Beyond the Vapor with Robert Stark
Robert Stark interviews Rajeev Ram about the Indian diaspora, Caste, HBD, Theology, and America’s Identity Crisis
This is The Stark Truth, hosted by Robert Stark, brought to you by StarkTruthRadio.com. Robert Stark is an American journalist and political commentator. You can listen to his podcasts at www.starktruthradio.com. Robert Stark, I'm joined here with Rajeev Ram. He blogs at Unsubstack under Cactus Brahmin, and I'm also joined here with Frances Nelly Pileter. I discovered you via your shows you've done with Walt Bismarck, but to start things off if you want to give an introduction to yourself and your political journey. And how detailed you want me to go? I guess just sort of a brief introduction. Okay. Yeah, so like you said, I blog on Substack. My Substack is Rajeev Ram.substack.com. I have called it the Cactus Ram and Testimonials, which you can read my about page four. I do some politicking on there, but a lot of his personal stuff in terms of sort of my journey. So I'm a second generation, two million Indian immigrants, and my parents are from India, and they came here to America in the 1980s and had me and my brother in the 90s. So classic late millennial. I was born and raised in Arizona, went to college in New Chicago. I'm going to Arizona over the 4th of July weekend. Oh, cool. Yeah, it'll be super hot. I'm sure it will. I'm going to fly into Phoenix and then take like a short trip to Sedona. Yeah. Oh, Sedona is beautiful. You'll love it. But yeah, so born and raised in Arizona, went to university in Chicago. My life kind of fell apart, and I moved back with my parents in Arizona. Then I got a job in the Bay Area for sort of startup and then worked at Google. And then after COVID, basically a couple of things in my life fell apart. So I took a huge road trip across the country, and now I live in Tennessee. So in terms of my politics, I would say that basically it was inculcated, you know, in the soup of 90s liberalism, definitely the sense of like civic nationalism and America's, you know, what they call a propositional nation. So definitely more like kind of like a centrist liberal, or maybe nowadays you call it like an old and old school liberal, you know, the type of person who still has a head on their shoulders and who hasn't descended into crazy extremes on ideology. And then over time, sort of being disappointed by the way that liberalism was kind of liquidating all sort of organic modes of organization and cultural organization. And then basically, especially after Obama and like a lot of the online culture wars in the 2010s, culminating in sort of all of the drama around Donald Trump. And then especially after 2020, I had this whole grief process where I basically, I was like, okay, so I'm not a liberal anymore because I have no idea what they stand for, what they're trying to do, or if they are trying to do things, they're very objectionable to me. So I hate using the term politically homeless because everybody uses that these days. I would say I still have this sense of like, you know, multi multicultural pluralism. I really value freedom of association. I value localism. That's one of the reasons I'm sort of living in a small town. I'm sort of experienced that firsthand. And then I guess nominally, I'm like more allied with some aspects of the right we now, for example, with Walt Bismarck because they seem to be heading in a direction that directly counters sort of the civil rights regime that we have in America around disparate impact and basically trying to make everyone alter the egalitarian. How did you discover Walt Bismarck? Yes. It's a good question. So he, so, by the way, I think out of all his bumper music, he, well, I got a custom song as well. I think you got the best. I think out of all the songs, I think you got the best intro song. Thanks. I appreciate that. I'm a talented music maker. And in fact, we're organizing a music contest soon where folks can write their own poetry and set it to music on Suno. So stay tuned for that. To give a little bit of history before I met Walt in particular, I mean, he was pretty active in the alt-right. And then after Charlottesville, he essentially got completely canceled from public life. So it wasn't allowed on Twitter, it wasn't allowed on YouTube, basically wasn't allowed any platform at all. And he describes that time as kind of like dissociating in his life and that's when he went, you know, to small-town America and he kind of wanted to do a similar thing that I'm doing. And he's written about that. And so what made him a comeback is when he came on sub-stack and wrote this piece around why he's no longer a white nationalist or why he's no longer part of the alt-right. And someone we all know through an artwork tracing wood grains actually retweeted that on Twitter and it became viral. And that kind of launched him into the space of discourse where we are now. And so the way that I met him was, I quote tweeted, I mean, there was a lot of people who were making fun of him in that piece who were being like, perder, this white guy I thought, you know, that he could go live in a small town and he failed and, you know, he is stupid because he was a former white nationalist blah, blah, blah. And I just actually wrote a note defending him for a lot of one particular aspect of what he said in his piece was that one of the reasons he really enjoyed working in the alt-right was because there was the sense of fraternal camaraderie and openness and creativity and basically comfort with ambition or at least non-hostility that, you know, we see in a lot of sort of managerial corporations and even academia. And I basically quote tweeted that or restocked it, I don't know what you call it, on sub-stack. And I said, you know, everybody's making fun of this guy, but I completely understand where he's coming from. Like I am the type of person who has felt like, you know, my ambition and my openness and my creativity has been stifled. I have been hungry for like sort of a fraternal camaraderie in a lot of instances. And I've succeeded and failed in various measures at finding it. And I said a couple other things and, you know, you can put, I can send you the actual note that I wrote and you can post in the show notes if you'd like. And so basically, from there, he invited me onto his podcast and kind of the rest has been developing over time. Are there examples of issues where you still hold more left-wing views and are you interested in syncretic politics? Yeah, so this is a difficult question. So first of all, can you describe syncretic politics? What does that mean? Fusionism where you have a unique ideology that combines aspects that could be right-wing and left-wing. Yeah. I mean, so broadly speaking, yes, I think I get, first of all, really bored and second of all, really annoyed that people who basically wholesale adopt their ideology from some platform that's handed to them, mostly because I think it just demonstrates that they actually haven't thought that much about their place in the world. Well, it's a sign of their psychological profile of being on the openness. Yeah. Oh, is it directly correlated to that? I think it is. But unfortunately, I think most people, like I think my view is that most people are wired to be conformist, so you'll end up with these political drives where it's these wholesale packages. Unfortunately, that tends to win out. Yeah, so I'm not like one of the very uber rationalist, like less wrong types that likes to decouple everything. I think there's some failure modes of that, but certainly syncretic politics makes sense. I'm someone, I guess, by circumstance who's been forced to straddle a lot of different cultural, social, and political lines. And so what that does is if you have a certain amount of intelligence and ambition, you're forced to confront a lot of different contradictions and more than that, you're forced to accept that there are certain contradictions that are inherently a part of life. And so it doesn't become acceptable to just accept packages like you're saying. So in terms of more left-wing views, it's kind of, I guess, if you describe the left-right spectrum as oriented towards right being more oriented towards natural hierarchies, whether that's aristocratic or based on market dynamics or whatever else. And then left is more egalitarian in terms of trying to level the playing field either through political programs or interventions, is that kind of, would that be an acceptable definition? Yeah, I think it's acceptable definition or even, well, I guess how your average person would think like the way they'd probably see it is there's a whole set of views where they might seek your way your average person would see it like they'd think in terms of these like wedge issues, like abortion and taxation. But I think that's what you said is a pretty good definition. Yeah, I mean, so it's interesting even like the alt-right, like there's different, there were different sort of layers of the alt-right, but even I noticed a lot of what I found interesting about some of the alt-right figures was that they took views that were not stereotypically associated with the right, like more even though they were right-wing in the sense that they believed in hierarchy, but they were more comfortable, they were not traditionally like economically and socially conservative, especially someone like Richard Spencer. Yeah, so I mean personally, especially because, so like, I'm a gay man, but I'm also like, I come from an Indian Brahmin family and most of them tend to be like very family oriented and in some sense socially conservative in that, you know, prioritizing the family is really important and yet at the same time, I've never felt like I am like a second-class or lesser citizen because of my sexuality and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that... And where you live is pretty conservative. Yeah, right now, it's super, super red county and what's interesting is I haven't, I mean maybe because I don't really come off as you know, I can pass or whatever, I don't know. Like I've been pretty, it's been pretty easy for me to thrive in a lot of circumstances even in this small town, even in like the church community that now I'm a part of that like on the books, they're anti-homosexuality and there's probably a lot of members who hold that view and yet I've never felt like persecuted or, you know, that I'm not welcome. So, you know, I guess I have a personal orientation, you know, to answer your question about right versus left, which is like, you know, the family unit is probably the best and most stable unit of society at the same time, like most people are going to sort of have like heteropatriarchal relationships and marriages, but that doesn't necessarily have to be enforced as the only standard for having families. I don't believe, so I believe basically leaving things to the market for the most part, pretty mention free market capitalists. I do feel like that does have to be accompanied by some sort of maybe underlying metaphysics that can sort of regulate externalities in which the market will automatically descend into like power law dynamics or like race dynamics to the bottom where you're just selling the most short-term, like, addictive product, but, you know, I'm really not, I think I'm just like very much against all sort of like totalizing universalism, whether it's like free market totalization or like religious totalization. I really like your term on clavism. I guess I come from like a lineage and sort of a sort of a civilization that has maintained this sort of like pluralistic onclavism for a long time, but does still manage to have a sense of like unity, and I also see that America has done that for a long time. You know, whether or not you want to argue, it was because of a specific sociocultural or racial context, like Anglos or Anglo Protestants. It still managed to do that, and so I guess I, whoever, I consider my enemies, people who feel like their version of totalization is what's going to solve the problems of society because that just never, that just never works. Do you have thoughts on the HPD implications of the Indian caste system? So did the different cast emerge as an ethnogenesis formed by selecting certain traits, personality or psychological traits? Yeah, so I think the thing, there's a lot of complexities to the caste system, but I think the way I'll like make an entry into this question is that even in the question of like the ink, like what is considered caste, there's actually two different notions that sort of combine to make what you consider someone's caste. So there's something called Varna, and Varna is kind of like your orientation and your predilection towards certain like proclivities and how you like create value and engage with life. And then there's another part that's called Juppy, which is like kind of like your lineage and like you're broadly speaking your family, extended family, extended tribe group. And so there's a lot of ways in which, so the four Varna's that we usually talk to that are bremans who are more the priests and teachers, the Shepthrias who are more of the warriors and kings and political administrators, the Vysheas who are more of the merchants and the entrepreneurs and landowners, and the Shudras who are more of just the day laborers and the agriculture lists, you know, and sort of the big massive people that supports the rest of society. So basically yes, in some sense, like especially bremans sort of became very endogamous in a certain way, and selected for like a very high level of intellect and also just like I don't know how to describe it, metaphysical orientation concerned with like the morality and the ethics of how to get different populations and some populations to live together in a unified society. So basically like different roles for different archetypes? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so the thing is outside of, I mean, bremans because they have such like good record keeping of their genetics and lineage, they tend to have sort of like a stronger caste identity than a lot of the others. And as soon as you go down to like Shepthrias or lower, like it tends to be a lot more of a mess and there's a lot less of a collective identity around it. And so then the other aspect of this is, you know, most people think that, you know, bremans are these people who are just like ascetics who live in the forest or, you know, who are only at temples, but you'll find in history, you know, based on displacements of populations, certain groups will end up, you know, breman cultures, maybe in the mountains will take up like herding of animals or certain economic incentives. And this is where like the jutty kind of changes. So you can imagine like if there's a group of people, let's say who settled in like the Midwest and they had a certain lineage and they had a certain like skill level, but then they got displaced to like Arizona or the Southwest, right, they would fundamentally have to change their orientation of how they, you know, do commerce and how they engage in metaphysics and how they actually practice out their lives, right? So you can compare, for example, Marathi bremans and Tamil bremans and Marathi bremans because the Marathi's tend to be more of like warrior type people, the Marathi bremans do have some more of like a martial sort of outlook, whereas the Tamilian bremans are almost like exclusively ascetic. And then the bremans that you've seen like North India closer to Nepal or even in Bengal have different practices, right? And so really the only thing that unifies them together is sort of this sense of like endogamy that is selected for high intelligence and maybe like religious and moral orientation over time. So like those with a predilection for action might take a different, be in a different direction than say like devotion or the intellectual neosis or say like meditation, so you'd say like someone who's sort of like high IQ but a bit autistic might be best selected like for meditation. Yeah, there's a lot of funny stories about how basically in the Hindu pantheon Shiva is basically the great meditator, the big aesthetic and all he does like for you know thousand thousands of years is just sit on the Himalayan mountains and meditate on the nature of existence. And so all of the people who follow Shiva you know kind of you know tend to be those type of people whereas if you look at someone like Vishnu Vishnu is always reincarnating you know on earth whether it is as a warrior or a statesman or you know he has this 10, sometimes he incarnates as an animal if you look at the history of things, right? And so he's much more involved in let's say the day to day of this of human life. And so because of that he tends to attract people who are you know more oriented towards devotion rather than meditation and asceticism you know he has a physical body he's an incarnation he takes a human form and so he expects people to gather around him you know as he restores Dharma in this in this planet right and so then you'll have like lesser deities that you know like Indra and Agni who are considered like lesser deities in the pantheon who a lot of people Agni is the deity of fire and Indra sort of like the king of angels and so you'll have some more of the warrior people like worshipping those particular deities because you know warriors have to have this internal fire and this sort of kingly attitude towards their subordinates and then you'll have certain sects that worship like the feminine versions of God so shakshaktheism shakti being the wife of Shiva there are certain people who worship the divine feminine in that regard and then there's like kind of cults that worship the sun deity and stuff like that and so I would say yeah like Hinduism proper you know is designed to sort of like you know group certain like collective nervous systems into the ways that they can like find divinity or find communion if that makes sense that are most appropriate to them I guess it makes it makes sense if it's selected to each person's archetype but I guess why there's some resentment against caste is someone could be born into a caste that doesn't necessarily reflect their personal archetype and then maybe there's not enough flexibility but I guess principle like I don't see it as as a bad I don't see caste as a bad thing if it were flexible and I because I think American society kind of does lack that pluralism and it kind of it doesn't it doesn't give people a path that's tailored to their archetype right but I mean even I mean like like I'll just use this example because I have a lot of Mormon friends and I was part of this rightly Mormon group even if you look at Mormonism right there's and it's changed since it's inception but there's a particular type of archetype or like collective nervous system that does well in Mormonism and even though all of them like are popping out well maybe not these days anymore but they're popping out like six or seven babies like four of them maybe stay and then like three of them find that they can't conform to like what the actual church and the you know the syncretic sort of insular politics of the church you know and the vocations around that asked them to do that right and so they leave and they become atheist or agnostic or whatever else right and I'm sure there's a there was a lot of evaporative cooling in that sense in caste it definitely you know there are accusations essentially now that you know Brantland's held the reins and subjugated everything for you know hundreds and hundreds of years and I don't find that to be true I think if you look at the history of things it was probably a lot more dynamic and there was a lot more sort of shifting and evaporating evaporative cooling between groups. I'm like working on creating this religion I don't know if I'd say I don't even know if I called a religion more like a philosophy for understanding like religion and sociology etc but that way we combined theosophy was with HVD. Yeah do you want to do you want to say more that sounds I mean yeah so I think about like about an interesting like so you you take something like the Christian issue of salvation and if you think about how it sort of selects for a very few except like the if you take off your Christian view about salvation only a very specific personality type of person gets saved so you either have to go in that be like a Calvinist and believe in predetermination or you sort of embrace something like theosophy makes a lot more sense and I guess the irony is that like a lot of theosophists some of them are more liberal and they see universalism as more of a liberal thing like all religions so like all religions any view that all religions maybe like there's still a hierarchy some could be more legit than others but the idea that all religions are inspired by God but that religion evolved differently because of how different groups were genetically like that's how I kind of came to that yeah Taylor yeah Taylor to different archetypes so people are not like because the problem with a lot of a lot of religion different religions and even specific Christian churches are tailored to a very specific like archetype yeah so I mean I think broadly speaking I would share that view personally in the sense that yeah you can come like probably a lot of religions are pointing towards God so to speak on different paths and certainly some are more true or effective there's a difference between I think those who feel like relationship to God is one of like let's say law and obedience versus people who think it's one of like mysticism and experience and so like the ones who are oriented more towards obedience I think tend to just have this temperament that God shows up as the person who reinforces social order in various ways and I think the ones that works I think like that does appeal maybe that serves a purpose to the masses but it'd be like for those who really crave more spiritually it's not really the answer to them but even like with Christian Christianity like you'd criticize Abrahamic face for lacking that pluralism but there's still like that diversity within within Abrahamic face as well oh totally yeah I mean if you read some of the desert fathers or the Christian mistakes they're definitely more theosophic you know God God has an experience it's something you like commune with in terms of like a personal practice or God reveals to you a personal path or a personal Dharma so yeah certainly certainly I agree one thing I will say is that there's this book I believe it's called Taking the One Seat by I don't remember who it's by but he's this but this teacher and in this book I mean he's a Buddhist and he talks about the Buddhist Dharma but essentially he says that it's nice to kind of in the abstract argue about which you know religions are more true or more false but at some point you as an individual sort of like have to take your seat and that means committing to like what your thing is and so that could be like it could be converting to like this more kabbalist Calvinistic salvific Christianity it could be like becoming a Buddhist who doesn't believe in you know the supernatural it could be returning to your Hindu roots it could be you know becoming Shinto right but at some point I think there's a way in which if you're not able to commit to sort of like your own path on how to reach God like you're not actually gonna get anywhere you know you're just gonna keep flitting around and so you know I don't to some degree I do believe that I mean there's a point in which you know whether or not you consciously choose it the way you take up a religion and the practice you do and the way like you let it embody your your life in day to day life kind of becomes the way you do it and like I just feel like it's better to take ownership over that than continue to you know even in like the general way you view the wider world and your personal world you know that's sort of like taking your seat or taking your path it's probably a good thing. Do you think the Brahmin versus Vaishia archetypes play out in America in the West and would you say America is fundamentally Vaishia nation? So you're talking about just the archetypes not the literal. Not the specific cast but the archetypes. Yeah it's interesting because I definitely think there's been elements of both like if you read like about some of the great awakenings or like you know the abolitionist movement or you read some of them like there seems to be like this very like moralistic you know zeal that sort of a lot of groups want to enforce on the nation and certainly it is a weird thing that America is quite a secular country but it's also weirdly religious in a way that you don't see other prosperous economically developed nations being as religious at the same time. It's weird because it's America is more religious and more elastic than say Europe but it's also much more mercantile. Yeah yeah that's the thing right and so I actually gave a presentation when I was a part of exit and I was talking about like Brahmin, Vaishia Brotherhood right because it does seem like in a way that both of those archetypes have been allowed to succeed in various ways and certainly I think right now I mean if you look at certain historical periods like in the Gilded Age where you had all those you know fantastic you know barons of wealth right and then Teddy Roosevelt came in with all of his like progressive republican trust busting right. There was like conflict between Vaishias and let's say Brahmin's right. So Roosevelt would be someone who was more he was more aristocratic from from an older class system but he sort of limited the merchant class and that's a common archetype for history. Yeah exactly right I mean I think there are a lot of people especially who have that more aristocratic orientation who do you feel a need to sort of give bounds around the market impulse and so now definitely I mean if you look at the internet age we live in I think we're completely dominated by mercantile sort of impulses right. I think that's not that's not really up for debate and I think one of the reasons there's so much like infighting and your factionalism like on the right or whatever is like this inability to actually feel like they can culturally constrain the market impulse in this like aristocratic or moral way. I saw a chart on at someone posted on Twitter and it showed that the wealthiest the wealthiest groups along like billionaires or multi-millionaires and india's Vaishias are much wealthier I think Banias are the wealthiest cast it's much more so than Brahmin's are. Yeah I mean I think that makes sense right I mean if you're and I think that's historically always been the case the Vaishias are the ones who are doing the commerce you know they were the ones who were selling the spices to the Dutch East India Company and to China. Brahmin's you know people I will say people tend to have like a conception of Brahmin's that they're again very poorer and they don't you know live in the worldly things but that's not true you know there are plenty of sort of a Brahmin jeties again jeties being sort of like the different actual lineages there's plenty of Brahmin jeties that you know depending on their context or if they had like proximity to the water and and naval trade you know they would have earned more wealth and there's nothing within sort of like Brahmin teleology or sort of lifestyle that prevents you from accumulating wealth it's just they're more concerned with like the social and civilizational structures and they don't just pursue you know wealth above all ends and so even I think in America again like Brahmin's are really the only cast in India that have really spent a lot of time tracing their lineage and genetics once you get to like even a certain level of Shatriya like just the mixing and like the identity becomes a lot more fluid and so I'm sure like you know all the Gujarati Veshos who own all the hotels and gas stations are probably richer you know than like someone like me who used to work in software engineering right so Tamil Brahmin stereotypically they mostly going to tech yeah and I've been thinking about that for a while because I mean some of them go into finance as well and and there's a couple of them that become doctors right but it is it is strange to me how like especially even like there are a lot more for example carolite or Telugu doctors than there are necessarily Tamilian doctors I think and so it's very interesting to me how like Tamilian Brahmin in particular seem to coalesce around like the technology space and I haven't mapped it out completely but like for example Satya Nadella I don't I think he's he's Avaisha I don't know his exact lineage but he doesn't strike me based on the way he cares himself and how he talks about the Google I think Google CEO is Tamil Brahmin oh yeah I'm Sundar yeah and the thing is most of these people come out from like very similar college so like Sundar went to the same college that my dad went to IIT Madras which is basically the pop technology school in Tamil Nadu right and so there's a couple of places where if you make it into that school right like and then you know you come to America or you emigrate like you'll kind of be in the same class and cohort as as everybody else who went to that college even if you're not specifically of the same like Juppy is is there a major divide between south and north indians and the ds4 in the United States um I mean major is a matter of relativity but I mean yes um I think um how would I describe it so I think north indians tend to be a little bit more entrepreneurial um they tend to focus on sort of careers and jobs and social organizations in a way that doesn't prioritize sort of cultural or intellectual influence and so um that would include you know people that work either in like um owning certain small businesses that are like you know the typical again example is like Gujaratis that own gas stations but even like dry cleaners that would be like hotels yeah or restaurants or um sort of like there's this way i've noticed most of the restaurants Indian restaurants are Punjabi and they're run by Sikhs yeah exactly right um or whether it's owning certain like you know Indian grocery stores or whatever else right I mean you'll almost never see like a 10 million or a Telugu like owning like a shop um and like doing commerce in that way almost all of them sort of gear towards high status employment and so whether you know that's doing an education for a number of years and then becoming a PhD or an academic or rising the ranks on the finance ladder or the tech ladder or something else right I think you'll find that um South Indians are partly because of their like behavioral predilection to like sort of be willing to put their head down and work at things for a long time within a system and so good a good analogy is South Indians are more would you say overlaps with like East Asian stereotypes in North Indian more with like Middle Eastern stereotypes yeah that's a pretty good analogy actually I think um especially because you know if you make the comparison to South Indians and East Asians like East Asians tend to be much more um concerned with like um how they appear socially and how they integrate with you know the rest of society and there are certain norms around that whereas yeah I mean I guess you could say the Arab world is um a lot less concerned with you know decorum and I don't know how to put it but that's that is actually a pretty good analogy and some of it might have to do with the fact that um especially North Northwest India has a lot more Arabic and Persian influence and South India I mean despite the fact that they're by the ocean like as a society they've been relatively insular and endogamous compared to most of the North Indians and so there's a lot more sense of like cultural and behavioral sort of continuity there that they keep not intentionally exclusive whereas North Indians are much more blended and mixed and so there's a lot less let's say natural cohesion. Are South Indians more politically liberal? Um I would actually say like South Indians tend to be apolitical in general um but they appear super liberal because that's a survival strategy right if you want to climb the ladder in America you basically quickly learn how to present how to speak um how to show up you know how to talk about things how to relate to others right and so I mean Indians overwhelmingly are democratic right they vote for democrats but I really don't think that reflects like a sort of like super liberal or progressive orientation especially not in the first generations it's just simply a way to comport with the dominant ideology in the country um because if you look at most Indians again they're pretty like you know they're not like socially conservative sense in the sense that they're like you know you know Russian Orthodox people who hate deviance right but there's a strong focus on family and keeping things like in in like sort of your tribe and um you know focusing on the betterment of you and your extended family right and that's you know that generally is not how like white liberal who live in San Francisco or New York tend to operate right so I I mean my position is that south Indians tend to be like relatively keep their head down apolitical but they'll vote for liberals because you know that's what gets them the most acceptance but with Indians um actually there's a lot more variety they can be anywhere from like viciously democratic to someone like Nikki Haley who's basically a huge neo-conservative you know and she's like riding on missiles that is really confusing. So the v-vik promise wamy is south indian but I think overall north Indians seem more overrepresented in politics. Yeah I mean that's true and I think part of that is because most of the ways that Indians have sort of like gotten to politics historically is through like how to describe this I don't know like if you look at someone like Nikki Haley there's like a very natural reason that she would sort of ally with you know conservative the conservative wing because that tends to be the wing that at least on the face you know promotes meritocracy and earning your way around things but obviously she's not like an orthodox Christian um and a lot of like the staffers and the people who get hired um you know they're not gonna take sort of like the religious right tack they're gonna have some combination of being like pro-military pro-free market and then like pro-family right and so the people who art can be the most vocal about that are especially people who do come from some of the more martial um groups in India and those who are like less concerned about keeping things insular and like building building status in these very sort of enclave-y ways. Is there a big divide between the the wave of Indian immigrants who came in the 70s and 80s I think you said that's your background and more recent immigrants who were like H-1Bs I mean you say the latter is more likely to view America as an economic zone. Yeah um definitely I mean most of the immigrants who came pre-1990 um 1990 that was the Bush there was the heart seller immigration act of 65 then there was the Bush senior enacted another immigration act yeah 1990 yeah so a lot of what I would call like the Reagan Indians so like my parents are examples of people who like loved Reagan right um those these are Indians who are like by nature very pro-american and patriotic almost all of them had some sort of elite position at home and that doesn't mean they were wealthy like my parents both grew up not in poverty but you know not with a lot of wealth but they went to good schools and they sort of lived in communities you know that high standards of behavior and you know some aristocratic training to some degree just in the environment right and so these are people who learned English from a very early age um like don't have any resentment towards like colonization show to speak or the British Empire who have a desire to integrate into the Anglo world and so because of that reason they genuinely are patriotic Americans and they want to do their best to integrate and they raise children like me and my older brother with that sense of civic nationalism and part of that too is because um you know they didn't get so I mean when my parents came here for their PhD program like their their sponsorship was like I mean they were paid peanuts right my parents were like five thousand dollars in debt you know after their honeymoon that they took to Europe and so it was really the sense of like we made it in America and we're gonna find our own way um and we're gonna do our best to like ingrati it ourselves as citizens post 1990s especially with a lot of manufacturing mostly going to China but some of it going to India and then a lot of like tech support going to Indian sort of like businesses or call centers most of them really don't see like America as a country that they want to integrate into part of that is because I think they see like the enormous amount of like degradation of western culture in the past 10 to 15 years and a lot of them are kind of asking like why the fuck would I try to integrate to that and if they didn't have an experience of the 70s or 80s or 90s where you know America was still very very culturally and economically um you know fluid in that you could you know come from Ohio and still make it you know earning six figures at some point. Let's see that Latinos and East stations too or I think immigrants because like the the dissident right they use the term like airport Americans and I or hard sell our Americans but notice there is a distinction like people who were here by the 70s or 80s have some degree of nostalgia for the way things are but I've noticed like I think with immigrants in general no matter if they're from China or South America or Latin America like the more those who have came I'd say like in the 21st century just few America's in economic zone which I don't I don't really blame them because that's basically how things are now. Yeah I mean that's accurate and most a lot of tech companies basically just see a way to hire cheap labor um and that isn't to say there aren't some really good h1b I mean I know a guy actually he's an h1b guy and he came here on a tech tech visa and then he got I know I guess he got I don't know do America have green cards and he's waiting for citizenship but he actually quit his tech job and he's like trying to become a professional cook and you know he writes all these poems about like World War II and all that stuff I mean so he's really trying to integrate in sort of to like the American mythology but I think that's pretty rare especially for post post-1990 immigrants and their children although I don't know how many of the h1b they're actually having children on American soil yet unclear to me. Do you have predictions for the future trends of the profile of Indian immigration? Do you think it will be like more do you predict it will be like more down scale in future or do you predict more like a brain drain immigration? I mean I think at this point America has captured all the high IQ Indians I think right now I think there's there's actually been a lot of illegal illegal immigrants showing up at the border that's been a huge recent trend. Yeah including Indians right? I think most of them are Punjabi's they're illegal immigrants. Oh interesting yeah I don't know the nature specifically of the illegal Indian immigration probably you if you live in California you're more you know tapped into that and none of them are like coming to Tennessee or whatever not yet I mean let's see if they make it here at some point but my feeling is that I mean America really did brain drain a lot of like the high IQ civic minded you know Indian elites you know in the 70s and 80s and there's not much left to tap from so I think two things are going to happen one is you know unless America actually decides to force immigration restriction a lot more low quality low IQ people are going to immigrate Indians are going to immigrate to America and then some of them are going to find that they can't make it here they can't you know they don't have enough skills to compete with all the other immigrant groups that are also trying for the same positions and so they'll probably try to take some jobs and sense of money home but I think a big portion of them will leave you know I can imagine California like you know 10-15 years from now is just like a bunch of really like low wage low skill immigrant groups including Indians who are like just trying to fight it out or with the scraps of menial jobs and you know if they can't make a living you know they're kind of going to give up it also depends on how much you know welfare and other you know benefits are paid to such immigrants but you know if you really wanted to make them go back you could just rip sort of the welfare carpet out of all of these folks and I think they wouldn't have an incentive to say anymore because they don't really care about America as a country or a project or like a civilization they just want to hire paycheck. Do you have thoughts on a lot of the anti-indian enemies on the dissonant right I've noticed this trend where it's sort of become like the new like JQ do you take personal offense to it or do you think it's sort of a reaction to like the sheer numbers of immigrants? Definitely I'm a reaction definitely especially in Canada I mean I think Canada is kind of a lot more fucked than the US in a lot of ways because it has a lot less population and it's been used to having a very low population and like it's it's immigrant population is just like completely exploded you know especially in the last decade and so a lot of it is just like yeah there's too many people like the housing prices are going like there's this I saw this video from Canada of like of this line that went it was like this end there's this video that went viral of this line for applying for a job and there's like this endless line of like young Indian men yeah um so I think a lot of I think a lot of the animus is around that particularly I think some of it gets leveled at like the tech workers because a lot of like white people don't really know the difference between different types of Indians and immigrants or pre versus post 90s and stuff like that I haven't worked in tech for a while I've heard a lot of people who told me stories about like you know someone will become a manager and then they'll hire a bunch of h1b's who all only speak like Hindi or Tamil or Punjabi and kind of exclude white people and kind of become very very insular you know in that company that's probably true to some degree and that's probably something that would make me really angry you noticed that when you worked in tech I did not yeah so like specifically the team that I worked on first of all it was um 90% male and probably like 40% autistic because it was you know the central distributed computing infrastructure which requires a high level of technical skill but it was kind of a nice combination between it was mostly 10 millions who were the Indians there were some Chinese folks some Anglos and a lot of Slavs right and Slavs are kind of simpler workhorses right they're willing to put their head down and do hard label hard labor you know and not necessarily have to take the credit for it but like all of the Indians that I worked with both in my team and like kind of immediately outward they again spoke English really well um you know you had to behave like Americans um so maybe this is happening in other parts of the company maybe this is happening at smaller startups I'm not sure um I don't I don't doubt that it's happening though where there there's like h1b Indians who are just very insular and kind of blocking white people out of certain positions probably happening do you think white people are at a disadvantage for being more individualistic and do you see them in the future becoming more like white speaking being more tribal and having like patronage networks I got talked about this with Walt Bezmark yeah I think some of them are trying to um but I really think they would just prefer to have some like develop some sort of collective will that could actually uh enforce you know immigration restriction and immigration law and my understanding is that there's actually like no new laws or directives that need to be enforced per se um like if there was the political will like you could kick out 20 million people tomorrow it's just the fact that white liberals in general tend not to want to do that for you know social reasons and then of course they don't tend to be not the ones especially if they're wealthy you have to live with the consequences you know because they just get their you know house and burnable heights that cost 10 million dollars or you know they go to act what's kind of ironic is that I think if immigration continue mass immigration continues then you'll see this vulcanization to tribalism but honestly like irony is that like a moratorium on immigration would kind of maintain like American civic nationalism longer but the thing is like what is America and who is America it's like kind of hard to define it's kind of hard to agree upon like no one can really define it at this point yeah are you making the argument that if immigration continues maybe the whites will actually develop a racial conflict yeah I think that if immigration continues I think whites would become more tribal and you'd see a vulcanization into on-clavism well immigration moratorium could actually kind of delay like 20th century-style civic nationalism like and maybe another 30 to 50 years yeah I mean I think one thing that would help for white people to be able to do this would basically to basically gut the entire sort of civil rights regime around like disparate impact and equal opportunity hiring laws and stuff like that I think in practice everybody realizes that that's pretty much anti-white whether or not it's like du jour anti-white it's de facto anti-white and I think one of the things you know I talk about this with Walt a lot whether or not you know you'll have whites that mix with Latinos and become castesos you know he likes to use the word casteso features and especially like in Florida where there's a lot of those Venezuelans and Cubans but I sort of I get where Walt's coming from but I think like that would but the question is that would take like a pretty that would take like a pretty large number of white people for that to work I guess the white population dwindles you I think you'll see more vulcanization like what he's talking about because he's so futurism would take like a much bigger demographic disparity yeah so um sorry I'm like trying to keep track there's like five thoughts tonight what was the original question you asked me a couple minutes ago I forget enclave is in right I think was you might see like white white enclaves popping up but isn't that kind of that's kind of like becoming could you make the case that's kind of like becoming like India so if America has panonclavism or this sort of like multipolar like pluralism decentralization with the philosophical HPD isn't that just sort of like reinventing India I mean I don't think so because first of all India has existed I mean the country India proper wasn't even considered like one country until British colonization right and then after decolonization there was you know all the stuff around Pakistan and like the most limbs seceded etc etc right but for most of the history like India was considered like a civilization it was considered an Indus Valley civilization but most of the states were pretty independent they had like their own kingdoms and sub kingdoms and there was kind of just based on language and like heritage because all Indian languages descend from Sanskrit and borrow from Sanskrit there was some sense of unity around that but it was basically one giant you know articles of confederacy right was I think America clearly has never I mean it lasted as an articles of confederacy for well like 15 years and then they were like oh no we actually need like a federal government and then all of the westward expansion after that was like subjected to like you know even if there was more like states rights and freedom of association it was still underneath the federal umbrella right so I don't think you're actually going to recreate India or like this sense of decentralized like autonomous kingdoms or states unless you actually you know drastically drain power and financial impact from the federal like you'd have to get rid of the Fed right you'd have to have like completely like different states I mean now they all use the rupee but even certain villages have certain currencies that they use right so like I don't I don't necessarily see that happening unless like the federal government like you fire 70% of people from the federal bureaucracy and that may be yeah like there's so many limitations like to freedom of association yeah so I mean I I'm on the side of you know I it's interesting I've never actually heard the point that you know hey we shouldn't restrict immigration because then whites you know will develop a racial consciousness but I've generally been on the side of like literally close the borders to everyone except like point oh one percent of people for like the next 25 years and then like let's try to figure out the fuck who we are as a country anymore if we even want I don't know like maybe people don't want to figure out who we are as a constitutional country anymore I'm not sure but I guess that leaves I guess that's self-interested because then you know I'm not really sure where I belong like if I don't belong to like the white enclavism but like I'm too integrated into the civic nationalism to belong you live oh you're saying you're too integrated into like civic nationalism so you've never lived in like a like a Indian F note verb no and it actually disturbs me like when I lived in Sunnyvale and I believe it's gotten a lot worse now there was a lot of like Indians and there actually have to be a lot of Koreans I don't know what that is and it actually kind of disturbs me about the lack of white people like I like being around white people I guess that's like where well pilleter you want to talk about like what you're advocating for because that kind of fits in I'm actually in the japan town in San Francisco so I mean I've been from the south San Francisco on Grand Avenue and then I was in daily city but now we're in Cathedral Hill Japan town and uh I'm not really was I know Sunnyvale San Jose areas for the people that just uh don't want to spend that much money downtown so they go there as a way but then in return you kind of have a congregation of that and so I think there is a benefit of being in daily city because it's all Filipino there's a benefit of being in Japan town because it's last of Japanese Americans and mostly Korean Americans and there's a benefit of course being in you know south San Francisco because it's all Mexican and so I could see understand that if all the Indians are in Sunnyvale then it kind of gets a little boring and out of touch because then you realize that there's no communities it's just kind of segregation rather and then people just commuting in and out on that same road back and forth from Brisbane yeah I mean I just the other thing too is that and I don't know how other second generation immigrant Indian immigrants feel but all of us feel a lot more American than we feel Indian and so you know we have our parents and grandparents you know who like you know when we go to like temple or we do certain rituals at the house we pay respects to them and pray to them and stuff like that but I really don't think any of us who are second generation and who went to like Protestant public school and all this other stuff are really looking to like actually be off-play this so we're kind of in a precarious position. We're getting close to the end of the show is there anything else you'd like to add or do you want to plug any upcoming projects? Well go check out my sub-stack and subscribe to it that's not necessarily a political sub-stack it's more a lot of things that I'm interested in a lot of the political energy right now is you know kind of being dedicated towards this Walt Wright project but you have a podcast that you do regularly with with him and a few other people yeah it's called the Overton window right it's a good one and then your sub-stack it's more philosophy psychology and culture yeah that's that's an apt description I feel like it's reductive but I'll take it it's uh it is literally just me trying to discover who I am and how I'm supposed to fit into a lot of different identities and cultures that I'm trying to grapple with and that's when what it was started and also a big strain of it has been like okay well the civic nationalistic liberalism that I grew up with and spent a lot of loyalty to you and derasted it and myself for us kind of collapsed and I don't think anybody really wants to go back to that very strongly so what the fuck do I do now um yeah I think I think like what you were touching upon is if there's a shift on clavism I think it would mean I think I actually do think it would be difficult for people who are like second or third generation immigrant backgrounds who really who really sort of assimilated into the civic nationalist identity of the late 20th century yeah like it would be easier I think it would be easier for white people and it'd be easier for new immigrants who have arrived in the 21st century but I think for people who who were from an immigrant background but assimilated into the late 20th century I think but I guess maybe they'll form their own form of onclavism like Francis what you're having what you're advocating for is like an identity identity politics for combining whites and Asians basically yeah and that's just you want to if you want to kind of introduce that it's been discussed we've just talked about it before on the podcast but if you want to kind of explain that briefly I mean I can go by the names of Eurasian futurism or the technology of anime realism or a subculture of a xa the point of being is that as no one can define white anymore as liberals like to say it's a social construction or it's middle-class values then everybody must be cosmopolitan but the problem is identity is natural and so instead of having cosmopolitanism where everybody's still blank and liberalism is the credo you can't have that so everybody's just going to default to second best in line Asian and so everybody if they're going to default to an identity they will say Asian over white because to the normal person that's just a social construction but Asian you could pick you know Chinese Japanese, Korean, Southeast it's there how do you consider is Asian I would consider South Asians and as well Indians because the reason why it goes back to that Indo-Aryan ideal and it just means that the bricks world or that part of the world becomes engulfed into everything over G7 so I think it's more than that I think it's about identity and about this Emile Durkheim ideal of an origin. So it's trying to because liberalism like it atomizes and dressinates people so it's like instead of becoming a reactionary you take from subcultures that are associated with liberalism and you try to create something that's more that's more rooted and more authentic from that it's interesting because a big assumption of this which is actually an assumption that my coho sunshine is a half white half Korean so he's your typical Eurasian futurist he's basically said the reason for this is because white is not aspirational right and there's an argument about whether that's like inherent to the way that white people are inherently like individualistic and universalistic but I kind of feel like if you got rid of a lot of this civil rights nonsense white would probably become aspirational again like I think one of the reasons is that the incentive landscape has steeply steered against whites and if you remove sort of that boot on top of the neck of whiteness it might return I don't know how much it would return but I mean to your point about why people don't want to find their identity in whiteness and then take their secondary identity I think if they do find identity in white it's probably going to be the subculture of voting Trump living in Pennsylvania and liking particular country music and that will be like Robert says aesthetic space and clearly subjective and the problem is it can't be a majority vote because it's too niche it's like Christian Lander says the right kind of white people and the wrong kind of white people the wrong white people like NASCAR and Vin Diesel movies and the right kind like electronic music and Brooklyn so that's going to be a problem yeah it's funny that you say that because there's a way in which like I think I permanently coded myself as like anti-liberal because I do MMA and I own a Glock now and like I don't watch UFC or anything like that but the cultural associations that I've adopted since moving to the south have kind of like excluded me from you know the electronic music Brooklyn type of archetype so it's funny I think it's just going to be a very rhinoic clash and I think as going back on Robert Stark's position one it could be on clavism I would say it's not libertarianism to its end I think you're still going to have a majority but this majority of normism is going to be Asian even though it's not going to question it in other words we might be continuing the word white but there'll be an overtone window within white and what it means to be wife might as well be half Asian and because in art because of its artistic choices its intellectualism its politeness because it overcomes the deck in a dead end of heuristic and hedonism and liberalism but they'll see some assimilation between the two though I think and that's where you explain the punk culture aspect yeah it's interesting I and it's interesting that you include indians as a part of that I've never heard a formulation I mean people when they say that stuff tend to pretty starkly contrast between East Asians and South Asians and so it's interesting how you include that and I can see that happening I mean I personally know both a lot of Indian women and Indian men who have married white people and so you know part of that's going to I don't know they're gonna have to they're gonna have to come to terms with um a Freudian background of psycho analysis the decision the ultimate decision of why and what is a sexuality and what is a desire and I think that has more superiority over Jungian archetypes and I think that's driving the far right crazy because they don't want to talk about Freud because he's Jewish but I just think that's a ballsy of its own probably came from Heidegger or something but uh that's where it's going that years opened up a whole new time that's kind of funny because i was a whole another show on that it's like that was kind of came that kind of came out of left field at the end there it seems like there's a lot to dig into so I would think ultimately I think Jacques Lacan seems to be the western to understanding of Freud and going from there and this direction where you see if it's Jijek or not or René Girard there's different aspects of psychoanalysis but long story sort sort it doesn't have to be Jewish you know because that's just a big digression and mistake it's whether you understand psychoanalysis the subconscious how I think how people are not honest with themselves about like I would say I would actually say like with wokeness and the whole idea of implicit bias even though like the premise is anti-white I think it's actually correct in the sense that people need people don't do all these things subconsciously that motivates their their politics and their social decisions and they're totally not aware of that like I think that's what frustrates me I mean we started this conversation about like syncretism and being open right and I think one thing that happens when you actually confront a lot of these unconscious drives is that you want to bring them out more into the open which then you're forced to like adopt non-packaged beliefs which requires a certain amount of openness right and it drives me up the wall the number of people who are unwilling to do that yeah I mean that's sort of like the essence of my political project but there there's almost there's almost a sort of gnostic angle to it as well yeah I mean obviously if you're more theosophic I can see that I think people are just going to come to terms with what they like and they're it's going to be beyond preferences and more into desire it won't be just a subjective libertarian choice because being anti-ilage means overcoming that so then you're just born into it you're going to be an Indian woman saying I like white men that's an identity politic that's a subculture that's an artistic choice that's me hey I mean if it brings out more honesty in it you know it prevents people from hiding under these weird ideologies that are run by like shadow things that they never want to bring to the service I'm all for that oh we're at the end of the show Rajiv Ram great show thank you so much for being on and also thanks Francis Nelly yeah thanks appreciate it thank you