No Meat for the Slaves: Q&A with Raw Egg Nationalist
AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Raw Egg Nationalist, author of The Eggs Benedict Option
For Poe’s review of The Eggs Benedict Option by Raw Egg Nationalist, GO HERE
RICHARD POE: The title of your book, The Eggs Benedict Option, seems to be a direct retort to Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. Why Dreher? Why choose him as your nemesis?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: This is a mildly funny story. I had a scuffed, half-read copy of The Benedict Option kicking around on the floor of my bedroom, and one day I was sat on the loo and I looked sideways at the book and suddenly I thought, “The EGGS Benedict Option!” Genius! So I actually had the title long before I had an idea what I was going to write about. At first I thought it might be just an essay, maybe a critique of Rod’s book, but I knew that the title was too good to waste on just an essay. In many respects, what I’m arguing for is an alternative Benedict Option, one in which we don’t run away to intentional communities, as Rod would have us do, but stand and fight for our nations here and now. Because the truth is, we’re not going to be allowed to run away and live our lives free of globalist control. That’s just wishful thinking, in no way informed by the realities of power today and in the future. My book is very different from Rod’s.
RICHARD POE: What is Raw Egg Nationalism? Give me the 30-second elevator pitch.
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: Here goes. Raw egg nationalism is about the relationship between individual health and the health of the nation. A nation is only as strong as the individuals of which it is comprised. That’s why the globalist opponents of the nations weaken the individual: weaken one and you weaken the other too. A population of fat, medicated, unmotivated people is not a nation: it’s just a bunch of slaves, or slaves-to-be. The raw egg nationalist emphasis, then, is on restoring individuals to health, so that the nation can be strong again.
RICHARD POE: I’d like to hear a bit more about the nationalist part. How does slonking raw eggs foster nationalism? And what do you mean by nationalism exactly? Different people define this word differently.
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: First of all, it’s worth saying that, although eggs are important, eggs aren’t the only thing raw egg nationalism is about. My emphasis is on nutrient-dense animal foods of all kinds, the foods our ancestors consumed and thrived upon. What’s important is to realise that there is a close nexus between the food supply and political control. Getting healthy is just the beginning. We need to fight the corporations and globalist institutions that want to subjugate us further by controlling the food supply and forcing us to eat a new global plant-based diet.
By “nationalism”, I suppose my basic intended meaning is to put national, rather than global, priorities first. That’s the bare minimum. We need a return to politics where the leaders of nations put the interests of their own people first. Trump did this, to the extent that he was allowed by his opponents.
RICHARD POE: Without compromising your anonymity, what can you tell me about the personal journey that led you to Raw Egg Nationalism?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: I’ve lived a pretty varied life so far, but one thing that’s been constant, certainly since I was a teenager, is fitness. I was lucky enough to have a mother who can really cook, and I always played sport at school – football (soccer), rugby, cricket and athletics. By the time I was about 16 or 17, I got into lifting and clean eating in a very determined way, and it’s been like that ever since, more or less. I was also a semi-professional martial artist for many years, although my skills are a little rusty now.
I “became” the Raw Egg Nationalist really by chance. I was a follower of Bronze Age Pervert, having read his book Bronze Age Mindset as soon as it came out in 2018, and I had a Twitter account, but didn’t really post anything until early 2020. Then I saw the hashtag #raweggnationalism and really got behind it. I found the experience of consuming raw eggs a genuine revelation. A little later, in the summer of 2020, I decided to write a raw-egg cookbook, since I think being able to cook is one of the most important skills to have if you want to be healthy in today’s world. The cookbook, which was initially just a free pdf, was an instant hit, and things have been crazy ever since.
RICHARD POE: In your preface, you say Socrates recommended denying meat to the common people, to keep them docile and obedient. Eating meat energized people, Socrates warned, leading to ambition and war. For those of us who believe people should be strong and aggressive, Socrates's proposal would seem to make him one of the great bad guys of history. Is that your view of him? Was Socrates a villain?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: We have to be careful here, because Socrates never made those statements himself, as far as we know. The Socrates who said those things was Plato’s Socrates, a character in the Republic. There’s no way to know, then, whether that’s what Socrates actually thought, or whether it’s even what Plato thought, as the writer of the text. Indeed, the character of Socrates could be a way for Plato to distance himself from the views being expressed. So I’m not sure Socrates is a “villain” in that respect, although Plato’s Socrates may very well be. There’s some evidence that the idea of vegetarianism being the most “harmonious” diet was commonly believed in ancient Greece, though. What I think is important to understand, fundamentally, is that even nearly 2500 years ago, philosophers and social planners – because that’s what Plato was, a planner of societies – understood full well that you could alter the very nature of a society by altering the foods it consumed.
RICHARD POE: Control the food supply, and you control the people. This is a major theme of your book. So who controls our food supply now? Aside from Bill Gates, who else may be hiding behind the curtain?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: In the book I’ve tried to avoid speculating about those who may be hiding behind the curtain, as much as it seems to be clear that people like Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab may be orchestrating things. What we can say, with no risk of being labelled “conspiracy theorists”, is that corporations control the food supply, not small producers or farmers or even the state. This is the history of food in the last century or so: the ongoing consolidation of control of production and distribution in the hands, first, of corporations and then in the hands of an ever-smaller number of corporations. Just a handful of mega-corporations control the corn supply in the US, for example, and by doing so they also control the rest of agriculture, since they determine the price of the feed that is given to the cows and pigs and chickens in the CAFOs (concentrated agricultural feeding operations). This corporate consolidation has taken place with the connivance of successive governments, of course. The Great Reset plan for agriculture would see corporations control every aspect of the food supply: what little freedom there is from corporation control today would be totally lost.
RICHARD POE: You wrote about one Dr. S. Matthew Liao who wants to “biohack” or gene-edit people to be allergic to beef, among other things. He also wants to make people smaller, though not so small that “we get eaten by cats,” he jokes. What other physical changes are they planning for the human race?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: Liao is a really weird dude. He’s suggested all kinds of crazy stuff. The main things have been to shrink people, perhaps through embryo screening (to ensure smaller children are born), and to make people allergic to meat, one way or another. Of course he wants to reduce the birth rate, and on that front he’s suggested raising female IQs (because smart women have fewer children, right?). He’s said we could all be administered regular doses of the pro-social hormone oxytocin, to ensure we’re on board with the global fight against climate change, an idea he seems to have ripped off from the Christian Bale film Equilibrium. He’s even said maybe we could genetically engineer people to have cat’s eyes, so we can see in the dark and don’t need artificial light to help us.
The thing about this biohacking stuff is, however weird it might seem to you, it’s only just around the corner. In fact, maybe it’s already here. A Chinese scientist used CRISPR gene-editing technology on three embryos not all that long ago, and the children are apparently growing up normally. Then there are things like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a brain-computer interface. I don’t think it’s a question of if: it’s when.
RICHARD POE: You mention that DNA can enter our bloodstream from our food. What defense do we have, then, from being gene-edited against our will?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: I’m not sure, to be honest. This is something I try not to think too much about, but it’s definitely going to be an increasing problem in the future. You may be aware that they’re already trialling mRNA vaccines for livestock. It’s going to be incredibly difficult, maybe even impossible, to isolate ourselves from this technology.
RICHARD POE: For me, the most fascinating part of your book was your portrayal of the Neolithic Revolution—the invention of agriculture some 11,000 years ago. You describe it as catastrophic for mankind. What was life like for those Neolithic farmers?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: Nasty, brutish and short, to borrow Thomas Hobbes’s famous phrase. Certainly for those who lived in the first agricultural states. You need to understand that war, and by that I mean large-scale slave raids against neighbouring populations, were essential to the survival of these early grain states, precisely because conditions were so bad that the peasants were dropping dead left, right and centre. James Scott goes so far as to call these early states “population machines”: they were constantly looking for fresh meat for the agricultural grinder.
RICHARD POE: You mention the grisly artwork of the Neolithic city of Çatalhöyük, such as a pair of female breasts jutting from a wall, whose “nipples are split apart” while “vulture, fox, and weasel skulls peer out from inside.” What do you make of this? What does such artwork tell you about the Neolithic soul?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: I think it suggests a people who are adopting a new attitude towards the natural world, one that’s animated not by wonder or a sense of man’s place within it – as the magical artworks that adorn the famous caves of the Ice Age era are – but by separation and fear. The natural world has become something menacing, something that always threatens to spill over into man’s domain and must in some sense be appeased to prevent that from happening. And I think they were right. I think they really had become separated from the natural world, or begun to be separated from it. It’s not a wonder this actual physical separation, entailed by the new sedentary agricultural life, should be reflected in their symbolic and mental worlds.
RICHARD POE: Dr. Weston Price seems to have confirmed your view that agriculture and grain-based diets were a step backward for humanity. How is Price regarded today? Do scientists acknowledge him?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: There’s no question that Price remains an outsider figure, although there are organisations like the Weston Price Foundation that promote his views. The whole thrust of nutritional “science” has been in the opposite direction from Price’s views. Part of the problem is that Price was something of an anthropologist – Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is basically an ethnography – but it’s not the kind of thing anthropologists would read either, despite the wealth of detail he provides about the ways of life of traditional societies. He’s fallen through the cracks between disciplines, to some extent.
RICHARD POE: Since agriculture proved so disastrous, should we return to hunting and gathering? You don’t suggest this in your book. Why not?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: It’s not obvious that we can, for one thing. Agriculture, despite the pain and upheaval it brought at the time of the Neolithic Revolution, and the fact that it is, ultimately, responsible for the modern world in all its worst aspects, has also brought us remarkable benefits. The question, I think, is whether we can find a way to meld the best of both systems.
RICHARD POE: You cite Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, and, on page 32, seem to agree with him that “we must look back, beyond liberalism, to older native traditions,” such as Russia’s traditional home gardening system. What can we learn from Russia’s self-sufficient home gardeners?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: I didn’t actually get the idea of looking at Russian household gardening from Dugin, although I know he is a champion of Russia’s agrarian tradition. It was a happy coincidence that I was also using Dugin to talk about the Great Reset in the book. I subscribe to a newsletter called the Small Farmer’s Journal, and one of the weekly bulletins contained a link to an article about household gardening. From there I found a fantastic PhD thesis on household gardening which told me everything I needed to know.
The main lesson from Russian household gardening is that a modern industrial nation can rely on local small-scale production to meet a significant portion of its food needs. We don’t have to rely on big corporations to produce all of our food.
RICHARD POE: To what extent do you embrace Dugin’s worldview? For instance, his neo-paganism?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: He’s a very enigmatic figure, and his recent portrayal as a result of the war in the Ukraine has made him something of a pariah figure in the West. He’s even been referred to as “Putin’s Rasputin”, as if he’s the mastermind of Russian policy, including the war in Ukraine. I don’t think that’s true at all, although he has pretty strong views about Russia’s place in the world and its historical destiny. I think his ideas about resisting globalism, which I talk about in The Eggs Benedict Option, are very sound, and I also like his deep “genealogical” criticism of liberalism. He’s a provocative thinker, at the very least, but one whose ideas are becoming harder to engage with, mostly because of recent events. His books have been banned off Amazon, for instance.
I’m not a neopagan. My religious beliefs, specifically my relationship to Christianity, are complicated, as I think they are necessarily for almost every Westerner today. It’s something I actually spend a lot of time thinking about: whether it’s possible to be Christian today, whether Christianity is up to the job of civilisational renewal, etc.
RICHARD POE: You write that America “has a special role to play in defeating the Great Reset.” What is that role?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: To lead, quite simply. The only stumbling block on the road to global government – real stumbling block – thus far has been America. And by that I really mean, America under Donald Trump, for all his faults and failures. America is the most powerful nation on earth, the essential nation, and if it can reject globalism and forge a different path, the rest of the world can follow.
RICHARD POE: You also write, “There are parts of America that are lost to the nation, at least for now.” Lost in what sense? Do you foresee a breakup of America, a “national divorce,” as some call it?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: I don’t think there would be a national divorce without bloodshed, and I really hope that doesn’t happen. Logistically, I’m not sure how it would happen. The US is integrated today in a way that it wasn’t in 1861. I don’t think you could just separate politically and economically, or even culturally, in the way that the Confederacy was able to back then. By “lost” I really mean that there will be parts of the US – and we can easily imagine which parts they’ll be – that absolutely won’t be on board for any kind of national revival. I think we just have to accept that and plough on anyway.
RICHARD POE: You state that a movement toward Raw Egg Nationalism in America would “have to be a political one, with the support of politicians.” How would we get these supportive politicians into office? Is there sufficient integrity left in the US voting system to allow any real change?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: I don’t think this will be easy, not at all. One of the problems with the MAGA movement has been the number of fake MAGA people who’ve gone on to reveal themselves. There have also been great MAGA candidates who have failed, like Blake Masters, despite being more or less the perfect candidate, in the perfect place. The system is rigged against populist candidates, and it’s not easy to see how we can change that. But we have to try. Maybe the place to start is with better screening of candidates, and we also need to find a way to hold candidates to account for their promises.
RICHARD POE: Noor Bin Ladin wrote a great Foreword to The Eggs Benedict Option. Why Noor? Why did you choose her?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: Noor has become a great friend of mine over the last couple of years. She collaborates heavily with me on my magazine MAN’S WORLD, conducting interviews as part of her “Noor Bin Ladin In Conversation With” series. She’s a brave and very vocal opponent of globalism. It was a natural fit, really. And her Foreword is great, as you say. She never disappoints.
RICHARD POE: With all the negativity in the air these days, what words of hope can you offer us?
RAW EGG NATIONALIST: Since I’m also known for making memes, I’ll let a very powerful meme provide the last words for this Q&A: “If the situation were truly hopeless, their propaganda wouldn’t be necessary.”
Richard Poe is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He has written fiction and non-fiction, including books on business, science, history and politics, published in 22 languages. Poe co-wrote with David Horowitz The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party. Poe is presently writing a history of globalism. His writings appear at richardpoe.substack.com, RichardPoe.com, and @RealRichardPoe.
So much here I agree with. The author loses me with Trump . And I voted for him the first time. But you really have to be avoiding reality at this point of the game , and it is a game, to not see that Trump is a paid puppet like all the rest . He brought us operation warp speed and declared a national emergency after all for something that has yet to proven was in fact an emergency of any kind.
Anyone that points to a media hero as savior has an agenda I’m afraid .
I hope you don’t . Time will tell.
“If the situation were truly hopeless, their propaganda wouldn’t be necessary.”
I don't agree. It might be true if we were just looking at another attempt to scarf up the wealth from the masses. But consider that a good outcome for all may not be viewed as still possible.
One view, held by many of our self-styled elites, is that humanity as a whole is rapidly driving off a cliff. In that view, the propaganda can be viewed as an attempt by them to manipulate the masses in a way that cuts off most of the masses from resources as early as possible in an attempt to save as much of what is left for a very small group that (of course) includes themselves. In other words, "If a good outcome is not possible for ALL, is it possible for SOME?"