Nate Hockman of The Lotus Eaters joins me on the show to talk about his piece on the recent rightwing arrest of a rightwing politician in Belgium, Dries van Langenvencken, and the implications for free speech in Europe.
00:03:34.940One of the charming things about Americans is how little they care about what's going on in other countries.
00:03:39.880But in this case, I think Americans aren't fully aware, at least your sort of average American isn't fully aware of just how insane things have gotten in Europe.
00:03:48.620And the most recent sort of high profile example of this was this Belgian politician in a very American way.
00:03:54.700I'm sure I'm going to butcher his name.
00:03:55.960But Dries van Langenhoven, who is from the sort of Flemish region of Belgium, who had served in parliament and was the leader of a pretty significant,
00:04:04.380substantial right-wing youth activist group with all the sort of normal European right-wing priors.
00:04:11.700And he got a year in prison and a 16,000 euro fine, which I think is something like $17,500 U.S. dollars for being in a group chat where allegedly offensive memes were being sent.
00:04:25.120And if that wasn't outrageous enough, he wasn't the person sending the memes.
00:04:28.960It was his digital proximity to, you know, edgy, whatever, offensive memes that got him a year in prison.
00:04:36.720Now, I think the important context in that case and in a lot of other cases that I'm sure we'll talk about is that his party that he represented,
00:04:44.420which is like this Flemish nationalist anti-immigration right-wing party, was surging and is surging in the polls.
00:04:50.760So, you know, maybe it's a coincidence that the Belgian state just suddenly became extremely interested in his private group chats right around the time that their actual sort of regime hegemony was threatened by the movement he represented.
00:05:04.540But you see the same coincidence happening over and over again across Europe.
00:05:08.660So it's pretty clear what the game is actually all about.
00:05:11.060Yeah, man, I love Western liberal democracy.
00:05:13.200Yeah, you're so free, you can vote for anybody you want as long as they haven't been in a group chat where someone posted a meme that your political enemies might find mildly offensive.
00:05:24.580That's, I mean, thank God we don't live under Putin.
00:05:27.560It's just amazing the amount of freedom that people in the West get to enjoy.
00:05:32.100And if we're not fighting for our democracy, then really, I mean, we could fall under some kind of strange totalitarianism.
00:05:39.300Book coming out about that on May 7th, by the way, Total State, check it out.
00:05:45.640And you're right that the most important thing, a through line through all the people we're going to talk about today, is really the fact that they represent the possibility of any kind of pushback in Europe.
00:05:58.260It's very clear that there is a frustration.
00:06:03.060And when we talk about this, it's not some far right crazy pushback.
00:06:09.000It is a pretty much basic liberals who just want the ability to say, I think maybe we shouldn't have unlimited immigrants inside our borders.
00:06:17.500Maybe we shouldn't teach all the kids to mutilate their genitalia.
00:06:21.600Like, just very basic things and nothing crazy for the most part.
00:06:26.760And yet, just the simple opposition, this populist is the word that gets thrown around, which just means democracy we don't like, uprising for many people, is terrifying.
00:06:37.680Kind of these ruling elites and the crackdown on speech is insane.
00:06:42.640And like you said, the fact that this guy himself didn't even send the meme, it makes it very clear.
00:06:47.340I mean, it feels like I could get arrested for having been on Xbox Live 10 years ago, right?
00:06:51.980Like, that's the level we're at now, where any connection, any tenuous connection to someone is immediately a reason to go ahead and imprison them.
00:07:01.180You don't need any real tangible evidence of a crime because, well, it's thought crime.
00:07:06.840At any point, you can be picked up for it.
00:07:10.580To your point about the fact that, you know, all of these parties and movements are routinely, you know, insistently described as far right if you read any legacy media reporting on it.
00:07:19.480It's one of the insufferable things about, you know, writing this column is you have to wade through these Washington Post and Politico pieces where it's impossible to sort of get any sort of sentence that isn't laden with these sort of buzzwords.
00:07:31.760But it's true, and it's actually one of the distinctions between the sort of right-wing nationalist movements in a lot of these European countries and the American understanding of nationalism, conservatism, the right, whatever you want to say, is that social conservatism as Americans understand it, and that has existed as a political movement since, you know, the 70s and the 80s here, does not really have a foothold in Europe.
00:07:57.880And that is expressed in the sense that a lot of these right-wing nationalist parties that are really anti-immigration are, in some ways, framing their sort of anti-immigration stance as a defense of a certain kind of liberalism.
00:08:11.100You see that, you know, in, excuse me, in the Netherlands, where Geert Welders won, you know, his party just won this massive sort of upset anti-immigration wave victory, where he rose to prominence as an anti-Islam activist.
00:08:24.460And part of his critique of Islam was that it was, like, anti-LGBT, anti-women's rights, anti-feminism.
00:08:30.560You see the same thing with, like, Tommy Robinson in the UK.
00:08:33.500So, you know, it's not the idiom that I would criticize, like, mass Arab immigration in, but the point is, like, a lot of these guys are a kind of sort of European liberal.
00:08:42.360But they, I think, in some ways, correctly perceive that the defense of a specifically Western European liberalism requires keeping out, you know, the entire population of Syria from your country, especially when you live in a country that's the size of a small northeastern state.
00:08:58.740So all that is to say, for all of the black pills about Europe, and I, you know, this entire segment is to an extent about some black pills about Europe, what is true is that the nationalist right in Europe is ascendant.
00:09:11.540And it's ascendant across a variety of different Western countries.
00:09:15.660You know, the legacy of Brexit was totally betrayed by the elites in Westminster.
00:09:20.100But since then, obviously, you've got Hungary.
00:09:23.400You've got, you know, Emmanuel Macron in the upcoming European elections is facing a viable challenge from the French Nationalist Party.
00:09:31.720The alternative for Deutschland, the alternative for Germany in Germany, which is a nationalist party, is they're talking about banning it outright in Germany because it's surging in the polls.
00:09:41.580It's arguably the most popular party in large parts of Germany.
00:09:45.960In the Netherlands, they just had this nationalist uprising where they won power.
00:09:51.720You know, Belgium, we were just talking about Italy.
00:09:55.160You know, so in most of these Western European countries, it's a potent force.
00:09:58.980In some of them, they have actually won power.
00:10:00.940And you can criticize each of these different nationalist movements for various reasons or for various things.
00:10:06.880But the point is, like, that's where the small d democratic energy is.
00:10:10.180And it is directly opposed to the sort of hegemonic regime which has governed in Europe for the past 50, 60 plus years.
00:10:18.000And unlike America, they have hate speech laws there.
00:10:21.520And they are increasingly willing to use them in the most draconian, the most authoritarian, the most, you know, Putinistic, whatever you want to describe it way.
00:10:31.600And, you know, these examples I was talking about in my column are just a few of those.
00:10:35.340Yeah, Melania, I know, has been a big disappointment to a lot of people.
00:10:39.940Yeah, a lot of, you know, the press was hyping her up as the descendant of Mussolini, the next coming of fascism in Italy.
00:10:48.040And she's just letting in basically a large amount of migrants.
00:10:54.320But you're right that this is the zeitgeist, right?
00:10:57.020Whether it is everything it needs to be, whether it is actually culminating in the current change of immigration policy necessary to arrest this massive wave,
00:11:08.440it is at least clear that there is a desire of the people to see a significant change.
00:11:13.460And that does matter, even if, unfortunately, currently there aren't people who are willing to go ahead and draw those bright lines.
00:11:19.980But you spoke about Germany, and that means we should probably go ahead and get to Martin Selner.
00:11:24.080He goes in there and tries to give a speech about immigration restriction.
00:11:28.780He gets shut down and arrested by the police just for talking about this.
00:11:33.260They're not even allowed to suggest in Germany that perhaps you don't need to have, like you said, the entire population of Syria moving in next door.
00:11:42.260And not only does he get arrested, he's banned from the country for three years, I believe now.
00:11:48.060He can't even enter it, you know, because it's so dangerous that anyone might suggest that you shouldn't have wide open immigration.
00:11:55.680And I understand that at some level this is part of their power, right?
00:12:00.580Like it's critical that this is the alliance, the pan-European alliance, I guess, because of the kind of the progressive status quo is mass immigration.
00:12:10.440But at some point you have to think that this is a suicide pact, right?
00:12:15.020Every one of these countries is dealing with this.
00:12:17.780And they're basically at this point planning to imprison their native population just to shut them up long enough to make sure that another population can be moved in.
00:12:27.860How long can a place like Germany continue to exist in this matter?
00:12:34.140And you could say the same thing to an extent, I think, about the quote-unquote status quo in America is one of the weird paradoxes of the sort of hegemonic regimes in the West today is that the paradigm they're defending is not just unstable, it's destabilizing.
00:12:50.620So they are going to increasingly extreme lengths to try to defend a paradigm that in some ways is subverting their own power.
00:12:58.560Now, whether or not the subversion of their own power leads to right-wing nationalists eventually coming into power, I don't know.
00:13:04.860But the point is, in some ways, I don't want to give them any tips, but in some ways making certain concessions would probably serve their own interests.
00:13:13.620Because, A, you've seen some sort of parties do this, like in Scandinavia, you've had a bunch of center-left parties make certain concessions to the anti-immigration sentiment in order to maintain power and to varying degrees of success.
00:13:26.580But in a lot of these other places, they are just so ideologically committed, or perhaps because of material interests.
00:13:33.040I don't know the exact motivations of each of these parties, but they are so committed to mass immigration that they are unable to make concessions to parties like the AFD in Germany, the anti-immigration wave in Belgium, in the Netherlands, et cetera.
00:13:49.780And what you are going to increasingly see, I think this is undeniable now, is things like what you saw in Ireland at the end of last year, where there was this mass uprising of riots from native Irish people who had been holding peaceful protests for years, the better part of at least a decade, against immigration.
00:14:10.520And these were the definition of peaceful protests, like the Irish would go out with their babies in their strollers and sing songs, and you have church groups protesting mass immigration.
00:14:21.460And you had all of these high-profile cases of migrant attacks at various places in Ireland, which is a very small, traditionally very homogenous country.
00:14:29.400And you had waves of migrants just getting dumped into these small rural Irish towns.
00:14:35.300Their housing crisis is the direct result of mass immigration.
00:14:39.840Their welfare system is about to collapse, arguably.
00:14:43.280So you had all of these real problems, and the native Irish population had been trying to make their voice heard, and the government had been doing the opposite of listening to them.
00:14:50.900They'd been ratcheting up the immigration levels.
00:14:53.520And then you had this grotesque stabbing by, I think it was an Algerian national, of three young Irish children, and Ireland exploded.
00:15:02.760Like, all of Dublin was on fire for a couple of days.
00:15:06.620The population was increasingly incensed.
00:15:09.720And most recently, Leo Varadkar, the head of Ireland's government, resigned, I think, in no small part because of this.
00:15:16.080So it's a perfect example, right, where you try to keep the lid on as the boiling point continues to go up.
00:15:21.940And eventually, it does boil over, and people in power are – their power is destabilized as a result of that.
00:15:29.020So I don't know if a lot of these other people are going to learn their lesson, but it is – you're absolutely right that the current status quo is actually probably weakening their hold on power in some ways.
00:15:40.560Yeah, this is – yeah, I've got an ongoing bet with my buddy Nima Parvina, academic agent, that the woke will not be put away.
00:15:46.780And one of the reasons I'm very sure that I'm going to hold a cigar in victory in my right hand from Nima Parvini is because of this exact fact, right?
00:15:56.780Every one of these ruling elites is – they have a suicide pact going.
00:16:01.220Their current policies are unsustainable.
00:16:09.480They seem to be becoming more and more just completely mad over the need to push this policy.
00:16:17.300And when you're in that kind of extreme religious fervor, you're not pulling back because you're going to make smart, tactical decisions.
00:16:24.500Like, those off-ramps are all behind you at this point.
00:16:27.560And so I think that's actually the toughest thing for a lot of these European countries is probably to realize is that kind of the – all the easy decisions are in the rearview mirror at this point.
00:16:37.440And that's the only thing left is very hard decisions, which makes political change even more difficult because you really have to start talking about deportations and other things that would have been a lot – it would have been a lot easier simply to slow down this process.
00:16:49.380But now you actually have to extract foreign populations if you want to be able to save your country at this point.
00:16:55.960And that, of course, is a far more difficult thing to do.
00:16:59.040And so that really exacerbates the situation.
00:17:01.600And it really is amazing to me that all of this has happened at every one of these countries at the same time.
00:17:08.820Every one of these elites, every one of them seems to be pushing the same direction.
00:17:12.580And the native populations are always trapped.
00:17:14.840We have the same thing to a lesser extent in the U.S.
00:17:17.560Luckily, we're a larger country with a lot more kind of space to breathe on this issue.
00:17:22.580But we have the same problem where it doesn't matter if the Republicans are in power and it doesn't matter if we get a new GOP speaker.
00:17:29.480The most important thing is how much money can we get to Ukraine?
00:17:33.600The major priority is building border walls between Israel and Palestine and not on our own border.
00:17:39.520And it doesn't it doesn't seem to matter which half of the managerial elite we put into power.
00:17:45.900I mean, Trump slowed down entries, which is good that there was a notable drop.
00:17:51.060And that kind of shows you how simple the policy change can be.
00:17:54.900Simply letting people know that there just isn't going to be free stuff and jobs for them when you get there shuts down a large amount of your mass immigration.
00:18:02.060You know, just knowing that you're not going to immediately be welcomed into the country because this mass immigration journey is actually very dangerous for a lot of people is very expensive.
00:19:04.580It was much worse than nothing happening, actually.
00:19:07.180Boris Johnson and subsequent Tory leadership presided over a unprecedented increase in immigration, which, again, is it is difficult to think.
00:19:17.140In general, there are a lot of right wing populists in a lot of different Western countries have failed their voters in fundamental ways.
00:19:25.580It is difficult to think of a political failure and a political betrayal so egregious, at least in modern or recent history, as that of the Tories and Brexit.
00:19:36.200I mean, they they were smart enough to know that it was about immigration.
00:19:40.680They can't, you know, plead ignorance on that front.
00:19:43.080And yet they presided over a massive increase of immigration into into the United Kingdom.
00:19:50.300And, you know, the thing to sort of remember, you alluded to it earlier, was these European countries, you know, I lived in just because of where my family was working in high school.
00:20:00.400I lived in Amsterdam and you drive to neighboring European countries in a couple of hours, like it's like driving between states in the northeast.
00:20:09.400So these are a lot of these countries of the size of New York City or, you know, maybe slightly bigger, slightly more landmass.
00:20:16.400But when you when you talk about immigration into these little sort of nation states, the drastic effect of something like that, particularly when it's a sort of third world population that is radically different from the native population with completely different customs, practices, beliefs, et cetera, is I mean, like in some ways it's actually surprising.
00:20:38.860There hasn't been more of a of a response from the native populations, given the drastic and radical changes that have been wrought in their countries as a result of this phenomenon in a relatively short period of time.
00:20:52.220I mean, the Syrian refugee crisis was what, like 2014, something like that.
00:20:56.620So so frankly, I'm surprised you haven't seen more sort of Dublin riots.
00:21:01.540And, you know, now obviously you are seeing an expression of that in elections and the small democratic will.
00:21:07.100But you have to wonder, like when these people keep voting this way and all they get is more immigration, like, you know, it's like that Simpson meme of the sort of 2004 Bush election where, you know, he presses the carry button and they just keep saying Bush.
00:21:21.600When they keep voting for change and they keep getting not just more of the same, but in many cases a ratcheting up of the problem they're voting against.
00:21:29.180That was what was true of Maloney in Italy.
00:21:31.220She presided over an unprecedented increase in immigration.
00:21:34.580At a certain point, like you can't blame these people for losing faith in the democratic process.
00:21:39.380And I think, you know, everyone should be worried about what happens then, because I think that the riots like we saw in Dublin and, you know, here in America, what we saw with things like January 6th are probably only going to be the beginning unless people actually eventually get what they vote for.
00:21:55.100Yeah, I want to go into that in more depth because I think you're exactly right.
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00:23:49.400And he was, he was, I think he had a Telegram channel or group chat with like three or 4,000 people in it.
00:23:57.240And he was sending out like templates for printable stickers that were anti-immigration stickers and mass immigration.
00:24:03.480There was, I mean, it was, it was sort of a, but within the American Overton window, it was stuff like, you know, will the native British people be replaced in their homeland?
00:24:14.140But it was, it was anti-immigration stickers.
00:24:17.340It was squarely within certainly any American conception of free speech.
00:24:22.120And he was arrested and given two years in jail for inciting racial hatred.
00:24:28.660And I went, I mean, I read the, it's called like the Crown's prosecutor statement there.
00:24:33.040Um, and the, just, it was sort of beyond parody if it wasn't so dark about the statement where they, they had this sort of long description of how he was found with stickers in his wallet and they opened his wallet to pull out the stickers.
00:24:47.140And they were with the stickers had slogans expressing views of a nationalist nature and views of a nationalist nature, at least in public, uh, are, are apparently, uh, meriting two years in jail in the United Kingdom.
00:25:02.240Now, um, and like, it was literally, it was like a drug possession charge.
00:25:07.060It was what they were charging him with was possession of stickers with intent to distribute.
00:25:11.620Like that was literally the language that they used.
00:25:33.680Um, and you know, if you look at like the headlines in, in UK, like the conservative party with a few notable exceptions is all for this, uh, just like they're all for mass immigration.
00:25:44.120So, uh, especially in the UK, there really isn't an actual political rights at all anymore.
00:25:51.220And, you know, I have perpetual gripes about the GOP.
00:25:54.620I think they're constantly failing their voters.
00:25:59.480Uh, but they're, they are substantially better.
00:26:02.520And the conservative infrastructure we have to actually apply pressure to the GOP is substantially better than anything in the UK where this stuff is happening,
00:26:10.340not just with the consent of the governing conservative majority, but often with the active encouragement of it.
00:26:15.920Um, yeah, you, you, you spoke about, uh, the, the need to crack down on speech because the, of the constant unrest, because both sides are just not reacting.
00:26:26.820There is no political, uh, outlet, both sides are gung ho behind these policies.
00:26:34.780And so you get this, this, uh, rage bubbling up.
00:26:38.160That's how you get the, the protests in Ireland.
00:26:40.060And that's how that goes, those develop into riots.
00:26:42.640And it's interesting because of course, our own government in the United States use social media pretty aggressively to create color revolutions in other states.
00:26:54.340That's how we ended up with, you know, the Arab spring and many of these others.
00:26:58.100That's how Ukraine has its current government.
00:27:00.200It's very democratically elected government.
00:27:02.280I assure you very democratically elected, certainly not placed in charge by blue America and the CIA.
00:27:10.060Uh, and so, uh, when, when you have this technology and you're familiar with how to manipulate, you know, you need to shut it down.
00:27:17.280And so these Western governments who have on pretty regular basis used social media as a way to unseat anybody who wasn't going to bow to the global Western order went ahead and basically realized that they need to start cutting their own citizens off from this very same technology.
00:27:36.080It's dangerous to have their people plugged in to the same outlets because who knows if those people might try to organize alongside them.
00:27:44.260And that's why I think we've seen this aggressive policing of basically any anti-immigration rhetoric and, uh, you, the, in the use of social media, because they understand the power that this disruptive tool has.
00:27:56.300And they want to make sure that there isn't any kind of organic response to the very thing that they're trying to implement in their own country.
00:28:06.020Yeah. You never expect the color revolution to come home.
00:28:08.700It's supposed to be something that you do to other countries.
00:28:11.000It's not something that's supposed to happen to your regime at home, but that's exactly right.
00:28:15.100Um, it is fascinating to, to watch the rhetoric of, you know, people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and sort of like quintessential regime aligned, you know, Democrats, security state technocrats, managerial elites, whatever in the sort of early 2000s in the lead up to the Arab spring, where they're talking about social media companies as these beacons of democracy, you know, this, where people can exchange information and ideas that subvert, you know, like the authoritarian regimes.
00:28:44.240And this is how you have sort of mass democratic uprisings.
00:28:47.980Uh, and it is, it is squarely at odds with the way that any of those people talk about social media today.
00:28:52.680I mean, Barack Obama was out there during the Arab spring touting Twitter.
00:28:56.500He was asked, I think in 2018 or 2019, what he thought, uh, the biggest threat to democracy was today.
00:29:02.480He said internet disinformation, right?
00:29:04.440So it as the, it's like a Frankenstein's monster phenomenon where they have created something, uh, that was, they correctly saw as empowering small D democracy, but they never expected that actually empowering small D democracy, uh, would lead to, to democratic uprising here as well.
00:29:22.800So that's the, uh, the conundrum that I think they find themselves in.
00:29:26.980And I think, um, you know, it, it is why they are increasingly hysterical about technological disinformation, et cetera.
00:29:35.260Now, like that isn't really a word that was in our lexicon five years ago.
00:29:39.100And now there's an entire multi-billion dollar industry dedicated to, you know, working people up into fits of hysterics about it.
00:29:45.880And there's an obvious reason for that, right?
00:29:48.280Yeah, there's a morbid fascination, you know, I understand it's evil, but as, you know, kind of a professional word sell, I do find the, the making of the sausage fascinating.
00:30:00.020I, I appreciate the craft of the new speak, even if I know it's, it's, you know, totally evil.
00:30:06.380It's like, well, I got, I got to give you guys credit that that is an impressive way to, to manipulate that and manufacture that.
00:30:24.060It's, it's horrifying, but, but it's beautiful in a way, you know, it's like the creation of a Death Star.
00:30:29.200You're awed by it, even if you know, it's about to blow you up.
00:30:33.020But I have to ask you this, you know, we talk about free speech in Europe.
00:30:37.020And I wonder sometimes if this is a projection backwards of American and specifically Anglo norms onto a continent that wasn't maybe this homogenous.
00:30:48.920You know, obviously America has kind of the, the, the tradition carried over from the UK of kind of a, a, a more rights-based society, a bill of rights, having, having the ability to have free speech.
00:31:06.180That's not necessarily a pan-European value in the way that I think we often pretend that it is.
00:31:13.120We may not have God emperors in Europe the way that you did and, you know, China and other places more explicitly.
00:31:20.780But I feel like that ability to voice your opinion and, and kind of have that limited constitutional monarchy and things really are straight out of the Magna Carta.
00:31:29.840And, and, and the, you know, kind of the, the chain of, of custody that delivers that into the American tradition.
00:31:35.980And in many ways, because the United States kind of conquered the world in World War II and exported its government to every European country, we now pretend like this is a long European tradition when maybe it's not.
00:31:51.100And we shouldn't be as surprised that most of these countries kind of just went back to their norm once, you know, it became more politically convenient.
00:32:00.900I think there's a lot of truth to that.
00:32:03.000What I will say is that I think, I'm, I don't know exactly quite how to formulate it.
00:32:08.500I think there is, while there is not necessarily a sort of rights-based, almost sort of libertarian in an older sense of the word, tradition that is unique to the Anglosphere.
00:32:18.440Although we were just talking about what was happening in the UK.
00:32:20.660So I think insofar as sort of traditional Anglo values were something that was born, that were born in the UK, you know, the situation is worse in the UK now than it is a lot of, in a lot of main, mainland European countries.
00:32:34.200But it is certainly true that there's a sort of much more fierce, much more ardent tradition of sort of smaller Republican liberty in, in the, in the Anglo tradition.
00:32:44.920With that being said, I think there is something that is distinctly sort of, you know, what has defined Western civilization for the last thousand years, at least, is a sort of restlessness, a dynamism, a certain amount of expansionism, which led to the West, you know, going beyond its borders to conquer the entire world and build empires.
00:33:07.220And back home, that led to its own sort of dynamism that, that led itself, I think, to the sort of development of broadly self-governing societies, where in a lot of these mainland European countries, before you had like the effective neutering of the monarchies, you still had an enormous amount of independence, both at the individual and the communal level.
00:33:30.700You had city states, obviously going all the way back to ancient Greece, you had various sort of developing of a conception of liberty, a conception of rights, like all of those things.
00:33:41.820Now we talk about them as abstract ideological concepts, and they've been totally perverted and bastardized more recently, but they were originally terms that, that, you know, political theorists developed to describe conditions that already existed on the ground in Europe.
00:33:55.820And I think that that is true in a variety of different places, but it's, it is a tradition that I think runs across the West.
00:34:05.660And in many ways, traditionally did distinguish the West from, you know, competing or rival civilizations, like Chinese civilization, which is sort of like the, you know, the, the, the major other world civilization,
00:34:19.680had like millennia long dynasties with very little change, you know, large sort of bureaucratic structures.
00:34:28.780And that was just sort of the status quo.
00:34:30.760And it was the status quo for your great grandfather.
00:34:32.600And it would be the status quo for your great grandchildren.
00:34:35.400You had dynasties in Europe, but there was much more dynamism, much more change, and much more of a sort of spirit of independence.
00:34:41.840And even I would venture a form of a spirit of liberty that, that runs across the West.
00:34:48.920So that's a long way of saying what is happening now.
00:34:52.220And other people have said this, that in places like Italy or Belgium or wherever they are, they are much more used to a level of unfreedom than like Americans or even other kinds of Anglos are.
00:35:06.980But it is also still true that the West has been defined by a certain kind of dynamic independence, which is obviously at odds with what these regimes are trying to do today.
00:35:16.940Get unlimited grocery delivery with PC Express Pass.
00:35:33.020And like you said, there is a, luckily in America, there is a different dynamic.
00:35:37.140Like you, I am very sure that if the GOP was to be destroyed tomorrow, that would actually be a problem for the Democratic problem for the party.
00:35:46.700That's actually one of the things that the GOP does.
00:35:50.240However, it's true that the conservative base, at least, really does genuinely have a level of resistance to the progressive mindset that simply doesn't exist in other European countries, I think, at the same level of fervor.
00:36:06.320In the GOP, you still pretty much have to be anti-immigration.
00:36:11.060You have to be anti-illegal immigration for sure.
00:36:13.080And growingly, and now it's even more okay to just be anti-immigration, even legally.
00:36:21.780That's a very positive shift that we've seen inside the party.
00:36:25.460We're getting rid of kind of this Cato Institute conservatism.
00:36:30.240And, you know, the quicker the better.
00:36:32.680So that is a heartening change to see.
00:36:35.460However, you know, while we do know that the First Amendment is, you know, the Constitution isn't going to protect anything at this point, but the vestiges of it, kind of the story that we tell ourselves, or at least half the country tells itself, still lends those constitutional protections a level of legitimacy that the government kind of has to pretend is real.
00:36:58.160They have to at least work around pretty aggressively.
00:37:01.180And that means that we have a lot more free speech in the United States.
00:37:04.160It's still an important kind of firebreak at some level between us and the growing totalitarianism.
00:37:10.960And because of that, you know, it's easy for us to say, like, well, at least we've got the First Amendment and we'll be fine here.
00:38:01.800But the but the fact that that's coming in the United States is still terrifying.
00:38:06.740Make fun of, you know, Belgium for some guy getting memes in group chat.
00:38:10.600But really, how far away is Douglas Mackey's case from?
00:38:13.420Well, not just that, but also the introduction of these sort of quasi private, not really quite private, but still not subject to the same sort of constitutional impositions, technology platforms where increasingly that is the public square.
00:38:29.580That is where the conversation takes place.
00:38:31.320If you don't have access to those, then you are effectively unpersoned in large parts of American life.
00:38:37.120Like that raises the question of, like, even if you have sort of certain vestiges, cultural, institutional, et cetera, of a sort of First Amendment framework that would protect against.
00:38:49.620I mean, they're not fully protecting against in the case of Douglas Mackey, but are at least holding at bay the kind of direct state tyranny that you're seeing in Europe.
00:38:58.160But if the government can outsource this to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, it is effectively getting the same bang for its buck.
00:39:06.500It's not you know, it might not be able to do certain things on the margins, but that's effectively the same the same effect, because the effect they're looking for, of course, is to excise these figures and their ideas from the public square so that the fewest people possible hear them.
00:39:21.000Right. That that's what they're trying to do in Europe.
00:39:22.660That's what they're trying to do in America.
00:39:23.960And increasingly, where everything is online, you can do that pretty well if you have, you know, what happened post J6, where every single technology platform in uniform banned Donald Trump.
00:39:34.340Right. Like, you know, Donald Trump is unique in that he has a big enough megaphone and profile that he can get past that.
00:39:39.740And then you have Elon Musk coming over, coming on. He's at least allowed to be back on Twitter, even if he isn't using it.
00:39:45.520But that level of coordination, which you have seen in smaller scale cases than Donald Trump, allows them to get 80, 90 percent of the way there, which is why I think, you know, I've become increasingly convinced that I always obviously thought censorship and free speech were issues.
00:40:01.600I've become increasingly convinced that they are sort of the defining issues of our time.
00:40:05.680I mean, obviously, you could make a case, a strong case, I would say, that mass immigration is the issue of our time.
00:40:11.100I see them as as inextricably linked to one another.
00:40:13.760But there's an argument you can make where it's like, you know, you aren't even going to be able to make the case for against mass immigration or even show people what mass immigration looks like in practice if you can't post, if you can't, you know, get your ideas and your videos and your images out there.
00:40:31.240And and this, you know, it's I was thinking about this the other day.
00:40:35.200It's bizarre that in the wake of 2020, there was a period where Republicans were at least talking about this.
00:40:41.260And most of them weren't actually interested in doing anything about it.
00:40:44.440But because it was in the zeitgeist, their feet were getting held to the fire to a certain extent.
00:40:49.180And it is not I think it is not being discussed with the amount of urgency that is required by Republicans and to an extent by the sort of conservatives who are responsible for holding their feet to the fire.
00:41:00.700I think it is the issue of our time, arguably, and I think it will continue to be until there's some sort of resolution.
00:41:07.700Yeah, I think you're right that these are actually just linked together, that they are symbiotic because the the mass immigration and we'll just put our cards on the table here.
00:41:18.980There's no hours too late to beat around the bush here.
00:41:21.600The reason mass immigration is important is because democracy, popular sovereignty is the legitimating force in the United States.
00:41:29.500And whatever people, you know, oh, these people can't vote, they can't vote.
00:41:33.420Yeah, of course, they're going to vote, guys.
00:41:43.440They know that once they get enough people in here, they're going to get an amnesty that the things will shift.
00:41:48.000This is absolutely about changing the voter base, making sure that the people who provide the legitimacy, provide popular sovereignty are different and make sure that they'll vote the way that the left wants to.
00:42:00.420And so they have to bring people in to to shut down the free speech.
00:42:03.940If you get a critical amount of people who don't care about free speech because they're not from this tradition, they don't have that connection and that value, they will eventually just go ahead and give it up because it doesn't matter to them.
00:42:15.640And the same thing, you know, and so that the free speech and the mass immigration are exactly the same issue because that's how they get rid of the free speech.
00:42:22.660And they need to get rid of the free speech to continue that process.
00:42:25.460And so these things are are absolutely 100 percent connected.
00:42:29.740Now, most of the opposition to this is on the right, though, as we know, the GOP is a wildly imperfect tool for this.
00:42:38.780And so as we both already kind of pointed out.
00:42:42.340And so I want to go ahead and show people something that dropped just an hour before we got on here.
00:42:47.820And what happened was Greg Abbott, Greg Abbott has been great.
00:44:56.780This is now I don't know what the actual text of his bill or his executive order.
00:45:01.460Rather, this isn't a bill is going to be.
00:45:04.620However, this is the language he tweeted out in the press release below his tweet.
00:45:08.700And the last paragraph says the governor's executive order requires that all higher education institutions in Texas review their free speech policies to establish appropriate punishment for anti-Semitic rhetoric on college.
00:45:22.980And university campuses, not action, not violence, not intimidation, rhetoric.
00:45:44.340However, there is a terrifying amount of the guy, the guys who are supposed to be protecting free speech, the guys who are supposed to be stopping this chilling of speech, this intimidation by the government using anti-Semitism as an excuse to say, we are going to stop explicitly.
00:46:03.620We are going to create punishment for anti-Semitic rhetoric on college campuses.
00:46:10.160I mean, what do you do at this point when the guys who are, again, once again, supposed to be defending us from this stuff are the very ones putting it out?
00:46:17.660Yeah, it's been remarkable since October 7th to watch conservatives just enthusiastically embrace, at least in this specific context, like everything they spent the past five years, I think rightly denouncing DEI, censorship, anti-free speech, you know, measures, et cetera.
00:46:36.300I understand, you know, I've seen some disturbing clips from campuses as well of, you know, kids getting targeted because they're Jewish, et cetera.
00:46:45.440Obviously, to your point, that's unacceptable.
00:46:48.000It's unacceptable on, like, race and religion neutral grounds.
00:46:51.640Like, that just should be unacceptable on campuses, period.
00:46:54.840But the, you know, stuff like this, like you were saying, you know, Abbott's move in this regard is not unique.
00:47:01.580It's something you've been seeing and certainly has been getting full-throated support from the entire GOP.
00:47:07.440I think Abbott a couple years ago, I don't know what ended up with it, but he banned Gab on the basis that it was, like, proliferating, you know, anti-Semitism or something like that.
00:47:17.860Like, this is essentially exactly what the left has been doing for a very long time, just in the specific context of anti-Semitism.
00:47:25.980And it's, among many other reasons to object to it, like, the obvious question when he says something like there'll be appropriate punishments for anti-Semitic rhetoric is what is anti-Semitism?
00:47:37.460Because, you know, the past sort of five months or so has demonstrated there's a substantial amount of disagreement about what does and doesn't constitute anti-Semitism.
00:47:45.340And, you know, just in terms of the left alone, we've seen what they think anti-Semitism is.
00:47:52.960And on university campuses, who's in control? The left, right?
00:47:56.100So you're giving the left another tool to say, well, this is what anti-Semitism is.
00:48:02.340Like, well, we'll take that increased, you know, bureaucratic power and we're going to punish it.
00:48:06.640Who do you think the left-wing administrators on university campuses are going to go after with this newfound, you know, DEI adjacent power?
00:48:13.760They're going to go after people, you know, whatever, criticizing George Soros, whatever the left calls anti-Semitism.
00:48:19.460They're not going to, you know, maybe they will go after, like, pro-Palestinian people as well.
00:48:24.780You know, I don't know the exact text of the bill.
00:48:27.200But the point is, like, especially, especially in the context of the universities where any sane person who's been paying a modicum of attention over the past few years knows it's not right-wingers in control.
00:48:41.680You are seeing effectively in all these different measures a beefing up of the DEI regime.
00:48:47.060And it's crazy because the entire sort of donor war on, like, Harvard and Brown, et cetera, was framed as this anti-DEI campaign.
00:48:55.180But if you actually look at the material effect, what it ended up doing in most of these sort of elite Ivy League schools was beefing up the DEI department.
00:49:03.760I had a sort of – I was waging for about a month there, like, a one-man Twitter jihad against Bill Ackman because he was someone who was just driving me crazy because he was lying.
00:49:18.140I mean, that alone was just, like, insufferable to me.
00:49:20.920But even more fundamentally, he was conscripting good, decent conservatives who correctly and legitimately cared about DEI into his fight against Claudine Gay and Harvard on the basis of something that had nothing to do with DEI.
00:49:36.020And, you know, that was apparent when after he got Claudine Gay fired, he turned around and gave a million dollars to, like, a Democrat who had a DEI plank on his platform, right?
00:49:43.940So, you know, what Ackman and a lot of other sort of people in that space did was effectively in the language – adopt the language of sort of anti-DEI for a brief moment in pursuit of beefing up the DEI bureaucracy.
00:50:33.900That's unseating the person you're unseating.
00:50:35.580And not only that, but now all the Democrats that wanted to get rid of Claudine or punish the pro-Palestinian wing, woke wing of kind of the left-wing power structure, they get to blame the right.
00:51:35.060There's still people just insanely blurting this out.
00:51:38.740And if we have laws like this being put in place by conservative governors, we have commands like this being issued by the GOP.
00:51:48.260Again, the question becomes, is there anyone with the courage to actually represent most of the conservative base who don't want this stuff, who don't want this garbage, who want to be able to speak and want to be able to show their difference and their disagreement with what is going on here?
00:52:07.700It's very clear that across the parties, even across the activist and commentator sphere of this, that there's just no home for people who want to be able to say, maybe we shouldn't be involved with this country.
00:52:21.280Maybe we don't have to give our money and our blood and our foreign policy around this particular foreign power.
00:52:29.300Maybe we can care about this country and focus here.
00:52:32.360And apparently that's a position that's not acceptable anywhere.
00:52:35.560And the fact that the definition of anti-Semitism, like you said, can be altered by the left or the right immediately to go ahead and punish anyone is terrifying.
00:52:45.560What I've noticed in all of these actually has been that they all mentioned the importance of linking the university's definition of anti-Semitism to a third party, to another organization.
00:52:58.960Now, I think that most of the people who are saying that will say, oh, well, the left is going to manipulate it.
00:53:03.660So we have to take it out of the hands of the people in the administration because they're leftists and they'll use it.
00:53:11.500They'll use it to like, I don't know, empower the Palestinian protesters or whatever.
00:53:14.880But it feels like the actual answer to this is actually we're just going to link this to pressure organizations like the ADL or it probably won't be explicit the ADL because they're so obviously progressive.
00:53:25.860But it'll be some, you know, slightly less left wing ADL variant that will then be the ones that get to define what is now apparently illegal on a college campus because a Republican said so.
00:53:38.500I think you're even giving him too much credit, like in terms of the ADL and not being the ADL, like when the Republicans were hearing, holding these hearings on anti-Semitism on campuses, they invited the ADL to testify, you know, which is like the ADL is spent, you know, the past whatever.
00:53:55.760I don't know how many decades advocating for everything that Republicans claim to be against.
00:54:01.840So, you know, it was remarkable seeing Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, go on Squawk Box or one of these TV shows, Sunday TV shows, and like pound the table and complain about the victim Olympics on campus, you know, and it was like, it should be obvious to you guys what is happening here, right?
00:54:23.520Like, does Jonathan Greenblatt actually care about the victim Olympics on campus?
00:54:27.600No, he wants to see, like, you know, the DEI regime beefed up.
00:54:32.540And actually there was, they interviewed in a separate piece around the same time, the former vice president of the ADL, and she said this.
00:54:38.300She was like, we don't want to dismantle the DEI regime.
00:54:40.920We just want to expand it to include anti-Semitism.
00:54:44.460So, like, every step of the way, the Greenblatt one is the most shameless because everyone knows what Greenblatt is actually about, which is not dismantling DEI.
00:54:51.240But you had this, you know, this mass sort of mobilization of people, including, like I said, I think a lot of conservatives who are decent, smart people who just got taken for a ride on this one, mobilize in the name of deconstructing, dismantling the DEI apparatus.
00:55:08.080And again, you look around you now, and what's the net result post-October 7th is, at the very least, it's neutral.
00:55:15.160And in some of these places, it's that the DEI regime and its sort of attendant bureaucratic branches are more powerful than they were on October 7th.
00:55:22.460Yeah, and the most egregious part about all of this, I think the thing that really inflames people's anger, rightfully so, is that for at least a decade, I mean, it's been more than that kind of below the surface, but explicitly over the last decade.
00:55:36.720There's been a jihad against, you know, white straight males on college campuses.
00:57:05.880I think it's pretty obvious to people that the GOP is fine with identity politics.
00:57:10.980They, they embrace identity politics for all of their, you know, whinging about the end of identity politics and colorblind siding and everything.
00:57:19.100They, they play identity politics all the time.
00:57:22.980And when it comes to the type of identity politics that is pre-approved and okay on the GOP, they snap to and go ahead and jump into action.
00:57:32.360The minute that a group that they feel needs to be protected, you know, gets in trouble.
00:57:37.920Yeah, I wrote a column, or I guess it was like an essay for the American conservative, like a month after, after October 7th, maybe a couple months, making precisely the point that, that you just made, which is like, you had this shocking mobilization, shocking, at least from the conservative perspective.
00:57:56.200I had never seen anything like it in my lifetime, at least as long as I've been in politics, when you started to see these like anti-Israel uprisings on these elite campuses where all of these gajillionaire donors, right?
00:58:09.320Like you had obviously Ackman, you had Ken Griffin at, you know, at Harvard, you had a bunch of different guys at UPenn.
00:58:15.660All of these gajillionaire Republican donors, for the most part, were pulling millions of dollars from the universities within weeks of October 7th.
00:58:27.020And surprise, surprise, like, you know, these things have material power.
00:58:30.820They forced concessions on the behalf of the university administrations, the administrators, the college presidents, they got a couple of them fired, those McGill at Penn, you know, Claudine Gay at Harvard.
00:58:42.180And, like, this was their red line, right?
00:58:45.320Like, that they were, they were not going to stand for these uprisings on campus.
00:58:50.340And the donors were just one component of it, right?
00:58:53.260Like, you had the Republican Party mobilized in unison to hold these hearings.
00:58:56.840And it was the only thing Fox News was talking about for weeks on end.
00:59:00.640And, you know, you had one of those conservative groups, I can't remember which one, like, put up the doxing truck on the Harvard campus where they were broadcasting the names of all of these kids who, like, signed this letter.
00:59:12.420And I was like, all right, like, great.
00:59:16.580But to your point, like, what's been happening on college campuses for the past two decades?
00:59:23.940Like, I certainly can tell you from my experience that you were seeing openly G-word idol rhetoric directed towards white people, especially straight white men.
00:59:34.680And not just in, like, the sort of most brazen, open, outrageous sense, but that sort of sentiment was embedded into the way they taught everything, right?
00:59:44.400This is not, you know, news to anyone who pays any attention to what happens on college campuses.
00:59:49.080And what's more, like, you were talking about corporate trainings.
00:59:51.140Like, the sort of rolling revolution that has swept across America over the last five years exacerbated, accelerated post-BLM in 2020.
01:00:01.320Its seat was these elite universities, right?
01:00:03.700Like, it began the universities, the ideas that proliferated, the tactics began the universities.
01:00:07.680And then, you know, these elite universities, they nurture the next generation of elites.
01:00:11.820They go out into our elite institutions.
01:00:14.100And, you know, a couple years later, you get, like, the New York Times firing its editorial board, the head of its editorial page because he published a Tom Cotton op-ed, right?
01:00:22.520That pipeline is well sort of documented.
01:00:47.660They were very proud and open about it.
01:00:49.360And then, yeah, within weeks of October 7th, all of a sudden, like, this was the red line, the conservative donors, the conservative activist groups, the Republican Party itself, all of them.
01:01:00.660One of the enraging things to me about the sort of post-October 7th response was what it proved was that, like, okay, you guys were actually capable of this all along, right?
01:01:53.760We can't protect you, and that's something that's only going to continue to cause incredible amounts of unrest and agitation among people, and you hope that eventually someone realizes this before things get bad.
01:02:08.180All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and switch over to the questions of the people, but before we do, where can people find your great work, man?
01:03:06.220If this is supposed to be defending free speech, but you aren't allowed to actually go ahead and question the things that are happening in the quote unquote democracy, then what are we doing?
01:03:18.120Yeah, and also, I mean, people have commented on this, but the sort of regime itself is anti anything that could be actually accurately described as democracy, right?
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