Clown Car

People love my conversations with Amy Wax. Fresh off the news that Penn has sanctioned her for making very politically incorrect but mostly true statements, she’s back on the podcast to talk about the whole experience. See here for our first discussion, which focused on immigration, and the second in the midst of the ordeal she was going through with Penn.

The university tried to buy her silence to end this whole affair, but Amy characteristically refused. Penn claims to adhere to the principle of academic freedom, but says here that it is punishing conduct, not speech. This is an old trick that I discuss at length in The Origins of Woke. It is true that speech is a form of conduct, and conduct doesn’t become allowable just because it is speech. Imagine a professor who went around harassing black students by whispering racial slurs in their ears. But this is not that, nor anything that should be considered close to an edge case if the principles of free speech and academic freedom are going to mean anything at all. The position of Penn is in effect that talking about different statistical distributions across groups is conduct that can be punished.

We start by going over the fallout from the Penn controversy and whether she will be planning a lawsuit. The conversation moves on to the state of the academy more generally, why things have gotten this bad, and some of the pushback we have seen and why there hasn’t been more of it.

We then begin to talk about the election, and the unique appeal that Trump has to the Republican base. Amy is not exactly enamored with the man, but as a political pragmatist, she is supporting him anyway. She explains some of her main policy priorities, namely the need to save the academy, crime, and the rule of law. On the last point, I push back a bit by arguing that if this your concern, then Trump is clearly inferior to just about any other American politician one might imagine.

Amy and I go into some of our differences on whether you should talk to the media, even if you think they’re likely to be unfair. In the end, she tells me that I’ve given her something to think about, which I was very glad to hear. I’ve also been on a long-running crusade to get Amy on Twitter. I think she would be uniquely good at it and build an absolutely massive following. She says that she’ll think about that suggestion too, but I unfortunately don’t believe she’ll do it, even though the world would be a much funnier and more interesting place with an Amy Wax Twitter account.

Some of my previous articles come up during the conversation. See “The Biomechanics of Trumpism” and “Coping with Low Human Capital” in particular.

Substack now allows collaborative livestreaming. Rob Henderson and I gave it a try last night. Still got some kinks to work out, but it went well. Give me any feedback you have.

Unfortunately it doesn’t look like you can see what people were typing in the chat. Perhaps that option will be added in later. One thing I like about Substack is you see a constant improvement in the product.

When Richard Spencer (follow on X, Substack) asked me to appear on his podcast, I was a bit hesitant. Ever since our past relationship became public, I’ve wanted to forget my earlier writing career ever happened. Talking to Spencer again would just remind me and everyone else of a time in my life I’d rather ignore.

That said, I’ve been paying attention to his output, and I must say he’s become one of the sharpest critics out there of the American right. With my past, there’s no way I could justify shunning Richard for his own mistakes or shortcomings. The immediate threat of cancellation is no longer salient, and enough time has passed that I can reflect a little bit on my journey and the fact that I was part of something that wound up being pretty important, even if the ultimate product doesn’t reflect who I am now and was in many ways bad for society.

Plus, to be frank, I find Richard really interesting, and we’ve always gotten along well. As you’ll see, we had a lot of fun bonding over our shared contempt towards rightoids.

In the end, this was a conversation I wanted to have. So I said to hell with it. Here, I’m releasing the audio and video of my appearance on his Alexandria podcast from last week. We talk about the development of the non-mainstream right over the last decade and a half, how we’ve both changed, and our shared frustration with what the right has become. We discuss possible future paths of the Republican Party, whether there are any realistic and acceptable alternatives to liberalism, and what it means to recognize liberals as the side of serious people actually able to govern. Near the end, Richard asks me about how my views have shifted on Russia and Israel, and I take a few questions from the audience.

Perhaps most importantly, we get into our disagreements over the Costco Guys and how we should perceive them in the context of Nietzsche’s Last Man and Fukuyama’s idea of the End of History.

Richard and I are unique in that it is rare to find someone who truly understands how bad MAGA is but who is not a leftist, and even has some views one can classify as far right. The Trump cult is not a binary thing in my experience. It’s a spectrum, but to be right-leaning at all today almost requires one to be somewhere on it, for psychological and career-related reasons. To me, a Trump cultist is not just someone who buys his NFTs, but also the analyst who constantly degrades himself by making ridiculous arguments in order to excuse or justify his behavior. Among these are ideas like: he hasn’t committed illegal acts; there are any comparisons to be made between the attempted coup in 2020 and anything Democrats have done; and liberals are too hysterical in warning about the dangers of Trumpism.

If you care about ideas at all and have the least bit of intellectual honesty, you can’t say things like this. I don’t even care if you’re going to suck it up and support Trump anyway, or, like Richard, you tell people they should vote for Kamala. Our dignity as thinkers and human beings, along with my own intellectual curiosity and desire to understand the world, simply demand we speak plainly and truthfully about this man and what he represents.

Last month, I had a meeting with Dennis McCarthy (newsletter here), who is one of my readers. He encouraged me to read the two books he had written. At first, I thought it was highly unlikely that I would simply based on probabilistic reasoning, since I get way too many reading suggestions to take them all up. But as I talked to Dennis, I realized that this situation might be different. His first book, Here Be Dragons: How the study of animal and plant distributions revolutionized our views of life and Earth, supposedly provided a novel method to prove the truth of evolution.

I had read a lot of books on Darwinism when I was younger, and always found inspiring the idea that of all the living beings that have ever existed, I could be part of the small fraction of one species that is able to understand the incredible story of how we got here. Besides providing a new perspective on evolution, Here Be Dragons was filled with fascinating tidbits about life on earth, including why mammals isolated on islands tend to get smaller while reptiles don’t; how some islands have probably seen dwarf humans, miniature elephants, and giant lizards all duking it out at the same time; the close relationship between the elephant and the tiny elephant shrew; the platypus as something in between reptiles and mammals; and microscopic bacteria that get energy from chemicals rather than sunlight and are the basis of an ecosystem at the bottom of the ocean (thread with screenshots here for X subscribers). I couldn’t put it down. This is the rare book that not only was highly enjoyable, but has changed my reading habits, making me realize that I need to go back to works on evolution as they still have the power to affect me very deeply.

McCarthy’s second book is Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare's Plays. When someone tells you that he knows for certain who the real Shakespeare was, it certainly gets your attention. Most people who make claims like this tend to be cranks, but Dennis mentioned that, despite not being an academic, his discoveries have been published in journals and covered in The New York Times. I’m not a big Shakespeare guy, but thought the book was worth taking a look at, and I can recommend it as a detective story and biography of Thomas North, whose exciting life in effect provided the source material for the most important literary canon in the history of the English language. Having been born into aristocratic luxury, then falling into poverty and fighting as a soldier after he is cut off from his family estate, losing political favor, and devoting himself to the life of the mind, North’s story itself is a kind of Shakespearian tragedy that could make for a captivating movie.

Dennis’ book left no doubt in my mind that he has solved the Shakespeare question. He found countless phrases that appear in both North’s books, notebooks, or the marginalia of his books and Shakespeare’s plays, and never at any other time before or after in the history of written English. To take just one of many examples like this, McCarthy notes the similarities between the notes North made in the margins of Fabyan’s Chronicles and passages in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.

In the 1623 First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, the play’s first known publication, the queen refers to an earlier British king who fought the Romans as “Cassibulan.” The playwright’s Cassibulan is a misspelling of Cassibelan, a king who, according to Fabyan, died 23 years before Cymbeline’s reign. In fact, though there is no known historical text prior to the First Folio that uses that spelling, the playwright also misspells the name in the same way all four times that he refers to the king. For example, in the passage below, the Roman consul Caius Lucius refers to the amount of Cassibulan’s payment of tribute. It is clear from North’s annotation that he is responsible for both the misspelling of the name and the peculiar phrasing of the amount of that tribute…

Tellingly, the playwright uses North’s language. Where North refers to “tribute granted” “to Rome” by “Cassibulan,” who “paid yearly 3000 li [three thousand pounds],” Cymbeline has “Cassibulan … granted Rome a tribute, yearly three thousand pounds.” EEBO [Early English Books Online, a search engine - RH] shows that by the date of the First Folio, only one other work includes the four-word string “yearly three thousand pounds.” That work, published in 1612, post-dates the first known performances of Cymbeline in 1610–11. Even more significantly, EEBO also confirms that no work prior to the First Folio has the spelling Cassibulan. North has written out a near-quotation that would be put into the play.

This is simply a few phrases in one play. The entire book is McCarthy doing this over and over again, both for Cymbeline and dozens of Shakespeare’s other plays. One chapter is literally called “80 Shakespearean Passages Borrowed Nearly Verbatim from North.”

Either McCarthy has committed fraud, or the Shakespeare debate should have ended with the publication of his book.

I was therefore shocked when I went to the Wikipedia page on the Shakespeare authorship question and learned there was a scholarly consensus that Shakespeare was indeed the author of the plays he has been credited with. The name of Thomas North is not even mentioned on the page, although he does appear as one of 87 in the entry for “List of Shakespeare authorship candidates.” There is no way that Shakespeare scholars can read McCarthy’s book and not be convinced by it; the only way that his theory will not win out is if it is ignored.

I want to make sure that doesn’t happen. For that reason, and also because I wanted to talk to him about biogeography, I invited McCarthy on the podcast to discuss his two books. We had a great conversation, including on what motivates him and what it is like to work as an independent scholar. If you have a platform, I recommend featuring Dennis’ work yourself and helping spread the word about Thomas North’s fascinating life and the debt that civilization owes him.

Today on the podcast, I am joined by Scott Greer. You can find him on X, Substack, and YouTube.

Scott and I have a bit of shared history. We both wrote for very politically incorrect websites around the same time. He was outed back in 2018, which led to him losing his job at the Daily Caller. As Scott points out, few of the things he said under a pseudonym would be out of place in mainstream conservatism today. Still, it all worked out in the end, as with nearly 170,000 X followers, he has reach that most conservative writers could only dream of.

Scott is a white identitarian, and although I don’t agree with him on many racial issues, he’s in a unique place where he’s “extreme” in a certain sense, but also politically pragmatic and connected to reality. I can’t stress how unusual it is to find a white identitarian who doesn’t believe in shadowy forces secretly controlling the world. Go to Scott’s Twitter feed, and you’ll often see him shoot down one conspiracy theory or another. More and more, I’ve come to see conspiratorial thinking as one of the main things that make discourse impossible. We can debate values and facts, but I don’t know how to address the kind of paranoid free association ramblings you find among many on the right now.

In addition to providing political analysis, Scott also serves as a kind of Jordan Peterson-type figure to his fans. He encourages them to take the Greerhead Pledge, which involves no tattoos, not smoking pot, not watching Marvel movies, and not listening to hip-hop. Unlike many identitarians, Scott does not want white people to simply coast off their identity and sink into moral and cultural depravity. Rather, he seeks to cultivate a kind of upper-class aesthetic and sensibility.

Scott and I discuss views on immigration, and I bring up the notable lack of racial tension I see in Southern California. He acknowledges that his main gripe is with poorer and more dysfunctional immigrants, which leads to me asking why not just adopt classism instead of racism. We also go into why Scott was so strongly in favor of Trump over DeSantis in the primaries this year. One thing I press him on is whether we actually need a positive white identity, and why regular conservatism with a strong stand against identity politics and wokeness isn’t enough. Scott also talks about the JD Vance pick, and his recent essay on Tim Walz and “sportslibs,” which I think is a really great term.

I strongly encourage everyone interested in these issues to subscribe to Scott’s Substack, “Highly Respected.”

Bryan Caplan joins me to talk about his new graphic novel Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation. We basically agree here that NIMBYism is a straightforward case of bad government policy standing in the way of markets being able to provide goods and services people want. Bryan makes the case that housing is one of the most impo…

I share some thoughts on JD Vance being selected as Trump’s running mate. One thing we can say is that, for better or worse, this is the most exciting pick he could have made. People with unorthodox ideas and without the approval of mainstream institutions have more of an opportunity to have a cultural and policy impact than before. This is far from an unalloyed good, but the variance in possible outcomes is much wider than before.

I discuss Vance as the true successor to Trumpism, in the sense of adhering to a politics that is centered around extreme rhetoric but moderate policies. Other topics covered include the triumph of rural white identity politics; anti-globalization as the center of the conservative soul; and the contradiction between Vance getting support from both the Tech Right and conservatives who are more hostile to free markets.

Hannah is a friend of mine and a successful career woman who lives in a major American city. She describes her job as an “influencer,” which I think undersells all that she does. Regardless, Hannah joins the podcast to talk about two things. First, we discuss what’s been going on with Biden. We really are in uncharted territory. I can’t hide my bias here: I bet a lot of money on him being the nominee, and have staked my reputation on a long term prediction that 2024 would be Trump versus Biden, which I made back when both were only at about 33%. It would be nice to say that I called the next four years of American politics regarding something that markets only gave an approximately 10% chance of happening.

Of course, logically I know that my forecasting ability doesn’t ultimately depend on whether a decrepit old man makes it to the finish line. I did in fact get the Trump cult right, and also the fact that Biden wouldn’t have a serious challenge in the primaries. Perhaps you can’t blame me for not seeing how badly he’d deteriorate just in time for an effort to force him off the ticket, but it’s one of those things that was of course priced in, even if I think that the odds of him dropping out have always been too high. Through this talk, we revisit my essay on the media being honest and good, and discuss some of the motivations of those who want to push the president out. See also this video I recently posted of Chris Matthews on what must be going on in Biden’s head.

The second half of the conversation covers the Lucas Gage drama. He’s an online antisemite who was recently swatted, had pizza and Chinese food sent to his house, allegedly by the Jews, and was then suspended from X. While I only occasionally dunk, Hannah has a real passion for learning about online buffoonery, and so she comes well equipped to discuss this hilarious and sad tale. She explains to me “wigger Twitter,” Gage’s interest in neuro-linguistic programming, his background as a white nationalist, and his eventual transformation into an anti-racist who still hates the Jews. We talk about what makes Gage such an incredibly goofy figure, including his embrace of therapy culture, and Hannah presents her theory that antisemites are now a kind of online establishment that those with trollish tendencies find it fun to mess with. We close with thoughts on online culture, and my hope that the lunatics might be segregated from the rest of society.

Note that the connection between us in this chat had some problems, so there are a few instances where we sort of talk over one another, though it doesn’t have a major impact on the quality of the conversation.

I was going to call this “From Mosul to McKinsey,” but Rana Mallah (X, Substack) suggested this title instead. I replied that no wonder she works in consulting, since that’s pretty good!

Rana and I met at Manifest a few weeks ago and I was deeply impressed with her story. She was born in 1997 in Iraq, which was probably the most…

Today I have the pleasure of talking to Daniel Hess, a father of six who goes by the name “More Births” on X. Pronatalism in the US as far as I can tell remains mostly an online movement, largely promoted through Elon Musk tweets and the work of the Collinses. To people who spend a lot of time online, this can make it seem more powerful than it actually is in the real world. Nonetheless, nearly all contemporary ideas that end up taking the world by storm start out online, and in the last few years I’ve seen more and more mainstream acknowledgment that falling birthrates are a major problem.

There’s always been a straightforward utilitarian argument, which holds that life is good, and the more people the better. I would also say that there is something spiritually wrong with not continuing your line and having a stake in future generations. As one grows older, you become increasingly aware that you are disconnected from cultural and technological developments young people take for granted, and there are events happening today that will have consequences you will not be around to see. Aging without leaving something behind I think of as a miserable experience because every other part of growing old involves decay and is at its root a march towards death. There are of course more pedestrian issues with low fertility, of the kind that might get talked about in The Financial Times or The Economist like future worker-to-retiree ratios and how a younger economy is a more dynamic one. All that stuff is true, and provides a more politically palatable way to express concern about collapsing fertility, though I’d say having more people to actually enjoy growth and technological development is the main issue.

We start off by Daniel telling me a little bit about himself and how he got into pronatalism. We proceed to discuss the state of the movement, and how people outside our bubble think about birth rates. The conversation goes on to cover different regions of the world, my article on low Asian fertility, possible policy responses, the Georgian miracle, the role of culture, different American states, North Korea having more official births than South Korea, religion, the causes of the Baby Boom, what makes Israel and Mongolia different, and much more.

Note that Daniel shares graphs and charts about the fertility crisis throughout the conversation, which obviously won’t be available if you choose to only listen to the audio. You’ll want to watch the video to get the full experience.

My favorite image he shared was the one below.

In some European countries, around half of 25-34 year olds still live with their parents! The numbers range from 1.8% in Denmark to 56.6% in Hungary. These are completely different kinds of social organization, and this is just a map of Europe and the US. Seeing it made me reflect on living at home while I attended law school in my twenties and how that takes you completely out of the mindset needed to find and attract partners.

As Daniel points out, the fertility issue is not going anywhere. East Asia in particular will in the coming decades be facing serious geopolitical and economic challenges as a result of not having enough young people. Daniel and I agree that this is primarily a cultural issue, which means that it can potentially be fixed by more people talking about it and spreading the good news about the personal, social, and spiritual benefits of having children.

Links

More Births on X

Birth Gauge on X

Works in Progress on the Baby Boom

Me on low Asian fertility and social conservatism as 4D Chess

Anatoly Karlin on selection for higher fertility, part I, part II, part III, and part IV