Vance

is a post-liberal.

He calls himself a post-liberal in 2023 at the publication of Patrick Deneen's Regime Change article.

I'm going to be careful here.

Tom's probably going to come in and discipline me a little bit for this because I tend to be the bad comp and he's the good comp.

But I wrote that really unpleasant chapter on the Judeo Masonic conspiracy theory.

And so I'm going to go for it and then Tom's going to reel me back in.

so anyway let you guys weigh in on that or anything else about okay there's lots of kind of kooky ideas weird history conspiracy theory this is the stuff of 4chan and 8chan and like the online spaces which you know again a lot of i say normal people but people with you know jobs and families and and who are not you know in their teens or their 20s are sort of like i don't know what most of this stuff is but What do you think in terms of implications? What should we be doing or thinking about or aware of in terms of responding to this kind of movement or these issues, especially on the right?

And as for what post-liberalism

is, this is normally the question I answer when I get it.

So Tom and I kind of have questions that if we get, we know who's answering them.

That's how he knew to jump in here.

So we'll hear from Tom.

But I've been talking a long time.

I feel kind of sheepish about that.

And I guess wrapped into that, why did Hungary care? Why was it their prerogative so much to try to influence this small group in the U.S.? What were they hoping to get out of this?

Can you give us?

Oh, yeah.

So the reason why it fails like that is you have a church that's primarily held hostage to temporal power, and it almost wants to be.

The church has a choice to either be a client of the faithful or a client of the state, right? And they become clients to the state because the states have the ability to use violence to procure tax money to fund the church.

And then they have to—so they get the promise up front, and then they realize that what they've actually become is an institutional accomplice to an authoritarian regime.

that will squeeze from the church all the legitimacy it can and then throw the church away when it can no longer offer that service.

And so you have a scandalized people that disaffiliates, so you have empty churches with no money.

I'm not calling that anti-Semitic, but I'm calling that like kind of, you know, allowing.

Just very briefly, share with us what's going on and the kind of political power they have.

Yeah, it's, I think, a big story that doesn't get a lot of attention.

So, you know, Gladden Papin was the president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs, which was a directly funded state operation by Viktor Orban out of Hungary.

And Orban dedicated a tremendous amount of resources to creating connections to American conservative movements.

And so...

You know, the things like the Danube Institute, Matthias Corvinus Collegium and, you know, Papin's own organization.

They would form these official or informal coalitions and then they would spread those kinds of connections into other right wing parties like Vox in Spain.

That's right.