Nightmare Vision is a prolific Twitter poster and a cohost of the popular Night Owls podcast. He edited The Essential Paul Gottfried, Essays from 1984–2024, which Passage Press will publish on August 19.
To begin, I ask NV whether he and his cohost, Future Moldovan Citizen, are obligated to agree with each other on everything. This leads to a retrospective on Night Owls, which is celebrating its first anniversary sometime this month. I ask NV whether Night Owls is a synecdoche for something much bigger. We then discuss the role of the internet in shaping the right. I ask NV how he found himself as the Gottfried collection’s editor. He explains how it happened and talks about the challenges associated with editing down decades’ worth of writing. We then get to the book, the first chapter of which is about fascism and anti-fascism. Why start there?
In the second half (available to subscribers), we discuss a Gottfried essay on Karl Marx and wokeness. Gottfried argues that Marx wasn’t woke – but why? Next, we move on to the chapter on the Germans, whose contributions to civilization Gottfried is particularly fond of. NV explains Gottfried’s thoughts on the tragedy of post-war German identity. We also cover Gottfried’s writings on the right, from the old-school paleocons to the alt-right. Despite coining both terms, Gottfried no longer uses the latter. Why is that? Tune in to find out.
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