they do have this strange attitude that IQ is a myth and that they’re smarter than you are because they’ve been clued in on this fact. I don’t quite know how to get around that kind of mentality.
VD: They live in this delusion bubble. That’s just your crazy logic, man. You just need to expand your mind properly and maintain that sort of Leftist doublethink that you’re referring to.
GJ: Yeah, well, the thing that really gets me is 1) why does anybody listen to these people anymore? and 2) why are conservatives so intimidated by these people that they, in effect, just enable them in making the world worse? I mean, a liberal today is a person who thinks they are more enlightened than you because they think there’s nothing wrong with – in fact, it’s a sign of progress and civilization – that a couple of lesbians in Berkeley are giving hormones to turn their little boy into a girl. They think that’s wonderful. That’s glorious. That’s progress. That doesn’t seem like child abuse to them. And if you say that seems like child abuse to you that just proves you’re a retrograde Neanderthal and probably a religious fundamentalist. How can anybody take these people seriously much less cravenly want their approval? And yet that is the mentality of the cuckservative.
So, let’s discuss your next chapter, chapter 4, which is called “From Conservative to Cuckservative.” How did these people come about and how can we fix them?
VD: Well, the important thing to understand is that there is no American conservative ideology. Other than the religious conservatives, most conservatives don’t have any actual principles. I don’t mean they’re unprincipled in terms of their morality. I mean they literally don’t have any foundational principles upon which their political positions are based, and so because of that conservatism is and always has been fundamentally reactionary. When the Left calls conservatives reactionaries, because the conservatives have no goals of their own. They have no positions of their own. Everything is just, “Let’s slow down what the Left is trying to do.”
The problem with that, of course, is that as things change over time, as the Left manages to move things to the Left, the new conservatives are now defending the position that the liberals were pushing for 20 years before. If you just look at it from a basic strategic point of view, even a game theory point of view, conservatism cannot succeed. The whole noble defeat thing that so many conservatives seem to take some pleasure in is actually totally in keeping with the ideology as it stands.
The interesting thing about the cuckservatives is that they’re not even properly conservatives anymore because they don’t abide by two of Russell Kirk’s six “principles” of conservatism. Now, we showed in the book that those principles are not really proper principles; they’re more attitudes than anything, but even when it just comes to the attitudes the cuckservatives have to a certain extent abandoned both the respect for tradition as well as the skepticism towards people with plans for improving society that are supposed to be hallmarks of the conservative spirit.
GJ: Yeah, one of the things that struck me about your discussion of Kirk and also your discussion of William F. Buckley is the essentially passive dependence that these people have on the Left. The Left sets the agenda and, as Buckley says, thinking himself so clever, “We’re just standing athwart the tracks yelling ‘Stop!’” Well, that’s a very weak position to be in.
VD: It sounds great, but as it turns out it was true and that’s all he was doing.
GJ: It was all that he was doing, and really all that he aspired to do was get off the tracks and get in the dining car. While the Left was piloting the train towards utopia, the conservatives are in the last car. They’re going to get there last, but they’re still being pulled by the Left. The Left is the engine. The Left is a vanguard. The Left is doing all the piloting, the planning, whatever. They’re along for the ride basically.
One of the things I thought was very good about the chapter is that you show that the cuckservative mentality is really in the DNA of post-war American conservatism, because who’s the founder of post-war American conservatism? It’s William F. Buckley, and Buckley from the very beginning had this attitude that we have to throw people overboard, throw them under the bus, to maintain the good graces of the Eastern liberal establishment, of the liberal press, and so forth. So, with the Birchers on to other groups, he was throwing them overboard and that’s basically the cuckservative agenda, and now they’ve basically thrown everything conservative overboard.
I thought that was a really good chapter, and it shows how deep the rot goes.
VD: Oh, I did too, and Red Eagle wrote most of that one, so it was fascinating for me.
My only contribution to that particular chapter was that when I was going through it I went, “You know, this doesn’t even describe the cuckservatives. It partly describes them, but they completely go against two of the principles.” That’s why they don’t really deserve to be called conservatives even though they would call themselves conservatives, because they are not in keeping with one third of the foundation of American conservatism.
GJ: Exactly. The next four chapters deal with immigration. I think immigration is the great political question of our time. We can actually make progress on immigration, and if we can make progress on immigration we can maybe save America, save Europe, and so forth.
So, give us some of your thoughts on the immigration issue.
VD: Well, I think the first thing to keep in mind is that we’re not talking about theory anymore. Back in 1965 and to a lesser extent 1986, it was still possible to talk about the theory of it. It’s not possible to do that anymore, because we have 50 years of experience of it, and that’s why one of the chapters is called 50 Years of Failure. There’s no doubt that it doesn’t work. There’s no doubt that they don’t assimilate. There’s no doubt that they drive the nation’s average IQ down, they drive the nation’s wealth down. The negative effect on the nation, whether you’re talking about the USA, whether you’re talking about the UK, whether you’re talking about Denmark, whether you’re talking about Norway, whether you’re talking about Finland, the net result is tremendously negative and tremendously destructive.
The one hope that we have across the West . . . I’m not one of those people who runs around saying, “Oh, the West is doomed! The English are doomed! The White race is doomed!” I don’t buy into that for a second. To put it into perspective, I remember reading books that were published in the early 20th century that were genuinely concerned about the idea that the Negro race was going to be gone by the middle of the 21st century. That’s what the demographic trends were back then.
But the problem is that these mass migrations are always directly correlated with large-scale war. As bad as things are in Europe, it’s very important to remember that Europe is reacting violently to only a million immigrants, and Europe has 520 million people. Europe’s got nearly 200 million more people than the USA. Meanwhile, the USA has been bringing in a million immigrants a year for 50 years.
GJ: Right.
VD: People look at Europe and they say, “That’s so terrible! Look at all these horrible things that are happening, and Europe must be doomed.” Over here we’re looking at it and going, “Yeah, we’re actually doing something about it.”
GJ: Right. I was talking to this guy in Hungary and he said, “Greg, you don’t understand. We have a terrible race problem in Hungary.” And I said, “Really? Tell me about it.” Because I was looking around Budapest, and it looked like paradise to me. He said, “Oh, we have 500 Africans in Hungary!” And I said, “In the whole country!?” And he said, “Yes.” I said, “I think you’re maybe overreacting a bit. I’ve been on subway trains with 500 Africans.”
But the point I took away from that was that Europeans have a lot less to complain about than Americans in terms of diversity, and they’re a lot more concerned about it, and that’s a sign of health.
VD: Yeah. This is part of what we talked about in our last interview, and I was talking about how the European national sense is much stronger. Even if you just look at the political systems right now, yes, Donald Trump is gaining a lot of support because there is a national spirit that is rising in America. Cuckservative went to #9 in non-fiction because people are interested in it, but that’s very different from what you’re seeing in France where the Front National is now the most powerful party in terms of popular support. Or the Sweden Democrats who are absolutely warred on by the entire establishment in Sweden plus every major newspaper and television station. and yet they’ve got more support than anyone. The nationalist parties are rising very quickly.
The question in Europe is, “Is democracy going to survive it?” Are the centrist parties going to throw out democracy in order to try to retain power to keep the nationalists out? That’s my concern in Europe, because if the nationalists come to power they’ll get everything under control. They’ll ship people back to their home countries, they’ll get the migration rates down very low, and it should not be necessary for there to be any serious conflict.
The problem will be if . . . And the US may well be involved in it. For example, the way they got involved in Bosnia.
GJ: Right.
VD: If the US gets involved and the centrist parties scheme and throw out democracy in order to keep the nationalist parties out, that’s when you’re going to see the hardcore ultra-nationalists come in, and they don’t give a damn about democracy, they don’t give a damn about anything other than making sure that their countries are totally homogeneous.
GJ: Right.
VD: And that’s when it could get really ugly in Europe. But in the US the problem is actually on a much larger scale, because I don’t think the political structure can survive. The 60 million people in 50 years is the biggest single human migration in human history.
GJ: The passage in the book in which you talk about that I thought was really powerful. Can I just read that for the benefit of the listeners? I actually copy and pasted that into my show notes.
VD: Sure.
GJ: “The 50 year mass migration into the United States is the single largest invasion in human history. At over 60 million, it dwarfs Operation Barbarossa, in which Hitler sent 3.8 million men into the Soviet Union. It is two orders of magnitude larger than the Mongol horde of Batu Khan, which conquered over 2.3 million square miles of territory from Burma to Bulgaria. It is 1,000 times larger than the First Crusade and it is twice the number of the immigrants who entered the United States between 1870 and 1930 that at the time represented an estimated 60% of the entire world’s immigrants. It requires near complete ignorance of history to assume, as cuckservatives do, that an invasion of this magnitude will not have an extraordinary impact on the long-term fate of the United States or that it does not represent an existential threat to the very survival of America as a nation.”
That really lays it out. That’s really hard-hitting. How could these people respond to this? I guess they could just stick their heads in the ground and hope that you go away, but it is a terrible problem.
VD: Yep. No one has had any response to that. No one. Not the critics. I mean, they can’t. Someone had put up a blog post somewhere attempting to criticize the book, and nothing. They just wave their hand and basically just stick their head in the sand and pray. That’s all they’ve got. I’m sure if you pressed them they would come up with some sort of “It’s 2015” argument as if that means anything. That’s all that they have to offer, which is that, “Well, maybe this time it will be different from every single other time that anything like this on a smaller scale in history.”
GJ: In short, that’s the definition of insanity right there, right? Expecting a different result from the same process, from the same mistake.
VD: The thing that’s so crazy about it is the fact that this is even larger scale than before. At least back during the melting pot migration there was a lot more room to be settled.
GJ: Right.
VD: You know, parts of the country were still not entirely settled, and that sort of thing, and so there was more room at the time. Of course, most of the immigrants coming in at the time were a little easier to assimilate than those that are coming in now, and plus they were under some pressure to assimilate.
So, I think that in the USA, if we’re lucky, there will be some sort of secession movements that will be permitted, and then some of those polities that secede will begin practicing forcible segregation and so forth. Of course, it’s very easy for me to openly support that because I am a Red segregationist, and I have yet to meet the White person who is willing to say that they’re willing to take more Indian land away by refusing to let us have reservations.
GJ: Right.
VD: Because what is an Indian reservation? It’s segregation. It’s racial segregation. For me, that’s always been something that’s always been very rhetorically useful. Saying, “You believe in segregation, too.” And they say, “No, no, I don’t! No!” “Well, you don’t believe that Indians should have their own land?” “Well, of course they should!” “Well, then you’re a segregationist. You’re just saying that we should have our own land, but you shouldn’t.”
GJ: The segregation they’re opposed to might actually benefit Whites as a group and that’s taboo, so . . .
VD: Yeah, but here’s what I’ve learned. It’s not that they are anti-White, and that’s the big mistake that I think a lot of the White Nationalists make. The White people whose every action and so forth is anti-White . . . We tend to think of them as, “Oh, you must hate White people” or whatever, but the reality is they don’t. They just have no ability whatsoever to envision a society where White people are not the overwhelming majority.
GJ: There is a kind of grandiosity, a kind of delusion of invulnerability that a lot of these people definitely have. Yeah, I would agree with that.
VD: I agree, but what I’m saying is that they do not understand the concept of demographic change.
GJ: Yeah.
VD: They do not get it. These are people who feel rather than think, and it is not possible for them to feel something that they have not experienced.
GJ: Yeah. I remember Christian Lander, a guy who wrote Stuff White People Like, was doing a talk in San Francisco back in 2010 that I went and saw, and one of the things that I came away with from that book-signing and talk was a sense of total invulnerability to demographic change. Just a sort of blithe sense that it’s always going to work out right. The kind of alarm that I was feeling is totally foreign to these people, and they actually used it as a sort of status-signaling for their superiority that they’re not worried about this kind of stuff. “What? Me worry about Affirmative Action? That’s for little people to worry about,” right? There is a definite quality of that with a lot of people on the Left especially, but a lot of people on the Right too.
One of the best chapters in the book is the immigration and economics chapter. I really felt that you destroy this sort of silly idea that it’s bound to be good for the economy. It’s good for some people’s economy, but for the working class in America, for the middle class, the vast majority of America it’s really not good for them. I think one of the sort of concluding numbers that you crunched out is that whenever an immigrant shows up in America it costs the native born working population about the equivalent of 1/5th of a job, which is one of the reasons why we have stagnating wages and declining living standards.
Another factor that is really striking to me is the recent data about the massive mortality now that we’re finding amongst basically working and lower middle class White people who are middle-aged. They’re dying off at rates that recall what happened after the collapse of Communism in Russia.
VD: Right. I think that when you’ve got a society that is in decline as the West in general and the US are and a society that’s being taken over, people lose hope. They don’t have any hope, they don’t have any reason to live. All they see ahead of them is change and darkness.
If I recall correctly, you’re not a Christian, correct?
GJ: Correct.
VD: Yeah. I think this is where it’s much more difficult for the secular or the pagan Right-winger than the Christian one, because Christians are really accustomed to the idea that they might not always be on top. Christians always fall away. There are plenty of soft Christians that fall away, but when you’ve got an attitude that says, “OK. At some point in my life, I may be tested by someone threatening to kill me if I don’t disavow Jesus Christ and so forth.” That’s a question that most Christians have wrestled with at some point in time. It’s something they’ve thought about and yet they make the decision, “OK. I’m going to stick with this.” Beyond that, we also have this institutional memory of when the Christian church was basically 11 guys. So, the Christian West is not inclined to give into despair, but the West is no longer anywhere near as Christian as it used to be and so I think that’s why you’re seeing a lot more of the despair, a lot more of the people who just don’t see a future, because it’s hard to see a positive future for the West considering that the unreliable-at-best loyalties of the leadership, the number of people who are enthusiastically embracing the invasion and their demographic replacement, and then you’re thinking, “The best case outcome is some sort of civil war and secessions.” No wonder people are depressed.
GJ: Oh yeah, I remember years ago when someone started explaining peak oil to me, and I shocked them when I listened to the argument and said, “Look, this is optimism. The scenario that you’re laying out is optimism.” They were rather appalled by that.
But yeah, exactly. We don’t have a future right now. Whites as a race don’t have a future if present trends continue. I think more Whites are aware of that and I think it’s a pretty depressing prospect for a lot of people.
Let’s talk about your ninth chapter though, which is called “Christianity and Cuckservatism.” I thought that was a really good chapter and, for somebody who is not a Christian, I look around at the Christian churches, and I shake my head, and I just think, “Oh my God, they’re the enemy, and we have to fight them.” The trouble is that the Christians within my little White Nationalist world spend more of their time trying to get me to shut up about the churches and not criticize them than they seem to spend time criticizing the churches for doing these terrible things and encouraging decline and encouraging the invasion and so forth.
It was very good to see a chapter written from a Christian perspective that takes the gloves off. You really clean these people’s clock. So, let’s talk a little about your argument in the “Christianity and Cuckservatism” chapter.
VD: Well, the first thing that I should say that I thought was interesting was that one of my colleagues who is very, very different than I am in regards to theology – I’m what they call an open theist and he’s a serious five-step Calvinist or whatever it’s called – it was kind of funny because I sent him the chapter after I finished it and I was expecting to get one of his patented 40-page critiques. He wrote a 40-something page critique of a blog post once, so I was thinking, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to get an encyclopedia back.” And I was absolutely astounded when he sent me a message back saying, “I don’t disagree with a single word.”
What that tells you is that if two Christians who are on completely opposite ends of the theological spectrum, if we both completely agree on it, then how Christian are these so-called Christian churches?
GJ: Right.
VD: That’s what the chapter really shows, which is that all of this pro-immigration, don’t say illegal alien, adopt the little Black kids, blah blah blah, all the stuff that you see coming out of the churches today, it’s not only bullshit, it’s not Christian.
The most powerful thing in that chapter is the verse where Jesus Christ himself says, “It is not right to take the children’s food and give it to the dogs” and he was talking about people there.
GJ: Right.
VD: You would think that people who were anti-Christian would at some point in time have landed at that verse and used it to claim that Jesus was a racist or something.
GJ: There is one anti-Christian I know who loves to quote that passage and say, “See how evil and rotten Jesus is?” And I look at that and say, “This is very useful!”
VD: “This is the one thing I agree with!”
GJ: Seriously, the thing that gets me about what you call Churchianity, which is a good term, the Churchians today is they seem to want to deny that it’s moral and right to have any preference for your own children over strangers, for your own country over neighbors, for your own race over other races, and yet you zero in on that in the New Testament indicating that no, those sorts of preferences were regarded as natural.
Looking at Aquinas, for instance. Aquinas in his Questions on Charity basically he says, “Yes, God’s love flows through all of creation, but creation consists of hierarchies and concentric circles of relationships, and so you have a natural preference for your own over strangers, and that structure of preferences doesn’t impede the grace of God, and it’s not something that needs to be fought against or disdained.” And yet what you’ve got with Christians today is this pure xenophilia, this perverse attitude that your neighbor is not your neighbor. No, the neighbor is someone who is far more foreign than your neighbor, and in fact your preference for these foreigners often turns your neighbor’s life in to a living hell.
VD: Right, but again, these are people who call themselves Christians but when they’re preaching immigration from the Gospel they’re doing exactly what the Apostle Paul warned about, which is the whole wolf in sheep’s clothing. These are not Christians.
I’m not playing no true Scotsman here. I’m saying these are not people for the most part… And I’m talking about the leaders, I’m not talking about the average church members.
GJ: Right.
VD: These are people who worship at the Temple of Babel.
GJ: Right.
VD: I would not be surprised at all if many of them actually served some other god. I actually got the concept of SJW entryism from being told about a church that had been basically invaded by people who had managed to take it over and the crazy thing is, I mention this in the book, the same thing happened 20 years later, just this last couple of years, at one of the churches that my parents attended. I actually know one of the pastors involved and my uncle was on the board of the church. They ended up getting invaded by these SJWs who promptly announced that they had a vision for combining Christianity with Islam and wanted to call it Chrislam.
Now, you cannot possibly hold Christianity responsible for that, because that is anti-Christianity of a sort that Richard Dawkins never dreamed of.
GJ: Oh God, yes! The core issue is really the idea of charity and loving your neighbor and being kind to strangers and so forth, and that notion carries a great deal of moral weight even in the minds of non-Christians. It’s been perverted into an attitude where you measure your virtue by the degree to which you betray the people close to you and side with people far away. It overturns families, it overturns communities, and it overturns societies. It’s just a kind of moralistic absurdity that is an agent of chaos and destruction.
VD: And you’ve seen The Lord of the Rings. What do we usually call a good that is perverted into something else other than its purpose?
GJ: Well, you tell me.
VD: We usually call that evil.
GJ: Evil. Yeah.
VD: I think this Churchianity is absolutely evil. I think it is absolutely of the devil. I don’t think you even need to be Christian to pick up the scent of brimstone from it. I realize for your secular viewers that may sound nuts, and that’s fine, but my point is that the good news for the secular and the pagan Right is that true Christianity, the Christianity that exploded across the world and the Christianity that caused the lands of Europe to become Christendom, is on your side ultimately in that regard.
There’s no question about that. Even someone like Anders Breivik recognized that. Breivik is not a Christian. He does not worship Jesus Christ, but he described himself as a cultural Christian because he understood that connection.
GJ: Right.
VD: In Europe, that’s going to be the big factor of change. It’s not an accident that Putin often speaks in religious terms. It’s not an accident that the forces that are rising in Poland and Hungary . . . Even Hungary, like you said, is fairly secular, but when you listen to the nationalists speak they often speak about the Christian heroes, the Christian kings.
GJ: Oh yeah.
VD: But the most important thing to keep in mind, and I think it’s something that can inspire seculars and pagans as well and it’s something that I always enjoy telling atheists, because they say there are fewer Christians now in America than there were before and I always say, “Hey, we only need 11.”
GJ: Well, yeah. I think Lenin said a similar thing. He looked around a little room, probably a little bar room or a coffee shop or something like that, and said, “There are 12 of us. The world is ours.” I despise Lenin and think he was a terribly evil man, but I have to admire that kind of attitude, that he definitely believed in the validity of his cause.
When people talk about the shrinking White demographics in America, I like to point out that when my father’s family arrived here in Jamestown we were a tiny minority on the continent at that point. Things do change, and one of the things that history teaches us is that it’s full of unexpected changes. That said, we do have certain expectations and hopes and predictions.
We’ve already touched on some of these things. Are you fundamentally optimistic though? Do you think that Western civilization is going to survive or do you think that it will be destroyed? And if it is going to survive, what kind of conservatives do we need to preserve it?
VD: I think it’s ultimately going to survive, but I think we’re going into a long period of war. Not a Dark Ages, but I think the political entities that we know many of them are going to break up, and I think we’re going to see tremendous movement of peoples as the formerly homogeneous nations that are now heterogeneous are going to become homogeneous again. And I think that process is going to be as unpleasant for pretty much everybody as it was the previous times around.
GJ: Yeah. We really have two choices. We have the Yugoslavia model or we have the Czech and Slovak velvet divorce, and I am afraid that the Left and its cuckservative shadows are not going to go for the velvet divorce. We’re going to have to go for the long, bloody process of going from homogeneous societies back to homogeneous societies again. Just like Communism they said was this long, bloody transition from capitalism to capitalism.
VD: Right. Well, the thing is that the models that I usually use are it’s either going to be the Spanish model or the Bosnian model, the Serbian model. Neither one of them are particularly fun or desirable, but that’s really the order of magnitude that we’re talking about. We’re talking about continental level stuff. We’re not talking about national stuff.
GJ: Right.
VD: So, that’s where the States, I think, it’s a bit more of a problem because not only is there greater diversity and not only are the demographics much worse, but it’s all mixed up.
GJ: Right.
VD: You know, it’s Liberians here and Arabs there and Somalians right next door and then there’s a White formerly Polish neighborhood. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, and so there’s going to have to be a lot more movement than there has to be in Europe.
So, we’ll see. It’s definitely going to be interesting, but hopefully in all of it people of every race will attempt to retain some level decency and humanity throughout. That would be my hope.
I was actually elected the captain of a mostly Nigerian football team a few years ago. You know, I don’t wish anything bad to happen to those guys. I do think that in the long run they should be back in Nigeria.
GJ: Right.
VD: And if push comes to shove that’s ultimately where they belong, but that doesn’t mean that I wish them any harm. I want things to go well for them. But I want them to go well for them in their own countries. Like you said, the velvet divorce is to be infinitely preferred to the violent one.
GJ: Right. And I totally agree with that attitude. That’s simply the decent human attitude to take.
It makes me so angry that the political establishment will not allow that to happen. Manuel Valls in France just said . . . His party, of course, is doing everything they can to keep the Front National from winning any of these regional elections by basically bowing out and telling their voters to vote for Sarkozy’s party. He’s saying that if the Front National wins it could mean civil war in France. These people don’t want to go quietly. They don’t want to fight fair. The Republicans in the United States are talking about a contested convention if Donald Trump gets most of the delegates. They’re not going to fight fair. They’re not going to play fair. They’re not going to go quietly, and they’re just creating a situation where because what they advocate cannot work it’s just going to create a terrible, bloody explosion in the end. I wish these fools would wake up and listen to reason, but when have you read in a book of history the line, “And then they listened to reason and everything worked out well”? I’ve read a lot of history, and I don’t find many chapters in history that end that way.
VD: No. Obviously, there’s going to be some level of force involved, but there certainly are many, many examples of some colonel deciding that the civilian government has gone too far and instituting change.
GJ: Yes.
VD: So, there’s plenty of possibilities in that regard, and there’s all kinds of crazier possibilities now with science and technology changing and so forth. But I think that if those of us who are nationalists want to continue to get our message across to people it needs to be one that’s always based on the truth, and it also needs to be one that is fundamentally based in human decency. None of the whole Nazi rhetoric about fleas and Untermenschen and that kind of crap.
The people of Papua New Guinea, the tribes of the American Southwest, the Nigerians, whatever, they’re all human. They’re all worthy of human respect. The fact that you don’t necessarily want to live in their society or live in a society that becomes their society, that’s not based on hate. That’s not even necessarily based on dislike. The only way that you’re going to convince people of this is, “Look, these are your two alternatives. Which is more humane? To help people go back to where they belong or to allow this to turn into some kind of horrific Third World War?”
GJ: Exactly. I completely agree with that. One of the approaches that I try to take with my writing is to emphasis, “Look, totalitarianism, imperialism, genocide, all this scary Hollywood stuff, all this bad stuff from the Second World War and before . . . That’s what we’re trying to avoid.”
VD: Exactly.
GJ: If people listen to reason we can avoid this. The Second World War could have been avoided if people had been more reasonable. You know, rather than partitioning countries that were ethnically homogeneous and patching together countries that were powder kegs of instability. Versailles lit the fuse for the Second World War, and it was entirely predictable and entirely preventable. And that’s the truth about the next world war. It’s entirely predictable and entirely preventable, and yet we’re standing at the brink of it, I think, and it’s very sobering to see what’s coming.
Vox, this has been a great conversation. We’ve been going on for 90 minutes or so, so I think we’re reaching the limits of the average attention span here, but I hope we’ll have opportunities to discuss these ideas further. Who knows, in two months you might have another book out.
VD: Who knows? It’s possible! Thanks very much. I appreciate it and I look forward to seeing your review of it soon.
