Jonathan Kieperman (Lomez)
speaker
140 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard May 2025
Jonathan Kieperman (Lomez)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So since he lost the 2020 election, this interim period where he was beset by these lawsuits and he was threatened with prison time and he was shot at and nearly killed.
We can look back at his past and see a new narrative about his life that suggests the possibility of this kind of rebirth from this civilizational exhaustion that I think is really the sort of core description of our present moment now. In this essay, I also point out this concept called charisma hunger. And there was a sociologist from the middle 20th century, Eric Erickson, quite prominent.
And he had this idea that in the modern world, and this has a lot to do with actually the loss of sort of religious conviction and religious life, that we were in search of these values. figures, these heroes. I'm very aware of the possibility that I am succumbing to this charisma hunger that Ericsson identified decades ago.
Nonetheless, I do think, and I think the people's reaction to Trump, their impression of him, I saw for the other day, did you see this wrestler who won the NCAA title? And he's draped in the American flag, this gladiator. And he gives this great big hug to Donald Trump.
And in so many ways, Trump is this kind of great father of the American people or certain segment of the American people who have embraced him. And he's not just a politician. He's not just a president. He's not just a TV star. And to my mind, that speaks to this mythical character.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's fair. And I'd also say for others who share your view here in this conflict between your sort of religious convictions and what Trump might represent, this is squarely within our sort of civil religious tradition.
I mean, if you think about the way that for most of our history, really up until like the Obama years, we thought about our founding figures and the way that they're presented in art. And the way they're written about in our sort of political and sort of civil religious texts, they are quite explicitly sort of divinely guided.
I mean, the hand of God is like reaching down and moving Thomas Jefferson, who also was not, you know. religious in any meaningful respect, and George Washington and John Adams, et cetera, and sort of placing them, you know, the hand of fate is on top of them.
And so it's not these these things like to imagine that Trump is reviving that tradition or is is now occupying that same role is not in contradiction to this long tradition of civil religion that we've had previously. It might require more proof for you. You might need to see better evidence.
First, let me start by saying I don't think actually Adolf Hitler was a great artist. I think he was actually deficient and technically deficient in certain ways that are very obvious when you look at his painting. Technically.
Yes. So this is actually this is a really interesting question. And of course, it's worth addressing. And I think all the things you said can simultaneously be true. And I think there's a fourth point I want to add here, which is sort of historically contextual. We started this conversation by trying to.
think back to where this current sort of moment of our cultural, social, intellectual, ideological path began. And we identified somewhere in the 2010s. Now, everything I'm about to talk about has precursors, but something else happens here around like 2012. And maybe you identify the Trayvon Martin case into 2013, 2014.
Certainly there's the Michael Brown hands up, don't shoot, Black Lives Matter. Simultaneously that we have a kind of a discussion happening in this country around immigration and what would happen to this country if we started allowing people in from all over the world. Is everybody the same from everywhere?
And if we're going to have a sort of pluralistic democracy, what does that look like in a future where it's not a non-white, predominantly white country? These are legitimate things to think about. A lot of people didn't want us having these conversations previously. But then what happens in 2013, 14 and then scales up over the course of the 2010s is this insistence.
And again, I think this is important coming from the left that we have our moment of racial reckoning. OK, so a bunch of people then are being asked to have a difficult conversation about race and the prevailing view that
which is taken on by the New York Times, by academia by and large, is that any differences and outcomes among people can be ascribed to this infinitely amorphous, non-falsifiable, infinitely pervasive thing called systemic racism. And this is, if not intentionally, de facto the fault of the white population in the country. So the question then is, is that true?
Are we allowed to look at the actual causes of why these discrepancies exist? And it just is the case that when you look at these differences, they are not attributable to white racism. You can actually identify causes. So I think a lot of young people online who are finding themselves getting the short end of the stick on these this new regime. Right. of DEI are reacting to it in kind.
And so a lot of this kind of racialized conversation is a response, is an answer to the insistence that all of these differences are white people's fault. Right.
OK, well, that's in theory.
No. So this is a very easy question for me to answer. And the answer is yes, I would publish it on the assumption that it has a kind of literary value that is independent from these objections you have to these racial caricatures. So have you seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The movie, yes. Yeah, the movie. Okay. Yes.
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