Between Two Lampshades
Michael Enoch Interviews Greg Johnson, Part 2

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Part 2 of 3

Editor’s Note:

What follows is the transcript by V. S. of Michael Enoch’s Between Two Lampshades interview with Greg Johnson on The Right Stuff [2]. You can listen to it here [3]

ME: A friend of mine said something to me pretty funny the other day. We were just chatting online in a sort of IM message, and he said, “It’s funny because you’re one of the least edgy people I know on the alt-Right.” And I said, “What are you talking about? Look at what we say. Look at what’s on my website.” You know what I mean?

GJ: Yeah.

ME: And he’s like, “Yeah, but you’re a normal guy; you’ve just got politically incorrect opinions.” And that framed it for me in an entirely different way. Because I’m like, “Man, what we’re doing is like . . .” I couldn’t stop doing it if I wanted to. I have to do it. But I’m thinking, “Man, if people see this my career could be ruined, my family, etc.” But he put it in this frame, and I thought, “You know what? You’re right. I’m just a guy with politically incorrect opinions. Fuck you!” You know what I mean? And that’s kind of the attitude I want our fans and listeners and our friends . . . I hope all our fans become our friends. I’ve consistently been bringing people in. When people comment on the site a lot and they email me and we talk. Then we become friends, and that I think is how we’re broadening our community. And everybody feels this feeling that we’re just guys, and we think politically incorrect thoughts, and we say them, and we have fun doing it. That’s our thing.

GJ: I think it’s great, because people can and do identify with you people just as people. That’s very important. When I was editing TOQ Online I started this series called Why We Write, or Why I Write is what it should have been called. I was thinking of the old Frank Capra Why We Fight series.

ME: We know why we fought!

GJ: Yeah. The purpose was just to have our writers talk about why they write. What makes them tick. The purpose of that was to allow people to identify more personally with these people so we’re not just names putting out information, but we’re real people with real stories. I think telling stories about people’s lives, situating things, being a real 3D person, speaking on the radio rather than writing – all of these things are very, very important for building community, building identification on the sort of sub-rational interpersonal level, not just ideas but people. We relate first and foremost to people not just disembodied ideas.

So, you guys are giving a really appealing embodiment to a certain trajectory of self-education and political incorrectness that I think is bringing a lot of people along in your wake. That’s why I follow your site. I’m really happy to be finally interviewed on it.

ME: Oh yeah, for sure. The only reason we didn’t do this before was scheduling issues. We played email tag before for weeks.

GJ: Oh, I know. I know. I’m not saying, “It’s about time!” I have a terrible time scheduling interviews, and I do interviews myself. I’ve been moving around a lot. I’ve been traveling a lot, etc. But yeah, it’s great to be here.

One thing I wanted to address is you said you couldn’t stop doing this. That’s how I feel about this. One of the things I would like to stress — because there’s so much negativeness and back-biting and “in-fighting” in the movement — a lot of people get the impression that it’s a really negative thing. It’s like being tied up in a bag full of weasels clawing at you. And I get why people have that impression, and there are a number of people I’d like to tie together, put in a bag, and drop off a bridge. But, that said, the fact of the matter is that on balance this has been far more fun and far more rewarding personally to me than anything else I could do with my life.

I have met the best people I know. I have met the most interesting people I know. Sometimes not the best, but you meet really interesting people. I’ve met some of the worst, craziest, most crooked and corrupt people I’ve ever met too. But once you get outside their baleful influence or if you avoid it, it’s still very, very interesting. So, I have a really interesting life, and I’m going to keep doing this. Not just because I think it’s really important, but because I think it’s personally rewarding. I think that if you’re just doing stuff because you think it’s right, it’s your duty, that’s sublime. That’s admirable. That’s Aryan. But it can’t sustain you. It can sustain you to pull yourself together and charge the machine gun nest or something like that. But it can’t sustain you for years and decades or a lifetime. You also have to have some personal rewards built into the process, and it is very personally rewarding on a psychological level.

The only thing that really bothers me about this life is the financial insecurity. But it finally occurred to me one day that financial insecurity is something that everybody has to deal with. I know people who are literally worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and they are consumed with financial insecurities. Once that dawned on me it was like, “Well, the last regret that I have has basically flown out the window.”

I really love this life. I think it’s very, very important, and I think that not only does it potentially make a difference in the most important issue that we face – this is the great battle of our time. I don’t just think of it as for the interests of White people. Although that’s my primary interest. I do think that this is something that aligns with the interests of the whole world, the welfare of the world, and I think that if we don’t save our race this planet is going to be nothing but a burnt out cinder someday.

ME: I agree, and it’s funny because the conceit of the Jews is that they’re the light of the world. Really? When you look it’s Europeans that are. We created the greatest civilizations across two continents (North America and Europe) and if we’re gone that’s it. There are, East Asians and I respect East Asians, and I’m friends with a lot of them. I think that we can always be friends with them and have bonds of mutual respect across borders.

But European civilization is really nothing like it, and if that goes then it’s gone. The world will be reduced into a ball of barbarism like you said, and there will be nothing beautiful and enlightening. It’s sad, and I don’t want to see that. As you said, I’ve gotten to the point where now I’m primarily concerned with saving the White phenotype, the White genotype, the White race essentially and keeping us going, keeping us from destroying our native homelands in Europe and our adopted homeland in North America. I’m still holding on to hope. I know there’s a lot of people in our sphere who are like, “Give up America.” But why should we give up America? We civilized it. Why should we give it up?

GJ: The people who say, “Oh, it’s hopeless. We can never get rid of all these people.” Look, it’s never been more feasible to move large populations.

ME: In North America, there are 230 million White people, people of European descent living in North America. That’s almost as many as there are in Europe. I don’t see why we have reason to think we need to give up this piece of territory.

GJ: No. The fact is that these people all came here in the last 50 years. The vast bulk of these people have come here in the last 50 years. They can go over the next 50 years. It’s not going to take some great cataclysm, some apocalyptic race war, some “Day of the Rope” scenario and all that kind of fantasy literature. If we just had a ruling elite that decided from this point forward that we are going to put our race back on the path towards life, health, flourishing — and what that requires is that we are going to change the dynamics of immigration so that there’s a net emigration of non-Whites each year — we could wait 50 years.

But, you know, even if it took 50 years for our continent, our country, to be entirely White, we would be reaping all the psychological benefits of that today. I think a lot of White people deep down inside are demoralized by the fact that they the feel that the race is on the path to suicide.

You look at the baby boom or you look at the Third Reich. Objectively, a lot of things had not changed between the end of the Weimar period and the beginning of Hitler’s Germany. What had changed was there was a sense that finally things were on the right path. That confidence did a lot of the rest of the work. After World War Two in America, there were all kinds of shortages and problems left over from the war, and yet there was great confidence that we were on the right path, and so we had this great baby boom that lasted really almost 20 years and a prosperity bubble that lasted even longer. That kind of self-confidence is something that we could win back and enjoy today if we just made the decision that White people will henceforth have a future in North America. We don’t have a future now, but if we decide to have a future we will reap all the benefits of having a future in the present.

ME: Yeah and I know there are various groups that have different narratives on the post-war boom in the United States, but it’s interesting to me that the post-war boom, regardless of whether you’re an Austrian or a Keynesian or a Monetarist or whatever the hell you are, was a boom of the confidence of our people and it was optimistic. What killed it was the counter-culture of the ’60s, the Civil Rights movement, the immigration law of 1965. That’s when the hope and optimism in the country started being crushed by this counter-culture, which was mostly led by Jewish revolutionaries and intellectuals, and that’s what put us on the path that we’re on now.

Those that were born in the baby boom had been highly influenced by this. That’s my parents, and I know it’s the parents or even grandparents at this point of many of our listeners. They become sort of infatuated when the mission of America became social justice and justice for everybody.

But it’s demoralizing to White people, fundamentally, and even though there is a lot of us here people don’t feel any connection.

It’s interesting that we’re having this conversation today because just this morning on my way to work I was walking down 17th street (I don’t know how well you know New York City) and Irving Place . . . Irving Place is one of the wealthiest parts of New York City. It’s actually one of the few parts of Manhattan where there’s a private park. The people that live in this area have a private park where you actually have a key if you own or rent a home in the area. It’s one of the few places in New York City where that exists. Really, really wealthy area. But it’s also right next to some of the scuzziest areas. This phenomenon happens, interestingly, all over the United States. Wealthiest areas near the scuzziest areas. There was a high school I walked by. I believe it was right there on 17th and right before Park Avenue.

There was a fire drill at the high school, and the students started pouring out, and I’m thinking, “Holy crap! 1 out of 15, maybe 1 out of 10 of these I’m seeing are White faces.” And I became incredibly demoralized. My heart sunk. It literally sunk, and I felt bad, I felt empathetic for those White kids that were coming out. I can’t really project my own feeling on to them, but I imagined myself . . . Because I went to a high school that was about 40-45% Black, and now the high school I went to is 55% Black. But I was thinking they really can’t be loving this, and if it was 90% White those kids would be having so much of a better time.

GJ: Oh yeah. There’s no question. We know this, because we know that’s the way the human brain is wired.

ME: Yes, there’s ample psychological evidence of this. Then I went up to my office and I thought, “Wow, so I’ve gone from the life that a high school student has to live in New York City to now the life of a middle-aged (and I hate to say it, but I’m approaching that), middle class professional in New York City, and everyone in my office is White. Some Jews, but mostly White or Asian. Asian, but like White-presenting Asian or Asian-Asian but silent. In an office of 200 people, maybe one or two very White-presenting Blacks. This is a different world from what the high school student is encountering. So, I could see the dynamic in one glimpse.

You have parents of people in New York City that are probably middle class professionals, and this is their experience, and their children’s experience is completely different, and there is no way to communicate across that gap. I know some of them have so imbibed this liberal ideology that if their children even tried to talk to them about it or even had the language with which to express this they would be . . . I don’t even know what would happen.

GJ: They’d send them to a psychiatrist.

ME: Yeah. They’d probably try to break them of it. It just made me sad. I went through sort of a . . . I hate to sound like I was overwrought and emotional, but for like a half hour at work I was just sitting there thinking, “Oh man, that sucks.”

GJ: It’s hard to feel like you don’t have a future. My grandmother on my mother’s side had three children, seven grandchildren, and she had three great-grandchildren. Of her seven grandchildren, only two of them had children. What did they all do with their lives? What have I done with my life? We’ve all had our careers, we’ve all had our hobbies, we’ve all had our trips, we’ve all had our lavishly doted upon Golden Retrievers, but no kids. She must have looked at that and felt sad near the end of her life. She died last year. What are the chances it’s going to continue, with that pattern?

It is sad. Every SWPL, every White person I know who dithers about having kids, I say two things to them. This is advice from someone for whom that ship has probably sailed. (A) All of the things you’re running around doing with your life instead of having kids or are putting off kids to do, none of these things are going to matter if there’s no next generation.

ME: Yeah, you’re totally right.

GJ: And (B) If you are worried about having kids, or you’re not sure if it’s a good idea, or you’re not sure if you’re up to it, or you’re afraid that you’re bringing them into a terrible world, just think about all of the ancestors that you had going back to the very beginning of our race. Every one of these people probably had it harder than you.

ME: Way harder.

GJ: Way harder, right? And somehow they overcame all of their qualms and life continued on. Are you going to be the whiny little maggot who brings all of their striving and struggles to oblivion because you just can’t get your act together and decide to go off the goddamn pill or stop using condoms or whatever and just take the plunge and carry the race forward one more generation?

ME: You know, I don’t even think with those that aren’t having children that it’s necessarily a fear or anxiety. I think it’s selfishness, frankly. And I think part of it is because the value of it was not inculcated to them, and there’s other factors that go into it that we discussed. But it’s selfishness, and it’s not even fear and anxiety. I think maybe for some people it is, but . . .

GJ: You’re right. The best people are afraid. White people are the only race that abort their children because they’re afraid their children won’t have an upper middle class lifestyle. That’s insane.

ME: But, you know, when you actually look at stats on abortion the overwhelming majority of abortion . . . Upper middle class White women very rarely have abortions. I don’t know how familiar you are with Charles Murray and his recent book Coming Apart. He actually outlines a sort of split between . . . You may or may not agree with this. I’ll just sort of lay out what his thesis is, which is that there’s two White Americas, and he’s saying there’s been a split where the upper or “oven,” as we say, middle class and wealthy White America has gone one direction and lower class White America has gone another. The problem in terms of behavior isn’t really with the top half. The top half continues to get married at higher rates than the bottom half, have high investment children at higher rates, are religious at higher rates. Essentially, all the positive traits for carrying on civilization happen at the top 50% of the White income bracket, but that top 50% is also overwhelmingly liberal and doesn’t care about any of the things we’re talking about.

GJ: Right.

ME: And the lower half is having abortions, they’re doing drugs, they’re not getting married, they’re having children out of wedlock, they’re mixed race children. It’s a mess. That’s really who’s being screwed over right now. In the long run, we’re all going to get screwed over, but right now it’s the bottom rung. It’s the bottom 50% that is getting really fucked. In the long run, it’s going to be all of us. So, us upper middle class need to get our shit together.

GJ: Well, one of the things that we have to do is overcome this wound in our body politic, which is the attitude I see amongst my liberal relatives, which is that they always define themselves in terms of not being like those White people.

ME: Yeah, that’s got to end.

GJ: Those lower 50% White people. “Oh, we’re not like those people. We’re liberal and coastal and eat goat cheese and arugula. We’re not like those gun-toting hicks in Montana or something like that.” I get that all the time. It is the lowest, most vile form of prejudice.

ME: It really makes me mad.

GJ: Until we realize that, “Look, you’re talking about your first cousin here. You’re talking about your sister!” These are our people, right? These are our people out there in flyover country that are being mocked, and we need to bristle and stand up for them. Yeah, if there are parts of our race that are being ground down and degraded, we have to come to their defense not feel superior to them.

ME: I completely agree. I remember when I first came to this realization. It happened somewhat when I was in a libertarian milieu, and it fully happened once I moved over towards the alt-Right, for lack of a better term, but now – fuck it – I’m friends with rednecks. You have a problem with that? Yes, I’m friends with rednecks, hicks, hillbillies, whatever you want to call them. Guys that have ten AR-15s in their basement. They’re my friends. Fuck you!

GJ: Yeah. I’m a big snob about a lot of things. There’s certain kinds of food I won’t eat. There’s certain neighborhoods I won’t go to. There’s certain kinds of television I won’t watch. I’m a big snob.

ME: I would recommend not watching any of it.

GJ: Breaking Bad is really good! But anyway, the kind of snobbery that I hate is the class snobbery, the liberal upper middle class snobbery against other White people. I’m friends with rednecks, I’m friends with ex-skinheads, and I will defend these people’s honor and integrity and their intelligence. I would love to see them matched in debate with some of the executives and board members of charities and snooty PhD-level people that I know, because I know these people would wipe the floor with them, even though they don’t have the self-confidence that they otherwise should because they’re largely self-educated.

Exactly. I’m a big populist in this sense. I’m an elitist and a populist. I’m a populist in the sense that the only just system is the system that serves the common good of the society and that means that you cannot have a just system if it’s premised on the ruthless exploitation or exclusion or shitting on a large percentage of your people. On the other hand, I recognize that the best way to have that kind of society is to have an elite that is organically connected with the rest of society.

And I do think there’s a role for certain elements of democracy. I believe in Aristotle’s idea of the mixed constitution. You need to have aristocratic and democratic elements to the constitution. The American constitution was based on the Aristotelian idea of the mixed constitution with a monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic element to it. It’s not a bad system. It’s a system that is not shallow. It’s not rooted in modern liberalism.

ME: I agree.

GJ: All these sort of NRx, anti-modernist people can be dismissed. It’s rooted in the Western political tradition.

ME: I completely agree. Would the U. S. constitution be so terrible . . . For those who think the United States was just a completely failed project, and I’m not even necessarily white-knighting for it, but let’s imagine the United States was still 90-95-100% White people. Really? Do you think the U. S. constitution would be such a bane on society then? No, of course not.

GJ: No. And one of the things that I have come to believe as I become more of a racialist is that in a way I am kind of dismissive of people who are too concerned with things like constitutions.

ME: Yeah. I’m right there with you.

GJ: My attitude is White people create order and civilization wherever we go, and it might be a Scandinavian style welfare state with a constitutional monarch or a republic or something else. But no matter how we slice it or dice it or organize it, if it’s White people doing it, it always tends to work out to be orderly, prosperous, and civilized. That’s all I care about.

ME: I can’t even tell you the level to which I agree with that. For so much of my political life I was focused . . . Like libertarianism, and you can relate to this of course because you were libertarian as well. Where I was like, “No. Free markets! Absolutely free markets! Unregulated . . . blah blah blah” and all this stuff for so many years. I still bristle a little bit when people start talking in, my opinion, overly socialistic terms, but it doesn’t even matter because if we had a White state these would be issues that would be hashed out and it wouldn’t go so far. Obviously, I think we can both agree absolute Communism is completely out, but other than that whatever and I’m not going to get so hung up on needing this sort of laissez-faire free market economy, although I do favor that, but that’s secondary.

You know what I mean? You and me might not even come down on the same page there, but it doesn’t matter because if we had a White state then it wouldn’t matter. We could have that political disagreement, the state would still be prosperous, the people would be prosperous, we could deal with X level of social democracy, whatever.

GJ: Yeah, you see, the way I put it in one of my essays somewhere. I’ve written hundreds of things now and I lose track of them. I said, “Look, I’m all for pluralism. There’s just one thing that’s going to be non-debatable under the system that I want to create, and that’s that our race is going to be degraded and destroyed.” That’s going to be non-negotiable. That’s going to be off the table. That’s not going to be an option. Everybody’s going to be on the same page about White people having the right to exist and prosper. Everything else will be up for grabs, and we will be arguing about abortion and feminism and socialism and taxes, but it will be an argument amongst White people and none of the partisans in those arguments will have the capacity to bring in non-Whites as allies to gain an advantage over their own flesh and blood.

That is my vision of utopia. It’s very broad-brush and sketched out, but that’s fine. That’s all we need. We do not need everything worked out. We do not need people who are writing constitutions and designing logos for the ethno-state. It’s just silliness.

ME: It’s fun though. Somewhat.

GJ: For me, in terms of economic things, the essential thing is the fundamental principle of society. In terms of fundamental principles, I am a collectivist. I think there is such a thing as a common good that can be defined for a people. I think that individualism is part of our nature. It’s part of what makes us highly functional as a race. We need to find a way to give maximum scope to individual creativity, maximum scope to individual preferences, private life. All of these things are good things, except when these things conflict with the common good, and when they conflict with the common good we say, “Wait. There are limits here.” I think that would leave as much liberty as one could reasonably want, as much individualism as one could reasonably want, without it turning into some kind of false absolute idol which undermines civilization. That’s what I think libertarianism does.

ME: Yes.

GJ: Libertarians start out coming up with this wonderful model of voluntary interaction, and they have this science of economics which shows how this works with the marketplace and the price of milk and stuff like that.

ME: And it works on that level.

GJ: And so they just imagine, “Oh, let’s extend this model out to its absolute limits. Let’s have marriages run on the same model as businesses. Everything’s voluntary. Everything’s selfish. Everybody is serving their given preferences by interacting and trading with one another.”

The trouble is that when you absolutize that, it’s bad, because it destroys social capital that made possible that limited realm where it actually works well.

ME: Yeah. I completely agree. I know that we have libertarian listeners. I know there are those Right-wing libertarians for whom our site is a guilty pleasure. That’s actually the market I am trying to reach, in their parlance. I am trying to hit that niche because that’s where I come from. That’s where my friend Seventh Son comes from. Basically, TRS came out of that. We were a libertarians that rethought it and came to a different perspective. That’s the market I am trying to hit, and I know we’re going to strike a chord with them, and it’s not because I don’t understand your talking points. So often libertarians think, “Oh, you’re strawmaning us. You’re not understanding what we’re talking about when we talk about free markets, when we talk about individualism.” No, I get it. I know it and I know you know it. I know Greg knows it.

We’re trying to hit you on another level. You can’t have those things outside of a White society.

GJ: Exactly. It presupposes a social capital that cannot be created by the market, and when you absolutize the market it actually undermines that social capital and will destroy the market and will destroy civilization. Therefore, we need to rein this in and keep it within the boundaries in which it is actually functional and beneficial.

ME: In libertarian terms, the market needs to be protected by a bubble of violence, a bubble of force, and I know that’s maybe a harsh term. A bubble of force like the state. It’s the state. The state is the bubble of force around the market for those people that are protected within it and that’s how it has to work. The state, in my opinion, the boundaries of it should be ethnic. Because why should it not?

GJ: Because why not?

ME: There’s no reason why not. If you’re into libertarian morality, I challenge you to come up with a reason why not.

GJ: Yeah. The way I look at it is that individualism presupposes that you have a certain high trust culture.

ME: Yeah, because there’s a reason — sorry to cut you off — why every freaking guy I’ve ever met at a libertarian meeting was a White guy. You know what I mean?

GJ: Yeah and it presupposes a certain high trust culture, and it doesn’t work if what you have is what John Robb calls . . . I like this euphemism. He has to use euphemisms, but I don’t . . .

ME: No euphemisms here. Say whatever you want.

GJ: Yes, I know. “Parasite tribes.” Jews, Gypsies, there are a million of them in the Indian subcontinent, whence the Gypsies come. Tightly endogamous groups that have dual moralities. If you’re strangers, you’re food basically. You’ll be exploited. These people enter an individualist, libertarian society, and they will destroy it. Why? Because in any interaction the individualist will try to treat them as individuals, and if they have the best price, the best product, they get the money, they get the job, whatever. But when they are in decision-making positions, they don’t act as individualists. They are thinking about the interests of their tribe.

So, yeah, you might be more qualified than cousin Abdul from Peshawar or wherever, but he’s going to get the job. So, these societies get infected with these growing ethnic mafias that will destroy liberal individualism once they become big and powerful enough. The only way therefore to maintain and preserve an individualist market society is to have a state that draws boundaries and keeps parasite tribes out.

ME: I agree with you like 8,000%. 1,488% I agree with you.

GJ: What that means though — and this is where the game is up, libertarians — is your individualism and anti-statism depends upon the state and collectivism to work.

ME: You need a group of people to use violence to protect your individualist market society.

GJ: Exactly.

ME: And I’m a laissez-faire guy. I love laissez faire. I am for that. I am not a socialist in those terms. Socialist in terms of the mechanism of violence to keep outsiders out. You and I might disagree on that.

GJ: I mean, look, I’m a little bit more of a social democrat. My dad was in a union.

ME: This is a fight you and I can have in the future ethno-state.

GJ: Exactly.