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Hey everybody welcome to the buck sexton show our guest tonight is orin mack entire he is with the blaze he's got the order

mack entire podcast over there he was born in Florida grew up all over the south son of a military officer a very high wattage individual I'm really good for to talk into him just based on his very excellent Twitter or in

thanks for being with us man great to great to have you on the program. Yeah thanks for having me tell me about foxes and lions in the context of politics America and

Nicola Machiavelli's seminal work the prince which I know you've recently cited all these things together in a sub stack break this one down for you I thought it was fascinating your most recent analysis on this.

Oh thanks no absolutely yeah so Machiavelli had this comparison between foxes and lions and his advice for rulers is that you should be clever like a fox and be able to avoid traps but trap but

foxes while clever can't really actually fight say a pack of wolves and so you also need to have some of the aspect of the lion the ability to fight back you know just kind of brute strength out of certain situations and guys who kind of continued in mackiavelli's political tradition guys like a

Velfrato Pareto kind of extended this he called them type one and type two derivations or residues but it's easier to just go foxes and lions and basically he said that you know each leadership classes has got an ad mixture of kind of your clever people the people who are looking to kind of manipulate

situations alter things look around corners explore new ideas and then it has your core of people who are strong patriotic they're about keeping institutions rock solid and perpetuating tradition that kind of thing.

And so your fox type leaders are the ones that are going to get you out of situations where you need cleverness nimbleness the ability to manipulate systems and your lion type leaders are the ones that are going to get you out of situations where you need kind of that martial strength and that kind of where with all the carry through those difficult situations and at the beginning of most

civilizations you have very lion type leaders but as you kind of go on you end up with more fox type leaders and we're in a situation right now we're almost entirely dominated by foxes and not lions I would think maybe the animal that comes to mind is jackasses or donkeys depending on who you're talking about it certainly also has some political connotations there for which party seems to doing the crazy stuff these days I mean one thing that I know you

written about the notion of of using this concept of the democratic machine as a way is that of actually avoiding accountability because one thing that I talked about during

COVID was the whole game the whole time was somehow there were endless orders and you weren't in charge meeting you the American citizen person individual of anything but nobody was really responsible for making sure that you were subject to constant endless orders that made no sense whatsoever how does that work.

Well one of the great things about democracy for people and powers it tends to obfuscate who's actually delivering kind of the rulings right if you have a king in charge you may hate that king you might be terrible might be a tyrant but the end of the day you know who sent the guys who are kicking your door down right like you understand who's in charge when you have a democracy well you know it's it's a system these people are supposed to be representing you they're supposed to be popular sovereignty means you select your own.

That means you select your leaders and that means that really at the end of the day even if a leader did something wrong it's kind of your neighbors job to vote them out right it's it's the person down the street who's the one who put that person into power and so you don't really have a one singular person you have a distributed network of people who are kind of in theory responsible for the action but aren't really always able to be held accountable which is why you know you might vote a guy out of office maybe end up getting rid of a Joe Biden or whatever but Joe Biden is going to be a good guy.

Whatever but Joe Biden's not running the country I mean who are we kidding here right it's the guys behind Joe Biden it's the people that you don't really have the ability to hold accountable that are the ones who are going to be there once he's gone and still be making decisions in places like the deep state.

I mean this in in the most general way like I just want to know where you go with this who does run the country right now.

So I think the big thing we have to understand is that really at this moment our country is run by an oligarchy I mean we're run with a distributed system and that system crosses many different disciplines you do have people in the government of course that's the formal hand of power but much of this powers also spread across what conservatives like to think of as the public private distinction that public private distinction does a lot of work for people but actually what really happens.

Is that as we've seen with things like the Twitter files these private companies work hand in glove with government agencies and non government agencies all the time and attempt to censor and control political opinion and make sure the right people get money the right people get elected.

The right kind of things are disseminated through all of our consistance making apparatus and when that's happening really the story is in charge at the end of the day.

And so you know it's it would be nice if you could point to one person and say hey this is the guy who's actually running things but we really have is a feeling across a whole class of people in you know political Washington the permanent bureaucracy corporate America the media who all have similar values they all share similar goals and they work together constantly to steer the country in a particular direction even if there's not one guy handing out orders.

Do you think enough of the country learned the appropriate lesson the very I would argue painful lesson about authoritarianism from the whole Fauci I covid lockdown mass because for me the midterm elections which I know there's a lot of things that people have been and can point to as to what happened there.

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