Can Effective Altruism and the Far Right Co-exist?

From Animal Cruelty to Rotherham - A Transcript

(Source: x.com/@KelseyTuoc)

Here’s a transcript of my discussion with the Effective Altruist Thought-leader Kelsey Piper on the nature of her moral values; touching on themes including Animal Cruelty and the Rotherham scandal.

You can consider it a prelude to discussion of the Effective Altruist Question —one of the most critically under-discussed ones on our road to power. Included are two added notes recorded afterwards. You can listen to it on the pod. I’ve added descriptive titles afterwards.

Kelsey entered the discussion with a lot of based-points from breaking the tech blacklist attempt on James Damore, blowing up Sam Bankman Fried, and trying to blackball Kamala Harris from the Democratic party. She leaves it with whatever the opposite of the noticing award is but major bravery points.

Our good friend

Roko

made many useful comments, co-hosted a post-discussion questions session and was key to bringing in a critical audience. I might just owe him based-points now.

Roko Mijic: I owe Futurist Right some based points because I didn't think that Kelsey would do this. I was very skeptical, so I was wrong. Congratulations.

—- Discussion Transcript -—

Kelsey Piper: So the conversation that we had earlier this week that ended with us deciding It'd be worthwhile to do a space and hash some of this out was about, like, worldviews about helping other people, right? And I'm from the Effective Altruist sphere. I care a lot about global aid. I care a lot about people who aren't in the United States. I spend a lot of my money trying to cure diseases in countries I've never been to. And Futurist Right, whose real name I don't know at all, said to me, you know, I was reading, he said, Ozzy's Thing of Things, which is part of what made me think, oh, then it's probably like more likely to be worth talking to you. Ozzy has a great blog. And Ozzy sort of made the case for a blanket humanitarianism beyond your innermost circle. Like your innermost circle, "it makes sense to prioritize your family, your friends, and your neighbors over strangers. " "But it makes no sense, " Ozzy said, "to prioritize strangers who live in Mississippi over strangers who live in Ontario over strangers who live in Malawi. " He was like, do you agree with that? Because that might be an interesting disagreement if so. But maybe we should get Ozzy in here to actually fully defend that. I don't actually fully agree with that. I think my own moral framework has like two axes. One of them, and this is what I said to him earlier this week, and he was like, we should we should get on and talk about this.

Kelsey’s values include Contractualism

-Kelsey Piper-

One of them is humanitarian. It's like if there's a person and they are dying, they are suffering, they are unfree in various ways, I would prefer that not be the case. And this is about the same no matter where they live. I don't feel like more strongly if I learn that somebody is dying in Mississippi or Ontario or Malawi. I'm all like, yeah, let's have them not die.

-Kelsey Piper-

The other is more like. . .

Contractualist, are they somebody who I feel would do this for me if our positions were flipped? Do I feel that I have obligations to them, you know, either as a consequence of past relationships we've had or, yeah, as a consequence of what I feel like they would do for me if our positions were flipped?

-Kelsey Piper-

Um, so I totally care about some strangers more than about other strangers, but it's about strangers who I feel share my values, my fairly universalist, fairly like broad values. And it's about strangers who I feel like if, I could be saved with like 12 dollars for a year of medication they would fork out 12 dollars.

-Kelsey Piper-

I, you know, I don't actually like the far right at all. I thought it was pretty cool when you guys didn't have any political power. But I think that almost everybody has some things that we have common ground on. And it's just like, in some sense, wasteful not to understand what those things are and therefore not to pursue like that common ground that does exist.

ON ANIMAL WELFARE

Futurist Right: So one of the issues that I found interesting was that you didn't seem as aware as I thought you might be during our conversation of the relatively large, I think, consensus forming on the far right as opposed to the mainstream right on animal welfare issues. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what draws you to those and then I'll talk about what draws me to those and we'll see if there's like a shared sentiment there.

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, I was kind of pleasantly surprised when you said, oh, yeah, also, we care about animal suffering. Most people don't, you know, so I was definitely starting from the assumption that most people on the far right don't either. I think that most of the animals we raise for food can suffer, can suffer in ways that are pretty analogous to the ways that we suffer.

-Kelsey Piper-

I think I wrote at one point, I don't know what it's like to be a dog, but I suspect that what it's like to be a dog kicked in the ribs is a lot like what it's like to be me kicked in the ribs. I don't know what it's like to be a chicken, but I expect what it's like to be a chicken forced to breathe ammonia is a lot like what it's like to be me forced to breathe ammonia. I think some of those more fundamental things come first and are very low down. And that means I think we're causing an extraordinary amount of suffering at like a really tragic scale. And that saddens me. It seems fixable. Like, I think that if we were throwing our energy as a civilization into not causing tons of suffering through industrial factory farming, then maybe we wouldn't cause enormous suffering through industrial factory farming.

-Kelsey Piper-

And it's one of those issues that's very difficult because so few people care. You know, I think it's like tough to feel like something really, really matters and everybody around you is participating in it. And, you know, it's hard sometimes to see what the next step forward there is. I used to be optimistic the next step forward there was like fake meat stuff but I've gotten a bit more pessimistic about that over the last couple of years.

Futurist Right: So, yeah, that's actually one of the areas where there's considerable disagreement on the far right about. It's largely anti-fake meat, but it is very strongly pro more humane conditions for animals. We're welfarists, largely, I think would be the term that you would understand.

Kelsey Piper: Is your anti-fake meat, anti-plant based meat, or is it also against like successfully growing, uh, animal like meat in, in a lab to be clear? We don't know how to do this yet. It's pretty far off, but like, are you against that on principle or would that be all right?

Futurist Right: I'm genuinely not a hardliner on, on any of, of the, like I personally, like culturally, um, very pro, all those things, though there's a lot of disagreement on the right about them. So if you want collaboration that would actually work, from the far right, that is, you won't get any from the mainstream right, I think. There's been many efforts to obtain it for, by now going on nearly 20 years, managed to sway National Review, sometimes Commentary Magazine, I believe. It's done nothing.

Kelsey Piper: So my impression. . . I think this is about fundamentals. I think that farmers are a powerful constituency and animal agriculture is a powerful constituency. And like convincing intellectuals is not going to have a bunch of results as long as like there is a business interest that is incredibly strongly opposed. Like there's a thing where senators will sometimes care about animal welfare, but never senators from the states that do a lot of animal agriculture. Um, yeah, it would be cool if you guys have a way around that, but I think it's fundamentally not about the intellectual part. . .

The Center-Left / Left distinction

Futurist Right: So that I think serves as an interesting introductory point to the question of moral value differences, as opposed to a difference in having moral values. Nothing that EA says is inconsistent with the general friendly expressions of the left or non-friendly depending on your perspective obviously I don't think of them as friendly expressions whatsoever but nothing is nothing should trigger hostility and yet you trigger enormous amounts from the left as well as the right but from the right I believe the difference is the reasons are very different while from the left it's just that you're trying to call them to their values.

Kelsey Piper: So I do get enormous hostility from the left. I spent like a lot of this morning getting yelled at by a bunch of people over what I thought was a like true and pretty moderate comment, which was that there is more controversy about Khalil's deportation than like the BYU computer vision guys deportation. I don't think that it's just a, like it feels very self-aggrandizing to be like, ah, they just hate us because we are actually living up to the values that they have. I don't think that is a zero of the picture, I think a more fundamental divide as it often seems to me is that a lot on the left don't want the system to work. If the system works, if America's power is exercised well and wisely in the world, if the aid programs we're doing are highly effective and save tons of lives, if we win people over and have large majorities and have like reform that makes immigration work like 20% better for the people of America and that feels instinctively like a loss because those are institutions that a lot of people on the left, like fundamentally don't want to exist. And I, I like America. I want it to succeed.

-Kelsey Piper-

Um, and I actually think that a lot of the center left left distinctions I find myself driven into the most are kind of ones that are about like, are we rooting for, um, you know, for America is a way of framing it that I don't think that they would agree with. No, maybe they would. Um, but that feels more clear.

Futurist Right: Um, so, so there's, there's the hard left, uh, opposition that you get. Uh, and there's, there's a lot to explore there too, but I'm thinking more of just like the, the normie, the normie on the streets, whether right wing, especially if right wing, but you can somewhat understand it if it's right wing, uh, But also just your normie leftist still just gets a sentiment of horror and alienation when they see the standard EA pitches, despite them not having, I think, I can't explain in terms of normal left-wing statements. And by the way, I'm using left descriptively as a general umbrella for anything, including liberal center. So I would call you a center leftist.

Kelsey Piper: I think this is like a quirk of the right like among the centrist democrats and left democrats and like marxists that I spend most of my time talking to like nobody would use left to refer to the centrist democrats like we are using those words for different internal ball games but I do understand what you're saying I just appreciate you offering the translation.

Futurist Right: Well, I mean, I suppose I shouldn't object because this might take us off a digression, but you do realize eventually, no matter what the regime is and no matter how it was established, we do tend to start speaking of a left faction and a right faction, even within right, far right or far left parties and systems and institutions. So I think it's actually a reasonable thing to just divide the U. S. into left-right, and then the liberal right is perhaps, and the liberal lefts are their own center left and center rights. At least until things dramatically shift.

Kelsey Piper: Right and I'm Left of center in the United States by any definition. Every time I argue with people to my left, I'm like, keep in mind, I voted for Kamala Harris. I wasn't even particularly close to not voting for Kamala Harris. That means next election, you have to win people who are, you know, to the right of me or like at least have some opinions that drew them to Trump or you will win fewer votes right like I've also heard Trace who I see is listening to the call say the same thing like we're the center left you don't have to like us you know it's completely fine to dislike us and argue with us and try and change our minds and everything but you need people to our right to have a majority in the united states today and yeah in that sense I'm on the left.

Kelsey is not inspired by the success of Hitler

Futurist Right: So let's get back into the general objections, though. There aren't even objections necessarily raised. Just you'd make the EA pitch to your normal normie left-wing person. Not far left, mind you. Just your center-left normie Democrat. And it doesn't seem to land. If it had landed, success in animal welfare would be far, far greater than it is now. Why do you think that is? Do you think it's just entrenched interests? or is there something that's not getting through and why is it not getting through and why is it that there's and I'm surprised that you weren't that you're not somewhat aware of this because it's almost like a meme at this point that the allegedly and I would argue accurately greatest far, far, far right party was very obsessed with animal welfare.

Kelsey Piper: No, no, okay, that I was aware of. But, you know, I try to, like, it would not have occurred to me to go, well, Hitler was a vegetarian, so maybe you guys are vegetarians, because I don't think that Hitler used good reasoning to arrive at literally any of his beliefs. And I can't fathom the kind of person who takes him as anything other than an example of like how badly it is possible to fail at everything by being a fascist and how much it will destroy everything.

Futurist Right: The main reason for raising Hitler so early on, I'm impressed how quickly we got into Hitler. Well, I got, I suppose I introduced him, was there's simply as an example of there can be groups that at the edge of society that quickly become the society. The people on your left who are always criticizing you probably will be doing so more now I think are somewhat right about that.

Kelsey Piper: I think it's true that fringe groups can become mainstream in a scarily rapid way. I'm against that.

Futurist Right: Sorry?

Kelsey Piper: Sorry. So I agree that fringe groups can go mainstream like quite quickly. And I think that mostly when they've done that, it's been ludicrously damaging. Like the history of either communist revolutions or fascist revolutions is just wreckage and destruction. You know, I like, honestly, you were a little while ago talking about why didn't EA make it bigger? And I actually think that Ideologies that do well at, like, very rapidly taking over tend to be ones that are, like, really bad in various ways. It doesn't feel like a coincidence to me. Liberalism has to build itself up slowly. Even liberal revolutions have tended to be, like, somewhat less revolutionary. Yeah, I don't know if that's a point of disagreement, but it does seem to me like fringe things get mainstream, and that is usually bad for everybody.

Futurist Right: Well, perhaps, but it's interesting here. So we're looking at a sentiment that, like right now, you could send out a poll to people in this space. Can you send out a poll?

Kelsey Piper: I don't know.

Brooke Rollins sucks and I should do better research

Futurist Right: One of our large figures. Put out a poll on factory farming. One of you that's relatively far right. Roko, I think, is the. . . Yeah, I think Roko would be the right person to do that. And get back the results. Or hell, look at Bronze Age Pervert, Raw Egg Nationalist. Many of these are almost meme accounts. But their statements when Trump's agriculture secretary, I believe, was announced and said something about bringing back. . . Sorry about that [mic-cut-out].

Kelsey Piper: Yeah Trump's doing a lot of terrible stuff on animals. Terrible stuff on slaughterhouses, terrible stuff on California's Prop 12.

Futurist Right: Yes. Well, I'm going to agree on animals specifically now. I think we have a lot of other disagreements, but where. . . [Kelsey **- I think you're right! ] ADDED NOTE FR: So Kelsey's laughing here because I somehow missed the March 17 Ag-Sec's directive, extending the permit for faster kill lines, which increases the suffering of animals being slaughtered. My bad. I suppose knowing of her efforts to bring back crueler living conditions for animals in her attack on Prop 12, I should have reflexively believed that she'd also do something to make their deaths crueler. I'm retracting my qualifier. Yes, the Trump admin has also been doing bad things on slaughterhouses. NOTE ENDS.

Do Normie Moral “Values” point to anything?

FR: I'm trying to establish like the general idea that I'm pushing for, which is that somehow, on the extremes that to some extent are reviled, things that are such basic sentiments that you don't really actually need to explain them much almost immediately get enormous support. And they don't in the mainstream, no matter how long those extremes try to push them.

-Futurist Right: And I'm wondering, are you sure that when people express moral positions normally, when normies express moral positions, they are actually pointing to some sentiment that you think you share with them?

Kelsey Piper: So yes, I think they are. I think for most people, philosophy is a fairly small part of what they do, and it is integrated with the rest of what they do in complicated ways. Like if I just think about my neighbors or the other parents at the school or the people I run into at the park or talk to in the line at the grocery store, I think that they care a lot about our world. I think they tend to be very moved by their desire to make the world better along the terms they understand it. I think the thing that prevents them from taking crazy ideas seriously is usually a combination of it would be really costly, like I do think that it is harder for almost everybody to take an idea seriously when taking it seriously would mean losing something that's really important to them and really meaningful to them. And I think it's when the idea is presented by people who, like, frankly, they don't want to emulate.

EA Failed the “Is This Good Test” but could’ve succeeded.

We just suck.

Kelsey Piper: Like, I think this is the other big part of why EA didn't get bigger, which I think about a lot, is that I think most people, when they looked at EAs, they didn't necessarily see something that they were like, if I lived my life like that, I would feel good about my life. My life would be amazing and meaningful and great. I think people who did feel that way do tend to become EAs. And I think on some level, an analysis a lot of people are running is more like, is this good? Like, is this part of a flourishing life? And unfortunately for a lot of people, vegetarianism doesn't pass the is this good test. And I think EA could easily but has not like succeeded at passing the is this good test. And frankly, I think the far right, like, obviously fails the is this good test because you guys, like, suck. Like, you seem very. . . You're so online, you hate so many people.

The Based Competition

Kelsey Piper: Did you read Richard Hanania's sort of characterization of, you know, some people on the right meeting up at a bar to have a based-ness competition?

Futurist Right: Yes, I did read that. And. . . I agree with some of it. And he's doing this hypocritically, [Kelsey: oh he is? ] by the way, because he actually shares and understands the instincts behind all the things that are being raised and those haven't really changed for him in any ideologically consistent way. Like if you read Hoste and you read Richard. . . you immediately understand that the main reason for the shift is purely strategic at the beginning and then who he hates more at the moment.

Kelsey Piper: So many of us are guilty of changing who we are based on who we hate the most. But I think there's a thing where. . . The far-right community just strikes me as immiserating and posturing-based and minimally rewarding of putting in tons of work and building something really impressive. There's a lot of dissident, light-right people who I read who just write really good, interesting stuff. And on the far-right, it's so much posturing. It's so much stuff that's just at a level of analysis where it's kind of unclear what the real world conversation we're having in the first place was. Like, I just, it doesn't feel intellectually fertile.

Futurist Right: And, and, and, Oh, sorry. By the way, everyone, I'm going to be letting Kelsey speak pretty extemporaneously. Maybe we're going to keep this space going on longer than was expected because we have quite a lot of ground to cover. But I obviously object to the characterization, to many of the characterizations she's raising. I just want keep this somewhat focused. All of you who read my work understand that I am rather radical on all these issues. Continue, Kelsey.

Kelsey Piper: Sorry, did you want to move on to something else? I obviously have these very strong disagreements and I don't want to hide them, but I also don't want to just come on here and lecture you. I do want it to be a dialogue. So if you have a question, I'm sort of happy to move on to that.

Can Nothing drive Kelsey to Hatred?

Futurist Right: So, yeah, I was thinking, what if on every particular issue, the far right position, the level of hate that you sometimes see on the far right, quite frankly, quite often, was based on ideas that were just as basic as, this pig is being tortured, I don't want them to suffer, I don't understand why people that say that this is a bad thing still eat and support the practice, and hatred is eventually just the result of feeling like no one actually takes their moral values seriously and holding those moral values seriously.

Kelsey Piper: So I hold some unusual moral values very, very seriously. I feel frustrated when people around me do things that I think are really bad. But that doesn't turn you to hatred. Like, radicalization to me just feels like deciding not to take responsibility for having an emotional orientation towards other people and towards the world that you endorse and that's justified. Like you can say, I think you guys are screwing this up really badly and still see people's like the other categories in which you respect them. You can respect somebody for being a fantastic like designer and programmer and also acknowledge that their taste in food is terrible. And I think you can do this with like shared and unshared like ideals to some degree. You can say, look, I really, really admire how attentive you are when parenting to really doing right by your kids. And I don't agree with the fact that you eat chicken. But I've made my case to you. You've made your case to me. Like we have to live in a society. So I just maybe like causally some of the like hostility and seething sexism and seething racism and stuff. Maybe causally some of that is about being disappointed in people for not living up to their standards, your standards.

Kelsey Piper: But seething hatred is not a very good response to that. It's not very productive. It doesn't seem very intellectually fertile. So I'm kind of like, have you considered relating in a different way to your disappointment with people?

The Haitian hypothetical

Futurist Right: So let's think of the kinds of things that would trigger hatred. Let's say you believed that despite America's wealth Now, you didn't you weren't aware of how wealthy the U. S. was, but you thought it was just a normal European country, maybe - but nonetheless, despite America's wealth, America had the child mortality rate of Haiti or the infant mortality rate of Haiti. And one party was clearly responsible for that. Would it not be right to hate a person that takes such a beautiful country and gives it the infant mortality rate of Haiti?

Kelsey hates Pete Marocco for gutting her favorite aid programs but would still save him from hell.

Kelsey Piper: I feel like this isn't like kind of absurd hypothetical. Okay, so I do kind of hate Pete Marocco in particular because he went in and he trashed a ton of like super high performing programs as far as I can tell, basically because he thought that it was bad for America to ever do any humanitarian aid. And that is the angriest I've ever been at someone is these programs that I think are fantastic and just destroyed them.

And I spent a while sort of thinking about how I wanted to relate to Pete Morocco. And it's going to sound a little bit melodramatic, but I think it's like I felt really intensely about this. And eventually I thought to myself, I hope there's not a hell.

-Kelsey-Piper-

I think there's probably not a hell. As far as I can tell, there's not. If there is, then I will spend as long as I have rescuing everybody from it. And that includes Pete Marocco. But I would get him out last. That is the most I've ever hated someone.

Would Domestic atrocities justify hatred?

Futurist Right: So that's fascinating. And I can tell you feel strongly about this. And this is for programs that are largely abroad. So just imagine someone doing something. I'm not agreeing that he has done those things, but I'm saying imagine someone and not doing it to a poor country either, doing it at home, at home in the United States a party mismanages something so poorly that it ends up with the U. S. having the infant mortality rate of Haiti. You say that's an insane idea and it is. But if you thought it was true, would you hate the United, would you hate that party? Would hatred be the appropriate response?

Kelsey Piper: I can specify here that while I imagine Haiti has pretty bad infant mortality rates, I don't actually know Haiti specific infant mortality specific facts. And that like globally, infant mortality rates have just been collapsing incredibly fast because free markets are really good and antibiotics are really good and vaccines are really good. So I think Haiti level infant mortality might also be 1970s level U. S mortality like don't hold me to the exact numbers I would have to look it up but my instincts are that infant mortality is like very sensitive to what year we're living in more than it's sensitive to country um but but if we're assuming. . .

Futurist Right: But you do agree that if something insane like that were to happen it would probably justify transformation of how you feel?

Kelsey Piper: If US mortality went back to 1970s levels, I would be horrified. If someone had intentionally engineered US infant mortality levels going back to 1970s levels, I would be horrified. I still think I might not hate them.

-Kelsey Piper-

I think it would depend on, okay, so people who believe that abortion is equivalent to murder already believe this, right? They believe that the US kills like 20 30 percent of all of its babies right? I have close friends who believe this they're pro-life they're pretty sure that every abortion is a murder. I respect them. They respect me. They don't hate me even though we disagree and I think it's because we disagree. I imagine they would feel very differently if I was like yeah I agree that abortion is murder i just think murdering babies is cool, I think our friendship wouldn't survive that but But presumably, yeah, so it would depend for me in this hypothetical. Are we talking about somebody who was like, I'm going to kill a lot of babies because I think it's the right thing to do? Or are we sort of imagining a situation where. . . like they thought something was the right thing to do. Like, okay, they thought slowing down economic growth to do more redistribution was the right thing to do. I know a lot of people that think that, but maybe slowing that economic growth down actually increases infant mortality by a comparable amount. Then I think they're wrong, but I like mostly don't hate them, right? I mostly just want to like convince them that they are making a mistake by their and my values that we both share. But sure, I'll grant you that if they're like, yeah, I think killing those babies is good. Sure, yeah, now I'm not feeling very sympathetic to this person. Also, somebody sends a comment, 1950s U. S. is the best analogy for Haiti's mortality rate. For anybody else who, like, finds that a useful intuition.

Futurist Right: So here's what I find fascinating. What you call an insane hypothetical, which was hard for you to grapple with, and well, I found several things about your response fascinating, but let's start with that. Are you aware at all what I'm getting at?

Kelsey Piper: I think I like read a tweet at some point that was justifiably getting angry at someone for sort of claiming in passing that the U. S. had the world's highest infant mortality rate, which is like a completely bonkers claim that anybody who put 10 seconds of thought into it hadn't. But yeah, I think when I read that, my reaction was, oh, somebody has never thought about infant mortality rates in their life.

Aaron Sorkin and Scott Alexander

Futurist Right: So this is Scott Alexander writing in 2014 on why Left wingers to tolerate right wingers. That's the main theme of Untitled. [ADDED NOTE AND CORRECTION - the actual name of the post mentioned is I CAN TOLERATE ANYTHING EXCEPT THE OUTGROUP. Untitled is a different, though arguably in some sense related post by Scott Alexander. NOTE ENDS] There are many sub themes, but he throws in a lot of concessions on that question. So he writes of having his proud memories of spending his Fourth of July's debunking people's heartfelt feelings of patriotism. And then he quotes the famous Aaron, infamous I think Aaron Sorkin rant from the newsroom in 2012, which, by the way, Scott was not the only one. You had liberal after liberal after liberal commentator reposting this like it was the greatest thing that ever happened, except it might be too preachy. Quote, "What makes America the greatest country in the world? It's not the greatest country in the world, worth 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, " and the often fake stats go on. There's a little bit more in the quotes. And we transition to Scott's comments. All of this is true, of course, "but it's weird that it's such a classic interest of members of the Blue Tribe. " Right-wingers don't do that, vaguely, is where he goes. Are you getting the impression that the hatred that the far left has of you might be under the belief that you actually agree with them on things as insane as the U. S. having the infant mortality rate of Haiti, which are clearly insane, and not caring?

Kelsey Piper: So on the infant mortality rate Sorkin quote I think my, my reaction is that people didn't read that closely. It was a list of like 10 statistics and they, one of them was completely deranged and they just missed it because they don't think about infant mortality rate as much as they should. Everybody should think about infant mortality rate all the time. It's actually just one of the most like encouraging and inspiring stories.

Futurist Right: Okay. I agree. I agree. [Kelsey Piper]: Sorry. Sorry. You had a deeper point.

Futurist Right: But actually, the quote continues with things like "out of" though not the part that Scott quoted. And this was, Sorkin is basically as far as how he presents himself, a liberal moderate. He runs into patriotism. He runs with patriotism very well all the time in the Newsroom, which was basically like the cultural touchstone of people that are now Democratic Party staffers. So he's not a far Leftist. Most of the people sharing this around were not far leftists. They agreed with the general point that is made later on about how we need more 1960s anti-poverty programs or something. And yet they found the arguments, the reasons raised didn't even warrant checking. How does that happen if you actually like the country in question? Like how do you get to a position where, so another quote in there was something like, the U. S. is, out of 197 countries in the world, 180 of them have freedom. Like how does a liberal hear, the U. S. has freedom, no 120 maybe, has freedom. How does a liberal hear, the U. S. is just like 120 countries in support of another point and just wave that away?

Motivated Ignorance?

Kelsey Piper: So obviously part of the answer is just ignorance, right? But I do think it's a sort of motivated ignorance. I think that it's often appealing to believe that the United States is like, if you're talking about how bad the United States is and how much cooler other places are, you feel cool and worldly, you don't feel like you're being self-important making the case for your own country. And everybody tends to see the best of other countries, but the whole of theirs, right? Like I know a lot of people who are younger than us and have an impression of a lot of other countries, mostly from TikTok, where you get seeing super airbrushed influencers, whereas in their own country, they can walk outside, they can see, you know, that there are homeless people, they can see that there are problems that aren't being solved. And they just don't do a good job of like extending that to elsewhere. But if you aren't looking at that data, then it's not. But then you can just say, okay, but why isn't that data circulating? Why is it instead this wrong data that's circulating? I guess part of my answer is like, this is a 2014 meme. Like, you know, I don't know that that's actually a huge formative element of modern.

THE ACLU

Futurist Right: Well, no, it's not. So it's not a formative element of the modern system. Well, to some extent it is, but I would say the newsroom, no, no, the newsroom is the show, the later show. It didn't really have much of an impact apart from that speech going around, but not really forming many people's worldviews. The West Wing formed a lot more worldviews. But I used that, and this is actually 2012, so this is before, like, the great explosion of wokeness that purged a lot of people, many of them people that you like. Hell, freedom. Freedom of speech was still a liberal value back then, right? At least coded that way. Like, the ACLU would still be defending rights to freedom of speech for, until, like, 2021, they started caving, I believe.

Kelsey Piper: So I think I wouldn't so much think of the ACLU, you know, defending the right of Nazis to march as the ACLU, like free speech having been a left value. I would say more that I think the ACLU used to not be very left and used to have like a bunch, mostly principled civil libertarians. And a lot of the people that it got when it was anti-Trump were more anti-Trump than principled civil libertarians is my guess of what's going on there.

Anti-Americanism and Extremism

Futurist Right: But I'm thinking, if you have relatively normie liberals, if you have a society where, like, there are plenty of statements you could say about the U. S. , criticisms that would match with the right-wing moral code, and that would immediately inflame a right-winger, simply because of how they're talking about his country, in the past, at least. And yet, you have normie libs, like, Sorkin is not a radical. can just casually say, and he's putting this in the mouth of a conservative commentator in his show, “207 sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom”, as a rebuttal to the idea that America is great because it has freedom. Do you not get the instinct here that there actually is, as the main position, as the default position, hatred towards the country? It's just that a liberal doesn't dwell on it too much. It's just in the background. It's just what they fundamentally feel.

Kelsey Piper: Can I, like, restate what I understand you to be saying and make sure I'm getting, like, what you're driving at?

Futurist Right: Absolutely. Please.

Kelsey Piper: Yes. It sounds to me like you're saying you think that the popularity of these kind of, like, America actually sucks memes, especially ones that have some, like, obvious errors in them, are, like, not just a, like, throwaway. They're indicative of probably a deeper attitude, which is, like, basically hostile to America. That basically it's bad that we have America. Basically it would be better if it didn't exist. and that, like, people who are saying this, probably, maybe they don't think about it very much, maybe they don't act on this feeling, but, like, fundamentally, they would be happy if we didn't have America, because they think it's, like, objectively pretty bad, and most other countries are better. Is that kind of what you're saying?

Futurist Right: I'm saying that would be the reasonable conclusion of how they should feel, but it's more like, It's a trivial, it's like a trivial assumption that doesn't inflame them as far as the liberal centrist, well, the left centrist. And it actually does inflame them if they are further to the left.

Kelsey Piper: Like liberals say this but don't feel strongly about it and people on the left say it and feel strongly about it, basically okay yeah I think I agree with the claim that liberals often pay lip service to these like critiques of America that I think are misguided because I think America is like a really good country or you know I felt more strongly about this two months ago that there was absolutely nowhere i would rather live under any plausible circumstances and leftists often take the same ideas, but where liberals are kind of paying lip service, like, oh yeah, I'm a broad-minded person who admits that Europe is better than us at everything. Leftists often like quite sincerely believe that America is fundamentally bad and shouldn't exist and a lot of them like would endorse the destruction of America for various reasons like some feeling that it's like founded on historical atrocities some feeling that all capitalist societies shouldn't exist some sincere anarchists, lot of sincere anarchists out there, yeah I think I agree that the liberals are kind of nodding to a thing often which they shouldn't because it's not true And on the left, there are more people who are like sincerely anti-American.

Futurist Right: So I would argue that just in the same way that the normie, hell, the normie conservative will still say, yeah, it's bad to torture animals. If he doesn't know what you're priming him to say, right? If you ask him, is it is it OK to torture animals? Is it good to torture animals? He'll he'll just give you. Yeah, obviously not. Then you confront him with factory farms, and now it demands something of him. So now starts, if anything, signaling vice in opposition. Like, why do you care so much? I'm saying that the driving ideology, the thing that people agree with, is something that should drive you to rage if you actually believe it. And that the liberal position of not feeling rage about it as a default, I think, is indicative of not actually being concerned rather than disbelieving in it.

Kelsey Piper: Hmm. So. . . I might agree with that. I have a bunch of like, uh, bounds I want to put on it or something. I think certainly sometimes that's what's going on. Sometimes people don't get upset because while they like would, would say the idea, they don't actually feel the idea. Uh, and sometimes people on the extremes, I think I would literally say people end up on the extremes because they take their political commitments somewhat more seriously and many political commitments taken seriously will make you an extremist.

Futurist Right: Now, earlier you were, and I admire the honesty, right? Like many people here feel the same way in the other direction. You were saying that it would be great if the far right had remained ostracized in the past. And like, I agree that from your general worldview, that would be great. I'm wondering if that doesn't lead to a world where less things are strongly felt in general.

Hatred doesn’t work for Kelsey

Kelsey Piper: Okay, so I think you can be a person who has deeply held convictions that you act on and who is also not an extremist. I think it takes more work. I think it takes more integration of the things you care about. I think it takes a lot more perspective taking and like ability to have empathy for people who are doing things that you think are really bad. I think it takes, frankly, some of the exact, it takes like valorizing and deliberately building some of the exact traits that it seems like you're kind of trying to discourage. Like you're kind of trying to say, is it not righteous to hate those people? Is it not like just to hate those people? And I'm kind of like, man, hating people seems to work very poorly. Like I have almost never accomplished something I cared about because of hating people.

Futurist Right: No, please go ahead.

Kelsey Piper: But if you have the ability to like have good theory of mind, understand where people are coming from, hold to your principles, but like actually be willing to defend them, then I think it is possible to feel very, very strongly about things and not become. . . An extremist in the derogatory sense, I mean it, you will still probably have some positions that are extreme in that, like, almost no one holds them. But you will not be an extremist in the sense of, like, being unable to, you know, constructively participate in society with respect for other people in it and, like, build a pluralistic society where people disagree on things and manage to disagree. build in the areas where they share and not destroy in the areas where they don't share, you know?

Futurist Right: So, the interesting thing here is, like, your main criticism here is hate, but. . .

Kelsey Piper: I actually don't think I've said that word. I think you've said that word. I think it's. . . I personally don't care very much about what's in your heart. I care a ton about how you treat people. I care a ton about whether every person is treated as an individual based on who they are and not based on their color of their skin or their national origin. What's in people's heart, I've never really considered very much of my business.

Futurist Right: So, yeah, I suppose that that would be a good a good default because you can't really know the hearts. But let's say you absolutely knew the hearts like you absolutely knew why people were doing things and they bore no relation to anything you consider like a moral instinct. Would that not change how you thought of them, how you evaluated them in any way?

Kelsey Piper: I feel like this is like a hypothetical that's sufficiently far. Like, I think that in fact, whenever I understand people better, I notice significant commonality with them. Like in practice, understanding moves me closer to commonalities with people and not farther away. If you imagine, like, literal aliens that function on a completely different basis than us, that we don't know if they have conscious experiences at all, that they're pursuing goals that are, like, totally orthogonal to our goals. Well, okay, this is kind of large language models, and I try and treat them respectfully, but I, you know, wouldn't spend a ton of my money to save one of them from dying. Although I do save them if they request that in case in the future it's cheaper to save them from ceasing to exist. Okay, maybe the answer is that even with something that's very alien, I still tend to try to relate to it as a potential ally.

On Just Deserts and Extremism

Futurist Right: So what I find interesting is, and I think this is like a fundamental disagreement, and there are a few people like you, I think, that are genuinely sincere about the - we don't want anyone to suffer position -. But I think both on the far left and on the right, there is an idea of just desserts in their morality. There is an idea that it's good to some extent for bad people to suffer. And yet So both on the far right and the conservative mainstream right, just the mainstream, the right in general tends to hold that sentiment. So it's interesting how the reason the main the main thing that you seem to be able to raise in opposition to the far right is simply a sentiment that it holds widely with the entire right. do you see where I'm kind of getting at this like it's not just it's not necessarily the specific disagreements but it's the sentiment overall sentiment that they share with the mainstream right.

Kelsey Piper: That seems descriptively true to some degree um and like in in a parallel way to where lots of people on the left are low-key Anti-American but some are like really sincere and intense about it.

Futurist Right: So and I suppose if you if you have no idea of just desserts and if you're not particularly concerned with what's in people's hearts. . .

Kelsey Piper: I wouldn't say I have no idea of just desserts. I think I tend to value people's welfare, even if I'm really, really mad at them. but I would not go so far as to say that I'm like totally indifferent between whether a bad thing happens to a person who did something to deserve it versus an innocent person. I would definitely rather the bad thing happened to the person who did something bad. But certainly just desserts plays a much smaller role in my day-to-day reasoning.

Futurist Right: Yeah, I think we've reached like a good understanding of how you feel on a basic level. The interesting thing I would note is that For a lot of people, when someone says something like that, it's so outside their experience that they imagine that it must be a cover for something else, right?

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, for sure.

Futurist Right: And most of the time it is, it's the cover of the side that's losing or that doesn't feel confident of its power yet and doesn't want to fully play their hand. Would you, would you agree with that too?

Kelsey Piper: hmm. . . I think I would say that that's treating people as like slightly more coherent than I think they are. I think they have a lot of impulses and some of those are impulses to be generous to others. And some of them are fairness impulses and some of them are, you know, humanitarian impulses. And yeah, A lot of, like, which of those are ascendant in a person has to do with what's rewarded by their friends, what's, like, punished around them, what the person who pisses them off the most reminds them of, stuff like that. And I definitely agree that when you are in power, some of the impulses to, like, lay down the law are ascendant, and some of the impulses to be principled are descendant, like, that power is bad for principles. This is a classic observation, right? Dating way back. And so I agree that people, when they're in power, don't have these principles as much. I think you can say that's insincere. It's not like I would say, oh, it's unfair to call that insincere. But I think I would more say that we are all a product of our environments and some environments encourage principle. And a lot of environments are actively hostile to principle. And a lot of people today, while there are principles they would endorse, are frequently in atmospheres that are sort of, hostile to principle. And honestly, one of the things that has bothered me about the new right is that it seems pretty hostile to principle in a lot of ways. Like it will turn on somebody who's like, no, this thing is actually crosses a line for me. And I've always felt there is something valuable and important and beautiful about being willing to draw a line anywhere, even if it's your own weird place where nobody else would draw it and say, no, that more than that, I cannot tolerate. And I feel like if you're on the right, but somebody says something, something that you think is over the line and you say, OK, that's over the line for me that I will not countenance. People are like, well, loser, like, you know, it doesn't feel to me like a culture that encourages principle. So.

Futurist Right: There is, I'm going to admit that there is obviously an element of tribalism to all groups. Perhaps, and because to a large extent, the far right agrees that some degree of tribalism is healthy it may sometimes encourage more of it than other movements. That being said, I do think, like, who would you think of as your principled dissenter that got kicked out because they're principled?

Kelsey Piper: So I gotta say, you guys all use like weird screen names and it's like quite hard for me, who's not good at names to start with, to keep track of who's who. But I feel like reasonably often conservatives that I follow because I tend to follow conservatives if I see them dissent once. That's like my principle. If somebody is all MAGA, then I'm not generally going to follow them. But if they say once, like, okay, this is a bridge too far for me, then I tend to follow. And, like, for some people, I started following them when Trump cut off Ukraine temporarily. And they were like, that's a bridge too far for me. And so I started following them. And I saw other people jumping on them because it was, like, kind of unacceptable to them that that was their bridge too far, but also kind of just that there was one. And I think I saw some other people who, like, yeah, they. . . broke from MAGA over like, you know, the deportations to El Salvador or whatever. And then other people were like, you know, it's a sort of hostility towards somebody saying, no, I draw the line there. At least some of that.

Futurist Right: I'm debating whether we should go down that line. How long do we have for this?

Kelsey Piper: Like 12 more minutes. Oh, wow.

Futurist Right: Wow. All right. We've got a few things to skip to and then we'll have Quick question from Roko, I suppose? Damn so much ground to cover. So you mentioned your objections to part of the thing of things description of the moral circle, right?

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, well, I mean, I think Ozzy was probably describing their moral circle, but the way it works, the thing they described isn't like precisely how it works for me.

Kelsey’s reciprocal impulse covers many aid recipients

Futurist Right: And you mentioned that to some extent you understand the reciprocal impulse.

Kelsey Piper: Oh, I very strongly have it. I feel a lot more obligation to anybody who I think would do the same for me. And a lot of like where the foreign aid stuff punched me in the gut was accounts of people who had relied on us, who had in their reliance on us become advocates for us and for our goals and stuff like that. And we pulled the rug out from under them. That was like, like I am upset on a humanitarian level about anyone dying, but I was specifically on top of that, like deeply upset by like people who I felt like were doing everything they could to deal with us in good faith, uh, being harmed for it when it was very, very easy to not do that.

Morally arbitrary distinctions

Futurist Right: so, so what, what, what, what distinctions would you consider arbitrary and do arbitrary distinctions matter, uh, in, in your, in your, in your definition of whether you care about whether the person will reciprocate. Like, let's say you believe the reason why they're not reciprocating is entirely arbitrary or why they are reciprocating is entirely arbitrary. Let's table the idea of whether it is or isn't arbitrary. People within your country, to some extent arbitrary, like there are borders. Our definitions on the far right are somewhat more, less arbitrary, but to some extent there are borders.

-Futurist Right-

Nonetheless, that someone's in your country makes them more likely to reciprocate. So do you care more about someone in America than abroad?

Kelsey Piper: So I don't even think that like, like it feels to me like such a poor proxy that you can like almost always get like wildly more information if you ask that person like two sentences about how they see the world. And so in like almost every situation, what I think of someone is about them, like, and not about what country they're from. And like. . . To me, the question of what would you do for me, just maybe some of this is that a lot of my friends are international. A lot of the people I know are not from the United States. And I notice literally no difference between the kinds of people who choose to come to the United States, including the kinds of people who choose to come to the United States for like lower wage jobs. I'm not just talking about like software engineers who come here to join the tech scene or whatever. I do not notice a difference in the degree to which I think those people would go way out of their way for me and the degree to which I feel obligated to go way out of their way for them. Like, it just doesn't feel to me like it's very closely related. Like, if you wanted to be controversial, I do think that, like, what religion people adhere to probably affects how charitable they are, and therefore a little bit affects how charitable I feel inclined to be to them. Like, that's at least not a useless one.

Futurist Right: And religion is, like, it's a matter of, like, fundamental, like, basic human principles and values and moral frameworks and whatever. It's not. . . necessarily innate, though some would argue in some sense it can be. That being the case, do you think it would be entirely reasonable for a country to have restrictions on immigrants on the basis of religion?

Kelsey wants to regulate immigration with insurance

Kelsey Piper: So I think that, okay, you want my like galaxy brain. I think that we should sell insurance. People should be able to buy insurance when they come into the United States against committing a crime or like a serious crime - I don't care about speeding tickets - or like ending up to needing to rely on assistance. And then-They can provide the insurance company with lots of information about their values, their worldview, their abilities, stuff like that. If there are friends who want them there, their friends can help pay for their insurance and stuff like that. then instead of trying to like draw these insane generalizations, which I think are like really destructive and like horrible to people totally needlessly, you would at least be looking at the actual thing that I think almost everybody cares about, which is like, is this person to be able to follow the rules when they're here? Is this person going to be, like are we asking taxpayers to spend a lot of money to help this person get on their feet? And if so, are the taxpayers on board? Do they want to do that? Um, And, yeah, then you're just asking the question you actually care about directly.

Futurist Right: So this is, to some extent, a factual disagreement and a disagreement about plausibility. Like, you think there are better ways to select for people that would care about you and people that would function in your society than, and thereby, people that you should care about in general than national borders or religion perhaps, or identity, or racial identity.

Race is not predictive for Kelsey

Kelsey Piper: Yeah, I just, I really, honestly, sincerely think that race is irrelevant to understanding people. I think sometimes people on the Right think that everybody else is a little racist and just pretending not to be. I genuinely, when I meet somebody, their race is not useful information about whether they are somebody who will do right by me and who I can do right by, and whether they are somebody who is, like, a part of all of the stuff I want to build. It's not.

Futurist Right: All right so

Kelsey Piper: With attitudes uh, but you can check the attitudes by talking to them.

What do we do about Rotherham?

Futurist Right: So what about a place where you believe, let's say you have your better system, right, that you think could work? Maybe it could be implemented in the U. S. , which you argue. I think you mentioned, has done, did integration better than other countries.

Futurist Right: Let's get to horror story zero, central. Rotherham and gang rapes in Britain on a mass scale and covered up by the authorities. You believe in democracy and you believe in due process. So you don't exactly have much of a process in your ideology for purging the kind of people who, even if assuming, even assuming that it could be immigration could be done functionally to Britain, that selection could be done functionally, would actually do so, right?

Kelsey Piper: The kind of person who rapes children is a person who rapes children. And I'm totally in favor of, through due process, getting rid of them. You try them, you jail them. Ideally, you like figure out, you know, how to interrupt these events so that you are minimizing how much harm happens but I don't, I think that if you enforce your law against raping children very few people will rape children and the kind of person who rapes children can be identified by raping children or maybe by like you know saying to their friends hey we should go out and find a 14 year old and get her drunk or whatever but not by what country they're from.

Futurist Right: So you're talking now we have a strong factual disagreement on this, but it would take several hours to like actually actually address it. So I'm really interested here in getting like your simply your moral intuition where we disagree on the moral intuition. So people that hear that I'm not pushing back on that. No, I do disagree. But I want to use the UK as like the central place where there might be a consensus that we can reach. Clearly, the UK does not function. Clearly, the UK is not doing this well. Clearly, it didn't do this well for a long time. Once you have a situation where in town after town, institution after institution covers up gang rapes in order to not be racist, that country cannot get a in your ideal system, even if it worked.

Futurist Right: That being the case, and you're opposed to radical, non-due process measures that might change the composition of the country dramatically, or of the leadership, are you willing to endorse, in the case specifically of the UK, a ban on all Pakistani immigration?

Kelsey Piper: Sorry, the logic here being that it is impossible to just arrest child rapists or deter child rapists or like in any way address the child rapists other than cutting off immigrants from Pakistan. I feel like this is just very, we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas. Like, as far as I can tell, the main problem here is that the first time someone raped a child and the child went to the police, the police were like, well, you know, were you drunk? Why were you out in the first place? And instead, what the police should have done is gone and arrested everybody involved and held very public trials, after which I think everybody else would have learned, oh, that's illegal. And if you do that, you will spend the rest of your life in prison.

Futurist Right: But the system reached in the UK through a Democratic process wasn't capable of doing something this basic. That would imply that they're incapable of your more advanced proposals. On the other hand, a rule like no immigration from Pakistan is simple and could actually be implemented.

Kelsey Piper: Sorry, I don't see how that's any simpler than no child rape. Like, I feel like you're comparing a policy as it was in fact implemented, which was implemented very poorly or whatever, to like an ideal policy that's not actually any simpler and that is just as possible to implement and then fail to enforce, right?

Futurist Right: You believe it's as easy to enforce law with due process to find and prosecute rapists, to collect evidence in places where most people might not be willing to testify, where they have strong ties in the community. We could go on and on about how tribal societies function - often even when they immigrate here, than to implement a blanket ban on a certain section of the world, at least till the system domestically is reformed?

Kelsey Piper: So I think that there's something misleading about saying like, oh, well, your thing didn't work. Compare it to the hypothetical implementation of my thing that does work. Doesn't my thing work? Like, if nothing else.

Futurist Right: Well, it absolutely works at what I'm concerned with.

Kelsey Piper: How? There are already a lot of people in the UK who can rape children. Maybe you prevent further people from coming into the UK, but this doesn't prevent any of the rapes of children. You have to enforce the law to prevent the rapes of children either way.

Futurist Right: Well, there are differences, even if you believe they're purely cultural, in propensity. No one actually denies that. So you're looking at a very well-tailored policy that you're trying to suggest and that, as far as I know, hasn't been implemented anywhere, versus one that would address the specific problem we're discussing. It would address the increase in the rate at least, would it not?

Kelsey Piper: Sorry, the idea is that we continue not enforcing the law on anybody who is actually in the country and has actually committed any of these crimes. We, in fact, give up on even trying to do that because it's beyond our capacities. The only thing we can control is who's in the country in the first place? I feel like you can invent a deranged hypothetical where you only have one lever.

Futurist Right: It is the true hypothetical of the country at the moment, though. We're not inventing hypotheticals.

Kelsey Piper: How is it the true hypothetical of the country at the moment? Are they having an up-and-down vote on banning all immigration from Pakistan? Then it's not a true hypothetical. You can always say, if you had exactly one lever, and it's this incredibly kludgy lever that is sufficiently distant from the problem, but you can either pull the lever or not pull the lever. You have no other effects on the world. Should you pull the lever? But you don't even have this lever. And to the extent you want to spend your effort and energy on improving things in the United Kingdom, I bet that they were talking about it. to additional advocacy along like at least a hundred other fronts are more useful than the returns to like the policy of advocating with the uk ban immigration from Pakistan like the actual comparison

Roko Mijic: Can I flag quickly that I disagree with this and I'll talk about it later?

Futurist Right: yeah of course Roko, ideally we're gonna continue this uh this general idea of starting from basic moral instincts and continuing on to policy later in a series of exchanges. Because I really want to hear from the EA community. I really want to, I do value the fact that they seem to be one group that acts according to their values. And I think ours is another. And I think there can be some degree of cooperation reached there.

Roko Mijic: Well, just quickly, I think the disagreement I have with Kelsey is this idea that banning people from Pakistan is a kludgy lever. That's like just this one kludgy lever on this one issue of child abuse. I don't think that's how the world works. I think actually there's 100 issues. One of them is rape of children, but another one could be treatment of animals. Another one could be civil liberties. Another one could be science. Another one could be IQ. Another one could be propensity to cousin marriage and so on and so forth. And actually, if you ban people from Pakistan, you move all of these issues in a good direction at the same time. So it doesn't actually work the way, you know, the way she thinks. It's not this bad, kludgy lever that just affects child rape. It's this fantastic, legible policy that just improves everything all at once.

Kelsey Piper: I am well passed out of time, but obviously if I thought banning immigration improved everything all at once, I would be in favor of it, and my disagreement is about whether it improves everything all at once or, like, any of those things.

Futurist Right: Okay, how about you have an up and down vote on the law Kelsey. But you can't/don't get to control how it's implemented. And you can propose whatever law you want. What do you propose?

Kelsey Piper: All right, I think I would propose a, like. . . So this is the thing where actual policy is hard, right? I would look at organizations that successfully dramatically reduce the rate of sexual abuse of children, which is also extremely common in like the Catholic church and elementary schools and lots and lots of entirely white communities. And I would figure out what those policies were. And then I would put that up for a vote. Like, I think what is the best way to reduce child sexual abuse is something where people have done a lot of work. And what would I put up for the vote? the set of policies that seems to be the most successful at reducing child sexual abuse among organizations that have tried it.

Futurist Right: Yeah, but I mean, you do understand how, to some extent, you're talking like if you were a school teacher, saying, what style of math or whatever, what style of writing should this student learn? And starting at ultra creative writing before the fundamentals are built. Like, the fundamentals are clearly not built here. Once you have scandals like these, it's evidence that the fundamentals are not in place.

Kelsey Piper: Did you have the same takeaway about the Catholic Church?

Futurist Right: Me? I'm an Atheist, of course.

Kelsey Piper: Alright, cause I feel like the far right feels much less strongly that this is true of the Catholic Church than that they feel this is true of the Pakistanis.

Futurist Right: There are stats on this. The stats are worse for Pakistanis. We do believe that.

Roko Mijic: Yeah, the thing is, there is a difference.

Futurist Right: Sorry. No Roko. We're going to have to keep your question section for next.

Futurist Right: Thanks for joining us Kelsey, and I hope this will be a somewhat productive area for us to collaborate on further.

Kelsey Piper: I'm excited to see what sorts of conversations come out of this, because I think it is a kind of conversation that mostly has not happened at all.

Futurist Right: Nice having you around, see you.

—

* This discussion aired live in Mid-April to an Elite Audience of hundreds of listeners on both sides of the aisle. It preceded the general relaxation of the cordon sanitaire that would soon see Harvard hosting a Yarvin debate on democracy, Starmer’s "Nation of Strangers" speech and Dominic Cummings' call for Special Forces Operations to “kill or capture” small boat immigrant smugglers. Roko's poll obtained supermajority support for abolishing factory farms despite his own support for them. Kelsey Piper continues to write and organize against the Administration.