#title A research text dump on Augustus Sol Invictus
#lang en
#pubdate 2026-06-30T09:43:00
#topics original texts, fascism, attomwaffen, neo-nazis, research text dumps,
#date 2026
*** Introduction
On December 16th, 2018, YouTube channel Philosophy and Esoterica uploaded an audiobook version of Ted Kaczynski’s “Unabomber Manifesto,” also titled “Industrial Society and Its Future,” read by white-nationalist figure Augustus Sol Invictus. The video gained over 100,000 views in three years.[1]
[1] <[[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/industrial-society-and-its-future-audiobook][www.knowyourmeme.com]]>
Until January 2018, when he dropped off the grid and went into hiding, Augustus’ outbursts were recurring; they in fact seemed to be escalating. So, World, shall we wait for one more Charlottesville? Shall we await this man’s best Unabomber impression? Augustus was writing to Kaczynski—the Unabomber himself—in prison, out of admiration.
He called once panicking because he had received a response to his letter to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.[2]
[2] The Noble Person Does Not Sin by Alexandria Brown. <[[https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/alexandria-brown-the-noble-person-does-not-sin][www.thetedkarchive.com]]>
At the University of Michigan exists the copies of all the letters in Box 97, Folder 101.[3]
[3] Series 1: Correspondence — Ted Kaczynski Papers, 1996–2014 — University of Michigan Special Collections Research Center — University of Michigan Finding Aids. <[[https://findingaids.lib.umich.edu/catalog/umich-scl-ams0239_aspace_ce23cadfccddfbd43f93f43ec928a2d3#contents][www.findingaids.lib.umich.edu]]>
*** Augustus Invictus, James Mason, and Atomwaffen Division
**Date:** 2020-03-31
**Topics:** Nazi, racist, Augustus Invictus, white nationalist, James Mason, Nazi, Atomwaffen Division, white supremacy, Charles Manson, violence, insurrection, Siege, jail, prison, racist
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[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFLRwnZTIDQ]]
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This video was created to inform the public about the connections between Augustus Sol Invictus, James Nolan Mason, and the Atomwaffen Division.
By raising awareness, this educational documentary seeks to prevent the racist violence that these individuals promote.
The longer, uncensored version of this video can be viewed at the Internet Archive:
“Augustus Invictus, James Mason, and Atomwaffen”
[[https://archive.org/details/Invictus_Mason_Atomwaffen]]
Video contents:
NBC News report on James Mason and Atomwaffen
CBS News report on the arrests of several Atomwaffen Division members
Inmate Augustus Invictus’ hearing before a South Carolina judge in January 2020
James Mason interviewed by Augustus Invictus in November 2019 in Denver, Colorado.
Atomwaffen propaganda video featuring James Mason
Propublica and PBS Frontline documentary on Atomwaffen, James Mason, and other U.S. neo-Nazis
Augustus Invictus’ “Guerrilla Radio” program in which he says that only white men should be able to vote and own real property, and then admits that he is a white supremacist
Augustus Invictus interviewed by Craig Patrick for “Money, Power & Politics.” Invictus admits to drinking goat’s blood as part of a pagan ritual. He also confirms that he desires an armed insurrection against the U.S. government, a second civil war.
Augustus Invictus speaking a 2017 Confederate monument rally in Orlando, Florida. Again, Invictus urges using guns against the federal government. “The federal government remains. It is a monster that sooner or later you are going to have to fight. And I don’t mean in ballot boxes. I mean literally, with rifles. Just as our founding fathers did. If you are not preparing for war, then you are a fool.”
Augustus Invictus interview with Justin “Master Chim” Garcia on the Pressure Project Podcast in 2017 following the deadly “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville. Invictus threatens to execute journalists.
Augustus Invictus speaking in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “They call me the Commie Slayer. And for good f---ing reason.”
Augustus Invictus speaking at a “free speech” rally in Washington, D.C. Other speakers and attendees included Richard Spencer, Jason Kessler, and Mike “Enoch” Peinovich. Invictus says that journalists and anti-racists should be killed by being dropped from helicopters, like Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet did.
Augustus Invictus speaking at the “Freedom March” rally in Austin, Texas in 2017. He calls for the death of George Soros, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Janet Yellen and the Federal Reserve board, communists, and antifascists. He said, “Hang them from the lamp posts. If not for your sake, then for the sake of your children.”
CN2 news story on Augustus Invictus’ court hearing in York County, South Carolina. The report includes testimony from Invictus’ wife describing his domestic violence against her.
*** SPLC Article
**Title:** Augustus Sol Invictus
**Source:**
<[[https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/augustus-sol-invictus][www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/augustus-sol-invictus]]>
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Related: [[https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/alt-right/][Alt-Right]]
Born: 1983
Location: Orlando, Florida
Augustus Sol Invictus — a goat-slaughtering, warmongering, repeat Senate candidate from Florida — is trying to reinvent himself as a leading voice in the [[https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alt-right][alt right]].
Augustus Sol Invictus (Austin Gillespie) had a fleeting moment in the national media spotlight in 2016, when he ran for Senate in the Florida Libertarian Party primary. During the race, it came to light that back in 2013, Invictus slaughtered a goat and drank its blood as part of a pagan ritual.
But the sensational, gory headlines minimize the identitarian, hierarchical worldview Invictus sells to his followers. Since his run at the Senate, Invictus has made plain he intends to become a prominent voice on the extreme right, speaking at rallies and founding a right-wing blog. Central to his message is that a violent second Civil War is necessary to preserve “Western civilization.”
**** In his words
“Do I believe that 6 million Jews were killed by evil Hitler? Is that what you’re asking?…Okay, then I am still waiting to see those facts.” — Hatewatch interview, August 5, 2017.
“No matter where you are, no matter what your race or creed or system of government, if you have a large group of outsiders coming in, things will change, and not necessarily for the better. Classical liberalism, libertarianism, a republican form of government — these things do not exist without Westerners. Those who see Africans and Europeans as interchangeable, they are either mentally retarded or they are deliberately dishonest. Either way, they aid in the destruction of our people, our lands and our culture. They are a cancer that must be excised if we are going to survive at all.” — [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUDorwEzwjg][“Fireside Chat on the State of the West, Part II: Causes of the Decline,”]] March 26, 2017.
“[The Federal government] has abandoned its eugenics programs and elitist mindset in favor of a decadent ideology that rejects the beauty of strength and demands the exponential growth of the weakest, the least intelligent and the most diseased.” — “[[https://www.splcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/files/a_declaration_of_the_failings_of_the_federal_government_-_invictus_for_senate.pdf][A Declaration on the Failings of Federal Government]],” October 2015.
“I say unto you, My Fellow Americans, that the Federal Government is not invincible. Verily, I say unto you that it can fall—and more than this, I say that it must fall. And if our blood must be the sacrifice, then so be it.” — “Fireside Chat on the Possibility of Revolution,” May 1, 2016.
**** Background
On June 17, 2017, Augustus Sol Invictus strutted up to the podium at a rally for free speech in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “What’s up Chapel Hill?” he shouted into the microphone. “They call me ‘The Commie Slayer.’ And for good f—— reason!”
Never mind that no one actually calls him, “The Commie Slayer.” Reality matters little to Austin Mitchell Gillespie, the man who legally changed his name to what translates in Latin to “majestic unconquered sun.”
Inflated grandiosity propels Invictus’ life and complements his particular brand of right-wing extremism. In actuality, he is a criminal defense lawyer who “resigned” from his profession. He’s a well-read man in possession of some intellectual talent. But in his own mind, he is a genius, a prophet, a revolutionary and a conqueror — even a god — destined to lead the people in a “great war.”
Invictus’ totalitarian worldview preaches that the strong should inherit the earth, and root out and exterminate the weak. He’s unclear about the aims of the second Civil War he intends to lead, but he claims his enemies are the communists, the “cultural Marxists,” and the “international financiers” who have forced a system of “mass democracy and egalitarianism” on the American people. His myriad speeches, writings, recordings and political activities in the past six years reveal his primary motivations to be racism, sexism and anti-Semitism, coupled with a dangerous penchant for violence.
He was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1983, and eventually ended up in Orlando, Florida, where he attended high school. He dropped out of college, and by 2006 he was married with four children. The same year, just a few weeks shy of his 23rd birthday, he abandoned his birth name in favor of his new, imperial moniker.
Around this time, by his own account, he was working at a [[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/whats-a-pill-mill/][“pill mill”]] pharmacy in Tampa that was raided and shut down by the Drug Enforcement Agency.
“No comparable job existed for me, and we were effectively rendered destitute,” he said in a [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3Fm27QDrkw][campaign speech]] in 2015. It’s unclear whether he was unwilling or unable to seek new employment, but he blamed the DEA for his financial hardship.
“I swore vengeance on the DEA and vowed that I would return to college, go to law school and enter into politics, and that one day I would shut their office down and put their families on the street.”
Despite his apparent poverty, he followed through with his plan, and graduated law school in 2011.
In early 2013, less than two years after getting his law degree, he renounced it, his U.S. citizenship and all his earthly possessions, in [[https://www.splcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/files/to_the_grey_world_of_man.pdf][a bizarre open letter]]. He insists that it was a religious and spiritual renunciation, but its contents were so disturbing that at least one of the recipients alerted the FBI.
Invictus did, in fact, go to the desert, hitchhiking across America to get there. When he returned, he filmed himself [[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ppxqan/augustus-invictus-the-florida-libertarian-who-loves-paganism-civil-war-and-goat-sacrifice-105][stabbing a goat to death]] and drinking its blood. Invictus, a follower of the pagan faith Thelema, called it a ritual sacrifice and religious offering. His organization, the Ordo Templi Orientis, emphatically disagreed and kicked him out.
The pilgrimage marked an important turning point in his activities on the far right. He considered a run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2016 as a Libertarian candidate. But when Marco Rubio vacated his Senate seat to run for president, Invictus turned his sights on statewide office.
His campaign sparked controversy within the Libertarian Party of Florida, and Invictus was [[https://www.politico.com/2016-election/primary/results/map/senate/florida/][decimated in the polls]], losing by a margin of almost 50 points.
During the campaign, Invictus was irate at what he thought were baseless accusations against him, labeling him a racist and a neo-Nazi. But the evidence was undeniable: a paper he wrote in law school making the legal and ethical case for eugenics.
He titled it “[[https://www.splcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/files/future_or_ruin-_the_argument_for_eugeni.gustus_sol_invictus_pulse_linkedin_0.pdf][Future or Ruin]],” which was also the name of a speech Hitler delivered in 1921. Invictus cites the [[https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/pioneer-fund][Pioneer Fund]], insisting that the notorious stronghold of academic racism is “not a white supremacist organization.” He makes repeated references to the intellectual inferiority of black people, which he presents as a matter of fact. In the paper’s footnotes, he cites extremist race scientists like [[https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/charles-murray][Charles Murray]] and [[https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/jean-philippe-rushton][Jean-Philippe Rushton]] to support his point.
He has since disavowed state-sponsored eugenics in [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-gMxyGlbw0][a campaign address]] discussing the controversy. But he never said he’s changed his mind about the practice, just that such a program, in the hands of bureaucrats, would inevitably be corrupted.
“It is not the love of excellence that poses the danger; it is the pettiness of men in government,” he said.
In fact, months after his lukewarm renunciation, [[https://www.splcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/files/a_declaration_of_the_failings_of_the_federal_government_-_invictus_for_senate.pdf][he wrote further in support of eugenics]] on his campaign website.
In the same post, he criticized the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “civil sainthood,” denouncing what he called, “the idolatrous worship of a different breed of lesser men.”
He also can’t deny his [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYuWH11EsdU][association with neo-Nazis]]. In 2012 he took a case representing Marcus Faella, the neo-Nazi leader of the white supremacist militia American Front. Invictus said later, during his Senate campaign, “I have become close personal friends with the members of the notorious skinhead organization.” He delivered a speech to their organization during his campaign, where he referred to members as his “brothers and sisters,” united in a fight to save the West from certain destruction.
“There is no hope on the horizon,” he said, “if it is not us.”
Invictus also joins many other figures in the Alt-Right in his virulent opposition to Islam and refugees. He pushes conspiracy theories about the European migrant crisis, including the existence of “no-go zones,” widespread implementation of sharia law and that there are roving Muslim gangs [[https://archive.org/details/soundcloud-308235772][attacking and raping]] white people. He’s even hoping to take a trip to Europe in the coming year to document [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-7rkFbCkq0&list=PLgo_ZfjmDdHTmifXX3StOCXjUQU89skde&index=5][“the fall of the West”]] for his blog, “The Revolutionary Conservative.”
He also claims that as a pagan who worships the Goddess, he can’t possibly be a sexist. But where mortal women are concerned, he’s made his low opinion clear. In his speech to the American Front, he described his version of the ideal woman: “The prize of a conquering hero.”
And on a radio appearance with the Florida-based “Sunshine Fascists,” he expressed disdain for women’s suffrage, insinuating that Sweden was the first European nation to “fall” — a common belief on the extreme right — because they were the first on the continent to give women the vote.
Invictus pens poems full of rape fantasies, violent domination and revenge against the women he believes have wronged him. He may claim that those writings are just a creative outlet or a figure of speech, but recent allegations of domestic abuse suggest otherwise.
Invictus has also expressed admiration for anti-Semitic thinkers and made references to anti-Semitic conspiracies. While in law school in Chicago, he discovered Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal scholar and philosopher, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYlUvQ0d7JM][who he describes]] as “one of my primary legal, political, intellectual, and philosophical influences.”
He also read Imperium by Francis Parker Yockey, the virulent anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer who called “the Jew” a “bearer of Culture-disease.” Invictus was so [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9BYrD-1VUc][inspired by the book]] that when he started his own law firm, he called it Imperium, P.A.
When asked why he holds these thinkers in such high esteem, he claimed to divorce their unsavory white supremacist views from their intellectual contributions. But that explanation seems at least a little disingenuous, particularly given Invictus’ personal views in favor of Holocaust denial, and his claims (which echo Yockey) that the Nuremburg trials were a “kangaroo court.”
In January 2016, Invictus dedicated an entire address to the issue of [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6fKkN_wNkU][“Our True Enemy, the Financiers,”]] in which he states, “usurers … are the enemy of all humankind.”
“It matters not whether you are black or white, cop or criminal, Christian or Muslim,” he said. “We risk disgrace when we dare to tell the creditors (emphasis his) we cannot afford the bill this month.”
He goes on to claim that the “financiers” control entertainment and culture, the media, and policy, and that their ultimate goal is to destroy Western civilization from within. According to multiple former associates, he’s denied the Holocaust in several private conversations.
Apart from his thinly veiled identitarian and totalitarian worldview, Invictus’ most troubling quality is his romantic exaltation of war, violence and bloodshed. In his warped narrative, life is gray and mundane without a war to make men heroes and martyrs. In keeping with his fantasies about the glory of conflict, he’s involved in the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CM35ZyGWHw][American Guard]] as a “Sergeant at Arms,” and he’s second in command of the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, an offshoot of Gavin McInnes’ Proud Boys that McInnes has called the “military division.”
Invictus has made specific, public calls to violence. He frequently threatens to [[https://www.compoundmedia.com/shows/the-gavin-mcinnes-show-375/5953bb4d70e61c13ac00ef55/][hang people from lampposts]], hurling the warning specifically at attorneys, progressives and journalists, even calling out VICE Media by name.
Invictus wants to see himself as a powerful leader, an extraordinary individual with a meaningful destiny. He’s seizing his opportunity. After years with the Libertarian Party, he [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JD9wLYINh8][announced in July 2017]] that he registered as a Republican, where, presumably, he feels he has a better shot at power.
*** Fascism Against Time
**Subtitle:** Nationalism, Media Blindness, and the Cult of Augustus Sol Invictus
**Author:** Shane Burley
**Source:** <[[https://sulbooks.com/site/2016/03/24/fascism-against-time-nationalism-media-blindness-and-the-cult-of-augustus-sol-invictus][www.sulbooks.com]]>
**Date:** March 24 2016
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The New Right is a particularly worrisome influence on many Pagan, Polytheist, and Magical communities. We are particularly pleased to host this long-form essay by Shane Bayer on the ideas of the New Right and their relationship to Fascism as seen through the platform of Augustus Sol Invictus.
We’ve also included a [[https://web.archive.org/web/20160324124025/http:/godsandradicals.org/others/confronting-the-new-right/][special page on the New Right]], their intersections with Paganism, and how a Pagan Anti-Capitalism can better address these same issues.
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[[a-r-a-research-text-dump-on-augustus-sol-invictus-1.jpg]]
At about 9:00pm on Tuesday, March 1st, Rose City Antifa (RCA) sent out an alert that a neo-fascist politician from Florida was having an open “meet and greet” in Northeast Portland. Augustus Sol Invictus had begun his “Northwest tour,” and was publicly congregating at the Radio Room in the trendy Alberta neighborhood. RCA, it seems, had been monitoring his Facebook, which he leaves public so as to create a constant stream of contact with supporters and vague ideologues.[4]
After anti-fascists protesters began calling in, Augustus and friends were kicked out and went down the road to the Bye & Bye, which refused both to remove the growing crowd of Invictus supporters or to defend them against the roaring collection of protesters that were amassing just outside its doors. Augustus was not shy about what came next, posting on his Facebook at length.
First of all, fuck you to the piece of shit bartender at Bye & Bye who refused to call the cops, saying. “Not my problem, man.” When there is a woman in the bar about to be jumped, it “is” your fucking problem. The day you and a woman you’re with are about to get jumped by twenty people, I hope the bartender tells you the same thing. Second, fuck you to the antifa who hit one of my supporters with a 2×4 and smashed the windows out of the car of another supporter. One day you’re going to pull that shit on someone who is armed, and you will get what you deserve. Come to Florida with that, and see what happens to you. Third, fuck you to the manager at Radio Room who kicked us out because you were so offended at the fact of my mere presence in your bar. I can get a cheeseburger at a thousand different bars in my short stay in Portland: you will always be an idiot, no matter what bar you manage. Fourth, thank you to the score of antifa who came by to take me out. I didn’t take the death threats seriously until tonight. You could have just left me alone and let me make my speeches in peace, but you decided to make a movement to assassinate me. I have been waiting for a worthy enemy all my life, and you have given me the best gift a man could ask for. Fifth, thank you to the supporters who refuse to be intimidated by threats of blackmail and violence. Remember that this is what the Fasces means: As individuals we can be broken, but together we are invincible.[5]
Below that he gave a special “fuck you” to Mark Zuckerberg, since Facebook had taken down the original post for violating their terms of use. The reaction to the news that Augustus was in Portland came hard and fast as a street action to confront him dropped onto the Alberta arts district like a lightening bolt.[6]
In RCA’s [[https://rosecityantifas.weebly.com/articles/augustus-invictus-meet-greet-report-back][report back]] they noted that Augustus’ phone had died, which actually may have decreased the number of supporters that came to clamor at his internet stardom. While Augustus was angry with certain Bye & Bye staff members, RCA also wrote that “the Bye and Bye bouncers went so far as to act as bodyguards for Augustus.”[7]
Earlier that day I had walked into a Panera Bread on Holgate to find that Augustus was as early as I was.
A couple of months ago I wrote an article, [[https://www.hamptoninstitution.org/augustus-sol-invictus.html#.Vumrmz942yo][“Imperium and the Sun,”]] looking at the neo-fascist politics of Augustus Invictus, his campaign and his associations. He wrote me back a letter outlining some problems he had with the article, but generally commending it for being a fair and biting critique of him. I followed it up with [[https://www.hamptoninstitution.org/augustus-sol-invictus-part-two.html#.Vumryj942yo][“Fascist Performance Art,”]] where I went deeper into his politics and aesthetics, as well as the ways that I think Augustus tries to insulate himself from criticism. In his letter, he referenced coming to Portland as a part of his Northwest tour, and mentioned he wanted to grab a cup of coffee if I was up to it. After a bit of mental pacing, I decided to do this, as I had more questions forming that I wanted direct answers to. At the end of “Fascist Performance Art,” I listed 14 questions for Augustus, all of which were designed to be straight forward and provide the kind of answers about his political ideas that had remained clouded behind a wispy ambiguity.
When I arrived, Augustus was reading Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men, a sort of manifesto of “male tribalism.” Jack, also living in Portland, has had his own infamy grow over recent years. His first book, Androphilia, was a call to other queer men to drop what he saw as the “gay identity,” and to instead reclaim their masculinity. He has gone on to write heavily about masculinity and male tribalism, now speaking at White Nationalist allied organizations like the National Policy Institute and American Renaissance. Most recently he has made news for joining the controversial group the [[https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/12/inside-virginia-s-creepy-white-power-wolf-cult.html][Wolves of Vinland,]] a “folkish” heathen collective that combines many of the tribalist ideas of motorcycle gangs with Germanic neo-paganism.[8]
Augustus was on his way to get a tattoo from Donovan after our meeting, which was his campaign’s logo on his back. This is an eagle, wings outstretched, clutching a “fasces.” This, as I mentioned in the other articles, is a bundle of sticks bound together, the image for Mussolini’s Fascist Party. It is also the image above the Roman senate of antiquity, a move towards the plausible deniability of the Invictus campaign. In his comment on Facebook, he mentions this “fasces,” a motif he is happy to resurrect.[9]
[[a-r-a-research-text-dump-on-augustus-sol-invictus-2.png][Campaign logo for Augustus Sol Invictus. The bound sticks are called fasces.]]
Past polite pleasantries, we jumped headfirst into the meat of it as I delved into pointed questions about his positions on race, gender, nationalism, and other topics that have made his “Fireside Chats” so controversial. For his part, Augustus not only answered honestly, but seemed to fight to do so. I have interviewed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people in my life, but almost none tried quite so hard to give an honest answer as he did across the table from me. Here he took time to analyze his own thoughts and to be as clear and as fair as possible, all of which is done to keep himself in line with some of the values that make up his own image of heroism.
I led with a question about race and IQ, asking if he believed that there were genetically defined racial difference in intelligence. This has been one of the most common edge arguments of White Nationalists over the last decade, creating a “field” known as “Human Biological Diversity.” This was formerly known as “race realism,” but HBD sounds even more innocuous and less likely to raise flags immediately to uninitiated onlookers. Augustus’ family is bi-racial, as he has bi-racial children with a woman from Puerto Rico.
He answered clearly that he thought that there was not enough evidence to make a determination one way or the other, and that IQ studies tended to be “political” and overly prejudiced. When I asked whether it gave him pause when thinking about his own children, he said no.
“No, I know my kids are smart,” he said, referencing that they were in the gifted program.
“I would say that I have never seen the work of Charles Murray [The Bell Curve] or J. Philippe Rushton [One of the best known proponents of racial differences in intelligence] disproved. I have seen many people offended by their work—but I have never seen anyone disprove it….I am largely agnostic in this area. I try to keep an open mind to all studies, because I am inclined to believe that anyone working to prove something about race—whether proving equality or inequality—likely has some sort of agenda.”[10]
Equality, however, is not something that Augustus approves of nor believes in, and when asked if he thought people were generally equal despite their own particular differences he replied, “absolutely not.”
In Augustus’ response to my first article, he took issue with my use of a source that said he had a “dim view of women.” His response included saying that he “worshiped the feminine,” which he meant to include Goddess worship as a part of his religious practice.
In my second article I wrote that this argument was essentially the “religious version of saying I have a female friend.” He told me that when he first saw this second article he was using LSD as a part of a religious ceremony and it made him incredibly angry. He later went on a White Nationalist podcast, Radio ThreeFourteen, and mentioned it, saying that my first article was fair and the second one was despicable trash.[11] He re-read the article later on and, while taking great issue with that particular statement, found it reasonably fair.[12]
I brought this issue back up. I said, both to him and in the article, that worshipping the “feminine” and believing that you respect women is not the same thing as being allied with feminism. “So, then, do you believe that men and women have different prescribed roles?”
He answered that they did, that they were fundamentally different, which I responded was certainly not a feminist or progressive reading of gender or women. He agreed:
“Men and women are biological compliments. To treat them as identical is to allow ideology to override common sense and thousands of years of historical evidence (“groundbreaking” studies of far-flung indigenous tribes aside).”
The “groundbreaking” work he is talking about, whether anthropological or socio-biological, is generally mainstream at this point, whereas the notion that there is a gendered “essence” specific to someone’s assigned birth gender has been largely discredited. This discourse is one of the last holds that the far-right has in modern culture, as the battles over gender identity form the hallmark of the fascist crossover into Evangelical ecstasticism or GOP punditry.
Much of the previous discussion brought in some of what seemed like a series of paradoxes about Augustus’ politics, which is not unusual when looking at the syncretic ideas in fascist movements. I assumed that the primary focus of his own right-wing ideas, and the reason he supported groups like the American Front even though he is in bi-racial relationships, is that he supports a general Will to Power and the use of categorical hierarchies to stratify society.
[[a-r-a-research-text-dump-on-augustus-sol-invictus-3.jpg][American Front poster]]
He confirmed this, saying that he believes that hierarchies are both natural and normal. We discussed this at length, where he used well traveled analogies, citing the differences in ability in certain skills and professions as examples of these hierarchies. He added that he and his family would do well in a “warrior” society that was heavily stratified, and that this fact is what is important to him rather than what the average person would experience. He made it clear that he would prefer his own vision of a warrior civilization, based on the will of strong men, which is why he allies with them despite the monoracial ideas of his colleagues.
This does not mean, however, that he believes in a multi-racial, multicultural society. He stood firmly as a nationalist, though he disagreed with “rigid” racial nationalists. To Augustus Invictus, racial nationalism was never a feature of past society, nor is it likely to be achieved. In his broader nationalism, Latino people may be allowed over the border.
“My view of nationalism is broader than racial or ethnic nationalism. But I do ally myself politically with racial and ethnic nationalists—whether white, black, Hispanic, or Chinese—because, as I see it, we all have the same goal of the self-determination of peoples.”
He often brought things back to how he sees his own family, where certain types of diversity may be allowed to be present—for example, someone dating his daughter. His nationalism was more cultural, and reminded me of the America First politics of far-right political parties in the ’60s and ’70s, or perhaps the positions of Pat Buchanan in 1992 or Donald Trump today. When asked if he would allow a Jew or African American person to date his daughter, he said he would be less likely, since they would be further from his own “culture.”
These racist politics are not cleanly defined as they would be in the American Front, and seem to require mental backflips at times. However, Augustus still has clearly put a lot of thought into them. He mentioned his affection for Malcolm X, stating that his Black Nationalism was not out of a “hatred of white people” but instead a “love of his own people.”
This is not an uncommon talking point, but one that seems to lack even a basic understanding of the differences between Black Nationalism and White Nationalism. The Black Nationalist movement was not simply an attempt to reclaim identity as some sort of essentialist tribal marker. Members of the Black Nationalist movement hoped to find a sense of personhood that had been robbed by white colonial enslavement, and to create a community so as to resist oppression. White Nationalism is, as best we can see, the last gasp of reactionary whites attempting to hold on to some sense of privilege, or the identity that was formed through the subjugation of other peoples.
[[a-r-a-research-text-dump-on-augustus-sol-invictus-4.jpg][“Androphilia,” a book by Jack Donovan. New Right ideology often advocates for hypermasculinity (even homosexual) to oppose the influence of Feminism.]]
He took a great deal of time to explain how he not only was not homophobic, but could not even understand how a person could be. He said several times that he “advocated bisexuality,” which could mean either that he condoned it or that he thought it was the preferred way of being. This is part of why he said he only dates bi-sexual woman and that it would be fine if his son dated a bi-sexual woman, but he was less likely to accept his daughter dating a bi-sexual man.
When asked about transgender people, he said that he did not like what seemed like the “blaming of heterosexual people” by transgender people, but he thought that he should not have any political control over them. He did, however, say that they made him personally uncomfortable, and that they would likely not be allowed in his own “tribe.”
He made this tribal distinction often, lacking political “universalism.” There were no answers about what was “right,” but what would be allowed in his own perfect social sphere—a culture where the weak are dominated by the strong (whatever that means). Certain types of queer relationships may be allowed, and certain ones not. Some types of racial communion would be acceptable, while others would undermine the national identity that he prefers. He sees his own nationalism as “concentric circles” similar to Jean-Marie Le Pen—first the family, then the neighbors, then the community, and so on. He feels that this is compatible with people like the American Front.
The only conversational point where he seemed a bit cagey was about the Jews. His law firm, Imperium, is named after the anti-Semitic fascist tome Imperium by Francis Parker Yockey, and he often goes on anti-Semitic programs to promote his campaign. He does not say much about Jews publicly, except a visceral opposition to AIPAC and all things Israel. He has been accused of Holocaust Denial in the past, so I asked him if he doubted the official numbers in the historical record of the Holocaust. He confirmed that he did, saying that while most Jews likely had no negative intentions towards “Western civilizations,” some certainly did. He later tried to clarify that he did not think blanketing Jews with a broad category made sense.
“I was trying to say is that grouping all Jews as “THE JEWS!” is fallacious, just as it is asinine to call all Scotsmen, Frenchmen, White Americans, and White Australians as “WHITE PEOPLE!” and ascribe to all “WHITE PEOPLE!” all the unjust treatment of all non-white people in the world. As I’m sure you are aware, there are many different Jewish groups, and none of them can agree on anything… Point being, trying to bait me on “THE JEWS!” is probably not productive.”
This does not undo what has been a deep relationship with anti-Semites, his public declaration of Holocaust Denial, and his sideline remarks about the Jews and their role in “Cultural Marxism.”
While he certainly answered in person that he did not believe the official reportage of the Holocaust, or found that the “numbers had changed,” he would not put that answer in print when answering the questions. Instead he focused on the person who had originally made [[https://freebeacon.com/culture/a-sacrificial-goat-in-every-pot/][this claim about him]], which happened when they were traveling through The Netherlands.[13]
“So with all due respect, Mr. Burley, I won’t be put on the defensive for the dirty tricks of [He has been naming this woman in the press, but she would prefer to remain anonymous].”
**** “Health Over Sickness, Strength Over Weakness”
A lot has been said about his stated support for eugenics, which comes from an article he wrote in law school after working on philosophical papers as an undergrad. He later dropped his support for eugenics as a state policy, but only because he said that if the kinds of people that are in power today took control over it then it would become a “dysgenics program.” My written questions included asking what type of eugenics program he would want to see implemented in the U.S., if, for some reason, he had total control over it.
“I value health over sickness, strength over weakness, intelligence over stupidity. I would not, however, be so ambitious with any eugenics program that I would seek to promote these things, though my opponents would love to hear me say that. The only thing I ever promoted was the lessening of human suffering. For instance, if it is a certainty that a child will be born with AIDS or Huntington’s Disease or mental retardation or severe physical handicap if two people came together to create a life, that is an evil that should be prevented. I still believe that, but I doubt whether a state-sponsored eugenics program is the right mechanism for it. I also doubt that many people actually read the article I wrote in law school, but the aim was always to prevent unnecessary suffering, not to create the Nietzschean Superman; which, incidentally, I believe must be created outside of all human civilization. Still, I would reiterate that any eugenics program, no matter how modest in its ends or means, would likely be used for evil by the bureaucrats put in charge of it, and this is too likely a danger to justify that risk. This is why I have stated repeatedly and publicly and without qualification that I do not advocate state-sponsored eugenics programs.”
[[a-r-a-research-text-dump-on-augustus-sol-invictus-5.jpg][Ernst Rudin, the primary architect of Nazi Germany’s Eugenics programs]]
What he describes here is less of a eugenics program and more of a state-run form of sterilization and abortion based on the idea that allowing disabled people to be born would be a form of civilizational cruelty. The eugenics notion would be that this intervention would eventually rid the gene pool of certain “weaknesses,” such as genetically prescribed disabilities. It could then be taken to its next logical step by trying to isolate and breed in “positive qualities.” While he has suggested intelligence would be one of these, in past periods of “racial hygiene” this often included things we would today consider subjective and situational, such as attractiveness, racial purity, and criminality.
We do not oppose eugenics simply because it is racist (which it is), but because it is scientifically incorrect. There is little evidence (beyond “groundbreaking” studies on Human BioDiversity blogs) that you can control disability in this way, nor that controlling disability actually leads to human benefit. I can agree with Augustus about one thing in this however: if the state ran a eugenics program it certainly would be a tool of unprecedented human brutality.
Eugenics may be the most taboo part of the Human Biological Diversity movement, as this tends to be paired almost universally with their ideas about Asian superior intelligence and Kenyan superhuman running capabilities. Race scientists like Richard Lynn have continued to argue in this direction, while non-scientific, culturally-focused White Nationalists at places like the Radix Journal regularly make claims like homosexuality could be abolished through eugenic selective breeding programs.[14]
The new focus on eugenics may seem like the revival of earlier periods of now discredited science, and it is, but the process of doing this is an essential and profound one for them. To do this, you make a few clear statements:
- First, the qualities that eugenics programs favored are essentially valuable. This means, for example, intelligence, as it is very narrowly defined in this instance, is innately a sign of superiority, and must be preserved as such.
- Second, the move away from these now-discredited racial and socio-biological sciences, which discussed the innate inferiority of the “lower classes” and the biologically defined roles of women, but also claim that we need to move backwards to old “truths.”
- Third, eugenics means that we can now use ideology to drive evolution, and can craft a world that has been ideologically predicted by people like Friedrich Nietzsche and Ernst Junger. Invictus certainly mentions that he does not mean to use eugenics to build a “superman.” Instead, that happens outside of a state. This does not mean that he would oppose driving biological evolution in the direction of what he sees as superior qualities.
Much of the conversation traced through his experiences running his campaign, how he negotiated his libertarian politics, and what his intentions were after the fact. His relationship with the Libertarian Party of Florida is a complicated one, as are most libertarian political outposts. Rather than a location for coherent economic politics, they are often the stop-over spot for those on the radical right attempting to crossover into some part of mainstream discourse. The anti-tax movement on the 1990s was an entry point for KKK members, skinheads, and various neo-Nazis, as was paleoconservatism and paleolibertarianism a vessel for a coherent far-right politic boring into the GOP in the 80s.
The libertarian movement is often broken up today by those who align with socially liberal values, and were brought on to the Ron Paul campaign on 2007–8, often associated with the Caito Institute and Reason Magazine, and those on the further fringes who decry the slow creeping liberalism into their hardened anarcho-capitalism. Free market capitalism seems like the ideological foundation of the Libertarian Party, its entire reason for existence, but for Augustus, this is not all that important. Though he often says buzz lines about destroying the “social safety net,” he is also incredibly clear in calling for its maintenance to shelter those lower on the economic ladder. This seems to be in line with his own nationalism, where a “nation” should be served by its government. It is those that are outside of the nation, whether ethnically or by whatever vague dividing line Augustus claims for himself, that would be stricken from governmental aid.
This is not a libertarian distinction, nor are many of his policies beyond ending the drug war and destroying the Department of Education. Instead, the Libertarian Party seems like a place where he can enter into a semi-mainstream public discourse without being immediately flagged as outside a reasonable frame of debate. He told me he that he originally intended to run a few years into the future as a Democrat.
**** Paganism, Fascism, and Obscurantism
We went into his religious practice quite a bit, where he outlined his own interpretations of Thelema more deeply. This includes seeing most European pagan gods as being culturally interpreted versions of each other, which is to say that Heathen gods are somewhat the same as Roman gods, yet with different names and cultural stories. He did not say whether or not this included non-European traditions, though I’m sure he would have granted it some degree of universality, while saying that he would only respect the European ones. He was consistent in his support for traditional paganism, and promised to sanction human sacrifice if given full reigns of world affairs. According to Augustus, collective sacrifice our enemies to the gods would bring a great deal of national unity, since the gods gain their power from blood.
The difficulty to find coherence in Augustus’ politics by many trying to defend him against claims of fascism comes not from his own incoherence (though there is some of that), but from the lack of discourse about the evolution of fascist politics in America and Europe. Not only is fascism not a label that Augustus finds too offensive, he generally revels in the label as a medal in a war for offensive individuality.
He is a fascist in all the ways in which that political title is true, even if he does not share the raving white supremacist racism and homophobia that many have come to expect from the cartoonish buffoons that occasionally hide behind police protection in public. Instead, he believes in the innate inequality of people, the need for tribal nationalism based on in- and out-groups, the different prescribed roles for men and women, a conspiratorial view of certain ethnic groups, and that we need to restructure society along a heroic warrior model.
What is difficult when we look at Augustus is that many people, who no one would describe as having National Socialist leanings, have found him attractive. Inside of individualist pagan circles, especially those allied with the Left Hand Path, critiques of Augustus as being on the radical right have gained little traction. Part of this comes from the penchant that many in those circles have for offensive and iconoclastic rhetoric, as well as a philosophical ethos to move outside of conventional moral strictures.
Augustus’s own rhetoric, of destroying the system and abolishing conventional politics (both right and left) has also been taken up by the less discerning elements of the left that find any kind of revolutionary character a plus. When people went through the lists of supporters in Portland there were a lot of personalities you would expect, as well as many you wouldn’t.
[[a-r-a-research-text-dump-on-augustus-sol-invictus-6.jpg][Collin Cleary, another New Right author.]]
Known left-wing activists have been traveled on his page, as well as progressive pagans who know far less about his problematic politics than that he is the most public pagan politician in America currently. Without a keen lens as to the history of Third Positionist and esoteric fascist politics, and with a definition of fascism that only reveals a shaved head and a Klan robe, how would people even know without taking up a research project?
When talking with Augustus a quote from Steven Weinberg, a 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics winner, came echoing through my mind. This particular quote is often used by problematic New Atheists and is meant to deride the religious, but I think it could be used for political orientations of this type as well.
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.[15]
Augustus was courteous and friendly throughout our entire conversation. He was both sincere and open to criticism, genuine in his demeanor. It sounds as if he is likely kind to his family and friends and generous in the circles he runs in. In a different world, he could likely be a friend. In this world, however, he was holed up in the Bye & Bye. In this world, he organizes a political movement that continues to found itself in xenophobic racism, sexism, nationalism, oppression, and violence. His politics, to him, are good natured and logical, but they also have consequences, ones that are very real for those who have been the target of these fascist movements, both in outbursts of violence and in the few cases when they are able to take political power.
**** Intersections with Libertarians & Confrontations with Antifa
What brought Augustus out here were some American Front events, starting across the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington. Augustus first raised eyebrows by defending American Front members against criminal charges in Florida, and eventually helping them formally disband the organization. He has said many times that he is friends with AF members, and lives with one currently. However, he would not be allowed to be a member, because of his bi-racial relationships.
After his private speech to the American Front, it was posted online as one of his “Fireside Chats.” Here he used the talking points one might expect, such as the fact that the AF deserves fair representation, yet in reality they could not get an attorney besides himself. Groups like the ACLU regularly represent neo-Nazis, and while many oppose this, nobody assumes that they share in their politics. That is likely because they do not publicly call themselves nationalists or fascists, nor do they speak at their events.
It was this very connection that eventually put a dramatic, and public, hold on Augustus’s Northwest tour. The primary purpose for him coming out was to speak at an additional American Front event in Vancouver, British Columbia. Vancouver Against Racism then started a campaign calling for the venue, The Railway Club, to cancel the event, which they did. Vancouver Against Racism also pushed for a counter-demonstration that would dwarf the original political event. Counter-organizers in the area had discussed a “creeping fascism” in their subcultural space, a term that is often used for the way that fascist ideas can seep into left-associated spaces through shared counter-cultural roots. They mention bands like The Night Profound, with fascist and skinhead connections, using their fan base to promote Augustus’ event. The band had previously turned heads when they brought in controversial bands like Death in June.[16]
Augustus was determined not to be influenced by increasing numbers of fingers pointed at him, making jokes about the growing anti-fascist contingent that saw him as a public target. As he went to cross over into Canada from Washington, he was detained by the border authority, who asked him questions several hours before essentially denying him entry. He was technically allowed to reconsider his application for entry, but this was likely semantics at this point.
In a press release put out several days later, which seems likely written by Augustus in the third person, it notes that his interrogation was about his “affiliation with neo-Nazis, about the charges of Fascism, and about allegations of racism:”
“I was a politician traveling to give a speech and yet they treated me like a gang member trying to run guns across the border. They said that no good could come of my entry into the country because violence would certainly ensue…There is no question my expulsion from Canada was due to political reasons.”[17]
He tried to tell the border guard that it was not him issuing threats of violence, but the “communists” instead—but to no avail. The Canadian government stated that he had no legitimate purpose to enter Canada except “to cause trouble.” Augustus alleged that they went through his text messages and emails, asked personal questions about his girlfriend and ex-wife, and got much of their information from the Antifa organizers blocking the Vancouver event.[18]
[[a-r-a-research-text-dump-on-augustus-sol-invictus-7.jpg][Rose City Antifa]]
He almost immediately went on Facebook to say that Antifa had “won the battle,” and posted the “Allowed to Leave Canada” paperwork that he had to sign as he was forced back stateside. Grandeur seemed to be the reserved place for Augustus to lick his wounds after this set-back as he took to social media in long, angry tirades referring to himself as a “leader” and providing advice for those that have to deal with Antifa:
Advice for those who are not professional street brawlers:
- – Do not travel to or from the event alone. Antifa are cowards without honor. They travel in numbers, and they attack only when the numbers are asymmetrical.
- – Assume an ambush. Antifa are cowards without honor. They will hide in the shadows to jump unsuspecting passersby.
- – Keep your head on a swivel. Antifa are cowards without honor. They are sucker punching bitches who wouldn’t know a fair fight if they saw it on pay-per-view.
- – Film everything. Antifa are cowards without honor. They will hit you and run to the police when you hit them back. It would be a good idea to have proof that you acted only in self-defense.
ASSUME DEADLY FORCE WILL BE USED. The antifa have openly declared their intent to assassinate me and to begin a civil war at this event. Take them at their word. If you are attacked, do not hold back.”[19]
He continues to focus on the bi-racial ethnicity of his children, his relationships with non-straight people, and his worship of the goddess as a protection against many of the allegations of bigotry that were leveled against him.
The news of his removal from Canada exploded like a social media frag grenade, heading to places like Gawker, Vice, and Raw Story, where they did not go much further than mentioning that a fascist who “drinks goat’s blood” has been blocked from entry. His own press was as equally outraged as he was, with right-libertarian and “race realist” Christopher Cantwell coming to his defense with anger.
“Speaking of liberal idiocy, Senate Candidate Augustus Invictus was refused entry to Canada this week because he has ‘no legitimate reason to enter the country and will just cause trouble’. That is quite odd since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to think open borders are such a fantastic idea, at least when it comes to Syrian “refugees.” Perhaps the leftist immigration agenda has nothing to do with freedom at all, and is rather about flooding countries with welfare dependent non-white voters who will perpetually favor the expansion of government.”[20]
This story revealed the uncomfortable relationship that libertarians, and, by strained association, Invictus, have to mainstream conservatism. As the anti-fascist contingents swelled in response to Augustus’s upcoming speech, libertarian internet press continued to push forward to support the event. Lauren Southern, a right-wing libertarian with Rebel Media and Press for Truth, came out to cover the event and bait protesters.
After yelling at the crowd that there were “only two genders” and mocking rape allegations, a protester came by and threw urine on her. Press for Truth then dug their heels in to focus on the story, calling the protesters feminists and “SJWs [Social Justice Warriors].”[21]
They never mention any details about who Augustus Sol Invictus is, or why the protesters are there. Organizers refer to Southern as their “local Ann Coulter,” saying that the protest was a “smaller crowd of wing-nut conspiracy theorists, and other right-wing weirdo[s].”[22]
Drawing together the subcultural elements of Augustus’ campaign that allowed him to be invited to Vancouver in the first place, as well as the reaction by the right wing to Antifa’s policy of “no platform,” [[https://itsgoingdown.org/augustus-vancouver-non-event/][organizers used this as a temperature check.]]
By not engaging critically with ideas, and preferring subcultural markers to a personal and political affinity with one another, people are leaving an open door to anyone who’s critiques of capitalism, “communism”, “corporatism” and “international financiers” is just subliminal messaging meaning Jews. By refusing to look into or take seriously pre-and-non-christian(sic) religions and occultism, just because it is not clearly associated with what they see as conservative capitalist values, people are leaving the door open to right-wing interpretations of Odinism, Satanism, etc, that reinforce racial hierarchies and create fear and hatred of immigrants on the basis of being “other” and not being “western”.
Disallowing fascism doesn’t mean being exclusive. It means being invested in an idea, and open with more intention. Not only would this be a serious thorn in the side to any fascist movement attempting to grow in sub-cultures, it might create an even more vibrant, creative, and interesting culture in which to mingle.
Another interesting quality to the right-wing mobilization around Augustus is the extreme reaction to ‘callout’ and anti-oppression culture. We see this in Lauren Southern’s rhetoric, and it was quite apparent in many of the Facebook memes and comments of Augustus himself and his supporters…The caricature of the spoiled brat university kid demanding a safe space (which can at times be embarrassingly accurate) is now being evoked, even by fascists, to justify the most disgusting misogyny and white-supremacy.[23]
This story was then uncritically picked up in Tea Party allied sources like Breitbart News, continuing to be echoed throughout the right-wing press as Southern being assaulted for her views on transgender people. What she was doing, coming out to favorably cover an event hosted by the American Front, seemed beyond the purview of BigGovernment.com. The rest of the coverage turned Augustus into the side-show that they have generally made of him, making sure to focus first on the internet famous goat-head and his stream-of-consciousness “LSD journals,” rather than the nationalist content of his speeches.[24]
**** Media Sensationalism = Media Complicity?
It was exactly this vapidity, the focus on the sensation of Augustus rather than the real story, that led to us casually talking over medium-roast in a Portland Panera. He reached out for me not because he had affection for my politics, but because there had been no one on the opposition that had been able to see his presentation as anything other than Live-Action Role Playing. It is exactly this paradox that kept him off the radar of anti-racists for months, largely because the dearth of coverage he garnered showed him as an insane creature clamoring for internet stardom rather than a dangerous fascist.
Instead, a real ideologue was proposing a growing base of far-right ideas that drew on subcultural fascist notions that had reshaped and been repackaged over the decades of anti-fascist organizing. For months, no one saw Augustus because the image of him climbing through the desert, preparing goat sacrifice for the camera was only enough to inspire trendy Twitter hashtags rather than an opposition. While this was happening, he was amassing supporters, not to get him elected, but to further a movement of Will to Power dissension that may continue to see its ranks swell as disaffection continues to flow through the country.
When asked if he opposes mass democracy as a concept, he said “absolutely.” This is unique for a candidate in a representative system, but that is because elections are simply a canvas on which he can paint with his own mix of spirit, water, and blood. He enjoys references to his movement as a “weird sect,” making fun in jokes about its cult status.
The support of the American Front is no fluke. Augustus has now accepted an invitation by the National Socialist Movement to speak at a Rome, Georgia, event on April 23rd. The event, which is co-sponsored by the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was actually taken down from his campaign’s Facebook after it was first put up. The post was then archived over at the American Third Party Report, where he posted a multi-page explanation. He resurrected the analysis that nationalists, including both himself and the NSM, were challenging “McCulture” and the oppressive state.
“And this is all one can ask for in an ally. The question is why this is so difficult for so many. As I have said in several of my speeches & interviews, I have never been attacked by a white nationalist or black nationalist—physically, verbally, or otherwise – for having an [sic] Hispanic family or for tolerating homosexuality or for drug use or for anything else; but I *have* been attacked—physically, verbally, and otherwise – by leftists for exactly those things, and for my refusal to denounce white nationalists as the Devil’s spawn. The willingness of the NSM to have someone like me speak at their event, combined with the willingness of the Antifa to stop me by any means necessary, should be a glaring demonstration of where the true intolerance lies.
So I will speak in Rome. And I will make it the best speech I have ever given. And I will speak to the Nation of Islam if they ever get around to asking. And I will speak to the Cuban nationalists in Miami and the Puerto Rican nationalists in San Juan. We are all in this together, no matter our race or ethnicity, against the special interests that would destroy our respective cultures for their own profit under the guise of humanitarianism.”[25]
This shift to the right, if not in rhetoric at least in relationship, is a telling point for the direction of Invictus, further pushing outside of acceptable discourse and away from anything the Libertarian Party would publicly associate with. His previous stop over at the more “respectable” neo-fascist milieu was short-lived, and now even those Alt Right depositories where he has done many interviews would likely find his most recent announcement politically toxic.
This turn may seem logical when looking at the most recent reactions to Augustus, which put him in a long history of antagonism between the shape-shifting far-right and the increasingly militant anti-fascist left. Before Rose City Antifa’s sharp confrontation and the organized response to his event in Vancouver, there was little conversation that discussed him exactly within the fascist context that he spoke. Now his connections and ideas have been placed front and center, putting all of his more moderate connections into question.
Part of this is done through the singling out of Augustus by the anti-fascist left, which has hardened his resolve to abandon most leftist appeasements and allies. This could useful to anti-fascist organizers who need to shed his false allegiances and clouded discourse in order to cleanly identify him as a dangerous right-wing revolutionary. If the Canadian libertarian press tried to redeem him through vilification of the “SJWs,” this was entirely undone as he announced an event with cartoonish neo-Nazis who cover their blackshirts with swastika patches.
In a certain sense, Augustus has cemented opposition to him while closing the door on any of the political crossover that he was hoping for with the Libertarian Party of Florida. Roger Stone, former Donald Trump lobbyist and right-wing ideologue, was rumored to be brought in to run against him simply to save the name of the party. Augustus did not see this happening since the Invictus campaign had “nothing to lose,” and Stone was in poor health. At this point, no one would be surprised if LFP Chairman Adrian Wylie would pull a “hail Mary” in a desperate attempt to save the party from the only person who could fundamentally destroy it. The destruction of the LFP would close that bridge between the far-right and the GOP, as well as the neoliberal economic cover that seeks to influence beltway conservatism.
**** “The Will To Power”
The toxic hand of Invictus now seems as though it will poison all who touch it, and that is not reserved simply for party politics. Augustus had been long listed as a speaker at the upcoming International Left Hand Path (LHP) Consortium in Atlanta, Georgia, taking place from April 8th to 10th. The event’s website is ornamented with the expected pictures of greasy ponytails, leather trench coats, and pastel drawings of naked women with dragons. It pledges to bring together Satanists, Thelemites, tribal religionists, and other people who “eschew conventional morality” and have a rough individualism in their occultism. Anti-racists have brought concerns to the organizers of the event, including Atlanta Antifa.The convention organizers posted a response in a snidely made “Critics Corner” on their website.
Their amateurish understanding of neo-fascism is one that seems to only see fascism as being synonymous with the political structures it used during WWII. Instead of being able to see that fascism’s nationalism and anti-egalitarianism has used a variety of political forms, they parrot back tired caricatures and clichés about the far-right that should have been dispelled with a simple Google search. They begin by going through references to the fasces on Augustus’ campaign images, which they find examples of just about everywhere. They then go on to defend Augustus’ eugenics paper, saying “Can you name one person who has not written or said something in their youth who later regretted it?” This is lukewarm as they then not only voice their support for eugenics in the same way Augustus had, but also to note that the LHP tradition would as well.
While we, at the LHP Consortium do not in any way, shape or form condone racism, neo-Nazism, or eugenics programs, we do strongly feel that the United States government has favored a decadent ideology that rejects the beauty of strength. And we also strongly believe that this country has enabled and even encouraged the exponential growth of weakness and ignorance by dumbing down the populace through disinformation campaigns, fear mongering, and defunding education programs in favor of feeding billions into the military industrial complex as well as funding corporate and foreign welfare. Our government habitually bails out corporations and banks while cutting funding for education and wounded veterans. The country has transformed the movie ‘Idiocracy” from a comedy into a documentary by encouraging and rewarding ubiquitous weakness and ignorance.[26]
They continued to mock allegations that Augustus is “both a fascist and an anarchist,” without even a cursory understanding of the anti-state fascist trend. Fascism has not been synonomous with authoritarian political forms, which were in fashion during the interwar period far beyond their fascist implementations. Instead, fascism defines itself through its exclusionary ultranationalism, its enforced hierarchy, heroic mythos, elitism, anti-democracy, and anti-egalitarianism. They went on to define the LHP as a uniquely opposed to the “self-deception” and “false morality” of the conventional Right-Hand Path religions.
Left Hand Path philosophy often sees altruism as a form of self-deception that is created and promoted by Right Hand Path religions. This is because most altruistic actions reap some sort of benefit or reward for the person or organization who is accomplishing the deed. For instance, if you donate money to Planned Parenthood to make birth control available to indigent and homeless women, you help to reduce society’s financial burden of caring for unwanted, sick, and drug addicted children, which in turn, should keep your taxes from going up and help to maintain a stronger, healthier community in which the altruist lives.[27]
These right wing sentiments are not modern addendums to the LHP tradition. The ideas of a egoist “self-worship” and a kind of Might is Right “overcoming” was central to LaVey’s notions of morality in the Satanic Bible, aligning itself with the kind of “strongman” politics that fails to be universalistic, egalitarian, or democratic. That being said, the LHP Consortium is also going to be filled by edge spiritual and occult practitioners who would be horrified by this discourse, and whose idea of ego-worship does not include the notion of the biological inferiority of entire groups of people. Their rough libertarian talking points attempt to insulate them from criticism for including someone whose behavior would be considered publicly abhorrent, but this superficial rage is only a veiled reference to the same “Will to Power” that Augustus has made his own life’s law. The work that many would want to do to undermine the right-wing contingencies inside of the LHP Consortium has already been done through their unwavering support of Augustus, which, after the NSM announcement, rippled through participants, shrinking their numbers and further breaking the LHP community from broader occult, New Age, and pagan contingents.
The irony of the Consortium’s response became apparent as they led two other pagan/occult organizations in dropping Augustus after the pressure mounted. Taylor Ellwood and Ken Henson, both presenters at the event, said that they would “not take part with Invictus.” It was actually Invictus’ own behavior that got him the final boot as the organizers were clearly going to side with him against Antifa. On a private forum, which was later deleted, Augustus went after the protesters with explicit language that insinuated violence.
You “protesters” are swine. I will not go out of my way to placate or sweet talk cowards, fools, & hypocrites. You claim to be practioners of the Left Hand Path. No member of the Left Hand Path that I have ever in my life met has been a soft, moralizing ninnie like the lot of you “protesters.” You call yourselves men and women. Some of you even dare to call yourself gods. All I see are keyboard warriors with SJW dicks so far up their asses they have their brains scrambled…You say I am a fascist. It is hilarious that your fear of Fascists far exceeds the fear Christians have of LHP practitioners. If only they knew how pathetic you really were. If only they could see the pitiful, pudgy face of Rufus Opus, claiming to be a representative of the occult community, worried to death that his delicate reputation is going to be smeared by association with a right-wing politician. You call yourselves fearsome, but I smell the fear on you from 2,000 miles away. You call yourselves individuals, but anyone else with eyes can see your sheepish conformity to society’s values. You call yourselves freethinkers, but look at what slaves you are to the reigning political dogma.[28]
The Consortium’s website has now taken down the Critic’s Corner page, and the original statement in defense of Invictus.
Augustus’ rage has become expected at this point as his response has just been a heart beat of increased anger, spewing out without restraint at any objection to him and his program. His response is quite telling for what this wing of those communities think about this type of leftist moral anger.
Modern attempts to whitewash the occult are a desecration of the sacred. In our line of inquiry, the more mainstream the discipline becomes, the more profane. To blacklist a speaker for voicing unpopular beliefs is not only outrageously hypocritical; it is self-defeating. And if this is the road we are going down, I thank you for counting me out.[29]
**** The War for the Past & The War for the Future
The injection of his ideas into paganism is both modern and recent, which is true both for racialist heathens and for ultra-liberal Wiccans. The argument that these modern political ideas were absolutely present in ancient pagan religions is more than hyperbolic, both for the far right and the far left. To a large part, this requires contemporary pagans to acknowledge the actual modern role that their religions have, even if reconstructed from incomplete records of the past. These religions do not have continuity to their original implementations, and are instead just as subject to contemporary understandings of philosophy, politics, and theology.
The battle over values is happening inside of Goddess worship just as it is happening in mainstream Christian churches, and both sides of those agreements turn to practice and lore as justification. Augustus’ arguments in favor of animal sacrifice are also intended to make the argument that he is resurrecting the “real” pagan tradition of the past, which mainstream American paganism abhors, and is likely the direction he goes in when voicing support for human sacrifice.
Augustus himself seems only energized, at least publicly, by this increase in oppositional attention. There has to be something personally hurtful for him during this as he continues to state publicly that people are simply misreading his positions and that their accusations are baseless. Though much of his rhetoric has been a smokescreen to make his previously unconscionable ideas palatable to a larger audience, the veil is dropping and his fascism is becoming known. The movement that he had been cultivating, a sort of “para” campaign to his public political one, now faces a challenge of opposition that it lacked for many months. The real questions are how Augustus is going to change, how far to the right he is going to shift, and how those “border agents” who enjoy straddling the line between mainstream occultism or GOP politics and the radical right are going to negotiate someone whose political orientation is becoming more and more plain.
After our meeting I sent an email to Augustus thanking him for talking with me and answering my questions, which is something I noted that he really had no obligation to do. He offered me several compliments in his reply, something that I have to note he likely intends to see reflected in the way I talk about him. Many people would criticize even having this level of back and forth with him, but I think that being open to listen closely allows us to better understand exactly what creeping fascism looks like today. Beyond headlines about blood letting and dropping acid during ceremonies, a certain media vacancy has permeated the discussion around the Invictus campaign—a trend that seems to be ending as the laughter turns serious. Rose City Antifa transformed the ephemeral into something concrete: a movement that is unwilling to grant his politics any showing in the public sphere.
The real question is less of intention and more of pragmatic politics, and how a senatorial campaign can continue once its façade has all but burned away.
[4] Rose City Antifa. Accessed March 1, 2016. [[https://facebook.com/Rose-City-Antifa-179035562463217/?fref=ts][https://www.facebook.com/Rose-City-Antifa-179035562463217/?fref=ts]].
[5] Augustus Invictus Facebook. Accessed March 2, 2016. [[https://facebook.com/augustus.invictus.3?fref=ts][https://www.facebook.com/augustus.invictus.3?fref=ts]].
[6] Ibid
[7] RCA Augustus Report Back
[8] “Queer Fascism: Why White Nationalists Are Trying to Drop Homophobia.” Anti-Fascist News. November 6, 2015. [[https://antifascistnews.net/2015/11/06/queer-fascism-why-white-nationalists-are-trying-to-drop-homophobia/][http://antifascistnews.net/2015/11/06/queer-fascism-why-white-nationalists-are-trying-to-drop-homophobia/]].
[9] Augustus Invictus Facebook. Accessed March 2, 2016. [[https://facebook.com/augustus.invictus.3?fref=ts][https://www.facebook.com/augustus.invictus.3?fref=ts]].
[10] The cited conversations come directly from either the conversation between Augustus and I on March 2nd, 2016, and a private email that Augustus send to me with the answer to the questions listed in Fascist Performance Art on March 5, 2016.
[11] “Augustus Sol Invictus – Libertarian Realism: Folk, Culture & Border.” Augustus Sol Invictus interviewed by Lana Lokteff. Radio 3Fourteen. Red Ice Creations. January 20, 2016. [[https://www.redicecreations.com/radio3fourteen/2016/R314-160120.php][http://www.redicecreations.com/radio3fourteen/2016/R314-160120.php]].
[12] Invictus, Augustus Sol, e-mail message to the author, February 22, 2016.
[13] Matthew, Walther. “A Sacrificial Goat in Every Pot.” The Washington Free Beacon. November 11, 2015. [[https://freebeacon.com/culture/a-sacrificial-goat-in-every-pot/][http://freebeacon.com/culture/a-sacrificial-goat-in-every-pot/]].
[14] “The Homosexual Question.” Jonathan Bowden interviewed by Richard Spencer. Vanguard Radio. Radix Journal. Unknown, 2012. [[https://www.radixjournal.com/bowden/2014/7/24/the-homosexual-question][http://www.radixjournal.com/bowden/2014/7/24/the-homosexual-question]]
[15] Weinberg, Steven. Address at the Conference on Cosmic Design, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. (April 1999).
[16] “Augustus in Vancouver: A Non-Event.” It’s Going Down. March 6, 2016. [[https://itsgoingdown.org/augustus-vancouver-non-event/][https://itsgoingdown.org/augustus-vancouver-non-event/]].
[17] Augustus Invictus for Senate. “Canadian Officials Treat U.S. Senate Candidate Like a Criminal.” March 5, 2016. [[https://www.invictusforsenate.com/news/press-releases.html][http://www.invictusforsenate.com/news/press-releases.html]].
[18] “Augustus Invictus on PFT Live.” Press for Truth. March 8, 2016. [[https://youtube.com/watch?v=HUIXD2YPP4g][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUIXD2YPP4g]].
[19] Augustus Invictus Facebook, accessed March 3rd, 2016. [[https://facebook.com/augustus.invictus.3?fref=ts][https://www.facebook.com/augustus.invictus.3?fref=ts]].
[20] Cantwell, Christopher. “Slasher.” Radical Agenda, Ep. 111. Streamed live on Mar 4, 2016. Accessed on March 5, 2016. [[https://youtube.com/watch?v=a38FMMIiscU][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a38FMMIiscU]].
[21] Breitbart Tech. “Libertarian Commentator Lauren Southern Assaulted by ‘Anti-Fascist Protesters.” Breitbart. March 5, 2016. [[https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/05/libertarian-lauren-southern-assaulted-by-anti-fascist-protesters/][http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/05/libertarian-lauren-southern-assaulted-by-anti-fascist-protesters/]].
[22] “Augustus in Vancouver: A Non-Event.” It’s Going Down. March 6, 2016. [[https://itsgoingdown.org/augustus-vancouver-non-event/][https://itsgoingdown.org/augustus-vancouver-non-event/]].
[23] Ibid.
[24] Powers, Scott. Libertarian U.S. Senate Candidate Augustus Sol Invictus Admits LSD Use, Describes Experiences in Journals.” Florida Politics. February 2, 2016. [[https://floridapolitics.com/archives/200340-libertarian-u-s-senate-candidate-augustus-sol-invictus-admits-lsd-use-describes-experiences-in-journals][http://floridapolitics.com/archives/200340-libertarian-u-s-senate-candidate-augustus-sol-invictus-admits-lsd-use-describes-experiences-in-journals]].
[25] Invictus, Augustus Sol. “Florida Libertarian U.S. Senate candidate to speak at National Socialist Movement conference.” American Third Party Report. March 9, 2016. (Original post deleted, yet archived at ATPR). [[https://amthirdpartyreport.com/2016/03/09/florida-libertarian-u-s-senate-candidate-to-speak-at-national-socialist-movement-conference/][http://amthirdpartyreport.com/2016/03/09/florida-libertarian-u-s-senate-candidate-to-speak-at-national-socialist-movement-conference/]].
[26] Pneumatikos, Laurie. “Antifascist in Atlanta.” International Left Hand Path Consortium – Atlanta. [[https://lefthandpathcon.com/critics-corner/antifascist-in-atlanta/][http://lefthandpathcon.com/critics-corner/antifascist-in-atlanta/]].
[27] Ibid.
[28] Janus. “Fascist speaker dumped from Left Hand Path Consortium.” [[https://www.watcherofthedawn.com/fascist-speaker-dumped-from-left-hand-path-consortium/][http://www.watcherofthedawn.com/fascist-speaker-dumped-from-left-hand-path-consortium/]].
[29] Augustus Invictus Facebook. Accessed March 14, 2016. [[https://facebook.com/augustus.invictus.3?fref=ts][https://www.facebook.com/augustus.invictus.3?fref=ts]].
------
Shane Burley
Shane Burley is a writer, filmmaker, and organizer based in Portland, Oregon. His work as appeared in places such as In These Times, Truth-Out, Labor Notes, Waging Nonviolence, CounterPunch, and Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. He contributed a chapter on housing justice movements to the recent AK Press release The End of the World As We Know It?, and has work in upcoming volumes on social movements. His most recent documentary Expect Resistance chronicles the intersection of the housing justice and Occupy Wallstreet movement. His work can be found at ShaneBurley.net, or reach him on Twitter at @shane_burley1.
*** South Carolina shock
**Subtitle:** A white South Carolina judge has ordered white nationalist Augustus Invictus to be released from jail.
**Author:** Nick R. Martin
**Date:** Apr 1, 2020
**Source:** The Informant. <[[https://www.informant.news/south-carolina-shock/][www.informant.news/south-carolina-shock]]>
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In a stunning reversal, a white South Carolina judge has ordered white nationalist [[https://www.informant.news/augustus-invictus-gets-another-shot/][Augustus Sol Invictus]] to be freed from jail as soon as today.
Sixteenth Circuit Court [[https://www.sccourts.org/circuitCourt/displaycirjudge.cfm?judgeid=2753&ref=informant.news][Judge Daniel Hall]] (pictured above) previously ordered Invictus to be held behind bars while awaiting trial, saying the racist figure who has ties to neo-Nazi groups like Atomwaffen Division posed a danger to the community. But Hall apparently had a change of heart on Tuesday, issuing [[https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6821826-Augustus-Invictus-Bond-Order.html?ref=informant.news][a written order]] saying Invictus would be allowed to go free if he posted a $10,000 bond.
The order is set to go into effect at noon ET today.
Invictus is charged with domestic violence and using a gun in commission of a crime. He allegedly choked his wife and held a gun to her head during a domestic dispute in December. He was also originally charged with kidnapping, but Hall threw out that count a few weeks ago. Invictus has pleaded not guilty to the remaining charges.
During [[https://www.informant.news/no-bail-for-augustus-invictus/][a hearing]] in February, his wife, Anna Invictus, read [[https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6777989-Anna-Invictus-Full-Statement-for-Bond-Hearing.html?ref=informant.news][a statement]] making it clear she was afraid of what he might do if released.
“I implore you, I beg you, I plead with you, your honor, to keep him safely behind bars so me and my children and the others who have helped me escape him do not fear for our lives,” she said. “Augustus is not the stereotypical drunken wife beater. His calculated, violent, manipulative intentions deserve special consideration.”
She also mentioned that her husband had studied the late racist cult leader Charles Manson, whose followers murdered several people in the 1960s. Manson is looked up to by a subset of neo-Nazis who advocate for mass shootings and terror attacks to bring about the collapse of modern civilization.
At the time of the hearing, the judge sided with the wife’s pleas and kept Augustus Invictus behind bars.
But last week, with the coronavirus pandemic gripping the world, numerous defendants in York and Union counties in South Carolina were given the opportunity to ask for release from custody yet again. Invictus and his attorney [[https://www.informant.news/third-chance-for-invictus/][latched onto the chance]].
In the order, Hall didn’t explain the reasons for his reversal or even mention the coronavirus. He only repeated the facts of the case and said he considered those as well as the law when making his decision.
Hall is a former defense attorney who has drawn unusually public criticism from local law enforcement in South Carolina for his leniency in criminal cases.
In 2017, the NBC-affiliated TV station in nearby Charlotte, North Carolina, [[https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/investigations/investigators/sheriff-local-judge-too-soft-on-criminals/416426973?ref=informant.news][aired a report]] looking at the judge’s record and said it “uncovered a pattern that has many in our area disturbed and calling for change.”
The station talked to Union County Sheriff David Taylor, who was openly angry about some of the lenient sentences Hall had handed down.
“The inmates in my jail know when he’s coming and they line up to plead guilty in front of him because they know he’s going to give light sentences,” Taylor told the station.
The report mentioned that South Carolina is one of only two states where the legislature, not the public, elects judges. A 2015 [[https://www.heraldonline.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/andrew-dys/article12352214.html?ref=informant.news][report by the Rock Hill Herald]] noted that Hall ran for a judgeship three times previously and lost before finally winning a seat on the bench in 2014.
Hall’s order on Tuesday requires Invictus to have no contact with his wife and to immediately leave York County upon his release.
Invictus’ defense attorney [[https://www.heraldonline.com/news/local/article241650536.html?ref=informant.news][told the Herald]] on Tuesday that he expects his client will head to Florida.
The judge did not order Invictus to wear an ankle monitor or keep in contact with law enforcement. Hall only required Invictus to return to York County for court appearances.
Like The Informant and want to help make it even better? Give me feedback, point out factual errors or typos, or send me news tips. Reach me at [[mailto:nick@informant.news][nick@informant.news]].
[[https://www.informant.news/author/nick/][]]
[[https://www.informant.news/author/nick/][Nick R. Martin]]
Founder and editor of The Informant. I’ve investigated hate and extremism for news outlets and nonprofits including Talking Points Memo, The Daily Beast, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
*** Debate with Augustus Invictus — Was Kaczynski Right?
**Source:** [[https://www.youtube.com/@caffeineandphilosophy1][C.B. Robertson]]
**Date:** May 13, 2018
**Description:** Was Theodore Kaczynski right about industrial technology? Augustus Invictus and C.B. Robertson debate the merits and dangers of technology and whether it makes us more or less powerful and happy.
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[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKpJHwcdrP0]]
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Chris: And we should be live. Let me check on that. It says we are live. I’m going to assume that we are. I am here. My name is Chris Robertson.
I’m here with Augustus Invictus and we are here to talk about Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber.
Contrary to most people’s impressions of him, he was not a crazy lunatic, but was actually a relatively serious scholar and had some rather critical opinions about industrial technology.
So I will let Augustus make the argument, because I’m going to be arguing against his position.
So, Augustus, ball’s in your court.
Invictus: Radical.
Well, I guess when you start off calling him by his FBI title the U-A-Bomber, that’s It’s starting off on the wrong foot.
But I mean, that’s how it gives people an idea of him anyway.
Yeah, well, definitely.
But I mean, that’s how everybody came to know of him at first.
So it’s probably not unfair.
But as far as the argument goes, he opens the first book that was published in the newspapers to stop the bombings.
Like the first line of it was that industrial society has irreparably harmed humankind.
It has had disastrous consequences for mankind and the globe.
So his argument is that with the industrial society’s advent, humanity started on a crash course to total annihilation and at this point, we haven’t gotten quite to annihilation, but we certainly have gotten to what we might term technological slavery, where we are entirely enslaved in the technological system and it’s something that I think, you know, Kosinski hasn’t been out of prison since 97 or so.
But I think, you know, in the past 20 years or so, we’ve seen that humanity has unconsciously accepted this fact.
We know that we are enslaved to the system.
You see movies coming out of Hollywood left and right about, you know, the Terminator this and Skynet that and you know, iRobot and all these different dystopian futures where humanity is asleep at the wheel and handing over, you know, the keys to AI or to machines in general.
So there is some part of the unconscious that recognizes the state that we’re in.
But if you talk to people about the dangers of something like artificial intelligence, which, you know, the Trump administration just came out with this whole task force to promote artificial intelligence.
People just laugh.
It’s like talking about UFOs.
You know, you talk about artificial intelligence and you’re the insane person because you think there might be a danger to it.
Kaczynski, same treatment.
He makes the argument that there’s an industrial society that is destroying humanity.
It has enslaved humanity.
It’s making us worse.
It’s not progressing anything and it’s, by the way, destroying our natural environment and Kaczynski is the crazy one.
So the argument basically is industrial society is an absolute evil that cannot be controlled, cannot be reasoned with, cannot be regulated or barricaded and the second-half of his argument is, therefore, we must revolt against it and destroy it.
That’s it in a nutshell, I reckon.
Chris: Okay and just for some backstory, what got you interested in Kaczynski? What was the most persuasive argument for you about his position, since we’re doing this kind of informally?
Invictus: The most influential argument for me, I mean, I suppose when I was introduced to his work, I mean, it was kind of finding a kindred spirit.
It wasn’t, I read this work and, you know, had a eureka moment where, oh, that’s right.
You know, we’re on a crash course and nature’s going to be destroyed and so are we.
It was, I already felt that way and here’s the person who had already put it into words when I was just a little kid.
But if I had to talk about one argument that really spoke to me on an intellectual level, I’d say it was in Anti-Tech Revolution, his most recent book, where he talked about Mao.
Now, he’s always talked about a lot of different revolutionary leaders, even talks about the founding fathers and in that book, he goes through all these revolutionary movements and I’ve always pushed for revolution just in a different sphere of action.
But he’s talking about Mao and Mao’s contention that, you know, a revolutionary has to play on this the main contradiction in a people.
what is that thing that the people must stand for and what is that thing they must stand against? There has to be a black and white conflict, a clear line, and you have to be on the right side of it, right? And to Kaczynski, it is wild nature versus technology.
That is the conflict and to me, that is perfectly accurate and I couldn’t have said it better myself I guess.
Chris: Okay and I guess one more question before I get into my take on it can you run us through what the power cycle is?
Invictus: Oh you mean for the leftists?
Chris: Well yes and the leftist psychoanalysis that he provides in the beginning of industrial society is Excellent.
But my understanding of that was that the left, his psychoanalysis of the leftists was merely a case in point of how he thought industrial society interrupted or stymied the power cycle.
Invictus: Right, or the power process.
Chris: Power process, I’m sorry.
Invictus: Yeah, that’s what it was a little unfamiliar.
It just came out of the blue.
So that’s how I remember it is, you know, he used the leftists as the example.
of the power process being inhibited by industrial society.
So to him, the power process is where, and I’m going to butcher this because this is not a scientific assessment.
This is a paraphrase, just as my disclaimer.
The power process is that process through which an individual goes to basically reach a self-actualized state and maybe not self-actualized in the sense of Maslow and psychology and all that, but in the sense that he feels, a man feels he has control over himself, his environment, his life and it used to be we’d have things like initiation, where, you know, a man becomes a member of a tribe and he goes through an initiation to become a member of that tribe and that was a very powerful statement that he has come into the world.
A rite of passage.
Right, right and we have no rites of passage anymore and this is exacerbated by the fact of industrial society.
So we’re all just cogs in this machine.
There’s no control over the environment and again, that’s his argument that we are all enslaved to this technology and it’s not like, you know, the modern argument that we’re all slaves to our cell phones or, you know, the computer and Facebook because we can’t get off it, because that’s that’s not enslavement.
That’s more addiction.
The enslavement aspect is not any, one piece of technology, but the technological system itself, which means the entirety of it, not just the internet, not just the automobiles, but everything from Honda to Facebook to, you know, the IRS to, I don’t know, construction workers and developers, everything that you think of as the system.
That is what we are enslaved to and when you have no power over that and when you really can’t determine your own life, because if you sit down and think about it for just 10 minutes, you really don’t have any power over this system and you have a very limited scope of ability to determine your own life and those people who really can’t have any influence on the direction their life takes, those people become leftists and that’s basically the crux of the argument, because they are so frustrated in their ability to overcome obstacles and to be their own person and to be independent and self-reliant, that then they seek this inclusion in a larger group and that’s where they fulfill their need for the power process by joining in this large group, by identifying with some minority group with which they have no real connection, They therefore fulfill that need, that psychological need that all humanity has to go through this power process.
Chris: Okay.
That’s a, it’s been a few days since I went through the material at your reading on your website.
You read it very well, by the way.
Everyone should go check it out.
I came by Kaczynski myself after reading Matthew Crawford and listening to Tristan Harris, both of which, and you said it wasn’t that addiction is different than slavery.
From a...
No, I.
Invictus: Think it is different in that, you know, if you’re saying all these kids today, they’re slaves to their cell phones, I think that’s like colloquialism.
You know, I don’t think they’re really enslaved to their cell phones, but we are existentially enslaved to the technological system.
Chris: Right, right and well, that’s one of the points that Matthew Crawford and Tristan Harris bring up is that the I mean, when you consider a heroin addiction, that’s not that’s not like some kid on their cell phone.
That’s a that’s a very, very serious dependency that can be absolute hell to get out of, you know, and I think from a From an outside looking in mechanistic perspective, it can be easy for us to say, well, that’s not slavery, that’s an addiction.
But from the experiential phenomenological perspective, the two can be almost interchangeable, I would say and so I have my very, very serious concerns with technology, particularly with the way that technology seizes and divides our attention.
When you consider that who we are is in many ways just the product of what we direct our attention towards.
The fact that technology not only seizes our attention but breaks it down so that we can’t concentrate on one thing for long periods of time and develop that depth of attention and understanding.
I think that many manifestations of modern technology are existential threats to us as authentic individuals.
Which is a, it’s almost more terrifying than conventional slavery because it makes us, in some sense, participants in our own enslavement.
Invictus: Oh yeah, and there’s the whole rhetoric about you’re actually your own boss.
You’re your master.
These things, they free you to do whatever you want.
Your cell phone, your computer, your automobile gives you the freedom to drive wherever you want.
But when you back up out of the picture and you look at it, actually you have your car so that you can drive an hour to work every morning and sit there for 9 hours and then drive an hour home and then you don’t ever want to get in the car again.
Then you do it all over the next day and your phone’s there so that not so you have the freedom to do this and that, but so that you can get a hold of people and people can get a hold of you and you can never get away from your phone.
So when you, take it from a bird’s eye view, these things, they do have the power to possibly free you from a certain situation, but at the same time, they’re really chaining you down, but very subtly.
Chris: Right.
So I wanted to begin with that partial concession, because there are dangers to technology.
However, I would want to begin with a look back at a Platonic dialogue called Phaedrus, in which Socrates is talking to another gentleman, and this gentleman is going on about the wonderful invention of writing that the Egyptian god Thoth, I believe, handed down to his people.
I could be getting that mixed up.
Invictus: No, that sounds about right.
Thoth was the Egyptian god of writing and magic.
Chris: Right and he’s explaining this wonderful gift that the Egyptians received of being able to write and Socrates says, that’s very nice.
You think this is a wonderful gift, but it is in fact a curse.
Writing in embodying your memory in this, on the paper, you actually lose the ability to remember things yourself, and you become dependent upon the writing, and people will and because the Greeks thought, and not without reason, that memory was an important part of thinking, that losing one’s memory because you’re writing things down will not only make people forgetful, but also stupid.
Invictus: Well, I’d actually, I’d agree with him on that.
I know that sounds a little insane, but I think that’s true.
Chris: Well, it’s not insane, but there is a clear, it’s a trade-off that we’re being offered because there is a cost in memory to writing, but at the same time, it opens us up to the writings of other people whose thoughts we would not have thought otherwise.
I can read Aquinas and Augustine and Plato himself and Aristotle and I can I could read the Bible and the book of the law and all sorts of other thoughts from from authors the smartest authors in all the world that’s true and given that’s that’s a trade-off though.
Invictus: Again because the you know the trade-off is do you really want to know all these things I mean there’s a lot of things that have nothing to do with our local cultures that are influencing us because this person in, I don’t know, China wrote this thing, 1000 years ago and let’s try to apply that to our business practices.
In ancient times, you had no opportunity to do that because the local academics, they knew everything about the history.
You know, there are tribes in Africa where they have a sage who knows the family history of everybody in the tribe back 1000 years.
But there are also more modern studies done.
not just Socrates, but say Francis Yates, which I know it’s ironic to quote a book about this, but Francis Yates wrote The Art of Memory, and she goes into all of these just astounding feats of memory where people would create, you know, the mind palaces of Sherlock Holmes, where they would, you know, make these total like amphitheaters in their minds and catalog things and be able to access them, things that we have no idea how to do today.
They’re not taught in schools, not taught in universities.
There’s no group of sages or professors who have any idea how to do these things.
But they are in books.
It’s gone.
Yeah, they’re in books for us to marvel at the ancient wonders, you know, like the pyramids of Egypt.
We have no idea how to reconstruct these things.
So you’re right.
There is a trade-off where you know, I can read Aristotle and I love Aristotle But at the same time my memory is **** compared to Aristotle Yeah, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing.
Chris: Yeah, I think that um We can we can look at an old analog to gauge whether it’s a good thing in an objective sense or not by looking at our ancestors about 42 to 46,000 years ago, our major competitors, the Neanderthals, were probably smarter than us, were stronger than us.
There is some evidence that indicates that they are better tool makers than us.
They were more resistant to the cold than us, and they were more resistant to attacks than us.
The one advantage we had was we had a slightly sharper shaped larynx that allowed us to create a broader variety of sounds.
That broader variety of sounds allowed us to have a more elaborate and precise language by which we could communicate and organize with each other.
Now, in the technical sense, language is a technology and perhaps, one could argue, the fact that we relied upon this language and social organization and dependence on others was what allowed us to become weaker and maybe not quite as intelligent as the Neanderthals.
But ultimately we wiped them out.
Invictus: Well, I think this might be the point to bring up that, you know, Kosinski is not saying that, and neither am I, that all technology is across the board evil.
His point is that there’s a difference between, and this is a more subtle point most people don’t see in his writings, but because there’s a difference between large-scale technologies and small-scale technologies.
So if you’re talking about small-scale, like the making of spears and knives, the ability to build houses, to put a yoke on an ox and plow your fields, like those things, People are going to make those up tribally.
They’re going to make them up all over the world, except Africa.
But that’s another discussion.
But in large scale technologies, those things collapse with a civilization.
So when Rome collapsed, nobody was making aqueducts anymore.
They just completely lost that technology on how to build these massive buildings, these massive infrastructure projects.
It was just gone and it had to be rediscovered hundreds of years later.
So if you know, the industrial society collapsed right now, no one would have any idea how to, you know, make cars from scratch.
Like you have to have factories for that.
For factories, you have to have electricity.
All these things are interdependent upon one another.
So if the large scale industrial society collapses, we go back to small scale technology and that would, you know, that would include, granted, writing.
It would include, you know, weapons making and possibly automobiles, if people were really that determined to make them from scratch.
But for the most part, the society itself and the infrastructure we have, it would completely collapse, Fight Club style.
Chris: Well, the reason that I brought up writing as my first counterexample was that Socrates’ critique of writing was essentially the same in its substance as Kosinski’s critique of industrial technology.
Now, I think there are some gray zones as to what qualifies as industrial.
Is the loom or the printing press industrial, for example? You could make a strong case, I think, in either direction.
But any technology at all, any dependence upon tools, period, has the same effect, not to the same scale, but it has the argument is essentially the same or could be made the same.
We become enslaved to the objects that we are dependent upon and it makes our power process easier and therefore in his argument less meaningful.
Now, I’d like to argue against that, but one of the reasons I in a little bit, but one of the reasons I brought up the Neanderthals and the Homo sapiens is that in anthropological circles, one of the big points of fascination is with matriarchal societies and matriarchal societies have existed around the world in the past.
The problem is that they get wiped out whenever they come across a patriarchal society.
It seems that when men don’t have a known investment in their society, they’re less likely to fight for it and so matriarchal societies get wiped out by patriarchal ones whenever they come into conflict and if one society were to give up on industrial technology in the same way, they would be giving up on the power that industrial society brings with it.
Like the Homo sapiens, if we had given up the power of language in order to pursue the strength and speed and cold resistance of the Neanderthals, we may have been the ones wiped out.
Invictus: Right, and there’s a two-fold response to that.
One is Spengler, who wrote Man and Technics.
He’s the guy that wrote Decline of the West, for those that don’t know.
But in Man and Technics, he’s talking about that exact point, that what makes the Western soul besides it being the Faustian spirit that’s striving for the infinite is our technical ability.
You know, everything that defines Western civilization has to do with technics.
It has to do with machinery.
But at this point, we’ve gotten to a point where it’s, you know, the machine has surpassed its creator, you know, like Frankenstein or something and the second fold point to that is Kaczynski.
who, you know, his argument is not we as Americans should disarm, you know, like the anti nuke people who think we should disarm our nukes and all of a sudden we’re going to have world peace.
He says in his book, Anti-Tech Revolution, that obviously, you know, one country is not just going to destroy its own technological foundation.
Like that would be suicide.
Absolutely.
If America did it, then Europe would take over or the Chinese would attack us or whatever and if China did it, then their country would be destroyed and we’d just grow in power.
So, you know, and that’s the practical failure is how do you do that? I mean, he recognizes that problem and he’s saying, therefore, we have to have this, you know, like revolutionary cadre, like like a Lenin type vanguard.
that just destroys the system worldwide.
The question is, how the **** do you do something that massive?
Chris: Right.
Invictus: And that’s where, you know, who knows? Who knows? And I don’t think Kosinski pretends to know either.
Chris: Yeah.
Well, specifically dealing with the Western dominance of technology, I was chatting with a friend of mine about Chinese history, and we were going over the question of how did Why did China not have a warrior aristocracy? They had it an aristocracy, but it was a bureaucratic aristocracy.
If you were a magistrate, if you were a scribe, that was the position of power.
They had soldiers, but they were kind of looked down on in the way that serfs were looked down on in mid-century Europe.
So what happened there? And by my friend’s hypothesis, the very early invention of the crossbow rendered ordinary people so power powerful in combat that the warrior aristocracy had no place anymore and it was it was arguably for this reason that the Catholic Church banned the crossbow in much of Europe by the time that Europe got around to inventing the thing, too.
So they technology had a profound effect on on China long before Europe was inventing these sorts of things.
So I don’t think we have the dominance of technology and even if we were to completely abdicate as the West, as a group, our technology, that still might not be enough when you include Asia and Africa has its own strengths outside of technology, we can say.
Invictus: Right, because I think, if we stop sending them weapons, they might not be able to produce them themselves.
Chris: Right.
Invictus: And then they’d be in a different situation.
Chris: Well, they’ve got they’ve got a population boom that we’re we’re about to feel in a big way, but we’re getting.
Invictus: Yeah, again, which is our fault because we keep sending them food and medicine and making sure that they, you know, don’t follow the evolutionary practices they’ve been following for 10s of thousands of years.
But that’s a different discussion, I reckon.
Chris: Right.
So it seems to me that we would not just need to unilaterally disarm the West of industrial technology and perhaps more than just industrial, but the entire world of that technology.
Invictus: Right.
I’d agree with you there.
If you’re going to destroy the industrial society, it has to be worldwide.
Destroying it in the Western countries would just be amount, it would amount to suicide on our part.
Chris: So I’m not content with just the necessity argument.
There’s 2 more arguments I want to make though, because if we stop, if we were to stop here for some reason, we’d be leaving it.
Well, yeah, that is a good ideal to strive for, but it’s not doable, but it still would be good to strive for.
I actually think while completely granting the dangers that technology, many of the dangers that technology can pose, There’s a couple points that I think he misses out on, which is, and the first being pre-industrial people, there’s a point that he makes that pre-industrial people were more psychologically well-adjusted and happy than post-industrial people and he says, now you may think that the fact that we’re living longer and healthier lives means we’d be more psychologically well-adjusted, but you’d be wrong.
Those two things don’t necessarily correlate together, and he’s right.
However, when you go back and read the old texts, when you read Job, for example, or the Iliad, or the Epic of Gilgamesh, you come across people who are so profoundly struck by the by the power of nature that they’re sometimes ascribed to, the gods, sometimes just to nature itself and the sadness they feel, I mean, when you read Job, it’s like, this is a guy who rent his clothes and ripped his hair, covered himself in ash and sat in silence for three days.
That’s a, when you think about what it would take to, sorry, go ahead.
Invictus: Oh, no, I didn’t say, I was listening.
Chris: Okay, when you think about what it would take to cause you to feel that degree of despair and sadness.
I mean, people in modern society do experience that, no doubt about it.
But this is a centerpiece in ancient stories.
It’s not like the ancient people were unfamiliar with not just suffering.
suffering, but with the psychological damage that suffering caused.
There’s one extraordinarily interesting, and in my opinion, underrated psychologist named Julian Jaynes.
He wrote a book called Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and he’s a neuroscientist of sorts, and there’s parts of your brain called Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area that have to do with language processing and there are parallel parts of the brain in the other hemisphere that we don’t necessarily know what they do, but we know that they communicate with each other and based on his analysis of literature and his understanding of neurology, he’s convinced that the other part of our brain, across from Broca’s and Wernicke’s area, is responsible for producing interior dialogue.
When we talk to ourselves, that’s what’s going on.
Except in ancient times, you keep hearing these people, they’ll generate their own thoughts, but they will ascribe them to gods and what his hypothesis is, that the fact that the corpus callosum, which is the connections between the right and the left hemisphere, Maybe those weren’t developed, and so their own interior monologues sounded external to themselves.
So they were running around hearing voices coming from inside their own head, but they sounded like voices of angels, gods, deities, other people’s dead friends, so on and so forth.
What would cause such a thing? It was a weird world full of schizophrenic zombies running around hearing voices.
His...
Part of the hypothesis is that, and we see this a little bit, we see a regression to this in people with severe PTSD, exposure to so much suffering, so much tragedy, so much pain in the old world that the corpus callosum didn’t develop in the way that it does in modern people and this was pretty normal across sight.
This is sort of speculative neurology, but it matches what most people read out of ancient historical texts, the amount of suffering and the psychological maladjustments that we experienced as a result of that seems to indicate that we’ve become more psychologically well-adjusted over time.
Now, I think that might be overstating it because from what I know of what we know about happiness, happiness seems to normalize.
pretty much no matter where we’re at.
People, if you experience a certain amount of suffering, you can become adapted to that.
So I don’t think we’ve become, this is strange after putting out the origins of consciousness argument, but well, I think it’s, you could reasonably say that we haven’t necessarily become more psychologically adjusted and I think social media and all these other sorts of things have some hand in that.
But we’re certainly not worse off than the ancients.
There may have been a few exceptional individuals among the ancients who were extraordinarily well adjusted.
But the fact that they came up with such incredible and effective coping mechanisms and philosophies and religious doctrines that were effective in generating psychological health I think, spoke to a deep need for those philosophies and psychological technologies to be healthier.
So I don’t think that Kaczynski is right in saying that the pre-industrial man was more psychologically well adapted.
Invictus: Yeah, see, I would retort that it sounds like an atheist argument, that he’s trying to figure out where did all this talk about these gods come from.
Clearly, these people were insane because gods don’t talk to people and to my mind, they do and that’s the mark of mental illness in this day and age, is that if you do hear the voice of God, clearly you’re batshit insane, which is ironic because Kaczynski actually is a pretty devoted atheist.
Right.
So I don’t know what his retort would be to the origins of consciousness argument, but to me, it sounds like Like you said, it’s speculative neurology.
It’s looking backwards to say, why don’t these people fit our standard of what a mentally adjusted person should be? So I’m not fully convinced by the argument that these people just didn’t have developed brains and I also retort that if you read something like, you mentioned the Iliad, right? And if you read something or watch the play of Sophocles, Ajax, That’s about Ajax coming back from the war and being totally insane and slaughtering and just out of his mind with madness.
So they did understand what madness was and there were warriors who went through the 10-year war and didn’t crack.
You know, they came back and they were I wouldn’t say fine but they certainly didn’t go mad they clearly had an understanding in ancient times of difference between you know hearing the voices of gods and being insane and hearing the voices of gods because you are a pious person who just happens to get messages from these people.
Chris: Certainly and as a as a Christian I am certainly on the side of believing that people can communicate with with God Just because some people can speak to and hear from God doesn’t mean everybody who claims to is sane, though, of course.
Invictus: Yeah, it is telling the truth.
No, doubt about that.
I mean, there are clearly schizophrenic people.
There are clearly, you know, people who are insane, people who do think that they’re Napoleon or Jesus Christ.
So, yeah, I’m not arguing there’s no such thing as mental illness.
I’m saying that I don’t think that it’s a, you know, sound argument to say that ancient people had something wrong with their brains because they don’t conform to what we think of as sane.
Chris: Sure and my argument wasn’t.
Invictus: I just suggest the reverse is true.
Chris: I wasn’t trying to suggest that ancient peoples, because their brain had developed differently.
in order to adapt to the environment that they lived in were in some ways, in any way, dumber or worse off or inferior to us.
I’m trying to say that they developed differently in order to adapt to a different set of circumstances than what we live in and the fact that those circumstances involved so much cruelty and suffering and trauma relative to what we have today and you can see the reactions to it in these ancient texts.
Gilgamesh was crying for days over the death of Enkidu, for example and of course, we both know Achilles’ reaction to Patrocles dying.
But I think that perhaps the saddest scene in that whole story is when Hector is speaking with Anjumaki, and Anjumaki, the background with Hector’s wife is that all seven of her brothers and her father were killed by Achilles, and now her husband is going out to fight this guy as well and it’s just like there’s...
It’s hard to even fathom, I mean, before your husband even goes to fight this guy, that’s already an immense amount of loss and suffering and a feeling of instability about the world and again, I’m not trying to say that these people were necessarily psychologically less well-adjusted than us.
I think their brains developed differently in order to normalize their experience of happiness.
But the experience of stress and trauma and despair and hopelessness are as old as the species and I think it’s, I think to say that it’s, we’ve reached a new height of this because of industrialized technology and we’re seeing this manifest in depression and suicide and drugs and modern leftism and so on.
Invictus: I like how you include leftism with suicide and drugs.
Chris: I mean.
Invictus: No, and I think there’s one of the big differences between what you’re describing in the Iliad or even, that was happening in the Middle Ages and something today is just basically meaning, and the meaningfulness of death and tragedy and suffering.
So, when her whole family had been slaughtered and then Hector is killed too and then dragged around in the chariot, all eight of them died because they were defending troll.
It wasn’t a surprise.
They knew what they were doing.
That was a man’s duty.
They fulfilled that duty and in those times, that was the best possibly have was on the battlefield.
Whereas, you know, somebody who’s 60 years old has lost all his or her family to car wreck, boating accident, cancer, whatever other random, stupid ways to die.
It’s the same thing, but totally without meaning.
Absolutely devoid of meaning.
So the entire world seems like this grand ******* circus act.
There is no God.
There is, you know, no order in this universe.
So I think, you know, from my perspective, that makes it infinitely worse.
I would rather lose all my family when my city is burned to the ground, because at least I know what they died for, then my wife and all our kids die in a ******* I don’t know, gas explosion.
It just seems like a different magnitude of order to lose your family to the absurd ways we all die today, as opposed to at least you’d got to stand a fighting chance back then.
Chris: I mean, that may have been true of Hector.
I mean, most of the people who died in ancient times, so far as we can tell, died extraordinarily painful deaths of their teeth and of disease and of accidents, drowning at sea, being willed by animals or bandits, so on and so forth and there are certainly glorious deaths.
I would say that there are glorious deaths in modern time, too.
I think of the astronauts that came down in that ball of flame a few years back.
A terrible way to go, but when you think about it, also one hell of a way to go.
Invictus: Absolutely.
Chris: It’s up there with exploding helicopters in ideal ways to die and I think one of my favorite psychologists is a guy named Viktor Frankl, who follows from the Nietzschean and Freudian school of psychoanalysis.
But for him, Freud focused on pleasure, Nietzsche focused on power.
But Frankel focused primarily on meaning and purpose and in his experience in World War II, it seems that the prisoners that he was around, because he himself was a prisoner in the death camps, I believed in Poland and he said that the people who had something to live for, even if it was something small and petty, had a better chance of making it out than the people who did not and that was just an observation he had, and he developed his whole school of logotherapy based on that observation and so this is a very, it’s a true point, I think, but it’s not one that industrial technology necessarily diminishes and can, even in some cases, improve.
This is a point that Matthew Crawford brings up.
I want to give you a chance to throw in a word or two before I just go on another monologue.
Invictus: No, you please do.
I’m going to give you the Viktor Frankl argument because I there’s there is nothing nice I have to say about Frankl’s.
I’m just going to let you go to your Crawford argument.
I can’t even talk about Frankl in a gentlemanly manner.
Chris: My hope is that the argument that he’s making is true beyond the speaker right his own.
Invictus: Character people searching for meaning yeah right I I’m gonna just agree with you on that aside from going into.
Chris: The historical origins of yes right yes claim and you could say that Nietzsche pre pre-dated um Frankel in the argument to Nietzsche in his in his style will say in a sentence or two what other people say in an entire book.
So when he says a man who has a why can withstand almost any how.
Right.
You get the gist of the argument without having to go into World War II and the conclusions we might derive from that.
But speaking of Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s concept of happiness was feeling an increase in your power and for Nietzsche, the necessity of it was not as critical as it is for Kaczynski.
Just becoming more competent at something, becoming stronger than something, is worthwhile in and of itself, even if it isn’t necessary.
One of the things that Kaczynski sort of mocked in industrial society and its future were people who focused excessively on their own bodies in.
Invictus: Yeah, and also people who had very specialized jobs.
Chris: Exactly.
Invictus: He’s saying, look, you don’t need any of these things to survive.
But to be fair, I think, you know, Kaczynski and Nietzsche were in different environments where, you know, Nietzsche was a college professor, like vacationing in the ******* Alps.
Like what a life and Kaczynski was living in a cabin by himself for 30 years, like just trying to battle the wilderness.
So they had just very different living positions, even granted Nietzsche’s, chronic physical illness.
I just think they had different ways of, understanding what power means to human beings.
Chris: Sure.
Invictus: Because Nietzsche was talking about, you know, the great men of history, Caesar and Alexander and Napoleon and Kaczynski’s talking about man as an individual against nature.
I mean, Kosinski and Nietzsche are both, you know, two of my biggest intellectual influences.
So I’m not saying one or the other is correct or incorrect.
I just think they were coming from two different perspectives.
Chris: Sure.
Well, one of the points that Crawford brings up is that Nietzsche wasn’t talking about power as dominance over other people, at least not exclusively and I think Nietzsche clarified this in a letter he wrote to a friend where he said, you know, I’ve met more powerful and noble men who are you know gardeners who stay at home and who who refine and hone their craft and create you know beautiful gardens and cook beautiful wonderful food then a lot of these you know politicians and you know so-called powerful people elsewhere right who higgle and for power with the rabble exactly yes and So technology, I mean, to go back to strength for a second, back in the 1800s or so, people, there were weight trainers.
They were usually in circuses and were clowns in the technical sense and they would do exercises, of course, to get strong.
But the weights that they used were, they used lead shot in balls on the end of their bars and that limited how much weight they could put on the bar and they had to do, they had to get the bar onto their shoulders if they were to do a squat, for example, or a clean or something, by standing it on its end and rolling it back onto their back before they could begin the exercise.
Brutal.
It was very difficult.
Yes.
It was only, and that limited how much weight they could get on.
It was only in the mid 20th century that we began making plates and began making racks to put the barbells on and what that did is it allowed us to lift heavier weights to get more and heavier weight onto our back and to lift it and that was something made possible by industrial technology.
Another point that Crawford brings up is, Crawford himself got his PhD in, I want to say, the history of political thought before he got a job at a think tank, quit that in disgust after five months and reopened his motorcycle repair shop and continued with that and one of the arguments he makes is that, you know, repair work and work with your hands is in many ways more cognitively demanding and rewarding than working on absolutely.
Invictus: I’ve worked in the gym for, four hours a day for the past eight months, and I’ve also been, a fellow at a human rights institute and it’s far more rewarding working out of the gym.
Chris: Oh yeah and some of these gym guys are ******* smart too.
Invictus: Oh yeah.
Chris: They’re like scientists.
Invictus: The nutrition they talk about, the systems they have, like they have it figured out and like I was saying, I drive to the gym and I use the, squat rack at the gym.
I’m not, bending over, rolling it over like a, like an 1800s power lifter.
So I’m not saying, I don’t use these things.
Like clearly these are better ways to train and they’re better ways to get around.
They’re better ways to do all these things that we’re talking about.
But the argument isn’t that, you know, we wouldn’t use these technological advances if they’re right in front of us.
The argument is, you know, we’d be better to have them.
Well, no, that you become enslaved to them as they become generally accepted.
So cars, for instance, you know, it gives me a greater freedom.
I don’t have to walk the two miles to the gym.
I probably should, but I don’t because I have the car and it’s faster, et cetera.
And, you know, that’s great, but The point is that with the general acceptance of the automobile, it made roads and it made distances, traveled more commonplace.
So now nobody’s in the same neighborhood.
People travel an hour away for work, which is, you know, 50 miles to 60 miles away, work every morning and you’ve become now trapped in this automobile.
It’s not granting you the freedom to get there anymore and that analogy might break down in the gym because I couldn’t imagine, lifting these lead shot things.
That sounds like it would be terrible.
But there is something to be said for our ancestors who did ancient strength training without the use of squat racks.
They had, you know, rocks and boulders and Milo was the guy that lifted a cow, you know, every day as it grew and that’s how he became the strongest man in the village.
So, you know, we have all these modern advances in weightlifting today.
But we don’t really need them.
I mean, we had strength training for thousands of years before.
Chris: Right.
Well, the need, I think, would go to two things.
First, to the necessity argument I brought up before with China and Islam and so on and so forth.
But the second thing where the need comes from, I would say, is women.
Women like civilization, I think more than men do.
Invictus: 100%.
Chris: We do these things for our ladies so that they will love us and be content in the houses that we build.
Invictus: Oh yeah.
It’s difficult to convince your wife to move with the kids out to the wilderness because I want to be a man.
Chris: Right.
Invictus: You’re going to say, all right, well, you go be a man.
I’m going to move in with Roger, who’s going to be my new husband.
He’s an investment banker with a nice apartment.
Chris: Exactly.
So But the greater point of Crawford is that in becoming a motorcycle technician, the industrial technology that is the motorcycle, or the violin, you could say, or the pipe organ, provide us means of developing competence as well.
These are extraordinarily complicated devices, and they require us to submit ourselves and our ego to the objective reality in front of us.
We have to learn what the entity is we’re working with, whether it’s a motorcycle or a nation or the English language, because remember, the language is a technology as well and it’s a trapping technology.
If I learn English, there are certain sounds that I can no longer produce.
I can’t say, due to my upbringing, I can’t pronounce a Spanish R.
I can’t do it and there are other sort of guttural linguistic sounds that other people can’t make, and we like to make fun of them for this.
Japanese people can have an extremely difficult time differentiating between the R and the L sound, much to our Western amusement.
So.
Invictus: It’s actually an interesting story about that in the, have you seen the series on the Unabomber, like the Discovery or whatever it was, the eight-part mini-series? No, I haven’t.
It just came out like last year.
Yeah, there’s a funny part where they’re getting the warrant for Kaczynski and it’s based on the analysis of his language, like his written language between the letters to his family and the Unabomber manifesto and the story that the judge tells before signing this warrant is that he was in the Korean War and they had a code word, you know, for people approaching in the night and the code word was liberty and when the approaching, you know, the approaching soldiers were asked for the code word, they said river prayer and so they knew they were not.
American and they slaughtered them all.
So that was actually how he justified signing this warrant.
I mean, I’m sure that’s just made-up for the show, but it’s a it’s a true sentiment there.
Chris: Yeah and the point of that, I mean, you could you make it even more basic and say that our our human body constrains us contrary to whatever gender fluid people we have out there.
We can’t we can’t fly.
with the bodies that we have.
We need airplanes to do that.
Nor can we run 70 miles an hour the way that the cheetah can.
Our body constrains us and so the thing that Matthew Crawford that I liked about him that he focuses on is that the goal is not freedom.
The goal is agency and I think Kaczynski would agree with this to some degree from my reading of him.
It’s that it’s that feeling of power over your environment, even though that power isn’t absolute, you can’t, you don’t have infinite choices.
You have maybe 5 choices and you try to choose the best one and these choices are offered to us by the, by our environment, basically.
If I’m playing a violin, there’s only four strings I can play on and there’s only so many finger positions I can use on each string and it’s those limitations that give us the choices in some sense.
Because if there was infinite positions on infinite strings on a violin, there would almost be no such thing as music, at least from the violin’s perspective.
So the technology that we are dealing with, the industrial technology, cars, computers, give us not just, they do give us all sorts of constraints.
But within those constraints, and because of those constraints, they give us the opportunity to develop competence as well.
Whether it’s repairing the car or networking your parents’ Wi-Fi, you know, they can sometimes have a hard time with that.
Invictus: Yeah, sure.
I mean, there’s, yeah, there’s no argument here that you have different opportunities to become competent.
And, you know, I mean, take jet mechanics, something that the ancients had no consent of.
There’s certainly plenty of room for people to improve and, become more intelligent, et cetera.
But you could make the same argument about things past.
I mean, the memory games, for instance, that we had talked about earlier, or playing the flute, or horsemanship.
Nobody rides horses anymore.
You know, shipbuilding, like the Vikings, we don’t do that anymore.
Now we build massive, you know, metal battleships.
So there are differences, certainly, but I don’t think that you need large-scale technology systems in order to become a competent person or to gain power over your environment or anything like that.
Chris: Certainly, no argument there.
The argument is not we need this technology in order to develop competence.
It’s that the technology doesn’t inhibit us from developing competence and participating in the power process.
Invictus: Well, in certain areas, perhaps not, but in certain areas it does, because there are different things, like automobiles, for instance, the motorcycle, right? So this guy, he’s, what book is this, by the way?
Chris: He’s got two books, they’re both exceptional.
The first one is called Shop Class as Soulcraft, and the second one is called The World Beyond Your Head.
I actually wrote a review of it on Countercurrents Last month, I believe.
Invictus: I’ll check that out.
All right, so this guy is a motorcycle repairman, right? So he’s spending this time working on his motorcycle and certainly he’s not inhibited from learning something else, but the time spent on that means he is not learning how to ride a horse.
It’s an opportunity cost.
Exactly, right.
It’s A trade-off.
So, you know, you’re not being inhibited from learning these ancient practices, just like, you know, you and I are riders.
We’re not inhibited from learning the art of memory according to the ancients, but in pure practical terms, we just, we can’t.
There’s just, you don’t have the time to do that and be a writer.
It’s impossible and all the other trade-offs in the world are the same way.
Like having a cell phone, it’s not inhibiting you from learning how to sail or mountain climbing.
But if you spend all your time on social media, you’re not going to be sailing or mountain climbing.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, it’s just a trade-off.
It’s not inhibiting you per se, but in practical terms, you’re you inhibition doesn’t mean anything because it’s already gone.
Chris: Well, I mean, the Kaczynski’s argument is that this technology, the industrial technology prevents us ultimately in the long run from going through the power cycle.
Invictus: Oh, I see.
Power process.
I see what you’re saying.
Okay.
I would I think that might be a misunderstanding of the argument, because I don’t think he would say, that motorcycles or weightlifting equipment, any of these specific pieces of technology.
would prevent you from fulfilling the power process.
I think what he’s saying is the system itself, like the whole thing put together, that does.
So, you know, having a car gives you the freedom to go to the grocery store faster.
Chris: Yes.
Invictus: But having a car and a job that’s across town and kids that are in two different schools on other sides of town, That’s the system itself and that is what has you enslaved.
So, yeah, I think you got to draw the distinction between, individual pieces of equipment, even those that might be produced by industrial society and the society as a whole, which is what is actual.
Chris: That’s sort of the argument that Heidegger makes about industrial technology as well.
He thought that the end game of industrial technology would be that it would turn everything into potential energy waiting to be used by something else.
It would turn everything into just the trees, into lumber, waiting to be used in the house, and that this would eventually include humans as well.
We would all be Human resources waiting to be used.
Sounds prophetic.
I think the thing that he missed, though, and call me a little bit arrogant for going toe to toe with a mind like Heidegger or Kazinsky for that matter.
But this end scenario seems to never arrive.
It’s like the left behind apocalypse where everyone gets pulled up.
It’s like, it’s going to happen in 1996.
Nope.
It’s going to be 2002.
Nope.
It’s going to be the end.
The end point never seems to arrive.
Socrates could have thought like we’d all be absolutely stupid by the year, you know, 1500 BC.
That didn’t work out.
I’m sorry, I’m getting Homer and Socrates mixed up in the age, but you get the, you get the point.
Invictus: Yeah, I think Socrates came around after.
Chris: Right.
Invictus: 1500 received.
Chris: Right.
Invictus: Yeah, I see what you’re saying and it seems to me like the frog in the frying pan where you just keep turning it up slowly and eventually he’s going to cook.
Chris: Well, let me tell you why I think that end time will never come and why it’s, it’s not quite a.
going to happen and the reason seems to be that people will use technology for their own ends that don’t coincide with the grand plan or what appears to be the logically necessary terminus point of the essence of technology itself.
That’s what Heidegger was concerned with, was the essence of technology, the means for something else and so, say the government comes up with a new technology, let’s call it Common Core, and they use this technology to try to make better, more manageable, more replaceable parts, human resources, out of their civilians, right? Seems like a decent plan, except Wouldn’t you know it, all these pesky people out there are using the very information in Common Core as a tool against Common Core.
People like Dr.
Duke Pesta or Stephon Molyneux or any number of other people.
We can use technology for our own ends against the utopian dream that is being imposed upon us and we do this consistently.
We do this with language.
Satire is infuriating to the powers that be because they have a such a hard time controlling it.
Invictus: Yeah, but I’d stay with the electronic situation right there that you were on because it, you know, you could.
Chris: Consider Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Invictus: Well, I would consider PayPal, Airbnb, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter.
who else stripe Expedia yep all of those are companies that terminated our accounts at the revolutionary conservative and everybody associated with our company after Charlottesville just wiped everything annihilated funding absolutely nothing we could do and it wasn’t the government government didn’t have to lift a finger and there was there’s no fighting back you know?
Chris: Well I wouldn’t I wouldn’t say that the government is the one central power and that’s another point that Crawford makes is that he sympathizes with libertarians in many ways, but disagrees with the old school libertarian idea that the government is the one true source of all evil and misuse of power.
He’s like, corporations and corporations and marketing organizations and things like that can do this too, particularly on our attention.
so on.
But we can use, we can use, and they will win victories and we will win victories and it seems, looking back across history, like there’s always this tension.
But the government never seems, or the powers that be, we can say technology itself, never seems quite able to dominate the human spirit.
We always find some way of twisting it back on itself.
Maybe we’ll create an app that controls the rest of technology.
I have an app that I used to use on my old laptop for writing.
It was called Freedom, incidentally.
You had to pay for it, unfortunately, but you would pull up the browser, you’d put in a time, say an hour, and it would disconnect your internet.
for an hour and you would have no ability to get it back until that hour had passed.
You couldn’t restart the computer and get it going again.
No, you had to wait a full hour and by manually choosing to use this tool, first of all, buying it makes you feel like you need to use it now too.
So just the act of paying money is helpful in that regard and then it’s much easier to type in 60 Enter than it is to actually stay off the internet for an hour.
I think that’s.
Invictus: Playing right into the enslavement argument, because now you’re not even your own master of your own agency making this decision to just end it with your own willpower.
You’ve now given that function over to an app.
that does it for you.
So now you don’t have to use willpower to stop it.
So I think that in itself proves the enslavement argument, just like a slave on a plantation.
You know, you convince him that he, and no, my family was not slave owners, SPLC, when you’re listening to this, but a master would pay to his slave.
You know, I’m going to let you choose which suit you’re going to use, you’re going to wear, you know, when we go to Charleston this weekend.
like you do with a child.
Like, hey buddy, which one of these shirts do you want to wear? It gives the illusion that they have a choice in the matter.
They’re going to wear one of the ******* shirts.
Right.
Not up to them.
They are, you know, he’s a child.
He doesn’t get to choose.
Same thing’s happening to us.
We are children.
We don’t get to choose, you know, whether to use social media.
We only get to choose whether we prefer Instagram or Twitter.
Chris: Well, this brings us back to the whole agency versus freedom argument.
Freedom means like I have as many choices as I want.
Agency is like I have a constrained number of choices, but those I can still pursue.
It’s not even my interests exactly, but it’s expanding this, the competence and power that I have over my own life and the utility, the tools that we use have less to do with it, because we already use tools, and this is one of the points that, forgive me for keep coming back to this guy, but Crawford talks about with what’s known as embodied cognition.
When we write, for example, sorry Socrates, we are using the paper as an extension of our memory.
That’s what the abacus did when it came to counting.
It allowed people to store larger numbers, not on their head, but on the abacus so that they didn’t have to keep it in their head.
The spear, as I think I talked about in Defense of Hatred, it becomes an extension of the soldier carrying it to the degree that he’s familiar with it and our growing up from being a newborn infant, actually this begins in the womb actually, but as you mature into a two-year-old and a three-year-old and become more tactilely skillful, We’re not born with absolute control over our limbs.
It’s something that we develop over time.
So what we consider, what we consider I or me to be becomes a serious question and a challenge.
But I don’t think that using technology to battle pernicious kinds of technology means that we’re giving up something of ourselves.
We are in some sense extending ourselves out across the field before us and using what’s before us to do what we want to do and to better ourselves.
Invictus: Yeah, but I think I’d have to disagree because it seems like it’s a moot point if you didn’t have that problem in the 1st place.
So it’s like I always get flack from the alt-right kids, right, when I talk about technology.
Because they say, you know, the retort is, if we have technology like Facebook and all these social media platforms and Gab and whatever, we wouldn’t be able to be fighting this system right now because it’s because of these platforms that we can get on here and we can **** post and we can post articles and so on and so forth against this system.
But that’s the entire point.
If it were not for this system, we wouldn’t need to be doing guerrilla ******* tactics on Facebook to fight Facebook.
Like if Facebook didn’t exist, there would be no reason for any of this movement to exist.
Like if the technological industrial society did not exist, the alt-right would not exist because everybody would already be what we consider alt-right these days.
They would already want to defend their family and their community and their country.
They would already, you know, live in a homogeneous society.
It’s technology that has put us in this position and now we’re just trying to grasp what straws we can to fight back against the very thing that put us in this place.
Chris: Well, I think the problem, and this comes back to the whole necessity argument from the very beginning, the problem is that we live in the jurisdiction of a state, a very militarily powerful state with a very powerful law enforcement agency and we’ve built laws around ourselves and we can’t just do what we want within that or we’ll get wakoed, right? We’ll get arrested for doing something wrong and taken away.
So we live in, for whether we want to or not, in a world of constraints that our ancestors have left us with.
That’s their legacy to us and they left it with us in the hopes that it would leave us better off than they had been and that their parents had been and it’s become more and more complicated.
In some ways it has been, in some ways not so much.
But the alt-right kids are, when you talk about kids, I’m getting a particular kind of **** poster in mind and they’re not very, very careful in their thinking about these sorts of arguments.
But I think on this point, they’re right in that we’re not living in a parallel universe where we could have done otherwise.
We are where we are, and we have the tools that are in front of us and not much else and I think that freedom, not freedom, I’m sorry, agency lies in using the tools at our disposal in order to achieve what we think is best, given the choices we have, rather than rejecting the tools that have been left to us by our ancestors, and in doing so, trying to free ourselves from the constraints that are their legacy.
Invictus: Well, what if someone maybe wasn’t as gifted with social media as some of these 17-year-old, you know, alt-right trolls are? And what if he’s an engineer who’s much better at making bombs? than at using Facebook.
Is it then legitimate for him to start an assassination campaign because that would be a way of attacking the system? Because that’s perfectly in line with using what your ancestors have given us.
I mean, bombs are definitely a Western thing.
Chris: I don’t know what I’m allowed to say here.
My first inclination, this isn’t a very serious point, is that bombs are really more of a Middle Eastern thing to do.
But I think that the problem with Kaczynski’s strategy with bombing was that it seriously damaged, I mean, his goal was, I mean, it was technological in its manifestation, but fundamentally it was ideological.
He was trying to get an idea out to help people.
That was his idea and I think unfortunately, because of what Sun Tzu calls the moral law, right? It’s what he opens up the art of war with.
He says there are five laws and the first law he gives is the moral law and that’s what motivates men to fight and to defend and what doesn’t.
He doesn’t talk about it in moralistic terms, interestingly enough.
He talks about it in psychological terms and I think on that front, Kazinsky was counterproductive to his own stated aims.
I think he made people afraid of seriously dealing with his ideas and maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s just the circles I’m running around now, but it seems to me that gradually, slowly, people are beginning to take his ideas more seriously again, or at least to try to deal with them for the first time in, you know, 10, 15 years or so.
But he could have sped up that process quite a bit if he hadn’t been running around Bombing people.
Invictus: Well, I don’t know man because you know how many of those people who have read Kaczynski have read Jacques Ellot and his book Technological Society which is what Kaczynski’s ideas were based on.
Nobody’s ever heard of that guy.
Nobody’s ever read of that book because he didn’t have a 20-year bombing campaign.
Kaczynski did and so that dramatic example did it and yes it brought a lot of backlash on him and on his ideas and they were you know verboten for a long time.
But people say the same thing about Tim McVeigh.
Right.
Blew up the federal building, those poor children in daycare, like he knew there was a daycare center there.
Blew up the federal building.
It caused a massive black backlash by the Clinton administration on the Patriot movement.
So, you know, all the right wingers say, well, Tim McVeigh really ****** us on this one.
You know, by doing the exact thing that Patriots were talking about for decades, he actually went and did it like a violent act against the federal government and everyone blames him for the backlash.
Same thing that happened to us in Charlottesville.
You know, everybody’s ******** on the alt-right and the right wing for doing unite the right because, well, look what you guys did now.
everybody hates the alt-right.
It’s destroyed.
Now they’ve torn down all our southern monuments and it’s all your guys’ fault.
But if you don’t ******* do something, and take action against the system, of course there’s going to be backlash.
But if you keep doing nothing, it’s just going to keep avalanching all over you.
Chris: Well, I certainly won’t argue that there’s never a time for violence.
I think only moral fools and people who haven’t thought things through would make that point.
There’s absolutely a time for revolution and violent action, if you want.
As an example of that, Vox Day over at his blog has variously been memeing about St.
Breivik, pray for us.
Now one of the things that people don’t know about Anders Breivik is that he wasn’t just attacking a, and I’m not trying to say this to defend or attack Anders Breivik, I’m just stating Vox Day’s opinion here.
Breivik didn’t just attack some random group of migrants or immigrants.
He wasn’t even specifically targeting migrants.
What he was targeting was a left-wing Labour Party youth leadership training camp and supposedly, the Labour Party has yet to recover from that attack in terms of raising up the next generation of political leaders within their group.
Voxay says to expect a lot more of these.
But my response to this whole thing about violence would be, the Romans had this phrase, carpe diem.
It doesn’t mean seize the day, as a lot of people think it does.
This is from that Robin Williams movie.
Seize the day, it’s this romantic thing.
That’s not what they mean.
Dead Poet Society.
Yes, Dead Poet Society.
It was an excellent movie.
It means something closer to pluck the day, and it implies a deal of timing and patience and it implies that the right moment is not necessarily the day, but to be aware of the possibility of a right time and to be prepared for it so that you can seize the day when the time arrives.
This is one of the better things that I think Jordan Peterson has said in taking down this stupid modern Christian interpretation of the meek shall inherit the earth as some sort of like the pacifists will rule the world.
That’s not true.
When you actually go back into the Greek, what the meek word meant was something like those who have swords and know how to use them, but aren’t quick to use them are the ones who inherit the earth.
Perfectly willing and able, but not That’s not their first.
Invictus: Yeah, I mean, you’re talking about the guy who said, if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.
Chris: Exactly.
Invictus: So not a pacifistic philosophy at all.
Chris: Yeah.
I think what turns people off and the question that you’re raising essentially is, there such thing as bad publicity or is all publicity good publicity? Beyond our excellent and wonderful friend Richard Spencer, I think history is replete with examples of people who got plenty of publicity, but their publicity did not do good things for their ideologies and those who were most effective seem to be the ones who patiently churn away for year after year after year, sometimes decades on end and then one day, seemingly out of the blue, become 20-year overnight successes I think is the phrase John Molyneux says.
Invictus: Well I’d say I don’t think that publicity is really the issue when it comes to someone like Kaczynski or Bravik I think it’s a matter of targets and this is probably skirting the line on what’s allowed on YouTube but you know when I first heard of what happened with Bravik I was taking the bar exam And my first thought, from the limited amount I knew was, what in God’s name is this guy thinking? Of all the targets you could pick in all the world, you choose kids.
Like that is absolutely the number one thing you do not do is target children.
Nobody has your back on that one.
There is absolutely no one in the world who’s going to think, bully, bully for you.
Spot on, mate.
That is awesome.
Everybody’s going to ******* hate you, even your own people.
But then in all these years later, like you said, they still haven’t recovered from that and he, I mean, he was wiping out the next generation of communist leadership in his country.
Actually, it makes a lot of sense intellectually, but politically it was a terrible move, just like Kaczynski.
If you think about his targets to the FBI and everyone else, they seem totally random.
But if you know his philosophy, actually, It’s with mathematical precision and perfect logic.
You know, he’s targeting airline executives, these professors who are pushing this nonsense, the people that he feels are responsible for the expansion of technological industrial society.
Logically, it makes sense, politically disastrous, because common people just cannot grasp why someone would kill an innocent computer scientist, you know, or an innocent young man who just wants to be politically active in his local, Labour Party youth group.
Chris: Yeah.
Well, I think that if we really want to do away with technology, the fastest thing we could do would be to take an Aevolian accelerationist approach, maybe up up our immigration a little bit and Let it collapse.
Let things deteriorate faster.
Yeah, that’s how Rome collapsed.
But things would get a lot uglier before they got pretty.
Based on the necessity, I think those threats are worth repulsing for their own sake.
They give me a sense of meaning and reason to get up in the morning dealing with Islam and with the left and with the, what you might call, the forces of global capitalism, which sounds weird to say as a capitalist myself, but you, I’m sure most people understand the distinction.
Yeah, I think those.
Invictus: As long as it’s not libertarians listening to the show.
Chris: Right, You can be a capitalist and oppose other capital, the forces of global capitalism and I think for the sake of opposing those, for the sheer enjoyment and power derived from learning about and developing a competence with certain technologies, and based on the fact that people prior to the Industrial Revolution also had severe amounts of stress and suffering and pain and psychological maladjustment.
Not more, but probably not less than what we had.
I think that opposing industrial technology and certainly taking a revolutionary, violent approach to it is not just the wrong approach for a wrong goal, but is probably going to be counterproductive.
Invictus: Well, man, I guess different folks, different strokes.
Yeah, I mean, there’s a...
It’s just like anything else.
There’s a point where you just have to make the decision for yourself.
Is this something, like, is this the hill I want to die on? Is this actually necessary? And if it is necessary, how do you do it? Is it practical? Can it be done? Well, I just don’t, I don’t know if there’s a way to sell that to the masses and I think that’s Kosinski’s point is that it has to be a vanguard of, you know, revolutionaries who are ready to die for it.
Chris: I suppose I have to get going here and finish up, but I’ll close with one final question to you to see if we can maybe hit, if not common ground, then leave the listeners with an interesting perspective on this.
Would you rather live in an industrial, and we can even say like post-industrial society, Or would you rather live in an Islamic society if it came down to it?
Invictus: I, well, first of all, let me ask what, I think I already know my answer, but what is a post-industrial society?
Chris: By post-industrial, I mean.
Invictus: After it’s collapsed or like after everything’s fixed or what are we talking about?
Chris: I’m talking about, I’m sorry, that was a poor phrasing on my part.
I’m thinking even more industrial than it is now, futuristic maybe even.
Invictus: Yeah.
I mean, I’d rather I’d choose the more industrialized society because I’m not a ******* Muslim.
Like it’s, yeah, I mean, it’s a disease, you know, like the technology or the way it’s turned out anyway, it’s a disease in the Western soul in my mind, but it’s still the West.
Chris: The Faustian.
Soul selling spirit.
Invictus: Yeah, right.
Yeah, exactly.
Like it’s the Faustian spirit on overdrive to a self-destructive purpose, but it’s still like our culture, it’s like, would you rather live in your family home that’s been, in your house for, 10 generations? Or would you rather have these people from, I don’t know, ******* Zimbabwe come and rent you an apartment down the street? Like, obviously I’m going to stay in the family house that’s been in my, you know, on my land for 10 generations, you know, decrepit or, you know, disastrous as it may be, because it’s my home.
It’s my family and the West is my culture.
Chris: So I’m still not convinced, but possible conclusion, Kaczynski was right, but the time is not quite yet.
Invictus: Well, I think he’d agree with you because he’s another point he makes in anti-tech revolution.
He talks about the trends of revolutions and how they come to be, saying that actually, you know, the example he used is the founding fathers who didn’t really create anything new.
They just accelerated a trend that was already on the way here in America.
He gives several examples of that, but he’s saying, you know, the technological society isn’t going to just collapse on its own.
Chris: And it’s certainly not going to collapse.
Invictus: Yeah.
Chris: Sorry, had to make use of the indoor plumbing real quick.
Invictus: It’s all good.
But yeah, I don’t think he’d say you can just destroy technological society.
It has to be something that it’s already coming down and this vanguard has to go in and, you know, help it on its way.
So I he’d agree with you that the time is just not now.
Chris: Okay.
Well, I think that’s probably a pretty good place to end it.
We’ve been going for about an hour and a half.
So it’ll be interesting to see what the what the commenters say down below and perhaps we can talk about this more in the future.
Invictus: Absolutely, man.
I’m always there for you, buddy.
Chris: All right.
Pleasure chatting, Augustus.
Take care.
Invictus: Back at you, man.
Talk to you later.
*** The Wild Adventures of @EmperorInvictus
**Host:** IanMalcolm84
**Date:** Dec 5, 2024
**Source:** <[[https://x.com/IanMalcolm84/status/1864490482644013132][www.x.com/IanMalcolm84/status/1864490482644013132]]>
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Ian: Well, good morning, good afternoon and good evening to everybody out there and uh, Mr is, is it Augustus, is it Invictus? Is it emperor? What? What is the? What’s the best call sign here?
Invictus: Well, many people call me dark Lord, but I mean Invictus, my last name.
Most people will call me Augustus.
So whatever you want to do.
Ian: The dark Lord, now is that after Voldemort or Darth Vader? Or where does that one come from?
Invictus: I’m a big fan of Voldemort, actually.
I try to try to explain to everybody that I grew up with Harry Potter, that Voldemort is obviously the good guy and no one sees that like Harry Potter’s is.
You know, obvious analogy to liberalism and, you know, Voldemort is the arch Nazi trying to protect magical blood.
It’s like we’ll just look at it objectively, obviously Voldemort’s the good guy, so.
Ian: Well, OK.
So given given that the space here is going to be a little bit organic in the sense that even the title itself, right, the Wild adventures of what better place to start than? With a deep dive into your kind of views here on the Dark Lord and on Voldemort, cuz this is a it’s very interesting because I started this off asking if it was Voldemort or a Darth Vader reference, and curiously I think there’s a similar comparison that could be made.
Between the quote Unquote empire in Star Wars, which is trying to bring peace to the Galaxy, Darth Vader even says that.
Unknown Speaker: That’s right.
Ian: And and this idea of the rebels being prospectively the ragtag liberals that are trying to take down an authoritative figure, so your your thought is that it’s one and the same in the Harry Potter series perhaps.
So I’m curious why don’t we why don’t we start there and then use that as a way to to play into your your.
Use of that term where it comes from and your views on the world.
Invictus: Well, why not? That’s just a what a wild start to anything.
Well, I mean, I had Harry Potter come into my life as everybody else did when I was, you know, a teenager or whatever, and it was for kids back then and then it turned into a pretty serious thing around the time the movie The Prisoner of Azkaban came out, it started turning more and more serious and you know, I never liked.
Star Wars, to be honest, like ever.
I did like episodes 2 and 3 when Anakin finally became the.
Man and I always identified with him too.
You know, he’s this ambitious young man that nobody takes seriously and they want to make him into a villain.
But you know, Hollywood often does that where they make the villain this the most relatable character, the obviously right character and he’s seen as wrong because he’s inflexible.
Or because he’s ambitious, or because he has this tragic flaw when an ancient literature or mediaeval literature, or, you know, any literature prior to 1950? The guy with the tragic flaw was the hero and he was the dynamic character.
He was the person that everyone identified with, so people like Anakin like Tom Riddle.
Like Bane, I mean, these are all people that we identify with and they’re people that Hollywood tries to cast as the villain.
I only say dark Lord.
Because it’s funny.
It’s a joke, you know, like people always identify me with the goat sacrifice thing from when I was a Pagan.
So it’s just been kind of a running gag for you.
Ian: Well, we’re we’re going to have to get into the Pagan side and the sacrificial goat here.
This is new to me.
But what what’s interesting about that is you were mentioning because Episode 2 and three in the Star Wars saga, and I’m just gonna discount the whole 789.
Not that I’m just throwing that out.
The window never happened, but the but the thing that’s interesting is so you bring up two and three, which is basically the.
Invictus: Never happens, yeah.
Ian: You know, you could call it the downfall of Anakin Skywalker, right? He he gives in to passion.
But the passion that he gives in to is not motivated by evil.
It’s motivated by a sadness for the loss of his mother.
A love for this woman, the fear of potentially the loss of that woman and like you said.
An ambitious young person trying to figure out how do I protect the things that I care for now, what’s interesting? Is that in episode 1 they talk about is this the chosen 1? And I always found it very curious because if you actually look at the six movie ark, the rise of Anakin is met with his tragic downfall and he becomes the villain.
But then in the very end of the whole movie.
It is actually him, not Luke Skywalker, that ends up taking out the mighty emperor, bringing peace to the Galaxy.
Or what do they call balance to the force? All those other kind of things, and so.
So up until the tragedy that was the 7th, 8th and 9th film that Disney made more recently, what I found beautiful is that George Lucas, who oh by the way, is not AJ, But yes and.
Unknown Speaker: Right.
Really.
Invictus: That’s the only takeaway I get tonight.
Ian: If I mean but like let’s Fact Check me on that one, but I’m pretty sure he’s not and what’s interesting is there’s a lot to be said about George Lucas taking the idea of the hero’s journey, which is a Joseph Campbell psychology piece.
It’s beautiful.
Invictus: Yeah, it’s listen.
Ian: And and that George Lucas took this approach of if you look at all six films, it is the it’s the tragic downfall, heroic individual that is redeemed in the end not due to their greed or their vanity or any of these things, but by an aspiration of some kind of higher motivation for their family, their people.
Whatever and it’s it’s actually and like you said, you weren’t necessarily a fan.
It’s one that I relate to a little bit more, but it’s it’s because it had such.
Beautiful, religious and kind of natural themes that were infused throughout the film.
If you think of not only the Vader side of things, but also you think of Yoda and this idea that the force is, it’s in the rocks, it’s in the trees.
It’s it’s between you and me, right, that that there’s something that’s.
That’s bigger to the world that we live in, that we should all try to embrace and to become part of and it’s really it’s.
It really is beautiful and I think George Lucas, while probably crazy in his own ways, was certainly beautiful as a spirit when he was motivated to largely construct that entire thing, which.
As wild as it sounds, that was all really his his brainchild as well as if I’m not mistaken, Indiana Jones and I can’t remember what his other property was.
India, there’s one other one that I’m.
Invictus: Yeah.
Ian: That slipped in my mind.
Invictus: That’s the only two really important ones are Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and I should qualify.
You know when I say I’m not a fan of Star Wars.
I mean, growing up, I hated Star Wars and it’s mostly because Luke Skywalker is such a snivelling little.
Well, just not a not a relatable character.
He’s not a I mean, yeah, OK.
He’s heroic in the sense that he does become a Jedi.
He is fighting.
You know what he believes to be the bad guy? I’ll, I’ll concede that.
But, you know, compared to Anakin Skywalker, Luke is just such a such a.
Of beta little I mean the real tragedy of Star Wars is that Anakin’s son was Luke Skywalker.
Like if you’re that great a man and your son becomes this guy, that’s got to be the hardest thing of all for.
Thinking but when you were talking about George Lucas being crazy, I mean, one of the things that Nietzsche said was that you have to have chaos in yourself to give birth to a Dancing star like you have to be a little crazy to be that kind of creative genius.
One of the other things that so Nietzsche would say is that, you know, the tallest.
Free.
If you’re going to reach to the heavens also has to have roots that descend into help and so you think of Anakin Skywalker or or any character really, like like a game.
Take bane.
I mean, you’ve got this ultimate villain who’s going to wipe out Gotham City, but at the heart of it is this story of a guy who’s caring for this young girl and you and Anakin story.
You have a man who’s in love and yeah, he has ambitions.
But like, it’s the love for his wife that turns into the dark and you know, you have to have this in order to have a redeeming arc.
You have to have a fault.
That’s just part of the storyline and the harder the fall or the, the greater the evil in that person, the greater the story of redemption in the end.
Ian: Well, and what’s so interesting about that is, is there’s been and I don’t know if it’s a shift I’d be I, I mean the way that you’re presenting these ideas about very, very excited about this cause I think you you see the world perhaps in a similar way where there’s the stories and then there’s the meta that inspires the stories and.
Kind of pulling all these apart, this idea of the vigilante, right, because you’re talking about Bane, which infuses the character of Batman, which, you know Batman’s a hero, but at the same time he’s he’s assisting the law, but he’s operating outside of the law.
He’s taking matters into his own hands.
So the use of the term hero is.
Is maybe a little bit nebulous with him, right? It might be a misattribution.
And and so with that in mind, do you think is this idea of the vigilante? Is this something that is becoming more popular in modern society because of? Changes to society.
Or do you think that the vigilante has always been as popular as it is in in today’s era, and the world’s always been the same level of chaos that we we might see around us today?
Invictus: Ohh absolutely.
I mean, I’m.
I’m Catholic, you know.
I’m.
I’m.
I believe in the teleological outlook of history and salvation history and all that but.
You know, I’m, I still believe Nietzsche was right about a lot of things and one of those things that, you know, Mircea Eliade and a lot of Pagan philosophers, they all agreed that time is an eternal circle.
There’s always this eternal return and to think that we have more or less chaos now than we did in the time of Achilles or of Hercules is totally fallacious.
That’s like that Francis Fukuyama’s end of history nonsense.
So when you think of the icon or or what you might call the archetype of of vigilante like, yeah, it’s pretty bad now and you’ve got Daniel Penny now and you’ve got all these Batman movies, but you know, 30 years ago, you also had the Punisher and that’s just modern history.
I mean, you and you’ve got Batman, as you pointed out, even before the Punisher.
But I mean go way back, like, look at all of the stories of the ancient heroes.
Look at Hercules like he was assigned these 12 labourers, sure, but.
You know, at the core of that story is the story of justice.
It’s of fighting evil.
It’s of destroying evil people and that’s.
That’s in Perseus.
That’s in Theseus.
That’s every story of a hero.
Is them killing somebody? That was evil and whether they were assigned that task by a king.
So they do have state authority to do so, or they were just a hero who took it upon themselves to go out and fight evil.
It doesn’t matter.
Archetype is still the same and it’s much clearer back then when they were, you know, hinterlands and there were places between cities because the life was set in city States and you’d have to travel into wildernesses.
So it was a little clearer picture then than it is, you know, the Punisher or Daredevil in New York City.
But the story is still the same.
It’s a lone man fighting against the evil in the world, and we worship that.
That is why we engage in hero.
Ian: It’s it’s so, so I love and this does it goes right back into this notion of the hero of 1000 faces, right, this idea that all heroes are the same at the end of the day in one capacity or another and one of the things I find so interesting about Campbell’s take is that there is this.
Speaker 4: Right.
Ian: There’s a way that you can basically, let’s deconstruct his belief system and look at the here of 1000 faces and come to the conclusion that of all the heroes and I bring this up because, you know, obviously in in your your bio, the very first thing and I love that you have this.
Is is the term Catholic? It’s it’s at the top of everything else.
It’s the the, the paramount piece and I’ve.
I’ve heard a lot of individuals.
I think it was Tom Brady actually who talked about that it was it was his belief in God his belief in his family and then his desire to make a better community and I you know I’m not a big football person not a big sports ball.
Person, but I like that concept and I bring it up because Joseph Campbell’s concept.
Of those thousand faces, the one metaphase, so that is the embodiment of everything, is the concept of Christ and I heard Jordan Peterson, of all people, who I don’t.
I don’t love his current affiliations with the daily wire.
But he talked about how of the thousand faces that Christ is the hero of heroes.
He’s the person that gave everything for nothing, for everyone but for himself and if you look at the concept of the thousand faces and this idea of going through the hero’s journey, whether it’s whether it’s Luke Skywalker, like you mentioned or it’s Harry Potter or it’s Jesus Christ, they all go through this similar, similar progression.
So I’m kind of curious if if that’s and that, have you examined thought about and when it comes to some of the heroes in your world, you know, who are the ones that I guess you most identified maybe with Voldemort of of of all of them I’m kind of curious how how has this kind of played into your world especially when it comes to consuming media because you’ve obviously read.
A lot of the both ancient and the most, you know, modern of heroic tales.
Invictus: Well, let me first say before we pass on from Joseph Campbell that he was Catholic and he was raised as Catholic and he went into anthropology and studied all these religions.
But.
You know you can’t escape the fact that they all point in One Direction, and that is the incarnation of the Christ.
As far as my own thought on that like.
At being a Pagan convert, a lot of what I think or thought during my conversion is you know what we have all these historical instances like.
Christ, what just came out of nothing like these? Uh, prior stories just didn’t happen.
Like, you know, the picantes, for instance.
That was written by Euripides.
Dionysus is put on trial and it the whole scene there is basically the gospel account of Jesus on trial with Pontius Pilate, and it’s like, well, the Gospel writers not know that and you have, you know, as this, this old quote, unquote.
Documentary back in the days like guys pointed out, well, you have all these so-called holy families like.
Horus and Isis and Osiris like that is reflected in Jesus and Mary and Joseph.
So you see all of these archetypes leading up to the Christ and you know the Protestants answer to that as well.
It was Satan playing tricks on people.
But there’s actually a very ancient concept that says that.
All of our ancient people, all of our ancestors, they were aiming towards what we might call platonic truth, and there was always the truth of God in this world before the incarnation of Christ, and all things were really approximating that perfection of Christ.
So that’s kind of how I think of it as.
You know, in what way do these ancient stories or even modern stories approximate that perfection of the Christ? And I think if you’re someone like Joseph Campbell, you cannot escape from that.
You were raised Catholic, you know that and no matter how far you go into all these other religions, comparative religion, anthropology.
You’re always going to come back to, well, this is the centre, not just of my life, but of the.
Entirety of creation.
I’d forgot the second part of your question, I’ll be honest.
Ian: Well no and it’s actually it’s really interesting because the path that you just took us down, I’m really curious because I mean obviously you know you’ve gone from at least self-proclaimed A Pagan to somebody who the first thing in their bio is their religious Catholic identity.
So I’m kind of curious like especially given the title of this space, I mean take us back to to little.
Emperor Invictus, right? Where where did the Pagan saw is? Is that raised Pagan? It was raised kind of atheist or agnostic and became a Pagan.
Like tell us all about the journey of going from, you know, seemingly at least a Pagan to a Catholic.
If not, maybe from a.
Agnostic to a peg into a cat like.
I’m very curious about this life journey he went on.
Invictus: Well, I mean that might be an all night conversation.
I’ll try to make it succinct.
I’m.
I mean, my father was, you know, a Freemason.
Essentially, with all that implies with, you know.
He he wanted to be Catholic, but just never actually was my mother, you know, both sides of my family essentially were from free Masonic roots.
But my mother, her family, had converted to Jehovah’s Witness by the time she was born.
So I had a very just strange.
I was born into a strange religious kind of voice and you know, by the time I was a teenager, they decided something had to be done with me specifically, but also my little brother and so they started taking us to non denominational churches, Baptist churches and just Protestant whatever they could get us to.
They were told.
Ian: You you were like car shopping for.
For religion, is that right?
Invictus: Yeah, right.
Whatever church is and I think that’s what a lot of Christians do today.
Well, I don’t like this, pastor.
Let’s go see what this pastor has to say.
Well, I don’t know what Presbyterian.
Let me try the Episcopalian church and I think Catholics do the same thing, like, well, I don’t know about this Latin mass business.
Let’s go see what this church down the street.
Maybe they’re more conservative than not as liberal as the other Nova sort of church, and a lot of people go tyre kicking.
For new churches.
Right and so my parents at some point were told by my little brother’s Sunday school teacher that I was possessed and that started a very strange.
Probably 1/4 century.
Ian: Can you can you define define possess there? I mean there there I’m thinking horror movie or is it a political comment where where where were they go?
Invictus: Of my life.
Oh yeah.
Speaker 5: Chinese.
Ian: Yes.
Invictus: No, not like I was, you know, crawling on the walls or anything like modern horror movies.
But definitely she meant I was literally possessed by, if not the devil himself, then at least a demon and this this became.
It turned out that was true and I don’t really talk much about that.
Obviously, but turns out that was true and you know, years later I had gone to speak to a santera, which is like a priestess, and the religion of Santeria.
That’s another long story that ended up going to Avalara, which is like the high priest of Santeria, and they just decided they just couldn’t do anything with me.
Like there was no way to exercise this demon.
And, you know, years and years later, like, I’ve been in A at this point, I was already in a cultist.
For like 6 years and you know, I just went down that path of occultism forever and ever until.
Actually, I was in law school and went through what’s called the CIA programme, which is the rite of Christian initiation for adults at the Catholic Church.
Who was Saint Michael Cathedral in Chicago.
Except when I converted, I didn’t really convert.
I, uh, you know, went through all the rituals as rituals like an occultist would do and so it never really took and I didn’t really convert.
I mean I went, you know, full I took communion.
I I was initiated into the Catholic Church, but wasn’t really Catholic, you know, from that point and I went fully apostate.
Continued in occultism.
That’s when the famous or infamous goat sacrifice came about after a pilgrimage to the desert and it wasn’t until I landed in gaol back in 2019, that’s when.
I I actually converted that’s when I it finally got through to me that.
All this cultism and satanic stuff was was.
Quite self-destructive.
So that’s when I went back to the Catholic Church and here we are now.
Ian: OK, there’s there’s a there’s a lot to unpack.
Invictus: I told you that that’s a long conversation, buddy.
Ian: OK.
All right.
So so let’s, let’s, let’s rewind and maybe hit pause a couple times and ask for the directors note.
Because.
All right, so let’s start with the possession piece because this, I mean, the word certainly caught me off guard there.
So you said, which you believe that was actually the case.
So.
So I suppose the first thing I would.
Invictus: OK.
Unknown Speaker: Yeah.
Ian: The first two things I would ask is where or why did this possession happen and what was the process of recognising that it was there and removing? I guess prospectively a demon or whatever it was that was possessing you and I, I apologise for the ignorance here.
It’s just that this one’s kind of catching me off guard a little bit.
Invictus: No, it’s well, yeah.
I mean it should.
You know, this should not be part of your normal worldview.
If it does you, you’ve got a problem or you’re an exorcist.
So.
I was must have been 12 or 13 years old when this person had said this as far as how that came to be the case.
Like I said, I went to a santera and this Palau and somewhere in in between all that Santeria stuff it, you know, I think it was the santera.
Who had told me that there was a curse placed on me when I was born or before I was born.
I went in the womb whatever it was and you know, they gave me the initial CM.
They were like someone with the initial CM placed this curse on you and I only knew one person with those initials.
Couldn’t have been her.
I went to my dad’s right.
I told my dad.
Hey, I talked to the santera.
She’s doing some.
Crazy stuff.
She’s telling me a curse was placed on me like you don’t happen to know anybody with the initial.
See him, do you? He’s like, actually.
Before you were born.
I was with this woman who was a stripper and she had a gay best friend and he was Boohoo like this, you know, magician sort of person and.
You know, he wasn’t with the stripper.
They may or may not.
Uh, you know, she said that he had if she was having his kid, right.
Blamed him for this and, you know, cursed his child.
But that was not the kid they had had so.
Speaker 6: So.
Invictus: You know, turns out I may have an older brother out there somewhere and my my dad was telling me this whole story.
That was kind of mind blowing that I may have an older brother that this, this stripper and her brujo best friend laid a curse on me when I was born.
That’s apparently where it all came from.
As far as how to get rid of it, that clearly did not happen until and I went through an A literal exorcism in the Catholic Church.
Ian: Uh, you said literal there.
So you actually had an exorcism performed? And if so, am I to presume it looked like something out of the film out of a horror movie? I mean, what what, like, tell us what that was?
Invictus: No.
I I wish I mean.
Then there would be some kind of definitive answer, you know, like seeing this black spirit depart from the church, screaming like that.
That would have been great.
But there was, there was no such climax.
It was very much like, well, I don’t know.
Did something happen? Did nothing happen? I have no idea what’s going on.
But yeah, that it was a literal when we went through the right the exorcism right at the church and it seems that nothing happens and then.
You know all this evil stuff starts happening and they say it’s, you know, the devil doesn’t want to let go.
Of his grip on you.
So all these evil things are going to happen.
That’s how you know it worked, apparently.
Ian: Well and so the the, the possession.
The consequence of that possession, it was the acting out.
It was the disenchantment that you had with religion.
Like, how did you arrive at the conclusion that something was off to the point that that this even happened.
Speaker 6: Oh man.
Invictus: Well, I wasn’t.
Concerned at all? You know, when I was a teenager, it didn’t occur to me anything was wrong.
You know, they’re telling my parents I’m 12 or 13 and.
Next thing you know, my mom’s taking all my Slayer CD’s and I can’t listen to Marilyn Manson anymore.
I wasn’t allowed to wear black.
I mean, when you look back on it, it’s like, well, obviously this kid’s troubled listening to Slayer and 9 inch nails and Marilyn Manson in his room was dressed all in black all the time.
Like, what the hell is wrong with this kid? At the time, it didn’t.
Occur.
To me, anything was wrong, you know, and even when the santera is telling me, hey, you are possessed.
I see a demon.
Over you and this demon is speaking to me, like telling me that you’re cursed and he’s going to kill you.
Like, even then, I’m like, yeah, whatever.
You know, this this doesn’t.
I’m.
I’m still.
I mean, to this day I’m.
I’m 41 now.
I I’m still indestructible, but especially when you’re 19 years old and you’re me.
Like dude, nothing can hurt me.
So it never occurred to me as a problem until again.
I ended up in gaol on.
100% false charges.
Kids were taken from me my whole life was just destroyed overnight.
That was when it finally got through to me.
Hey, this whatever you were up to, these things are not what you were promised.
This whole Pagan promise of strength and power and beauty and all these things.
I you are living the exact opposite of all these promises that were made to and it may be that it was Satan lying to you.
That’s how it finally got through to me.
I was, what, 36 years old at that?
Ian: Time well and so in that I’m curious the let’s let’s go to the this Pagan side.
I’m I’m I’m curious were you seeking.
You know, earthly material possessions and vanity and greed and all those kind of things and as a result, you found yourself sacrificing a goat or something along these lines.
Or was this something where you were more just an individual who didn’t necessarily believe in Christianity and as a result, you kind of just flirted with some other stuff? Or were you? Were you, like, methodically trying to bring about some kind of demonic force or benefit or something along those lines?
Invictus: Well, we didn’t believe in it as demonic.
Right.
It was just they were spirits.
Right and they were.
Things that called themselves angels.
There were these entities.
We don’t care what they are, as long as they’re accomplishing these ends of your occult ritual.
As far as what I was after.
No, I was never after the material riches and all that stuff.
You think of these people like, what is that woman? The name the she did the spirit cooking stuff.
Ian: Yeah, the Miriam and gravity or whatever.
Invictus: Thank you.
Yes, her and you think of all these like elite occultists in the government and that’s what they are doing.
They are, they are all about this, you know, personal power and riches and so on.
All this disgusting stuff that just kills your soul at.
For me, it’s.
It’s what we were talking about at the beginning.
It was always this struggle against, you know, this.
This this horrible evil, right? And you’re seeking power in that fight.
That’s how I always saw it.
Something more akin to, like, an odinist.
Which, I mean, I did those rituals as well as a Pagan where you’re asking the gods for superhuman strength.
Basically, to go and fight this evil, that’s how I always saw it.
So if I were doing a cult ritual or Pagan ritual with the odinists or the heathens or whatever we were doing at that time, it was always.
We have this mission to restore the natural order to overthrow this filth that has taken over the world.
It is very much A to me at least at the time.
An heroic enterprise like we are fighting and we need the strength of the gods to do that.
That’s how I always saw it, however.
Again, in retrospect, you think of all these promises that are made about power.
I mean, I’m speaking specifically about failing my, which was my own religion.
You know, you read the book of the law, you’re talking about power.
You’re talking about literal, actual power over the earth and it’s very it’s impossible, I would say, very difficult.
It’s impossible to square that with sitting in a maximum isolation cell.
You have no idea where your kids are and the entire world has just, you know, collapsed under you.
It’s like, well.
These were lies.
Ian: Well, and the lies were the false promises, which is is curious because I feel like that’s actually one of the tenants of.
Loosely speaking, just of evil, right? It’s it’s this.
This set of promises, the illusion of and, and whether it’s in.
In many cases, I feel like it’s motivated by greed, by vanity, by lust, whatever.
Have.
To you, it sounds like you were just trying to explore the world and to try and find something to connect with.
If I’m not mistaken.
Invictus: Well, yeah.
I mean to in a degree that the.
Higher purpose is always like finding the truth with a capital T, right? But I will say, you know, Full disclosure, there was a very specific point in my career as an occultist where I was given a choice by these entities, whatever you want to call them, angels, demons, whatever and there was a specific ritual that was done, a specific one of these entities that I’m not going to name, but they’ve, they’ve posited to me this choice and it wasn’t a question he said you choose knowledge or power and uh, he’s like this is the choice before you, right and then in that very moment, I chose power.
That was like I am not.
I mean, yeah.
Obviously I’m concerned with the knowledge and gaining that.
But I didn’t want to be some Pythagoras.
Being a scholar, I didn’t want to be some, you know, philosophy PhD, which is why I went to law school instead of getting my PhD in philosophy, even though I could have, I was always very much interested in.
We have to attain power in order to effect these ends, which is the restoration of the ancient ways.
So that’s where I had approached it.
From at all time.
Ian: And and when you say the ancient ways, I’m kind of curious.
So I look around and I see a lot wrong, at least with what I would define as modernity, a lot of areas where I feel like people are living lives that are vapid, they’re meaningless.
They’re hedonistic and ironically, in spite of people living solely for the pursuit of their own ego, they are finding themselves absolutely hollow.
Right, they’re only self-serving, but at the same time they’re not ever self satisfying and it’s because the things that they’re filling themselves with spiritually are as empty in some kind of, let’s say, meaningful calorie as a Big Mac, right and so we’ve got this society where people are gluttonous.
On food, on materialism, on hedonism, on sexuality.
Right.
It’s just endless consumption of things and.
People, but nobody feels any kind of deeper connection.
So is is it? Is it that which you were looking for when you say that you were looking for something from the past that maybe was a little bit more meaningful? Was it trying to get out of modernity or what was the driver there?
Invictus: Yeah, I think it was a lot of getting.
Out.
Of modernity and you know all this that we could criticise for hours, days, weeks, you know the industrial Revolution and its consequences and Snapchat and Instagram and everything under the sun.
But you know, it’s all just.
Of.
It’s just an exaggerated form of of anything we’ve seen in the past.
I mean, you know, the the, I don’t know, the courts of mediaeval Europe or, you know, ancient Rome under Caesar Augustus, like it was already so degraded at that point, the aristocracy and everybody was so into this.
Hedonism that Augustus had to pass these.
Don’t say draconian laws, but I mean very strict morality laws.
I mean, this is something that we as humanity struggle with and have struggled with forever, you know, Sodom and Gomorrah were wiped off the face of the Earth because of the things that we’re into now.
In America, so this is not some new problem at that time I didn’t see it that way.
Of course, at at that time when I was an occultist, I saw it as essentially industrial society.
Modern society in a technological sense.
I mean, I’ve.
Still to this day, you know I’m I’m just existentially offended by being surrounded by technology and electricity and the like at all times, you know, it’s offensive to me.
I can’t see the stars at night here in Orlando or that and I’ve always constantly got the hum of.
Electricity.
Computers, cars.
That alone, if we could just have a worldwide EMP and reset technology.
Me.
I’d be happy I’d die happy right now, that’d.
Ian: Be great well.
Invictus: So.
Speaker 5: And that a.
Invictus: Lot of that means going back to nature in my opinion.
Ian: So it’s it’s, it’s fascinating that you say that because I think if we look around at the world, we notice, I mean you were talking about some of the great heroes of the past, right? We noticed these these patterns that have repeated all throughout mankind over and.
Again, that idea of the EMP I often find myself looking around and saying, you know, I think between the Internet and social media and AI and just technology at large, maybe tomorrow would be better if all of that just disappeared and we went back to the late 80s before the.
The the maniacal use and development of the World Wide Web, let’s call it, and it then makes me wonder.
If perhaps that hasn’t already happened and if if for those individuals, since we’ve been talking, we’re talking movies earlier, the Matrix trilogy, right, the first ones about the rise of Neo the Saviour, who’s going to break the matrix and then you end up finding out in the second or third movie.
Oh, this is actually he’s the 6th NEO, they’ve they’ve come and they’ve gone and they’ve reset the matrix and then we go back and we.
Rinse and repeat the whole thing over again.
The moment that we’re in right now.
Is this the first time that this kind of technology has ever, ever existed, that it’s ever been or? Or do you think that we’ve been through perhaps some kind of reboot reset? And if so, is it because, you know, as a Catholic, it’s not necessarily, I would assume because we’re in a computer programme, but rather because mankind has gone through some kind of evolution.
Speaker 7: Boy.
Ian: And due to some kind of religious catalyst or a moral compass has kind of reset the system.
Like I’d be curious for.
Your thoughts on that?
Invictus: Well, I mean, that’s not speaking authoritatively, just in explorative sense.
That story is all over the world.
For centuries.
Millennia.
You know, you look at the Mahabharata and you that the Indian epic, you look at Plato, of course talking about Atlantis and its destruction.
You think about the Mexican origin story and by Mexican, I mean Aztec, the five worlds that were created.
I mean, there are stories in every culture on Earth about.
So this isn’t the first time around, right? And that seems to be corroborated by people like Robert Shock, the geologist who studied the Sphinx and the pyramids and said, hey, this sphinx, it actually has water damage from like 10,000 years ago.
How the heck did that happen? Well, probably because there were.
These were wetlands, there was grass all throughout Upper Egypt, Lower Egypt, according to the Egyptians.
But there was grass.
There was water here.
This was not a desert.
When this thing was built and there’s water damage to the to the foundation of this thing that seems to fly in the face of what we know of recorded history.
Even something is simple and.
I think uncontroversial at this point is transatlantic Colombian ISM.
Where you have.
Pyramids in Egypt and in Central America and in Japan, you have this worldwide phenomenon here.
Ian: Have you seen the one in Antarctica? And do you believe that that’s a real thing or is that kind of an Internet Bigfoot theory?
Invictus: I don’t know.
I mean it, you know, I’ve seen the one on Mars too.
That’s why I’m saying.
I’m not saying this, like, authoritatively like, hey, this alternative history happened, but.
I think you should be asking a lot of questions about that.
You know, you ever heard of Thor Heyerdahl?
Ian: I don’t think so, and unless he carries a mule in your and I’m I think I butchered the pronunciation.
Speaker 8: OK.
Invictus: No, no.
He was named after that Thor.
But I’m glad you don’t know him because this is going to blow your mind.
Ian: There.
Invictus: Four higher dole was also an anthropologist, but he was from Scandinavia and he had this crazy idea that the ancient peoples actually had a way to circumnavigate the globe, that they could sail and did sail from Europe, from Egypt to Mexico, from Mexico to Easter Island to, you know, all around.
The world and of course, everybody said that’s nuts.
They didn’t have shipbuilding capacities, no way.
So this guy went to Peru.
He cut down the trees himself.
He and his team, they tied them together just like the ancient Peruvians did and he sailed that sucker from South America all the way to Indonesia.
Just blew everybody’s mind and he he proved that they could in fact have made that distance and so not content with that, he then goes back and he builds a ship based on the specifications in an Egyptian.
Simple.
He left a piece off thinking this is non essential.
Turns out he’s sunk in the Mediterranean before making it to the Atlantic, goes back to Egypt, rebuilds the boat according to the specifications in the temple, and sails all the way to Mexico with his crew.
Proving that not only could they have made it from Egypt to Mexico.
But they definitely could have made it from South America to Indonesia, proved that they could have actually connected the entire world back then, and that explains the legends of the white God Kontiki in South America and in the.
You know the cultural transfer between all of these ancient civilizations, the hieroglyphics, the pyramids and it all comes together.
So something even that small.
Should call into question a lot of what we understand as authoritative history and that’s not even to get into the Sphinx having water damage, and has the world being destroyed before and recreated.
That’s not even getting into all that.
All I’m saying is what we know about history.
Is not.
You know necessarily true.
Ian: Well, and what’s interesting is so you find stories like the one that you just shared, truths that that blow the mind because it’s like, well, that doesn’t, that doesn’t add up.
It doesn’t make sense when compared with what I’ve been taught and the one that I find the most wild when it comes to the sphinx.
Or at least to Egypt.
Is not just the pyramids and their construction and their size, which in and of itself should make somebody scratch their head.
It’s also the precision to the stars, which is down to not even the inches.
It’s down to centimetres in these giant structures that we still, you know, many people.
Believe that we still can’t explain how different people, different theories, but there’s no kind of conclusive explanation as to how primitive man would have.
I shouldn’t even call him primitive, but.
But let’s just call it historic.
Man could have constructed that.
But even if you are willing to say, oh, they they constructed canals or whatever it is that you know, people might want to believe, when you look at the precision to some of these celestial bodies, it gets to a point where even if you just agree, OK, fine.
They did it with giant.
You know, amazing inventions that they came up with, their ability to pinpoint them to the stars and if I’m not mistaken, the three great pyramids are perfectly in alignment with Orion’s.
Felt in a way that you couldn’t have just looked up into the sky and said no.
No, no.
A little bit more to the left, like something else was clearly going on there.
Invictus: Right and I’ll be honest, I don’t know what that is.
I mean, there’s the famous, you know, meme of the guy is saying aliens.
Everybody thinks that aliens are what built the pyramids.
I don’t know, man.
I mean, there’s stories of aliens coming out and teaching the Africans how to farm and teaching them where serious is.
Because they’re saying where that they came from the star series, I don’t know.
I mean, all I know is I’ve seen some crazy stuff.
Of in my short life here, and I once saw in Mexico, in the dead of night, I saw the sun come down from the sky.
Never forget that so.
Speaker 2: Wait, wait.
You’re.
Ian: I’m.
I’m gonna have to and I say this only because I and I’m.
I’m I’m really curious for your your story here because I remember I was watching a show I had my my blinds closed significant others sitting next to me and it’s it’s I.
I don’t know.
Probably 9:00 or 10:00 at night and all of a sudden, the kind of floor to ceiling shades illuminate.
Invictus: 1.
Ian: And I’m thinking, I guess a car is right outside the window or something.
It was that bright, and sure enough, I opened them up and what looked like the sun in the middle of the evening is beaming there in the sky and the thing proceeds to sit there for what felt.
Like 2 minutes and then BOOP just stop dropped below the horizon line.
Now remember as it did seeing the moon way way way in the distance so it it wasn’t like it was the moon glowing unusually but it it and I don’t know if it you know it’s it’s the guy like you said from Discovery Channel the aliens guy I don’t know if it was a space station.
Or if it was Darth Vader himself, or the son or whatnot.
But I’m curious if it aligns at all with your experience, because I will never forget that moment as long as I live.
Invictus: Well, that is interesting because it did disappear under the horizon for me too.
So I woke up in the middle of the night.
It’s pitch black.
Back and sold this thing and no, I was.
I was not on drugs.
So I was dead sober.
I just had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, honestly, and saw this thing.
I I also had floor to ceiling Windows I was in.
I think it was the intercontinental hotel and I’m looking out over the mountains.
This this incredible hotel room like it looks over the mountains and I see this thing and I’m I’m watching it.
This sin behind the mountains and I mean the easy answer to that is that’s the UFO.
Everybody knows it’s Mexico.
There’s UFOs everywhere.
Like, I don’t know, I didn’t see anything like that.
I I only bring it up to say I’ve seen crazy enough stuff.
The.
You know, aliens coming out of a UFO to tell Africans that they came from the STAR series.
Wouldn’t surprise me.
I don’t think anything would surprise me at this point.
I’ve seen way too much.
Ian: Now, because you’ve you’ve mentioned substances, I have to ask.
This is one that I find very curious.
Have you in these adventures right? The Wild Adventures of Emperor and Victus have you? Have you experimented with or participated in some kind of ayahuasca ritual? And if so? I would love to hear all about it saying I find very curious.
Invictus: I have not deny Osca.
I did however, publish a book of a bunch of acid troops, so that was pretty.
Ian: Wild you you published a book about your experiences.
With it.
Invictus: Yeah, it’s unpublished now.
Once I went back to the Catholic Church, I went on a serious mission to destroy everything that I had ever published or put out there.
So it’s going to be tough to find.
But yeah, I did and that that was largely experimental and it was all poetry.
Ian: And and when you say poetry, the the, the work that you did about.
Those, let’s say the acid adventures.
That was the poetry that came out of that or it was you trying to be poetic talking.
About the past.
Invictus: No.
I don’t know.
I mean, I was on LSD writing the poetry itself.
It was a very intense experience.
I made a lot of recordings at that time of.
Other poetry, especially Ezra Pound, was a huge still.
I’m a huge fan of Ezra #.
For, I mean many reasons.
Yeah.
So you know, I’ve never done ayahuasca, but I’ve done my share of that and I’ve, you know, famously had been a hedonist for much of my life, so been sober now for.
Just over 8 years so all my cool days are behind me.
Ian: Well, God, God love you.
For for that and I say that because I know a lot of individuals certainly have all sorts of of struggles with various substances.
You know, as as simple as alcohol and as complex as all the hard things that are out there when it comes to.
To that entire portion of your life, I just have to ask, do you think that when messing around with something, whether it’s acid or any of these other substances? Are those drugs and ayahuasca is the one where I think it’s most interesting, perhaps from like an intellectual or spiritual exercise? Are they lowering a fog that exists all around us all the time, that is.
Religious, is it something that’s constructed by the water that we drink, the air that we breathe like is, is it lowering the fog that we’re not supposed to be able to see through? Is it opening a new piece of your mind and allowing you to tap into something spiritual? Is it screwing around with the wiring in your brain and creating things that are just merely? Chemical reactions.
What do you think exactly were happening during some of those adventures that you went on?
Invictus: Probably all of the above.
There’s.
You can’t really pigeonhole LSD into well, this is just this one thing, and that’s how we’re going to explain that and the universe.
I think a lot of it is a chemical reaction.
Sure.
I mean, I would counter, however, that pretty much everything in our world is a chemical reaction and people are very cynical and say, well, love is just a chemical reaction, it’s not real.
You know, there are people who are ******** materialists who say, well, all these so-called visions that people have of Jesus or whatever religious figure, it’s really just, you know, an electrical storm and their temporal lobe and look, we can reproduce that and they’ll SAP somebody and they see the Virgin Mary.
So yeah, I mean, at a certain level, of course, there’s there’s chemical reactions, and I’m sure LSD has that effect.
But at the same time, it’s a little too real to just say.
Ah, you’re just being poisoned a little.
You know, it’s just like alcohol, where it’s just damaging your brain.
Like now, something very real and unsettling and vicious and, you know, powerful is going on.
When you’re doing that.
Yeah, there is a theory that.
That.
Taking something like LSD, it shows you what the real world is and the theory is that we don’t see it that way in our normal waking state like we are right now, because we evolved as hunters, you know and if we were to see all these trees breathing and we were to see the vividness of the sky at all times and we were to hear these sounds and you can hear like a.
You know, like a dog when you’re on.
I mean, all of your sitting, and your senses are heightened so much.
If you were constantly being bombarded like that all the time, how could you possibly focus and, you know, hone in on the hunt to kill? So I think maybe there is some credence to that just in my personal anecdotal experience.
That.
It would make a lot of sense for us not to be able to see the world as it really is, because otherwise we could not possibly function in the world.
You of course have people who are functional after taking a lot of acid, but that just means they’ve developed the tolerance like they would to anything else.
It doesn’t mean that the world isn’t just as vivid and that they they haven’t destroyed themselves by the use of that drug.
So.
I think there are a lot of explanations as to what’s going on with LSD, and I’m not that kind of doctor man.
I’m just the Doctor of law.
I wouldn’t even pretend to know the authoritative answer on what the heck is going on with that.
I will say, however.
The thing that most inspired me to take LSD, not that I’m inspiring anyone else to do that is I read Alan Watts and it actually what? One of the biggest things that caused me to go to the Catholic Church was Alan Watts.
I think the book was called, behold the incarn.
Nation, behold the spirit.
That’s what it was.
Was behold the spirit by Alan Watts and he talks about the incarnation of Christ and that was such an incredible, I guess essay you would call it.
That I decided I needed to take the Catholic Church seriously.
I think it was that same book, however, where he talks about LSD.
So you know, when I think about it now, it’s probably a pretty prophetic.
Book to have in my hands at that period of my life.
Ian: Well, I love that you referenced him and I truly think I could listen to Alan Watts speak about almost anything for almost ever.
He his voice is as interesting as Morgan Freeman’s, and his mind is more interesting than almost anyone else.
Ever listened to talk about anything? I mean, he’s just exceptional.
Speaker 5: Absolutely.
Ian: He had a piece on, and I often found myself listening to the playback of it just cuz I could relate to it so much he talked about the concept of the overthinker and he said that the mind is a wonderful master and that it’s a terrible servant.
In the sense that it it’s basically the inverse of those two things.
Right, because it it’s fantastic when you can tell the mind what you want to focus on, but when the mind tells you what you’re going to focus.
On.
Invictus: A terrible master and a wonderful.
Ian: That’s that’s exactly right, yes, because it’s the.
It’s yeah, the it’s the inverse of one another in the sense that it does it, it can do wonderfully terrible things as maybe the way that I would say it because it can it can get.
Unknown Speaker: Yeah.
Ian: A mind like and I think you know, everybody thinks differently about the world for some reason.
I enjoy thinking about the meta aspects of it, like why I don’t really care about the bottle of bourbon.
What I find far more interesting is how did this come to be? Tell me about how the glass was made, how the label was prepared.
Why did the person who made that label? Decide to include the certain characters or font and what goes into the beverage itself and when I consume the beverage, what does it do to my? Mind and as a result, you know there’s some people that might be able to look at the bourbon pour glass and they enjoy that.
It makes them drunk.
I I sit there and like an obsessive compulsive crazy person.
I’m.
I’m trying to examine every little nook and cranny of of the story.
That is the thing that’s sitting there and when he talked about that.
You know, I’d recommend individuals listen to that, or really anything that he has produced because one of the more interesting people and I mean certainly in a guy.
Who is? You know, when it comes to something like drugs or or substances.
He’s spoken about things in a way that feels so out there that he had to be under the influence of something, either brilliance or some kind of substance, right?
Invictus: William he must have taken the substances, right? I mean, you don’t start writing those things unless you’ve been there.
You know, it’s like trying to write about the Himalayas, and you’re just looking at picture books like you’re going to expose yourself real fast.
People who have been to the Himalayas, they’re going to read those books and they’re like, bro, we know you’ve never been.
So there’s a huge.
There’s a huge disparity between those certain ways of writing, and I think he was the real deal as far as, like harnessing the mind or making it the servants, you know, Alan Watts based a lot of what he did on Eastern philosophy.
Behold, the spirit was probably an aberration, I’d say for Alan Watts.
I wouldn’t even call it a foray into Catholicism.
It was just like that was his standalone take on Catholicism and why it was so.
Important.
You know, one of the things I I’m not exactly an Allen wants scholar, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him talking about the Mahabharata or the Bhagavad Gita.
He talked a lot about Eastern philosophy.
I I don’t think he specifically talked about Indian philosophy.
That specific Indian philosophy.
Anyway, correct me if I’m wrong, but you know, they talk a lot in the Mahabharata and especially about about Gita, about control of the mind and that’s really what yoga comes down to is control of the mind making the mind the servant because there is this higher self.
That is the observer and you know, Catholic or not, that’s just a science.
That’s not even a religious faith that I have.
It’s just, you know, if you engage in these 8 limbs of yoga, you control your body and asana, you control your breath and pranayama.
You go up this ladder.
Where you’re controlling each of these things in your body and your mind, and ultimately your soul, you realise that you have.
To control your mind has this super mental entity you have to take control of that or will like you said eat you alive because you can’t even drink the bloody whiskey because you want to talk about this detail in that detail and all the rest it’s it’s going to choke you.
You’re not going to.
Be able to live in this world.
Ian: Well and where do you think the? That the lack of that coverage came from when it comes to watts.
Do you think it was that he was less informed or less interested in it? Or do you think that it was something that he maybe disregarded altogether? Like, why do you think? That is absent.
Invictus: Coverage like in of yoga.
Ian: Well, yeah, just of of of all of it.
You’re saying he, you know, he definitely spoke a lot about some of the various religions of the world and theologies and that’s one that I do think right.
I don’t remember him necessarily going into it but what do you think would have been the cause for that?
Invictus: Well, maybe because of what we’re talking about with drugs, right? I mean, maybe he just did.
You know it and I think Alan Watts is a very sincere person.
If he didn’t know about something, I don’t think he’s going to try to be BS us saying, yeah, I know all about yoga.
I’ve read, you know, this book in that book and I’ve got a whole system here.
I think, you know, if he wasn’t actually sitting down and trying to do the breathing exercises and trying to do the asana and trying to control his mind and do the concentration exercises.
I don’t think he’d try to blow smoke up our skirts, pretending like he did.
So I, you know, and I, it may be that he wrote about it and I just don’t know.
But I do know that.
You can tell very quickly the people who talk about yoga as some abstract theoretical thing, because they’ve never actually done the work and you can tell, you know, when you go to yoga classes, which of these yoga American hip girls is like wearing the spandex and doing the stretching stuff because it’s an athletic endeavour to them.
You can tell them real fast from a person who does the disciplines in the ancient texts.
I mean that they’re completely different cultures like this, you know, American subculture of, of housewife yoga.
That’s one thing.
You’ve got actual Brahmans who like practise.
How much out of you like they’re celibate? They don’t drink like you got yoga classes here in America where these chicks are like drinking wine at yoga like that.
That would be completely antithetical to the original concept of.
Yoga.
So it may be that Alan Watts just didn’t experience it and didn’t want to write about.
That would be my guess.
Just knowing Alan.
I mean, I didn’t personally.
Know Alan once.
But I mean, just knowing his his work that I’ve read, I don’t think he would talk out of his hat about something he didn’t know.
Ian: Well, and it’s it’s interesting you say that as you look around and they have goat yoga and kitten yoga and puppy yoga and all these other things, right, it’s it’s almost a mockery in some ways of of of the original teachings.
I’m going to ask if if you’re familiar with and the name of it escapes me at the moment.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Ian: But there’s a form of yoga.
That it’s it’s very much about, uh, not just the breathing and it’s it’s very little actually about the pose.
It’s much more about controlling your mind, your body, your breathing and they talk about.
Releasing a inner serpent and I found I tried it one time and then I remember sitting there in the class.
They were talking about do you do you feel the serpent coiling around your spine? And I was like, Nope, this is the.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Ian: Last time I’m messing around with this one.
Invictus: That was actually, honestly, that was my branch of yoga.
That was, of course, what I was into.
That’s called kundalini yoga.
Ian: That’s the one.
OK, so so can you help me understand where I was mistaken thinking that I was doing something that maybe was? Touching.
Maybe, maybe some some third rails I wouldn’t be interested in because it it it felt kind of demonic.
It was about feeling these inner flames and all this other stuff.
I was like, this is not aligned with, I think the good side.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Unknown Speaker: Yeah.
Invictus: Well, I, I mean, you might not be wrong.
I don’t do kundalini yoga anymore.
Because of that.
You know, the traditionalist Catholic perspective perspective on yoga is just don’t do yoga at all.
Yoga is evil.
You’re invoking Hindu God names.
So if you talk to.
Anybody at my church? This entire conversation we’re having would be heretical, I think, according to to 90% of my church.
So when you’re talking about Kundalini specifically, I mean you were raising energy from the base of the spine.
Again, I look at it from a scientific perspective of do you do these things and then these other things happen.
Then something you know, there’s like some mechanical process here, however.
You know, there’s a guy.
I’m not going to name names here, but he’s a kundalini instructor that I was just enamoured of, not in a Nick Fuentes way, but in like a, you know, just I admired this guy as a yoga teacher.
He would open every session with these chants and you would focus on, you know, your your chakra and you would chant this, but the chance.
I mean or.
They are God names.
They are like invocations of these Hindu entities.
You can’t get around that as a Catholic or or as a Christian in general.
So you know you can do the asanas and the pranayamas and the.
This and that, but if you are chanting the names, it’s hard to get around like, well, there’s there is something Pagan about this and if you were raising that kundalini energy with the serpents around your spine, like, how do you square that? With being a Catholic and I’ve I’ve talked with my spiritual director about this and about everything under the Sun, but about this specifically and you know, it’s kind of like a detente situation where it’s like, look.
If you’re talking about this in a scientific perspective, and there’s the Catholic Church has said nothing on it, then you know I’m not going to tell you.
You can’t look into these things.
But there is a line that you can cross where you have created an idol here, or you’re worshipping an idol, or you are engaged in a cult practises and you know damn well that you are.
Uh.
But it’s a fine line to walk, so I think you know, the safest thing is just just go to church, you know, just live a safe life and don’t do crazy things and end up where I’ve been.
Ian: Well, and along those and so it’s interesting that you say that because in in these wild adventures, you know, we’re we’re trying whether it’s the acid driven poetry to the arrests to the Pagan rituals and sacrificing.
I mean you’ve you’ve seen everything under the sun.
I I guess I’d be kind of curious for for people that are listening, let’s let’s presume that there might be somebody in the audience who is you 20 years prior and is trying to understand where should I be focusing my time.
You know, I once heard somebody that said, what is it? It was the Smart man learns from his mistake.
Like the genius learns from the mistakes of others, and the fool never learns from anything.
Right? What would you recommend to the 20 year old genius that is? You know that is you at a younger era that you could speak to and kind of share here two or three or five things.
That based on the last 20 years of these wild rides that I would recommend you either fully pursue or that you never even take a step down the path of.
Invictus: Or where to begin? Uh.
I’d say the first thing like you pointed out, the first thing in my bio was Catholic because as it says in the good book seek you first the Kingdom of Righteousness and all these things will be added unto you and the first thing to do.
Is.
Do not go into the occult number one thing I’d say at a 21 year old me 20 years ago.
Do not go into the occult.
Go back to the church.
That’s what I would say.
That’s number one on my list.
#2, I’d say go to jujitsu because 10 years from now, you’ll be a black belt.
Go to the gym.
You should be lifting.
Don’t do drugs.
Don’t drink.
I mean, I was a notorious even before I was famous.
I was a notorious hedonist, you know, drinking, drugs, women.
I mean, just and it never affected me like the picture of Dorian Grey.
Right? But what I should have been focused on was lifting was, you know, like I said, I’ve always been indestructible.
So I was like, well, this alcohol will never affect me.
Drugs will never and thank God that, you know, knock on wood that they and I’m fine, but I should have been focusing all those years my 20s and now, now that I’m 41, my 30s, I should have been focusing on.
Getting stronger, staying clean and when I did have a family, finally I started a family really early.
Should have been focused on that.
You know, one of the biggest mistakes in my life and this was after I was 21 and I was going to law school and my wife stayed at home because her family was here in Orlando and you know, as a big family, and she didn’t want to move to Chicago with the kids.
And, you know, I was a law student, and I let them stay.
That was the biggest mistake of my, I mean, I could probably give you 30 that are the biggest mistake of my life.
But that’s certainly one of.
Them.
Should have insisted.
No, you and the kids are coming with me to Chicago.
We’re a family.
No *******.
OK.
That was such a monstrous mistake in my life and you know, my first wife was Puerto Rican.
So I would never have been in this far right political thing.
But.
You know, just from a human perspective.
That was a horrible mistake.
Not doing that, so I would recommend to everybody.
Keep your family together at all costs.
Don’t commit adultery.
Huge one on my list destroyed my marriage with that one.
Uh.
I don’t know.
I think that’s a good.
Running list, just you know.
Focus on your family.
Focus on your getting.
Stronger your health.
That that should steer you in the right direction.
Ian: Wasn’t it? And you know what’s so remarkable? And maybe this will open up the conversation away.
So for anybody who wants to come up, maybe ask some questions.
I mean, the, the life adventures you’ve had have just been fascinating and to that it’s interesting because what you basically just suggest.
Tested is almost antithetical to the entire concept of social Marxism, which I mean, obviously we talk a lot in, in, in some of my faces about a group and kind of an ongoing effort of that that I see.
Anyway, that seems to detract from the good, loosely speaking, and what you just said is to focus on.
God to focus on your family, to focus on your loved ones, whether that’s your significant others or your your your blood family and then the last piece to focus on yourself, not not in a way that’s hedonistic, but focus on your strength, your your physical strength, your intellectual strength, your spiritual strength and these things make you know it’s it’s it’s interesting you.
Invictus: Right.
Ian: You use the term invincible, right? Your younger self, you’re invincible from alcohol, from drugs, from all these things.
It’s my belief that if you focus on those core tenants of of your your your spirit.
Your mind, your body that you can become invincible, independent of everything else.
The world will throw you.
Whether it is, you know, external detractors, internal detractors and the things that that we all carry with us, that are our our own demons, you physically, you know, maybe having one in, in a literal sense, right, but that if you focus on those.
Those aspects and making yourself as strong and as as informed take take on the world as you possibly can that you can.
You can always wake.
Up tomorrow to take on and tackle the world and you can always go to bed tonight feeling like you’ve done your part to try and make the world as as as much better as we can individually do so you know.
Invictus: Yeah.
I think that last sentiment alone is something to focus on.
You know, there’s something that the Catholics do since at least the time of Saint Ignatius, where you do what’s called an examine, an examination of conscience.
Preferably twice a day, but certainly the night time examine and you ask yourself like, what sins have I committed? Where have I gone wrong today? But you know, part of that examined too.
What have I accomplished today? You know, a lot of business gurus.
So, you know, the Tim Ferriss is and Tony Robbins of the world.
They’ll tell you the same thing like you go to bed.
You think about your accomplishments, you think about what? Have I done today? How have I, you know, moved the compass? How? How have I moved toward my goals today, and what can I do better to? Tomorrow I think thinking about that every day, did I go to the gym today? I did not.
I was in court all day.
That rubs me raw, but you know, did I? I can do better tomorrow because I’ll be at jujitsu tomorrow.
Did I spend time with my family today? No, because I was in court.
Well, I’ll do that tomorrow.
Like you have to constantly think about the most important things in your life.
That they constantly examine yourself every single night that I use profanity today.
I just did like 5 minutes ago.
Just set it on the programme used the F word like that’s going in the exam.
Tonight you got to have these goals, which is another thing I’d tell my 21 year old self and not just, you know, world domination, but like actual, tangible goals.
Like I want to get my black belt in jujitsu, I want to bench 225.
I want to.
I don’t know, ace, my calculus test, whatever it is like you have to have these goals.
You have to work toward them and not just annual leave on your New Year’s resolutions, but every single day you should be examining what have I done today to get toward those.
Rules.
Ian: I absolutely love that I have to ask because you’ve talked about physical fitness, mental Wellness, the, the emphasis on family and jujitsu are, are you familiar with and have you connected with Arthur Kwan yet on here?
Invictus: Arthur.
No.
No, I’m not.
Ian: OK, I’m.
I’m.
I’m.
I’ll set up a direct message or an introduction for the two of you guys.
He’s one of my favourite people on on X.
He’s a an extreme man of faith, of, of fitness and not from a vanity standpoint.
I mean, he if, if I’m not mistaken and anybody that’s that’s listening, please correct me if I’m wrong or overstating this.
I think he’s.
I don’t want to say a national champion but he’s a super dedicated individual and I believe.
Fujitsu.
But at the same time is an artist, a man of extreme faith, somebody that intellectually.
I think you’d really find fascinating talks a lot about the political world, the cultural disasters that we’re in, how to fix them.
He’s he’s very much about, you know, those three tenants that you spoke of this idea of.
Kind of a faith, a family and fitness and if you have those three things aligned that you can, you can tackle the world.
So I’ll I’ll, I’ll have to introduce the two of you guys.
I I think you would.
Invictus: Like, yeah, yeah.
You know, the another thing that you could say about the Tim Ferriss’s and Tony Robbins’s of the world, he’s business gurus going back to Napoli and Hill is the concept of a mastermind, which is another thing I’d advise everyone on the concept that you have a group of people who all have similar interests, sure, but mostly most importantly, a common goal.
They’re all working towards something so.
It’s very important to have just groups of men who are dedicated to pursuing the same goals that that cannot be overstated.
How important that is.
Ian: Well, I, I mean, I couldn’t agree.
I was.
I just said I connected the two of you guys in a little group chat.
Yeah, it it’s it’s interesting because and that’s what’s so it’s one of the things that I find so conflicted about which is the.
Invictus: Killer.
Ian: The world of social media, because I think so much of it is.
Dangerous.
It’s scary.
It allows for, you know, kind of propaganda at a degree that’s straight Orwellian at times, but in the same breath here we are hearing your story, learning from you, you know, maybe maybe there are individuals that are listening, myself included, that are are getting turned on to and excited about new ways of thinking about the world.
Things to consider learning about and you know being able to come out of this and to connect you with somebody like Arthur and maybe the two of you guys will have all sorts of other things you’ll find interesting.
So do you think at large and this is such a huge question, but but this concept of social? Net negative net positive.
Is there a way that we can get the positives without the negatives, I mean and I know this is a very off tangent, but just thinking of the world at large and how we connect dots and try to make the world a better place, what are what are some of your thoughts there?
Invictus: Well, I’m.
I’m a straight up Kaczynski guy when it comes to the Internet, social media, cell phones.
I just think the world would be better off if we burned it all to the ground.
Quite frankly.
You know, I think.
Of.
Guys like Elon Musk, like obviously a super genius doing incredible things.
You know, a lot of the genius that we’ve seen come through the Internet and being shared with people.
But I mean, the world’s always been like that.
I mean, they were.
It was like I mentioned Pythagoras before.
You think of Aristotle.
Teaching Alexander, we think I was explaining to my son Eureka and the story of Archimedes, you know and displacement and volume like we had these intellectual heavyweights and we’ve had them forever and the world was much smaller.
There was no technology like we understand it today, post industrial revolution and somehow we still had these amazing super geniuses.
We had Isaac Newton, we had, you know, just so many.
Geniuses all over the world, and we somehow seem to interconnect with each other before the Internet and you know, I grew up in the 90s and I I’m like, how the heck did we ever find each other in a grocery store before we had cell phones? How did I meet up with my friends? At the mall without a cell phone, how did we do these things? Well, because we’ve been made mentally ******** by the Internet and cell phones and technology.
We’re surrounded by it.
We’re we’re in it so much we can’t see the world without it anymore.
That I feel like a Superman every time that I can walk out of a place and find my way to my car when everybody else is lost because I and I always say, well, yeah, I used to be the orienteering captain in ROTC, but I mean, the reality is I still have a sense of direction.
I hate technology and we’re going real fast from that and it’s like at, at what point are we going to have, like, I don’t know if you ever read of Francis Yates, but there’s a book on, like, the memorization techniques of the Renaissance era and how these ancient techniques have gone back since ancient times and how they, you know, Napoleon would have this thing is filing cabinet in his mind and you think of Homer, right? Memorising the entirety of the Iliad and the Odyssey, or you think of the Druids and their entire oral history of magic? And it’s like where? Who do you know on Earth who has that kind of prodigious memory this, you know, cult centre where you can train that sort of mind.
It doesn’t exist anymore.
It doesn’t exist because we’re all frittering our intellects away on the Internet.
I genuinely can’t think of anything I hate more.
Than the Internet, quite frankly, but it’s necessary for our work now.
I mean, what are you going to do? What are you going to do without?
Ian: Well and it it, that’s that’s the danger.
It’s it’s.
You know it’s interesting because the and I just saw something today about this where somebody was essentially suggesting that the intellect of 1 is is the offensiveness to the other right and that individuals that are are exceptionally bright prospectively we should we should try to dumb down society so that nobody feels they’re left behind.
Unknown Speaker: Of course.
Ian: And I do feel like at a societal level at at at 50,000 feet.
That that is exactly what is happening.
Individuals are completely dependent on their mobile device to not only direct them around town, right through navigation, not only to service the crotch when they can’t remember things they’ve got their Internet browser on their phone, but.
I mean, I can remember knowing everybody’s phone number that I was connected to in one regard or another and now John Mayer has a an interesting.
Invictus: I remember those days.
Yep.
Ian: Line from one of his songs, he said.
I hope I get this right, he said.
I never learned your number.
I just stored it in my phone.
You think by now I know the shape of calling home, referring to moving his fingers around on a touchpad, right, which that was a beautiful line and but but that’s everybody.
Right.
Like he was referring to.
Hey, I didn’t remember my significant other.
I just saved it in my cell phone.
But I mean that’s how everyone is with everybody now.
Invictus: Yeah.
I have no idea what my girlfriend’s phone number is.
I’ll be quite frank.
I have no idea.
Yeah, I couldn’t tell you for $1,000,000.
No way.
Ian: Do you know the area code? The first 3 digits?
Invictus: I know the area code because I know what neighbourhood she lives in.
That’s.
Ian: OK.
Invictus: The.
So here I’m I’m sure that’s the way throughout the entire United States, but you know, you know the area code because you know well, she lives here.
So that’s how I know, but the rest of the phone number, bro, you could pay me 1,000,000 bucks.
Couldn’t tell you a single digit.
It’s sad, man, because you know what? If you go to gaol, who you going to call? Like? I know, maybe.
Ian: Not the Ghostbusters.
I I had to.
Invictus: Right.
Maybe 5 people that I could I could remember their phone numbers and called them from gaol that they’ve had the phone numbers for years and I memorised them, but everybody else like, you know, my own phone numbers changed 30,000 times in the past 10 years.
So can’t expect anybody to memory.
Is that we just store it in the phone, call them when necessary, do.
There’s so many people I don’t even know how to contact.
I’ll just look at them on Twitter.
I’ll find them on Instagram and like, oh, there he is.
I’ll you know, you just hunt them down.
Basically.
You don’t know how to contact anybody in reality.
Ian: Well, and the scarier piece there is is individuals, I mean at.
At least we know how to connect with or communicate with the people once we get to them right.
We’ve just kind of created these shortcuts to to save our minds the the, the nuisance of of remembering those additional data points.
But where? Where I find things crazy is the younger generation that’s growing up with technology and almost this inability.
To even conduct the most basic of social norms or social routines, and you know whether it’s dating or even just individuals that are friends with one another, they’re almost living this entire existence that is.
Completely divorced, perhaps from what someone like yourself might have experienced personally, just because they’re, you know, I you said 41.
So I’m going to guess your your you know you saw the let let’s say the Internet and cell phones and all those things largely probably came into normal use somewhere you’re you’re probably.
I would guess in high school, maybe college, but kids that are, you know, three years old with the iPad, their entire existence is essentially moulded through that, that digital interface and it’s going to it.
I I almost feel.
Like the digital side won’t become an extension of the person, but the person in the future will become the extension of the digital, if that makes sense.
Invictus: Well, that’s the goal, right? Like the Satanic goal of enslaving humanity and so you’ve got this dilemma where, you know, I’ve got young kids.
Do I let them use a computer so they know how to use a computer and they’re not freaks? You know, amongst their peer group, or do I say no? You’re never using a tablet.
You can have a phone when you’re 18.
I don’t care what the world thinks.
I’ve chosen the latter person.
You have older kids too, where I tried to do that and you realise, like you’re you’re one man against the entire world and their mother, by the way, who thinks that they need a cell phone because.
How are we gonna get a hold of them when they get out of ROTC or they get out of their band, practise or whatever? You know? How are they going to call us and tell us they need a ride home? Well, yeah, there’s no pay phones anymore.
How are they going to do that? So the entire world has been geared towards cell phones.
Entire world is now geared toward this election.
Like like interconnectedness between us and you can’t survive without it.
So you know, I’ve got young kids now and I just try to keep them out of that matrix for as long as I possibly can, which is easy in a traditionalist Catholic school where everybody is on the same page about that.
But.
Yeah.
For people who don’t have that, I don’t know what the answer is quite honestly.
Ian: Well, and it all of these things, it goes back to where we were a little while earlier in the conversation about this idea of of of nuking technology and I say that not in the literal sense for the folks that want to get me suspended.
But but just getting rid of some of these technical wonders that are perhaps just as societally.
Constructive, if not more so than they are actually societally beneficial.
Invictus: Yeah.
Which again I think is most things you know in in the practise of law for instance.
It’s very convenient for me, like I’m at the office right now.
It’s very convenient.
I could file a motion right now, like just get on the E portal file.
The thing.
That’s great, because I remember when I first started practising law, I would have to go physically into the courthouse and put 3 copies in these certain paper bins and it was just it was a process and you have to go obviously during business hours, you missed the time the clerk of courts close, you’re done.
You missed the deadline and now I’ve got, you know, till 11:59 PM or I could even sneak it in before 8:00 AM tomorrow.
Everybody gets to the office and it’s like, yeah.
I technologies obviously made my job a little more convenient, but at the same time there are so many things that have gone horribly wrong, like the explosion and litigiousness and lawsuits and just, you know, zoom hearings and all these unnecessary things and.
You know, you don’t even see your colleagues anymore at the courthouse, which, you know, a double edged sword.
Paint.
There were the days pre COVID when all the lawyers had to go into the courthouse for the stupidest thing that you’d have a pretrial day hundred 200 lawyers being the same courtroom, waiting for the podium for 30 seconds and you were in there for hours, you know, and now post COVID.
Well, we’ve got zoom.
Hearings technology is advanced.
You can all show up here.
You can do your work at your office.
But.
You know, I like that, but at the same time, I’m also not press and flesh giving FaceTime with the judge.
I’m not, you know, talking to my colleagues in the courtroom.
I’m not meeting new clients at the courthouse like that technology, which is so convenient, has in a lot of ways destroyed the person bill aspect of the legal profession.
So everything about technology comes at a steep price.
Ian: I fully agree with that and the double edged sword I do sincerely believe that you know as beneficial as let’s let’s say the dating apps right as beneficial as they may be in terms of helping individuals get connected to one another however we define.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah.
Ian: Connected quote unquote, and while there might be some individuals that have healthy relationships and maybe get married and have kids as a result the damage.
Of that, you know it’s it’s, it’s.
It’s kind of like saying, hey, the nuclear bomb is really great because we won a war and sure, like maybe the other people surrendered.
Invictus: Hey, mass integration is.
Really late because look at the, you know, Indian restaurants we get and I can I can get Turkish food at midnight.
Look at that.
Mass immigration.
What a what a great thing.
Like, yeah, there’s a there’s a horrible.
Ian: Indeed.
To it.
Yep, you might.
You might I might get literally stabbed walking down because of the dangers of modernity as I try to get the food.
But if I’m able to get it, it it might be slightly better than the ones the.
Other ones.
Invictus: MSNBC ******, who was like, I hope Trump supporters are happy that the price of guacamole is about to double.
Dude, I could Christ of guacamole could quadruple and I wouldn’t bat an eye if it deports all these illegals.
God bless.
Ian: Well, and on that one, I mean what’s it’s interesting because.
What you just said, I think takes two things.
Number one, it takes somebody that’s willing to examine a situation and say what are the pros and cons of what’s happening.
If you then are able to critically think about it because the media won’t do that anymore right there.
The media is just pushing the narrative that they want and they’re getting people to fixate on the things that they like them.
So to think about so first you have to be critical and willing to say I’m going to think this through independent of what the big guy on TV tells me.
If you then arrive at a point where you say this seems societally detrimental.
Mental you then have to go through the next hurdle, which is determining that you’re willing to say that out loud in different of the fact that you will get slurred merely because everybody else that’s asleep at the wheel has been programmed to not only tolerate something that’s societally dysgenic, but also to be a naysayer towards anybody willing to speak out.
Against it.
Right.
So so the amount of of you got to jump over both of those hurdles and do it with complete indifference to the slings and arrows that you’re gonna get while you’re doing it?
Invictus: Yeah.
Yeah, I I’ve been rather callous about that whole thing for years.
Uh, and not just because you know of, of all the horrible things that have happened to me where I’m like.
You know? Come on, bro.
Like, you can’t.
You can’t lose a job like you, can’t, you know, take this one hit because you said something controversial.
You know, I’m.
I’m callous in that sense, but more in the sense that like we’re in America, you know, you’re not getting killed for it and I, even before I went into politics, I would think like.
The First Amendment really is just a like a safety valve.
You know, you allow free speech for everybody, and they just complain and complain and complain and complain so they don’t actually do anything.
You know, when you have the days.
Where? Your speech against the crown would get you put in the tower and executed.
Then you better be damn sure that what you are saying is something meaningful.
I think a lot of the problem we have with this quote unquote free speech movement is that they want to use free speech to be irony Bros to just talk trash.
About whoever they want to talk trash about, they just they just wanna say nonsense to like troll people to to just be controversial for the sake of being controversial.
Their words ultimately become meaningless because there’s no consequence to no real consequence.
I mean, you’re not going to.
Now you know, there are obviously exceptions to that, like I may be going to prison next month because of Charlottesville and the Torchlight rally.
But by and large, you know, people talking in the Internet, they’re not going to prison for things that they’re saying on the Internet with no consequence at all and I, you know, sometimes I yeah, obviously I love free speech, but I think does it cheapen speech when there’s no consequence to what you’re saying? Like I think you know I.
Have this long standing personal grudge with Nick, Flynn says.
Because you know, he he criticised me for being Pagan and at the time I was, you know, offended by it, challenged him to a fight, whatever else and.
You know, looking back, he he was right to criticise me as a Pagan.
I get it.
But yeah, at the time I was like, alright, you want to talk trash on the Internet? I’m going to challenge you to a fight and you can come back that up and his response was to put out a video like, I don’t know why people take me here.
I’m just a comedian.
Like, I don’t mean anything I say, which means makes, you know, raises the question.
Well, why does anybody listen to what you say, if anything, coming out of your mouth? Is a joke.
You don’t mean anything you say.
Then why is anybody listening to you? Why are you holding yourself out as some kind of thought leader that has always driven me nuts? So having no consequence to what you’re saying, like it’s kind of is a great thing and you know, it’s great that we have this marketplace of ideas.
But at the same time, it really you got to think.
Is it cheapening what you’re saying? I think about that a lot.
Unknown Speaker: Actually.
Ian: You know, and it’s it’s interesting.
So and this is not a Fuentes slight and I often, you know, I see some of his stuff here and there, but I’ve I’ve in totality I’ve probably not seen an hour worth of his his because I understand he does daily videos right and I say this not to in any way to critique or or and damn.
Or what? What? Not I just haven’t paid attention to it, frankly.
But I do see things from him.
I think a lot of them are.
Valuable, right? I think he talks about things.
I think he addresses, especially when it comes to the JQ.
I think he he has highlighted that in a way that few have with a voice that’s as as prominent as his.
But when you talk about humour, I do 1000% agree that if you infuse too much of that.
Into political commentary.
Uh, you then have this this kind of get out of gaol free card that was used by Jon Stewart.
It’s it’s it’s been popularised by him and it’s now used by tonnes of people on the left.
John Oliver being an obvious example where what they will basically do is to throw 10 different statements at you.
Invictus: Oh yeah, right.
Ian: And all ten of them will be political in nature and if you catch them in one or two or three that are just completely incorrect, they’ll say, oh, it was a joke.
The joke it’s not.
Unknown Speaker: Yeah, stop being so.
Invictus: Serious all the time.
It’s just a joke.
Ian: Yes and there’s a very interesting exchange with John Stewart and he was talking with Tucker Carlson and his other Co host when he did that show Crossfire and in this exchange, it’s so fascinating because they’re going back and Jon Stewart is just mocking Tucker Carlson for his.
His appearance, his haircut, his bow tie, all the other things and then there is this moment where Tucker catch.
Him and really puts him in a corner and he goes.
Jon Stewart goes well.
I mean, my show follows puppets making prank phone calls like it’s for fun bro and then immediately tries to hand wave off any and all the critiques and it’s it’s it’s so it’s so weak and it’s it’s frankly and look I think Jon Stewart.
Invictus: Exactly.
Ian: Despite disagreeing with him on a lot of things, I think he has put a pretty good foot forward talking about some issues when it comes to the vets and other things.
I don’t think he’s a bad actor necessarily.
I think he’s just on what I would label kind of the wrong team, but that type of behaviour.
I I find really effeminate when when you have this this continual get out of gaol free card, this continual pivot that you rely on because it it a masculine frame when it comes to talking about serious issues is the willingness to acknowledge when maybe you’re wrong and to understand where you may may be wrong.
Why you may be wrong and then to reevaluate the position to just be able to hand wave off the critique and just move right on with the conversation, is it? It’s just really weak.
I find and so I don’t love that.
I don’t know if Nick Fuentes does that a lot, but it it is a critique that I seem to see floating around the net pretty frequently.
Invictus: I’ll be honest, I don’t know if it’s something that does a lot either because I just don’t watch Nick Fuentes.
But you know there, there’s obviously a place for humour and I crack jokes all the time.
But you know, you know when I’m joking and you know when I’m serious about something, you know, when I have a position that I’m defending and you know, when I’m just like that was an offhand.
You know there there’s never a time where I’m going to be like, bro, why are you taking me so seriously? I’m just joking around.
Just a jokester.
I’m a joker like that will never come out of my mouth like that.
That’s never going to be a defence of mine and so I think a lot of Jon Stewart’s just one example.
Yeah, but a lot of these guys.
Like you think of Bill Maher, Bill Maher is a comedian.
He’s a talk show host.
He cracks jokes all the time.
But I’ll tell you that Bill Maher ain’t going to sit there and say, well, I’m just a comedian.
Don’t listen to what I say.
Bill Maher is serious and he’s cracking jokes, but he’s making actual points.
I don’t.
I don’t think he tried to weasel out.
I I think you know someone like that.
He’s actually pretty honest.
In in the Bill Maher sort of way you can be honest.
But yeah, anyone on our side like you said, Jon Stewart, maybe Bill Maher, they’re batting for the wrong team.
I think anyone on our side that does that sort of thing like, no, I don’t take me seriously, bro.
I’m just an irony, bro.
I don’t actually mean anything I say.
They should be just immediately exiled.
Why are we listening to them at all? They should start a comedy programme, you know, make videos.
Murdoch.
Murdoch made great videos and they never did anything, you know, shady or gay? I mean that they made great videos and everybody knew they were making videos.
They’re making statements in those videos, and you took it for what it was.
That’s they.
They never tried to back out of what they were doing.
So I think if you’re going to make art, if you’re going to make social commentary like that and funny stuff like that, then let people know that’s what you’re doing.
You’re not pretending to be a thought leader, you know, political movement leader while trying to back out of everything you say.
Ian: Well it it is and on Bill Maher, it’s interesting because.
I do find that there are.
There are some folks that are in the spotlight that I find more interesting than others and I think while there’s been a lot of stuff that Mars put.
Out that I.
Find, you know, maybe gross is the right term and I do note that he seems to come from a similar group that that often is very, very, very over represented in a lot of these things.
But but I yes, the Chinese are everywhere.
They aren’t everywhere.
God, it’s so it’s so insidious.
They are just like.
Invictus: Chinese.
Speaker 6: Arguing there control our government.
Ian: You walk around in Washington, DC, there’s just Chinese restaurants everywhere and the politicians, it’s just the CEO’s.
Speaker 6: Everywhere.
Invictus: Citizens between America and China, Can you believe that the Chinese citizens in our Congress? It’s incredible.
Ian: I see lots of lots of the politicians with the US flag and the Chinese flag right next to it on their lapel.
It’s it’s ever so calm.
It actually is pretty insane when you see the the, the, whether it’s a congressman, a senator, a governor when they’ve got the Israeli pendant or pin on their lapel, it’s it’s.
Invictus: Or they’re very rare.
IDF uniform to work at the House of Representatives.
Ian: It’s pretty sure you wouldn’t see that anywhere else.
Invictus: Yeah, they’re out of control.
Ian: It is.
It is pretty remarkable.
But but I suppose maybe to to open this up and I say this cuz we got a lot of a lot of folks that are are coming up here some with their hands.
Up like Pierce, I see captains got his hand up.
Invictus: Was that what that means? OK, I’m like, this is my first time on someone else’s space.
I usually just do my own podcast from restream.
So I never actually.
I’ve never seen this screen.
Ian: Yeah, they’re.
OK, now.
Now.
Are you OK? So so is actually before we go to the hands and we’ll go to Pierce first.
But but before we do, do you wanna share a little bit about some of that work? Where can people find you support your efforts outside of of Twitter cuz I mean, like you said you you’ve been referenced by Fuentes.
Right.
You’ve been famous in a number of different kind of points in your life across different channels.
Do you want to kind of share some of the work where people can find you, how they can support some of your, whether it’s the, the book that you want to disappear or or some of the content you put together going forward?
Invictus: Uh, yeah.
I mean my my Twitter is obviously Emperor and victus.
Uh, my YouTube, I don’t know.
You just search Augustus and victus.
It’s my channel.
I do the podcast, crime and punishment there.
Which is all just legal commentary, really.
I’ve I’ve destroyed all of my social media so I don’t have a Facebook.
I don’t have an Instagram, don’t have Snapchat.
My the same spiritual director that I have, the priest who did the exorcism, he also convinced me to just axe all the social media, you know, because we we tell ourselves it’s for marketing, it’s for business and it’s not like you’re just you’re using Instagram to look at chicks.
You know it, so stop fooling yourself.
So really Twitter and YouTube, where I do the uh podcast.
That’s really all I have publicly people for legal reasons.
I always tell people do not message me on social media ever about, especially about a an important thing.
My e-mail address is invictuspa@protonmail.com.
That’s the easiest way to get a hold of me.
You can find me in Orlando.
My.
I mean, look, I’m looking at it right now.
My profile, my address is on there.
So you can mail me there, you know, plenty of ways to get a hold of me.
Ian: But it and it is it’s.
It’s so wild like this goes back to that social media thing and the Internet in spite of all of its vices, the fact that we can have a conversation with somebody like yourself, that has been.
Published produced across all these different channels and to be able to have this medium where we can have this conversation and to have individuals that can come up from all over the world and to listen or directly engage with the.
Really is.
It’s pretty spectacular and I’m just always so humbled by and thankful for folks like yourself that are willing to kind of carve out time and just just converse with the world.
Right.
Just throw things out at the wall.
So.
So really, really, really appreciative of it and with that, let’s let’s maybe ask some or open up the floor to some questions.
Here I’m I’m kind of curious.
Dominic, do you wanna you wanna throw anything into the fire here before we go to Pierce? Or if not, we’ll go down there.
Speaker 9: Well, hi, gentlemen.
I’m going to be honest, man.
I kind of got in here a little bit later into the interview.
So I, I mean, I heard a few base takes and some things I liked I liked, but ultimately I kind of got in here a little late to give you to give you any real true feedback.
Invictus: How about the things you didn’t like? Would you hear? Let’s start with those.
Maybe we’ll talk about them.
Unknown Speaker: Oh.
Speaker 9: Well, honestly, you should ask the people that have been listening the whole time because I like I said I got it.
You’re kind of late, man.
I apologise.
Unknown Speaker: Earlier.
Invictus: No.
Ian: Problem and and.
For what it’s worth, it it’s.
It’s neat for the two of you guys to connect as well, I guess is if you’re not familiar.
Domino’s been doing a lot of work with not only Owen Shroyer also worked a lot with Alex Jones, some other really big big folks in the space and.
Invictus: So that, yeah.
Ian: He’s just always a wonderful mind contributor and also a connect and so if if ever it would be helpful to try and get connected into that portal, you know he he’s just a wonderful individual, always goes out of his way for folks that that we kind of bring into these spaces but.
But let’s get on to Pierce and see if he’s got a question for you.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Thanks for the MIC, Ian.
It’s my first time up in one of your spaces here.
It’s kind of been a long time listener now, a big fan of your spaces and I gotta say that you bring forward a lot of interesting topics.
I I agree with a lot of what you have to say and some of what you have to say.
I disagree with, of course as well.
No, I just wanted to comment on what you guys are talking about about technology and what you’re kind of getting at is, is technology inherently bad or is it like kind of inherently evil? I, I would say it depends on the person using it or who’s necessarily.
In control of it.
Right, like these smartphones, they can definitely destroy a person’s life.
If you’re on there, Instagram throwing, you know, scrolling through booty pics, stuff like that.
Right.
But if you use it as a tool of learning or even like a storage device for your mind, I think it can greatly enhance your cognitive abilities or even, you know, your ability to learn things at a much accelerated pace.
Right and kind of a, you know, analogy.
I’ll, I’ll, I’ll.
I’ll make up here.
The contractor right and back in the day, I’m sure people were way better at putting in screws with a screwdriver, right? If I were to go head to head with the guy back in the day, putting in screws with.
The.
Screwdriver.
You know they’d smoke me.
They pulled me like 2–3 times as fast, but now we have drills and I’m going to smoke buddy with the.
Screwdriver with the drill, right? And it’s the same way with these smartphones.
Like you said, Homer, with the Iliad, could remember the whole Iliad, but outside of the Iliad, how much more knowledge did he really have? Right where nowadays there’s so much more knowledge at our fingertips, so much more to learn, so much more to know that we can’t remember every single little detail.
Every little thing.
But we can store much.
Like many more concepts in our minds, make references to those concepts in our computers or phones to recall, you know, the finer details of those concepts, right and that’s how I use this technology to benefit my life and to learn more and stuff like that.
So yeah, again, it’s, I don’t think it’s necessarily.
Evil or bad, it comes down to the person who’s using it, and then it.
Also another way you can look at it too, who’s in control of it, right, like there’s some technologies.
That I think.
Are bad right now, because the people who are in control of it are bad, right? Where if we were able to get rid of those bad people in control of these certain technologies, you know, they they might be able to use for the greater good.
So yeah, just that’s that’s basically all I wanted to comment there and great space, great space guys keep up.
The great work.
Invictus: True man.
Yeah.
I was a philosophy major when I was in undergrad, and that’s what my bachelor’s degree is in and one of the key distinctions is analytical philosophy.
Versus continental philosophy, you got existential philosophy got all these different branches, right? And in analytical philosophy they talk a lot about the extended mind or at least they did back when I was in school and they would talk about, you know, like notepads or books.
I mean, these are extensions of your mind, and you can always reference them.
Right.
So you have people like Thomas Jefferson.
They would have these common books, and they would write all these quotations and they would reference them for life, and they would go back to these books.
All the time, Thomas Jefferson had a very famous one, and Hamilton had famous common books.
Hamilton’s common book on law actually became like a textbook for law students in New York.
So these these are kind of the concept of that extended mind and of course that came to include computers and it it is very much a real possibility that you know, with everything Musk is doing that extended mine may become literal when they start putting chips in people’s mind.
So it’s not to necessarily a new concept, it’s just I’m very wary of things that are.
You know, technologically based and that that kind of take away from the natural order of things.
You know it’s a lot easier to control a common book or even to to editor or curate common books or publish them or don’t.
You could burn your common book, you know, and no one will ever see it again.
Whereas the chip man, you’re you’re opening a Pandora’s box there and I, you know, you’re you’re right.
There’s like a neutrality of this technology.
It’s not inherently good or inherently evil.
I think of a sword.
Right.
You could use a sword be a brigands, go rape women.
You know, Rob stores.
You know, kill children like you could just be a *** ** * ***** and have a sword and just, you know, cause mayhem.
On the other hand as.
Word in the hands of Perseus will kill Medusa.
A sword will kill an oppressor.
A sword will liberate a city.
A sword will kill the Hydra.
You know a sword is the symbol of Constantine, of of Christianity.
St.
Paul, I mean.
The sword is an ultimately excellent symbol.
You know, a sword is the spirit of of a man.
I mean, we name our our swords so it could go either way, right? But when you have something as out of control as like an atom bomb or a hydrogen bomb or.
The Internet.
Like you’re in a different world of possibilities, of good and evil and so I’m just always very wary of that and as far as your point about who has control.
Yeah, that’s always the issue.
Right and there’s that, I think the first Iron Man movie was excellent before they went all MCU on everybody and there was a point where the bad guy.
He’s talking to this tribal leader and he’s like, you know, technology was always your weak point here in the world and we control the technology.
We, the West, you know, we control technology and that’s why the entire world is subject to us.
You know, just as the world used to be subject to Genghis Khan because he had horses and bows and arrows and.
You know every society advances these technological developments and weaponry, and right now we are on top and we want to maintain that control.
But again, you lose that control like.
You’re in a world of trouble.
So we lose control of the Internet, we lose control of rockets, we lose control of drones and you know what? If China gets this technology like, you know, it just keeps escalating to this horrible situation.
We should never been in in.
The first place.
So that’s my.
Position on technology in a nutshell.
Speaker 6: Well, I would argue that we are out of control of it.
Ready that, that, that I think is is a is a long discussion that you know we can probably have another day.
Invictus: Touché.
Yeah, that’s a good point.
Ian: Well and I think it’s interesting and that just I think I’ve already arrived at what’s going to need to be the Part 2 Emperor and Victor space because I would love to focus specifically on this concept of technology with you through the lens of Ted Kaczynski and the Unabomber.
They brought him up uh briefly before and I mean, his manifesto is it’s dystopian in a way that perhaps Orwell or Huxley were and I mean, we could.
We could talk about, you know, that manifesto in of itself for an hour or two.
We could talk about, obviously the man and some of the things that happened with it.
The the one question that I’d have before we get on to captain is do you think there’s any possibility? He I mean, he and we can talk about this in much more detail in the space on this subject.
But I mean obviously he was part of MK Ultra.
He was a lab rat for them.
He was a guy with an IQ probably somewhere up, maybe near even Bobby Fischer, right.
One of the smartest people probably the last 20 or 30 years.
Is is it at all possible that he was framed or or do you think he 1000% just went off his his rocker, went into the woods, sent the bombs, did all of those things like is, is there any possibility in your mind that you think he was just such a threat because of the things that he thought and that he wrote about and that he was trying to advocate for that? That maybe he was set up or is that just a completely crazy conspiracy theory?
Invictus: Well, I wouldn’t say completely crazy.
Like I said, I’ve seen a lot of crazy things, man.
But I will say I think Kaczynski was the real deal.
I don’t think that he was framed.
I think you know, if you read industrial society in his future, there’s a very chilling line.
At the end of one of the sections where he said in order to demonstrate these truths to you and make these truths known to you, the public.
We had to kill some.
People.
It’s like a very sobering line like.
Look these and you got to.
Think.
These ideas that we know of as Kaczynski’s in industrial society in the future, we only know them because he essentially blackmailed the New York Times and Washington Post into publishing this thing, saying I’ll stop bombing.
If you publish this little thing right here and that’s how we know about these and that’s how he was caught was because his own brother mentioned noticed the line.
You can’t have your you can’t eat your cake and have it too, which is the real way of saying that phrase and so the FBI came up with this whole forensic linguistics, like new science to.
Basically not frame him, but like look, we’ve we’re making up this new area of silence so that we can prosecute the Unabomber and so, yeah, I don’t think it’s it’s correct that he was framed, I think.
We only know about his ideas because of the bombings, and we only know it was him because his own brother ratted him out.
When they when the writings themselves were published.
So he is a very well was they rest in peace a very.
Complicated guy like you said a super genius.
He was in the 4 runner programme the MK Ultra and they did evil things to him.
But I also don’t think it’s it’s fair to say that he went mad and started killing people because, you know, just that one line about in order to make these truths known to you, we’ve had to kill some people.
It shows you.
He really did think these things through.
He didn’t just, like, have some emotional.
Reaction and start massacring people and when you look at how he mailed these bombs, I mean he was taking buses like cross country in in these crazy patterns like with mail.
I mean the whole process of this he didn’t get caught for 20 years for a reason.
So I don’t think it was like some emotional disturbance necessarily.
I think he just had this plan and this plan of revolution and of targeting industrial society and the people he felt responsible for doing it, like computer engineers and professors that we can’t put the pieces together because we’re not on that same intellectual plane.
We we just.
You know, unfortunately, just don’t know everything about his motives and when you’re in a place like he was and I don’t mean like mentally, but like, physically you’re in AD Max.
Like what are you going to say? You know everything you say there is monitored everything you write.
Is monitored.
Even when you’re talking to your attorney.
They’re watching you on the camera.
You have to cover your mouth to talk to your own intern.
I mean, how could he possibly, like, explain it? Yeah, I killed so and so, because.
He’s in charge of this computer programme and this is representative of this in industrial society, like we’ll never know, we’ll never know what was really going through his head.
But I just don’t think that he was just a madman.
No way.
Ian: Yeah.
No, I, I, I would certainly agree with that final take about not being a madman and I mean, I arrived at a similar conclusion the, the behaviour is certainly indicative that I like the way that you phrased it, right.
We we know it was him because of the writings and we know who he is to begin with because we found out that the writings were him.
Essentially.
Invictus: Right.
Ian: Is very, very well stated and the wildest piece perhaps about that is that were it not for the bombings to your comment, nobody would have ever known who he was.
Nobody would have ever read his manifest, which really is it’s it’s shockingly accurate while being very, very dystopian.
He certainly made some points that I think at this point we look back and recognise were irrefutably accurate predictions on the future.
But but again, if it weren’t for.
Invictus: Taxi.
Ian: You know him making the decisions that he made and doing those atrocities that he did, that work would have probably never been seen by more than a half dozen people and.
Invictus: Yeah, I mean, he could have published it in some obscure, you know, right wing periodical and 1993 and no one would ever see it and now everybody knows about it and it’s a sick way that it came about, but like.
You know, that’s.
I won’t say they’re copycats, but like, that’s a lot of this phenomenon of we have mass shooters manifesto comes out because everybody knows.
You know, that’s the most effective way to get out your message and I’m obviously not advocating that.
I don’t think that’s a good thing.
I just think that cynically looking at it from a realistic perspective, everybody knows you want your message to get read like you could either build your Twitter to 1,000,000 people and.
You know, people will discuss your posts or.
You could massacre a bunch of people and they’ll find what you’ve read and think.
What the hell is wrong with this guy? How did this happen? Ohh, because industrial society has destroyed humanity.
That’s how this happened.
So theologically speaking, he had a thought process as dark as it may have been.
Ian: Yeah.
No, it’s it is and like I said, we’re going to have to do a whole space on that and dive into that writing because you know, certainly familiar kind of superficially with all of it.
But the pieces around technology, I really dove into a little bit there, but I think there’s probably a lot of people that are familiar with the man, maybe have heard about his manifesto, but don’t know much about it.
I I think a lot of people would be probably interested in that.
Let’s get down to to captain and then we’ll go over to to real truth or for some questions.
Speaker 2: How do you in great space tonight? How’s it going there, Augustus? Salve.
I I hope you’re doing well.
Yeah.
You know my brother.
Hey, we’ve talked outside of these spaces before.
I won’t get into it now, but I’m glad to hear you’re doing well and.
Invictus: Savvy.
Speaker 2: I’ll get that.
Invictus: Thanks.
Speaker 2: Yep.
You, you got it.
So I actually had a question for you, but now it’s almost like it’s Providence that I followed.
The gentleman who spoke before me because I wanted to tell some things, being somewhat of a classics major is.
The in ancient Greece, the Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey was that was recited by a Bard, and I know you were saying, what else does he know? But this gentleman had to remember every line in that story and would travel each month to a different city in Greece and recite.
Both books from memory.
So if you can imagine the power of the mind to be able to know that many pages that many lines of poetry and be recited on cue month to month, to month to month.
Yeah, it it.
It literally is a pointer at the decline of the human mind and where it was at its summit.
You know, that bar might not know much on carpentry or fighting in the field, but man, the mental powers of that bar to be able to remember that whole book and recite it.
Second of all, I wanted to bring up and if everybody in the space, if there’s one thing you could do.
Right in your life.
Read this article.
I think it came out in 2008 by Nicholas Carr.
Is Google making us stupid AKA alternative name? How the Internet and Google Keep us in the shallow? And and if nobody’s read this article, please read it.
It literally talks about the dumbing down of the human mind being so reliant on the Internet search engine, or just even watching TV in general with the six minute content and then four minute commercial span and how it fragments your attention span no longer.
We did go into the library for four or five hours.
Augustus, I know you’re a lawyer and study for the Lsats and go into a deep dive where you’re literally putting on the scuba gear in the mind and going way down and getting deep into your your topic and learning the facts and so forth.
We’re fragmented.
You spent about 10 or 15 minutes and we had enough.
I got to take a break.
So just wanted to point that out and August this to my question originally for you.
Is out of your experience because it’s so interesting what you’ve said.
What made you decide to get into law school at the time you did so I yield.
Invictus: All right.
So let me ask you first, I want to turn the tables on you here.
When Homer was trout or the Bard, any bar before Homer wrote it down, they were travelling city to city doing these recitations.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
Were they singing the Iliad and Odyssey were these books sung? Where they simply recite it like we would expect someone to recite poetry today.
Speaker 2: You know, it’s interesting because Greek translations has unique terms and there’s much more to what the English offers us, but from what I’ve been told, it’s singing, there’s enthusiasm about it, there’s up tempo, there’s down tempo.
So yeah, there was a lot to it than just simply regurgitating.
Yeah.
Invictus: Yeah, yeah and I just regurgitating the words, but like, there was a whole action to this thing like a Greek chorus and.
Speaker 2: A performance exactly.
Invictus: It’s a ramp, yeah.
Interesting.
Yeah, that’s that’s intense, man.
When you said is Google making us stupid? What was that person’s name? Something car? Was it Nathan Carr?
Speaker 2: And Nicholas Carr.
Invictus: Nicholas Farr.
Speaker 2: It came out in the Atlantic, I believe, around 2008.
I was actually in school taking a class.
Our our professor had us read this and I instantaneously.
Was enamoured.
I literally dove into this thing because there was a couple of other articles he had us read and it just it hit right to the core of what we’re talking about.
Technology.
There’s a meme out there with a bunch of.
Let’s just say under 24 year old kids walking up to a payphone that would think was pictured and maybe Friday the 13th, the original one that came out in the 80s where there’s a Rotary payphone and they’re like all three of them are looking at each other and it’s like, how do we work this thing? So it’s just it’s funny.
Invictus: True.
Well, I’m going to read that to answer your question about why did I go to law school and at that time so.
Man, it’s like Nietzsche said, you have to be a barrel of reasons to remember all the reasons you did things.
I remember being a pharmacy technician.
When I was younger and the pharmacy was raided by the DEA and I was just a nobody kid back then, man and it just destroyed my life and I had a family.
I had a wife and four kids at the time, and I was just so personally affronted by this that I was like, I’m going to go back to college, I’m going to go to law school.
I’m going to go into politics and I’m going to destroy the DEA.
There’s like a Quentin Tarantino vengeance arc.
Looking back on it, the DEA really did me a favour by getting me on this trajectory to where I am now.
I still hate the DEA.
I think they do evil things.
But you know, that was my original impetus to go back to college, to go to law school, to go into politics.
Even when I got out of law school and went into politics, I still had this vendetta against the DEA, and I ran for the United States Senate as a libertarian and my entire MO was burned down.
The DEA and all this other stuff.
Speaker 2: I remember that brother.
I remember that.
Invictus: But at the time, you know I, like I said, I was an undergrad in uh, in philosophy.
So as a philosophy major, you can really only do two things.
You can get your pH.
D in philosophy, or you can go to law school like the only two career avenues you have and I already determined I’m going to law school, so I still am glad with the decision that I made.
Speaker 2: Awesome brother, thanks for sharing.
Invictus: Yeah, 100% man.
Speaker 2: And God bless Charlottesville.
Invictus: Ohh thank you.
Ian: Well, and love that we we see some familiar faces in these spaces from time to time.
Reconnecting people love to see it and with that let’s go to to real truth or.
Speaker 7: This is a real threat.
Ian: My my apologies, real real threat go forward.
Speaker 7: When this hit went down today, when you hire a junkie to do your work, that’s.
How it looks? And that’s really it.
Invictus: Have they caught? The guy yet?
Speaker 7: He’s just a degenerate.
People wanting people gone, man and I hope all you guys realise that and they do sloppy work.
Invictus: Well, I mean, I just learned about this before we came along as I was in court.
They and I was waiting for the space to start and saw this blowing up on X and I’m like what happened? And I remember hearing at the courthouse that the CEO had been shot on the streets and then seeing that it was a, quote, unquote, professional hit man, I’m wondering, like, have they caught the guy?
Speaker 7: See.
Invictus: This guy got away with a with a hit in broad daylight and nobody knows who he is.
I.
Mean that’s pretty good.
Speaker 7: The problem with everything that people just seem to agree with.
Is that we have video cameras everywhere, especially New York, NY’s a big city, but.
Speaker 9: Yes.
Speaker 7: You’re going to be seeing if.
You do a crime like that, especially against a big CEO like that.
But it was sloppy.
It was paid for and people want people gone and appreciate having me up here.
I’ll talk to you guys later.
Invictus: Sure, ma’am.
Thank you.
Speaker 2: If I can, if I can add something to there, some people that I know that are professionals, this hit was very sloppy.
It was handled.
If you look at the way.
He kept on trying to.
It seemed like he jammed the gun.
He actually got a lucky shot in the chest that actually killed him.
He didn’t get a headshot in.
So yeah, I just wanted to add that in.
Ian: Well and the and I’ll tell you, one of the crazy aspects about this, if I’m not mistaken, this is this is the second very, very high profile individual murdered in San Francisco.
I think it was.
Oh, God, I can’t remember the name of the company that he was from August.
It’s not sure if you do, but I wanted to say Uber, but I don’t think that that’s correct.
But but they had they had somebody in San Francisco, one of the billionaire tech guys, just about a year ago like that got stabbed in front of his home, if I’m not mistaken.
Invictus: I might have missed that one, honestly, that’s why.
Speaker 7: That’s really because no one really cares anymore, and people won’t stick out for other people and just let corruption just go and it’s very disappointing in life to see that because no one knows right from wrong.
You know what I mean? Like, it’s just like, oh, well, let’s go.
Unknown Speaker: Please.
Invictus: Yeah, well, especially in San Francisco.
Ian: Yep, and it was.
It was.
It was cash.
Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App a, a billionaire tech executive, stabbed out front of his home just in San Francisco, just so.
I just say it because it it really is unbelievable because you’ve got all these big.
Speaker 7: That that OK.
Ian: Tech billionaires? You’ve got of course, a bunch of companies that have their headquarters in San Francisco, most of which are are rapidly liberal.
They’ll go out and talk about the benefits of all the changes in San Francisco as.
The homelessness goes through the roof.
Drugs go through the roof, people are defecating on the sidewalk, homes are being broken into the tech.
Billionaires are being stabbed in front of their homes and we’re still told by these same elites that everything’s getting better.
It it really did.
To the comment that was just made there by real threat, it really almost does.
Feel like Gotham City in a sense, where it’s becoming such a disconnect between the elites and the average citizens dealing with the fallout and the consequences of their insanity that you know you you were talking earlier.
Invictus about the Punisher and Batman right? It it almost feels like we’re we’re seeing that and there is I don’t know if it’s just the nefarious indifference to the suffering of the people or if it’s a genuine despising of them.
But the people at the very top seem completely unwilling to recognise the horrors.
They are bringing on their citizenry and their cities that they’re kind of lording over at this point.
Invictus: Yeah.
You know, I don’t.
I don’t know if it’s like a hatred of the lesser people, I really think.
These guys genuinely believe this.
You know, they genuinely believe that the more immigrants you have, the better.
Like these same people out there.
They’re members of the Sierra Club and they’re pro environmentalist, and they’re out talking out that side of their mouth and at the other side of the mouth they’re talking about, we need millions of more immigrants.
Not having any thought about the environmental impact that that’s going to have and I’ve I’ve.
I remember, you know, JD Vance, his hillbilly elegy, when he’s talking about like, I know these people and they’re not as bad and he’s been given interviews since being nominated for Vice President too.
He’s like, look, I know these people was on Tucker talking about this.
I know these people and they’re not like evil masterminds.
Ian: Right.
Invictus: They’re just, it’s banal.
It’s a lot more uninteresting than that.
Like, they really believe these things, and they’re just unexceptional people, and they really just, this is the consequence of their apathy and their ideology.
Ian: I couldn’t agree with you more on that and it it’s it’s wild because it it goes back to this idea of viewing the political ideology that they subscribed to, not through this lens of pragmatic realism, but rather through a religious attachment to it.
Right.
It it sincerely is a cult, and whether that is driven by, you know, either ignorance to the reality of their their belief structures or to something perhaps more nefarious.
I actually believe it’s a combination of the two in the sense that people at the very top know that it’s going to be destructive.
They just don’t care and the people that subscribe to the ideology, they’re just absorbing what they hear based on the television and social media and all this other stuff, and so they’ll, they’ll continue nodding their head along and, you know, parroting the lines, so to say and the people at the very top that are orchestrating this.
So that if they use those emotional levers, you know, on immigration, they’ll talk about tearing apart the families, right and use all these other pleas at the heartstrings because any amount of common sense can can get somebody to look around and say, you know, I don’t think bringing 40 million illegals into the US in a five year period is a good use of time.
So it it, it is remarkable.
Speaker 7: I was just wondering everybody’s opinion on what happened in South Korea last few days.
Invictus: I mean, I’m not, like, a South Korea expert.
I saw a thread on it that seemed pretty convincing about how the president used to be a prosecutor and the President under whom he worked had tried to basically strip the prosecutor of his powers because they’re going after the wrong people.
Is this whole story of corruption? This former prosecutor ends up becoming president, and then.
He’s trying to resurrect these prosecutions that the previous government had gutted and so the leftists impeached him for it, and or they started to talk about it, and he he instituted martial law, which was apparently a very bad move because no one in the public supported it and so he, I guess they did bring the articles of impeachment last I heard and it’s just a corrupt mess and don’t worry though, it’ll be here in America next year.
Like if.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Thank you.
Speaker 10: One thing I lied is that they’re also the opposition was considered to be cozying up to north.
So North Korea.
So yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, more than me.
So I’m just going to add that.
Can you elaborate?
Invictus: Yeah.
Yeah.
So the opposition is leftist, right? So this guy in power net? Well, I don’t know if he’s he might be out of power as of this afternoon.
I don’t know.
But the guy who was president this morning, he was part of the Conservative Party, so the opposition is the leftists and they are accused of being anti state.
They’re leftist, they’re Marxist, they’re the communists, they’re aligned with North Korea and so it’s like this existential war between the leftists and the right wing in North Korea and the right wing just got a major blow today, apparently.
But yeah, I mean, you know, even.
Before this, what’s that?
Speaker 10: The force is over.
Special forces took over.
They.
Yeah.
The guy is not in charge anymore.
Invictus: OK.
Well, there you go, that’s the update.
But you know, even before all this happened, you know, I was friends with a Korean girl when I was in college and she gave me the lowdown on Korea and Koreans don’t see themselves as North and South Koreans.
Apparently they just see themselves as Koreans then.
So it was only the to them.
It’s like, inevitable.
One day there will be a Korea.
It’s just, how’s that going to be so? You know, if it all becomes a Communist Korea like, well, that’s Korean business I guess.
But, you know, back then when we made that line, we were in the.
Middle of a.
Cold War and So what we’re going to do, we have the policy of containment, and these are the consequences of that policy.
Speaker 2: Hey, Gus is before we go to break and if you shoot me a follow back I for reasons I won’t say on here now I won’t get verified on ex at this time but if you follow me back I can send you a direct message with the link to the Nicholas Carr article and some other.
Info on the boards.
Invictus: Just did buddy.
Ian: Well and with that if if if anybody wants to come up and ask a final question to Augustus if if not certainly excited for the next little go around here, we’ll certainly get that on the books around Kusinski.
If you’re up for that and victus would love to have that space and.
Unknown Speaker: Just.
The.
Speaker 6: I don’t know.
Ian: And this.
Invictus: If you were aware of this, but I was the actually the.
Guy that did the audio book for that.
Ian: Wait, what? You gotta tell us more?
Invictus: So.
Yeah, I was.
I never.
I mean, it was on my YouTube channel, but once it got downloaded, like I didn’t have my name on it or anything.
So it was just like I would get people sending me these memes with clips from industrial society in the future and apparently the zoomers got a hold of that audio book and started making memes of.
You know, chicks being in the guys that are listening to industrial society in the future was my my voice.
So my kids being zoomers, they got these memes and they would show me and it was just it was a riot.
But yeah, that was that was me.
So I have a very dear place in my heart for that book.
Ian: Well and I saw that sanguine just came up.
Did you have a question for Invictus?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Thanks for letting me speak here.
Augustus, this is the guy.
When you did your YouTube YouTube live stream.
UMI was the username you wouldn’t pronounce, but uh.
Speaker 6: Gosh.
Invictus: Well, Sanguine Soul makes a lot more sense than the other word.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but no, no question.
Just wanted to offer my support and.
Unknown Speaker: And so.
Speaker 4: You know best of luck to you.
Invictus: Oh, thank you very much man.
Ian: And I love it.
We we always get the most positive if energies in these spaces I’ve, I’ve I truly feel so.
Humbled and blessed for for the community that we’re building here and it’s it’s it.
It has nothing to do with me.
I I am merely A conduit to minds like yourself and Invictus.
I I’ve really loved this conversation.
Learning about you, your, your, your past, your present.
When it comes to the future, I know that you you mentioned that you.
Have deleted and scrubbed a lot of those other social accounts, but anything that’s kind of on the horizon that you’re excited about that you want to kind of share with the larger audience or or kind of final remarks here that you want to make before you close things out.
Invictus: I don’t know if I’m excited about it, but I feel like I am compelled to write a version of the confessions like Saint Augustine.
Like the story of my conversion to Catholicism.
So I mean, there is a draft and I’ve I’ve talked to a couple publishing companies that are willing to do it.
I just and I’m like I said, I’m not excited about it.
It’s not a book I want to publish, but that’s probably the next thing that’s coming out.
Just don’t know when, I don’t know.
It’s going to be before I go.
To prison or after I go to prison, we’ll see.
Ian: Well, and on the prison side and the literal or figurative use of of of that any anything that the audience could do to support in those causes or in the effort on the book front just cause I know we’d all be excited for that.
Invictus: On the book front, no, I don’t have a publication dates.
I mean, I have publishers who are willing to publish the thing, but I’m really not happy with the book and I don’t know what would make me happy with it.
Maybe an ayawaska retreat? Maybe.
Maybe that’s what’s.
Next, but right now it’s just kind of like this is a thing that I really need to do and I just can’t bring myself to do it, but it’s going to get done and I’ll let everybody know.
Ian: Well, let’s let’s go to annihilation.
Who just raised their hand, and then we’ll we’ll get some final remarks here.
Speaker 10: Thank you.
Yeah.
You know.
From an authors perspective.
How did you? Initially you know.
Uh, basically end up.
Speaking your mind out of to a level that we all just.
Yeah, like you’re speaking for us in a in a sense.
Like, how did you come up with that? And I mean, cause that I know there’s a lot of people that they just feel like.
They’re at that level too.
They just didn’t write about it, you know? And and So what? What would what would you say that you did different? From these people like that just never wrote a book, wrote the wrong book.
You know, how did you do it?
Unknown Speaker: Apps.
Speaker 10: What inspired you with things like that?
Unknown Speaker: That’s.
Invictus: That’s a good question.
I mean, I’ve written, I’ve written a handful of books, I’ve I’ve written many books.
I and I think the dividing line is.
Do you have something that you want? Everybody to know like, do you have some message that has to get out there? You know before gaol and my conversion and all of that, I had this.
Just.
Just this unstoppable need.
Speaker 10: Do you like duty bound?
Invictus: Like.
To what?
Speaker 10: Rebound.
Unknown Speaker: Yes.
Invictus: I’m sorry, I was kind of breaking up there.
Speaker 10: Were were you duty bound? In a sense, like you just had to *******.
Say the truth.
You just you just knew it.
Invictus: I don’t think it was even duty.
It was more like a like a like a drive, like an inner compulsion like it this these things have to be said.
You know, I have this message that has to get out and right now I don’t.
You know, I have this book that is the story of my conversion and I’m just like.
I don’t know.
I’m not the guy to be talking about Catholicism.
Like.
I just don’t feel like that’s my.
Place and I’m I’m the worst convert in the world.
Like I am.
You know, anybody reading the story? My conversion is going to think I’m grifting.
I’m pretending to be Catholic.
I just don’t have that same drive to do it as I did for, like, writing this story about my pilgrimage to the desert.
Right.
Or, you know the.
The political books that are like the compilation of speeches that I made when I was running for office, like those things, were very much.
Like.
I was called to do this.
I was called to make this campaign to say these things, and I’m going to publish them and it was a very adamant sense of that this, so that your question about like, what divides the person who’s done these things but doesn’t want to publish them from the person who does publish them.
I think it’s just the sense that these things have to be said.
The world has to know these things.
This has to be done.
If you don’t have that, I wouldn’t even call it a confidence I would call it just a.
A A divine mission.
If you don’t have that sense where like the world must know these things, then you’re not going to take the time to sit down and write the book and go through the.
Hassle of publishing.
It you have to have that sense that everybody needs to know these things.
So I’m going to get this.
Done no matter what.
That’s the dividing line.
Speaker 10: And I’ll just end it with.
Would you say having a family? Did.
It really affect like did that was that the final line basically if you have to do it because no one else is doing it and you need to say the truth.
Because no one, no one knows saying the truth, you know, and you want your family.
At the very least, to hear, to hear you speak it, you know.
Unknown Speaker: Yeah.
Invictus: Well, in a sense, yeah, I mean, you want to be able to look your sons in the face, right when they grow up and you want to tell your you want your sons to.
Speaker 10: They’re like that.
Invictus: Know I did.
I.
Everything I could on the other hand.
Everybody in this game knows.
It takes away from your family.
You know, there’s a line to walk where? All the time that you spend on politics all the time you spend on law all the time you spend on public life, it takes away from time with your family and so a lot of people do not want to do that and I fully understand that.
Speaker 10: Against the machine, it’s.
Invictus: Yeah, I mean, you’re you’re subjecting your.
Your children, your wife to the torches of that machine.
You’re subjecting them to scrutiny from strangers, just rejecting them to death, threats and hate mail and you know, kids at school talking trash about them.
My kids, teachers, every.
Everybody knows who my kids.
Are.
There aren’t many Invictus running around.
Everybody knows who I am in town, so it’s not like you know.
Speaker 10: I believe you’re a man of honour.
Invictus: Well.
I try to be I mean.
Speaker 10: At the very least, just remember that you know.
Invictus: Well, thanks, man.
But yeah, there’s there’s a.
There’s a line to walk if you’re going to have a family and go into politics or or even writing or something public mean, you’re going to be putting your family in some level of danger.
Something to keep in mind.
Speaker 10: Like you know, if I was the king, I would give you the, you know, I’m not gonna give Bill Gates a knighthood, right? I’m not ******* that sort of king, but I tell you, you’re a man of honour and you represent us as a people like and what you did was righteous, you know.
That’s all that you need to remember, I guess and that what your family should remember about you when they grow up is they need to remember.
You’re right.
You’re an honourable man.
Now.
There’s there’s no greater honour, honestly than than that.
Invictus: Thanks man.
If something happens to me, just tell my kid that, please.
Speaker 10: Yes.
They’ll I think they’ll hear it.
You know, sometime in the future.
Invictus: Thanks ma’am.
Ian: Well, and I would have to concur with that and I say it just because Invictus, if there’s one thing I’ve noticed throughout the space it’s it’s your.
Humility in and willingness to examine.
You know yourself, your past, your present, your ups and downs, trials and tribulations, and to discuss them honestly and to be really vulnerable with them and I know that for some to use that term might sound effeminate or something along those lines, but I don’t think there’s anything that’s more masculine and that’s more indicative of strength than the willingness to sit back and say this is who I am.
Take the good, the bad and the ugly.
But I’m going to give it to you as it is and if you think about.
That idea of being vulnerable again? Maybe it sounds effeminate to suggest that that’s that’s strong or strength, but what do we associate physically with a strong man? We think of somebody that walks with their shoulders back and their chest proudly out and the reason for that is because it indicates that.
You.
Feel that you are not vulnerable.
That’s the entire reason that that posture is perceived as as strength.
It’s because you’re proud enough to stick your chest out, right.
The alternative of that is the person that’s hunched over.
They’ve got their hands in front of their chest right there.
That’s a defensive physical posture and we recognise that and so.
To be able to be out there with your chest out, literally or figuratively, as you’ve been to say, this is me.
Feel free to take shots at it for my past and my mistakes and all those things I just find it really admirable.
Invictus: Thanks man.
That’s touching.
Thank you.
Ian: Yeah.
No and let let’s go.
We got one final question here from lightning and then we’ll come back to Invictus for some final remarks.
Speaker 8: Cool.
I I’m just going to say invite this.
I appreciate the work you’ve done over the years.
Just, you know, publishing stuff on your channel.
It’s helped me and I will, I will say you have helped me and some friends of mine at some point.
I will also say that crime and punishment is an amazing.
Broadcast.
Invictus: Oh, thanks man.
Thank you.
I saw your your picture.
I thought that was Francis Parker.
Yeah, it is.
OK, I thought that was you first.
I was.
Speaker 8: Ohh.
It is.
Invictus: Like, hold on.
A second.
Speaker 8: It was kind of.
Invictus: Yeah, Francis, Burger, Yaki and I went to the.
Same law school.
Yeah, he’s a I named my first law, my first law firm.
I named it imperium after that.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Invictus: Look.
Speaker 8: Yeah, because, uh, I mean, it’s like I’ve heard him over the years and I still only read him like, oh, this guy’s.
Actually kind of very much interesting.
Invictus: Yeah, yeah, I like him.
He, you know, a lot of his work was rehashing Oswald Spangler and one thing we didn’t get to talk about in this programme was was Karl Schmidt, who was obviously a big influence on on Yawkey and probably.
The greatest you know, aside from Nietzsche, maybe the greatest philosophical influence on me.
I mean, Carl Schmidt destroyed my entire life like I was in International Criminal law.
I was in academia like I did.
I’d be in Europe right now, like just living the dream.
If it weren’t for Carl Schmidt, I read that and just destroyed my whole worldview to set me on this path.
Unknown Speaker: Ohh.
Speaker 8: Here.
Well, it’s an honour talking with you, man.
Unknown Speaker: So.
Invictus: Thanks man.
Thanks Becca.
Speaker 8: Doubles and doubles on your conversion too.
You know, I listened to you when you were like into, like the weird, like, uh, Pagan stuff and it didn’t bother me well.
Unknown Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker 8: Religiously, it bothers me, but you know, I knew you were smart guy.
Invictus: Well, thanks for sticking with me, Bill.
Ian: Well, and I’m sorry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just want.
I just wanted a second.
Sorry and I just wanted to 2nd that crime and punishment is an amazing podcast.
If you guys want to learn about the law.
Check it out, read it.
It’s taught me a lot.
Yeah.
Just giving you a plug there, brother.
Invictus: Thanks man.
I’ll have to.
I haven’t done that show since the summer, so I’m I had a girl asking me about it earlier this week.
I’m like, yeah, maybe I’ll try to do it this week.
So now I feel like I’m guilt tripped into start restarting it now.
Ian: Well, let’s go back to lightning.
Speaker 8: Ohh yeah, and then the case regarding Church of the creator.
Unknown Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker 8: That hell.
You you’re you’re going to talk about Matt Hill at one point.
You know, that might be a good topic.
Invictus: Well, it’s time we got it.
I mean, I’ll, I’ll say you know, just from a legal perspective.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Invictus: No backing up from a personal perspective like whatever you want to say about Matt Hale or his case or, you know, whatever the Church of the creator, whatever you got to say.
OK, you have to know like that guy is just another breed like, and I mean in a good way.
Like this guy, you know? Again, whatever you think about his case and how he got there, he was like, they essentially doubled his sentence.
He was sentenced to 40.
Yes.
Years been in AD Max.
He’s been in Terra haute.
I mean, he’s just been put through the ringer.
40 years.
This guy and he just.
I’ve never seen anybody that just keeps fighting and just keeps fighting all all the time.
I mean, he’s just.
It’s an incredible inspiration for somebody who’s just the.
Whole world is turning against him.
He’s in the most hopeless situation and he just keeps fighting.
It’s it’s incredible, honestly.
But you know he it’s a.
It’s a dark tale because you know, I remember, you know, before ever talking with with Reverend Hale when I was just a, a mere law student.
Must have been my like, my second year.
Maybe my third year of law school.
His case is used.
As a case in the legal ethics classes, and I went to law school in Chicago, you know, Yaki also went to the poll law school.
He transferred to Notre Dame.
But yeah, you know, I was at the poll and one of the cases in the legal ethics class is the case of Matt and the point that they’re illustrating in that case is you do not have a right to practise law.
Practising law is a privilege and if you have these horrible worldviews, we’re not going to let you in the bar.
You’re not allowed to to practise law if you know the entire legal profession doesn’t think you’re of the character.
Practising law.
That’s the cautionary tale and then when you get to his.
His his legal trials.
Far after that, I mean that’s that’s a whole other can of worms that.
Yeah.
We just, we don’t have time for tonight, that’s for sure.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Well, Illinois is.
It’s a little.
Bit like East Germany.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 8: Well, never, never consent to anything that is, like, illegal on the.
Internet.
Invictus: Yeah, you know, that’s one of the things that Doctor Duke advised me on long ago.
He’s like, you know, anything that anyone comes at you with that is even remotely illegal.
You cut them off immediately and you never speak to them again.
You have to be cold blooded.
Speaker 8: Nice.
Invictus: About it.
Yeah.
Like you were in a public position.
Where people are going to come at you with weird things and they might, they might be feds.
They might not be feds.
They might be setting you up.
They might not be.
They might just be ********.
Whatever.
They’re.
Speaker 8: They’re just.
No, they’re trouble.
They’re trouble only.
Invictus: Yeah, they’re trouble in one way.
So you know the guy that they set up, Matt Hale or or how did they get to Edgar Steele? Like, you know, you cannot be put in that position, whether it’s through stupidity or it’s they’re just bad luck or they’re actually trying to set you up.
You have to be.
The.
Cognizant of that, you have to cut that off immediately and just be cold blooded about it.
Yes, probably the best advice I’ve ever gotten in this whole politics game was from Doctor Duke.
Speaker 8: That’s amazing.
Invictus: Yeah.
Yeah, he’s.
He’s a great guy and I.
Yeah, we can talk about him too, but, you know, I got nothing but positive things to say.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think I have, like I may disagree with certain things about him over the years, but he’s definitely probably one of the more intelligent like original movement guys.
Invictus: Yeah, yeah, I read his my awakening back in law school and I was like, hold on a second.
This is this is David Duke.
This is the.
Guy that’s uh.
You know, is Satan and Carnett that that whole period after finding Carl Schmidt and having my whole worldview of the international order turned upside down.
That’s what was my original red pill and it led me to reading my awakening and reading mine comp and reading everything that I was like, hold on a second.
Let me get to the bottom.
Of all of this, because of this guy.
You know, if this guy is telling the truth, then and they’re lying about all this, well, then what about this guy? What about that guy? What about this subject? And it just it’s a cascading.
Disillusionment with everything in the world.
Speaker 8: I like a lot of the videos Zoomer historian puts out because that was kind of like how I got red pilled like I was reading a tonne of World War 2IN European history.
You know, particularly Germany and then certain things like, wait a second to the this this party in the 1930s.
You know, isn’t it? Just seems like German nationalism.
Like what?
Invictus: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Invictus: Yeah, it’s funny that the rabbit holes you go down, that’ll be the red pill.
You know, for me, I was working on a paper with my professor who was a mentor.
It was for a paper that he was writing on the law of war.
I worked for the, you know, the International Criminal law scene, and he was writing this paper, and he had quoted Hobbs on something and I was like, no, that’s wrong, that there’s no way.
That’s what Hobbs said and I had to go.
I’ll track down the original Leviathan in Latin at the Northwestern Library, and in that whole search for the original Hobbs in Latin, I found Karl Schmidt.
Like, it’s just the weirdest, like.
You know way to to get into something.
So, yeah, somebody sees a video on YouTube and that sends them down that path.
Like whatever it is.
I know you can’t.
Speaker 8: I probably would would have been in and cap because somebody handed my dad a book like, right after Obama was elected, called the creature from Jekyll Island and you know J.
But you know it it’s it sets the seed where you’re being beginning to think like, wait a second.
Invictus: Oh yeah, heck yeah.
Speaker 8: Having, you know, banking and stuff like this might not be the best thing for a society.
Ian: Lightning have you? Uh, have you gone down and truth teller always recommends these two, which is the creature Jekyll Island and then also the history of central banking by Steven Goodman.
I don’t know if you’ve read that one.
It’s.
It’s also exceptional.
It basically gives you the history on how let’s just say the creature that came out of Jekyll Island had been used and reused for not just hundreds, but for thousands of years going back to Rome and it was the same consequences over and over and over again and curiously, it’s.
Often pointing back to the same group of people.
Chinese.
Invictus: The Chinese, they’re acting it.
I’ve never heard of that book.
I’m on it though.
I’ve.
Ian: Written it down.
Yeah, the history, history, central banking and the enslavement of mankind.
The crazy.
Speaker 10: I don’t know Chinese like do you know? About the Jews.
Ian: Part is creature Jekyll island.
You can still get on audible.
The history of central banking.
I had to go to to eBay to get you, can’t you? Can’t find it anywhere except there.
But.
But I got a second hand copy of it and it’s it’s fantastic.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Invictus: Interesting.
I’m on it.
Ian: Well, let’s go.
We got one final speaker here.
Let’s go to James Perry and see what’s going on over there, and then we’ll we’ll go back to Invictus for some closing remarks.
Speaker 5: I know I think it’s I think it’s been a great space.
I I’ve actually learned a lot here and.
I didn’t.
I’m I guess I’m one of the ignorant individuals.
Who? Who didn’t know who, who Augustus was and now I know and so I’ll go out and I’ll, I’ll start doing some some research of my.
Own.
About several of the topics that I’ve heard, but I wasn’t in the space for a long time.
You guys were just about to close just before then, but I really, really appreciated the remarks because I’m one of those individuals who still believes that that law is very much.
Common sense and I understand that it’s more complex than that.
But you know, we still have to walk around.
You know, people have to be able to walk around at at some point and have some freedom, right? So.
I.
I just wish that that Lawfare wasn’t.
That it wasn’t so strict on the people, but I still understand why socially we have this ridiculous set of laws within our within our society.
Does that make sense?
Invictus: Yeah, I mean, I wish lawfare wasn’t a thing to by Frank being the subject of lawfare, I really wish it would go away sometimes.
But I mean, yeah, that’s that’s how things have always been right.
Like we were talking about at the beginning of the show, it’s just it’s the eternal return.
This is how it is in every society.
That’s just the fact of life like.
You know, one of the things that I get really amped up about in my my soap box and I’m I’ll get just this righteous anger and I’ll, you know, shake my fist is the Nuremberg trials.
Like the Nuremberg Trials were such a miscarriage of justice on every level.
You can possibly conceive and Victor’s justice is one of those things that always comes up by critics of the Nuremberg trials.
They’re like, you know, you.
Put all these Nazis in the dock and you put them all on trial and I would just as a lawyer, go off on the trial and how it was conducted and the evidence therein.
But leaving all that aside.
You know, you just think of the fact that this is Victor’s justice.
You got these Germans in there.
You’re saying they did these evil things.
You’re putting them on trial for these war crimes.
But the judges are all from countries who did the same things, if not worse.
That’s the definition of victors justice like you got the Soviet Union talking about German war crimes.
Get out of here.
You’ve got, uh, you know, the British who bombed Dresden, murdered women and children, and they’re going to talk about German war crimes.
Is the worst hypocrisy you get and then you’ve got the Germans like paying reparations, war reparations for a war that should never have started and would never have started, but for, you know, Churchill and I would recommend Churchill, Hitler and the unnecessary war by Pat Buchanan for everybody and I also recommend Karl Schmitz.
The concept of the political.
But you you get mad about this victors justice thing and the hypocrisy of it, but.
But then you got to take a step back, right? Because we’re talking about law fair.
That’s how I’m going to thread this in here.
You got to take a step back and be like, oh, hold on a second.
Nuremberg was certainly a departure from, like international law norms, but like, if you look at the history of European warfare, you’ll get mediaeval Lords going to war against each other.
One mediaeval Lord.
Beats another mediaeval Lord.
You better believe that guy’s going to be paying reparations.
He’s paying the victor, you know, to the victor goes the spoils.
Like this concept of Nuremberg and the Nuremberg Trials.
Like, yeah, it just legitimised this new world order concept of.
Well, we have.
These abstract laws rule of law, you know.
All this nonsense like ideological nonsense.
But the actual fact of the matter of having victors justice, of having someone pay not just reparations, but going back even further, paying tribute to a conqueror like these are just facts of life.
So you know, as a lawyer or as a right winger or as a.
You know, just the guy who’s concerned about the truth.
Like you can get upset and jump up and down all you want about the Nuremberg trials and how unjust they were.
But.
You also have to be realistic about the fact that Nuremberg trials weren’t exactly.
The.
Like the first.
Of its kind, like the concept of it has always existed since the days of Agamemnon and before, it has always been the case that the Conqueror, you know, soccer.
Yes, thank you.
It’s always been that way.
Speaker 5: Socrates.
Invictus: So I try to think of, you know, lawfare like, yeah, America is out of control.
Prosecutors are out of control in this country.
Lawfare is evil.
But you also got to think, dude, there’s always been lawfare and it’s always the case that if you’re in politics, you’re going to get it, you know, or you’re going to use it.
I mean, it’s just the fact of being in politics.
So it sucks.
But it’s just something you live.
With.
Speaker 2: Speaking of.
Perhaps the guilty of lawfare should have to drink the hemlock potion after all.
Invictus: No comment.
Unknown Speaker: Yes.
Ian: Well, and look the no comments it’s it’s funny the Speaking of which I think it’s a good thing for us to to touch on real quick before we we wrap the space just because earlier today a poster I can’t remember the guys name off top of my head Steven something if I’m not mistaken.
Uh put up a post that was a link to a website that he puts together in which he announced that he was doxing 4 different quote unquote anti Semites on X.
Invictus: I saw that, yeah.
Ian: Which included the official 1984 Bullseye 9 millimetre, who ironically, 9 millimetres.
He’s pretty politically neutral, he’s.
He’s not nearly as quote unquote radical as the other three and noble who? This is a guy noble had, I think 30 or 40,000, maybe even 50,000 followers when an account got nuked, he then set up a subsequent alt accounts, which he got up to about 8000.
That’s when he got docked and now that account.
In, in the wildest turn of events.
Imaginable.
This other individual docs as these four people, which is against X’s terms of service just as the ADL docs the official 1984, maybe two or three weeks ago.
Again, that’s a blatant violation of the terms of service of this app.
Invictus: Yeah, there’s different rules for them.
Ian: Yep, the ADL still on the platform a A there was a warning label or a community note under their doxing of of 1984.
It was then subsequently removed, curious, and now this other individual has been able to docks 4 people and of all of them.
It’s not the person doing the docs and it’s the person that got docs and noble who has since been kicked off the platform.
His account now shows suspended and I just say it because, I mean, hell, I just put up a post not too long ago, a woman, I suppose she’s attempting to troll my my post and said that Trump’s entire cabinet so far has been all Pro Israel operatives and I then took a screenshot of it and said if I make this claim is is my claim anti-Semitic and the craziest part of all of it is that one of that person’s followers came in and said yes.
It is so.
We see this double standard playing out where right in front of our faces there is a seemingly.
A interest that is able to violate all.
Rules they don’t get, they don’t get punished.
If if we say things that are even slightly offensive, we’re just immediately booted off the platform, and sometimes the things that we can say that are offensive are things that they tell us in a mocking fashion and I say this folks just because, you know, Victor said no comment and on a lot of these things, I’m gonna advise folks that we just say no comment or that you don’t even type a comment there.
Speaker 10: I’ll I’ll comment.
It’s the Jews, alright.
It’s the Jews, you.
I’m telling you guys, that’s what everybody’s not saying.
It’s the Jews always has.
It still is.
Ian: I mean, what I what I can say is there is this double standard and the people that I believe are benefiting from it it I don’t think I disagree with your comment there and when it comes to over representation when it comes to the subservience that I see from the Western European nations and from America towards Israel.
I I think you make you can make a very compelling argument, but my point is we have to stay on this platform, folks.
We’ve got to keep voices like Invictus around, and unfortunately that sometimes means we got to bite our.
The the influx in inflammatory content that and I don’t think it’s just aimed at me.
I’m sure it’s aimed at all of you guys that.
Are aware of.
This pattern there are bots now trolling.
There are 8200 operatives and Mossad operatives that are trolling.
They are going to say everything under the sun.
To **** you off, to upset you, to gaslight you all with the hopes that you you put your foot in your mouth and you say something that they can report you for and it is now blatantly obvious.
That I what’s his name? Andrew.
Andrew Meyer has been stalking all of my posts and all of them.
He throws around the F word and I don’t mean the four letter one.
I mean, the other one that if I post 1000%, I will be suspended from the platform.
There is no part of me that doesn’t believe that.
But he can write it.
Over and over and over again towards me and I just rise above it, and I recommend that everybody follow suit.
Don’t give in to the temptation, it is the it’s the apple in the Garden of Eden and they are they’re going to hold it up over and over and over again and try and get you to just say something.
They get kicked off of here.
We have to stay on the platform because and Invictus, I don’t know if you have the same sentiment, but.
It’s my belief I don’t normally cuss Invictus.
I know that you don’t either, and so, so cover yours.
If you don’t like intensive language folks, we are *******.
Speaker 5: Why not?
Ian: Saying we are winning at light speed right now and they do not know again F bomb.
What the ******* do? Because the more they censor and shadow ban and suppress and manipulate and lie, the more parent it becomes to everybody that something is going.
On and then they start looking into October 7th.
They start looking into all the way back.
Actually to you.
Were you just talking about the Nuremberg trials? And people start looking and they start saying wait a second.
So my understanding of what took place is based on the testimony of a guy whose testicles were crushed under wait.
Wait, huh.
That doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Invictus: Yeah.
Right.
Oh, you just scratch the surface.
Just scratch the surface of the derberg trials and you’ll be like, hold on a second.
Now, wait a minute.
Like, are you talking about, like, an American trial? Because, yes, the prosecutor was American.
I mean, they knew what was going on.
They tortured guys to get these confessions that would never fly in America, not in a military court, not in a civilian court like you tell anybody a single piece of what happened at the Durbar trials and they’re like.
How did this happen? You know, I point out to people like the films that they showed.
At the Nuremberg Trials, they were done by a Hollywood film crew.
You can actually find them on imdb.com and they play these.
This would never come in as evidence in an American trial and the fact that they got away with this at the normal.
Trials should give everyone pause, but.
It’s just taken as a religious article of faith.
That the Nazis were.
Put to a trial in Nuremberg and they had committed war crimes, and that’s that.
I mean, they were hanged for that.
Right.
Like, what is there to? Look into but.
You look into it as a lawyer.
I mean, you have a field day with that.
There have in fact been several books written on it.
I mean, long before I was ever a lawyer like advanced to barbarism, which was written by a British lawyer.
You know several books on this and.
But you’re you’re saying like about October 7th and the sewers thing like people.
See this thing about the sewers in New York and you’re like, what the, what is going on? And eventually it will lead.
As it did for me after reading Karl Schmidt and then, you know, reading everything I could like, eventually it’s going to come down to.
Well, hold on a second, this entire international.
Speaker 6: Order.
Invictus: That we take for granted, it’s based on what is essentially a human sacrifice at the Nuremberg trials.
Like we set up this entire world order on these crimes of war crimes.
These, these wars of aggression.
Like all these things we prosecuted these Nazis.
Or we established the United Nations Security Council, all these organisations, so that this would never happen again and the entire impetus behind it was a lie.
I mean that’s that’s got to do some damage once people figure that one out.
Speaker 10: Thank you for saying that cause my blood was boiling.
You know.
You just said what I you know what needed to be said and that’s that’s one contention.
I I do disagree with.
The host right? I think we need to say what the truth we need to get censored.
We have to just.
Speak out and get mad over getting censored because this is.
It’s just getting ridiculous.
Speaker 8: But do it smartly.
Well.
Invictus: Well, I think what he’s saying is, you know, if you use the F word and not ****.
But like the other F word, that’s like, oh, you’ve violated gay rights.
Speaker 10: Fagot Fagot is the other word for anyone needs to know, ******.
Invictus: Like, yeah, you’re going to get banned.
Like like I posted something about M&M the other day and I used the F word and I got.
I got a post banned on that.
I’m like, are you kidding me? I can’t talk to Eminem.
Speaker 10: I’m going to get.
Bad it’s OK.
But.
Shouldn’t be there.
Invictus: And and use the F word on this platform.
Ian: Well, and keep in mind that when you get those post bans and I can, I can promise you this, I could actually show you statistics cause I ran.
I’m such a nerd.
But the when you get those hateful conduct slaps on a post, you can then appeal them.
If you lose the appeal you can then delete the post which you should always do.
Because if you don’t, it’s like a wart on your account and it will limit your your visibility to all.
Well, but even if you delete it after you delete it, so after you you agree you’re still marked and your your exposure, your visibility for weeks after that happens is going to be greatly reduced.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
But I want to say it’s OK though because because we’re not free, you’re not free.
If if this can happen to any one of us.
What is this mentality of tolerating this ********?
Unknown Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker 10: This this is, you know, we have to lie now to the general public.
Just we can’t even be ourselves and open what is.
But I think I I’m I’m not.
You know that’s there’s a red line has already been crossed at that point in my opinion you know I’m I can’t.
Ian: No, no, no and that, that’s.
Well, and that’s that’s the challenge is that look is that that I and I’m in total agreement with you the thing that we have to do at least in my opinion is to stay on the battlefield and to grow our ability to influence the masses who are completely.
Speaker 10: Live that way.
Ian: They are in the dark on this subject and the way that we’re sometimes going to be able to get there is not by engaging in, let’s just call it more vulgar or crass argumentation, but rather when when there is an example like this where this individual is able to literally docks people, which is a flagrant violation of the terms of service and then they suspend X suspends the person that got.
Docs we need to take the screenshots and to show it to the world and to say if this doesn’t demonstrate a double standard, I don’t know what could and that’s my point is that the more they grip that it’s that since since Invictus and I started with the Star Wars reference the tighter you close your grip, the more the star systems will slip through your fingers and that is what is happening.
They are losing the narrative.
They’re gripping on it ever more tightly and as they do, the truth slips through their fingers, hits the ears of the masses that are not awake to this stuff and that is how we are going to win person by person, day by day.
Yep.
Speaker 10: There’s a reason.
I say this.
Because the way you’re suggesting is you’re a protected class because you have.
You know, you’re basically infamous.
Essentially, according to the Jews, they’re gonna censor *** because you’re gaining too much.
You’re you’re speaking too much sense, essentially and I feel it’s just like COVID.
Like I never wore a mask.
I’m just gonna say that I’ll like and I’m proud of it.
But I’ve always heard from the people you know, you know the working class.
I am.
They were saying I’m just gonna wear one because I want to get along, you know, and not bother my wife or whatever.
Something ******** like that.
Right? But in they were shafting me.
I wasn’t wearing one.
So in their silence, I got shafted.
At the end of the day, we all lost because of their complicity in the crime.
That was to, you know, forced me to ******* wear a muzzle.
It it, I mean, none of these people were standing up for me at the end of the day.
That’s why I say.
Say what you have to say.
Be unapologetic.
No more tolerance.
No more lies.
You know what I mean? Like, because we’re all punishable together.
That’s that’s how we win.
Is is when none of us is going to tolerate any single one of us getting bullied anymore.
That’s what I feel is what needs to happen.
There’s no, there’s not.
You’re not gonna win with half measures in my in my sincere opinion, I felt betrayed by my own people.
That’s, I think lightning has something to say with that.
Yeah.
Ian: We we just.
I’m telling you and that’s the thing I really think that the best posture that we can take, they’re going to come at us with all this inflammatory nonsense.
They’re going to gaslight us like I was saying.
Like you’re saying that it’s it, it’s mockery.
It’s you look around and you see subservience from the people around you the best and this is my opinion.
Right.
Not a fact, but I believe the best thing that we can do is stand *******.
All be ******* proud.
Know the ******* truth.
I apologise for all the profanity here.
Speak it with an absolute indifference and speak it peacefully, but with an absolute in absolute indifference to the slurs that are going to come back and what I mean by that is, for example.
Speaker 10: Name the Jew.
Ian: If uh it every time something came out about the Biden administration sending another billion $10 billion over to Ukraine, I would.
I would just sit there and I would calmly post and I would say Biden’s kids, all married Jews.
Biden’s cabinet is 66% and Jew, Kamala is married to a Jew.
Zelensky is a Jew.
Is it possible that there is a Jewish overrepresentation in Washington that is selling out the American people for a foreign interest question mark? And all these people would come back and you’re an anti Semite and all this stuff and I would just say where’s where’s the air? Is anything I said wrong and they have nothing to say? Hey, because at this point it’s it’s and it’s so obvious it’s so flagrant and so for example, I this woman.
Speaker 10: Because it’s right.
Why this is one thing I’ll say, though we hail you our own as as, as heroes, we hail our own as leaders.
Because specifically because you’re under attack by the Jew that’s trying to censor you because you’re saying all the right things.
So when you self censor, that’s that’s I’m just going to say it’s a mistake.
Ian: Oh, you, we we should never self censor.
Just all I’m suggesting is to to self censor the the, let’s say the colour commentary.
Speaker 10: Right then you lose our support.
Ian: Theory that you would add to a truth that comes across and makes it an inflammatory statement, right? So for example.
Speaker 10: We’re.
We’re here, man.
We’re ready to *******.
I’ll.
I’ll ******* get censored next.
It’s my.
Whatever.
It’s my turn, you know, I mean.
Unknown Speaker: Hey.
Speaker 2: A better way to think.
Speaker 10: I’m just saying, yeah.
Speaker 2: Of it is is side by side shield wall and Ian, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this.
I was.
I happened to drop into a geek site to the other day and then.
Talking about the algorithm and if you can for people who follow me and everybody in the space save the space however you want to bookmark it.
Like it and retweet it or requote whatever you want to do, do all three.
It’s like a home run hit and you make somebody like Ian and his voice, such a proponent on acts where they don’t want to delete him or squash him because he’s got too much of A following.
So I just want to add that there there too.
Speaker 10: That’s a good.
Yeah, lightning.
Lightning’s been trying that.
Ian: Yeah and and.
Speaker 10: For a while.
Speaker 8: Ohh yeah, I was just saying, you know, sometimes be small.
Well first of.
Well, you know, I think we already covered this like, you know, don’t don’t say stupid stuff and then you know, probably avoid certain types of people and you know, obviously.
I mean it’s it’s generally libtards and Zionists, I would say like don’t don’t do stuff around them.
But like for example like at my church I’ve, I’ve interacted with quite a few people who I get.
I was kind of surprised how kind.
Invictus: Of.
Speaker 8: Closer to our sort of policy.
They are.
You know what I mean? So it’s like it’s it’s also kind of small stuff like for example, I was talking with a guy I knew about Churchill.
I also know another guy from uh, let’s just say a part of the world where, you know, the suffering of our people is particularly bad, you know, be.
Be another important thing is to sort of be normal, but also speak the truth.
You know, to kind of balance the two, you know like.
I I think Duke was was particularly good at sort of like you know.
Putting out the message like, particularly in the 2000s when it was like, really like, you know, the movement I think was like in a bad spot.
You know what I mean?
Speaker 10: I guess really what I want to drive in here is that you don’t get a free ride once you’re at the top.
You gotta keep continue to speak the truth.
To the power.
Which is.
It’s obviously Jewish power.
We all know this.
You got to.
You got to keep it going.
Otherwise you’re not going to have our backing.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 10: And and we’re here.
We’re we’re literally here.
This is why you’re there in the 1st place, right? We’re supporting you is how you got there and that’s why I’m saying continue the fight because we got your.
Speaker 8: Tell the truth, don’t be.
You know.
Take the risks you you think you know, like, like if you talk to somebody and they’re like, you know.
It would be kind of hard to explain, but like you know.
There’s sort of like.
Closer to our sort of worldview, you know, you can definitely, you know, just be like, oh, yeah, you know, there was all the stuff about Churchill.
Was true, yeah.
Yeah.
Get that conversation.
Yeah.
Speaker 10: At Churchill, you know, just go listen to Hitler.
What he thinks about Churchill.
Then you’ll find out who Churchill was.
Ian: Well, or you could just go back pre war and you could read Churchills writings on the Jews.
I think it was on the soul or the spirit of the Jewish people.
Very interesting article talking about how he believed that Zionism and Communist Jews were a great threat to the global peace of the world at large.
Kind of curious that that little tidbit is left out of history books, along with the fact that in Churchill’s writings there’s.
Curiously, there’s almost no message.
In fact, there is no writing in his history as well as in a number of other famous historians of the time.
Their their literary works don’t have any mention of a curious aspect of World War Two that is basically the aspect that everybody’s taught about.
It’s it’s rather strange that some of the.
Most prominent world leaders of the time in their own writings.
They seemingly left out that piece.
What’s this? That’s very strange.
Very strange indeed.
It it it might it.
It might also explain why there’s some other strange truths that came out from something called the Zundel trial in Canada that I recommend everybody look into.
I’m not denying any history.
I’m not making any claims.
I’m.
I’m just suggesting there’s some.
Curious things that that have been left out of the textbooks when we’re taught World War 2 history.
Hey, I didn’t say that I’m going to.
I’m going to.
Speaker 10: The thought never happened.
Invictus: I.
Ian: Deny that claim recorded space, denying that claim.
But I will recommend looking into those things that I mentioned.
They’re they’re curious.
Speaker 2: For you, I have an I have a 19.
Sorry go.
I was just going to say I have a 1946 set of Encyclopaedia Britannica that had bought off, an elder gentleman and I have all the updates for all the years and.
It is until 19, I think it’s 66 or 67 where you get the word Holocaust mentioned in encyclopaedia text.
Just know.
But.
Ian: It’s.
You can also go and you can use the Google Ingram viewer.
I think they call it which scans all books for any and all topics that you want and it shows the prevalence of those topics appearing throughout literary works over the last 100 plus years and if you type in Holocaust, you’ll see it.
Uh, it kind of comes into existence seemingly around that same window.
How? How curious that it first hit the encyclopaedia and then all these books simultaneously and then movies and all these other things.
It’s very peculiar it it.
It would make one scratch their head.
Speaker 10: There’s also the direct.
French there’s also, you know, which was written before Ink Pen was even a thing.
Right.
So that’s another one.
Ian: Ohh the ballpoint pen and Anne Frank that is a cup.
Unknown Speaker: Yeah.
Ian: Very well actually and not only that, there was, there was a court case about the authorship of Anne Frank’s diary, and curiously, that court case made the recommendation that they update the author of the diary that, hey, I’m not denying anything.
I’m just saying that some curious.
Unknown Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Didn’t the official writer? Didn’t he sue to get money or something? That’s.
Ian: District.
Ohh it was a court case.
That’s my point.
There was a court case about it and the comment around the ballpoint pen is.
I mean, seemingly perhaps Marty McFly got into The Time Machine and went back in time and delivered a pen that was.
Unknown Speaker: Not the type of life.
Ian: Used because otherwise it is curious that a ballpoint pen would be used by somebody prior to its existence.
How strange, again not denying anything.
I’m merely merely pointing to some stration.
The other thing on this note, since we’re having this conversation, I just wanna draw everyone’s attention.
The top left of the space I think it will be a kind of under the carrot you’re going to.
See the record.
Icon and I say that because I would highly recommend that nobody ever go into a space that is not recorded and I say that because your voice could theoretically be recorded in those spaces, clipped, taken out of context, all kinds of other things you enter into a space that is recorded, you forever have that record.
So you can say Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope, not going to let you take that out of context.
I think it’s really important to make that recommendation as well, since we’re talking about censorship and suppression, all that stuff.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Ian: But but with that being said, Invictus, you want to you want to add some some closing thoughts here.
We’ve talked about a lot of things kind of going through the wild Adventures of of of Emperor and Victus.
I am excited for that additional follow up space if if if you’d be interested in entertaining that and then otherwise just your thoughts on.
You know, kind of maybe closing remarks and things if you want anybody to take something from this space on on some of your adventures, your learnings from them and maybe things to infuse in their day-to-day.
Any final thoughts would be of interest.
Invictus: Yeah, I guess I’d go back to one part earlier that people might have missed.
I mean, we’ve been here for several hours now.
So you know people who came in late might not have heard that part.
But I think the most important thing you would ask, you know, what would you tell yourself 20 years ago? And my advice was.
You know.
Go to church first of all, first and foremost like God should be the centre of your life.
Focus on your family.
You know if you have one and focus on yourself, not in a hedonistic or like modern American way, but focus on yourself in the sense of making yourself stronger instead of, you know.
******* away your weekends or getting drunk or, you know, going to find yourself and San Francisco or whatever, you know, you should be in the gym and you should be making yourself stronger and you should be learning how to fight and you should be learning how to shoot guns.
You should be learning how to survive in the wilderness like you should be doing all of these things.
That and I have.
Very little advice for women, I suppose, because I’m not one, but most of this is for for dudes, but I think that’s the ticket is making yourself stronger, not wasting your 20s, your 30.
These focusing on your family and getting stronger and God and you know that will.
Surely have you avoiding 99% of the mistakes that I’ve made.
Ian: Well, and I’ll add one more thing to that wonderful piece of advice.
Since you talked about your 20s, I remember being told if if you can take.
10 or 20% of everything that you can make throughout your 20s, you will have a wonderful time in your 40s, fifties, whatever, going for it, right.
It’s a basically an investment recommendation.
I would throw that out to everybody if you can spend like Invictus was saying, if you can spend your 20s for.
Speaker 5: Hmm.
Ian: For any young man that’s in this space, if if you can spend your 20s focusing on your mind, your body, your.
Hear it and I don’t.
I don’t mean to say your bank account from a perspective of greed or vanity or any of that kind of stuff, materialism, but there are realities to the benefits of financial prosperity and the ability to be indifferent to the machine, right, the, the, the most dangerous people right now to.
The let’s just call it the elites are those that are in a financial position where they’re able to be indifferent to the idea of an employer coming to them and say, sorry, you’re you’re you’re being fired right there.
There are.
There are individuals like Invictus that are out there.
They’re able to be independent of that, but unfortunately, if you’re going to work or intend to work for a big company, these are our third rail issues that you’re not able to speak to because if you do and your docs, you’re out of your job 1000% and so.
The idea of having financial stability that allows you to be indifferent to that, that might allow you, like Curtis Stone off grid Curtis, who I have a tonne of of respect for maybe it’s off grid stone I can’t remember.
But but for him to be able to move his family outside of a big city to be out to build their own self-sufficient essentially ranch, I mean that’s that’s an amazing luxury that he can now raise his family, spend time with his wife and his children and be self-sufficient with food that he knows is healthy.
Water that is fresh, etcetera.
These are things, unfortunately that, that there are there are costs and so you know, since since Invictus was mentioning things to do in your 20s, I would just implore everybody, you know, that is a wonderful window where you can take that money and you can apply it to a Starbucks, drink or another beer at the dive bar.
Or you could just say, you know what? I’m going to take even if it’s 5% of every dollar you make and just put it somewhere.
Aside put into Bitcoin, put it into, you know, a Fortune 500 company stock like wherever you want put into the bank.
You’re gonna get maybe 4% APR.
Or whatever it is.
But just but just try to save in your 20s I’d.
I’d highly recommend it to everybody, not financial advice.
I you know, I’m the last person to prospectively go to when it comes to those things.
No credentials for that, but I would really just recommend that and implore it cause I think it’s some of the best advice that that I’ve ever heard so.
I threw that out there.
Invictus: Yeah, this is not investment advice.
Just.
Unknown Speaker: Yes.
Invictus: Finally, don’t sue us, right? Yeah.
No, that’s a really good point, man and when? Whenever we give advice on on public spaces, we we never really talk about the financial aspect of things.
That’s a really good point to make, man.
Even on a personal finance level of saving 10%, I’d recommend to everybody.
Ian: Yes, not at all.
Invictus: The richest man in Babylon, there’s a financial classic.
Written in the early 20th century and said you gotta read it and that’s, you know.
Just the starting point for personal finance.
But you know in the right wing there’s like this disease where if you talk about money, you’re a Jew, you’re a grifter, you’re you’ve got some kind of game, some kind of angle.
You know, I’ve.
I’ve done.
A lot of things over the past 10 years that I’ve been doing this and like we we’ve raised money for prisoners, commissary, you know, we’ve raised money for legal funds.
We’ve had publication like, you know, and everybody on Twitter is now getting paid or you got, you know, things on YouTube.
You got super chat so.
Any time that you were asking for money for any sort of project, you’re going to have parasites just crawling all over your.
Comments and calling you a grifter and like I am personally bitter over that considering the amount of money I could be making just as a normal lawyer not doing political cases.
So I took that to heart for a long time and it’s just a disease like a cancer in the right wing that you have to get rid of and because you cannot, as Ian was saying, you cannot do anything without money.
Like to do it you you can’t run a movement on sunshine and hope you.
You can’t build a ranch, right? Just by YouTube likes like you can’t support your family just off of how many followers you get on Twitter.
Like at some point you got to put money in the bank, man and in order not to be.
As vulnerable to doxing as vulnerable to you know, the system coming down on you, you gotta put money away.
Like you gotta save money.
One of the biggest things like.
I mean, I could give advice to my younger self all day about all the things I screwed up.
You know, one of the things throughout my 20s is despite the fact that I’m indestructible, I’m definitely going to be dead by the time I’m 30.
Like, there’s no way I’m going to survive to 30 years old the way I’m living and it turns out I made it to 30 and then I made it to 40 and I had no.
I think.
Nothing saved when I magically made it to 30 years of age and wasn’t dead, so if I could go back and do it all over again, I’d do exactly what he and his advising I’d put 10% away and I’d invest it.
That’s just the prudent thing to do.
You know, prudence is one of the four cardinal virtues.
It’s not grifting.
It’s not Jewish.
It’s not greedy.
It’s not materialist.
It’s simply prudent.
It’s one of the cardinal virtues that everyone has known for thousands of years.
So you got to get your head away from that whole thing.
Like, if you’re thinking about money.
It’s evil and greedy and.
So on and so forth.
It’s just.
A totally self-destructive way to look at the world.
Ian: Well, and on that the if you think about it, if if you’re taking and storing for let’s let’s say a rainy day fund, right, you’re saving for your future, you’re saving and like Invictus was saying, you’re you’re using those savings to invest knowing that it’s going to grow and mature and all those things.
That’s the that’s the antithesis of taking your money and using it to buy.
You know, another night in the globe or another, another jacket or whatever other, you know, materialistic piece of of of nonsense.
People buy right.
Whether it’s a watch, a car, all these things and look, I’m not.
I’m not saying that those things are bad in of themselves, but that notion of prudence and of thinking.
You know, with a slightly longer time horizon, and I think one of the ills of the modern society and we know who is responsible for this, pushes this Yolo ideology, which you see flood social media, right and it was like the buzzword I feel like maybe a year or two ago.
You know, and what does Yolo encourage? Well, it it encourages live for the present, live for the moment, you only live once.
So live right now and if you do well, what does that mean about tomorrow? It means that you have nothing saved.
Nothing stored.
You haven’t braced or prepared for the fact that maybe tomorrow you won’t be able to Yolo.
Because maybe.
The thing that you’ve been doing for work is no longer available to you.
Maybe.
Speaker 10: Drug addict mentality.
Ian: Yeah, it’s it.
It’s if you think about it, the whole what back to Invictus’s comment around the, the idea of saving being somehow Jewish.
It’s like, no, the thing that the machine is trying to get us to do is the exact inverse of that and what that should tell you is that the notion of saving, of being prudent, of being thoughtful for your future and putting things aside.
Is exactly what they fear.
It’s no different than.
They encourage us to be loud and brash, and they encourage the folks that are in kind of these intellectual circles that we’re in to use.
All of this colourful language and say all these hateful things, because then they make us a caricature.
We become like the characters from American History X rather than sophisticated individuals that like.
Invictus are out, literally in the legal field trying to make a difference in the world, trying to share positive messages, trying to make the world a better place and trying to expose the over representation of this kind of demonic force in the world around us and so the things that they want us to not do are the things that we should be doing and we should be speaking calmly and rationally about these topics.
We should be saving for tomorrow so that.
We can find.
Speaker 10: No self censorship.
Ian: Yeah, and no self censorship.
Speak your mind, folks and when they say you’re a bigot, you’re a racist.
Say, look, I just, I’m just presenting some data points.
I’m.
I’m just presenting statistics.
I’m just presenting history, but it is critical that you have the data points, the history and the fact.
X on lockdown because if you list off 10 facts and you say, well, look at all these things and tell me I’m wrong and they can point to two of them and prove that you are well then you just shot yourself in the foot.
So let’s be really informed.
Let’s be really confident in the truth that we speak and let’s be, let’s be confident in our position.
Because we’re winning.
It’s so evident.
Like I said before, they are panicking and every day, every week, every month we pick up a new champion.
Some of them are a little bit more.
Let’s say.
I don’t want to use the term Cox, but they some of them are more so than others, right? We get little truths from Candace Owens.
She leaves out some other things here and there, but then every now and then we get a Danville.
Marian moment, where he goes on Piers Morgan and just unloads, right and he doesn’t have all the facts.
He like some of the things I, I wish he delivered differently, but he’s out there and he’s he’s on our.
Team and every month there’s another person joining our cause who’s like, I think something’s up here, guys and so, so folks be be optimistic.
Be confident.
Be proud.
We we live in the truth and we’ve got folks like Invictus that are with us.
I’m so grateful to him.
I’m grateful to everybody that joined the space that listened in that came up that.
Contributed that asked questions that that made comments in the purple pill.
Folks, everybody out there you are all appreciated.
You are loved, you are supported and you have an entire intellectual and spiritual army that are behind you that want a better tomorrow that are working to bring that about and just know that we are going to get there.
It’s going to be a it it it it’s it’s a marathon, it’s not a Sprint.
But we are well on the way.
We’re we’re.
I don’t know if we’re a mile in or if we’re 10 miles in, but I know that we have a long way to go, but it’s going to be glorious when we get across the finish line and so Invictus, I’ll kind of turn it over to you for some, some little final closing remarks here if you want to add anything.
To that, but again, I do want to thank you so much for being part of this.
Invictus: Yeah.
No, thank you very much for having me, man.
It’s been a been a long time.
So I’ve done an interview that I can recall except with my friend Chris.
Cantwell.
Yeah, I would second the optimism.
I would always point out you have to fight.
You know something that I point out on on the podcast a lot is.
People talk about activism and they want free speech, and they want this right and that right.
But when you, when it comes down to it, you have none of those rights.
If you’re not going to fight for them.
I’ve often made the case that.
You know if if you’re going to get arrested and you’re just going to take it, it’s going to roll over and, like, give up.
Well, I mean, there is a certain benefit to just being out there and doing the activism and so on and so forth.
But at some point, you got to realise if you’re in this thing for the long term, you’re going to have to lose.
You’re going to have to appeal something.
You’re going to have to go to the Supreme Court, you’re going to have to have your life ruined and you’re going to have to come back from it.
That’s just part of the whole process, part of the hero’s journey.
Like we were talking about.
It’s part of the life of an activist part of the life, of anyone who’s in public life and politics.
You.
Or fighting for something.
You want to change something? There are a lot of forces that are going to try to stop you from doing that, as invincible as you think you are, or as right as you think your messages.
That’s never going to change.
There will always be people trying to kill you, put you in prison, destroy your family.
Just something to to look at with sober eyes.
You know, another thing I’d point out in this very regard that everything is a fight.
I had mentioned earlier that I worked for an institute I worked for the international human Rights Law Institute.
If you can believe that was like a fellow had a fellowship at this institute and I told this guy I worked with.
Jewish guy.
Uh.
I told him, you know, when I like.
I had said earlier.
I’m going into politics like I’m only here so that I can go into politics.
That’s what I’m doing in law.
That’s my entire life and he looked at me like.
Are you serious that you you think you’re going into politics and he’s like? Listen, man.
If politics isn’t just about, you’ve got a good idea.
Step on up.
Uh, no.
Politics is a fight.
Politics is not about ideas, even necessary.
I mean, if you’re going to be in politics, I’m not talking about, you know, political theory and being a professor and talking about ideas.
I’m talking about actual politics, where you are vying for power.
It’s not just about debates and arguing with people and who’s right, and your ideas and like, oh, I’ve got a great idea to change the world.
Let me come up here and say it and everybody’s going to, you know, agree with me and tell me how bright I am.
Like, no, you’re going to get in there and they’re going to beat the crap out of you and if you don’t fight like.
You’re not in politics, so he gave me this look.
Like, dude, I don’t think you know what you’re talking about, and certainly, you know, at that time, I did not know what I was talking.
About.
So that’s kind of what I’m advising everyone here.
On is the same thing you know, he had told me that politics isn’t just about sharing ideas.
It’s about fighting for those ideas and if you don’t have the stomach to fight for it and you know, maybe just talk about it, but don’t pretend that you’re trying to get power to actually change things.
Those are two different things.
Ian: Well and that fight for the time being, of course, just advocating for the intellectual and the spiritual fight via via discourse, right, via debate via anything and everything that we can do to bring attention to what appears to be a system that’s clearly corrupted and broken and I.
I sincerely believe on that, that.
That is what is needed.
You know whether that’s online or that is being out in person in your community, sharing these truths, as uncomfortable as that might be.
But there’s no need for.
There’s no need for violence.
There’s no need for any kind of physical confrontation or conflict.
Above and beyond disagreement, which I think there’s always going to be, and I say that folks, because if we can just get 3 to 5% of the general public to be aware of the subversion that is taking place of the culture, the politics, the economics, the central banking system, etcetera.
Those 3 to 5 million individuals, that’s let’s let’s let’s think those numbers through that’s 9–9 something like 15,000,000 people, maybe 20 million people.
I know it’s a lot, but if we can get to that kind of.
Volume.
Then there will be an unmistakable voice in unison.
Saying why is this? Happening and the media won’t be able to ignore it.
The politicians won’t be able to ignore it.
The people running the companies won’t be able to ignore it and then in their tone deafness and indifference to the question that those, let’s say 10 to 20 million people will be asking.
The other 200 million people are going to start looking around and saying, you know, there’s there’s 15,000,000 people demanding a conversation around something and the media and the politicians and the bankers and everybody else is they’re seemingly ignored.
Maybe we should listen to what they’re saying and then it’s game over, folks.
It will be the.
End of this oppressive system, this oppressive regime, and it will be the beginning of something beautiful.
So know that we are on that path, know that we are.
We are taking steps to bring that about and know that every day, every little conversation that you have every.
Person that maybe you don’t awaken, but maybe you get them to at least just like the movie inception.
You get them to kind of scratch their head and think about something for an extra couple of seconds.
That little nugget that you leave with them is going to blossom, and when it does, they’re going to join our ranks, as will all the other individuals that you share these truths with because it is.
Overwhelming at this point that we are fighting the good intellectual and spiritual fights.
So I just want to thank everybody for being here.
Thank you for joining the Space Invictus.
Thank you so much for helping to lead this.
Like I said, everybody, we’re going to certainly be trying to set up another space with Invictus, either for later this month or next.
On kind of that the Ted Kaczynski files, if we can call it that kind of unpack where he was going, why he feared technology and perhaps the OR welding and accuracy with which he did so and so I just want to thank all of you for listening in for participating and like I said, folks just continue standing tall, speaking those truths and never ever, ever back down when you know that truth is at your back and so God bless everybody out there.
Godspeed and as always, good morning, good evening, good afternoon.
Wherever you are in the world.
But God bless to everybody.
Out there.
So thank you so much.