Darryl Cooper in Conversation with Greg Johnson

17,828 words

Darryl Cooper has been in the news a lot after his interview with Tucker Carlson. In 2016, Cooper invited Greg Johnson on as a guest for his podcast Decline of the West. Presented here is the complete transcript of their conversation. The audio version can be listened to by clicking here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”

Darryl Cooper: Hey everybody, this is Daryl Cooper. This is Decline of the West podcast episode six. I’m here with Greg Johnson, founder and editor of Counter-Currents Publishing. How are you doing Greg? 

Greg Johnson: I’m fine. Thank you for having me on the show. 

DC: Yeah, it’s good to have you here. I’m glad to hear it. So, there is a lot of ground I want to cover with you today. And so out of respect for your time, I’m ready to jump right into this. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about Counter-Currents Publishing and what it is you guys do, and I guess start there. 

GJ: I founded Counter-Currents Publishing in 2010 with Michael Polignano, who was my business partner for the first three years of it. Counter-Currents was founded as a publishing house; we do print publishing — we publish books — and we also have a webzine. I call it North American New Right, but everyone calls it Counter-Currents. 

The purpose of Counter-Currents is to provide a forum for writers who are broadly compatible with the project of creating a New Right in North America, and by a New Right I mean a metapolitical approach to changing politics. We wish to change people’s ideas about identity and morality to lay the foundations for actual political change. 

The political order we envision is ethno-nationalist. We want to create a white homeland in North America for people of European descent. And the reason for that is very simple. We don’t think that multiculturalism is working out very well for white people. We look around the world, and in every white society, birth rates are below replacement. 

There are many causes for this, but the principal cause, in our view, is that we’ve lost sovereign control of our homelands. There are no white societies that make the preservation of their people and our race as a whole a political priority. They’re chasing other dreams instead. And that has instituted really alarming demographic trends.

Due to a culture of consumerism and selfishness, people are not reproducing. There are all kinds of economic and cultural incentives to not reproduce. There are also incentives to reproduce outside the race (miscegenation), and we’re finding that our living spaces are being invaded by nonwhites who are highly fertile. 

So we’re losing control of our homelands, and we think that that has to be reversed both in Europe, where our race comes from, and also in the European colonial societies like the United States or Canada or Australia, New Zealand, or places in South America like Argentina or Uruguay, which are still largely of European descent. 

DC: Okay. Thank you. That introduction is going to be pretty jarring to a lot of listeners. So this is going to lead straight into my first real question. And, this is going to serve as an introduction to the rest of the questions from you. So if you’ll indulge me for a few minutes, it’ll take me a minute to build up to, I just want to be very clear about where I’m going with this first question. 

I’ve always been very fascinated with people who make a decision to split off from the mainstream when they very clearly have a choice to do otherwise. I love John Krakauer’s books. For example, he wrote Into Thin Air about his experience climbing Mount Everest when a bunch of people in his group died up there, and he doesn’t weigh himself down with the technical details about climbing. He doesn’t wax aesthetic about the majesty of the mountain or the lovely views of the grand ambition of human achievement or any of that. He spends most of the book explaining in grinding detail what an utterly miserable experience the entire thing is; you have a headache, you’re nauseous, you can’t eat, you can’t even enjoy it because the oxygen level’s so brutal, and all these things. And he tries to get to the bottom of what kind of a person would do this to himself and why. 

He wrote a book about Christopher McCandless, a smart upper middle-class kid who graduated from college because he felt that it was his duty to meet his parents’ expectations up to that point for having raised him. But then he splits off and he wanders through the wastelands around the Salton Sea in the desert in Nevada, working his way up eventually to Alaska. And when he gets there, he abandons his car and burns the last of his money, and he goes off like the title of the book says, Into the Wild. 

This kid ran into a lot of people on the way. He developed relationships. He had a profound impact on a lot of the people he met. So this was not some kid who lost his mind. He wasn’t crazy in any sense of the word that would still retain its meaning. He knew exactly what he was doing, and this was a decision that he made. 

So somebody like you is very interesting to me. You could play society’s game if you wanted to. You’ve got your Ph.D. in philosophy. That speaks not only to your intellectual horsepower, which you know has never been incompatible with eccentricity. But more importantly it speaks to the fact that you know how to play the game. Showing up on time every day, the discipline of work, the being able to navigate a university environment for many years. That whole part of it. 

Now today you run Counter-Currents Publishing, and I don’t know how many books are out, but you’re pretty prolific. So all of this speaks to the fact that you could have shut your mouth, maybe kept your social and political philosophy close to the vest, maybe venting on certain issues when you knew you were among like-minded friends, and so forth. You could have become a successful academic or writer. You could have done the bourgeois thing without bringing into your life the complications and the difficulties that you must have known the path that you chose was going to invite. The forces in our societies that are aligned against people like you are powerful and ubiquitous, and they know what they’re doing. 

I mentioned to you before we started recording that I’m going to be interviewing a black nationalist soon and a Right-wing Zionist settler from the area outside Hebron. I had to really think about whether I wanted to do this interview, because I knew that I could interview those other two guys with no problems. But I know that there’s a good chance that just having a conversation with you is going to possibly make not only my own life more difficult in certain ways, but could even cascade down on to my family and people who know me, because that’s how the forces that are aligned against people like you operate. 

I apologize again for this long-winded introduction to this question, but I guess I wanted to make clear that this isn’t the standard question that opens a lot of interviews like this, which is some form of why do you think what you think or how did you get to think this way. A lot of people think a lot of things, and when those thoughts are too psychologically or socially hazardous, most of us are pretty good about just stuffing them back down, so that we can get back to our lives.

I’m interested in the path that caused you to cross over that gulf. Were there were events or revelations or flashes of insight? I’m interested in the path that led you to decide that the drama implied by breaking your own society’s most dangerous taboos were not going to be sufficient to deter you from this path. That it wasn’t going to be enough for you to have an opinion, but that you had to act, and you even had to devote your life to something that you knew would invite not just incomprehension but real hostility and real hatred and social and professional consequences onto yourself. So can you talk about that a little bit?

GJ: I don’t want to give myself too much credit. On the one hand, I’ve always been somewhat contrarian. When I was a high school student and even before that, when I was in my early teens, I was very interested in history and culture. A lot of it was art history, but also ancient history, archaeology, etc. 

I was very interested in exotic cultures: Amerindian societies, Mesoamerican and South American Indian civilizations, Easter Island, etc. Thor Heyerdahl was a great hero of mine when I was young. I think I read my first Thor Heyerdahl book when I was twelve years old. It was Fatu Hiva, and then I read Aku-Aku after that. 

One of the things that I learned from the experiences of nonwhite peoples in Polynesia and also the Americas is just how fragile civilization is, and how civilizations that are very ancient in their roots and very powerful, can still be really brittle when encountering outside forces that are sufficiently ruthless and have certain technological and organizational advantages, and how a world can end. And these worlds ended over and over again. I was very impressed with the art of these people and saddened to see the destruction of their material civilization, and, of course, we know almost nothing about their actual beliefs, so their spiritual civilization was even more fragile. Things like that were very important to me. 

I was a big Egyptophile when I was a kid and a teenager. I studied the history of Egypt. I used to know all the pharaohs of the major dynasties. I used to know all the Roman and Byzantine emperors and pretenders. My brain was a sponge for that kind of information. 

Of course, the lessons recur over and over again about the fragility of civilization. So I had a strong sense that our own civilization is very fragile. Very beautiful things we created could be lost, potential creation and exploration could be nipped in the bud, if people didn’t make the right decisions. 

So I had a strong sense that civilization is very fragile. I also had a strong sense that we were making all the wrong decisions. I used to be a libertarian. I used to think that statism was the wrong choice. And, of course, if you look at Communism in the twentieth century, it’s a very easy conclusion to draw.

DC: Sure.

GJ: I also had a sense that if people don’t speak out about these problems when they’re getting started or when they’re in their earlier stages, it’s very irresponsible, because as these problems progress over time, it gets harder and harder to correct them. If you’re trying to get from point A to point B, and there’s a 1% deviation in the course at the very beginning, well that’s easy to correct after a few steps. But if you go hundreds of miles, suddenly it’s very difficult to get to the target. 

I always had a strong sense that initial decisions, fundamental principles, have long-term consequences, and if you don’t get things right from the start, as time passes, it becomes harder and harder to correct things. And, therefore, farsighted people need to speak up; they need to be brave. 

I was always less motivated than my peers by social approval. I don’t know why that is. It has just always been the way that I am. When I was a teenager or even younger, people would try to talk to me about God, and I would get impatient because it sounded like they weren’t making any sense. And I’d say I just don’t believe this, I’m sorry. I knew there were social consequences for that, but when their eyes and mouths grew wide in shock, I am ashamed to say I found that a little bit satisfying. I enjoyed that effect. I didn’t say things just for the effect, but it didn’t bother me that I believe things that were out of step with the rest of humanity. 

Okay, so flash forward to when I get my doctorate and go off into academia. At the time I would have been ripe for the picking, easily co-opted by the system. I worked a long time. I wrote and studied, and I had an excellent education. I could think and write rings around a lot of my peers. However, when I was coming out of my Ph.D. program, political correctness was already stifling in academia, and it’s only gotten worse. I can’t imagine being in that environment now. 

I basically couldn’t find a decent job anywhere. I knew silly females in graduate school who had just defended a dissertation prospectus about writing feminist interpretations of their three favorite movies. Something that’s stupid and easy to do. A dissertation on how they feel as a woman about their three favorite movies. And these women would go off and get thirteen or fourteen job interviews for tenure-track jobs. That’s how insane the system was around 2000 and 2001, when I started going on the job market. And it’s only gotten worse since then. 

So if the system had cared about co-opting me, I might be a tenured professor at some university churning out articles that might be read by seven to ten people. And books that might be bought by a few hundred libraries. And people might leaf through them a few hundred times, and a dozen people might read them cover to cover. And that’s basically the life of an academic, where you do grindingly overly-detailed research that almost nobody reads and has almost no impact on the world. 

And here’s the sad and pathetic thing about it: I would have been absolutely delighted with that life. But it was denied me. The system didn’t co-opt me, didn’t give me all that security and comfort that I would be too afraid to lose. And it’s not because I was outwardly politically incorrect, although I think these people could sense that I didn’t want to play their little reindeer games. The main problem was just being pale and male. That was my main handicap. It had nothing to do with my thinking. They didn’t want me for my mind, basically. 

So I ended up having a short inglorious academic career, and by the time that I was out of academia and I had decided that I’m not going to torture myself trying to get back into a job surrounded by these people, I was very much into the White Nationalist scene, and I could see all kinds of ways that I could make it better. And so that’s what I decided to do, and, as Pepe the Frog says, “It feels good, man.” I write articles that are read by thousands or tens of thousands of people. Even things that I write on philosophers get read a lot. They get discussed a lot. I actually have an impact on the world that I could not have had if I had remained in academia. 

One of the things that I’ve been talking about for the past few years is the army that I’m going to raise up. Is Greg Johnson building an army? The answer is yes. I’m building an army of NEETs. Building an army of people who are not in education, employment or training. They’re basically people who went to college, got educations, racked up huge amounts of student debt. They’re all white, of course. They racked up huge amounts of student debt, and then they ended up working full time or part time stocking shelves at Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods or something like that, or as baristas. Because the Obama economy has no need for educated white people. 

There was a Breitbart article, five or six years ago now, about how 25% of recent college graduates in the state of New Jersey were living with their parents. The system has stopped co-opting them too. So one of the things that’s contributing massively, mightily, to the growth of the Alternative Right is that there are a lot of very smart young white people who don’t have anything to lose, because they don’t have a job, they don’t have a mortgage, and they don’t have a future anyway. There’s nothing that the system can threaten to take away. And at the same time, they can envision toppling this system and replacing it with something better. 

That’s what the White Nationalist movement really is all about. We have a plausible explanation for why people who were told that they were tomorrow’s leaders are now underemployed and deeply in debt. We also have plausible solutions for that. The Occupy Movement with its “progressive stack” and unfocused kvetching about banks and devotion to anti-racism, basically anti-whiteism, does not have an answer, so Occupy basically withered away. 

But the Alternative Right as they call it, White Nationalism as I call it, is growing, and it’s growing because we have a constituency. The constituency has not been co-opted by the system. In fact it’s been alienated by the system, and they have plenty of time on their hands, plenty of motivation and access to the internet. Thus far, it’s been largely an online movement, but now we’re taking it offline into the 3D world, and a lot of the people who are showing up are tremendously impressive. So we’re going to be a terror in the next ten or fifteen years. The world that we live in is going to change very rapidly. I do not think America as it exists today will exist in 2025. 

Darryl Cooper: Something that you just said, definitely, it’s something I’ve observed. I think maybe ten or fifteen or twenty years ago, a lot of the time when you would think of a White Nationalist, you’re not necessarily thinking of a savory character. And I think there was probably some justice to that stereotype.

But a lot of the people that I’m meeting now, who self-identify as Alt Right, like you said, are college-educated people who are well put-together, who carry themselves well, who often have families that are at a young age and who take care of them. It’s definitely a different brand of people than the Venice Beach skinhead that I would have run into when I was a kid. I don’t want to leave that theme of alienation that you were talking about right now, but we’re going to get into that in a little bit. I kind of have that ear-marked. 

There’s one question I wanted to ask about your introduction. I came around to the idea that civilizations are fragile a little bit differently than you did, although I assume there’s probably some intersection. I, like a lot of high-school boys, read Nietzsche a lot, and in my early twenties, I got to Oswald Spengler, and I love Spengler. I love Spengler today. I don’t adopt his ideology as whole cloth as I used to, but I still love him for the gift that he gave me at the time. 

Spengler famously, or maybe infamously in White Nationalist circles, prioritized culture over race. And in the 1930s, he was openly critical of the mere zoology as he called it of the National Socialists. And when he did talk about race, it was clear that the concept for him was rooted in metaphysics rather than just a sort of simple materialist biology. 

Who are some of the thinkers that have influenced your views on race, and is your social and political philosophy rooted in a metaphysical conception of race or something closer to home? Like maybe the sociological perspective that might’ve flowed from somebody like Robert Putnam, maybe if he’d had the courage to follow through his ideas to their conclusion. You talked about the fragility of civilization, but what was the thing that knotted together the idea of race and civilization for you? Because there’s a lot of people today, at least in the United States and Europe for sure, who would not necessarily force that connection.

Greg Johnson: I came upon Spengler somewhat later than you. It was in graduate school when I read Decline of the West. It’s a magnificent book, a truly magnificent work of the imagination, a magnificent synthesis, and a very useful heuristic. A lot of it doesn’t ring true. You can quibble with a lot of his facts, and I think his underlying relativism is too extreme. I don’t believe that it’s meaningful to talk about different mathematics in different civilizations. I don’t think that stands the test of philosophical argument. That said, it’s a brilliant heuristic. 

It’s essentially a kind of Epicurean account of the rise and fall of civilization. It is a cyclical view of history, but it’s not Traditionalist but Epicurean in inspiration. The thinker who is closest to my mind, the thinker whom I find to be one of the most adequate as well as pregnant with new possibilities in the philosophy of history and culture, is Giambattista Vico. I love Vico. He was a great reactionary. There’s an essay by Steven Holmes, “The Permanent Structure of Antiliberal Thought.” It’s basically a description of Vico. He doesn’t make that clear, but Vico is the paradigm of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment critic of modernity and liberalism. I see Spengler as fitting into that tradition as well. Spengler was deeply influenced by Nietzsche, and I love Nietzsche too. But that’s just bibliographical. 

How does race figure into it? Spengler was just wrong about race because he thought that Franz Boas was telling the truth about race. He thought that Boas’ studies that claim that people’s heads changed when they moved to the New World and were in a different culture or a cultural environment or landscape refuted the idea that that race is mutable only by biological evolution. But we know now that Boas was making it up, that it was fraudulent, that it’s not true. So if Spengler were around today, he might not hold the same view. 

Spengler was part Jewish, and therefore he also had a personal motivation to be opposed to the kind of racial purist attitudes that were floating around in Germany in the interwar period, and certainly in the Third Reich. But those are questions I’d like to set aside. 

My eyes glaze over and I get very uncomfortable when people talk about metaphysical notions of race. When Evola talks about race in different senses of the word, that’s the weakest thing in his work. Race is simply a biological concept. That’s all it is. If you want to talk about character types and the like, that’s a separate issue. But race is a biological concept, and it’s only a biological concept. 

If people start talking about metaphysical notions of race, they’re either trying to bootleg in some kind of dualistic metaphysics, or they are confusing race with other categories that are perfectly legitimate and useful like the study of different character types or soul types, as in the Platonic psychology of reason, spirit, and desire, which allows you to talk about different types of men: the desire-driven man, the rational man, and the honor-driven man. Or the psychology of the temperaments and humors. All of these are perfectly legitimate. I just don’t want to call them race. I just want to reserve that term for biology. 

In terms of my own thinking about race, I was always deeply aware of it, because I was so fascinated with exotic peoples when I was a kid. My parents subscribed to National Geographic, and their friends had stacks of old ones in their basements from their kids, and they’d give them to me. I was just fascinated with physical anthropology and cultural anthropology from a very early age. 

I was sort of a connoisseur, just on the surface, of different racial types. I could look at aborigines or Papuans or other peoples like that, and at a glance I could pretty much classify them in terms of racial and subracial types. I didn’t have any negative attitudes towards other races because I grew up in an almost entirely white environment. My attitude towards them was fascination. I still have lots of books on my shelves about Amerindians, the Far East, Polynesia, and so forth. So it is both an old and an abiding interest to me. 

Thus I never bought the idea that race was somehow a social construct or it’s all culture. It took me years to understand where that was even coming from. It’s basically a metaphysical posit of egalitarianism. They have a project of making everybody the same, and therefore they have to posit that the main stumbling block in the path of that, biological race, can somehow be ignored. And it’s as simple as that. They constantly talk about deconstructing our concepts. We need to deconstruct their concepts. They constantly talk about how our concepts are just creations of our power drives and our agendas. Well, they’re tipping their hand about their own ideas as well. 

I’ve always been a person who’s motivated by the truth, and I’ve changed my views on a lot of things very radically over time because I just found that certain arguments were better than others. I’ve always found the idea that systems of ideas are just expressions of their time and place or just ideologies, tools of domination, and so forth to be a tell. If people say that, chances are they practice what they preach. Their ideas are often just tools, and they’re dishonest. 

I took me a long time to come around to that because I’ve always been so naïve. I would think maybe I just need to analyze Foucault a little bit more, and then it’ll make sense. Perhaps the problem lies in me. It took me many years before I finally just got to the point of declaring that certain systems of ideas are just nonsense, carefully constructed to serve a particular agenda. And they have to be deconstructed as that. 

But I’ve never bought the race is a social construct stuff from the beginning. And once I got out into the world and started interacting with people instead of living in a completely white bubble, I started noticing that racial differences are not just exotic and interesting, but they’re also absolutely crucial for determining people’s likely behaviors, likely level of performance, likely level of civilization, likelihood of civilizational conflict and decline, and so forth. So it wasn’t a great leap for me to become a race realist. I was a race realist for a long time before I actually decided, “Screw multiculturalism”; screw these forms of liberalism that I was clinging to. We simply must have homogeneous societies. We need to change the demographic composition and trends of our societies if we want to survive. 

I’ve always been worried about demographics. It was always in the background, nagging and gnawing at me, even as I was holding onto universalistic political ideas like libertarianism or classical liberalism or conservatism. I worried that if our population is replaced by dumber people, none of this is going to work. And at a certain point, that nagging little voice in the back of my head got louder and louder, and finally I thought that I just had to change my political paradigm. We can’t afford to play these little games anymore. 

There was a time when I was a post-libertarian conservative trying to figure out ways of squaring the circle and maintaining a sensible, functional society in an increasingly multicultural environment. And when you just look at the trends, after a while you have to say: “No, it’s not going to work.” 

For Republican conservative types, the last refuge before full-on White Nationalism is assimilationism. But even if we could assimilate all these people who are coming in, we’re not even trying. They’re assimilating us one taco at a time. And until such time as we start trying to assimilate these people, you need to stand up and say, “Halt! We can’t have any more of this invasion.” 

I had so many conservative friends who would run screaming from the room when I would wag my finger at them and say, “If you really believe in assimilation, and we’re not assimilating, you’ve got to blow the whistle and halt immigration.” But no, they wanted to marry some girl from the Philippines. They always had some private reservations, or they were involved in globalized businesses, and it was a good for their balance. They were invested in undermining wages in America, for instance. 

Long after I was a race realist, and long after I worried about demographic change, I finally got to the point of just saying that a universalistic conservative political ideology is just a sucker’s proposition. Game theory helped on this. I was aware for a long time that if you have an environment where everyone’s playing by individualist rules, and you come in working as a team, you have a systematic advantage. You demand that the individualists always give you a fair shake when they have something that you want. And when individualists come to you for some favor you can dispense, you duplicitously pretend like you’re giving them a fair shake, and then you hand it off to your cousin and pretend that he’s just the best guy for the job. 

Well, we’ve been importing a lot of people like that into our society, and it’s being hollowed out and taken over by these “parasite tribes,” as John Robb likes to call them. But you can only hack individualist white society, you can only hollow it out so far, until it’s like an image in Atlas Shrugged that always affected me, of a great tree that stood for hundreds of years and then came crashing down in a storm, and everyone was shocked to find that it was hollowed out and empty inside. It was just a shell. 

That’s what’s happening to us. We have this fantastically powerful society, with great cities and industries, but it’s being hollowed out. The people who built it are being replaced by other kinds of people who could never have built it and can never sustain it. And the people who built and sustained it, our ethnic group, is being constantly attacked. We’re constantly off balance. We’re constantly in retreat. We’re slated for replacement. Our enemies gloat about our demographic decline. But there’s going to come a point when we have a war or an economic crisis, and we will find that the resources of civility that got us through the Great Depression will not be there anymore. Eventually when this system is stress tested, parts are going to start flying off. It’s just going to collapse. 

We need to basically call a halt to this. It’s not working. We need to move back to a society that is normatively European rather than multicultural, and that is ethnically European. The demographic decline of whites in America has been going on since 1965. In 1965, we were a 90% white society. Everything was normatively white, meaning that all the nonwhite groups were required to live up to white social and legal norms. That exercised and important pressure on them to make them more bearable to be around. 

But the normative whiteness of our society has been thrown out, and the borders have been opened, and the founding white population is maybe 60% now. In many states, white children are a minority in kindergarten and first grade. That’s the future in store for us. A lot of white people are aware of that, and they feel hopeless. They feel like our people do not have a future on this continent anymore. Indeed, if present trends continue, we don’t. 

I think that the solution to that begins with the realization that it took fifty years to get this into this horrible mess. And it might take fifty years to get us out. As a practicable political proposal, let’s return to status quo 1965, and let’s do it in fifty years. Let’s halt immigration from the nonwhite world, and let’s create incentives for these people to emigrate rather than immigrate. And in fifty years, the older members of those communities will have died of old age, and the younger ones who are reproducing will have emigrated, and we could go back to status quo 1965. Hell, I’d like to go further than that. And in 2065, when I’m dead and gone, I hope people will move the goalposts further. 

But what matters is that it’s a totally feasible plan. You just have to change the basic incentive structures and laws that have caused our demographic decline. And then you have to wait. 

It’s a perfectly fair proposal. Whites have accepted that deal. We’ve accepted living in a system where our kind has no future. It’s perfectly fair for us to say we’re changing the rules now. Now nonwhites have no future in this society, and I’m not using “no future” as a military or mafia euphemism for murder. I’m simply saying that the nonwhite population will decline to the point where it’s negligible or non-existent for post-1965 groups. 

There’s no reason to have any of them here. They have homelands all over the globe to which they can return. But we have only one homeland, and we’re losing it. Blacks and a few Hispanics and Amerindians have a claim to being here. We can deal with that later.

DC: I am getting the feeling, Greg, that you must have missed a Jon Stewart’s address to the nation. You didn’t get the message. This isn’t your country. It never was. Come on, man.

GJ: Yeah, I missed that address to the nation. 

DC: Didn’t make an impact, maybe?

GJ: It didn’t make an impact. But seriously, the gloating our enemies are constantly engaged in: as someone once said, they’re partying today like it’s 2043, like we’re already a minority. And that is starting to spook the horses. It is starting to wake up ordinary white people. We’re in a weird situation. And we have to ask ourselves: “What’s the upside of sharing a continent and a political system with people who obviously hate us as a group?” 

Darryl Cooper: I think I can understand why Leftists are into all this stuff. That’s fine. I don’t really care, because they’re my enemy, and I don’t really care what they think. But you’re talking about conservatives, Republicans, and maybe even people who are very critical of some of the cultural Marxist ideology, yet who will react with real horror or hostility, as if you’ve said something really terrible, when you bring up even cutting off immigration, forget about White Nationalism or something like that.

And these will very often be people who are in full support of a Jewish ethnostate in Israel. If the Japanese were going to maintain a Japanese supermajority, they wouldn’t think anything of that. But they think very differently when it comes to their own country and their own people. I think that part of it is educational brainwashing. There’s definitely been a Leftist push in that direction. But I also think that the reason people are probably susceptible to it on the American Right has a lot to do with Christianity, and not just the turn the other cheek and love your neighbor kind of thing. 

There’s this idea in Christianity that Jesus has come to call out the people from among the nations. Come out, leave behind the old rivalries of blood and soil and all those things and join a community of the spirit. Or join a community, in a more secular way, that’s based on a common assent to a set of ideas. And as long as you believe in these things and are part of this consensus, then you’re a part of our people. 

I can understand why people are attracted to that idea, because I think that humans have throughout history had this tendency to seek larger scale social formations. We go from band societies to tribes. We go from tribes to super tribes. We go from super tribes to chiefdoms to states to what we have now. And I understand how people can be attracted to that. 

When the Left overreaches, as it has recently, people are still willing to come back to the ideas that you’re talking about, or at least come back to the ideas that somebody like Donald Trump is talking about. They think of race as like a backup power system. They think it’s a beautiful thing to have this community of the spirit or community of consensus. But they keep this backup power system in case that doesn’t work out.

And over the last several years when the Left has been partying like it’s 2043, with the rise of Black Lives Matter and what happened at the Donald Trump rally in San Jose, where people were burning American flags and attacking women and children purely because they are white Trump supporters, they start to realize that civic nationalism may be a beautiful idea, but if other people aren’t playing that game, then clearly it’s not going to work out very well. 

I’m actually okay with being in this society as an individual, and we all make our own choices. But it’s something that you alluded to earlier with game theory: That doesn’t work when there are alliances within society that aren’t operating that way. I think there’s a reason that in liberal societies, we’re very suspicious of secret societies. Because we know on some deep level, even if it doesn’t get spoken about outwardly, that if you have coalitions within the society and that sort of nepotism, then the whole thing will break down, because it just doesn’t work unless everybody’s on board. As soon as people start to favor one another based on some identity that is smaller than the larger whole that we’re all trying to participate in, then it all just breaks down, because as soon as one group cheats, everybody has to. Otherwise you’re just going to get run over. So I understand the appeal of it on some level, the aesthetic appeal or whatever you want to call it. But I think you’re probably right.

A lot of these people who talk about the Trump movement and the rise of the Alt Right being the result of decades of Republican rhetoric are completely insane. I think that the recent rise on the Right is entirely due to overreach from the Left. And is that the way you see it? Sounds like you do.

Greg Johnson: Of course. The people who can’t distinguish us from Mitt Romney Republicans are idiots. They’re on autopilot. Basically they’re just Marxist ideologues on autopilot. And they come up with the most amazing bullshit. The stuff that Marxists say would be really quite entertaining if it didn’t have any influence and wasn’t contributing to driving society over a cliff, which it is. 

The fact is that Republicans and especially religious conservatives are actually the most pious believers in universalism and anti-racism. I’ve said this many times: The Christian creationist who doesn’t believe in evolution at all is more capable of believing in racial egalitarianism and actually practicing racial egalitarianism than the white liberal who believes in evolution but just thinks it somehow stopped at the brain, that brains are all somehow fluid and mutable and re-programmable culturally. And if we just get the incentives and the education and the uplift schemes and the rhetoric right, we can make all these people in the ghetto hike up their pants and turn their baseball caps around the right way and start being stockbrokers and concert violinists. They really do think that.

But liberals are 95% in agreement with us in terms of human biodiversity, whereas the creationist is 0% in agreement. They really do believe in magic. And that’s what you have to believe to think that multiculturalism can work. You have to believe in “magic dirt,” as people like to say. These Mexicans, as soon as they step over onto the magic dirt of America, are going to start becoming like us. They’re going to suddenly become members of and willing participants in a high-trust Northern European style society. And it’s magic, because we’re not even going to try to assimilate them or pressure them into adopting our way of life. They’re just going to do it spontaneously, because it’s magic. That’s patently silly. 

But if you believe that God created the world out of nothing and species didn’t evolve, you believe in wholesale magic. Creation is magic on the wholesale level. I always find it very amusing when Christians say they believe God created the world out of nothing but don’t believe in the real presence of God in the Eucharist. That sounds fishy to them. That’s too magical for their tastes. But be real. If you believe in magic wholesale, you can believe anything, really. 

There’s a great satisfaction for white people in believing in communities that are entirely spiritual. It has a kind of sublimity to it. It makes us feel very big and powerful to avow these things, precisely because it’s not in accordance with what we see in reality. It makes us feel all the bigger for repeating these views and trying to live by them, because it causes suffering, and suffering ennobles us. 

DC: It takes faith, right?

GJ: It takes faith, and it requires suffering. And we feel like we’re ennobling ourselves through it. And there’s a deep truth to the idea that there’s something noble about people who are willing to suffer for ideals. But they have to be true and right ideals. 

I’m a cultural idealist. I don’t believe in cultural materialism. I believe that the origin of civilization, the origin of history, is the willingness of people to suffer and die for things that aren’t real. That’s how we get this world of art and literature and so on. 

But it really only works when it’s just us playing this game. We’re so easily exploited by outsiders, who come in and they see this tendency towards idealism and this willingness to suffer and this feeling like we’re really big people by undertaking impossible tasks. 

There’s a wonderful collection of essays on pathological altruism co-edited by Barbara Oakley and three others. (1) She’s written a number of other books including Cold-Blooded Kindness, which is an absolutely fascinating book. (2) It’s very well written. It’s also fortified with lots of empirical studies. She’s one of these writers like Malcolm Gladwell who writes in a very vivid, popular way, and yet she’s bringing to bear really hard science. Basically it’s a study of codependency and codependent enablers. 

When I read that book, I thought, “Oh my God, it’s me,” because I have a tendency to enable people. And when I enable them, it makes me feel big and powerful. But I realized that I was not helping people. I was enabling them to stay in jobs and living situations and maintain habits that were bad for them, because it made me feel good about myself. 

There’s an immediate application of this codependent enabling model to pet hoarders. These people feel really good about themselves and powerful by having large numbers of animals around. But the animals are suffering. They have too many animals to take care of. The animals are filthy and miserable and sick and suffering. Yet the pet hoarder feels very big and powerful and good. 

I think a lot of liberal psychology towards nonwhite immigrants is basically this kind of pet-hoarding ego trip. They gain a sense of efficacy and bigness by enabling these people to live in their societies. And the very fact that other people around them are discomforted by this and say this isn’t good adds to the ego trip. They feel they’re superior to those white people because they’re willing to suffer more. These peace- and love-mongers are on total ego trips. And yet at the same time, they think of themselves as altruistic. They present themselves as altruistic and yet they’re harming everybody in their relationships.

I would say this explains 95% of the behavior of white liberals towards nonwhites. Especially people who make excuses for nonwhite immigration into white societies and the persistence of pathological nonwhite behavior patterns. They’re giving themselves little dopamine highs by feeling big and powerful and superior to those white people who aren’t with the program. They are loving and taking care of these people who are here until the societies are overrun and destroyed, just like the pet hoarder’s house is overrun and destroyed by cats. I know that psychology is very seductive because it seduced me. It’s shameful. I’ve harmed people while being on this grand ego trip. 

But part of the genesis of civilization is the willingness of people to not be practical. To even risk death for ideas. We have to realize that this is one of our strengths. It has just been perverted. Something very perverse and sick has been grafted onto it, and we need to be able to understand what’s good at root and then what’s pathological in branch. Then we need to lop off those sickly branches and return our society to health.

DC: Yeah. The codependency angle is very interesting because as I mentioned to you, I’ve been talking to a black nationalist too. And maybe you wouldn’t be surprised how much alike you guys sound in certain ways. I think the general public gets this idea that the White Nationalist movement is just simply, “We don’t like those people. We don’t want them here.” But the black nationalist that I’ve been talking to, he sort of echoes what you’re saying, that this is not good for us either. Like the liberal social psychology professor at NYU, Jonathan Haidt. I don’t know if you’ve met him or heard of him. But he often repeats this phrase, “Diversity is divisive,” and it’s kind of a tautology. 

Yet when I’ve repeated that tautology to people, they have a Pavlovian negative response to it. Like they don’t want to hear it. And the sentiment kind of echoes the conclusions of the sociologist Robert Putnam. He said the same thing. And when he discovered that, he was very reluctant to even release it, because he’s a very progressive sociology professor, and he was dismayed by what he found. But he’s an honest and earnest scholar. So he put it out there, and he’s made the same point. 

You talk a little bit about alienation and anxiety and the hit that social trust seems to take from living in a diverse multicultural society. And there are going to be a lot of people listening to this, and a lot of people who are the type of people we’ve been talking about on the Right, Republicans and even Donald Trump voters who want to build the wall. They are very familiar with that feeling of alienation and anxiety. 

But they are wearing that same Pavlovian shock collar that I just mentioned. So they’re pretty well-conditioned to attribute those feelings to anything other than diversity or multiculturalism. So what would you say to some of those people? What case would you make to those people to get them past that conditioning to consider what you would say are the real roots of these feelings? That’s a central challenge that the White Nationalist movement faces at this point.

GJ: I think the main problem is that these people are being lied to by conservative intellectuals and opinion leaders, who are just liars about this issue: the people who say the problem with Detroit is all those Democrats. I mock these people all the time. “I got off the train in the wrong neighborhood, and I was terrified. I was surrounded by all these Democrats. I was afraid they were going to beat me up and pick my pocket. So I got back on the train to try to get away from all those Democrats. These liberal Democrats are really scary people.” They know better than that, and you just have to rub their noses in it. The problem with Detroit is not liberal Democrats. Somehow Seattle, which is run by liberal Democrats, is not like Detroit, which is run by liberal Democrats. 

The key is to just be real with normies and to give them permission to be real. There is no plausible account of the structure of the human amygdala that says that people are wired to feel fear around liberal Democrats, but there’s a very plausible account about how the brain is structured that shows that it’s natural, normal, and right for people to feel fear and anxiety around people of different races. That’s just the way people are. It starts very early, practically as soon as we can focus our eyes. So it’s before social conditioning. We respond favorably to people who look like us or are genetically similar, and we respond disfavorably to people who are genetically different. That’s just how we’re wired, and that’s one of the factors that determine how comfortable we are in a social situation. 

Now there are other factors as well. You might be with a black man who speaks standard English, and if you can communicate well with him, you feel a lot more comfortable with him than if he speaks with a heavy accent or he’s babbling some unintelligible language. And if he’s babbling loudly and angrily, and showing the whites of his eyes, then you feel really frightened. So there are social factors as well. 

But you know, we’re not just importing different races, we’re importing different races and hundreds of different ethnic groups at the same time. And that just adds to it. There are only so many races in the world, and we don’t have Bushmen from Africa or Australian aborigines coming here. Only a few racial groups are actually coming here, and if it were just that simple it would be less problematic. But people from hundreds of different cultures are coming into the United States. There are shops in New York City that sell publications in hundreds of different languages. 

DC: They’re running into this issue in Europe right now because they say, “Oh, we’re taking Muslim refugees.” And in a lot of these refugee neighborhoods and camps, they’re starting to find out that you can’t just say that they’re “Muslim” refugees, because a lot of these people don’t identify with one another at all. So they’re having gang wars between different groups. And I think we do tend to clump peoples together like that. 

GJ: There is a sense of Muslim brotherhood. But it’s pretty thin if you look at the kind of absolute savagery that is going on in civil wars in the Muslim world right now. 

DC: There’s an Arab proverb that’s pretty famous: “Me against my brother, and my brother and I against my cousin, and my brother and my cousin and I against the world, or against the stranger.” I think there is an aspect to identity that always identifies against an other. I don’t think that if everybody were the same in the world that would ever occur to anybody to think of themselves as white or black or anything like that. But I really don’t know if identity necessarily can exist without the presence of an other.

Darryl Cooper: I want to get into a few other questions. Doing my research for this interview, I didn’t read too deeply into your views on capitalism and liberal democracy, but I got the impression that you’re probably at least as critical of those things as I am, and I’m very critical of both of them. I want to get into a few other questions. Doing my research for this interview, I didn’t read too deeply into your views on capitalism and liberal democracy, but I got the impression that you’re probably at least as critical of those things as I am, and I’m very critical of both of them. So, what role do they play in creating and sustaining the atomization of our societies relative to diversity and multiculturalism, or in your view, can these things really even be teased out from one another?

Greg Johnson: Yeah, there’s a lot there. Let me just tell you what I think is right, and then we can get to capitalism and liberal democracy. I am a kind of classical republican, meaning this: I think that the best kind of society was the one outlined, say, in Aristotle’s Politics where you have a large middle class or large number of people who have property and who are self-employed. So I believe in private property, widely distributed, as a condition of liberty. I think liberty is an important value. It’s not the most important value, but it is an important social value. And I think that private property widely distributed is one of the conditions of liberty. 

I think that we need a mixed regime, à la Aristotle, where you’ve got a monarchical element, an aristocratic element, and a popular element, and those things all have roles to play. The monarchical figure is necessary because especially in times of emergency, you need somebody who brings discussion and deliberation to a close and acts.

DC: Sovereignty principle, Schmitt and so forth. 

GJ: Yes. You need a decider and an actor who takes responsibility. Schmitt points out that what underlies liberal democracy is the hope that we can always just keep talking. Then we’ll never have to stop talking and make decisions and take responsibility for those decisions and force people to go along with them. So you need the monarchical principle, the one guy who decides and takes the consequences. 

The aristocratic principle is important because people aren’t equal, and all of us want to be governed by people who are better than average. It just makes sense. If you get the choice of being governed by average people, below-average people, or above-average people, obviously you want to be governed by above-average people, because you get better results that way. So you need a way of making sure that positions of responsibility go into the hands of people who are wiser and more honest and public-spirited than average. 

But if you just have aristocracy, you have the danger that these people are going to start governing for their own class interests. Therefore, you need the rest of the populace to play some kind of role in checking the tendency of monarchical figures or aristocratic groups to be corrupt. So you’ve got to have all three forms of government checking and balancing one another. 

I think private property is one of the important sources of liberty. However, unregulated capitalism, especially financial capitalism, has a tendency towards the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few. And you do not want to be ruled by people who are simply richer than average. That’s one of the bad forms of government. You want to be ruled by people who are wiser than average and responsive to the general public. That’s how you get to the common good as opposed to just basically a society that’s factional. 

So there’s a role for private property. There’s a role for private enterprise, but there’s also a necessity of regulating these things whenever they conflict with the common good. It’s perfectly fine to have markets. However, as soon as you start on the road to globalization, you start undermining polities, undermining communities, introducing factionalism, and therefore you need economic protectionism at the very least to preserve sovereignty. 

You don’t want some fool who thinks foreign policy is really expensive and difficult to outsource it to a foreign country. That would be insane. You’ve got to at least protect certain industries that are connected with your national sovereignty. 

As for liberalism, it is simply a political compromise that became an ideology and a metaphysics. Liberalism came about after the Reformation to put an end to the wars between Catholics and Protestants. We decided that peace is more important than arguing and fighting about the differences between Christian sects. 

That’s all well and good, but now it’s been turned into a metaphysics. Today people concerned about maintaining liberalism argue for relativism just because they’re terrified that if somebody believes that something is true and good, they’ll reach for a club and bash their neighbor’s head in. That’s folly, because you can’t found a workable society on relativism, and having a workable society is more important than the liberty of everybody’s opinion.

DC: Yeah. I run into this type of conversation all the time, and I’ve run into it recently when Donald Trump gave his talk about maternity care and maternity leave. I got into a debate on Twitter about it with a libertarian with a talk show. And all he would say is “It’s economically inefficient.” I just kept repeating, I don’t give a shit. I don’t care. The fact we have working, intelligent, productive mothers who don’t feel like they have the capability to take time off to have children, or at least they don’t have time or the resources to do it until they’re farther along, maybe in their late thirties or so. And we have to fix that somehow. One way or another. And maybe this doesn’t work. Maybe we have to try something else. But we have to try something. And if it’s economically efficient, I don’t care. We’ve got to do something and run with it. 

GJ: Economic efficiency is a dubious value. 

DC: It’s an idol to these people. And I almost feel like it’s an idol to a lot of the people on the standard Right, cuckservative types. Because freedom and liberty are fine; they’re great. But it’s a purely negative value. Freedom to do what? Liberty for what? And nobody really has an answer to that. So they settle on liberty to make money, liberty to have property. I guess that’s all they can offer you. Then they’re surprised when something like the Alt Right is actually giving people a positive project, whatever people may think about it. Some people think it’s pathological. You have a group of people who are coming out of the Right, which has, in my opinion, been completely emptied of any type of positive idea or project. And now people are being offered something, and they’re surprised that it appeals to people. And I don’t understand their confusion, to be honest with you.

GJ: Part of it is just fear. There’s this article by Judith Shklar called “The Liberalism of Fear.” That’s basically what drives liberalism. It’s fear of conflict, fear of oppression, and so forth. Fear of real debates about values. But everybody wants more stuff. That’s a low, base set of motives. But everybody shares it. Therefore we can found society on a least common denominator, the pursuit of wealth.

DC: Sure. Yeah. I think anything that everybody shares is not really worth attaining to me. You’ll hear this from conservatives all the time, when they’re pushing the war in Iraq to build democracy. They’ll say, you go to Iraq, you go to Afghanistan, and people everywhere just want to raise their families in peace and make a living. And my response is those are not human values. Every mammal wants to do that. That’s what every cow wants to do. Any mammal wants to raise its family in peace and make a living. There’s nothing positive there that’s interesting at all. I think it’s very vapid.

GJ: It is vapid. And of course, in all these societies, this peaceful, mammalian behavior — the kind of behavior that Plato describes in the Republic as the city of pigs, where everyone’s just basically living in some kind of vegetarian matriarchy and are only concerned with comfort and security — disappears very quickly when men grow up and start fighting with one another over things that aren’t real, like honor. Like their self-image. That’s what drives history. That’s the beginning of history for Hegel. These fierce-looking bearded Muslim types, that bow-tied conservatives claim “just wanna have fun,” don’t just wanna have fun. They wanna have fights. That’s true of all men, even Western men. But it doesn’t fit in with the whole desire-based model of liberal capital consumerist society. It’s a false understanding of man. 

Plato talks about this in the Republic, and I always come back to it. I think it’s a fully adequate psychology, infinitely superior to Freud. Plato talks about how the soul has three parts. There’s reason, spirit, and desire. Spirit basically has to do with honor and one’s love of one’s own, as well as the capacity to love things that aren’t real, to be passionate about ideals, culture, and so forth. It’s the root of patriotism, the root of fanaticism, etc.

And when you look at the early modern philosophers, the people who created the modern mind, who wired us up — people like Hobbes, Locke, and Hume — they’re aware that man has this spirited part of the soul, and they’re even willing to exploit it to some extent. But they are very concerned to bottle it up. The modern bourgeois conception of man is basically a desire-driven creature who uses reason as an instrument. Hobbes says reason is to the desires as scouts and spies. Reason goes out there as scouts and spies to get the stuff that satisfies the desires. It’s purely instrumental. That’s modern man. He’s a desire-driven creature who has the faculty of instrumental reason, technology, science. He’s a very clever mammal. 

Those things that cause men to fight as opposed to consume and produce, well, that’s “pride and vainglory.” Those have to be bottled up. Locke wants to secure the world for the people he describes as “industrious and rational.” “Industrious” meaning desire-driven and “rational” meaning using their reason to satisfy their desires. And who are the great enemies of the industrious and the rational? The “contentious and quarrelsome.” The spirited man. We have been so bamboozled by these people. 

Fast-forward to Freud. Freud has no concept of honor. The closest thing you get to honor in Freud is narcissism. And this is the standard chick attitude about men. “Oh, he’s so egotistical. Oh, would you put aside your silly ego? Oh, you’re just narcissistic. You should feel ashamed of that.” We don’t have a positive concept of honor. Yet that middle part of the soul, thumos, is the driving force of history. And we’ve been taught not to even understand what that is. 

DC: I feel that probably goes a long way toward explaining the war that Northern American English have been making on the Scots-Irish in the South for a long time, arguably up to today. I read something similar in the last couple of years. Steven Pinker, in his book Better Angels of our Nature, states what you’re saying very explicitly. He says honor is a bad thing. We need to get rid of the idea of honor, rid of the idea of patriotism, all of these things. 

You have the industrious, rational North making war on the Scots-Irish in the South. And when you look at the core of Donald Trump’s support today, these are the people that Kevin McCarthy is denouncing in the National Review, saying that they need to die off, that these communities need to go. There’s definitely a real hostility there.

Iwant to ask you a little bit about the United States specifically. Your most recent post on Counter-Currents was a remembrance of Francis Parker Yockey, who’s best-known for his first book Imperium, and as a title that implies he advocated a pan-European empire.

There are thinkers on the Alt Right today, like Richard Spencer, who advocate some form of this. You two have done a little bit of battle on that question, and you favor a more particularized ethnic nationalism, and he hopes for a more utopian universalism from Vladivostok to San Francisco. 

What is your position on that question, ethnic nationalism as opposed to a sort of universal white empire, rooted in? Do you worry that the uniqueness of French culture and German culture and so forth will be subsumed under this larger formation? Or are you really just saying that people are not ready for this, and they will fight you over it, and they’re not going to give that up? So forget about it. 

Second, will the set of ideas collected around the Alt Right turn out to be a specifically American version of White Nationalism? It seems to me that white Americans and ethnic Europeans in Europe, nationalists in those places are facing different challenges. 

The ethnic French nationalists are concerned with protecting and defending a French people and a French culture with deep historical roots and a cultural mythology that they want to protect from the corrosive effects of modernity or capitalism or immigration or what have you. 

American White Nationalists seem to me to be engaged in a project of trying to awaken or build or rally a new national identity altogether. Because it’s true that America was a white country for a long time. But as I was just talking about, that white population was never really unified. 

The northern English basically made war on the Scots-Irish in the South for a long time. Some people would say that that continues today. Irish and Italians and Southern Europeans were all at various points considered outsiders. And now that’s no longer the case. Everybody’s sort of intermarried and interbred, and there really is a sort of a white culture in America today, even though the Irish and Italians have their little cultural things that they do. 

Yet the vast majority of white Americans do not consider themselves a unique people apart from the civic nationalism of the United States. So are American White Nationalists engaged in a very different program from the European nationalists? And, and is the Alt Right maybe coming together to address those specific challenges?

Greg Johnson: Those are related questions, obviously. I wrote a short piece called “Why ‘White’ Nationalism?” I’m both an ethnonationalist and a White Nationalist. I’m an ethnonationalist in the sense that I think that we need to preserve distinct ethnic identities, distinct nations like France and Estonia. That’s very important. (3) 

But I don’t exclude the United States from that. In the United States we have created an American identity. It’s basically been created by mixing together people from various European stocks who weren’t all that different to begin with. But a lot of them had to give up their ethnicity, their roots, and so forth to become Americans. They were deracinated and homogenized into something new. And that new thing isn’t so terribly bad. I’m an American, and there’s nothing else I can be.

There’s a line in Brideshead Revisited where Julia says about her husband that she thought he was a whole man, but she realized that no, he’s only a small part of a man grown monstrously large. Now he was a Canadian, but in that respect they’re basically the same as Americans. Yes, there is something about Americans and Canadians and Australians and other basically European colonial societies that’s a little monstrous. 

Why is that? These societies were founded by people who were willing to sever their ties with their homelands. We were founded by rootless people. We were also founded by quarrelsome people, religious fanatics. And those traits are partly genetic. So rootlessness and quarrelsomeness are bred into the American character. 

We’re also, of course, very bourgeois. We don’t have an aristocracy here. We were founded by people who were coming to the New World to better themselves materially or to escape to a place where they could practice their own particular religious denomination. I guess those are two small parts of the human being grown monstrously large: the tendency to be religious nonconformists and materialists. The materialism is really triumphant. But even the religious nonconformism was highly materialistic, Calvinism and so forth. The religion has faded into a culture of moralism and posturing. But the bourgeois element is undimmed and enormously powerful. These are real problems.

And yet for all that, Americans have achieved great things. We certainly deserve to survive as a people. We deserve to have a future like the peoples of Europe. And I’m fighting for that future. I want Americans to have a future, and it’s going to be in a white homeland in North America. 

Now to this business about white imperialism versus ethnonationalism. I was very alarmed when Richard Spencer started talking about a “homogeneous European man.” I’m sorry, but that basically means deracinating and blending out of existence all the different European peoples. And that’s something like what happened in the European colonial societies.

That’s what a white American is. A homogeneous European man. And indeed, Irish Americans and Italian Americans have St. Patrick’s Day and Columbus Day. But let’s be honest; let’s be real here. A lot of this is LARPing. A guy says he’s Irish American because he’s got an Irish surname. But I know people who claim to be Irish Americans, and they’re a quarter Irish and three quarters Italian. But they have an Irish surname. So they’re “Irish” American. I know Italian Americans who have an Italian surname, but they’re a quarter Italian and three quarters something else. So hyphenated-American ethnic identity is often just LARPing as something because you bear an ethnically identifiable surname, and that’s it. 

And if you look at the people who go to Saint Patrick’s Day and to Octoberfest, they’re the same people. Also an “Irish” American has more in common with a “Polish” American or an “Anglo” American than he has with somebody who lives in Ireland today. In terms of language, in terms of food, even in terms of general culture, they feel at home in the company of one another, and they feel like foreigners if they’re in Ireland or Poland or England or whatever. That’s just the reality of the situation. 

So to say, like Vox Day has said to me several times, there is no such thing as a generic white American. They’re Italian Americans and Irish Americans. I don’t think that’s true. There was a time when that was true, but that time has gone. That was then, this is now. 

From the viewpoint of the European who is descended from people who didn’t up stakes and move to the New World because they wanted a better life, more stuff—from the viewpoint of a Frenchman or a Hungarian or anybody who’s rooted and stayed behind—an American is a monster of rootlessness and homogenization. They’re not going to allow that to happen in Europe. They don’t want to become homogeneous European men. They want to be French or Hungarian or Latvian. And they have got every reason and right to do so. So they’re going to veto this imperium idea.

DC: They will kill and die to prevent that.

GJ: They will kill and die to prevent it. So it’s never going to happen. When Richard Spencer talks about “the ethnostate,” he uses it in the singular, because he thinks of just one state. Well, the one ethnos for that single ethnostate has to be homogeneous European man. He doesn’t think of the Czech Republic as an ethnostate. That’s just Richard envisioning Russian tanks in the streets of Prague. He’ll deny that. But he who wills the end has to will the means. 

I tell everyone who says Europe should be united: Great, you put the Czechs and the Slovaks back together in the same state again, and then we’ll talk. You put the Serbs and the Croats back together in the same state again, and then we’ll talk. It’s not going to happen. It’s just grandiose and empty. Do we want Serbs and Croats to start fighting with one another again? Absolutely not. That’s a horrible thing. Then don’t force them to live under the same state. 

The end of communism was horribly mismanaged by the Bush I administration. They said “We stand for stability,” the stability of multinational, multi-ethnic empires against nations yearning to be free of communist tyranny. What horrible fools Bush I and his people were. When the communist regime fell in Yugoslavia, or when it was falling apart in Russia, the United States should have stood for the liberty of all the different peoples in that vast prison house of nations that was the Soviet bloc. We should have stood up for the peaceful partition and secession of distinct ethnostates. 

But instead of doing that, we suffered a decade of wars in the Balkans, so that they could end up with such states. We should have just gone straight there in a diplomatic way. That would have been the best thing. 

So if you don’t want Serbs and Croats to fight again, don’t force them to have the same state over them. Do we want to prevent wars between European peoples? Then don’t force them to have the same government over them. 

Now what if they want to fight anyway? That’s when you need a Pan-European sensibility. Because we are all Europeans. That’s a racial sensibility, a sense of our common whiteness. So even in a Europe of proud little ethnostates, there’s room for a sense of overarching whiteness and Europeaness, and that’s real. So if tensions start rising between the Hungarians and the Romanians somewhere down the road, the other states in Europe need to step in and say, “We need to walk this back.” 

There’s a concept from the ancient world. It’s called “the King’s Peace.” After two attempts to conquer mainland Greece, by Darius and Xerxes, the Persians gave up on that. Yet Artaxerxes II found a way of extending Persian influence into mainland Greece without actually ruling over it. He extended hegemony, soft power, by basically saying that if any Greek city-state attacked another, he would put the full weight of the Persian Empire on the side of the attacked party. It was not a perfect solution, but it did reduce fighting between the notoriously quarrelsome mainland Greek city-states for two decades. That was a great gift. 

The ideology of the Persian Empire is that it created peace between warring peoples that could not create peace between themselves because they were too well-matched in battle, so one could never conquer the other. But they could be pacified by an overwhelming third force. The Persians fought for glory and wealth, of course. But Cyrus also legitimated his conquests by pacifying peoples weary of war but unable to conclude peace on their own by forcing them to get along. That’s why Cyrus was the first “prince of peace,” a title later transferred to Jesus.

Peace was the ideology of the Persian empire. But you don’t actually need to rule others to resolve conflicts. You just need a pan-European sensibility. The most nationalistic people I know in every European society realize there’s something terribly tragic about Europeans killing one another. Because as a race we have so much more in common. Every European society is threatened with negative population growth. Every European society is threatened with invasion from non-Europeans. That’s far more important than little border disputes that can be solved without bloodshed. 

The closest thing to a European imperium that would be both desirable and practical is a non-sovereign intergovernmental treaty organization, something like NATO, in which European nations ally together out of two common interests: to maintain peace among themselves and to maintain advantageous relations with other racial and civilizational blocs, like the Muslim world, Africa, Far East, etc. There needs to be some kind of coordination. So something like NATO, without the United States or Russia in it, an actual European NATO, would be the best solution. But it would be totally consistent with maintaining the distinct sovereign ethnostates that exist in Europe today.

Darryl Cooper: I would say for a lot of Americans on the Right, the biggest and last stumbling block is the Jewish question. What is the Jewish question? Why does it merit being named clearly and separately as opposed to just sort of being an obvious fact following from ethnonationalism in general?

Greg Johnson: Well I actually wrote a piece called “Reframing the Jewish Question,” where I say that it is just a first-order implication of ethnonationalism. (4)

DC: That’s poor preparation right there. 

GJ: What you said reflects a very common attitude amongst White Nationalists. They always say first we start with ethnonationalism and realism about race. But the Jewish thing is like higher mathematics. It’s like advanced calculus. We don’t have to go there right away. My response is no, it’s not advanced calculus. It’s a first-order self-evident implication of the ethnonationalist principle, which is that the best way to prevent conflicts between different peoples to the extent that that’s possible is for them to have their sovereign homelands. 

And lo and behold, Jews actually struggled for a very long time to create a sovereign Jewish homeland, namely Israel. And my attitude is that Jews should live in their sovereign homeland. But they don’t, because they’re not forced to. And because it’s very advantageous for them to have it both ways. They have their ethnostate, and they also live as a diaspora. Now the ethnostate benefits from that, because the diaspora is constantly meddling in the internal affairs of their host societies to support Israel. 

That’s especially true in the United States, where we have as many Jews living as in Israel, and Israel gets billions of dollars every year in loans and just outright giveaways and loans that will never be paid back. So they’re just giveaways. Americans have also wasted our people’s blood and trillions of dollars since 2003 fighting wars in the Middle East that are dictated by Israeli strategic calculations. I won’t even dignify it by saying that it’s in their interest. But certainly they calculated it to be in their interests. US interests simply didn’t enter in. It is absolutely catastrophic that our foreign policy is controlled by people who are thinking primarily about the interests of a foreign society, namely Israel, rather than the good of America. 

Jews are a distinct people, and they’re loyal to one another, and that’s all healthy and well and good. But if that’s true, then we cannot give them citizenship in our societies, power in our societies, and influence over our societies at the same time. That is what the Jewish question is. That Jewish question arose with the emancipation of Jewish communities in Europe. For a very long time they were encapsulated self-governing communities. Then they were “emancipated” by Napoleon. He was the great emancipator of Jewry. 

As soon as Jews were emancipated and became citizens of the societies around them, people raised a question: “Not only are Jews citizens of our society, with all the rights of citizens, they’re also, in fact, citizens of their own society. Their primary loyalty is to other Jews all around the world, in even in our rival societies, even in enemy societies, even in societies we’re fighting wars against. Isn’t there something weird about this? Isn’t this an inherently unjust and disadvantageous relationship that we’ve instituted?” 

Let’s look at this in terms of game theory. Just as a team strategy beats an individualistic strategy, if you’ve got somebody with dual citizenship, basically, that dual citizenship is a way that their team can play you. They can hack your system. And as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries unfolded, we saw that pattern over and over again. Influential Jewish minorities in various European societies caused wars and revolutions and catastrophic policies for the societies that they were ostensibly citizens of and thus ostensibly should have been looking out for their common good. 

But naturally Jews are more concerned with their real nation, the Jewish nation. Thus when the interests of their two nations conflict, they tend to side with the Jewish nation. Which is a very bad for their host societies, because Jews tend to be upwardly mobile and highly influential. Therefore, they tend to be well- placed to subvert the interests of their host societies. 

In the nineteenth century, influential Jews in Germany were playing really dangerous games, shifting German foreign policy in Eastern Europe to be advantageous to Eastern European Jewry. Today, influential Jews shift American foreign policy to be beneficial to Israel. That shouldn’t be possible. We shouldn’t allow foreign peoples to influence our institutions for the benefit of foreign powers.

It doesn’t matter if they’re Right-wing Jews or Left-wing Jews. The pattern is the same. There’s a story in the Old Testament, in the book of Genesis. It is the story of Jacob and Esau. One Jew has wronged another. Jacob has wronged Esau, his half-brother. Years later, Jacob sees Esau’s clan approaching his clan. He doesn’t know if Esau means ill or not. He fears being attacked. So to ensure his survival, he divides his camp. He sends some of his people to the other camp as defectors. The role of these defectors is to influence the enemy camp. And if the enemy camp attacks the home camp and destroys it, at least some of the home camp will survive among the enemy. 

If you look at the history of Jewish intellectual movements and Jewish political involvement since Jewish emancipation, you see this pattern over and over. The neoconservatives are a beautiful example of this. The main population of neoconservatives comes out of the Zionist wing of the Trotskyite movement. Bolshevism was largely a Jewish thing. Marx was a Jew. The core people who advanced Bolshevism were Jews or part-Jews or married to Jews. It was a heavily Jewish phenomenon. The most ethnically conscious Jews ended up following Trotsky, and the most ethnically conscious Trotskyites became Zionists, and Zionist Trotskyites at a certain point “defected,” from the Left to the Right and became conservatives during the Cold War. 

As the neocons colonized the Republican Party, like cuckoos, they ejected the eggs and the hatchlings of real conservatives from the nest. They mopped it up pretty thoroughly. They destroyed the careers of a lot of actual conservatives, non-Jewish, non-neocons. Who were some of these hatchlings, these bonafide conservatives who are ejected from the nest along the way? The whole John Birch Society was read out in the 1960s. Then people like Joseph Sobran and Peter Brimelow were ejected. 

Once the neocons took over the Right in America, they turned it into a vehicle for advancing Jewish interests around the world, especially in the Middle East. The neocons are pushing and have pushed these catastrophic wars in the Middle East. Now that Trump has come along, they don’t feel comfortable, in the Republican Party. So they’re just reinventing themselves as Democrats, because the foreign policy of Hillary Clinton’s party has always been controlled by the same faction. 

How do you make sure that American foreign policy is always pro-Jewish? You divide your camp and you colonize both the Republicans and the Democrats, so that no matter who’s in power, they have a pro-Zionist foreign policy. When Democrats are in power, they go through the charade of the “peace process,” because Democratic voters want peace. You know, the peace process that never eventuates in peace and always requires more American money to keep the whole thing going. When Republicans are in power, it’s a more truculent approach, where we’re actually fighting wars, because Republicans sublimate all their warlike and fascist impulses into Zionism. But it’s the same group of people running American foreign policy, exercising veto power over American foreign policy for the ethnic interests of Israel. 

Enough is enough. We cannot trust these people to actually look out for the interests of America. So they need to go. They need to go to their homeland and become a normal people. We need to rigorously police their agents and friends in America so that they’re not subverting American foreign policy away from American interests and towards Israeli interests. It’s really as simple as that. I wish Jews all the best, but I cannot like them, and I cannot regard them in a friendly way until they relinquish power over our society and stop egging it on towards catastrophic foreign policy disasters. 

Jews also play a huge role in promoting every form of Left-liberal decadence and decline that sensible conservatives have to oppose: race-mixing, gay lib, women’s lib, multiculturalism, porn, drugs, and so forth. They’re shorting Western civilization, meaning they’re profiting from the decline of our values. They’ve set themselves up in our society to profit from our decline. They profit from the decline of our families. They profit from the decline of our sexual behavior and morality. They profit from the decline of our institutions. Our marriages are breaking up? Well, you know, that’s great for lawyers. 

So overall I think that Jews play an incredibly negative role in American society and other European societies. But there’s no reason, though, why we should have these conflicts with them, because they have a homeland of their own. They need to go there and live there and flourish there. 

DC: I don’t quite understand the multiculturalism aspect of it, especially not in the United States where we have a different type of Muslim population, a large enough country where it’s not quite a problem. But from what I understand, Jewish groups and Jewish voters in European countries are pretty much fully on board with importing as many refugees as they can. I don’t understand what they would get out of that, because I can’t imagine anybody that’s going to be more tolerant of them as a group than especially an Anglo-Protestant society, but European in general. Do you have any thoughts on that?

GJ: Jews have long memories. They constantly try to goose our memory with Holocaust education, because it’s their contention that a European society within living memory tried to exterminate every last one of them and conquer the world. Now there’s a lot of malarkey connected with that claim, but a lot of Jews fervently believe that. They believe that Europeans are capable of trying to exterminate every last one of them. Whereas Jews have lived in very cordial relations with Muslims for very long periods of time. They chose to put their ethnostate in a sea of Muslims, which is very interesting. They could have gone to Uganda or Madagascar or the Soviet Far East. But they chose to live in a sea of Muslims. They’re not as afraid of Muslims as they are of us. And that’s basically the reason. Therefore, they feel greater fear in homogeneous European societies than they do in a sea of Muslims in Israel. That’s fascinating. That might not be rational, but that’s how they feel. 

Jews promote multiculturalism because they are an outsider group. Hence they don’t want you to think of yourself as belonging to a Christian society because they’re not Christians. They don’t want to live in an ethnically defined society, because there are different ethnic group. Thus they have worked tirelessly to open up the borders not only of the United States, but of every European society to nonwhite immigration. Why? Because as the European majority is diluted, their power grows. It’s as simple as that. 

Now, a lot of people say, “But these Muslims beat up Jewish schoolboys. They’re dangerous people.” Yes, that’s true. But every day Israel makes and enforces policies that they know will cause terrorism directed at Jews. Every day they do that. They know that a certain number of Jews are going to die because of the policies they enact. But they’re willing to accept that. They’re willing to accept that within the borders of their own state. So they’re certainly willing to accept it in France. They’re certainly willing to accept it in the United States. Because they think it redounds on balance to the greater good of their community, and they’re willing to accept a few casualties. It’s as simple as that. 

DC: Just like in any country, when a president needs support, he starts a war, when Jewish emancipation happened in Europe, a lot of the conservative rabbis and people who were really committed to the community were more afraid of assimilation than they were of extermination or violence. Creating a certain level of conflict firms up the boundaries and the membranes between peoples.

GJ: This is true, this is very true. And assimilation is a great threat to Jews. All traits are distributed along bell curves, and that includes genetic traits like ethnocentrism. Like other people who are predominantly Middle Eastern, Jews as an ethnic group are more ethnocentric than Europeans. This is just a fact of reality. It’s biologically clear. But those traits are distributed on bell curves, and the less ethnocentric Jews will marry out. 

I’ve known a number of them. I’ve had Jewish friends. Over the years, I’ve allowed them to drop, and some of them died. I’ve not tried to make new Jewish friendships, because as I became increasingly aware of the Jewish problem, I just didn’t want to have these sticky dual loyalties in my own life. 

One of these friends actually gave me “permission” to think a lot of these thoughts. In fact, she egged me on. She had a very interesting life. She was an orphan. She had every reason to believe her parents were killed in the Holocaust. She was raised as Catholic, and she only discovered that she was Jewish when she was a teenager. This Jewish family showed up and said that she was part of the family. They took her away from the Catholic orphanage where she was being raised. She wanted to be a nun when she grew up. They told her she was a Jew and tried to make her into a Jew. 

She told me that being turned into a Jew basically meant being turned into a misanthrope who hated the rest of humanity, stayed indoors all the time, and didn’t go out and play. When she wasn’t inclined to do that, they actually started calling her “the little German.” And after a while, they took her back to the orphanage and dumped her. That’s a really fascinating story. But she was one of these low-ethnocentrism Jews. She ended up marrying out. She married a white guy. She had kids, and she didn’t even tell her children about her Jewish heritage until they were all grown up. 

That’s an example of the kind of people who marry out. You can only really have barriers to that if there’s a great deal of polarization in society between Jews and gentiles. So yes, the Jewish community needs antisemitism to affirm its boundaries. That’s why they’re constantly searching for it with a magnifying glass and tweezers. 

I love Yoav Shamir’s documentary Defamation, where he went to the offices of the Anti-Defamation League in New York, where they collect antisemitic horror stories, maybe sixty or eighty a day. Fortunately, the vast majority are quite trivial. People calling in complaining they weren’t allowed to take Jewish holidays off. It’s antisemitism! These people don’t feel privileged enough. They’re objectively the most privileged group in America, but not privileged enough by their own lights. So they have an organization that has hundreds of millions of dollars a year, where they can snitch on their employers for not giving them even more special treatment than they already get. 

This is antisemitism, but they need this. They need this consciousness to maintain their boundaries. Yet a lot of Jews are choosing to marry out and cease to be Jewish. You can’t blame them. A lot of them just want to join the human race, rather than be misanthropes, which is what their religion requires. So Jews need antisemitism to survive as a separate group. 

Yet at the same time, they have this weird reflexive habit of constantly racking their brains to figure out where antisemitism comes from. I remember Natan Sharansky wrote a book that of all people, George W. Bush praised. It may have been the second book he ever read after the children’s book on 9/11. I read some excerpts of it on the web, and I was howling with laughter because he says antisemitism is the most baffling thing. There’s no common denominator. It happens in Buddhist societies and Christian societies. It happens in Muslim societies. It’s happened in every stage of history. Under capitalism, socialism, and Communism. There’s no common denominator. But wait a second, there’s one thing that all of these societies have in common, and that’s Jews. Israel Shahak said the ghettos grew up because they existed in the minds of Jews. They were just an externalization of the Jewish mentality, of their own separateness and their insistence on being separate. Their dietary laws, their dual ethical codes, all these things are designed to maintain their sense of separateness and distinctness as a people. But that separateness and the tendency to look down upon other people as not really human does inevitably produce a backlash. And we call that antisemitism. Jews are aware of their own Jewishness. When gentiles become aware of Jewishness, it often takes the form of antisemitism.

DC: In 1903 or 1904, Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, was at a British governmental panel on immigration giving testimony. One of the people asked him what his definition of a nation was. I can’t remember the exact quote, but he said something to the effect that it’s a recognizable group of common cohesion, united by a common enemy. And he asked him, so what’s the common enemy? And he said, to the Jew, it’s the anti-Semite. When I read that, I thought to myself, if your sense of social identity is completely tied to the presence of this enemy, this implacable universal enemy, the question that obviously pops up is what happens to you if there’s no antisemitism left? And the answer is that can’t ever happen.

GJ: They can’t allow that to happen. So they conjure up the anti-Semite. It’s a necessary prop of their existence. If they can’t conjure up real ones, they conjure up fake ones. Which is why so many anti-Jewish acts of vandalism turn out to be fake hate crimes created by Jews. In fact, they are real hate crimes committed against gentiles.

Darryl Cooper: What about people like the woman you knew? I guess that’s a question a lot of people have. In fact, a friend of mine here in Orange County is half-Japanese and half-Jewish, but outside of that fact, he would fit perfectly on the Alt Right. He sounds like you without the White Nationalist part. In the society that you envision . . . I guess you sort of answered this question earlier. You don’t want to throw that guy out. You want to control immigration and then just slowly over the course of a generation or two have the demographics change, right?

Greg Johnson: You have your amiable Asian friends. A lot of White Nationalists have amiable Asian friends. You don’t want to be mean to these people, but at the same time, we don’t want to continue down a road where our people have no future. There’s no danger of Asians becoming extinct. They exist in vast numbers. They have their own sovereign homelands. Yet at the same time, there’s a grave danger that whites will go extinct. I know it sounds catastrophic and alarmist, but it’s actually very simple math. Every year, more of us die than are being born, and if that doesn’t change, there will be none of us eventually.

One of the ways that we don’t reproduce ourselves is by miscegenation. A lot of us reproduce, but we don’t reproduce our race because we marry out. People who are conservative find Asians very tempting because of their brightness, their orderliness, and their capacity to create high civilizations and appreciate our own. 

We need to have barriers to that. Over a few generations if we erect those kinds of barriers, it will cease to be an issue. That’s really all I have to say about that. I’m not one of these people who faps and drools to race war propaganda scenarios and that kind of nonsense. I just think that’s unnecessary, and it’s gross. Our aim is to prevent racial conflict, not encourage it. 

DC: It’s usually fake. I’ve met some of those people. If I put them in a room with a gun and a black person and said, “Do your thing,” they would not do it. It’s LARPing a lot of the time. They like the thrill of verbal taboo-breaking, shocking people, being that guy. I don’t really have a lot of patience with them. That’s why I’m talking to you as opposed to maybe somebody else.

GJ: I wrote this piece called “Tough Talk from a Hard Man (On the Internet).” (5) A lot of these people are just tough talkers, posturing as hard men on the internet. I’m sorry, but we have to take it off the Internet. We have to be real. We have to think about solutions that are sensible and moral and decent and fair. There’s nothing fairer than allowing every people to have a land of its own.

DC: If the Alt Right continues to grow in power on the American Right, we’re probably going to have to ditch the word “conservative” and bring back “reactionary,” because the way you phrase it, it’s a defensive response to something that you see happening, and a line needs to be drawn.

GJ: Yeah. 

DC: It’s not an attack. It’s a defensive position in a way. 

GJ: Yeah. But I don’t like the idea of being called a reactionary or being a reactionary. Yes, it’s a reaction. It’s self-defense. But reactionary has a connotation of cranks who don’t want to use computers. They want to use quill pens. People who not only LARP, but LARP as seventeenth-century puritans. 

DC: I’ve seen some of them going on about America needing to be a Catholic country. I’m like, what are you talking about? Are we on the same planet? It might happen if we continue our immigration from the south. That’s making us more Catholic. But that’s the only way it’s happening.

GJ: Yeah, exactly. I get a good chuckle out of that kind of stuff. Actually, I don’t think of myself as a reactionary at all. I think my policies, to be honest, are closer to the Progressive Movement of the earlier twentieth century than to anything that’s reactionary. They believed in eugenics. They believed in nature preservation. They passed immigration restriction. A lot of them were influenced by Darwinism. That’s all good. 

A lot of these people recognized that the things that made America great, which are not captured by thin concepts like liberalism and democracy. The things that made America great at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century were ethnically specific. They were connected with the ethnic genetic interests of northern Europeans, and they wanted to preserve that. That’s me, up one side and down the other. That’s how I feel about politics. They also believed in regulating capitalism to serve the common good. I believe that too. So in some ways I’m a throwback to the Progressive Movement. 

I like Guillaume Faye’s book Archeofuturism because he is progressive in some ways — he believes in technology and progress in those senses — but he realizes that these things need to be infused by a return of archaic values, meaning pre-liberal, pre-modern values. What that means aside from, say, healthy attitudes about the differences between the sexes, are classical aristocratic values, pre-bourgeois values. I think that’s absolutely right. 

I wrote a piece about Frank Herbert’s Dune as a kind of archeofuturist science fiction novel. Herbert was thinking about what form of society is consistent with mankind rising to the stars and colonizing the galaxy, and he concluded very rapidly it wasn’t going to be liberal democracy. It had to be an aristocratic society with immensely long time horizons, so he modeled it on medieval European society, where holy orders and dynasties and aristocratic families thought far into the future. They had enormous time horizons, as opposed to today, when corporations think about the next quarter and politicians think about the next election, and all serious problems are just kicked down the road to somebody else. That’s no way to go to the stars. 

DC: I think a lot of the people who are new arrivals to the Alt Right, and even just Trump voters, are former conservatives and or libertarians. I was a libertarian, and you get to the point where you realize that it wasn’t the Civil War or 1776 or any of those that were really our finest hour. I think I’ve heard you say that the American labor movement in a lot of ways was our finest hour. And as a libertarian, you vomit when you hear that, but . . . 

GJ: I know. But there’s so much truth to that. My view about labor unions is basically this: In a badly ordered society, where you don’t have a wise leadership that’s looking out for the common good, labor unions are the best way of moving accidentally, through negotiation and clashes between different interest groups, toward a good society. First of all, we need constant pressure towards technological progress, and that means keeping labor costs high. That’s the way that we avoid the plantation economy, which is the evilest form of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. And that’s what globalization is producing today. A global plantation economy. We need the pressure towards technological progress.

DC: I was very happy to hear Peter Thiel allude to that.

GJ: Yes, he sees that, very clearly. The other thing that the labor movement does is make sure that the productivity gains of technological progress go to the working and middle classes. We do not want the wealth generated by all these technological productivity gains to be just hoarded by some vastly wealthy people, because that creates a dangerously unrepublican form of government. 

As I outlined in an essay called “Money for Nothing,” (6) the ultimate goal of forcing technological progress, and forcing the productivity gains of technological progress to go back to the workers, would be a society where machines put us all out of work. Because if we had a society where machines put us all out of work in the present dispensation, everyone would starve, and then the capitalists would starve too. 

DC: And then they would get their heads cut off. 

GJ: Yeah. Perhaps they think that when the workers die off, they can create machines that will pay them to consume the products of other machines. It’s a totally ludicrous vision of things, but it is what we get when we lose track of the fact that the only purpose of the economy is to enable humans to live well. 

How do we get to the Star Trek economy or The Jetsons economy? An economy where productivity gains are cashed out, not in terms of increased consumption, because we live on a finite planet. So it has to be cashed out in terms of increased leisure. Until we’re working one hour a week, or something like that, and all living at comfortable Western middle-class standards. 

What do you do with the rest of your time? Explore the cosmos, improve recipes, plant gardens, raise kids, strum guitars, whatever. That’s what I would like to see happen. And I think that the clash between labor and capital was pushing things in that direction in America before globalization, when we opened up the borders to in-sourcing the Third World and shipping factories to the Third World. That’s pushing us in the direction of a global plantation economy. It has taken the mainspring out of the forces driving us towards constant technological improvement. Except technological improvement in computing. Computers make us more productive, but they are also ways that we amuse ourselves in a declining society. Let’s just be honest about that. 

We need to stop the slide toward the global plantation economy. We need to return to a high-wage, high-tech economy that produces a broad middle class and evolves eventually into a society where everybody’s basically out of work, because machines produce everything at virtually no expense. But instead of being starving unemployed workers, we will all be collecting dividends, basically because everyone will be part of the capitalist class. This is how we get to the post-scarcity utopia that utopian socialists were babbling about in the nineteenth century. That can actually happen. 

I’d like to see that kind of Star Trek world. The economic theory that can lead us there is called Social Credit. I explain it in the essay “Money for Nothing,” which is in my book, Truth, Justice, and a Nice White Country. I’m sure there are friends of yours who are gasping at that title. I hope so. 

Social Credit, before it was cast down the memory hole, was the preferred economic theory of Anglophone fascists from Canada and the United States and England all the way to Australia and New Zealand. It was a huge thing before it disappeared after World War II. There’s a whole undiscovered continent of Right-wing critics of unregulated capitalism out there.

 

Notes

(1) Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan, and David Sloan Wilson, eds., Pathological Altruism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 

(2) Barbara Oakley, Cold-Blooded Kindness: Neuroquirks of a Codependent Killer, or Just Give Me a Shot at Loving You, Dear, and Other Reflections on Helping That Hurts (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2011).

(3) Greg Johnson, “Why ‘White’ Nationalism?,” in Toward a New Nationalism (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2019).

(4) Greg Johnson, “Reframing the Jewish Question,” Toward a New Nationalism. 

(5) Greg Johnson, “Tough Talk from a Hard Man (on the Internet),” Toward a New Nationalism. 

(6) Greg Johnson, “Money for Nothing,” Truth, Justice, & a Nice White Country (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015).