Episode 33 : Tradition, Metapolitics, and Elite Theory with Dave Greene

In today’s episode of Walt Right Perspectives I speak with

Dave Greene

, who writes here on Substack at Fiddler’s Greene and is active on YouTube as The Distributist.

Dave recently published an article criticizing what he calls the “New Secular Right” or “LinkedIn Right”, and he groups me into this category alongside Hanania and Cofnas. In this call we discuss several points from this article, most notably Dave’s strategic reservations with my highly personal notion of politics and more oblique tactics.

We also discuss Dave’s recent Twitter brawl over gay surrogacy with

TracingWoodgrains

and myself, and debate the merits of my transactional approach to dealing with the gay issue vs. his own desire to draw a very firm line.

Topics include:

• Dave’s ideological history growing up in a highly progressive environment and eventually embracing traditional Catholicism and reactionary politics

• Dave’s pragmatism and focus on politically disempowering a decadent elite class who control education and create perverse incentive structures

• Most people unthinkingly embrace social values fed to them by authority figures

• Is Dave too blackpilled?

• Dave enjoys Walt’s Disney parodies from 2015, particularly The National Review

• Walt’s artistic approach to argumentation

• Dave’s preference for ideological consistency and rhetorical sincerity vs. Walt’s preference for Burkean personal politics and oblique rhetorical tactics

• Walt’s argument that a rigid ideology motivates people to filter off experiences that don’t conform to their worldview

• How Walt approaches homosexuality as an urban “barstool conservative”

• The mechanics of Walt’s coalitional and transactional approach to politics

• Is Walt’s transactional approach that of a cynical lobbyist? Is it scalable?

• What are the commonalities that Dave Greene sees in the “New Secular Right”

• Dave’s position that society needs a unifying ethos to replace wokeness

• The social acceptability of HBD goes up and down

• Walt’s proactive strategy for insulating himself against future cancellations

• How can one resist the temptation to break ranks and betray people to your right?

• How Walt is actually helping his old friends who think he betrayed them by platforming people with publicly edgier views, thereby making the Overton Window fully continuous

• The importance of directionality in assessing the friend enemy distinction

• Walt’s interest in “kicking down doors” in stultifying discourse spaces so more committed / specialized people can more effectively run with the issue

• Why Walt is comfortable holding contradictory views and going down weird rabbit holes

• All ideas naturally flow from high IQ people to low IQ people

• The need to maintain a public position and private position on some issues

• Walt’s desire to protect neurotic and promiscuous women

• OnlyFans converts to Trad Christianity are better marketing vehicles for traditionalism than dour modesty enjoyers

• Elite men have agency and can be exhorted to change their behavior in a way that women and lower status men generally can’t

• Can one maintain different public and private standards?

• Substack as an elite “private space”

• You can’t beat Andrew Tate by hectoring or wagging a finger at him—you need to proactively mentor Zoomers yourself and give them better strategies.

• Would Dave like Nick Fuentes if he got married?

• Walt’s plan for creating a flexible idea space vs. Dave’s desire to propagate “lindy” ideas that are more robustly scalable to lower IQ / agency people

• Diversity and multiculturalism are pro-white

• How Walt is still “pro-white” without being a white nationalist

• Walt’s Pro-White Case for Reparations and plan to move the capital

• Why Ron DeSantis failed in his presidential ambitions

• The need to cultivate an intermediary “officer class”

• How Dave conceives of himself as an educator

• Dave’s suspicion of transactional political horse trading because of past progressive betrayals

• Walt supports reparations because he wants to piss white people off and permanently destroy white guilt

• Hanania’s fervent Zionism and support for immigration buys him rhetorical space to support rolling back Civil Rights law

• How boring dry intellectuals are “funneled” into the popular consciousness by artists and mememakers

• Every discourse space requires both the hammer and the anvil

• Dave and John Arcto’s opposition to emotionally exploitative demands for tolerance "from gay friends

• How Buttigieg gays are a non-representative “foot in the door” for more dangerous social trends

• How to approach edge cases on issues like homosexuality

• Walt’s prediction that the trans movement will collapse like the pro-pedophilia movement from the 70s

• Liberals backtrack by pretending they never had the bad position to begin with

• Walt’s desire for a build a more intellectual vocabulary for “barstool conservatism”

• Dave and Walt debate the merits of pro-life maximalism

• Can tactical maneuvers work when executed publicly?

• Walt’s “intersectional identitarianism”

• How the right can make permanent inroads with single white women by adopting breach of promise laws whereby girls can sue ex-fiancés for wasting their time

• The Question of Consent and sexual agency—why Walt disagrees with

  Regan Arntz-Gray
  ’s exhortation for Zoomer women to be more agentic and thinks a harder material/legal incentive structure is required to improve female outcomes

• Zoomers have uniquely low agency

• Elites can’t be straightforwardly braggadocios about their sexual conquests

• Shaming men for promiscuity isn’t directionally appropriate for dealing with sexually unadventurous Zoomers

• Should the rules of the city differ from the rules of the countryside?

• Cities as “IQ Shredders”—Walt thinks they’re good

• Walt sees himself as “more Trad than Trads”

• Is our average IQ too high because of the Flynn Effect?