(Related: my Substack article, The Trial of Kyle.)
Here is the interview. A couple of excerpts:
Mark Granza: A decade ago most people would have considered ‘Woke Capitalism’ a contradiction, and probably laughed at the idea. Today, nobody questions its existence. Do you think there are there inherent characteristics within Capitalism that transform it into a progressive machine, or are corporations simply responding to the ideological demands of the political class?
Blake Masters: Capitalism works. It’s a really good system for generating wealth. The problem with capitalism is that can work too well in a sense, it can create the conditions for people to grow complacent, which ultimately, as Ross Douthat has written, contributes to the sort of decadence we’re experiencing today. Capitalism’s an incredible engine of material progress, but it’s not a self-contained moral system. It has its own incentives, but those incentives aren’t always necessarily correlated with a conception of the good. Companies under capitalism just respond to profit incentives. If you act on them you’ll generate a lot of wealth, but it won’t tell you what to do with that wealth, which is why a parasite like Wokeness can basically spread and take over. An example is offshoring. Maybe it’s good for GDP, but if you have too much of it, that’s clearly really bad for the country and most people living in it. It crushes the middle class by sending jobs overseas by the millions. But such are the incentives that the capital owners are responding to. So I think problems like Woke Capitalism, or ‘globalization’, are actually much older and bigger problems than people think. Because you can’t just be a capitalist country, because a country is not just an economy. You also need a conception of yourself as a nation, as a people, and as a culture. And that’s what America is increasingly lacking today.
BV: The last three sentence are very important. A country is not just an economy. Do libertarians understand this? Not to my knowledge. They want to reduce everything to economics when it is the history, heritage, and culture of a nation that provides the framework within which a successful economy can operate. Or is the rule of law an economic concept? How about the concept of citizen?
Mark Granza: I’d like to move from here to the issue of Justice in America. You were a vocal supporter of Kyle Rittenhouse before and during the trial. What do you think the fact that Kyle (as opposed to someone like Gaige Grosskreutz) was the one being prosecuted says about the US justice system?
Blake Masters: I think we’re very close to a two-tier justice system, if we’re not there already. Look how differently loyalists and dissidents are punished today. The Kyle Rittenhouse case was simple. The ruling class hated that a young man defended himself with an AR-15 because it contradicts their official narrative. And so they did everything they could to punish Kyle. The FBI literally withheld high-resolution version of the footage from Kyle’s lawyers, because it basically clearly exonerated Kyle and they found that inconvenient. Now I think the jury’s decision to acquit Kyle of all charges showed that you can still get sort of a fair trial in America, that there’s hope. But again, that only happened because in this case, there happened to be extremely clear video evidence in his favor. If there weren’t, Kyle would be in jail for life. So this case is a wake-up call. It’s crazy that Rittenhouse, and not his attackers, was on trial at all. Contrast that to how the BLM and Antifa looters and rioters who committed violent mayhem during the summer of 2020 – nothing happened to them! And on the off-chance one of them did get arrested, then-Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris was there with her bail fund, just waiting to bail them out. Meanwhile, the January 6 protestors, many of whom were not violent at all, are treated like terrorists, with some being held without trial in solitary confinement and others getting sentenced to many years in prison. If we don’t do something now, the rule of law will soon be gone forever. Anyone who questions the left’s narrative is going to be hunted down. I truly believe that. That’s what we’re fighting against.
BV: Again I say that the last three sentences are very important.
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