Interview With Amit

Simon Laird: Hello! I am here with Amit? Is that how you say your name? Amit? Right. You are formerly… you were formerly with the DNC, is that right?

amit b.: Yeah, I was a youth member.

Simon Laird: A youth member, okay, and where are you now?

amit b.: Oh, now I’m conservative, I guess you could say.

Simon Laird: I mean, are you still working in politics, or are you doing something else?

amit b.: No, I interned most recently at, Red Letter AI, which is an AI company that was, working on campaigning for Republican campaigns. They’re still active, they’re still an ongoing startup, but I just… I stopped. Recently.

Simon Laird: Okay.

amit b.: But…

Simon Laird: Well, we were going to discuss a few topics, but to start with, why don’t you tell us about China?

amit b.: I think most conservatives have realized that China is… so, so with… I think we always have to look at, Thiel is probably the best, presenter on the conservative thesis for China. Donald Trump I think really doesn’t have a good understanding of China. One thing… one thing about China that’s always so interesting is a lot of the neoliberal capital problems that happened, right? So, after Bill Clinton was president and a lot of the neoliberal capitalist policies, a lot of… a lot of, middle-class Americans and Midwestern Americans, I think, realized that China basically replaced a lot of our manufacturing capabilities. they replaced… they took away our jobs, essentially, right? A lot of the neoliberal capitalism and Democrats in the early 2000s, so pre-Bush. basically sold out a lot of our industrial basage, and essentially a large part of our U.S. economy that was for this upper… for this lower middle class slash middle class Americans, right? These are Midwest Americans, right?

Simon Laird: Well, is that really true, though? Because… I think that, Well, to go back a few years, I think that the reason why America had such strong manufacturing after World War II. was… Well, one, it was because they had built up a lot of… They had built up a lot of factories and a lot of property, plant, and equipment. But also, Japan and Europe were devastated by the war, and so there was… there wasn’t a whole lot of competition.

amit b.: Right, they could build new, essentially. They could build new factories.

Simon Laird: Had to build new factories, right.

amit b.: But you argue it’s a bubble, essentially, that American labor could never have beaten… I…

Simon Laird: Well, I think that there was an artificially prosperous time for American manufacturing right after World War II. And Europe did not become a manufacturing powerhouse because they have their own internal corruption and bureaucratization problems. And I think that part of the reason why America has lost manufacturing jobs in China is just that we’re returning to the historical norm. China is becoming A powerful and productive country again after a 100-year hiatus with communism. So, in a way, it’s true that the, the neoliberal policies, as you’re calling them.

amit b.: Right.

Simon Laird: played a role in that, but I think it’s just because we’re returning to the historical norm.

amit b.: There’s a political anger. These people want their factories back. They want the jobs back. If you ask me.

Simon Laird: So what do you think… do you think that free trade is a good policy overall, or are you against free trade?

amit b.: I would consider myself a libertarian, and so… I think it depends on what industry. Right, I think some industries, they’re so important where we really do need,

Simon Laird: Right, yeah, so I agree that with strategic industries, we can’t have free trade. We need to have some of those in America. But what about non-strategic industries, like making car parts, or plastic parts?

amit b.: Well, again, there’s always a debate, is that a security issue or not? I would say, to the level we have with China today, it is an issue. in the early 2000s, it wasn’t as bad, right? So the Chinese thing has, like, it’s like, I think now, what, 80% of the stuff we consume is just Chinese, like, it’s just plastic, little boo-boos, you know, all of it, right? But in, like, the 2000s, like, right after the, like, neoliberal capitalist policies started applying, so a lot of those were government policies, right? Like, they just stopped, they just stopped giving subsidies to the factories, you know? And they stopped giving subsidies to companies like Ford and GM and all that, right? They cut back on the spending. And… Like, it wasn’t a bad issue, like… Look, 20 or 10 years ago, if you ask people at think tanks, like, if there was a Chinese problem, most of them were gonna say this single line. They were gonna say, if we make China more capitalistic and more like American capitalism, eventually their political system will become more democratic. Now, that theory failed.

Simon Laird: Right. Yeah, I think that theory was crazy from the beginning.

amit b.: That’s what they thought was normal. They thought that the Chinese problem would figure itself out, it would never be an issue like it is today. We’re relying on an actual You know, semi-communist, or at least nationalistic, socialistic, company, or sorry, country, that really doesn’t like us. Right? The Chinese culturally really don’t… I mean, they see Americans as, like. kind of lazy. Like, they realized that we had our great empire, and that we were culturally the best, but now, if you ask a Chinese person, what do you think is better, Chinese culture or American culture? they’ll say, like, very, very, like, notoriously, we’ve been around for thousands of years, we’ve existed before America, we’ll exist at… like, we’re gonna be here no matter… they expect us to crash and fall, basically. Right? They expect us to, like. you know, American society to basically destroy itself. You know? I think COVID is a great example. Because COVID was a blessing for the Chinese, but a curse for us Americans, I think, and for American society in large.

Simon Laird: I think in some ways they’re correct that America is a collapsing empire.

amit b.: Yeah. And they know this, like, they’re literally trying to think of the end game, right? They’re trying to build policies and, like. they’re trying to make sure their society lasts for another thousand years. Whereas in America, we worry so much about, like, the midterms, or the next presidential election. We don’t worry about.

Simon Laird: Yeah, the midterms, that’s not exactly a thousand-year horizon.

amit b.: Yeah. Like, American politicians don’t focus on the long term, whereas the Chinese, they’re the complete opposite, you know? They’re obsessed with the long term. You know, I think that’s just one of the things of, like, American history versus Chinese history. they’re so analytical and so understanding, whereas in American history, a lot of it is just propaganda, right? A lot of it is just, like. You know…

Simon Laird: There’s probably some propaganda in China as well.

amit b.: Yeah, but… But the Chinese are just not as emotional. You know? they just…

Simon Laird: Okay?

amit b.: I would say their culture and society is more analytical. And they’re realists, they’re geopolitical realists. They understand that America has had a hegemony over world control since World War II, right, since Europe fell. And they understand that, you know, Europe destroyed China, you know. And they’re scared, they’re really scared of that happening again. Right? To them, if they are weak, it’ll just be a return. Like, they have their sense of embarrassment, right? And they don’t want to be embarrassed again. As Americans, we don’t have this. We’ve never been, you know, beaten down. Like, imagine this. Imagine if Nazi Germany was really powerful, and had actually dominated Europe, and had really put America in an incredibly scary place. Like, imagine if they had, like, I don’t know, actually bombed New York, or actually had, like, taken over a city in America. That’s basically what happened to China. Now, China has, like, that historical memory of, like, oh shit, they tortured our wives, they killed our children, they conquered us. So they’re scared for that to happen again. And that applies to all Chinese thinking. When they think about AI, when they think about defense, when they think about technology, when they think about interacting with the outside world, they’re always remembering that they were once conquered by Western powers. And that’s, like, when they… when they deal with Western powers, they might act nice, they might treat us like equals, but they know in the back of their mind that, you know, we could… like, we’ve done it before, you know? Like, they… like. they saw… a lot of the Chinese, like, historical people, a lot of the thinkers now, they were alive when, you know, we dropped, the bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, right? A lot of the core, communist.

Simon Laird: scholars.

amit b.: mention, like, hey, Western powers have played so much in Asia, why shouldn’t China own its own… like, why shouldn’t they have control of the South China Sea? Why shouldn’t they control Asia? You know? So this is a big, big issue, very clearly.

Simon Laird: Which do you think is a bigger threat to liberty in America? The Chinese government or the American government?

amit b.: the Chinese.

Simon Laird: The Chinese government. Okay, why?

amit b.: it’s two things. First of all, we under-assumed a threat, so this is another thing I see on the right. We focus so much on the cultural issues in America, or, like, the left, but you realize, if you put up Joe Biden. against Xi Jinping. Who’s more scary? They’re different leaders. One is a president of a supposedly free country, right? I mean, Biden, you know, I wouldn’t, you know, four years of Biden.

Simon Laird: They both rep… they both have, An administration which implements their policies.

amit b.: Right. But it’s like, Z’s the most powerful dictator in America, or sorry, most powerful dictator in history. And it’s crazy, you know, I see the left, they’re arguing Trump is a dictator, and you’re like, okay, then why do you defend socialism, right? Like, they’re pro-China now. A lot of the DNC people are actually pro-China now. Recently, in Texas, they banned Chinese ownership of land, right? So foreign ownership of land, especially from China, because we were having issues with it. Gene Wu, one of the, Texas Democrat top guys, I don’t know if he’s, like, an executive director or whatever, or I think he’s a senator or congressman. He basically came out and was like, oh no, I’m against that. I think that that’s not freedom. And it’s like, how are you on the side of the CCP? Like, what… how does this make sense? You know? So…

Simon Laird: What do you think about America allying with Russia?

amit b.: I think that’s a good idea. Like, I think there are ways where we can work with Russian ideology, because the Russians don’t like the Chinese either, right? Like, they have an issue. You know? they’re not ideologically the same. You know, Russia is like a post-capitalistic. socialist, right? Where it’s, like, China’s actually China… I wouldn’t say China’s actually communist, I would say they’re more like just state-backed capitalism. With large… with large taxes.

Simon Laird: Yeah, and economic… the economic policies are not the only thing. Like, obviously, the Chinese Communist Party now is probably more nationalist than classically communist.

amit b.: Yeah, I mean, I’ve read now, so I’m familiar with some of the text, but it’s like, the Russian… the Russian people… ideologically, who really… like, because I think, I think what most Russian people like the USSR, right? Most of them wanted to come back. Right?

Simon Laird: That would not surprise me.

amit b.: like, I’m pretty sure most of them, like, especially the older generation in Russia, much prefers the pre-capitalist era, because capitalism just destroyed Russia, right? Like, they got absolutely.

Simon Laird: Well, there was, it wasn’t really… I’m not sure I would call it capitalism.

amit b.: Yeah.

Simon Laird: There were people in the Russian mafia who were connected to the government who basically took all of the assets of the country. Privatized, but in… it was privatized in a way such that a tiny number of oligarchs ended up owning everything.

amit b.: Well, no, essentially what I think it was, it was… it was shock… shock capitalism. So the capitalism happened too fast. They couldn’t…

Simon Laird: I don’t think capitalism happened too fast. I think it had to do with the way in which the Russian mafia got control of all of the assets of the state. That’s where the Russian oligarchs come from.

amit b.: Hmm. Yeah. I mean, I think that system is gonna break down, I think, though.

Simon Laird: The oligarch system?

amit b.: In Russia, yes. I think Russia will… I think Russia’s gonna become more democratic, I do believe that. I think the short term…

Simon Laird: Maybe.

amit b.: Ukraine… because the thing is, like, they’ve done it before, right? Russia loves revolutions. So it’s like. Putin is very close to a revolution, I think, if he keeps messing around with Ukraine. Because in Ukraine, you know, the issue is drone warfare. It’s such a complex… like, Putin… Putin had this mindset of, he’s gonna go in there with tanks and, like, World War II technology and take over the country, and that didn’t work. Right? And he thought, oh, the West, the West isn’t gonna care. Now, look, Europe is, like, Europe’s, like, blowing up now with defense technology, because they want to kill Russians. Right? So Russia really.

Simon Laird: Yeah, I would be more on Russia’s side than the EU’s side, if there was a war between the two. But the EU was more powerful than Russia, so that probably would not work.

amit b.: Well, I mean, Germany, Germany’s back, which is good to see. Germany finally brought back They got so scared of Russia that they bring back their defense manufacturing. they, you know… and there’s also India, right? The play between India and Russia and China, right? India’s kind of the deciding factor if America can win, like, a long-term geopolitical battle against China, right?

Simon Laird: Yeah, I’m just not sure what we’re even battling for at this point. The American government doesn’t represent me. And it doesn’t seem… the American government seems to have no interest in doing anything but harming me as an American. I don’t see why I should be interested in the American government winning some kind of.

amit b.: I mean.

Simon Laird: China.

amit b.: The thing is, they’re never gonna lower taxes, right? That’s one of the biggest things, I think, if you’re a libertarian. You always notice, over history, they’re just increasing. The taxes, and the rules and regulations. and I assume you’ve seen Palantir, of course, right? The whole… I mean, everyone’s aware of the NSA, and, you know.

Simon Laird: I know a little bit about it. They’ve developed software to track people on the internet, right?

amit b.: I mean, it… It’s so much now. Like, it’s… it’s kind of insane, like… and they were supposed to be using this on terrorists, and, like, actual threats to American democracy, but the opposite happened, where now they’re using it on, like, normal American citizens. And.

Simon Laird: That’s not very surprising, that’s how it always goes.

amit b.: Yeah, I mean, it is always, always, But it is very grim, right? The Chinese threat, and… And I guess you are right. you know, if America was to fall, how much would it mean for everyone? Like, it would… it would mean most of the elites in our country, right? The people who own, you know, I think, what, like, 20… well, like, 80% of the stock market is in, like, 20% of people’s, like, ownership.

Simon Laird: I… I would guess it’s even more concentrated than that. But I don’t think that 20% of Americans are elites.

amit b.: What would you put the percentage at?

Simon Laird: Well, I don’t think that Elite Status Lines up exactly I think there’s a… the ruling class… Excuse me. The ruling class is this politically… Connected group, like… For example, I think the niece or the daughter of Jane Goodall Did this thing where she sailed… Really far away with a… in a sailboat. And this got massive coverage in the mainstream media. The fact that she got massive coverage in the mainstream media has a lot to do with the fact that she is a blood relative of Jane Goodall. There are other people doing extreme sports that don’t get covered in the New York Times.

amit b.: Right, it was a familiar connection,

Simon Laird: So, I think that people like Jane Goodall and the faculty at the Ivy League, and the people who write for the New York Times, they’re all part of this ruling class set. And even though… Of course, none of them are poor, but even though many of them are not in the top 0.1% of income, and many of them are probably not even in the top 1% of income. They still have They hold the reins of political power. And if you are in the top 0.1% of income, like, if you make a million dollars a year, but you’re an insurance salesman in Kansas, you’re really not part of the ruling class. And if you wanted to get political power, you would have to spend a lot of money

amit b.: And lovely.

Simon Laird: give a ton… you would have to give a lot of money to your local congressman, and they still wouldn’t listen to you as much as they listen to the New York Times editorial page.

amit b.: Yeah, that’s, I assume you’ve seen what Barry West is doing at the free pass, correct?

Simon Laird: I like what she’s doing with the free press. Yes, she is very much from the ruling class, but I like to see this fault line. You know, there’s this fault line within the ruling class, where, because she’s very pro-Israel, she’s now created this pro-Israel site called… The Free Press, which is a… .

amit b.: Semi-conservative, I should say.

Simon Laird: I wouldn’t even call somebody conservative. I would… I would say it’s… maybe centrist, but it’s, it is distinguished from the New York Times and the Washington.

amit b.: Which is incredibly pro-Israel, of course.

Simon Laird: Yeah, and they’re just willing to touch a bunch of other subjects as well, like transgender issues. So yeah, I think that it’s… It’s a way for ruling class people to do… to, like, break with the groupthink without actually having to abandon their tribe. They can have their own thing over at the Free Press.

amit b.: Right. Well, I… like, that’s… yeah, I mean, that’s, like, the… that’s, like, the biggest… Newsletter, or, like. news organization that counters the New York Times, I’d say. you know, Vox is, like, the progressive… You know, I see…

Simon Laird: Vox is very much in the same boat as the New York Times.

amit b.: Yeah, it’s like progressive slop.

Simon Laird: Yeah. You know.

amit b.: just.

Simon Laird: I wonder how big the Free Press’ readership is, I’m gonna look it up.

amit b.: I don’t know, I think it’s getting… yeah, it’s getting bigger day by day, I know that. I know that, what do you call it? David Ellison. was supposed to, get CNBC and then put her in. Like, she was supposed to get, some kind of, like… she was gonna…

Simon Laird: IBS, I think.

amit b.: Oh, CBS, yeah.

Simon Laird: CBS, yeah. If she becomes head of CBS, that is a big deal. It says 136,000 paid subscribers. On Substack. I don’t know what the ratio of paid subscribers to all readers is.

amit b.: But it’s also content-wise. Their content is much more, like, I would say open-minded. and, like, actually academically challenging than the New York Times. Like, I haven’t read a New York Times article in, like. Because it’s just opinion, it’s not news, you know?

Simon Laird: Right.

amit b.: It’s not even, like, they’re not even trying to ask the question of, like, oh, should we question, like, say, transgender rights or the importance of trans… like. It’s, you know…

Simon Laird: And it’s also written in… they write it in a very literary way, so it’s almost like a form of… Of literary entertainment, rather than just news and opinion. For example, in the New York Times, whenever they take someone’s picture, they’re like. looking to the side, or, like, looking very pensive. It’s extremely dramatic. It’s kind of over the top.

amit b.: Another thing is, like, you were talking about elitism, and how, like, a rich person in, like, like, yeah, basically, a rich person in the middle of nowhere has no political power, because all… most political power in America is focused in the North. And focus in the Northwestern. In the Northeast. Yeah, so Washington, D.C, New York.

Simon Laird: changing a little bit with Silicon Valley, but…

amit b.: Well, and Hollywood’s in California as well. I would say it’s very minimal. Actually.

Simon Laird: Yeah, and even Hollywood, a lot of, Well, the… a lot of the influence came… a lot of the people who built Hollywood were Jews from New York City, who moved out to California to make movies, so there’s some… There’s some cultural connection there.

amit b.: Yeah, I mean, I think LA culture as a whole It’s mostly left-wing.

Simon Laird: Right.

amit b.: So it’s always, you know, it’s always, oh… You know, who cares about societal rules? you know, like… like, they’re happy to have abortions, you know? Like, to them, having an abortion is, like, something to brag about. It’s, like, crazy, you know? Like, down in the South.

Simon Laird: It’s a very disturbed culture.

amit b.: Yeah, it’s like… I don’t know, it’s, like, so weird. You know? Like, most women would not brag about, oh yeah, I had to go through, like, a surgery and do all that, right? I think the solution to abortion is literally just make the pill more accessible and you know.

Simon Laird: That is happening. The abortion pill was only legalized, I think, in the year 2000.

amit b.: Yeah.

Simon Laird: And it has steadily increased in use, and now makes up more than 50% of abortions, so I think we will see a decline.

amit b.: Then, more sex education, I would say, generally, those two things. what, what’s…

Simon Laird: Maybe. They’ve had the sex education for a long time, and it didn’t seem to do a lot. But, yeah, the abortion pill, I think, is going to lead to a decline in in-person abortion visits.

amit b.: I mean, my worry would be two things. I’m not, quite religious. I do believe that the child that is being aborted I do believe they are a child. I’m pretty sure most doctors and, you know, like, actual, you know, scientific, medical people generally agree, to them, that is life. whether or not the average… like you said, most people are brainwashed by the New York Times, so they just say some shit like, oh. you know, kill the fetus or whatever, right? Like, I’ve seen these kind of things online.

Simon Laird: Yeah. I think some of it also is… is, negative polarization. I think that… A lot of things liberals believe are negative polarization against conservatives, or what they think conservatives believe, the celebrating abortion is totally an example of that. Like, for a long time, almost nobody.

amit b.: There’s no reason for it. There’s no reason for it, I mean.

Simon Laird: Yeah, and even… even the language pro-choice originated because people… because in the 90s, politicians didn’t want to say they were in favor of abortion.

amit b.: Yeah.

Simon Laird: But then, you know, over time. Being pro-choice becomes part of people’s political identity, and it’s part of the identity of their community to be against the evangelical conservative.

amit b.: There’s almost two Americas now, the liberal one and the conservative one.

Simon Laird: I think that it’s always been like that to some extent. I think… so the… the people of the Northeast came from a different part of England than the people in the South. And the… a lot of the cultural differences that we have still today are from the 1600s and 1700s. Like, the, You can look at voting maps today, and the… Like, some of the voting patterns still line up with the settlement patterns of different waves of…

amit b.: Anyway.

Simon Laird: From England 400 years ago. So, to some extent, there were… or even the Civil War is a good example. The Civil War was largely an ethnic war between these two different groups of English people. who came to America, and slavery was the catalyst of the war, it was the issue which instigated the war, but the conflict between the North and the South is way older than that.

amit b.: Right, but it’s more economical and cultural even, one could argue.

Simon Laird: I’ve… no, I don’t think that economics was a big part of the American Civil War. I think it was… I think it was an ethnic conflict that was… that was instigated by this labor issue.

amit b.: I, I, I don’t know, I would, I would actually downplay… I don’t… like, even Texas, Texas swinged, towards the Confederacy, but, like. the thinking here was less about the slaves and more just about economics, right? It’s like. Very clearly, all these farms… like, it was an agricultural society versus a manufacturing society. You know. the North was already manufacturing, the South was not, and you were basically telling the South, hey, you know, no more farm labor. Boom. You know? And you did see it.

Simon Laird: So, you’re saying no more farm labor because no more slavery?

amit b.: Yeah. Potentially.

Simon Laird: Yeah.

amit b.: Again, I think slavery is wrong, but I think what would have slowly happened is, I think, eventually the South would realize, oh shit, we do have to give these people rights, eventually. So it would have probably just gone to sharecropping, or some form out of that.

Simon Laird: Maybe so.

amit b.: Yeah. Because I would say, naturally, like, Western ideology usually expands freedoms over time, usually.

Simon Laird: Well, I’m not sure, though, because I think that… I think that… some of the things which are called Western ideology are more like Puritan Northeastern American ideology. And I think that they became powerful in the broader West because those people won a lot of wars. They won the American Civil War, and then they won World War II, so they got to impose their ideology on all of America and Europe.

amit b.: Well, I think most people understand Southern kindness.

Simon Laird: Yeah. Well, here’s another example. So, shortly after the Civil War, the Supreme Court Declared polygamy unconstitutional.

amit b.: Which…

Simon Laird: Or rather, they, they said the… federal government had the authority to ban polygamy, which was a big deal, because there was polygamy actively going on in Utah at that time.

amit b.: Right. The Mormons had moved out there while it was still part of Mexico, but it was uninhabited, and they had built this flourishing society in Utah.

Simon Laird: They wanted to join the United States, but they weren’t being accepted for statehood because of, the polygamy issue, and also the Supreme Court said that… or I think maybe… maybe somebody in Utah sued, saying that it was his freedom of religion to practice polygamy as a Mormon, and then the Supreme Court struck it down. But the point, though, is that Lincoln had actually allowed the Mormons in Utah to believe that they were going to be allowed to keep practicing polygamy. And then, shortly after the Civil War, the Union just was in the position of power to force the Mormons to stop doing that. the Republican Party platform around that time had a specific plank that said, we are against those two relics of barbarism, slavery, and polygamy. These modern Western values, like anti-polygamy and anti-slavery, they are things that were explicitly fought for, by… by the Northeasterners, which at that time were represented by the Republican Party.

amit b.: Right, and the Southern, kind of, KKK was, of course, democratic. And that flipped, and…

Simon Laird: Yeah, I don’t… I think it’s silly to, like, associate that with the modern Democrat Party, but yes, the KKK was a response to the Union occupation of the South during Reconstruction.

amit b.: Right. And then there was a resurgent KKK around the 19…

Simon Laird: 10s, 1920s. And then the KKK that people think about in, like, the 1960s was mostly not real. That was, an attempt at a third resurgence, which mostly sold, roads.

amit b.: Well, how…

Simon Laird: Like a pyramid scheme, but they didn’t actually do very much.

amit b.: How do you think the racism of the past has turned into, like, the Groiper movement today? I assume you know who Nicholas.

Simon Laird: I think they’re actually totally unrelated. I think that, yeah, I think that 10 years ago, or 15 years ago. that, like, the old school of racism was almost totally dead. And the online stuff is a reaction against… liberal hegemony. It’s a reaction against what we now call wokeism. I think that the people who… call themselves neo-Nazis today, like, on the internet. or Groipers, they are a lot like people who were raised in evangelical Christian households and call themselves Satanists. They’re raised with this idea that, oh, this is the ultimate villain. So if you’re a young person, you want to rebel. You can say you’re a Satanist, or you can say you’re a neo-Nazi. Yeah, I think it’s actually totally unrelated. I think it’s a new thing that has come up with the internet. However, many of those people then, of course, do reach out to older KKK people and learn about what they believe.

amit b.: Right. I mean… I mean, one could predict, maybe today, that there might be a resurgence in the KKK, in the upcoming decades, maybe, because of the Groiper movement, because of… A little bit, maybe.

Simon Laird: I think it’s unlikely. I think that the era of the KKK is…

amit b.: over.

Simon Laird: is over. You know, that aesthetic is not popular at all among online right-wing people. I do think there will be an upsurge in neo-Nazi sentiment. For some reason, the neo-Nazi movement seems to be much more appealing to people than, than other forms of… than the American style of racism.

amit b.: Right. Well, I mean, I think, like, the slippery slope, I think you wrote a piece on this where it was, like, conservative IQs versus liberal IQs, and conservative intellectualism versus liberal intellectualism. So liberals hyper-focus on race politics and, you know, identity politics, and then the issue for us conservatives is, you know. I think too many of us read eugenics. Right? Too many conservatives get into unite the eugenics stuff, or race-based stuff, where we start trying to break down things. Like, I recently saw a paper where it was like, oh, you know, like, different American race groups. should be, like, put into different industries. It was, like, the most rat… it was, like, the most stupid shit I’ve.

Simon Laird: Where did you read that paper? I think it was, like, another conservative blogger, I don’t know who it was, it was, like, a… Okay. Not an academically published paper.

amit b.: Not an academic monitoring, of course.

Simon Laird: Okay.

amit b.: No one in, like, a…

Simon Laird: I actually think it’s the opposite. I don’t think mainstream conservatives are interested in race and genetics enough.

amit b.: Because, again, I think 15 years ago, there was…

Simon Laird: like, there was none of that. Like, I… so I live near DC now, and I sometimes go to these think tank events. None of them will say anything about race and genetics.

amit b.: Because they’re scared, yeah, they’re scared.

Simon Laird: They won’t even talk about genetics. in a non-racial context. They won’t even talk about heredity of, like, some individuals being smarter than others.

amit b.: And I think that some of them…

Simon Laird: Like, have read the bell curve and do kind of know what’s going on, but some of them really don’t. The younger ones, especially, I think, really don’t. And so I think that, actually, there is a, like, Republican-American conservative ideology, which is not about race at all.

amit b.: And people who like that ideology.

Simon Laird: they want to defend their views on the merits. They have, like, the Thomas Sowell view that we should be caring about culture, which I largely agree with. Right. So then when you accuse them of being, like, a closet race hater, they say, no, no, you don’t understand, I believe all this other stuff, and I actually agree with them on a lot of that other stuff. But I think because of that, there’s a… there’s a pathological unwillingness to talk honestly about genetics, and to talk honestly about race and Republicans. So, contrary to popular belief, I think that… That mainstream conservatives and the think tanks are… are, like, race denialists. I don’t think that they’re… they’re closet racialists. I think that they have the opposite problem. They’re not racialist denialists.

amit b.: Right. Well, I would say that’s probably just a lack of, reading, probably.

Simon Laird: Some of it’s lack of reading. For the… Well, but also, you know, you… it’s impossible to read every book in the world, so I did not know about race, and I didn’t really even think about the heritability of IQ until I was about 23, when I just stumbled across some video lectures on it on Stefan Molyneux’s YouTube channel. And I thought, okay, well that… I was skeptical at first, but I learned more about it, and I thought, okay, this makes sense. People who don’t hang out on Stefan Molyneux’s YouTube channel would not have seen it. Now, of course. In the last 10 years, there’s been this huge explosion on social media of the online race, including a lot of New knowledge. A lot of awareness, public awareness of race science.

amit b.: Right.

Simon Laird: So… Yeah, some people are probably genuinely unaware.

amit b.: Well, I don’t know, I…

Simon Laird: People, I think, are maybe just avoiding the issue.

amit b.: I got into the race thing probably around, you know, 18 or 17, because when I was in high school, I spent a lot of time reading. I was just in a library all the time, so I really got into, like, Nazism, especially the studying of Nazism house. Like, because the Nazis built their understanding of eugenics and race on the American understanding. So they actually looked at our Civil War-era, like, eugenics program. And built their own.

Simon Laird: It was a Civil War-era eugenics program?

amit b.: Yeah, like, the way, the way we analyze skulls. Like, you know, down in the South, we analyze skulls as a way to take good slaves from bad slaves, and to separate.

Simon Laird: I know the Nazis denied IQ.

amit b.: I don’t know about that part, but…

Simon Laird: Yeah, they had IQ tests, but they saw that Jews got higher IQ scores than Jews.

amit b.: Oh, and yeah, they didn’t like.

Simon Laird: I made up a fake German intelligence test that the Germans did better on. And also, the Nazis had a bunch of non-scientific esoteric beliefs.

amit b.: Yeah.

Simon Laird: I believe that the Aryans came from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean from an island called Atlantis. They thought I came from there, rather than from.

amit b.: Right.

Simon Laird: they… some of them believed that the Earth was hollow, and they believed it was inhabited by these… people called the Vril, and they thought if you went to the North Pole, you could go inside the Hollow Earth I wasn’t a bunch of wacky, unscientific stuff. I had not heard… that they followed phrenology from America.

amit b.: But it was… it was so interesting to me at a young age, like, the Nazis, because, like, as a concept, it’s like, we dealt with the communists, but, like, historically, we always understood the Nazis as the worst kind of example of human… like, we didn’t think the communists were that bad, even though they committed a genocide of similar numbers.

Simon Laird: Right.

amit b.: not race-based, right? The Nazis focused on the Jews and gypsies, whereas, like, the Soviet Union did gypsies, you know, they killed gypsies the same as Nazis did. They had the same thesis, but they didn’t hyper-specific on Jews, and didn’t hyper-specific on, like, doing the Holocaust. They just killed them, you know? They didn’t do… well, I mean, they did have Siberian…

Simon Laird: I think some… I think the reason why the Nazis are viewed less favorably is just because of propaganda. I think that there was a lot of wartime propaganda, like, there was…

amit b.: It’s still around. Yeah, it’s still around.

Simon Laird: Go around, yes. That’s where the vilification of the Nazis came from, and then also there were a lot of communists infiltrating the American government and the American…

amit b.: intelligentsia in the University of… I would also say it’s something on the left.

Simon Laird: wooden.

amit b.: The left believes Nazism is an extension of the right-wing ideology, whereas…

Simon Laird: I think the left is just… is just… ironically, I think they’re wrong about that.

amit b.: the natural source.

Simon Laird: Self-fulfilling prophecy.

amit b.: Hitler was a socialist.

Simon Laird: Yes, yeah, like, if you went back to 2010, like, the people who loved Ronald Reagan, they genuinely don’t really have anything at all to do with Nazism or Nazi.

amit b.: Yeah, they’re like complete opposites, yeah.

Simon Laird: But the left falsely believes that they do. And so when the left made Nazism into the ultimate villain, then the next generation of online nonconformists wanted to align themselves.

amit b.: I love not seeing them, right? That’s such a weird… yeah, I… I don’t know. I, of course, disagree with what Hitler did. But it is always an interesting case study. of how politics works. And it’s like, it’s interesting how Hitler took the elites of his country and basically offered them the bargain of, hey, if you give me power and give me a dictatorship. I will give you some return to greatness. Like, it shows you the desperations that human society and the elites of our country can go to. Right? And, like, that’s one of my fears, like, I think in America, we might get, like, a leftist example, or a communist-like example of Hitler, who basically says something like, hey, I will offer you neoliberal capitalism. That actually works. you know… And, like, I’ll fix all the problems.

Simon Laird: I’m hopeful that we are past the era of dictators like that, because… so in my opinion, I think the centralized state is going to gradually go away. Because the reason why the centralized state Came into existence in the first place was because of gunpowder. A thousand years ago, there was nothing like the centralization that we have today.

amit b.: There are a bunch of different…

Simon Laird: Thiefs and, yeah. Lords with their fiefs, and even individuals had a… like, there would be some individual knight who would have a lot of power over his own.

amit b.: Right.

Simon Laird: And of course, there was also the church and the Roman Empire, but the thing that really caused the centralization was gunpowder. Because with gunpowder, there was a big return to having these large professional armies, so it increased the power of the king relative to the local lords. Also, if you have gunpowder cannons, then having a castle is no longer a very good defense, so if you’re a lord, you can’t just sit in your castle forever. And then the existence of the centralized state, in my opinion, was continued by mass communication technology like radio. So they had radio, and also television. Hitler got his start from talking on radio. No, actually, his first speeches were covered in newspapers, but then he became big talking on radio.

amit b.: Yeah,

Simon Laird: And in the Soviet Union, for example, every morning. I think the first thing they said on the radio was like, hello, this is Moscow speaking. So every single person in that gigantic landmass was getting some input, some direction straight from the capital every single day.

amit b.: Right.

Simon Laird: Now we have the internet, so that centralizing power of radio and TV is no longer.

amit b.: Possible.

Simon Laird: It’s no longer possible.

amit b.: And I think this… we’re seeing this with the breakup of power of the mainstream media.

Simon Laird: I think that the alternative media is going to get more and more powerful, and I think they’re going to… I hope that they will start building their own communities, so they have physical… a physical community in addition to an online community. Right. And the more that people build local institutions, I don’t mean local, like, just your local city government, I mean, like. Organic people with similar ideas getting together.

amit b.: all that.

Simon Laird: The more people build those real civic institutions, the weaker the de jure government is. And I think that it’s… I don’t think that the government in America right now really has the stomach to send out the army to crush people like it used to.

amit b.: Even something like…

Simon Laird: Like, do you know about the Waco Massacre in the 90s?

amit b.: Yeah, I’m aware of it.

Simon Laird: Even something like that would be a way bigger deal today, because now we have social media. If that… if the Waco Massacre happened today, there would be 24-7 video of it while it was happening. Every single detail of everything the FBI did would be caught on video and broadcast to conservatives, and it would get picked up by, you know, Matt Walsh. And people would hear about it, and they would see about it on social media. That was not possible at the time, because we didn’t have the technology at the time.

amit b.: I mean, you’ve seen Trump say that, you know, he might deploy National Guard to Chicago. You have seen that, right?

Simon Laird: This is an example, though, of what I’m talking about. There are people resisting the ICE officers, and the deportations are not very successful. They’re deporting a small number of people per day. It’s not enough to put a serious dent in overall immigration.

amit b.: Yeah, because.

Simon Laird: Trump is trying to do… Trump is trying to do the centralized state strategy, and it’s not working.

amit b.: You can’t do it in 4 years, though. It’s almost impossible. Like, Biden let in so… like, I know what it is, Biden let in so many, and it’s almost impossible… like, even if he did do a good job.

Simon Laird: But also, they just don’t have the public support behind them. It’s very easy to take these part-wrenching videos of some person being dragged out of their car, and lots and lots of… a strong majority of Americans. So yeah, I think that if… I don’t think that the government actually has the stomach to enforce its power at gunpoint, which means that people are free, basically, to challenge the government and form their own communities. That’s what I think we should do.

amit b.: Well, you, you know about, Seattle and the, I think it was, like, the Chome thing.

Simon Laird: Jazz.

amit b.: Yeah, chat, yeah, they formed their own country for a while, or something like that.

Simon Laird: Yeah, those were a bunch of deranged Antifa people who just would not be able to create anything functional, so I think we can do a good job on the jazz.

amit b.: So you’re saying, like, more of that’s gonna happen?

Simon Laird: No, I don’t think so. I think there’s going to be more things, like Return to the Land, which is the group that’s creating these all-white farms in parts of Arkansas and other states. They’re creating these intentional communities of people who have similar values and want to live together, and I think we’re going to see a lot more of that.

amit b.: So more leftist communes and more, more right-wing.

Simon Laird: I think there’ll be more communes. And also, it’s not just communes, we’ll see more people try to build like, institutions that are not just one community. Like, Give SendGo is actually a good example. So, the reason why GiveSendGo exists is that there used to be this website called GoFundMe, but they started taking down.

amit b.: Certain people, yeah.

Simon Laird: They started taking down people who were conservative, so then this… these other programmers created a rival site called Give SendGo.

amit b.: Huh.

Simon Laird: And so now it is much easier than it used to be for right-wing people to raise money.

amit b.: I don’t know, on the commune thing, I would say, in modern America, more the youth. will be socialistic, or will get into communist or Marxist texts, but I don’t think… I don’t think people will actually become more community-focused, right? Like, I… I think Americans will actually.

Simon Laird: I don’t think communists are community-focused at all.

amit b.: Huh.

Simon Laird: I think communists are, like, opportunist people who would otherwise be criminals, but they have this ideology that rationalizes their desire to take other people’s stuff, and then they meet the other people who would be disposed to be criminals, and they make.

amit b.: They don’t believe in capitalism, yeah, they just think we’re kind of living… and.

Simon Laird: So even, like, the Cuban Revolution, for example, they call it a revolution. The way that one of the big ways it succeeded was that they bribed a guard with, like, $10,000. It was… the Cuban Revolution was more of a coup.

amit b.: Been a reputation.

Simon Laird: I believe even the Bolshevik Revolution was as well. So it’s more like there are these… I think that communism… It’s… it’s not… So much an ideology or an economic system like capitalism, it’s more akin to a mafia.

amit b.: Hmm.

Simon Laird: The communists were these organized groups of malicious people who killed their enemies and behaved like an organized crime group.

amit b.: I would generally agree with that thesis, yes. But, like, you have to understand, most… most, like you say, most higher academia in America reads Marxist texts. They care more about, you know, Those kinds of things.

Simon Laird: Do they even read Marx anymore, or do they read some kind of…

amit b.: Postmodern drag queen.

Simon Laird: Jesus.

amit b.: No, most of them have a… no, most of them have a… I think most… most leftists, most intellectual leftist people, and even at the DNC, I mean, these people do quote Marx.

Simon Laird: Okay. I do believe in, like, Marxene, because, like, that’s where a lot of the race…

amit b.: And, like, identity stuff comes from.

Simon Laird: From Marx?

amit b.: from Marx. They hyper-focus on, like, oh, you know, it’s so unfair or unequal that you weren’t born this way, or… and we should fix that. Society should help you and equalize it for everyone. And make it equal opportunities, or whatever. It’s like.

Simon Laird: What did you see when you were with the D… when you were in the DNC? Were there more technocrat people, or were there more postmodern people?

amit b.: post… I mean, it… it is… it’s less people with skills, And more people would, like, charisma. And who have a better understanding of ideology and philosophy. Right? Like, they understand if you frame things in an emotional way, you can win. Right, that’s why they.

Simon Laird: What I mean, is their ideology the technocrat ideology of someone like… Well, I don’t know how sincere he is, but what Ezra Klein claims to believe, or is it more like the postmodern drag queen ideology?

amit b.: It’s still woke. like… Kamala was, like, the final, like, ugh, yeah. Because, like, I saw the GLAAD people, you know what GLAA is? It’s like this, like… it’s, like, this hyper-trans, like, gay rights organ… but it’s like…

Simon Laird: I assume that they modeled themselves after the ADL.

amit b.: Yeah, but the thing is, like, I asked a lot of gay donors, do they feel represented by it? And they told me point-blank no. Like, a lot of them donors themselves didn’t actually like the organization, they just did it because they were pressured into it.

Simon Laird: They donated to the organization.

amit b.: Because they were pressured into it.

Simon Laird: Okay, so you’re not talking about… people who donate to the DNC but don’t like GLAAD. You’re talking about people who donate to GLAA.

amit b.: Those are, like, yeah, those are, like, DNC-associated organizations. Like, nobody thinks they’re a Democrat, but come on, they’re clearly Democratic-run, you know?

Simon Laird: So you’re saying there were these gay donors who didn’t like GLAAD, but they felt pressured into donating to GLAAD anyway, and they did it?

amit b.: Yep.

Simon Laird: Wow.

amit b.: That’s probably, like, the biggest thing that I saw that I was like, oh, wow. That, to me, shows the hypocrisy that, like. it’s like the… I think JD talked about it, JD Vance talked about, like. the, what was it? The gay guy, the normal gay guy vote, where it’s like, even they realize how… like, I think that’s a good lit… like, what you just asked me, where he said, are they… are they, like, Ezra Klein liberals, where they actually care about economics, and, like, actual… You know, like, stuff that’s actually important, or do they just care about cultural issues and wokeism? Even, even the, even the kind of, like, the gay people. and, like, the trans… I mean, like, no, even lesbians, kind of, like, Barry West, she realized that they fundamentally, the liberals nowadays in the DNC and the Democrat Party as a whole, only care about cultural issues and identity politics instead of offering real solutions. they can… they can’t offer anything politically serious, right? For 40 years, like, GLAAD now…

Simon Laird: Yeah, I think it’s… what the Democrats are doing, though, it’s not just… They’re not just cultural issues. A lot of it is… Like, a race war against straight white men.

amit b.: Yeah, I’m sure.

Simon Laird: trying to figure out how to extract as many resources as possible from straight white men. And I think that that kind of ethnic, tribal aggression is a very powerful glue for sticking a movement together. Even if the different people in it have a lot of totally incoherent and diverging interests on other things, tribalism does stick people together.

amit b.: No. But no, I would say they’re hyper-focused on woke. I think it’s, like, the Ezra Klein thing and the Reed Hoffman funds Ezra Klein, right? So, that’s a neoliberal capitalism thing, where they’re trying to go away from the wokeness thing and bring it back to, okay, let’s focus on housing, let’s focus on energy, let’s focus on, like, actual problems. that’s mostly a donor thing. The donors want to do that. The actual party, like, the actual voters…

Simon Laird: That’s interesting.

amit b.: they’re already, like, the actual organizers of the party are already so woke, right? Kamala and her.

Simon Laird: And by organizers, you mean, like, community… community organizers who lead the door knocking?

amit b.: Yeah. Like, you know… They’ve… they’re… they’re politically… themselves so woke already, they can’t understand the concept of talking about actual issues. Right? So Kamala, in her recent book, she didn’t talk about, oh yeah, like, we need, we, you know, oh shit, I ran a… I ran a political campaign that was too politically woke, or too, you know, too focused on identity politics, right? She didn’t say, oh shit, maybe we shouldn’t, like, not brought on Beyonce and Cardi B and, like, all these random celebrities.

Simon Laird: read Jesse Single’s… review of a chapter of her book.

amit b.: And she just complains, you know, she just…

Simon Laird: Kamala Harris was talking about the ad that said, Kamala is for they, them, President Trump is for you. And there’s one… There… there was one image in that ad of a 50-something-year-old, like, 6’6 man standing next to college girls, because he, this 50-something man, was on the college girls’ basketball team. And when Kamala Harris recounted that, she, like, initially framed it as if Republicans were complaining about him being old. Like, oh, he didn’t fit in because he went to college later in life, after being in the army. So it’s a level of misdirection, which is just insane.

amit b.: Right. It sounds like…

Simon Laird: Yeah, I guess if they’re… if they’re younger staffers or all these hyper-woke people, they can’t be honest about it even after they lost.

amit b.: Yeah, I mean… It’s like, it’s like a different lingo. Like, if you even say… like, remember when Biden was… I think he was, like, asked the question of how many genders are there on… on news, right? And Biden hilariously says, at least 3.

Simon Laird: At least 3. Okay, so that’s a safe answer. He’s not saying 2.

amit b.: And it’s like…

Simon Laird: I’m not saying a million.

amit b.: Right. Biden, in his heyday was, like, a semi… like, he was always a Democrat, for sure, but it’s like, you know, his views on drug policy… he was not a progressive person in the past, right?

Simon Laird: Well, I don’t think Biden ever had real views. Biden was a pathological liar for his whole life. Like, he… he had this one story where he claimed that he went to South Africa and… like, protested outside the prison where Nelson Mandela was being held, and then Nelson Mandela, like, met him later and said, thanks, Joe, for helping me out there. That wasn’t true. It turned out that, like, people found out that he had… that Mandela had been in prison a thousand miles away from where Biden was, and then the White House had to come out and admit, like, okay, he actually… he actually made all that up.

amit b.: Well, yeah, I mean, he was…

Simon Laird: There was another thing where he also… Biden also, like, claimed that he’d graduated at the top of his class when he did it. He also claimed that during the AIDS crisis, he went to the… he went to Black neighborhoods and, like, started giving people condoms. Like… The story was that Joe Biden, as, like, a.

amit b.: Senator, like, went door to door, trying to give Black people condoms.

Simon Laird: Which doesn’t sound very believable.

amit b.: Like, a progressive person would believe that. Right, like, if you throw a…

Simon Laird: Maybe. I think he’s a very opportunistic politician.

amit b.: Right. But it’s like a field of reality distortion on the left. Like, on the right, we’re very realistic about, you know, how fucked we are. You know, everyone realizes the American empire’s in decline. You know, the liberals are focused on the wrong issues, then the conservative world is kind of just, like. I would say split, still, you know? It’s very broken down. It’s not as, like. top-down as the DNC and, like, the left-wing organizations are, right? They’ve really got a consolidation on American institutional power, which you talked about with the New York Times. They really understand that investing in education and academia, right, they control academia. control… like, say, I’m pretty sure you wrote something along like this, where he said that, liberals control basically most of the major institutions in America. Right? And… And, like, you know, like, it’s crazy that our president could say these things, right? He could say, oh yeah, there’s 3 genders, maybe, you know, oh yeah…

Simon Laird: spring.

amit b.: And, like, It’s just, you know… I don’t know, it’s just…

Simon Laird: even 400 years ago, so the people of the Northeast 400 years ago were… Puritans, they were essentially a… A religious cult.

amit b.: Hmm.

Simon Laird: were sort of kicked out of England, so they came to America. And even 300… yeah, about 300 years ago, the people in the South thought that the Northeasterners were prone to fanaticism. They thought that they had a cultish attitude that was just kind of innate in them.

amit b.: Well, I mean, the South, I think, is, we’re too aristocratic. And there were two, maybe… yeah, I mean…

Simon Laird: Well, they had plenty of their own problems. Yeah, I just think it’s the fanaticism that we see on the left, I think, has very, very deep roots.

amit b.: Right. I mean, it’s her thinking, you know? On the right, like, within the right, you see debates, you see conversation of, like, okay, like, forever wars. Like, what, you know, there’s a debate on war and conflict, whereas on the left. like… as soon as… as soon as, you know, Joe Biden said, hey, we’re gonna go into Ukraine. Nobody, you know, nobody, nobody asked why. Nobody asked, hey, maybe we should think about it.

Simon Laird: I mean, that was a big shift, going from being the anti-war party to the pro-war party.

amit b.: Right. And, like, what, they pull out, out of, I think it was, was it Iraq, or… Right.

Simon Laird: out of Afghanistan.

amit b.: Afghanistan, yeah, sorry. Like, it still shocked my mind we were in Afghanistan, you know? I know Bush got us in there, and then, you know, we never, you know, Obama.

Simon Laird: Yeah, I think the initial… I think the initial invasion of Afghanistan was justified, because the 9-11 attackers did come from there, or some of them did at least.

amit b.: Right.

Simon Laird: So I think it was justified to retaliate, but yes, they… they should have been… they should have retaliated and then been gone within…

amit b.: 6 months, not stayed there for 2 years. Right. Because, like, the Dick Cheney plan was to stay around and to build this, like, post, like, it’s so… such ridiculous.

Simon Laird: In Afghanistan?

amit b.: Like, yeah, DC and these neocon Republicans thought they could bring democracy to these countries.

Simon Laird: Yeah, that’s…

amit b.: Right? And the under-larging issue under that, like, oh, okay, like, oh, we’re gonna bring these people to democracy, was the oil, and, you know, if we build infrastructure, we can get all the money back we spent, you know, sending the troops over there. That never happened. It just turned more… like, we built infrastructure, but we also kept troops, but the infrastructure became shit. And then the troops, like… And it was not…

Simon Laird: In the end, it was non-American companies that got the oil contracts after.

amit b.: Right.

Simon Laird: the oil field.

amit b.: Yeah. Yeah. The locals got, like, I’m pretty sure, like, the funniest, funniest example was, like, we literally paid them to grow heroin.

Simon Laird: That was in Afghanistan, yeah.

amit b.: Yeah, like, it’s so ridiculous, like… You know. And it’s crazy, like, these are the people… like, when Dick Cheney was saying this stuff in the 2000s, everyone was looking at him and clapping their hands, right? Everyone was like, yeah, we’re gonna bring these people democracy, the Middle East is never gonna have war again. And now we look, and it’s like, we’ve got Iran trying to carve up power, Saudi Arabia’s trying to carve up power, Israel’s going through a thing, right? Like, the Middle East today is still as chaotic as it was 20 years ago, you know? Even more, I would argue more than it was 20 years ago, you know?

Simon Laird: Yeah, I think that… I think that the impetus to get America involved in those wars in the Middle East, in Iraq at least, was the Israel lobby, because while the Middle East as a whole is more chaotic than it was 20 years ago, Israel’s position is actually better. I mean, they might be running out their PR because of the Gaza issue now, but certainly before October 7th, Israel was in a very strong position, the strongest position it had ever been in. Because Saddam Hussein was…

amit b.: Let me start.

Simon Laird: One of the big… maybe the biggest regional threat to Israel, and the US took him out, and then… Assad was… Or Assad’s regime was sort of a threat, but he’s now gone as well, so Iran is the last one.

amit b.: Well, he’s still alive in Russia.

Simon Laird: He is… thankfully, he’s still alive, but.

amit b.: Hopefully they bring him back, you know. I actually had a counter-belief that the United States should have supported him, actually kept him there. But, you know, hey.

Simon Laird: I would have been in favor of that, yeah.

amit b.: Yeah. Because now, like, now… because the guy we’re dealing with now, he’s a Syrian… He’s an Al-Qaeda member. Yeah, like, we’re literally dealing with a terrorist.

Simon Laird: Yeah. Like, we were fighting this guy, like, 10 years ago.

amit b.: And now we’re on the same side. It’s like, come on.

Simon Laird: That’s the source of part of my apathy towards the American government’s fight with China. The people fighting these geostrategic battles are just not doing a good job, and they don’t care about my interests anyway. Anyway, we are coming up on an hour, so this was a fun conversation. Do you have any final thoughts?

amit b.: No, I think we’ve overall learned China is a scary threat. Liberals are kind of confused. And then, right-wing intellectualism is… is probably, broken, right? So, too, too, too sporadic, but you… you hope that institutions will grow, and…

Simon Laird: I am hopeful that institutions can grow, and I am trying to play my small part in that.