137. The Red Scare w/ Jack Mason & Ben Braddock

You are listening to Filthy Armenian Adventures,

a travel agency for the soul.

And this is your host, Alec Mohebian.

Today, we will open a portal to that stage of history,

known as the Red Scare.

Our guide is Leslie Fiedler,

and the three monumental essays

that open his first book, An End to Innocence.

His chambers and the Age of Innocence

originally published in 1950,

after thoughts on the Rosenbergs,

originally published 1953,

and McCarthy and the Intellectuals,

originally published 1954.

From the preface,

indeed I feel just a little misrepresented

by a first book so largely political.

I think of myself as primarily a literary person,

though one whose interest in works of art

is dictated by a moral passion

rather than a cool technical concern.

And I do not hesitate to admit

that I write of politics reluctantly

in a world where to ignore them

would mean to be less than human.

I have no expert knowledge in political matters

and am an indifferent researcher,

but I have lived deeply, though somewhat grudgingly involved,

through a crisis in liberalism

which seems to me a major event

in the development of the human spirit.

This crisis I feel peculiarly qualified to describe

precisely because I am a literary man,

immune to certain journalistic platitudes

and accustomed to regard men and words

with a sensibility trained by the newer critical methods.

It is a close reading of recent events

that I should like to think I have achieved,

a reading that does not scant ambiguity or paradox,

but tries to give to the testimony of a witness

before the Senate committee

or the letters of the Rosenbergs,

the same careful scrutiny we have learned to practice

on the shorter poems of John Dunn.

I asked my friends, Jack Mason,

of the perfume nationalist and the writer Ben Braddock

to read these three essays for a bull session

on the legacy of the red scare.

To ruminate on how familiar the narrative tactics

and the characters are to our own time,

where communism has shapeshifted its way

back into power in American minds and institutions,

and history must be falsified at breakneck speed

to cover up the consequences, the crimes,

and the complicity of our most empathic,

liberal friends in those crimes.

Just as Mr. Fiedler shows us history was falsified

in what we now call the red scare.

But to me, it seems quite clear

that it's all just a little bit of history repeating.

Well, he also describes,

he also describes a bit of behavior

so that it's the exact same as what he's talking about.

And this book came out in 1955 that like,

liberals cannot believe that someone

of the liberal persuasion is capable of wrong,

that the liberal per se is always the hero,

always on the right side of history.

And that, you know, any thing they might do

that's against the law or just, you know,

against like decency and morality,

that these are somehow in service to this like,

greater arc of history that they have decided

that they're on the right side of.

It's like a weird perverted form of Calvinism

of being, of believing that you're just like part of the elect

and that you're just kind of like automatically,

you know, one of the chosen ones.

The mandate of heaven,

liberals have that,

that's why they're so successful at what they do.

Conservatives don't have it,

and that's why conservatives fail

and when conservatives win,

as we have been winning since 2024,

they immediately think it's a mistake and feel guilty

and worry about being considered mean.

Liberals don't have that problem at all.

But yeah, and like liberals,

liberals, they, they have this

because it's like this delusional self-belief,

but then you have someone like Trump

who actually does have the mandate of heaven.

Like there is a literal miracle that happens in Pennsylvania

when he turns his head and precisely the right angle

to get grace instead of

horrifyingly murdered in 4K.

And then even then,

this is not enough for,

you know, for the cattle

to just simply accept,

okay, there's a miracle,

maybe we should just like trust,

you know, that God has a purpose in this man's life

and just, you know, trust him as a leader.

No, it's just the constant backbiting,

undermining and sniping

that happen since then,

it shows that like conservatives have

kind of the same problem as liberals,

but in exact reverse.

And most of the conservatives

that are seen were communists anyway.

And they'd only very briefly

disguise themselves as something else,

but they're completely communists.

They all came from the Bernie Sanders camp

and identified as communists

a couple of years before.

So that explains a lot.

Yeah, they take this old communist

thing of like when they're on the left,

you know, believing we have the mandate of heaven,

and then like when they pose as, you know,

being on the right,

it's the exact inversion of believing

that they have the mandate of hell.

And it's just constantly looking for

proof that they're being somehow betrayed

or whatever by our beautiful president

that, you know, God Himself has shown them loves.

Well, to normal people to the vast majority

of the population, there's no world

in which the word communist means anything bad.

They just doesn't like to proof of all the murders

and what happened in the Soviet Union

and all of that.

It doesn't make any difference.

It just doesn't.

They are communists.

Yeah, they are.

They're groomed and educated in a certain way

that anything left wing

does not have the sensational ring of evil

to them that anything Nazi does.

Yeah, and Fiedler touches on this.

I mean, he says that, you know,

the liberals just cannot imagine

that even the radical progressive i.e.

communist is really bad

because all of them just believe that,

okay, anyone on the left is incapable

of doing anything bad

and evil only comes from the right.

Therefore, like, you know,

if someone on the left could do something

and they could just,

even if it's the most horrible crime on earth,

they could just say, well, you know,

it was a mistake, but, you know,

they don't even know what they didn't do.

They don't even have to say it was a mistake.

People now,

in the post-COVID world have zero emotional reactions

to the reality of murder or violence.

They're completely desensitized to it

unless it supports their political preconceptions.

But in the fifties,

when there was still, like,

a little more residual grounding

in the Christian, you know,

heritage culture of America,

at that point,

I think there was still even,

there was a little bit of, you know,

acknowledging some wrongdoing.

But we're now so far removed from that heritage

that it really is, you know, like you said,

there's just no acknowledgement whatsoever

that there's anything wrong with any of the monstrous things they do.

Well, they didn't acknowledge much back then.

I mean,

it takes a man of total honesty,

like Leslie Feedler,

who describes his own, you know,

his own identity as a liberal

and therefore his own complicity

in the illusions of liberalism

in the first half century,

which included a complete blindness,

complete blindness to the horrors of the Soviet Union.

Like, there are two types of people,

basically, on in the liberal side of the equation.

And one of them are the people

who recognized the evils of the Soviet Union,

through many different stages of revelation,

and there are those who didn't,

and who simply, like,

shape shifted their way out of that recognition,

or who recognized them when it was,

or at the latest point, which is 1956,

Khrushchev report,

that was the latest point,

where they could no longer deny it

because the Soviet Union itself

confessed to the crimes of Stalin in that report.

And that's an important date, too,

because like, this came out a year before that,

in 55.

And so...

Right.

Feedler was doing something really brave

and transgressive,

which was defending chambers

and liberal intellectual circles.

Like, for him to go as hard as he did,

given the sort of context of his milieu

and just like the intellectual situation

at that point in time,

and this is before the Khrushchev report.

Yeah, you get an early taste of like,

okay, Feedler, someone who just calls the balls and strikes,

no matter whether it's good for him professionally or not.

He provides a really great explanation

of the workings of the media

and of academia and intellectual thought

in the Rosenberg chapter

by describing the division

between the first version of the Rosenbergs,

like the reality of them,

which before anyone really cared about it,

before it had been co-opted as this left-wing cause,

and the media creation of them,

which is totally absolved of any crime,

lacks any consistency whatsoever.

It's just then,

it becomes a snowballing invention of the media

and there's no relation to the actual people

that no one cared about before.

It was politically useful.

And we've seen that real case versus fake case thing

play out over and over in all these.

January 6th.

Yeah, George Floyd.

George Floyd.

The Daniel Penny.

The gap between what the relevance are,

yeah, the gap between what the real events are

that they have these happenings over

and that they turn into celebrity causes.

It is never,

like they are never chimping out over like something

that their stated explanation for chimping out

is never matches the actual set of facts

or whatever on the ground.

And it's uncanny.

And it was interesting reading about that

because it was a reminder that this goes back,

like this is a very long habit.

It's easy to kind of make the mistake of thinking

that the error that we live in is unique and special.

Well, because there's no one there to tell you

that this has been going on for decades and decades

except for Rush Limbaugh who is dead

because the current crop of conservatars certainly don't,

even the best of them,

and still any sense of history,

they focus on circular,

current thing cycles.

They're completely goldfish-brained,

stuck in the moment in which they exist.

And in order to be effectively turned into a conservative,

like for life,

you have to understand the full scope

of how long this has been going on.

Because otherwise,

like we saw with all these

fair-weather Bernie Sanders friends,

they get a little interested for a minute

in the idea of conservatism

based on a couple of current issues

like the tits being lobbed off

of the transgender children

or vaccines or something like that.

But then they don't have the structural understanding

of what's going on underneath it.

So they don't know where to go

when things get too hot for them.

So they just retreat to being a liberal

which is what they actually understand.

Yeah, for me,

it was like freshman year of college

reading Atlas Struck in a distance.

It was really old novel.

And this is happening, you know,

with the dawning of the Obama administration.

And being able to see all the exact same archetypes,

like in my college,

on TV, all of this.

And that was,

that was like the big vomit for me,

like, okay, this is a,

this is something that goes incredibly deep

for a very long time, you know.

Because that's the most effective reading

Atlas Struck in the fountainhead

is the most effective way of educating people

on what a communist actually is spiritually.

Yes.

The like shape shifting reality

of that collectivism,

not just the face of it,

which is this like political party

that existed at a certain point in history.

But once you understand

through her descriptions of it in prose,

just that element,

you see it everywhere.

And just that instinct

for her conformity

and how it is weaponized.

She does such a good job

of getting across what the real motivations

of these people are,

not just what their superficial thing is,

which is always, you know,

cloaked in the sort of,

you know, concern for the poor

or feminism or whatever else.

She gets to the heart of it,

like what makes these people

so disgusting and corrupt

at the core?

It's like almost an inborn thing.

Yes.

Which I pretty much believe is that

I kind of believe people are born

lib tards.

Yeah, it kind of reminds me of

a certain degree and they can't be

changed.

Yeah, like Steinberg talked about how, you know,

just as some people may be born

with physical deformities,

like some people are born with sort of

deformities.

And I think that's what basically

what leftism is.

One of the really

fascinating parts of this story,

which

Fiedler brings, you know,

most directly to light,

it's kind of the point of his essays here,

especially on the Rosenbergs

and on his,

who by the way, I'm going to play a clip

of his from 1970,

who his was a liberal darling

who was a liberal day.

Whitaker Chambers,

you guys have to read,

well, I'll help you.

I will do an episode after this,

where I just read excerpts of

witness by Whitaker Chambers,

which is a book everyone should read,

which should be assigned reading

if you want to have any understanding

of American history.

I say that as someone who hadn't

read it until December,

because I, you know, figured I already knew

the second half of,

is to the second half of the 20th century,

what witness is to the first half of the 20th century.

No matter how much you think you know,

it's still vital to read that book,

to truly understand what it meant,

to be alive at that time,

to believe in communism,

to realize it was evil,

and to try to make amends

for that in your life,

and to try to save America

from its influence,

which is what Whitaker Chambers did.

He was a wonderful book.

He was basically a martyr.

He basically killed himself.

In fact, he tried to kill himself

during the trial,

and he tried to save his.

He got into the most trouble himself,

because he tried his best to save his

from the worst charges,

which were outright espionage.

And for all of that,

his reward for all of that

was an early death,

being absolutely torn to shreds

while really,

even to the present day,

but thankfully,

the liberal historian,

Sam Tenenhaus,

when he wrote his biography of Chambers,

vindicated him,

for the liberal audience.

But for decades,

his was considered,

because his got out of jail

and like just three, four years later.

Yeah, he was welcomed back with open arms.

He was welcomed back with open arms

in this 1970 BBC,

whatever interview of his.

You can hear the smug,

dripping contempt

with which the mainstream media

treated Whitaker Chambers.

You can hear it in there,

the way they described his theatricality

and his opishness and his fatness

and the fact that it was like,

the Communist playbook for disparaging

your enemies or discrediting your enemies

when you're caught red-handed

was repeated and echoed

in the Western press through the decades.

As it is today,

to everyone who disturbs the,

who disturbs the agenda.

But it really drive,

it'll really drive

the injustice of it all,

home if you read

Chambers' own testimony

in witness

at what he was trying to do

and what he did ultimately.

And this is actually a relief.

Yeah, this is a really good time

because, oh yeah,

there's some passages in there

that are very,

they're very,

like, easter-like, you know,

with the crucifixion on.

In fact, I think he even, like,

talks about how everyone

ends up hanging when they're all across.

It's a really beautiful

passage, but he's

a fantastic writer.

Oh, he's a great writer, yeah.

I mean, he was writing all like these,

central thing pieces for time

that were super popular,

because he was writing for working for time

after he left the Communist Party.

And he was writing, like, unsigned,

he wrote a lot of their most popular

essays about religion,

about literature,

about all these things, you know,

kind of, for the general audience.

It's a very long memoir,

but the chapters are super short

and they're all very,

it's all very dramatically and lucidly told.

I read it because I was just so

affected by it.

I was reading it in December before Christmas.

And I was just so, like,

emotionally affected by

every little twist in turn,

because I, you know,

not because literally me,

but because I get it.

Like, I get what,

exactly what he was going through.

I know it exactly,

everything he describes,

the feeling of being completely alone,

standing on the

unexpected

wink and nod of

sympathy from a random stranger,

or from, you know,

Henry Loose, now and then,

like, just when you're about to kill yourself

from loneliness,

from the loneliness of being alone in history,

with this immense burden, nobody understands,

because, as Leslie Fiedler describes,

the age of innocence.

American innocence was not

equipped to understand the communist threat.

That's how they infiltrated so much.

And we did not infiltrate at all,

as far as I'm aware, in the Soviet Union.

I mean, there were no-

No, there was-

All of the people we thought we had there were double agents.

In fact, like, we didn't know that the Soviet Union

was going to collapse,

even, like, two months before it actually did.

Like, we thought that they were,

you know, militarily stronger than ever,

and all this, you know, like, all the US,

all the Western intel assessments were just that,

yeah, these people are really strong.

It's going to be a very long time, you know,

whatever. And that was immediately rewritten.

Yeah, that was immediately rewritten to-

Oh, yeah, they were just-

Yeah, they were crumbling apart,

and the Soviet Union never had cancer.

It's kind of like what I guess we're seeing right now

with, with Iran, you know,

where all the assessments were that

they're this really powerful,

regional power, and they're like,

they'll sink a carrier on the first day or two

of the war, and like, there's all this stuff.

Yeah, I'd read all of those assessments,

and, you know, like,

like last year in the lead up to,

Operation Midnight Fury,

I was, I was really nervous about it.

And then like, we went in, we did it,

we bombed their nuclear program

to smell the rains, and then like,

nothing happened. And then I was just like,

oh, this is like the Soviet Union,

all over again.

Very just totally overestimated

power, whatever.

But there's a, there's a,

another thing from Chambers.

Well, I have it on my mind.

There's this quote that,

from Trump, from like the last few months

that I saw being mocked,

but it was, he was saying that communism

is thousands of years old.

You know, they're trying to do like the fact-check thing.

I'm like, no, it's like a hundred years old.

But there's this great Chambers quote about how,

you know, communism is not new.

It, it, it originated

under the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

You know, when the devil told the Eve,

like, you should be as gods, right?

And so like, identifying like this thing,

it's been, it's, you know,

it's been around for a very long time.

It's the fantasy that you can make heaven on earth.

Yep. And all the delusions that are downstream

of that fantasy, and all the,

and all of the self-deceptions

that are required to prop up that fantasy.

And as Chambers makes, you know,

abundantly clear, and you can, you know,

one is free to disagree with this,

with this part of it, but in his view,

the only way to defeat communism ultimately

from winning the 20th century

was to replace it with

a faith in Christendom.

And that's the thing, that was his,

that was his, you know,

big kind of larger argument,

which is it's not enough to simply

reject, reject communists as

this or that, as, you know,

foolish young people, whatever,

they had a unshakable faith,

which had to be, which could only be fought

with an equally unshakable faith,

or at least an equally, equally powerful faith.

It couldn't be fought by the kind of wishy-washy

in-betweenness that liberals at the time,

and to this day kind of typically

embody his view was that

you're just, you're outnumbered,

you're kind of outnumbered spiritually

by communists if you don't understand

why communism is evil,

and also it's, you know,

he does a good job of communicating

early on in the book,

why people became communists at the time,

which is that there was a crisis

of history following the industrial revolution,

and we do have a crisis of history

on our hands today.

It's not perhaps as brutal,

but it is a crisis of history,

namely that people are, you know,

human beings once again

are becoming redundant

and useless,

and digitally,

if not also

demographically replaced,

and people don't know how to handle that.

I mean, we millennials have experienced

this firsthand, like in real time,

the crisis.

It began seemingly innocently

with a little recession,

and a deepened and a deepened and a deepened,

and as trivial as it all seems,

when you look at one little part of it versus another,

it's not trivial at all.

People are lost spiritually.

They're not having babies.

I mean, that's as crisis a crisis gets.

Like, they're not functioning

as adult human beings.

Until they turn 43,

if at all.

And the kind of insanity

that we've dealt with in the last 10 years,

it's almost an insult to call it

to equate it with the committed faith

of communists of the last century.

It's much less of a commitment.

It's much less conscious.

It's like just as subconscious self-melting

into an easily manipulable little putty

that people are looking for religion

in everything, everywhere.

And they have these

malleable, fried,

weak little minds

that can be filled with anything

as long as it doesn't have much substance.

So the defining

kind of archetype of the 2020s

has turned out to be this

sober AA fitness person

who is obsessed with food additives

who has newly discovered

some usually trendy Catholicism

Christianity.

And what they want is rules,

rules, rules.

Everything to be guidance

and betrays this really depressing insecurity.

They also have this kind of

superstitious neanderthal view

that if they punish themselves

enough for sex,

then the rain will come

or they'll be saved.

In some way, so the whole defining tone

of the 2020s is everyone wishing

for this punishment for sex

that no one's having anyway.

Just because it's been

perhaps a few decades

since there's been a big

sex panic compared to

of the scale of what we're dealing with now.

Yeah, they're just looking for

guidance and leadership

and religion in literally everything.

And they,

for the most part,

cannot find good information

and they don't trust their own instincts.

They lack confidence.

They're even though socializing

has been,

and like public social life

has been totally eradicated

and destroyed since COVID.

Everyone is still must answer

to their social connections

for everything that they do

through their phone.

Just weak, weak, weak people.

And we're also in the precipice

of this entirely new

just like taking it to another level

with the peptides, right?

Like injecting yourself

with trainee hormones of some sort.

But it's like we're not even sure

if they're hormones.

They're supposed to be

fragments of protein.

It's not enough to be neurotic

and have like 20 different types of supplements you take.

You have to actually put the needle

into your body to get the real

psychological placebo effect

of whatever this is you're putting in.

And you know, smashing yourself

in the face with the hammer

because it's going to make your jaw line stronger

or whatever.

All this stuff under the umbrella

of fitness and health influencing

and alternative health

and all of that.

It's going to be extremely embarrassing

in the future when a proper

tastemaker describes it in a way

that people can mock and digest

after it's safe to do that.

It's incredibly embarrassing to me now.

It's having experienced years

and years of it on Twitter

and seeing how these food trends

take hold and they're adopted

sort of semi-saturically

and then taken seriously

and then abandoned.

And it's kind of all

all for nothing yet.

It has a religious seriousness

about it.

And the

the fitness obsession

which is obviously this reaction

to everyone's sedentary lifestyle

and like the lack of sex

and lack of public life

and loneliness that everyone experiences.

The fact that that's gotten

to this like hyper

customizable like

high-tech thing

where it again

becomes like a substitute

for alcohol because like

after people quit alcohol

they get so into the fitness stuff

that they start like taking testosterone

or something that also like impairs

their judgment which they then

have to quit.

And it's just like

they click a thing of like

just wanting your own

like decision-making skills

taking away from you with literally any substance.

Well, it's like having to constantly

go through the cycle.

You know, you take up the running club

because you decide that you don't want to be bulky

you want to be laying and then it's like okay

well that messes with your joints

so you do yoga.

And then you find out

yoga is inviting

Indian demons into your body

and you shouldn't be doing that.

And so you have to like

I think the thing that is

that is sort of

broken at least in a

in a medics sense or in a

spiritual sense is like

the

at least just like the insane neuroticism

over

low-exmaxing whatever is the

the hockey team

the American hockey team

and they're beautiful to feet

of the perfidious Canadians.

Yeah, the calm.

The first upset over a communist

a communist hockey country

in 50, 45 years, 46 years.

And you get this

handsome beaming

half-Jewish,

half-Catholic, New Jersey

kid who has like

three teeth busted out.

And you know, and he looks better than anyone

who is

you know being just very neurotic

and precious about their appearance.

And anyone on the Yelena Villesbo

runway.

And it's because they're young

vital white men

full of calm

and the calm is what

is needed to

cure civilization.

And they're competing years ago.

It has to become specifically.

It can't be this woman centric

like woman worshipping type of

feminized sexuality

that big straight wants people to

have to be a defiant

comfield erection

a male sexuality

and unapologetic

quality about male sexuality

that is not about you know

buying into this conservative

thing of you're a bad little boy

don't touch your pp

like you know

that's not going to work.

Society needs male vulgarity.

I think this is why

women are so upset about the war

because of relationships

between the sexes

and a society.

And I think that

some of the women just kind of

feel their power slipping away

as we in a new war.

You know, things have

shifted into the phallic.

You know, you have

these missiles slamming

into concrete.

Well no matter how

the constant pounding

is going to happen.

You know, we know that

no matter how conservative a woman

professes to be

at root,

they dislike anything that men

are doing on their own

or any refusal of their

governance or turning things

into a kindergarten that they can govern.

Especially if like something is going on

that is drawing men's attention away.

So like, you know, the monitoring.

You know, men love

the situation during warfare,

during like seeing what kinds of

planes are flying,

all this sort of thing.

And so that's, you know,

less time that they're going to be

spending, you know,

stepping or whatever.

Building, building the nest,

contributing to the female nest.

They're less available to have their

real psychically drained.

It was especially

gratifying to see this happen

in the United States,

which are basically the women

Olympics, which is the one

athletic kind.

And I know Jack you're not into sports,

but if you notice

figure skating is a big female thing.

They figure skaters make a ton of money

all year round because they have like

Saturday night figure skating,

which is basically just dancing on ice

with judges holding up signs.

And women are really into figure skating

and all the jibber jabber and

including women who hate sports.

So the Winter Olympics is a lot of,

the attention it gets is a lot focused

around figure skating.

And the fact that a male

sport once every half a century

intervenes in a manner,

in a manner that involves

a United States upsetting a

communist country is,

is very gratifying to witness.

And I'm not even a hockey guy,

but it's very symbolic.

As Ben said, of a certain kind of

motivation and revolt

from the democracy we've

been living under.

But hockey is an extremely violent sport.

And it's like it is.

And what really annoyed me is like

people feeling the need to mention

like the women's hockey team

that had won a couple days earlier.

I mean, I guess it's okay

if they want to play hockey.

Because like this is how I guess you breed

the the elite hockey athletes

for the men's team.

It's it's less

enjoyable to see like women

fighting each other.

And I don't think that happens that much

in hockey. And like the whole point

everyone knows the point you go to a hockey game

is you want to see like people get

into a brawl.

There's no stakes to

the woman version of things.

Like women, there's no stakes.

It's just like an imaginary little

world of lesbian entertainment.

Yeah, so women have figures

that have to kind of pretend

that it has stakes

and it doesn't.

Yeah, and you know the idea

that like certain sex

like you know men

have their sports and women have

their sports and like there's

you know there's a

complimentary nature to it.

Like there's obviously biological

differences in those manifest

and the manner of the sport.

The fact we just we still can't accept

that.

And we have to shove everyone into

the same ones in respect.

Oh, look, they got you know

they beat the Canadians too.

It's like okay, cool but

just this like thing of like

okay, well is the girl

steam going to come to the White House?

Well, that was the funniest thing

is the way the way that

that had to overshadow

you know the boys in their big

victory.

And were they going around

asking like you know

well what do you think about

the men's match and you

know it's like it's

these female athletes

they love climbing on a

soap box and you know

screaming about how

like why am I being asked this

question you know they just

they have to ruin everything that

they have to invade every

moment of glory that a male

has to make everything about

themselves.

They have to equalize everything.

They cannot just sit back

and let the boys have their

moment.

No, men are not allowed to have an

achievement at all.

You just can't you have to you

have to like just swoop in

and make it all about you.

It's like something we've

lived I've lived through this in

many in many worlds but

then the 90s were peak women

are just as good at sports as men.

This this thing which was

codified into law under Title

9, one of the craziest I

mean it's only because it's in

sports does it not stand as

like one of the most absurdly

communist laws in the history of

the world to insist

with scientific faith by the way.

Like it sounds crazy now

because eventually the myths

upon which it were based have

been debunked and nobody

talks about it anymore really.

But when I was growing up

through high school it was

insisted to me by my teachers

that that it is wrong to say

that men are better than at sports

than women.

They're it's objectively false.

They thought that literally

objectively women and men would

be one day and the only thing that

helped women backward lack of

resources.

But the only actual

biological difference in race

was just the color of the skin.

There there's nothing other

than that.

Yeah it's all like

cyclical cell.

But like you could you but

there's okay the racial the

racial delusion.

However obviously cope it was

at all times there's at least

you can understand the desire to

hope that it's not true and

you give enough culture

it can make up for you.

I get that

innocence let's call it way

more than I get the innocence

the sheer

like hysterical

obtuse that requires you

to ignore the reality

that men are physically

capable and more

interested in athletic

competition.

This is culturally ingrained

to the degree that

people even conservatives

don't know

what a waste of time

this is and how

much it has

shrunken everyone's brain

shrunken education

shrunken

public discussion

and discourse.

Just the

built-in systemic

overrating of women's

culture.

This is the

history area of life

and how much time that takes

up how the entire history

of cinema which was

you know made by men

invented by men.

All of that was done by men.

The only thing anyone knows

how to discuss now is the

achievements of women because

this is how we're all taught

in school.

How is this good or bad for women

where the achievements for women

and so that's the only way that most people

even think about anything is

like they look at it and see

how is this good for women

how is this good for women

and it's fucking insane

they've never stood back

and realized how

completely insane that is to look

at every aspect of life

and only think about how it's good

for the achievements of women.

What do you have

of like trying to discuss

women's achievement in cinema

is the woman who achieved more

in cinema than anyone else who

had allowed to mention her names.

Well that goes with that's always

par for the course. I mean that even

if that woman wasn't

working for the Nazi regime

and if she was just in the

United States of America being very

fiercely opposed to the Nazi

regime as well as a communist

effort is whitewash from history

as in the case of Ein Rand

and others. Yes correct.

It's like it never

anything that's too inconvenient

to the communist

blah blah of the moment

it's actually

it's actually any of the real achievements

because they completely

they completely

bog every

like these women that they're trying to hold up

as these exemplaries

like no one's ever heard of

or whatever else. So it's like the women who

even actually achieved something

it's like there's this weird

resentment against them.

I think it's usually because

they don't fit the mold of the kind of woman

they want to be a high achiever.

No it's because they're not mean to know

because they have to

they sense if they won't admit it

that what they're ultimately trying

to do communistically

is even the playing field with

mediocrities.

And if a woman

achieves fame and notoriety

and success by being great,

she's not helping the mediocre crusade.

She's not doing anything for the mediocre crusade

because she's showing that actually

anybody can succeed in America

if they're great. That's just

she's doing it. She's doing it in a male

quote-unquote male dominated

industry, a patriarchal industry

etc etc. So she's

showing that you don't have

to implement communism

in order for women to flourish

that like the exceptional women

actually do really well

in our existing system.

Right.

Leslie Fiedler

to go back to Leslie Fiedler.

He excels at dropping

the most insane

references to literature

often melodrama

18th century stuff

soap opera type stuff

into all of his writing

very unexpectedly.

He was obviously the most

the biggest influence on polia

in the like kind of classic

points that he makes

in the way that he writes.

But this from the McCarthy part

he makes reference to East Lenn

the original

sensation novel by Mrs Henry Wood

which is a favorite of mine

does McCarthy on the one

side the state department the

democratic party and international

communism on the other

a threatened America between

this is our modern East Lenn

a melodrama but about who's the hero

who the villain we cannot agree

played over and over with an

almost mindless persistence

in lack of variation

in the newspapers on the radio

on television the names

the conspiracy exposed

the liberal revealed his camouflage

communist or understrapper of the

communist or alternately

as the produced innocent

rounding on his tormentors

and all the radiance of his virtue

sitting in the same playhouse

the two audiences see two

quite different plays acted simultaneously

by the same cast

John Carter Vincent no one

Latimore and Philip Jessup

and Edward G. Pazniac

in the title role

i love that

he's

he's definitely the ground he's

definitely the uh... what do you call it

patient zero of the polian

the polian style the polian kind of um...

synth uh... synth uh... synth uh...

synthesizing style where

he can whip in like fierce

cultural critique with uh... literary

illusion and um... vast

knowledge of culture

another part of his uh...

that uh... rain

like really relevant currently as

you have this uh... this line said

there's no political act that is not

marked these days by the obsessive

envy and anguish of the Europeans

in our regard

oh yeah the middle portion of this book

is about europe and his

travels to italy and stuff

and he has some important stuff

in there too specifically

actually i took a

i took note of one of those

he's there describing the way in which

like the

liberal myths that were

hatched up in america

were especially like

about the road the

fictional case of the Rosenbergs

was just

you know accepted smuggly by everyone in europe

because they had so much guilt

to that so much guilt

about how far they went

probably you know up to world war

two in their atrocities to each other

that they had to find a way to

even the score somehow with america

and which is the source of anti-americanism

you know postwar anti-americanism

that lingers to this day

although i don't think it's nearly as

and as you still see the europeans

will still believe like the most

uh... absurd

libertarian of any event

that ever happens it's pathological

like uh...

you know

they're just it's like

really frame on anything

something on the in the united states

is the msnbc

it's like that tier of

uh...

kind of register and i guess

a lot of these things and i've got

uh... i've gotten smooth and over

ahead but then the whole

tariff debacle last year

kind of brought it back to the forefront

on the just uh... the panic and

thing that has run

deep in europe for decades and decades

and they don't know how to ship stuff

now

since i order perfume from them all the time all this fucking frogs

they'll email you

like claiming they like you'll you'll be like

i don't care i'll pay the tariff

and they'll just

email you literally mentioning trump

and act like they don't know

how to go to

the post office or wherever to ship

something internationally

like the technology doesn't exist

they're insufferable

it's played only a secondary role

there was evident in the shrillness

of the cries of horror

rising from countries where only a little while before

the lynching of political enemies was considered an act of virtue

a desire to celebrate the fall of america from innocence

to indulge in an orgy of self-righteousness

at our expense

there is no political act and the simplest

cry for clemency was inevitably a political act

that is not marred these days

by the obsessive envy and anguish

of the europeans in our regard

if the europeans could only have believed as firmly as they pretended

that we had utterly yielded to hysteria and persecution

the balance of guilt that tilts so annoyingly in their direction

would have been righted

and they have and they might have loved this more

not less

but they could only want to believe this

not really credited

any more than they have been able to really accept

the stories of germ warfare in korea

this is just another reason why

these myths have kind of proliferated

all over the western world

it's like they wanted and he's analyzing

there that they wanted to believe

that we really wrong the Rosenberg

we executed two innocent people

but they can't actually believe it

they don't actually deep down believe it

so it's not

if they actually deep down believe

that they would feel sorry for us for being

just as bad as they are

you know that kind of thing

you have a German friend who

when he found out like the extent to which

we had killed the american indians

he was kind of relieved

because he didn't you know

he felt that germany had a special guilt

around the holocaust

yeah it's real

it's the evening of the score

it's like a way to

and the flip side of that is

yeah the flip side of that

which is one of the earliest lessons

I've learned from

you know political sociology

whatever and I learned it from

Eric offer

in a few of his aphorisms

it's that nobody

will ever

forgive you

for doing wrong to you

like if someone does you wrong

that is the most unforgiving

that is the one thing they can never forgive you for

because the guilt of

that is something nobody wants to handle

so never expect someone

to forgive you

to feel guilty about it

and to take the guilt upon themselves

the guilt will always be

pinned on you

and what they're going to do is frame you

with imaginary crimes

to even the score

so that's what happens

and it sounds like a hoidy toy

hifalutin idea maybe a little bit

it's not

when you see it at

when you when you when you when you

you when you yeah

for you when you when you when you

when you when you when you when you

be all the way down

you the more they have to build the

more they have to build you up

they are imagination

to build you up in their imagination

So build.

Yes, very, very, very...

And it's less...

One thing is basic

For those of you who like

uh, uh, savaged America and, you know, depicted Americans as these terrible colonialisers while

they inevitably worship our pop culture and everything about us and, uh, no nothing about

that.

You know, we, that, we as Americans have this inborn inferiority complex to the exalted

Europeans with their little cappuccinos and their eat, pray, love and, uh, their, you

know, non-existent work days where they choose not to work and everything and their wonderful

statues and culture and all of this and like they don't fucking know anything about that.

Like I'll, uh, when I was a teenager learning about all these like European movies, no one

I've ever met from over there knows about any of that.

You know, they're just watching like minions movies.

So even in 19, like 51, I was surprised, uh, that it was the case even so early.

Yeah, like, uh, you go to some of these places like, you know, and they know nothing about

their own history.

So it's like the American tourists that go there, they're much more interested in, you know,

the garments or whatever else, like you get it like Sicily, right?

And it's like, you can talk to some of locals, they like, you know, they know some of it,

but it's obviously like, it's obvious that they're not as interested in it as even like

casual American tourists would be, you know, just going to miss a place and wanting to find out about it.

Um, that's something that I think really, uh, sets American culture apart is like,

we do have much more of a curiosity about things and an openness, um, to know that.

Like most of the world is very closed off and provincial.

You know, the, the, the thing that we probably, our biggest shortcoming is actually about

our own sometimes, and often, and I think this can discuss political, uh, there's a political

metaphor in this too, which is that we are, we can often be dismissive of our own

people and culture. We, we, we, we kind of like, you know, easily will ignore, um, or kind of just

discount something as, as it has been or overlook it entirely or consider it low class as we,

as we, as we are not trendy enough, not hip, not fashionable. Meanwhile, it can be worshipped in

Europe. And sometimes this has been, it's not just because like there are 10 years behind

2000 and late and always just, you know, trailing us. It can be that we've just like, we've just

neglected gold in our own hills, you know, and, uh, which others find and others, and others

celebrate. And that seems to be a bigger problem actually here than our neglect of the greatness

of other lands because we are often, America's often looking for to import, you know, foreign

geniuses and find foreign things. It doesn't extend to all over the world obviously. There are

vast parts of the content of the earth that we're kind of not interested in or nobody's really

looking there. But there's, there's a lot that is, I mean, look at the popularity of Japanese

culture here. Oh, toxic. I mean, it's really, I'm not kidding. Like I'm not making a joke. Like

it's disturbing when you see like the young people, you go to Barnes and Opal or like there's

this particular Asian strip mall area that's always super crowded here. That's full of like

what's younger than zoom, zoomers and the ones younger than them.

And that goes out there. That's a, and they're just these sad warped, just genic monsters that

are only into this trash. And I like plenty of Japanese shit. Like I, even having to like say

that is annoying because like you can see the problem from anywhere in America. Why are all of

these young people monolithically only interested in this one specific niche countries cartoons and

nothing from their own country. And it's like this deep, deep flaw in their education and upbringing

that they are taught in such a way that they ignore everything American and think that there's

some innate flaw and have to exoticize their interests by only watching this one type of stupid

fucking cartoon and pretending that it's like the most exalted achievement in mankind. It's so

disturbing to me.

Yeah, I don't know. I literally don't get it. The Japan, though, of America for much of the

rest of the world is Texas. Like there's this thing of, if you go to Europe and say you're from

America, they're sort of neutral on their response typically. But if someone is like they're from,

I'm from Texas, they absolutely lose their mind. Like they're so fascinated by it.

So, because Cowboys was, I was, I was, I was on a long layer of her coming back from a horse,

a two week horseback riding trip and travel far too much. Two weeks on horseback. Two weeks on

horseback, like two weeks on horseback. Two week horse journey. I thought I was going to have my

luggage at the layover and the layover was an assemble and they just checked it through all the way

back to America. So, I'm in just riding gear and I have an overnight layover. So, I go into town

to get some food. I'm just wearing cowboy hat, boots, jeans, the whole nine yards.

I mean, that's your normal get up anyway. Yeah. And there, time I've seen you. Yeah, but not

traveling, you know, when you've seen it's been in like Texas in LA, which are countless. Anyway.

So, I'm like walking down this really busy street, this, you know, very cosmopolitan Muslim city.

And they're losing it. And I ended up, you know, like I didn't pay for dinner that night because

the restaurant owner came out and just like wanted a photo with me. Well, there's six, nine, seven

row man. You're seven feet tall and you're dressed like the Marlboro Man, you're walking down

toxin square. It's because it's because it's because I was dressed like the Marlboro Man. That's

the point is like, if I wasn't dressed like the Marlboro Man, then I'm just like, it's like you're

fucking chopped off of the billboard. My point is like walking down looking for some baklava.

I do appreciate that they picked a good, at least like a very red state kind of version of

America culture to like. You realize like, this is, this is what people outside the United States,

what people really like about Americans. It's everything that's associated with conservatives.

There's nothing about liberal Americans that really appeals in any kind of

soft culture sense to the rest of the world. I mean, I would have said Taylor Swift, except she's

not even, she's not a liberal anymore. She's a Republican again. So there really is

nothing about liberal American culture that is authentic in any way that is appealing on any kind

of mass level, I guess. Like, we exported transgender at 2010's transgenderism everywhere.

And so I think the 2010s are a case of American leftist slime successfully being exported everywhere.

But the ties were doing it better before we were.

And he talks about, and he talks here to about how they, how happy they were,

the joy they had when the Rosenbergs were executed, because it gave them the excuse to

chimp out and to act like, you know, and he has a great like,

yeah, yeah. Like, there were no limits to the absurd masquerade. A hundred marching communists in

London put flowers at the foot of a statue of Franklin Roosevelt with an attached red card reading

that Roosevelt's ideas may live. The Rosenbergs must not die. Not Marx or Lenin's ideas,

please note, but Roosevelt's. It is all of a piece, Julius draped after his death, not with a red flag,

but with the ritual prayer shawl of the Jews, not the international song, but go down Moses

and the Psalms, the American flags flying brassily over the Cordaget, and the rabbi to intone

unbelieved in prayers at the grave. But the hoax would not quite hold to the end.

For the crowd at the funeral parlor, booed when a rabbi invited for the sake of camouflage,

reminded them that the Jewish religion teaches forgiveness of enemies. In an instant,

the fake piety and humanity had disappeared from the carefully prepared faces,

and those who had cried for mercy a little while before hooded down the mention of its name.

But there was worse yet. I was in Rome when the news of the Rosenbergs death came through,

and I can speak only of what I actually witnessed. But there, at least on the faces of the

communist crowds surging and screaming before the American embassy, I saw evidence of joy.

They were glad these young activists that the Rosenbergs were safely dead.

For a little while, they had been afraid that some last minute reprieve might cheat them out

of their victory celebration, that they would be unable to go through the streets in their Sunday

best, chalking up death to the killers of the Rosenbergs, and to sit afterwards over a

bottle of wine content with a good day's work. But even this is not the utterest obscenity.

I'll stop reading there. But those who look at us happy they were over George Floyd.

That was what the whole year was about. They love, they love when they get a martyr.

And how happy they were about January 6, being their little, their survival of a violent

situation. Those little things that are so few and far between are all that affirms their

view of the world. They're insulated like, you know, eggshell, view of the world so infrequently

gets affirmed that they love when the rare spectacle occurs. And they love that these

two idiots Renee Good and what's the other one got killed trying to attack ISIS officers in

these protests? This is like the greatest gift you can give to a lip-tard is the fictional

affirmation of their of their diaper baby faith. Well, and they're also legitimately happy

that a death has occurred because they're evil. They're on the side of evil. So they're happy

about the literal death. There's that too, you know, and I was talking to it. I won't mention

any names, but you know, I happen to be like, I won't know because it's not it's not one of,

it's not somebody we know, mutually, but I happen to like, you know, you see, let's just put it

generically. It's like how how they love talking about how funny it is that Anna Hachian almost died

of COVID, which is how they, which is how they view it, which is like not even I've learned and

I won't get into details, but it's not confined to mere like shit posters. Like I heard this

in the wild, somebody thinking that that was so funny that oh yeah, that she almost died of COVID

because I mean, it wasn't even an anti-vaxxer, but that's like the that's the that's the, you know,

that's like what hovers in their head as like an amusing episode of history. The entire

seven plus years I've been doing it, they've wanted me to kill myself. I mean, literally like that's

and they would think it's really funny if you do. And they would think that it's funny and

enjoy it. What keeps me from doing it is knowing how much satisfaction it would give them. So

yeah, exactly. But that's that's what they want. I mean, that's what they wanted to say one

because you saw the problem. They celebrated after Charlie Kirk died.

There we go. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it jumped right out. And, you know, there were, I mean,

I remember seeing it when when Trump got shot and you know, there's all the people who regretted

that he survived. And then there were all the people who like and the instant aftermath when

it was unclear, if he was okay or not, they were already, you know, celebrate. Even people, you

know, people like out in the wild. Like I was, I mean, I was in West Virginia of all places and

it was I was in this like restaurant and, you know, got like a call like hey, check out the news.

And then the, you know, the bartender who was this, you know, had like the

the purple hair and this kind of thing was just like asking about it, but then she was

completely smiling. And it was the most bizarre kind of thing because, you know, here, there's

a shock, you know, I'm like, well, you know, the president's just been shot. And she's like

gleeful. And I'm like, I'm in West Virginia. This shouldn't be happening every year. Like, I

expect this in like, Libertardville, but what is going on? I mean, look at, it goes

as deep as it can possibly go. Look at one of the flagship liberal values. It's the assisted

suicide thing. And that's, you know, you're, you know, when you finally get your communist

health care like in Canada, you don't get access to anything that heals you without waiting for,

you know, nine months or two years or whatever, but you can instantly kill yourself. Same day,

same reason, same day. So that's their values, their values are death. They're the party of death.

And that's what they, and it's on issues like that that they, that they depend on for their

sense that they are pro-freedom too. Because everyone thinks that they're pro-freedom, right?

And, you know, including communists like, if you look at their language, they all think that

they were fighting for freedom, the freedom of the, from man's liberation, from capitalism,

and from having to work and all this. And the ultimate, the ultimate freedom is abortion.

Like, that's the, that's the thing they just increment. It's the absolute pinnacle of the whole

pile of it, you know. I don't know that they're even believe, they, do they even believe in,

is there any point in getting married, other, if not, to have some abortions in the liberal point of

you? Well, they like the torture that it exerts on one's friends and family and the fact that it

costs lots of money. Yeah, English. So the woman, the inner woman triumphs there over the

I have to, I think they really like that. They really like that it offends people who are offended

by, you know, babies being like killed in the womb, right? It's like they get a,

they get a deep sense of satisfaction, you know, that like a Christian out there is,

you know, or any kind of good person is kind of sickened by this idea, right? It's just,

they're, they're kind of doing it for the shock, disgust, value, you know, only the conservatives,

this sort of thing. Yeah. It's, I do think that we kind of have to,

the big difference between now and a hundred years ago is, I think, the, the shape shift that

has occurred in the kind of communist, the, in the, the biography of the communist idea,

which is not the same as it once was because again, and this has also been whitewashed,

up until the Khrushchev report, up until it had until it was literally exposed by its own government,

the so communism meant the Soviet Union. They've done this switch since then where they talk

about how, oh, actually, the Soviet Union wasn't really communism, and that was a particularly

bad form of communism. And so that really wasn't communism at all, and neither is Kuber and I,

they do that thing now. It's not only, not only kind of a fake cover-up, but it's literally the opposite

of what communism meant. Communism was not some sort of ink like, you know, university

concept that nobody really understood. It was very clearly understood. It was the Soviet Union.

It was fealty to the Soviet Union and its foreign policy as the future and the hope of mankind.

That's what it was, and that is why none of them could confess, that is why none of them could,

in any way, they could neither confess to being spies nor could they disavow what they did,

because in their minds, as Leslie Feeder analyzes, in their minds, they were being loyal

to their ultimate cause. And their ultimate cause was not, in any way, an enemy to, they couldn't

view it as an enemy to their own state. To them, it was the highest, the most, it was God,

and God was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, it was the USSR. So it had to, this faith had to

be maintained until 1956, and even beyond by many, but it's, it's an important thing for students

of history to understand, because they've tried to whitewash that fact. Communism was the Soviet Union.

It was the last hope, and that is why they dedicated their lives to it. Now, to me, that there is

no Soviet Union anymore. So it's much, it is no longer this concrete kind of thing that you can trace

it all back to. It's now back to an ideological virus that is, that shapeshifts that kind of

can be much more easily half-believed, or, you know, believed without any real, it doesn't require

any commitment to believe it. You just kind of have to passively go along with it. Everyone on

the left now is a communist sympathizer to one degree or another. There are no real anti-com,

you know, it used to be that you had, because of the, because of the existence of the USSR,

you also had anti-communist leftists who were leftists. They believed the basic ideas, the wrong

ideas, but they hated the USSR for specific historical reasons, or they, you know, the party that

took over, or whatever, like the Trotsky, it's whatever. That doesn't exist anymore. So it's kind

of this all big, this one giant blob of communist sympathy that, that, and kind of like unspoken,

un-unconquered adoption of its general point of view on life. And I feel like the thing that it

all re- like coheres around today, which didn't exist a hundred years ago, is the woman question.

The woman, the female character, the, as a one journalist, Helen Andrews calls it, the great

feminization. I feel like that is, it's hard to talk about a little bit, because it makes it seem

like we're at war with 51% of the population. But it's also impossible to ignore. It has taken the

shape of this like, which, of this literal which, which is, which it is high time we haunted.

Hey, this is your host, Alec Mojibian, the quick message before we continue. Based in that

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the most important ones, the ones with the real effects. Plus, regular brief,

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And that does it for the free portion of this episode, for the second half where we dissect

the witch, the big w. Subscribe on patreon at patreon.com slash filthy Armenian.

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Thank you for listening. See you on the other side of the paywall.