WarRoom Battleground EP 841: Auron MacIntyre - Confronting the Total State

Summary

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Podcast Summary: War Room Battleground EP 841

Episode Title: Auron MacIntyre – Confronting the Total State
Date: September 2, 2025
Host: Joe Allen (Sitting in for Steve Bannon)
Guest: Auron MacIntyre, author of The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies

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Overview

This episode of War Room Battleground features a deep and wide-ranging conversation between guest host Joe Allen and writer/political thinker Auron MacIntyre. The focus is MacIntyre’s book, The Total State, and the concepts underlying America’s transformation from a constitutional republic to what he calls a “managerial” or “total” state. Throughout the discussion, MacIntyre draws on political theory—especially the works of James Burnham, Curtis Yarvin, and Alexander Dugin—to analyze contemporary issues facing American governance and culture, as well as the deeper spiritual and technological crises of our era.

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Main Discussion Points

1. The Managerial/Total State: Origins and Conceptual Framework

[02:30–06:34]

• MacIntyre’s Journey:
  • Began as a conventional conservative believing in civic structures and the Constitution’s protective power.
  • COVID-19 revealed to him a shocking lack of resistance against overreach across supposed firewalls (church closures, bureaucratic abuses, etc.).
  • Prompted a deep dive into political theory; concluded that American government now operates through an “entirely new political system”—the managerial state.
• The Managerial Revolution (Burnham):
  • 20th-century thinker James Burnham observed that across countries—democratic or otherwise—large bureaucracies became society’s true ruling class.
  • The focus shifted from citizen participation and virtue to the efficiency, scale, and technocratic management characteristic of “managers.”
  • Quote:

    “Because more and more of our society was scaling up, we were moving more and more of our investment in social structures into large bureaucratic Institutions. … The way that the managerial elite think … all carry over into our daily lives.” (Auron MacIntyre, 07:15)

2. Elites, Democracy, and Bureaucratic Technocracy

[09:23–14:59]

• Managerial vs. Republican Structures:

  • Republican government relies on decentralized virtue, individual agency, and local responsibility; managerial structures require conformity, standardization, and scale.
  • The transformation involves citizens acting as “cogs in the machine,” with diminished real agency.
  • The alternative to the managerial model is not another way of scaling, but abandoning excessive scale in favor of organic, local community.
  • Quote:

    “I don't think there is an effective way to organize at this level without dehumanizing ourselves, without giving in to the managerial impulse.” (Auron MacIntyre, 13:25)

• Pendulum of Civilization:

  • Drawing from Gaetano Mosca, MacIntyre notes that societies swing between bureaucratic centralization and decentralized, feudal structures—a never-ending pendulum.

3. Localism, Community, and the Pro-Human Stance

[14:34–16:08]

• Both Allen and MacIntyre emphasize “pro-human” politics, prioritizing local decision-making and organic communities.
• AI and automation are framed as the ultimate extension of managerial dehumanization.
• Quote:

  "AI is just the way the managers escape this problem. … It is the ultimate solution to the managerial problem of diminishing returns on complexity." (Auron MacIntyre, 15:21)

4. Interlocutors and Intellectual Influences

a. Curtis Yarvin and Monarchy

• Yarvin contributed significant systems analysis but is a materialist who downplays spiritual renewal.
• Supports the idea of a strong executive (“monarch”) to break bureaucratic paralysis—a pattern historically seen in sclerotic societies.
• MacIntyre is open to the necessity of elites but urges for “a better kind of elite.”
• Quote:

  "The organized minority will always lead the disorganized majority. … What we want is not the elimination of elites but a better kind of elite." (Auron MacIntyre, 18:32)

b. The American Future: Balkanization or Federal Renaissance?

• Post-COVID, regional self-selection and localism are accelerating, exemplified by political shifts in places like Florida.
• MacIntyre sees intentional, values-driven communities as essential to countering trends toward homogeneity and totalism.
• Quote:

  "This is really the lie that technology has told us—that we could just live wherever we wanted and it didn't matter who our neighbor was… But what we're doing is going back to a place where we live in real robust organic communities." (Auron MacIntyre, 22:45)

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Notable Quotes & Moments (With Timestamps)

• On the Constitution’s Failure:
  • “Why did the Constitution not stop what happened during COVID? Did we fail the Constitution or did it fail us?” (Auron MacIntyre, 03:54)
• On Virtue and Scale:
  • “You cannot cultivate virtue at scale.” (Auron MacIntyre, 10:59)
• On AI as Embodiment of Managerialism:
  • “AI is just the way the managers escape this problem … It is the ultimate solution to the managerial problem of diminishing returns on complexity.” (Auron MacIntyre, 15:21)
• On Elites:
  • “The organized minority will always lead the disorganized majority. … What we want is not the elimination of elites but a better kind of elite.” (Auron MacIntyre, 18:32)
• On “The Great Sort”:
  • "It went from being a purple state trending blue to becoming a deep red state. … People simply did not want to live with the woke madness, didn't want to live with the COVID madness." (Auron MacIntyre, 22:25)
• On Spiritual Resistance to the Total State:
  • “When we are living in accordance with God's purpose … we can feel that we're acting in a way that makes us more human, but also connects us to the divine.” (Auron MacIntyre, 32:54)
• On the Need for Localism and Robust Federalism:
  • “We could return to a system in which we trust our locality. … Not as some subsidiary of the central government, but as a real living community.” (Auron MacIntyre, 36:31)
• On Liberal Democracy Turning Tyrannical:
  • “If you make popular sovereignty … the justification for rulers’ power, they don't just turn over power to the people. ... They get really good at controlling popular sovereignty, manipulating public opinion.” (Auron MacIntyre, 39:45)

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Discussion of Key Thinkers

5. Critique of Liberal Democracy and the “Total State”

[38:35–44:18]

• MacIntyre argues that so-called “liberal democracy” enables manipulation via media, bureaucracy, and the managerial elite, devolving into a procedural tyranny.
• The expansion of the franchise and the manipulation of mass opinion make democracy susceptible to control by entrenched interests.

6. Spirituality, Tradition, and the Limits of Materialism

[31:47–37:59]

• Modern politics—left, right, and managerial—are predominantly materialist.
• MacIntyre maintains that spiritual values are essential for resisting dehumanization, and that American history’s regional and religious diversity offers a template for countering imposed homogeneity.
• Return to real federalism and localism is necessary to recover virtue and social meaning.

7. Alexander Dugin and the “Fourth Political Theory”

[44:18–47:18]

• Dugin’s philosophy, while controversial, suggests a post-liberal, post-fascist, post-communist era.
• MacIntyre is clear that he doesn’t share Dugin’s Russian imperialist agenda but agrees on the need to recover valuable pre-modern traditions and adapt them for present conditions.

8. Technology, AI, and Post-Human Politics

[47:18–50:50]

• Political manipulation increasingly carried out by algorithms and AI—heralding “post-human politics.”
• The danger is not only from overtly inhuman mechanisms, but the removal of human feedback and agency from all meaningful decision-making.
• Both technological and spiritual “non-human forces are on the move.”
• Quote:

  "The AI feeds you your ideology, it perfects the ideology … There's very little interaction you're having with the machine at this point." (Auron MacIntyre, 49:33)

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Memorable Moments

• AI’s Political Agency:
  • The metaphor from Dugin: “A man used to send a text message; now the text message will send the man.” (Auron MacIntyre quoting Dugin, 48:26)
• Concluding Vision:
  • MacIntyre urges for a society oriented around virtue, spiritual meaning, local autonomy, and resilience in the face of techno-managerial challenges.

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Closing

[51:01–51:24]

• MacIntyre points listeners to his book (The Total State) and his show (The Auron MacIntyre Show on Blaze TV, YouTube, etc.).
• “What we’re trying to do is carry traditions that were lost … intentionally [by] globalist liberalism … and marry it with where we are so [they] can move forward into something that can hopefully overcome our technological problems.”

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Takeaways for Listeners

• The “total state” is not just a deep state or bureaucracy, but a pervasive system that replaces virtue with technocratic process and erodes local agency and spiritual meaning.
• Overcoming the managerial state is not simply political—it requires rebuilding organic communities, cultivating virtue, and reviving spiritual traditions.
• Technology (especially AI) is both a tool and a threat, amplifying the reach and power of managerial elites unless consciously resisted.
• The future will be determined by whether Americans choose human-scale, virtue-oriented communities, or continue to submit to impersonal, algorithmic control.
• The episode closes with a plea for engaged, spiritually rooted, and locally invested citizens—“pro-human” in the fullest sense.

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Transcript

[Steve Bannon]

This is the primal scream of a dying regime. Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people. You're just not going to free shot all these networks lying about the people. The people have had a belly full of it. I know you don't like hearing that. I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. It's going to happen.

[Aaron McIntyre]

And where do people like that go to share the big lie? MAGA MEDIA I wish in my soul.

[Steve Bannon]

I wish that any of these people had a conscience. Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.

[Joe Allen]

WAR ROOM here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. Good evening, I'm Joe Allen, sitting in for Stephen K. Bannon. Here at the War Room, we discuss politics a lot. You won't hear me weighing in very often, but this is a political show. One of the things that sets the War Room apart for many of our colleagues in the media is a very heterodox approach to politics. So you won't hear a whole lot of normie con rah rah rah cheering for kids capitalism, at least not in its rawest form. Nor will you hear anyone besmirching the working class as being impediments to the accumulation of capital. I think that that heterodox approach, the ability to hold multiple and sometimes contradictory ideas in tension and try to arrive at truth by way of that process is essential for anything like a valid political movement in the 21st century. Here to talk to me about politics from a very learned and heterodox position is Aaron McIntyre. Many of you are already familiar with him. He's the author of the Total How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies. He's the host of the Arran McIntyre Show, a frequent contributor at the Blaze, fantastic writer, amazing thinker and a pretty good guy. Arin, welcome. Thank you very much for being here.

[Aaron McIntyre]

Thanks for having me on.

[Joe Allen]

So I would like to begin by talking about the Total State. Fantastic book. A lot of different ideas and different thinkers woven into a single piece to charge into the problems we have now in the 21st century with the managerial state and various other sorts of impediments to freedom. Can you tell the audience a bit about the thesis of the Total State and how you arrived at it?

[Aaron McIntyre]

Sure. I think like a lot of people, I was just a very normal conservative listening to guys like Dennis Prager or Sean Hannity or these kind of guys on the radio, I knew that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were going to keep the government in check. We had the branches of government, all the things that we expect to hear from your average civics lesson. And then Covid hit and everything went insane. You know, the. The churches were closed, strip clubs were open. You couldn't go see a family member, you know, go to their funeral or see them in the hospital, but you could go riot in the streets if you were a Democrat. And it just became very clear as I looked around at all these conservatives who had told me my whole life, well, this is what the second amendment's for, and this is how we're gonna protect our rights. And of course, the government will never overreach this stuff. And. And just nobody was doing anything. And that just sent me down this rabbit hole because I had to understand what was going on. I had gone to school for politics. I always been interested in political theory. I'd even taught high school history and civics and these kind of things. I had reported on politics as a local reporter. I thought I understood this, I understood how this worked. And I actually turns out I didn't understand anything about it. And so that's really what the book is. It's my journey to kind of understand why the Constitution didn't stop. What happened during COVID Did we fail the Constitution? Did it fail us? Is there another explanation? And as I went down this road, reading a lot of thinkers that I had never heard of, when I was studying political theory in college, I started to discover there is actually a very robust right wing understanding of political theory that explained a managerial revolution that had taken over our politics, that had taken away the type of democratic republic that we thought we operated under, and had created an entirely new political political system that was operating right under the surface of what we were supposed to be doing. And so my hope is that ultimately the book helped people understand why that happened and how ultimately we could fix it.

[Joe Allen]

I'd like to get into the philosophy and writings of James Burnham first and then move on, maybe to Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land. But before we do that, your time as a teacher, how did that inform what you're doing now? Because I think your style on your show and your presentation in writing is both very complicated, but also very accessible. You're a very good teacher. And I'm just curious, do you see what you're doing now as a continuation of that process?

[Aaron McIntyre]

Yeah, in a lot of ways, it's kind of getting to teach the classes. I always wanted to and talk about the things I always wanted to. But that is, you're right, that's the through line. Whether I was writing as a. As a local journalist, whether I was a teacher or what I'm doing now, it's always been about kind of trying to understand something more complex and explain in a way that people can ultimately understand. And so I hope that's what comes through when I'm doing it in the show. Because, yeah, I am still using many of the methods that I would have used to try to pull in all of this information, condense it down into something that is usable, and then give practical examples that people can kind of take into their lives, hopefully.

[Joe Allen]

James Burnham, the Managerial Revolution. There's probably a number of people in the audience who aren't familiar with that work. Probably a lot who are. My first introduction was through the late Christopher Zeman, the Z Man, God rest his soul. And your work has fleshed that out a lot. Can you explain to the posse what James Burnham's central thesis was in the Managerial Revolution and how that informed your way of thinking about politics in America?

[Aaron McIntyre]

So James Burnham is a really interesting figure because he's a former Trotskyite. He's a passionate communist. He's trying to understand the different ins and outs of politics and how they work. He falls out of love with communism and famously becomes a very arch conservative. He joins guys like William F. Buckley in starting the National Review. Somehow his work has fallen out of favor with much of the conservative movement, even though he was really there in the founding of the new generation. But in his transition between his prior communist leanings and his conservative politics, one thing he kept in an eye on was the way power worked. Specifically, he drew on a set of political theorists known as the Italian elite theorists. And really what he focused on was the interest, the separation of interest between the managerial elite and politics as we understand it. He recognized that whether it was under fascism or communism or liberal democracy, all major countries had to post industrial revolution, centralize control of power. FDR is doing in some ways the same thing as Stalin is doing. In fact, in sometimes they actually admire each other in the way that they're doing it. And so the American way, I think, is ultimately better. I'd certainly rather live under it. But he recognized that they were creating an entire class of people who had a new skill set which was operating these large bureaucratic institutions. And because more and more of our society was scaling up, we were moving more and more of our investment in social structures into large bureaucratic Institutions. And today we can't really think of much that isn't run by large bureaucratic institutions, of course, government and business. But we can think of things like churches that traditionally would have nothing to do with this structure. Now we hear, oh well, we want to run this more like a business. Our pastors sound more like Ted Talk CEOs than they do people preaching God's word. And we just see this across every domain of society. And so because this has become our major organizing principle, the way that the managerial elite think, the way that they organize our society, the beliefs that they have about humanity, their anthropology, they all carry over into our daily lives. And the way that we do things, they also handle the way that we, you know, they manage the way that we understand our government and the way that it operates. And so by better understanding what the managers are and what their incentives are and how they work through these bureaucratic institutions, it helps us to understand what has happened to our politics. Because republican democracy cannot work in the same way that large bureaucratic institutions have to operate. These are two systems that are completely incompatible with each other. And so as long as we're ordering our society along this managerial axis, there's no way that we can follow the Constitution. So what we've done is create an entirely alternative way to operate our government while still pretending that we're operating under the auspices of the original United States Constitution.

[Joe Allen]

When you say that they're incompatible democracy or constitutional republic perhaps? Republican democracy and the managerial organization of society, do you mean then that the managerial organization is always going to be top down, kind of technocratic experts at the top dictating and not responsive to the grassroots, or do you mean something else? That's what I take from it, but yeah.

[Aaron McIntyre]

So the key with the managers is they need everything to basically fit into place. Right? The, the efficiency. Think of something like an assembly line. Right? The efficiency you generate off the assembly line comes from the fact that people aren't making decisions that they don't have agency. The efficiency of the assembly line is that you turn the humans into machines. They each perform a very specific task the right way every time. There's no outlier they don't get to make, you know, they don't have any agency on that. It's all about following managerial procedures. That's a very mechanical way to think about human organization. And what they did is they took that assembly line understanding and they applied it to everything. This is why when you call into a service center, you get a bunch of people who are technically humans. But they're all reading off scripts, they're all running down specific answers. You can't get anyone who can actually go and fix a particular problem because nobody has authority. They're all relying on this managerial apparatus because that's what you have to do to scale up the operation. If you're just answering 10 questions, you could get really good questions answered. But when you have to answer thousands and millions of calls, well, actually it turns out you can't. And you have to standardize these things. Our Republican government system was built on the idea that every citizen would have their own virtuous input into the system. They all had their own responsibilities. They had to prove themselves of a certain level of virtue, practicing in a particular way in order to participate. But you cannot cultivate virtue at scale. You can't do that when you need massive organizations to operate. And so what our elites have done is trained people to think more like machines, to operate more in the way that they would if they were sitting on an assembly line. To now the point where people don't actually make decisions on who they're voting for, how the system will change, they simply participate in a process that kind of gives legitimacy to the change the managers have already decided on. Many people call this the deep state. And I think that's a good understanding of some of it. That explains the permanent bureaucracy that we've seen that Donald Trump and others are trying to dig out of the system right now. JD Vance will go on, Vivek Raswamy will talk about the need to dismantle these systems. But of course it reaches well beyond the bureaucracies. It also goes into our media, into our education system, our universities, our banks, everything is run in this way. And so that's why I think the total state is more helpful, because it's what begins in the deep state, but spreads through our entire society.

[Joe Allen]

Without lingering too long on the managerial approach to governance scaling, it seems that it's maybe not a necessary way to organize a society that has scaled up to the degree that our now modern society has. But I'm curious then. It's obviously a useful way to organize very large scale institutions, nations, empires. What are some alternatives that you see to the managerial approach to scaling? Is it another alternative approach to scaling, or is it an abandonment of scale entirely?

[Aaron McIntyre]

I think it actually has to be an abandonment of scale. So to be clear, Berne was not decrying the managerial revolution. He saw this ultimately as the technocratic solution that was necessary to move things forward. Other thinkers like Sam Francis may have lamented what the managerial revolution had done to Americans. But once that had been done, he said, basically, this is now the only way we can organize at the this point. We. What the, the very difficult decision. This is why this is the hardest thing right now. And this is what most people miss about this. We have to make a real decision about whether we want to operate as a republic, as an organic political entity, or if we think the scale is worth dehumanizing ourselves. And it has to be one or the other. I don't think there is an effective way to organize at this level without dehumanizing ourselves, without giving in to the managerial impulse. And this is far from the only. You know, I'm far from the only person to assert this. Even some of the elite theorists like Gaetano Mosca talked about how civilization is always moving between the bureaucratic and the feudal, and there's always, you're always somewhere on this continuum. Continuum. We're never staying in one state or the other. And so we're always moving towards one of these poles and then moving back. So there's a very natural give and take as we kind of decide as humans. Oh, well, we want to centralize things, we want to build things up. We, we want to scale, we want to gain the efficiency out of them. Then we recognize, oh, these systems are breaking down, they're not working anymore, they're dehumanizing, they're making people miserable. And they either come apart on their own or we make a choice to scale them back down. But either way, we can't keep existing in that state. But then once we head back towards the decentralized, we tend to naturally pull back in. So it is this pendulum swing back and forth constantly that we can't necessarily avoid.

[Joe Allen]

So you're not an extremist, really. You're just pushing the dial towards independent communities, perhaps churches, schools, local governments as sources of meaning and order. Or would you like to see a radical deconstruction of the entire machine, which, you know, at least on my most fantastical days, I would actually like to see that.

[Aaron McIntyre]

Well, I think one thing we can share in common is that we're both pro human. What we're looking for is the human wins over the system. We're, we don't want to be run by algorithms. We don't want to. And recognize AI is just the way the managers escape this problem.

[Joe Allen]

Right?

[Aaron McIntyre]

It's there. They don't want the Tower of Babel to b to fall.

[Joe Allen]

You might, you might say that AI is an embodiment or a kind of distillation of the managerial state.

[Aaron McIntyre]

Exactly. It is the ultimate solution to the managerial problem of diminishing returns on complexity. And so that that's kind of what they're hoping is that this saves them. But I think both of us recognize that there lies all kinds of demons. And so ultimately I'm pro human now. Do. Do we need to Ted Kaczynski this situation? No, I don't think so. But I do think we should be, like you said, making very real and deliberate movements towards the human to making those choices that are local, that put the hand. The choices in the hands of real people in organic communities. That's not going to be easy and there will be some sacrifices. But I think the people who do that are going to be much better off in the long run. The people that completely embrace this system and become dehumanized by it.

[Joe Allen]

You have written and talked quite a bit about Curtis Yarvin's ideas. You've never been a Yarvin acolyte. As far as I can tell, you've always weighed his ideas against others and have been actually quite critical of his ideas at times. But in your book, you do weave his work into the ideas behind the total state. Can you tell me a little bit about his influence on your thinking, what you've drawn, what value you've drawn from his work?

[Aaron McIntyre]

Yeah, the real value of Curtis is he was really the only guy in the modern day who was working and in dialogue with this tradition, this James Burnham, Sam Francis, and more importantly than the Italian elite theorists that they were building on, he was one of the few people who was really looking into that. And so I don't agree with every assumption he draws from them, but the fact simply that he was analyzing power in this way, understanding the mechanisms that were underlying our system, throwing away the kind of, you know, hopeful assumptions we had about holding on to exactly the same government we had back in the 1790s. He was very good at opening these things up. And so I think he's very valuable because he's ultimately a systems analyst. And that means that he's very good at tracing the contours of power and laying them out. Now, his prescriptions often, I think, leave something to be desired because he's ultimately a materialist. And so his solutions often don't factor in the human soul and the spirituality that I think, has to be part of these solutions. But when it comes to really diagnosing the problem, he's very, very good at that. And he's so widely read and brings in so many thinkers that have been largely excluded from the right, even though they should have been predominantly in our mind when we're thinking through this problem. I don't see how you can exclude his work. You don't have to agree with everything someone says to recognize that the way that they're ordering the thought and the way that they're allowing you to explore other thinkers is very valuable.

[Joe Allen]

What do you make of his ideas on monarchy? And clearly he doesn't necessarily mean a king with all of the royal decoration and ornamentation, although that's what it brings to my mind whenever he talks about the monarch. But he seems to mean more an abstract concept of an executive, a strong executive who cuts through the bureaucracy, who cuts through the, you know, complaints of the masses, will say, what do you make of that idea? Is it elitist? Is it useful?

[Aaron McIntyre]

Well, it's all elitist. But to be clear, I'm fine with elitism in the sense that elites will always exist. I am. I am a populist in the sense that I would like to do what is best for the people, ultimately. But we have to recognize that the people will, for better or worse, always be led by a minority of the actual country. The organized minority will always lead the disorganized majority. And so that means what we want is not the elimination of elites, but a better kind of elite. And Curtis's idea is basically that this, what we have is a systems problem. And if we can just kind of organize everything under a single monarch, we'll have a much more effective way at operating the system. Now, there's a lot of arguments that are, you know, the compelling around this, right? The fact that, as you say, it can cut through all the bureaucracy, it can cut through all the red tape, it can cut through the Gordian knot. That seems to be our immovable system at the moment. Very appealing for a lot of people. And there's a reason that at the end of these kind of complex, sclerotic oligarchies, we tend to get a strong man. You know, Oswald Spangler called this Caesarism, where you would have a Caesar figure that would arise when the money, power, the oligarchy had kind of tied up the entire society and made it impossible for it to move. You would have this decisive figure who came in and cut through that. And so just historically, Curtis is probably right that something like that could be down the line. Whether we like it or not, whether we think that's great or not, this is the solution that people tend to fall back on when they end up in this scenario. Now, ultimately, is that the way that we want to order our society? Is that what really fits in the American tradition? Well, you know, a constitutional monarchy is what we had in England before we came over. And that's certainly a very different monarchy than, say, a God emperor. A lot of people think of the king having all kinds of power, but of course, in England, that wasn't the case. The king was actually rather constricted compared to other monarchs in the way that he could wield power. So would that in some ways be in line with our tradition? A little bit. But of course, America is also defined by throwing off that king, and so perhaps returning to a republic scaled down to the level where it can actually operate again, or could be an option. But the reason Curtis doesn't like that option is it requires virtue. It requires us not to look at the mechanics of the system, but also look at the spiritual health of the people. And he just doesn't think that we're in a place where we can rehabilitate the spiritual health of the people. I think that that unfortunately might be true, but I'm hoping it's not. And I'm not giving up on the human. I'm not giving up on that possibility. And so I respect his arguments. I think they're strong. I think that there is a possibility we might end up in that scenario. But we also could be in a scenario where these bureaucracies break apart. We have more of a Not so much a Balkanization, but simply perhaps, a return to a far more robust federalism that exists in the United States, in which we could create communities that no longer require these massive scales and therefore allow us to cultivate the virtue that is required for republican government. But either way, drastic change on the level of what would seem like a revolution would basically be necessary. At this point.

[Joe Allen]

We only have a few moments left before we go to break. But in the time we do have, just to drill down on that idea, your experience of America and perhaps abroad, do you see that diversification, that some deride it as Balkanization, but a kind of individuation collectively on the part of different areas of the country? It's always been kind of the case, but it seems like the great sort of has really brought it into focus. So that Florida, your current abode, is quite different from California culturally. Do you see that happening right now, and do you see that as a good thing, both politically and culturally?

[Aaron McIntyre]

Yeah, I think it's a really important thing, as you said the great sword is happening no matter what. That's already occurred, especially post Covid as we saw in Florida. It went from being a purple straight state trending blue to becoming a deep red state. And a lot of that was due to the fact that people simply did not want to live with the Woke madness, didn't want to live with the COVID madness. They knew that Florida was different and they knew by physically relocating themselves into a geographic area next to people who shared their values, they could live the kind of lives they want to live. And this is really the lie that technology has told us that we could just live wherever we wanted and it didn't matter who our neighbor was and we didn't have to share anything because kind of this over identity of America would just solve those problems. But what we're doing is going back to a place where we live in real robust organic communities. It's still far off, but I see people building religious communities. I still see people building intentional communities with people who share their values. And I think that's ultimately the future of the United States.

[Joe Allen]

Yeah, that tension between nationalism, which is very, very important, and localism, regionalism. It's going to be a very difficult problem that we will have the rest of our lives. But I really appreciate your approach to this as far as putting turning that dial back to the local as opposed to the kind of blah, blah, homogenous one state. We'll be back after the break to talk more with Arin McIntyre. We will return with some more esoteric topics. Perhaps Alexander Dugan, Nick Land and even a bit of transhumanism, post humanism and post human politics. But before we go, you should go to birchgold.com bannon that's birchgold.com/bannon. Is the continued divide between Trump and the Federal Reserve putting us behind the curve again? Can the Fed take the right action at this time or are we going to be looking at a potential economic slowdown? And what does this mean for your savings? Consider diversifying with gold through Birch Gold Group. For decades gold has been viewed as a safe haven in times of economic stagnation, global uncertainty and high inflation. And Birch Gold makes it incredibly easy for you to diversify some of your savings into gold. If you have an IRA or an old 401k, you can can convert that into a tax sheltered IRA in physical gold or just buy some gold to keep it in your safe. First, get educated. Birch Gold will send you a free info kit on gold. Just text Bannon to the number 989898 again, text Bannon to 989898. Consider diversifying a portion of your savings into gold. That way, if the Fed can't stay ahead of the curve for the country, at least you can stay ahead for yourself. Also, go to Tax Network USA's website@tn USA.com Bannon maybe you missed the last IRS deadline where you haven't filed taxes in a while. Let me be clear. The IRS is cracking down harder than ever and this won't go away on its own. That's why you need Tax Network usa. They don't know the they don't just know the irs. They have a preferred direct line to the irs. They know which agents to deal with and which to avoid. Their expert negotiators have one goal. Settle your tax problems quickly and in your favor. Their team has helped clear over 1 billion in tax debt. Whether you owe 10,000 or $10 million, even if your books are a mess or you haven't filed in years, Tax Network USA can help. But don't wait. This won't fix itself. Call Tax Network USA right now. It's free. Talk to a strategist and finally, put this behind you. Call 1-800-958-1000, that is 1-800-958/1000 or visit tnusa.com/bannon that is TN USA.com/bannon all right posse. We will be back with Aaron McIntyre on the other side of the break. Stay tuned.

[Steve Bannon]

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[Aaron McIntyre]

Kill America's voice. Family.

[Steve Bannon]

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[Aaron McIntyre]

No. What are you waiting for? It's free, it's uncensored, and it's where all the biggest voices in conservative media are speaking out.

[Steve Bannon]

Download the Getter app right now. It's totally free. It's where I put up exclusively all of my content 24 hours a day. Want to know what Steve Bannon's thinking? Go to Getter.

[Aaron McIntyre]

That's right. You can follow all of your favorites.

[Steve Bannon]

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[Aaron McIntyre]

Download the Getter app now.

[Steve Bannon]

Sign up for free and be part of the new thing.

[Joe Allen]

Welcome back, War Room Posse. I am here with Oren McIntyre, author of the Total State. How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies. A fantastic book. I recommend picking it up anywhere books are sold, signed copies available.

[Aaron McIntyre]

No, only if you meet up with me.

[Joe Allen]

Okay. Yeah, you'll have to track him down. He is right now at the National Conservatism Convention, natcon. Maybe you can find him there if you have your ticket. Okay. Arin, I would like to return to an idea that we left off on Curtis Yarvin. And I would say the majority of people in politics, whether they be philosophers or politicians or lobbyists, hold to a materialist conception of the world. Maybe not always philosophically, but in practice. Their behavior in the world is based on material conditions, material analysis and material responses. Now, you have argued quite often and quite strenuously that the spiritual supersedes the material. The spiritual is more important. How do you see the spiritual, the human soul and its relationship to God, as a point of resistance in a way to understand, really, the total state?

[Aaron McIntyre]

Well, when we are living in accordance with God's purpose, when we're following our telos, we can feel it. We can feel that we're acting in a way that makes us more human, but also connects us to the divine. We know that there's a transcendent property to what we're doing and an ultimate value that gives us true worth. When we're in a materialistic frame, we're just going through the motions. We're just looking to reach particular goals that have been laid out for us but are ultimately arbitrary. Oftentimes, it feels like we're not even in control of the process as we turn over our desires to mechanisms that otherwise are simply preying on them in order to derive what a direct material benefit that we gain and so when our politics are oriented about, around what is good for people in their real lived lives as opposed to what is good for spreadsheets and maximalization of economic units, we can feel a real difference. Thomas Carlyle used to call this the condition of England question. We can go around and gather data, we can become statisticians and look at different polls and different ways to, you know, measure whether people are doing well. But that doesn't actually tell us how people's lives are being improved or being destroyed. To do that, we actually have to understand people's way of life. We have to see what they value and see what their interactions between spouses and children and families and business owners and communities are. And that's really what helps us to gauge whether or not we are successful as a society. So I think we reintroducing the spiritual is critical because if we don't do that, we just live in this spreadsheet materialistic world that turns us all into interchangeable widgets and that doesn't make anyone happy.

[Joe Allen]

I couldn't agree more on both points. The points about the dehumanization process of becoming a cog or a data point, and also the transcendent spirit, the true value that lies within ourselves and the true value that lies beyond material phenomena. We see God, but we run into a real problem in America and really across the modern world. Perhaps this is a perennial problem that goes back to the caves. But there are a lot of different systems of value. Some of them are radically different. We've just highlighted two, right? The spiritual perspective versus the material. And in the spiritual perspective, you get a wide range of viewpoints and value systems. And in the material perspective, the same. How do we approach American society in a way that can uphold those transcendent spiritual values without trampling on or over saturating homogenizing the rest of the culture? Or is it possible? Is it desirable?

[Aaron McIntyre]

So if you look back, if anybody has ever had the opportunity to read Albion Seed, it's a David Hackett Fisher book about the founding folkways of the United States. And he identifies that there are four main groups that are initially settling the United States. And each one of them is. While we think of them as uniquely American and we can identify a lot of the traits of the Quakers or, you know, the Hill folk, or, you know, the, the, the Puritans, we could. We can see their legacy in the United States. Each of them were very distinct and they were radically different from each other. Often they had difficulty interacting with each other's way of life. And we recognize that throughout American history, the kind of just vast country of the United States and its federalization has allowed for us to kind of have this different regional texture to our communities that was still American, but had its own distinct flavor. Now, after World War II, especially when we had mass communication, we have the train, we have the automobile, we have the airplane, all of a sudden our world got much smaller. And all of a sudden the desire to impose a homogenous culture came across America again. Not that Americans didn't have many similarities, but now it became essential to crush out those regional differences to the point where we started sending the 82nd Airborne, you know, down to the south to make sure that they behave the same way the north did. Now, a lot of people may say, well, that was worth it at the time. But recognize that ultimately this was a forced way to make people interact how you would like them to, not the way their community had done previously. And so that's ultimately, I think the answer is we could return to a system in which we trust our locality. We actually pretend like the 10th amendment is in the Constitution, and we allow states to operate the way they were originally supposed to, not as some subsidiary of the central government, but as a real living community, making decisions based on the ways that the people there operate. That way, you're responding to the communities that are much smaller than this 50 state conglomeration we currently have.

[Joe Allen]

Before we go into the more esoteric, just a quick note on that. Do you think that, for instance, striking down Roe v. Wade and allowing states to decide their own policies on reproduction, the current rise of localized and state level AI politics and even drug laws, do you think that this is an expression at the political level of that diversification and maybe even a way to amplify it?

[Aaron McIntyre]

It's certainly a beginning, but of course there's a lot, lot, lot more to do. We don't recognize, unless you've really been in the nitty gritty of a lot of local and state politics, how deeply dependent these different municipalities and states are on federal funding and how much that determines all of their.

[Joe Allen]

This audience definitely is. This audience knows more about local politics. They've forgotten more than I've ever known.

[Aaron McIntyre]

Yeah, but so, so, so it's definitely a scenario where those are kind of the very beginnings of taking some of those chains off the states and the localities and allowing to make those decisions. But it's barely even a, you know, a toe into the water of where we need to be.

[Joe Allen]

All right, so liberal democracy is right there in the subtitle of your book. And there's a subtle threat that liberal democracy leans towards tyranny. Perhaps not always, but you've written and spoken a lot about Alexander Dugan and Curtis Yarvin, both critics of liberal democracy as being the end all, be all of human social development. Talk a little bit about that. How did you arrive at your critique of liberal democracy? And how do these thinkers really flesh out your response to the problems of liberal democracy?

[Aaron McIntyre]

Well, a lot of people, you know, we're taught that democracy just means freedom. They're the same thing, right? It's just a synonym for each other because democracy protects the people, the will of the people from the tyrant. But if you look back, obviously, or actually if you just look at where we are right now, it's very clear that, well, democracy didn't stop the COVID lockdowns, it didn't stop stolen elections, it didn't stop many of these things. And so perhaps the mechanism could have some restrictive effect on government, but it clearly is not some kind of universal answer. It can obviously fail. And we want to ask, well, why is it failing? Why is this mechanism that was set up to, you know, prevent this, why is it failing? And what you recognize is that if you make popular sovereignty, if you make the will of the people the justification for rulers power, they don't just turn over power to the people. That's not actually how it works. They want to retain power like any elite does. So what do they do? They get really good at controlling popular sovereignty, manipulating public opinion. And one of the reasons that they lean on mass liberal democracy as opposed to very small scale republican democracy, is that republican democracy was based on the idea that virtuous people who are very active in the community, who have already proven themselves to be the head of households, capable of operating their own property and caring for families, and these kind of things were willing to act in defense of the state. These were the only people who got to make decisions because they were very much bought in. They had to pay the cost for making the country run. But when you spread the franchise out to any and everyone, I mean, to the point where now Gavin Newsom's complaining that we're gonna be checking for citizenship because, well, we gotta get those illegals in there and make sure that they vote right, yeah, that's where we're at. And when you have that scale of democracy, what happens is it becomes very easy to manipulate the average voter because while it's not a group of people who are dedicated to defending the country, and you know, proving their virtue. It's just anybody, anybody with a phone or a television can suddenly become a voter. And they get all of their news and information through the media, through education, through entertainment, the very forces that the managerial elite control. And so suddenly, they control the liberal democracy, and they are able to manipulate it however they choose. But it's even more powerful than that because now they're speaking with the voice of the people. A king was always strong, right? Don't get me wrong. Kings had power, but they were still only one man. They still had to get the barons, they had to get the lords, they had to get the other factions of society, the Church, on their side. I mean, literally, a large amount of Western history is just kings trying to figure out how they could possibly defy the Pope, right? That's where so much of our history comes from. But when you're a person, when you're a organization ruling in the name of the people, well, all of a sudden, who can deny the whole people? Who are you, one man to deny the entire collective will of society? And we see actually that the rise of liberal democracies coincide with expansions of government. Actually, the more liberal democracy we've had, the bigger and more powerful governments have become. So very paradoxically, from what we've been taught, democracy seems to actually grow and justify large government, total states, rather than impede them in any way. And when you recognize this feature of democracy, this completely flips your understanding of why and how we should operate as a society.

[Joe Allen]

And when you say democracy, liberal democracy, I think it's important to make the distinction between that and the constitutional republic. That was the American ideal in the beginning, as you say, something that was based on more local value systems, more on virtue, than just mass appeal.

[Aaron McIntyre]

And this is something, again, that all. Even the ancient philosophers, you don't need to read these new edgy philosophers, Curtis, Yarvin or Dugin, to figure this out. We know that Aristotle told us that ultimately the democracy could become the most tyrannical of all governments. This was recognized. And the solution for him was a mixed government, a government much like our own that tried to bring in a little bit of monarchy with the executive, a little bit of the will of the people, ultimately with the congress, and then something like the judiciary, to mediate between the idea that we would have these different classes in society and they would be represented in different forms of government, mixing that constitution together. This is what was actually supposed to restrict our government. But the problem is that because in America, we don't really have these defined classes that existed in the old world. We kind of leveled all of these different branches of government that were supposed to push against each other and represent real interests and spheres in society. We kind of melted them all down into one popular sovereignty force. And so now popular sovereignty runs basically all of our branches of government. There's nothing differentiating against them. And so this mass democracy has no real checks and balances in the way that our founders intended, because we've melted down the distinctions in our society that are supposed to fuel those branches, their checks and balances in the first place.

[Joe Allen]

You know, Alexander Dugin, the Russian philosopher and perhaps chaos magician, he argues that we're beyond liberal democracy, just as we've been beyond fascism and ultimately are beyond communism, even if you do have states such as China or Venezuela that are, you know, ostensibly Marxist or communist, but really not really. They're just state capitalism or however you want to describe it. But his argument in the fourth political theory is that you can in fact, retrieve something of value, perhaps from all of these systems and the traditional religious systems in order to combat what he sees as a globalist, transhumanist sort of future in which human beings are completely stripped of everything we knew to be soulful or even human. Are you working on your fourth political theory? Because he made it quite clear it's open. There is no distinct theory. Do you see yourself as in line with that kind of project?

[Aaron McIntyre]

You know, it's difficult because obviously Dugin is rightly a controversial figure. You know, he's very much tied to Putin and, you know, is in many ways providing the philosophical backing for many of the actions he's taking. And in that way, you have to be careful when you're reading his philosophy, because I think he is motivated politically. I don't think it's just an objective look at these things. All of his answers just happen to fall into the kind of the Russian empire and, you know, ultimately justifying the decisions they're making. So I don't want people to look at this and say, well, I'm on with board with Dugan's political project, because that is just absolutely not the case. Case. However, I do think he does have some important insights into the moment we're in, many of which you're addressing there, that we really are already in a post liberal world. This has already occurred. And so if we're going to figure out how to bring a political philosophy together that can work in the modern day for the situation we find ourselves in, we do have to look outside of this kind of end of history globalist liberal project. And we have to say, what are some of the things from older political theories that we might be able to take into the future, but maybe leave behind the things that were baggage that made them fail, that we no longer want to be involved with, and how we marry them into the modern day, into our own tradition, into our own way of thinking so they can be more successful. So we're not looking backwards. We're not just, you know, trying to return to a former time we cannot return to. But what we're trying to do is carry traditions that were lost, that were discarded by large scale globalist liberalism intentionally in order to erode the self reliance and particularity of different peoples. How do we bring that into our current day and marry it with kind of where we are at so they can move forward into something that hopefully can overcome our technological problems, overcome some of the problems of modernity that we find ourselves in, but can do so by bringing forward many of these traditions that we left behind.

[Joe Allen]

Unlike many people on the right, you have not neglected the issue of technology, particularly artificial intelligence. In our final remaining minutes, I would like for you to just give me a sense of what you're working on right now. When we last spoke, you were gracious enough to interview me and let me air my grievances against the Stargate project and its backers. You talked about post human politics, and I'm very curious by what do you mean by post human politics. Where do you see political strategy and political life in the near or distant future in that regard?

[Aaron McIntyre]

Well, as we already know, our ruling elites are very good at manipulating us through media and all of these things. In a way, they're already kind of an algorithm. They're losing their human agency. They're building this machine. You know, we've all heard the term machine politics, right? When we had the different democrats who would run these towns and they would be able to turn people out, and you didn't have to think about who you were voting for because the political.

[Joe Allen]

Machine had already made the AI at Tammany Hall. Right?

[Aaron McIntyre]

That's exactly right. And that feels like where we're heading next. It's no longer necessary for even humans to manipulate us in the way that they have been doing through advertisement and history and propaganda. Instead, the AI can do it for us. It can. Look, you know, we're already seeing this AI when it's deciding how to adjust different prices, different rents to squeeze people to the, the last little drop that's already horrible and dehumanizing but it's going to do it with your political beliefs. It's going to learn how to manipulate, manipulate you, show you exactly what you, it wants you to see, drive you to particular actions. One of the visions that Alexander Dugan uses, one of the illustrations he uses is the idea that a man used to send a text message. Now the text message will send the man. Imagine a. Oh wow, yeah. Imagine an army of political, you know, partisans who are operating because an algorithm tells them to activate in any given.

[Joe Allen]

Time and which we see already. Right. And we have for arguably two decades. It's just become more and more sophisticated. Social media made it that much easier to kind of get a sense, take the temperature of political sentiment and also to disseminate the propaganda. Would you say that this is a continuation of previous processes or do you think that AI and the advanced neural networks represent a kind of a quantum leap in how post human politics are conducted?

[Aaron McIntyre]

I think it is a continuation, but it is accelerating rather quickly. We removed human feedback almost from the process at this point. The AI feeds you your ideology, it perfects the ideology it takes that immediately runs it back to you. There's very little interaction you're having with the machine at this point. It's more or less driving the whole thing. And that is the concern technologically on the post human political side, that AIs will become major drivers, non human forces that will be determining a large amount of our politics. But the other end of this is the Dugan end when he talks about the spiritual forces that ultimately we're seeing a culmination of post rational spiritual forces that are re entering into politics. Our Areno calls this the return of the strong gods, if you want a more American explanation of the same phenomenon. And so more and more we're seeing choices that are being made, I think on a spiritual level that perhaps we're not manifesting previously. And so I think both in the technological and spiritual realm, we're starting to see that non human forces are on the move.

[Joe Allen]

Arn, I could continue this conversation for hours, but we are out of time. If you would please let our audience know where they can find your work, where they can find your book, and what they can expect in the future.

[Aaron McIntyre]

Of course, I got the book pretty much everywhere you'd expect. Barnes and Noble books, a million Amazon, the show is on the Blaze TV and also it's of course on YouTube and anywhere you catch podcasts, it's the Orin McIntyre Show. So if you want to catch me there, I'm also on Twitter and gab and substack and all the places you'd expect under Orin McIntyre.

[Joe Allen]

I really appreciate it, brother.

[Aaron McIntyre]

Absolutely, man. Thanks for having me.

[Joe Allen]

Yeah, an honor. All right, War Room Posse. We will be back tomorrow morning with more action packed news and commentary with Steve Bannon back in the pilot seat. So tune in tomorrow morning. Thank you very much. God bless.

[Steve Bannon]

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