For those of you who follow American politics closely, Darren J. Beattie needs no introduction. As one of the bravest journalists out there, Darren – along with his team at Revolver News – has single-handedly inflicted more damage to the Regime than anyone else by exposing their sinister plots to subdue the US population. If you are already a Revolver News reader, you’ll be more informed than most about Deep State tactics, be it color revolutions, speech control methods and, of course, the Fedsurrection. At this critical juncture, we owe Darren a tremendous debt for his history-making reporting on January 6, as the unraveling of this specific narrative marks a unique opportunity for the American people at large to grasp the extent of the rot in their nation’s institutions.

In addition to his many achievements, Darren is the master at trolling members of these nefarious organizations/Regime satellite groups, and his sophisticated, wry commentary makes him one of the most interesting follows on Twitter. Who can forget his (legitimate) calls for Jonathan Greenblatt to wash his feet?

While I’ve had the honor of collaborating with Darren on several occasions writing for Revolver and recording our conversations on my podcast (his succinct yet comprehensive breakdowns of Jan 6 on our calls are a must listen, if you haven’t done so yet), I’m thrilled to interview him for this issue of MAN’S WORLD. Hopefully, you’ll get a greater insight into one of our generation’s boldest fighters in the following pages, as well as a taste of his humor (we’ll have to release the recordings for those voice impressions one day!)

 

Darren, first and foremost, happy new year! You and Revolver News started 2023 with a bang, having just released your highly awaited interview with President Trump. How did you find his spirits? What are your thoughts on the campaign so far, and how do you envision DJT’s road back to the White House?

Well, thanks very much for having me and for doing this interview. Yes, the Trump interview happened, and it went great. It’s getting tremendous feedback. It’s already over a million views on Rumble and will probably be around 1.5 million I’d imagine by the time this is published. So it’s getting a tremendous amount of feedback, a lot of people are saying it’s the best conversation they’ve heard with Trump. I think maybe part of the reason for that is because it’s by far the most extensive conversation that Trump has ever had on the topic of the intelligence community’s abuses, on the Fedsurrection; he goes on extensively about Ray Epps. We go on to the JFK files that he originally pushed very hard to release, and we get into the pushback from Pompeo on that issue. We also discuss Fauci… We have a great time impugning various trash individuals like Frank Luntz, who, as I’ve said in another context, really is the personification of the swamp. A disgusting guy in every respect and he’s got some things in his closet, we can be sure of that. So we get into a wide-ranging discussion.

As to how his spirits were, I think his spirits are great. I think he’s ready for the fight. He understands what the situation is and you know, just to put it very simply, understands there’s unfinished business. So, I have every hope that he’ll make it and be back in the White House in 2024.

 

I’m still on the Trump train, as I’ll always appreciate the role President Trump played in awakening the world to the ills of globalism, and to the depravity of its proponents in America’s ruling class. This is why I’ve supported him since he announced he was running in 2015. As the only non-tenured academic in the whole country who publicly endorsed then-candidate Trump, what appealed to you most in his message?

It is true, I was the only non-tenured full-time academic in the country to support Trump and to enthusiastically endorse him. I was also the only faculty member at Duke to correctly predict the outcome of the election, which, in some ways, scandalized my colleagues even more than my support for Trump (laughs). You know, this seems like ancient history at this point, and it’s important to reflect this is a long time ago. It’s kind of like how, you know, boomer Republicans talk about Reagan. It’s getting to this point where even for 2016, it feels so antiquated in a way. But at the time, it was so fresh and so novel. At the time I was teaching a class (which I had originally taught in Germany) that I had designed specifically to reflect the case that the coalition, and the packaging of various political positions that comprise the Republican party platform, no longer reflected the contemporary post-Cold War circumstances, and that there was a natural reconfiguration that had to take place both on the left and the right. So it was quite amazing to see this happen in real time on both sides to some degree. There was a Trump phenomenon, which was historic, but then there was also at least a little bit of a… I would say more than a whimper, if not historic it was something substantial, coming from the Bernie side that seemed to reflect some inconsistencies or a lack of congruence in certain ways on the left as well.

And so from the intellectual side, that’s where the support came from… from a theoretical understanding that there was a real place for Trump’s message at that particular time. But far more so, I was entranced and enchanted by his courage, and the honest signals that he was sending that he was truly willing to defy the Regime. I don’t think I’m unique in this. I think it was quite something to hear that announcement speech coming down the escalator and you know, making the famous comments about immigration and such, even though that didn’t really clinch it. What clinched it is the expected response to that. The full weight of the coordinated opposition of every powerful institution in the country weighing down on him, and when he refused to apologize for that, that’s when it seemed like, “okay, there’s something real here”. And I don’t know if in public life we’ve ever seen a single individual face such coordinated opposition and stand so defiantly in the face of that opposition, as we saw in the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump. I think it’s probably unique in American political history and even though, as I said, it almost feels like I’m a boomer talking about Reagan here as it was so long ago, I think it was such a significant thing that we’re still feeling the reverberations from it.

And Trump is still very much a viable figure, and that’s why the same enemies and the same opposition continue to this day trying to shut him down and shut him up and all of his supporters for good.

 

Indeed, so much has come to light since he came down that escalator almost eight years ago. By merely running, he showed us just how American institutions are intertwined and work against US citizens like Trump himself (as exemplified by all the witch hunts he’s had to endure), from the Mainstream Media, Big Tech platforms, the DOJ and the entire national security apparatus. Sadly, this targeting of those who pose a threat or dare question the Regime’s legitimacy has only intensified since, culminating with the Fedsurrection and the arrest of January 6 political prisoners. Which brings us to your time serving as a speechwriter for President Trump after you left academia, and to Revolver News, which you founded in 2020. What led you to start a news outlet in the first place?

Well, the founding of Revolver was something very interesting and in some ways unexpected. I guess in a sense there’s the origin story of being the punished figure who had been subjected to unfair media attacks. Now, as a speech writer in the Trump White House, all of a sudden I got the “pain box” treatment, something we’ll talk about a little bit later, but I felt a little bit of the pain box in the form of a coordinated hit piece of, you know, every headline that you can imagine using all the buzzwords against me, white nationalist and this and that.

And I felt very acutely the power of the media, and how unfair the media was, but also the media’s capacity to create reality. It’s just a very interesting proposition and I thought maybe, you know, being able to do that for good, but reflect reality rather than manufacture an artificial reality, and to talk about things that no one else is talking about.

But originally I thought it could be a suitable replacement for the Drudge Report and was mainly focused on aggregation. It only developed in some kind of organic and unexpected way into this investigative powerhouse that it has become and is probably best known for now. And I think that really just speaks to the need for investigative work, for actually uncovering stories. I think there’s such an over-saturation of mid-wit opinion pieces. Like, how many more times do you need to, you know, read an op-ed from some 110 IQ person who overwrote something that’s been written a million times already. Anyway, it’s just boring. There’s no need for it, but actually uncovering new information and not just new information, but shaping narratives in a very deep way. The Fedsurrection is a great example. Nobody was talking about the Fedsurrection before we broke this story. It’s a completely new world, a new realm of inquiry and a new dimension of conversation that’s been charted by means of investigative reporting.

And so I think it’s just such a powerful mechanism, not just to uncover the truth in some narrow sense, but to really shape the conversation more broadly. It’s a very powerful way to grab people’s minds and attentions and to focus them on things that they otherwise wouldn’t focus on or understand.

And another thing is, the combination of the theoretical with the concrete. This gets back to say, our coverage of color revolution reporting for example. You know, you can theoretically describe something like a color revolution, a specific regime-change methodology. But it’s so much more powerful when you encapsulate that thesis in a specific human being, a specific person, and you attach that person to the thesis, and that person is a kind of villain representing what you’re talking about. In the case of the color revolution, it was Norm Eisen. And I think that concretely representing these sort of theoretical problems, the biggest and the most broad formulation being the weaponization of the national security state against the American people, is something we’ve been able to do through our reporting in a kind of a different way than we could have just writing typical think pieces.

 

Revolver has been at the forefront in exposing the mechanics of the Regime’s information and intelligence war against the American people, and no journalistic outlet has done more to expose the government’s role in the Fedsurrection than you. The importance of the investigations you’ve conducted cannot be overstated. This is perhaps the first time that a Government’s entrapment operation has been unraveled in more or less real time, meaning that their official narrative didn’t have time to congeal before being debunked. When did you realize pursuing this story had the potential of causing great damage to the Regime?

Well, it was very clear that the Regime was extremely invested in some kind of false narrative on January 6th from the very beginning, and we saw that with the repeated desperate attempts to make the death of Brian Sicknick, a kind of MAGA blood libel, as I called it. You know, originally they were saying, “oh, this officer was bludgeoned to death by the MAGA mob, by the frothing MAGA mob, with a fire extinguisher.” “He just grabbed a fire extinguisher and smashed him over the head and beat him to death.” And of course that was provably false. Revolver News ran a major piece on this. It’s actually our first big January 6^th-related piece and we called it MAGA Blood Libel. And it took off and it went wild. And then the New York Times changed its position. They said, “well, maybe he wasn’t beaten by a fire extinguisher after all… but he did die as a complication from bear spray, bear spray from the MAGA mob”. Well, Revolver News did a subsequent report, one of our sort of Hallmark investigative pieces where we did a very detailed sort of image analysis when you looked at the heat maps and things like this, and it didn’t look like Sicknick was even sprayed at all by the person that the New York Times was suggesting sprayed him. Didn’t look like it happened at all. And sure enough, New York Times comes up with another correction and say, “okay, well after all, he died of natural causes”, but by then the damage had been done. It’s already stuck in people’s minds. So already this notion of the deadly mob, the deadly MAGA mob had taken hold in the media’s collective imagination. But it was important to get in and refute these early, before the narrative could really ossify more broadly into the general public. Because that’s what they rely on. They want these narratives to become sacred before they can be challenged. And you see the “sacred before challenge” thing with, you know, 9/11 and certain other issues that are much harder to talk about. But that’s the story there.

And again, it’s an interesting story in its own right about January 6th, but the telling of the story of January 6th through investigative reporting, there’s so much more than that – it’s a vehicle not only to, you know, tell the story and push back against the weaponization of the national security state to de-legitimize the regime, but also to give people on the conservative side, on the right wing side who may not fully appreciate the history of these things, give them a broader sense of what kind of country they actually live in, because this stuff goes back a long time.

There could be some innocent people reading this say, “that’s just not who we are”. Or maybe since evidence is so compelling in this case, that this is just an unfortunate deviation, with a rogue intelligence agency gone mad from, you know, the threat of Trump. And you know, that’s just not true. This stuff goes back a long way and in many cases, relative to some other operations, January 6th is kind of child’s play.

You know, Merrick Garland, who’s now the head of the Department of Justice, this is not his first rodeo. His portfolio goes all the way back to the nineties where he ran the domestic terrorism operation under Clinton, and he was one of the key mop up men to cover up the Oklahoma City issue. So again, this goes way back and there are a lot darker things than January 6th. And so they got the band together to a certain degree. Eric Holder incidentally, is another mop up man for Oklahoma City, but that’s, that’s a story for another time.

 

You’ve stated on Tucker Carlson: “After seeing all of this you have to ask yourself: Does the national security apparatus do anything but conspire against the American people?” When did you first come to this conclusion?

Yes, I think that’s a great line. I count it as a great line because it stuck, people remember it. It’s not that I’m saying it’s my personal favorite, but people remember it. People remember there’s a national security state, or the FBI, do they do anything but conspire against the American people? And you know, if you look at the pattern, you go from Russiagate, now to the Twitter files where it’s clear that the censorship problem, as I’d been saying for a long time, was in large degree, an intel problem. It wasn’t just your handful of physically hideous, woke women, and men even more disgustingly in a way, in middle management in these big tech companies. I mean, there is that, but the story’s much bigger. And the story is this kind of collusion, this weird insidious relationship between agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, and in many cases the Biden White House, and Twitter and other tech companies. So we’ve seen the Intel role in censorship and then of course with the Fedsurrection, we see an intel role there… The Whitmer case and all this. And it really seems like there the term “national security” itself suggests that these bureaucracies exist chiefly to provide security for the American people, but seems like all they do is to provide security for the illegitimate crooks that control the country. And they provide anything but security for most Americans. Certainly not for half of the American population that is effectively deemed national security threats and domestic terrorists. So, that’s really the issue here. National security has nothing to do with the security of actual Americans. It has to do with the security, the positions of power, and the ill-begotten loot for the disgusting, illegitimate trash that run this joke country.

 

Continuing with your quote from that same appearance on Tucker: “Everything in our politics will be fake and performative until we bring the National Security State, including the FBI, to heel.” What actions should be taken to reverse these gross rights’ violations against the American people, and dismantle the Regime’s apparatus? What can be done when the uni-party in place systematically perpetuates and strengthens the system that feeds them?

As to what we can do to bring the national security state to heel, I mean anybody who hasn’t been living under a rock, has seen the heroic efforts of Matt Gaetz and others to kind of force the issue in the House. And the end result of that, at least to my understanding, has been a promise of a Church-style committee hearkening back to Senator Church’s Committee that explored intel abuses in the seventies and such. A Church-style committee that looks like it’ll be run by Thomas Massie, and Thomas Massie’s probably the best person to run something like that. And so this is the most promising mechanism I think for at least getting a start to what we would need to do to bring the national security state to heel. I’m currently working on a lot of writing to kind of look back to the example of the Church Committee, and what lessons we can learn from it. To what extent is our own situation different? You know, so much of this has to do with public pressure. Public pressures are leveraged because none of these politicians want to do anything. If they could sit around and you know, point to the latest fake scandal about AOC’s new dress, you know, just continue in the worthless pantomime, they would do that forever and keep collecting their paychecks. The only way they’ll do anything is if they’re bullied to do so by public pressure. Then it’s the question, where does public pressure come from?

Where does it come from? It comes from reporting like what we’ve done at Revolver News. It comes from citizens who act on the basis of that reporting, who put pressure on their representatives, but ultimately it has to come from the media as well. The broader media. And that’s the disadvantage here, because the Church Committee was riding a wave of the Watergate scandal, you know, big bad Nixon, big, bad, you know, FBI that was harassing Martin Luther King Jr. and such. And so, because a lot of these intel abuses were, to simplify it, against the Left or Left institutions and such. It was a different dynamic because you had the media on your side to create the public pressure, and unfortunately we don’t have that advantage. The situation now is far more asymmetrical in terms of the distribution of power than it was back in the seventies when the Church Committee took place.

 

Yes, the stranglehold of the press, media and online platforms today is quasi-total. Project Mockingbird was never shut down, but was instead expanded to the point where the information industry and the government are one and the same. An interesting aspect is how leading figures are allowed to rise to fame, gain credibility status, and who then effectively act as gatekeepers. Lex Fridman comes to mind, having read your equally stimulating and amusing Twitter feed recently. Tell us more about how you view these characters and their function in the “conversation”.

Ah yes the great question about Lex Fridman. “Lex Fridman”. I just watched about five of his videos earlier. I think, despite my early support for Elon – you know, Elon was reading Revolver, and we came out  with a piece before it was even public that he was deciding to acquire Twitter about what would happen, sort of gaming out the Regime’s response to it and so forth. And he did read it. It came out in court, in some kind of discovery process. And it turns out he was texting an unnamed individual about this Revolver piece. But you know, it’s funny, Twitter under Elon now, he removed the Covid misinformation unit and so many things seem to be getting better and yet I noticed I’m still shadow-banned to some degree, certainly throttled, and I’m thinking this is the ultimate irony of ironies. I managed to survive Twitter under the old FBI, you know, Paraaaag Agrawaaal and Veee-jaya (laughs), and the ultimate irony is, I’m gonna get banned from Twitter for mocking Lex Fridman (laughs).

Like Lex Fridman is the new third rail in social-media speech restriction. And it’s such a funny thing, it’s like people think I have some vendetta against him, and people won’t be able to hear my intonation, so they won’t be able to get what are the honest signals from the voice. But I honestly have nothing against him; like, as far as I know he could be a bad person, or he could be a good person. I don’t know. It’s not about who he is as a person, it’s about sort of symbolically the fact that our discourse is entirely fucking fake, and it’s increasingly conditioned by these algorithms that shove shitty-ass content in your fucking face all the time. And I’m tired of it and it offends me because, you know, there used to be an internet based on quality of content. And now that’s totally shifted and anybody can relate to me – they’re thinking, if you watch any remotely right wing content on YouTube, to the extent that it exists at, or even if you’re watching a cooking video, I say you can’t watch anything on YouTube without it shuffling over to shove Lex Friedman down your throat. Why? And you know, it’s the same kind of mechanism with people like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson. But at least with Jordan Peterson, there’s some degree of discernible talent. He knows the performance role he needs to play and he plays it. And you know, not everybody could do that, frankly, so there’s something there at least. But with Lex Fridman, it’s like the ultimate test of the algorithm because there’s literally nothing there. First of all, he markets himself as this MIT professor. He has very little to do with MIT. Like I would have almost as much, I almost joke, I should literally go into MIT – we have Revolver fans at MIT and Darren Beattie fans at MIT, several actually, and just have one of them say, “okay, I’m gonna let you walk in the classroom. We’ll make sure, maybe it’s an interesting class, maybe it’s complex analysis, or maybe it’s even, you know, honors analysis over the real numbers. Or maybe we can get into something really, really sexy, such as, I don’t know, differential topology or something like that”. Just make sure there are a lot of real arcane symbols on the blackboard, and I’ll go there, I’ll take my picture in front of the blackboard and I’ll give my spiel about Ray Epps to an empty room, and then I’ll change my profile to “MIT lecturer”. I lectured at MIT, I’m an MIT guy (laughs) and every single tweet I send after that, I’m gonna say, “here’s a word from MIT. Here’s a word from MIT”. I don’t even live in Cambridge, no: “Here’s a word from MIT”. That’s more or less what Lex has done, more or less.

Okay. There’s this rapper who gave a lecture at MIT and it was so funny (laughs) it was the same blackboard, with the same like, “Ooh, these are arcane math symbols. He’s a math guy! He’s a math guy!” Rogan brain, fucking idiots. Like… I don’t want to say about Elon because there’s a complicated relationship. I like him. Sometimes he’s so cringe, but I do give him credit for being the man in the arena. I do respect that genuinely. But God, how Rogan- brained do you have to be to like, “Oh, Lex, he’s an AI researcher!” “Oh, he, he does AI?!” “He codes?! He learned to code?!” Well, where did he learn? He learned at Drexel. He’s not involved with MIT, his real involvement is with Drexel, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with extremely low-ranked universities. I want to be on the record as saying that there’s nothing wrong with being associated with extremely low-ranked universities like Drexel, and there’s nothing wrong with getting into those low-rank universities because your father happens to teach there, which looks like that was the case with Lex. But at least own it! Don’t run from it. Don’t run Lex! Don’t run Lexi! And that’s what he is doing. He’s running away from his own pedigree in order to market this idea for people who are so Reddit-brained and dumb: they see the more dry and boring this guy is the smarter he has to be. He perfectly conforms to a mid-wit idiot’s idea of what a smart person should look like, and maybe that’s the secret sauce of his success, I don’t know. So maybe there is something there that would actually be more comforting than I think what the real issue is, that he’s totally driven by the algorithm. The algorithm loves him. This new sort of completely mechanized society where the algorithm just shoves slop down your face. The algorithm is all, all powerful.

I mean, people have seen these clips of the Boston Dynamics robots. I’m saying they’re designing those to punish people who refuse to watch their daily allowance of Lex Fridman videos. You’re not gonna get your Neurolink dopamine hit if you don’t watch the latest Lex interview (laughs) with Ben Shapiro, talking about how great it is to be able to talk!

That’s the future. So uninspiring. Such utter brain death and so bad for discourse, so bad for humanity, and that’s really what it is about Lex. It’s not personal, it’s just symbolically it’s such a stark and bleak reminder of how controlled it all really is. So controlled. So that’s all I have to say about the Lex issue.

 

An important aspect of robust, free speech environment is the right to remain anonymous online, which Revolver has vigorously defended as a necessary feature of a free society. Figures of the IDW and Elon Musk, most notably, have openly advocated against online anonymity, which in my view is inconsistent with what they pretend to promote. Is this another gate keeper tactic?

Yes, I’ve defended the principle of online anonymity very strongly. Revolver has done several articles defending this principle from a variety of perspectives. The attack on anonymity gets into precisely some of the stuff we were just talking about with the sort of the Lex Fridman/Jordan Peterson thing. It’s part of this broader constellation of arguments against anyone having real opinions. This time, they call it civility, and by civility they basically mean you do what the algorithm tells you to do. And in this case it’s sort of the Jordan Peterson/Intellectual Dark Web two-step. And that is, you know, the situation is so ridiculous out there with all the drag queen nonsense and transsexual nonsense, and that’s a subject in its own right. But the problem is so many people are so desperate for anyone to speak out against this, that it creates this sort of cheap-date scenario where you have these people like Jordan Peterson go up and they’ll say, “you know what? I think, I think the whole pronoun thing has gone too far blah, blah, blah. I am willing to say it, I’m willing to say it: boys have penises, girls have vaginas. I’m willing to say it.” And then based on this profound observation and this brave commentary that boys have penises and girls have vaginas, they earn trust from well-meaning, but ultimately, simple-minded people. They earn trust, and so when they go on the next thing, like Jordan Peterson at the height of the Kavanaugh controversy, he says, “You know what? I think we should cave. We should give in. It’s not worth the fight”. And people say, “Whoa. What? What do you mean? What do you mean? Is this guy…? No, no, this guy’s on our side! He said boys have penises girls have vaginas. This guy’s on our side! Hey, hey Steve! This guy’s on our side, he said he was against drag queens. So I guess we gotta trust him when he says we need to cave on Kavanaugh. He’s on our side!” That’s the mechanism of the cattle mind. Similarly, I mean, I don’t even know this for a fact I’m willing to bet Peterson was pro-vaccine, and more or less in line with the establishment on the whole Covid thing more broadly, but definitely on the vaccines. But you’ve seen many cases of this, like Ben Shapiro, for instance. “Ben Shapiro’s said boys have penises, girls have vaginas”, so when he says “take the vaccine”, “Oh, we can trust him. We can trust Shapiro”. It’s so simple. It’s so sad that people are stupid enough to fall for this, but basically the game is they earn trust by offering little crumbs when it comes to trans stuff, and then they’ve got your trust to promote the establishment line on basically everything else in critical moments.

And so one example of this is Jordan Peterson in the name of civility, civil discourse, which means never say anything brave or interesting. Civil discourse would be better served if there were no online anonymity. Well, you know, there are multiple problems with that. You know, America has a tradition of pseudonymous speech going back to the Federalists and so forth. But I mean, it’s just the nature of the Regime we live in. You can’t, you know, very, very few people, very few people, can survive speaking in their own name. Still fewer people can make a living speaking out against the Regime in their own name. That’s like the ultimate category, and that’s where I am. And it’s very difficult to be here. I will be honest, it’s very difficult to do that, but very few people can pull that off or are in a position to do that. And so you’re left with the necessity of online pseudonymity. And that’s of course the thing that Jordan Peterson’s attacking. So, no, it’s absolutely necessary to any kind of real discourse.

That said, like what I just gave you, that’s sort of the expected answer. That answer’s been around for a long time. So just, just to make it fun, I will have an addendum that’s not opposed to that, but I think it’s a little bit less expected, but it needs to be said. And that is, I think that the quality of online pseudonymous discourse has diminished considerably since 2015/2016. There are a lot of reasons for that. I think a lot of the best posters have, you know, basically aged out. They’ve had families and they’re out of the game. A lot of them have been just banned from social media and I know some have come back, but still the mass bannings have their effect in multiple ways. That’s another explanation. But there’s a third aspect which is kind of interesting. In a certain way, I think you could say one factor contributing to the decline in quality of anons has been the celebration of anons, and the fact that anons can now sort of make careers out of things and, you know, you can have your own brand and people in big shows are featuring anons and, there’s some really great ones still. I think the Raw Egg Nationalist is great and there are really important ones still doing great stuff. But then there’s also this phenomenon, where the example of these success stories contribute to this idea that if you play it a certain way, you’re gonna get put on, the system will put you on. You’ll go on Fox, this or that. And this new sort of incentive structure has been great for a lot of great people, but I think it’s also dampened the edge, it’s reduced the edge a little bit to the online anon sphere. And like I said, you know, my Twitter’s out there for people to see. My public thing is out there for people to see, and I’m edgier than, like, 90% of the anons at this point, which should not be the case. I shouldn’t be out there more than a lot of these anons. And so there are people who are anons by virtue of having a pseudonym, but then there’s a sense of being kind of the spiritual anon. And I think that’s been lost, and it’s been lost for a lot of reasons. But one less addressed reason for that is that anons now are more celebrated and appreciated than ever, which is great because there’s a lot of great material, including this magazine, and everything that’s going on with this magazine. But the downside to that is there’s now this implicit sense of auditioning for something, and this kind of self-awareness leads to self-censorship. It leads to sort of mimetic behavior where you’re just becoming like everyone else. And I think it undermines that pure spirit of the online anon, as originally understood. So I’ll throw that in there and I’m sure people will interpret that the wrong way, but there is an essential truth in that and I think it’s worth reflecting upon.

 

One the more personal side and as mentioned at the outset of this interview, you started as an academic, having studied mathematics and philosophy, before being catapulted into the arena of politics. Do you miss that period of your life?

It is true, for a lot of my life, my early life, so to speak, I wanted to be a mathematician. I had several mathematicians in my family. My uncle used to be the chairman of Department of Mathematics at Berkeley. My late grandfather worked at the Courant Institute in New York with a lot of very celebrated figures. And I was very good at math and I loved doing it. That was my overriding obsession for a long time. And that turned to philosophy. Ultimately I found the right sort of synthesis and ended up writing a dissertation illuminating the structure of modernity from the standpoint of Martin Heidegger’s conception of mathematics. And I still think that’s the best thing that I’ve ever done. Although, you know, when all is said and done, people are gonna say, you know, probably “Darren Beattie the guy who coined Globalist American Empire” or something like that (laughs), but I am also very proud of coining Globalist American Empire, and it shows you can’t really predict what’s going to work and what isn’t. You have to just submit it to the public sphere and the public sphere decides what works or what doesn’t. That’s, I mean at least for the mimetic content, not necessarily the case for philosophical content, but certainly for mimetic content I’m very proud that Globalist American Empire, along with its convenient acronym, has kind of taken off even to the point that people are using it without even knowing where it came from, which I think is a great sign of its success.

But yeah, to the philosophy thing, I spent a long time just extremely dedicated to mastering philosophy, to reading deeply. Now I look back on it extremely fondly because I don’t know when I’ll ever have a chance to do this again but, you know, there were many nights where I was just there in my apartment, I was in grad school. I smoked a lot. Some nights I would smoke three packs a night, and I’m a pacer. I’m one of these people when I’m thinking I pace, and I pace back and forth and back and forth, cigarette after another, after another. Just for a very small passage of Rousseau, just to get to the bottom of a very small passage, and the amount of mental energy I put into that small fucking passage, given what age I was. Like, there’s a part of me that wants to go back and say, “Stop this. You can do this when you’re 60. You should be raising money from a bunch of dumb VCs who don’t know what the hell to do with their money and build the next glorified food delivery app, because that’s what society actually rewards. You know, found a doodle-oodle or whatever stupid name that these people give to the food delivery apps. Get a Gooble! (laughs) – found a company called Gooble, raise a couple hundred million for it and make sure that you deliver junk food to people more efficiently and, you know, you could scale it” (laughs). Something like that. Cause that’s the kind of dumb shit that, you know, then you’d have the money to do what you want.

But no, I look back on it very fondly, just pacing back and forth to master this one piece of Rousseau, and I really do think that it’s enriched my life tremendously. And also it does give perspective because I do think all this stuff, this political world is very important. I enjoy it. I kind of like being in the mud, if you haven’t noticed (laughs). I like the combative aspect. I like the aspect of making fun of the FBI and making fun of these just pathetic journalist types who have arrogated to themselves this sense of power and sensoriousness. I do like that, but I think that once you’ve imbibed and really digested philosophy down to your bones and it becomes part of you, it does change you a lot and it gives you a perspective. And a certain type of, I don’t want to say arrogance, but it is a kind of arrogance because it, you know, by contrast, you understand on a deep level how trivial everything else is, and you understand what real quality means. So it can ultimately be a recipe for perpetual disappointment. But one of the things that’s kind of sad is that the news business in particular, like having to follow the constant fantasmagoria of the news cycle and the vicissitudes of things, being on top of, you know, whatever the latest thing in the news is, it really does degrade your mind. I think I’ve lost a lot of IQ points, just being involved in the political world and it’s sad. I don’t think I would even be capable of focusing in the way that I did when I was really absorbed with philosophy. Maybe I could get it back again. Making money unfortunately is important… but being able to make money while making a difference is a great thing and it’s a great privilege. Like I said, the system is not designed, first of all, for people to be able to challenge the Regime and get away with it. But what it’s really not designed for is for people to be able to challenge the Regime and make a living off of it. And I’m one of the few people in the country who’s in a privileged position to do that. I’m very grateful for it and very lucky, and I’m just getting started. I’m not about to retire. I’m very jacked up on this. I’m just getting started. But yes, there is a part of me that’s been lost and to the extent possible, I would like to revisit some of the philosophy, see if I can do it in a way that seems authentic and not in this kind of Twitter way, I guess you could say. To do it in a way that I feel comfortable that it’s not degrading it.

 

Coming back to the concept of the “pain box”, as you’ve termed it. The times call for people to oppose the very system designed to silence and force us into compliance. To develop the capacity and the means to extricate one’s self from the social pressures that are designed to make it difficult not to comply with the Regime’s rules. How do you recommend people acquire these mind and skill sets?

The pain box question which we’ve been discussing is an interesting concept. I had a kind of viral audio clip that circulated around, asking whether Elon Musk had what it takes to step into the pain box. The pain box is really what everyone wants to avoid. There’s a tremendous appetite for sort of anti-establishment material for challenging the regime. And so the jackpot from the typical sort of political actor or even commentator’s point of view is something that bears the simulacra of subversiveness, but really avoids the pain box. It looks like you’re doing something but you’re really not. And that’s because the pain box is very difficult, and people have experienced it to varying degrees. But that’s basically why I thought Donald Trump was the real deal, when I saw that he could endure the pain box like no other, literally the coordinated opposition of every single institution in the country, if not the world, which was against him. And he withstood it, kept his composure and it didn’t phase him. In fact, he pushed harder.

People don’t appreciate just how hard that is. Human beings did not evolve for the pain box. And you know, there’s a reason they say – while it’s cliché and I think it bears qualification – that people are more terrified of standing in front of a crowd than death. That’s because social disapproval makes people extremely uncomfortable and the mechanism of the internet and social media has enabled a kind of social disapproval, a mechanism on steroids that also has professional repercussions, potentially legal, all sorts of things, and very, very, few human beings are constituted in a way that they can withstand that. Including a lot of wealthy human beings, in fact, especially a lot of wealthy human beings. That’s why I do have to give Elon credit because so many really wealthy people, even people in the tech side and others, they’re just risk-averse. They have so much money, but they never do anything bold with it. And while we could criticize Elon here and there, he is in the arena more than I would’ve expected. So I give him major credit. He’s someone who has money who actually did something bold with it. And hopefully that’ll encourage others to do so, but there’s a lot of weakness out there. Even people with money who should know better or who should have higher aspirations, who should be a little bit more ambitious – but the pain box is the reason people avoid it. And the more you have, the more the pain box can do to you. So it’s understandable.

And this gets to the question of masculinity you and I talked about. I’m not one of these guys going to the gym all the time. Maybe I should. I used to be quite fit. I like to play tennis a lot, and I’ve gotten more fit, but I also just I like to eat. I love Dr. Pepper, and an occasional Negroni. And I just hate the gym, I’ll be honest. I think it’s so boring. I can’t get into it. I guess my health pays the price. I think the core of masculinity though, if I have to address it, is not about that. The core of masculinity is really having the characteristics that you need to withstand the pain box. And you know, you could be, you could be as ripped as possible. You can be in great shape, which, you know, that’s good for just life generally. A lot of guys in great shape. The second they get a little hint of the paint box, they snap in. They don’t have what it takes. Which is a kind of spiritual strength. A lot of people don’t have it. So what’s the point in building up your strength or any kind of equivalent of strength, building up wealth, building up anything if you ultimately don’t have what it takes to be truly independent, sovereign, and to withstand social pressures? Because there’s nothing more feminine than caving into social pressure. I mean, what more iconic demonstration is there of this than the frothing Megan Kelly trying to do her corporate-ladder-climbing takedown of Donald Trump with an audience full of bought and paid-for shills? For Jeb Bush and others just waiting for the debate to go over, for Donald Trump to be defeated so they can go back to their steakhouse and talk about how they want more immigration. And they thought they had the kill shot, they thought they had Trump “Oh, what about all these bad things you said about women?!”

What about these bad things you said about women? and Trump just said, “Well, only Rosie O’Donnell.” That to me, that’s masculinity. That’s calm under pressure. It’s withstanding social pressure, and it’s the rarest thing in the world, and you just don’t see it very much at all. And I’d say that’s the core of masculinity. If you don’t have that, you’re not getting anywhere. If we don’t have people who exhibit those traits, we’re not getting anywhere. And so that more than any other attribute, more than muscles, more than money, more than, you know, more than Bugattis (laughs), being able to withstand the pain box, to withstand the social pressure and to hold frame is the most important and manly thing you could possibly do. And a lot of women, do it very well. And so I have to give credit for the women who do that. I think Kari Lake does it amazingly, but she does it in a feminine way, which is very impressive. She’s a very impressive, very impressive person. So it’s not unique to men, but I think ultimately that ability to withstand the pain box is masculine trait, and we need more of it, and so we’ve got encourage it as much as we can.

And on that note, we’ll end the interview. It’s been great. Thank you so much, and thank you to the Raw Egg Nationalist and to Man’s World – great publication. I really appreciate it and I think we can do a lot of great things in the future. Thank you.