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Conversations That Matter

The Right's Epistemology Crisis

Conversations That Matter

Jon Harris

Society & Culture

4.61K Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2025

⏱️ 69 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The American Right is not merely “splitting” between MAGA and America First” or “populists vs. institutionalists.” Something far deeper and more dangerous is happening: a civilizational crisis over truth itself.


Once, the Right united against a corrupt legacy media. Today, distrust has metastasized. Fox News is bleeding credibility, The Daily Wire is viewed with suspicion, and the loudest voices now belong to independent influencers who boast that we live in a “post-fact era” — and celebrate it.


Candace Owens hosts the world’s biggest podcast by telling millions they’re being lied to by virtually everyone, then offers her own intuition (and fringe Freemason theories) as the escape hatch. Nick Fuentes is called “brilliant” simply for speaking fluently and without filler words. Professional standards, peer review, retractions, and institutional accountability are dismissed as tools of the elite that already failed us.


A century ago, José Ortega y Gasset and Gustave Le Bon warned exactly what happens when masses lose faith in inherited standards yet prove incapable of replacing them: the triumph of the pseudo-intellectual, the vulgarization of public life, and the rise of leaders who impose opinions by force of will rather than reason.


We are living in the world they foresaw.


This episode asks the questions few on the Right want to face:


If we reject both legacy media and the disciplined alternative institutions that tried to replace them, what is left? 

When sensationalism, transgression, and raw emotional appeal out-compete responsibility and accuracy, have we simply traded one form of manipulation for another? 

Can we rebuild trustworthy platforms, standards, and leadership without falling into either naïve institutionalism or cynical nihilism?


Ultimately, the fragmentation of the Right is not just tactical or teleological — it is epistemological and spiritual. Shouting “Christ is King” while abandoning the very standards that once flowed from Christian civilization will not save us. Real restoration begins in local: in families, churches, schools, and communities that prioritize truth, virtue, and accountability over clicks, clout, and catharsis.


A sober, urgent diagnosis of where the Right is — and a call to rebuild on ground that will actually hold.


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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

We are live on the Conversations That Matter podcast.

0:04.0

I'm your host, John Harris.

0:05.0

This will be a rather short podcast.

0:07.0

I'm just going to be going over an article that I wrote that I published yesterday on my substack on the epistemology crisis afflicting the right.

0:14.9

I did a whole podcast.

0:16.5

I think it was almost two hours long about two weeks ago where I talked about the vision of the

0:23.1

good that different members of the right have depending on the group they're in, the subgroup

0:29.9

they're in. And I think that was helpful. Someone asked me recently who was going on a show bigger than

0:36.4

mine if I had any resources and I sent them

0:38.9

that. But I was really hoping to before they went on this particular show, give them another

0:45.0

angle. And unfortunately, I didn't meet that deadline, but I am talking about this now. I thought

0:52.3

this for a while. And I had actually a really good conversation with someone.

0:56.5

I know I'm not naming names here because they haven't given me permission to name them,

0:59.6

but someone else who has a bit of influence in Christian right circles, I suppose. And I thought

1:07.8

the conversation we had was just very clarifying. This person was seeing the same things I'm seeing and even helped put some language to it.

1:14.2

So I am maybe borrowing a few angles from someone else in conveying what I'm about to convey to you.

1:23.6

But this is something I have been thinking about for quite a while.

1:26.6

And I think it's very important.

1:28.2

I think if we don't have a solution for this, we are going to be very vulnerable. We will be taken

1:37.1

advantage of by the worst elements unless the Lord is very gracious to us. We will have people who

1:43.5

know how to manipulate,

1:45.0

know how to control crowds, know what to say, know what image cells. And there are people who

...

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