In this episode, we are joined by Mr. Nigel Farage, a man who has been involved in politics for a long time. He has been on the show many times and has been a regular guest on BBC Radio 4's Breakfast with David Frost. He is a man of many talents and has a long and distinguished political career. He's been a member of the Conservative Party for over 30 years and is considered a leading voice in the pro-EU and pro-European movements. He also has his own political party, the Independence Party, which he describes himself as a "nationist" party.
00:00:17.000You probably know him as Mr. Brexit, largely known as the architect of Brexit, and he's been involved in politics for decades at this point.
00:00:26.000He may have some plans here coming up in the The next couple of years, I don't want to, I don't know, I don't want to foreshadow and overstep my bounds, but Mr. Nigel Farage, where's the website?
00:00:38.000nfarage.com is where you can find me and everything I do.
00:00:41.000And you know, I'm busy broadcasting and traveling and speaking, but yeah, there's some talk I may get back into the front lines of politics.
00:00:49.000Okay, so what does that mean, front lines?
00:00:51.000Well, I can, you know, do what you do and we can have our followers and we can have our influence and we can change people's minds on things.
00:00:59.000We can make them look in different ways.
00:01:01.000I've managed to get the government to change policy on illegal immigration.
00:01:06.000I've got government to change the law on how banks operate with people.
00:02:09.000In our country, there are few and far between.
00:02:10.000Yeah, you know, that's one of those things where people say, oh, it's not left-right, because I understand conservative means something different in different countries.
00:02:15.000I mean, I was raised in Quebec, where we don't have conservatives.
00:02:17.000We have liberals and liberal separatists, basically.
00:02:20.000Although the separatists are more conservative a little bit, if people kind of understand their reason for separating, it's just not logically sound.
00:02:27.000And one thing I wanted to kind of touch on before we get to today is you do have something that not a lot of people have, conservative-liberal.
00:02:35.000You have a long-standing record that you've always been this guy.
00:02:39.000That you've always been, you've been remarkably consistent.
00:02:41.000I always say, like, well, there was no grifting because there was nothing to grift back then.
00:02:50.000I spent 20 years working for American companies.
00:02:52.000I was in the commodities business, which was a really exciting thing to be in with all the markets and the noise and the buzz and the fun.
00:03:00.000But I had political views, obviously, and current affairs and politics move markets, move prices.
00:03:06.000And I just looked at what was happening with this European project as, bit by bit, we gave the government of our country to a bunch of unelected bureaucrats based in Brussels.
00:03:17.000And then they started talking about a single currency, getting rid of the pound, and I just thought, this is nonsense.
00:04:45.000Yeah, I was actually in Spokane, Washington, and I came out of a, I was either a Rite Aid or a CVS, and it looked like a guy had like a tire pressure gauge, and he was smoking crack.
00:04:56.000And I looked at him, and there was a police officer right there.
00:04:58.000I thought, well, I guess it's legal here.
00:05:32.000And I basically think that the world, our world, has been completely taken over by big banks, big business, and big politics.
00:05:39.000And the little guy, the little woman, who wants to set up their own business, have a go in life, the sort of people who in the 1980s made our countries, both of our countries, quite wealthy, and they did well themselves.
00:05:52.000There's not much room for these people anymore.
00:06:00.000I became a campaigner and I thought, right, the best way to campaign is to stand for office.
00:06:07.000And I've been doing that for over 30 years.
00:06:09.000I then got elected to the European Parliament, which was enormous fun because, I mean, this was, this place was, and still is, the temple of globalism. I mean this is it. This is why the Clintons
00:06:23.000love it. This is why Biden's always loved it. This is the, if you like, the prototype for what
00:06:28.000they want us to, the way they want us to live. Is that tough for you to basically be a member of a
00:07:11.000It's basically civil conflict without the war.
00:07:13.000And a lot of Americans don't understand that because it's such a big country, you know, and we have all these states and there still is a sense of a union.
00:07:20.000I think Americans may not realize that coming from the UK, you're so close to neighbors, just as close as we may be to Oklahoma, who may share nothing in common as far as interests.
00:07:30.000I mean, look, you know, one of the joys of Europe is you drive a hundred miles, you'll find different languages, different customs, different cheese.
00:07:41.000Actually, the joy of Europe is the different countries and the idea that you want to crush that and make them all the same is horrible.
00:07:51.000So yeah, I spent 21 years in the European Parliament.
00:07:58.000And normally If you're surrounded by people that scream and shout at you and hate you, you will normally tend to move in their direction a little bit, because being disliked is not a normal human condition.
00:09:27.000The reason it's catching on is because there was, you know, craft brewing with beer, and people realized beer could be a lot better, so then they tried to do craft distilling.
00:09:33.000But most craft whiskey, um, is god-awful.
00:09:37.000It's dog s***, pardon my language, because people can't sit on product for four to eight years, right, but you can make really good gin pretty quickly.
00:11:13.000I think states said they also just love that you can have a sense of humour and seeing Donald Trump was kind of the first politician, or really since Reagan here in the States, who was able to do that, whereas it's more commonplace in the UK to some degree.
00:11:24.000Let's be honest, a lot of American conservatives, and it is changing.
00:11:30.000But a lot of American conservatives have been, over the decades, some of the most boring people in the world.
00:12:11.000And there's a sense of humanity about him.
00:12:13.000And I think I think that's what the Conservative movement needs to be.
00:12:17.000The other point I'd make, and I don't forget I've spent 40 years involved with this country, I've commuted back and forth across the pond more than anybody, business, media, politics.
00:12:30.000There's an election on, I've got the TV on in an American hotel room.
00:12:34.000And it's constantly, this candidate's terrible, I'm not very good but this guy's even worse.
00:13:09.000And I think sometimes people will see, for example, like President, they'll see someone like a President Trump saying, look, we have a problem with immigration.
00:13:15.000And they'll say, see, that's negative campaigning.
00:14:33.000They were the ones when I was really saying something that made people laugh, made people smile, taking the mickey out of very very pompous people, pointing out the absurdities, and so really it was YouTube that made me.
00:14:48.000Yes, I was in the European Parliament, but you know, frankly, politically, very very small fry.
00:17:06.000And then, I don't know what it was, watching him speak, I think, I said we were told there was going to be a great global leader, a man being paid more money than President Obama.
00:18:28.000And so it accomplishes the same goal where people who may be in the middle are willing to listen because they're likely at least half laughing.
00:18:33.000But what it also does, it gives you a volunteer army.
00:18:37.000You know, how have you brought your stuff to where you've built it?
00:19:40.000And I want to ask you if you see the parallels, because you did a documentary, I want to say two years ago, on immigration in the United States.
00:19:46.000I went back and watched it, where you were talking about the border crisis under Biden, 750,000 or so at that point in time crossings.
00:19:55.000Did you see it accelerating that rapidly?
00:19:59.000Oh, I think if you are not prepared to defend your borders, and if you allow people to come into your country illegally, And if you provide accommodation for them, and food for them, and the chance to work in the illegal industries of drugs or whatever it is, that message says to the world, please come.
00:20:46.000These dinghies of young men, put it on the internet, and suddenly, you know, I forced the media into making this a story, and it's now the dominant issue in British politics.
00:20:55.000It's the issue that will literally finish Sunak's career.
00:21:00.000Because we're allowing in, it was 700 yesterday, 700 yesterday across the English Channel, they are 90% young males.
00:21:09.000I've even filmed them throwing their iPhones into the sea, throwing their passports into the sea, so we can't trace who they are, so we can't deport them anywhere.
00:21:35.000Yeah, you know, and so these are the issues that I've campaigned on and yet been called all the names under the sun, but here's the point.
00:21:42.000These are young men of fighting age whose attitudes towards women Whose tolerance of people who are gay, whose support for terrorist organisations like Hamas, is at a level that effectively what we're doing, and you're doing it now in this country, I've warned people in America for years, do not allow big Muslim enclaves to build up.
00:22:11.000And that is not, in any way, being insulting.
00:22:13.000I've got lots of Muslim friends who are perfectly integrated and do well in their lives.
00:22:17.000But if you build up these big enclaves, or effectively ghettos, you know, what happens is, that is the environment in which extremism flourishes.
00:22:45.000They fall because they become corrupt.
00:22:47.000They fall because they lose a sense of purpose of what they are.
00:22:50.000And you can go back thousands of years and see the rise of these great civilizations and then the fall.
00:22:55.000And we are at a point, the Western world is at a point where I genuinely believe these battles are civilizational.
00:23:02.000No, I completely agree with you, and I always say the big difference between, you know, when people talk about this being a nation of immigrants, the United States, which is different from obviously a lot of countries in Europe, because, sorry, your number one draft pick got away, and we fled the crown.
00:23:17.000And it was all about taxes on a breakfast beverage, and, I mean, it wasn't even that caffeinated when you put it in context, so imagine what they would have done.
00:23:24.000But, yeah, when you think about it, okay, fine, sure, nation of immigrants.
00:23:28.000But people came here at one point, whether it's the Irish, you know, Jews from Europe at one point in time, Italians, right?
00:23:34.000They came here with a promise of nothing.
00:23:36.000It was a risk that they were taking to try and build a life that's very different from a country that has a welfare state, where people are coming to benefit from that social safety net.
00:23:44.000So, Milton Friedman, you know, the high priest of free markets.
00:23:50.000And people say, Nigel, how can you want to limit immigration if you believe in free markets?
00:23:55.000Even Milton Friedman said, you cannot have the free movement of peoples around the world all the while you have a social security system.
00:24:03.000Well, that's why when you say you're a libertarian, I remember spending quite a bit of time in DC and had a lot of friends who worked, for example, at Reason Magazine.
00:24:11.000They believe that borders are just kind of a, it's sort of an antiquated idea, and many of them ended up voting for Obama, which surprised me, where I said, oh, okay, so if libertarian in the states means it can include at one point in time, you know, Glenn Beck, Greg Gutfeld, and Bill Maher, I was like, this doesn't really mean anything.
00:24:25.000So I would tend to be considered more libertarian, but I just say conservative.
00:24:29.000Yeah, I mean, look, I'm libertarian in a sense.
00:24:31.000I do not want the government telling me whether I can smoke a cigarette in my local pub.
00:24:36.000I don't want government telling me whether I can hunt foxes at weekends, if that's what I want to do, if that's my thing.
00:25:13.000Is it the same thing in the UK where a lot of people get it?
00:25:15.000I think something very, as I say, I was, the first lockdown I could live with, you know, I saw the scenes in Milan and I thought, wow, is this the 1919 flu?
00:25:56.000We did two shows a day because I knew people were locked at home.
00:25:59.000And I can't tell you how many Conservatives, whose names I won't provide right now, calling me saying, you know, this is really irresponsible, you shouldn't be bringing in the crew.
00:26:17.000We've woken up on the fact we were lied to.
00:26:19.000The other thing, and I'm not going to go down a rabbit hole on this, as some people have done, but There can be little doubt that some of the vaccines that were produced just weren't vaccines.
00:26:31.000And I remember, and I had the first two.
00:27:51.000And the big reason is not because of those in DC, but because of those in Hollywood and those in New York, those in media and big tech are in bed with media right now.
00:28:00.000And that's why, like you talked about running for office again, sure, but you can have Just as much, if not more, of an impact sometimes in taking on the media.
00:28:07.000Not playing ball with the big tech platforms, unfortunately.
00:28:20.000We actually included their chart that, hey, there have been more flu deaths in infants and toddlers this season, this year, than all of COVID ever combined.
00:28:29.000I think it was like a five time, multiple of five.
00:28:33.000And YouTube said, well, even though it's correct, it may cause people to not take COVID seriously enough.
00:29:40.000We'd go out for drinks after work that would go on.
00:29:45.000And kind of it's where people met it's where people met their partners and got married it was going to work was fun Anyway, so I've been with this bank since 1980.
00:29:53.000The last 10 years I've been with Coutts, a wholly owned subsidiary, the posh bit, if you like, of the bank, private banking.
00:30:00.000The Queen was a client, all the rest of it.
00:30:02.000My account was always in credit, never any problems at all with it.
00:30:07.000I ran my personal accounts through it, I ran my company accounts through it with media income and stuff like that.
00:30:14.000And I get a phone call one day, we're closing your accounts.
00:30:16.000I get a letter confirming, you know, you've got ten weeks to leave this bank.
00:30:56.000Now luckily for us, and you haven't got this in America, Under our Freedom of Information Act, we are able to go to any private company that we've done business with and ask for the file of all the documents and comments about us.
00:34:30.000I mean, you've seen the wardrobe we have.
00:34:33.000I mean, of course, they went, no, no, but you just lean into it.
00:34:36.000You go, well, if you're talking about doing a parody sketch of Terminator, but he's a crackhead in an alley and he lands naked, like, are you talking about nudity?
00:34:43.000And then what happened is because we were making some big business moves, and we have NDAs here.
00:34:49.000Same thing, anyone who comes in here, because we address the privacy.
00:34:52.000And then there was a hit piece about the fact that there was an NDA at the company.
00:34:55.000And then Gerald had a meeting with employees saying, like, guys, look, you guys know we're bringing on these sponsors that we can't talk about.
00:35:02.000Then there was a hit piece that Gerald had a conversation about the NDA at the company.
00:35:07.000Whatever happens, whether it's true or not, if you try, it's whack-a-mole, they'll just try and get more egregious with the lies, so just move on.
00:35:16.000It's funny, I was at, um, a few months ago, I was invited to speak at Eaton, the famous British private school that has produced, I think, 24 Prime Ministers.
00:35:28.000I get an invitation to speak at Eaton, which is hugely controversial, because, you know, most of the staff didn't want me to go, but I accepted.
00:35:36.000They were virtually fighting to get into the theatre.
00:35:39.000Because it was the biggest turnout they've ever had for any speaker.
00:37:34.000And what's happening is, you take the sort of 25 to 35 year old cohort working in all of our corporate companies, working in our public sector, and they're all of the same mind.
00:37:45.000And if we don't get education right, we will lose the freedoms and values that you and I enjoy and share.
00:37:51.000I mean, my education came from my father, because when you say you were taught how to think or how to think critically, my dad really instilled in me the Socratic method.
00:37:59.000It was one thing that I knew before I even went into junior high, but I will tell you that in high school in Canada, and in college in Canada, That never came up.
00:38:35.000Two American beaches, two British beaches, one Canadian beach.
00:38:40.000I don't know how familiar you are with Juno Beach, but you guys had Sword and Gold?
00:38:44.000Yeah, we had Juno Beach, so I watched Saving Private Ryan, and then in Canada, we watched in history class, they showed us actual footage from the boats in Juno Beach, and I watched it, you know, there's a bunch of fog, and the Canadians walk all the way up the beach, into the fog, and not a round is fired.
00:39:28.000You know, 80 years on, the numbers are thinning out a little bit, to put it mildly.
00:39:33.000But we did all those things so that we could disagree with each other.
00:39:39.000We did all these things to live in freedom, which means I may not agree with you, but I absolutely support your right to hold your opinion.
00:39:49.000I would ask you to do me a favor, actually, when you go, if you could film this or have a conversation, because I would love to do this with these veterans from World War II, and see what's going on right now, especially people from Europe who are closer to it, see what's going on on campuses with Hamas and Palestine, and when they use the term othering, but actual othering from the river to the sea, and I'd love to ask them, hey, is this what it was like at the start when you talk about Nazi Germany and vilifying a group of people?
00:40:13.000Because it's the last time, we may be able to ask them, are we veering into that again?
00:40:17.000Well I think, I mean I have to say, I think the scenes at Columbia, over the last few days, looks like 1936 Germany.
00:40:47.000It really is, but I would love to, I mean, pick the brain of those veterans and say, is this something, do you feel like you've been here before?
00:40:54.000If they're lucid enough, because a lot of them would give us... Yeah, that would be very interesting.
00:43:52.000And funny stories, you know, his mom tried to get him quitting cigars, where she said, if you don't smoke cigars for two months, I'll give you, I don't remember how much money it was.
00:43:59.000And he took it and then bought himself a case of cigars immediately.
00:44:03.000And his lifestyle, I mean, his lifestyle is extraordinary.
00:44:40.000And I won't say the name because I don't even want to draw attention to it, but there was a prominent conservative and someone tried to make it a scandal that he was sexting somebody, okay?
00:44:47.000It was a consensual relationship with a woman who was sexting him as well.
00:44:51.000As far as I'm concerned, it's just gross.
00:45:38.000We had our civil war before everybody else.
00:45:41.000You know, 1642 onwards we have the English Civil War, the King thinks he has a divine right to govern from God and doesn't need to take account of what Parliament says.
00:45:51.000Parliament fights him, beat him in the war, cut his head off.
00:45:56.000So we now become a republic, a new enlightened republic, under a man called Oliver Cromwell, who calls himself the Lord Protector.
00:46:02.000Might as well have called himself King!
00:48:31.000And it led to a big head-to-head on BBC television.
00:48:35.000And it was really interesting, actually.
00:48:38.000I think I really upset him because I wrote an article about it shortly afterwards where I said, before going on set, Russell Brand's two personal make-up artists were busy combing his chest hair.
00:48:52.000So, yeah, we had this sort of, almost like, hate.
00:48:56.000And I was broadcasting, I was radio broadcasting one day, and he sort of came down the corridor trying to break into the studio, I mean, like, with crazed eyes.
00:51:15.000And he's been very respectful with me, but I do get the sense that maybe he's still figuring it out, whereas I do get the sense that Russell Brand has had his quite literal come to Jesus moment.
00:51:23.000No, no, no, and I, as I say, I've made up, I've kissed and made up with Russell, and that's fine.
00:51:44.000What upset him was that the first show that he did on Talk TV was an interview at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump.
00:51:55.000I had been to Mar-a-Lago the week before to have a chat with Donald, which I enjoy doing, and I think he enjoys me coming there because I never ever say a word.
00:53:06.000Well it's funny because I remember him sort of seeming, veering towards populism, kind of supporting Trump and then I don't know necessarily what happened there.
00:53:13.000And you've sometimes been labelled a populist.
00:55:31.000And I think the one, and I would never say it's a good thing that that's happened, but the one thing that has come of it is people realize that it's not just, people tried to see it through, oh, you don't get a fair shake if you're black in America.
00:55:42.000It's not race, it's not necessarily even class or wealth, it really is about your political target.
00:55:48.000And that can happen to anyone, rich, poor.
00:56:07.000Yeah, it doesn't need to change the way that former Vice President Joe Biden says, and just pack the court and add some seats, because then it just becomes an arms race of, I'm going to add seats, and I'm going to add seats, and I'm going to add seats.
00:56:34.000You know, we've been building infrastructure.
00:56:35.000We did a telethon for it, so we will actually have boots on the ground in every major swing city, state.
00:56:40.000We'll actually be able to collect real-time data along with the news wires where they call states with decision desks.
00:56:45.000We're going to have an election integrity map where people can upload incidents and we'll be able to verify them so you can see it in real time.
00:56:52.000Because we had, you know, these huge election streams.
00:56:54.000I mean, the first in 2020, It was, I think, 17 million people.
00:57:00.000And then we were suspended from YouTube for the midterm, surprise, the week of.
00:57:03.000And so many people went and watched on Rumble, and it was still a few million people who tuned in.
00:57:06.000And the one thing that we have that other people don't is, the left tries to gaslight you, that term is overused, but they say, no, no, no, no, a pipe didn't burst in Atlanta.
00:57:15.000But people who watch with us can say, I remember when the news report came in and the entire Mug Club team said, well, the news we're getting is a pipe burst.
00:57:23.000I remember what happened when they were bringing in red wagons of ballots of votes in Detroit and we were covering it live.
00:57:29.000So YouTube couldn't remove us afterwards saying it was a conspiracy theory because we were covering it as it was happening.
00:57:35.000The major issue, and I hope that everyone else does this, we do what we can, is for example, I remember Arizona being called with 1% of the vote in.
00:57:45.000And we were the only people who said like, I said, no, no, we're not going to put that on the board.
00:57:48.000But I couldn't verify why at that point.
00:57:51.000And so now we've tried to put some fail safes in place where we'll be able to, where hopefully they'll, they'll be following our lead as far as accuracy, because we were still relying on traditional media because of their money.
01:00:20.000And this specific county in Nevada, they weren't allowed to change voter rolls any other time during the, it was supposed to be Wednesday at, I believe it was 5 PM or at midnight.
01:00:29.000But when our story came out, we had someone right there saying, this is the place where this person voted that doesn't exist.
01:00:35.000They changed it, I believe on a Monday or Tuesday at 2 AM.
01:00:38.000And we went to them the second time, and I spoke with the county registrar, I believe was the term.
01:00:43.000He said, yeah, well, even if all you're saying is true, I said, I will swear under oath it's true.
01:00:48.000He said, there's nothing we can do now.
01:00:50.000And we were suspended for that video on YouTube, right?
01:01:17.000On the 4th of August 2020, I went on one of the regular daily podcast shows, with Bannon actually, and he said, come on Nigel, you predicted it all in 2016, you're the form horse, who's going to win the election?
01:01:32.000I said, I can see what's happening here.
01:01:34.000I said, on the day of the vote, Donald Trump will win.
01:01:50.000And actually, I just realized we're going, but I want to go to Mug Club really quickly where we can actually talk a little bit more without worrying of the, well, YouTube censors us anyway, but the website is Enforage?
01:03:01.000I've had four kids to bring up, dependents, etc.
01:03:04.000So for the first time in 30 years, I'm earning good money, I'm enjoying life, I don't have quite the same level of vitriol.
01:03:13.000But maybe there's an historic opportunity in British politics.
01:03:17.000And maybe If anyone can re-galvanize the forces of conservatism into something that is coherent, consistent, bold, but ambitious in terms of the vision, then maybe I'm that soldier.
01:03:34.000Well, so I've got a big decision to make.
01:03:36.000I would add one more to that, is I think that in the post-Covid world, people are absolutely craving authenticity, and that's why hopefully I've driven home that people should look at your track record.
01:03:45.000If they're looking for someone authentic, Win, lose, or draw.