Speaker 1: My name is Charlie Kirk. I run the largest pro
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Speaker 1: I could say the only conservative professor at Cambridge University,
Speaker 1: doctor Orr, who is a contributing editor for Heritaane Culture
Speaker 1: at gb News, Doctor James or everybody here to be
Speaker 1: with you, Charlie, doctor or great to see you. First.
Speaker 1: I want to just you know, you sat through the presentation,
Speaker 1: You've been around all of this as a as a
Speaker 1: brit as a professor. What is your take on this
Speaker 1: whole thing we have gone on here?
Speaker 2: Well, I got to say, first off, I was saying
Speaker 2: to Andrew earlier, it's pretty overwhelming for a brit like
Speaker 2: me to see the scale of your success and of
Speaker 2: your ambition, what you've achieved. There's that, you know, lots
Speaker 2: of lots of students at Cambridge claim they want to
Speaker 2: change the world, that they can go into jobs that
Speaker 2: are going to change the world. And I thought to
Speaker 2: myself this morning, you really could say that you are
Speaker 2: changing the world. As America goes, so goes the world,
Speaker 2: and that's what you're doing. You're doing extraordinary things in
Speaker 2: transforming America, recalling it to its founding ideals, promoting people
Speaker 2: of caliber and character and courage, particularly among the young.
Speaker 2: This is a huge problem for us on the right
Speaker 2: in Britain and we're working very hard on it. And
Speaker 2: I just felt both envious but also excited because I
Speaker 2: thought we can we can bottle some courtjuice and take
Speaker 2: it over to Britain, and we need to work out
Speaker 2: what the DNA is, and we need to try to
Speaker 2: replicate it as best we can. It's hard to do that,
Speaker 2: particularly if you're a movement that's focusing on national pride
Speaker 2: and national distinctiveness and sovereignty and so on. You can't
Speaker 2: just copy and paste everything that you're doing. Of course,
Speaker 2: with a very different constitutional setup, very different electoral dynamics,
Speaker 2: very different challenges in many ways. But I think philosophically
Speaker 2: we're very much there. We're very much on the same page.
Speaker 2: That is to say, we want to work out what
Speaker 2: the not so much what the politic of left and
Speaker 2: right is. I think that's the sort of the politics,
Speaker 2: the philosophy of the what I call the Long twentieth
Speaker 2: century nineteen fourteen to twenty sixteen. I think the Long
Speaker 2: twentieth century ended in twenty sixteen, and the politics of
Speaker 2: left and right ended in twenty sixteen, and we're now
Speaker 2: talking about the politics of national preference, the politics of
Speaker 2: national interest. This is still still kind of shocking to
Speaker 2: the liberal ear, but this is the direction of travel
Speaker 2: for the new Right on both sides of the Atlantic.
Speaker 1: So what do you mean by that the long twentieth century.
Speaker 2: Well, so historians like to talk about this that you know,
Speaker 2: we periodizing in history is always very very very difficult,
Speaker 2: and you know, it turns out that that human development
Speaker 2: doesn't always obey neat neat time periods. But of course
Speaker 2: we know what we mean by the twentieth century. But
Speaker 2: I think there are these sort of history doesn't quite
Speaker 2: obey those neat kind of neat neat even divisions. And
Speaker 2: so historians will sometimes talk about the long nineteenth century
Speaker 2: that sort of began roughly in eighteen fifteen and probably
Speaker 2: ended in nineteen fourteen, right, eighteen fifteen Congress of Vienna,
Speaker 2: and then really you've got this extraordinary period of peace
Speaker 2: in Europe, and then nineteen fourteen is really the point
Speaker 2: at which that piece explodes. And so I think also
Speaker 2: we can talk about the long twentieth century persisting in
Speaker 2: some ways beyond twenty to twenty sixteen as a fundamental
Speaker 2: watershed moment in how we think about national flourishing, how
Speaker 2: we think about politics, how we think about the organizing
Speaker 2: axes and horizons of national flourishing, of mutual flourish.
Speaker 1: Was that Brexit plus Trump? Is that why you think
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen was the year that began the twenty first century.
Speaker 2: I think that's right. I think it's always easy to
Speaker 2: conflate the two phenomena. They had distinct phenomena in lots
Speaker 2: of ways, but there's lots of overlaps too, and I
Speaker 2: think that it really marks a moment of change in
Speaker 2: the West. And it's very convenient point. It's not just
Speaker 2: Brexit and Trump, it's also the rise of pronation national
Speaker 2: conservative movements all across Europe. You're seeing it with Vaux
Speaker 2: in Spain, You're seeing it with Jager in Portugal, You're
Speaker 2: seeing with AfD in Germany. You're seeing it with the
Speaker 2: Hassean blemm Nacnale in France, the Fertlli del Italia in Australia,
Speaker 2: seeing it in Italy, I'm sorry, and in Austria as well,
Speaker 2: all over Europe. For deaths in Hungary and going at
Speaker 2: different speeds. And you know, one of the challenges Conservatives
Speaker 2: are always trying to conserve what is our own and
Speaker 2: so it's actually very difficult to form. What of the
Speaker 2: Communists used to have a comm Intern. It's very difficult
Speaker 2: to have a con intern because you know, Marx could
Speaker 2: say workers of the World unite, the progressives can say
Speaker 2: Wokesters of the world unite. Right, it's a fundamentally transnational ideology.
Speaker 2: That's that's very very powerful. This is a movement something
Speaker 2: that moves in lockstep before conserving our own nations. It's
Speaker 2: much harder to have that sense of international solidarity. But
Speaker 2: you know, I think various movements have tried to catalyze that,
Speaker 2: in the National Conservatism movement, which I'm proudly that the
Speaker 2: chair of in the UK is helping to do that,
Speaker 2: and and so yeah, that's that's a big challenge.
Speaker 1: So so what do you think led towards that national
Speaker 1: conservatism moment? And let's go a step back and also
Speaker 1: take a moment introduce yourself. You you teach the Western
Speaker 1: care at Cambridge. Correct.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't say I'm not allowed to teach the Western canon,
Speaker 2: so it would be sort of too big. But to
Speaker 2: give you an example, I teach a program in moral
Speaker 2: philosophy from Plato through to Nietzsche, that includes Aristotle, that
Speaker 2: includes August and inclusive Quinas cant Hume. So as much
Speaker 2: of the kind of classic Western philosophers as I can
Speaker 2: fit in and then and then I also teach an
Speaker 2: Enfild program. But probably speaking, yes, I teach Western philosophers
Speaker 2: without the but not through the prism and not through
Speaker 2: the lens of kind of critical theory. I try not
Speaker 2: to politicize my teaching in any way. Of course, that
Speaker 2: itself is a political act these days. Just trying to
Speaker 2: be neutral, trying to try to listen to these ancient,
Speaker 2: ancient thinkers on their own terms and not trying to
Speaker 2: force ideological kind of masks onto them. But but yes,
Speaker 2: I see myself very much, you know, as trying to
Speaker 2: pass on what is best in the Western tradition. I
Speaker 2: think really universities have only three primary purposes. That is,
Speaker 2: to pursue the truth, to preserve the truth, and to
Speaker 2: pass on the truth. And then those are the kind
Speaker 2: of you know, there's a little bit crude, but those
Speaker 2: are the kind of the three piece. Those are the
Speaker 2: sort of three That's the way I sort of think
Speaker 2: about what I'm doing. So partly it is preserving the
Speaker 2: best of what has been said and thought in the West,
Speaker 2: but it's also not wanting to kind of you know,
Speaker 2: be kind of inert in that always having that sort
Speaker 2: of sense of looking forward, testing, always you know, probing,
Speaker 2: searching for new things, being open to novelty, open to change,
Speaker 2: but kind of anchored, anchored in the great in the
Speaker 2: great Western tradition.
Speaker 1: So with that, with that backdrop, post World War two,
Speaker 1: there was somewhat of a new world order that was established,
Speaker 1: the neoliberal world order, and it was one that was
Speaker 1: based on free trade, that was based on both American
Speaker 1: dominance but also kind of NATO expansionism, international cooperation, some
Speaker 1: could call it globalism, and liberalism seemed to be an inevitability.
Speaker 1: The famous book End of History by Francis Fukiyama is
Speaker 1: what lateeen eighties of that mistake ninety two, okay, nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety two, where he basically said, this is it. We've
Speaker 1: reached it. Like all the ideas that have been tried
Speaker 1: have led us to this moment. Classical liberalism, whatever you
Speaker 1: want to call it, liberalism is the best it's going
Speaker 1: to get. And congratulations, humanity. History is over. What happened
Speaker 1: from Fukiyama in nineteen ninety two to now what you
Speaker 1: say twenty sixteen to now where you go from this
Speaker 1: kind of hubristic prideful, you know, kind of exaltation of
Speaker 1: liberalism to a completely different moment right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, that book The End of History by Francis
Speaker 2: Fukuyama is it's a fascinating kind of moment of sort
Speaker 2: of kind of hubris, you might say it kind of
Speaker 2: misplaced optimism. But if you read the ververy end of
Speaker 2: that book, the actual full title of the book is
Speaker 2: The End of History and the Last Man. And he
Speaker 2: has this fascinating kind of final chapter or two of
Speaker 2: that book where he says, look, actually, this sort of
Speaker 2: sense of this end of history dispensation where where everything
Speaker 2: is we've hit the SunNet uplands of the kind of
Speaker 2: liberal utopia and peace and prosperity for all that in
Speaker 2: the end is not going to satisfy man's instinct. And
Speaker 2: this is particularly this is what he calls the thumos.
Speaker 2: This is this is if we think of Plato's like
Speaker 2: three level three leveled soul. You've got the noose at
Speaker 2: the top of the mind. Then you've got the thumos,
Speaker 2: which is courage. That's just the sort of sense of
Speaker 2: that the kind of bit the spirit that animates us.
Speaker 2: And then you've got the epithumia, which is kind of
Speaker 2: the base appetites, and Plato says you gonna have all
Speaker 2: three of these in check. And what Fukuyama says is
Speaker 2: that there's a real danger that with this kind of
Speaker 2: the in the sun lit uplands of the kind of
Speaker 2: globalized utopia, we're going to suppress the thumos. But that
Speaker 2: thumos is not going anyway, it's not going away. It
Speaker 2: will come back. And so he's very he's not he's
Speaker 2: not quite as naive as that, And I think what's happened,
Speaker 2: you know, that question might think of the quest for
Speaker 2: thumos as the search for identity. In fact, Fukuyama wrote
Speaker 2: a very interesting book on identity where he sort of
Speaker 2: starts to conceive that the kind of sort of Berkeley
Speaker 2: liberalism was never really going to deliver the goods. And
Speaker 2: so I think, you know, the suppression of that sense
Speaker 2: of sense of self, sense of rootedness, sense of home,
Speaker 2: sense of distinctiveness and what we are and what we
Speaker 2: love that was never going to be sort of erased
Speaker 2: by the liberal doctrines of a book and of a
Speaker 2: blank slate, doctrines of human nature. We're rooted, we're rooted
Speaker 2: human beings. We're related to what's around us. We're conservative
Speaker 2: about what we love most about what's closest to us,
Speaker 2: and that's never going to go away. And we got
Speaker 2: to face up to reality as it is given to
Speaker 2: us and not as we would like it to be.
Speaker 1: But what went wrong with the liberal project?
Speaker 2: Well, I think the fundamental problem with the liberal project
Speaker 2: is that it's grounded on fundamentally mistaken assumptions about what
Speaker 2: it is to be human. The basic idea is that
Speaker 2: human beings are born into the world with completely independent,
Speaker 2: completely blank, completely blank slate. This is lots of view
Speaker 2: of the table erasa or the white page, and we're
Speaker 2: completely free of all unchosen obligations, and there can be
Speaker 2: no obligations that we don't ourselves choose. And this is
Speaker 2: just a complete fantasy. I don't think it's an accident
Speaker 2: that the great liberal philosos like John Locke and Emmanuel
Speaker 2: Kant never had any children. Anyone who's had anyone's had
Speaker 2: a child will understand that the radical nature of dependency,
Speaker 2: that most basic bond we're born into the world with,
Speaker 2: that most literally with a physical bond we're attached to
Speaker 2: as a physical bond to our to our mothers, and
Speaker 2: so that was always going to be a problem. That
Speaker 2: we're not blank slates. We are connected. We flourish most
Speaker 2: when we're connected to what is closest to us. That
Speaker 2: and it's not natural to love what is closest to us.
Speaker 2: I was in France. I think last month up in
Speaker 2: the mountains is beautiful shadow dressing. Some must have been
Speaker 2: fifty or sixty. I suppose conservative right wing students from
Speaker 2: all across I think probably you know, twenty five different nations.
Speaker 2: And I opened. I wasn't quite sure what I was
Speaker 2: going to say to them, that the organizers hadn't been
Speaker 2: very clear. So I found myself beginning the session by saying,
Speaker 2: who here has got the best mum in the world?
Speaker 2: And every hand went up, and they looked around and
Speaker 2: they started laughing at each other, and I said, notice
Speaker 2: what you're not doing right now. You're not arguing with
Speaker 2: each other. You're not discussing what are the proper optimality
Speaker 2: criteria of being a mother. You're not there would be
Speaker 2: a crazy, you know, inhuman thing to do. It's a
Speaker 2: totally natural thing to think that your mum is the
Speaker 2: best mum in the world. And then I said, who
Speaker 2: here lives in the best country in the world. And
Speaker 2: everybody's hands went up. And my point was, I don't
Speaker 2: owe you an argument for why my country is the
Speaker 2: best country in the world any more than I owe
Speaker 2: you an argument for why my mum is the best
Speaker 2: mum in the world. Somebody who asks for an argument
Speaker 2: has had what the philosopher Bernard Williams calls one thought
Speaker 2: too many. That the person who has one thought too
Speaker 2: many is like the guy the utilitarian. He walks up
Speaker 2: to the river and he sees two women drowning, his
Speaker 2: wife and a strange woman, and stops to ask, what
Speaker 2: if that strange woman might win the Nobel Prize in
Speaker 2: Public economics? That person has had one thought too many.
Speaker 2: It is a totally natural disposition of every human to
Speaker 2: love what is closest to their own. Aquinas sees this.
Speaker 2: Aristotle sees it is at the beginning one of the
Speaker 2: greatest works of politics ever written. Book one, page one
Speaker 2: of Aristotle's Politics, he says, how do we think about
Speaker 2: how we get on? How do we think about the
Speaker 2: life of the police? Politica says, well, you know, we're
Speaker 2: born into the world and we're dependent upon each other
Speaker 2: male female, Men and women will bond, then they will have,
Speaker 2: then they will pro create. There'll be a family, a household,
Speaker 2: and oycosts, but that won't be enough. That will be
Speaker 2: enough for daily needs, but it won't be enough for
Speaker 2: sort of you know, non date more than daily needs.
Speaker 2: So you'll have a village and the village will come together,
Speaker 2: but that won't be enough either. You will need to
Speaker 2: grow into a polus for self defense and so on,
Speaker 2: a city state as it were, a country, a nation,
Speaker 2: and that Aristotle thinks, okay, that's for pretty small in
Speaker 2: the fifth fourth century BC Greece. But but that was
Speaker 2: the functioning, that was the way in which Aristotle that
Speaker 2: was that was this kind of optimal size for human
Speaker 2: beings to flourish too as it worked get fulfill their
Speaker 2: their their proper ends as human beings. And I think
Speaker 2: that's still the basic way of thinking about things. I
Speaker 2: think it's it's really what you see in Aquitas. I
Speaker 2: think it's what you see in the Bible as well.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's there's so much thereat out to to think about.
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Speaker 1: can find out more about Pastor Allen and the ministry
Speaker 1: at Alan Jackson Forward slash Charlie. So let's go. Let's
Speaker 1: let's pull one of those threads, which is that all
Speaker 1: the French young people at that chateau will raise their hand.
Speaker 1: Who lives in the greatest nation? Why does Europe not
Speaker 1: vote or believe that vocally in any of their politics.
Speaker 1: Let's now center our conversation around Continental Europe, and then
Speaker 1: we'll make our way to your home, if I may
Speaker 1: say so. Continental Europe is a husk of its former self.
Speaker 1: It's an open air museum. It's sad, it's depressing. There
Speaker 1: are pockets obviously of joy and of history. But I
Speaker 1: think you would agree, doctor, or it's not what it
Speaker 1: used to be. How did that happen? World War Two?
Speaker 1: The West one? Right? And now we look in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five, Europe is an unrecognizable continent in more ways
Speaker 1: than one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, and we would it
Speaker 2: would take a very, very kind of long, long conversation
Speaker 2: to really get to the bottom of it. I mean,
Speaker 2: one book i'd really recommend on this is actually by
Speaker 2: an American, Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.
Speaker 2: This is actually goes way back. It's two thousand and nine,
Speaker 2: which is a long time considering what's happened in the
Speaker 2: intervening period. But I think Caldwell really sort of it's
Speaker 2: an incredibly prescient book, and he starts to see the
Speaker 2: kind of the sort of conditions of the unraveling kind
Speaker 2: of kicking in. And you're right. You know, after the
Speaker 2: Second World War that the French had what they call
Speaker 2: the tont Glorias, the thirty glorious years in Germany. You have,
Speaker 2: at least in West Germany, you have the vis chap under.
Speaker 2: You know, this economic miracle, this extraordinary explosion of economic
Speaker 2: flourishing and national self confidence in West Germany. And I suppose,
Speaker 2: you know, nineteen eighty nine has got to feature somehow
Speaker 2: in the story of Europe's decline or Europe's sort of
Speaker 2: wants that, you know, the great bugbear of the Soviet
Speaker 2: Union and that great enemy of freedom everywhere had been dissolved.
Speaker 2: Then I think there was a sense of, well, you know,
Speaker 2: before that, there was a sense of what are we for?
Speaker 2: We know what we're for. We're for freedom, and this
Speaker 2: is something that is pretty uncomplicated, and it's going to
Speaker 2: stitch us together as a kind of as the West.
Speaker 2: It was easy to think about the West, and it
Speaker 2: was easy to think about the rest. And I think
Speaker 2: after the nineteen eighty nine into the nineteen nineties before
Speaker 2: the Wall that the fall of the Wall in a
Speaker 2: way sort of starts to mark the beginning of the
Speaker 2: kind of questioning what are we about? What is our story?
Speaker 2: What are we for? As a fascinating moment in two
Speaker 2: thousand and four, when the European Union is trying to
Speaker 2: work out a constitution. In the end it fails because
Speaker 2: it can't agree on anything really, and there's a huge
Speaker 2: debate about what goes in the preamble of the constitution.
Speaker 2: Where how do we set out right at the beginning
Speaker 2: of constitution we the European Union? Who are we? What
Speaker 2: makes us we? What makes us a wei? They said, well,
Speaker 2: our Hellenic inheritance, Greece and Rome, the classical inheritance, yes,
Speaker 2: the Enlightenment inheritance as well. No mention of the Hybreic
Speaker 2: or the Christian inheritance. This was seen to be something
Speaker 2: that was, you know, low status, not something that wanted
Speaker 2: to be admitted. John Paul the Second is right towards
Speaker 2: the end of his life two thousand and four and
Speaker 2: got involved in Italian politicians got involved. There's a huge
Speaker 2: fight about it, and in the end the decision was, no,
Speaker 2: we're not going to have any recognition of the fact
Speaker 2: that the European Union is in any way at all
Speaker 2: the successor to what it really was a successor to,
Speaker 2: namely Christendom and the Holy Roman Empire, and that which
Speaker 2: stitched Europe together as a sort of self conscious collective
Speaker 2: entity that was gone. And I don't want to overstate
Speaker 2: that too much, but I think that it was an indicator,
Speaker 2: an index into the way in which the Europeans were
Speaker 2: beginning to run out of a sense of who are we,
Speaker 2: what are we for, where do we come from? And then,
Speaker 2: of course, with the emergence of a kind of technocratic,
Speaker 2: democratically unaccountable potent in parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg, the
Speaker 2: parliament is in both places. Wait for this, for one
Speaker 2: hundred million, one hundred million years a year, the European
Speaker 2: Parliament moves from Brussels to Strasbourg. I think it's every
Speaker 2: fortnight back and forth.
Speaker 1: How long is a fortnite?
Speaker 2: Sorry too, you didn't have fortnits over here? For it's
Speaker 2: fourteen days, two weeks.
Speaker 1: We do, or just trying to fortnite?
Speaker 2: So two and it just just to think of that
Speaker 2: they can't kind of couldn't resolve something as basic as that.
Speaker 1: But they moved back and forth.
Speaker 2: They moved back and forth. Yeah, just so the Belgian's hat,
Speaker 2: you know, the kind of Franco German packed is happy.
Speaker 2: And then the sort of you know, the idea of
Speaker 2: there being a European union beyond the Franco German alliance.
Speaker 2: So that's that's what you ge. That's when you go
Speaker 2: to Brussels. So all these crazy things, crazy sort of
Speaker 2: features of the kind of European settlement, and there's a
Speaker 2: kind of democratic deficit, you might say. I used to
Speaker 2: play this parlor game when I was I'm now at Cambridge.
Speaker 2: I was at Oxford in twenty sixteen, just ahead of
Speaker 2: the Brexit vote, and one of the parlor games I
Speaker 2: would play with my I was the only out of
Speaker 2: the closet Brexiteer as far as I know, in the
Speaker 2: whole of this college among I don't know, think about
Speaker 2: seventy eighty colleagues. And I used to ask them who's
Speaker 2: our who's our member of the European Parliament, like which
Speaker 2: who represents us? Who represents Oxford and the surrounding areas
Speaker 2: in Brussels, Strasbourg, And no one could answer. No, one.
Speaker 2: No one knew, not even the professors of politics, and
Speaker 2: there was no reason for them to know, because it's
Speaker 2: a fake. It was a fake. It was and is
Speaker 2: a fake parliament with very little powers, very very little
Speaker 2: few veto powers, very few powers of it to initiate legislation.
Speaker 2: Nobody voted for them, nobody, nobody had any reason to
Speaker 2: know who they were. And so that has been a
Speaker 2: huge problem. That kind of the sort of the European
Speaker 2: Union project has been, you know, from nineteen ninety two onwards,
Speaker 2: where it really became a self consciously political union and
Speaker 2: not just an economic and trade one. That's really been
Speaker 2: it's been a disaster. And I hoped that in twenty
Speaker 2: sixteen Brexit would be the first brick in the wall,
Speaker 2: that it would it would catalyze a kind of domino
Speaker 2: effect that was probably wishful thinking, becase is particularly in
Speaker 2: the euro he're in the euro nations. You know, it's
Speaker 2: one thing for Britain with its own pound, its own currency,
Speaker 2: to break away, it would be much more dramatic, there'd
Speaker 2: be much more dramatic consequences of if a euro country
Speaker 2: split away. But the Europe has been a disaster for
Speaker 2: the countries who have been members of it. I mean Italy,
Speaker 2: for example, has scarcely had any GDP growth. I think
Speaker 2: it started to pick up recently, but really, for the
Speaker 2: first twenty years of its being part of the euro
Speaker 2: effectively nothing at all. Greece and Spain youth unemployment was
Speaker 2: through the roof effectively, you know, you've got you know,
Speaker 2: the Spanish currencies of Greek currency effectively being shackled to
Speaker 2: the German deutsch Mark. And so the Germans weren't complaining
Speaker 2: because the currencies was artificially depreciated, their exports more attractive,
Speaker 2: and so it was all this kind of elaborate ponzi
Speaker 2: scheme which at some point is going to unravel. And
Speaker 2: then somehow, you know, ideologically within the elite forming classes
Speaker 2: in Oxford and Cambridge, in London, certainly in Britain, you know,
Speaker 2: the idea is that to be European was to be
Speaker 2: part of the European Union. Those two are absolutely part
Speaker 2: and parcel, and I never understood this. You know, you
Speaker 2: can hate FIFA and love football, as I've often said,
Speaker 2: you know, or soccer, I should say, you can hate FIFA,
Speaker 2: like the Worldwide Organization for Soccer, and you can, and
Speaker 2: you can love soccer. In fact, you can hate. I
Speaker 2: hate FIFA because because I love football, I don't like
Speaker 2: what FIFA is doing to international football. I don't like
Speaker 2: the corruption. I want the game to be a richer game.
Speaker 2: And I think it's the same with the European Union,
Speaker 2: and it's had this sort of deadly effect on our
Speaker 2: sense of what it is to be European.
Speaker 1: What explains the hyper secularization of Europe post World War Two?
Speaker 1: Why did we see such a dramatic drop off of
Speaker 1: church rates? Is it as simple as they saw tragedy
Speaker 1: and suffering and nihilism took the void. What because Europe
Speaker 1: has had depressingly low church rates and they just keep
Speaker 1: on finding new lows every decade. Where what percentage of
Speaker 1: people in Europe do you think regularly attend church?
Speaker 2: It varies quite a bit from country to country, but
Speaker 2: it is shockingly low relative to certainly relative to the
Speaker 2: United States. So you know, in Italy it's it's now very,
Speaker 2: very very low. I think it's it's certainly well below
Speaker 2: five percent. I mean, you know, religious adherence is just
Speaker 2: a very difficult thing to measure, you know, is actually
Speaker 2: going to church?
Speaker 1: Does it?
Speaker 2: Does it does it accounts as sort of being a
Speaker 2: Christian or being being a church go you know in Britain,
Speaker 2: you know what what caused it? I mean, it may
Speaker 2: be the opposite, I think. I think I'm more tempted
Speaker 2: to the analysis that actually it's prosperity and flourishing, particularly
Speaker 2: material flourishing and prosperity that tends to catalyze a sort
Speaker 2: of collapse in the sense of any need for meaning
Speaker 2: or any any any orientation to the transcendent. And I
Speaker 2: suppose also in the sixties you're seeing the emergence of
Speaker 2: competing systems of meaning, competing accounts of what it is
Speaker 2: to have significance, competing sets of answers to livesteep as questions.
Speaker 2: We see that a lot of that important from California
Speaker 2: and elsewhere. And I suppose the sort of something, you know,
Speaker 2: there's something fashionable about religious skepticism that was certainly true
Speaker 2: in the sixties. If you think back, you know, to
Speaker 2: the high noon of the New Atheists in two thousand
Speaker 2: and five, you know, there was something very, very sort
Speaker 2: of elite. There was something very a lot of cachet
Speaker 2: in being in being an atheist. And I'm tempted to
Speaker 2: think that theists in New Atheism was just a politically
Speaker 2: correct way to be skeptical of Islam. I think that
Speaker 2: the timing works quite well there. But I think if
Speaker 2: you look in the last few years, I mean, I
Speaker 2: just saw some data out from Britain this morning. You know,
Speaker 2: I think between eighteen to thirty five year olds, belief
Speaker 2: in God has tripled over the last five years. Bible
Speaker 2: purchases has gone up by eighty seven percent over four years. Now.
Speaker 2: It's from a pretty low low base, but something is
Speaker 2: happening out there. You know, it's still you know, it's
Speaker 2: quite it's still quite small. But the numbers among among
Speaker 2: gen z or gen z as you call them, that
Speaker 2: some cam gen z well, because z is how you
Speaker 2: pronounced the letter in English, and I know you Americans
Speaker 2: have a different way of putting it.
Speaker 1: But no, it's just it's interesting. So let's now, let's
Speaker 1: now take our attention to your country, which I had
Speaker 1: the opportunity to visit, and you hosted us wonderfully in Cambridge. Right,
Speaker 1: great to have quite quite the ambush so not by you,
Speaker 1: but by Cambridge. But we survived.
Speaker 2: It, more than survived it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we we I think we we triumphed, some could say,
Speaker 1: and you were so sweet and so kind throughout that
Speaker 1: entire process. So the United Kingdom or Britain or England,
Speaker 1: whatever were we want to want to give, give to
Speaker 1: give it voted for Brexit in twenty sixteen. Where are
Speaker 1: British politics today? What is the status of British politics?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well it's it's it's a great question, you know,
Speaker 2: in twenty sixteen, and we have this extraordinary expression of
Speaker 2: democratic will in seventeen point four to six million people
Speaker 2: voting for the principle that laws affecting the United Kingdom
Speaker 2: should be made in the United Kingdom and should be
Speaker 2: accountable to the people and the voters of the United Kingdom.
Speaker 2: It's a very just you know, because seemingly an entirely
Speaker 2: uncontroversial principle. But it was the biggest vote of we've
Speaker 2: had in the history in British voting history. And another
Speaker 2: key driver there was the sense of we're losing our sense,
Speaker 2: we're losing what it is to use the first person plural,
Speaker 2: as Roger Scrutin, one of my favorite philosophers, likes to
Speaker 2: put it, that sense of we, we the people, What
Speaker 2: is it that makes a wei and I think what
Speaker 2: was going on in Brexit was this kind of inco eight,
Speaker 2: kind of cry that we are losing that sense of
Speaker 2: who we are. That every time, for the last forty
Speaker 2: to fifty years, every time the British people have had
Speaker 2: an opportunity to express a view on mass demographic change
Speaker 2: and transition, it is said no or go much slower,
Speaker 2: And every time its leaders have effectively ignored those that
Speaker 2: clearly expressed will. And I think twenty sixteen was a
Speaker 2: moment where suddenly it looked as if we might have
Speaker 2: the opportunity to finally regain control of our laws and
Speaker 2: regain control of our borders. At the same time, what
Speaker 2: actually happened in the last five years. One in what
Speaker 2: have we had is one in twenty seven people in
Speaker 2: Britain have arrived in the last five years. One in
Speaker 2: sixty arrived in the last eighteen months in the first
Speaker 2: twenty five years of this century, gross migration, gross immigration
Speaker 2: talking twelve to fifteen million people. That's roughly four to
Speaker 2: five times as many people who arrived on our shores
Speaker 2: in the first thousand years of our history. It's difficult
Speaker 2: to overstate. And I know you've had you know, You've
Speaker 2: had enormous influxes too under the Biden administration, but you're
Speaker 2: a much bigger You've got a much bigger territory, and
Speaker 2: you've got a different kinds of different kind of categories
Speaker 2: of migrants coming in, and you've at last got an
Speaker 2: administration that's willing to do something about it.
Speaker 1: But this praise God for that.
Speaker 2: And indeed and that has had but that has had
Speaker 2: a profoundly kind of traumatic shock on us sprits, and
Speaker 2: it's had a kind of tectonic effect on the landscape
Speaker 2: of British politics. So what's happening in British politics? Well,
Speaker 2: quick update. Last year July twenty twenty four, we saw
Speaker 2: the Loveless Landslide. So we see the Starmer government getting
Speaker 2: an astonishing one hundred and seventy five odd seats of
Speaker 2: majority in Parliament, which is an enormous, enormous majority and
Speaker 2: one of the biggest in living memory, on only twenty
Speaker 2: percent of the vote twenty percent of the people eligible
Speaker 2: to vote, something like thirty four percent of the vote share.
Speaker 2: It was you know, the sofa one, I mean the
Speaker 2: couch won that election. It was a very low, very
Speaker 2: low turnout. Nobody it was an apathetic election. Nobody seemed
Speaker 2: to care. Fast forward now, you know, we were just
Speaker 2: over a year in. Back in the first of May
Speaker 2: of this year, we had the local elections whe which
Speaker 2: are a pretty good proxy. It's a bit like the
Speaker 2: midterms and not a bad proxy for what the country's
Speaker 2: mood in is. And I think you know, Labor gets
Speaker 2: goes from thirty four percent to twenty percent, The Conservative
Speaker 2: Party goes down to fifteen percent, extinction level, almost an
Speaker 2: unprecedented low. And for the first time in one hundred years,
Speaker 2: a new party emerges, a third party to rival the
Speaker 2: duopoly that's had britten in its grip since nineteen twenty
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty three, and that is Nigel Farage's Reform UK,
Speaker 2: which surged through to win six hundred seventy seven local seats,
Speaker 2: which if you extrapolate that out, is thirty percent of
Speaker 2: the electorate. That's an They were at fourteen percent a
Speaker 2: year ago. And that's going up and up and up.
Speaker 2: And what you're seeing for the first time in the
Speaker 2: history of British politics since there have been political parties,
Speaker 2: let's say the Tories are emerging like the sixteen seventies,
Speaker 2: sixteen eighties and really kind of bedding down in their
Speaker 2: modern form in the eighteen thirties. For the first time
Speaker 2: in the history of British politics, there is another right
Speaker 2: wing party emerging, another Conservative Party. That is. It looks
Speaker 2: as if, in my view, we'll have to see what
Speaker 2: happens next May with some more proxy elections, then there'll
Speaker 2: be a general election in twenty twenty nine. The last
Speaker 2: point that Kirstarma can call it. But my sense is
Speaker 2: that Nigel Farage is on track to be the next
Speaker 2: Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Speaker 1: That deserves some applause. So let's examine that deeper and
Speaker 1: more thoroughly. Some people in the audience will hear the
Speaker 1: Conservative Party, don't we like them? Explain what a concert
Speaker 1: what it means to be part of the Conservative Party.
Speaker 1: That's not exactly you know, Let's say the equivalent that
Speaker 1: we would have here in the United States of what
Speaker 1: we consider to be a conservative.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's right, I mean, but even here, I suppose
Speaker 2: in the States there are lots and lots of fascinating
Speaker 2: debates within the GOP, within the Republican Party. Is to you,
Speaker 2: what is it to be a conservative? You know, is
Speaker 2: it to be Reagan night. Is it to be a fusionist,
Speaker 2: is it to be a Trumpist, Is it to be
Speaker 2: a kind of compassionate bush Eite conservative, whatever it might be. So,
Speaker 2: I mean, and you know, to some extent we mirror
Speaker 2: some of those those debates, those debates about freedom, economic freedom,
Speaker 2: How to rank that in the order of what it
Speaker 2: is we want to conserve. But roughly speaking, you know,
Speaker 2: the Conservative Party was in power from twenty ten to
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, and you know, all all of the
Speaker 2: good things that it delivered, it delivered by accident.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It granted the referendum on Brexit in twenty fifteen, not expected.
Speaker 2: In its manifesto, it didn't expect to win in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2: It thought there would be another coalition, that the referendum
Speaker 2: would be scrapped by their coalition partners. But they won,
Speaker 2: almost unexpected, not expecting to. They granted reluctantly the referendum,
Speaker 2: They campaigned against Brexit, that that was the official government position.
Speaker 2: Then they lost. The government fell. A new government came in,
Speaker 2: headed up incredibly by Theresa May, a prime minister who
Speaker 2: voted against Brexit. A prime minister dude voted against Brexit.
Speaker 2: Was tasked by sort of the internal party political dynamics
Speaker 2: of the Conservative Party to deliver Brexit, and sure enough
Speaker 2: it was a complete catastrophe. That's when I cut up
Speaker 2: my membership card, you know, to be Conservative in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: twenty seventeen. Was was quite straightforward. It's just you've got
Speaker 2: one job. Seventeen point four million Brits have asked us
Speaker 2: to do this one thing and right now all that
Speaker 2: we want you to do, and they couldn't do it. It
Speaker 2: couldn't do it, couldn't do it. Finally, that May government
Speaker 2: falls in twenty that summer of twenty nineteen, after a
Speaker 2: spectacular defeat at the European elections. Those European elections are
Speaker 2: good for something, it turns out, because in the space
Speaker 2: of six weeks Nigel Farage sets up the Brexit Party
Speaker 2: and goes from zero to winning a national election in
Speaker 2: the United Kingdom that has never inconceivable, quite just unthinkable,
Speaker 2: And that's spelt the end of the May Party and
Speaker 2: Boris Johnson takes over and finally managed to get Brexit
Speaker 2: over the line. Then the plague strikes and COVID and
Speaker 2: lockdown and so on and so forth, spending goes through
Speaker 2: the roof, and you know, we've got very very serious
Speaker 2: economic economic problems headaches to it to worry about. So
Speaker 2: being conservative has been it's been very very hard to
Speaker 2: kind of keep a track on what it means to
Speaker 2: be conservative. I suppose for Brits, the British Conservative Party
Speaker 2: is just to be conservative, is just to be a pragmatist,
Speaker 2: just to be pragmatic. But as you know, I remember
Speaker 2: harry On because he passed through a mutual friend of
Speaker 2: mine and Charlie's came through. He said that the trouble
Speaker 2: with pragmatism, James is it doesn't work. And it's true.
Speaker 2: You know, you got it, you can't.
Speaker 1: G K.
Speaker 2: Hsson says, you know, the pragmatist's chief end is to
Speaker 2: be something more than a pragmatist. If all your prizing
Speaker 2: is efficiency, then it doesn't. Then what is efficiency? Efficiency
Speaker 2: towards what It's got.
Speaker 1: To be aim. You have to aim your destination.
Speaker 2: She's got to have a tellos, you've got to have
Speaker 2: a horizon. And I think for years and years and years,
Speaker 2: the Conservatives horizon was just to win. We just need
Speaker 2: to win, and they were very good at winning. They're
Speaker 2: the most successful.
Speaker 1: Elect sound like a Republican party that we know of.
Speaker 2: But I and the Conservative British Conservative Party is the
Speaker 2: most success successful election winning machine in the history of
Speaker 2: politics anywhere in the world. But you know, I think
Speaker 2: that is that may now be coming to an end.
Speaker 4: This is Lane Schoenberger, chief investment Officer and founding partner
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Speaker 1: debt relief yrefight dot com. So so then so that
Speaker 1: defines the Conservative Party Reform, which is Nigel Faraja's party
Speaker 1: is growing. How and you've mentioned this, how does mass immigration,
Speaker 1: specifically mass Islamic immigration playing into how people are thinking
Speaker 1: about this election and the United Kingdom?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well it's a great question. I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: it's very hard to know. With so many people coming in,
Speaker 2: it's very hard to know, like who they are, what
Speaker 2: do they believe, what do they what do they think?
Speaker 2: Let alone working out strategies of integration or or assimilation.
Speaker 2: So what's happening now? I mean, so we've got illegal immigration,
Speaker 2: so roughly you know, tens of that. I would say
Speaker 2: tens of thousands of people coming onto the to the
Speaker 2: Calais beaches and paying people traffickers three four thousand euros
Speaker 2: a pop to take the pretty dangerous journey to in
Speaker 2: Dinghies across the across the channel. And so there's an
Speaker 2: Now that those numbers are tiny relative to the levels
Speaker 2: of legal migration, which are huge, but somehow it concentrates
Speaker 2: the concentrates the mind, this fact that you know, these
Speaker 2: people are coming over. We don't know nothing about them.
Speaker 2: Most of them are young men of fighting age, very
Speaker 2: few women, very few children. Very hard to believe that
Speaker 2: they are actually refugees fleeing persecution and warfare. I mean,
Speaker 2: France is not a great country right now. You know,
Speaker 2: you might not like it very much, but you know,
Speaker 2: is it in the grip of civil war and widespread
Speaker 2: urban conflict. I mean, yeah, only in August really and
Speaker 2: you know, actually Calle is a pretty nice, pretty nice
Speaker 2: place to be. But that's but that's what's going on.
Speaker 2: And so the government doesn't know what to do with
Speaker 2: these people. The Tories didn't know what to do with them,
Speaker 2: The Labor Party didn't know what to do with them.
Speaker 2: We are we are wedded and kind of enmeshed in
Speaker 2: all of these complex webs of international obligations, treaty obligations.
Speaker 2: There's a foreign court in Strasbourg that has jurisdiction over
Speaker 2: we can and can't admit, Well.
Speaker 1: It wasn't Brexit supposed to fix there.
Speaker 2: Well, it is something that is worth clarifying here. So
Speaker 2: there are two courts. There's two European courts. It's European
Speaker 2: Court of Justice in Luxembourg and then there's the European
Speaker 2: Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. And we did not
Speaker 2: leave the European Court of Human Rights. That is a
Speaker 2: separate jurisdiction which emerges after the Nuremberg trials in the
Speaker 2: late nineteen forties, where there was a sense that in
Speaker 2: order to kind of ensure that this could never happen again,
Speaker 2: that the Nazi war criminals were never able to say
Speaker 2: what laws did we break? And actually it was very hard,
Speaker 2: you know, the Allied prosecutors found it very difficult to argue. Jackson,
Speaker 2: the US prosecutor, and David Maxwell fIF found it very
Speaker 2: difficult to say, well, you know, it's not clear what
Speaker 2: laws you have broken. I mean, technically it's not clear
Speaker 2: that the Holocaust, for example, was against the law. The
Speaker 2: Nazis were scrupulous legislators, so there was this sense we
Speaker 2: have to have this convention we had in order to
Speaker 2: ensure that this never happens again. And that's different from
Speaker 2: the European un The European uion doesn't come along till later.
Speaker 2: And we still remain under the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court.
Speaker 2: And for as long as we are under that that
Speaker 2: it's jurisdiction, we effectively, you know, our courts are required,
Speaker 2: you know, to effectively grant the recision of deportation orders
Speaker 2: by the British government on the grounds that deportation to
Speaker 2: the on Orangin country would breach the deportees human rights.
Speaker 2: I mean, so you're getting you know, I had a
Speaker 2: story that is happening last week of of people of
Speaker 2: people facing deportation going to their embassies, protesting outside the embassies,
Speaker 2: claiming that they would have caught the eye of officials
Speaker 2: within the embassy, and then claiming that it would be
Speaker 2: too dangerous for them to go back. They'd be likely
Speaker 2: to be political prisoners or they like to believe to
Speaker 2: be victims of political persecution. Is quite extraordinary. You have,
Speaker 2: you know, people joining terrorist organizations because that will mean
Speaker 2: that they're going to be political, you know, persecuted politically
Speaker 2: when they go back to their owge in countries or
Speaker 2: Article Article eight right to a family life, which is
Speaker 2: incredibly open basket human right. You can say, no, I
Speaker 2: just I just feel I'm going to be you know,
Speaker 2: I'm gay, and and and Syria is not going to
Speaker 2: like that. Okay, fine, you're you're not You're not going
Speaker 2: back and you're not gonna You're not gonna win that.
Speaker 2: You're not gonna win that. The government is not. No
Speaker 2: government's going to win that case against the human rights
Speaker 2: legal industrial complex because Britain very much, you know, is
Speaker 2: it's no longer the rule of law, it's the rule
Speaker 2: of lawyers.
Speaker 1: The is Nigel thinking about ending that jurisdiction and what
Speaker 1: is he running on in regards to immigration.
Speaker 2: So one of the key questions is do we get
Speaker 2: out of this court? How do we get out of
Speaker 2: the court. You know, my view, if you want to
Speaker 2: really get Brexit done, you just this is you have
Speaker 2: to finish the job. You have to. We have to
Speaker 2: remove ourselves from the jurisdiction of the Strasburg Court. That
Speaker 2: means rescinding Tony Blair's nineteen ninety eight Human Rights Act,
Speaker 2: but the political appetite to repeal a human rights act
Speaker 2: and effectively this sort of new constitution of kind of
Speaker 2: rights based regime, very kind of continental in spirit, very
Speaker 2: different from the common law approach that England has always
Speaker 2: has always had.
Speaker 1: Contrast that can you build into that for a second,
Speaker 1: I don't want to just buy that.
Speaker 2: Let's just think about this. So there's very too, there's
Speaker 2: a very different you might say, there's the kind of
Speaker 2: the jurisprudence of the English speaking peoples, the kind of
Speaker 2: a common law, the idea that we we discern the
Speaker 2: principles of justice, of natural justice from the bottom up
Speaker 2: on a case by case basis, and we work it
Speaker 2: out through concrete quarrels between particular neighbors, between contractual disputes,
Speaker 2: or in the case of the criminal law. The European model,
Speaker 2: this is a little bit crude, but broadly, I think
Speaker 2: broadly kind of plausible. The European model is just to
Speaker 2: kind of imagine what you know, to come up with codes,
Speaker 2: abstract codes that are going to just apply universally no
Speaker 2: matter what, but are basically agnostic and kind of not
Speaker 2: attentive to the concrete particularities of human and interrelations. And
Speaker 2: so you know that one of the great sort of
Speaker 2: guests of the English speaking peoples is is this idea
Speaker 2: of a kind of bottom up common law approach. We
Speaker 2: see this in We see this in Blackstone, we see
Speaker 2: it in cook we see it in all the great
Speaker 2: jurists that we, the English speaker speaking peoples have inherited.
Speaker 2: Whereas the European idea is to think in these sort
Speaker 2: of rights based ways, which has been kind of a
Speaker 2: metaphor drawn from kind of the world of property. So,
Speaker 2: I mean, one way of thinking about this is, you know,
Speaker 2: we have an Offenses against the Person Act eighteen sixty one,
Speaker 2: and we have were these words, these lovely earthy saxon
Speaker 2: words like murder and manslaughter, grievous bodily harm, actual bodily harm.
Speaker 2: And I sometimes joke with my students, you know, which
Speaker 2: do you think is the more kind of morally accurate way.
Speaker 2: What's the kind of right moral grammar in these two
Speaker 2: scenarios is Peter murdered Lucy or Peter breached lucy right
Speaker 2: to life? And I think you know the kind of
Speaker 2: the common law bottom up way of thinking is just
Speaker 2: what is more accurate that he murdered her, or maybe
Speaker 2: it was manslaughter of diminished responsibility, whatever it might be.
Speaker 2: Whereas a rights based view is a much more kind
Speaker 2: of artificial liberal, kind of construct of this sort of
Speaker 2: floating ethereal blank slate with all these kind of strings
Speaker 2: and these different rights coming off it, and it's very difficult,
Speaker 2: it turns out to reconcile all these different rights.
Speaker 1: It's intentionally confusing, exactly right, exactly, it's a feature, not
Speaker 1: a bove.
Speaker 2: It has turned out to be a feature, not a bug.
Speaker 2: And part of the you know, part of what is
Speaker 2: what they're attempting in the rights based regime is to say, well,
Speaker 2: if we all signed up to one common shared view
Speaker 2: of what is right, capital are singular right, then secularism
Speaker 2: can't work, because the point of secularism is to try
Speaker 2: and create this slightly fake, neutral public square where everybody's
Speaker 2: allowed to kind of dis agree about the fundamental question.
Speaker 2: So they do, we don't have any more wars of
Speaker 2: religion like this is the basic idea of kind Treaty
Speaker 2: of West Balia sixteen forty eight. And so we've got
Speaker 2: to be agnostic about the underlying capital are right, because
Speaker 2: if we're not agnostic about it, then we'll start killing
Speaker 2: each other. It'll be a kind of you know, Hobbes
Speaker 2: and war of war against all. So what we say
Speaker 2: is everybody, every individual has a right to determine what
Speaker 2: is right. And then it becomes impossible for any judicial
Speaker 2: process of discerning what is absolutely because what is it?
Speaker 2: What is a judicial What is a judge supposed to
Speaker 2: do to discern the right to discern objective natural justice?
Speaker 2: And it's impossible to do that when you've got these competing, conflicting,
Speaker 2: conflicting claims, conflicting demands.
Speaker 1: So that's so helpful. The question that a lot of
Speaker 1: people have is why is Europe continually importing people that
Speaker 1: not only wish them harm but will replace core European
Speaker 1: identity and culture? What get either metaphysical? If you have
Speaker 1: to hear it is confusing to me and to the audience.
Speaker 1: Why what is it? I mean, Paris, Brussels, London, these
Speaker 1: are unrecognizable cities and it's being done voluntarily. Why who's
Speaker 1: once who's voting for this? What is their argument?
Speaker 2: So increasingly they're not voting for it, So we are
Speaker 2: seeing that this is this the key driver for populist
Speaker 2: movements all across continental Europe and now in Britain. I
Speaker 2: think is a sort of is an kind of emerging
Speaker 2: resistance to all of this. But it is taking a
Speaker 2: long time. And it's a good question. Why has it
Speaker 2: taken so long? Yes, you know, I think the first,
Speaker 2: you know, shooting from the hip, the first answer might
Speaker 2: be guilt, a sense of kind of post colonial a
Speaker 2: post colonial need for atonement. And you see this in France.
Speaker 2: It's it's, it's it's present in Britain. There's a sense
Speaker 2: that we wrong the world. You know, we invaded the world.
Speaker 2: Now we need to invite the world. That that's that's
Speaker 2: the kind of that's the idea, and you see this.
Speaker 2: You know, there's even this sort of guilt dynamics with Germany,
Speaker 2: even though Germany were useless imperialists. I mean, they were
Speaker 2: absolute terrible. I think they had a Namibia, but they
Speaker 2: were that you know, maybe the problem of the twentieth centuries.
Speaker 2: They feel they missed.
Speaker 1: Alibia is actually a great country and it went an
Speaker 1: underrated city.
Speaker 2: Now it is, but you know, it didn't actually have
Speaker 2: much of it didn't have it. They felt they lost
Speaker 2: out on the nineteenth They were terrible straggle for Africa.
Speaker 2: So twentieth century, now it's our turn in our own backyard.
Speaker 2: I didn't know the speculative, but I remember in twenty
Speaker 2: fifteen after Merkel announced, you have opened up the gates,
Speaker 2: vishaffend us, we can do this, and she was making
Speaker 2: policy that's a part one of the most consequential policies
Speaker 2: in the history, in the history of Europe, and in
Speaker 2: living memory. It's it's almost done in real time on
Speaker 2: a TV program where a I think it's a young
Speaker 2: Palestinian or Syrian child sort of emotes or it gives it,
Speaker 2: you know, begs begs her to begs her to help,
Speaker 2: and you can she's almost changing her mind in real time.
Speaker 2: Twenty fifteen, she opens up the gates of Europe. Effectually
Speaker 2: she says to yeah, the German borders are open, which
Speaker 2: of course means Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece. And suddenly you
Speaker 2: have this domino effect and you know, tens of thousands
Speaker 2: coming across in dignies, a thousands dying, thousands drowning from
Speaker 2: from these very risky voyages voyages, and so the trains
Speaker 2: would be rolling into Munich and there would be big
Speaker 2: signs in German saying simply atonement, atonement eight, you know,
Speaker 2: eighty years on, seventy seventy years on, this is how
Speaker 2: we atone for our sins. And I think so there's
Speaker 2: a kind of there's a specific German version of that,
Speaker 2: there's a British version of that, there's a French version
Speaker 2: of that that explains those first waves. So that'd be
Speaker 2: the first answer.
Speaker 1: And can I just interject before My view is that
Speaker 1: when you don't have Christianity, you don't know how to
Speaker 1: deal with guilt, and so you come up with these
Speaker 1: strange counterfeit ways. Because in Christianity, we go to the Cross,
Speaker 1: we go to Jesus. In secularism, you invite a bunch
Speaker 1: of Muslims.
Speaker 2: I think that's a very sobtle point. I mean, so
Speaker 2: I don't know if you it's it's not as simple
Speaker 2: as inviting a bunch of that. That's not what they're
Speaker 2: consciously thinking. No, it's but it's what it's. But yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's a kind of atonement for we're we're kind
Speaker 2: of atoning by finding new victims and finding victims that
Speaker 2: instead of we're kind of inflicting, inflicting suffering on them.
Speaker 2: Now we can sort of somehow we can over time
Speaker 2: we can sort of brick we can we can a
Speaker 2: tourne we can see kind of kind of secular redemption.
Speaker 1: But you're a second one that I interrupted you.
Speaker 2: So no, no, thank you, so very very very stute point,
Speaker 2: thank you, Charlie. That second point is it's just the
Speaker 2: ror economics. So the idea is, you know, the dogma
Speaker 2: and the Treasury, the finance Department in Britain is, you know,
Speaker 2: we've got to just keep the Ponzi scheme going. We've
Speaker 2: got to just keep the GDP you know line, the
Speaker 2: line has to keep going up. The pie has to
Speaker 2: keep getting bigger, even if it means that the slices
Speaker 2: of the pie keep getting smaller. And this is a
Speaker 2: dogma in finance ministries all across Europe. So it's just this,
Speaker 2: it's just this Ponzi scheme were we're not having kids,
Speaker 2: we're aborting hundreds of thousands of them. And there's a
Speaker 2: demographic collapse all kinds of it's a demographic collapse or
Speaker 2: winter all across Europe. Already it's already here, it's here
Speaker 2: in Britain. It's it's it's certainly happening in Britain. And
Speaker 2: so the dependency ratio of taxpayers to dependence, whether it's
Speaker 2: the out of work, which is which is which is,
Speaker 2: which is very high, it's I think it's nine million.
Speaker 2: In Britain. I basically have twenty seven million taxpayers, nine
Speaker 2: million out of work, six million public sector workers, thirteen
Speaker 2: million pensioners. So that ratio, and that ratio is going
Speaker 2: to get a lot worse.
Speaker 1: Pensioners are retirees.
Speaker 2: Sorry, that's right, pensions are retirees. And so that and
Speaker 2: those sort of dependency ratios of taxpayers to non taxpayers
Speaker 2: is going to get worse and worse and worse. So
Speaker 2: the idea is if we can just you know, we
Speaker 2: we can kind of import people who can contribute somewhat
Speaker 2: to our national economy. In fact, it turns out their
Speaker 2: net drains on our national economy. But that's been one
Speaker 2: of the myths. I think. The other myth is to
Speaker 2: go back to liberalism to the third answer would be
Speaker 2: this kind of the liberal of the blank slate. And
Speaker 2: the way I've the way I was thinking about this
Speaker 2: the other day is in the context of the transgenderism debate,
Speaker 2: and the view seems to be in it. It's the
Speaker 2: similar kind of metaphysical myth that that has kind of
Speaker 2: bewitched the liberal mind as with transgenderism. So, you know,
Speaker 2: with transgenderism, you know, the problem is, Look, if anyone
Speaker 2: can become a woman, what is a woman? What is
Speaker 2: it to be a woman? If subjective self declaration of
Speaker 2: any human being is we've lost our definitional distinctions. And
Speaker 2: I think that's the same problem with what we might
Speaker 2: call transnationalism. If anyone can become an Englishman, what is
Speaker 2: an Englishman? If anyone can become an American, what is
Speaker 2: an American? We've got this such sort of definitional vagueness
Speaker 2: that we sort of it becomes impossible to go back
Speaker 2: to that phrase, ever, to use the first person plural,
Speaker 2: ever to be able to say we the people. We're
Speaker 2: not an idea, We're not a proposition, we're not a project.
Speaker 2: We're a people with a home, with a history, with
Speaker 2: a heritage. And that doesn't mean that we can't welcome
Speaker 2: people in. I mean that the model I have for
Speaker 2: this is the Book of Ruth and that very short
Speaker 2: short book in the Old Testament, and that's I think
Speaker 2: a perfect model. You know, what does Ruth do? She's
Speaker 2: a Moabite, she's not an Israelite. But what does she do?
Speaker 2: Her husband dies, she says, to where you go, I
Speaker 2: will go where you lodge, I will lodge boas your
Speaker 2: people will be my people, and your God will be
Speaker 2: my God. And she's she shows humility, she integrates herself,
Speaker 2: she works the fields, she's loyal and the and the
Speaker 2: interesting thing I noticed this, even to the end of
Speaker 2: the book, she doesn't become Ruth the Israelite. She's still
Speaker 2: so her identity is still there. So she's incorporated into
Speaker 2: the people of Israel, but she's still a Moabite, a
Speaker 2: moabit test And we just have we we can't even
Speaker 2: have that conversation. We're not even you know, we have
Speaker 2: no idea. What did it know? You're not allowed to
Speaker 2: say what is it to be in Israel? You're not
Speaker 2: allowed to say what is it to be an Englishman?
Speaker 2: You know, there's somebody the other day who just said,
Speaker 2: you know, the concept of englishness and English identity is evil.
Speaker 2: One of Tony Ble's speechwriters, John Rentol's, he deleted the tweet,
Speaker 2: but that's interesting. There's been a vibe shift a year ago,
Speaker 2: he wouldn't have deleted it. But so things are changing fast.
Speaker 2: But there is this strange myth that sort of bewitches us,
Speaker 2: that that that there's nothing that there is to be
Speaker 2: to be British, to be English, to be Welsh, to
Speaker 2: be Scottish. You can just you know, pass through the
Speaker 2: gates of the hethrow, get your piece of paper, and
Speaker 2: this magic dust will descend upon you and infuse all
Speaker 2: of Shakespeare and a Saucer, and that kind of will
Speaker 2: ensure that your pulse quickens when you see a spitfire
Speaker 2: in the sky, you know. And it turns out that
Speaker 2: magic dust isn't doesn't work.
Speaker 1: National identity is more than paperwork. It's more than just
Speaker 1: having documentation. And I look at mom, Dannie. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's got his paperwork. Like, guy's not an American. He's
Speaker 1: just not nothing about him as American. I'm sure he's
Speaker 1: got his paper I'm not doubting it. Like I'm sure
Speaker 1: he's got all of his documents, but nothing he says
Speaker 1: or believes is anything close to what it means to
Speaker 1: be an American. Period's at odds. Actually, well, this is
Speaker 1: an Islamist Marxist.
Speaker 2: This takes us quite nicely onto onto Islam, because you know,
Speaker 2: one of the challenges that Islam has always had is
Speaker 2: to incorporate into itself, into its political theology, the concept
Speaker 2: of the nation state, MM, the concept certainly the concept
Speaker 2: of the secular public square. Of course, it's it's incomprehension
Speaker 2: or the or the distinction between the secular and the sacred.
Speaker 2: This is not something that is that comes naturally a
Speaker 2: tool to Islamic theology. And actually you can understand in
Speaker 2: many ways, I think Islamic political theology is more consistent,
Speaker 2: more predictable, and more kind of comprehensible than Christian political theology. Know,
Speaker 2: when Augustine comes along and says, well, yes, you know,
Speaker 2: God is in charge of everything, but there are some
Speaker 2: parts where he's just gonna let us be neutral, and
Speaker 2: he's going to let these earthly authorities take control. And
Speaker 2: the Church has the worries about the eternal, and the
Speaker 2: earthly authorities worry about the earth, the kind of the temporal,
Speaker 2: and that's the kind of the beginning of the seculum.
Speaker 2: The idea of the secular starts to emerge with Augustin.
Speaker 2: It's not meant to be a kind of godless zone.
Speaker 2: But that's really effectively what it what it becomes after
Speaker 2: after the eighteenth century. And you know, for Islam, if
Speaker 2: you're if you're a monotheist, that's a very strange idea.
Speaker 2: Why should there be any corner of creation that is
Speaker 2: somehow even kind of provisionally neutral and godless. Islam can't
Speaker 2: cope with this thought, and it's monotheism. It's particularly it's
Speaker 2: very very aggressive and strong commitment to to to tawied,
Speaker 2: to to the doctrine of wonderers and the power, to
Speaker 2: the power of God makes it very hard for this
Speaker 2: kind of Augustinian idea to emerge. And so the nation
Speaker 2: state is fundamentally a kind of secular construct. Now it's
Speaker 2: one that Christianity has been able to baptize, right, so
Speaker 2: I would just come back from from Hungary. I mean,
Speaker 2: they are very self consciously a Christian nation founded by
Speaker 2: Saint Stephen, and there's crosses everywhere. It's in their constitution.
Speaker 2: That's not a problem. England, England is you know, oar
Speaker 2: monarch is also the Supreme Governor of the Church of England.
Speaker 2: We are technically, you know constitution. If any of you
Speaker 2: watch the coronation or the funeral of her late majesty.
Speaker 2: You know that is you know, the ceremonial kind of
Speaker 2: pedigree is a Christian one. But within Islam, it's it's
Speaker 2: it's much harder for Islam to form it. It's much
Speaker 2: harder to convince a loyal Muslim to have a political
Speaker 2: loyalty to a nation rather than the uma, rather the covering,
Speaker 2: rather than the Islam. And so Islam is a much
Speaker 2: more a much more cosmopolitan and rootless universal identity, and
Speaker 2: it finds it very difficult to work with the particular
Speaker 2: and with with kind of sort of secular national boundaries.
Speaker 2: I mean, one start just to close the loop on
Speaker 2: the right. For example, you know, there are six roughly
Speaker 2: six percent of Muslims in Britain, zero zero point five
Speaker 2: percent of them are are in the armed force. Are
Speaker 2: in the armed forces so much that there were more
Speaker 2: British Muslims who went to fight for Isis than there
Speaker 2: are in the British arm Force.
Speaker 1: I'm surprised that only six percent, because I go to London,
Speaker 1: it feels like a lot more than six percent. Well
Speaker 1: that's because they're.
Speaker 2: Very concentrated and they're very dense. So had we had
Speaker 2: a successful strategy of assimilation integration. If such a that's
Speaker 2: a point, then there might have been a much a
Speaker 2: much more diffuse diaspora. But but that's not how it works.
Speaker 2: And you get these certain tipping points where effectively, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of effectively chain migration that creates these demographic silos,
Speaker 2: and that that increases that effectively means integration becomes impossible.
Speaker 2: What is it to integrate into the city of Birmingham today?
Speaker 2: What is it to integrate into the city of Bradford?
Speaker 1: You have nothing to integrate to it to become a Muslim?
Speaker 1: That's right?
Speaker 2: The majority population, majority population in Luton or not? Is
Speaker 2: it coming close to or is he even there?
Speaker 1: Muhammad is the number one birth name in the biggest
Speaker 1: cities al across.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that, you know, that's indicative. It's
Speaker 2: a little bit complicated that that that stat because Muhammad
Speaker 2: is way more common just as a first name among say,
Speaker 2: you know, from one hundred Muslims, you're gonna have way more,
Speaker 2: way more Mohammads, whereas your first name is a much
Speaker 2: more evenly, more more evenly distributed in the West, I think,
Speaker 2: but it's still it's it's it's it is an index
Speaker 2: of swords.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're honored to be partnering with Alan Jackson Ministries
Speaker 3: and today I want to point you to their podcast.
Speaker 3: It's called Culture in Christianity, the Alan Jackson Podcast. What
Speaker 3: makes it unique is Pastor Allan's biblical perspective. He takes
Speaker 3: the truth from the Bible in a play issues we're
Speaker 3: facing today, gender confusion, abortion, immigration, Doge Trump, and the
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Speaker 3: the problems in every episode, he gives practical things we
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Speaker 1: Each episode will make you recognize the power of your
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Speaker 1: hard to bring Biblical truth back into our culture. You
Speaker 1: can find out more about Pastor Allen and the ministry
Speaker 1: at Alan Jackson dot com forward slash Charlie. So let's
Speaker 1: build on this Islam topic a little bit. What you're
Speaker 1: saying is that Islamists have no concept of separation between
Speaker 1: mosque and state.
Speaker 2: I think that's actually islam one I won.
Speaker 1: And I think that's important. And that's why when I
Speaker 1: say Islam is not compatible with Western civilization, I'm not
Speaker 1: inherently even attacking Islam. I do in other comments I say,
Speaker 1: but not in that one, that that's that's a that's
Speaker 1: a separate topic for another time. But that one they
Speaker 1: get mad. They say, oh, no, we can coexist outside
Speaker 1: of the state, but Islam is a all encompassing there
Speaker 1: that that a law is overall right, that you submit
Speaker 1: in all that you do. And talk about how when
Speaker 1: the Islamists go into Western countries, we know that they
Speaker 1: don't assimilate, but they actively then try to run for
Speaker 1: political office and then try to get involved in government.
Speaker 1: The rates of Islamic participation in government far exceeds rates
Speaker 1: of Christian participation in government. In the West. We are
Speaker 1: on the precipice of having a Muslim mayor in Minneapolis,
Speaker 1: New York, Calgary, and London. By the end of this
Speaker 1: calendar year.
Speaker 2: Well, so I think the reason for that is because Muslims,
Speaker 2: certainly in Britain, tend to vote in blocks and tend
Speaker 2: to vote as households rather than as individuals. And this
Speaker 2: is it's just the way it is. They tend to be,
Speaker 2: you know, rooted more in kinship and tribe and ethnicity
Speaker 2: than is common has been common in England. I mean
Speaker 2: in England.
Speaker 1: We know.
Speaker 2: This is a wonderful book by Alan McFarlane, colleague of
Speaker 2: mine in Cambridge, called The Origins of English Individualism that
Speaker 2: shows that the English people from the thirteenth twelve thirteenth
Speaker 2: century onwards were constantly moving around, always moving around. We
Speaker 2: were not very familiar, We weren't very sort of clan
Speaker 2: based at all. Whereas are sort of new arrivals, the
Speaker 2: new English as it were, I do not take that
Speaker 2: approach at all. And so you've got you've got very
Speaker 2: very high rates of kind of electoral electoral blocks. And
Speaker 2: that means, you know, it's like eighty eighty five percent
Speaker 2: of Muslims will vote labor roughly and so effectively. That's
Speaker 2: why you see a lot of a lot of you know, mayoralties,
Speaker 2: a lot of local MPs. Will the Mayor of London's
Speaker 2: at Econa seems to be like he's going to be
Speaker 2: running on Metropolis for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 1: Isn't that interesting that eighty five percent of American Muslims
Speaker 1: so Democrat eight and eighty five percent of UK Muslims
Speaker 1: vote Labor, which is interchangeable parts. That goes to show
Speaker 1: that it's not an outreach problem on behalf of the
Speaker 1: Republican Party. You're conservative, that's their disposition, like you're importing
Speaker 1: future voters, Yeah, of a certain political party.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's true. What interestingly we saw last
Speaker 2: summer was five MPs were elected to the House of
Speaker 2: Commons on explicitly pro Gaza tickets. That is to say,
Speaker 2: they were elected they were in Labor strongholds, but their
Speaker 2: promise to voters they were going to stand as independent MPs,
Speaker 2: and their promise was we're going to take Gaza more
Speaker 2: seriously even than the Abor Party is taking it. And
Speaker 2: so for the first time in the history of British politics,
Speaker 2: we saw five members of Parliament returned to the House
Speaker 2: of Commons who were explicitly loyal to a foreign entity
Speaker 2: that doesn't even exist, but not to Britain, and you
Speaker 2: know that is something that's new and that and so
Speaker 2: you're starting to see some cracks in this strange coalition
Speaker 2: between you know, Rainbow and crescent and stuff.
Speaker 1: So I want you to build that out because we're
Speaker 1: running tight on time. But so what is it to
Speaker 1: say that against rainbow? So the precrescent and the stars.
Speaker 2: So think of think of rainbow as a kind of
Speaker 2: metonomy for progressivism, and the crescent for Islam, and the
Speaker 2: star for socialism, good old fashioned old left socialism and these.
Speaker 2: This is that, this is really this messy coalition that
Speaker 2: holds the left all across the Western political landscape, and
Speaker 2: up until now they've operated in lockstep. I said this
Speaker 2: in my neck On speech last July. You know the
Speaker 2: jokes on us conservatives when we laugh at Gaze for Gaza,
Speaker 2: The joke's on us. Why because in fact it's a
Speaker 2: completely within within their worldview. It's a completely consistent and
Speaker 2: coherent position. It's not it's not funny, it's frightening. What
Speaker 2: it means is what they're saying, what that movement and
Speaker 2: movements like it are saying, is that we hate the
Speaker 2: West more than we hate each other. And we're going
Speaker 2: to We're going to destroy the West before we turn
Speaker 2: on each other. A gaze for Gaza. You know, Rainbow
Speaker 2: and crescent will be together until we've got rid of
Speaker 2: the cross. And so you know, in Britain you're studying
Speaker 2: to see those cracks appearing. I think, you know, maybe
Speaker 2: they're parts of the America where you're starting to see.
Speaker 2: But then you know, Trump miraculously gets dearborn and he
Speaker 2: gets very you know, he wins the Muslims, does very
Speaker 2: well among the Muslims. So it's more complicated with you here.
Speaker 2: But I mean that coalition is very fragile, and you know,
Speaker 2: for now it's held together by this sort of common
Speaker 2: sort of collective hatred for the for the oppressor, whether
Speaker 2: it's Israel or whether it's the British establishment.
Speaker 1: I have two final things I want to talk about,
Speaker 1: the first of which is broad and then I want
Speaker 1: to talk about jd Vance at the end. First of
Speaker 1: which is when you come to America, what is it
Speaker 1: that you appreciate about this country that you want that
Speaker 1: you want Americans to know as an outsider, that you
Speaker 1: see that it's different and unique.
Speaker 2: Well, in a strange way, coming to America is like
Speaker 2: coming to a new world, a strange and unfamiliar world
Speaker 2: where you know, you can't speak English properly and you
Speaker 2: have all these funny habits. But another you know, for
Speaker 2: the most part, there's a sense now, particularly given the
Speaker 2: scale and speed of the demographic change and churn in
Speaker 2: my corner of England, to the southeast of England, there's
Speaker 2: a sense of coming home, you know. I can you know,
Speaker 2: land in particularly somewhere like Phoenix a couple of nights ago,
Speaker 2: and I sort of I'm surrounded by not quite my people,
Speaker 2: but I'm surrounded by the English speaking I'm among the
Speaker 2: English speaking peoples. I'm in the anglosphere. I'm you know,
Speaker 2: I'm in the world of the anglosphere. And that's something
Speaker 2: which now has almost as a kind of nostalgia. There's
Speaker 2: a sense of there's a sense of home, weird homecoming
Speaker 2: that because I can see glimpses of the old world
Speaker 2: in the new glimpses of the old world that are
Speaker 2: no longer, that are beginning to fade in the old world.
Speaker 2: I don't know if I'm putting this very clearly, but
Speaker 2: do you understand what I mean?
Speaker 1: I do? And look, we're a very confusing country because
Speaker 1: we're very we had contradiction, but one of them is
Speaker 1: free speech. Free speech was a British birthright. If how
Speaker 1: many people are arrested on a daily basis in Britain
Speaker 1: for speech crime.
Speaker 2: Thirty a day, arrested thirty offenses, so we you know
Speaker 2: what we now have in England is this sort of
Speaker 2: kind of complex shopping list of different offenses and indeed
Speaker 2: non offenses. Fifteen years ago something was introduced called a
Speaker 2: non crime hate incident.
Speaker 1: How about that for or I was going to say, so.
Speaker 2: The idea behind a non crime hate incidents is if
Speaker 2: you've been you haven't committed a crime, but somebody has
Speaker 2: got upset at something you've said, or you're sailing a
Speaker 2: bit too close to the wind on discrimination, we'll take
Speaker 2: your name and we'll record it and we'll keep it.
Speaker 2: Now that the last government did manage to reverse it,
Speaker 2: introduced it, but it managed to reverse some of the
Speaker 2: worst of that, but it's it's still there. And so
Speaker 2: we have these extraordinarily kind of pernicious statutes on the
Speaker 2: books which effectively weaponizes allow the police to spend their
Speaker 2: whole time policing tweets, not streets, and what you're seeing
Speaker 2: in the police force is a sort of massive mass demoralization.
Speaker 2: I saw three days ago there's a seventeen percent drop
Speaker 2: over the last year and sign ups to the police force.
Speaker 2: It's because it's a pretty thankless job. Now. It used
Speaker 2: to be the case that a policeman, to become a
Speaker 2: policeman was one of the great kind of professions you
Speaker 2: could get into if you were you know, civic minded,
Speaker 2: pretty bright, but you know, not an egghead like me,
Speaker 2: you could go into the police force. Theresa May brings
Speaker 2: in a requirement for a degree requirement. You've now got
Speaker 2: to go to some Mickey Mouse university to get a
Speaker 2: Mickey Mouse degree to be eligible to become a British Bobby.
Speaker 2: And guess what, you know, they just want to sit
Speaker 2: around policing tweets and checking TikTok and and checking your thoughts.
Speaker 2: As one friend of mine who was arrested a few
Speaker 2: years ago, was told by policeman on his.
Speaker 1: Way, they're arrested for wrong speak.
Speaker 2: Wrong speak and wrong think in the case of these
Speaker 2: poor women. Or Adam Smith O'Connor that your vice president
Speaker 2: of the case that you're presidents so eloquently drew attention
Speaker 2: to in his brilliant Munich speech back in February. Adam
Speaker 2: Smith O'Connor, who whose child was aborted and he would
Speaker 2: pray outside the abortion clinic where his son was aborted,
Speaker 2: at pray silently in his head. And because he breached
Speaker 2: the buffer zones that have been imposed by in the
Speaker 2: course of the last government, under the consert extensibly conservative government,
Speaker 2: he was arrested for breaching those zones and for being intimidating.
Speaker 2: There's a no protest, no speech, not holding a sign,
Speaker 2: praying silently.
Speaker 1: And do you believe that there is a reckoning that
Speaker 1: will come on the culture of free speech in Britain?
Speaker 2: So I think there'll be a reckoning on everything. I
Speaker 2: mean the part of the free speech. You know, it's
Speaker 2: when you start talking about free speech a societies talking
Speaker 2: about free speech, worrying about free speech, that there's probably
Speaker 2: no more free speech. We never worried about free speech
Speaker 2: when there was a WII, when there was a first
Speaker 2: person plural, we didn't have to worry about it. Why
Speaker 2: because basically ninety eight percent of the population broadly speaking,
Speaker 2: shared a common universe of norms and conventions and manners
Speaker 2: that are built up over sedimented over centuries, and so
Speaker 2: we knew what the acceptable parameters and limits of speech were.
Speaker 2: But once you go through this extraordinary experience, unprecedented experiment
Speaker 2: in mass demographic reconfiguration, let's just just put it euphemistically,
Speaker 2: then all the norms have gone, all the norms are dissolved,
Speaker 2: and you've got to learn to cope with and get
Speaker 2: along with, exist alongside people for whom free speeches makes
Speaker 2: no sense at all.
Speaker 1: Well, especially Muslims are not going to be the ones
Speaker 1: arguing for free speech.
Speaker 2: The opposite, correct, correct, absolutely.
Speaker 1: Right, They're not going to be your big fight.
Speaker 2: No, I mean, because the central idea within it alarm
Speaker 2: is alarm.
Speaker 1: So submit is submission. And also they don't want you
Speaker 1: to be able to criticize Muhammad or all that.
Speaker 2: You know, the idea of free speech that comes through
Speaker 2: in Athens with this idea of paisiaa isogoria in the
Speaker 2: Athenian Assembly in the fifth century BC. But if you
Speaker 2: also see it come through in the Christian tradition the
Speaker 2: second century AD, when these early Christian apologists are get
Speaker 2: being arrested and they go to the emperor and they say, look,
Speaker 2: surely you o Emperor, you don't want me to bow
Speaker 2: the knee or burn my pinch of incense or worship
Speaker 2: few if you wouldn't want me to do that, if
Speaker 2: you knew that my belief was being coerced, Surely it's
Speaker 2: a good thing for me to try to freely decide
Speaker 2: what I should worship. So you see this in Titalian,
Speaker 2: the first Latin church father. He's the first person to
Speaker 2: come up with the phrase freedom of religion libertas religionness.
Speaker 2: There's actually freedom of speech is downstream of freedom of
Speaker 2: religion as a Western value. I mean, yes, it's there
Speaker 2: in Athens, but really emerges in the kind of that
Speaker 2: tussle between the early Christians and the Roman authorities and
Speaker 2: his freedom of really we should have freedom to worship,
Speaker 2: freedom to meet on Sundays, and that took three hundred
Speaker 2: years for them to win that riot. But then the
Speaker 2: freedom of speech and freedom of expression and freedom of
Speaker 2: association is a kind of secular kind of counterpart to
Speaker 2: that and downstream of it.
Speaker 1: Last question, you a piece just came out that showed
Speaker 1: you that has said that you were JD's mentor JD
Speaker 1: Vance's mentor our wonderful Vice President United States and maybe
Speaker 1: the next president of the United States tell us about that.
Speaker 2: First of all, that's ridiculous. If anything, he has mentored
Speaker 2: me far more than I've mentored him. I've learned so
Speaker 2: much from him. I've been learning from him since twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: when a Texan friend of mine pressed He'll Billy Elergy
Speaker 2: into my hands two weeks before the elections, saying Trump
Speaker 2: is going to win and this is why. And I
Speaker 2: remember reading that book, and my mutual friend of ours, Rodre,
Speaker 2: was graving about it and and did an interview with
Speaker 2: with with JD and and and the book, you know,
Speaker 2: rocketed up through the charts. So he caught my eye then,
Speaker 2: and just it's just a great, great sort of privilege
Speaker 2: and sort of pride to it to be able to
Speaker 2: call him a friend. And we we've got to know
Speaker 2: each other over the years. And you know that mental line,
Speaker 2: it's just media mischief, really.
Speaker 1: I so, what do you see in him as a statesman?
Speaker 2: So I see somebody who is sort of wise and
Speaker 2: mature beyond his beyond his years. I think he's got
Speaker 2: a kind of a sense of calm, a sense of
Speaker 2: I think's he's just highly intelligent. You don't get that
Speaker 2: many just really high IQ politicians anymore, certainly not in Britain.
Speaker 2: I don't know about America. But now he's just got
Speaker 2: kind of raw cognitive processing power, and but he doesn't
Speaker 2: show it too it doesn't show it too much, but
Speaker 2: it's there, and that helps a great deal. Like he
Speaker 2: can he can size up, he can size up a problem,
Speaker 2: he can size up in this. You know, the most
Speaker 2: interesting thing about that leaked signal chat do you remember
Speaker 2: from a few months ago? I thought the most interesting
Speaker 2: bit was JD's saying something like, wait a minute, the
Speaker 2: US only gets x percent. I think it's four percent
Speaker 2: of trade through the Sewers canal. The Europeans are getting,
Speaker 2: you know, several factors more, why are we bearing the
Speaker 2: brunt of this? And I just thought, of course, I mean,
Speaker 2: first of all, that what did that little revelation say.
Speaker 2: One he really drilled out he wasn't getting policy advised.
Speaker 2: He just worked that out. Two, he's working it out
Speaker 2: with the interests of the American people first and foremost
Speaker 2: in his mind. I was very striking little detail that.
Speaker 2: And we just don't have politicians like that. We don't
Speaker 2: have politicians whose reflex is to refract every public policy question,
Speaker 2: whether it's foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy, cultural policy,
Speaker 2: through the prism of the national interest, of national preference.
Speaker 2: This is just a strange, you know, idea to liberal mind,
Speaker 2: but it's the politics of the future. It's the politics
Speaker 2: of home, it's the politics of belonging, it's the politics
Speaker 2: of nationhood, of the first person plural, and it's what
Speaker 2: defines the new Right, and it's why the old Right
Speaker 2: gets confused when some slightly left leaning economic policies sometimes
Speaker 2: pop up. Nigel's sort of talking about maybe, you know,
Speaker 2: renationalizing the water companies, and it seems crazy. I thought
Speaker 2: you were was a Thatcher, right, But actually, if you'd
Speaker 2: think it may be the case that if you're really
Speaker 2: putting the natural interest first, maybe you want to go
Speaker 2: easy on trade, maybe you want to put some tariffs on.
Speaker 2: And you know, it's very hard for the pre twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: the long twentieth century kind of political ideology to understand this.
Speaker 2: But once you've got the national preference in mind, you
Speaker 2: can understand JD's decisions, you can understand the Vice president's
Speaker 2: way of thinking about the world, you can understand the
Speaker 2: president's way of thinking about the world. He's not, you know,
Speaker 2: you might think he's a limousine liberal. You might have
Speaker 2: predicted him to be a limousine liberal from nineteen nineties onwards.
Speaker 2: And he's whacking all these tariffs on and he's doing
Speaker 2: things which are you know, he's been and it's foreign
Speaker 2: policy neither isolationist nor idealist. He's being a realist. He's
Speaker 2: he's assessing the world as it is and not as
Speaker 2: the liberal mind would like it to be.
Speaker 1: Well, doctor, where I think i'll use the first person plural.
Speaker 1: We really enjoyed our chat here today. God bless you, doctor,
Speaker 1: or thank you so much.
Speaker 4: For more on many of these stories and news you
Speaker 4: can trust, go to Charliekirk dot com.