TRIGGERnometry: w/ Jeremy Boreing on Grift Industrial Complex (Transcript) 

And in part it’s happening because Donald Trump is a one term president. You know, it’s a unique thing in our history. There’s only been one other example of non-consecutive terms for a second term president.

It essentially means Donald Trump was a lame duck from the day he was elected to this second term. Now he’s made a lot of moves to make that less true. He had a great, particularly around foreign policy, he had a great first year of his second term, which you might not always see from a second term president. But you can tell that the buzzards are circling.

People understand that a lot of a politician’s power is in their ability to win the next election. Donald Trump doesn’t have constitutionally the power to win the next election. And everybody wants now to define what’s going to happen next in the conservative movement.

And there’s an opportunity for people to make a lot of money, an opportunity for people to seize a lot of power, an opportunity to advance new visions for what the future of conservatism in America and globally can be. And then there’s structural issues around social media and how we’re incentivized as creators of content within that framework.

I think those two things and this sort of inherent problems in both are creating this really confluent moment where we see almost open civil war, and in some cases, very open civil war on the right as people are both trying to make money, build their own brands, and compete for actual true political power in a post-Trump world, which is rapidly approaching.

You know, we’ll have our midterms this year, and then you will immediately be in the next presidential cycle. I mean, starting in 2027, we’ll be trying to figure out who the next president of the United States is going to be. And because we know it can’t be Donald Trump, the question is, you know, what direction is the country going to go?

Competing Incentives and Staying True to Mission

FRANCIS FOSTER: It’s very difficult, isn’t it, Jeremy, to remain pure, in inverted commas, or to have your intentions remain pure when you’ve got so many, how can I put this, competing incentives. When you’re a podcaster or you have a company like the Daily Wire, how do you ensure that the choices you make are the right ones?

JEREMY BOREING: Well, you can’t ensure that your choices are always going to be the right ones. And you probably have to accept in life that some of your choices will be the wrong ones. Both because you’re reacting to incentives, because at times you have limited information, and because at times all sin and fall short of the glory of God.

We certainly made our share of mistakes at the Daily Wire during my tenure. I think we hit a lot more than we missed. But when you’re a big company and when you’re helping people navigate the complexities of worldview, of politics, of even theology, your misses are consequential. And some of our misses were quite consequential.

I think, though, to your question, one has to have a vision for what it is that they’re trying to accomplish, and one has to rightly order their priorities. Of course, we all have a lot of competing priorities.

The Daily Wire was deliberately set up to be a for-profit organization because part of our premise in setting up the company was recognizing that conservatives too often rely on nonprofit mechanisms to promulgate their worldview, while the left, which purports to hate market economics, almost exclusively uses for-profit institutions to promulgate their worldview. So by our own definition, we chose the less efficient and therefore less successful mechanism.

We wanted Daily Wire to be a corrective to that from the very beginning, which necessarily means that making money has to be a high priority. But making money can never be the highest priority when you’re ordering the priorities of a company like the Daily Wire. When you’re ordering the priorities of a business like the business you have with Triggernometry, you have to keep the mission as your number one priority because definitionally, all the other priorities will subordinate to it.

If you ever find yourself making profit or audience growth the number one priority, then necessarily the mission will subordinate itself to that priority. And that’s when you start making really cynical decisions.

And in my experience, I’ve made cynical decisions, of course, in my career. Every time I make a cynical decision, it’s come back to bite me. I think that’s not true if you are a cynical person. I mean, there is a lane for the pure cynic. I call it the Grift Industrial Complex.

The Grift Industrial Complex

Beware the Grift Industrial Complex. It’s real. It can be incredibly lucrative. And it can be incredibly rewarding, too, in terms of the feedback that you get from audience.

If you tell people what they want to hear, they are always very happy with you. If you tell people always what they want to hear, they reward you financially. They reward you by clicking and by liking, by giving you that affirmation and that dopamine.

And pretty soon that becomes the thing that you serve. Pretty soon you don’t wield cynicism. Cynicism wields you over time. And I think we see a lot of people falling into that trap right now.

The Candace Owens Decision

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, we absolutely do. And I mean, well, let’s talk about it. I mean, one of the people who is at the forefront of the movement that you’ve just talked about, let’s call it the Grift Industrial Complex, is Candace Owens. When Candace worked for you, do you sometimes look back at the decision and think that wasn’t a good one when she was working at the Wire?

JEREMY BOREING: Yeah. Well, I certainly think that hiring Candace is probably the biggest mistake of my professional life so far.

At the time, I had misgivings about Candace, but it wasn’t a completely cynical decision. I believed that Candace could be a great force for good in the world. I still believe that Candace is the most talented person I’ve ever met, not just in conservative media, but in any media.

She has it. She has that star quality. You know it the moment that you meet her. Unbelievable charm, unbelievable charisma. The camera absolutely loves her. She has incredibly unique gifts and skills in that area.

And when she wields those gifts and skills for good, she’s incredibly effective. She was during the BLM movement in America. Some of the content that we made when we first brought Candace on was focused on that topic. And I think she was as good as anybody in the world and made a really positive impact.

I’ve said before Candace is like nuclear energy. You know, if you harness it properly, she can power a city. If you lose control, she’ll flatten the city. And I think that’s what we’re seeing now.

Candace, all those same gifts that she has at various times used for good, she’s now using for ill. And there’s no one better. The problem is if what you’re pursuing is bad and you’re the best at it, you’re going to do an incredible amount of damage. And Candace is doing an incredible amount of damage.

The Charisma Problem

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Do you think one of the things that, and I’ve talked about this quite a bit in the past, you’ve talked about the camera liking people, etc. We are in the business where charisma is so over-indexed that people very often will confuse charisma with accuracy.

They will say, “Well, this person’s very charismatic, therefore what they’re saying is true.” And that seems to be a big problem. I don’t know how much of a problem it is on the left, but within the right wing media ecosystem there just seems to be the sense that if you get someone charismatic saying something crazy that seems to get millions of views.

Is there something about the conservative mindset or is there something about the way people think that they’re particularly susceptible, or am I being unfair? And are people on the left just the same?

The Grift Industrial Complex and Audience Capture

JEREMY BOREING: Well, of course people on the left are susceptible to this. There’s a reason that every actor in Hollywood, they are who they are because they have star power, they have gotten the platforms that they have because they’re incredibly charismatic and great on screen and great at telling stories and they’re all crazy and they’ve been promulgating a horrible worldview for decades. So of course that’s a problem on the left.

It manifests itself differently on the right though, because the left has almost hegemonic representation among the instruments of popular culture and has for the lifetime of just about anyone who could be watching this now. And so for that reason, a lot of their audience capture happened in places that were less consequential. It happened in narrative fiction. I say less consequential and probably it’s actually more consequential over time but less sort of urgent than say someone like Candace Owens might be. So you just don’t see it in the same way.

Because your average interaction with say, a radically left wing Hollywood actor isn’t them telling you their opinion, it’s them performing a role or playing a part. Because the right was sort of boxed out of that. The major apparatus of culture formation for the last several decades, we found, in part because of the work of Daily Wire and in part because of the work of others, we found these alternative lanes, which are much more direct. Talking into the camera, saying what you believe.

And so that’s where we’ve actually built our audiences. That’s the kind of trust that was placed in us from day one. And so I think you see the abuse of it a lot more clearly on the right. And there may be something in the sort of conservative mindset that makes us more susceptible to, say, conspiracy theory. You know, when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I had a teacher in high school, had a poster on the wall that said, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, I think that’s a Nixon quote.

JEREMY BOREING: It’s a Nixon quote. It is, yeah. Yeah, it’s a great Nixon quote. But that is a conservative kind of point of view that because we are in a sort of bunker mentality, we are hard done by and we are beset. And so you do begin to see, you do begin to see probably threats that aren’t there, patterns that aren’t there.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I mean, I think that’s probably part of the bunker mindset is well put, because I think a lot of it is there’s a sort of feeling on the right that I certainly see that people feel like the world is moving in a direction they really don’t like. And therefore there must be a small group of people that are in charge of this process with very tiny hats. Ideally with very tiny hats.

But actually, you could see this happening even before the explosion in antisemitism that we’ve seen recently. They were looking for a framework to explain everything. The theory of everything is a small number of people have got together and they’ve decided to ruin our lives, which I think is a simplistic explanation of this thing. Why is that? So? I mean, I guess throughout history that’s been a very appealing way of looking at things, right?

JEREMY BOREING: Yeah, well, of course. Because most people either don’t have a lot of power or perceive themselves not to have a lot of power. And I actually think the latter is far, is the more dangerous phenomenon that we’re dealing with right now. And so the assumption is that somebody has to be in charge, somebody has to be running it. It obviously isn’t me. I’m not getting the things that I want, the world isn’t working out the way that I think that it should, so it must be working out the way someone else thinks that it should. Of course, the reality is that if you’ve ever met anyone in government.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

The COVID Conspiracy and Its Lasting Impact

JEREMY BOREING: Now, it’s also funny to me that, you know, the billionaire who’s been famous literally as long as I’ve been alive with a gold toilet on his personal 767 is somehow not a part of whatever the ruling elite is even in his second term as President of the United States. So I think all of these sort of Illuminati elite, you know, kind of conspiratorial views do fall apart upon contact with the real world.

But that’s not to say that there aren’t actual conspiracies, and actual conspiracies do make it harder to debunk the concept of the conspiracy theory. And one of the, perhaps the biggest reason we’re living through what we’re living through right now is because of COVID-19, because of the reaction of the governments of the world to this novel coronavirus.

It was one of the most formative, especially for this young generation. Imagine being in high school and being sent home for a year or two years or in some cases three years because of a disease that did not affect you demographically. You are unaffected. And then learning over time how much of it was overreaction, and that’s generous. How much of it was opportunistic, and that’s probably the most true case. And how much of it was downright cynical and a power grab by governments.

And I think that’s probably true in some aspects of it. But you take all of that together and now tell people that conspiracy theories aren’t real. And, well, it’s a losing argument because we just live through, you know, one of the great conspiracies really in human history. And of course, we’re going to be dealing with the damage of that overreach by governments for the rest of our lives. It was a generationally consequential event.

I try to be very careful and guarded with my language. I never want to say because of the coronavirus or because of COVID-19, because of course, none of these things are because of COVID-19. They’re all because of the reaction of governments and media organizations and the apparatus of popular culture, which are almost completely dominated by the left to seize power, seize economic opportunity, and in some cases, just panic and overreact. I mean, you know, sometimes there is no obviously conspiracy except stupidity.

But I don’t see how we in the short term easily overcome the psychological damage done to free people across the west by our governments in relation to Covid.

FRANCIS FOSTER: It’s such a profound point and because I have this joke which is we all treated Covid like a bad one night stand where we’re just going to walk away going, “No, that never happened. I never said this, I never did that.” And we’re just all going to walk away and pretend like it was just one big dream.

JEREMY BOREING: Yeah, super normal. To lock children in their houses for three years couldn’t possibly be a consequence for taking people in the most socially formative years of their lives and putting them behind a computer where their only interaction with other human beings is digital interaction. All going to work out fine.

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Charisma and Dynamic Instability

FRANCIS FOSTER: One of the things I wanted to talk to you about is, we talked a little bit about, touched on it, almost like charisma. I’ve got this theory and I’d be very interested to hear your view on it. Having worked with actors and influencers, to me, charisma and mental illness are kind of almost intrinsically linked. And I’ll tell you why. Because when you see someone in real life and you talk to them and I’ve seen this with a lot of actors. I’m like, “Oh, my God, this guy’s crazy.”

JEREMY BOREING: You put a camera on him, boom.

FRANCIS FOSTER: It’s charisma, that edge that I don’t know where he, which way he or she is going to go. In real life, you’re like, that’s scary on camera.

JEREMY BOREING: That’s magic. Yeah. Well, I think of it as, in aerodynamic terms, there’s a concept called aerodynamic instability. Right. That you want your fighter jets to be unstable. Dynamic instability, I think they call it. Because the whole point of a fighter jet is that when it’s in a dogfight, it has to very quickly move. And it’s, as it turns out, an airplane is designed not to do that. The whole purpose of an airplane is to go straight for a long time.

It’s not like the movies, you know? I mean, if you were ever on a giant jumbo jet and all the engines went out, do you know what would happen? Almost nothing. You would go because the wings are doing the work right now. You will eventually crash because there’s not enough thrust to create lift. But those wings are going to keep you. It’s not like you just go into the ground. No, you’ll go straight for a long time. The pilots will have a ton of time to try to find someplace where they can put down safely, because a plane is meant to be very aerodynamically stable.

But a fighter jet. No, a fighter jet, if the engine goes out, it crashes into the ground instantly, because it needs all of that thrust of those giant jet engines to keep it going straight, because at any moment, it could want to go in a different direction. And so what makes a great fighter jet a great fighter jet? What makes a great rock star a great rock star? What makes a great actor or public speaker or show host charismatic and great is dynamic instability.

It is that very idea that at any moment, right when you think you’ve got them in your crosshairs, they’re going in a completely different direction, you know? So, yeah, I think there, I’ve never heard anyone kind of frame it up as mental illness, but it’s probably not the same as I’m offended.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Here, because you’re either saying, I’m not charismatic, mentally ill. Which one is it? Maybe.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Maybe a little bit of both, but, and that’s fine for an actor. That’s fine for a comedian. That’s fine for, you know, a lot of a rock star. I kind of want my rock stars to be on edge. I don’t want my rock star to go home or to go to a hotel and have a, you know, a cup of cocoa in an early night. I want him to be out living my dreams. Right?

JEREMY BOREING: Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: My political influences. I don’t want my political influences to be like that. I want my political influences to be like someone like Ben. I may disagree with Ben on certain things, but I know that he’s consistent, he’s logical. The same with Constantine. But when you have political influences like Candace, like Candace and Tucker, that’s another package entirely, isn’t it?

The Political Projects of the New Right

JEREMY BOREING: Yeah. Well, I’d be careful about conflating Candace with Tucker. Candace Owens is engaged in a—as I see it, Candace is engaged in a project of self-aggrandizement. I’ve asked Candace on two separate occasions, what do you actually believe? And on both occasions she told me, “I believe what the people believe. I am the voice of the people.”

Never mind that that’s a completely amoral statement. Never mind that I don’t know who the people are in this conversation. Never mind that the people, whoever they are, can obviously be wrong. Candace is actually saying something somewhat profound. She’s saying, “I will say whatever gets the most reward.” She may not even know that that’s what she’s saying. But she’s essentially articulating audience capture as a virtue.

Tucker Carlson—I don’t believe Tucker Carlson’s engaged in audience capture. I think Tucker Carlson is part of a small cohort of people. Cohort includes Marjorie Taylor Greene. Cohort includes Steve Bannon. Cohort includes Nick Fuentes, although I’m not saying that Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson believe all of the same things. But these are people engaged in an actual political project.

These are people who are engaged in trying to create a new American majority premised on left-wing economic populism and right-wing social populism. You can say what you want about that, whether it’s good or bad. You can say what you want about it, but it is a political enterprise. They believe that they can create a majority and that that majority can rule the country. And it’s a new vision in terms of the ruling class in our country.

It’s not that there’s never been people who put forward that vision, but it’s never been as poised to seize actual political power as it is right now in the hands of that group of people. So I don’t—you know, some of the sort of superficial qualities look the same, but I don’t think it actually is the same. Candace is not engaged in a political project. Tucker Carlson is very much engaged in a political project.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So flesh out the political project. Left-wing economic populism, that is protectionism at home, redistribution of wealth.

JEREMY BOREING: Yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Protection of the ordinary man against the corporate powers, et cetera, that kind of stuff. And on the right, it would be a kind of nativist, identitarian worldview, or—tell us more.

Economic Populism and Social Conservatism

JEREMY BOREING: Yeah, well, I think you summed it up well. I would add that on the right, it’s also conservative social policy. I mean, you’ll hear Tucker when he talks about Maduro, and he’ll say things like, “Well, he may be a communist. I don’t know if he is a guy may be a communist, but he outlawed gay marriage in his country and he outlawed abortion in his country.”

I think Tucker has rightly recognized that right-wing social policy tends to be very popular among working people. He’s also recognized that redistribution of wealth—people like getting checks, people like—and it’s also very easy, especially in the wake of COVID I think, and in the wake of other sort of failures of whatever the elite is. I don’t think that there is a sort of secret cabal of Jewish billionaires running the world or anything, but obviously there is sort of a ruling class. There are sort of people who have more power or more agency in the country than others.

And I think he realizes that because that group is necessarily small and because envy and resentment are very real parts of man’s nature, it’s always easy to stir people up economically against that group, even when that group—which in the case of Tucker, it’s funny because a lot of the sort of tech billionaires agree with Tucker’s political project. But nevertheless, it’s very easy to get the bulk of people angry at that group of people, angry at unchecked immigration, which you should be angry at unchecked immigration, angry at the excesses of the left social policy over the last 50 years, angry about the divorce rates in the country, about the illegitimacy rates in the country, the fatherhood crisis happening in the country, the collapse of masculinity that’s happening in the West.

Those are all, each and every one, real problems. If you marry these things together, perhaps there’s a majority that will have a politics that’s new. You know, when Tucker says—I’ll end with this—Tucker says, “J.D. Vance and Marjorie Taylor Greene and I can change the foreign policy of this country.” Well, believe him. He’s telling you what his project is. He’s trying to change the sort of historic politics of the country. That’s it. Candace isn’t.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, no, it’s a very good distinction you make. And I suppose, I mean, if you take it at the level of—

FRANCIS FOSTER: Being.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Angry at certain things that have been done. There is a majority of people, not just in America, I think, across the western world actually, who are rightly, I think, frustrated with open border immigration policies, the destruction of masculinity as a positive force in the world. I think it’s atrocious and has been horrific for our societies and on many other things. And that’s not something that even right-wing people or left-wing people have to agree. It’s kind of a majority opinion.

JEREMY BOREING: It’s a majority opinion and lots of—

Anger as Destructive vs. Constructive Force

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Other things we could talk about. My issue, I suppose is more about whether being angry about stuff becomes a productive force or whether it remains a destructive force. Because if you don’t convert anger into solutions that are forward-looking, then all you’re doing is stirring people up for—and you talk about Candace being self-aggrandizing.

Well, as you said, there’s an incentive structure in the media game. You know, I always tell this story and we joke about this. So when Francis and I first started Triggernometry, had a girlfriend, a very smart woman, and whenever we used to complain about the state of the world or look, this thing happened or that thing happened, she’d always say to us, “Look, whatever’s bad for the world is good for Triggernometry.” Right?

And in the media game, ultimately that is unfortunately true. And so stirring people up to be angry while offering no practical solutions is a perfectly good game plan if what you’re trying to do is make money, build a platform, make a bigger audience for yourself, et cetera. Is there a constructive vision behind all of this or is it more of just a destructive force at this point?

JEREMY BOREING: Again, I just wouldn’t conflate the two categories. The grift industrial complex and the people who belong to that category probably don’t care about the political outcome. As you say, whatever is bad for the world is good for the bottom line. Whatever’s bad for the world is good for the subscriber count. Whatever is bad for the world is good for my engagement.

The people engaged in the political project that I suggested, they do have a constructive vision. I’m using constructive here definitionally, not connotatively. I don’t think that it’s constructive, I think it’s a bad vision. But it is a vision to seize power and remake the world order. It is a vision to end the post-war consensus. It is a vision to have a post-liberal west.

At the fringes, they talk about this fairly openly, post-liberalism and sort of a reduction in human freedom because they blame human freedom for the excesses of the west over the last generation or two generations. And this is why I see a huge alignment between, you know, Antifa thugs tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and people on the so-called new right saying that Churchill is the chief villain of the Second World War or that America shouldn’t have used the atomic bomb to end the Second World War, or that man didn’t—you know, America didn’t walk on the moon, or that 9/11 was an inside job.

That’s just rhetorically tearing down our statues in the same way that Antifa is physically tearing down our statues. It’s saying that the narrative structure on which the country is premised, or more broadly the west is premised, our short sort of shared legacy, was either a lie told by evil men to gain power over you, or in some cases it was—well, I’ll say that essentially they’re saying that those structures were a lie and therefore there is nothing to conserve.

That’s why I think it’s a fundamentally anti-conservative proposition. It’s a very radical and reactionary proposition. It’s saying everything that has been great about the country was wrong. All of our greatest achievements were actually immoral. Because when you have a sort of national identity, that national identity, as it turns out, is an immune system against tyranny.

If you want to bring about a tyrannical post-liberal authoritarian order, you have to get rid of that underlying narrative, that story that people tell themselves that allows them to see themselves as free, to see themselves as being on the side of freedom, to see themselves as being on the side of the human advancement and human flourishing.

So it is constructive insofar as they are constructing a new governing philosophy and implementing it. I think it’s destructive in the sense that I think everything that actually is good and true about our role in the world is the very thing that will be the first casualty of this new political project.

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Well, you say that they’re having an impact or I don’t remember the exact word you used. And you mentioned J.D. Vance. I mean, so far, the Trump administration’s foreign policy has been utter repudiation of that entire worldview, I would argue. But do you—you see J.D. Vance as a champion of that movement and potentially taking over and implementing that vision? Is that what you’re saying?

The Enigma of J.D. Vance

JEREMY BOREING: I don’t know. I think that J.D. Vance is a unique figure in my lifetime in American politics because he plays it incredibly close. I don’t know. And I think very few people know what J.D. Vance, what his actual political North Star is. You know, Tucker Carlson claims him when he says, “Marjorie Taylor Greene, J.D. Vance and I will change the foreign policy or can change the foreign policy of this country.” You know, that’s one side claiming J.D. Vance.

Now, do they actually have a claim on J.D. Vance? I don’t know that they do. I think one has to look at the fact that J.D. has a, apparently a very close relationship with Tucker, that he has not repudiated Tucker as Tucker’s rhetoric has gotten more and more and more outside of—outside of any sort of traditional American conservatism and ask themselves why. Why does J.D. remain so close to Tucker?

I think it’s premature to say it’s because he is a part of that new political project. I think it’s just as likely that it’s a sense of loyalty. J.D. owes a lot of his political career to Tucker. Tucker took a bet on J.D. Vance when very few other people would, both in his run for Senate and in helping, by all accounts, helping point Donald Trump toward the idea of selecting J.D. as his running mate. It may be out—you know, and listen, I respect that. Friendship is actually a really important concept to me, I think.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And gratitude and loyalty.

The Value of Friendship and Political Loyalty

JEREMY BOREING:

Gratitude and loyalty are very important values. I don’t think that we should—you know, there’s sort of this other debate on the right, and people who I normally align with very much, people who I respect greatly, like Dennis Prager, Ben, have made the case recently that friendship should not trump people who are in our business actually holding other people to account for the things that they say. And I think that is—I understand why they’ve taken that view, and I think there’s a lot of truth to the view, but I don’t think that the view is entirely true.

I think friendship should cause us to give people a lot of latitude, a lot of rope to try to deal with things privately before we try to deal with them publicly. I mean, friendship is an incredibly important virtue. Right. And of course, friendship can’t ultimately prevent us from being publicly critical when we’ve exhausted all these other mechanisms. So probably I have a more nuanced perspective on that maybe, than some others.

But all of that to say, yes. Maybe that’s why J.D. Vance seems so aligned with Tucker. And if so, understandable. There’s also a political reality. J.D. Vance has to keep together the Trump coalition in order to have a chance to be president in three years. And that means that he probably, politically, from his point of view, needs all the people who listen to Tucker just as much as he needs all the people who listen to Ben Shapiro.

Donald Trump, particularly in 2020 and 2024, did a great job of building that coalition, I think, and others have said as much. So this is not an original thought. I think that Tucker is doing an enormous amount of damage to the Trump coalition, and I think that that will become a political liability if left unchecked for J.D. Vance.

But right now, if I’m J.D. Vance, I can understand politically why you wouldn’t want to get into the business of dividing up the coalition, drawing lines, which makes it harder, presumably, to become the next president, or he’s actually a part of their political project. It could be any of those three things. And I think that only time is going to help us understand which of those three things it is.

But I think it would be cynical to assume right out of the gate that just because J.D. Vance is friends with Tucker Carlson and just because Tucker Carlson claims J.D. Vance—that’s politically advantageous for Tucker Carlson to do. Right. That doesn’t mean that J.D. Vance is a part of Tucker Carlson’s political project, and obviously, I certainly hope he’s not.

I think that sometimes it’s easy to say, well, Donald Trump, poor Donald Trump, what a buffoon that he chose J.D. Vance, and J.D. is actually part of this project to take apart his coalition. And he only picked J.D. Vance because Tucker Carlson told him to. That’s sort of like saying George W. Bush only invaded Iraq because the Jews told him to, you know, become the President of the United States and not have your own judgment and your own opinions.

I’d like to think that probably Donald Trump isn’t some puppet that can be wielded by other nefarious political actors. He chose J.D. Vance in the end, maybe on Tucker’s recommendation, but he chose him. I’d like to think that he believes, therefore, that J.D. Vance can be a good steward of the coalition that Trump built.

The Religious and Spiritual Dimensions

FRANCIS FOSTER:

We’ve been talking about this movement, and I’m loving the conversation. We’ve talked about the intellectual side of it, the political side of it, but I think there’s one element of the movement that we haven’t spoken about, which is the spiritual, religious side of it. A lot of these people in this movement are Christians. They’re very, very devout Christians, or hardline, however you want to describe it. And when they talk about America, it’s almost to me like they’re talking about a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah. And the only way to deal with a Sodom and Gomorrah is what God did, which was to burn it to the ground.

JEREMY BOREING:

Fire.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Yeah.

JEREMY BOREING:

Well, listen, there is a religious component to a lot of what’s happening. You know, people like Nick Fuentes like to lead with “Christ is King” as a sort of tribal rallying cry. Right. I think that that’s anathema to—I think what they’re actually—the term “Christ is King” is not anathema to Christianity or the gospel message, but what they are admittedly doing by invoking the term “Christ is King” is—Nick Fuentes is very clear about what he’s doing when he uses “Christ is King.” He chose a rallying cry that would exclude Jews. That’s why he chose it.

So therefore, “Christ is King” is a way of excluding Jews from the political project that he’s engaged in creating. I think that is anathema to the gospel. I think it’s using the name of the Lord in vain. I’ve said as much publicly before. I think one should be very careful about wielding the name of God for personal or tribal gain.

Does that mean that there—so that is a religious component to what’s happening. And where there is religion, there is a spiritual component as well. I say that as a believer. I’m a Christian. I therefore believe that when one invokes Christ, they’re invoking something real. Now, whether they have the power to actually make such an invocation, your mileage may vary, but they’re certainly playing with forces.

Hamlet might say there are more things in heaven and earth than are present in our philosophy. They’re playing with something that’s real, whether they think it’s real or not. But I don’t think that it is—sometimes you just talk because it’s your turn to talk. And what you should really do is think for a second.

What I would say is the language of religion is being used right now to the benefit of people who, as far as I can see, do not have—are not engaged in a project that’s consistent with the gospel of Christ, but it is very powerful tribal language. They’re wielding sort of elemental forces that have existed in all cultures throughout time. And in the case of Christianity, I believe forces that are quite true. They’re wielding them for personal gain and to great effect because they are greatly effective tools.

I don’t think that what’s being expressed is any sort of true Christian religion. And I don’t think that the fruit that will be born out of this political project is fruit that’s consistent with any sort of Christian fruit as might be described in Scripture. But they’re giving God quite a bad name at the moment by using him in the way that they are.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

Because to me, as somebody who was raised Catholic, I went to Catholic school from the age of four right through to the age of 18. Jesuit school. So I know a little bit about Christianity and Catholicism in particular. It seems to me an incredibly vengeful movement.

JEREMY BOREING:

Oh, yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

And that is not corresponding with the teachings of Jesus Christ as I was—

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

That’s very Old Testament.

The Trad Catholic Movement and Anti-Semitism

JEREMY BOREING:

Well, I would say that a big part of what’s happening is a sort of—I don’t mean this in the church sense of schism, because of course Protestants and Catholics are in schism. But I mean, in a political sense, there’s an effort to create schism between Catholics and Protestants, particularly in America, because Protestants in America are supportive of the state of Israel, broadly speaking.

And this sort of trad Catholic movement that’s very popular in the country right now amongst this group of people in particular, young male, you know, Gen Z men, white men, are being really drawn to Catholicism in part because of the failures of American evangelicalism over the last 20, 25 years and in part because of the excesses of—well, what they would say are the excesses of liberalism right over the last 40 years.

They’re being drawn to something that’s more liturgical, that’s older, that’s more structured, that’s more—that emphasizes works more than it emphasizes vagaries like faith, what they might perceive as vagaries like faith. They want something that they can do, something they can belong to. They want to be part of a tribe. Not everything about tribalism is bad. You know, we do belong to tribes.

But they want that sense of feeling and purpose. They’ve been ostracized from the country in which they are the historic majority. They’ve been told every day that everything that’s wrong with the world is because of them, when, of course, that can’t possibly be true. They’ve been children for most of the time they’ve been on the planet, and so they’re drawn to things that feel to them substantive.

And of course, Catholicism is not anti-Semitic. But Catholicism has had struggles with anti-Semitism throughout history, struggles that have been addressed even in the 20th century by the church that they’ve acknowledged and that they’ve taken enormous, I think, steps to try to mitigate against. A lot of these young Catholics in the country right now are sort of evoking a Catholicism before those changes were made.

And I think it’s just sort of—I think that it’s a confluence, as we were discussing earlier, it’s kind of this moment where the appeal of trad Catholicism is connected to the fear of these conspiracies is connected to the blaming of a smaller and smaller group which eventually ends up with the smallest group, which is Jews. You know, a skepticism and sort of aversion to the idea that there are powerful elites who run things.

I think that all that has sort of conflated in this moment where there is this tribal, spiritual and very Catholic move. I say very Catholic because—not because it’s broadly—not because Catholicism is broadly this, but because this is broadly Catholic, if that makes sense. And it’s an open effort to separate off Protestants from political power on the right.

You know, when Tucker Carlson says that he hates Christian Zionists more than he hates anyone, he walked that back. But what he is talking about is Protestants in the country saying the people who have historically voted Republican in the country aren’t the Republicans that we want as part of this new conservative right-wing coalition. And so there is this very religious component to it all.

Evil as a Tool

I don’t think that it’s being motivated by religion. I don’t think that what’s happening is an expression of religion in the country. I think religion is being used as a tool. This kind of goes to a broader thing that I think about, which is both for audience capture, both for overthrowing liberal democracy and ushering in a more authoritarian form of government in the country, both for getting clicks and getting views, both cynicism, both anti-Semitism, which is being wielded by so many people left and right right now.

In all of these instances, people are, I think, trying to wield evil tools, wield evil as a tool to advance their agendas. And what they’re missing is that you cannot wield evil. You are the tool that’s wielded by evil. Everybody thinks that they can, kind of ironically or—well, I’m smart. I can use these tools, but they won’t impact me. But you can’t.

You know, you grew up Catholic. Evil is an active force, not a passive force. Evil can be personified. It has opinions, it has agenda, and it gets the final vote when you start trying to wield it for your own personal gain.

I think we see that so clearly with what Candace has become. I mean, she’s now talking about doing exposé documentaries on Charlie Kirk’s widow. That is evil. Is Candace evil? I’m not the judge of Candace’s soul. But Candace is doing evil. And she’s doing evil, I think because she cynically believed that she, and maybe still believes that she can wield these evil tools to her own gain. And that works in the short term? Sometimes. It doesn’t ever work in the long term.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

No, because what you’re talking about fundamentally is your soul.

JEREMY BOREING:

Yeah, that’s right.

The Grift Industrial Complex and the Entertainment-Politics Divide

FRANCIS FOSTER:

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Every day as a human being, you have a choice whether to do the right thing or to do the thing that will serve you in the short term. But ultimately the thing that will serve you in the short term will ultimately lead to somewhere you really don’t want to be.

And the problem is, and we’ve touched on this before, is we have now got a media ecosystem that incentivizes the short term, it incentivizes clicks so that you can make those short term choices. But eventually what you end up as is something deeply awful in the way that human cells can mutate and turn into cancer cells.

And it seems to me we need to have this conversation, which is when we look at our influences, do we go, is this politics or is this entertainment? Because I talk to a lot of people who go, you know what? I listen to Candace Owens and I watch her and I love her. And I go and I’m like, why? And they go, look, I know she’s mad, but it’s fun and it’s entertaining.

And you go, so what is she? Is it politics? Is it entertainment? Nick Fuentes, is it politics or entertainment? Tucker is far more to the political side, that’s clear. But there’s this whole raft of other people and you can’t actually understand or pigeonhole what they are.

And you get this with other people as well, people who go Bassem Youssef, former guest on the show, talks about Gaza when he’s exposed, he goes, “I’m just a clown.”

JEREMY BOREING:

Clown nose on.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

Yeah. Clown nose on. Politics or entertainment? What is it? What are you?

Rhetorical Pornography and the Shame Factor

JEREMY BOREING:

Well, again, on the specifics, I think that Fuentes is engaged in a great political project. I think he’s a formidable opponent for anyone who believes in human freedom. But, yes, for many, on the sort of grift industrial complex side of things, it is primarily entertainment.

And, you know, you say people tell you that they listen to Candace. I had a guy tell me recently. He said, you know, what should I say to my wife? You know, she keeps telling me about things that she hears Candace say, and I don’t even know how to respond to them.

I said, well, I would just respond by telling her fun things that you saw in some porno video that you watched. He said, whoa, what are you talking about? I said, well, the same level of shame should accompany both statements.

Like, one should be ashamed to say publicly that they’re watching Candace Owens now. And Candace Owens, who is at war with the widow of her purported best friend, Charlie Kirk. This is so far beyond the pale, you know, the fact that people can say with a straight face, “Oh, yeah, well, what do you make of what Candace said?”

What I make of it is that it is a kind of pornography. It is rhetorical pornography. It does the same thing that regular pornography does. It titillates, it stimulates, it’s slightly naughty, it’s great for getting clicks, and it makes tons of money on the Internet, and you shouldn’t be able to look at it if you’re under 18.

Personal Responsibility and the Post-Liberal Critique

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Well, it’s interesting. I’m curious about the political project side of things, because I think it’s fair to say, actually, that, you know, what you call the grift industrial complex, there have always been people, and the more attention they can get, the more crazy stuff they’ll say. And that is something.

Actually, you know, we can talk about the influences. I honestly think it comes down to personal responsibility. You as an individual have a choice about whether you consume this or not. And pornography is the same. I don’t want to ban pornography. Does it mean I think people should consume as much of it as possible? No. Right. And those are, there’s a lot of room for personal responsibility within this.

This is one of the things that people like us get accused of is like, we want to censor these. I don’t want to censor anyone. I’m just saying that this is, I don’t want to prevent McDonald’s from being sold. I’m just saying McDonald’s is probably not good for you, you know, or as good for you as other food. At least I’m going to get sued by McDonald’s anyway, you get my point.

But the political side of it is interesting because I think whatever we may say about the direction that these people want to take the west in, I think many of the critiques of the status quo, as we’ve discussed before, actually quite legitimate.

And James Orr, who we’ve had on the show, who’s now a big influence within reform, but he’s very good friends with JD Vance, as I’m sure you know, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. One of the best people I’ve ever met, too. When he was on the show, he talked about the fact that in his view, or at least the view he was pushing forward, woke is the inevitable consequence of liberalism.

And so if you hate woke, as I think we all do, his argument will be, well, you have to look at where it came from. And therefore this calling for a post liberal worldview and post liberal order is a natural reaction, I think, to that. So why are they wrong?

Original Sin vs. Political Isms

JEREMY BOREING:

Well, they’re not wrong in diagnosing that we have a problem. I think that they’re wrong in that they remove human agency. All these isms are looking for an original sin. You know, communism says the original sin is class, and libertarianism says the original sin is government coercion. And, you know, this new right says the original sin is liberalism.

But of course, the original sin is original sin. Original sin is pride and the fall in the garden. And the thing that leads to all of the other problems that these people are trying to diagnose as the problem. But where I find fault with that is that it removes any agency after the problem.

You know, people will say, I supported the Iraq war in my early 20s. Now people will say, well, obviously the Iraq war went very poorly. And so people will say, well, was it a mistake to invade Iraq? And their evidence that it was a mistake will be a bunch of things that happened that they basically imply were inevitable once the decision to go to Iraq was made.

But it wasn’t inevitable that we would send too few troops. It wasn’t inevitable that we would disband the Ba’athist army and therefore there’d be nobody to hold the country. It wasn’t inevitable that Barack Obama would win the presidency two presidential elections later, running on a promise to pull all the troops out of Iraq no matter what, and then did so, which gave rise to ISIS and required us send troops back in and retake cities that we’d already taken.

None of those things were inevitable. Those were other decisions that also got made to actually get to the heart of, was it a mistake to go to Iraq? You almost have to ask that question after working your way backward through all the other mistakes.

And I would say the same with liberalism. We live in a world of problems. Many of those problems you can trace back to, you know, the enlightenment and the beginning of the sort of liberal movement in the west. But at each one of those points along the way, humans fallen from the actual original sin were making any number of decisions that all compiled to bring us to this moment that we’re in, and it was not necessary.

I just can’t say that there was only one thing, that there was only one moment of true human agency that ever existed, and it was the moment that your political philosophy got inspired by. Oh, yeah, man, yeah. Just if caveman Joe had never had, you know, two rocks when caveman Tom only had one rock, then we wouldn’t have all these problems today. I just don’t buy that kind of an argument there.

The Case for Human Freedom

We have the excesses of the liberal order today that we’re rightly trying to figure out how to deal with. I don’t think that one has to go all the way back and say liberalism itself has failed. Human liberalism just means human freedom. Human freedom has not failed. Human freedom is consistent with the gospel. It’s for freedom that Christ has made you free.

The idea of man’s relationship to God being governed by law, as it turns out, was never God’s actual design to be fulfilled in man. And so he brought about human freedom in Christ. And that’s a picture of what’s also true in government.

The liberal order also gave us everything, like the entire modern world to say, well, we have to get rid of the thing that has allowed us to lift billions of people out of poverty, that’s allowed us to create these unbelievable technological advancements and increase human flourishing in so many ways. To say that it is the fundamental problem, I just think that’s a mistake.

I think we could look back at all the, what is inevitable because of actual original sin is that whatever system is put in place is going to degrade over time and bear and collapse under its own weight over time. The illiberal order that some of these people want to put in place and listen, I think some of them probably want an illiberal order that’s virtuous. I think some of them want an illiberal order that is not virtuous.

But even if I grant that the illiberal order will be a virtuous illiberal order, that it’ll be a strong man for good, that is still going to break down, I think it’ll break down much faster than liberalism broke down. The, again, because there is an actual thing called actual original sin. And it isn’t class, and it isn’t government coercion, and it isn’t democratic politics, and it isn’t human freedom. It’s sin. And sin just corrupts everything as it goes.

So, you know, I think people are looking for a simple solution to what is actually an unsolvable problem, which is the problem of man. And one of the beautiful things about particularly America’s form of liberalism as sort of created by our two founding documents, the Declaration and then the Constitution, is it sort of built into its understanding of the world, the problem of original sin, actual original sin.

And it sought to constrain or mitigate some of the worst excesses of actual original sin by strong protection from minority rights, not just populism, by not allowing one branch of government to hold in itself too much of the power, too much authority, to actually require government to be small, to require government to be slow, so that people can’t react out of impulse in every moment.

And I would say it seems just as likely to me that most of the problems we face now are because of the erosion of those systems which were meant to positively channel liberalism, breaking down as they are to, I would blame that long before I would blame the concept of liberalism itself.

The Need for a Positive Vision

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Well, and that really, I think, is the question now, before we move on to other things, is how do you articulate a positive vision of how to deal with the excesses of liberalism that have become woke and embedded themselves in institutions, et cetera. And without going to the simple solution, the scapegoat, this group’s to blame, etc. What is the positive vision to address all this without going tyrannical, without going into this type of worldview?

The Need for Virtuous Liberalism

JEREMY BOREING: Well, I think that we can look back at moments when Western civilization was functioning much more, in a much more healthy way. And you don’t have to look back all that far. You know, we were discussing a little bit before the show, in the brief time that we got together, how different the world was before, just before COVID-19, how if we could get in a time machine and go back to 2019, we probably would be shocked by the reality, even though it was only six years ago and we all lived through it and were adults and fully formed and had laid down with ladies and gone to war, and we can’t even remember what the regular world was like before they stopped it spinning on its axis and then tried to hit control, alt, delete and reboot the whole damn thing.

History, I say this all the time. People will ask me, I’m particularly bad at this. People say, do you remember when this person did this? And I’ll say, yeah. And do you remember when this person did this? Yeah. Which came first? I don’t know. Because history becomes very two dimensional to me. History flattens. It does for all of us. You should probably get a little longer than I get out of it. But history becomes very flat. But history wasn’t flat. History was just as complex and robust as the present, obviously.

And if you could go back just a little ways, the west was doing great. The Reagan-Thatcher moment in the 1980s was an unbelievable moment of economic growth, economic prosperity, strength, the defeat of the Soviet Union, the victory of liberalism and democracy over tyranny. You don’t have to look back. You don’t have to even look back at all. You only have to look across land masses or across oceans to see the results of tyranny, to see the results of strongman government and how it actually fails in practice.

Of course, it’s true that in the Kingdom of God it won’t be a democracy. There will be one guy in charge, but he’ll have the advantage of being perfect and also being God. He’ll know everything. He won’t make mistakes. He will be truly virtuous until you get to that system. I think a far better system is a channeled liberalism.

Channeled by what? Channeled by rule of law? Channeled by cultural institutions. We’ve destroyed all of our cultural institutions. Channeled by the family. We’ve destroyed the family. Did liberalism destroy the family? No, we destroyed the family. And when we destroyed the family, liberalism became unchanneled.

So I think the real problem that we face as a people is that the work is us. We’re actually the thing that’s gone wrong. Liberalism is not, by the way, some sort of—I think we derive our sense of liberalism from Christian religion. And so I do think that there’s a spiritual component, a spiritual example of liberalism being good, seeing what virtuous liberalism can look like. But liberalism itself is not some innate virtue. It’s like capitalism is not an innate virtue, but channeled by virtue. Capitalism and liberalism are the two most successful and most virtuous sort of philosophies that we can have for governing society.

We’ve got to put those—we’ve got to bring back the virtue part that constrains them and channels them. I would much rather do that than try to just form a government where or some governing order wherein the unvirtuous rule over the also unvirtuous. That’s not going to fix things.

Creating Culture: The Pendragon Cycle

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, one of the things that causes us to be where we are, I think, as a culture and across the Atlantic actually is we’ve become very split. And one of the reasons is that particularly people on the right have really got into a thing which is, you know, there’s a—it’s very easy to criticize culture. It’s very hard to make culture.

And one of the things that you guys were really ambitious with when you were at the Daily Wire and I hope still now is creating new things, is creating culture. The Pendragon Cycle is a massive project that you’ve been working on. The trailer looks incredible. It was absolutely fantastic to see. Tell us about that and what, you know, how—I have heard it was a pain in the ass to make.

JEREMY BOREING: Everything.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Everything went wrong. You know, actors falling off things, breaking things, you know, having to be replaced by people who’ve never acted and etc. Tell us about that.

JEREMY BOREING: Yeah, well, I often think when people are critical of movies that I make, that while I know that the movie I actually made is nowhere near as good as the movie that they would have made if they had ever made a movie, making movies is impossible. Yeah. My friend Phelan McAleer told me years ago. He said, “Directing a movie is a job that is so difficult, it’s actually impossible. And therefore, it mentally breaks every person foolish enough to endeavor to do it.” And he’s right. You just go mad because it’s so complex, and you’re just in a war against reality the entire time.

You say you heard about these horrors that happened on our set. It’s true. We had a guy, a good friend of mine, Jeff Don, had a massive heart attack on set. We had a horse roll over one of our actors and break his legs. Amazingly, he had an identical twin, also living in Budapest at the time, who wasn’t an actor, but who was very kind and stepped up and made sure we were able to continue. One of our producers fell on the ice and broke her arm horribly, like required surgery. And those were the good days. Those are the days where the production itself mostly kept working.

The Divine Act of Creation

And yet there’s nothing more rewarding than creation. I’m one who believes that in the New Testament, in the Book of John, it says in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and through him all things were made that were made, and apart from him was nothing made, made. And to me, that says that if you take the Christian view that Genesis 1 says God created the heavens and the earth, and John 1 says that all things were made through Christ. And the Christian perspective is that Christ is the part of God most associated with man. He’s the part of God that walked the earth as man.

Then what you can draw from all of that is that man is that—that God associates creation with man, that the part of God that is creative is the part of God that identifies and walks as man. You take Adam naming the animals in the garden. A thing without a name may not even exist. If you read Spencer Clavin’s terrific book Light of the Mind, Light of the World, you know, this entire quantum concept that exists now in science, human observation is an active participant in God’s creation. We’re literally creating the world as we observe it. God creates through man.

And so I think that we have a responsibility to be active participants in creation. Not just passive. Not just through looking around are we creating, but through getting our hands dirty. And that might—you know, I think creating business is a beautiful thing to do. People, when I first started the Daily Wire, my Hollywood friends would say, “Oh, how’s it feel? You used to be a creative. Now you’re a suit.” I said, “No, I am a creative. I’m creating something different than what I used to try to create.”

You know, creating a family is part of the act of creation, maybe the most important part of the act of creation. But we’re not here to consume and die. We’re here to create. And for me, there’s an artistic component to that. I’ve been fortunate in my life to get to make movies, to make music, to make businesses. But I think for whoever you are, wherever you are, you should be a part of that.

Fighting for Freedom and Building the Future

And as conservatives—and all of these words have become very tricky in modern time, right? The word conservative has about 18 different definitions. And we are part of the conservative civil wars for the definition of the word. But I don’t want to conserve the past. I want to conserve the best things about the past while building a better future because of the wisdom that we’ve inherited. I don’t want to throw out the wisdom of the past and try to build a whole new world based on my impulses or my instincts, divorced from all the great hard won creation of the people who went before us. But I also don’t want to keep the stuff that sucked.

And I think that that is what we’re called upon to do as people, as people who are part of this right of center movement in the country. The left understands creating the future. They just reject the past. And the right tends to understand holding onto the past, but fails when it comes time to build the future. I’ve always said at the Daily Wire, I would say our job is to fight the left and build the future. I think my kind of updated Jeremy 2.0 view of it is fight for freedom and build the future. We have to continually be building.

And Pendragon’s the biggest artistic project I’ve ever gotten to be a part of building. A thousand people worked on it. A thousand artists worked on an unbelievable cast. I think truly there may have never been a better cast of relatively unknown actors that ever came together to make a project. I think when people see the show, they’ll think I’m exaggerating here, that I’m sort of bragging. I take no credit for it. The way the cast came together was miraculous. And I think when people see the show, they’ll be like, “Damn, these guys are terrific.”

And we told a story. The most told story in the western canon outside of stories directly from the Bible is the Arthurian myth. And we told it in a way that I think is sort of true to its actual Christian origins. And, you know, to the extent that maybe Game of Thrones was subversive in its time because of its nihilism, I think the Pendragon Cycle is subversive in its time because of its rejection of nihilism. It’s a very hopeful project and it’s sort of about this moment that we live in. It’s about a moment of great political upheaval, of great spiritual and religious upheaval, and about how we prioritize our values.

And so to that extent, even though we made something that’s about the deep past, I think we made something that’s really urgently relevant to the world in which we live. I couldn’t be more proud of it.

Final Question

FRANCIS FOSTER: Jeremy, what a pleasure it’s been to have you on, an incredible conversation.

JEREMY BOREING: Thank you.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Final question is always the same. What’s the one thing that we’re not talking about as a society that we really should be?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Before Jeremy answers the final question at the end of the interview, make sure you head over to triggerpod.co.uk, where you get to see him answer your questions. How did the death of Charlie Kirk affect you and other senior people at the Daily Wire? And what do you think his lasting impact will be?

JEREMY BOREING: You know, I should have fired Candace much earlier than I did.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why? What for? What was—why was she actually fired?

The Overlooked Crisis of Social Media

JEREMY BOREING:

There are so many. Of course, one who’s going to go on Triggernometry thinks about the answer to this question. I came up with a whole list of things that we should be talking about that we aren’t.

One of them is just the left. You know, this right-wing civil war seems to be all-consuming right now. Meanwhile, the left is reassembling after the political defeats, their recent political defeats, and they’ve gone completely mad. And they’re poised to grab great political power in the coming years. And I’m very concerned about that. I’m concerned that we’ve been too triumphalist and we’re about to have real challenges again on our hands.

But I think the biggest thing that people should be talking about that we’re not talking about right now is the negative impacts of social media. It’s like we’ve skipped it completely and we’ve moved on to worrying about AI. And AI is still an abstraction, largely unbelievable advancements. It’s an unbelievable tool at the moment, although an imperfect one. And it may be as disruptive and horrible as everybody fears, but it’s not the moment we actually live in.

The moment that we live in is the moment created by a cell phone in every pocket and social media on every cell phone and what it’s doing to us as a people. You know, all of the things we’ve discussed today have been empowered by this moment, this moment of social media.

Some of them are good. There’d be no Daily Wire. As I said at the very beginning, what we realized was the opportunity in social media. That was our founding observation. Pendragon wouldn’t exist without social media. It’s an alternative to the way Hollywood does things. That’s an opportunity that we were afforded because of social media.

Obviously we have access to information, access to friends who in previous generations we might have lost touch with, access to family who we might not have been as close to, access to data and information. And you know, I got sick recently and was able to so quickly understand things that would have taken so much longer in any system that went before.

The Disruptive Nature of New Technology

And yet all the audience capture, all of the political disruption, much of the things that have happened in the last 20 years that are blamed on liberalism are actually because of the excesses created by this new technology. And when new technology emerges, it’s always the same. Yes, it brings about the opportunity for huge good. And in fact the reality of huge good. And it brings about the opportunity and the reality of huge ill. It’s incredibly disruptive.

You know, the printing press led to 30 years of sectarian violence across the entire continent of Europe because suddenly people could read the Bible. And so what they do, like everybody who first reads that God so loved the world that he sent his only son, that whoever believed in him would have eternal life, they start killing each other. The first thing.

It takes a long time to adapt to these kinds of disruptions, to socially evolve. And I think you can make an argument that we haven’t fully evolved to embrace the printing press yet. The printing press. And in our lifetimes, how many of printing press level advancements technologically have happened? Nothing. No one’s ever lived through more disruptions than the people on the planet right now.

And you see what’s happening. There’s been great reporting, even done this in the last week about the political gap between male and female, the huge changes in attention span, the changes in the nature of tribalism, that now we have more in common with strangers who have no geographical connection to us than we do with our neighbors.

You know, if your kid’s on their bike and they get hit by a car, your Facebook friends aren’t going to do. You need your neighbor to come out of their house when they hear the noise and call emergency services and provide CPR. It’s the people who are around us that are the people who should be the most important in our lives. And social media for the first time in all of history has disrupted that and what it’s doing to children.

The Need for Guardrails

Again, great reporting this week on what’s happened just since computers became ubiquitous in classrooms. And we’ve gone so far past computers being ubiquitous in classrooms. There’s a computer in every child’s pocket.

You know, we talked briefly about pornography and you said you don’t believe it should be banned, but that obviously people use too much pornography. We could have an argument as to whether or not pornography should be banned, obviously. But I will say that there are some things that people can’t self-regulate about and there are some things that some people can’t self-regulate about.

And we have always, as a culture, even in the freest societies in the west, we have always provided some guardrails around those things. Maybe not yes or no guardrails, but certainly some guardrails have existed. And we live in a time where most of the most destructive things are online and there are no guardrails at all.

You know, I’ve noticed some conversation since being here that maybe Britain recently put an age gate in front of pornography. Some states in America are doing that. Obviously there’s challenges with it. Are you giving the government access to information about who views pornography or who doesn’t? Are you making it? You know, I think there’s some real concerns about the way that that’s going about.

But obviously you can’t live in a society where the average 12-year-old has seen more breasts than King Solomon. And we do. And that’s just a fact. Just like shutting down the world and then hitting restart is going to have an impact that we have not even begun to really reckon with yet. The ubiquity of pornography for men in particular and for children especially, of course that’s going to have unbelievable consequences and we’ve not even begun to grapple with those consequences.

Rhetorical Pornography and the Dopamine Economy

And I would just say, as I said earlier about Candace Owens, so much of what we engage with online now is just rhetorical pornography. It’s just the same dopamine-inducing narcotic and we have not solved it.

It seems so obvious to me that children should not have access to technology that adults have not yet figured out how to condition themselves to use. And listen, I’m one of the great beneficiaries of social media. You guys are among the great beneficiaries of the social media age. I do not cavalierly say, oh we should outlaw social media. But I think the true negative impacts of social media, we’re only beginning to understand them.

And I think that if we want to preserve all of the good created by the ubiquity of the computer in your pocket and social media on the computer, we have to get serious about understanding the negative consequences and figuring out how to mitigate against them.

I suspect that there’s a world probably not too far in our future where everyone having the Bible and being able to read the gospel is only good. And all of the “but first we killed each other” is behind us, but we’re just not there. And I don’t think that there’s enough emphasis on trying to get us there. I think that we all like the dopamine and so we basically don’t want to talk about these. And there are some guys, Jonathan Haidt and others who do of course. But I think the impacts are so terrible right now for the culture that it’s shocking that it isn’t the biggest thing that we talk about.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Well, we have Jonathan on, Jonathan Haidt. Our interview has done really good numbers because I think a lot of people recognize this, particularly when it comes to children as you point out. And again, I also think again, it’s an error that comes down to personal responsibility. Are you going to let your children have a smartphone and at what age? And all of these conversations I think parents should think really carefully about.

JEREMY BOREING:

Well, I agree about personal responsibility but I also think that it’s good that we say kids under 18 can’t have cigarettes.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

And—

JEREMY BOREING:

I think that we will look back. You know, you see pictures sometimes from the turn of the century where there’s a 12-year-old boy on a street corner selling newspapers with a cigarette in his mouth.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

And you think that’s when our countries were growing.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

It’s a better time. Maybe we need to bring back smoking.

JEREMY BOREING:

For 12-year-olds. Well, I will say I would rather my daughter smoke than have social media.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

Agreed.

JEREMY BOREING:

I think that we will look back at kids having smartphones and social media today with an even worse pit in our stomach than looking back at those kids smoking.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Yeah, I actually think the movement is in that direction in terms of schools banning phones, countries banning certain things for under 18s, et cetera. So I think I’m grateful you bring that issue up because I think it’s really important. Hopefully we are moving in the right direction, but there’s a long way to go. I totally agree with you.

JEREMY BOREING:

Please follow me at Jeremy Boreing on Twitter.

Where to Watch The Pendragon Cycle

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Jeremy, great to have you on. Before we head on over to Substack where some people get to ask you their questions, just tell everybody how they can watch The Pendragon Cycle if they want to.

JEREMY BOREING:

The Pendragon Cycle premiered on January 22nd at Daily Wire Plus. You can head over there and buy a subscription and it’s a seven-episode series and I can say with all honesty, every single episode is better than the last. By the time you get to episode five and six, it’s really unbelievable what the cast accomplished, so hope everybody will give it a shot.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

All right, well before you head over to Daily Wire Plus, head over to triggerpod.co.uk, where Jeremy’s going to answer your questions.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

Like many right-wing commentators, I think the Daily Wire does a great job of offering legitimate criticism of the woke left and casting stones, but almost nothing in the form of offering solutions. Does Jeremy agree?

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