Greg Johnson Interviews Vox Day
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[1]6,816 words
Editor’s Note:
This is the transcript by V. S. of my interview with video game designer, musician, blogger, novelist, and publisher Vox Day. To listen in a player, click here [2]. To download the mp3, right-click here [2] and choose “save link as” or “save target as.” To subscribe to our podcasts, click here [3].
Greg Johnson: I’m Greg Johnson. Welcome to Counter-Currents Radio. My guest today is Vox Day. Vox, welcome to the show.
Vox Day: Thanks, Greg, good to be here.
GJ: I recently discovered your work. I am ashamed to admit it, but your interests had not really intersected with mine until you published SJWs Always Lie [4]
I thought this was a really excellent book, and it’s on the required reading list for all of my readers. I’m expecting book reports in my in-box tomorrow morning from my inner circle, so to speak. They should all be reading it.
I wanted to just get to know you a little bit better, get to know your political philosophy, get to know how you became the author of this book. So, can you tell me a little bit about your worldview? How would you describe your political philosophy and who are some of the intellectual influences on its formation?
VD: I would describe myself as a Christian Western Civilizationist. I’ve been a libertarian for a long time. I was briefly even a card-carrying libertarian. But I was always more of a small L libertarian rather than a capital L one. Mostly because there were certain amounts of libertarian dogma that didn’t quite work out in the real world. Then as time went on it became readily apparent to me as I traveled around the world, as I lived in different countries, as I learned different languages, it became apparent to me that the abstract ideals that we often tend to follow in America in particular are not really relevant to most of the world.
I was being interviewed by a reporter from Le Monde in Paris about two months ago and he had absolutely no idea how to even describe the concept of libertarian to his readers. That’s in France which is at least Western civilization and so forth. Trying to have a conversation about that sort of concept in Japan or China it’s just totally meaningless. So, that’s when I really became more cognizant of the importance of the nationalist element.
I think that just as Stalin found it necessary to modify international socialism for the Russians and just as Mao found it necessary to modify international socialism for the Chinese, it’s necessary for every other ideology to also understand that there are nationalistic, tribalistic limits to the abstract application of those ideologies.
GJ: That’s interesting. I’m an ex-libertarian myself. I was not a card-carrying libertarian, but I subscribed to Reason magazine and read lots of Ayn Rand and Hayek and Mises mostly when I was an undergraduate. There were things that led me away from that.
Two books in particular. First, I read Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions [7]
What are some of the things that you think don’t work about libertarianism? You said that some of the abstract libertarian dogmas just don’t work, so specifically what are those?
VD: Well, the most important one, as we are now seeing, is the free movement of peoples. What really changed my thinking and it was a process, you know, it wasn’t an immediate thing, although it was a fairly quick process now that I think about it . . . I grew up on Milton Friedman. My father had me reading Free to Choose when I was fairly young, and so I was a big free trade dogmatist and around the time of NAFTA and all that sort of thing I could recognize some of the problems but I bought into the line that the problem is that it’s not real free trade. It’s a free trade agreement, but it’s not real free trade.
Then I read a really good book by Ian Fletcher, and he directly addressed the concept of Ricardo’s comparative advantage, and he really destroyed it. I think he had something like seven major problems with it, and that got me interested, so I started looking into it. I’m very fortunate in that I have a pretty active and intelligent blog readership and they really like to engage and they have absolutely no respect for me so they’re quite happy to argue with me.
Most of them were free-traders as well so we ended up having an on-going two or three week debate about free trade, and it got pretty detailed to the extent that I went through Henry Hazlitt’s entire chapter on free trade just to look at it critically rather than just reading through it and accepting it. Just looking at the arguments. I found that the free trade arguments were just full of holes. Not just Ricardo’s, but also Hazlitt’s. That’s what got me realizing that Ricardo’s argument was totally dependent on the idea that capital could move but labor couldn’t and so what that got me thinking about was the fact that a libertarian society – even if we could convince everyone in the United States that libertarianism was the correct way to approach things – would rapidly be eliminated by the free movement of peoples as people from non-libertarian societies, people from cultures where they have absolutely no ideals that are in common with the Founding Fathers or with libertarian ideals, would rapidly be able to come in and end that libertarian society in much the same way that the Californians have gone into Colorado and completely changed the political climate there.
So, Ian Fletcher’s book is what really triggered that whole shift in thought process. Now I look at the concept of the free movement of peoples, free trade, and those sorts of concepts with a considerable amount of skepticism. Of course, in Europe we’re seeing some of those problems related to the idea of the free movement of peoples just as you see it in the States with the Central Americans coming across the border.
GJ: Right. What is the name of the Fletcher book?
VD: Let me see here. Actually, I have it right here. It is Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why [9].
GJ: OK. That’s going to go right on my reading list. Thank you.
There were two things that really undermined my libertarianism. One was very much what you were talking about. It simply occurred to me that a libertarian society requires people that are willing to play by that ethic, but if a libertarian society doesn’t exclude people who will exploit that ethic then it will be destroyed. If you have open borders, and anybody can come in and basically they can come in and take your stuff or take your society from you, that will be the end of libertarianism. Therefore libertarianism requires that you exclude the free-riders, exclude the people who don’t play by those rules. But you can’t do that by libertarian means. You can’t draw borders around people, you can’t say, “You have to leave because you won’t play by the rules of our game.”
VD: Well, you can if you modify them. I think that the libertarian movement, if it is going to survive, is going to have to make the same shift that we saw with the Communist ideology and it’s going to need to shift from an international libertarianism to a national libertarianism, because otherwise it simply can’t survive.
GJ: Right.
VD: One of the authors that I publish at Castalia House is the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld. He’s absolutely brilliant. He’s actually added to the military canon. You can’t understand military events if you haven’t read van Creveld.
The thing that’s fascinating to me is we were talking and we have a military sci-fi, military fact anthology that we publish every year called Riding the Red Horse [10]
When the Helveti invaded the Gaulish lands and Caesar went and ended up defeating them after they had beaten the Roman legions previously, that was a movement of peoples. That was not just an army. And it’s the same with the Goths; it’s the same with the Huns; it’s the same with the Mongols. These were not the equivalent of the German Wehrmacht marching across a border. This was the entire society on the move, and so the distinction that we make between immigration and war is really a relatively modern one, and it’s largely an unofficial one as well.
GJ: I would agree with that. I said this some years ago, I think, in an interview with Dennis Fetcho [11]. We were talking about this very topic, and I said that looking at the late Roman Empire, looking at the barbarian invasions, these were not armies blitzing across borders. These are large migrations of people, and the Romans were constantly bringing these people in and settling them in their lands to work for them and fight for them and things like that. The Romans thought this was working out quite well for them right up until the point when it wasn’t.
VD: Well, sure, and that’s the problem, because it does work fine for a while. It’s connected to the same reason that central banks keep interest rates low and the same reason that kids don’t do their homework until the night before. I mean it is a normal human thing to put off the difficult task as long as possible and unfortunately one way that a society can put off some of its problems, put off facing those problems is by permitting large migrations to enter and of course the price of that usually is the eventual collapse of the society.
GJ: Right and in the short run it does serve short-term elite interests, which is why it’s permitted in the first place. It’s cheap labor, soldiers for the legions, whatever the motives were. Or just because it’s easier to go along with this for a little while than raise an army and repulse it. Eventually though you find that you’ve been replaced in your own homeland.
When Rome was sacked it was sacked by people who were settled for generations inside the Roman Empire itself. It wasn’t a long march for them to get to Rome and sack it.
VD: Right.
GJ: They were already there, and I think that looking at what’s happening in Europe today and looking at the United States today it’s exactly the same process.
VD: The ironic thing is that it’s actually much worse in the USA than it is in Europe, even though people don’t realize it, because most Americans don’t understand that the Muslim population in Europe is about 5%. It’s actually a little less than 5%. Whereas the Hispanic community in the United States is pushing 30%.
GJ: Right.
VD: And also the European nations have a much stronger, much more active sense of nationalism. You can’t be German if . . . I was up in Cologne a few weeks ago and there was a Turkish gentleman who was my taxi driver. We were talking a bit and he had been in Germany for something like 27 years or 30 years or something and he still considered himself to be Turkish, whereas if someone has lived in the States for 30 years people say, “Oh, you’re an American. You’re an American now.” Whereas the Germans would never reach that conclusion.
GJ: Right. This almost sounds like the beginning of a stand-up routine, but whenever I get into a cab I always ask the immigrant what country he’s from, and they always tell me, and then I always ask, “When do you plan to go back?” I put it in the most naïve possible way, and there’s only been one instance where somebody’s gotten upset with me for asking that question. Usually, they get really thoughtful and they say things like, “Well, I’ve been here for 20 years, and I thought I would go back very soon, but I just sort of got caught up in things.” And I ask if they’ve gone and visited their homeland: “Oh yes!” A lot of these people, especially if they come from Asia or Africa or the Middle East, they don’t feel like they’re Americans. They feel like they’re exiled Afghanis or exiled Eritreans or whatever.
VD: Well, it’s not difficult for me to understand this because I’ve lived in Europe now for nearly 20 years, and we made the decision to leave, and we have integrated pretty fully. Certainly the kids don’t consider themselves to be American at all, because we don’t go back; we don’t visit it. We’re still culturally American in a number of ways, but that’s also because it’s somewhat difficult to escape American culture because of the entertainment.
GJ: Right.
VD: But to me it’s always funny that I left 20 years ago and people say to me, “Oh, well, you’re still American” and then I say, “Well, then why do you think that someone from El Salvador who’s been there for 5 years is an American?”
GJ: Right. Exactly.
VD: It makes no sense.
GJ: I have been in conversation with certain liberal academic types who within a five minute period will talk about horrible tragedies of discrimination, etcetera, the bloodshed between the Irish and the English, this horrible, horrible, long, dark history. And then within five minutes will be talking about how glorious it is that there are Pakistanis and Bangladeshis living in England.
It’s like, “If two peoples as similar as the Irish and the English have this long tragic history of bloodshed, why do you think it will be any different and any better with people who are so radically different?”
VD: And that’s my concern especially in Europe, because this whole Syrian migration crisis didn’t begin all that long ago, and yet you’re already seeing fairly totalitarian laws in places like Hungary and stuff. They just passed a law last Friday where they can search your house without a warrant if they’re looking for migrants.
GJ: Right.
VD: And this is like, what? A couple weeks in? Can you imagine what sort of laws they’re going to be passing and what they’re going to be permitting and what the governments are going to be doing if they don’t get this flow to stop fairly quickly?
GJ: Right.
VD: I’m afraid that it is going to be absolutely horrific. The problem is it’s the open borders people who are going to be completely to blame. None of this needed to happen. This is a completely unnecessary crisis that has been created.
GJ: I agree. It sort of illustrates Sam Francis’s notion of anarcho-tyranny too because, on the one hand, if you’re a Hungarian citizen this is profoundly upsetting, and it’s basically an across-the-board loss for you if you’re a Hungarian citizen. For the Hungarian government though, they have to have some little area of their consciousness where they realize that they benefit from this.
Nietzsche once said that “the kings of Europe never sat so securely on their thrones than since the anarchists started throwing bombs at them” and why is that? Well, because it allows them to clamp down on their populations. It allows them to have an emergency to arrogate power, to do something.
VD: The thing that’s actually slightly alarming about Hungary is that this is not the extremists that are passing these laws. This is like the equivalent of the Republicans.
GJ: Oh yeah.
VD: This is not Jobbik, who is to the Right of the current government, and then they’ve got the Arrow Cross beyond that. I think that we’re basically two election cycles from the nationalists taking power, which would be a good thing. But my concern is that if the nationalists are not able to take power then you’re going to see the Ultras eventually taking power simply because people are not going to tolerate this constant invasion, the rapes of the native populations, and the criminality and the ghettos.
When I was in Paris – it wasn’t that same trip, but on another trip to Paris – it was extremely comical in a dark way, if you’ve got a black sense of humor. I was walking through the Jardin Nelson Mandela, which is a garden square sort of thing dedicated to Nelson Mandela.
GJ: Oh, spare me. God.
VD: And there were about 60 Africans just kind of lounging around. Not causing any trouble. Just hanging out and enjoying the sun, which was fine. There were 4 French gendarmes armed with machine guns who were standing on a platform overlooking them keeping an eye on them all.
GJ: Right.
VD: I was just thinking that I don’t think this is quite what we had in mind when we wanted to honor Nelson Mandela here.
GJ: Right. It’s a very, very disturbing thing. I do think this is good for nationalism in Europe, and I think that the Europeans will save themselves from this. I am less certain about the United States, because I think the United States has a very, very weak sense of identity. It’s largely a propositional form of identity rather than a racial or ethnic form of identity. Those are shallow roots and we have this idea that we assimilated the Italians and the Irish, so why can’t we assimilate Hispanics and Fijians and Africans? What’s the difference?
VD: I’m the great-grandson of a Mexican revolutionary myself and so I have Spanish-speaking cousins. I wouldn’t say that I am of Hispanic culture. I’m more sort of tangential to it, but the thing that people don’t understand about Hispanics is that they do have a functional culture. I mean, the way that they live works, but it’s very, very different than American culture. You can see it when you go south of Los Angeles now. It’s not entirely Third World, but it’s not First World either. They don’t live like Europeans do.
GJ: Right.
VD: We were driving through Switzerland once and we saw this woman who was actually vacuuming the sidewalk.
GJ: That’s great!
VD: That would never, ever happen in a Hispanic community. They just don’t keep things up. They’re not as uptight about things, and it’s not all a bad thing. Where we live in Italy it’s actually similar in some ways because, you know, “Don’t worry about it. You can deal with the problem tomorrow. The problem is still going to be there tomorrow. Don’t worry about today. Let’s just have a drink and enjoy the nice weather.” It’s not a horrible thing, it’s not a bad thing, but you’re not going to get to the moon that way.
GJ: Right. Exactly. An Italian friend of mine years ago said that his mother or grandmother had this saying that, “Every morning the housewives of Switzerland sweep the streets and deposit the dust over Italy.” So, it doesn’t surprise me now that they’re using vacuum cleaners. That’s a new one on me. I’m going to steal that as a story.
One of the things that struck me as a point of disagreement with your book, and it’s not an explicit point in your book that I was disagreeing with but sort of an assumption, is that you don’t seem to think that identity politics as such is legitimate. Is that correct or was I just reading that into it?
VD: Well, it depends what the identity politics are. I think that nationalism and tribalism are not only legitimate, I think that they’re virtually unstoppable forces.
GJ: OK. That’s useful. Thank you.
VD: But I think that identity politics of the sort where you decide that you’re really a dragon and I decide that I’m really a little girl . . . That’s just absurd. That’s not real. It’s basically a false form of identity politics. The thing is that the Left, ironically enough, either denies or embraces the first form of identity politics depending upon what the identity is. Ironically, it’s fine to practice Hispanic identity politics even though virtually no Hispanic people consider themselves Hispanic.
GJ: Right.
VD: My cousins are Mexican. They’re not Hispanic.
GJ: Right.
VD: They don’t think of themselves as Hispanic or Latino or whatever. Whereas they don’t recognize anything from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity. You’re not allowed to have a political identity that’s based on that.
GJ: Right.
VD: But you can, of course, declare yourself Otherkin and then we’re all supposed to respect the idea that you’re really a llama.
GJ: Right. Exactly. So much of the Left now seems to be humoring and patronizing crazy people.
VD: I think it has something to do with something that both Orwell and Dalrymple have said which is that once you can convince someone to accept the idea that 2 + 2 = 5 you can get them to accept anything.
GJ: Right.
VD: So, they don’t care what the lie is. They just want you to indicate that you are willing to submit to it because it’s the lie, it’s the fact of the lie that is the important thing. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I am going to be very unpopular in certain circles, because my single guiding point is to try to ascertain and stand by the small T truth in the name of the large T truth, and that’s what I try to stand by. I don’t really concern myself much with whether it makes you feel bad or someone else feel bad or even me feel bad. There are a lot of uncomfortable truths out there that I would like to be able to reject myself, but that way lies madness.
GJ: Right. Exactly. The main objection that I have to mainstream conservatism in the United States is that it will not embrace identity politics for White people. The battle in America today is a battle of identity politics, but they want to remain above that. The enemy is invading us from the North. They’re invading us along the identity front, fighting us on the identity front, and mainstream conservatives refuse to go where the battle is. They refuse to engage on issues of identity. Instead they want to go fight on another front, right? They’re not engaging the enemy and I don’t think they can win that way.
VD: Well, they can’t win that way, but one of the fundamental problems that you have is that in the same way that there’s no Hispanic identity there is no White identity. If you talk to someone, whether you did it now or you did it 30 years ago, if I went up to my friend and said, “Hey, what are you?” he wouldn’t say that he was White. He would say that he was Swedish and Norwegian and so I think that the attempt to build any sort of White identity politics suffers from the same problem that the Hispanics have.
And if you think about it, the Hispanic identity has been very, very unsuccessful politically compared to its numbers.
GJ: How so?
VD: Well, I mean if you just look at the number of “Hispanic” people in California, and you look at the number of Hispanic politicians they are woefully underrepresented. It’s only very recently that the first Hispanic mayor of Los Angeles or whatever was elected and that sort of thing despite the fact that they had the numbers to theoretically be basically dictating everything in California for years now. But Anglos, as they tend to call Whites, do not have that Hispanic identity. They’re Mexican, they’re El Salvadoran, they’re Guatemalan, and so forth. It’s not just the fear of being called names. It’s also the fact that there is no White identity per se. There are the different European nations and the echoes of them in the USA.
GJ: I think yes and no. I had a meeting in California. It was a gathering of Counter-Currents writers and readers and donors. I think there were 38 of us in the room, and I asked how many of the people present were of some kind of unmixed European ethnic group, meaning that they weren’t German-Norwegian-Spanish or whatever, that they were just Scottish or German. It turns out that only 2 people in the room were of unmixed European ethnicity, and both of them had been born outside the United States. One was born in Germany, one was born in Scotland.
VD: I understand that, but you’re talking about DNA there. You’re not talking about culture. You’re not talking about the way that they were raised and how they identify themselves.
I’ve lived in Europe for 20 years. The sense of national identity is so much stronger here.
GJ: Oh, I totally agree with that.
VD: You can’t even compare it. What I’m saying is that is part of the challenge that I’ve never heard anyone talking about. It’s just the fact that the White identity isn’t any stronger as la raza cósmica, as the Hispanic intellectuals call themselves, the cosmic race.
GJ: Right. I think that is changing, because I think that in the United States what you’re getting is a kind of generic European.
VD: But they don’t. That’s the thing. I’ve written on this several times. People say we successfully integrated the Irish, we successfully integrated the Italians, and all that. We didn’t really. If you look at the political history of the USA, it is very, very clear that the Irish, the Italians, and especially the Germans and Scandinavians in the Midwest – not the Germans who came first, but the Germans who came later and settled in the Midwest – they have never, ever understood the rights of Englishmen. They never had any history of it.
The whole Magna Carta, limited government, all that sort of thing is totally and utterly foreign to the European immigrant populations that came in the later waves. I don’t think it’s an accident that if you look at a lot of the crucial changes that took place, especially when you get to the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, I don’t think it’s an accident that you had the Irish grandchildren of immigrants who had a very different perspective on it than the Anglo-Saxons who had settled the country in the first place.
That’s not a hill I’m willing to go to battle on just because it’s a huge subject, and it’s not one that I’ve seen very well studied, but I do think it’s a mistake to assume that all these people coming from Napoleonic law, Roman law traditions, which I see over here because the legal systems here are very, very different than either in England or the States because they came from these different intellectual traditions. I don’t think that they really ever truly grasped some of those concepts and I think that is something that factored in to how the USA transformed over the last 60-70 years.
GJ: Yeah, I can see your point there. Again, 1965 is 50 years ago. There have been two generations since then. I meet people who have fascinating exotic German names and I’ll ask them, “Wow. What an interesting German name! Where does that come from?” They don’t even know it’s a German name anymore, right? They’re just a generic White American, middle class person. I do think that’s happening more and more. I know this Greek guy and I asked him about his ancestry, where his family came from in Greece, things like that. Well, that was two generations ago. Doesn’t mean anything to him.
VD: Well, sure, but the problem is that the fact that they’re generic and they don’t know anything, and they’re just generic White doesn’t mean that they’re going to care about the generic White thing the way that their Lutheran Scandinavian grandparents would have cared about that identity. I think that what you’re going to see happening is that it’s not until people begin to suffer from the aggressive identity politics of other groups that identity begins to really coalesce and harden.
GJ: Exactly. And I think that you might not be interested in White identity, but your enemies see you as a generic White guy.
VD: Yes, exactly. Well, not me, because I’m Indian and Mexican, but yes.
GJ: Hell, your SJW enemies still want to call you a generic White guy.
VD: That’s true.
GJ: Which I think is fascinating.
VD: I love the fact that these monolingual idiots who are just white, white white liberals, they try to get on my back about being some white Republican conservative guy when I speak Italian, German, French, some Japanese, I haven’t lived in the States for 20 years, and I’ve never voted for a Republican for president.
GJ: Right.
VD: They’re so focused on this template of the enemy that if you’re in opposition to them they’re going to cram that square peg into that round hole by any means necessary.
GJ: Exactly. They have a script and nothing’s going to get in the way of reading their script out.
Let’s talk about the SJWs Always Lie book. Why do they always lie? What’s going on there?
VD: Well, I think that first and foremost it begins as a defense mechanism. Most of the serious SJWs that you encounter are people who have had very difficult childhoods and have been dealt unfortunate hands by fate. It’s not at all uncommon that if you go to an SJW-heavy site you will see that most of the commentators will talk openly about the drugs that they’re on. They’re almost all diagnosed with some form of depression or anxiety or something. So, they’re very, very fearful people, and reality is simply too much for them, and so they retreat into a fantasy land, and then they attempt to make that fantasy land real in the same way that advertising companies do.
You know, if you just keep telling yourself that you’re really a girl then eventually maybe you and people around you will start to believe it. It’s totally insane. It’s not true, but they’re basically trying to fake it until they make it, never mind that they’re never, ever going to make it.
GJ: Right. When I look at people like this I just think Nietzsche was right. There are people who basically create ethical codes to put themselves in a flattering light. Some of these people seem really, really ill-favored by nature, right?
VD: Yes.
GJ: So, they’re going to create an ethical code that not only makes them look good, but actually places them in the vanguard of humanity. So, they go about doing that. They choose their beliefs according to what makes them feel good about themselves, which is an inherently dishonest premise to begin with, and if that’s the starting point, well, everything after that is basically going to be one lie after another to keep the original lie afloat.
The idea that “race” and “gender” – I’m holding my fingers in the air making scare quotes – and things like that are all social constructs, that’s just a metaphysical posit, a metaphysical presupposition of this egalitarian plastic ideology that they want to have where you can basically be anything and all the differences that make people feel bad can be ironed out, can be removed somehow through social progress.
VD: Right.
GJ: It’s something that I actually try to insulate myself from. I don’t need to be reminded constantly about how crazy the Left is, and so reading your book and especially reading some of the quotes in there, some of these incredibly crass quotes, really was a rather upsetting experience. It’s like, this is why I don’t read Gawker.
But you’ve been in the trenches, and I realized that a lot of the people that I’ve gotten to know recently really are in the trenches fighting this stuff and rolling it back, and I missed out on all of that. That’s one of the things that was so exciting about the book. Reading about Gamergate, which only sort of showed up on the edge of my attention, it was nothing that I really looked into, or all this stuff about the Hugo Awards and things like that which I’d never heard of, all of this stuff did not enter my world really, and so seeing how you and people associated with Gamergate actually rolled back some of this political correctness in one area of culture and then again in the sci-fi area was really inspiring.
I’m now looking at people who are in the trenches on comment boards, creating memes, and things like that. This really is the front line of the culture wars. It was very inspiring to me, and I think it would be inspiring to a lot of my readers who are equally out of touch as me, to see that this actually can be rolled back and how to do it.
So, do you have advice for people who actually want to get into the trenches and roll back PC?
VD: Well, I think the first advice is don’t be afraid. One of the main reasons that people don’t stand up to these people is that they’re afraid. They’re afraid to be called names, or they’re afraid to be called racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. The thing is that they’re just words.
GJ: Right.
VD: There are times when you’re going to suffer for speaking the truth. There are times when you’re going to lose opportunities or you’re going to have negative experiences as a result, but the reward that comes from the self-confidence and self-respect of knowing what you said was true and it doesn’t matter that 100 other people are claiming that there are not 4 lights, but 5 when you can see that there are 4 right there is worth it.
The thing that is so important is that each person who stands up and says no inspires numerous others. Maybe it’s 1 other, maybe it’s 100 others. You don’t know, and a lot of times you won’t even know what sort of positive impact you’re having on others. But that’s why I think it’s important to look to those who are already doing it, see how they’re doing it, and then learn from them.
GJ: Yeah. I thought that the practical advice that you give for what to do while being under attack is really very useful. For a long time I have wanted to put together a guide for people who are under attack, because I see a policeman or a schoolboard member or a minor politician or somebody accidentally says something true about race in America, and then they are in the beams of the SPLC and all these groups, and they are forced to resign, or they’re pressured to resign. I’ve always wanted to have something to hand to them, and even better would be somebody like a slick lawyer who would go to them. Be there in 24 hours, sit down with them, and say, “This is what’s going to happen to you. These are the places where you can stop it. These are the lines that you can draw. This is how you can prevent yourself from losing your job.” And so forth.
I think that would be great, because it strikes me that it might only take one person to stand up in one highly publicized instance for this tide to be stopped.
VD: Well, one is not going to stop it. People have already stood up. Chick-fil-A, however you pronounce that.
GJ: Chick-fil-A, yeah.
VD: They did. The Duck Dynasty people did. So, people are doing it. You’ve got FIRE, that university legal system.
GJ: Right.
VD: It wouldn’t surprise me at all if either they branched out into some sort of anti-SJW activity or if some new organization were to take form doing something similar providing legal services and that sort of thing to people like the Tim Hunts or the Brendan Eichs of the world.
GJ: Right.
VD: But the main thing is for the information to get out there. The main thing is for people to understand that they’re lying to you. Going along with what they want is not going to end anything. It’s not going to make it better. All they’re going to do is take your scalp and turn it into a bloody flag.
GJ: Right.
VD: So, don’t believe them. They’re liars.
GJ: Right. The tendency that so many wide-eyed, good-natured Americans have is to treat other people as acting and speaking in good faith, as thinking that an apology will actually produce atonement and repair a relationship and help you move forward with your life. And it’s very, very hard for people to wrap their minds around the idea that they’re dealing with a kind of mafia of people who can very, very carefully imitate those sorts of moral behaviors and attitudes. But they’re only doing it to gain advantage against you, and they’re only going to use it to destroy you.
Once we stop treating these people as members of the same potential society . . . That’s what we want. We have this idea that we have a great way of life, and if we’re just open to others they’ll see the light and want to be part of it, which puts us at a disadvantage when people have no such intention, but they’re good at faking our kind of language. We have to get people to realize that these people might walk and talk like human beings, but they belong to a slightly different species. They don’t want to be part of your society. They want to destroy you, because they want to destroy our society and replace it with some kind of totalitarian system which basically seems to boil down to patronizing crazy people.
VD: Right.
GJ: Anyway, your book is what I’m trying to get into everybody’s hands, and I ask my readers to pledge to me or to themselves, to God, whatever, that if they see somebody under fire in their hometown or state or whatever to act and to make sure they get what you’ve written to see if they might save themselves.
And yeah, there have been people who have stood up to this, and it’s not necessarily going to be the case that one person standing up will be the one who makes a difference and starts something. But it is the case that sometimes one person can change everything if it catches on.
VD: I really appreciate your support for the book and I’ll be delighted to hear what your readers have to think about it.
GJ: Well, that’s great. So, what’s next for you? What are you working on?
VD: Well, I’ve got a number of books to edit, the Fourth Generation Warfare Handbook [12]
GJ: Hey, that’s great! I’m looking forward to that. I’m sure they’re going to give you a whole bunch of new material just from their reactions.
VD: Oh, they’ve already given me enough to do half the book just in the first week!
GJ: That’s great! That’s great. Well, Vox, this has been a very good conversation, and I really appreciate your time. I know you’re a busy guy. So, is there anything you’d like to leave our readers with? One last word, so to speak.
VD: Well, I would just say, like Greg said, read the book and see how you can apply it to your life, see how you can apply it to your job, how you can apply it to the organizations that you belong to and understand that it is worth making the effort and taking the risk to stand up against the SJWs, because they’re coming for you whether you stand up or not.
GJ: Exactly. Well, thank you very much. This has been a great conversation. I hope the first of many.
VD: I hope so, too! Thanks again, Greg.