Dr. James Orr, the only conservative professor at Cambridge University, joins me to talk about what it means to be a conservative in the 21st century, and why it s so important to have a strong conservative base in America.
00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:09.000I could say the only conservative professor at Cambridge University, Dr. Orr, who is a contributing editor for Heritage and Culture at JB News, Dr. James Orr, everybody.
00:01:24.000First, I want to just, you know, you sat through the presentation.
00:01:28.000You've been around all of this as a Brit, as a professor.
00:01:34.000What is your take on this whole thing we have going on here?
00:01:37.000Well, I've got to say first off, I was saying to Andrew earlier, it's pretty overwhelming for a Brit like me to see the scale of your success and of your ambition, what you've achieved.
00:01:49.000There's that, you know, lots of students at Cambridge claim they want to change the world, that they can go into jobs that are going to change the world.
00:01:57.000And I thought to myself this morning, you really could say that you are changing the world.
00:02:06.000You're doing extraordinary things in transforming America, recalling it to its founding ideals, promoting people of caliber and character and courage, particularly among the young.
00:02:16.000This is a huge problem for us on the right in Britain.
00:02:21.000And I just felt both envious, but also excited because I thought we can bottle some Kirk juice and take it over to Britain.
00:02:31.000And we need to work out what the DNA is and we need to try to replicate it as best we can.
00:02:35.000It's hard to do that, particularly if you're a movement that's focusing on national pride and national distinctiveness and sovereignty and so on.
00:02:44.000You can't just copy and paste everything that you're doing.
00:02:46.000Of course, we have a very different constitutional setup, very different electoral dynamics, very different challenges in many ways.
00:02:52.000But I think philosophically, we're very much there.
00:02:56.000That is to say, we want to work out not so much what the politics of left and right is.
00:03:01.000I think that's the sort of the politics, the philosophy of what I call the long 20th century, 1914 to 2016.
00:03:07.000I think the long 20th century ended in 2016, and the politics of left and right ended in 2016.
00:03:12.000And we're now talking about the politics of national preference, the politics of national interest.
00:03:18.000This is still kind of shocking to the liberal ear, but this is the direction of travel for the new right on both sides of the Atlantic.
00:03:24.000So what do you mean by that, the long 20th century?
00:03:27.000Well, so historians like to talk about this, that, you know, periodizing in history is always very, very, very difficult.
00:03:33.000And, you know, it turns out that human development doesn't always obey neat time periods.
00:03:40.000But of course, we know what we mean by the 20th century.
00:03:43.000But I think there are these sort of, history doesn't quite obey those neat, kind of neat, even divisions.
00:03:49.000And so historians will sometimes talk about the long 19th century that sort of began roughly in 1815 and probably ended in 1914, right?
00:03:57.0001815 Congress of Vienna, and then really you've got this extraordinary period of peace in Europe, and then 1914 is really the point at which that peace explodes.
00:04:07.000And so I think also we can talk about the long 20th century persisting in some ways beyond 2000 to 2016 as a fundamental watershed moment in how we think about national flourishing, how we think about politics, how we think about the organizing axes and horizons of national flourishing, of mutual flourishing.
00:06:08.000To give you an example, I teach a program in moral philosophy from Plato through to Nietzsche.
00:06:14.000That includes Aristotle, it includes Augustine, including Aquinas, Kant, Hume.
00:06:19.000So as much of the kind of classic Western philosophers as I can fit in.
00:06:24.000And then I also teach an MFIL program.
00:06:27.000But broadly speaking, yes, I teach Western philosophers without the, but not through the prism and not through the lens of kind of critical theory.
00:06:35.000I try not to politicize my teaching in any way.
00:06:38.000Of course, that itself is a political act these days, just trying to be neutral, trying to listen to these ancient thinkers on their own terms and not trying to force ideological kind of masks onto them.
00:06:53.000But yes, I see myself very much as trying to pass on what is best in the Western tradition.
00:06:59.000I think really universities have only three primary purposes.
00:07:03.000That is to pursue the truth, to preserve the truth, and to pass on the truth.
00:07:09.000And then those are the kind of, you know, it's a little bit crude, but those are the kind of the three P's.
00:07:13.000Those are the sort of three, that's the way I sort of think about what I'm doing.
00:07:16.000So partly it is preserving the best of what has been said and thought in the West, but it's also not wanting to kind of, you know, be kind of inert in that, always having that sort of sense of looking forward, testing, always, you know, probing, searching for new things, being open to novelty, open to change, but kind of anchored, anchored in the great Western tradition.
00:07:38.000So with that backdrop, post-World War II, there was somewhat of a new world order that was established, the neoliberal world order.
00:07:48.000And it was one that was based on free trade, that was based on both American dominance, but also kind of NATO expansionism, international cooperation.
00:08:18.000Like, all the ideas that have been tried have led us to this moment.
00:08:22.000Classical liberalism, whatever you want to call it, liberalism is the best it's going to get.
00:08:27.000And congratulations, humanity, history is over.
00:08:31.000What happened from Fukuyama in 1992 to now, what you say, 2016 to now, where you go from this kind of hubristic, prideful, you know, kind of exaltation of liberalism to a completely different moment we're in now.
00:08:48.000Well, that book, The End of History by Francis Fukuyama, is a fascinating kind of moment of sort of kind of hubris, you might say, a kind of misplaced optimism.
00:08:59.000But if you read the very end of that book, the actual full title of the book is The End of History and the Last Man.
00:09:05.000And he has this fascinating kind of final chapter or two of that book where he says, look, actually, this sort of sense of this end of history dispensation where everything is we've hit the sunlit uplands of a kind of liberal utopia and peace and prosperity for all, that in the end is not going to satisfy man's instinct.
00:09:23.000And this is particularly, this is what he calls the thumos.
00:09:27.000This is, if we think of Plato's like three-level three-level soul, you've got the noose at the top, the mind, then you've got the thumos, which is courage, that's his sort of sense of the spirit that animates us, and then you've got the epithumia, which is kind of the base appetites.
00:09:43.000And Plato says you've got to have all three of these in check.
00:09:46.000And what Fukuyama says is that there's a real danger that with this kind of in the sunlit uplands of the kind of globalized utopia, we're going to suppress the thumos.
00:09:59.000And so he's not quite as naive as that.
00:10:03.000And I think what's happened, you know, that you might think of the quest for thumb as the search for identity.
00:10:08.000In fact, Fukuyama wrote a very interesting book on identity where he sort of starts to conceive that the kind of sort of Berkeley liberalism was never really going to deliver the goods.
00:10:17.000And so I think the suppression of that sense of self, sense of rootedness, sense of home, sense of distinctiveness and what we are and what we love, that was never going to be sort of erased by the liberal doctrines of the blank slate doctrines of human nature.
00:10:43.000And we've got to face up to reality as it is given to us and not as we would like it to be.
00:10:48.000But what went wrong with the liberal project?
00:10:50.000Well, I think the fundamental problem with the liberal project is that it's grounded on fundamentally mistaken assumptions about what it is to be human.
00:10:58.000The basic idea is that human beings are born into the world with completely independent, completely blank, completely blank slate.
00:11:07.000This is the blocks of view of the tabular rasa or the white page.
00:11:10.000And we're completely free of all unchosen obligations.
00:11:14.000And there can be no obligations that we don't ourselves choose.
00:11:47.000We flourish most when we're connected to what is closest to us.
00:11:52.000And it's not natural to love what is closest to us.
00:11:55.000I was in France, I think, last month, up in the mountains, this beautiful chateau, addressing some, must have been 50 or 60, I suppose, conservative right-wing students from all across, I think probably 25 different nations.
00:12:09.000And I opened, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to say to them.
00:12:11.000The organizers hadn't been very clear.
00:12:13.000So I found myself beginning the session by saying, Who here has got the best mum in the world?
00:13:00.000And my point was: I don't owe you an argument for why my country is the best country in the world, any more than I owe you an argument for why my mum is the best mum in the world.
00:13:11.000Somebody who asks for an argument has had what the philosopher Bernard Williams calls one thought too many.
00:13:19.000The person who has one thought too many is like the guy, the utilitarian, who walks up to the river and he sees two women drowning, his wife and a strange woman, and stops to ask, What if that strange woman might win the Nobel Prize in public economics?
00:13:35.000That person has had one thought too many.
00:13:37.000It is a totally natural disposition of every human to love what is closest to their own.
00:14:14.000But it won't be enough first of, you know, non-daily, more than daily needs.
00:14:17.000So you'll have a village, and the village will come together, but that won't be enough either.
00:14:21.000You will need to grow into a polis for self-defense and so on, a city-state, as it were, a country, a nation.
00:14:29.000And that, Aristotle thinks, okay, that's pretty small in the fifth, fourth century BC Greece, but that was the functioning, that was the way in which Aristotle, that was his kind of optimal size for human beings to flourish, to, as it were, fulfill their proper ends as human beings.
00:14:48.000And I think that's still the basic way of thinking about things.
00:14:51.000I think it's really what you see in Aquinas.
00:14:53.000I think it's what you see in the Bible as well.
00:14:55.000Wow, there's so much there to think about.
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00:16:04.000So let's pull one of those threads, which is that all the French young people at that chateau will raise their hand, who lives in the greatest nation.
00:16:15.000Why does Europe not vote or believe that vocally in any of their politics?
00:16:22.000Let's now center our conversation around continental Europe and then we'll make our way to your home.
00:16:27.000If I may say so, continental Europe is a husk of its former self.
00:17:22.000You know, after the Second World War, the French had what they call the trend glorieuse, the 30 glorious years.
00:17:28.000In Germany, you have, at least in West Germany, you have the Wisschaftwunde, this economic miracle, this extraordinary explosion of economic flourishing and national self-confidence in West Germany.
00:17:40.000And I suppose, you know, 1989 has got to feature somehow in the story of Europe's decline or Europe's sort of, you know, once that, you know, the great bugbear of the Soviet Union and that great enemy of freedom everywhere had been dissolved, then I think there was a sense of, well, you know, before that, there was a sense of what are we for?
00:18:02.000And this is something that is pretty uncomplicated and it's going to stitch us together as a kind of, as the West.
00:18:09.000It was easy to think about the West and it was easy to think about the rest.
00:18:12.000And I think after 1989 into the 1990s, the fall of the wall in a way sort of starts to mark the beginning of the kind of questioning, what are we about?
00:19:11.000And in the end, the decision was, no, we're not going to have any recognition of the fact that the European Union is in any way at all the successor to what it really was a successor to, namely Christendom and the Holy Roman Empire, and that which stitched Europe together as a sort of self-conscious collective entity.
00:19:29.000And I don't want to overstate that too much, but I think that it was an indicator, an index into the way in which Europeans were beginning to run out of a sense of who are we?
00:19:45.000And then, of course, with the emergence of a kind of technocratic, democratically unaccountable Potempkin parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg, the parliament is in both places.
00:20:19.000They move back and forth, yeah, just so the Belgians are, you know, the kind of Franco-German pact is happy, and then the sort of, you know, the idea of there being a European Union beyond the Franco-German alliance, so that's where you go.
00:20:30.000So all these crazy things, crazy sort of features of the kind of European settlement.
00:20:36.000And there's a kind of democratic deficit, you might say.
00:20:39.000I used to play this parlor game when I'm now at Cambridge.
00:20:42.000I was at Oxford in 2016, just ahead of the Brexit vote.
00:20:45.000And one of the parlor games I would play with my, I was the only out-of-the-closet Brexiteer, as far as I know, in the whole of this college, among, I don't know, I think about 70, 80 colleagues.
00:20:56.000And I used to ask them, who's our MEP?
00:21:01.000Who's our member of the European Parliament?
00:21:20.000And there was no reason for them to know because it was and is a fake parliament with very little powers, very little few veto powers, very few powers to initiate legislation.
00:21:38.000That kind of sort of the European Union project has been, you know, from 1992 onwards, where it really became a self-consciously political union and not just an economic and trade one.
00:21:48.000That's really been, it's been a disaster.
00:21:50.000And I hoped that in 2016, Brexit would be the first brick in the wall, that it would catalyse a kind of domino effect.
00:21:58.000That was probably wishful thinking because particularly if you're in the Euro denomination, you're in the Euro nations, it's one thing for Britain with its own pound, its own currency to break away.
00:22:09.000It would be much more dramatic, there'd be much more dramatic consequences if a Euro country split away.
00:22:17.000But the Euro has been a disaster for the countries who have been members of it.
00:22:21.000I mean, Italy, for example, has scarcely had any GDP growth.
00:22:24.000I think it started to pick up recently.
00:22:25.000Really, for the first 20 years of its being part of the Euro, effectively nothing at all.
00:22:31.000Greece and Spain, youth unemployment was through the roof.
00:22:34.000Effectively, you've got the Spanish currency, the Greek currency, effectively being shackled to the German Deutschmark.
00:22:41.000And so the Germans weren't complaining because the currency was artificially depreciated, so their exports were more attractive.
00:22:47.000And so it was all this kind of elaborate Ponzi scheme, which at some point is going to unravel.
00:22:52.000And then somehow, ideologically, within the elite forming classes in Oxford, in Cambridge, in London, certainly in Britain, the idea is that to be European was to be part of the European Union.
00:23:03.000Those two are absolutely part and parcel.
00:24:14.000I mean, you know, religious adherence is just a very difficult thing to measure.
00:24:17.000You know, is actually going to church, does it count as sort of being a Christian or being a churchgoer?
00:24:25.000You know, in Britain, you know, what caused it?
00:24:27.000I mean, it may be the opposite, I think.
00:24:29.000I think I'm more tempted to the analysis that actually it's prosperity and flourishing, particularly material flourishing and prosperity, that tends to catalyze a sort of collapse in the sense of any need for meaning or any orientation to the transcendent.
00:24:44.000And I suppose also in the 60s, you're seeing the emergence of competing systems of meaning, competing accounts of what it is to have significance, competing sets of answers to life's deepest questions.
00:24:58.000We see a lot of that imported from California and elsewhere.
00:25:04.000And I suppose the sort of something, you know, there's something fashionable about religious skepticism that was certainly true in the 60s.
00:25:12.000If you think back, you know, to the high noon of the new atheists in 2005, you know, there was something very, very sort of elite.
00:25:19.000There was something very, a lot of cachet in being an atheist.
00:25:23.000You know, I'm tempted to think that new atheism was just a politically correct way to be skeptical of Islam.
00:25:30.000I think that the timing works quite well there.
00:25:32.000But I think if you look in the last few years, I mean, I just saw some data out from Britain this morning, you know, I think between, is it 18 to 35 year olds, belief in God has tripled over the last five years.
00:25:46.000Bible purchases has gone up by 87% over four years.
00:25:50.000Now, it's from a pretty low base, but something is happening out there.
00:25:57.000It's still quite small, but the numbers among Gen Z or Gen Z as you call them, well, because Z is how you pronounce the letter in English.
00:26:07.000And I know you Americans have a different way of putting it.
00:26:56.000You know, in 2016, we have this extraordinary expression of the democratic will in 17.46 million people voting for the principle that laws affecting the United Kingdom should be made in the United Kingdom and should be accountable to the people and voters of the United Kingdom.
00:27:15.000It's a very just, you know, seemingly an entirely uncontroversial principle.
00:27:20.000But it was the biggest vote we've had in the history in British voting history.
00:27:28.000And another key driver there was the sense of we're losing our sense, we're losing what it is to use the first person plural, as Roger Scruton, one of my favorite philosophers, likes to put it, that sense of we, we the people.
00:27:45.000And what was going on in Brexit was a kind of inchoate kind of cry that we are losing that sense of who we are.
00:27:53.000That every time for the last 40, 50 years, every time the British people have had an opportunity to express a view on mass demographic change and transition, it has said no or go much slower.
00:28:07.000And every time, its leaders have effectively ignored that clearly expressed will.
00:28:14.000And I think 2016 was a moment where suddenly it looked as if we might have the opportunity to finally regain control of our laws and regain control of our borders at the same time.
00:28:27.000In the last five years, one in what have we had?
00:28:32.000Is one in 27 people in Britain have arrived in the last five years.
00:28:43.000One in 60 arrived in the last 18 months.
00:28:48.000In the first 25 years of this century, gross immigration, you're talking 12 to 15 million people.
00:28:56.000That's roughly four to five times as many people who arrived on our shores in the first thousand years of our history.
00:29:06.000It's difficult to overstate, and I know you've had enormous influxes too under the Biden administration, but you're a much bigger, you've got a much bigger territory, and you've got different kinds, different kind of categories of migrants coming in, and you've at last got an administration that's willing to do something about it.
00:29:28.000And that has had a profoundly kind of traumatic shock on us Brits, and it's had a kind of tectonic effect on the landscape of British politics.
00:29:40.000So what's happening in British politics?
00:29:43.000Last year, July 2024, we saw the loveless landslide.
00:29:47.000So we see the Starmer government getting an astonishing 175 odd seats in a majority in Parliament, which is an enormous, enormous majority, and one of the biggest in living memory, on only 20% of the vote, 20% of the people eligible to vote.
00:30:15.000Fast forward now, you know, we're just over a year in.
00:30:19.000Back in the first of May of this year, we had the local elections, which are a pretty good proxy.
00:30:23.000It's a bit like the midterms, and not a bad proxy for what the country's mood is.
00:30:29.000And I think Labour gets goes from 34% to 20%.
00:30:35.000The Conservative Party goes down to 15%, extinction level, almost an unprecedented low.
00:30:42.000And for the first time in 100 years, a new party emerges, a third party, to rival the duopoly that's had Britain in its grip since 1923, and that is Nigel Farage's Reform UK, which surged through to win 677 local seats, which, if you extrapolate that out, is 30% of the electorate.
00:31:06.000That's they were at 14% a year ago, and that's going up and up and up.
00:31:12.000And what you're seeing for the first time in the history of British politics, since there have been political parties, let's say the Tories are emerging in like the 1670s, 1680s, and really kind of bedding down in their modern form in the 1830s.
00:31:25.000Well, the first time in the history of British politics, there is another right-wing party emerging, another Conservative Party that is, it looks as if, in my view, we'll have to see what happens next May.
00:31:54.000So let's examine that deeper and more thoroughly.
00:31:58.000Some people in the audience will hear, wait, wait, hold on.
00:32:00.000The Conservative Party, don't we like them?
00:32:02.000Explain what it means to be part of the Conservative Party.
00:32:07.000That's not exactly, you know, let's say the equivalent that we would have here in the United States of what we consider to be a Conservative.
00:32:19.000I mean, but even here, I suppose in the States, there are lots and lots of fascinating debates within the GOP, within the Republican Party is talking, you know, what is it to be a conservative?
00:32:33.000Is it to be a kind of compassionate Bushite conservative, whatever it might be?
00:32:37.000So, I mean, and to some extent, we mirror some of those debates, those debates about freedom, economic freedom, how to rank that in the order of what it is we want to conserve.
00:32:48.000But roughly speaking, the Conservative Party was in power from 2010 to 2024.
00:32:54.000And all of the good things that it delivered, it delivered by accident.
00:33:00.000It granted the referendum on Brexit in 2015, not expecting in its manifesto.
00:33:07.000It thought there would be another coalition and that the referendum would be scrapped by their coalition partners, but they won almost not expecting to.
00:33:15.000They granted reluctantly the referendum.
00:33:23.000A new government came in, headed up incredibly by Theresa May, a prime minister who'd voted against Brexit.
00:33:30.000A prime minister who'd voted against Brexit was tasked by sort of the internal party political dynamics of the Conservative Party to deliver Brexit.
00:33:41.000And sure enough, it was a complete catastrophe.
00:33:43.000That's when I cut up my membership card.
00:33:47.000To be conservative in 2016, 2017 was quite straightforward.
00:34:02.000Finally, the May government falls in the summer of 2019 after a spectacular defeat at the European elections.
00:34:09.000Those European elections are good for something, it turns out.
00:34:12.000Because in the space of six weeks, Nigel Farage sets up the Brexit Party and goes from zero to winning a national election in the United Kingdom.
00:34:22.000That is never, it was inconceivable, just unthinkable.
00:34:26.000And that spelt the end of the May Party and Boris Johnson takes over and finally managed to get Brexit over the line.
00:34:33.000Then the plague strikes and COVID and lockdown and so on and so forth.
00:34:36.000Spending goes through the roof and we've got very, very serious economic problems, headaches to worry about.
00:34:44.000So being conservative has been, it's been very, very hard to kind of keep a track on what it means to be conservative.
00:34:50.000I suppose for Brits, the British Conservative Party is just to be conservative is just to be a pragmatist, just to be pragmatic.
00:34:58.000But as, you know, I remember Larry Arnke, he passed through, a mutual friend of mine and Charlie's came through.
00:35:05.000He said that the trouble with pragmatism, James, is it doesn't work.
00:35:36.000Does that sound like a Republican Party that we know of?
00:35:40.000And the Conservative, British Conservative Party is the most successful election-winning machine in the history of politics, anywhere in the world.
00:35:48.000But, you know, I think that may now be coming to an end.
00:35:52.000This is Lane Schoenberger, Chief Investment Officer and founding partner of YReFi.
00:35:57.000It has been an honor and a privilege to partner with Turning Point and for Charlie to endorse us.
00:36:03.000His endorsement means the world to us, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Turning Point for years to come.
00:36:09.000Now, here Charlie, in his own words, tell you about YReFi.
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00:37:01.000So then, so that defines the Conservative Party.
00:37:05.000Reform, which is Nigel Farage's party, is growing.
00:37:09.000How, and you've mentioned this, how does mass immigration, specifically mass Islamic immigration, playing into how people are thinking about this election and the United Kingdom?
00:37:33.000Let alone working out strategies of integration or assimilation.
00:37:38.000So what's happening now, I mean, so we've got illegal immigration.
00:37:42.000So roughly, you know, tens of, I would say tens of thousands of people coming onto the Calais beaches and paying people traffickers 3,000, 4,000 euros a pop to take the pretty dangerous journey in dinghies across the channel.
00:37:58.000And so there's an immediate, now, those numbers are tiny relative to the levels of legal migration, which are huge.
00:38:06.000But somehow it concentrates the mind, this fact that these people are coming over.
00:39:08.000There's the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.
00:39:10.000And then there's the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
00:39:14.000And we did not leave the European Court of Human Rights.
00:39:16.000That is a separate jurisdiction, which emerges after the Nuremberg trials in the late 1940s, where there was a sense that in order to kind of ensure that this could never happen again, that the Nazi war criminals were never able to say, what laws did we break?
00:39:33.000The Allied prosecutors found it very difficult to argue.
00:39:37.000Jackson, the US prosecutor, and David Maxwell Fife found it very difficult to say, well, it's not clear what laws you have broken.
00:39:44.000I mean, technically, it's not clear that the Holocaust, for example, was against the law.
00:39:49.000The Nazis were scrupulous legislators.
00:39:52.000So there was this sense we have to have this convention in order to ensure that this never happens again.
00:39:58.000And that's different from the European Union.
00:40:00.000The European Union doesn't come along till later.
00:40:02.000And we still remain under the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court.
00:40:05.000And for as long as we are under its jurisdiction, we effectively, our courts are required to effectively grant the rescission of deportation orders by the British government on the grounds that deportation on origin country would breach the deportees' human rights.
00:40:28.000I mean, so you're getting, you know, I had a story that this is happening last week of people facing deportation going to their embassies, protesting outside the embassies, claiming that they would have caught the eye of officials within the embassy, and then claiming that it would be too dangerous for them to go back.
00:40:47.000They'd be likely to be political prisoners, or they'd like to be victims of political persecution.
00:40:52.000You have people joining terrorist organizations because that will mean that they're going to be persecuted politically when they go back to their origin countries.
00:41:01.000Or Article 8, Right to a Family Life, which is incredibly open basket human right.
00:41:07.000You can say, no, I just feel I'm going to be, you know, I'm gay.
00:41:23.000No government's going to win that case against the human rights, legal, industrial complex, because Britain very much, it's no longer the rule of law.
00:41:45.000In my view, if you want to really get Brexit done, you have to finish the job.
00:41:51.000We have to remove ourselves from the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court.
00:41:54.000That means rescinding Tony Blair's 1998 Human Rights Act.
00:42:00.000But the political appetite to repeal a Human Rights Act and effectively this sort of new constitution of kind of rights-based regime, very kind of continental in spirit, very different from the common law approach that England has always had.
00:42:20.000So there's very two, there's a very different, you might say there's the kind of the jurisprudence of the English-speaking peoples, kind of a common law, the idea that we discern the principles of justice, of natural justice, from the bottom up, on a case-by-case basis.
00:42:34.000And we work it out through concrete quarrels between particular neighbors, between contractual disputes, or in the case of the criminal law.
00:42:41.000The European model, this is a little bit crude, but broadly, I think, broadly kind of plausible.
00:42:45.000The European model is just to kind of imagine what, you know, to come up with codes, abstract codes that are going to just apply universally no matter what, that are basically agnostic and kind of not attentive to the concrete particularities of human interrelations.
00:43:01.000And so, you know, that one of the great sort of gifts of the English-speaking peoples is this idea of a kind of bottom-up common law approach.
00:43:10.000We see this in Blackstone, we see it in Cook, we see it in all the great jurists that we the English-speaking peoples have inherited.
00:43:18.000Whereas the European idea is to think in these sort of rights-based ways, which is kind of a metaphor drawn from kind of the world of property.
00:43:26.000So, I mean, one way of thinking about this is we have an Offenses Against the Person Act, 1861.
00:43:32.000And we have these words, these lovely earthy Saxon words like murder and manslaughter, grievous bodily harm, actual bodily harm.
00:43:45.000And I sometimes joke with my students, you know, which do you think is the more kind of morally accurate way?
00:43:50.000What's the kind of right moral grammar in these two scenarios?
00:43:54.000Peter murdered Lucy or Peter breached Lucy's right to life.
00:44:03.000And I think, you know, kind of the common law bottom-up way of thinking is just what is more accurate.
00:44:07.000He murdered her, or maybe it was manslaughter, diminished responsibility, whatever it might be.
00:44:12.000Whereas a rights-based view is a much more kind of artificial, liberal kind of construct of this sort of floating ethereal blank slate with all these kind of strings and these different rights coming off it.
00:44:24.000And it's very difficult, it turns out, to reconcile all these different rights.
00:44:32.000I think it has turned out to be a feature, not a bug.
00:44:35.000And part of the, you know, part of what they're attempting in the rights-based regime is to say, well, if we all signed up to one common shared view of what is right, capital R, singular, right, then secularism can't work.
00:44:52.000Because the point of secularism is to try and create this slightly fake, neutral public square where everybody's allowed to kind of disagree about the fundamental questions so that we don't have any more wars of religion.
00:45:04.000Like this is the basic idea of kind of Treaty of West Valia, 1648.
00:45:08.000And so we've got to be agnostic about the underlying capital R right.
00:45:12.000Because if we're not agnostic about it, then we'll start killing each other.
00:45:15.000It'll be a kind of, you know, hobbesium, war of war against all.
00:45:18.000So what we say is every individual has a right to determine what is right.
00:45:22.000And then it becomes impossible for any judicial process of discerning what is absolute, because what is a judge supposed to do to discern the right, to discern objective natural justice.
00:45:35.000And it's impossible to do that when you've got these competing, conflicting, conflicting claims, conflicting demands.
00:45:44.000The question that a lot of people have is, why is Europe continually importing people that not only wish them harm, but will replace core European identity and culture?
00:45:59.000Get even metaphysical if you have to here.
00:46:02.000It is confusing to me and to the audience.
00:46:18.000So increasingly, they're not voting for it.
00:46:20.000So we are seeing that this is the key driver for populist movements all across continental Europe and now in Britain, I think, is an kind of emerging resistance to all of this.
00:46:30.000But it is taking a long time, and it's a good question.
00:46:34.000I think the first, shooting from the hip, the first answer might be guilt, a sense of kind of post-colonial, a post-colonial need for atonement.
00:46:43.000I mean, you see this in France, it's present in Britain.
00:46:47.000There's a sense that we wronged the world, we invaded the world, now we need to invite the world.
00:47:32.000That's one of the most consequential policies in the history of Europe in living memory.
00:47:39.000It's almost done in real time on a TV program where a, I think it's a young Palestinian or Syrian child sort of emotes or gives, you know, begs her to help.
00:47:53.000And she's almost changing her mind in real time.
00:47:55.000And in 2015, she opens up the gates of Europe.
00:47:58.000Effectively, she says, you know, the German borders are open, which of course means Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and suddenly you have this domino effect, and tens of thousands coming across in Dignies, thousands dying, thousands drowning from these very risky voyages.
00:48:17.000And so the trains would be rolling into Munich, and there would be big signs in German saying simply atonement.
00:48:59.000I mean, I don't know if you, it's not as simple as inviting a bunch of, that's not what they're consciously thinking.
00:49:04.000No, but it's what it's but yeah, it's a kind of atonement for we're kind of atoning by finding new victims and finding victims that instead of we of kind of inflicting inflicting suffering on them, now we can sort of somehow we can over time we can sort of brick we can we can atone we can seek kind of kind of secular redemption.
00:49:25.000But you had a second one that I interrupted you.
00:50:10.000And so the dependency ratio of taxpayers to dependents, whether it's the out-of-work, which is very high, I think it's 9 million in Britain.
00:50:22.000So we basically have 27 million taxpayers, 9 million out of work, 6 million public sector workers, 13 million pensioners.
00:50:29.000So that ratio, and that ratio is going to get a lot worse.
00:50:55.000I think the other myth is, to go back to liberalism, to the third answer, would be this kind of the liberal myth of the blank slate.
00:51:01.000And the way I've thinking about this the other day is in the context of the transgenderism debate.
00:51:07.000And the view seems to be, you know, it's the similar kind of metaphysical myth that has kind of bewitched the liberal mind as with transgenderism.
00:51:15.000So with transgenderism, the problem is, look, if anyone can become a woman, what is a woman?
00:51:26.000If subjective self-declaration of any human being is, we've lost our definitional distinctions.
00:51:33.000And I think there's the same problem with what we might call transnationalism.
00:51:37.000If anyone can become an Englishman, what is an Englishman?
00:51:40.000If anyone can become an American, what is an American?
00:51:46.000We've got this such sort of definitional vagueness that we sort of, it becomes impossible to, to go back to that phrase, ever to use the first person plural, ever to be able to say, we the people, we're not an idea, we're not a proposition, we're not a project, we're a people with a home, with a history, with a heritage.
00:52:04.000And that doesn't mean that we can't welcome people in.
00:52:06.000I mean, the model I have for this is the book of Ruth.
00:52:10.000That very short book in the Old Testament.
00:53:28.000But there is this strange myth that sort of bewitches us that there's nothing that there is to be, to be British, to be English, to be Welsh, to be Scottish.
00:53:37.000You can just pass through the gates of Heathrow, get your piece of paper, and this magic dust will descend upon you and infuse all of Shakespeare and Chaucer and that kind of will ensure that your pulse quickens when you see a Spitfire in the sky, you know, and it turns out that magic dust doesn't work.
00:53:58.000National identity is more than paperwork.
00:54:01.000It's more than just having documentation.
00:54:24.000Yeah, this takes us quite nicely onto Islam because one of the challenges that Islam has always had is to incorporate into itself, into its political theology, the concept of the nation-state, the concept, certainly the concept of the secular public square.
00:54:43.000Or the distinction between the secular and the sacred.
00:54:45.000This is not something that comes naturally at all to Islamic theology.
00:54:49.000And actually, you can understand, in many ways, I think Islamic political theology is more consistent, more predictable, more kind of comprehensible than Christian political theology.
00:55:00.000When Augustine comes along and says, Well, yes, you know, God is in charge of everything, but there are some parts where he's just going to let us be neutral and he's going to let these earthly authorities take control.
00:55:15.000And the church has the worries about the eternal, and the earthly authorities worry about the temporal.
00:55:22.000And that's the kind of the beginning of the seculum.
00:55:23.000The idea of the secular starts to emerge with Augustine.
00:55:26.000It's not meant to be a kind of godless zone, but that's really effectively what it becomes after the 18th century.
00:55:33.000And for Islam, if you're a monotheist, that's a very strange idea.
00:55:37.000Why should there be any corner of creation that is somehow even kind of provisionally neutral and godless?
00:55:48.000And its monotheism, it's particularly very, very aggressive, strong commitment to Tawid, to the doctrine of oneness, and to the power, to the power of God, makes it very hard for this kind of Augustinian idea to emerge.
00:56:04.000And so the nation-state is fundamentally a kind of secular construct.
00:56:07.000Now, it's one that Christianity has been able to baptize, right?
00:56:23.000England is, you know, our monarch is also the supreme governor of the church of England.
00:56:28.000We are technically, you know, constitutionally.
00:56:30.000If any of you watch the coronation or the funeral of her late majesty, you know, that is, you know, the ceremonial kind of pedigree is a Christian one.
00:56:38.000But within Islam, it's much harder for Islam to form it.
00:56:42.000It's much harder to convince a loyal Muslim to have a political loyalty to a nation rather than the ummah.
00:56:51.000That is to say, the covering rather than the Daral Islam.
00:56:55.000And so Islam is a much more, a much more cosmopolitan and rootless, universal identity.
00:57:04.000And it finds it very difficult to work with the particular and with kind of sort of secular national boundaries.
00:57:26.000So much, there were more British Muslims who went to fight for ISIS than there are in the British armed forces.
00:57:34.000I'm surprised it's only 6% because I go to London, it feels like a lot more than 6%.
00:57:37.000Well, that's because they're very concentrated and they're very dense.
00:57:40.000So had we had a successful strategy of assimilation and integration, if such a thing is a great point, then there might have been a much more diffuse diaspora.
00:57:50.000And you get these certain tipping points where effectively, you know, kind of effectively chain migration that creates these demographic silos and that increases, that effectively means integration becomes impossible.
00:58:02.000What is it to integrate into the city of Birmingham today?
00:58:06.000What is it to integrate into the city of Bradford?
00:58:08.000You have nothing to integrate towards.
00:58:22.000It's a little bit complicated, that stat, because Muhammad is way more common just as a first name among, say, from 100 Muslims, you're going to have way more Muhammads, whereas first names are much more evenly distributed in the West, I think.
00:58:40.000But it's still, it is an index of swords, yeah.
00:58:45.000We're honored to be partnering with Alan Jackson Ministries.
00:58:48.000And today, I want to point you to their podcast.
00:58:50.000It's called Culture in Christianity, the Alan Jackson Podcast.
00:58:54.000What makes it unique is Pastor Alan's biblical perspective.
00:58:58.000He takes the truth from the Bible and applies it to issues we're facing today, gender confusion, abortion, immigration, Doge, Trump in the White House, issues in the church.
01:00:34.000And talk about how when the Islamists go into Western countries, we know that they don't assimilate, but they actively then try to run for political office and then try to get involved in government.
01:00:46.000The rates of Islamic participation in government far exceeds rates of Christian participation in government in the West.
01:00:54.000We are on the precipice of having a Muslim mayor in Minneapolis, New York, Calgary, and London by the end of this calendar year.
01:01:03.000Well, so I think the reason for that is because Muslims certainly in Britain tend to vote in blocks and tend to vote as households rather than as individuals.
01:01:19.000They tend to be rooted more in kinship and tribe and ethnicity than has been common in England.
01:01:30.000I mean, in England, we know this is a wonderful book by Alan McFarlane, a colleague of mine in Cambridge, called The Origins of English Individualism, that shows that the English people from the 13th, 12th, 13th century onwards were constantly moving around, always moving around.
01:01:46.000We weren't very sort of clan-based at all.
01:01:48.000Whereas our sort of new arrivals, the new English, as it were, do not take that approach at all.
01:01:55.000And so you've got very, very high rates of kind of electoral blocks.
01:02:00.000And that means, you know, what is like 80, 85% of Muslims will vote Labor, roughly.
01:02:06.000And so effectively, that's why you see a lot of, you know, mayoralties, a lot of local MPs will, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, seems to be like he's going to be running our metropolis for the foreseeable future.
01:02:17.000Isn't that interesting that 80 to 85% of American Muslims vote Democrat, 80 to 85% of UK Muslims vote Labor, which is interchangeable parts.
01:02:26.000That goes to show that it's not an outreach problem on behalf of the Republican Party or Conservative.
01:02:38.000Interestingly, we saw last summer was five MPs were elected to the House of Commons on explicitly pro-Gaza tickets.
01:02:48.000That is to say, they were elected, they were in labor strongholds, but their promise to voters, they were going to stand as independent MPs, and their promise was we're going to take Gaza more seriously, even than the Labour Party is taking it.
01:03:01.000And so, for the first time in the history of British politics, we saw five members of parliament returned to the House of Commons who were explicitly loyal to a foreign entity that doesn't even exist, but not to Britain.
01:03:19.000And so, you're starting to see some cracks in this strange coalition between rainbow and crescent and star.
01:03:27.000So, I want you to build that out because we're running tight on time.
01:03:31.000Say that again, rainbow, crescent and star.
01:03:35.000So, think of rainbow as a kind of metonymy for progressivism and the crescent for Islam and the star for socialism, good old-fashioned old left socialism.
01:03:47.000And this is really this messy coalition that holds the left all across the Western political landscape.
01:03:55.000And up until now, they've operated in lockstep.
01:03:58.000I said this in my NATCON speech last July.
01:04:01.000You know, the jokes on us conservatives when we laugh at gaze for Gaza.
01:04:22.000What it means is what they're saying, what that movement and movements like it are saying, is that we hate the West more than we hate each other.
01:04:31.000And we're going to destroy the West before we turn on each other.
01:04:37.000Rainbow and Crescent will be together until we've got rid of the cross.
01:04:42.000And so, you know, in Britain, you're starting to see those cracks appearing.
01:04:46.000I think, you know, maybe there are parts of America where you're starting to see, but then, you know, Trump miraculously gets to earborn and he gets very, you know, he wins the Muslims, does very well among the Muslims.
01:04:58.000So it's more complicated with you over here.
01:05:00.000But I mean, that coalition is very fragile.
01:05:03.000And, you know, for now, it's held together by this sort of common sort of collective hatred for the oppressor, whether it's Israel or whether it's the British establishment.
01:05:13.000I have two final things I want to talk about.
01:05:15.000The first of which is broad, and then I want to talk about JD Vance at the end.
01:05:19.000The first of which is, when you come to America, what is it that you appreciate about this country that you want Americans to know as an outsider that you see that is different and unique?
01:05:30.000Well, in a strange way, coming to America is like coming to a new world, a strange and unfamiliar world where you can't speak English properly, you have all these funny habits.
01:05:44.000But for the most part, there's a sense now, particularly given the scale and speed of demographic change and churn in my corner of England, southeast of England, there's a sense of coming home.
01:06:00.000I can, you know, land in, you know, particularly somewhere like Phoenix a couple of nights ago, and I sort of, I'm surrounded by not quite my people, but I'm surrounded by the English-speaking, I'm among the English-speaking peoples.
01:06:17.000I'm, you know, I'm in the world of the Anglosphere.
01:06:21.000And that's something which now has almost a kind of nostalgia.
01:06:25.000There's a sense of, there's a sense of weird homecoming.
01:06:30.000Because I can see glimpses of the old world in the new, glimpses of the old world that are no longer, that are beginning to fade in the old world.
01:06:36.000I don't know if I'm putting this very clearly, but do you understand what I mean?
01:07:24.000So the idea behind a non-crime hate incident is if you've been, you haven't committed a crime, but somebody has got upset at something you've said, or you're sailing a bit too close to the wind on discrimination, we'll take your name and we'll record it and we'll keep it.
01:07:41.000Now, the last government did manage to reverse, it introduced it, but it managed to reverse some of the worst of that, but it's still there.
01:07:49.000And so we have these extraordinarily kind of pernicious statutes on the books, which effectively weaponize, allow the police to spend their whole time policing tweets, not streets.
01:08:01.000And what you're seeing in the police force is a sort of massive, mass demoralization.
01:08:06.000I saw three days ago, there's a 17% drop over the last year in sign-ups to the police force.
01:08:12.000Because it's a pretty thankless job now.
01:08:14.000It used to be the case that a policeman, to become a policeman, was one of the great kind of professions you could get into if you were civic-minded, pretty bright, but not an egghead like me.
01:08:38.000They just want to sit around policing tweets and checking TikTok and checking your thoughts, as one friend of mine who was arrested a few years ago was told by a policeman on his discussion.
01:08:55.000In the case of these poor women, or Adam Smith O'Connor, that your vice president, the case that your vice president so eloquently drew attention to in his brilliant Munich speech back in February, Adam Smith O'Connor, whose child was aborted and he would pray outside the abortion clinic where his son was aborted and pray silently in his head.
01:09:19.000And because he breached the buffer zones that had been imposed in the course of the last government under the ostensibly Conservative government, he was arrested for breaching those zones and for being intimidating.
01:09:30.000There's no protest, no speech, not holding a sign, praying silently.
01:09:35.000And do you believe that there is a reckoning that will come on the culture of free speech in Britain?
01:09:42.000So I think there'll be a reckoning on everything.
01:09:45.000I mean, part of the free speech crisis, you know, it's when you start talking about free speech, a society is talking about free speech, worrying about free speech, that there's probably no more free speech.
01:09:58.000We never worried about free speech when there was a we, when there was a first person plural.
01:10:06.000Because basically, 98% of the population, broadly speaking, shared a common universe of norms and conventions and manners that had built up over sedimented over centuries.
01:10:19.000And so we knew what the acceptable parameters and limits of speech were.
01:10:26.000But once you go through this extraordinary experiment, unprecedented experiment in mass demographic reconfiguration, let's just put it euphemistically, then all the norms have gone.
01:11:17.000But you also see it come through in the Christian tradition in the second century AD when these early Christian apologists are being arrested and they go to the emperor and they say, look, surely, oh emperor, you don't want me to bow the knee or burn my pinch of incense or worship you.
01:11:32.000If you wouldn't want me to do that, if you knew that my belief was being coerced, surely it's a good thing for me to kind of freely decide what I should worship.
01:11:42.000So you see this in Titullian, the first Latin church father.
01:11:46.000He's the first person to come up with the phrase freedom of religion, libertas religionis.
01:11:50.000It's actually freedom of speech is downstream of freedom of religion as a Western value.
01:11:55.000I mean, yes, it's there in Athens, but really emerges in the kind of that tussle between the early Christians and the Roman authorities.
01:12:04.000We should have freedom to worship, freedom to meet on Sundays.
01:12:08.000And that took 300 years for them to win that right.
01:12:11.000But then the freedom of speech and freedom of expression and freedom of association is a kind of secular kind of counterpart to that and downstream of it.
01:12:21.000A piece just came out that showed you that, has said that you were JD's mentor, JD Vance's mentor, our wonderful vice president of the United States, and maybe the next president of the United States.
01:12:46.000I've been learning from him since 2016 when a Texan friend of mine pressed Hillbilly Elegy into my hands two weeks before the election saying, Trump is going to win and this is why.
01:12:57.000And I remember reading that book and my mutual friend of ours, Rodre, was raving about it and did an interview with JD and the book rocketed up through the charts.
01:13:08.000So he caught my eye then and it's just a great sort of privilege and source of pride to be able to call him a friend.
01:13:16.000And we've got to know each other over the years.
01:13:20.000And that mentor line, it's just media mischief, really.
01:13:24.000So what do you see in him as a statesman?
01:13:26.000So I see somebody who is sort of wise and mature beyond his years.
01:13:32.000I think he's got a kind of a sense of calm, a sense of, I think he's just highly intelligent.
01:13:38.000You don't get that many just really high IQ politicians anymore.
01:13:59.000You know, the most interesting thing about that leak signal chat, do you remember from a few months ago?
01:14:04.000I thought the most interesting bit was JD saying something like, wait a minute, the U.S. only gets X percent, I think it was 4% of trade through the Suez Canal.
01:14:16.000The Europeans are getting, you know, several factors more.
01:14:41.000And we just don't have politicians like that.
01:14:42.000We don't have politicians whose reflex is to refract every public policy question, whether it's foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy, cultural policy, through the prism of the national interest of national preference.
01:14:57.000This is just a strange idea to the liberal mind.