Dominion Society of Canada - The Future of Nationalism and British Identity ｜ Charlie Downes at DOMCON26

00:00:00.000 i want to start by thanking the dominion society for hosting this fantastic event i mean given all

00:00:05.840 of the pressure they have been under from the left from other kind of uh you know interest

00:00:12.640 groups that don't want to see events like this take place they don't want to see organizations

00:00:17.600 like the dominion society succeed and grow it really is remarkable that they've pulled it off

00:00:23.200 with such grace i mean what an incredible day it's been so round of applause for them

00:00:30.000 So, as Ken said, my name is Charlie Downs.

00:00:38.420 I'm the campaigns director and spokesman for Restore Britain,

00:00:41.760 which is Britain's...

00:00:43.760 Britain's fourth largest political party by membership.

00:00:54.820 We have over 150,000 members now

00:00:56.840 and millions of supporters up and down the country.

00:01:00.000 we punch well above our weight in elections and the establishment and their friends in the media

00:01:06.560 are increasingly afraid of the tendency within the british public within the british public's

00:01:13.120 soul that we represent it's therefore remarkable that when i was trying to come to your wonderful

00:01:20.960 country i was repeatedly blocked from doing so by the canadian state i am a 25 year old political

00:01:28.320 activist from a fellow Five Eyes nation, a nation, by the way, which has the same head of state

00:01:33.000 as your own. And on Thursday, when I was supposed to fly out here directly to Toronto, I was

00:01:40.180 informed that my electronic travel authorization had been withdrawn. It had been approved in July

00:01:45.580 when I first applied for it, but I was not notified nor given a reason for why it had

00:01:50.680 been withdrawn. It actually had been reopened. So it was a kind of bureaucratic loophole

00:01:55.360 to prevent me from flying into your great country.

00:01:59.560 Therefore, we chose to take a different strategy,

00:02:03.360 which was to fly me to the US and enter Canada via the southern border.

00:02:08.020 Now, on trying to do this, as some of you may know,

00:02:10.880 I was detained by Canadian border authorities

00:02:14.280 and held for over three hours,

00:02:16.620 during which time Matt's car, Matt was my driver,

00:02:21.700 Matt's car was strip-searched, everything was taken out of it,

00:02:24.980 they sent a canine unit into the car and into our bags it was as though they were trying to find any

00:02:29.820 excuse to keep me out of this country and when they didn't they hauled me in for an interrogation

00:02:36.440 which lasted about 20 minutes during which they asked me a series of questions which I found

00:02:41.760 absolutely remarkable they asked me where Restore Britain's funding comes from they asked me what

00:02:50.100 restore Britain's policies on deportations are. They asked me what I think of the allegations

00:02:56.800 that have been made against the Dominion Society that they and their leadership have ties to

00:03:01.760 neo-Nazism. These are agents of the Canadian state essentially agents of the Canadian state

00:03:11.400 subjecting me to what felt like a struggle session where I had to you know answer these

00:03:16.540 ridiculous questions from a chap who, you know, to his credit, didn't seem that bothered by the

00:03:21.600 whole affair. It had clearly come from on high, these instructions to prevent me from coming into 0.88

00:03:26.140 the country. But eventually I did make it in and you have all been very, very welcoming. So thank

00:03:31.520 you very much. Today's speakers have been a very tough act to follow, so I hope that I can retain

00:03:48.780 the energy and power that has run through today's speeches. The title of my speech today is the

00:03:56.320 creed of the revolutionary right in the 2030s, because that, I think, is what all of you here

00:04:01.800 and all of our members back in Britain are. We are not conservatives. We are revolutionaries.

00:04:09.260 We believe that this system and the effects that it has had on our nations is illegitimate,

00:04:25.180 beyond redemption and needs to be torn down democratically of course

00:04:30.640 the beauty and strength of european civilization are unrivaled in human history for five centuries

00:04:41.420 we stood astride the world spreading faith knowledge and order to its furthest reaches

00:04:46.320 driven by an insatiable appetite for truth and power in equal measure the world-conquering

00:04:51.920 spirit of European man imprinted itself across every continent on earth and dominated every

00:04:56.980 field of human endeavour. In the cathedrals of France, the castles of Germany, the art of Italy,

00:05:03.460 the philosophy of Greece, the music of Austria, the governing traditions of England, the vast

00:05:08.580 dominion of Canada, and the military might of America, the glory of that spirit is made flesh.

00:05:14.940 Yet in the sterile malaise of the 21st century, it is as though the burden of that inheritance

00:05:20.420 has become too much for us to bear. European civilization stands as a towering technological

00:05:26.180 colossus of tremendous material wealth, yet spiritually it lies in ruins. Where once we

00:05:32.720 chased power, now we chase pleasure. Where once we sought truth, now we deny its very existence.

00:05:39.100 Where once we endeavored to order our lives in accordance with the will of God and his objective

00:05:43.140 moral law, now we recognize no authority higher than our own fleeting appetites. We have turned

00:05:48.920 away from the greatness to which we once aspired and embraced a philosophy of civilizational suicide

00:05:54.280 that the politicians, academics, journalists and financiers who call themselves our ruling class

00:06:00.180 call progress. They claim that their ideas have made us freer, richer and more enlightened yet

00:06:07.600 the evidence of our own eyes tells us that the opposite is true. Our countries are awash with

00:06:12.740 unwelcome and hostile strangers. Our people know nothing of their own history and culture.

00:06:18.060 our children are adrift and empty of purpose our wealth is concentrated in ever fewer hands

00:06:24.460 while ordinary people struggle to secure the foundations of an independent life and the

00:06:29.160 ruling class is content to preside over it all as long as the money and cocktail party invitations

00:06:35.340 continue to flow in our complacency we have allowed them to sell our civilization out

00:06:40.920 from under our feet the hour is late without urgent action our demise is all but certain

00:06:47.540 As demographic transformation, technological revolution, fiscal crisis, geopolitical realignment

00:06:55.000 and generational change converge, the 2030s will be the most consequential decade for European

00:07:00.140 civilization since the 1940s. The choice that confronts us is existential. Do we live and

00:07:07.880 re-embrace our position as protagonists and leaders of mankind or do we die

00:07:14.680 and be remembered as irredeemably evil.

00:07:21.200 The purpose of this speech is to put forward a creed

00:07:24.120 around which those committed to the former

00:07:25.860 could organise in the coming decade.

00:07:28.200 We are not conservatives.

00:07:29.720 On the contrary, there is much about the present order

00:07:31.880 that we seek not to conserve, but to overthrow.

00:07:34.920 What we seek to conserve, rather,

00:07:36.660 is the civilisational identity and inheritance

00:07:38.800 that this order is destroying.

00:07:40.540 this is the distinction that separates us from the right wing of the present ruling class

00:07:47.220 the conservative parties in britain and canada the cdu in germany much of the american republican

00:07:52.720 party and so on they have accepted the basic tenets of progress diversity is a good in itself

00:07:59.500 individual autonomy as the highest form of freedom morality is relative egalitarianism

00:08:05.960 as the basis of social justice economic growth as the principal measure of national success

00:08:11.240 and the continued transfer of political authority away from the historic nation towards markets

00:08:16.600 courts bureaucracies and supranational institutions they confine themselves to arguing over their

00:08:22.200 implementation and the best promise to offer promise to deliver collapse at a slightly slower

00:08:27.480 pace the right of the 2030s on the other hand must not merely break with the ruling class and its

00:08:32.920 doomed ideas we must declare war on it and embark upon a process a project of active

00:08:38.600 civilizational restoration to that end in this speech i offer two non-negotiable principles

00:08:44.920 upon which a new revolutionary conservative movement for european civilization must be built

00:08:50.520 European identity and Christian faith.

00:09:08.440 Belonging to European civilization is first and foremost a matter of ancestry and inheritance.

00:09:14.680 Until the 21st century, this fact was taken for granted,

00:09:17.540 as it was for every other civilization throughout history.

00:09:20.540 In our own age, however, the distinct identities of European nations

00:09:23.900 have been emptied of their historic content in law and culture

00:09:26.720 and reduced to one universal formula.

00:09:29.640 Democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, tolerance, equality, and human rights.

00:09:35.600 In the eyes of the ruling class, these values have become the sole test of national identity.

00:09:40.080 Anyone from anywhere can become English, German, French or European simply by professing allegiance to them and acquiring legal citizenship.

00:09:50.840 This is progress applied to national identity.

00:09:54.300 The beauty and character of individual European nations are erased, while ancestry is relegated to mere happenstance.

00:10:01.420 The son of an English family that has inhabited the British Isles for 50 generations unbroken 0.73

00:10:05.500 possesses no greater claim to his nation's identity and inheritance than the Pakistani,

00:10:10.620 Somali, Indian, or Chinese who arrived yesterday, provided the newcomer shares our values.

00:10:16.820 Across all the nations of European civilization, the same logic is applied. 0.96

00:10:21.060 What, therefore, meaningfully distinguishes European nations from one another?

00:10:25.460 If English, German, Italian, and Canadian identities

00:10:28.480 are all defined by adherents to the same set of universal principles,

00:10:32.380 then none possesses any substantive content of its own.

00:10:35.860 Democracy and the rule of law may be principles

00:10:37.840 by which a nation chooses to govern itself,

00:10:40.360 but they cannot explain what makes that nation distinct

00:10:42.440 from another governed according to precisely the same ones.

00:10:46.640 England was England long before the advent of liberal democracy

00:10:49.580 and modern human rights doctrine.

00:10:51.500 Indeed, across the centuries,

00:10:52.500 European nations have variously been pagan, Catholic, Protestant, monarchical, Republican,

00:10:58.420 communist, fascist, and much else besides, embracing political, religious, and social

00:11:03.380 arrangements fundamentally at odds with many of the values now set to define their identities.

00:11:08.620 Were our ancestors, therefore, somehow less English, less German, or less French because

00:11:13.260 they did not believe in the values of progress?

00:11:17.640 If a nation survives profound changes in its values and institutions while remaining

00:11:21.980 recognizably the same nation, its identity must reside in something deeper than the political

00:11:26.420 doctrines of any particular age. That deeper foundation is the historic people itself.

00:11:32.840 A nation is not an idea, but a living being made of flesh and blood. It is in its essence a family

00:11:39.360 composed of the living, the dead, and the yet to be born, descended from common ancestors and heirs

00:11:45.020 to a common inheritance, a history, a religion, a land, a language, and a law. Out of this

00:11:51.960 crucible is born a distinctive national culture which in a healthy nation acquires ever greater

00:11:57.360 richness and texture as each generation receives it inhabits it and passes it on to the next

00:12:02.600 indeed it is also out of that same inheritance that the very values our ruling class claim

00:12:07.760 define our civilization emerged for better or worse liberal democracy the rule of law and the

00:12:13.140 concept of human rights were distinctly european developments these principles did not create

00:12:18.080 European civilization, European civilization created them. In other words, a nation is a people

00:12:24.340 and if you lose the people, the nation ceases to be. We are witnessing this process in real time

00:12:29.980 as demographic upheaval tears through many European nations as a result of state-sponsored

00:12:34.760 mass immigration. Nations that were until recently prosperous, peaceful and high trust,

00:12:40.180 such as Sweden, Canada and New Zealand, are increasingly characterized by rising crime and

00:12:44.460 disorder, ethno-religious fragmentation, and outright sectarian conflict on the streets and

00:12:50.320 at the ballot box. Look at what is already happening in the parts of England, for example,

00:12:55.220 where the English population share is declining most rapidly. Pakistani rape gangs in Bradford, 0.70

00:13:00.900 Bangladeshi electoral fraud in Tower Hamlets, and violence between Hindus and Muslims on the 0.99

00:13:05.400 streets of Leicester. The attempt to integrate these foreign populations into our nations 1.00

00:13:10.660 through little more than citizenship and adherence to platitudinous values has utterly failed because 1.00

00:13:17.380 legal status and political assent simply cannot overrule the power of ancestral and religious

00:13:22.020 kinship or manufacture a common national identity to believe that they can is to naively or

00:13:27.860 deliberately misunderstand human nature but even if every newcomer integrated perfectly speaking 0.64

00:13:34.740 our languages observing our customs obeying the rule of law and professing every value demanded

00:13:39.780 of them, the fundamental objection would remain. Civic assimilation can create common habits and

00:13:45.640 political loyalties, but it cannot retrospectively create common ancestry. To adopt the institutions

00:13:51.500 and values produced by a civilization is not the same thing as inheriting the historic identity

00:13:56.620 from which they emerged. The ruling class refuses to confront this reality. Instead, it seeks to

00:14:03.300 pathologize perfectly normal, moral, and healthy attachments to ancestry and inheritance as racism

00:14:08.940 or more recently ethno-nationalism placing the conception of national identity that was taken

00:14:14.200 for granted mere decades ago beyond the bounds of respectable opinion. This hostility is not just

00:14:20.280 ideological the civic conception of nationhood is also remarkably convenient for the economic order

00:14:25.600 over which this ruling class presides. Once nationhood is detached from ancestry and inheritance

00:14:32.120 the nation itself can be reconceived as little more than a market occupying a territory. It ceases

00:14:38.560 to be understood as a people and becomes instead an aggregation of atomized and interchangeable

00:14:43.520 individuals valued principally for their capacity to produce and consume the economic logic of

00:14:49.920 progress has little use for inherited bonds that constrain individual autonomy mobility production

00:14:55.600 and consumption and therefore seeks to dissolve them we may already be living with the consequences

00:15:02.000 of this transformation but it is our children and grandchildren who will pay the true price

00:15:07.060 On present trends, they stand to inherit nations less recognizably their own, 0.60

00:15:11.900 and in some cases, to grow up as minorities in their own ancestral homelands. 0.95

00:15:17.440 They may never know a culture defined by historical continuity,

00:15:20.560 shared identity, and mutual cooperation,

00:15:22.880 only a vicious zero-sum competition

00:15:24.980 between a series of self-interested groups vying for power and resources.

00:15:29.480 Lebanon, South Africa, Yugoslavia,

00:15:32.700 there are countless historical examples

00:15:34.420 of what happens when multiple, mutually hostile ethnic groups

00:15:37.920 occupy the same finite territory.

00:15:40.940 Furthermore, the ruling class already discriminates

00:15:43.400 against European populations in policing, education, employment, and beyond,

00:15:48.560 even while we remain the demographic majority.

00:15:51.200 There is no reason to believe that this would abate upon us becoming a minority.

00:15:55.140 On the contrary, it would likely intensify.

00:15:57.840 If these trends are allowed to reach their ultimate conclusion,

00:16:00.480 it will mean the death of European civilisation altogether.

00:16:04.420 As such, the first principle of the right in the 2030s must be to reassert ancestry and inheritance as the foundations of both individual European national identities and our collective civilizational identity.

00:16:17.420 The Englishman, Frenchman, German and Canadian remain heirs to distinct national inheritances while recognizing in one another branches of the same European family.

00:16:28.060 After all, across the nations of European civilisation,

00:16:31.320 we face many of the same existential challenges.

00:16:34.380 Demographic replacement, the erosion of inherited culture, 0.83

00:16:37.600 the atomisation of our societies, and ultimately the same foe.

00:16:41.760 A self-serving ruling class increasingly hostile

00:16:43.960 to the very notion of historic peoplehood itself.

00:16:47.520 Our nations must stand shoulder to shoulder

00:16:49.160 and meet these challenges as a united European front. 0.70

00:16:57.280 The religion of European civilization is Christianity.

00:17:26.300 This is not because it is instrumentally useful in creating a prosperous society,

00:17:30.500 nor simply because it is the faith we have professed for more than a millennium,

00:17:33.740 but because it reveals the true nature and ultimate purpose of creation.

00:17:37.780 It is our religion because it is true.

00:17:40.180 If Christ is God made flesh, most crucially, if he was crucified, died, was buried and rose again from the dead,

00:17:45.860 then his teachings cannot be reduced to one lifestyle or moral philosophy among many.

00:17:50.040 His claims upon us do not depend upon whether we find them useful or convenient.

00:17:54.100 They proceed from the author of creation himself, and it is therefore our duty to embrace them.

00:18:11.180 This requires faith, the recognition that the highest truths cannot be discovered by reason alone,

00:18:17.260 but must be revealed by God and embraced with humility.

00:18:20.020 nothing could be further from the spirit of progress and its heart lies a moral order

00:18:26.140 whose ultimate good is ever greater individual autonomy the liberation of the individual from

00:18:31.260 every inherited or unchosen constraint upon his ability to determine for himself who he is and

00:18:37.040 how he ought to live up to and including the human body itself christianity begins from the opposite

00:18:42.980 premise man is not sovereign over himself he is a creature not the creator neither his nature nor

00:18:49.620 his ultimate purpose is his to define. Nor does he exist as an isolated individual, but within a web

00:18:55.920 of natural relationships, inherited obligations, and authorities that precede his own will.

00:19:02.360 This understanding of man is illustrated particularly clearly by the covenantal structure

00:19:07.080 of scripture. As theologians such as Scott Hahn have observed, the biblical covenants unfold

00:19:12.620 through an expanding series of social forms. Marriage, the household, the tribe, the nation,

00:19:19.020 the kingdom, and ultimately the universal church. These covenants between God and man are established

00:19:24.940 through a succession of key figures, progressively revealing a hierarchical social order whose

00:19:30.160 constituent forms possess objective natures that are not ours to redefine. The first, marriage,

00:19:37.520 is revealed through Adam, as one man and one woman united permanently before God. The second,

00:19:43.560 the household, is revealed through Noah, as a married couple with their children, 0.82

00:19:47.360 dependence and property. The third, the tribe, is revealed through Abraham as a series of households 0.56

00:19:53.720 united by lineage, language and religion. The fourth, the nation, is revealed through Moses

00:19:59.380 as a series of tribes united under one law in one land. The fifth, the kingdom, is revealed through

00:20:05.560 David as a nation or series of nations united under one political authority, the king. The sixth,

00:20:12.120 the universal church, is established by Jesus Christ as the body that unites all nations

00:20:17.080 in the one true faith under him, the creator and lord of the universe. 0.99

00:20:42.120 I knew it was worth sitting in that horrible immigration center for three hours to see you

00:20:48.620 guys. This progression reveals a hierarchical social order in which each successive form 1.00

00:20:55.300 builds upon rather than abolishes those beneath it. The household preserves marriage, the tribe 0.94

00:21:00.660 the household, the nation the tribe, and the kingdom the nation. Equally the universality

00:21:06.380 of the church does not abolish the particularity of nations. Each structure has a proper

00:21:12.040 place within an order that precedes individual choice, and their ultimate purpose is not mere

00:21:17.360 individual fulfillment, but the salvation of souls. They are schools for the cultivation of

00:21:23.840 virtue, prudence, justice, courage, temperance, faith, hope, and charity. Sincerely embraced and

00:21:32.240 embodied, they orient the individual towards God and away from sin, preparing us for our ultimate

00:21:37.460 end in the kingdom of heaven we tamper with them at our peril yet tamper with them we have

00:21:44.660 the ruling class has spent generations attempting to dismantle this order in the name of progress

00:21:49.700 treating treating each of its constituent forms as another constraint from which the sovereign

00:21:54.100 individual must be liberated marriage has been progressively stripped of almost every

00:21:58.740 characteristic that once defined it its sacredness has diminished as it has become as it has come to

00:22:03.860 be understood primarily as a civil contract between individuals rather than a solemn covenant before

00:22:08.900 god the normalization of divorce has undermined its permanence rendering a lifelong union

00:22:14.260 dissoluble at the will of either party normalization of adultery pornography promiscuity

00:22:19.780 and sex outside marriage has similarly eroded its demands of fidelity and sexual exclusivity

00:22:25.140 while cohabitation has displaced marriage altogether as the expected foundation of family

00:22:29.540 life more fundamentally still the purpose and very definition of marriage have been transformed

00:22:35.140 where marriage was once understood principally in terms of permanent obligations to one's spouse

00:22:39.680 children family and god it is increasingly conceived as an instrument of individual

00:22:45.220 fulfillment whose legitimacy endures only for as long as it satisfies the desires of those within

00:22:50.320 it same-sex marriage severs its legal definition from the union of man and woman while the growing

00:22:56.040 normalization of polyamory challenges its exclusivity to two people. At the same time,

00:23:02.140 theories that deny the objective significance of sexual difference attack the underlying

00:23:06.460 anthropology from which the traditional Christian understanding of marriage proceeds.

00:23:10.840 The cumulative effect is not merely to relax the rules surrounding marriage, but to replace

00:23:15.560 one conception of the institution with another. From an objective, permanent, sexually complementary

00:23:20.920 covenant ordered by obligations beyond the self to a relationship defined increasingly by the

00:23:26.780 preferences and autonomy of the individuals who enter it. As with nationhood, this redefinition

00:23:32.680 has been accompanied by a language designed to place these truths beyond the bounds of

00:23:36.460 respectable opinion. Belief in the distinct and complementary roles of the sexes is branded

00:23:41.260 sexism, belief that marriage is properly the union of man and woman, homophobia, and belief

00:23:46.840 that sex is an objective biological reality that cannot be altered by individual will,

00:23:51.100 transphobia. In each case, the distinction between irrational hostility towards individuals

00:23:55.980 and meaningful moral judgments about sex, marriage, and human nature is deliberately collapsed,

00:24:01.200 allowing normal, moral, and healthy beliefs about these things to be pathologized as a prejudice.

00:24:06.980 The household has been subjected to a parallel assault. Its most fundamental purpose,

00:24:12.620 the creation and raising of the next generation, has been undermined by abortion and contraception,

00:24:18.420 while assisted reproduction and commercial surrogacy increasingly separate procreation

00:24:22.520 from the marital union and transform the creation of human life into a medical and at times

00:24:27.360 commercial transaction. At the same time, the authority of parents over the formation of their

00:24:32.620 own children has steadily been ceded to state schools, bureaucracies, corporations, and other

00:24:38.040 institutions outside the household. Its economic independence has been weakened no less profoundly.

00:24:43.760 A usurious and rent-seeking economic order has loaded households with debt, inflated the cost

00:24:48.540 of housing and other necessities, and placed ownership of property increasingly beyond the

00:24:52.560 reach of young families. Taxation and the structure of the labour market increasingly assumes that

00:24:57.300 both parents will participate fully in paid employment, diminishing the household's capacity

00:25:01.620 to provide directly for children and other dependents. Even the intergenerational transmission

00:25:06.420 of property, one of the principal means by which households acquire continuity and independence

00:25:10.900 across generations, is increasingly impeded. Meanwhile, overextended welfare programs have

00:25:16.280 transferred functions once performed by families and communities to the state. The objection is

00:25:21.480 not to providing for those genuinely in need, but to a system that can substitute bureaucratic

00:25:25.860 provision for familial obligation, penalize marriage, and make individuals increasingly

00:25:30.400 dependent upon the state rather than upon durable households of their own. The cumulative result

00:25:36.200 is a household progressively deprived of the functions that once made it an independent social

00:25:40.920 and economic unit producing and raising children caring for its dependence accumulating and

00:25:46.040 transmitting property and providing its members with a sphere of authority and security

00:25:50.040 substantially independent from both the market and the state the tribe has been weakened both

00:25:56.440 materially and morally these economic pressures on the household have rendered our people

00:26:01.400 increasingly nomadic young adults are routinely expected to leave the towns and villages in which

00:26:05.640 their families have lived for generations in search of affordable housing education or employment

00:26:10.840 scattering extended families and dissolving the dense networks of kinship and familiarity

00:26:14.920 from which enduring communities are formed local businesses churches clubs and other institutions

00:26:20.200 that once bound households together have declined alongside them not least through the predatory

00:26:24.440 expansion of both international corporate interests and the state at the expense of local economic

00:26:29.320 life the ideal subject of the ruling class's economy is not a man rooted in a particular

00:26:34.600 place among relatives and neighbors to whom he owes particular obligations but a mobile unit of

00:26:39.500 labor willing to move wherever his economic utility is greatest. At the same time the very

00:26:46.040 instincts towards inherited solidarity has been placed under moral suspicion. As established above

00:26:51.820 the ruling class increasingly treats attachments grounded in ancestry and particular peoplehood

00:26:56.400 as morally illegitimate when they conflict with its universal conception of identity.

00:27:02.100 The result is a demand that individuals regard the bonds of dissent, locality, language, and inherited culture

00:27:08.160 that connect one household to another as either irrelevant or shameful.

00:27:12.440 Thus, the tribe is attacked from both directions,

00:27:15.080 materially by an economic order that uproots and disperses its members,

00:27:19.000 and morally by an ideology that delegitimizes the inherited loyalties capable of binding them together.

00:27:25.060 The kingdom, too, has been hollowed out.

00:27:27.320 kingship conceives political authority as a personal and enduring responsibility for the

00:27:33.000 welfare of his people the king embodies the state inherits obligations to those who came before him

00:27:38.320 and holds his kingdom in trust for those who will come after liberal democracy substitutes for this

00:27:44.060 model a permanent competition for temporary power political leaders are rewarded above all for

00:27:49.720 winning elections and therefore for pursuing what is immediately popular rather than what is true

00:27:54.300 necessary or conducive to the long-term interests of the nation the electoral cycle privileges the

00:28:00.360 next five years over the next 50 while party government encourages rulers to conceive of the

00:28:05.040 population as competing constituencies to be assembled into a winning coalition rather than

00:28:09.700 as a single person as a single people whose common good they are obliged to serve at the same time

00:28:16.320 political office has increasingly become a profession rather than a vocation of stewardship

00:28:21.800 Career advancement, party patronage, relationships with donors and organized lobby interests,

00:28:26.820 lucrative opportunities after leaving office, and the pursuit of status and influence all pull the

00:28:31.240 professional politician away from the interests of those he governs. Yet even as the political

00:28:35.540 class has become more professionalized, political responsibility itself has become less personal.

00:28:41.120 In a properly ordered kingdom, ultimate political authority has a single and visible locus in the

00:28:46.060 sovereign. Today it is dispersed among ministers, parties, courts, bureaucracies, regulators,

00:28:53.340 central banks, treaties and supranational institutions. Power is exercised everywhere

00:28:58.660 yet ultimate responsibility resides nowhere. The result is government increasingly detached

00:29:06.740 from the ideal of kingship. Temporary where it should be continuous, factional where it should

00:29:11.420 pursue the common good, short-term where it should be intergenerational, and evasive where it should

00:29:16.240 be personally responsible. A healthy political order requires rulers capable of governing

00:29:21.500 not merely according to the preferences of the present electorate, but according to truth,

00:29:26.640 justice, and the enduring interests of the people entrusted to their care.

00:29:31.040 Finally, the universal church has been attacked at its very foundations by the doctrine of progress

00:29:36.100 itself progress is morally relativist denying that there exists an objective moral law binding

00:29:42.340 upon all men in all times and places and reducing morality instead to individual preference social

00:29:47.860 convention or the changing consensus of the age progress is materialist admitting as real only

00:29:54.500 that which can be physically observed and measured leaving no place for the soul the supernatural

00:29:59.540 or any ultimate purpose beyond the material world progress is atheist its rebellion culminates

00:30:06.020 in the denial of god himself severing man from the transcendent source of moral order

00:30:10.660 and leaving him answerable ultimately to no authority higher than man

00:30:15.380 the consequence has not been the creation of a neutral public realm in which questions of

00:30:19.860 ultimate truth are simply left unanswered christianity has instead been progressively

00:30:24.660 displaced by a rival moral order with its own account of good and evil, its own orthodoxies

00:30:29.640 and taboos, and its own vision of human flourishing. Religion is permitted insofar as it retreats

00:30:35.260 into the realm of private preferences, but its claim to describe truths objectively binding

00:30:40.340 upon individuals, institutions, and political communities is increasingly treated as illegitimate

00:30:47.140 or even dangerous. Christianity may survive as a heritage, ceremony, architecture, or private habit

00:30:53.640 what it must not be allowed to do is remain an authoritative account of reality. 0.87

00:30:59.800 This is the ultimate purpose of progress. The emancipation of man from every authority he did

00:31:05.720 not choose culminating in emancipation from God himself. Yet in seeking to make himself sovereign

00:31:11.760 man does not become free. He merely exchanges an order directed towards a transcendent good

00:31:16.900 for one directed by his own appetites, fashions and temporal interests. The attack upon the church

00:31:22.600 therefore completes the assault upon the objective moral order of creation. For once God is rejected,

00:31:28.380 man ceases to recognize an authority capable of judging his desires and instead makes his desires

00:31:33.420 the measure of all things. Taken together, the full horror of the ruling class's project becomes

00:31:39.420 clear. These are not isolated social changes or mere tweaks in policy, but mutually reinforcing

00:31:45.780 assaults upon every layer of God's creation. Marriage made temporary and subjective, the

00:31:51.260 household deprived of children, property, and independence, the tribe uprooted and stripped of

00:31:55.640 moral legitimacy, the nation dissolved through demographic discontinuity, the abandonment of

00:32:00.240 the historic peoplehood, and the subordination of economic life to global markets, the kingdom

00:32:05.560 reduced to an arena of electoral competition, careerism, and fragmented authority, and the

00:32:10.280 church driven from public life by a rival creed that denies the very existence of objective and

00:32:15.680 transcendent truth, and which is now embedded throughout the commanding institutions of European

00:32:19.920 civilization in the absence of these foundations our civilization is collapsing we are richer than

00:32:27.040 almost any people in history yet increasingly lonely anxious rootless indebted childless and

00:32:33.440 spiritually adrift our birth rates are collapsing our communities are dying our institutions are

00:32:39.280 losing legitimacy and confidence in the future is giving way to resignation and despair these are

00:32:45.360 not the symptoms of a flourishing civilization they are the symptoms of one that is dying

00:32:50.880 As such, the second principle of the right in the 2030s

00:32:55.040 must be to recognize the Christian faith as the truth

00:32:58.000 and restore it as the moral foundation of European civilization.

00:33:14.120 The law and institutions of a Christian civilization

00:33:17.340 should not pretend to be morally neutral. 0.74

00:33:19.920 Political neutrality is an illusion. Every legal system distinguishes between right and wrong.

00:33:25.240 Every education system transmits some conception of good and evil. And every state ultimately

00:33:30.440 privileges one moral order over its competitors. The question is not whether our civilization will

00:33:35.280 be governed according to a moral creed, but which one. In our own age, that creed has been progress,

00:33:41.580 an anti-civilizational and ultimately anti-human force that seeks to tear down the truths, bonds,

00:33:46.660 and obligations that give human existence meaning and order we must expunge its doctrines from our

00:33:52.100 laws institutions and culture and in its place restore the moral order of jesus christ upon

00:33:57.940 which european civilization was built

00:33:59.700 There is no force in this world more powerful, more beautiful or more conducive to the good

00:34:20.100 than European civilisation imbued with the truth of the Christian faith.

00:34:29.700 It was this union, a great people, striving towards a transcendent good,

00:34:37.440 that produced the civilization whose inheritance surrounds us.

00:34:41.660 And it is only by recovering both that we can hope to restore it. 0.99

00:34:49.640 Our civilization will not be restored by marginally lower immigration, 0.96

00:34:53.420 marginally lower taxes, another review, another commission,

00:34:56.940 or another election in which the fundamental assumptions of the ruling class remain beyond

00:35:01.160 question. The crisis we face is deeper than policy because its causes are deeper than policy.

00:35:08.040 We therefore require something more ambitious than conventional conservatism. We require

00:35:12.800 restoration. The restoration of our peoples in their ancestral homelands and the restoration

00:35:17.600 of Christianity at the heart of our civilization. The ruling class will call this extreme.

00:35:23.260 let them. There is nothing extreme about defending our inheritance, loving our people,

00:35:29.660 worshipping God, raising a family, or wanting our children to inherit a civilization

00:35:34.160 recognizably continuous with that of their ancestors.

00:35:37.180 the true extremists are those who have spent generations tearing these things down our task

00:35:54.480 in the coming decades is to begin their restoration thank you very much

00:35:58.000 Thank you very much.

00:36:28.000 Thanks indeed.

00:36:31.000 Cheers.

Dominion Society of Canada - September 01, 2026

The Future of Nationalism and British Identity ｜ Charlie Downes at DOMCON26

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