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Editor’s Note:

If you are new to Counter-Currents, the following transcript of Greg Johnson’s interview with French Marxist journalist Laura Raim is an excellent place to start. It is the first interview in Greg Johnson’s new book, You Asked for It: Selected Interviews, vol. 1, now available from Counter-Currents.

Greg Johnson: Hello?

Laura Raim: Hello! Hi. Can you hear me well? 

GJ: Hi! I can hear you well. Thank you.

LR: OK. I put on the video, but it may be not necessary.

GJ: I can see you. I can see you very clearly.

LR: OK.

GJ: I’m trying to see the titles of the books on the shelves behind you, but they’re not that clear.

LR: You’re not going to like them!

GJ: Yeah, the first thing I do—it’s a very bad habit—but the first thing I do if there’s a bookshelf I try to see what’s on the shelf.

LR: I do the same. But I’d say it’s mostly Leftist propaganda, mostly.

GJ: OK. I have a bit of that myself actually.

LR: Oh, OK. Really? What kind?

GJ: Well, practically anything written in the 20th century is Leftist propaganda. But I have about a half of a bookcase of Marx and the Frankfurt School. I was just re-shelving all my books, and so I found that recently.

LR: OK. So, as I was writing in my email, the first question is “What are the intellectual roots and references of the Alt Right?” I’ve read that some people think it’s Samuel Francis or James Burnham before that, but what would you say would be the most important intellectual roots and references?

GJ: Well, the term Alternative Right was coined, I believe, around 2008 by Paul Gottfried. He gave a lecture where he basically declared the paleoconservative movement dead, and I think in the same lecture he also called for the creation of an “alternative Right.” So, I see the Alternative Right as primarily emerging from the paleocon movement in American political thought, and the paleoconservatives would be people like Samuel Francis and Joseph Sobran and Patrick Buchanan.

Now, Richard Spencer was working for The American Conservative which was founded by Patrick Buchanan and Taki and a couple of other people to be a flagship for paleoconservatism. Paleoconservatism defined itself in contradistinction to neoconservatism, which they were trying to combat.

The paleocon movement got old. A lot of its leaders died. It never effectively institutionalized itself. It never effectively mobilized large donors. Of course, Patrick Buchanan has written many best-selling books and had a lot of media access. He was the main face of it, but he’s getting old. The American Conservative lost steam. Taki left. I can’t remember when, but he did create Taki’s Magazine. Richard Spencer ended up editing Taki’s Magazine for a while, and then he left Taki’s Magazine, and then he created Alternative Right at the beginning of 2010. Sometime after that, the fellow who was running Washington Summit Publishing and National Policy Institute, Louis Andrews, died after a long battle with cancer, and so those organizations were handed over to Richard Spencer.

So, I see primarily a continuity between the paleoconservatives and the birth of the term Alternative Right. However, when the Alternative Right webzine was created there was a fairly self-conscious attempt to bring in a lot of different thought currents under that very vague umbrella, and so that included things that were not necessarily welcome in paleocon circles, and that would include things like neo-pagans and paleo-masculinity and White Nationalism. And so under that broad umbrella a lot of different thought currents came together.

I actually wrote something about this at The Occidental Quarterly Online just after the Alternative Right webzine launched, so if you want to cite that or quote that, that’s there. It’s up there somewhere.[1]

After a couple of years, Spencer, I believe, lost interest in editing Alternative Right, and other people took it over, really, on day-to-day functioning, and then he shut it down and launched his Radix publication. I thought in some ways that was a good idea because he felt like he had lost control of the brand, but on the other hand already at the time Alternative Right was becoming a generic term, and if you have a product that becomes synonymous with a whole genre—like Xerox or Walkman or something like that—the last thing you do is throw away such a valuable brand. But he did. He walked away from the brand, and Colin Liddell and Andy Nowicki have kept that alive.

In the last two years, of course, the brand has become much more mainstreamed. Because of its vagueness, a lot of figures that are, again, closer to the mainstream of conservatism than I am have embraced it. I would define myself as a White Nationalist and as a New Rightist and not as an Alternative Rightist, although I would use that term because it’s a broad enough umbrella to encompass me. 

LR: But more specifically a White Nationalist. 

GJ: Yeah, exactly. And I don’t feel the need to use vague, broad umbrella terms, but other people do just because they’re not comfortable with being more specific. I’m all for people being as explicit and involved as they want to be and just respecting those decisions.

So, people like Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, Vox Day—all of them fairly prominent and connected with some of the edgier reaches of the mainstream Right—have started using that term as well. Also, people like Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer. As soon as the term got popular, he started branding himself as Alternative Right, and it’s a douchey move on his part, a trollish thing, to just try to take advantage of the popularity of the term, and I don’t blame him in the least for that.

Anyway, it is a very broad umbrella term, but the main intellectual root of it comes out of the paleoconservative movement.

Now, as to what defines it today, I think the real core, the heart of it, the energy of it really is White Nationalists and New Rightists and people like that. 

LR: Yeah, I got that from what Richard Spencer writes. For me, it’s a White Nationalism sort of identitarianism thing. 

GJ: Yes. European identitarianism: that’s another term that we borrowed from Europe. It’s a good term. It’s analogous to libertarianism. It states what’s most important in your ideology, which is the preservation of your distinct racial and cultural and historical identity. So, it’s a good term.

And that really is, I think, where all the real energy is, and that is what’s generating a lot of the intellectual excitement, if you will, on the Right from the creation of memes and trolling and arguments.

You know, in the past year-and-a-half or two years, things that have come out of our sphere have actually started to shape mainstream political discourse within the Republican Party, for instance. I think it was in 2012 that Gregory Hood at Counter-Currents referred to mainstream conservatives as “cuckold conservatives,” and that was really the inception of the cuckservative meme, which, when it became more widespread through Twitter, became a really effective barb that drove a lot of mainstream conservatives wild because it was so true. So, we started shaping the discourse, and I think that’s very valuable.

Now, another current of thought that is flowing into the Alternative Right that’s very important is the breakdown of the libertarian movement. This is very important. I used to be a libertarian years ago, and I followed this intellectual journey a long time ago. But in 2008 when the Ron Paul movement was getting started, I started noticing how overwhelmingly white Ron Paul supporters were, and it was an implicitly white thing. They weren’t aware of the fact that this was a very white form of politics. It made sense more to white people than to any other group.

I was betting at the time that a lot of these people would start breaking away from this and moving in the direction of white identity politics. When I was the editor of The Occidental Quarterly, near the end of that time, I actually set in motion an essay contest on libertarianism and white racial nationalism. The purpose of that was to get our best minds to think about this idea and create an analysis and work towards creating talking points that we could use to ease the way of a lot of people towards our position.

I don’t think that bore any fruit at the time, really, at least I didn’t see any, but a few years later after the 2012 election campaign and the end of the Ron Paul movement basically, within the libertarian sphere there was a real push by cultural Leftists to basically just take it all over and to eject anything that seemed conservative or patriotic or whatever. It became this Leftist, globalizing, and really sometimes quite explicitly Jewish takeover.

What happened is a lot of people were pushed out by just revulsion. There were these intense discussion groups online where people would be battling one another about this, and a lot of people just left in disgust. One of those online groups, a Facebook group, actually became the source of The Right Stuff, therightstuff.biz which now has The Daily Shoah as their flagship podcast.

Those people are all ex-libertarians, and they have moved out of libertarianism towards white identity politics in basically the same way I did and a lot of other people have. So, that really is a broad tributary that is flowing into white identity politics and into the overall Alt Right umbrella, and it’s a very vital force too.

Most of the people involved in this are quite young. Most of them are quite educated. It’s very, very interesting. I had a dinner recently with some new young people who have come into it in the past 6 months to 2 years and then some people who have been around for decades. The contrast could not have been more marked, because really the people who had been in this for decades were all misfits. They were socially awkward and weird people. And the younger crowd coming in were mostly quite impressive: fratty, preppy, squared away people, many of them with recent military careers, most of them in their 20s or around 30 and just a very different look and feel to this. People with a lot of agency and discipline and organization.

Now, there are a lot of people who we call autistes, who are—if not outright autistic—at least on that spectrum. They’re socially awkward, and yet they do perform valuable functions. They’re great meme-creators and number-crunchers.

But there’s also a large number of people coming to this who are very normal in their presentation and their background. They’re the kind of people who psychologically would not be inclined to get involved in any kind of radical identity politics. But there’s a wind in our sails now, and they feel not only conviction, but they also feel that this is something that they can put their effort into, and it might actually bear fruit. So, there’s a great deal of excitement and intellectual vitality here.

And this is very interesting also. One of the things that is an internal, I guess, rift within the Alt Right umbrella is, of course, the Jewish Question. I believe the term really was first coined by a Jewish writer Paul Gottfried. The paleocons have always been somewhat friendly with Jews, publishing them and associating with them at their conferences and things like that, and within the White Nationalism sphere there’s a strong group of people who are quite critical of Jewish power and influence in our societies. People like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich are Jewish to some extent in their identity. It’s disputed in Cernovich’s case, because he once said he was Jewish, but he put out his DNA profile, and none of it came up as Ashkenazic or Jewish at all, but there were people who left Russia claiming to be Jews who weren’t, so he might be descended from that kind of line.[2] But anyway, that is a factor. There is a Jewish camp and a Jewish-friendly versus Jewish-critical camp split within the Alternative Right.

One of the interesting things that I’ve now been hearing about is young Jews, including young Orthodox Jews, which seems like a very unlikely category, are now being drawn into this. They’re reading Heartiste. They’re sharing Alt Right memes 

LR: Heartiste? I don’t know Heartiste. 

GJ: Chateau Heartiste. It’s a blog run by this fellow who used to go by the name Roissy. Now he goes by the name Heartiste. Autiste is a play on Heartiste. But anyway, it’s a “game” blog. It’s on a higher level than “how to pick up girls,” but it deals with realism in the relations between the sexes, and it’s enormously popular, and he identifies himself as an Alt Right figure. It’s part of the manosphere, which is a sphere that overlaps with the Alt Right.

But anyway, we’re finding these young Orthodox Jews are now into Heartiste and into Alt Right memes. One of the things I think is going on here is they’re just drawn to something that’s intellectually vital and exciting. So, this is something that I’ve been seeing signs of in recent months. 

LR: When you say there is a split on the Jewish Question, can you give me examples of those who are more friendly and those who are more critical? 

GJ: Well, I’m quite critical. Kevin MacDonald is certainly quite critical. The Occidental Observer is his flagship publication. He also edits The Occidental Quarterly now. So, that would be one wing, and there is definitely a wing that calls itself Alt Right which is basically just rebranded National Socialism and, of course, they are quite judeo-critical.

The people who are more neutral or friendly on the Jewish Question would be people like Jared Taylor, who runs American Renaissance. Some of the people who were involved in the original Alternative Right are neutral or friendly on the JQ, as we call it, and then of course there are just outright Jewish figures who contribute to this and that would include the grand old man, the dean of it I suppose, Paul Gottfried now, and beyond that there’s Milo and Cernovich.

And within our camp there are people who say, “Well, look, we can be White Identitarians, but we also”—and they love to tweak this PC language—“should seek ‘allies of color.’” And so their Jewish allies would fall under that umbrella.

One of the interesting things about this—and specifically the tributary coming out of libertarianism—is that although libertarianism and the Ron Paul movement were overwhelmingly white, there were certain outliers who were, say, black Ron Paul people or Asian Ron Paul people or South Asian Ron Paul people, and in the battle after the collapse of the Ron Paul movement after 2012, a number of these non-whites have been swept along by the logic of it and also by their personal relationships into being allies of White Nationalism.

Personally, I’m happy to have any allies I can get, and so I’m in an awkward position where some of the people who share the best memes with me and are showing up in my Facebook feed, well, you know, one’s a black guy, and a couple of them are South Asian—Muslims, actually, which is even more awkward in some cases. But they put up with me and my “remove kebab” rhetoric, and we’re all friends, and they have an intense moral and intellectual interest in this.

So, the broadness of the Alternative Right category really helps, I think. It allows a lot of people to participate in this, but also the broadness of it is threatening to some people because in the end these are not just ideas and fun on the internet. We really do have a vision of society.

Personally, I would like to see racially and ethnically homogeneous societies emerge, and so what we have is a strange moment in time where people in this multicultural context—some of whom are multicultural and multiracial—are coming together in a movement that is aiming at separation someday. I admire the people who are involved in this. They’re very, very principled.

Some of them say, “Look, you know, I don’t feel at home in a multicultural society either. I feel less at home than you do.” Speaking in the United States or Canada, “You guys created this society, and you feel more at home here than I do, but nobody feels at home anymore in multicultural and multiracial societies.” And so we’re finding that we do have allies of color, because one of the dominant traits that we’re talking about, one of the main themes ultimately boils down to alienation.

LR: Mhm.

GJ: Everybody should have a homeland. Everybody should have a room of their own where they can go and be themselves. A home of their own. And then, logically, a homeland of their own. It’s nice to have a place where everything is familiar, where everything is intelligible, and where you don’t feel alienated, you don’t feel a lot of stress and anxiety. Multicultural societies really are creating high stress situations, low trust situations, and the breakdown of community. So, we’re communitarians, if you will. 

LR: And your idea of the . . . What did you call it? The racially, ethnically . . . What was the word that you used? 

GJ: Homogeneous. 

LR: Homogeneous. This would be for the United States, right? So, what do you do technically with the black citizens, ideally? 

GJ: Well, ideally, what I would like to do is . . . The landmass of the United States is quite large. And we do have to make some distinctions here.

First of all, there are indigenous people, and certainly they have rights here, and I would not in any way expel them or remove the remaining indigenous peoples, but I would give them maximum autonomy within their little ethnic reservations, and I think that’s the only fair thing that can be done at this point.

As for blacks, most of them came here involuntarily, and they’re descended from slaves. The fair thing to do would be to give them their own territories and their own autonomy and basically separate that way.

LR: Where, for example, could they go? 

GJ: Well the South. There are large, heavily-black states in the South. There are a couple of those, and they certainly have ample resources, ports, and things like that. Everything that somebody would need to have a thriving country. Some states in the South might make a good black homeland.

Now, as for post-1965 immigration, that is really the main problem. Since 1965, America has gone from a country that was 90% European in descent to a country where we don’t even know anymore, because the government has been maintaining that there are 11 million illegal aliens in this country for decades. We know that number has changed. It’s more like 30 million or more than that. So, we honestly don’t even know what percentage of our country is European-descended, but it’s approaching 60%. It’s going down to 60%, and where there are statistics about children being enrolled in school there are large numbers of states where among 6- and 7-year-olds we’re the minority now. Just a distinct minority. Most of that is due to immigration into the United States in the last 51 years.

My view is the following: I wrote an essay called “The Slow Cleanse,” which sounds like a dieting thing, but it’s about ethnic cleansing, to use an ugly term.[3] But basically it says we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be seduced by these apocalyptic scenarios about race war and cataclysm and things like that. We should recognize that the contemporary situation was created over a 50-year period, and it was created by instituting demographic trends that are not favorable to the European majority. We can fix it in the same way. We simply need to create positive trends for the European majority.

So, what would those trends be? Well, first of all, stopping immigration from non-white countries. Second, sending back all of the people who have come here illegally. That would be a good thing. Just make it impossible for them to draw welfare, hold down jobs, put their children in schools. Basically, take away all the incentives that led them to migrate here in the first place, and then they will deport themselves.

Beyond that, then there’s a large population of people who are sometimes second and third generation now. They do have homelands. A lot of these people do have close contacts with people overseas, and we know that because they’re constantly trying to bring more relatives over here. Lord knows I’m all for keeping families together, and what we need to do is reverse that kind of chain migration, family reunification tendency.

Many, many people move in America all the time. We are a very rootless society. People have to move because they live in a city where there’s a real estate bubble, and their rents become too high for them to afford. And we just accept, “Oh well, rents are going up because of speculators. You have to move.” No one sheds a tear about that. People’s jobs change. The factory they work in closes and is rebuilt somewhere else, in Mexico or Indonesia. We don’t shed many tears about that kind of forced uprooting of people.

My attitude is that we should not shed any tears about uprooting people for something far more important than just the whims of the market and the private interests of capitalists. We should basically have an attitude that people move all the time, and if there are non-white families that work for large corporations that are global corporations, the next time they’re relocated we want them relocated overseas.

At many, especially West Coast, American universities the majority of students are now Asian. I think we should encourage those Asian students, many of whom are bi- or trilingual and have fairly shallow roots in America if any at all, we should encourage them to pursue higher education in Singapore or Japan or China, and if they do it there they’ll not come back.

Basically, if you just start nudging things in those directions we can wait 50 years, but one of the things that I constantly stress is that we would not have to wait 50 years before we could reap some of the psychological benefits of knowing that as a group white Americans now have a future, because a lot of white Americans feel that as a group they don’t have a future. I think this is part of the reason why the mortality of whites, especially working-class whites, has gone way, way up, because a lot of people are hopeless, they see nothing but diminished prospects for themselves and their children, they turn to alcohol and drugs and risky behaviors. This has been rather epidemic, especially in the last 4 to 8 years since the current economic depression set in.

I think that if people thought they had a future again in America—or the French, if they thought they had a future as a people in France today—they would start feeling a lot more optimistic. Probably they would start new businesses and have babies. So, we reap a lot of psychological benefits today even though it might take 50 years for us to get back to status quo 1965.

In terms of my ultimate goals, I love the idea of neat, homogeneous, partitioned homelands, but as a reasonable political goal that I want to put forward within the present political context I’d say let’s return to status quo 1965. That was when American workers were doing the best, when America was sending a man to the moon, when our cities were clean and vibrant in a good way. Vibrant with commerce and culture rather than Rastafarians and druggies and things like that, jungle music, whatever. It would be perfectly reasonable to do that.

The 1924 Immigration Act set ethnic quotas based on a certain base year. We could have a status quo 1965 principle, and if we got back there I think we would be at a point where white Americans would probably feel so de-stressed and happy about their future that they probably wouldn’t even think that we’d need to go all the way to separate homelands. I would want to. You know, in 2065 when I’m dead, I’d want the next generation of our movement to be moving the goalposts in that direction, but the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t need to be some kind of cataclysm or apocalypse like a lot of Old Right—and by Old Right I mean Fascist and National Socialist-influenced people like William Pierce, for instance—envision.

LR: OK. Thanks. Back to my initial question about the references. Who would you say are the main thinkers of White Nationalism either contemporary or older political thought? 

GJ: The main thinkers of contemporary White Nationalism first. The people who are the most read and commented on would be Kevin MacDonald and Jared Taylor. They’re contemporary writers in their 60s and 70s, and they’re very, very influential. William L. Pierce of the National Alliance is certainly a huge enduring influence on White Nationalism in the Anglophone world and outside of it for that matter. He’s an ambiguous influence. There are many things I disagree about with him. 

LR: William Pierce? 

GJ: William Pierce, yeah. He’s a very important figure.

Samuel Francis had a great deal of influence on it. He never really defined himself as a White Nationalist explicitly, but he participated in American Renaissance conferences and wrote many things that deal with race.

J. Philippe Rushton wrote on human biodiversity and racial differences in his book Race, Evolution, and Behavior and many other papers. He was certainly a major influence in White Nationalism today. Probably the most canonical statements about racial differences for most White Nationalists are Rushton’s writings. 

LR: That would be based on evolutionary biology? That kind of thing?

GJ: Yes.

LR: Could you sum up for me William Pierce? What does he bring?

GJ: Well, Pierce was basically a neo-Nazi. Early on, he was a follower of George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party. He joined that party, and after Rockwell was assassinated he carried on one strand of that National Socialist vision in America. He created the National Alliance and ran it until his death in 2002. It was a largeish organization. Certainly the largest organization in the United States of its type. They published books and magazines, held conferences, and encouraged people in various forms of activism.

His most influential book, unfortunately, is The Turner Diaries, which is a kind of revolutionary potboiler with a race war apocalypse in it. It fascinates a lot of people, but I think that it also serves as an impediment to thinking about serious policies that one could actually put in place that most people would not just shriek and run away from.

He was a somewhat contradictory figure because, on the one hand, he was an elitist. He had a PhD in physics. He had a stratospherically high IQ, although he tended to have an engineer’s mentality. He was basically a kind of Leninist in his views about politics. He thought of himself as an orthodox National Socialist, but he was pretty much a Leninist in his revolutionary attitudes.

On the other hand, he was constantly taking shortcuts and compromising with what he himself called the “buffoonery of populism,” which led him to, for instance, buy a skinhead music label and recruit in the subculture of skinheads, which didn’t work out well for him.

So, yeah, at his best he’s very, very good, and he really did influence me on a number of points. I remember in 2000–2001 listening to his weekly radio broadcasts where he would analyze primarily current events, and he would stress over and over again the relevance of basically the power of the organized Jewish community in America in shaping events and just hearing that repeated over and over again over a couple of years and seeing the relevance of it to the things I was following was very, very convincing to me.

Before that, I had read Kevin MacDonald’s work and intellectually it made a lot of sense. He’s dealing with psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, deconstruction, and intellectual trends like that. But to have Pierce bring it home to contemporary unfolding political events was very powerful for me, and it showed the relevance of that analysis. And really that was his greatest influence, I think. His radio broadcasts. That and The Turner Diaries. Of course, he’s no longer commenting on current events, but The Turner Diaries are still being purchased and read.

LR: When you say he’s a neo-Nazi, is there an effort in the Alt Right or at least in the White Nationalist branch to have a filter from neo-Nazis? I mean, to bound them? 

GJ: Well, yes and no. There are really three attitudes towards neo-Nazis. One is there are people who are neo-Nazis, and they think everybody else should think their way. Two is there are people who aren’t neo-Nazis and want to engage with them somewhat constructively because a lot of them are really young, they’re naïve, and they’re highly idealistic people, and they can grow intellectually.

And so I’ve tried to be somewhat constructive in my engagement and to say, “Yes, I see the relevance of this. However, it’s more complicated. It’s not quite so simple as you thought, and basically historical re-enactment of interwar fascism is not the answer.”

Then there’s a third group of people who basically want to create a cordon sanitaire around them and just keep them out completely. Those are the three tendencies within the Alternative Right.

LR: OK. And you’re in the second category. 

GJ: I’m in the second category. I think that unreconstructed National Socialism and interwar fascist movements—let’s just call it that—are certainly not the way forward. These people were aware of a lot of truths, and I won’t deny that, and I do think that something like fascism, in a very generic sense, is what every society ends up with if they try to do things like reconcile different class conflicts—interests of labor and capital, for instance—and if they take their own side in international conflicts. I do think that a kind of organic idea of society is somewhat fascistic, and societies move in that direction whether they want to call it social democracy or something else. They still move in that direction as they reconcile internal contradictions and as they educate people to be patriotic and so forth.

But, on the other hand, the thing that’s worst about these ideologies is, to me, they’re not realistic about how we’re actually ruled. They emerged at a time when they were literally fighting Communists in the streets, and to beat Leninists they adopted their tactics. They had to. You take a knife to a knife fight and a gun to a gun fight, and when you’re fighting Leninists you have paramilitary parties and militias and things like that. That’s what they did. Unfortunately, they adopted quite a few traits of Communism, including some of its worst traits, and in the end they didn’t beat it.

Today, we’re not ruled in a hard, Leninist fashion. The Left controls us through soft power. As Jonathan Bowden put it quite strikingly, we have something that between the wars would have seemed utterly impossible and paradoxical: we have a Left-wing oligarchical society. We are ruled by an oligarchy, and yet all the reigning cultural values are Leftist. Leftist values, especially Leftist identity politics, are no threat to the reigning oligarchy. In fact, people like Chomsky have pointed out that they actually lead to the breakdown of identities that impede globalization and the globalization specifically of what we call capitalism. I just want to call it oligarchy.

And so, we have a Left-wing oligarchy. How did we get a Left-wing oligarchy? Well, after the Second World War, the Left basically realized that organizing the proletariat was something that the Right could do very effectively against them, and also that putting dictators in power can certainly turn against them. Stalin was a very scary figure. And so they launched, basically, a different path, a New Left if you will, of creating intellectual hegemony. This march through the institutions that the Old Left was already engaged in continued under a New Left, and we have now arrived at a point where basically all the dominant values put forward through the media and the popular culture and the educational system and mirrored in the political realm are all Leftist. There’s a hegemony of Leftist ideas and values, and just as you take a knife to a knife fight and a gun to a gun fight you take ideas to a battle of ideas.

Really, the French New Right is my inspiration here. The French New Right realized that aside from riots in the streets and student protests in the ’60s, the real battle was a battle for cultural hegemony, intellectual hegemony, and so to fight the Left in its current manifestation, which was cultural and intellectual hegemony, you have to deconstruct their hegemony with better ideas and create an alternative hegemony. That’s really what the New Right is about, and that’s why I call myself a New Rightist.

So, this is the speech I’m constantly giving whenever called upon to people who think that we just need to have some kind of Leninist party, and then we’ll fight a race war. No, it doesn’t work that way! And if you think that you’re going to fight an armed struggle against the military and the police forces of any modern Western society, you’re deluded. They can’t even beat the mall cops and security guards of any modern Western society. It’s just delusional.

LR: So, you’re saying you have to fight the cultural war, the intellectual war.

GJ: Yes. It’s a cultural, intellectual war. Yeah. And that’s what the New Right is about. That’s why I define myself as a New Rightist.

What I see the Alt Right as is a great front in that cultural and intellectual war, and there are a lot of culture-creators involved in this now. Very creative people. It’s quite exciting. The people creating parody songs, memes, podcasts, videos. It’s tremendous the amount of creativity that’s being mobilized, and a lot of these people are very young, again.

The guy who’s been running my YouTube channel just graduated from high school, right? He just turned 18 this summer. He does very good videos though, and he’s been doing this since he was 13.

LR: It’s interesting that you say Leftist values. I see what you mean by Left identity politics and things about diversity and things like that, but it’s not the Left in the sense of working in the interests of workers, working against income inequality. 

GJ: No. That’s gone! But, you know, the Left makes gestures in that direction, right? Yet, in the United States, it’s been democratic administrations, center-Left administrations, that are completely onboard with globalization. That’s been massively destructive.

LR: Yeah, there isn’t a Left anymore. It’s liberals.

GJ: I wrote a piece called “The End of Globalization,” and I’d recommend it to you.[4] I’m working on creating a video for it for YouTube. My values on most issues are Leftist. I talk about how globalization is undermining most of the things that progressives hold dear, most of the things that were actually won by the Left.

I used to be quite a patriotic American, but as I got to know more about American history I really came to the conclusion that the most glorious chapter in American history was the history of the labor movement. Not the frontier and not cobbling together an empire and not constant interventions in the Latin world, but the labor movement.

But what’s happened with globalization is that the things that have been fought for like shorter work weeks, higher pay, making it possible for women not to work in factories (remember when that was a leading Leftist cause?), children not working, and things like that. All of these things are being undermined, plus environmental regulations as well.

The reason why these things worked, really, is there were limits to trade, right?

LR: Yes.

GJ: You were dealing with societies that were not global but somewhat autarkic. They did engage in trade, but they had mercantilist policies in place. When you globalize the marketplace, wages will fall to a global level. 

LR: Yeah, you don’t have to convince me of that. I’m a socialist and against free trade and a protectionist. 

GJ: Good. Well, we’re on the same page then on that issue.

LR: Isn’t that somewhat contradictory with the libertarian trend?

GJ: Yes, it is. It’s contradictory, and what’s going on is its unraveling. Libertarians, of course, believe in globalization and open borders, and you’re free to do whatever you want. Marry your boa constrictor or whatever. And now they’re realizing that there are things more important than trade and individual choice, and that is identity, living in a functioning society, and so forth. And so they basically say, “This isn’t important.”

It’s so interesting to hear people who three or four years ago were ferocious partisans of free markets now saying, “None of this is important. None of this matters.” 

LR: Really!? They say that? So, they’re just not libertarians anymore?

GJ: They’re just not libertarians anymore. They would like to live in a society where there’s lots of freedom, where it’s easy to create a business, but they realize that globalization is actually hollowing that out, and so they want to be “libertarians in one country,” if you will. They want libertarianism with protectionism. They realize that that’s really the only way you can have these things, because libertarianism is an ideological product primarily of homogeneous, high trust Northern European societies, and it would work in those sorts of societies as long as they maintained certain barriers to entry.

For me, I think they’re a little too sanguine about that. I think social democracy works well in those societies, too! This is really the way that some of these former libertarians talk now. It’s like, “Look, it doesn’t matter what kind of economic system we have. What matters is that we have a society where it’s just us, where we feel like we have a future, and where we can wrangle about women’s rights and labor and all these other things amongst ourselves rather than having different parties basically bringing in alien groups to ally themselves with and use as leverage in their political battles against people who are of their own race and nation.”

For me, Anglo-Saxon capitalism is a terribly evil system. For me, the Anglo-Saxon capitalist model is a plantation, and the globalizing impetus of Anglo-Saxon capitalists in America has been basically the recreation of plantation economies. Also, I oppose the social hollowing out of Western countries, and also I oppose the increasing destruction of economic and especially technological progress, because there are really two ways of raising productivity: one is you make better machines that allow you to do more. The other way of increasing “productivity” is simply cutting the costs of labor, right? 

LR: Right. 

GJ: As a mathematical construct, productivity treats those things as equivalent, and yet as a social phenomenon those are radically different routes. By restricting labor markets and keeping labor expensive, one of the things that the labor movement has done is constantly push for improvement of capital, which makes everybody more productive. Once labor markets are opened up and people can increase profitability simply by cutting costs, one of the main impetuses that we’ve had toward technological progress has been removed, and really one of the things that was most exciting to me about the recent Republican Convention was when Peter Thiel spoke. I read his book Zero to One, and one of the things he maintains is that globalization is incompatible with technological progress, which is really interesting coming from . . . 

LR: Wow!

GJ: This is from a guy that works in Silicon Valley. He talked about this a bit in his brief speech. He said that all of America used to be hi-tech. When he was a kid, they were sending men to the moon, right? Today, we have 140 character tweets. Most of the technological progress that happens today is in the realm of computers, and most of that is simply improving ways that we can amuse ourselves during our decline.

I think that’s very, very powerful. There’s a lot of truth to that.

So, yeah, in the future, if we get what we want, we’re not going to have free trade, we’re not going to have globalization, we’re not going to have destructive competition that’s basically a race to the bottom, and instead we’re going to create conditions where middle-class incomes and working-class incomes continually rise, and there is a constant spur to technological progress that’s going to make us all, someday, out of work. The machines will put us all out of work someday, and then we’ll have arrived at utopia. 

LR: Talking about libertarians, how does the neo-reaction movement fit in?

GJ: The neo-reaction group is a somewhat peculiar group of people. They’re somewhat snobbish and secretive. Some of them are friendly with me. A lot of them come out of libertarianism. A lot of them are in two industries: technology and finance, which is why I think a lot of them are very, very secretive because they work for huge companies that would frown upon their shenanigans.

I think it’s a highly interesting, highly intellectual group of people. I read their blogs, I read some of their books, and I value it. I think they try to remain aloof. It’s an apolitical stance like you get from the late Ernst Jünger or post-war Evola. You know, “We’ll just rise above all this stuff and not get involved in politics.” I think politics is moving in our direction, and not getting involved is not an option at this point. It just makes you irrelevant. Still, they have lots of interesting ideas.

One of the things that I most like about the neo-reactionaries is that they’ve learned a lesson that I learned years ago. For years, the most influential book on me was Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, the most influential piece of fiction, but that changed, and eventually I realized that the piece of fiction that’s had the most influence on my thinking is Frank Herbert’s Dune.

The thing that fascinates me with Dune is its combination of futurism with archaic values and social forms which is basically what Guillaume Faye talks about in his book Archeofuturism as the way forward. We need to reinfuse modernity with certain things that are treated as archaic, and that means identity politics, an aristocratic ethos, a warrior ethos, and things that have been bred out of us by consumerism and bourgeois modernity.

So, Herbert basically applied himself to this question: what social form is consistent with mankind ascending to the stars and colonizing the galaxy? And it was very obvious to him that that was not consistent with democratic politics which has a very low time horizon. It requires grand politics, grand visions, a grand strategy stretching forward over generations, and we had that briefly under the pressure of the Cold War and because Kennedy was a visionary, but politics as usual took over. Space exploration has faltered, “because democracy.”

What you would need to reignite that is some kind of society like we had pre-modernity where we had aristocracies that thought in dynastic terms, where you had orders like the Catholic Church that thought in very long terms over time and perpetuated themselves over time.

What the neo-reactionaries take from Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his writings on the failure of democracy is basically this point. Hoppe said, “Look, democracy is a failure and undermines civilization because it shrinks time horizons down, and that means you can’t pursue grand strategies and civilizational goals. You’re just thinking about the next quarter if you’re in business. You’re just thinking about the next election if you’re a politician.” So, the neo-reactionaries take this critique of democracy and modernity very seriously, and so the question then becomes, “What kind of social form do we need basically to get ourselves toward a technological utopia?”

On the other hand, however, I have also defended a certain form of populism and a certain form of democracy. I have an essay called “Notes on Populism, Elitism, and Democracy.” It’s in my book New Right vs. Old Right.[5]

You do need some kind of popular counter-balance to elites. There’s no question about it. I’m a populist in this sense. I believe in classical republicanism as opposed to liberalism. I believe in an organic model of society. I believe, like the classical republicans believed, that the main force in a society that guards liberty is a strong middle class. However, liberalism and globalization undermine the middle class. Therefore, if you value liberty you have to value protectionism, and you have to impose certain restrictions on the operation of capitalism to make sure that the rich get richer and the poor get richer and the middle class get richer. So, I don’t believe in strict equality, but I do like the Aristotelian idea that inequality has to be somewhat proportionate. There can be distributive justice, in other words, which is a concept that libertarians just completely reject. They write that out of their system of ideas. 

LR: So, you would still be for keeping democracy? 

GJ: Democracy to some extent, but . . . we’ve become too democratic, I think. Average people have lower time horizons. The more power that average people have and the people that ride to power on the votes of average people, the shorter the time horizons are. However, if you just get rid of any popular representation you’re just leaving yourself open to abuse by elites.

So, the classical republican view—and this really did influence the founding of America far more than, say, Lockean liberalism, which is a myth that libertarians put forward—and modern republicanism à la Montesquieu was an organic view of society. You had to have limitations on commerce, you had to protect the middle class, and you had to have checks and balances. So, you had, in effect, the mixed regime.

The model of the mixed regime comes from Aristotle’s Politics, it’s in Montesquieu, and it’s in the United States Constitution. And really every good, functional Western European society, ancient and modern, has had some form of a mixed regime. You’ve had a monarchical principle, whether it’s a hereditary king or a president or whatever, you’ve had an aristocratic principle, and you’ve had a popular principle. Those things have to be kept in balance, and so I believe in the mixed constitution, the mixed order. I just think that we’ve strayed excessively towards a combination of democracy and oligarchy, and we don’t have leaders who think long term about the common good anymore.

Again, libertarianism doesn’t have a notion of the common good. They’ve got procedures, and whatever comes out of the sausage machine at the end is blessed, right? No matter what it looks like, because it’s going through their procedural notions of what is right.

I now have ex-libertarians who routinely talk about the common good or the good of society. There’s a resurgence of these classical republican notions like the common good percolating around within this context of the Alt Right, and I’m happy that I’m one of the people who has been promoting that. 

LR: OK. But you would still keep elections? Something that does represent the will of the people? Because it’s one thing to have checks and balances and another having some way of representing the will of the people. 

GJ: Yeah, well, the will of the people is a really complicated notion. This is something I do like to point out against the most anti-democratic people in our circles. The fact of the matter is that if we had direct democracy where people voted with their television set or their smartphone or their computer, we would actually have better policies than we do today on things like immigration and trade. There’s no question about that.

So, in situations like that the people actually know what’s right. Better than the elites, which need to be brought to heel, brought into line. They need to be replaced, basically.

But what is the will of the people? The people wants what is best for it, but what’s best for us is not necessarily what we want at every given moment, right? So, we really want that cigarette right now, but that’s not what’s best for us in the greater scheme of things. So, you do have to give power to the populace to check elites, but you also have to have people who are wiser and more public spirited than average in positions of authority so they can basically say, “No, we’re not just going to have bread and circuses and free cigarettes.” There are bad popular policies that can come about to through direct democracies. So, you do have to have a moderating influence.

This is a standard thing that Rousseau talks about when he talks about the general will. The general will is not necessarily what the populace wants at any particular moment. It’s what they want when they’re thinking most rationally about things in the long run.

The origin of this idea, fascinatingly enough, is Plato’s Gorgias. Socrates in the Gorgias says there’s a distinction between what you want and what you think you want right now. What all men want is the good life, they want well-being, but what they think they want at any particular moment might not necessarily be conducive to well-being. And if freedom is getting what you really want rather than what you just think you want right now, then that leads directly to Rousseau’s conclusion that you can be forced to be free. You can be freer if you are paternalistically prevented from throwing away your freedom and your future by, say, getting addicted to heroin or gambling away your week’s wages before taking it home to feed your family. 

LR: So, at the end of the day, you’d still be for some elections? 

GJ: Yeah, definitely! 

LR: OK. 

GJ: Definitely. And there are different ways you can do that. There are forms of popular representation that don’t require people standing for election. You can have sortocracy. You can have systems like they had in the past where people are randomly pulled out . . .

LR: Right. Like in Greece. Like in Athens. 

GJ: Yeah, like in Athens or like people who do jury service in America today. You’re just pulled out randomly to do jury duty. But there are all sorts of ways that you can do that. But yeah, representative democracy is one way to do it.

Another way of doing it is plebiscites. Plebiscites tend to be quite favored, actually, among authoritarians of the Right, and honestly if Marine Le Pen ever ends up running France she’s probably going to have to be using plebiscites more than getting things passed through the legislature. 

LR: To what extent is neo-reaction something that influenced the Alt Right? A lot of the articles that I read in the US media about the Alt Right made it seem that neo-reaction was at the core of it. 

GJ: It’s not. It’s very peripheral. You see, this is part of the problem with the news coverage in America. It’s extremely lazy. They do a quick Google search, and they find a few articles about neo-reaction, and they think, “OK. I can run with this. It sounds kinda edgy and sinister even.” Yet the fact of the matter is that it’s always been marginal, and it holds itself aloof from most of what’s going on in the Alternative Right sphere. It has not influenced it all that much.

It parallels what I think in some ways. I can’t say it hasn’t influenced me at all, honestly. I see where they’re coming from. I can complete some of their thoughts. It’s simpatico, but it hasn’t been influential on the Alternative Right, and it’s just lazy reporting that leads people to say this kind of stuff, basically. 

LR: I would say that one of the points in common seems to be the rejection of equality. 

GJ: The rejection of egalitarianism. A kind of elitism. But a lot of us are really populist, right? I mean, the core of this thing is a populist attitude. You might believe that the best way to serve the good of the whole is to have a certain elitist element in government, but you can’t even just say that elitism tout court is completely the way to go. Like I’ve been arguing, you need a mixed regime. You need a popular element.

We are populists, and they are elitists, and that’s really the big gap between us. They tend to be really interested in technology and things like that. Well, we’re very interested in that too. There’s no question about it. We tend to be engaged in actual things that we hope will produce political change, and they’re trying to posture as being above all that.

Basically, they’re signaling, “We’re no threat to you, system that might destroy us or fire us from our job at Google or whatever! We’re no threat. We’re just harmless little fuzzballs. We’re just harmless eccentrics circling around on the internet.” And I can understand that as a protective coloration, but a lot of them really do seem to take it seriously, and until they stop that sort of posturing and start actually recognizing that the world today needs changing, and they can actually effect it, they’re somewhat irrelevant. Interesting, but irrelevant. 

LR: Right. Another difference I would say—tell me if I’m correct—is that if they are strictly anti-modernist and the Alt Right is too modernist in the sense that identitarianism and nationalism are still a product of modern times. 

GJ: Yeah. One of their memes—I call it the 1789 canard—is that they claim that the modern nation-state is a very modern invention. Yes and no. When you read Machiavelli, Machiavelli was calling for what? The unification of the Italians to chase out the barbarians who were invading their country. There was an Italian nation in the Middle Ages, and the Italians recognized each other from the Piedmont down to Sicily as a common people, divided politically, but a common people. The ancient Greeks regarded themselves as a common people. They were politically divided, but they were the Hellenes as opposed to other people. So, there were national identities even in antiquity. There weren’t necessarily nation-states. 

LR: Yeah, the nation-state is a product of modernity. 

GJ: Yeah, and I think it’s one of the great products of modernity. This is one of the ways I differ from these people who are all traditionalists. Oh, if you’re a traditionalist you believe in empire. No, I’m not a traditionalist in that sense. I don’t believe in empire. Empires are always created by murdering people and oppressing them, and I don’t believe in that.

To the people in our circles who defend empire and colonialism, I always say that if you defend these things you’re basically signaling to your neighbors that you’re not above a little murder and theft when it suits you. 

LR: Yeah.

GJ: And I think that’s just a morally retarded attitude. It’s morally retarded, and it’s quite anachronistic, because we don’t live in a world where white people are ever going to be running everything again. It’s just not going to happen! 

LR: Richard Spencer seems to have a fantasy of recreating a white sort of Roman Empire with Europe and America reunited like a big white empire.