or this evening depending on where you are. I am joined by Mike Brock. Mike, hi.
Well, I am good. So guys, everybody, Mike is an extec executive, now a reluctant Cassandra. At least that's what his Substack bio says. And he writes over at Notes from the Circus. So Mike, tell us what is going on. Are there elephants in the zoo? Are there giraffes? Are there lion tamers? What is going on in the circus today?
Well, what's going on in the circus? I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on in the circus, right? The circus is our, what I like to say is our epistemic condition. I mean, well, this guy, the head of Binance, who was serving some prison time, was pardoned today by Trump. Sure, that had nothing to do with Trumpcoin and all that crypto corruption. We're knocking down the east wing of the White House. It's gone now. I don't know if anyone's noticed, but it's not there anymore. I think, look, I mean, what's going on? I don't know what to say to people anymore. I wrote a piece today that was going after the anti-anti crowd in a pretty aggressive way. I have a lot of friends, weirdly enough, you might not believe, who I would associate with that sort of anti-anti crowd.
But before you go on, define for folks what you see as the anti-anti crowd.
It's really these people. Some of them are center-left, ostensibly like Glenn Greenwald, and then you have others like Andrew Sullivan, and various people at the National Review online. Some of them are just friends of mine that you don't know, but they live in that thought world where it's just like, you know what, Trump's a big problem, but the opposition to him is even worse. These liberals think there's more than two genders. Oh my god. It's a very frustrating phenomenon, these people who can sit there and nod along and be like, yes, I see that Donald Trump is accepting unconstitutional foreign emoluments from Qatar and granting them Article Five protections in exchange, and I can agree this is really corrupt, but can you also agree that Hunter Biden was also engaged in really salacious influence peddling, in order to be fair, to understand why Republicans might not care? I'm like, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. These guys are attempting a regime change in full public view. They want to bring on 20,000 masked thugs and deploy them across the United States and disappear people, kick down doors without individualized warrants in violation of the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution's Bill of Rights. These anti-anti people are just long in the tooth. I think we need to stop taking them seriously. I don't think we should invite them to the cool parties anymore, Reed. That's my opinion.
Well, having known some of those people, let's be clear, Mike, they were never at the cool parties. They were never at the cool parties. Not in junior high, not in high school, not anywhere else. Like there was a party. They might have all been together at it. You and I, well, I know I wouldn't have been invited. But I think there's a broader point you're making, too, which is that there's always some level of both sides no matter what. But I think the other part is this idea of, and I have a lot of friends like this, look, I don't like him, but I like them even less. And I'll tell you, there's a big part of the electorate, especially the swing electorate, that don't think about it in that way necessarily, but it has the same downstream effect, which is I don't like what Trump and the Republicans are doing, but I want nothing to do with the Democrats.
Yeah. This is why I'm so angry at them. Because they generally see reality the same way that you and I do. They kind of get it, right? But then they're like, yeah, but have you seen the latest nose ring, purple-haired woke person that Chaya Raichik has posted on Libs of TikTok, and see how crazy the left is? Surely you can understand why I sit on my hands. It's like no, I can't. I can't understand that. This person has nothing to do with my life, but my Fourth Amendment protections do, as do those of 374 million Americans. I think our population's probably dropped about a million people in the last eight months as people flee this country. But look, I think these people need to poop or get off the pot. Pick a side. It's a time for choosing, as Reagan said. And these anti-anti people, as far as I'm concerned, this will be the last time I talk about them.
But Mike, I think this is the point though, is the time for choosing is something that these people don't want to do. Because to choose means you have to take a stand for something, not just against everything. Not just being the critic, to reference another president, Teddy Roosevelt, but to be the man or woman in the arena, to actually say no, I am going to take a stand. I am going to fight for something. Look, history is replete with critics. That's not anything new. I'm one of them, as so many of us are, and that's fine. But the other part, too, and I think that you've done this, and what I want to talk a little bit about tonight, is the idea of yes, be against whatever you want to be against, but what's the other option? What's the solution? What's the path forward? And that was one I wanted to talk about vis-a-vis the idea of on the center left. You call these folks anti-anti, and Bari Weiss, I mean she says she's on the center left.
But well, I mean she's...
Do you believe that? I mean, I don't know.
This is where the lines are so blurred. You get a Bari Weiss who says I just want to be an independent news outlet. I'm all for that. I want to be free of the strictures of Washington DC and New York and the cultural mores that represent a very small slice of people, so we can get the straight dope out there. The problem is it never stops there. It always descends somewhere into fantasy, fallacy, some level of gaslighting or conspiracy theories. Sometimes it's outright propaganda, but it's not independent media. And that's fine, too, but just be honest about what you are.
Well, I mean, if I can just say what my critique is of the free press. I had this spat with this outlet that goes by the name Pirate Wires. It's run by this Mike Solana, who's the VP of marketing at Founders Fund, Peter Thiel's venture capital outlet.
We lost you.
Oh, sorry. Can you hear me now? Sorry. There's a really badly placed mute. So, Founders Fund, you were arguing with the pirate.
So, yeah. So, I mean, I don't know. He's ostensibly he works a full-time job at Founders Fund, but is also the editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires. That's apparently speaking truth to the liberal hegemony against people like me, apparently, that decided that what we really needed to do was think about the credibility of Heather Cox Richardson. She has 2.7 million subscribers on Substack. Have you heard? And she's made some errors along the way. Surely this implicates her thesis that Donald Trump is an authoritarian. He could have good reasons for the things he's doing. Landing a Blackhawk helicopter on a South Shore apartment building in Chicago and kicking down a bunch of doors with American citizens inside without warrants. Maybe he had some good reasons for that really. The authors Blake Dodge and Katherine D. telling me that they were just trying to make sure that the i's are dotted and t's are crossed and just making sure that she's credible. Is this the real conversation that we're having? These people are telling me they're just speaking truth to power. Doesn't seem to me that they're speaking truth to any power. It seems that they're speaking truth to the disempowered. The game is very clear. I mean, they thought it was unfair and conspiratorial of me to ask the question like, how did this story come about? Whose idea was it to do this piece on Heather Cox Richardson? Was it Mike Solana's piece, the VP of Founders Fund, who works for Peter Thiel, who has explicitly advocated for an end to democracy? He's currently on some insane tour about the Antichrist. The Antichrist apparently being this crazy one world government that the elite of the world are pushing us towards. And Peter, you mean the same outlet that created Palantir and all the other things?
Actually, and these people have the audacity to sit here and say that I'm engaged in conspiracy theory. Like what the hell is your paymaster talking about? In these antichrist talks, sounds pretty conspiratorial to me. Sounds crazy. This sounds like Opus Dei stuff. So, I just think that it's pathetic at some level. Because I think anybody on the outside looking in, just taking account of the interests behind these people who claim they're centrists, but their entire focus is on the credibility of people like Heather Cox Richardson. They'll probably come after me at some point if I keep ruffling their feathers. I stepped down from my position in Silicon Valley and I left Silicon Valley, and it hasn't been good for my career, just to be clear. So, if they think that I'm somehow serving some liberal elite cabal, the liberal elite cabal that they think I might be defending doesn't want anything to do with me because they're all too busy taking a knee for Donald Trump. So, anyways, sorry.
No, listen. This is where, you know, I'm glad you said that because this is one of those things that you were talking about. There was a piece you wrote earlier this week that I quoted and put up on the Substack notes thing, the idea of what you're doing, which is when you start talking truth to power, you stop getting invited. When you start talking truth to power, people don't want to be around you as much. There are opportunities that you might have had if you would just shut up and get in line. If you would just stop it. And to your point about the elite left, I think the one thing in all of this talk from the anti-antis to the Founders Fund guy and all of this other stuff is the lives of actual Americans and human beings around the world that they want to talk about anything other than the fact that their whole mission in life is to either passively screw the country or actively screw the country.
Yeah, I agree with that. I wrote a big piece about it about a year ago now, this plot against America piece, not a full year ago, but where I documented my journey, my intellectual journey really. I grew up with these people. I was involved very early in the libertarian movement. I hung out with Students for Liberty and Koch people when I was in my 20s. I was really young and stupid, like a lot of us were.
You just hated stop signs. Every stop sign you saw was oppression.
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I think you're allowed to read Atlas Shrugged in your late teens, early 20s, and entertain the idea that selfishness is a virtue for about three or four or five years. But by the time you get to 26 or 27, your brain's fully developed and you haven't really started to ask some questions like, well, maybe there are some things that are more important in life than my own personal wealth pursuits and material gains. Maybe I should care a little bit about the world that I'm leaving to my children. Maybe I want to live in a society where I don't see people dying and shooting up on the streets. Maybe someone like me, I'm lucky, I've had a relatively comfortable life, a successful career. I'm a smart guy. Am I really on a slippery slope to totalitarian Marxism to observe that maybe if I spent 2 or 3% more on taxes a year, which really isn't that much, some of these people might still be alive, that we could give some healthy food to some hungry kids at school so they can learn and become contributing members to society? And they'll say, well, why don't you give to charity? Well, I do. But I think our founding father Thomas Jefferson understood something. He advocated for public schooling. He thought, and I think he was correct, because he was trying to internalize Plato's critique of democracy and the necessity of the philosopher kings, and he was like, yeah, we should have public education. We should imbue some civic virtue into the nation's children. I think he's right about that. I think we need to get back. So, I think these people are, I hate to say this because I'm not a Bernie bro or anything, but I have a hard time disagreeing with anything Bernie Sanders says these days. I just do. It's hard to disagree with him after seeing what I've seen and just seeing these guys' arguments, these PayPal mafia people who argue. I don't know if I should be swearing like this on your Substack. I'm sorry.
But if we haven't scared them off by now, that's not going to do it.
Yeah. These are degenerates. They're morally degenerate people. You read about these people's personal lives, Thiel going to sex parties and Musk being all ketamine and on MDMA all over the place, Curtis Yarvin guy hanging out with this guy. These are moral reprobates.
Let me just interrupt. You're not going to get an invitation to Galt's Gulch with an attitude like that.
I don't want to go. I've read the book. I've read Atlas Shrugged several times.
Why would you do it more than once? That just seems like...
Well, what was funny was after I came up with this whole theory, I wrote a piece on my Medium blog a few years ago. It was like the libertarian to fascist pipeline, and I went at some of the anarcho-capitalist thinkers like Murray Rothbard and more contemporaneously like Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who is just a fascist, although some people will insist he's a libertarian, he's not. And just going back and rereading it with my more mature moral appribations and reading through that book and realizing what a moral wasteland that book is. What a shitty world that would be to live in with people who talk like that and act like that.
Yeah. Well, and just terrible writing. I mean, truly awful prose.
Yeah. Like 36 pages of John Galt's speech to the nation.
