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That's plaud.ai slash dailybeast and use code beast for 10% off. Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN HLN Guy and current KIDL News conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left and I'm producer Jesse Kehl and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun smart conversations with some great guest co-hosts as well as some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media and beyond.
Our goal is to try to make some sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What an excellent show we have today. First we're joined by Jank Ugar, host of the Young Turks and we'll talk about a host of issues. Then we're joined by Andrew Prokop, who's a senior politics correspondent at Fox and he's going to talk to us about Curtis Garvin who's the strange new influential figure on the right.
But first we have Anthony Fisher who's the senior opinion editor at the Daily Beast. Joining me now as guest co-host is Anthony Fisher, senior opinion editor for the Daily Beast and writer of the Calling Balls and Strikes newsletter on Substack. Anthony thanks so much for joining us. Delighted to be here, Andy thanks.
I appreciate you filling in as guest co-host. So let's get right to the news. Obviously the big story that happened over the weekend and is still going on in terms of coverage is the attack on speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul Pelosi. I guess it was on Friday morning a guy broke into the Pelosi's home in San Francisco and apparently had duct tape, he had zip ties and according to some reports he yelled out, where's Nancy.
Law enforcement says he was definitely looking for Nancy Pelosi. She was not there and he then proceeded to be Paul Pelosi with a hammer putting him in the hospital for I believe a fractured skull. Obviously a horrible attack and fairly obviously politically motivated unless you are one of those people who is wrapped up in the conservative media ecosystem, in which case it was apparently Anthony I'm from what I'm hearing it was a gay sex thing done wrong. Mr.
Pelosi's recent history of driving under the influence and other things like that apparently being used as evidence that any other explanation other than a gay sex Trist gone horribly wrong is the only reasonable explanation. Yeah, the guy has been obviously he was arrested. His name is David DePape. He got a fairly large, I can repeat the mild way of putting it internet presence and it's all it's just your bog standard right wing lunacy.
It is the standard anti-Semitism. It is it's very QAnon. It's very Trumpist. It's all of that.
So of course people on the right are talking about how oh but he was a nudist in Berkeley. Yeah, I mean come on Andy, you know, wake up people, you know there can be no other explanation. Here's the thing I want to be very cautious. We're recording this Monday afternoon the attack happened very early in the morning Friday and they're still considering how much time has passed very little hard evidence we know.
So I'm only kind of going by the official reports from things that the police have been willing to say out loud not just right through sources because we should all know better than to trust an on and a certain through the police. Yes, and official sourcing for that. Sure. Yeah, he's kept it all at all.
But I'm only going by the stuff that is actually being said out loud. There's been so much stuff which I'm sure we're going to get to which has trickled through not even back channels but very much the forward facing channels on Twitter that are based in absolutely nothing. And so I don't I haven't done enough homework to know how deeply involved in the Berkeley nudist community this person was or if this person once voted Democrat before they went down the QAnon rabbit hole that is not an impossible thing. There's plenty of those people that exist.
Look at Roseanne Roseanne was once a gay rights icon for her on screen kiss with Sandra Bernhard I believe or Laura Dern whatever but she went down the hard conspiracy theory Trumpist rabbit hole it can happen. I don't know enough about David DePape and his motivations to speculate on where he came from or how he got into this particular position but as you said what we do know about him is that he is prolific online spreading particular ideas that are very much of a piece with the Trump QAnon big lag covid vaccine conspiracy theory et al kind of political face. So that's what we're working with right now and until I hear otherwise that's kind of where I'm going to suspect this person's motivation is live. Yeah, absolutely.
I mean at this point it's you know it's Occam's razor but what we've got here is and it really is unbelievable because there was a time when all these conspiracy theories would stay in sort of their own little insane bubble and post Trump that is not the case and post Trump what we see is a Republican Party increasingly captured by these theories and a Republican Party that amplifies these theories and as one example Congressman Clay Higgins who is in line to I believe be the head of the Homeland Security Committee if the Republicans take the house back he tweeted and has since deleted but he tweeted a picture of some weird picture of Nancy Pelosi's hands pressing against her forehead and he captioned it that moment you realize the nudist hippie male prostitute LSD guy is the reason your husband didn't make it to your fundraiser. Yeah, yeah. I mean again this is the guy who is going to be chairing if the Republicans take the house back he's gonna be chairing the Homeland Security Committee. You know you can't even console yourself or fool yourself I guess which is what we used to do by saying these people are you know they're just crazy you spend too much time on Reddit you spend too much time on the chance you spend too much time online in general and nobody in the real world believes this kind of shit because it ain't true anymore.
I mean yeah for all the bad takes that might come from Democratic politicians it'd be hard pressed to find somebody at this level of influence and power kind of going this route like take the worst kind of root brain internet id and broadcasting it for all to see days after the speakers husband survived the assassination attempts really. Yeah, I mean look till I'm shown otherwise I'm not gonna come straight out and say this was an assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi because as you point out we don't know everything yet what we know so far if it can be believed is kind of pointing in that direction but we just don't know and then you have people like Donald Trump Jr. who at least had the you know the bottom baseline of common dignity to say that the attack on Paul Pelosi was a terrible thing and then he went on to of course blame it on the rise of crime in American cities and the fact that all these cities are run by Democrats so he couldn't just let it be he had to go and say other stuff which by the way also isn't true. Sure.
I don't know if you saw just this morning he shared like an image from South Park of two characters having gay sex and I remember what the exact meme on it was but it was a Paul Pelosi joke I believe he shared it to Instagram like this is where we're at. This is former President's son possibly future President's son while coughing out of one side of his mouth like it's a shame but this kind of thing happened is going this deep into this conspiracy theory and you know really just gross on a billion different levels like it's homophobic it's disgusting it's so many different levels feel like we're kind of like bashing into the ceiling I'm like disgust because there's so many different things in this soup right now and the only thing that I'm certain of is that this could get worse. It's only Monday afternoon you know again to reiterate there's only so much we know and yet the conspiracy theorizing the kind of slanderous insinuations that are being made out there these are going to cement themselves into the mind of the body politic it doesn't matter what's corrected later it doesn't matter if Donald Trump's your deletes one or two of these social media posts or whoever else does stuff is out there it'll stay out there forever you know I don't want to jump the gun but Twitter's new boss was part of this is the spreading of this. Yeah well and that's another thing that we can talk about so Hillary Clinton over the weekend tweeted out about how awful this attack was and you know I'm a proud new owner of Twitter decided that he needed to reply to her saying there is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story.
Then meets the eye and he then provided a link to a piece from the Santa Monica Observer that basically ran through all of these fucked up conspiracy theories that we're talking about and as other people were quick to point out the Santa Monica Observer is most famous for publishing a piece that Hillary Clinton was actually replaced by a body double in her debates with Donald Trump back in 2016 and must you know Mr. Free Speech Guy since deleted his tweet which has of course angered some people on the right powerful figures on the right such as cat-turned-to for our listeners who don't know I'm not joking and he actually is kind of a powerful figure in this weird right wing dystopia that we find ourselves in but but yeah he you know. He couldn't help himself but to jump in and even again it's the way they couch it like there are the people who just go straight to the conspiracy theory and then there are people like well there's just a tiny chance and it's the I'm just asking questions. Yeah I mean there's a lot to impact I just want to start with the Santa Monica Observer Elon Musk is definitely a hero to a lot of the people who are the I do my own research I do my own research on the code of vaccines I do my own research on voter fraud these are the people that were sharing a thing called Enford's Law I believe like two days after the 20 election which they claimed was a mathematical theory that proved that there is absolutely no way that Biden could have won the election they were they leaped on the stuff Elon Musk in doing his own research came across this low traffic.
Even among conspiracy theory websites sort of fringe website and not only did he did this come across his transom he shared it to the former First Lady former Secretary of State former Democratic presidential candidate as a way of kind of shaming her like he's the one who's actually doing the research he's the one that's actually trying to find the truth whereas she's the one mindlessly repeating propaganda this isn't to say oh look at Elon he's a hypocrite which he obviously is of course it's more to say that it's more a glint into that mindset a mindset that clearly Elon subscribes to and a shit ton of his fanboys and fan girls and fan days subscribe to which is that the regime media or as I've also heard it put the cathedral you know the enemies of the people they all are pushing this one narrative to question that narrative is to be a fuck criminal and only by digging into you know lesser traffic sites like the Santa Monica Observer and to be brave enough to seek these things out and then share them of course without vetting them in any way only those people have the real inside scoop on the truth which is frightening in a lot of ways but you know this is this is kind of the natural next step to the idea that because mainstream media gets things wrong sometimes and there's an echo chamber and their self censorship which is all true you know mainstream media can be its own worst enemy people who you know insists that there is one quantifiable truth and that it's being held by the guardians of journalism like these are people that are you know giving all the ammunition they need the only ammunition that the Elon must class needs but it doesn't change the fact that Elon and these people are like digging into crap websites sharing them completely credulously and no matter what happens after that the we did tweet any of that stuff it all is going to stay in these people's brains it's it's it's it's it's cemented forever for those of our listeners who are curious about a term that Anthony just used the cathedral keep listening because coming up on this podcast is an interview with Andrew Prokop writer at Vox who talks about Curtis Yarvin who is the person who created that expression the cathedral and he explains what it means so I just want to do a little self-plug there but yeah getting back to the story no you're absolutely right and it's just it's a Ted Cruz who you know, podcaster Ted Cruz who I guess is also a senator she's a just out there tweeting you know, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt. Oh god yeah Matt Walsh who a writer for something for the Daily Wire tweeted the whole thing you know I do know that trying to paint a hippie nudist from Berkeley as some kind of militant right wingers absurd and will always be absurd and Ted Cruz retweeted or quote tweeted it and wrote truth and it's like it's not truth but as you said truth doesn't matter truth doesn't matter in a long time facts hasn't mattered in a long time and so even at the point where we have this absolutely horrific incident where an 82 year old man was attacked with a hammer and this is this is the shit that we have this is the shit that we get yeah that we're even like think about this like we're we know very little so much hasn't been you know been released by law enforcement yet and but this is the conversation's moved to this part we're not even talking about the perpetrator anymore we're talking about the interpretations of what happened you know that's that's where the you know the the conversation immediately leap frogs beyond just adjudicating a crime and it's perhaps and it's possible intent but it's the interpretation of it it's the political interpretation like what does it mean you know it's been said that we're in the post-truth world and you know for every unhinged racial mato segment that you know professed to have the smoking gun behind russia gate 500 of these right-wing fever dreams type of conspiracy theories are born and i'm not saying that a equals b like one is the cause of the other both sides all sides are really not placing enough of a primacy on stamping out complete and total bullshit on their own side saying like you got it wrong you completely got it wrong just completely own it and i would say absolutely that's worse on the right right now or you know people like a musk i think would insist that they actually aren't right but they're just left to left or left with a bigger threat or whatever you know it's all you know it's all bullshit but they are monetizing and you know otherwise capitalizing on a thing that's you know a real thing that's been percolating forever which is like distrust into the elites and that is a bipartisan thing but in this case like literally anything that might come from an authority figure that isn't what they want to hear is obviously something that came from above from the cathedral and must immediately be shut down and mocked viciously that's where we're at right now it's the new era of civility joining me now is the host of the young turks the largest online news show in the world or so he claims jank you there jank thanks so much for being here great to have you interesting intro look i haven't had the time to do my own research and as a free thinker and heterodox thinker i will not accept anything as fact until i do my own research so all i can do is say that you claim this god bless god bless no one's by the way you're not the only one everybody's skeptical of it and then when i asked hey uh name me a larger show or online network i've never gotten one yet okay you've convinced me by the way uh i now i'm fully on board i also want to point out before we start that i am a quarter Turkish oh okay well so then we're definitely gonna agree okay at least 25 percent of the time we will agree that's right before we get to the news of the day i did want to say you tweeted something a couple days ago i thought was interesting you said here's what we need in 2024 to save the country one an outsider no one inside the system can or wants to change the system to someone really smart so that eliminates entire republican party three someone for once with good intent is there one such person in the entire country i thought that was interesting and i know that i'm assuming at that point you knew you were coming on here and i you don't need to suck up to me like that and but i i do appreciate it and don't think i don't but no i actually thought that was a very interesting tweet you're completely gone on the idea that anyone in the system can do anything at this point yeah 100 first of all the republican party is not just useless it's awful counter-dough is dead set on destroying democracy which we'll talk about in a little bit so that's obviously not anything that any reasonable person to ever entertain so that leaves the democratic party well the problem with the democratic party is that they suck they're terrible at running elections they keep losing to monstrous republicans and the republics aren't that bright i mean Donald Trump's IQ is barely in double digits and right now he's probably the favorite to win again the democrats are completely incompetent they are in the compliance business the problem is when fascism comes along they comply they're a corrupt party an incompetent party and so and they will not allow reform from within the party but one thing that they are really good in is attacking and destroying progressives and primaries with honestly the help of mainstream media that is staview progressives as their number one enemy like by far and away way bigger danger than donald trump that's because they're corrupt and so no i'm not interested by nor kamala harris or any of these lukewarm useless politicians so i know you ended that tweet with a question is there one such person in the country is there okay is there anyone you can think of who might fit that bill well that's the difficult part and it's weak yeah did you get any good responses at least you know i hadn't thought of this one guy and i thought oh that's kind of interesting uh john suer i was like it's not impossible right so oh he's a comedian what are you talking about unless he's a comedian donald trump is a literal clown i think he has a red bulbous nose of floppy shoes and steward is super smart i think he's progressive i'm not positive which is good news right then he'll have quote unquote credibility in mainstream media and make if he is a progressive i would counsel him to keep that quiet until later okay so that he's not banned from all of media so it's not impossible honestly and this is it's kind of a really i think people would view it as an ironic statement although it isn't i think that a businessman could be an interesting possibility but they got to be progressive and that's why i think people think it's ironic but it's not there's a lot of great business owners that are progressive just someone who knows what they're doing is strong and smart and progressive and populist so it's a tough bill because media tells us who the powerful people are right and they never allow progressives on so no one has built up enough power and name recognition to take that role on but we need it because we can't have an insider an insider is never going to change the system an insider got to the top within the system they love this system and the system is killing us so it sounds to me like what you're looking for is a Ben and Jerry ticket kind of so not those particular folks although they're wonderful folks but something along those lines and is that possible we'll see yeah i'm not entirely sure that steward fits the progressive mold i most of the lefties i know are not huge fans of his but not that they set the tone for the party but but i feel like in a lot of ways steward is thought of more as a not quite establishment liberal but closer to that than to the progressive way so if we have disagreements on policy that's actually totally fine i don't mind that i'm not duchessingary not at all the reason why i would be worried about an establishment liberal is because of the mindset not because of policies right the mindset is we shouldn't fight republicans we should be civil we should whisper because npr told us a whisper we should support money in politics because corruption is awesome so even if steward was more of a moderate than i am within the party as long as he's not corrupt and there's no reason in the world to think that he would be then it's game on thrilled to have it people have a view of the left as being very ideological indoctrination area and that's not exactly right and it's not completely wrong either it depends on what part of the left you're talking about well it's definitely right on twitter yes that's just no doubt about that yeah i mean look guys i've been attacked slash canceled by every wing of every party and there's a reason for that because i don't say standard things find me a thing i say that 70 percent of the country doesn't agree with for example i think almost all the politicians are corrupt well 90 percent of americans agree with me zero percent of people in power agree with me so okay am i radical because zero percent of people in power agree with me or am i a moderate because 90 percent of the american people agree with and so when he gets to some portions of the left are they dissatisfied with me of course because i won't follow standard ideology my co-host antica spari won't follow nobody in our network will follow it we're independent thinkers so if you give us an idea it's great i don't care where it came from if you give us an idea that's not working i also don't care where it came from and that really pisses people up especially on twitter yeah twitter is not you know for our listeners who are not on twitter it's not in the top 150 000 nuanced platforms in the world i think it's fair to say so speaking of twitter we had two things like perfect storm type things over the weekend first was a horrible attack on the husband of house speaker nancy plosie and quickly became obvious that the attacker is may have been an assassination attempt we don't know that for sure but the reports are that he shouted where's nancy as he entered the house and he certainly had the views of someone who would want to do something like assassinate nancy plosie the same time you might must have just taken over twitter which was causing a complete shit storm on twitter and probably not anywhere else in the actual world but then he decided to insert himself into the plosie story by retweeting an article it was in the Santa Monica observer a paper that had previously published about how hillary clinton i think had been killed and replaced by a robot which you know but he ironically did this in replying to a tweet by hillary clinton and he basically was like well it's possible we don't know the full story here and it linked to this just ridiculous piece about what has now become it seems a standard right-wing talking point uh which is that the paul polosi attack was actually some sort of gay sex thing gone wrong so we sort of had this coming together of this horrible political story and this the story about what is gonna happen to twitter and it just seems like the same few exceptions that we see every time now on the right which is basically like people at the bullwark or something like that they're all over this conspiracy story or something seems off here take cruises tweeted it elon obviously has tweeted it clay higgins put up a tweet which he since deleted what do you make of this yeah there's a lot of issues here and they're all probably the most important issues in the country because it's gonna affect who's gonna win in 24 and whether we're gonna have a democracy uh or not and that is not at all hyperbolic we are headed straight towards an iceberg and as much as people in power kind of talk about it around the edges i don't think they get it at all i don't think they realize how close we are to losing the country and i don't mean losing it like oh the republicans won and the democrats ride a power but i mean losing it as in trump wins and we never have another election right or we have fake elections going on and i mean the last time they literally had fake electors and so and now secretaries of state are running that say yes next time we will do fake electors and next time we'll do actual frickin coup and so the writers on january six were not the coup the fake electors scheme dreamt up by eastman navaro bannon and supported by donald trump that was a coup and so how it relates to this is for the right wing is lost now i'm gonna get back to the mainstream into the establishment and how they have a huge culpability in this play okay but first patient zero is the right wing and patients the right way of putting it all the way through elan musk they have lost their god damn minds we need clarity on it yes we're not 50 50 yes not at all 50 50 i cannot have a debate with a lunatic okay there is no like i can't say in hillary clinton i think she's establishment one-on-one i think she's epitome of corruption she does not have a body double she didn't die she doesn't do anything in a basement in a pizza shop you guys are lunatics you absolutely lost your minds your detached from reality let's be absolutely clear if you're in that camp of the republican party you must get a therapist i swear to god you're an occult you can't see straight they brainwashed you and you're in a very very dangerous cult so you're totally detached from reality and guys killing on let alone the entire republican party but killing on is 45 million people i know they're so scared they think the democrats drink the brain juice of children just sheer lunacy so you see the panic in my voice right you see the urgency in my voice you ever hear that from the god damn democrats get up and fight back you've got to fight back i mean for example what right now they have nowhere near the testicular of fortitude needed for this job biden the minute must does that biding should be out there going apparently the richest man in the world has lost his god damn mind and just take the fight to him pervergaly not physically we're not right wing punch him in the face right punch him in the face pervergaly politically rhetorically right for god's sake getting the god damn game right they're just sitting on the sidelines so we have a massive danger and so once you have lost track of reality your inches are from fascism and then what i've been wanting on on the unturriss and cyt the entire network for two years straight out and everybody was like oh yeah yeah that's a concern and i may be maybe and i was like no no you don't understand guys the bottom line is anti-Semitism so whenever we talk to q and i guys and i because we're not mainstream media we don't care about stupid platforming issues and stuff no we got to go talk to them to find out what's going on in their crazy heads and what's going on is whenever you get past the latinos the muslims blacks is gays etc they don't care about any of that that's just window dressing that's just fun hatred for them the bottom line is they all say the same thing the jews are on the country and so when you get to anti-Semitism not only is it grotesque and of its own right not only does it portend horrible things for the country etc but it's also the very last step before fascism and now anti-Semitism is here and raging and can i curse yes fuck Kanye west fuck him okay because he opened up that Pandora's box and now everybody all the ghouls and goblins are flying out right and of course what did trump do he instantly jumped on it instantly said it did an anti-semitic grant of his own he's been an anti-semitic for a long time oh my god he's automatically jewish who cares everything he says is anti-semitic he said that there were good people on both sides when there was a Nazi march how does how could it be any clearer than that and yet our feckless leaders are sitting there with a thumb up their ass and not barely fighting back so that's my take on the right wing i'll pause here before i can never establish him that is a hundred percent fair take if anything i think maybe you undersold it but yeah i think you're right about the anti-semitism because that is just historically that is always the underpinning of these movements and again it's not that they're not also racist it's not that they're not also homophobic and transphobic and everything islamophobic and just every other thing that you can name but it is always the anti-semitism that underpins this and for the exact reason you said because it's the protocols of the elders of zion i was just reading a book uh a fiction book that had to deal with the protocols and i remember thinking when i was much younger how did anyone believe that the protocols were not a forgery and i don't think that anymore it's very obvious how people believe that because they still do and you see it all day long on places like twitter you see it all day long from republican politicians and like you said donald trump has a jewish daughter and it's an insidious form of anti-semitism because it's not even necessarily a sort of i hate you or i don't like anybody who's jewish and donald trump in his mind he can have a son-in-law who's jewish and have grand children who are jewish and that's okay with him but at the same point he absolutely believes the central tenets of anti-semitism which is that jews run the world and what we get is this thing that unites people like hany west and donald trump and tucker karleson is one of the people who won't come right out and say it and that he'll use george soros as their sort of stand-in but you know damn well that that's what he thinks and it is this overarching belief and look it's worked unfortunately it has worked historically and it leads to horrible things as we know and that is consistently where they go so you are 100 correct in identifying anti-semitism as sort of the root of all of this i think yeah so i know it's across a little bit i debated him a political and we talked before we talked after and he never said anything to me that was directly anti-semitic so i'm being fair here and honest but the things that he did say made me think and this is now remember like three years ago at least so this new rage of anti-semitism had not popped up yet and i walked away thinking this guy could be dangerously anti-semit and for the listeners they have to understand nowadays everything is called bias and so if a jewish person says this oh it's by your bias what your bias in favor of wanting to stay alive and not discriminate and hate against etc so rest assured this is not bias i grew up muslim and by the way look at what happened what did Donald trump do first he came for the latinos and said they were criminals and rapists and nothing happened then he came for the muslim and he said we should ban all muslims until we figure out what the hell is going on newsflash he's never gonna figure out what the hell is going on he's an idiot okay we didn't do anything then he came for the chinese we didn't do anything then he came for trans folks we didn't do anything and now we're at the end here anti-semitism is the end and so it is the most toxic of all of these the right wing knows in their god that the guy who crossed the border doesn't have a dollar in his pocket he can't control a damn thing they know it they know it and when they think about the elites they don't know reality i went to work and i went to columbia law school i know i've got money from private equity etc who is in the operational in fact you could look it up you could look at the partners at the top private equity companies in the world those are the wealthiest most powerful people in the world you know what they are they're christians muslims jews budis lack of white asian it has nothing to do with race it has nothing to do with religion it just has to do with hey they said this is that led to those particular people being at the top and so for the simplistic mind they think no it's a group of people because humans are tribal and yeah you can't talk sensitive okay well if jews are on the world and they're all super powerful and super rich how do you explain Israel where there are wealthy jews, middle class jews and poor jews how come the poor jews aren't running the world how come they're not part of the cabal no logic not required and so once you lose the threat of logic we're all screwed because that means you can get them to believe anything well i mean other thing is i mean if we're running the world boy i mean we've been nothing but persecuted for thousands of years almost wiped out during world war two we are really really shitty at it yeah yeah i mean but that's the thing guys once you lose track of logic there's no end to it if the jews were running the world why did they let six million of them die right and then of course they're immediately going to go to no they didn't right and right and by the way i give adl anti-deformationally tremendous amount of credit because when trump came for the muslims they actually stood up and said no so they were wonderful in helping muslims and other americans and all of us right now should be deeply deeply concerned about anti-Semitism whether you're jewish or not all right i think because of time purposes we're gonna have to end it right there but jank thank you so much for coming on this it was an absolute pleasure to talk to you thank you guys appreciate it next time i will be just as harsh on this that was excellent what i mean now is andrew pro-cop senior writer at vox andrew i swear we're not having you on because i've basically had someone on named andrew or some form of the name andy every week since i've taken over i swear that's not why i'm having you on i'm having you on i wanted you on because you wrote a really good article at vox about a guy who has somehow become sort of quietly in the sense that he's not a household name a very influential person on the right and the guy's name is kurtis yarvin tell us about this dude yeah so first of all thanks so much for having me on i'm not interested in writing about kurtis yarvin because i kept kind of seeing his name come up in the context of this year's midterms there was a great article in vanity fair by james pogue that delved into a little bit of this how to now republican senate nominees jd vans and blake masters have actually referred to this guy's ideas on the campaign trail and they are of course both also funded by the billionaire peter teal and teal is also a fan of yarvin so i began looking more into what he's been writing about and saying and he is a very unusual figure in american political commentary because he is explicitly outwardly anti-democracy he thinks democracy is a bad system he thinks it should be abolished in the united states in favor of a monarchy or some kind of one-man rule system where one person has absolute power to do what he wants and essentially getting rid of both you know the voters and the separation of power that exists in the american system so pretty far out there and so i thought it is really interesting i don't want to lead anyone to believe that vans and masters are fully on board with this with this plant they they more view yarvin as an influence on their thinking because yarvin has had a critique of what's wrong with america that's gotten more and more traction on segments of the right i agree that this doesn't necessarily mean that masters and vans are sort of pro-monarchy or pro-one person rule on the other hand i don't think either of those guys would have a problem with that if they were the one person blake masters was asked about this he says i believe in democracy i believe in the constitution i believe in our republic but you know the reason he has caught on among them is he started writing a blog back in two thousand seven fifteen years ago under the pseudonym mincias mold bugger very interesting moniker he kind of presented his whole theory of how the world works right then he looks at america today and he says this is what's wrong the american government no longer works the president has no real power to achieve what he wants there's the deep state and congress and the court are all hening in the president and our political leaders just can't do anything it's too dysfunctional then he also has a critique of kind of the culture he talks about what he calls the cathedral which is what he believes to be the elite academic and journalistic institutions that set the boundaries of discourse in america and rule certain ideas okay to talk about other things not okay to talk about this very much caught on with conservatives in recent years conservatives who are very exercise and angry about you know woke is up or the woke who feel that everyone is trying to cancel them for their views on race or gender or whatever it's a sort of theory of why this is happening that like the media and academia are pushing everything so far to the left this helps explain the world to them so he has caught on among people like vans people like masters tucker carlson had him on a fox streaming show and talk to him for over an hour about his ideas yorkin is also noteworthy if you're very online you probably heard of people talking about being red pilled or or pilled that's a reference to the matrix where mio is offered the red pill which will let him see reality clearly for the first time or the blue coat with a let him remain in a fantasy and yarvan is actually the person who first popularized that metaphor which is now kind of everywhere especially on the right with regards to politics with regards to this idea that you know what you see around you and the media what you hear from your political elites it's all fake to a certain extent and then there's this real reality of how the world works that he's going to show you and so he helps show jadie banson like masters these things they've cited him as as a big influence in their thinking yeah you point out in your piece you even say that vans has used that language he said he's been red-built yes in a conversation when he was referring to yarvan specifically so you know that's a background on yarvan but the real reason i thought this was super important is that not only does he theorize about you know why democracy is bad like any political theorist could come up with reasons for that and it would be an abstract thing and it would be a deal but he also has a bunch of very specific ideas about what could be done to topple american democracy even that could be viewed as a theoretical thing until the 2020 election in january 6th which suddenly makes what seemed to be sort of far-fetched fantasies a little closer to reality when you have the president trying to overturn the outcome of the election to stay in power when you have a mob of his supporters storming the capital like this is pretty close to the kinds of things that he's been wanting to happen for some time and he has a bunch of proposals for how to essentially do january 6th better next time how to make it work for the forces who do want to overthrow the american government yes it's pretty scary stuff and you know there's an interesting thing going on here in the old days you sort of thought of republican strategists and people like that you thought of like a lea water like rough and tumble brawler type which i'm don't mean as a compliment to lea water but now it's like you have someone like yarvin who is like you said a lot of what he says sounds a lot like what i remember from my college philosophy courses it's sort of you know they even have a isn't there a phrase that the dark enlightenment yeah that was used to refer to sort of the movement he's helped start there are a couple other people bloggers online writers associated with it it's called the dark enlightenment or sometimes neo-reactions that kind of became the term associated with it in the early 2010s and he was always one of the leading figures here and that's when his ideas first got some attention and some notoriety especially in tech circles he is a computer programmer who is in the bay area he has a very kind of startup tech guy trolling almost mindset of looking at the world that did appeal to by no means most but certainly some people in the tech world who didn't really buy into liberalism or progressivism who don't like what they refer to as the social justice warriors or the woke he was already kind of catching on in the early 2010s and he got some attention his identity was revealed by journalists at the time and he got some real world blowback from that as you know he would try to speak at some conferences for his startup and there would be big protests his invite got rescinded to one a lot of advertisers pulled out of another one that was kind of his first brush with infamy so to speak and he sort of disappeared from the radar stream for a while he closed down his blog he went on hiatus in 2014 shut it down in 2016 to focus on the startup that he had helped found but then he left that in 2020 and has kind of returned to the political scene and now appears to be more influential than ever on the right and specifically among what has been deemed the new right you know we started talking about neo-reaction and the dark enlightenment but now we're getting into the post-Trump ideas conversation on the right and of course what Trump did was he essentially repelled a bunch of the existing conservative intellectuals and people like there were a lot of you know conservatives who might have had far right views on tax policy or whatever but we did believe in liberal democracy and we're kind of appalled at Trump's behavior and they all sort of left most of them left the party or got purged or just kind of quit you can see this with like people leaving national review and going to found their own publication and in the senate with people getting primary or retiring and so on and so there's this new intellectual space on the right where the ideas that are in play are much further in this kind of challenging democracy space then has certainly existed in my lifetime as far as I'm aware of like all sorts of things that were previously on the table or dean taboo are now being discussed and this is this is the new right um there's another great piece in the New York Times magazine about the Claremont Institute they're kind of the main think tank affiliated with this and they helped kind of welcome Yarvin into the full they started running his essays in 2019 and 2020 and now he's all over this kind of new right podcast space laying out his ideas and yeah he's really in the mix and his influence seems to everything so you mentioned peter teal earlier and yeah I mean obviously you know Yarvin has influenced teal and this is probably not a surprise since he sort of floats from one weirdo techno libertarian theory to another it feels like anyway and you know then you mentioned people like masters and JD Vans both of whom are funded by Peter Teal and so is that the pipeline now is this is this the is it the Yarvin to Teal to candidate's pipeline I would have to track exactly how that happens there's a good report in mother Jones that I'd linked to in my story that Blick Masters was reading Yarvin back in 2012 when he was I believe in business school or law school at that time he was kind of getting interested in teal around the same time but I wouldn't be able to say who is responsible for you know somebody reading him what I do know is that teal and Yarvin are pretty close teal started funding his startup about a decade ago and then emails were later leaked that confirmed that Yarvin attended teal's election night watch party in 2016 for the presidential election later Yarvin was emailing another alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos and Yarvin wrote teal is uh fully enlightened but he plays it very carefully in public so we don't know exactly where teal is putting his money and how it may or may not be spreading Yarvin's ideas specifically or ideas but we do know that teal said back in 2009 he no longer believes that democracy and freedom are compatible he was disillusioned with the state of democracy and again he's he's interested in a lot of these strange intellectual characters on the right but his relationship with Yarvin specifically has been a long lasting thing this has not been a momentary uh flirtation if you will with with Yarvin I thought they're pretty close and I don't think the full extent of their relationship is fully understood at this point but there's something there it seems like it's a lot more than sea studying for example which was another Peter Teal interest yeah yeah for like a year or two or whatever he wrote this in the piece if I recall correctly that Yarvin doesn't like being called a fascist and he prefers something closer to a monarch what is the distinction there in this philosophy is there one this is a controversial question because his critics say he's a fascist like this is obviously fascism and he argues that fascism was a specific 20th century phenomenon that arose kind of in response to communism it was this mobilization of people on the rights to take power in various countries you know monarchy existed long before fascism existed it was kind of the default system of national government for centuries uh for anyone dream with democracy so he argues that you know monarchy is just a broader category than fascism now when you dig into his specific ideas of how to get to that monarchy they certainly start to sound kind of fascist like at one point he was talking on a podcast with actually a former Trump administration official Michael Anton about you know ways that January 6 could be done better next time and he said you know Trump has a lot of support among the police department the security services how about we start having the Trump supporters among those start-wing special armbands so everyone knows come on so he likes to play with that he likes to you know say oh i'm not a fascist but you know here are these things that might be a good idea and everyone sees that as well that certainly sounds pretty fascist i'm not a fascist but let's bring back the brown shirts yeah yeah and honestly i you know i feel like it's liberal and progressive kind of conversation about the far right in recent years there's just a lot of energy put into whether to use the terms racist or fascist to describe them what i tried to do in this piece was focused on what he was specifically arguing and proposing and kind of let that speak for itself which i think it does yes without like getting into this like interminable dispute over what term is appropriate for this or is not appropriate i think like we can have an abstract academic discussion about language all day but what i think is most interesting is that he has these very specific ideas about what could be done in the near future to overthrow the American government so you can call that fascist over you can call that whatever you want a right-wing coup but let's talk about this stuff that is out there and being talked about on the right now and being considered in some form and and i think it's it's important to for people who are not on the far right to just be aware that these conversations are happening and to remember after january six that these things may not be so abstract for forever yeah so his stance is sort of it's basically not all autocrats or fascists yes okay so we get we need a hashtag hashtag not all autocrats so before let you go you are going to become sort of this it's this weird cultural figure where he pops up at like these in the hipster scenes even here in downtown new york he goes to parties how did that happen yeah that is definitely a very strange developments that i will admit i don't fully have my handle on i'm in i'm in washington dc yeah i'm gonna leave that to the yorkers to figure out because i don't totally understand what's happening there but what i do know is that he has explicitly said that his strategy going forward what he thinks is most important is to sow seeds of doubt of democracy in the minds of people on the left that he wants everyone who is on the left liberals left us would have you socialists to all become convinced that democracy is failing we barely have democracy anymore why is this even worth saving what is the point of this so he has been focusing on lately on topics where he could actually find some agreement on the left because a lot of people on the left are concerned that our government has become a bit too sclerotic and ineffective that there are flaws in the constitution the president isn't strong enough to get the legislation he wants past that the supreme court is too powerful now the left is very concerned about the supreme court i think accurately and just that politics has just become this endless slaw of warfare against the other side and he's trying to sort of disillusion people on the left with the system as a whole and because he believes once that disillusion spreads enough that will pave the way for a right wing like leader to take over with minimal resistance so it's basically taking sort of the left wing bernie sanders the system is rigged you know energy and trying to harness that yeah or at least spread that feeling but rather than have it channel towards something positive like electing bernie right have it just ended a slaw of disillusionment so that people won't even bother to try to save the government or democracy that we have to pave the way for the people he wants to take over andrew thank you so much for being here i encourage everyone there's so much in the article that we didn't have a chance to touch on i encourage everyone to go over to box.com and check it out and check it out andrew again thank you so much and and thanks for writing this i learned a ton from it it was all really interesting thanks so much for having me this was a great chat Anthony Fisher maybe leave me all right so this is the uh the time on the show when we not only dance but when we do the segment called fuck that guy and we're gonna do something a little special today and we're gonna share well this doesn't sound right uh we're gonna share a fuck that guy um it is one of the absolute dumbest people on the planet i don't think that's hyperbole i think that is actual truth i've said before i believe that when he tries to get dressed in the morning he is absolutely defeated by buttons his name is charlie kirk and he had this to say about the uh the attack on paul paul paul paul for example politico says top republicans reject any link between glp rhetoric and paul paul paul paul sea assault of course you should reject any link why is the republican party why is the conservative movement to blame for gay schizophrenic nudists that are hemp jewelry makers breaking into somebody's home or maybe not breaking into somebody's home why are we applying for that exactly and why is he still in jail why is he not been bailed out by the way if some amazing patriot out there in san francisco or the bay area wants to really be a midterm hero someone should go and bail this guy out i bet his bales like 30 or 40 000 bucks bail him out and then go ask him some questions so Anthony what do we have here we have a guy first of all calling for he says so many just ridiculously dumb things in this thing it's hard to even know where to start but i guess let's start with uh he wants someone to be a hero and and bail this guy out the thing that you've got me is there's a lot of criminal justice reform talking there and he's talking he he says that you can commit murder and be out in the day in chicago which chicago's got a lot of problems but that's not true uh that's not true uh that's not true yeah so whatever the motivation of the perpetrator you'd think that a violent assault on a person in their home would beg the kind of response for from a conservative like charlie kirk which would be more like you know if you must make fun of the plosse be like this is why they're dumb they should have been on to the teeth with you know automatic weapons pointing every inch of the sidewalks of this guy never got near them that's that would be the you know kind of principal logical charlie kirk right wing take but uh there is no principle and there's no logic so it has to go into this guy as a hero this guy we this is the kind of uh crime that uh it's okay in fact laudable he's a he's a hero we must bail him out and take advantage of uh i guess sepsis goes lacks bail laws for potential political assassins which was nothing yeah and again there's so much more he talks about uh he read some headlines that that mentioned that the you know gop denies any link to the attacker and he's like well why would the gop why would conservatives have to deny that and i'll tell you why charlie and it's real easy because as we discussed in the main section of the show uh this guy has a huge internet footprint and he is spouting he spouts a lot of things that have become mainstreamed by the republican party post 2016 and this gets me to be something else like that ronah uh romney mikdaniel said the other day and it was sort of the same thing and she's like why you can't blame you know republican attacks on plosse you know verbal attacks on plosse you can't you can't draw a line between those and what happened here and the answer that is in a in a sane world you absolutely couldn't but in in the world we live in now you absolutely can and particularly on the republican side or on the right because you know that we saw what happened on january six we saw how words led to violent actions and we've seen it time and time again and republicans know this and they know that there is a fairly large segment of their support is coming from people who are to not to put a fine point on it unhinged and they know what these words mean to those people so yes in a totally sane world you could say hey us going after Nancy Pelosi that's just politics and and yes it is just politics except you know exactly what you're doing you know how this if you want to get mentoring and candidate about it you know how this activates a certain segment of your people and you either don't care or it's what you want and this is strictly my opinion please feel free to tell me i'm being stupid here not to introduce another uh fuck that guy candidate here but uh just the other day on friday john cardillo who's a you know right when commentator x and rpg cop friend of rondisantis invited guest of rondisantis several times uh he tweeted i'm gonna say it i couldn't care what less would happen to polosi he and his wife are evil mother folk fuckers who have raped and pillaged this nation blah blah blah yeah damn who could possibly hear that kind of rhetoric and take it to its most extreme end game right and you know it's often been pointed to that there you know have been left wing incidences of this like the guy who shot steves galese and uh at the practice for the congressional baseball game this guy attempted a mass assassination of republican lawmakers and if it weren't for the capital police being there because galese was there as the third republican in line they would have been a massacre and you know i honestly do think that story is a little too easily forgotten but here's the huge difference all right when people pointed out that this guy was a bernie sander supporter bernie sander's immediately and unequivocally denounced it denounced violence right sent his sympathies to the you know just at least and anyone else who was in danger i don't even think on the most comy tanky edge lord twitter accounts around that time was there anybody kind of capitalizing on it like going yes that's made all of them i don't think that really happened whereas here you have let's say a mainstream conservative commentators basically saying they're evil and they had it coming yeah exact bernie sanders there are people probably uh second of our listenership doesn't like bernie sanders like him or not there's nothing bernie sanders has ever said that would resonate as a call to violence there is a ton of things that have been said by multiple people on the right that could easily be read as calls to violence and again i'm not you know i want to make it clear i'm not saying that anything that these republican people said was illegal i'm not saying that they should be you know they shouldn't be charged as accessories to this crime or anything like that but the point is they know what they're doing they know what they're doing when they do these sometimes veiled sometimes not calls for violence when they accuse democrats of being treasonous when they accuse democrats of being murderers when they accuse democrats of wanting to kill republicans etc they know exactly what they're doing and this is what happens and they know that that's my point hope you enjoyed checking out this episode of the new abnormal we're back every Tuesday friday and sunday if you enjoyed it please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going see you next 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