Did the political establishment pave the way for the rise of Trump and Farage? In a recent article, an academic from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Toulouse argues that the lack of action on behalf of the political mainstream actually led to the rise in support for the far-right and nationalist movements across the world.
00:01:04.680The theses inside this article are definitely worth the War Room Posse's consideration on this.
00:01:12.880And the academic featured at the heart of this article, Laurence Gunther, Dr. Gunther from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Toulouse joins us tonight from Toulouse.
00:01:27.820Dr. Gunther, thank you very much for joining us.
00:01:30.780Your thesis, let me get this right, your thesis is effectively that it's the action or the lack of action on behalf of the political mainstream that actually created inadvertently the rise of these populist and nationalist movements right across the world.
00:01:51.020But why don't you give us the, in your own words, the what led you to concentrate on this specific branch of research?
00:01:59.160Yes, so I became fascinated by topics of what we call the rise of populism now during the rise of the AFD in Germany, like a few years ago, maybe eight years ago or so.
00:02:18.360And I read an article about the topic that summarized what researchers had done so far, and I noticed that the issue of representation was not at all considered.
00:02:32.720So the question whether mainstream parties, the parties that existed until then, represented the political opinions of voters, in particular in Europe.
00:02:44.540So there was little research on that, so I started this research and then I analyzed the attitudes and political positions of politicians and voters and found that the particular full theory of populism is quite correct.
00:03:05.740And in particular that mainstream parties are basically all cultural, social topics, much more liberal, much more left-wing than most voters.
00:03:16.660And populists build this, what I call a representation gap.
00:03:21.320They often, like politicians from right-wing populist parties, often have attitudes that are relatively close to those of the average voter, a bit more right-leading, but relatively close.
00:03:39.100Because this is it, this is the heart of it, this term which you've coined, representation gap.
00:03:44.160Your analysis effectively shows that voters and mainstream politicians have long been broadly aligned on the economic issues, such as tax, spending, public ownership and what have you.
00:03:58.340But on the social, cultural issues, such as immigration and criminal justice, there's a huge gap between the political parties and the various peoples around the world.
00:04:10.020Um, and that, therefore, Western publics, uh, having long desired a greater emphasis on, on order control, uh, and cultural, um, in integration, uh, noticed, have noticed that the politicians themselves have tilted in the opposite direction, uh, favoring what could be called inclusive and permissive approaches.
00:04:32.780And that is, I think, uh, the, the, a perfect synthesis here of this representation gap.
00:04:40.480Uh, it seems to me, though, Dr. Gunther, that the best thing that the political mainstream could do, if it finds the rise of what it calls the far-right alarming, is actually pivot to where the public is, uh, on, on, especially on the issue of, of immigration.
00:04:59.760But that's not what's happening, is it?
00:05:04.580So I do agree that to win back voters, I think the optimal thing for mainstream parties to do is real political action on cultural issues, in particular regarding immigration.
00:05:19.740That would mean limited immigration and particularly asylum immigration.
00:05:25.100I do think that for a long time there was no real action.
00:05:34.200There were some attempts by mainstream parties, and here I'm talking mostly about Europe.
00:05:39.580There were some attempts by mainstream parties to co-opt the rhetorics of populist writing parties, but usually without any action.
00:05:49.640And if they tried action, then usually this action did not have any results, like the plans of the Tories to re-migrate.
00:06:01.540In the end, it did not have any tangible results.
00:06:06.640I do see that slowly on the European level, there is a move toward more restrictive immigration policy.
00:06:12.920But this is happening very slowly, and often it doesn't have results so far.
00:06:21.080So that, I think, is the perfect analysis.
00:06:26.580The response of the so-called Christian democratic centre-right has been to try to imitate, in a certain extent, the vocabulary and the rhetoric of what the mainstream calls far-right,
00:06:41.900but without the follow-through of the actual action.
00:06:46.420That's why, in our movement, in the economic nationalist sphere, we term these groups effectively performative.
00:06:55.400Their discourse is a performance and doesn't really get to the heart of the issue, which means so much to the voting public.
00:07:04.380Dr. Gunther, what really interested me about your research and your argumentation is that it cuts across a lot of the narrative coming from the political mainstream,
00:07:20.300that what are called far-right political movements are somehow fascist, anti-democratic,
00:07:29.120and like you mentioned the AFD in Germany, basically, the AFD is almost a prescribed political party now.
00:07:38.920The courts are constantly intervening with its candidates, and not only in Germany.
00:07:45.680The interesting thing about your research and the way you frame this is that, in fact,
00:07:51.960that analysis from the mainstream media, but also the political mainstream, would actually be incorrect.
00:07:58.420What you're pointing out here is that these groups are responding to a democratic need which isn't being catered for by the mainstream political parties.
00:08:09.680And that makes these far-right groupings far from being anti-democratic, but part of, an essential part of, the democratic process.
00:08:20.460So I think this is a very fascinating point, and this, I think, reveals some struggle over democracy,
00:08:32.140that we have underlying this discussion about concrete politics, because, you know,
00:08:38.380the thing is, I think, most, probably the majority of voters would interpret my results the way you do.
00:08:50.380But the interesting thing is, most researchers or politicians that I've talked to have a very different interpretation,
00:08:57.620because their interpretation is, well, if populist parties have the same attitudes as the average voter,
00:09:09.220what that means is that the average voter is a fascist, because these, like, I think many mainstream politicians
00:09:19.260and also many researchers and journalists are very convinced, because of the positions of living populists,
00:09:29.100that they are fascists, so everyone who's like that is then also a fascist.
00:09:34.300And I think democracy is also defined in very different ways by people across a different spectrum nowadays.
00:09:42.720So, again, I do think that many voters would, like, define a democracy like you, or a democratic behavior like you,
00:09:51.100if you represent a large part of the electorate, then this is a very democratic act,
00:09:57.700because democracy is fundamentally about representation in the eyes of many people,
00:29:20.660Materialism, which has been a dominant current view during the early 20th century, has become recently a belief which is almost irrational.
00:29:32.100It's a belief which is extremely difficult to keep and hold.
00:29:38.660And the recent discovery shows that the reasonable way is to believe that there is a creator God.
00:29:47.180All these discoveries that the materialism is a difficult belief is known by the scientists and know all the difficulties, but it's not known by the general public.
00:29:59.440And the goal of our book is to make known to the general public here and in Europe that materialism is a belief like any other, but it's a belief which has received so many shocks and has so many problems that it is probably today an irrational belief.
00:30:17.680Would you mind just explaining the term?
00:30:58.440It's just matter organized by chance and necessities and by the laws of nature.
00:31:04.960This is the definition of materialism.
00:31:08.540Well, Robert Wilson, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for his discovery of cosmic radiation, the background radiation that ripples right across the universe following the Big Bang, has written the foreword to your book.
00:31:26.580And in that book, he says, although the general thesis that a higher mind could be at the origin of the universe does not provide a satisfying explanation for me, I can accept its coherence.
00:31:42.880If the universe had a beginning, then we cannot avoid the question of creation.
00:31:49.440So, Olivier, my question to you following on from Robert Wilson wrote there is that even though you have a Nobel laureate right forward to your book and he doesn't share your conclusion, do you think this suggests that a new frontier isn't belief versus science, but humility within science?
00:32:14.800Yes, Robert Wilson is a very important Nobel Prize winner because he was with Arnaud Penzias, one of the two who discovered, as you said, what we can call the proof of the Big Bang.
00:32:30.120And he was the one who wrote the preface of our book in the beginning in France and in Italy.
00:32:37.120Now he's one of the endorsements of the book.
00:32:39.300And as you said, he said that he is not a believer, but he was an atheist and he become an agnostic.
00:32:46.280And he said that his discoveries of the beginning of the universe, we cannot avoid after this, the question of the creation, as you said.
00:32:55.420And it's very important because he recognized that the hypothesis of God is coherent and that, but he said for myself, I'm not sure that it's the only way to explain the things.
00:33:10.480So that's the case of many, many Nobel Prize winners that we are meeting today.
00:33:16.840We were in Princeton and in Berkeley a few weeks ago to discuss those topics with them.
00:33:23.560And many of them recognize that the hypothesis of God is coming back and that for the moment, they have nothing to explain the beginning and the fine tuning of the universe.
00:33:34.160But they say, perhaps one day we will find something.
00:33:37.760So what we are saying with this book is that there is a great reversal in science, a great reversal, which means that for centuries, science seems to be able to explain the world without the hypothesis of God.
00:33:54.500OK, so let's have a look at the two primary theses then that about this book, about the origins of the universe, the Big Bang and the origins of of life or life or DNA based life on planet Earth.
00:34:10.500Because we have to lean. In fact, I think part of the genius of of your book and the way you've put this out is you're you're actually using science itself and philosophy to suggest that there are gaps in science to do with the the origins.
00:34:31.640The arguments themselves, I think that you're presenting are an updated version of what Aristotle was suggesting two and a half thousand years ago about the need of the prime mover, the unmoved mover.
00:34:48.640Ho u kinumenon kine, that which being unmoved moved moves, excuse me, that's how Aristotle framed it.
00:34:59.800Would you just in your own words explain what this argument is about causality, the principle of causality and what arises from that, which is determinism, the principle of determinism and why they are absolutely essential to contemporary science.
00:35:20.700And the fact that they can't resolve the origin and the fact that they can't resolve the origin either in with regards to the Big Bang and the origins of the universe or the origin of life, why those are fundamental issues that that that that that needs to be responded and cannot be responded to according to the science itself.
00:35:44.460Well, even before Aristotle, there was another philosopher, a Greek philosopher whose name is Parmenides.
00:35:54.140And he used to say, and he used to say already, it was in Latin, ex nihilo nihil, which in English is from nothing, nothing can come.
00:36:09.360And today, 99 percent of the scientists and philosophers, they agree on the fact that from nothing, nothing can come.
00:36:17.440So there is a consequence on this principle on which everybody agrees is that the universe, if you want to be a materialist, the universe cannot have an absolute beginning, a beginning from nothing, because it had a beginning from nothing.
00:36:37.280So it's extremely interesting and important to know that all the materialists today, they believe or they have to believe that in one way or the other, our universe is eternal.
00:36:50.340And surprisingly, during this last 100 years, several discoveries, several evidence came, we count six or seven evidence showing that it is almost impossible that our universe could be eternal.
00:37:11.860We, it is today highly, highly probable that our universe had a beginning.
00:37:19.260And then in that case, of course, we have the reason for a cause, a cause which would be different.
00:37:27.260And this cause, of course, in philosophy, a cause which has a capacity to make the universe, we call it with a name, we can call it with a different name, but we call it with a name, which is God.
00:37:39.860So this question of the materialism, it's one of the aspects that it is making the materialism an irrational belief, because today, to believe that the universe is eternal is a very difficult hypothesis to sustain today.
00:37:58.360What you were saying just now, if I've understood this correctly, about the collapse of a number of hypotheses in the last century, principally, we're talking about the collapse of the argument of the big crunch, right?
00:38:15.680So you have the big bang sort of 14 billion years ago, and then the gravity of all the matter and energy inside the universe causes the universe to collapse in on itself, and then have an infinite successions of big bangs and crunches.
00:38:33.680That hypothesis was very convenient for scientists, for materialists, because it sort of allowed them to avoid, I actually don't think it was, I actually don't think it was a satisfactory explanation, because even if you had this infinite series of expansion and contraction, you still need to explain why they, what sparked the big bang.
00:39:01.300So I think this goes back to Newton, right, that you can't have, you can't have any effect that doesn't have a prior cause.
00:39:09.760This is part of the principle of causality.
00:39:13.240But put that aside, put that aside, in the 1990s, the scientists realised that the universe was expanding at an accelerating rate.
00:39:25.580It was so great, so great, so great, that actually the idea that it was going to implode in and of itself, that gravitational force wasn't sufficient.
00:39:36.400So it's not an infinite series of expansion and retraction, it's a one-off.
00:39:42.280From nothing, the big bang, all the matter, all the energy, all the time, space in the universe, just emerged out of nothing.
00:39:53.880That's what the scientists want us to believe.
00:39:57.340And with the collapse of the big crunch theory, they really do need to come up with either an explanation for that, which they can't do, because it breaks the principle of causality,
00:40:09.980or they need to read your book and show far more integrity about what they don't know and accept the need for something outside of the system, to having created the system in the first place.
00:40:26.060Yes, what is sure is that the discovery of the big bang was a very big problem for the materialist people.
00:40:34.460And we have a chapter in our book saying that all the Russian scientists who discovered the big bang with Alexander Friedman, they were persecuted and killed in order to avoid this hypothesis of a beginning by the communist Marxist regime of Russia.
00:40:58.360And also in Germany, it was the same, and the reason is that the beginning is a problem, as Michele said, for the vision of the world of the materialist.
00:41:09.780And after this, when it was not possible to inform the big bang, they invented the idea that perhaps after the big bang, you will have a big crunch and an infinite number of big bang and big crunch in the past.
00:41:22.440But in fact, as you said, as you said, it does not work for many reasons.
00:41:27.260You mentioned Saul Perlmutter, who discovered in 1998 that after eight, nine billion years, the universe accelerated its expansion.
00:41:40.060And we were with him in Berkeley a few weeks ago discussing all this.
00:41:45.120And that's one of the reasons of the impossibility of the big bang and big crunch in the past.
00:41:50.380But there is many others, because, for example, if you have an infinite number of big bang and big crunch, the entropy should be at a maximum.
00:41:59.240The black hole should be very numerous.
00:42:01.820The cosmological constant should dominate.
00:42:05.020And you should have a universe looking like a cigar and not homogenous and isotropic as it is really.
00:42:13.920So, as you said, to summarize, the hypothesis of the big crunch and big bangs in an infinite number of big bangs and big crunch in the past does not work.
00:42:24.920So it's one of the problems of the materialist because there is no explanation of the beginning and there is no good explanation of the fine tuning.
00:42:33.900Gentlemen, will you stand by just for 30 seconds, a minute, and I'll come back and we're going to dig on in this a little deeper.
00:42:44.240Folks, I gave out the Birch Gold telephone number to text.
00:42:49.720I'll do it again if you've now got your pen and paper at the ready.
00:42:53.040You need to text Bannon, B-A-N-N-N-O-N, to 989898.
00:43:03.960And Philip Patrick at Birch Gold and his team are standing by waiting to give you advice and help you should you want to roll your existing IRA or 401k into an IRA in gold.
00:43:26.540Michelle, you were saying early on, and I want to dig in on this because I think there were two themes here in the book.
00:43:33.460The first theme is that science doesn't have all the answers and that the more we understand about the universe, the more the lack of those answers becomes significant.
00:43:48.860Which is sort of the reverse of what most people think.
00:43:53.920But most people would think the more we know, the more the argument for God disappears.
00:44:00.040The more we know, the more science is discovered, especially on the astrophysics level, the more the gaps are becoming apparent.
00:44:10.140That's, I think, the first part of your book, which I think would be very helpful if people had a wider appreciation of.
00:44:18.080The second part of the book, and I think you put this very well, is the idea that if you just take the secularist, materialist view of the universe
00:44:31.520on its own, that requires to some degree a religious type of faith to sustain.
00:44:42.060Michelle, could you just explain a little bit about that?
00:44:45.300It's clear that the recent discoveries, which is since, I would say, since one century, are bringing, in fact, are bringing evidence.
00:44:59.080We cannot say proof because absolute proof are just in field of knowledge like mathematics.
00:45:05.800We don't have absolute proof in the real world.
00:45:08.420But in the real world, we have evidence, and we have now many evidence that's a world that cannot be explained without the creator God.
00:45:18.000And let's take the main discoveries which are bringing that.
00:45:21.580The first one is that our universe cannot be eternal.
00:45:25.900Today, the science has six or seven evidence that it is almost impossible for our universe to be eternal.
00:45:33.640It has evidence coming from the physics, from the thermodynamics, from the expansion of universe, from quantum mechanics, from mathematics, etc.
00:45:44.860So, because if there is an absolute beginning, there is a problem, of course, and everybody understands that.
00:45:55.240The fine-tuning of the universe is a fantastic discovery.
00:46:00.160It's a discovery which is quite recent because it's dating from the 1960s.
00:46:06.140A discovery which means that all the numbers of the universe which are guiding the universe, ruling the universe,
00:46:14.000these numbers, these numbers are so finely tuned that in some cases, it's a 15 decimal after the main number which cannot be changed.
00:46:25.620If we change them just by one, our universe would not exist anymore.
00:46:30.360And it's very important to know that several top scientists have changed their mind.
00:46:37.900They were materialists, and they have changed their mind discovering the fine-tuning.
00:46:42.040And, for example, it has been the case with Fred Oil.
00:46:46.240Fred Oil was a top scientist in the United States and the one who was mocking Georges Lemaitre about the theory of the expansion and the Big Bang.
00:46:57.840And he invented the word Big Bang, which then had a big success.
00:47:02.960But when Fred Oil was confronted with the fine-tuning of the universe, he decided himself that he would change his mind.
00:47:29.860So the world has changed, and this is why we call, we name it in our book, that there is a reversal of science.
00:47:39.840For centuries, science seems to say we don't need a God to explain our universe.
00:47:46.680And the philosopher said, if we don't need a God to explain the universe, there is a reason which is very simple and very obvious, is that just God does not exist at all.
00:48:13.240Could you just give me one minute and just say why you think that there are areas of science that require as big a leap of faith as that required in Christianity?
00:48:30.400What I would like first to say that you said that there is a great lack of answers.
00:48:43.920It's now we have new questions, the questions of the beginnings that we talk a lot, but also all the questions of the fine tunings and also many enigmas in the history of humanity that we are pointing in the second part of our book.
00:48:59.940And also in biology, for example, in biology, we discover that life is a miracle, in fact.
00:49:08.480Even atheist people who discover the DNA, for example, Francis Crick, he said the apparition of life on Earth is a miracle.
00:49:48.860The laws of the universe produce a marvel of technology that the density, just to imagine, the density of information in the DNA is 40 billion times more than what we can do in the best chips today in our century.
00:50:08.840So the scholars, the scientists, are absolutely astonished when they discover such technology that is absolutely essential to produce life.
00:50:24.320Because, as we said, all the bacteria, all the human beings, all the plants and all the animals need the DNA.
00:50:41.760I know you're in demand all over the world to promote this book.
00:50:45.480And I strongly recommend it, especially as we're coming up to Christmas.
00:50:49.200I strongly recommend it as a Christmas stocking gift for perhaps your friends or family who haven't given Christianity a chance because they think that science has resolved all of the questions.
00:51:05.340Olivier Bonessi and Michel-Yves Bolloway, very quickly, where do people go to learn more about the book?