Thaddeus Russell vs. environmentalism

Thaddeus Russell joins Ross, Christophe and Paul to explain why he takes issue with the environmental movement. He challenges the moralist approach to political problems, describing how environmentalists leverage guilt and shame individual choices—while ignoring big emitters like the US military. Thaddeus also offers an overview of the Progressive Era, discussing the historical efforts to eliminate cultural diversity in the US and sharing his take on the parallels between progressives and environmentalist

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Full Transcript

Ross Kenyon: Hey everyone, just a heads up that this episode with Thaddeus Russell has more swearing and is, for lack of a better term, adult-themed than usual. It’s a long one as we basically let Thad tell us why he does not typically care for environmentalists and environmentalism. There are a bunch of spots that we would have liked to have challenged and unpacked more as you probably could have guessed from that previous sentence, but that’s the hazard of a free-flowing podcast. Thad also didn’t get a proper introduction, which is my fault. He is the author of A Renegade History of the United States, the host of the unregistered podcast and is formerly a history professor.

With that said, we hope you enjoy the show.

Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.

Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon, here with Paul Gamble and Christophe Jospe. We have a special guest in the Nori office today, Thad, Thaddeus Russell, as some might say. Thank you for being here. Host of the Unregistered Podcast, historian, controversial, just starting shit wherever you go. How’s that work for an intro?

Thaddeus Russell: I don’t know. I mean, it’s, you know, I feel welcomed, but also like you’ve issued me with a warning, you know, to the public.

Ross Kenyon: I had a friend who would always describe Slavoj Žižek as being the opposite game from Sesame Street, which was just like whatever was proposed, it would just be like the inverted version of it. That’s sort of you in a way too, Thad.

Thaddeus Russell: I think you take logic that is supposed and All I know is that I’m the opposite of Slavoj Zizek, right? Because he spits when he talks. I don’t do that. You seem very well ordered. And I don’t, I can’t even pronounce the guy’s name. Yeah. Yeah. He doesn’t, his grooming is off. I mean, does he get haircuts? I don’t think he, I don’t, I don’t think so. It’s not a good look. You know, you don’t, it’s the kind of person you don’t want to be around physically. And so I feel like, and I’m a little insulted, Ross, that we start off with that comparison, but we can move on.

Aren’t we here to talk about the earth or something?

Ross Kenyon: We could do that.

Thaddeus Russell: Do you mind if I just get Rockstar and pull this out and just hold it?

Ross Kenyon: You just do that. The microphone.

Thaddeus Russell: Here we go. Now, now, here comes the voice.

Ross Kenyon: Pro Gamer.

Thaddeus Russell: Here’s the radio voice. Okay, now I’m ready to go. You guys fire away.

Ross Kenyon: Now you actually have the opportunity to do some mic drops. There you go. Literally.

Thaddeus Russell: I’m not going to hurt your gear. That would be bad.

Ross Kenyon: Thad, why don’t you just tell the audience a little bit about what brings you here? How do you think about environmentalism in history? Hmm. I don’t know. Give us a basis so we can start prodding you. You have such a long list of sentiments that we’ve seen you expound upon. So give us a nice entry point.

Thaddeus Russell: I do have a long list of sentiments. It’s true. Well, here’s something you guys don’t know. I haven’t told you yet. You’re looking at a former leader of the backpacking section of the Sierra Club. I was a trip leader for the national... Backpacking, you know, the trips you can pay money for and you can get led around the Sierras, you know, by the people I was that. So I, I’ve spent much of my life walking around mountains and along the oceans and I’m from California and beaches and rivers. And yeah, I’ve always loved nature.

Point Reyes in California still is my favorite place on earth. I love the Northwest because of all the green here. When you’re from the West, which I am born and raised in Berkeley, uh, It’s kind of a part of you. I think there’s very few people who were born and raised in the West, right? Who don’t have some kind of love of nature. Absolutely. That’s pretty common among us. And I certainly always have. You know, my dad was into camping. My parents would take us places to, you know, the hills, the mountains, the oceans, the beaches, the rivers, the lakes, before they dammed the rivers.

The California rivers, I still mourn every day. I want to tear down those dams. We can talk about that too. Yeah. But so I had that. And I was also a lefty. My parents were socialists, radical socialists. I was surrounded, of course, in Berkeley in the 60s and 70s and 80s by all those people. Environmentalism wasn’t like a huge thing then, at least in my milieu, but it was certainly a part of it. Then by the 1990s, certainly 80s and 90s, when I was in college and then graduate school, it kind of became a big deal on the left.

In the 80s, it really took off. And when I was in college, I went to Antioch College in Ohio, which was a little tiny hippie college where there were a bunch of anarcho-communist types, not anarcho-capitalist types. These are basically socialists who sort of don’t like the state. And they were very much involved in what they called the ecological movement. And anytime someone throws that word around ecological, you know, they’re playing for real.

Ross Kenyon: Environmentalism. Exactly.

Thaddeus Russell: Environmentalism for them was like, you know, exactly liberal wankers. These were the kinds of people who were down to like chain themselves to trees and to fight, you know, loggers on the forest roads and stuff like that. The guys I was hanging out with were attached to this dude named Murray Bookchin, who some of your listeners might know about. I know you guys know this guy. He’s dead now, but he was in this little weird subculture. He was kind of the leading intellectual of one faction of people who were interested in...

I guess what you call, I don’t know, this all sort of makes me ill even to talk about it. But anyway, I guess what would be called environmentalism or an environmental way of life. But his answer was through decentralization, local communities, but local communities that were organized basically as small communist republics. So for me and my politics now, that’s actually a lot better, much better than much of the environmentalist movement. But it also, the important thing for me was it sort of exposed me to the real inner logic of environmentalism because Bookchin and the Bookchinites were actually, even though they were radicals who liked to chain themselves to trees, Their claim to fame then and still was as the leading critics from within the movement of this really nasty subculture called deep ecology, which is still around and still has manifestations in various ways.

Deep ecology comes out of Edward Abbey’s work and other people’s work. And this is the branch of environmentalism that environmentalists don’t like to talk about because it was and still is explicitly misanthropic. Labels human beings as the problem, as a virus, as a cancer, as something. And often we’ll say things like it, it would be better for there to be fewer human beings. And many of them will say it would be better for there to be no human beings. So their valuation of things is very clear and upfront. They value things that are not human above those things that are human.

And I really appreciate that in people when they are clear about what their politics are and then express it clearly. So we know where we stand. I knew where I stood with a deep ecologist. I still do. The thing is, is that since then, I have realized that misanthropic strand lies within not just these crazy people who chain themselves to trees, but I think it’s the heart of the entire movement. I think it’s what animates it. I don’t see any major pronouncements by any major environmentalists that doesn’t have some strand of antagonism toward human beings.

And I’ve kind of held that idea with me and I’ve been watching environmentalism since then. And with the climate change movement erupting in the last decade or so, it’s become clear again that these people are really not a big fan of my existence. They’re not a fan of my existence. They’re also not a fan of a lot of the things I like to do with my body, including move around the planet. Because apparently that’s not okay because it burns fossil fuels unless you’re going to certain conferences in which it’s encouraged to burn a lot of fossil fuels.

But no, it’s really this sort of fundamental hostility at least stated not just to the existence of human beings but to how we live the things we want. I’m a guy who’s into sensual pleasure and freedom. I like the way things feel and touch and smell. I like not just sex but I like food and I like food from all over the world and I like to travel and I like to see places. I like... I like the nice things, you know, the stuff that requires production on a large scale, you know.

I like living in buildings, you know. I like traveling with things with wheels on them. And they at least publicly say that they don’t like those things. And on top of that, they say that it’s morally wrong for me to even want them. There’s a moralism at the base of this whole thing that is really, to me, the problem with it. There’s a moralism that... Divides the world and all the things in it between good and bad. It’s black or white, or it’s the devil or God, and there’s nothing in between.

So if you have a desire for things that most human beings have had desires for, like to sleep in a nice bed, a comfortable bed, and to be in a nice house, maybe to have a little space of your own, and God forbid, be able to travel not on foot, Those are problems. Those are problems. And that means that you have a fundamental characterological problem. There’s something deeply wrong inside of you because you know what? You’re not like the Indians. See, the Indians didn’t want those things. The native people, that’s why we love them so much.

They didn’t want those things. You guys know that, right? They didn’t want them. And that’s why they remained pure for all those millennia, not building anything, not developing things. All that gorgeous land on this plain of earth, you know, they left all of this fallow when we could have come along and made this into a magical paradise. No, the Indians stood there and just stood there or they sat there. What’s that REM song? Stand in the place where you live, right? So the Indians did that. That’s why they’re great. They didn’t want more.

They didn’t want more than the trees and the streams and the teepee.

Paul Gambill: It’s the noble savage theory.

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So now what I want to say is that’s not wrong and that’s not right. This is about what you value. So if you value living like that, then go for it, please, by any means. You can go someplace in British Columbia or maybe it’s the Yukon by now you have to go. Go there and please go live like Indians as you imagine them, by the way. This was imagined Indians I was just describing. Right. But leave me the fuck alone, because I’d like to drive my car to get my latte.

Thank you very much. We could go on about my hatred of compost toilets. Are you still listening, listeners? Environmentalist podcast.

Ross Kenyon: It’s going to be a weird one.

Thaddeus Russell: Just stay with it. So think about this. Let’s just back up here. Let’s just broaden our focus. Any political problem, doesn’t matter whether it’s you want clean water, you want clean air, or you want welfare for all, or you want to end a war. What’s the best way to go about it? Right. So you got to understand the issue first. You got to study it. Now, if you start with morality, there’s no point in studying because you already know a priori what is good and what is bad. Right. You’ve already been told what certain results, you know, from political calculations are good.

So there’s no point in studying. OK, so it’s anti intellectual. Number one. Oh, oh, damn. You know what else it is? It’s anti-science, isn’t it? Because if we approach any question with, you know, this moralism locked in, again, there’s no point in studying it. Why study it? Look, 97% of scientists have told us, guys, you know, what the deal is, haven’t they? And they’ve been super clear about it. It’s catastrophe. There’s going to be a catastrophe unless we take radical action immediately. 97% of scientists, I’m told, right, have told us.

So we know. We also know that the owners of large businesses are evil by definition because only a greedy person would own a large business. And we know that greed is evil. Why do we know that? Well, because the Bible tells us so. So it just stacks up. I mean, if you have this moral framework, which, by the way, comes from Christianity, I submit, then you just can look at it and know what the answer is. The answer is we must expropriate all the property from the evil people, put them out of business, possibly put them in prison.

And in fact, they’ve called for this, right? Many climate marches have called for imprisoning the owners of fossil fuel companies. Um, we must then on a deeper level have a change in people’s character. And you see this a lot. You see this a lot in American history too. You see this a lot among evangelicals. You see this a lot among colonialists and imperialists of all kinds. We have found these people who have ideas that are problematic and That cause social ills of various kinds. We must change their minds, right? So in America and in the developed West, we have too much greed.

We have too much desire for stuff, which is destroying the earth, we are told. So it becomes a global, psychological, social engineering project. Do you, do you associate this with the revival movement in America?

Ross Kenyon: Is that sort of what you’re hearkening back to? Sure.

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah. It’s all, it’s all right. Awakening. It’s all of a piece indeed. So I think this is a uniquely American movement. Although of course you see a lot of it in Northern Europe too. Although I think there’s a lot of shared, I think they learned a lot of this from us. You know, we also Americans also invented eugenics at about the same time. I don’t think that’s a coincidence by the way, fellas.

Ross Kenyon: Uh, yeah, we want to talk about the progressive era. Let’s do that. I don’t think people know that period of time around the turn of the century was even called that. Why was it called that? What were some of the ideas that were being bandied around?

Thaddeus Russell: It was called that because we were moving forward, Ross. We were moving forward as a world, as a society. It’s a good thing to do. And we were moving forward because there were some among us who were so educated and intelligent and had such good plans and who gained power during that time between roughly the 1880s and 1920s. You had basically a class of intellectuals for the most part. You might call them social activists, but basically they all went through the elite universities. They all went to the Ivy Leagues in the Northeast who called themselves this new thing called progressives.

They were called progressives and they called this the progressive movement. So they did many things. The big thing that they’re interested in, and this is going to tie in directly to environmentalism in a way that’s going to shock your audience. The big issue for progressives at the time, the biggest was the immigration problem. That’s really why progressivism came to be at that time. Between 1880 and 1920, the population of the United States roughly doubled, mostly because of immigrants. This is the big immigrant wave that everybody knows about. This is when all the Irish and the Jews and the Italians and the Slavs and all those people came in.

We’re all probably related.

Ross Kenyon: This is bigger than teetotalism at the same time?

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah. And so progressivism was a response to the flooding of our shores with these immigrants. We did. We, the United States, did see suddenly these Jews who spoke Yiddish, who brought this extended family with them instead of the nice, tidy American family. And they were interested in jazz. This is when Jews were in the entertainment business and they were busy inventing Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s. Burlesque and vaudeville and all these sort of unseemly things, right? They had these foreign cultures. They had to be dealt with. This is a problem.

They had to be assimilated and made into people like Americans. And we had Italians who, you know, they tended to be, you know, doing naughty things in the 1920s as well.

Ross Kenyon: When the progressives had successfully removed- Are you talking about like the anarchists, like Sacco and Vanzetti, that sort of thing? Uh-huh.

Thaddeus Russell: Okay, yeah. When the progressives had successfully removed the demon rum from our society through prohibition, that was a progressive cause, prohibition. They were successful in getting that law passed. They, of course, were not successful in removing demon rum. Italian, Sicilians, of course, were the front lines, right? They were the shock troops. They were the ones who were fighting the good fight, in my opinion, by distributing the beer and the booze illegally. If not for them, we may still not be able to drink legally in this country. That’s something to take into consideration.

They were the enemies of the progressives, or I should say progressives made them the enemy. So progressives were not anti-immigration, but they were opposed to any different culture. Existing within the United States. So they were pro-assimilation. So they opened these things called settlement houses in every city and around the country in which they would bring in these immigrant groups and they would teach them to speak English. They would teach them how to work in a factory if they were men. If they were women, they would teach them how to be good American housewives.

They would teach them how to dress properly. They would teach them all the proper customs.

Ross Kenyon: Was this the Jane Addams?

Thaddeus Russell: This was Jane Addams was the most famous one. Hull House in Chicago was the most famous settlement house.

Ross Kenyon: You used to live right by it, yeah.

Thaddeus Russell: That’s right. And so that’s what it was. It was an assimilation factory. And they would actually have ceremonies to celebrate sometimes when they had a group of Hungarian immigrants or Russian immigrants finish their program successfully. They would have it where they would line up on stage. They would enter the stage in their native garb, right, dressed like they did back in the shtetl in Russia or whatever. And then they would go through. They’d have a giant melting pot sort of made up on the middle of the stage. They would walk through the melting pot, the pot, the cauldron, and then come out the other end all dressed as Uncle Sam.

That would be the ceremony dressed alike. It’s called the 100% Americanism campaign. Henry Ford gave a lot of money to this. He was big behind it, but it was a progressive movement. So they were helping the poor, weren’t they? They were helping the poor and the immigrants. They taught them English. They taught them skills. They got them jobs. Sometimes they got them housing. All great. Who wouldn’t like them? So they’re considered to be heroes for that reason. What people don’t see or fail to see or refuse to see is that there was actually a Holocaust going on, a cultural Holocaust.

Now, you could consider that to be a good thing if you were opposed to all other cultures different than Northeast Yankee culture, right? Which is what all the progressives were. They were not just Americans. They were Northeast upper class educated Yankees. There’s a cost and a benefit to citizenship, to becoming a full American. The benefits are great. We get protected by the Bill of Rights. Awesome. It really is. I like the Bill of Rights a lot. Equal protection under the law. Super cool. You get to vote. I’m not super stoked about that, but whatever.

You know, I’ll take it, I guess, over a monarchy for now, you know, but it tends to be popular. I’m just saying these are all, you know, for most people, pretty good. So it’s hard to argue against it. What is missed is that you’re not allowed really to bring in anything else culturally. So diversity, cultural diversity has to lose. And that’s exactly what happened. So Jews now and Italians now who are American and Irish Americans, can you even tell often that they are of that ethnicity? Not really, unless you know their last name.

They assimilated pretty much fully after World War II. That was the job of the progressives. Now, I like the things that Italians and Jews and all these other immigrant groups are doing. Most of what I like about America came here because of them or because of gays or because of blacks, all of whom have been forced... Or seriously persuaded to assimilate as well and throw off all of their distinctive culture as well. Barack Obama is sort of the prime example of this. Is he not the perfect American, at least how he presents himself?

He’s completely disciplined. He used to smoke and gave that up when he took office, right? He doesn’t drink, apparently. What do we know about his sex life with Michelle? Nothing. They never talk about it. They’re a sexy-looking couple. They must have sex. They have two kids, we would think. Never mention it, right? That is the ultimate. That is as repressed as it gets. That means he’s a perfect American. That’s why he became president, right? You have to do that to get by. Trump is the example that proves the rule. Trump is not...

Disciplined in these ways at all. In fact, he’s just the opposite. Well, what has been the response to Trump in respect and among the respectable in this country?

Paul Gambill: It’s all about changing norms, violating norms.

Thaddeus Russell: It’s like a virus entering the body and all the antibodies just attacking it. They’re just trying to expel him because he is the opposite of what you’re supposed to be as a good American. It’s so hard for people to see that, especially in the presidency. It’s really amazing how so much of this is just aesthetic, psychological stuff. And superficial, you might say, although it’s not superficial because these things matter to me. I like money. I like what it can get me. I like flying in planes. I like nice buildings with nice hotels inside of them.

The kinds of things that Donald Trump likes. I’m sorry, everyone. But those are good. Now, here’s who told us that they’re not good. Puritans. The people who founded this country, right? They’re the ones who came here and said, you’re supposed to work hard because work is godly. That’s the Puritan work ethic. And you’re supposed to make money for sure. They said that. But what you can’t do with the money is invest it in yourself. You can’t enjoy it. You’ve got to invest it back into the community, ideally into the church or the town or something like that.

Or even better later on, invested into like a country across the world where there are poor people. Put your money somewhere else. Give it to someone else. Be selfless. That’s at the heart of Puritanism. It’s at the heart of Christianity too. So Trump, of course, just takes a big piss on all of that, doesn’t he? And here’s the thing though. I ask everyone, whose side now are you on? Let’s think about this again. So on the one side, you have the blacks historically, you know, have been known for being of the body, being sensual, being about commercial pleasures, you know, jazz, hip hop, rock and roll, all these things they invented.

Those were commercial, you know, you paid to go listen to the music, right? Dance, slang, all these things are individualistic as well. There’s nothing American about them. Now, without just black culture, right, just think about the United States of America and then remove black culture as we understand it, or remove the descendants of slaves and all the things that they’ve given to this culture. For me, it’s a way less interesting place to be.

Paul Gambill: It’s sort of like in The Man in the High Castle, that Amazon show, how in any eastern side of the U. S. where the Nazis control, like they’re only allowed to listen to Wagner and opera.

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah. So let’s just take. All right. So imagine that. Imagine if assimilation had been fully successful, which, by the way, that was the project of reconstruction after Civil War. No one knows that. But the Freedmen’s Bureau schools, there were 2000 of them across the South and many, many slaves, ex-slaves went through those schools. They taught them just like the settlement houses later on with the immigrants. The same thing. Reading, writing, arithmetic, how to speak English properly, how to work well if you were a man, how to be a good wife and mother if you were a woman, and then they gave them extensive moral lessons.

Do not drink. Do not smoke. Don’t be lazy. Go to church. Be punctual. Be orderly. Be efficient. Learn how to be a good soldier. Because eventually we will call on you if you’re a citizen. Remember, that’s the deal, guys. It’s not just fun and games and the Bill of Rights and equal protection under the law. When this country goes to war, guess what? Vietnam might happen someday. And we’re going to even send the black people there to fight and die for that. So that’s what this means, guys. It’s not just good stuff.

But that’s what happened during Reconstruction. So if Reconstruction had been successful, and by the way, this was explicitly stated, we must annihilate all aspects of slave culture, they said. So if we didn’t have that, if Reconstruction had been successful and they’d assimilated all those people, we would clearly would have had no jazz, no blues, no rock and roll, no R&B, no hip hop, none of that. You know, a whole bunch of American English comes from black vernacular. So much, not just the obvious slang stuff, but so much of the way we speak comes from that.

Dancing, moving their bodies, the way that Americans move their bodies comes so much from the long lineage of black movement. It is that basic. And I’m just talking about black people, right? Let’s talk about gays for a second, right? Same thing. So until the 1970s, gays represented sexual freedom. Why? Because they had to, in a way. The only sex they can have is recreational. They can’t have procreational sex. By definition, all gay sex is only recreational, which... That’s a problem if you’re a Puritan because we don’t like pleasure. That’s selfish, it’s individualistic, and it’s about your own pleasure rather than serving the greater community.

So we’ve got to get rid of that too. So when the gays started asking for marriage, the conservatives jumped on board, many of them, the smart ones, and said, damn right, this is good. We’re going to make them just like us too. And that was actually the explicit message of the leaders of the gay marriage movement. People like Andrew Sullivan and Larry Kramer, right? They said this. They said this. We’ve got to stop fucking in the bushes. We’ve got to close down the bathhouses. We’ve got to have wives and husbands, and we’ve got to go shopping at Ikea.

We’ve got to have children. We’ve got to do the white picket fence. We’ve got to assimilate. And this was the line that was used. We’ve got to show that we are just like them.

Paul Gambill: Wouldn’t you say MLK took the same approach during the civil rights movement?

Thaddeus Russell: And then black people have had the longest history of this because they’re still undergoing it ever since slavery, since Reconstruction. Yes, every civil rights leader, black or white, all the way through MLK, all the way to the present. I devote an entire chapter on this in my book, Renegade History. MLK was the fiercest among them. He gave sermons to black churches in which he said, we need to walk down the streets and not let white people ever think that we’re thinking about sex. Don’t ever look at a white woman. Don’t look at a woman.

He says, you must work hard. You must work harder than anybody else. You must love work. Even if you’re a street sweeper, he said, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted buildings. No matter what you gain from it, work hard. No sex outside of marriage, no drinking, no smoke. Of course, he was a hypocrite, but didn’t matter publicly. He was saying these things. Total Puritanism from top to bottom and calling for an outright annihilation of black culture. Martin Luther King did not even mention jazz until the 1960s. He was so assimilationist. He was so hostile to black culture.

You could read some of his sermons from the 1950s and think it was delivered by the Ku Klux Klan. I’m not kidding you. The things he said about black people and black culture. But it’s the same story. Assimilate, remove the differences, remove the chaos, remove the disorder of having different cultures inside this country. Make everyone the same.

Paul Gambill: Where does the environmentalist movement fit into this?

Ross Kenyon: Is it like the anti-pleasure component? Is that what you see?

Thaddeus Russell: Well, so there are, I see, there’s one way of looking at human beings, and especially in this country, I think historically, there’s sort of You can look at it this way. There’s sort of two large groups always, or I should say there’s one large group and one small group. The large group is most of us. Most of us have no interest in managing this society or even any part of it, don’t we? Very, very few people even want to manage their block, much less their city, much less the country or the world.

That’s the vast majority of people, a vast majority of Americans. That’s us. There’s also been this very strange, always for hundreds of years, smaller group that’s wanted to manage stuff and their ambitions have ranged around the world, right? It’s usually not just they want to manage their local town, but they get global ambition. So that’s the progressives. To the bone. Okay. Now, if you want to manage things, for instance, they invented the city manager model. In fact, I think Seattle was one of them. Seattle, I believe was one of the model progressive cities, which was they would hire an engineer to basically run the city unelected because they were the experts.

So let’s give control to the experts, to scientists, right? To people who use rationality and reason. That was, again, a progressive idea. Why was it so appealing to them? Remember, they all went to universities, right? They went to the elite universities. This is when science was first being championed as an alternative. This is the heart of the Enlightenment. As an alternative to the old medieval superstitions of the great religions, which that sounds okay to me. But they became in love. They fell in love with science and people have called this scientism.

It’s sort of a religion of science where anything that comes out of the scientific process or scientific method or comes even out of a lab or out of the mind of a science is considered to be unquestionably good or true. It’s this tendency or instinct we often have, right? Well, if they’re a scientist, they must be right. If they put it through this process, it must be correct. Which, you know, that’s obviously true, isn’t it, guys? That everything that has come out of scientists’ mouths and out of labs over the millennia has always been true, right?

No, exactly the opposite. If you read Thomas Kuhn, The Structures of Scientific Revolutions, you know that, of course, every scientific claim gets overturned constantly.

Paul Gambill: Yes, science doesn’t prove anything. Science is only about disproving things.

Thaddeus Russell: Right. So I say, ask a scientist.

Ross Kenyon: I associate this with, do you like James C. Scott’s work? There must be linkages between the two in an overlap. But this idea that the world can be made rational, that we can sort of structure things in a very coherent way. And people will just, they won’t innovate around the margins. They’ll actually just follow what we tell them to do. And that will work. And that’s part of why I think environmentalism rubs people the wrong way is that they have these expectations for how people are going to react to what they’re trying to do.

And it doesn’t seem feasible a lot of the time.

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah, so James Scott’s work is largely about what he calls the hidden transcript of everyday resistance to attempts to control ordinary people, usually through the state, but not always, sometimes through corporations in league with the state. But generally speaking, it’s the hidden resistance, the everyday resistance of, in his case, he was talking about peasants in Asia. The ways in which you can resist without actually having an organized rebellion, a revolution, taking control, none of that. Just day to day, just not working as hard as you’re supposed to, not being as orderly as you’re supposed to, not obeying all the laws like you’re supposed to, right?

So he kind of pioneered that. And my work, Renegade History, comes very much out of his work. I couldn’t really do what I did without his innovation there. So I love that. I want to get back. What I was getting at though, is sort of the way that rulers think. And he’s had a, he has a book about what’s it called? How the, how the state thinks or something like that. It’s that’s one of Scott’s works as well. So if you are one of these people who wants or needs to manage.

Society of any kind, right? This is not us. This is not most people. It’s hard to get into that headspace, right? But just try to just put yourself in there. Imagine that’s your thing. That’s your thing. You need to do this. I used to kind of be like this when I was on the left. You know, I used to have fantasies about if I were a congressperson, you know, what laws I would pass.

Ross Kenyon: Which kulaks you would deport. Yeah, exactly.

Thaddeus Russell: It gets down to that fast, doesn’t it? Yeah. Well, your first, your primary problem will always be your citizenry. How controlled are they? You cannot have citizens, if you’re the ruler, who are wilding out. You can’t have citizens, forget that, you can’t have citizens who are individualistic in a fundamental way. You have to have citizens who have merged their identity to some extent with your identity and with the identity of the society you are ruling. So anything that causes them to seek pleasures that are individual or of the body or sensual are going to be a problem.

You have to at least keep an eye on them. And if they ever become the dominant interest of your population, you’re going to have to take measures like censorship or putting people in prison for watching TV, right? Like the things that go on across the Middle East as we speak right now, right? People are punished for listening to rock and roll music in the Middle East. In the Soviet Union, they were throwing the gulag.

Ross Kenyon: For blue jeans?

Thaddeus Russell: For blue jeans, for t-shirts, for having long hair, for imitating James Dean, for listening to Charlie Parker. Later on, it was for listening to Bruce Springsteen. In communist China, the same thing. In nationalist Japan in the 1930s, when they were gearing up for war with the United States, one of the first things they did was ban all Western and American culture. Until then, there were dance halls on every block in Tokyo and Osaka.

Ross Kenyon: So Thad, I have to push back a little bit.

Thaddeus Russell: Sure.

Ross Kenyon: Because I actually lived in the Middle East and saw plenty of rock and roll in Cairo.

Thaddeus Russell: Exactly. Yes, you did.

Ross Kenyon: And lots of Egyptians went too. We all had a fun time. No one was getting thrown in jail. So what are you talking about?

Thaddeus Russell: That’s right. So this is exactly correct. So if you look at... Anybody can Google this right now. Just Google the name of any major city in the Middle East. And then with that, Google satellite dish or satellite dishes. And you will see, I promise you, I don’t care which city it is in the Middle East, you will see huge apartment buildings. Just studded, covered with satellite dishes, which tells me that the mullahs who run those countries or who run sections of those countries are losing big time. What’s winning is the stuff that I like, sensual pleasures, right?

That freedom that comes through those pipes, that comes through your television screen. There is a fatwa, there are databases, you can Google this as well. There are databases online that simply list all the fatwas issued by high clerics, high Islamic clerics around the world daily. There’s fatwas, you know, this is bad, this is forbidden, this will punish you for this. And you’ll see that there are frequently fatwas against Kim Kardashian, against piercings, against naval rings, against movies, against Madonna. One of the leaders I think of Hamas at one point threatened to kill Madonna, not because she was pro-Israel, I don’t think she is, but simply because she showed her midriff in a video, you know, 20 years ago.

So...

Ross Kenyon: Sure, but it’s one thing to say there’s a fatwa from some radical cleric that might have some kind of sway. It’s another thing to say on a political level, you’re going to be arrested for listening to rock and roll music.

Thaddeus Russell: But that did happen in Tehran, in Iran, until very recently. Even still, they get thrown in jail. I mean, I’ve known people who have been thrown in jail in Tehran for playing or listening to rock. Now that’s changing now. So now what’s going on in Tehran these days, if you read the news, Not about Trump and his blustering, but about what’s actually going on in the streets. You see report after report of what? Women throwing off their headscarves in front of the cops. And even daring the cops to do anything about it.

Because there’s a revolution going on that we have nothing to do with. Although we’ve inspired very much so. Not we. Our pop music artists. Our bad people. The dancers. Beyonce deserves much more credit for anything that goes on in Iran than any politician or the 82nd Airborne. Yeah.

Unknown speaker: Totally agree. Ross, help get us back on the rails.

Ross Kenyon: Yes, let’s finish this thread about the link between the progressive mindset.

Unknown speaker: It’s all coming back. It’s all coming back?

Thaddeus Russell: No, seriously, watch. Yeah, well, here it goes. Okay. So, again, so if you want to manage other people, if you want to manage a society of any size, even if you just want to manage a little company… Paul, right? If you have any, you need to know that these guys aren’t drunk, don’t you? Yeah. You kind of want to know whether Ross has a heroin problem, don’t you? If Kristoff is like super into video games, like that might be okay, but it would be on your mind. You would watch out for that because he could be playing video games when he’s supposed to be doing what?

Working. God damn it, right? Right. It could also be making noise when this has to be a quiet space in these offices, right? So you, simply by being a head of a company, you have the same set of problems. The good news is there’s only a few of you here. And you’re kind of, it’s all voluntary, right?

Ross Kenyon: Penopticon, Paul.

Thaddeus Russell: They didn’t become citizens of your little republic by birth, meaning they were trapped into it. You know what I mean? They chose to be here. We all signed our social contract with each other. That’s right. That’s right. Voluntarily as adults. Whereas I didn’t, see. See, I was just born in this place. And next thing I know, I’m like, oh, I got to go to war if some shit goes down. And I got to follow all these rules that I never even voted for. And yet... What’s that about? Oh, and by the way, simply from the stupidest luck ever, just from being born in this chunk of rock right here, I also get to decide how everybody in the rest of the world lives too if I want to vote.

I get to decide if people who live in what’s called Mexico get to come here or not. When I’m just a completely idiotic American who knows nothing about Mexico just because I was just born here. I mean, I do need someone to explain that logic to me sometime. So, back to managing. Back to you, back to being the boss, boss or president or senator or anything or czar. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter if you’re a communist, a socialist, a libertarian, a liberal, a conservative. If you’re managing something with people in it, you’ve got to keep them orderly, as orderly as possible.

Because they got to be productive, for one thing. The thing falls apart if they don’t obey the rules, if they don’t follow the rules or the laws. The whole thing falls apart. We all know this. This is just common sense, okay? So that means, guys, there is a fundamental conflict between the people and the rulers, always. Mm-hmm. I’m thinking, excuse me, everyone, often, quite often, I’ll say this, it’s a lot. I think about sex. I think about partying. I think about doing drugs. I think about vacations. I think about sleeping.

I think about resting. I think about going to the movies. I think about just listening to music. Do I need to go on? Do I think about sitting in a cubicle in a corporation, in a corporate office from nine to five, five days a week?

Paul Gambill: Never. No one does.

Thaddeus Russell: No one does. Even when we love our jobs like I do, it’s still work and it’s still very often my body says, Thad, stay in bed. Thad, go have sex. Thad, go get high or something other than this thing. That’s civilization yelling at my body. That’s a controlling impulse. Now, the progressives were these weird people who wanted to do, who wanted to manage us because they thought that they understood how we could live better. They thought that we, the people, And they were especially concerned about immigrants and their dirty ways and all their alcohol drinking.

Remember they were all drank wine, right? They all drank booze. They, they imported it. They spoke different languages. That’s chaotic. You can’t employ people very well if they speak Yiddish. Can you write or Italian? They bring extended families, not little tidy nuclear families. It’s Jesus Christ, the Greeks. It’s like, oh, it’s not just mom and dad. It’s mom, dad and grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins and friends raising all the children in these slums where all the children seem to be raised by the neighborhood, not just by the family, like not by the individual family.

We don’t know who’s who and what’s what. Disorderly, chaotic. That’s what the progressives were all about.

Ross Kenyon: It’s illegible.

Thaddeus Russell: It’s illegible. That’s right. That’s right. To manage, and Foucault later expanded on this, right? To manage a society, right? You want to know as much as you can about your employees, don’t you? Ideally, don’t you? Well, so that’s what the progressives did. They studied them extensively. Again, they were academic, so there’s lots of studies of what the immigrants really were, what they wanted, what they needed. And then again, they were very interested in science and especially engineering, and they were interested in social engineering. And that’s the term that they coined social engineering.

We have really good ideas about how to engineer human beings. We’re going to teach them how to speak English so they all speak the same language so they can all work together. We’re going to teach them how to work in the same places together. So assimilation and integration becomes essential in America, right? Because we have all these people who would look different. They’re from different places. But we need them to work in our factories. And then, oh, guess what happens right around 1917, right in the middle of all this? Oops, shit, we’ve got to go to war in France for a reason no one can understand.

And we’ve got to go to war in France against Germans involving the English and the Russians, all of whom are hating each other, yet our country is made up of people from precisely those places. So we’ve got to convince them that they are not, they are no longer Austro-Hungarian, they are no longer Russian, they are no longer British and German. They are all Americans, 100% American. So assimilation, right? For order, for efficiency, for control. Am I clear enough so far? Civilization demands this. Progressives understood that. They understood that and they championed it.

So Freud, Sigmund Freud is running around at exactly this time, writing this book called Civilization and Its Discontents, in which he makes the argument I just made. And the progressives were like, holy shit, dude’s right. Holy shit, civilization is the enemy of the individual. Civilization is the enemy of individual pleasures and freedoms in particular. Civilization is the one that invented the taboo on children’s sexuality. Civilization is the one that invented the taboo on sexuality outside of marriage. Civilization is the one that said a nuclear family is the best form, right?

A family. It’s the best way to raise children. That gets stuck in our heads. Civilization tells us work is good, not masturbating. Work is going to a cubicle. Think about that. Think about how weird and sick this is. We all just know in our bones, don’t we, that going and sitting in a cubicle from 9 to 5 Monday to Friday for the rest of our lives is better than jerking off. Now tell me... Tell me what, who’s, what? There’s some pathology here. I don’t think it’s on my side. So if you want to manage society, you need order, you need efficiency, you need to be opposed to the individual, and you need to be opposed especially to individual desires that get in the way of having nice big factories that pump out cars and then tanks, right, in World War I.

We get all these immigrants and these factories to pump out all these weapons and we have to send them overseas to fight to use those weapons. So now you can kind of maybe see why, you know, environmentalism might flow out of that. It’s hostile to the things that also dirty the planet. If you agree, and I do, you know, that generally speaking, industrial capitalism brought us all these wonderful things that I enjoy, but it made stuff dirty for a while, at least, didn’t it, right? I mean, if you go to Pittsburgh back in time to 1920, 1930, yes, it’s pumping out all the steel that made all these amazing buildings that we live in and the trains that were phenomenal miracles that transported human beings across continents.

Great. But damn, the air was dirty. And so was the water, right? So again, if you want a perfectly functioning, efficient society, if that is your highest value, which that was the highest value for progressives, you’re going to be very attracted to a movement that tells people that they must live simply. They must live simply, meaning they must live simply according to their own desires and their own bodies. Their bodies must be given short shrift, second priority or no priority. The first priority is always to the community, the greater community.

So a progressive said instead of God’s community that you sacrifice your individual desires for, environmentalists said it’s the whole damn earth you’ve got to sacrifice your individual desires for. So Compost toilet. You got to use a compost toilet. You would rather use a regular toilet where you get to stand up like a man to pee. But no, we got to sacrifice pleasures. But the good news is, guys, we’re going to go to heaven when we do this. Because it’s for the earth, not just the country, not just humanity, because we don’t even like humanity.

You’re saving the whole earth, right? So it’s as good as what is promised in the Bible. That’s the same thing.

Ross Kenyon: I really like your linking of environmentalism to millenarian thought to just the sort of like... Which is what? Like when you think that Christ is coming back and there’s sort of like a golden age, we’re preparing ourselves for it and it’s like creating heaven on earth.

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah. And then guilt is the currency. Guilt is what keeps the whole thing churning forward, right? It’s like... Without the guilt, I think the whole thing falls apart, which is really interesting if you think about it. So environmentalism, I believe, is pretty much exclusively a rich person’s project.

Paul Gambill: Yeah, it’s interesting you say the whole thing falls apart because my first thought was, well, but what’s the whole thing? It’s not like they’ve accomplished that much.

Thaddeus Russell: Well, the whole thing meaning the ideology.

Paul Gambill: Yeah, okay.

Ross Kenyon: Is it as simple to talk about environmentalism in monolithic terms?

Thaddeus Russell: I mean, you guys tell me, you know, better than I do, but I, no, I mean, of course there’s different strands. And I started talking about, you know, my, my brief dalliance with these radical, the radical fringe, I guess. But, um, no, I see this though. I see it. Every environmentalist I’ve ever been aware of has had some strand of, I mean, they moralize against what they call greed, right? Greed is sort of the root of it, I think for them, isn’t it? Isn’t that the original sin that causes everything?

So without greed, we would have no environmental destruction. We’d live on a pure planet. Yeah, I’m like, excuse me, speak for yourself. I want things. You going to stop me? You going to stop me? And I’m supposed to feel bad about wanting certain things?

Paul Gambill: What if you can have both?

Thaddeus Russell: Then I’m down. But just stop telling me what I should and shouldn’t want. See, this is the thing. It’s about what I should and shouldn’t want. They try to get inside my head. I resent that.

Ross Kenyon: Guilt is not really that great of a cudgel either. I’m not sure how long you can sustain that. Are you kidding?

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah. Well, it’s no, here’s how it works. It’s really effective among rich people.

Unknown speaker: You never went through Catholic school, Ross.

Ross Kenyon: No, no, no.

Thaddeus Russell: Do you hear me? It’s really effective among rich people. When you travel in countries that are not wealthy, and that’s most countries, right? You don’t see this stuff. You don’t see this stuff. There is none of this kind of abstract guilt about humanity or the planet, right? There may be guilt about what’s going on in their actual lives, but there’s none of this social guilt.

Paul Gambill: Because otherwise they’re trying to survive.

Thaddeus Russell: Exactly. Well, yeah, we have the time and the resources, and we also have the guilt of being at the top, I think. That’s part of it. But I think it’s actually American. It’s an American thing. This country was founded by evangelical Christians. Hello. I mean, Puritanism wasn’t necessarily evangelical in the way we think of it now, but it did have at its core this tenet that all people should live this way, that to be close to God means to live simply. Got that? That was Puritanism. To be close to God, the city upon a hill, the godly city, in Puritan terms, this is Cotton Mather, this is the Founders, this is Plymouth Rock, those guys, that’s what they said.

To live according to God, to live close to God, you must live safe. Simply, they were the original environmentalists. They built their own houses with their own hands. That’s pretty goddamn environmentalist, isn’t it, right? They didn’t even use machines. There were no carbon emissions at all, were there? They took down the trees and then built houses. They used the entire animal when they ate it, right? And that to them wasn’t for environmental reasons. It was to live according to God. This is from Christianity, Apostle Paul, Epistle to the Romans. Look it up.

He says, you must sacrifice your members, meaning your body, your bodily urges, your bodily desires for God, for God. So the Puritans took that up. Then the Progressives took that up. And environmentalists have perfected it, I would say.

Paul Gambill: Ted Nordhaus just came out with a really good essay titled The Empty Radicalism of the Climate Apocalypse, in which he makes this argument that...

Thaddeus Russell: He sounds too provocative. Too argumentative. He sounds like a radical. I don’t think we should take him seriously.

Paul Gambill: He’s taking what you’re saying to the next step, which is that people in the environmentalist movement at the 1960s, 1970s were coming out with the small is Local is good. Decentralized is good movement. And now we have people talking about how we, based on the last IPCC report, we only have 12 years to deal with our carbon emissions, but they’re not acting like it. They’re not acting like that’s true. And his argument, I don’t know if I agree with it, but his argument is that if they really, really wanted to deal with this coming apocalypse, then they would be investing in large scale centralized control of implementing enormous renewable power grids and transportation grids and so on.

But at best, the left is asking for solar panel subsidies.

Thaddeus Russell: Okay, so James Hansen, Mr. Climate Change himself, right? Remember, he was all into China for a while. He thought the Chinese had the right way of going about it. He called, did he not, about 10 years ago, I think he still does, for the United States to... To do what the Chinese have done, which is massive social engineering to fix the climate change issue. Right? So he says, look at them. They stopped their people from having children for several generations. That was really successful. So we could do that. If they could do that to a billion people, gee, we could make 350 million people do all kinds of things through government control.

Including, you know, reduce emissions to zero. He’s right. He’s right. If we had a Chinese command and control centralized economy here, we could reduce emissions to zero. This is true. You know who did that? A guy in Cambodia named Pol Pot.

Ross Kenyon: I’ve heard of him.

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah. So their emissions, I think it worked out, right? Well, their emissions were damn near close to zero. I’m pretty sure in the 1970s, they also had damn near no life in that country either, but that’s a separate story. So no food, a lot of skeletons, a lot of bones, which you can still visit. Yeah. So that didn’t go so well. Neither did it go well in China. So that’s one strand of environmentalist thought. Yeah. If they’re serious about it, you’re right. Because they can’t. Here’s the thing. Here’s the thing.

So taking greed out of 8 billion people, that’s going to take a while. That’s probably not going to work.

Ross Kenyon: Do they not realize too that once this machinery is in place, it always swings back. So you’re going to have a Republican in office at some point who now controls this terrible machinery and it will be used against you and your friends.

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah. I mean, so the analogies are amazing. They’ve talked about world war. They’ve talked about, they use the war analogy a lot.

Ross Kenyon: Marshall Plan gets thrown around a lot.

Thaddeus Russell: Yep. Marshall Plan, New Deal, Apollo, War. But war is the big one. And I’ve heard this argument for a long, long time, since the 1980s. I remember an environmentalist telling me in the 1980s, well, if we could go to If we could do World War II and win that, then we could easily fix the planet, clean the planet up. I said, yes, I suppose this is true, but can we talk about what that might mean? A few eggs might get broken for that omelet to be made, like in World War II.

Amazing. So 65 million people. 65 million people died for this. And they throw this around like it’s no big deal. Like the war had no cost. So 65 million people died.

Ross Kenyon: I think I heard it was 80. Is it only 65? Anyways, it’s staggering.

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah. Well, okay. So if you’re willing to trade your life for your project, go right ahead. But where’s my AK-47 in the meantime? Because I know you guys are coming for me. So...

Ross Kenyon: Dude, you’re absurd, dad.

Thaddeus Russell: Are you still listening, audience?

Ross Kenyon: Are you still there?

Thaddeus Russell: We should put a pre-warning before the show starts.

Ross Kenyon: Oh, I definitely will be doing that.

Thaddeus Russell: Do I want clean air and clean water? Yes, goddammit, I told you. I’ve been hiking since I was a baby. Yes, I love the Sierra Mountains more than anyone.

Paul Gambill: So that’s interesting then, because I totally agree. And I think one of the big problems when it comes to global warming and climate change itself is if it’s just an emissions problem, the problem is... We can’t see it. So like you talked about dirty air and dirty water. And that’s why we got like the Clean Air Act and the acts that cleaned up water systems in the US. But we haven’t really had that for carbon dioxide because we can’t see it. So there’s something different about it now today.

Thaddeus Russell: It’s great because it’s purely abstract. That’s what’s so great about it. It’s like God. You can’t see it. You can’t touch it. But you know it’s there and you can always use him. You can always use him. Well, God doesn’t like that. Yeah. No, honestly, it’s very useful in that way. When you can’t see it, it’s this phantom thing. It’s like. What? Where’s the climate change?

Paul Gambill: Like how different would it be if when cars drove around, you saw this like purple smoke coming out of back?

Thaddeus Russell: Or like Beijing apparently is now, right? Yeah. From what I can tell, I mean, I’ve seen pictures, you know, friends have sent me pictures. I’m like, are you kidding? Is that nighttime? No, it’s noon. So yeah, you go to Beijing, you can see that. Sure, I got it. That’s less useful, I think. I think it’s more useful to have a phantom menace, kind of like communism in the 1950s, kind of like Putin recently, right? There’s a phantom, kind of like child sex abuse in the 1990s.

Paul Gambill: Or today still.

Thaddeus Russell: That’s right. That’s right. We love, especially in this country, we love our hysterias, don’t we? Yeah. The Ku Klux Klan, last I checked, they were running the country about two years ago. Is that right? And the Nazis were right behind them, right? It was the Nazis and the Klan were actually, they ran the country, right? Yeah. Most educated Americans actually believed that for a while, just recently. Okay. Yeah. So the fact that, that we love, that we become obsessed about things, well, oh, let’s go back to the Puritans. How about witches?

Paul Gambill: Right.

Thaddeus Russell: How about witchcraft? That was the Puritans, wasn’t it? Oh, I don’t think there were witches in Salem and witchcraft going on. It was something they couldn’t see or hear.

Paul Gambill: Who are the witches in today’s environmentalist movement’s eyes?

Thaddeus Russell: Your, your destructive desires, Paul, your desires. That’s, that’s who the witches are. The witches are inside all of us. No, am I, am I making stuff up yet? Is that not right? So ask an environmentalist. I’ll bet you ask any one of them, McKibben, any one of these people, Naomi Klein. What’s really the biggest problem? The biggest problem is that it’s our greed. As I’ve said, it’s our desire for stuff, which I’m sure in their more honest moments, they have to admit because they fly all over the place and they live in nice houses, I’m sure, that they don’t need.

I don’t know where Bill McKibben lives, but I’m sure it’s more than he needs. What do you need? You don’t need much to survive, do you? You just need a box. I’m sure he lives in more than a box. All right. So that means Bill’s got a problem. If Bill, if you’re out there and listening, if you live in more than just a little cement container box, like a poor Mexican in a shanty town would live in, if you live in more than that, you’re hurting the earth and you need to work on yourself.

Ross Kenyon: That Tolstoy short story, how much land does a man need? That’s right. Answer, six feet. That’s right. That’s right.

Thaddeus Russell: No, so I’m not making stuff up. Look, Google the word greed, you know, search it in all the environmentalists, search it in the Sierra Club manifestos. I’m sure it’s all over the place.

Ross Kenyon: It doesn’t fit with your, you know, if you got it, flaunt it, throw the money at the camera.

Thaddeus Russell: So this is why Trump is the worst person in history, because he violates that central norm of Puritanism and Victorianism, which is that one must be humble and modest, right? When you make the money— Wrong! When you make the money, you’re supposed to invest it in good things and godly works, right? Not in your clothes and your hair and your wife. Right.

Paul Gambill: So this is interesting because when we talk about Nori inside various different circles, I’ve just noticed that the typical environmental groups that everyone knows the names of, they think we’re interesting. But in a lot of ways, we represent something that is very anathema to what they believe in. And we’ve had much more positive reception from people who might call themselves more politically centrist or conservative. And I think that’s because of the fact that we’re trying to take advantage of greed. We’re trying to use people’s greed to create the infrastructure that solves this problem.

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah. It’s kind of like, it’s a little bit like the left’s answer to the criminal justice problem, mass incarceration, police killings and all that stuff, right? To them, the analysis is this is all about racism, right? It’s all about racism. It’s the systemic thing you can’t see. You can’t hear. You can’t even necessarily touch. It’s just it’s an idea. It might be happening. You’re not exactly sure. Right. It’s a little strange to explain why there’s more than half a million white people in prison right now with this. But anyway, it will.

Paul Gambill: It’s also very unscientific going back to what we were saying earlier, that science is about disproving things. You literally cannot disprove this boogeyman.

Thaddeus Russell: That’s right. That’s right. It’s really useful, isn’t it? To have to have the enemy be unseen, unseeable. So, right. So it can be used against you all the time. And it can be used against your enemies all the time. It’s always there. And here’s the other great thing about it. These phantom enemies, they’re ahistorical. They’re trans-historical. They exist outside of history. They’re always like racism.

Ross Kenyon: Like class struggle?

Thaddeus Russell: It’s class struggle, maybe. But racism in our country, that’s what we think of as this thing that exists outside of human consciousness, outside of history, just sort of floats around like this evil demon. Every once in a while it swoops in and does something terrible. But it’s the same thing that was here in Reversing 1850 and 1790.

Paul Gambill: It’s like we’re overcome by the spirit. That’s right.

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ross Kenyon: That, man, I didn’t even give a proper introduction. Maybe I’ll append one here at the beginning. That was a lot. We’re gonna keep going, but we wanted to do a little bit of a table turning kind of thing with you.

Thaddeus Russell: Sure, go for it.

Ross Kenyon: Well, in its intro, you talk about how you like renegades. In your book, Renegade History of the United States is a very interesting read, would recommend checking it out. You like these people who, well, basically everything you just described, those are your heroes, the people who flip things on their head, the people who go after pleasure, who don’t play by the rules. Of course, you admit that if society was run only by them, things would fall apart very quickly. But you need these people to expand the boundaries of freedom. That’s pretty fair so far.

Thaddeus Russell: Absolutely.

Ross Kenyon: So you often have controversial guests on your show and we think it’s important to talk to people that you might not always agree with either. But we have a controversial idea we wanted to run past you and see what you thought.

Thaddeus Russell: So go for it.

Ross Kenyon: Paul, would you like to do this?

Paul Gambill: I believe very strongly that when we solve climate change, I’m air quotes here, but by solving I mean reducing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from 410 parts per million today back to 300, what it was before the Industrial Revolution. The group of people or industry that will be proportionally most responsible for achieving that result will be the oil and gas industry.

Ross Kenyon: And Big Ag and Mining. Basically all the big hated companies are going to be the ones to solve climate change and probably make a lot of money doing it.

Unknown speaker: Because they can scale it. Right. Exactly. Right. And they have the means and the resources.

Thaddeus Russell: Possibly. Maybe. What about... So let’s look at other social issues. Maybe that can help us. The history of them. Let’s look at something I know a fair amount about. Mass media. Right. So I’m in, I’m in media now because I’m a podcaster. Right. I couldn’t have been in media 20 years ago at all at any level. Right. So 20, 30 years ago when I was growing up, you know, in the seventies and eighties, how many, how many TV networks were there? There were three plus PBS. Hmm. Um, there were no podcasts to have a radio station.

You had to get what an FCC license, right? For me now, for you guys, what did it take for us to put a podcast out there for the entire world to hear? Nothing, essentially. There is no licensing. It’s basically unregulated. It takes very little money even to buy this equipment and you just stick it on iTunes and you’re good to go. And anybody on earth can listen to it at any time. So now we have, everybody’s got a podcast. There are millions of podcasts, millions, right? Everybody can be on Twitter, can be on Facebook, can be on Instagram.

Everybody has access to the media and The New York Times, CBS, NBC, ABC are way, way, way, way less important than they used to be. And they’re declining every day in importance. Thank God. Hallelujah. Nobody even watches PBS anymore. Who’s under 70. So why did that happen? Two things, technology and deregulation. So Rupert Murdoch came along in the 1980s and said, yo, why can’t I have my own channel? And the FCC was like, go fuck off. And he’s like, I’m going to continue to sue you. And he finally won. And then we had Fox.

And Fox, of course, we only think of it as this terrible conservative thing. Well, what did Fox do? They put this show on TV called The Simpsons, which proceeded to subvert everything in American culture for the next umpteen years. Oh, right. And then they also put Married with Children on television, which subverted the American family. Radical stuff. But that was the least radical thing that Fox did. They simply opened up the airwaves. FCC started to loosen this up. And then cable news came on and then the whole thing exploded. And then with the airwaves, the same thing with technology and podcasting and blogging.

And everybody has their own media company now. And it’s a glorious wonderland we’re living in until they try to regulate it again. So... So the story is within just a 20 or 30 year period, we had a sea change revolution in mass media in the United States, in the world. Sea change. It is radically different now. Like my podcast, and it’s not even that huge of a podcast, it gets more listeners than a lot of TV shows get. That was unheard of 20 or 30 years ago, right? That’s a fast thing.

It’s cultural and technological. You hear me? So if you get the technology, And you get a cultural movement going and you might not even need to encourage people, right? No one was encouraged. Hey, we need to have a podcast revolution. That’s not why it happened. It’s just that people had the technology and they’re like, oh, I’ll do my own podcast. And next thing you know, we have 10 million podcasters, right? So I think if you get the technologies in place, which is already happening with the environment, climate change, all kinds of people are working on all sorts of innovations and technologies.

And like the Prius, you know, it turns out a lot of them also just save you money or they make your life better. Like organic or quote organic food just often tasted better, right? Right. That’s why people buy organic largely and certainly will, right? So if you can come up with technology that makes life cheaper and better, more comfortable, that also happens to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, we’re going to win. The whole thing. We don’t even have to tell anybody anything. And we certainly don’t have to moralize or shame anyone because they’re going to be actually acting on their own self-interest.

Even, my God, their own greed. And maybe even their own greed, and I think I’m preaching to the choir right now, their own greed could actually clean the earth, could take the carbon out of the atmosphere, could fix this, if it is a problem, this problem. Yeah. So that’s what you got. You don’t even have to say anything. You just have to come up with the technology and then have a few people use it and employ it in ways that make life, forget the planet, my life, my individual life better.

Problem solved. That sounds like an endorsement of Nori to me, Ross. What do you think? Can I go now?

Ross Kenyon: Your contract is fulfilled.

Thaddeus Russell: I think it’s time for drinks. I think we’re done. I just fixed climate change. Can you call Naomi Klein? Whose job is that? Which one of you does that? Nose goes on that. Let her know that I solved it. And she just needs to be notified. She needs to let her comrades know that we’ve solved it.

Ross Kenyon: She can retire. God, I’m sure at some point she will know because she’s come up on the podcast so many times. And I know you talk about her on your podcast too. Love her. You just love that she freely admits this is an opportunity for socialistic policies in the United States.

Thaddeus Russell: Hey man, it’s not me. It’s her. She said this. I mean, read her book. She said this in interviews. I mean, I love her for this. She was honest about it. She said... Naomi, I know you’re listening. So listen, correct me if I’m wrong. You know my number. She said, look, I wasn’t interested in environmentalism or climate change really at all until I realized that it was a great vehicle for socialism. That we can say, oh my God, unless we change everything right now, we will die. Meaning unless we have socialism right now, we will die.

We will drown. And that’s what she’s been saying with a fair amount of success.

Ross Kenyon: Is there any burning questions you have before we go? Just know a little bit goes a long way with that. He’ll take it and run with you.

Thaddeus Russell: We haven’t even talked about number three up there, which is going to blow everybody’s mind.

Ross Kenyon: I know. Well, we can keep going, but I don’t know if your time is going to run out here soon.

Thaddeus Russell: Well, I got to tell them about immigration.

Ross Kenyon: Okay. Why don’t you give it a...

Unknown speaker: You’re not stopping him.

Thaddeus Russell: I haven’t said nearly enough controversial things.

Ross Kenyon: This episode is the longest of all time, but...

Thaddeus Russell: This is serious, guys. Let’s be serious. Let’s focus here. We’ve got to finish this right. No one knows. No one knows anymore what the official line of the Sierra Club and all the major environmentalist organizations was on immigration until the 1990s. The official line of every major environmental organization and every major environmentalist I’ve ever heard of during that period, the crucial formative period of the movement, the 1960s and 70s, David Browder and company, all those guys, Across the board, there was a consensus that immigration was bad, that immigration restriction was necessary.

And many of them called for total restriction on immigration. Now, why would environmentalists be against immigration? Because they’re such nice people. Liberals like that love Mexicans, don’t they? And they love immigrants, don’t they? And they’re so sad when immigrants get stopped at the border by mean people who are Republicans. Well, as a matter of fact, everyone, look it up. The argument makes sense. The logic they understood then. If you allow people to migrate freely around the earth, what are they going to do? They’re going to congregate in large numbers in places that the planet cannot sustain without massive engineering projects to bring, oh, like let’s say a whole bunch of water to someplace like the Los Angeles basin so that 20 million people can live there where there is no river, no stream, no lake, no nothing.

It’s an environmental catastrophe. Is it not Los Angeles, right? That’s because we allowed people to move there.

Ross Kenyon: It’s also your per capita income. It’s like a Haitian coming to the United States, their per capita income doubles, triples, quadruples, quintuples, instantly just by crossing the border. They get richer. They get richer.

Thaddeus Russell: And this is the argument that was made. Everybody look this up. I mean, this was written about. There’s been books written about this. The environmentalist movement was anti-immigration until about five minutes ago, and I’ll explain why they changed their line. Yes, these immigrants also become richer when they come up here, and then they spend more and despoil the earth more, right? Right. But let’s just think about this. Sustainability, right? That’s a big word, isn’t it? We love sustainability. Let’s be sustainable. What does that mean? It means, they have said this, it means eating the food from where you live, right?

It means living, staying where you were born. Doesn’t it? It means making this place, this locality, sustainable. It means the people who live there should live from the products of that place. Here’s the problem. That is often finite, what a place can produce, right? So that means there is a finite number of people any particular locality can sustain. Whoops. Sustainability, everyone, is inherently anti, not just immigration, it’s inherently anti-migration. So who loves the Mexicans and who doesn’t? Who’s the enemy of immigrants? Is it Donald Trump or is it people who are part of the environmentalist movement?

Paul Gambill: It can be both.

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah, maybe. I don’t know about that, actually, because Trump’s a businessman, right? So he knows he’s learned quickly that he needs Mexicans. You know, the business people understood this. That’s why the Bushes were actually pretty good on immigration, meaning they were generally pro-immigrant because they’re business people and they love their Mexicans in Texas. They love their Mexican workers in Texas. Trump kind of knows this. Yeah. So the logic makes sense, doesn’t it? If you’re an environmentalist, please, environmentalists listening to this, Naomi and Bill and all the rest of you, I need to hear from you.

Why are you not anti-immigration? How on earth can sustainability and open borders and open migration coexist? They cannot. Now, why did they change their line? The Sierra Club and all those organizations are now pro-immigration, at least officially. Why? Because in the 1990s, the Democratic Party noticed that many of their votes were coming from brown people and that brown people liked pro-immigration lines. And then by the 2000s, the Democratic Party was like, oh, shit, we’re going to be a majority minority country pretty soon. And most of the brown people vote Democratic.

So we’re going to be basically much more pro-immigration than our opponents to win elections. And they went and they told the Sierra Club and all these environmentalist organizations, sorry, guys, here’s the deal. We’re going to have environmentalist planks. We’re going to talk about climate change all the time. But you’ve got to change your line on immigration, which is exactly what they did. And the history of this has been written. You don’t have to take my word for it. There have been many books and articles. Just Google it. You’ll see. But the point I’m trying to make here is that the logic of environmentalism as a movement in the 20th century in the United States of America is inherently, ineluctably, anti-migration.

Anti-migration. If you love Mexican immigrants, you cannot be a part of that movement. I’m sorry, there is a fundamental contradiction. You can’t talk about sustainability the way it’s talked about and believe in it the way that it’s talked about and also say that you’re pro-immigration. You cannot be. You cannot allow the free movement of people across the planet. You can’t allow people to just live anywhere they want, because what are they going to do? They’re going to move to a place that the earth cannot sustain. And they’re going to import all the water and all the food and all the stuff that isn’t there naturally.

And next thing you know, you’re going to have a metropolis like Los Angeles or Mexico City. Right. Or Shanghai. There are catastrophes.

Ross Kenyon: This is why it’s often coupled with progressive policies with an income tax or redistribution generally is that some people are consuming too much. The problem can just be solved by moving the numbers around. Right.

Thaddeus Russell: Well, the thing is, I mean, and I’m sure you guys know this better than I do, but isn’t it true that the wealthier a country, the cleaner it is? Yes, absolutely. Yes, right. So there you go. I mean, so yes, from the great progressive era, which was also the great industrial capitalist boom in this country from roughly the 1880s to roughly the 1920s. Yeah, you see all the production and you also see all the pollution. Same with China, right? As far as I know. Industrial production spiked in recent years, but then didn’t it plateau a couple of years ago?

And haven’t their emissions started to drop recently once they actually got rich enough to deal with this?

Paul Gambill: It’s been stabilized the last couple of years, but it’s probably going to continue to rise if we look at worldwide emissions because there are other countries following.

Thaddeus Russell: Worldwide. Right. But China, see the wealthier you get. So seems to me the pattern is yes to go through industrial, although this may change itself, but so far going through that industrial capitalism or just industrialization process sort of necessitates a lot of dirty air and dirty water. But then once they get wealthy enough, then they’re able to invest in it. It comes down.

Ross Kenyon: It’s the Kuznets curve. Yeah.

Thaddeus Russell: Technology and innovation then can do it. Right. So yeah, let’s get richer. Greed is good. Someone said that. Greed is good for the earth is what Nori wants to say, right? Yeah.

Paul Gambill: And I think Nori might be right. If people can make money while doing this, then I don’t care who it is that’s making money as long as the carbon’s coming out of the atmosphere.

Thaddeus Russell: So back to my thing about criminal justice. So the analysis is that it’s about racism, okay? Then the answer is we just get rid of racism in cops.

Paul Gambill: Right. Right.

Thaddeus Russell: So there are about a million law enforcement in this country right now? Like a million, something like that. It’s that many people who are in law enforcement. Okay, so let’s do that. Let’s have a big retraining session where we just make sure none of those million people have any racism in their heads. Let’s do that. Let’s do that. It’s impossible, right? It’s ridiculous, even to think about this. Okay. So we could do that, or we could actually do something else. We could actually change the laws. Change the system. You know, like making drugs illegal.

We could change the fact that drugs are illegal, right? And then that would just reduce the prison population by about a quarter instantly, just off the top. Bingo. Right. Right. Nonviolent offenses. Right. Victimless crimes. Boom. Let’s just eliminate all that. We’re going to take at least half the prison population out just with that alone. Right. That’s what I’d rather focus on. What are the laws that make this thing happen rather than this nebulous phantom that may or may not exist in the heads of all these people, about half of whom, by the way, are not white.

Right.

Paul Gambill: Yeah.

Thaddeus Russell: Law enforcement.

Paul Gambill: Well, I’d say the equivalent then is some big ones are like the oil subsidies. That’s a big one. But also the way that we don’t deal with carbon emissions as an externality. And I’m not necessarily... We’re not necessarily in favor of a carbon tax policy or certainly not cap and trade policies. But if we were aware of what people are emitting and then tracking that and then requiring people to pay for cleaning it up just like garbage, then I think that would work a lot better.

Thaddeus Russell: Okay. The thing is, Paul, you’re wasting your time because what really matters, I’m telling you, this is the thing. It’s Christianity. What matters to them is what’s inside of our souls. And what’s inside of our souls is... Problematic. We have a problem with greed. Do we not? So long as there is greed, they believe there will always be environmental catastrophe. It’s a human engineering problem.

Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we’ve tried to approach this very logically in that kind of way. And if it’s about changing the character of your heart or about your relationship with God or the planet, we’re trying not to count on that because that can be quite fickle. But maybe that doesn’t win as much acclaim as otherwise.

Thaddeus Russell: Look, all I know is I am constantly hassled, especially in cities like Seattle. Just all day fucking long, I’m hassled by people telling me what I should and shouldn’t do. Okay? So composting toilets, I told you guys when I walked in here today, I was... Pissed off at my composting toilet today. And then the recycling, I can’t even tell. When I’m in San Francisco or Seattle, I have truly, I have no idea where to put the recycling thing. I mean, like I really, it’s a waste of money. And I’m from places like this.

I’m a West Coast dude. And I come now and I’m like, and I actually seriously don’t know which can to put the thing in anymore. So I am, we, we, we in cities like this, not in normal places where most people live, but in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, we are, are we not constantly hectored Constantly about our personal, individual lives, these little minutiae, like where my urine goes, really? That’s the thing that I hear about much more, way, way, way, way, way more than anything you’re talking about, which actually might fix it.

Paul Gambill: Right. I grew up in Arizona and I’ve lived in Seattle for eight years. And when people ask me how I like it, I say, well, I mean, I love it here. I love having mountains and forests and water all around me. I can deal with the clouds and the rain. It’s not that hard to deal with. If I could just like swap out all of the people... Exactly. It would be so much better. If I could get people from the Southwest, where I grew up, up here, I would love that.

Thaddeus Russell: Oh, so now we know who the real Nazis are. Okay, so you’re the one who wants to kill everybody. See? See, everybody? Read between the lines. I got it out of them. I was actually sent here by the Antifa. You guys are busted. I’ve been recording this the whole time on my phone, and I’m going to send it to the... There’s going to be men in black masks coming soon. You should run. You know this is going on the internet, right? Oh, what’s the internet? Yeah, um... So, yeah, no, it’s all about personal shaming.

It’s all about individualistic shaming. It’s all about shaming of my desires to, now it’s come to me standing up while I’m peeing. But yeah, no, right, this is the lingua franca of the movement. It’s all about that. There’s so much, I mean, sure, yes, of course, there are environmentalists who are at least dealing with the questions you’re raising. They may have different answers, and that’s fine. But most of what goes on is shaming of individual choices. Yeah. Yeah, which add up to nothing. Yeah. You know, it’s like I get especially pissed off like around here when I get shamed to piss in a compost toilet and spray the bowl down rather than flush the damn thing while an F-35 is flying over my head.

Burning how much? Putting how much carbon, how many, and do progressives, these people who say they’re anti-war, do they ever, can we talk about this? Do they ever mention the United States military? What percentage of carbon comes from the United States military? It’s astounding. Yeah, it’s a lot. And yet they’re going to yell at me where my urine goes?

Paul Gambill: Are you kidding me? You know what? I have an interesting story for you. They never mention it. I was in D. C. last fall and I met with a defense oriented think tank to talk to them about this because they’re actually like much more, even though you would associate like the defense industry with more conservative Republican politics, they’re very keenly aware of climate change and the effects and all that kind of stuff. So they told me that they actually hate it when some environmental group like EDF or Sierra Club or something like that.

Thaddeus Russell: EDF was the one I was thinking of earlier. EDF was the other big one that was anti-immigration.

Paul Gambill: So they hate it whenever the Defense Department does something that is positive or good for environmental causes. And then if one of these groups comes out and praises them, well, then that’s a signal to the Republicans in Congress to immediately defund whatever that project was. So it’s this really weird mix that by supporting this thing, they’re ending up neutering it, killing it.

Thaddeus Russell: It’s just it’s it tells me that they’re not actually interested in cleaning the earth because we know the United States military, I believe, is the number one polluter in this country. I believe that’s right in terms of emissions. Am I right? I think so, too. Yeah, it is. Whatever it is, it’s an astounding amount. That they produce. So for me, if climate change is real and it’s produced by carbon emissions and all that, then it’s a twofer. And this should be obvious. Let’s reduce, radically reduce the United States military presence and budget and spending on it and all the machines that burn all those fuels.

I’m down with that just for the, you know, no war part of it. If we get a cleaner, cleaner earth from it, I’m also down with that. Do they mention this? Do they mention this? No. So that’s really bad. To me, that’s a really bad look for them, for the environmentalist movement. Naomi Klein writes giant books about all kinds of things. Does she even mention this? Maybe she does. I’ve never heard her talk about it. Does Bill McKibben, does any of these people, does Bill Nye ever talk about reducing the military budget?

Do you know how much carbon we would take, we would reduce, right, in terms of emissions if we reduced the military budget by 50%?

Paul Gambill: It’s like... Staggering. Global percentage points, like integers.

Thaddeus Russell: Staggering amount. But they never mention it. Yet they hector me all day long about where I piss.

Paul Gambill: That is, you know, that is interesting in that I... Your individual actions don’t really matter when it comes to carbon emissions. It’s sort of, it’s the exact same thing. It’s like your individual vote doesn’t really matter in a democratic election. Collectively added up, they all do, but you as an individual. And so what can you as an individual do? You can compost through your toilet. You can compost your food scraps. You can maybe drive an electric car, depending on what your power grid is. But ultimately, that has no bearing or outcome on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Thaddeus Russell: What if everybody in the world, all 8 billion of us, drove a Prius and pissed in compost toilets? What about then? Would we fix it then?

Ross Kenyon: I always get caught up on the game theory of this.

Thaddeus Russell: Wait, answer the question. So even then, so even if there were a cultural global revolution in this way, right, where greed is removed from our minds, right? That’s what that is. Because, you know, to be willing to piss in those toilets, you know, that takes sacrifice.

Unknown speaker: First off, like 20 to 25% of all emissions come from land use change, like agriculture.

Thaddeus Russell: Oh, agriculture. We haven’t talked about ag. Of course, big ag and the military are the major, right, emitters, are they not?

Paul Gambill: Yeah. But ag can also be part of the solution and that’s really what we’re focused on.

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah. So I’ve heard that, you know, beef is a big problem here, right? And the subsidies for the beef. And I heard a libertarian really impressed me once, but he was asked some audience members of, well, are you for ending subsidies for the cattle industry? And he was like, yes, even though hamburgers would be what, $50 or something? Yeah. And there you go in terms of carbon emission, the carbon emission problem too. But again, I don’t hear a lot of talk about that. So which leads me to believe that they’re really much more interested in making me feel guilty.

Ross Kenyon: That and adding new subsidies is way easier than removing old ones. The vested interests are impossible.

Thaddeus Russell: It’s a religious movement, guys.

Paul Gambill: There’s a very interesting like schism forming between like the vegan movement and the regenerative agricultural movement and how that fits with like so it turns out. So grass-fed cattle in a very specific way can actually sequester more carbon than is emitted. So there are those people who are going up against the vegans who are saying you should never eat beef. And they’re like, but wait, we can actually use this as part of the solution. And it’s this really weird conflict. It’s like, well, you guys all kind of want the same outcome.

Thaddeus Russell: Vegans, I don’t think, are going to lead us to the promised land. I don’t know.

Paul Gambill: Probably not.

Ross Kenyon: It’s not a future of pleasure. No. Monoculture soy.

Thaddeus Russell: It’s not your future. Speaking of asceticism and self-sacrifice. I’ve tried it. It’s not very fun. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, what’s the future? I mean, yeah, I think it’s... I think it’s going to be that. It’s going to be technology and a cultural movement, not led by elites. It’s just going to be people doing it on their own when they see that things are cool and fun and make their lives better.

Paul Gambill: That’s where we’re trying to take this because really we’re building this software infrastructure so that like anything that people do will just automatically have carbon removal incorporated into that in the background. Because if you’re trying to get like just all the Fortune 500 companies to offset their emissions, that’s not enough. That’s nowhere near enough. It has to be like driven by the people.

Thaddeus Russell: And it’s got to have an incentive, right? Exactly. So what’s the incentive here?

Paul Gambill: It’s a token-based system, blockchain and all that. Oh, really? Yeah. So people can make money off of trading this as well.

Thaddeus Russell: Oh, that’s where I’m going with Renegade University, actually.

Paul Gambill: Ooh, let’s talk more after the show.

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah, we’re going to probably have our own coin and we’re going to do blockchain accreditation. Cool. Yeah, eventually we’re going to go fully autonomous. So I like it. I like it.

Ross Kenyon: I like it. I’m not surprised.

Unknown speaker: I want to hear about this too.

Thaddeus Russell: And, you know, we might even be teaching some classes on climate change and what some alternatives might be. So let’s talk.

Ross Kenyon: I’ve been calling Paul Professor Paul for a really long time. This might be your chance.

Paul Gambill: I’ve got the Tweed Jacket.

Thaddeus Russell: We don’t allow Tweed. Oh, sorry. All right. We don’t allow professors either. I mean, if you’re going to... Oh, sorry. I take that back. We allow professors. You just can’t act like one. Oh, fair. Yeah. So it’ll be fine. Can do. Good. Good. Good. So did we... I mean, any other global problems you want me to solve today? We handled war, immigration... Social change, generally. Did we talk about climate? Did we get to that?

Ross Kenyon: Kind of, yeah.

Thaddeus Russell: Environmentalism, I think I mentioned that. Yeah.

Ross Kenyon: We got criminal justice, too. Criminal justice, yeah.

Thaddeus Russell: Racism.

Ross Kenyon: And I would love also, I mean, in my...

Thaddeus Russell: We haven’t talked about sexism, which is bad. I feel bad. Okay, do we have another hour?

Ross Kenyon: Well, we’re four angry white dudes, so we probably should talk about sexism.

Thaddeus Russell: Well, I’m just going to say I’m an ally. You know, that’s all I’m supposed to say, right? I’m an ally. That’s all. Next?

Paul Gambill: Next question. All right. That’s all too.

Ross Kenyon: Good. I think we got it all, Thad. I think that’s enough for now. I guess if someone wanted to experience more of you that didn’t get enough already, what might be a good way? That costs a lot. Let me just say.

Thaddeus Russell: Yeah, that’s a special. The experiencing me, that’s really expensive. It’s like the Patreon. Actually, as a matter of fact, people can experience me. No, I do. I do public events. In fact, this weekend in Seattle, I’ll be like, it probably won’t air in time. But yeah, no, go to ThaddeusRussell.com and you’ll see both Renegade University and the Unregistered Podcast. There have pages and you can join the Unregistered Underground, which is my supporting listeners network. And you get lots of cool benefits by supporting the podcast and Renegade University. We are coming out with our 2.

0. We’re coming out with a new platform very soon. When you’re a member of Renegade University, you can take video courses. There will be online courses and seminars. You can do one-on-one meetings with me and other faculty. We have lots of public events like in Seattle this weekend and all over the country. We have weekends. We have evening events. We have live podcasts. We have full weekend seminars.

Paul Gambill: I’ve done one of your online seminars on postmodernism. I think back when you were like really getting that whole thing started.

Unknown speaker: He wouldn’t shut up about it.

Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah.

Thaddeus Russell: So apparently it was good. That is still, that’s still, that’s our most popular course so far. Yeah. And I’m going to come out with a second, a new version of that probably from next year. Yeah. People love that. I love talking about it, but we cover history, philosophy, psychology. We’re going to have, and then we have the, we’re calling the school of agorism. We’re going to teach people how to do black market economics in various ways, whether you want to have a nail salon in the hood, you know, and not pay taxes, or if you want to make your own cannabis concentrate, we’ll teach you how to do it.

Paul Gambill: Cool. And you get and monetize it with the blockchain. Uh-huh. Yep. That’s very 2019.

Thaddeus Russell: Yes, it is. It’s actually more 2020, but yeah.

Paul Gambill: Yeah.

Thaddeus Russell: We see very well.

Ross Kenyon: All right. Well, thanks for coming and hanging out with us, Thad. We appreciate it. We had a good time.

Thaddeus Russell: Anytime. I hope I didn’t talk too much.

Ross Kenyon: Do you really?

Thaddeus Russell: No. Busted. Thank you.