Narrative warfare, the open society and the case for building apart

Today I’m joined by David Reaboi. He is a national security and political warfare expert, the president of Strategic Improvisation Consulting, and the author of the upcoming book Qatar’s Shadow War. Welcome, David.

Thank you. Great to be with you.

Yeah, it’s super exciting to have you with me, because I put out a little call to people asking what would they want to know from you. And it’s been a pretty popular thread, because you’re obviously a popular guy. And I’m not going to ask you the main question everyone wanted to ask you. As you can probably tell, because you were on that thread with me, people really want to know what your workout regimen is like and how you got those gains.

Boring. Boring.

I’ll link to your podcast about this specific topic, and then people can dive into that, because we’ve got lots of other very interesting stuff to talk about. Because you’re a bit of a polymath, you know, someone who knows a lot about a lot of areas and also can integrate this knowledge and kind of have a multifaceted perspective on things. So I want to pick your brain on a few things that I personally don’t know that much about, one of them being national security, which is obviously a very fraught area at the moment. So one of the questions that I think someone asked in the thread, but also I found really interesting, was the idea of the open society. You know, this has been kind of the ideal throughout the years, and it’s been taught as this amazing innovation, and this is the end of history, the open society is upon us. But it hasn’t been as smooth sailing as people had expected it to be. So do you see this format of the open society, this ideal, as something that will need to be reformed, or will need to be looked at from a new perspective?

Yeah, it’s a really good question. I saw it on the thread, and it made me think a lot. And the first thing that I would say is, I think there’s a temptation that we are sort of the only actors in this scenario having to do with the West. So if you kind of just take a step back, to try to get a handle on the bigger picture and sort of what’s happening to, let’s say, the open society or our conception of it, we see that in many ways the left has abandoned, let’s say, Enlightenment principles, on which the idea of an open society is really based.

So if you throw out free expression, let’s say, and you throw out the idea of equal justice under the law, what are you left with in terms of an open society? You’re left with kind of two options. Option one is to fight to regain those principles, which a lot of folks are kind of valiantly doing. I think they’re valiantly doing it, but I’m not sure that they will be effective in the long run. And option two is sort of where I’m at these days, which is to say, okay, we’re going to do as much public education as possible on the importance of these things, but where we cannot win, sort of geographically, we need to reorient ourselves to new political constructions that at least contain the kernel of a population that believes in those things. So I don’t think there’s any way at this point of going and, as the old saw goes, winning the battle of ideas. I think that’s kind of mistaken, in the same way that people say, take back the culture. Well, you never had the culture. You know, the thing to do going forward is not to win or try to compete, but try to do something apart. So in the same way that people make the cultural arguments, and they say, well, just start making movies and writing novels that will compete head to head with the things that the left creates, or go back and say, okay, we’re going to now create running commentary to prove why the things that the left does is garbage. I mean, sure, that’s great. It’s fun, but it’s not going to win you anything. At the end of the day, there are people who you are going to convince. There are people who already believe what you believe. And you say, okay, let’s start a successful political movement the way any successful political movement starts, which is you focus with the base. You focus on the people that you have, and you say, okay, how can we strengthen these people? And then, after you’ve done that, then how can we move out? As opposed to despising your base and appealing to people who are kind of wishy-washy. Now, I know that answer kind of went everywhere, because I think at the end of the day, this is like the big conversation that we’re having across many, many different issues.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, the question was super, super broad. And yeah, I mean, I think this is a conclusion that a lot of people are coming to, especially because we’ve been in this hypocrisy porn phase of punditry on the right for a long time. And the hypocrisy porn is getting more interesting every day, obviously, because the hypocrisy is ratcheting up quite hard, especially recently. But nothing’s happening. Quite the contrary.

That’s right. Like all porn, it’s ultimately unfulfilling.

Exactly, exactly. So it’s essentially, at this point, it’s kind of like consumption. You’re turning on your Ben Shapiro to get your anger for the day. Nothing’s happening. He’s not moving the needle on anything. And it’s, yeah, it’s quite disappointing. And also what it does is kind of, it frosts people up, you know, like the Capitol riots. It’s been kind of the most recent event where people, obviously, I’m sure those people were watching a lot of hypocrisy porn. They were very angry about what was going on. They took action. The action instantly backfired, because they’re not in power. They have no cultural power. Any move this faction makes is going to be plus one for the enemy, because you don’t know the narrative.

Who said it, kind of brilliantly? I wish I could credit them. You know, “your speech is violence and our violence is speech.” And those are the rules, and that’s what it is. And you realize you’re not playing with a level playing field. And the answer to that isn’t saying, hey, look, look at the hypocrisy, look at the hypocrisy. Well, yeah, that’s a feature, not a bug. They’re very happy with that system. And for people who are in the middle, who kind of don’t know what’s going on, there’s a temptation to say, hmm, well, if that’s the way the system works, maybe there’s a reason why the system works. Maybe there is something special about those on the right, that they don’t actually deserve rights. They don’t actually deserve these things. I think that’s just as plausible a road to go down as someone who’s kind of outraged at the hypocrisy.

Yeah, and you can see the narrative warfare against this faction ratcheting up quite sharply. Words like, you know, fascist, racist, just essentially the dehumanizing language, has been completely ubiquitous lately. And I think that’s essentially the purpose of it, to just make sure that there’s a category for these people, the deplorables, the whatever, that doesn’t really allow them a space at the table. So they’re sitting in their box. And it’s quite interesting, because you’re essentially an expert in communicating these things, and how governments communicate, and how national security concerns are communicated. How have you perceived this increase in narrative warfare? To me, it’s been very obvious, but I’m kind of on the receiving end of it, so it’s pretty easy. But I’m sure, from the perspective, there’s always that parallax view. From the perspective of the left, this is just another Tuesday. It’s imperceptible. But what do you think the consequences of this will be? Because I think, okay, this is obvious, but is it obvious for someone on the other side?

That’s, I mean, that’s a really good question, if it is or is not. I do think it’s obvious to the extent that it’s working on many in the left. I mean, there are folks who I know, family and friends and things like that, who are on the left, and they have kind of seamlessly bought into a lot of narratives very, very quickly that would have taken years or months, or decades really, to permeate through society. We can’t escape the, I know it’s very easy and fashionable for everyone to blame Twitter and to blame social media, but it’s really true. You know, we’re in a different situation where, I mean, let’s say I lived in San Francisco and used to hang out at the cafes and talk to people. And I was already, you know, I was kind of on the right my whole life. So going there was interesting, because I like to get in people’s faces. I like to discuss and argue. And I would encounter, in the kind of radical coffee shops in San Francisco and in Berkeley, I would encounter all of the same arguments that I’m getting now, that we’re all getting now on social media. You know, the whole thing about whiteness, the whole thing about making the kind of Marcuse repressive tolerance arguments, no human being is illegal. All of these things that are like punchlines today were tested out in places like San Francisco and Berkeley.

And social media made it such that now a middle-class couple living in West Virginia, raising three kids today, could be on Occupy Democrats on Facebook, and they could be pushing the most, let’s say, advanced or corrupted, depending on your point of view, messaging. And it’s really made it possible to radicalize a large number of people very, very quickly. And, you know, so that’s where we are. I know they say the same thing about us, which is quite funny. And you can say, just for sort of honesty’s sake, that’s true as well. Yeah.

It’s sped up the tempo.

Yeah. I mean, it’s sped up the tempo in terms of these things. And, you know, I spent most of my career doing the Islamist beat, which is specifically focused on the Muslim Brotherhood, and what makes and made the Muslim Brotherhood unique, which was their very particular, very specific take on the radicalization process, or what we call the radicalization process, pegged to Islamic law and also to the experience of the first generation of Muslims during the time of Muhammad. So thinking about and seeing this radicalization process and all the little things that it entails, for example, the jargon and the vocabulary and redefinition of words, and in fact progressive revelation and things like that, you see how much they apply to the left specifically right now. And it’s really been interesting.

Yeah. I think there’s this kind of a recipe for any sort of religious movement. I think in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, it’s very directly tied to religion. But I mean, if you saw the events of this summer, if you were paying attention, then you could not see the religious angle on it, you know, the prostrations. There was even foot washing ceremonies, healing. This is straight from the Old Testament. There’s not even any edits. This is, yeah, pretty old-school worship, essentially. And I also think there’s just quite a component of, because this is a mainstream narrative, and this is what we’ve been getting in more or less subtle ways through media, through Hollywood, through music, through everything. I mean, this was my software too, for a long time, because I’ve been watching American media. That’s why I talk like this. And it’s really interesting, because that’s kind of where I sense-check myself. Because, like you said, it might be that we’re also kind of ratcheting up the narrative and going a little bit crazy with our own narrative, and stir crazy. But when I talk to people who are possessed by the secular religion that we’re all kind of swimming in, their arguments are very flat. I always say that they’re like losing 50 IQ points whenever you talk about these subjects, because they have never had to defend them. So the fact that I know both sides of the argument, and I’ve kind of had to fight my way to this point, makes me feel like it’s a bit more of a justified position. Like, I was a gender studies major. I mean, I know the arguments for a lot of this stuff. It’s not like this is new to me. But, you know, the fact that…

So you were a gender studies major. That means there are genders.

Yeah, exactly. How many are there? I’ve actually studied diversity management, which is kind of essentially a business angle on gender studies. Back then, that was maybe, what, eight, nine years ago, there were two genders still. So the whole trans craze hadn’t invaded, at least in Austria, where I did my undergrad, hadn’t invaded the conversation yet. But it was essentially pretty much third-wave feminism all the way through, like stereotype threat and all the literature. It was quite hard exams, because you have to learn all these fake science papers by heart, and then you’d have to regurgitate them in front of a committee. And that was it. But yeah, it was something that was really trendy at that point. It was kind of the new thing to do in Austria, where I was studying. Anyway, that’s what I’m saying. It’s not like I’m ignorant to the argumentation that they have, but it’s interesting to see people who…

But it’s interesting that you use the word flat, you know, as opposed to shallow. I think flat kind of captures it better. It immediately makes one think of, like, you know, the NPC character.

Yeah, it’s dull. It’s unidimensional. That’s the thing. You know, it’s like black and white. And I don’t know, maybe that’s also why these kind of dissident spaces are really attractive to me, because I’ve never really liked the official narrative. I’ve always found it to be a bit, you know, there must be something more to this. And then you kind of peel back the layers, and then that’s kind of where the dimension comes in, right? I agree, absolutely. I mean, it’s an interesting time. And that’s also part of why I left London, maybe, what was it, almost a year now? It’s been coronavirus, so time dilates. But it’s just being in these, you know, I was in tech, so tech is pretty much a monoculture. It’s very woke. It’s very permeated by our new secular religion. And it was, like I said, it was kind of a black-and-white space. And, you know, kind of taking the show on the road was partly a good idea for me from that perspective.

Right. No, no, no. I know that, of the folks watching in the United States, I know that this looks very attractive. I mean, I get people who message me all the time and say, hey, can you help me get Hungarian citizenship? And the desire to sort of pick up and go is something that I think we’ll see intensifying greatly.

I mean, I used to say things like this. I mean, in many ways, my kind of family experience, which is leaving Romania in the early 1960s, and then my dad’s side in the late 1960s, and coming here, kind of prepares me for this idea, which is, at some point you say, okay, enough is enough, and then you go. And there’s no shame in it. You are relocating because not everywhere is ideal for all time. And this is a thing that, the more I think about this, the more I realize that there’s a kind of gold mine here in terms of figuring out what’s really going on.

So I think, I have this thesis, which is that we’re living through today the consequences of misunderstanding the end of the Cold War. Because I think everyone misunderstood the consequences. Everyone looked and they saw what they wanted to see. And especially we in the West, because it’s, you know, what I can speak for really with any authority, is we came out thinking that, famously, we had Fukuyama’s thesis that the end of history is here, and sort of liberal democracy has been solved. You know, the problem of what kind of government to have has been solved by liberal democracy, and we’re basically done, and we’re just cleaning up the last holdouts. I think, sort of alongside that, we had a whole bunch of little tiny assumptions that went into that thesis, that we kind of took these assumptions and then turned them into eternal truths. And one of these assumptions is that, for example, the United States will always be the last beacon of hope and freedom for the world. I mean, that’s not necessarily true. It has nothing to do with history. It has nothing to do with permanence. I know it’s a nice kind of patriotic thing to think about, but it’s not necessarily true. And that applies to any country.

And it applies to kind of history more broadly. My friend Michael Anton wrote an amazing book, which is, I think, one of the great books of our time, called The Stakes, which is kind of regime analysis of the American regime, and his predictions about where things are going in the future. And one of the great points that he makes is, he calls these people conservative Hegelians, talking about the kind of traditional conservative movement folks. He calls them conservative Hegelians because they assume that, you know, they study so much history, they study the history of the Roman Republic, and they know of all these civilizations that have collapsed, but America uniquely will not collapse. America uniquely will not fundamentally change in any ways that are negative and permanent, and we’re going to keep this thing going forever, because it is basically an article of faith. Now, that’s one of the things that we need to get over, I think. And, you know, I mean, as someone living in Eastern Europe, from Eastern Europe, you may look at that and say, well, yeah, of course. What are you people, dumb?

But it’s something that’s kind of so fundamental to the way we understand ourselves, especially if we’ve been kind of lifelong conservative movement folks, or just kind of, let’s say, run-of-the-mill, kind of patriotic Americans most of our lives. We’re coming up and we’re seeing this moment, and either we double down on the delusion and kind of go in, let’s say, a Never Trump way, which is what a lot of the establishment has done. And I don’t think necessarily it’s because of corruption or anything. I think, honestly, these people are scared shitless of the implications of, let’s say, taking the red pill, or seeing things a little more clearly when it comes to this issue in particular: the future of the United States, the future of democracy and things like that. And on the other hand, you have a lot of folks who turn around, kind of like me and like many friends. We turn around and we say, hey, every indication is that this thing collapses. Not necessarily by the typical standard by which we think about collapse, but kind of based on the principles of the founding. I mean, you’ve got to be pretty obtuse at this point to think that this is the America of the American founding, or even the American society of the 1980s and ‘90s. You know, we’re very far from that.

So we say, I mean, I guess I coined a little phrase, which is, you know, so-and-so doesn’t know what time it is. Do you know what time it is? And it’s sort of shorthand for that conception, shorthand for that kind of awareness. And I think increasingly there has been rancor since 2016 that is kind of tangential to Trump on the right, with people who are just, you know, people who know what time it is and people who don’t know what time it is. And there’s no more kind of cause for friction and anger than that, because you’re not looking at someone who you see as an opponent. You’re looking at someone who you see as a kind of traitor to reality. And that creates so much friction within the right. And of course, within that, in, let’s say, dissident right communities, you have kind of the same dynamic playing out, with people who are at different points along, let’s say, along the road, as, you know, Qutb would say. And I guess you have the same thing on the left, but on the left they’ve kind of figured out how to deal with this better. That may be kind of intrinsic to their politics.

Yeah, that makes sense. And for you, what would be the main lesson of the Cold War, if you could summarize it? The one that we should have taken, rather than the one that we understood?

Oh, man, there’s so many. There’s so many. I mean, the big one, I think, is this thing that I’m kind of obsessed with, which is universal values. The conception that we all have universal values is the thing that, I mean, just focused on the right, let’s say nominally the right, the Republican Party, for a second in this analysis: it is the animating factor behind, let’s say, the freedom agenda, the Bush freedom agenda. It’s also the animating principle behind free trade. It’s also the animating principle behind immigration, open borders immigration, which is, at the end of the day, everyone is just a one or a zero. And if everyone is, or put it this way, if everyone just wants freedom, they just want economic prosperity, then what you’re really saying is everyone is either a one or a zero. You know, everyone is basically the same. And you can have, let’s say, 50 million Somalis come in to the country or 50 million Norwegians, and you basically got the same country. And, you know, it’s not even a knock to Somalis to say, hey, this is actually reality we’re talking about. This is not even a value judgment. It’s just a matter of reality. And immigration, for me, was kind of the first issue where I dissented from, let’s say, mainstream conservative orthodoxy. And I was always a restrictionist. I always said, wait a minute, this is crazy. Why do we want this? You know, I understand bringing in people who are easy to assimilate into a country that is interested in assimilation. Right now, you’re bringing in people who, it’s more difficult to assimilate, into a country that is opposed in principle to assimilation. So it’s a recipe for disaster when it comes to social cohesion.

And we’d have these fights with folks on the right, who would respond with silly libertarian arguments that are all kind of based on this. And someone else had, again, I wish I could attribute some of these things, maybe someone who’s listening knows who originally said it, but I think it was actually brilliant. It was, somebody said that the Wall Street Journal exists to translate the priorities of the ruling class into moral arguments. And when I heard that, I was really knocked out, because that’s exactly what they do. You know, they don’t say this is good for the bottom line. They say, no, no, no, we’re translating this into a moral argument, and you are a bad person if you don’t agree with this. And thinking about sort of their utility in the political warfare space, if you look at it as a corporate influence or information operation, that is a huge asset to have, really, for any outfit. Hey, you’ve got this massive media outlet, and their job is to make sure to convince folks all over the country who are completely outside of the last, you know what, this is actually really good for you. This is good for you because it’s moral and it’s great. And yeah, man, I just talked all around the world. I’m not sure I said anything coherent.

No, it definitely makes sense to me. I mean, I’m sure it’s very coherent to everyone listening. It’s an interesting situation that you say it’s the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal, I think, is now a small part of it, but I think that description applies to, especially, the New York Times. The New York Times has been laundering morality for the upper class since the Soviet Union and all sorts of other interesting escapades that they’ve had. I mean, most of the media is doing that. And it’s been really interesting to observe this this year, especially when we’ve witnessed the largest transfer of wealth from the middle and lower middle classes to the upper classes, to the tech overlords who’ve actually made this pod life possible. The fact that there’s people delivering food, and they all work as gig economy workers, and they’re all empowering the Amazons and all that. And the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and all of these corporations have been covering this up, obviously, with discussions of the virus. But I think, from your perspective, how do you see the narrative warfare surrounding the virus? Because this is essentially, the discussions about this is almost like the Blitz. You need to shelter in place, hide under your table, wear seven masks. I don’t know, maybe that’s just me being tired of this whole drama, but it seems to me like this has been quite the effort from our media class to construct this narrative.

Right. Yeah, I agree. I think that, I mean, I think of the old kind of progressive, kind of first-generation progressive point, which is, the main domestic efforts, the moral equivalent of war. You know, in a kind of progressive mission, it’s to make things that are not war, war, in the sense of a massive public effort that has everyone involved. Because really, that’s what, you know, if you’re a statist, if what you want is bigger government and, consequently, less freedom for your people, then large projects like this are, you know, they’re everything. They’re absolutely essential. And the future for countries that sort of go along with this kind of politics is a succession of these sort of mass hysteria events, or let’s say mass effort events. Which is, you know, I think of Cuba. Once Castro was in power, you have decades of sort of counter-revolutionary efforts in order to put down anti-regime forces. So yeah, I mean, it’s very much the same. I mean, when this whole thing was starting, people were making comments, and they were saying, yeah, of course, this makes perfect sense, because the COVID hysteria dials in very nicely to an ethos obsessed with health. On one hand, I mean, it only goes so far, because when you’ve got fat acceptance and all this other kind of politicized nonsense, you can’t really say it’s obsessed with health. But let’s say it’s obsessed with the temporal world and terrified of disease. And disease, or pandemic, let’s say, is like another flavor of the climate change thing. It’s nature coming to kill you. And that’s a really familiar narrative on the left already, for decades: we have wronged nature, and it is coming to kill us. Now, with this virus, it’s interesting, because the “we have wronged nature” is not part of it that much. But it’s still the thing. I mean, it very kind of easily slipstreamed into their consciousness.

And now, of course, I mean, most everyone has already pointed out, astutely, that a lot of blue state governors, and now we have a blue state president, are very excited to use these new powers to basically do anything they want. And it’s depressing on one hand, because a lot of people are falling for it. But on the other hand, I don’t know, I’m pretty white-pilled at this point on some of these things, especially when it comes to the virus, because the virus has been responsible for more red-pill moments than can be counted. Because now people are understanding.

I mean, I’ll tell you, just my experience with this virus over 2020, is there are folks who I know, let’s say, in the fitness world, who didn’t give a damn about politics one way or the other. They couldn’t tell you who’s a Republican, who’s a Democrat, why, left, right, whatever. Well, now they’re going and they’re sharing memes, and they’re watching YouTube videos like this, and they’re listening to conversations. And now they’re really interested, because the switch went off, which is: this shit really matters. Like, there is a difference between Ron DeSantis in Florida and Gavin Newsom in California. You know, who you elect actually matters to your life, in a way that they didn’t see it mattered before. Not only to your life, but to your business, to everything. I mean, you know, you want your kids to go to school? Live in Florida. I know folks who left New York because they just couldn’t take it, because they have no idea when their kids will be able to go to school. And even if you are not politically astute, or based or woke or otherwise politically engaged, having to deal in that reality, or deal with these choices, will push you, I think, in a better direction. I mean, of course, you have people who still kind of stubbornly cling to the old way of thinking, or will say that what’s happening in places which are not suffering through the lockdown is irresponsible and terrible, and Florida’s awful, and they’re killing millions of people and dumping bodies in the Everglades, blah, blah, blah. Sure, great. Keep going. You know, good luck with it. But for more people, they are distrusting government, they’re distrusting media. And I think that’s an unqualified good for the world.

Yeah. And with the November elections, we’ve seen a lot of changes in legislation. Like, I feel, you know, this year was obviously, like you said, a pretty red-pilling year for a lot of people. And it feels like the other side has been trying to not even win the conversation. They’ve tried to restructure the system so that, I’m not going to say in illegal ways, but maybe in legal ways, it favors their case structurally, essentially. And it seems to me like, if this election was won, I’m not going to say what I believe, but if it was won, it was won in large part also because of a ground-up restructuring of the way things are done, almost unilaterally pushed through by one side. And is this kind of a desperate move? Because it feels like, like you said, a lot of red-pilling this year. Was this kind of trying to head them off at the pass and sort it out through different channels?

Yeah, I mean, this is sort of the key question, isn’t it? Which is that, on one hand, you can look at it and you can say, well, their final victory is at hand, because they are at the precipice of silencing all of us with a click of a button and unpersoning whoever they want, shutting down our access not only to communications, but to things like bank accounts and whatever. On the other hand, you can say, well, they won’t be able to do it to this many people, will they? And that’s a valid question. Which is, one of the great red pills that people are swallowing now is that most of us no longer say, the other side isn’t interested in that. No, no, no, they just want to win elections. They’re okay, you know, blah, blah, blah. They’ll do a lot to win elections, but that’s as far as that goes. But people now understand that they don’t think we’re people, and that it’s a natural consequence of their ideology. I mean, these guys spent, and I say this on Twitter all the time, because people still don’t get it, especially in the establishment commentariat, but you say, well, for four years they called Donald Trump a Nazi and his supporters Nazis, and considered him the great threat to the republic and to democracy that needed to be defeated at all costs. What do you think that means? Is it possible that these guys actually believed it? And if they did believe it, what would they do to act on that belief? And if you haven’t grappled with that question, or those questions, I don’t think you have any business doing political commentary, because you’re fundamentally unserious. You’re assuming that your enemies, or let’s say your adversaries, don’t actually believe what they’re saying, and that it’s all nonsense. I mean, shit, you sound like a Marxist, with false consciousness. So a lot of people need to, I feel like I keep going to the same place with these answers, which is about the failure of the mainstream conservative commentariat. But I do believe it needs to be beaten down intellectually, so that maybe we can have a more productive discussion about what comes next and what we can do.

I noticed that people who are not from the United States also kind of look at this, and they say, why are you guys so obsessed with these Never Trump guys? Why are you guys so obsessed with these other establishment figures? And I don’t know, maybe you’re right. You know, I’ll watch Sargon of Akkad, and he’s never going after the milquetoast right. He just ignores them, because he sees that they are nonsense and a distraction and ineffective. So it’s interesting, the difference in the United States versus outside the United States. I think it has to do, frankly, with the way the conservative movement was constructed and is constructed, in terms of what gets funding, and how sort of the mechanics of the institutions on the right can function, either you have one or the other.

Yeah, I think for people who are outside of the U.S., they’re also outside of the apparatus of conservatism as it is there. So they just can’t really see the behemoth. They’re impervious to the old school, right? And essentially what they are feeding off of, and what I’m feeding off of as well, as being one of these people, is: what is the energy on the internet? You know, where is the energy flowing? And it’s not really at National Review. I mean, I sometimes read it, but that’s not where things are bubbling up. You know, there’s just quite a lot of super interesting conversations happening that have nothing to do with the establishment, have nothing to do with the establishment figures. They really don’t contribute that much, except for voicing kind of an aesthetic disgust that they point at Trump and whoever is associated with him. Like, that’s…

Yes. Yes. And I noticed, too, that they don’t engage with us. And when I say us, I don’t even mean, like, you know, dissident right figures, from here to there, all around the spectrum. They literally do not engage with anyone who is outside of their particular kind of narrow clique. And it’s interesting, you know? I mean, I feel like there are folks who, you know, they’re one-man shows, who do a lot more for the right than an entire magazine. And not a single National Review, because I think there are a lot of kind of people operating in a similar space. But I don’t know, did you grow up on the right, or were you on the left? Did you have an awakening? What was your experience?

I was pretty much on the left, as you are as a young person. I was never really like a socialist, communist. I mean, you can’t even be that when you’re Eastern European. But, you know, it kind of intuitively made sense to me that we should be really redistributing. You know, it’s just that intuitive disgust that people have with people being really rich. It’s all very visceral when you’re young, and you’re like, why is this person starving? And I just made up a whole political ideology out of the simple observation of people being unequal. And then I think it was kind of my early 20s when I kind of started slowly shifting rightwards, and now look at me. So yeah, it’s been a journey, I have to say.

Right. Yeah, yeah. No, I think that has a lot to do with sort of understanding where people are. And it goes a long way in explaining how folks present their ideas, and what ideas they engage with. Not even necessarily where their conclusions are, because I think people from a variety of backgrounds can sort of come to the same spot. But what you emphasize in terms of your presentation, or your communications, is at least somewhat dependent on kind of where you are in politics. You know, how long have you been in it? How long have you identified yourself with, let’s say, different ideology, different movement, at different points? So I think that has to do with it. And it’s funny, because many of my friends and I look around, and we’re all kind of old movement right-wingers, and we all are apostates from that in many ways. And I know that other friends are new to this and coming from the left. Some folks even come from a kind of harder-core left than you have, for example. And so everybody’s presentation is different. The way we look at some of these things is also different. And it’s not even left-right. I mean, you can throw a libertarian in there as well, or kind of really any other system.

The kind of confluence that I see, people arriving at, coming from different areas, and, you know, there’s this whole post-left movement that’s kind of active on Twitter, and kind of the post-liberalism, which is kind of the right-leaning people who don’t really want to call themselves classical liberals, because it’s not a very coherent ideology. There’s all sorts of people that have now reached the conclusion that’s almost, in a way, the opposite of classical liberalism. It’s a bit of a social conservatism, and fiscally, I wouldn’t say liberal, but, you know, more of a restrictionist, you know, it’s not a free-market libertarian position. It’s essentially, if you take the Koch brothers, and, you know, you probably disagree with them on most things. And that’s kind of where I see a lot of people coming from, the left, right, reactionaries, people like that on the internet. They’re kind of like, okay, there need to be limits on things. There need to be limits on the market. There need to be limits in kind of the social realm as well. Who decides this is probably best done at a local level: federalism, communitarianism, localism. That’s kind of what I see being really active now. And this is something I ascribe to as well. And it’s interesting to see, because a lot of people in these groups, like you said, they call themselves Marxists, they call themselves all sorts of things. They either have old-school allegiances, and they’re not really Marxist anymore, or they have this materialist lens that’s really helpful. But do you see this as well as being kind of a wave or movement? Because there’s not really any party that represents this ideology, or whatever it is, what’s forming.

Yeah, look, I’m not sure what the next step is. Eventually, what’s going to have to happen is, every successful political movement, in any way, really needs to have elites. It’s the truth. It’s the true thing. We may not like it. I know, as soon as you say that, people will jump down your throat on Twitter. But it’s definitely true. You know, somebody is going to be running the regime. You know, let’s say, okay, great, so you secede from the union, you know, you’re Texas or you’re Florida or whatever. Okay, great. So how are we going to run the place? Who’s going to run it? You need to create a credentialed class that is sort of with you ideologically, but is professional. I mean, this was one of the big problems of the Trump administration, which is, the Venn diagram of based and competent overlaps seldom. And this is the problem. You know, I mean, for the left, it overlaps quite a bit. You know, there are plenty of Looney Tunes leftists, but because they have the credentialing institutions, because they were smart enough to build them, for crying out loud, or to capture them, because they saw them as valuable, they have a credentialed class of folks who, at the drop of a hat, at a moment’s notice, can go and they can take over the government, if they’re elected or whatever. That’s it. The Trump administration had a hard time finding folks who it could bring in from different agencies, for example, to go into the National Security Council, because almost everybody at these agencies was opposed to them.

So that translates over to the conservative movement too, because we need credentialing institutions. We need to make this real. This is one thing that, for example, the neocons really understood from the first generation, I think. You know, not to sound too Islamist, but in the case of the neocons, the first generation was definitely the best generation. And they went, and they knew, and they were like, hey, if we’re an intellectual movement, we’re going to need a magazine. We’re going to need a couple magazines. We’re going to need a think tank. We’re going to need a couple think tanks. Because a bunch of random people writing at a bunch of random outlets does not make a movement. A movement has to have real things, and it needs someone to build them. And just as important, it needs someone to fund them. And at some point, somebody’s going to have to feed the army. And somebody’s going to have to say, okay, it is now no longer a kind of death sentence for you to work in, let’s say, whatever term, America First, based, nationalist politics. Meaning, if you take this job here, you’re not going to be blackballed for the rest of your life from getting any other job. You will have enough place in this network at least to find employment for as long as you want. And that’s really important, because if you’re depending on folks who have been marginalized, folks who are trust fund people who don’t need the money, or if you’re depending on people who, I don’t know, have nothing else left to lose, to create the elites of your movement, you are missing out on a whole lot of people who respond to sort of traditional incentives, which is: have a job where you can pay the rent or the mortgage and be able to support your kids and live a decent life, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then you will be able to contribute to the fight. Because if you’re not, then it’s really hard. And let’s say every successful dissident movement anywhere around the world, any national liberation movement anywhere, let’s say, requires that professional class of folks who, at the very least, maybe they have to worry about not getting killed on a day-to-day basis, but they don’t have to worry about where the money is coming from.

Yeah, there’s quite a big class of people now, I mean, obviously on Twitter, on the internet, that essentially are doing dissident work, but from behind anonymous profiles. So it’s definitely a big class on Twitter, obviously more on the right. There’s no reason to explain why. And some of them are really high-profile. Like, there’s Bronze Age Pervert, who is essentially a very influential thinker, a big seller in the space. And there are quite a lot of, you know, some of the best thinking on Twitter is probably done from behind these anonymous avatars. Do you think there’s a role for this to play? Is there enough leverage in this type of presentation to move things? I mean, at least in the case of BAP, there obviously is. He’s very influential. But it feels to me like it’s always a bit of a trade-off. If you’re not going to be there, people can’t really draw strength from your presence. That’s also what I’m telling myself to console myself, in case they come for me one day. But, you know.

Yeah, I mean, the anon thing is what you do when you don’t have power, and it’s what you do when you’re under the gun. And I know that, I mean, I agree, there are a lot of great people doing great work who are anonymous. The problem, though, is that you can’t build anything with it. And I’m not saying it’s their fault. And I’m not saying, hey, you know, you’re a chickenshit if you don’t put your name out there. Because they’re very real. You know, obviously everyone is in a different place, and everyone has unique circumstances. And asking one person to sort of stand up and declare they’re Spartacus, without any reinforcements, is going to have their head chopped off. But what this speaks to is the importance of building something bigger. Because you’ll never win, let’s say, you’ll never win the war with your best people as anons. You just won’t. Because at some point, these people have to feel secure enough, or we have to create an environment where they feel secure enough, not to be anonymous. That may not work for everybody, and it may not happen tomorrow, but this is a real kind of priority thing that needs to happen. Because if the only way that you can operate in this society is to be anonymous, then it’s a bullshit society. And that’s the thing that needs to be changed.

Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t know, it’s quite a worrying thing that at this point, you know, we’ve had things like Parler. There’s been attempts to create infrastructure and systems that, you know, conserve this population that’s now kind of being disenfranchised. I’m curious kind of where the first important step was going to be taken, or has it already been taken, to create these alternative institutions? Because it’s obviously not the case that we’re just going to barge in and retake the institutions. It’s not going to happen. So where do you see the first steps, the useful steps, being taken in this direction?

Right. I actually see, I mean, it’s funny that you brought up Parler. I actually see the tech thing as being the tip of the spear when it comes to this stuff. Because in many ways, it did expose what’s happening in a very real way for a lot of people. A lot of, let’s say, you know, normies, grandmothers in the U.S., especially during 2020, got themselves on Twitter, and they got very used to talking politics and telling people what they think about things, sharing, whether that’s a curation thing or whether it’s creating original content. They got used to it. They know how it feels. It feels good. It feels great to go in and create your own network online, with your own following, and people who care about what you say, and all that stuff. It’s great. Once people got a taste for that, I think it’s very hard now to put them back in a bottle when it comes to, let’s say, reverting to a televisual model where the news is just broadcast to them. You know, once you have grandma on Twitter interacting and shitposting, then grandma listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio, just kind of passively, is just not going to cut it anymore. So I think that dynamic, and the censorship of these folks in places like Twitter and Facebook, is a driver of an autonomous impulse that sort of starts at social media and is going to transfer over into other things. I think, personally, that it’s going to transfer into almost every industry that we can think of, which is what I think is really the future: a kind of ideologically targeted products and services of all kinds.

I think that’s what we should be doing. And I think we’re there as far as the need goes. We weren’t there six months ago. But when BLM protests and Antifa protests happen, and every possible product you have ever purchased over the last 15 years is sending you emails talking about how they stand with BLM, and you’re looking at this and you’re going, I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want this. This is a minority opinion in the United States. And you, you know, Fortune 500 company or whatever, are not interested in what I have to say. You are not interested in my business. And if there was a reasonable alternative, I am ready to take it. And sure, it’s going to take a little while for people to say, you know what, I’m going to buy based-brand sneakers as opposed to Nike sneakers, or I’m going to substitute these products, or I’m going to go to some, let’s say, some janky, right-wing, bug-filled version of Amazon rather than Amazon. But at some point, these things will come online. I mean, in the same way, the interface of Parler sucked, but people were on it because they knew that it was important to support things that are made for us. And that idea is building, and it’s building sort of across many, many different industries. But I do think, I mean, to answer your question, I think social media was really the big one. And the idea that, immediately, social media has no compunction in banning or throttling the accounts of millions, tens of millions, of their users, just like that, with no thought whatsoever. They don’t think you’re human. They don’t want you talking. And people are internalizing that. And the more they internalize that, I think the more they will search for other options and be open to other options.

Yeah, I completely agree. I just worry that the way these systems work, they’re based on these network externalities. And the value of these networks is that everyone else is on them already, which is kind of their unique selling proposition. And that’s why a lot of people are trying to reinterpret them as utilities. Because once everyone’s on the Twitter network, or everyone’s on the Facebook, it’s essentially the public square now, if you’ve already kind of adopted everyone. So they’ve got a lot of leverage with this. And they could have done this in very subtle ways, but I think they were very desperate this year, and then they just essentially purged, very, very violently. And I’m hopeful, like you say, that this is the next step, that people will adopt new products and new services. But I think we’re now in that interim where, you know, I know a lot of people are quite disillusioned with what happened with Parler as well. And a lot of people are calling Parler a bit of a honey trap as well, because their data management wasn’t very good, at least. And there’s a lot of data leakage from it as well. And yeah, I don’t know. I mean, personally, I hope to see people stepping up in a better way, or like, they need to be at a different level, because Silicon Valley is out there, man. They’re very good at what they do. They’re an oligopoly, a monopoly, for a very good reason. So I think it’s going to take a little bit more elbow grease from our end, at least on the technical side. But at the same time, I also know that a lot of Silicon Valley is based. I would say at least 20 to 30 percent of people are secretly very, very based, because you see them. They’re lurking, they’re stalking, they’re reading, they show up in the Clubhouse, they comment, they like, they subscribe, and all this type of stuff. So they’re there. They consume the content. They’re drinking the Kool-Aid. And I’m sure there’s quite some heft behind that. And I’m sure that might be the harbinger of, okay, because these aren’t dumb people. They’re pattern matchers. They see reality often. Do you think that there’s maybe a shadow elite that’s being prepped in the background? Because it does feel like there might be a little bit of a Silicon Valley counter-elite, you know, the offspring of Peter Thiel, you know, the ideological…

Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, I think we both know some of these folks, and they’re great. Whether or not they’re great at scale is another matter. You know, I know my friends are great. I’m sure you think your friends are great. Whether or not they can construct a real movement within Silicon Valley, I think, is another matter that we don’t know the answer to. But at the end of the day, I do think that our friends in Silicon Valley need to commit to the idea that what they, or what we, would like to create, or what we need to create, is a thing that’s separate. And that’s kind of where autonomy comes in. Which is that, you know, I don’t think that improving Facebook, or fighting to, I mean, it’s the same conversation that you have when you say, okay, no, no, we’re going to take back Yale. You know, we’re going to take back Harvard. I mean, it’s just like, okay, we’re going to take back the New York Times. Dude, you never had these things, much less the capability to take them back, whatever that means. So this is all about building. And whether or not the folks in Silicon Valley who are based are ready to create something that will sort of socially alienate them from the rest of, let’s say, their social universe, remains to be seen. I wish they do. I hope they do. One of the things that folks who are in politics have on the folks who are in tech is, we’re used to being called, you know, nasty names. You know, my joke is, the first two, it’s never going to hurt worse than that. And for people who are in the tech world, in many ways, they’re not used to this. They’re used to being thought of as masters of the universe in their fields. Taylor Lorenz coming down their ass is a sobering experience. I mean, hey, maybe it’s a red-pill moment. You can probably see that in real time, to see what happens to tech folks who are kind of apolitical, you know, middle-of-the-road guys, who are attacked by Taylor Lorenz at the New York Times, and then sort of say, wait a minute, maybe the whole media is crap, not just this one reporter.

Yeah, yeah. They’re very practically oriented people. And I don’t think they deal with this stuff until they have to. But I feel like now, you know, the frog has been boiling now for at least the last couple of years. So I think a lot of very intelligent people who have managed to be part of the establishment without paying too much attention to what the actual ideology was, you know, they’ve just kind of coasted by, are now being the target of people who are more firmly in the establishment. And, you know, that’s a red-pill moment, because at the moment, you know, the revolution eats its own. And they’ve been eating away at the fringes, and now they’re coming towards the core. They’re coming towards the Marc Andreessens, you know, the masters-of-the-universe types. And this is where, I feel like this is an inflection point, where these guys either become part of the counter-elite, or there’s going to be people watching and seeing them being taken down, and they’re going to be the counter-elite. But whatever happens, I feel like there’s just something brewing in terms of who’s going to lead the future.

Totally agree.

Yeah, it’s a really interesting time. I’m curious who our new overlords will be. I hope they’re based. That’s my only requirement, guys, whoever it is. As long as they…

Lift. You know, we’re in good hands.

Exactly, exactly. You have to lift. Post physique is also very important. But before I let you go, I have a question of the show, which I try to ask everyone. It’s essentially: do you have a subversive thinker, or someone who you think should be more popular, people should read or listen to or think about, that just doesn’t get enough time in the sun? That’s probably someone who’s been influential on your thinking and deserves a bit of credit.

That’s a really good question. That’s a good question.

Who counts as subversive? Depends.

Yeah, I mean, who counts as subversive? I mean, there’s so many people who I think are kind of criminally underrated, in terms of, if we’re looking through, let’s say, a kind of mainstream conservative lens. I’ll say this, and it’s not a dodge. Throughout, let’s say, the Iraq War, you would read the Weekly Standard and you’d read National Review, and you would hear a particular criticism of, or defense of, the war. Neither here nor there, I’m just saying that there was a particular narrative. Over at the Claremont Review of Books, you had a completely different frame for that conversation. Now, both publications were, let’s say, broadly supportive of the war on terror, or let’s say both sides. But Claremont brought up things that were just not a part of the conversation. Specifically Mark Helprin, Angelo Codevilla, those two. But, you know, specifically Angelo, and his writing about the war and the post-September 11th period. Specifically also his book about peace is absolutely amazing, and it’s one of the most underrated things. I mean, nobody talks about it, when I think they really should, To Make and Keep Peace Among the Nations.

But this is to say that the folks at Fox, Weekly Standard, National Review worked really hard for many, many years to make sure that nobody knew what the Claremont Review of Books was, that nobody interacted with Angelo or any of the folks who were sort of critiquing the Iraq War, or critiquing the Bush administration, from the right. And this was a tactic that’s kind of still used today, in the sense that the mainstream right does not even acknowledge some of the criticisms or the critiques that come from, let’s say, further or deeper into the right. Because, fundamentally, I think their biggest fear is to be considered right-wingers. So the demon that they’re always after, the great demon that they’re always slaying, are folks to their right. So, sort of to wind up, I mean, really anything in Claremont, anything at The American Mind. Michael Anton’s book, The Stakes, I think it was the book of the year, by far. There’s so many folks who are involved in that kind of intellectual universe, and it’s my intellectual universe, and I’m proud to be involved in it too. So I think that’s really the only, let’s say, the only mainstream place on the right that is at all interesting at this point. Another plug would be for Tablet Magazine, which now is doing stuff that is to the right of National Review, often. And it’s not even a conservative magazine. You know, it’s just a Jewish publication that deals with a lot of stuff. And frankly, their editors are based. So a plug for American Mind, Claremont and Tablet.

Yeah, absolutely. I have to second that. I mean, yeah, the guys at Claremont, I voraciously consume all of their content. I know you’re part of the Institute as well. But there’s the Roundtable podcast, which I think is very good. People should listen to it. And their Substack is great. Spencer Klavan, James Poulos, everyone on this team is just amazing guys. And yeah, and American Mind is also one of the few publications that’s just going to publish whoever has a good idea, just like, you know, nobody’s like me. But no, just people who are good writers, or are not necessarily part of the establishment. There’s not that much haggling going into being published in the American Mind if you’re good and the editors think you’re good. And there’s also a lot of anonymous accounts that publish there. You know, people who are very smart, have something to say, but don’t necessarily want to say it under their real name, real face, for obvious reasons. They have a space at the American Mind. So, like you said, yeah, it’s one of the few incubators of real, solid dissident thought at the moment. And Tablet as well. Yeah, Michael Lind’s work at Tablet. And, you know, people who are theoretically on the left, they write some of the best right-wing articles I’ve read lately. So it’s excellent. I wanted to leave the end of the podcast to discuss your new book that’s not out yet. I’m really curious about it. It’s called Qatar’s Shadow War. And I imagine it’s about Qatar and a secret war.

Yes, thank you. Thank you for mentioning it. It was just announced. I mean, I knew I was doing this for a while, but it was just announced. It’s going to be available shortly in a number of different places. But it’s a really short book. What I wanted to do, I’ve been involved in sort of this discussion that wraps up a lot of different subjects for a couple of years now, I guess since 2017 or maybe longer, that really focus on, let’s say, two things. Number one is the way information operations are fought today with the media, and the dynamics of, let’s say, a standard information op, whether it’s Qatar or Russiagate. I talk a lot about Russiagate, and kind of compare and contrast the two. So you’ve got that. And then, on the other side, you’ve got the dynamics of what a lot of people are calling the new Middle East, which is something that I used to talk about many years ago, when people said that I was either a Saudi shill or crazy. But I said, no, you know, there are changes coming to the region that are going to be very positive. And most of the sort of the fulcrum on which, let’s say the twin, plural fulcrum? Fulcry?

Maybe.

The fulcry on which these things move, it’s Iran and also Qatar, which, let’s say, are the kind of two hubs of Sunni and Shia Islamism. And sort of the book deals with these two things and tells you why it’s important, gives you a little history of Qatar also. And I deal with a little bit of the freedom agenda, and I smack around the Bush administration for a little bit. And then I close out discussing sort of how do you guard against information operations in a free society? And the answer is, you really don’t. And to the extent that people can be red-pilled on some of these things, for example, they see Russiagate, and it lets them, I mean, it’s one of the reasons I used it as an example for the book, is Russiagate lets people understand how government and media work together with special interests in order to, you know, sort of exactly how to push a narrative and how to get people to believe the things you’re saying. What are the component parts of the narrative that you’re trying to get people to accept, and what are the steps required in doing this?

So anyway, this is the kind of thing that was, there was an embargo on Qatar that sort of set off this Saudi-Qatari conflict in the summer of 2017. And it just now wrapped up, where they’re kind of to the point where they’re throwing away the hatchet and mending. So we have a period of a couple of years where sort of this book takes place, where there was a tremendous amount of really, you know, information warfare and influence operations, and all these things we used to think of as spy games happening inside, you know, surrounding Washington, D.C. And the book chronicles quite a few of them.

And it’s really a lesson, too, not just about Qatar, but about how any other country, specifically a small country, or no, not even a small country, you can throw China in there, but how foreign countries use the United States as a battlefield in conflicts that they have with one another. And yeah, I mean, that’s a totally natural thing, because we are Rome. If you are India and Pakistan, and you are fighting it out, you’re going to be fighting it out primarily in the capitals of the United States and China, in terms of influence and jockeying for this and that. So, I mean, that’s just one example of many, and it has to do with sort of where we are positioned globally. But anyway, I think that is probably going to be the end of that, as far as my Middle East writing goes. So in a way, it kind of puts a marker on a kind of 15-year period of me doing that. So I’m kind of happy about it, and seeing what the next 15 years has in store.

Extraordinary. Do you have any projects on the horizon, or anything that’s kind of taking your fancy, direction?

Well, yeah. I mean, it’s mostly internal to the United States. I think that, increasingly, thinking about national security and foreign policy is kind of overtaken by events, at least in the United States. I mean, you can see it. You know, you just see it on Twitter. Blah, blah, blah, something, something going on in the Middle East, something going on in China or Europe, nobody cares. Yeah, the American audience no longer cares, because I think there’s a broad understanding that the war is here. There’s an understanding that sort of the age of foreign policy, where we have the luxury of dealing with it and of getting engaged, is kind of over. And, I mean, I felt this way for a while now, but, I mean, after the 6th of January, and after the, you know, I mean, you’ve got people talking in the United States, actually serious, you know, quote unquote, serious people, talking about making terrorist designations against Trump supporters and MAGA people. And, like, in a world like that, how can you possibly care about what’s going on abroad? So that’s where I think my focus is going to be. It’s going to be here in the United States, and specifically how to, you know, something you brought up earlier, which is how to make communities in the U.S. more autonomous, and how do you sort of create the infrastructure that supports that autonomy, whether it be political or economic or geographical or whatever, communications.

Yeah. So no more voice, only exit. I feel like there are a lot of people that are going to join you in that fight. Could you tell people where is the best place to find you? Where’s all your good stuff posted?

You can go to Twitter, and you can go to my page at Locals, and you can go to my website, which is just DaveReaboi.com.

Okay, perfect. I’ll list them all in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining me, Dave.

Thank you. It’s my pleasure. Great to be here.