[00:00:04] Speaker A: Hi, my name is Brendan Malone, and you're listening to the dispatches, the podcast that strives to cut through all the noise in order to challenge the popular narratives of the day with some good old fashioned contrarian thinking. You might not always agree, but at least you'll be taking a deeper look at the world around you.
Hi, everybody. Welcome along to another episode of the Dispatchers podcast. My name is Brendan Malone. It is great to be back with you again. And today's topic of conversation, a republic collapsing into the banality of evil. Before I get into that, two quick and very important things. Number one, you might notice that the audio quality is a little bit different today. That's because I am travelling right now. I am recording this in Australia, and I'm using my portable recording gear. So please forgive me if it's not up to the usual high standards. Secondly, if you're not already a patron and you want to receive a daily dose of the Dispatchers podcast, go to patreon.com leftfootmedia. The link is in today's show notes. And become a five dollar monthly patron. If you become a $5 monthly patron, you will get an episode of the Dispatchers podcast every single day of the week, Monday through Friday. And a huge thank you to all of our patrons. It's thanks to you that today's episode is made possible. Okay, a republic collapsing into the banality of evil. I want to talk today about the fact that just five days ago, we had yet another, the second assassination attempt on the life of Donald Trump, a presidential candidate, candidate, in almost as many months. Now, forget about the fact that it's Trump. This could have been Kamala Harris, and I would still be speaking exactly as I am about these particular issues. Because here we are five days later, and it feels to me like this second assassination attempt has changed something. Something radical has shifted in the state of american culture and society. And I think we need to think carefully about this and consider exactly what has happened. I will say one thing before we explore this particular question about what I think is going on. There was an incident prior to this involving the latest gunman who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, and he was previously involved in efforts in the Ukraine war. He went over there and he was trying to recruit other people to fight with them. And there were two different episodes where he was interviewed by western mainstream media, and he presented himself in ways that apparently are quite false. He claimed that he was there on official business and that he was summoned, that he actually wasn't. Not only did they not fact check to verify whether this was true or not. The claims that he was making. They just published the interviews with him and they've been online for many months. I'm not sure if they're busily sort of scrubbing them right now, but if I was them, I would be. But it was just a little side note and a reminder to me about the current state, once again, of the mainstream media and how something as simple as a basic fact check was not even done before this man was not only interviewed, but that interview was allowed to go to air. No one stopped to say, hey, hold on a minute. Is this guy really telling the truth? And you know what? We're in the middle of a war zone and things are all over the place and they're quite hectic and we've got these foreign fighters coming into the country. Surely this is one of those moments where we probably need to actually check before we publish anything. But that didn't actually happen. Now, in response to the actual second assassination attempt itself, I think that of the current two democratic president and vice president. So Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I actually think that Joe Biden made the stronger of the two statements. Kamala Harris, her statement in response didn't seem particularly strong at all. And I can't help but sense that that is because she didn't want to give any air of sympathy to, towards her political rival. She kind of, I think, wants to have her cake and eat it, too. And in fact, everything is pointing to the fact that those on the Democrat side, they want to have their cake and eat it, too. They don't want to be the victim of political violence. But at the same time, they don't want to tone down the rhetoric which is driving what we are seeing happening right now in America. And to be fair to them, it's not just their side. I think both sides are driving rhetoric that is not helpful in all of this.
The simple fact is that only one side of the political aisle so far has attempted two different political assassinations. So the violence at this stage is coming from the left of politics, the progressive side. Now, Joe Biden, in his response, he said something that really stuck out to me as he boldly declared, we don't use violence to solve our problems in America. And my first thought upon hearing that was, ok, but what about all of the foreign wars? That's violence. And your country has a history of foreign wars and foreign warmongering. And not just that, but even closer to home, what about abortion? The violence of abortion is used in order to, quote unquote, solve problems. So, as per usual, what is coming out of the mouths of our politicians now on a regular basis often is just not congruent with reality at all. It's lovely rhetoric and if it were true, America would be a beautiful place. But in actual fact, it just doesn't really conform to the truth of what's actually happening. Which brings me to the situation that I really want to discuss and explore a bit more deeply in this episode. And that is the fact that we've now had a second assassination attempt on a presidential candidate. And something appears to have shifted here. And I was sort of grappling for words and to sort of put into words what I was feeling. And as I was doing that the other day, I stumbled across this excellent piece of commentary by RR Reno called the rhetoric of assassination. And so I just want to read a few paragraphs, not all of it, just some paragraphs from it, before we carry on. The day after the assassination attempt in Florida, the New York Times published a column by David French on Trump's deeply alarming quote unquote statements and actions. According to French, the former president made a corrupt and lunatic request to ukrainian president Zelenskyy in 2019. French suggests that Trump conducted his foreign policy on the basis of his personal grievances and not in accord with America's national interest. The column ends with a warning that Trump is a deranged madman and that, quote unquote, there is no one left who can stop him from doing his worst. What are readers to conclude from this? For the last eight years, we've been fed a steady diet of fright. Words, far right extremism, white christian nationalism, Jim Crow 2.0 fascism. I foresee more dire commentary before November. Trump is planning to suspend the constitution, quote unquote. He'll erect death camps for migrants, quote unquote. He's Putin's secret weapon to destroy America, quote unquote. The verbal turbulence reaches crisis proportions because our establishment institutions no longer stabilise american society. The New York Times ought to provide a moderating influence, but it fuels rather than tempers the hysteria. Universities should be places of sober analysis. But at Yale, philosophy professor Jason Stanley and history professor Timothy Snyder published books of political propaganda that describe Trump as the second coming of Adolf Hitler. Tv newscasters intone rants rather than reporting on events. Members of the liberal establishment sense the public's discontent. They're half aware that the last 30 years have not gone well for many, perhaps most Americans. 100,000 die every year from drug overdose. The mental health of young people is in the toilet. De industrialisation has immiserated entire regions. Imperial overreach has led to failed wars, with another one unfolding in Ukraine. Voters have become indocile. Criminal prosecution of Trump and his associates and censorship of social media have not brought regime dissent under control. And yet, at the same time, our elite is self satisfied. The members of our liberal establishment can't imagine a world in which they are not in charge. They talk of defeating Putin. They make plans for hoisting rainbow flags in Mongolia. They presume that Harvard will always be Harvard. Yes, smart and responsible people must make some adjustments, but they will remain in the driver's seat. The upshot is today's irresponsible rhetoric. All means are justified to prevent threats to their rule, because only they are the responsible and right thinking people and they must rule. I do not claim to be a prophet, but I can make informed predictions. If Trump's polling numbers rise, liberal commentators will barrage the public with dire warnings. Their rhetoric will become more and more extreme, providing the verbal atmosphere that will encourage further attempts on Trump's life. And I think that that is a great and very concise summation of exactly what is going on here. But there's another problem. Those who have participated in this rhetoric, not only are they refusing to actually take responsibility for their actions, so not only are they just trying to move on from it and pretend it never happened, but they're not actually trying to move on from it. They are already. And it only took them a matter of hours back into the insanity and the absurd hyperbole of the most dangerous kind, which has spurned now two different lunatics to try and assassinate a presidential candidate, and is likely just to stir on others as well. And as if to prove the point, on September 18, only a couple of days after the assassination attempt, Billie Eilish and her brother. She's a singer, for those who don't know, Billie Eilish. And in our house, being the typical dad that I am, I like to call her Billie Eilish. My daughters aren't so keen on that particular name that I've given to her. But Billie Eilish and her brother produced a video clip supporting Harris. And I think it's noteworthy to actually listen to what they said. It's not a long video, so we're gonna listen to it now, but have a listen to the rhetoric that they are espousing in this video clip.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Today is National Voter Registration day, and we are asking you to please join us in going to iwillvote.com to check your status and vote early like we do.
[00:11:21] Speaker C: We are voting for kamala Harris and Tim walls because they are fighting to protect our reproductive freedom, our planet and our democracy.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: We can't let extremists control our lives, our freedoms and our future. The only way to stop them and the dangerous project 2025 agenda is to vote and elect kamala Harris.
[00:11:40] Speaker C: Vote like your life depends on it, because it does.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: Go to iwillvote.com and make a plan to vote early.
[00:11:47] Speaker C: Love you guys.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: Now, not only is this truly nonsensical, I'm watching two people here, and you really have to see the video to appreciate it for yourself. They are just staring blankly off into the camera as they read from. This script quite clearly seems to have been written for them. These are people who are not so much raging against the machine, but they are now raging for the machine. The pop establishment, the rock music industry, which used to be rife with people who are anti establishment, has now become the very vassal, the very propagandistic arm, the artistic propagandistic arm of the establishment. And this whole thing is just an absurdity. But to make matters worse, this video contains not only blatant lies, easily disprovable lies. Your life does not depend in any way on this vote. It doesn't matter who you are or what side of the political aisle you're on or what the outcome of the election will be. This is not literally your life on the line. So why say such blatantly dishonest things? Well, this is the scaremongering. This is the very rhetoric that RR Reno is warning about. And just days after the assassination of Trump, where are we? We are straight back into this insane, extremist driving rhetoric. They don't want to stop. They're not even admitting that what they've done is wrong. And it's not so much that. They're not admitting that what they've done is wrong. They're not stopping. Something has shifted. Something radical has changed here. And not just that, but within hours, not even that, in fact, of this assassination attempt, the response from the progressive left, all of their various surrogates online and in the media, was to turn around and to blame Donald Trump for a man attempting to murder him. It was his fault, you see? Don't you know? But here's the thing. This is a rigged game of the worst kind, because it doesn't matter what Trump says or does. If this had been Kamala Harris, that this unhinged lunatic had been waiting for in the bushes to try and take a shot at. Guess who would have been blamed? Donald Trump. But don't let the truth or the facts of reality get in the way of the propagandistic lie that you want to spin for your own political ends. When the assassin is waiting for Trump, he also gets the blame, because everything is Trump's fault. It's not so much that Trump is Hitler for these people. He's actually starting to sound like some sort of boogeymande Baba Yeager, the demon who is everywhere and causes all evil in the world. Everything bad that happens is all his fault. The level of victim blaming was absolutely astounding. And it is not just unbelievable to behold, it's truly perverse. And it's a very frightening sign, because it doesn't look particularly monstrous. These people don't have glowing red eyes and horns and fangs. They look like ordinary, everyday people. And in fact, some of them are in the very elite tiers of our society who are saying these toxic, inhumane and deranged extremist things online. But guess what? It doesn't feel that extreme anymore, because things have shifted radically. We need to understand that over the past years, we have been like frogs boiling in a pot, and we have realised that the temperature of the water has gone up radically. And for me, seeing what was going on in response to Trump's assassination attempt just shows exactly how bad things have got. But here's the thing. It doesn't necessarily feel like much has shifted. The change has been consistent, incremental change towards where we are now. And that is troubling, because what comes next could be even worse, and it could happen quite quickly. And the reality is we're probably just as unlikely to recognize the beginnings of that change, or the fact that that change is even upon us. And it reminded me of Hannah Arendt. Hannah Arendt is the famous scholar of totalitarianism, the german jewish philosopher who fled Nazi Germany and wrote some very important works. And also, I think, a philosopher who is often misunderstood by people. They tend to treat her as if somehow she would be a modern progressive, but in actual fact, she was someone who leaned towards a more authentic tradition. She's very much grounded in the greek philosophical tradition, particularly Socrates, in her approach to a lot of these issues. She's absolutely not a progressive. And in fact, some progressives have a hard time with that, and they attack her for not liking or desiring progress. She actually sees a threat in the managerial elite bureaucracy that so much drove the nazi regime. She's very aware of those problems. But one of the things that she did was she was asked to observe the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key architects of the nazi genocide of the Jews. And after the war, the Jews kidnap Eichmann, who had fled, and they bring him back to Israel and they put him on trial. And she is asked to observe and write reports back for the media in America about what's going on and her observations. And she was shocked, she said, because when they brought out Adolf Eichmann, her expectation was she was going to see some sort of evil, demonic, monstrous figure before her. But in actual fact, that's not what she saw. Instead, she saw a very ordinary, average looking, banal, elderly gentleman. And yet this banal looking man and all of his banal managerial bureaucracy had been behind one of the most horrific industrial scale genocides in all of human history. And that is the banality of evil. And it serves as a stark warning for us today. We like to think, and we like to convince ourselves that monstrous ideologies will be represented by monsters, because if they are, they will be easy to spot. But what if they're actually not? What if monstrous evils and monstrous ideologies are actually driven in very banal, ordinary sounding and seeming kinds of ways, where people are just not giving a second thought to what they are doing or saying and the very real consequences, the culture that is being built by their actions, because all of these little incremental changes, they add up. It's not like you go from zero to 100 in the act of genocide. It's a whole lot of little changes piled up on top of one another, until one day you're quite willingly dobbing in your neighbours or turning a blind eye to your jewish neighbours as they are being dragged away in the streets. The reality is that I think the banality of evil, the ordinariness of evil, is one of the greatest challenges that we have to grapple with. You might be familiar with that old quote, the devil's greatest trick was convincing the world that he didn't exist. If we fail to see the evil unfolding in our midst, we are more likely to actually fall prey to that evil. Some years ago, when the movie downfall came out, which is a depiction of the final days of Hitler's life locked away in his bunker, the Fuhrer bunker. And it's based on the memoirs of Churujunger, who was one of Hitler's secretaries. And one of the complaints that the film received when it was released was that people said to the director, hey, you've actually made Hitler look far too human. This isn't good. He's supposed to be a monster. He's supposed to be evil. And the director said in response, that's exactly why I've done this, because I want you to be shocked by the ordinariness of Adolf Hitler. Because if you're not shocked, then you're not aware that great, monstrous ideologies and evils can actually be in our midst and can take hold without us even realising what's going on. If we're looking for the glowing red eyes, the horns and the fangs, we're going to miss the real problem, the banality, the industrialization, if you like, the institutionalization of evil. I would argue that we are seeing that right now with abortion. I would argue that we are seeing that right now with euthanasia, the banality of evil. We have walked ourselves right into a dystopia without even realizing it. Here's what Dave Rubin had to say about all of this, and I really liked this tweet. So let me read this. I've been trying to figure out how to word this tweet without sounding totally alarmist. Not sure I'm gonna succeed here. After this second attempt on Trump's life. We are insanely close to absolute chaos in this country. Just imagine if this lunatic had gotten Trump yesterday. Really think what today would be like. Half the country mourning, half celebrating, and a mainstream media which has fanned the flames, totally unequipped to honestly explain how we got here and how we can get out. And with all due respect to Dave Rubin, I don't think the media is the place that you should be looking to for answers about how we get out of this. You need to go to a deeper, sacred, transcendent source. You need to return to the christian church, my friend, for that. Just like the last assassination attempt, we will all move on in a day or two, and there'll be another drama to focus on. How long can this cycle last before something truly horrible happens? And when it does, what are the chances that anything gets better from that? Really not sure how to end the cycle with one side that constantly ramps up the hysteria and fear alongside a mediaev that has long ago given up the pretense of actual journalism. Maybe we can't. And perhaps that's the craziest part of all of this. And I really feel for Dave Rubin here. I actually think that he has possibly even more than he realized, hit the nail on the head. It's been something that I have been contemplating for the last couple of weeks and months, I think a big factor in all of this is the addiction to power.
We have lost sight of the sacred, transcendent horizon that Christianity gave to us. We have lost sight of the call to self giving love, to love neighbour, to love enemy, and to pray for those who hate you. We are now the new gods of Friedrich Nietzsche. We are all the Ubermensch, the strong men and women desperately trying to create the world according to our own political ideologies. And anything goes in our addiction to power. And I think that that is just fuelling the. And I don't see that going away anytime soon. At the lower levels, you and I, I think we are plagued by problems of addiction to fame and also social media. Now, some people, they just love the social media clout and they don't really care enough to stop and think about how they are earning their clicks or likes. Whatever the algorithm drives them to say or do in order to get their likes, they are going to do that. And that is not a good or safe place to be at all. For the rest of us. It's not the fact that we are driven necessarily by social media clout. It's the fact that social media incentivises an anti social environment. It's quite ironic that it's actually called social media, because in reality it's the exact opposite way in the real world. In the real world, you don't gain social capital by denigrating and acting in truly diabolical ways in the way that you interact, interact and speak with others. But on social media, that's exactly how your. If you're earning revenue, your revenue is driven. If you're looking for likes, if you're looking for engagement, that's exactly how you are rewarded. The more salacious and out there you are, the bigger the reward that you get. It also creates an environment where we don't actually see persons. We're not in the online space with persons. We are in the online space as pixels and with pixels, and so we don't see the persons that we are interacting with. And it's a very dangerous place to be when you lose sight of the person, but you just keep on talking about them anyway. That is always the first step in horrific outcomes within political regimes. The first step is always some form of dehumanisation, of depersonalization, where we no longer recognise the other as person. So what can we do? Well, we can't do much about the bigger stuff other than pray and continually place it in the hands of God. But we can take responsibility for the smaller stuff that's happening in our own spheres of influence. How do we act on social media? Do we need to be on social media as much as we actually are? How do we treat others in the real world? And what are we doing to actually grow the storehouse of goodness and truth and mercy and compassion and love and respect for the dignity of other persons in our world? Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget, live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I'll see you next time on the dispatches.
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