Saturday Bonus Podcast - ​The Rise Of The Counter-Elite

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Michael Berry Show. It's time now for another bonus podcast,
which means this segment did not air live on the show.
If you find this of use or you have suggestions
for other bonus podcasts, feel free to email me directly
through the website Michael Berryshow dot com Michael Berryshow dot com.
I do read those, I do forward those when we

(00:22):
have good ideas to Jim Mudd and we go out
and find things. And a number of our bonus podcasts
come from your great suggestions. Some of them make it
on the show during the week as well. Michael Schellenberger
is the founder of Public the CBR, Chair of Politics,
Censorship and Free Speech at the University of Austin. A

(00:43):
fine institution that has risen over the last few years.
Is not ut It's not the Longhorns. This is a
university of sort of classical studies and the best selling
author of San Francico, Why Progressives Ruined Cities an Apocalypse
Never while environmental alarmism hurts us all. He sat down

(01:06):
with Audrey Unverfirth of The Uncaptive Mind, and the two
discussed the rise of the counter elite in response to
the elite ruling class becoming more aligned with other elites
around the world than they are with their own countrymen.
That's called globalism. One example is the wef there are others.

(01:27):
It's this elitism that has led to open borders and
mass migration into Western society, which if it's not turned back,
will destroy us all. Hope you find this conversation enlightening.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
The society is disordered, the elites are disordered. You're getting
kind of boundary violations. Things are in the wrong place.
So you see a breakdown of the traditional offences as
Chesterton described it, that protects society. So, you know, on
the gender it allogy, you see the traditional protections for
children are undermined, and the idea of changing their bodies

(02:06):
to affirm really an imagined identity. We see the actual
borders between countries being eroded, you know. We see efforts
to basically not enforce laws, undermining you know, basic laws.
So you see all of these essential offenses, structures, foundations,
whatever else you're going to call them, of Western civilization

(02:26):
coming under attack by the elites, particularly by the left elites,
but really the whole elite class in general.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
Michael, what is the pathology of our elites?

Speaker 2 (02:37):
I think it's I think some context is important. So
you know, we're at the end of an important political
cycle that was not a four year cycle or even
a ten year cycle, early an eighty year cycle. We
came out of World War Two. The United States and
Europe had this open society vision that I think was
quite healthy. It was trying to push back against the
dysfunctional nationalism that had led to two world wars. But

(03:00):
you know, as time went on, it became just too extreme.
The open society dogma became this idea of kind of
homogenizing all cultures, exaggerated levels of integration. You can see
mass migration without real consideration of how to assimilate folks
or what the impact would be on other unskilled citizen labor.

(03:23):
So I would say the pathology of our elites had
to do with really the classic pathology of civilizations in decline,
I'm afraid, which is the elites start to identify with
elites in other countries more than with their own working class.
And also then the elites started to import other workers,

(03:43):
and they start to identify with other workers from other countries,
ostensibly in the name of empathy and compassion, but in
reality as a way to kind of keep the working
class down, to maintain status for themselves, for elites in
the society to essentially live, you know, like feudal nobility
with a whole servant class from around the world. So

(04:06):
I think that's at the heart of it, is just
a kind of decline of solidarity by elites with with
their fellow countrymen.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
And what are the consequences of that? What does it
mean to live in a nation where the elites feel
more allegiance to their elites across continents than to the
people living down the street from that.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, I mean it's it's it's really corrosive, you know.
So you see, I think we see it most dramatically
in the mass migration, which you know, we actually do
the best job in the United States of assimilation. I
think it's been much more difficult for Europe to do it,
both because of the kind of cultures that exist here.
Ours is heavily in immigrant culture already in Europe. They

(04:51):
have their own traditions. Plus I just think they're they're
bringing you know, it's a large Muslim population that's being
brought to the European Union. The United States has traditionally
been a Catholic Christian population with a different set of
values that are more i think aligned with Western civilization.
So mass migration has been a big part of it.

(05:11):
You know. I think we've seen the rise of this
digital censorship complex or you know, digital Services Act is
what it's called. That's really a digital censorship act, a
real intolerance of any different points of view, particularly nationalists
or populist views, in favor of really imposing the official
woke globalist dogma that I think we're all familiar with.

(05:33):
So it's really I think that the term for it
is sometimes given is an arco tyranny. That on the
one hand, it's you know, anarchic on the streets, there's
increasing lawlessness. There's the grooming gangs in Great Britain, which
is one of the most shocking, you know, sex abuse
scandals in recent history. And at the same time it's
tyrannical and you have small groups of experts operating out

(05:56):
of Brussels that think they should decide what the truth
is and decidable kind of information the masses are allowed
to be exposed to.

Speaker 3 (06:03):
Right, we have drugged up homeless fighting with machetes on
the streets of Austin Texas. Meanwhile, we have censors in
the EU telling us what we can and cannot say.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
Right in some sense, the like I think one of
the ways to think about it is the society that
the society is disordered, the elites are disordered. You're getting
kind of boundary violations. Things are in the wrong place.
So you see a breakdown of the traditional offences as
Chesterton described it, that protect society. So, you know, on

(06:37):
the gender ideology, you see the traditional protections for children
are undermined, and the idea of changing their bodies to
affirm really an imagined identity. We see the actual borders
between countries being eroded, you know, we see efforts to
basically not enforce laws, undermining you know, basic laws. So

(06:58):
you see all of these essential offens, structures, foundations, whatever
else you're going to call them, of Western civilization coming
under attack by the elites, particularly by the left elites,
but really the ho elite class in general.

Speaker 3 (07:12):
And so Nietzsche has this parable of the mad man,
which I love and I keep thinking of it as
I read your work lately, because when Nietzsche's madman lights
a lantern in the bright morning hours, he cries that
we've killed God where his murderers, all of us are
his murderers. But the mad man is mad. The morning

(07:34):
is bright, And I wonder sometimes if there are a
few brave voices like yours who have been calling our
attention to the rise of the total state for a
long time now, but there haven't been nearly enough voices
calling our attention to what's happening. And in America right now,

(07:54):
there's this sort of weariness tied with hope, if that
makes any sense, where we're so excited about the vibe
shift that I'm personally tired of the negative headlines. We
want something to be hopeful in, Yes, And so I wonder,
as someone who's been calling our attention to mass censorship

(08:15):
for so long, how hopeful should we be If you've
been giving us these warnings for a while now, and
they've perhaps fallen on too many deaf ears, can we
still be hopeful about what's next?

Speaker 2 (08:31):
I mean, I think it's important to remember that you know,
the future is still being created. It's being created by us.
So I think if you go into the future, if
you look forward with an overly pessimistic attitude, you're not
going to be able to you've already lost. Yeah, you've
already you've already given up, So you have to have
some positive vision. Look, I think, you know, we saw
a huge political revolution in the United States. I mean,
it was it's extraordinary what's happened. And I certainly have

(08:53):
my own problems with President Trump and my own criticisms,
but what he's done on certain issues has really been
quite transformative just in the last few days, and many
people know that. I've been very advocate, a big advocate
for free speech, not just in the United States but
around the world, here in Europe, but also in Brazil,
where I'm under criminal investigation for the Twitter files. Brazil.
When you know, pro democracy advocates, pro free speech advocates

(09:16):
went to President Trump and they said, we need to
put financial sanctions on this particular Supreme Court justice, who's
really one of the bad actors. Trump's response was, we'll
do fifty percent tariffs instead. He is more audacious than
the advocates in many of these spaces, and the result
of those tariffs, I think is that Brazil is going
to have to change its policies. In fact, we've already

(09:38):
seen the Supreme Court now is divided. Just this is
all happening in the last like forty eight hours. The
Supreme Court is starting to become divided. You see President
Lula is starting to soften his tone. Look, the United
States remains the global hedgemon, you know. I think, you know,
not just in the West, but globally. And so when
the United States says we're going to put fifty percent

(09:59):
tariffs on Brazil, well even accepting the orange juice and
airline business, which are these two big businesses, it's powerful.
And so that gives me a lot of hope. Similarly
with Europe, and we saw JD. Vance come to Munich,
I believe back in January give a great speech saying
the world threat to Europe is not from Russia or China,
it's from within. That's a militarism from within. So on

(10:22):
the one hand, you know, I think Nietzsche's is obviously
the person that did the most to draw attention to
the fact that the Enlightenment represented by the light in
that parable killed God in the sense that it really
undermined traditional Christian faith is what he was writing about.
But I think that Nietzsche also he was a huge
fan of Emerson. I just visited the Nietzsche House, I

(10:44):
didn't quite appreciate how much he appreciated Raffaldo Emerson. And
Emerson was an American and America is fundamentally different from
Europe in so many ways. It is a place that
nurtures constant creation and recreation. And so we've seen this,
you know, return of the strong gods in the form

(11:04):
of Donald Trump, but also in Elon Musk. You see
it in a you know, variety of contexts. I think
the United States coming back and saying no, you know,
the center of power is no longer in Europe and
it's in the United States, and we're going to start
demanding that the light of freedom, you know, shine once again.
And I think that is that is the thing I

(11:24):
have the most hope for, you know, Worts and all
with Trump, He's done certain things that I think express
a kind of audacity that only an American president could
pull off, right right.

Speaker 3 (11:36):
And and then I wonder for younger listeners who are
watching this and wondering what to do with their lives.
Perhaps they have hope and how things are changing, but
they don't want to lie. They recognize that most of
our institutions are decaying or they're already broken. They want

(11:57):
to build a new Yeah, what advice do you have
for them?

Speaker 2 (12:00):
I mean, at a practical level, you need to be
pursuing activities that AI is not going to be able
to replace. So the older entry level jobs that were
in many institutions of doing summaries of existing information that
AI is going to replace and do, and so it's
not enough. I think that it's the soft skills are

(12:20):
coming back. Persuasion, sales, investigations. You know, people exaggerate AI
and what it can do. I think it's important to
remember that it can't create new information. People might think
it is, but it's really just predicting what the next
you know, word or sentence or paragraph would be. So
learning how to do investigative work, learning how to be persuasive.

(12:42):
I think living in truth, as you said, I think
it's important to keep in mind that we have souls,
and I would say those atheists that are watching this,
I think they, even the atheists, would agree that we
have something like a soul or something transcendent about us
that makes us a distinctive being here on earth. And
as you said, keeping true, you know, keeping true to that,
keeping true to a north star, that for me, and

(13:05):
I think a lot of other people has always paid off.
And it's much simpler to it's much easier. You don't
have to you don't have to reinvent the wheel. I mean,
we have these classical virtues. Obviously they need to be
brought into your life, but learn the classical virtues. They
get passed down for thousands of years for good reasons,
because they are such a good guide for life. So

(13:26):
there's a lot of reasons for optimism right now as
well among young people, including on AI, including these transformations
of the world. Look, the last thirty years had a
lot of ugliness to them, and I think that the
next thirty years there's going to emerge a lot of
real bright spots and we should We have a lot
of reasons for hope.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
I hope. So, And how are you thinking of the
incentives of media right now? Sometimes I worry that the
incentives of new media are all wrong. On one hand,
it's amazing that some and can have an idea and
they can post it from their living room and it
can receive millions of views at the same time, Once

(14:08):
you have built an audience, to what degree are you
captive to that audience? And how are you thinking about
that as you're running public and sharing global news stories.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
It's a constant challenge. I mean, I'll be honest with you.
I mean, my pain subscribers who I love and I
have nothing negative to say about, but they really want
news about the United States. And you know, like I
did work, some of the most important work in my
life I did last year in Brazil, and it was
not something that my subscribers, you know, were really interested in.

(14:43):
So you have to make certain decisions, you know, you
have to balance these things out, is the best way
to say it. I mean, I love covering American politics too,
so it's not like I won't do that. But you know, look,
I think the society's very rich, and there's a lot
of institutions that have plenty of money. There's certainly plenty
of wealthy people that are willing to support you. I
think we are seeing more people willing to subscribe to

(15:06):
new media. I think this is the only time in
the history of humanity that an aspiring journalist can make
money directly from subscribers. I mean, it's incredible to think
that in the thousands of years of writing, mass production
is now in the is a possibility for everybody, and
so you know, really concentrate on doing new things. The

(15:30):
market right now in media is oversaturated with podcasters just
repeating what other people are already reporting out. So I
think there's a huge untapped market for investigations, investigative journalism.
We actually have a nonprofit that we work with alongside
public called Civilization Works. We've got a little fund of
money we fund investigative journalism through it. You know, so people,

(15:54):
you know, if you are looking to do something interesting,
get the idea first and then go figure out how
to find money. I think that's one of the most
important things, because I think there's plenty of people that
will support that kind of good work. And content remains king.
As we used to say, it's not about everybody has
access to a full blown media landscape, but original content

(16:15):
is still extremely valuable, and you can see it when
there's something interesting like just an ad for blue Jens
right now is just being talked about for much longer
than it probably should be, or an appearance by Kamala
Harris on a late night television show talked about more
than needs to be. So people are hungry for new content,
and so that means that really developing a practice to

(16:36):
be creative is essential and I think will be rewarded
in the market.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
Yeah, And on one hand, the average American has so
much power right now. And at the same time, we
were talking yesterday about how every society has an elite.
The communists might pretend otherwise, but you always have an elite.
And so what happens after our elite fail and how

(17:01):
shall we be thinking about cultivating a new elite or
a new natural aristocracy who actually deserve their position in society.

Speaker 2 (17:11):
Well that's I think that's one of the big events
over the last ten years is the creation of accounter elite,
which I think clearly now exists. I mean it took
a period of eight years. You know, Donald Trump was
the elite. I mean, he's a wealthy developer. He was
the first to kind of form a bond with working
class voters. I mean that's really the heart of the
MAGA movement. It really took him til twenty twenty four.

(17:32):
It took him getting shot in the head for the
Silicon Valley community to really come on board, to be
more comfortable with him. There was certainly some leaders like
David Sachs who had been a longtime Republican or Peter Teel.
But what you saw in twenty twenty four I think
was leaders in Silicon Valley, including Mark Zuckerberg, you know,
Jeff Bezos. I think they realized that they couldn't just

(17:54):
kind of keep going along with the woke mob, that
they really needed to take a stand against it. And
so we've seen this happen now. You know, Facebook has
fired and defunded many of its so called fact checkers,
it's censorship police. And we've now been seeing many people,
many journalists, many of the worst journalists at the Washington
Post leaving, you know, just taking their payoff packages and

(18:16):
going somewhere else. So I think we are still the
very beginning of seeing the counter elite start to take measures.
And look, it has much more legitimacy already than the established,
you know, left liberal elite that we've had since that's
really been in Paris since World War Two. So another
reason for optimism. I mean, all those people that left
the Washington Post are going to need to be replaced.

(18:37):
I mean, if you're a young journalist and you're twenty two,
twenty three, twenty four, you may have a great role
at the Wash at a new Bezos owned Washington Post.
You might have a new role at Meta, where Zuckerberg
seem you know, he's been doing a rebrand that appears
sort of coterminous with his midlife crisis. Could be very
positive in that sense. Elon Musk is still a very
live action figure when it comes to AI. So look,

(19:00):
I just think there's huge amounts of possibility. I always
say to young ambitious people, come to Austin, go to
San Francisco, go to New York. Those of the America
still has it, you know, the action. It's not going
to be in China, where if you're successful, they put
you in prison or they take your company. It's not
going to be in Europe where you are just stifled
by bureaucracy and censorship and over regulation. It's still happened

(19:22):
in the United States of America. And that is a hope,
not just for the United States, but I think for
the whole world.

Speaker 3 (19:28):
And in closing, you taught one of our most popular
courses at the University of Austin. You're teaching again this
coming school year. And so just to wrap things up,
give us a book recommendation or two, because this interview
was far too short. We're pressed for a time. I'm
so grateful to talk to you, but point us to

(19:51):
some books that our audience should search out.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
Sure. First of all, I love being at the University
of Austin. I've been so grateful there. I had such
an amazing experience with you when I gave that speech
in twenty twenty three. I think you did a terrific introduction.
I was so impressed by your poise and how articulate
you were. But I've just loved being there. We're building

(20:16):
a house in Austin at this very moment, and I
was going to teach a class on nietzsche Christianity. I
still would love to teach that class, but I was
so shaken up by the impact of AI and the
need to make sure that my students learn skills that
are not AI. I'm going to do a class on
investigative journalism, of which there's a great market for those
people that can learn that, and then a class on

(20:37):
the psychology of persuasion, which should teach skills, you know,
evidence based skills that can serve people in anything that
they do in life, including just being in normal human relations. Gosh,
you know, I loved the summer. I read The Master
and his Emissary by Ian Milgilchrist, which he's a neuropsychologist
or he is a neuroscientist and philosopher. It's a book

(20:59):
that brings together there are a lot of insights from
people like Nietzsche and Heidegger. It argues that our society
is overly left brain focused. It's too linear, it's too mechanistic,
and that we need to be more right brain. Think
of renaissance, think of context. So I loved that book
because I think it gave language and it's really just

(21:19):
a metaphor left brain right brain for a broader set
of things in society. So if I had to recommend
one book, I think that would be the one.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
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(21:47):
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(22:12):
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(22:35):
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(23:00):
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