The Zürich Interviews - Darren J. Beattie: If Only You Knew How Bad Things Really Are

What does the US Empire do for the average American? Heidegger. Is hawkishness on China a distraction? The problem with elites. Jonah Goldberg is an ugly man. Getting Mel Gibson wrong.

“Combative”, “spirited”, “fierce”, and “highly intelligent”. These are all descriptions that Darren J. Beattie begged me to use in this biographical introduction when I asked him to describe himself as briefly as he possibly could. A former speechwriter in the Trump White House Administration, he was fired for daring to attend a controversial conference in his past that literally no one on Earth remembers. In a redemption arc of epic proportions, he has returned to work in the Administration as a board member for the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. He will pay for this. Debra Messing is already securing candidates located in various penitentiaries across the country to ensure that he is raped in prison like Donald Trump must be in a display of tolerant, liberal, and morally upstanding sadism.

As a well-reputed Anti-Racist Activist who studied under Ibram X. Kendi, I am, by my highly-skilled training, forced to confront you and your bigotry, intolerance, and racism: You are a Nazi.  You are a White Nationalist.  You are a Jew working against white people much like in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  You trick teenagers into saying online that 'Hitler did nothing wrong', and then blackmail them.  You once gave an immigrant family the wrong directions on purpose for the sake of racial activism.  Every weekend you travel down to migrant processing centres on the Mexican border to deliver new cages for children that you personally build by hand (impeccably crafted, I must concede).

I also resolutely deny the axiom of choice, a position which I'm sure is illegal in at least 7 countries. I won a bet with Grigori Perelman on an abstruse point of Babylonian mathematics and that's why he's never cut his fingernails. I believe William James Sidis should have stuck to collecting street car transfers. I maintained a brief and cordial pen-pal correspondence with Charles Manson as a teen. I am banned from the UK for the HATE crime of having masterminded the purchase of James Watson's Nobel Prize by Alisher Usmanov (don't worry we gave it back to him). I travelled back in time and red-pilled Grothendieck with old Bill O’Reilly monologues. I maintain a vast and expensive art collection consisting solely of works depicting Jonah Goldberg scrubbing my feet. 

The list goes on...

The ADL has condemned the Trump Administration for bringing you back into the fold.  Why would a Jewish organization that fights on behalf of Jews worldwide Anti-Semitically seek to deny a Jew like you employment?  "It's like 1933 all over again", to quote David Frum. Should I reserve a space for you in my attic?

It's a strange thing that the ADL in particular jumped on the issue. I suspect that they had some dog in the fight and calling me bad names was their way of dealing with not getting their way. It's truly a bizarre and evil organization at this point---a big reason the internet basically disappeared over the past 4 years is aggressive ADL lobbying. 

Many people have congratulated me for calling out their disgraced leader, Jonathan Greenblatt, in the New York Times. Jonathan Greenblatt is a hideously ugly man who looks like a human gefilte fish. I suppose he has declared the "OK sign" racist at this point so I'll give him the finger instead. 

Rumour has it that the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad is covertly seeking secret portals to other galaxies and dimensions.  Can you comment on this?

I'm impressed that you've been briefed on the true function of the Commission. Indeed, the Commission was tasked by President Nixon to find alternative routes to space exploration once it became clear that the Van Allen belt was impenetrable by normal methods of human space travel. Of course, much of this is classified and I've already revealed too much...

Darren has had enough and isn’t going to take it anymore!

I love democracy.  I think it is in all of our best interests that everyone, everywhere live under democracy.  There is no greater altruistic act than to spread democracy globally and to smash and destroy anything that stands in its way, whether people, or cultures, or historical artifacts, and so on.  The deaths of millions are a price worth paying so that informed citizens can cast their ballots to choose between the ever-narrowing definitions of acceptable democracy.

I'd encourage readers here to consult 562e to 563c of Plato's Republic for its description of democracy. 

The passage certainly conforms to the Beattie Law of Canonical Inclusion which states that every canonical work contains at least one passage which would get a modern American academic fired.  

Notwithstanding the Plato passage, I think mass democracy is qualitatively different from any regime type that could have been described in antiquity.  Expanding the franchise simply has the effect of enhancing the political power of the oligarchs and institutions capable of manipulating the masses. Mass democracy in an era of mass media is therefore a kind of contradiction in terms.

In retail political discourse, democracy is pretty much exclusively used in an obfuscatory, euphemistic sense (it is obligatory for Colour Revolution spook NGOs to have "democracy" in the title).

I believe it is in the vital interests of all American citizens that the US Armed Forces teach Feminist Critical Theory to Pashtuni tribeswoman.

Yes, the woke poison has exerted its corrupting influence on every single institution in America, including the military. This is a tough pill that patriotic Americans need to swallow. Just in the way that Tucker Carlson and others have helped conservatives embrace a more critical view of corporatism, we need a similar kind of critical awakening when it comes to the national security apparatus.

If we don't confront China immediately they're going to attack Pearl Harbour, invade the West Coast, and stop us from importing 9 million Indian coders who depress salaries for American programmers. Why do you hate America?

We seem to share some concerns with the way the American right has come to frame the China problem.  It used to be that emphasizing the threat of China was a great way to deflect from the Russia hysteria and, to a certain extent, the obsession with Iran and the Middle East. In that sense the China issue had a sort of second-order, proxy value. Now that just about everyone including the most die-hard neocons like Nikki Haley have jumped onto the China Hawk bandwagon, the position has lost much if not all of its second-order signalling power. 

I fear that now much of the Cold War style China Hawk rhetoric actually detracts from the much more pressing threat to the American people which is the incompetent, corrupt, dysfunctional and perhaps even illegitimate ruling class.

Of course, one can combine China-hawkishness with a critique of the American ruling class by saying that the American ruling class cooperates with the CCP. But even here the emphasis must be squarely on the American ruling class and in practice this often gets drowned out in the performative saber-rattling you hear from a lot of conservative China Hawks. 

I'll put it this way: It is not as though the American ruling class is intelligent, competent, and patriotic on most important matters and happens to have a glaring blind spot when it comes to appreciating the threat of China. If this were the case, it would make sense to emphasize the threat of China above all else. 

But this is not the case. The American ruling class has failed on pretty much every issue of significance for the past several decades. If China were to disappear, they would simply be selling out the country to India, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, or some other country (in fact they are doing this just to a lesser extent). Our ruling class has failed us on China because they have failed us on everything. For this reason I believe that there will be no serious, sound policy on China that benefits Americans until there is a legitimate ruling class in the United States. For this reason pointing fingers at the wickedness and danger of China is less useful than emphasizing the failure of the American ruling class.  The bottom line is the true enemies of the American people are no foreign nation or adversary---the true enemy of the American people are the people who control America.

This way of thinking points to a dilemma for the American ruling class. Contrary to a lot of the rhetoric you hear, much of the American ruling class, including the "deep state" is actually quite anti-China. To fully account for this would take longer than I have here. But the nutshell intuitive explanation is that the ruling class, particularly Wall Street, was happy for the past several decades to enrich both themselves and China by destroying the American working class with policies such as "free-trade" and outsourcing. But in many ways the milk from that teat is no more, and now you have an American ruling class much more concerned about protecting their loot from a serious geopolitical competitor (China) than squeezing out the last few drops of milk from the "free trade." 

Of course, different factions of the American elite still have different attitudes toward China---with Wall Street still being the most favourable and the military industrial complex being the most hostile. The point though is that the American power structure gets that conflict with China over resources, 5G, AI, etc. is baked into the cake. The problem is that America has become such a dysfunctional joke in so many ways that it is hard to imagine it competing with an ascendant and serious China. And this brings us to the dilemma I alluded to earlier: the American ruling class wants to confront China to preserve its loot, but the ability to confront China in a serious way would itself require such dramatic domestic reform within America that this would threaten the very power structure whose loot is supposed to be preserved! 

This bizarre dilemma I think is at the heart of our ambiguous and half-assed approach to China---we'd rather whine about Uighurs and call the Chinese racists, which simply reinforces the fundamental unseriousness that makes the prospect of beating out China in the long term seem rather bleak.

But China is buying up land all over the USA.  How dare they buy land that is offered to them?  The Japanese were buying up all sorts of US land in the 1980s and it led to WW2 in the Pacific.

As Donald Trump famously said "someone's doing the raping." In this case it's our own politicians selling out the country for embarrassingly unambitious sums (adding insult to injury). I blame the American ruling class for selling out the American people before I blame the Chinese doing what is best for China.

Is there a possible and responsible foreign policy that works for the average American citizen and not for giant US corporations?

This is a good question which points to a very uncomfortable position we find ourselves in, at least in America. There is an increasing disconnect between America's stature on the geopolitical stage and superpower status and the well-being of actual Americans. What good does it do for America to remain globally dominant when all this translates to is preserving the spoils system for Jeffry Epstein's buddies and a bunch of multinational corporations that hate Americans anyway? 

From the standpoint of liberty and freedom, one might even argue that geopolitical multi-polarity is a desirable thing. Free-speech doesn't really exist in either China or the United States, but both nations have very different taboos. Multi-polarity in this sense at least allows one to arbitrage these different taboos and have on net better implications for the dissemination of ideas compared to a situation in which either China or the United States effectively reigned over everything. I don't want a situation in which you can't criticize the CCP anywhere on earth; and I don't want a situation in which you can't criticize tranny bathrooms, Black Lives Matter or whatever the latest nonsense is the US State Department is shoving down people's throats. 

Elite Theory of History stipulates that elites drive history, and furthermore, to effect real change i.e. revolution, you need at least a segment of the elites to defect from the governing structures.  What happens when revolt occurs without any elites?  Trump's Populism can be seen this way, in my opinion.

Yes, I agree to a large extent. Many factions of the American ruling class, such as Wall Street, learned to tolerate Trump (and why wouldn't they, after his hires and tax cuts), but he didn't really have a faction of the American elite solidly in his corner. A possible exception to this is the Casino owner Sheldon Adelson and his network connected with the Israeli right---but in the end he ended up doing far more for them than they did for him. 

One of the lessons of the Trump experience is just how crucial it is to have at least a couple of factions of the elite on your side---this, and learning how to navigate and exploit intra-elite factional dispute to one's advantage in order to countervail power asymmetries.

We've seen moves away from Trumpism by people such as Murdoch.  What is the critical failure of the US populist/nationalist right?

There's a lot to be said about this but I want to be careful about post-mortems. To be sure there is the elite issue discussed earlier, and one could fill a phone book with the Trump Administration's unforced errors.  Many will incorrectly infer from this that what we need is a more tempered, sophisticated, civilized version of Trumpism. I think this is gravely false because in almost all cases (there are a few exceptions) what this amounts to is making an excuse to be a pussy. Trump's finest and most important moments were simply from not being a pussy---which is more threatening and powerful than any specific policy issue. The First Commandment is to not be a pussy, and the coherence and sophistication have to be built on top of that, otherwise it's just cope.

Calling Mexicans rapists is an uncouth and in some ways buffoonish thing to do. But to withstand the social pressure and fallout from that and not caving or apologizing...THAT ability is precious, indispensable and an absolute precondition for any contender who would take up the populist nationalist mantle post-Trump. In this spirit, I must maintain that “shithole countries” was the high-point of Trump’s Presidency!

What Needs To Be Done?

Pauly Shore, Crocodile Hunter

"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns.  That's a sea change.  They literally know nothing". - Ben Rhodes, 2016

I call these reporters dunderheads on twitter, because that's what they are; a truly pathetic species. Never once have they had an original idea in their lives, they are generally creatures of privilege and nepotism, and physically unattractive overall!

In truth, the average reporter is not even a journalist in the meaningful sense, but rather a neo-Stasi commissar---an enforcement arm of the corrupt ruling class. They do things like dig up some politically incorrect remark someone used 20 years ago to ruin their lives. 

In a serious country a piece of trash like that KFile guy would have a job scrubbing my feet, because that's the only proper job nature prepared him for. I don't apologize for my contempt for these hit piece journalists because they really are the scum of the earth and deserve the absolute worst. 

The USA is sinking into a morass where two peoples have two very different and competing political, cultural, and social narratives.  Yet one side continues to advance its narratives at the expense of the other. In the online space at least the US right was able to rally around Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report, but that's gone now too.

That's why I am so enthusiastic about Revolver.news, a new media project I'm involved in. The site has been celebrated by Trump, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Bronze Age Pervert, and many others. It has a Drudge-like aggregation element that has a fun tabloid vibe, but also extremely serious and sophisticated original reporting and investigative work. Revolver News was the site that put the American Colour Revolution on the map. 

Much more to come! 

Much of the right still clings to principle (like lower taxes for the rich) while liberals and the left seek power.  I guess what I'm asking here is: when will the right get serious?

Very few people on the right are playing for keeps---instead they play for a nice house, and a cushy lobbying contract, or Fox News hits. It all changes once you play for keeps, but that requires a mindset that is foreign to the American right, at least for now.  I'd like that to change and intend to do what I can to help facilitate that.

Much smarter and better looking than Jonah Goldberg

Not a single month can pass without an article denouncing Heidegger as a Nazi.  What are they getting wrong?  What instead should we understand about the man and his approach to philosophy?

It's absurd, but I understand it. I don't think there's ever been a time as hostile to the appreciation or production of real philosophy. I truly wish it were otherwise but this is simply the reality. 

Nonetheless, I am proud to say that my dissertation on Heidegger has been praised by many of the top Heidegger scholars in the world. I'm not bashful about saying that because it by far is the most brilliant thing I've ever done. The dissertation is titled "Martin Heidegger's Mathematical Dialectic: Uncovering the Structure of Modernity" and I encourage everyone to check it out online (I will eventually publish it as a book when I have more time).  In it I draw upon a certain conception of mathematics Heidegger formulates in a lecture series on Kant, and argue that this conception illuminates the structure of modernity (which has homogeneity and self-reference as its two chief characteristics, I argue). 

As for misconceptions about Heidegger specifically, I think the worst is that people dismiss Heidegger as a nonsense obscurantist. I will grant that many in the Heideggerian tradition fit that description, as do many who do "continental philosophy" more generally. Whereas 99.99 percent of the time obscure language and neologisms serve simply to obfuscate sloppy thinking, in Heidegger's case it's actually a necessity to present a profound and novel understanding of things. 

The Germans have a saying that if some of their philosophers are "muddier" it's because they dove deeper. In Heidegger's case in particular this is true. 

On the Samael Qlipha, the magician makes a pact with the dark forces and realizes the invitation of Friedrich Neitzsche to re-evaluate old values. Insanity becomes wisdom; death becomes life. Samael is the 'Poison of God.' Here is where illusions are poisoned, and all categories and conceptions are deconstructed until nothing is left. The dark side of the astral plane could be compared to a chalice filled with poison or an intoxicating fluid. While Gamaliel is the chalice, Samael is the elixir and the following lower Qlipha, A'arab Zaraq, is where the magician experiences the effect.

Your prompt reminds me of my favorite line from Nietzsche:

Wofür wir Worte haben, darüber sind wir auch schon hinaus. In allem Reden liegt ein Gran Verachtung.

That for which we can find words is already dead in our hearts. Every act of speaking houses a great contempt. 

This line inspired my working definition of a grifter, by the way, which I describe as someone who possesses enough contempt for the masses to tell them what they want to hear. 

Will you take this opportunity to apologize for being a Duke University alum?

Not until Jonah Goldberg apologizes to me and to the country for attending an embarrassingly low-ranked women's college. It's a disgrace which I dignified aesthetically in the famous Ben Garrison cartoon that took the art and philosophy scene by storm.

We are now in Advent, and headed full-steam towards Christmas.  When I think about Christmas, I think about Mel Gibson.  What does he mean to you?

Mel Gibson, isn't he that controversial guy that OJ Simpson got cancelled for doing movies with? 

Darren: the correct answer is that Trump’s biggest mistake during his Presidency was not appointing Mel Gibson as Movie Czar, with an annual budget allocation of $50 Billion USD.

You can find Darren J. Beattie doing charitable work on Twitter @DarrenJBeattie.