Welcome to the podcast. This is episode 420. My name is Douglas Wilson. Thanks for coming. Thanks for joining us. So I want to begin with an observation that I learned from my son-in-law, Ben Merkel. He made a very insightful comment about the rise of sort of edge lords on the right. I've been calling

them the dank right or the alternative right or the, and where there's a lot of anger, a lot of

vitriol, a lot of over-the-top ethnic stuff, whether it involves Jews or blacks or women.

So what's going on?

Why is this going on now?

And I don't remember anything like this going on in the conservative movement during my entire adult life. I'm sure this

stuff has always been there, but it's always been on the fringes, right? Now, it's generating a lot

of traffic, a lot of people making a lot of noise. What's going on? Well, Ben's observation

was that there's a certain personality that thrives on the outside.

So when the bad guys are in control, when Biden is in the White House, and they're doing all this nonsense, there is a certain kind of opposition that radicalizes, coalesces around this,

and just attacks the folly. And a lot of times it's very effective, it's pretty, it's pungent,

it's a take-no-prisoners approach. But here's the the difficulty this kind of person only

knows how to fight from the outside only knows how to be an outsider and only knows how to punch

up right and so what happened what happened in 2024 when Donald Trump won the presidency, and here we've got a slim majority on the Supreme Court, we've got the House of Representatives, we've got the Senate, and we've got the White House, we being this broad conservative coalition.

And you've got a bunch of these edge lords,

I called them, who do not know how to govern. They do not know how to say, oh, we won,

let's become responsible. Citizens get involved in our local municipalities and start making life better for everybody.

They don't know how to govern.

They don't know how to run anything that is worthwhile.

They do know how to run a guerrilla campaign from the jungle.

So they do know how to raid the city, raid the capital city from the jungle, and then retreat back into the jungle. And so, rather than fade into oblivion, rather than go on welfare, rather than just

sort of, I guess I'm a nobody now, a lot of these people have pivoted and are now attacking

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