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Supplementary Material 16: Riding a Phoenix to Rescue the Gurusphere (Patreon)

Published:
2024-10-08 00:48:17
Edited:
2024-10-08 00:57:13
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

We plunge ever deeper into the convoluted world of guru punditry and are dazzled at the theatrics at the 'Rescue the Republic' event, inspired by the profound insights of Eric Weinstein on political speeches, and thrilled at Michael Moynihan's hard knock interview with the moderate heterodox thinker Megyn Kelly. Join us won't you?

00:00 Introduction and Health Check Adventures

04:15 Exploring the GuruSphere and GuruCon

08:57 Matt and Chris Debate Round 1: The Unholy Alliance

16:35 Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson's Prayer Time

24:51 Bret's Amazing Metaphor: David and the Phoenix

36:01 Matt Taibbi's Speaking Truth to Power with the Bible

40:24 Rage Against the War Machine

43:25 Eric Weinstein's analysis of Kamala Harris

58:44 Joe Rogan's Bias and Broken Conspiracy Prone Brain

01:13:53 Michael Moynihan softballs Megyn Kelly

01:26:11 Cynical Chris and Moderate Megyn: Alex Jones & Tucker are right!

01:32:57 Hard Knock Heterodoxy

01:47:35 Matt and Chris Debate Round 2: Left and Right

Links

Rescue The Republic Website

Rage Against the War Machine

All the videos from the Rescue the Republic event

Eric Weinstein deciphers Kamala's speech for Chris Williamson

Megyn Kelly Enjoys Watching Legacy Media Crumble | HONESTLY

Files

Comments

Barbara Wright

I guess I’ve always assumed that the RW, the conspiracy peddlers, and wellness grifters have converged on the MAGA environment because the MAGA people have self identified as gullible. Like gulls, they’ve worked out there are rich pickings around a returning trawler. . It’s an interesting debate, about the gap between one’s views and where one self identifies in the political landscape. A gap is harmless for most people, but dangerous if you are in the business of moving the Overton Window, as Kelly, Tucker etc seem to want to do. Simple to claim affiliation with a moderate tribe, gather them as an audience, and then lead them, Pied Piper like, further right. Very, National Socialist German Workers' Party.

SHOUNAK SARKAR

Alright, with regards to the opening argument between Chris and Matt, I am on the Chris side of the argument :) I get where Matt is coming from though. Folks like Tulsi, RFK Jr, Jimmy Dore, Taibbi and Greenwald may have started out on the left, but there is a horseshow effect happening where they have migrated to the far-right from the anti-establishment far-left, because MAGA basically positions itself as an anti-establishment movement. These aforementioned people spend all their time now attacking Democrats, progressives, moderates and centre-leftists. There is nothing left wing about them anymore, so yep Chris is right. They should be considered right wing. Same goes for the IDW blowhards! However, I suspect that many of them like Bari Weiss, Dave Rubin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and also Konstantin Kisin were never on the left anyways, it was part of the branding to call yourself a classical liberal or whatever while pushing standard conservative / right wing arguments. Btw Chris and Matt, speaking of which, there is an interesting article on the Guardian which explains this horseshoe new age / hippie to far-right conspiracy theorist phenomenon. Have a read (https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/22/leftwingers-far-right-conspiracy-theories-anti-vaxxers-power)

Mark boulton

I’m sleep deprived and probably far dumber than the average DTG listener but I have some input on the main debate of the ep regarding the new wave of right winger. I think Matt is right in the sense that many of the Save the republic crowd do seem like 90s or 00s lefties and that it is a little jarring when you put them next to what you’d normally think of as a typical button down right winger.. I think what Matt was putting his finger on was that there are a lot of people who were, at least ostensibly, left wing until recently, who had a massive change of gears during covid. Someone like Naomi wolff is a classic example of this. She went from left leaning feminist advising Obama to being a talking head on tucker Carlson when vaccine passports were all the rage. People like this are genuinely confusing and seem quite novel and STR event was full of them… Where Chris is right is in the way that hippydom and leaning right aren’t actually the complete opposites you might expect them to be, both Ann coulter and Tucker are huge grateful dead fans and hippydom has always had an anti institutional underpinning… Anyway… don’t know if that was useful but thanks for reading

Subodh Kafle

"What can be unburdened by what has been" is absolutely not from Marx lol, he would have hated it. The guy thought the idea of revolutionary socialism in Russia was impossible because the Russian economy and society hadn't yet progressed to the prerequisite stage. On the Vietnamese piano player - when I went to the war crimes museum there, there was a guy playing a synthesiser. He had completely smooth skin covering where his eyes should have been, a deformity caused by Agent Orange. I wonder if Eric would acknowledge this as an example of someone suffering under capitalism? Anyway it's very funny that Eric has gone from insisting that he had solved physics and economics to having a supplement peddler read the first paragraph of entry level Wikipedia articles to him while saying he doesn't know what posy Keynesianism is.

Emma

Ok this probably goes without saying in this educated group of people. But I'm an environmental scientist working in waste policy, and can confirm estrogen pollution of waterways is a massive environmental problem and changes the ratio of males to females in fish and amphibians with flow on impacts to population size. I guess thus is where the gay frogs story comes from. But it's so infuriating because he's trying to pitch it as some sort of leftist conspiracy to make the world more gay. When if anything it's a right wing conspiracy for big corporations like drug companies to make huge profits while externalising a lot of your costs such as leaving the government/ taxpayer to foot the huge expenses of trying to find ways to get pharmaceuticals and other weird chemicals out of the waste water.

Michael D

Today I learned I much preferred listening to Russel Brand talk about his winky than to hearing him pray. So this is what being triggered feels like 🤔

Neil vdp

I’m with Matt. He’s an honourable, respectable and Australian man who courageously speaks the truth to power. I know him para-socially and believe in his wisdom. As Chris said- this is his segment, he gets to introduce it- in this case he has the power. Stick it to him Matt! 🤣

Joe Percy

Aside from the fact that you were just talking past each other a fair bit, absolutely on Matt's side in the early debate - Chris was the confused one, and to my ear very stubbornly refused to listen to Matt's actual point, which (as I understand it) is not that there's some range of political views represented at the event, but that it's a weird mishmash ideology that only very recently became recognisable as right wing. Anti-vax still feels left wing coded to me in a euro context, as someone brought up on the fringes of the woo-left.

Salex

Though it pains me to turn my back on a fellow Qlder, I’m on Chris’ side 😂

Nina Davies

I can confirm that the weird left is now weird right. I have huge quantities of western Buddhist 'friends' on Facebook and a few in real life who were lefty hippies and who now very much flirting with the popularist right. I suspect they were always just rebelling and never thinking anything through. It has to be said, some are trying to cling to the daft left at the same time. They would get on well with both Jeremy and Piers Corbyn .... and the old and new Russell Brand. I'm with Matt - it is a new landscape.

Linda Sears

My thinking on the lefties gone right issue is that the ones who were, for want of a better word, lifestyle lefties were more into the freedom and rebelliousness of sex, drugs, and rock and roll than into creating social changes for the good of people unlike themselves. For example, many hippies became yuppies in the ‘80s because they wanted to advance. Austin Texas, which used to be hippy/alternative has become a haven for folks like Rogan.

Sam

Matt is definitely confused, all the "unaligned" people are part of the "Why I left the left" kind of movement, even if they don't call themselves right wing. Nobody on their side is a "Why I left the right". Their type of Libertarianism is right-wing libertarian, definitely not left-wing libertarian. They are all gathering under the umbrella "right wing populism" with a mis-match of everything they see as even remotely against the status quo: anti-vaccine, religious fanatics, anti-globalist, anti-democratic. But a the end of the day they all push for having a strong leader, going back to an idealised culture of the past, forcing their ideology on others, strict hierarchies, oppressing the ones they see as degenerate. There is nothing novel here, they match almost to the point right-wing fascistic movements, as seen in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and so many other places in the 20th century.

Richard

Matt from the top rope with, "The contrast between what you're seeing and hearing, which is a clown car.." Thanks for the laugh in these trying times guys. Much needed. Much appreciated.

David Noble

There needs to be a distinction made when discussing political leaning, between *relative* political positions and objective political positions. e.g. The Democrats are *relatively* left wing when compared to the Republicans, but they are objectively centre-right. I think Matt was talking about the relative whilst Chris was talking about the objective.

Kevin Nyberg

Was not prepared for this episode to start off with Dad and Dad fighting 😭😭😭 If you get podcast divorced do I get two Christmases and two birthday parties, one in Japan and one in Australia? #brokenhome

John Barrie

I think Chris with a drink in him would be a terror in an argument 😬😉

Max

Any other post-Keynesians in the chat?

David Jones

Without taking sides, I’ll just recommend the Conspirituality podcast, which explores why devotees of what we think of as leftwing communities have merged into the MAGA right.

Randy

The Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones apologetics is all Motte and Bailey all the way down.

Liz Tily

World record breaking pregnant pause. I stopped running, paused my Garmin, unzipped my phone pocket, unlocked my screen all to trouble shoot the loss of chatter. Only to find that guy was having a moment of feels. That’s disrespectful.

Trees

Even as a fan of TFC and Michael Moynihan, I found the Megyn Kelly interview irritating for many of the reasons highlighted. That being said, I believe you are misinterpreting Megyn's comment about not being ideological. She's talking about different ideologies within the Republican party and US Conservatism. She's not positioning herself as moderate with that statement, just saying she can get along with Trump and the National Review. AFAIK that's all true. The only issue for her is that we have a word for someone with little ideology who still consistently ends up on one side of the political divide: partisan. That doesn't take away from the fact that Kelly portrays herself as being dispassionate and honest about facts and only then sharing her opinions and listening to others tolerantly. All BS and shown to be BS in the interview.

Nikko Pomata

On the "right wing" question, I want to dispute Matt's circular-reasoning point (which may mean I'm going even further than Chris): I get that defining what counts as ideologically "right-wing" by who's in the right-wing coalition feels like letting the tail wag the dog, but my (very postmodern) two cents is, the ideology is the tail and the movement that advocates it is the dog

Richard Haas

Not a single speaker at the grift con is even remotely left leaning. Watch a few jimmy dore videos and tell me how he ISN’T just a right wing hack? Same for russel brand obviously.

Tobbe lobben

How stupid is Joe Rogan? He can’t understand why the left gets more people donating? Probably because republicans politics isn’t popular with most people.

Paul Bowman

OK, the true answer is... you're both confused! (I would say that, wouldn't I). Matt opens (in debate #1) with "far right", then shifts to "hard right" and then, when Chris lumps everything together as simply "the right", Matt continues as if they're talking about the same thing. In fact about the only term that didn't get thrown into the pot was "centre right". That level of confusionism is hopeless. And strategically dangerous. But before I go on with my own interpretation, a couple of pointers to established academic sources. Because there's a danger of re-inventing the wheel here, as if there aren't people who've already done decades of research on right/left distinctions in ideology and politics, centre- vs far- left & right, etc. And the cross-over where ideologies don't just stay in one disciplinary lane, like political science, but are also considered from a social psychology pov. The dominant political science approach to ideology studies is Michael Freeden's concept-centred morphological model. Which ties into something brought up in the convo about how some elements in RW ideology can change, but there must be certain core features that remain more constant. Freeden's morphology is about distinguishing core concepts from adjacent and peripheral ones. His model gives a good descriptive language which allows us to talk about these questions. For e.g. we could argue that for the US centre-right to far-right from the 50s until now, a core concept would be the naturalness and legitimacy of economic inequality, rich & poor. An adjacent concept would be anti-communism. And, back in the 50s during the Cold War, a peripheral concept would be Russophobia (goddam russkies!). Today that peripheral concept has done a 180 into Russophilia (Putin, what a guy!). The core concept is unchanged but the adjacent anti-communism is now re-purposed to aim primarily at the Dems and anyone suggesting teaching kids not to be racists might be a socially good thing. On the social psychology side of the fence, both Michael Billig (see e.g. his "Ideology and Social Psychology", 1982, and more recent works) and Serge Moscovici are united in rejecting the Adorno/Frankfurt school approach of trying to extend Freudian psychopathology into a social psychology of fascism (and more recently differential psychology of trying to map personality traits to ideological positions, like in "The Authoritarian Personality" and many recent cognitive psychology paradigm attempts at a social psychology of fascism). Both are great resources for anyone in the social psychology field interested in reading a bit more heterodox viewpoints, outside of the dominant cogpsy perspective. Finally, from my own wheelhouse, the best anti-fascist analysis of the far right in the US would be Matthew Lyons's 2019 "Insurgent Supremacists". Matt's main contribution, imo, is to move away from a purely concept-driven view of FR ideology (a la Freeden, or Cass Mudde) and look at political attitudes towards the established political system. From that perspective the US right and FR can be divided into "system-loyal" and "insurgent" groups. That switch in the US FR from system-loyal (back in the 60s, the leader of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell used to file monthly reports to the FBI of what he and his members were up to, for eg) to insurgent positions (under W. Pierce - he of the Turner Diaries, James Mason of Siege fame, etc) took place around the late 70s and 80s. Coming back to

Meg

The more I hear Matt speak the more I believe he is pronouncing everything correctly and it is everyone else who is wrong.

Chris Wishy

Wow, new levels of cringe I thought weren’t possible.

Chris Wishy

I totally understood Matt’s point. Robert Kennedy Jnr was pulling votes from left wing types, and Brand still has a bit of left wing schtick. Seems like some contaminated lines for sure. They support Trump because he’s into conspiracies about the Deep State. not necessarily economic policy. (Need to throw some anti-immigration bones to boost numbers for sure)

Ben

Cells at Work! Very cute show

Curtis Kofoed

God Megyn Kelly is such a hack. It's a scathing indictment of people like Moynihan and Weiss that they find her compelling. Disappointed to see the fifty column continue this slide. It's pathetic but unsurprising

Jen

I love the supplementary materials! Thanks guys!!

Jen

I really have to wonder how many of these folks are also getting paid by Russia. I mean, come on!! It’s so creepy, Meegyn must be making some serious money to be acting so stupid.

Brian Petersen

Hey Matt and Chris, just wanted to say thanks for your commentary- it's extremely valuable, I wish there were more podcasts like this to inject the occasional sanity I.V. into my veins. I tend to listen to you on the airplane or while doing art. Keep it up!

Russell Halberdt

a really funny thing about moon landing deniers is they absolutely hate flat earthers because they feel it makes their totally rational position look loony. ive even seen some moon troothers say flat earthers are controlled opposition the government runs to make them look bad.

Dries T.

Just a quick shout-out to Matt's "doing a Jamie". While I deeply appreciate Chris' heroic zeal, knowledgeability and preparation for all these conversations, Matt's effortless throwaway lines are probably my favorite feature of the podcast.

Jeanne H-B

On the dad of Kamala Harris, I think (Brett?) was trying to elicit the one and only thing my MAGA relative “knows” about the guy: he wrote a textbook on Marxism. Which makes him a commie in their mind, and makes her a commie…or some such. Because, famously, no one can study a subject like Marxism without being seduced by it? That’s why there are no books that are critical of Marxism, right? (The evenhanded bio of Prof Harris that links him to post-Keynesianism is not the easily digested drama of memes that claim he is an evil commie because he wrote “THE” textbook on Marxism.)

Mark Francis

I am with Matt, it’s super weird that some guru’s and IRL friends of my get high on conspiracies from both ends of the political spectrum. Mick West pointed out that all conspiracies have a political bend, 9/11 inside job is a left wing conspiracies because in Mick writings ‘conspiracies are for losers’ meaning the out group make conspiracies about the group in power ie Bush Jr… the dough heads just do not recognize the political nature of their beliefs

David B.

Great to see a brit and a canadian fighting so hard for a US political movement

Tristram Vahan Draper

I think it helps to not define left / right wing based on policies but based on the ideology or reasoning behind those policies.

Andrew

matt’s right the evidence for routine screening isn’t great: it makes people feel good but it’s fraught with issues like false positives, diagnosis of things that would’ve resolved without intervention: check out the cochrane review for any screening you’re being offered.

Bernt

I am paid subscriber to the fifth column and on their recent pay walled episode moynihan actually addresses some criticism from listners following his interview with megyn Kelly. The criticisms were similar to that of Matt and Chris, although less harsh. Moynihan kind of owned up to some of it. He acknowledged it was a soft interview and said in part it is because their friends, but also he said the tight interview format of the free press doesn't lend itself too confrontational interviews. I thought that was kind of a bs excuse. I get not wanting an interview to dissolve into shouting match, but I think was plenty of room substantive push back. I am frequently disappointed by the fifth column. They have major blind spots when it comes to certain right wing figures. This interview was not out of character. I actually canceled my subscription renewal after their incredibly credulous coverage of the fall of Minneapolis doc, along with their subsequent response to the criticism they received for said coverage. Sometimes they can still have interesting things to say, but I think they have gotten worse over time, like so many heterodox folks.

J Scott

9:18, did Matt just say “Robert F.K. Jennedy” 😭

Trees

I agree with Matt's argument, at least as I understood it,  which was that you shouldn't just consider RTR "an extreme right phenomenon" and there are important ways in which these people have come together that aren't based on right wing ideas. Being conspiratorial and fringe doesn't necessarily make you extreme. Look at their issue list it's a bunch of stuff that's anti-establishment, much of which is currently right coded. Other than immigration their issues don't really align with top right wing issues. Where's abortion? Crime? Terrorism? There's nothing about economics or debt. Go search Pew for top issues for likely Republican voters. Where their positions are right wing are they actually extreme? Brett's super lineage theories on immigration are nuts, but is he pushing for revocation of green cards and mass deportation? In my deep red state, mainstream Republicanism means nearly absolute restrictions on abortion, attempts to make drag illegal, unconstitutional restrictions on books in schools, state registries of children requesting different pronouns. That's what the lawmakers are focused on. The ones on Twitter might agree with some Tweet by JBP about how the Olympics are offensive or whatever, but their actual priorities are different and still much more classically Conservative and hard right than what I heard of/read about at Rescue the Republic. And culturally, these people are quite different from the MAGA base. They may fit in on the Twitter right, but most of the speakers would be quite out of place at a red state Republican campaign event or meeting. Brand's performative Christianity would definitely piss people off. It's all too online, foreign and, well, elite. And at least from the reporting I read the audience was a mish-mash of political backgrounds. You get that at MAGA rallies, to but the motivations here are very different. I think Molly Ball's piece in the WSJ paints a very different picture of the event than Chris. Free link: https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/coalition-of-the-weird-mobilizes-for-trump-5145e4a4?st=bJ2Mqg&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Zeno Kujawa

Just wanted to say I love these episodes, you could keep talking for three more hours and I would listen to it

Tree

Im only 14 minutes in so it might change, but I vote for Matt as being the confused one.

Matt Dear

Megyn Kelly: I'm not a conservative, I just think trans people should be suppressed, and believe conservative conspiracy theories about illegal immigrants. Does that make me a conservative?? Yep. Also enjoyed the therapy-speak 'appropriately reacting' schtick.

ketracel-white 🧁

thank you for brightening up my day with some laughter guys <3 love it