Rebel News Podcast - EZRA LEVANT ｜ What is the 'Woke Right'？ Ezra Levant interviews Dr. James Lindsay

00:00:00.460 James Lindsay is one of the smartest guys I know. In fact, sometimes I struggle to keep up with what he's saying.

00:00:05.740 He's very deep and philosophical and very well read.

00:00:09.040 I'm going to put a bunch of questions to him about the state of conservatism, including what he calls the woke right.

00:00:15.800 How can that be? I thought woke, by definition, was left.

00:00:19.740 It's a great talk and I hope you enjoy it.

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00:01:17.720 You're listening to Rebel News Podcast.

00:01:24.720 Tonight, what's the woke right?

00:01:31.460 A feature interview with Dr. James Lindsay.

00:01:34.040 It's September 1st, and this is the Ezra LeVant Show.

00:01:36.760 You're ready for freedom.

00:01:40.100 Shame on you, you censorious bug.

00:01:43.240 You know, they say in litigation, never ask a question that you don't already know the answer to.

00:01:58.720 But that's not a good way to learn.

00:02:00.960 To learn, you want to ask questions you don't know the answer to.

00:02:04.540 The reason they say that in litigation is you don't want to be surprised with an answer that's contrary to your case.

00:02:11.740 When you're actually litigating, you're not really seeking the truth.

00:02:15.640 You're seeking truths that make your client's point of view.

00:02:19.620 So one of my guests, I guess my point is a lot of the interviews we do are with people we sort of know where they're coming from.

00:02:26.940 And we want to pull things out of them that help strengthen our point of view.

00:02:31.520 We believe in freedom.

00:02:32.500 We're conservatives.

00:02:33.440 We believe in justice and prosperity.

00:02:37.060 There's a lot of things we believe in.

00:02:39.100 But what happens when you're not in a position to worry about getting an answer that surprises you?

00:02:45.360 I think those are some of the most interesting interviews.

00:02:47.780 They're a more authentic interview.

00:02:49.780 They're less sort of stenography and more searching for truth.

00:02:53.460 And that's what we're going to do today.

00:02:54.740 One of the guests I love talking to, and they always turn into hour-long interviews, is Dr. James Lindsay from New Discourses.

00:03:04.080 And it's because he deals with raw ideas, sometimes abstract, but very applicable to the world we live in.

00:03:12.380 He really helped me understand communism, not just as an insult or a put-down, but as a way of thinking, as a kind of cult-like religion.

00:03:20.980 Through him and through others like Xi Van Fleet, who fled from Maoist communism, I've really come to understand how that is one of the largest evils in the world.

00:03:32.160 And I know sometimes to call someone a communist sounds cartoonish.

00:03:36.400 Anyhow, Dr. James Lindsay has been very useful for me to understand the phenomenon of woke, that really only started using that name, I don't know, probably less than a decade ago.

00:03:48.660 What does woke mean?

00:03:50.580 To me, it meant applying Marxism to things other than just economic discussions.

00:03:55.640 In classical Marxism, you have the working class and they call the proletariat, and then you have the capitalists who oppress them.

00:04:03.980 To me, wokeism was applying that same class structure to race, to sex, to transgenderism.

00:04:12.120 So what does woke right mean?

00:04:15.880 What is the woke right?

00:04:17.520 Isn't that a contradiction in terms?

00:04:19.200 To me, wokeness is all about Marxism.

00:04:22.400 How can you be woken right at the same time?

00:04:26.220 I'm confused by this, but I want to understand it because there is a bit of a battle amongst a lot of the people I admire and follow online for their views.

00:04:34.740 And joining us now to help talk about the world we live in and answer some of these questions, and we'll see where the conversation goes, is Dr. James Lindsay, who joins us now from Tennessee.

00:04:45.360 Dr. James, welcome back.

00:04:46.380 Thanks very much for taking the time.

00:04:48.580 Yeah, thank you, Ezra.

00:04:49.340 It's always good to see you.

00:04:50.260 You know, that was a bit of a rambling introduction there, but I really do look to you for philosophical guidance.

00:04:57.380 I mean, I propagate ideas myself, but they're generally not abstract, and they're generally sort of practical politics.

00:05:05.660 I look to you to help me sort out the ideas.

00:05:09.600 Before we get going with the woke right, can you give me, I guess, your one-sentence definition of what the word woke itself means?

00:05:19.100 Did I sort of do it earlier?

00:05:21.380 No, I think you did actually a good job.

00:05:23.380 If you want to clarify that, of course, Marx had this idea called class consciousness that was kind of the basis of being Marxist.

00:05:30.760 So that Marxist analysis means coming from a position of having awakened to a class identity that supersedes your individual identity and using that to try to overthrow the society that evolved in the late 20th century or middle of the 20th century to something called critical consciousness, borrowing from critical theory.

00:05:50.120 So I often say, and I know it's very technical, and I don't mean to be abstract because you gave a great definition.

00:05:55.160 I would just say what you said is fine, but the technical terminology is being woke means having adopted a critical consciousness.

00:06:01.980 We use woke to distinguish from previous iterations of Marxism, though I think there's still – I think Marxism, when Karl Marx wrote it, was woke.

00:06:11.520 I think when the fascists reacted to the communists in the middle of the 1920s and 1930s, what they were doing was what we would call woke right.

00:06:19.360 It was a woke reaction to woke left, but in the 20th century modernist context.

00:06:24.820 And then what we're having now is that the woke on the left took up – or what we've been calling woke – took up postmodernism.

00:06:32.500 They took up identity politics, relocated the Marxist analysis through identity categories rather than through economic analysis.

00:06:40.420 And what we're having for woke right very simply is just a reaction to that, takes on the same ideas, and points them back in the other direction.

00:06:48.960 Let's get into that in a moment, but I just want to give an example.

00:06:51.300 I think the conflict between Gaza and Israel, a lot of it is projected through that lens of critical theory or woke, as in all Israelis are oppressors, and all Hamas or Gaza supporters are oppressed.

00:07:08.800 So in that framework, you can do anything to liberate yourself from oppressors.

00:07:14.740 Every oppressor is, by definition, a bad guy, even if they're a visible minority, even if they're poor, even if they actually have thousands of years of roots in the Holy Land, they're oppressors, full stop.

00:07:28.160 So anything is justified to get them out.

00:07:31.260 And it destroys individualism, and it permits atrocities, I think, like what happened on October 7th.

00:07:37.220 So I think a lot of the Western support, I think the Muslim or Arab support for Hamas is tribal, and there's some emotional reasons and religious reasons there.

00:07:50.740 But I think the educated white Westerners who I see in these, you know, I went to the Columbia for the encampment, they're not motivated by Islam.

00:08:00.820 They're not motivated by historic grievances.

00:08:03.500 They say, oh, Israel's the oppressor.

00:08:05.380 I know how to handle that because I do that with environmentalism.

00:08:09.020 I do that with, you know, any other debate.

00:08:12.140 I just think, who's the oppressor?

00:08:14.100 Who's the oppressed? 0.76

00:08:14.720 I know whose side I'm on.

00:08:15.900 I think that's what's going on with white support for Hamas.

00:08:19.820 Would you agree?

00:08:21.280 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:08:22.500 There's a saying.

00:08:23.440 It's attributed to David Horowitz, who, you know, recently passed, who wrote Radical Son.

00:08:28.240 But David Horowitz picked this up while he was a member of Students for Democratic Society, which was a communist organization.

00:08:33.480 And the saying is, the issue is never the issue.

00:08:36.380 The issue is always the revolution.

00:08:38.220 So, you know, these white Hamas nicks at Columbia or whatever else are seeing, like you said, the resistance, as they call it, against the oppressor, which is part of the. 0.73

00:08:50.740 The global revolution in communism, they call it revolution.

00:08:54.800 And in Arabic, they call it intifada.

00:08:58.200 And so the idea is that there's going to be this revolution or shaking off of the oppressive power structure.

00:09:04.660 There's this kind of snarky thing.

00:09:06.100 I don't know that it's fully fair.

00:09:07.520 But there's this kind of thing I see running around on social media lately, which is, you know, name one Palestinian invention. 1.00

00:09:13.120 Right.

00:09:13.520 And the answer that's often given quite seriously by a kind of wide array, a surprisingly wide array of people, but certainly by communists.

00:09:22.480 I mean, people who have hammers and sickles in their bios on X, for example, is they invented resistance.

00:09:28.320 And so resistance in this case is the idea that you were just describing, that because they are oppressed, anything is justified, whether it's kind of post-colonial violence, which is kind of the setting in which it usually takes place, whether it's, you know, terrorism going back to Marx's endorsement of revolutionary terrorism in his the civil war in France, which analyzed why the Paris commune was successful.

00:09:52.160 He said, oh, the missing ingredient that allowed them to take power was terrorism.

00:09:56.300 That's what we've been missing so far.

00:09:57.960 And then Lenin writing in what is to be done in 1902 explains, well, why did the Paris commune fail?

00:10:02.800 Well, they didn't kill enough people.

00:10:04.020 That's why they weren't serious enough with their terrorism.

00:10:07.020 And so this is the essential idea.

00:10:10.740 You are right.

00:10:11.420 The support for this that we're seeing is that it's tapped into this.

00:10:15.120 It doesn't matter if it's, you know, trans. 0.98

00:10:17.780 It doesn't matter if it's BLM.

00:10:19.400 It doesn't matter if it's actually something economic.

00:10:22.720 Like Mandami keeps saying in New York, and it doesn't matter if it's supporting the so-called Palestinian or Hamas cause against Israel.

00:10:30.480 The issue is never the issue.

00:10:32.160 The issue is always the revolution.

00:10:33.600 The idea is to take up whatever cause and use it.

00:10:36.340 This is in the Communist Manifesto, by the way, at the very end, right before workers of the world unite, like two sentences or three sentences above that.

00:10:45.220 Karl Marx says that it is the position of the communists to always take the side of any revolutionary party in any country.

00:10:52.600 So the Hamas represents a revolutionary party against the concept of Israel. 0.61

00:10:58.380 So the communists take that side by default.

00:11:02.060 We'll come back to Woke right a little later because you've raised so many interesting things here.

00:11:06.080 I want to talk just for one minute about what I saw in Colombia.

00:11:08.940 I went down there and I actually wandered around.

00:11:12.060 I was not allowed into the inner sanctum of the encampment.

00:11:16.900 They sort of blocked people who they could fairly quickly identify were critics.

00:11:22.560 There were some foreign students there, but it was mainly Americans.

00:11:27.100 There were a lot of trans students there, which I found very noteworthy.

00:11:34.020 I got to say, I was surprised by how many Asian women were there. 1.00

00:11:37.460 I didn't see a single Asian man, but Asian women, college students. 0.96

00:11:42.400 I saw them not just at Colombia, but at another university in New York that had an encampment.

00:11:48.040 And I was thinking, okay, Colombia is a very expensive school to go to.

00:11:51.680 I looked it up and at the time, I'm just going off the top of my head, in Canadian money.

00:11:55.660 It's about $100,000 a year.

00:11:58.700 That's like no one is, I guess if you're going on a full scholarship, you could be from a poor background,

00:12:04.440 but it's basically a rich kids school.

00:12:08.440 And I was boggled.

00:12:11.780 Why are all these rich white kids, trans kids, Asian Americans, why are they supporting Hamas? 0.55

00:12:21.680 And I think maybe it's a way of saying, no, I'm not an oppressor class.

00:12:26.660 I may be an Asian American woman who can afford to go to Colombia. 0.98

00:12:31.600 I'm the top of the power pyramid.

00:12:36.000 But no, no, no.

00:12:36.660 I'm going to show you that I'm not an evil rich person luxuriating in the middle of Manhattan at university.

00:12:45.020 I'm actually with the oppressed, so throw me in with their lot.

00:12:50.280 I'm going to go drink a $10 fancy coffee and go to my $2 million condo, but I want you to know that I'm one of the good guys.

00:12:58.140 That's my theory.

00:12:58.960 It's a way of dealing with the contradictions of being a left winger who's super rich and powerful in the wealthiest city in the world.

00:13:08.100 That's my theory.

00:13:08.820 How would you explain what I saw?

00:13:10.800 Rich white kids, rich Asian kids, trans kids supporting Hamas. 0.98

00:13:15.840 Why would they do it?

00:13:17.620 I mean, besides what I just said, that the issue is never the issue.

00:13:20.120 The issue is always a revolution once you become radicalized on the left.

00:13:24.580 It's a matter of, I think, a lot of what you said, but I want to kind of add a little color to this.

00:13:30.060 But I think, I mean, I'm going to blow it by telling you that I'm telling you a joke, but I'm going to start with a joke, actually, that I thought of while you were talking.

00:13:36.340 You said quite a few words there, and you said that the school and Canadian money is about $100,000 a year.

00:13:42.160 And by the time, I was going to say, by the time you finish talking, actually, it's about $105,000 a year because of the inflation that you have.

00:13:48.520 And so that's my joke.

00:13:50.240 Ha ha.

00:13:50.620 Real funny.

00:13:51.160 Sorry, Canada, about your lot.

00:13:53.000 But the deal is that for propaganda to work, you have to, propaganda is like, it means propagate, right?

00:14:00.480 It comes from the Latin for the word propagate, propagare.

00:14:03.200 And so the idea is, it's like you're throwing seeds, right?

00:14:06.340 So you're out in your garden, you're throwing seeds.

00:14:08.020 And if your seeds, this is very biblical, fall on stone, they're not going to sprout.

00:14:12.060 They're not going to grow.

00:14:12.680 They have to fall.

00:14:13.600 If they fall on sand, they might or might not sprout.

00:14:15.760 They might not do well.

00:14:16.860 If they fall on soil, fertile soil, though, that's when you're going to have something grow.

00:14:21.380 And that's kind of the parable here.

00:14:23.040 And so what you have is, I think you've described part of the fertile soil.

00:14:27.580 You have these, and I think there are evidence, there are data showing this now.

00:14:30.940 So there's solid evidence showing that downwardly mobile elites, so often the next generation of wealthy people who are unable to replicate the success of their parents, are drawn to this kind of mentality because it gives them the ability to look virtuous, as you said.

00:14:47.800 And I think there might be other reasons that have to do with the status loss of downward mobility.

00:14:53.040 But you have this fertile soil there in, A, the fact that you have these, like you said, very wealthy people frequently.

00:15:00.880 Communism tends to be a rich man's game who are trying to virtue signal that they're on the side of the poor, that they're kind of atoning for their guilt through the socialist liturgy in a sense.

00:15:13.540 But on the other hand, you also have this fact that for a lot of people, this lands because there is a lot of economic challenge.

00:15:24.580 And we hear this thesis very often.

00:15:26.320 I know my friend Constantin Kissin says this pretty frequently on Trigonometry, which is that people will not support a society that's not working for people like them, right?

00:15:36.440 And so that's, in my opinion, the soil.

00:15:38.860 But on the same time, people are propagating this.

00:15:41.620 Like you said, you know, a lot of them are East Asian women. 1.00

00:15:43.620 And I hate to be this prosaic, but I have to ask at this point, it's a legitimate question.

00:15:48.140 How many of them are Chinese nationals doing it on purpose? 1.00

00:15:50.400 And the reason I ask is not because I have a suspicion of Chinese Asian, Asian, you know, young women at colleges.

00:15:56.500 It's because we've arrested a bunch of them.

00:15:58.340 So we know that this is a thing that's happening, that we have actually CCP agents that are getting caught in these protests, stoking these protests.

00:16:06.360 So they're the propagators looking as though they're just part of the movement.

00:16:09.920 And so I think that what you have is this mixed bag that's raising the popularity of this for a wider demographic.

00:16:18.060 Primarily, the explanation you gave is good.

00:16:20.480 But then there are legitimately challenging and worsening conditions in many regards that are making these kinds of revolutionary and radical thoughts attractive.

00:16:29.100 And then you have a dedicated, well-funded, international even, and malicious in some cases, propaganda program to draw more and more people into this.

00:16:40.100 In fact, I think this is actually at the global scale remarkably coordinated with, you know, the so-called red-green axis or red-green alliance between the Islam and the radical Islam and the communists. 0.51

00:16:52.780 To the point where I think that it's not – everybody says it's a perfect storm as though it's a perfect storm of conditions that happen to arise.

00:17:00.840 But it's more like a perfect opportunity that is being seized by bad actors to take advantage of fertile soil of a unbelievably large body of downwardly mobile, you know, upper middle class to upper class second generation or third generation people that's being fed a steady drumbeat narrative that's literally pushing them into this.

00:17:24.180 Once they get across the line and become a radical, though, the issue is never the issue.

00:17:28.480 The issue is always the revolution.

00:17:30.460 So anything, whether it's trans, whether it's Hamas, whether it's trans and Hamas at the same time, even after Hamas said when we take over we're going to kill all of them, which I believe they said the other day, there will be none of this in, you know, our Palestine or whatever they wanted to call it.

00:17:45.400 It doesn't matter.

00:17:46.480 It doesn't matter.

00:17:47.100 Once you cross the radical line far enough, it's just we're protesting the evil oppressive power structure that's everywhere, always, all at once.

00:17:56.260 And whichever tool, whether it's, again, trans, race, Hamas, whatever, whatever it is, we're going to use that tool.

00:18:03.440 Right.

00:18:04.120 Wow.

00:18:04.940 You know what?

00:18:05.660 I want to just touch on the Chinese – the Asian-American woman. 0.99

00:18:09.440 I guess I went – I mean I'm a little bit older than you.

00:18:13.060 And to me, Asian students were diligent.

00:18:17.080 Their parents checked on their homework.

00:18:19.360 The idea of them smoking pot or committing petty crimes was unthinkable.

00:18:23.380 They all were expected to become doctors, lawyers, or accountants.

00:18:26.380 It was sort of like the Jews a generation ago, I think. 1.00

00:18:30.820 And that's how I thought of it.

00:18:32.480 And that's what was confusing me.

00:18:33.680 But I remember now, there's 600,000 Chinese nationals in America in university.

00:18:40.160 By the way, it's proportionately much worse in Canada.

00:18:43.080 There's over 100,000.

00:18:44.320 We're about a tenth year's size.

00:18:45.760 So it would be about double that in Canada.

00:18:48.880 And I never thought of it.

00:18:50.600 Maybe, you know, because I don't see South Asian – and I've only been a few of these encampments.

00:18:55.900 But it may be that, you know, some of these Chinese apps, these news apps, or, you know, there's a lot of social media platforms run by China that expats in Canada and the United States use.

00:19:11.840 Maybe they're encouraging people to go to these.

00:19:13.760 I'll put that aside because I don't know for sure.

00:19:15.860 But let me talk about Zoran Mandani just for a second.

00:19:19.100 Because I've been trying to think, how can he be stopped?

00:19:22.220 Because I think he really is a communist.

00:19:24.120 I actually don't think he's particularly an Islamist.

00:19:27.960 I think he just sees that as a way to appeal to Muslims and other minorities in New York by sort of saying, I am an other. 0.70

00:19:37.100 I want to throw off the white man.

00:19:41.560 I don't think he's – like, I don't think he's a diligent and religious five-time-a-day praying Muslim. 1.00

00:19:49.040 But I think he's using that.

00:19:51.440 And so I think that's why some of the attacks against him aren't working.

00:19:54.940 For example, there was a video of a woman eating rice on the New York City subway with her hands.

00:20:01.440 And I don't know if you saw that.

00:20:02.820 And it caused a bit of kerpuff of people saying, what are you doing?

00:20:05.580 Use a fork.

00:20:06.480 You're on a subway.

00:20:07.800 Be behaved.

00:20:08.460 So Mamdani went on the subway and recreated that and was eating with his hands on the subway.

00:20:16.220 He was running to the controversy.

00:20:19.100 He went back to Africa recently and he said, I know my critics are going to mention it.

00:20:24.260 So let me lean into it.

00:20:25.720 Like he was doing – he's sort of scamming his way into a low-rent apartment.

00:20:30.140 Some of his opponents mentioned that and he leans into it.

00:20:35.400 And the reason I think that's so smart is because he understands he's not trying to appeal so much to conservative white dudes.

00:20:44.120 He's appealing to anyone who wants to throw off the system.

00:20:47.640 He's appealing to people who – if they could get a subsidized apartment, they would.

00:20:52.920 They hate the system because they can't afford it.

00:20:57.680 Maybe they feel that there's some racism around.

00:21:00.560 So he's leaning into every criticism saying, yeah, that's me.

00:21:04.680 Yeah, I'm foreign.

00:21:05.720 Yeah, I'm African-American.

00:21:07.440 Yeah, I'm Muslim.

00:21:08.340 Yes, I take advantage of subsidized housing.

00:21:11.520 Like I think he is embracing the perpetual revolution you talk about.

00:21:18.240 And so people pointing that out aren't hurting him.

00:21:21.340 They're helping him by clarifying for voters in New York what he stands for.

00:21:26.580 I don't know.

00:21:26.860 Maybe I'm wrong on that.

00:21:27.880 Maybe he has to win liberal white women to win the mayorship. 1.00

00:21:32.000 But I think he's totally leaning into being a communist because he knows that's a winner these days.

00:21:37.700 I mean especially in places like New York City.

00:21:40.420 I think that they learned a lesson from your country, from Mark Carney very likely.

00:21:45.480 Mark Carney was able to pull off this unbelievable reversal of the lead Pierre Pilyev had, which is one of the largest political leads at that scale of an election that I think has ever been overturned.

00:22:00.240 And he did it by leaning into Trump as the problem or the anti-Trump, right?

00:22:05.560 And so by doing everything in the world that would irk Trump, he can appeal to these New Yorkers, a lot of – especially the Democrat New Yorkers who are not the ones who gave in and voted for Trump in the last election.

00:22:20.140 And then meanwhile on the other side, of course, you have two or three candidates, I guess, three candidates opposing him that are all over the map.

00:22:27.800 How this character is to be defeated when he's playing the game basically perfectly, I have absolutely no idea for short of some kind of a genuine scandal that is not the kind of scandal that appeals to conservatives but that would shock the conscience of these New York Democrats.

00:22:47.480 And I think you're right.

00:22:49.080 I think you're actually right, especially pointing out the Muslim thing. 0.88

00:22:52.580 They're able to lean on the – Trump is xenophobic.

00:22:56.040 He did the Muslim ban way back in 2017, blah, blah, blah.

00:22:59.980 And so I think it's – I think you're onto something that he's leaning into these controversies and when people try to raise them as the controversies that might hurt him, that it actually helps him.

00:23:12.340 The only caveat to that is when he leans into explicitly communist stuff.

00:23:17.720 I don't find – there is a very large contingent of outright socialists and the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, which is a communist front organization, is behind him if I'm not mistaken.

00:23:30.200 Although it might be mistaken.

00:23:31.340 I don't know if Mandami is actually affiliated with that or just strongly supported by them.

00:23:36.080 But it is not common to find – I even find that Democrats, if I wear one of my shirts that says anti-communist on it, even what I refer to as visible Democrats, often support the message on my shirt.

00:23:48.660 So I think that him leaning into the identity categories, leaning into the controversies, leaning into everything that upsets conservatives helps him accept the communist thing.

00:23:59.260 Him saying seize the means of production really scared a lot of people and I think it scared a lot of people in New York.

00:24:04.540 When you get into too many of the specific policies, people don't understand that that's communism and it doesn't work as well.

00:24:09.520 But his affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America and his outright seize the means of production communism I don't think is helping him.

00:24:16.440 And I think that that's the more profitable angle to go after than his, you know, putative race, religion, et cetera. 0.81

00:24:25.580 Mark Andreessen, who's a tech startup guy in San Francisco and he's a bit of an amateur philosopher, I think he's interesting.

00:24:34.320 He's sort of a freedom-oriented guy who's come around to Trump.

00:24:37.740 I mean a lot of San Francisco is hard left and he's part of this wave of sort of tech billionaires that has had a bit of an awakening.

00:24:43.960 He, I think, gave a very good explanation for why so many young people are hard left.

00:24:51.720 And you say communism and some of those ideas scare people and I think you may be right.

00:24:56.420 But I see, and again, it could be just a Potemkin village. 0.54

00:25:00.820 It could be AstroTurf.

00:25:02.460 But I see a revival in actually named communist parties in Canada.

00:25:08.900 And now, again, someone could be paid to put up the posters.

00:25:13.780 Some of these people could be paid to come.

00:25:15.800 But the Communist Party, using that name, leaning right into it, is having a bit of a revival.

00:25:23.240 Now, I have no idea.

00:25:24.120 They could, I mean, Canada, there's a lot of foreign governments playing around in our politics. 0.69

00:25:28.160 China, Iran, just to name a couple.

00:25:30.320 But I think, and here's what Andreessen said.

00:25:33.480 He said, what is a young person's experience with capitalism these days?

00:25:39.860 Housing prices so high you can never buy in.

00:25:44.920 You know, wages so low you can't get ahead.

00:25:47.560 If you can't plausibly see yourself as a winner in capitalism, why would you protect it?

00:25:56.040 You don't have a stake in it.

00:25:57.320 You cannot mimic the lingo of property rights conservatism of the 80s and 90s because it's

00:26:05.200 not working for you.

00:26:06.360 And you have an enormous amount of debt from your useless university degree that cannot be 0.90

00:26:14.100 purged through bankruptcy.

00:26:15.240 So when you think about money and cash and savings and investments, it's all bad.

00:26:23.040 And it's all the system.

00:26:24.740 You can't get, you can't buy a house.

00:26:26.620 You can't get a down payment.

00:26:27.920 And you've got this monstrous debt you'll never be rid of.

00:26:31.620 Andreessen says it's not surprising that people do not support communism and that young people

00:26:37.320 are siding with kooks like Bernie Sanders.

00:26:41.460 No, I think he's, I mean, that's what I was saying earlier about the soil.

00:26:45.240 I think that the soil is, in fact, very, very fertile to grow these kind of revolutionary

00:26:51.280 ideas, particularly in cities where the property costs are.

00:26:56.460 I mean, they're high everywhere, but they're astronomically higher proportionally.

00:27:00.760 The competition for jobs is much more significant.

00:27:04.000 And so he's not wrong that this is a fundamental structural issue that, you know, we have based

00:27:13.380 on a lot of huge economic shifts that we've undertaken, at least since the 1990s, that have

00:27:21.880 created this gigantic problem.

00:27:23.160 And like I said, that creates the fertile soil in which these messages are very resonant.

00:27:27.720 And of course, what's hard to teach people and hard to get through to them when they're so angry

00:27:33.160 at what they're dealing with in their day to day life now is that it's very easy to pick up

00:27:38.900 the wrong solution to these problems and put yourself in a far worse situation in a few years.

00:27:44.760 And I've had this fight with people, you know, countless times.

00:27:47.940 I don't care that there's some possibility, they say, that things will be worse in five

00:27:53.800 years if I can get relief from my problem that I have now.

00:27:57.480 And, you know, this kind of short term thinking or even utopian thinking, maybe it'll work this

00:28:02.740 time, is is the danger because they are facing real struggles.

00:28:07.040 And those struggles don't actually demand that I keep hearing we need compassion and we don't

00:28:11.840 need compassion.

00:28:12.460 We need solutions for these problems.

00:28:14.660 We actually have to deal with these crises of immigration that are screwing up all of 1.00

00:28:20.740 our markets, including our housing markets and our job markets.

00:28:23.400 We have to we actually have to do the hard work of dealing with all of the different problems

00:28:28.740 that have driven these prices up.

00:28:30.720 You know, the various regulations on building housing, all the different things that have

00:28:35.020 come into play where the market can't actually correct.

00:28:38.160 But what they're what they it's hard to get people to understand is that they're not

00:28:41.180 suffering capitalism.

00:28:43.100 They are suffering a public private partnership, which is in a huge diversion from capitalism

00:28:49.740 that has worked to enrich a small number of people who are pushing something on.

00:28:54.580 It's called a stakeholder economy, which is just the new socialism.

00:28:57.920 And so it's this is all, you know, specialist terminology.

00:29:01.280 It's very new that they're probably not familiar with a lot of it.

00:29:04.280 And they don't understand that it's the deviations from allowing the market to solve a lot of

00:29:11.720 these problems and the deviations from responsible governance of a liberal society, whether it's

00:29:19.100 through immigration problems or whatever else that have caused these problems.

00:29:22.200 But if we don't start solving these problems, people ask me all the time, well, you know,

00:29:25.800 not to circle to the woke right.

00:29:27.480 But we see this radical thing happening on both left and right, especially with young

00:29:31.380 people.

00:29:31.740 And they're like, well, how do we fix it?

00:29:33.320 And the number one answer is you have to cut off the fuel source.

00:29:36.760 Or if you want to use the metaphor of the field, you have to make that soil less fertile.

00:29:40.900 And the only way you can do that is by doing what President Trump is allegedly trying to

00:29:44.840 do.

00:29:45.080 And in some cases, having great successes and in other cases, not having as many successes

00:29:48.880 or doing scary things.

00:29:50.380 Um, but you have to solve the problems.

00:29:52.820 And if we solve the problems, you take that, you know, revolutionary urge away.

00:29:58.640 And that revolutionary urge makes people susceptible to the propaganda that leads them on predetermined

00:30:04.660 courses that are gigantic multi-level marketing scams in poly socioeconomic and political that

00:30:11.800 will eventually screw them over far worse.

00:30:13.800 But they feel like, you know, in the short term, it's going to make something better.

00:30:17.000 And so they buy in.

00:30:18.160 And how you communicate to people that they're that almost everything that they're perceiving

00:30:23.720 is not wrong, but misinterpreted for them deliberately to lead them in directions that

00:30:29.740 will make their situation worse is, I mean, this is what I've dedicated my life to, basically.

00:30:34.060 And I might as well just, you know, go outside and bang my face against a brick wall as easy

00:30:38.080 as it is to convince people of these things.

00:30:40.860 You know, you use the word stakeholder capitalism.

00:30:43.160 That is the catchphrase of the World Economic Forum.

00:30:47.060 They talk about that all the time.

00:30:49.260 And of course, as a matter of fact, Ezra, if you read the book called Stakeholder Capitalism

00:30:54.240 by Klaus Schwab and you flip to the I forget if it's in the front or the back, but it gives

00:30:58.020 a bio of Professor Klaus Schwab.

00:31:00.540 It says in the bio that the World Economic Forum was created specifically to push the

00:31:06.080 stakeholder capitalist model.

00:31:07.740 Wow.

00:31:08.500 Wow.

00:31:09.100 Of course, Mark Carney, our new prime minister, was a director of the World Economic Forum.

00:31:13.840 And that's really all he did, stakeholder capitalism.

00:31:16.760 Bank of Canada, Bank of England, the GFANS, the Global Financial Alliance for Net Zero.

00:31:23.940 That was not shareholder activism.

00:31:27.320 That was stakeholder activism, basically riveting itself to businesses and getting them to like

00:31:35.180 injecting politics into massive companies.

00:31:38.080 And it's Trump that's ended that, by the way.

00:31:40.720 Trump, with his war on DEI, has caused a lot of these big banks to back away.

00:31:46.160 The battle's not over, but Trump has joined the fight.

00:31:50.200 Let me briefly explain the stakeholder thing because people need to know this is very important.

00:31:54.280 Stakeholder is a new buzzword.

00:31:55.720 I mean, new 1971 or whatever.

00:31:58.080 But it's this buzzword.

00:31:59.960 What does it mean, right?

00:32:01.720 What is a stakeholder?

00:32:02.620 Well, everybody's a stakeholder.

00:32:03.680 Why is everybody a stakeholder?

00:32:05.200 Because if the company's doing something out there, maybe they're polluting the environment.

00:32:10.020 Maybe they're making a bad product.

00:32:11.300 Maybe they're making a product that everybody benefits from, a good product, whatever.

00:32:15.040 You have a stake in what that company does.

00:32:16.720 So everybody's a stakeholder.

00:32:18.620 So the name for that in old communism or just the old name for this is a people's economy.

00:32:24.980 Right.

00:32:25.320 It is a bunch of experts, which in Russian is pronounced Soviet, that is going to make decisions

00:32:30.880 on behalf of the people because all the stakeholders, unlike the shareholders, all the stakeholders,

00:32:36.140 which is everybody, cannot vote.

00:32:37.880 So they need expert representatives who are unelected, who understand the situation and

00:32:42.300 what all the stakeholders actually need, who are going to govern things for you.

00:32:46.440 So it's the people's economy is one way to phrase it, or people's capitalism, which is

00:32:50.880 obviously, you know, as soon as you say it that way, it's communist.

00:32:53.700 But this isn't where stakeholderism came from.

00:32:56.040 The first legal implementation of the stakeholder economy was not recent.

00:33:00.860 It was not Klaus Schwab.

00:33:02.120 It was not 1971 with the World Economic Forum.

00:33:05.020 It was not actually Soviet Union with the Soviets, which is exactly the model that it's using.

00:33:10.980 It was in 1937 under something called the Nazi Shareholder Act, which made the Nazi party

00:33:16.540 the primary stakeholder replacing shareholder primacy in order for Hitler to make his war economy.

00:33:23.840 You can look this up.

00:33:24.680 I'm not exaggerating.

00:33:26.700 I'm not even interpreting.

00:33:27.860 It is taken as the world's first stakeholder economy was installed by the Nazis in order 0.90

00:33:33.640 to justify the war machine.

00:33:35.360 In other words, to get the corporations of Germany fully in line with the Nazi party. 0.59

00:33:39.960 And their first responsibility as a corporation under this act was to the folk.

00:33:44.040 In other words, the people.

00:33:45.440 The stakeholder economy is the people's economy, is the folk's economy, if you want to put it 0.92

00:33:50.600 kind of in the German, half German.

00:33:52.680 And so what you actually have here is a soft totalitarian model that they figured out how

00:33:58.460 to retool all of these awful things, whether it's a Soviet model or whether it's the Nazi 0.93

00:34:04.200 Shareholder Act stakeholder model and kind of mishmash this together, which they've been

00:34:09.620 testing out in the People's Republic of China, which explicitly says that they've adopted both

00:34:14.340 of those models to make their two-pronged economy under the Deng Xiaoping thought.

00:34:18.960 One country, two systems.

00:34:20.900 Well, there's your two systems, by the way.

00:34:23.300 It's the Soviet system mixed with the Nazi system from the 1937 Nazi Shareholder Act.

00:34:28.640 So people need to understand this stakeholder word is very friendly, makes it think that,

00:34:32.660 you know, these people care about me.

00:34:34.260 It's in this nice managerial BS language that nobody understands.

00:34:38.340 So it seems safe.

00:34:39.800 But it's actually just a reinvention of the Nazi and Soviet economy in new words.

00:34:45.280 Hmm.

00:34:46.440 I tell you, if I can convince you, I'd love to invite you to come with us to the World Economic

00:34:52.360 Forum, their annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, every January.

00:34:56.580 We've been going for, oh, I think about four years now.

00:34:59.280 And although we don't have access to the inner sanctum, they would never, they don't even

00:35:03.720 respond to our requests.

00:35:05.920 We can interact with the muckety-mucks on the street. 1.00

00:35:09.220 In fact, we bumped into Larry Fink himself last time and the head of State Street.

00:35:13.460 And we haven't been able to capture Klaus Schwab.

00:35:16.580 He's more reclusive.

00:35:18.000 But let me tell you one quick anecdote from those trips.

00:35:23.100 There, you would think you're in Europe.

00:35:25.220 You know, distances are short.

00:35:26.740 You're near Germany, you're near Switzerland's a small country.

00:35:29.880 There is only one protest every time at the World Economic Forum.

00:35:35.520 You would think it would be many protests.

00:35:37.960 And it is an environmentalist group.

00:35:39.720 And they come in every year for one day.

00:35:42.500 And they bus themselves in from Germany.

00:35:45.060 And they stay in clusters nearby.

00:35:48.440 Like, we see them.

00:35:49.660 And then they come and they don't criticize capitalism, really.

00:35:53.840 They demand more sort of stakeholder environmentalism.

00:35:58.700 Like, they're not saying a single word that contradicts what Klaus Schwab is doing there.

00:36:03.720 It's this fake protest bought and paid for, luxury bus, luxury accommodations.

00:36:09.920 There are no other protests.

00:36:11.180 There's no Antifa there.

00:36:12.680 There's no Greenpeace there.

00:36:14.020 Oh, and I can assure you, there was not a single Hamas flag in the whole place.

00:36:20.820 It was just this one carefully curated protest.

00:36:25.680 And the year before, Greta was there.

00:36:27.340 She's busy with Hamas now.

00:36:28.800 So what you're saying, it really sinks.

00:36:31.880 Because the left, you would think they would find this gathering of oligarchs unacceptable.

00:36:37.200 Not at all.

00:36:38.420 They want to encourage the oligarchs to keep up their good work.

00:36:42.160 You've got to come with us.

00:36:43.040 I think you'd get a real kick out of it.

00:36:45.000 I think you would be like a kid in the candy store.

00:36:47.320 Just all these different people.

00:36:49.740 We might have to do that.

00:36:51.500 I'm not putting you on the spot.

00:36:52.800 But I just want you to think about it.

00:36:54.240 Hey, let's talk for one more minute about immigration.

00:36:57.000 And then let's finally go to the woke right.

00:37:01.260 Trump claims that 1.5 million people have left the United States.

00:37:07.100 Most of them sort of self-deported, which I never thought was a thing.

00:37:11.420 But I think it is actually happening.

00:37:13.040 And we know that thousands of them, the Haitians, they're coming into Canada.

00:37:16.800 They're going to Montreal.

00:37:17.740 Wouldn't you rather live in Montreal than in Port-au-Prince, Haiti?

00:37:20.800 There have been hundreds of thousands of forced deportations.

00:37:25.880 They've started with the baddest dudes that they've sent to El Salvador.

00:37:29.400 And I think you will soon see, if this keeps up, if you take another million people out of the country, if you actually stop all incoming illegals of the border, which I believe they've done, and if you get a few million people a year, that is enough to change the rental market.

00:37:49.800 That is enough to change the wage market.

00:37:51.880 I see, especially in certain industries where it's all foreign workers, meatpacking for some reason, mainly foreign workers.

00:37:58.920 In Canada, we see the same thing.

00:38:00.940 They're in all the retail.

00:38:03.060 They're in all the fast food drive-thrus.

00:38:06.340 If you were to send home a couple million foreigners from America every year, a million from Canada every year, you would have cheaper housing. 0.87

00:38:18.100 You would have higher wages for Canadians, and you would have a marked decrease in crime, especially in the States, where Trump is now taking over big city crime control.

00:38:28.280 And you would have this better future under a capitalist American economy.

00:38:35.740 And maybe you could convince young people that there is a path for them to get married, have a family, and make a goal of it, maybe even on one income.

00:38:45.280 I don't know.

00:38:46.280 I think that Trump has actually, in the last, he's only been in office for a little over six months.

00:38:52.980 I think he has made real changes that would allow people to feel better about life, that would stop their enchantment with the communist left.

00:39:02.060 If Trump keeps doing what he's doing, crime, housing, inflation, I think he's going to make America, actually, I don't want to, like, it's his slogan, but I think he will make America great again.

00:39:13.120 I mean, that's the idea, and it's actually working.

00:39:17.320 You know, people who have, you know, a kind of broader view of how these immigration trends work understand that if you, you don't have to, you know, get ice out to grab everybody in the country to deport them.

00:39:30.680 And all you have to do, actually, to get most people to leave is to make it not a free ride.

00:39:37.760 And a lot of them will leave.

00:39:40.280 They are here under false pretenses, sometimes for a better life and sometimes not.

00:39:45.220 But if it's uncomfortable, if they know that they are subject to if they get caught, ice will actually arrest them and take them out of the country or deport them, then put them possibly in some horrifying prison like Alligator Alcatraz in the meantime.

00:39:57.540 Then a lot of them will just not take the risk, and they'll leave.

00:40:01.240 If you make it, you know, harder for them to be able to say, I don't know, commercial driving licenses, and it's difficult for them to get jobs, then they will leave.

00:40:10.700 And the whole point is to get most of the people to leave under their own power who have come in.

00:40:17.960 And like you said, all of the downstream effects that you're talking about, we should be chasing very vigorously all of the ones who are actively perpetrating crimes.

00:40:26.920 I think that both Canada and the UK need to learn from this.

00:40:30.320 And, of course, your governments aren't interested in doing that.

00:40:33.060 In fact, they're interested in the opposite.

00:40:34.820 The people who are committing crimes need to be taken away.

00:40:37.180 They need to be actually deported, and in the cases where, you know, they maybe have some kind of naturalization, possibly considered denaturalization. 0.64

00:40:45.800 And this problem can start to solve itself once you start – once your country starts looking very seriously that we're not going to tolerate this illegal immigration problem, once you start looking at it very seriously, a lot of them will leave under their own power. 0.99

00:40:58.800 So you don't have to go find out how to round up 20 or 30 or 40 million as it turns out to be in the United States.

00:41:04.700 Nobody quite knows how many because millions of them – you know, you round up tens of thousands and millions of them leave on their own because the conditions and the fear just isn't worth it.

00:41:15.560 The idea is to do that as much as possible.

00:41:17.700 And like you said, the downstream effects are that capitalism actually gets to reemerge in a healthier way.

00:41:24.620 We actually have a market that is within the confines of our national law as opposed to something that's gone completely lawless, and it actually starts working for citizens again, and then they start to have that hope.

00:41:37.940 The American dream, whether you're American or not, the concept that you are upwardly mobile if you work hard is what repels revolutions into status tyrannies or stakeholder models or whatever else.

00:41:51.340 The stakeholder model that we've already adopted is the problem.

00:41:54.980 It's not capitalism though.

00:41:56.060 It's stakeholder capitalism, which is actually a Soviet, fake capitalism.

00:42:00.000 And if we could focus our energy on fighting the actual problem, people would see things would start to get better very quickly.

00:42:04.920 And I agree.

00:42:05.660 Trump is taking some very strong steps and has done remarkably in six months in that regard.

00:42:12.240 You know, there are some industrial unions in Canada.

00:42:15.660 Most of the unionization is in the public sector.

00:42:17.880 But there are some on the auto workers union, for example.

00:42:20.940 And those workers do so well these days.

00:42:23.580 They've got a cabin.

00:42:24.420 They've got a boat.

00:42:25.200 They've got – Marx would say they have false consciousness.

00:42:29.220 They think they're the ruling class.

00:42:31.540 They're just the proletariat. 0.98

00:42:32.740 But no.

00:42:33.620 If you've got a good life and you're making enough money that you can have, you know, like I say, a boat, a cabin, et cetera, you're not going to feel particularly revolutionary.

00:42:44.700 I bet there's not a lot of factory workers for Zoran.

00:42:50.200 And that's the prime critique of the critical theorists, by the way.

00:42:53.180 Marcuse wrote through the 1960s repeated complaints about this.

00:42:57.380 Max Horkheimer gave interviews through the 1960s giving repeated complaints about this where the problem was that capitalism had stabilized the worker and allows him to build a good life.

00:43:07.860 Now, you know, Marcuse is like – and it is a good life, but it's not an ideal life, right?

00:43:11.920 And so the critical theory was developed specifically to fix that so-called problem that people were able to build better lives.

00:43:18.700 So they found ways to complain and say, well, capitalism doesn't work for everybody.

00:43:22.320 It doesn't work for this race. 0.77

00:43:23.400 It doesn't work for that sexuality. 0.96

00:43:24.740 It doesn't work for women, blah, blah, blah, and encourage all those identity factors who were, you know, in their opinion, marginal to the successful system that we actually were operating here in our free countries. 1.00

00:43:35.600 You know, I want to tell you one more Davos anecdote.

00:43:40.100 We're staying in the Swiss Alps, and it's pretty much 100% Swiss up there in Davos, not so much in Zurich and Geneva.

00:43:48.800 So it's the kind of place where they have sort of trust – I don't know what they – like you open the fridge door, you can take the groceries, and you just leave money.

00:43:58.740 Like on someone's house, they have a little business, and they're not there.

00:44:02.000 It's like a garage sale.

00:44:03.260 It would be like a garage sale or a yard sale, but no one's there.

00:44:06.620 It's such a high-trust society that you leave the money, and you take the product, and everyone trusts everyone.

00:44:15.700 And in all the restaurants and shops there, all the workers, the cashier, the cooks, they're all Swiss. 0.83

00:44:22.940 Now, it's expensive to live in Switzerland.

00:44:25.900 It's expensive to live in Davos.

00:44:29.120 But holy cow, what a quality of life.

00:44:32.540 There's no crime in Davos.

00:44:34.620 And I think of Toronto.

00:44:36.060 New York City is about 37% foreign-born.

00:44:39.760 Toronto is in the 40%.

00:44:41.060 There's a nearby city called Brampton.

00:44:44.900 It's about 60% foreign-born.

00:44:47.100 A lot of these people come from low-trust societies.

00:44:49.380 The food banks don't work anymore because international students or foreign workers just go there for free groceries. 1.00

00:44:55.160 You cannot have a food bank without a high-trust society because people say, oh, what a bunch of idiots. 1.00

00:45:00.460 I'll just come and do my grocery shopping here. 1.00

00:45:02.240 And so I think what would happen in Toronto if a million foreigners were to leave?

00:45:07.600 Well, housing prices would fall.

00:45:10.020 So, yes, the boomers and other people who own houses, I suppose they would be hurt that way.

00:45:16.000 But suddenly everything would be better.

00:45:18.840 It would be more like living in Davos, Switzerland than living in Karachi. 0.98

00:45:23.360 I think immigration is such a crisis.

00:45:27.360 And I think it's the ultimate way that George Soros planned to defeat the Free West.

00:45:33.380 And I say Soros because his central focus for two decades has been mass migration to the West.

00:45:41.280 Do you think that's correct?

00:45:43.120 Yeah.

00:45:43.420 His main nonprofit is called the Open Society Foundation.

00:45:48.280 And he has this really crackpot vision of the Open Society that when you actually read what it is, you know, people try to trace it back to Karl Popper, who obviously wrote the Open Society and its Enemies, and who was George Soros' mentor.

00:46:00.620 So there is a connection between Popper and Soros.

00:46:03.460 But when you read Soros, it's very, very obvious.

00:46:08.000 Read The Alchemy of Finance.

00:46:09.000 It takes no effort.

00:46:10.460 By the end of the first or second chapter, you're completely convinced this guy's a Marxist in denial.

00:46:14.800 He says that he's not a Marxist, and the only reason he doesn't like Marxism is because it has too closed-ended of a solution.

00:46:21.540 It has to end in communism.

00:46:23.480 But he loves everything else, the dialectic, the vision, the whole idea.

00:46:27.280 So, yeah, he wants national borders to be meaningless.

00:46:30.780 And so one of the ways to erase national borders is to make them so porous that they are meaningless.

00:46:37.260 And so this has been for 20, 30 years, one of his biggest projects.

00:46:41.780 He also says in The Alchemy of Finance that he takes, and I quote, a certain malicious pleasure in short-selling an institutional favorite.

00:46:49.620 Well, the Western democracies were geopolitical institutional favorites.

00:46:53.220 So if you can undermine them, you can short-sell them.

00:46:57.200 And he takes a certain – in fact, he says that it's actually like a god complex that he has.

00:47:02.460 He actually admits that in the book, that he sees himself as a kind of god, and the only thing that keeps him attached to not believing he is a god is his failures in the market because it's so unpredictable.

00:47:12.460 But if you can short-sell institutional favorites like the United States, Canada, the UK, et cetera, then he's going to take a certain malicious pleasure in that.

00:47:20.440 This is what he delights in.

00:47:21.480 It aligns with his crackpot Marxist internationalist theory of a so-called open society, though the conclusion doesn't have to be communist in his view.

00:47:29.300 It can dialectically go wherever the winds blow it.

00:47:32.400 But the key to that is to utterly dissolve the idea of national borders and thus national sovereignty.

00:47:38.920 You know, I'll have to tell you another time about the day where George Soros sued me personally.

00:47:45.340 But we'll save that story for another day.

00:47:47.180 I'll have to do a show on it maybe.

00:47:50.520 Donald Trump is doing a lot of the things that we've been talking about here.

00:47:54.860 Immigration, the most important. 0.99

00:47:56.160 He's doing a lot of things that symbolically scratch itches for conservatives.

00:48:04.140 In fact, if you look through his executive orders, they're so creative.

00:48:08.220 Taking on the universities itself was something that people said, oh, you can't do that.

00:48:12.580 Look at him go to war against Harvard of all.

00:48:14.640 Like he started with the toughest.

00:48:17.260 You know, the fact that he's resolved six international conflicts is sort of a bonus that I don't even think people were thinking about.

00:48:23.580 And that's not the most important thing for an American president to do.

00:48:26.860 But it is sort of awesome.

00:48:28.940 And if I were an American pundit, I would be saying amen every day.

00:48:34.440 I'm a Canadian pundit.

00:48:35.360 So instead I'm railing against Mark Carney, mass immigration. 1.00

00:48:39.140 You know, every problem in Canada under Trudeau is the same or worse.

00:48:43.380 If I was a Brit, I would be in panic by the thousand illegal migrants at a time coming over from France in dinghies and the rape gangs that are in the U. 0.95

00:48:55.800 So there's so much to talk about and to fight about in Canada, including the fact that the conservatives didn't win an election.

00:49:01.760 In the U.K., there's so much to talk about and fight about.

00:49:05.700 But in America, you know, if you're a right winger, if you're a critic of Soros, if you're a critic of the World Economic Forum, holy smokes, your dreams are coming true.

00:49:16.380 And you're being entertained by Donald Trump, who is an inherent entertainer.

00:49:21.520 So Will Chamberlain made a tweet the other day, and I had him on to talk about it.

00:49:25.740 He said, one of the reasons you see sort of a craziness amongst some pundits on the right is that Trump has taken away their fodder.

00:49:36.340 And he was referring to Candace Owens and I think a little bit to Tucker Carlson.

00:49:40.300 And I know there was a certain part of the right-wing commentary at who it felt like they were lusting for Trump's attack on Iran to go awry.

00:49:49.740 They were actually sort of hoping it felt like for Iran to launch a major war against America instead of just staying completely silent while Trump used the B-2 bombers on them.

00:50:01.500 And I had Will on to talk about it, and I saw that you made a comment that maybe Will himself – in fact, Will said that you've called him woke, right?

00:50:09.460 And I didn't understand.

00:50:10.500 That's what I thought.

00:50:11.040 We've got to have James on to figure this out.

00:50:13.120 Do me a favor.

00:50:14.280 Answer two parts to the question.

00:50:15.820 The first is, is there something going on with pundits, including my former hero, Tucker Carlson, who I looked up to for so many years as a role model?

00:50:26.560 I think he's gone way over the edge.

00:50:30.060 I think he's – I just don't understand what's going on there.

00:50:33.640 And Candace Owens, I think she's anti-Semitic. 1.00

00:50:36.720 And I don't want to throw that term around lightly.

00:50:38.700 Like the stuff she says about Jews being demonic, it's just – it doesn't even feel like political commentary anymore. 0.51

00:50:44.000 My first question is, what the heck is going on with them and a dozen copycats to them?

00:50:51.240 And then I'll ask you to figure out this Will Chamberlain thing.

00:50:54.500 But first of all, help me diagnose what's going on with Tucker and Candace.

00:50:58.980 Well, I mean, not to drag Will into it prematurely, but I have a more cynical interpretation of what's happening than he does.

00:51:04.280 I perceive that there is a radical splinter movement that has been embedded within MAGA probably all along, actually.

00:51:11.460 We used to call it the alt-right.

00:51:13.640 Then there was the so-called very fine people hoax around the Charlottesville event in August of 2017.

00:51:19.640 Is that right, the date?

00:51:20.520 Yes.

00:51:21.760 And they went underground, but they didn't go away.

00:51:24.940 What they did was they put on happy faces and they joined the movement and became more and more prominent within a broad pro-America MAGA thing that grew.

00:51:32.880 And it rapidly strengthened under the Biden years.

00:51:35.940 And then I feel like last summer they started to emerge from their cocoon and to try to run a radical splinter movement.

00:51:43.200 And I think Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and most of these other – sometimes Trump calls them panicans – are all part of this.

00:51:51.280 And you'll notice the pattern.

00:51:52.540 What they did in the advance, say, of the Iran strike was that they came out saying this is going to cause World War III.

00:51:59.180 Trump is terrible.

00:51:59.940 This is it. 0.70

00:52:00.420 They turned on Trump quite vocally, and then when it worked, they turned around and claimed that they were the ones who made it work, that in fact Trump is great, but it's also that he's great that he listened to them and their wise counsel as influencers and pundits.

00:52:15.560 And I think this is all a game.

00:52:16.840 I have an extraordinarily cynical interpretation of this.

00:52:19.880 I think it is a deliberate strategy to undermine MAGA from within because they could not – and I don't mean these same people – whether it's World Economic Forum, George Soros, Democrats, if there's a deep state, if it's foreign adversaries like Russia, China, Qatar, Iran, et cetera.

00:52:36.000 They could not undermine MAGA from without for the last 2016 to 2024.

00:52:42.280 They could not take it down from the outside.

00:52:44.480 They had to end up taking it down from the inside.

00:52:46.840 And what better issue to do than Israel and Jews to split people, to scare off Jews and people who care about them, people who are recent nose-holding voters for Republicans for the first time who could have been converted into lifelong conservatives away from this communist lurch the Democrats have taken. 0.99

00:53:06.000 And now they're terrified that – what's going on here?

00:53:09.360 Are these people Nazis?

00:53:10.660 Are some of them Nazis?

00:53:11.680 Are they at least working with or sympathetic to Nazi ideas?

00:53:14.920 Why are they laundering Hitler? 0.81

00:53:16.260 Why are they saying Churchill was the bad guy of World War II and that maybe Hitler was the good guy, as Tucker Carlson's guest said the other day?

00:53:25.440 People are freaking out about this.

00:53:27.160 And my interpretation of it is there is a splinter cell that is operating as though it's the other hand of the other side that's aiming to take down MAGA from within.

00:53:37.380 And I don't know why and cannot start to guess why certain influencers and pundits like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and so on are participating in this.

00:53:50.060 But I think with at least a certain list of them, it is beyond question.

00:53:54.560 I mean there's a short list of reasons why people do this.

00:53:57.140 They have some kind of resentment that they're trying to enact.

00:53:59.680 We know that Tucker Carlson is a paleo-conservative who is not particularly happy, that MAGA took the thrust of radical energy in the mid-2010s.

00:54:08.260 So maybe he has a political motive that he wanted a more radical, older, conservative model to resurge and it didn't.

00:54:13.700 So he's got to take down MAGA.

00:54:15.360 Maybe it's there's personal animus under the surface between him and Trump that he keeps hidden.

00:54:19.460 Maybe it's the more, you know, ugly and prosaic nature of these things, money, blackmail, you know, or whatever.

00:54:26.260 And then there's also the possibility with influencers of audience capture.

00:54:29.360 We know there's a foreign bot problem. 1.00

00:54:31.060 I know you talked to Will about that as well.

00:54:33.060 A foreign bot problem on Twitter that's amplifying some of these worst possible ideas. 0.98

00:54:38.140 A lot of people don't realize it, but a lot of the so-called Nazi content on Twitter is heavily pushed by the Russians.

00:54:43.440 This is a game that they are playing.

00:54:44.960 It is traceable to Russian cells that are trying to amplify the likes, amplify the retweets, fill the comments with negativity when it goes the wrong way, to slowly lead these poor influencers who are obsessed in many cases with their statistics.

00:55:02.200 What are my numbers showing?

00:55:03.180 Am I growing?

00:55:03.880 Am I getting a bigger audience?

00:55:05.140 Am I getting more likes?

00:55:06.080 Am I getting more retweets?

00:55:07.460 Am I getting more shares on my video?

00:55:09.200 They're obsessed with these metrics.

00:55:10.560 You can screw that person's head up so easily without giving them a dime inorganically.

00:55:17.140 Like they make money off of their ex getting more engagement.

00:55:20.080 They make money off their YouTube getting more engagement.

00:55:21.960 But you don't have to show up with a checkbook and, you know, snarling, you know, face and say, you know, say this stuff and we'll give you $10 million like in the tenant media scandal.

00:55:32.580 You don't have to do any of that.

00:55:34.280 You can actually fry these people's brains just by playing in the dopamine circuit of their social media experience if they're not aware that that's happening.

00:55:43.760 And we know that that kind of thing is happening.

00:55:45.860 It's very clear the bot activity if you hit certain keywords or whatever.

00:55:50.000 So why these influencers and pundits and so on are participating I think is multifaceted.

00:55:56.460 I think there are many reasons that apply in different amounts of different people.

00:55:59.660 It's also their own business that has not been broken in many stories.

00:56:03.540 So we don't know.

00:56:05.300 It's actually it's actually ambiguous to us.

00:56:08.280 And so the best we can do is speculate and guess which we always have to do, you know, with, you know, circumspection and caution.

00:56:16.160 We can't be accusing people of, you know, oh, Tucker's doing this because he's blackmailed that we don't have proof of that.

00:56:21.700 If we did, it would be a different story, you know, so we don't know why they're doing it.

00:56:26.540 But I'm utterly convinced by the level of coordination, the strategic rollout, the kind of timing, the ability.

00:56:33.040 I have an ability to predict some of the things that they do, like their new push.

00:56:37.280 They said, you know, they started saying, what is an American is going to be the most important question.

00:56:41.160 What is an American? What is an American?

00:56:42.800 Then, boom, the next week they roll out Heritage American as the answer to this question that they've ginned up out of the immigration argument.

00:56:50.480 So I think it's coordinated.

00:56:52.900 I don't think that this was an, you know, unplanned organic evolution.

00:56:57.900 And so I think that this is a radical splinter movement that is significantly coordinated, that stretches back not a year, but 10 years, and that we're well behind the playbook of what they're running, that it's extremely well funded, that there is a lot of money and there's a lot of foreign support.

00:57:14.920 But my interpretation of what's happening there is extremely cynical, unfortunately.

00:57:20.820 I don't think it's organic at all.

00:57:23.140 You know, I think what you've just said there is the most persuasive explanation I've heard.

00:57:27.500 But, you know, Rebel News, we like being quite conservative.

00:57:31.600 In some ways, we're quite radical.

00:57:34.620 You know, we're Canadian, though.

00:57:36.880 We were very interested in the U.S.

00:57:39.480 But at least four of our alumni have gone crazy in that direction.

00:57:46.640 And I think it's worth noting that all four of them were single women. 1.00

00:57:51.560 And I remember talking with them as I could feel things vibrating.

00:57:57.420 And when you say dopamine, there's something about social media and how it interacts with, I think, the female mind slightly different than the male mind.

00:58:06.720 I mean, women, I think, are more social than men. 0.92

00:58:09.680 They, you know, the validation, you know, young women on Twitter, the more radical they get, the more loving notes they get from men, including, I know this sounds ridiculous. 0.92

00:58:20.260 But everyday marriage proposals.

00:58:22.900 Now, these young female influencers know that they're not going to marry this guy. 1.00

00:58:27.420 But maybe it's a dream.

00:58:28.300 Well, maybe I'll find someone out there who's sort of a male.

00:58:31.340 But it's a good feeling.

00:58:33.280 It's a lot of likes.

00:58:34.180 I remember talking to one young woman, I won't say who, who would get hundreds of thousands of views on her videos. 0.74

00:58:39.420 And she really thought that the alt-right was the core of her audience.

00:58:43.640 I said, no, they're not real.

00:58:45.200 And I think, and the thing is, and we had one person on our team, I won't, maybe it's giving it away.

00:58:53.080 She came from a reality show background.

00:58:55.440 And there you've got every episode has to be more dramatic than the last one.

00:58:59.880 What's your move this episode?

00:59:01.460 Okay.

00:59:01.640 How do you trump that?

00:59:02.800 So social media magnifies a lot of these things.

00:59:06.960 And there's one more thing that I didn't contemplate until I, I think it might have been Will who said it.

00:59:12.620 The payment doesn't have to be from the official ambassador from Qatar.

00:59:16.860 It can be just like there are bots, you know, giving you likes and views.

00:59:22.200 If you have some sort of a super chat function or a tip or donation function,

00:59:27.140 you can be getting lots of $50 and $100 gifts from people with inscrutable online names.

00:59:34.880 And so you don't even have to know that you're being funded by Qatar.

00:59:39.540 I mean, there are some cases I found it very odd that Qatar registered, that someone registered

00:59:45.040 as a, under the Foreign Agent Registration Act to spend $200,000 to lobby to get the, I think

00:59:53.100 it was the Iranian, to get the Qatari PM on Tucker's show.

00:59:57.840 I mean, that, it's normally not that brazen, but I think a lot of it is just what you said.

01:00:03.680 It's psychological, it's, it's feeling of momentum, it's sort of safe in numbers.

01:00:09.440 And if Candace and Tucker can do it, and there's such big battleships, then everyone in a canoe

01:00:14.060 says, oh, I'll follow along in their wake.

01:00:16.280 I think, I think it's a lot of that.

01:00:18.900 I just don't get it with Tucker because surely money's not important to him.

01:00:22.400 Surely he's got enough.

01:00:23.780 Maybe it's a sort of vengeance against the Murdochs, who I think were considered Zionist

01:00:27.860 or something.

01:00:28.300 I don't know.

01:00:29.160 It makes me sad because I don't think anti-Semitism, I think in a way, by definition, it's, it's 0.93

01:00:35.300 a kind of wokeness because you're judging all Jews as the oppressors.

01:00:40.060 And, and it's this sort of mystic cosmic enemy.

01:00:43.920 It's a real leftist thing to say, oh, I have a problem in my life. 0.95

01:00:48.200 It's got to be the Jews. 1.00

01:00:49.340 It would be like going through an Rorschach inkblot test.

01:00:52.160 The Jews, the Jews, the Jews. 0.88

01:00:53.740 Like it's become an obsession for a lot of these pundits and even some comedians.

01:00:58.880 They just won't stop talking about the Jews in Gaza.

01:01:01.900 And I'm not saying don't talk about it, but that is not the core issue for Republicans

01:01:06.780 or Americans or Trump supporters.

01:01:08.940 Okay.

01:01:09.100 I'm done my rant.

01:01:10.900 That was a beautiful rant.

01:01:13.000 But yeah, I mean, this does interface.

01:01:15.460 The thing is, is like you said, with some of your, your former, you know, alumna that they've

01:01:20.400 gone crazy, right?

01:01:21.660 Well, what is, what kind of crazy have they gone?

01:01:25.680 And this is where that woke right label came in.

01:01:29.400 In my opinion, they've gone woke.

01:01:31.260 How did they go woke?

01:01:32.340 They saw all the left woke and they absorbed its assumptions.

01:01:35.560 They absorbed its tactics.

01:01:36.740 And they said those worked for the left.

01:01:38.560 The assumptions are probably true because they're, you know, political warfare worked for them.

01:01:44.640 Therefore, there must be something to it.

01:01:46.740 Let's take that on.

01:01:47.840 Maybe identity politics is the right way to believe it.

01:01:50.520 Maybe there is actually a consortium of people and maybe it is run by some kind of shadowy

01:01:56.360 identity group.

01:01:57.060 Of course, there are differences between the way the left and right observe these things.

01:02:02.220 But the fact is that they have absorbed these assumptions like there is no possibility of

01:02:07.140 objectivity or neutrality.

01:02:08.780 And maybe those things aren't actually desirable at all.

01:02:12.040 Maybe all knowledge is actually local.

01:02:13.920 So rather than, you know, having indigenous peoples who have their special knowledges that 0.81

01:02:18.460 are being disfavored by this, by the alleged capitalist system.

01:02:22.200 Now we have heritage, you know, nationalists, heritage Americans, heritage Canadians, heritage

01:02:26.780 English, whatever, whose ways of knowing are ultimately located in their people group.

01:02:32.260 And those are being, you know, disfavored by this, whatever we want to call it, global American

01:02:38.560 empire or whatever other names, you know, neocon regime, postwar liberal consensus, whatever

01:02:44.440 names that they give at different times in different places that's keeping them.

01:02:48.520 And I'm trying to stay out of the impolite names that they give this stuff.

01:02:51.300 But this system, you know, is keeping the true indigenous of, say, the United States, which 0.99

01:02:59.500 would be the heritage Americans who founded the country rather than the Native Americans.

01:03:03.900 And it's keeping not just that, but their ways of living, being and knowing out of the

01:03:09.360 discussion because they're deemed things like racist and xenophobic and so on.

01:03:13.240 But my definition for woke right has always just been that it's people on the right who've

01:03:17.780 adapted critical consciousness to advance their, you know, their idealistic vision of

01:03:23.880 society and it's absorbing the left, the energy of the left, same energy opposite direction

01:03:30.720 is what I was trying to get to.

01:03:31.920 They absorb the energy of the left, the woke energy and say, well, they must be on to something

01:03:35.980 because they've been so effective at getting power.

01:03:38.540 And it's, you know, caused us to be alienated from our experience in life.

01:03:43.020 And so we have to transcend our alienation through collective identity and throw it back

01:03:47.720 at them.

01:03:48.060 That's my whole idea of woke right.

01:03:51.000 And this also explains, unfortunately, and I don't think he's very woke right.

01:03:56.020 It's a scale, just like your niece who comes home from school and says some goofy stuff

01:04:00.500 about trans isn't necessarily, you know, a hardened communist out in the street with her 0.81

01:04:05.180 fist up. 0.73

01:04:05.840 You can be a little woke.

01:04:07.700 Well, at the same time, you can be a little woke right.

01:04:09.740 And this is why I think, you know, that the term woke right applies to Will Chamberlain,

01:04:16.080 although barely, lightly, is because he's adopted this idea.

01:04:19.620 He's a member, a important member of the National Conservative Movement, which is to, if you actually

01:04:24.760 read Yoram Hazoni's book, Yoram Hazoni is the director of the National Conservative Movement.

01:04:29.560 Yoram Hazoni wrote a book called The Virtue of Nationalism in 2018.

01:04:33.440 And if you read it, he actually says that epistemologically, your, I know it's a fancy

01:04:39.740 word, but your understanding of the world is located in your people group, which is a

01:04:43.860 nation, and that there should be the ability for nations to be sovereign, but not just

01:04:48.440 in terms of deciding their own affairs, where he kind of gives what amounts to a libertarian

01:04:54.560 position among nations instead of individuals, where each nation can't interfere with the

01:04:59.500 others, and he doesn't have great solutions for how an aggressor nation is going to be

01:05:02.780 dealt with by smaller nations.

01:05:05.380 But also that he has this underlying idea that truth is located in your people, which is a

01:05:12.200 kind of postmodern traditionalism as an answer to postmodern egalitarianism on the other side.

01:05:17.720 So it's the same energy opposite direction.

01:05:20.420 And so I don't think Will Chamberlain is very woke.

01:05:23.460 He's not, I don't think he's not anti-Semitic at all, as far as I can tell.

01:05:27.200 It's a big mistake people make to think, well, all these Jew haters, that's the woke

01:05:31.480 right.

01:05:32.080 Well, yeah, they are, but it's a broader term than that.

01:05:35.660 And it's not a sloppy term or an imprecise term.

01:05:38.060 It's having adopted certain epistemological and metaphysical commitments, and then having

01:05:42.300 adopted also those views to give permission structures to use tactics that are, you know,

01:05:49.520 in parallel or the reverse operation of what the woke left has been doing to us, like, you

01:05:53.800 know, canceling people as in yours truly.

01:05:55.740 Well, I think that you and Will should have a debate.

01:06:00.220 I wouldn't be intellectually powerful enough to moderate anything like that.

01:06:04.800 A lot of this is, to be very candid, a little bit above my head, but I'd like to see the

01:06:09.980 two of you talk about it.

01:06:11.060 Let me throw one last thing at you.

01:06:12.260 I know I've kept you for more than an hour.

01:06:13.820 I'm very grateful to you for your time.

01:06:16.240 I always like talking to you, Ezra.

01:06:17.300 Don't worry about it.

01:06:17.980 Thank you very much.

01:06:18.500 I've been traveling to Ireland a bit.

01:06:20.120 I had never been there until about a year ago, and I see a very authentic grassroots

01:06:25.160 organic uprising.

01:06:26.400 I mean, they are powerless.

01:06:28.000 There's no political party supporting them.

01:06:29.800 No media supporting them.

01:06:32.140 These are the most grassroots people you've ever seen, but they've been able to achieve

01:06:37.660 some amazing things.

01:06:38.720 They have very large protests, tens of thousands.

01:06:42.080 Ireland, remember, is only five million people.

01:06:43.980 And there's something about being Irish.

01:06:48.640 Like, it is an ethnicity.

01:06:50.340 It does trace back hundreds, thousands of years.

01:06:54.680 And there are some people who are saying, look, I can become Irish.

01:07:00.100 I'm Nigerian, but I want to become Irish.

01:07:03.460 I'm Pakistani.

01:07:04.900 I'm a Pakistani Muslim imam, but I can become Irish.

01:07:09.040 And of course, in some ways you can, but there is an essential Irishness.

01:07:13.540 And it's a real thing.

01:07:15.000 And I know there's probably 50 countries in the world that have, even within their

01:07:19.320 constitutions, a state religion or a state ethnicity.

01:07:23.680 Greece does.

01:07:24.460 Armenia does.

01:07:25.860 Even England has the Church of England.

01:07:28.340 And I don't know how to reconcile that because I really think Ireland should be Irish

01:07:32.980 and Italy should be Italian.

01:07:34.820 I know de Gaulle said it is possible for some alien to come to France and adopt things.

01:07:43.580 And I mean, de Gaulle himself said you can become French, but he very quickly said it has

01:07:48.360 to be in a small enough number that you can be absorbed by France.

01:07:52.660 How do you answer that?

01:07:53.900 Because I don't want to see Ireland just become some homogenized migrant farm like Toronto has 0.96

01:08:00.940 become.

01:08:02.240 How do you allow Ireland to be Irish and England to be English? 0.93

01:08:08.060 They're putting up their English flags now.

01:08:09.960 There's a real flag battle, which I think is very fascinating because a flag is you're

01:08:14.360 trying to concentrate, distill your very essence.

01:08:16.920 That flag speaks to what I am.

01:08:18.320 Well, what does it mean?

01:08:19.380 What does the St. George Cross mean?

01:08:21.480 Give me a hand on these ones because I want to be sympathetic to these indigenous Irish,

01:08:29.280 indigenous Brits, and everyone around the world who I sort of think should have a right

01:08:35.160 to a place that's theirs.

01:08:36.900 How do you square that?

01:08:38.200 Because I don't want to be woke, right?

01:08:41.080 No, no.

01:08:41.860 Of course, the challenge, and maybe it's true actually for Canadians to a degree as well,

01:08:45.700 which gives you the same difficulty that I have as an American, is that at least the

01:08:50.160 American nation is 100% not that.

01:08:53.460 So Americans do not have, I mean, you can say that it was, you know, its backbone was

01:08:58.120 Anglo-Protestant or whatever, as, you know, Samuel Huntington has said in his book, Who

01:09:03.160 Are We?, arguing fairly persuasively that that was the backbone core of the American colonies.

01:09:09.040 But the entire idea behind America always has been that it's not an ethnic identity.

01:09:13.600 And in fact, it is a, you're not supposed to call it a propositional nation anymore, but

01:09:18.860 it's a nation based on the idea that if you are willing to work hard and believe in the

01:09:23.740 dream of self, believe in the principle of self-governance, then you can believe in the

01:09:28.100 dream that prosperity or the blessings of liberty will flow from adopting this stance

01:09:32.800 of liberty, which does require under self-governance to, you know, adopt to a certain set of standards.

01:09:38.840 And success within that country is actually going to follow things.

01:09:41.700 As it turns out, if you're competing against the Protestant work ethic and you're not adopting

01:09:45.800 something akin to the Protestant work ethic, you're going to get shellacked because very 0.94

01:09:49.980 few people work harder than that.

01:09:51.820 So there are these, you know, other elements, but there is no ethnic American, certainly at

01:09:56.740 the very least, as the left just taught the world almost catastrophically.

01:10:01.780 We certainly at least had the African population of America.

01:10:07.260 And the, if you just simplify it to the Anglo-Protestant, which leaves out the early Catholics, it leaves

01:10:12.920 out the Jews, it leaves out the diversity among Protestants who don't agree with each other,

01:10:17.360 Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and so on.

01:10:22.200 It's a different, it's what I'm just saying is that it's a hard thing to look at a country

01:10:25.800 like Ireland, as you described correctly, and, and not impose that American e pluribus unum diversity,

01:10:36.220 lack of ethnicity in our, our makeup view.

01:10:42.080 So, you know, the question is, you know, do certain people groups have a, like you said,

01:10:47.660 kind of this long historicity, and this is usually how it gets characterized.

01:10:51.140 The Irish are, you can characterize the Irish as a historical people, or you can characterize

01:10:55.780 them as an ethnic people, which is a very big and important distinction, right?

01:11:00.620 And so if we look at the Irish, for example, just to use the Irish, the Irish are better, 1.00

01:11:05.800 by the way, than the English, because England is not an independent country, but Ireland

01:11:10.040 is.

01:11:11.080 So it makes things a little easier to discuss.

01:11:13.620 England is part of the United Kingdom, which is its own sovereign and independent country.

01:11:17.220 It's a little bit different.

01:11:18.600 But the, the Irish are a historically continuous people.

01:11:25.220 So when somebody like de Gaulle is talking about the idea that you can absorb, as he, as he phrased

01:11:30.580 it, the alien, at least in small numbers, and the, that the alien can become French.

01:11:34.940 And in particular, what will become French is their children who are completely raised in 1.00

01:11:38.680 that immersive environment.

01:11:39.940 And then their children's children, no matter what they look like, will be more or less 0.92

01:11:44.780 indistinguishably French, uh, after some period of time.

01:11:48.540 Uh, what you can, what you can, can say is that the historical contingency matters.

01:11:55.220 And it can be the basis.

01:11:57.120 The problem is that it doesn't trans, that this European idea doesn't transpose very

01:12:02.080 well onto, uh, the United States because we have, we've had a different constitutional

01:12:07.540 makeup from the beginning.

01:12:08.800 And so it does matter.

01:12:10.160 So the question is, do, does that people group have an inherent right to be in the location

01:12:14.880 from which they emerged?

01:12:16.460 And, um, you know, short of brutal military conquest, the answer might be yes.

01:12:22.920 Right.

01:12:23.440 And even in the case of brutal military conquest, as we see with Israel, we said, no, in 1948, 0.53

01:12:29.120 we said, or seven, we said, no, the Jews do have a right to their ancestral homeland.

01:12:33.280 And we're going to help see through to that.

01:12:35.180 And we, you know, we've already talked about the challenges that that's generated ever since,

01:12:39.240 largely through Soviet manipulation.

01:12:40.660 By the way, we can't just say that it's religious.

01:12:43.400 The Soviets helped create the Palestine Liberation Organization through the PFLP, the Popular Front

01:12:50.580 for the Liberation of Palestine, preceding it.

01:12:53.120 And so it's a hard question.

01:12:55.640 The question is, how do you go about this?

01:12:57.740 Does that historicity matter?

01:12:59.480 And do the customs and cultural aspects of a people group matter?

01:13:05.320 And I think the answer to that actually, contra many of my, uh, critics online is yes, they

01:13:10.560 do matter.

01:13:11.680 Of course, the American experiment is different, but does that mean that you want to lean into

01:13:16.500 an ethnic conception, which when you go a little further becomes what the Germans called a

01:13:21.240 folk community or a people's community, uh, Volksgemenschaft.

01:13:24.760 And we know where that went with the Nazis.

01:13:27.460 That can actually turn quite ugly.

01:13:29.440 And the rhetoric is out there luring people who are beginning to think that way further and

01:13:34.960 further into that radicalization, which if it can't be opposed because it's just, you know,

01:13:40.100 a step further along a path that you're already walking, then you have a real problem on your

01:13:45.140 hands when you actually have stepped into, you know, people starting to go through their DNA to

01:13:50.260 try to find out who's legitimately Irish and who's not.

01:13:52.900 Where this historicity, uh, the definition is actually a stronger, a stronger way to look

01:13:59.280 at it.

01:13:59.780 Who's essentially characterizing what it means to be Irish.

01:14:03.280 Now, again, I have to qualify this because people are going to clip this now and they're

01:14:07.340 going to take it out of context and they're going to say, see, James accepts the idea of

01:14:11.140 a heritage American, which I don't.

01:14:14.520 And the reason that I don't is because while that might be fine for the 50 countries out there

01:14:20.480 that have been ethnically constituted all along, and it might be fine as a sovereign

01:14:25.780 nation for Ireland to decide to do, or the Brits to try to figure out how they're going

01:14:31.160 to take the English and the Scots and the Welsh and everything else and figure all that

01:14:35.160 out ethnically.

01:14:36.400 Um, what a mess.

01:14:38.420 America never had that.

01:14:40.040 America was fundamentally a different nation from the beginning.

01:14:42.620 I can't speak for Canada.

01:14:43.780 I don't know your history as well.

01:14:45.260 Um, but America never had that.

01:14:48.120 So this idea of a heritage American, by the way, which I qualify for the highest grade of,

01:14:52.680 I had a ancestor who was a captain in the revolutionary army who later in his descent, uh, his line

01:14:59.900 gave birth to Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general who I'm directly related to.

01:15:04.680 So I'm sons of the revolution.

01:15:05.940 I'm sons of the Confederacy.

01:15:07.100 I'm first families of Virginia.

01:15:08.520 I'm as heritage American as it comes, and I reject this concept that there's some specialness

01:15:14.680 to being an American.

01:15:17.040 What ultimately I think, and this is maybe getting a little bit, you know, difficult,

01:15:21.340 there's a legal definition of citizenship that is the legal definition of whether or not you are

01:15:25.640 a member of your country.

01:15:27.500 And then there is a socio-spiritual, and that's a fancier term.

01:15:31.480 It's like the combination, it's like seeing social elements or cultural elements as a kind

01:15:36.980 of spirit, right?

01:15:38.440 And this, I think, is, there is a socio-spiritual element to what does it mean to be, say, an

01:15:43.540 American.

01:15:44.100 And the answer to the question of what it means to be an American is not some particular

01:15:48.760 ethnicity, some particular background, but rather a commitment to the, to the, to the

01:15:55.520 tradition, to the fundamental belief that if we have self-governance and, um, greater

01:16:01.040 liberty, that prosperity can flow.

01:16:03.160 And this becomes a covenant that we have to uphold a tradition to talk about it.

01:16:06.980 And Burkean language that we have to uphold in the faith that, uh, the blessings of liberty

01:16:13.360 will come from accepting this proposition and taking our responsibility within it.

01:16:17.560 And so what that means is America is a propositional nation.

01:16:20.800 And the proposition is if you adopt self-governance and work hard and provide value to your society,

01:16:27.740 you can expect a chance.

01:16:30.320 You will open the door to the blessings of liberty.

01:16:32.160 And the prosperity that that generates when everybody does that will actually raise all

01:16:37.000 ships and make a rich and prosperous and successful and abundant nation, which I think the last

01:16:41.100 250 years have actually proved out remarkably well as a clear and reasonable basis for this

01:16:47.800 faith.

01:16:48.900 And so believing in that faith and putting that faith first in your day-to-day socio-political

01:16:55.580 activities is what it means to be an American.

01:16:58.580 That doesn't mean you're American if you believe that and don't have American citizenship as

01:17:03.380 much as I love it when, you know, the Chinese try to take over Hong Kong and the Hong Kong 1.00

01:17:07.960 respond by waving American flags, expressing the idea of America, or when you have this,

01:17:13.340 you know, changeover of the president in South Korea last year and they, the South Koreans took

01:17:17.920 to the street and waved American flags to express their, their love of freedom.

01:17:22.680 Those are citizens of Hong Kong and citizens of South Korea.

01:17:27.800 They're not Americans, but they express that belief. 0.95

01:17:31.200 They believe in that dream and they believe in those values.

01:17:34.580 And I think it's perfectly acceptable for America to be a nation that distinguishes itself by,

01:17:39.300 you know what?

01:17:40.480 Our historicity is in a long, unbroken chain of people who believe in this.

01:17:44.300 It is not in a particular people group.

01:17:46.580 We were a bunch of people groups who came over for various reasons, mostly religious liberty.

01:17:50.580 Um, and so we're a different kind of thing.

01:17:53.360 And that idea I think is great for other countries.

01:17:56.400 It's not fully appropriate.

01:17:57.940 I don't have a problem with Ireland being Irish because it's Ireland.

01:18:01.080 It's not America. 0.65

01:18:02.060 I don't care.

01:18:02.840 It's their country and they can run that experiment if they want.

01:18:06.540 Um, but America, while I'm fine with this idea where it has historicity, it doesn't have

01:18:14.280 historicity here.

01:18:15.560 And I don't think we need to try to force it to have historicity here.

01:18:18.700 And again, like I said, I don't want to impose America on Canada.

01:18:22.060 I know how your people hate that.

01:18:23.420 So I don't know how much of that, you know, Canadians have absorbed, but I think it's something

01:18:27.000 worth thinking about.

01:18:28.100 So what I say to people in these situations like in England or in Ireland or so on is that,

01:18:33.860 you know, I won't, I think it's important for you to, to think about that, right?

01:18:38.540 Australia is an example of another group of people who are, they don't have that historicity.

01:18:44.020 Um, they were a penal colony.

01:18:46.320 Almost all of the parts of Australia that are pop are populated are away from the major

01:18:50.320 shipping lanes because it was a penal colony.

01:18:52.960 They didn't want people being able to get on a boat and get away.

01:18:55.440 Uh, and so it had a different mix, a different, um, a different beginning point.

01:19:00.660 This historicity there is actually different.

01:19:02.960 So a country like Ireland or a, you know, non-independent country like England, uh, that has this historicity

01:19:10.540 has to deal with it and that they have to find ways, I think, to deal with it that avoid

01:19:15.000 stepping too far into the ethnic designation, that avoid stepping too far down that road.

01:19:21.820 The ethnic designation is actually fine as long as it stays within boundaries that understand,

01:19:28.660 as we put it in America, that it is a form of arbitrary designation.

01:19:33.060 It says nothing actually about your character, whether you're a good man or a bad man.

01:19:38.400 It says nothing about your intrinsic talents as much as we want to attribute it to ethnos. 0.91

01:19:43.660 It is usually other things.

01:19:45.680 It's usually character.

01:19:46.980 It's training.

01:19:48.160 It's discipline.

01:19:48.940 It's diligence.

01:19:50.120 And if you step down that road too far and start thinking in terms of a folks community

01:19:54.100 and that folk community is defined ethnically, I just warn people about taking that road because 1.00

01:19:59.640 we've tried that experiment before.

01:20:02.100 It didn't go well.

01:20:03.740 And if it ends up turning a lot of the world or America against you later, because you've

01:20:09.800 taken that road and made serious errors, then you've done it to yourselves.

01:20:16.440 And so my, my statement isn't that's wrong.

01:20:19.640 My statement is be careful with that kind of thinking.

01:20:23.420 Root it in your historicity, deal with the fact of the realities of being able to absorb

01:20:29.480 cultural values and assimilation and point out that you cannot absorb a 10th of your population

01:20:35.240 in a short period of time from a radically different population.

01:20:39.960 Deal with the fact that some populations, whether they're Islamist, whether they're communist,

01:20:45.500 whatever it happens to be that are radical in that way, have no intention, not just of,

01:20:50.280 not just do they have no intention of assimilating, they are actively hostile and want to take

01:20:54.940 over your country.

01:20:56.780 And you have to deal with them as they actually are.

01:21:00.120 And we can't have this namby pamby, you know, light touch or actually, you know, culturally

01:21:06.980 relativist view that ultimately this, the woke left view that has led us down this disastrous

01:21:13.320 road so far in the same way that we don't want to walk down the other road.

01:21:17.300 So again, my message is, if you want to do that for your country, if it's historical to

01:21:21.240 your country, that's fine and reasonable, but you need to do it responsibly, you need

01:21:26.600 to do it thoughtfully, and you really need to study the errors of the 1920s and 1930s and

01:21:31.480 not repeat them under this, this duress you're under, which I sympathize with.

01:21:36.580 You know, you said a lot of things there.

01:21:38.620 I, I agree with some of them, but I, I feel like I'm more of an ethnic nationalist than

01:21:43.800 you, and I think of Ireland, I mean, it's had a million foreigners put into that country

01:21:48.920 in the last 20 years.

01:21:50.340 They've gone from 4 million to 5 million people and it's caused enormous stress.

01:21:53.800 If those million migrants were bought, were Irish Americans, there's about 30 million people

01:22:01.040 in America who trace their lineage to Ireland.

01:22:03.520 If you had taken a million Boston Irish and put them in Ireland, you'd have some growth 0.99

01:22:10.120 pains as infrastructure caught up, but that would be a fit in every way.

01:22:16.200 It is the ethnicity that- 0.92

01:22:18.720 No, it's the culture.

01:22:19.820 It's the culture.

01:22:20.480 When you import a million, 20%, well, 25% increase of Muslims into a country that is not Muslim with 1.00

01:22:32.420 vastly different organization in their own historical contingency.

01:22:38.780 You have a completely different story, but if you were to take, let's say, people who

01:22:44.880 had come from, you know, Lebanon and they were raised in Boston in an Irish American community

01:22:51.000 for 40 years, for, for four or five generations, and they're just as Irish as the next guy in 0.98

01:22:57.100 the Boston sense and ship them over, it wouldn't matter that their skin is brown and it wouldn't 1.00

01:23:01.320 matter that their, their ancestors came from Lebanon.

01:23:04.480 Wouldn't matter a bit.

01:23:05.700 It's the culture that matters, and I do believe that the Irish should be able to preserve their

01:23:11.260 culture, and I do believe that Islamism is a hostile, cultural, imperial movement that needs to be 1.00

01:23:17.800 resisted. 0.52

01:23:19.520 The Nazis, of course, are an extreme example. 0.89

01:23:22.380 I'm not comparing the situation to that's the end of a long road that starts with the ethnic identity, 1.00

01:23:27.960 but I reject the claim.

01:23:29.560 I know too many people across this great nation in the United States and in your nation and in

01:23:34.880 others and that are, are, I'm arguing with a man right now on and off on Twitter whose last name is

01:23:40.100 Wong, and he's clearly South Asian with the Union Jack flying behind him on his bio.

01:23:45.680 I'm sure he's as British as he thinks he is, but he didn't come, his people are not English in the sense

01:23:51.460 that they have a long history of being there.

01:23:53.460 It's the culture.

01:23:55.000 I've known too many Americans from every background who are as American as apple pie, and I've met so

01:24:00.740 many Canadians when I come to your country of different backgrounds who are as Canadian as

01:24:05.120 your favorite Canuck or your best hoser, and it's just what it is.

01:24:09.500 I think it's much more cultural, but the thing is, is cultures don't change overnight either.

01:24:14.460 There is a long cultural memory.

01:24:16.280 They are going home, and the less assimilation that there is, the less absorption there will be, 0.96

01:24:20.980 and the thing that Charles de Gaulle was referring to, is resisted.

01:24:24.940 That's the multicultural experiment that has been encouraged that is the disaster of all of our 1.00

01:24:30.460 countries, but it's not the ethnicity.

01:24:33.140 It is, unless you mean by ethnicity, a culture that's tied to a genetic background, but I mean it in the

01:24:40.200 strict genetic sense.

01:24:41.420 You know, there's so much to talk about, and I have much to learn about the taxonomy here,

01:24:49.860 about what the different shades of nationalism are.

01:24:52.620 I know there's civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism, and then there's a phrase that I've

01:24:57.780 heard, foundational black Americans.

01:25:00.440 Those are blacks that came over to help build the country as slaves, frankly, which is a different 1.00

01:25:05.720 ethnicity than maybe a newcomer.

01:25:07.280 There's so many shades here, and it's a difficult thing.

01:25:09.420 And you're right, in America, it's different.

01:25:11.920 America is not an ancient civilization like the Celts.

01:25:16.880 It's exceptional.

01:25:17.940 What can I say?

01:25:18.600 Listen, we'll have to put a pin in it for today.

01:25:20.980 I've kept you 40 minutes longer than I promised I would.

01:25:24.920 I learned so much from you, and I'm not done learning.

01:25:27.260 I'm not fully resolved in all my thinking, and if I were, I think that would mean I would

01:25:33.120 have a closed mind.

01:25:34.080 I really appreciated you helping tackle some of these issues, and we'll talk again.

01:25:40.620 I'm really – it's great to have you back.

01:25:42.480 We used to have you back a little more frequently.

01:25:43.940 Let's not let so much time pass in the future.

01:25:46.400 What's the best way for people to follow you?

01:25:49.940 Newdiscourses.com.

01:25:50.980 Is that the best gateway to the stuff you're working on?

01:25:54.920 Yeah, that's right.

01:25:55.720 And the podcast I published there is called the New Discourses Podcast, which you can find

01:26:00.060 on any of your favorite podcast platforms.

01:26:03.260 I think we're on all of them, actually.

01:26:04.980 And I'm at Conceptual James on all the social medias except for Facebook, which has still

01:26:10.200 permanently banned me for making a joke about Canada, actually.

01:26:14.160 Well, we forgive you for the jokes about Canada.

01:26:16.200 No, I'm on your side with this joke.

01:26:17.780 It was about the MAID program.

01:26:19.360 They didn't like that joke.

01:26:20.900 Well, great to talk with you, and I'm going to be thinking about our conversation for a

01:26:24.260 while, and maybe I'll recalibrate some of my own thinking, but it's great to hear from

01:26:28.080 you.

01:26:28.200 Thanks very much.

01:26:29.560 Thanks, Ezra.

01:26:30.300 All right, there he is, Dr. James Lindsay.

01:26:31.980 You can follow him at NewDiscourses.com.

01:26:33.940 Well, that's our show for today.

01:26:35.420 Lots to think about.

01:26:36.740 Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home,

01:26:40.980 good night, and keep fighting for freedom.

Rebel News Podcast - September 02, 2025

EZRA LEVANT ｜ What is the 'Woke Right'？ Ezra Levant interviews Dr. James Lindsay

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