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Transcript: Why The West Is Waking Up From A 70 Year Nap – Eric Weinstein

Read the full transcript of Eric Weinstein’s speech titled “Why The West Is Waking Up From A 70 Year Nap” at ARC 2025 conference [Mar 16, 2025].

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Introduction: Emerging Victorious

[ERIC WEINSTEIN:] So, we’re going to get to something big at the end, but we’re starting from a little bit farther back than I thought, because it turns out I think that many of us don’t know what’s been going on to build up to this moment. I’m going to try to get through it relatively efficiently. I want to talk about emerging victorious. The culture wars has been very poorly understood. How many of you have ever been in an actual war, have seen action in an actual war? Very interesting. I think it’s quite a lot more than many of you imagine.

I want to begin with going back to the Bible. I am your DEI speaker. As an atheist Jew progressive from the United States, I’m sort of slightly askew. But what I want to do is I want to go back to the Bible and Isaiah, which is at the end of Bob Dylan’s famous All Along the Watchtower. And if you go to the King James Version, where it says, “Go and set a watchman and let him declare what he seeth.” It’s two riders that are approaching, as the song says. And what do they come with? They come with news of the fall of Babylon.

The End of the Post-World War II Order

We are in a situation in which the post-World War II order has fallen. J.D. Vance has announced this. I personally think it’s very important that the U.S. treat its friends in Europe very, very well, and it should be done in a fashion that lets people know that the U.S. will be there for the long haul. I am sure that that is in the cards, but we have to realize that we are waking up from a very long period of time, which I’ve called the Great Nap.

Now, the question is, is peace linked to gelding, to emasculation, to devitalization? There’s a very famous quote spoken by Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man. And I’m sure many of you who know the film know the quote I’m thinking of immediately. “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.” And of course, he goes on to say that in Switzerland, there were 500 years of brotherly love, and they came up with the cuckoo clock.

The possible moral is that radical creativity, innovation, and vitality is inseparable from violence. Violence is not necessarily a bad thing. When it comes to masculine traits, people have a very hard time finding any masculine traits that aren’t also feminine traits to say a positive thing about, except apparently we are able to pee standing up. I think that another positive trait of men is that they can control their violence, and that violence can be used for protection, and that violence can be used for creativity. But we are about to go back into an era which is perhaps a very high vitality.

Emasculation and Authoritarian Control

I want to talk about a very difficult subject, and that is that the concept of actual physical emasculation has a rich history going well into the 20th century, and in fact, into the 21st century. One of the reasons that we’ve been deranged by the trans discussion is that the trans discussion is about devitalization, and is a recurrent theme that authoritarian regimes attack the reproductive rights of their citizens.

And whether this is China, in which the last eunuch died in the 90s, rather astounding, whether we have in Italy the last castrato, who was actually recorded, and you can listen to him sing, not a very good castrato, I might add, or Sanjay Gandhi, who triggered, in part, the reaction in India. Do we have Indians in the audience? Very disappointing. I would say to them, “Simpurnakranti Abnarahaid Bhaviyathas Hamarahaid,” total revolution is now the slogan, that is how angry people were, and how violent they became, because of sterilization camps that were practiced in the 1970s.

And I have this quote from Elon Musk, because I think what you have to assume is that when you go to war, one of the great terrors is that you will be disfigured. The Sun Also Rises, as a famous example, bouncing beddies were discussed in Vietnam. And the fact is, is that these people very much came for our children. This is not cute, it’s not funny, it’s a terrible tragedy, and I don’t think that I overspeak when I call it a reproductive holocaust.

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I’m not going to read the quote, because I don’t think I can get through it personally. This child was with my son in high school, and I can tell you that the schools are infested with an orientation that is against the family, against the natural order, and against society itself.

Understanding Hybrid Warfare

The reason that this talk changed radically at 4 a.m. is that I became aware yesterday that many of you don’t know the basic terminology or framework of what you have just been through. You think you have been through the culture wars, which is some sort of cute internet conflict that seems really draining and exhausting. No, no, this is actually something that has recently been termed hybrid war.

It’s a 2007 concept from Frank Hoffman, and it says that in the current situation, non-shooting wars have no border and no end. Anything that can come through the internet means that there is no frontier. We are all combatants to the people who practice hybrid warfare. We can all be manipulated from abroad. Tokyo arose as everywhere. And as such, you’re mistaken. All of those of you who did not raise your hand that you’ve been through a war, you have no idea where you’ve been.