Right. Right. I mean, I live in a building here in Argentina that the great Argentine essayist and literary critic, Jorge Louis Borhes called a labyrinth to confuse men, but Borhes also said that or observed rather that all fiction in the end is autobiographical. In that sense, it is kind of my own story in a way, or at least the experiences that I've had filtered into the narrative, but you're completely right when you say that it's an outsider's perspective on the idea of America. Part of the reason that I thought that might be novel or interesting to readers was because as you know and as you've pointed out on this episode and elsewhere, it's become incredibly fashionable of late, particularly among the learned chattering class and those in the academies to sledge America and to take on the top dog. It's seen as some, especially of the last couple of years, it's often seen as some irredeemable stain on the pages of history.

From the very outset, the founding is now, the date of the founding is up for debate. What went into the founding documents is scrutinized. It's very difficult, oftentimes, if you are within a particular cultural malaise and the book here is set at the beginning of the 21st century, which is to say if you are a United States citizen, it's sometimes difficult to step outside of that vantage point and get an outsider's perspective. I was fortunate enough to immigrate to the United States in early 2001. I come from Australia. Your listeners can probably hear my accent, but we might look a bit like Americans and talk a bit like Americans And we have the same TV and Western culture and are largely influenced by American music and television and movies and whatnot. I recognize pretty quickly what Freud called the narcissism of small differences.

That is to say that there is a huge gaping difference between the founding principles of the United States and those of Australia, which the population of which still rightly refers to themselves as subjects, since they haven't had their own revolutionary war yet where Americans very proudly consider themselves citizens. There's a lot of very fundamental differences between the United States and countries abroad. I wanted to just bring an outsider's perspective to that argument and to that debate and see if there was anything worth offering.

The protagonist, the eponymous Morris, follows his heart across the pond as a hopeless romantic and part-time bar room philosopher, lands himself in the United States, and pretty soon embarks on, I would say, a pretty classic American coming of age type story. A classic Bildungsroman in narrative structure. There's coast to coast, I don't want to give too much away here, but there's a coast to coast road trip. There's lots of homage to the great American writers, H.L. Mencken, Lysander Spooner, Henry David Thoreau, writers who I was reading at the time and who meant a lot to me, and who I think America has, as you know, a long and storied history when it comes to subversive writers and writers who challenged their government, their status quo.

I think that we might be, but particularly in the realm of fiction, we might be in danger of losing that as everything kind of becomes homogenized in the world of literature at the moment. Anyway, so Morris goes on his journey, which takes him from sea to shining sea. By the time he ends up at his final destination, he has met a colorful cast of Americans, both over the phone and in little towns across the 50 states, places in the rust belts, the prairies, the Rockies, what have you. He's gotten to know a little bit more about America and hopefully a little bit more about himself along the way.

Well, I'll just preface this by saying you mentioned Walt Whitman. I took a few lines of his poetry at the very beginning of the book here, and I'll read them out. It's "Afoot and lighthearted, I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me, the long brown path before me leading wherever I choose." I chose that particular passage because, for me, the United States embodies this idea of choice and self- determination like, frankly, no other experiment in governance or national mythology or whatever you want to call it has before or since. And it's really caught up in the essence of the founding documents. And people like to denigrate that now and like to presume from their perch here that they could do without such rights as are enumerated in the First Amendment to the Constitution, for example, that being the right to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and in particular to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances.

But you don't need a particularly colorful imagination to envision what happens when you don't have those kinds of founding principles. And so you mentioned what might be different in Australia. Well, you only need to take a look at what's happening on the ground in my country of birth at present where the army is on the streets in Melbourne and Victoria. They have built permanent camps in Howard Springs in the Northern Territory where the Australian Defense Forces, the euphemistically named Australian Defense Forces are now rounding people up and taking them there against their will.

There's no such thing as freedom of speech in Australia. You know, we like to think in these weird countries, which is to say Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and developed countries, we like to think that we have all of these rights as they're laid out in the founding documents, but we get those mostly vicariously. We get those through watching cop shows that are produced in the United States and just assuming that we have those too. But in countries around the world, and you could have a look in Germany or Austria, for example, in the United Kingdom, what's happening in Europe with regards to, I know we're going to talk about vaccines and traveling and mandates and all of that kind of stuff, but there's a real independent streak in the genetics of the American dream. And I just don't find that elsewhere.

I think it's taken for granted. And the grand irony is that it's taken for granted and denigrated by largely a hysterical clutch of the most privileged people on the planet that are whining from Ivy League perches about what a misogynistic, racist, irredeemable country they live in when they live in not only arguably one of the freest countries on the planet now, but maybe ever.

Yeah. I mean, I don't think you have to look very hard across the landscape today. You know, whether it's the abysmal betrayal of its duty that the Fourth Estate has perpetrated by way of holding up false narratives, or whether it's the encroachment of progressives into wanting to tear down the checks and balances that hold the separate powers of government apart.

There are many, many movements afoot right now. I know we spoke last time on this program about the attack on The Western Canon and cancel culture. And these are all different front lines on the same basic battlefield. But what I'm wary of is I could understand, in some way, people who had never enjoyed these freedoms not valuing them in the way that they should. But we're talking now about people who are essentially ingrates. I mean, they grew up with these freedoms and maybe that's why they don't view them with nearly the value that they ought to.

Yeah. I mean, it's not accidental. I know you've written before extensively both in your newsletters and in books that you've authored and co-authored with Bill Bonner, for example, about Gramsci's long march through the academies, to take just one example.

But what we have now is the wholesale capture of intellectual life in the United States beginning with the academies. And now, the graduates from these academies are going to work in publishing houses, for example, and they are churning out books that look and feel and sound exactly like their neo-Marxist professors. And so it's any wonder that the culture is being flooded with exactly that kind of toxic ideology.

So when I look at people and they're, not to sound like a curmudgeonly old geezer here, but when I look at people who are newly graduated from universities who aren't maybe as flexible in the workforce as they want to be because they've taken on a lot of debt and they've been sitting in lecture halls listening to or being rather indoctrinated to for the past four years, it's not difficult to understand why they would come out and just see this as par for the course.

And again, part of the reason for me wanting to write a work of literary fiction is because I think by and large the newsletter industry, in large thanks to yourself and others and the alternative media just in general, is fairly well studded with independent thinkers just by nature of there being alternative to the mainstream. And so we have a lot of firepower there. But when it comes to the arts, and in particular to literary fiction, there's just no game. I mean, it's completely owned.

If you look at Amazon Best Seller lists or Oprah's Book Clubs or whatever, it's completely owned by the people who are avowed Marxists and who have a very particular agenda, a very particular worldview and are not shy at all in pushing that. And so I think it potentially has an out-sized impact if we stake a bit of a claim there and say actually not one step further. And I may just be a tiny little rusty needle in a hay field, but it has to be a start.

You know, in the second half of the 20th century, we had no shortage of American writers who would've been appalled at what passes for contemporary literature. And I'm talking of giants like Saul Bellow, for example, who I allude to pretty extensively in the book.

To boil it down, I think that the primary beef I would have with it, you hear a lot of people say, well, it's great in theory, but it just doesn't work in practice. I don't agree with that. But even that says, well, it's great on paper, but we just didn't take into account human beings. Which when you're coming up with a theory, a sociological or economic theory and you don't take into account human beings or you treat them as superfluous, which is essentially the way that they were seen, their interactions to be commodified, then you're missing, I think, a fairly essential part of the entire project, and that's individuals along the way. This is, again, to get back to the cornerstone of the American experiment. It's the individual that matters, not the collective.

And when we talk about Marxist and particularly neo-Marxist, that is to say the postmodern neo-Marxist theory that is emanating from American academies and academies across the West at the moment, what we're talking about is essentially a worldview that posits hierarchical power structures at the center of everything and seeks to divide people up into classes in this zero sum interaction, the logical end game of which is displacement and war between the classes.

The Communist Manifesto is a 60 page pamphlet, which calls for violent overthrow. And if you see the world through this warped prism, where everything that somebody else has is because they're, first of all, denied it to you, and we live in this non-cooperative zero sum world, where everything is a power struggle and we all exist on these hierarchies, then it's very plain to see why people aren't interested in open debate and discussion. Because for them, it's not about discussion or compromise. It's not about the market. It's not about free exchange. It's about dominance and power. And I think that's to be resisted at all costs, if only because we know where it ends, and the history books are pretty clear on that.

I was putting the same idea in context of the Hegelian Dialectic, which is that every idea that has driven Western society mostly leads to the next idea. And Marx was a capitalist who critiqued the capital system. And if you can't get out of that dialectic, if you can't get out of the idea that it's all about material goods and who has what, then you're stuck. You're stuck with the conflict. And that's what I think is happening.

I think I'm only just trying to add to what you were saying, that if you only view the world in that way, then the only logical conclusion is violence. Instead of trying to figure out, okay, there are people who have stuff, and there's people that don't have stuff, and there's bad people and there's good people, whatever, that all exists. Why can't we just get along?

Who was digging graves throughout the 20th century? And the experiment was run, and it was run in Russia, in China, in large parts of Southeast Asia, up and down this continent that I'm speaking to you from here, it was run in parts of Africa. And everywhere, no matter what the climate, what the natural resources of the place, no matter the cultural inclinations of the people, no matter what came before them, when this was run in all of its various iterations, whether it was Castroism or Maoism or Stalinism or Leninism or Trotskyism, or any other ism that you care to point to that is on that spectrum or that end of the spectrum, the results are horrific and speak for themselves.

So when we cede small points, we open a wedge, I think, that makes it difficult for people who are coming along behind us to navigate properly. And so, you get this confusion and this bumbling around, where people don't know that you can't have a command economy, no matter how many bright sparks you get into a room, no matter how much coffee you give them under a dim light and with a whiteboard marker, to get them to figure out how many shoes need to be made or how many loaves need to be baked. It doesn't work like that. The way that markets work most efficiently for the production of capital goods is a division of labor, a la Mr. Smith, and the invisible hand left to do its work in the way that Mr. Leonard had with his I Pencil essay.

We don't need to know how to mine lead and mill wood and get the yellow paint and chop down the rubber trees. We don't need to know how to do all that stuff. All we need to know how to do is the job in front of us. We need to know how to do it well, to specialize, and that liberates us to spend our time in other pursuits and to escape that merely commodified existence, which seems to be, ironically enough. It's the entire preconception of the Marxist mentality, in the same way that race is the entire preeminent figuring in the mind of the anti-racist. All they see everywhere is race. All that these people see is that which they are trying to get past. Doesn't make any sense.

Yeah. It's a rotten onion. When you start peeling back the layers on his mischievous acts, you keep peeling and you keep finding more rot. But, essentially Wilson was, to cut directly to the heart of it, the first President to openly and roundly, in George Will's words, hack at the founding documents, root and branch. And so he believed, in contrast to the founders, who held that rights were inalienable and that they were natural and that they preceded government, and that it therefore was the government's responsibility to secure those rights. Wilson held, as did his progressive acolytes around him, like Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and others, that their apprehension of the subject was that rights were not natural, that they didn't precede government, but rather they were privileges and they were contingent upon certain behavior. And so that they were to be conferred by the government.

Now the founders used the word secure in the very first sentence of the Constitution, so it wasn't like they were trying to hide it deep in the T's and C's or the fine print or anything. They were fairly adamant about this, and Madison talks a lot about it in The Federalist Papers. But he, being Wilson, really deeply disagreed with this. He saw the role of the state as something like a cudgel to beat and shape society into the shape that he thought it ought to represent, rather than letting the individuals, with their own natural rights, express their own wills, desires, fears, hopes, dreams, what have you, in their own lives. He saw the role of the government as to withhold rights from people, based on certain behaviors that he wished for them to undertake.

So it's not surprising when you understand the core philosophy of someone like Wilson's, why he would, for example as you mentioned, introduce the Federal Reserve Act, which he did in his first year in office, the Revenue Act, which gifted Americans the income tax. So you can thank Wilson for that one. It was Wilson who, with the aid of that slippery propagandist, Eddie Bernays, whose books were found among Goebbels favorites. It was those two who concocted the marketing slogan to sell World War I to an otherwise war weary America. They had just, remember a generation earlier, concluded their own bloody civil war. They wanted nothing to do with foreign entanglements. As Jefferson had pointed out much, much earlier in the piece, it was those two, Wilson and Bernays, who concocted the phrase, "Making the world safe for democracy," which we now take as just something that befalls the world's policemen to do. But that was a pure marketing slogan.

And so, the kinds of things that Wilson was up to during his two terms, and he ran for a third term, by the way, despite having suffered a stroke in 1919, but was roundly defeated. In any case, the kinds of things that he was up to during those eight years are not at all surprising when you recognize what his fundamental beliefs were.

Which actually we have a tie to. We wrote about this in Empire of Debt. We have a direct tie to the first draft of the League of Nations. It was written in the library of 14 West, which I actually went to the Maryland Historical Society to verify because the story had been told. I'm like, "Is that really true?" But it's actually in the historical record. Yeah. His motive for getting us into World War I was to guarantee Belgian neutrality, and 14 West, which is the headquarters of our corporation, was the Marburg mansion. And Marburg was the ambassador to Belgium at the time. So, we're directly connected to this progressive story, even though we probably don't agree with a lot of it.

Where do you see progressives going now? Because if I could take you through Empire of Debt a little bit, we had Wilson and then we had Coolidge. Coolidge was on the market side. And then we had FDR, who battled the Great Depression. And then we had Eisenhower who wanted the government to build roads. And then we had Kennedy and Johnson who wanted to freaking dominate the world again, just like Wilson did. And that caused a problem. And then we get to Reagan, in his whole era, where he's like, "The only way we can dominate the world is just to beat the shit out of everyone."And so then he used government debt for the first time to really facilitate the massive military complex that Eisenhower warned us against.

And then you go back and forth. And it doesn't really matter who's in charge anymore, because now that we have this big system of debt and military, we could vote in Trump or we could vote in ... Who's the curtain guy?

Yeah. Well you're talking to somebody who wrote a hundred thousand word work of literary fiction in an age where people can barely concentrate beyond 140 characters. So, you might be talking to the wrong guy there, but yeah, I agree with your general assessment of the past century. In that essay that you mentioned, Center Cannot Hold. I took some inspiration from Joan Didion's. She was around at the time, as you'll know, in the 60s, and she was covering a lot of what was happening in the Haight-Ashbury, countercultural malaise of that period.

And I just thought it was very interesting that a lot of the spiritual heroes that progressives cite today, when they look back in history, they like to think that they are aligned in some way with civil rights activists, from that particular era of US history, when nothing could be further from the truth. And so I just teased out the big five ways that they were absolutely anathema to those activists. And that was of course, with regards to free speech, that they are absolutely antagonistic towards now. And you only have to pick up a newspaper, or witness what's happening in American academies to see who got canceled last week, or who's going to get canceled next week. So, we have that.

We have the folks in the sixties who were very much anti-establishment, very much anti-military, which is fairly much the opposite of what we have presently, where the last two presidential candidates both voted adamantly for the invasion of Iraq. Among no end of other foreign military misadventures and expensive ones at that. We had a movement that encompassed civil rights issues, both with regards to race and gender. You have a look at the progressives today. They are among the most rabid bunch of Neo-segregationists to be found anywhere in the union. So, that is another way that they've managed to disgrace themselves. And there were a couple of other ones that I had in there.

Oh, bodily autonomy happened to be one, where people in the 60s wanted nothing more than to be left alone, to take whatever drugs they wanted, whether it was contraceptives, or recreational LSD, what have you. And were very, very fearful of the government encroaching upon that most sacred of civil liberties. And now again, every other day we hear of some new medical mandate that the government is handing down and dictating to people. So, it seems to be a complete about face, when it comes to the modern, progressive sensibilities, and those who might consider themselves descendants of some peace loving hippies.

But if you take it all the way back and you realize the foundations of America's progressive movement, you find that it was Wilson who introduced the Sedition Act and clamped down on pacifists and conscientious objectives to the First World War. It was Wilson who was an out and out racist, both during his tenure as a president at Princeton, and while he was presiding over the presidential administration and oversaw the segregation of federal offices, the military. These are things that your listeners can look up for the moment. They'll probably be scrubbed from Wikipedia in not too long.

There are textbooks out there that are physical, and that'll take a little longer to hunt down and burn. But we know that he was hugely militaristic. He yanked the Americans into World War I, after all and. On practically every front that the self-described new left were fighting in the 60s, Wilson was diametrically opposed to them, as are today's progressives. So, I just thought that was an interesting full circle to have come.

I'm not exonerating by the way that the new left for their economic illiteracy. And people have pointed out to me since that article, and I agree with this assessment, that yes, of course these people were championing free speech. But when they got it, they were the first ones to usher in the age of political correctness. They were of course against the police and against the state, but in a very Marxist fashion, when it was their team at the top of the power totem pole, they had no problem using the caudal of the state to suppress their own enemies. So, yes, I was perhaps being a little too charitable to the new left then, but I really just wanted to underscore how far progressives have drifted from those that they would think of as their spiritual ancestors.