The Charlie Kirk Show - Why Is Europe Choosing To Replace Itself?

00:00:03.000 My name is Charlie Kirk.

00:00:05.000 I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic.

00:00:11.000 My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth.

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00:00:41.000 Most important decision I ever made in my life.

00:00:43.000 And I encourage you to do the same.

00:00:45.000 Here I am.

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00:00:48.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:49.000 Here we go.

00:00:56.000 The 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.

00:01:09.000 I 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.

00:01:21.000 Good to be with you, Charlie.

00:01:23.000 Dr. Orr, great to see you.

00:01:24.000 First, I want to just, you know, you sat through the presentation.

00:01:28.000 You've been around all of this as a Brit, as a professor.

00:01:34.000 What is your take on this whole thing we have going on here?

00:01:37.000 Well, 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.

00:01:49.000 There'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.

00:01:57.000 And I thought to myself this morning, you really could say that you are changing the world.

00:02:02.000 As America goes, so goes the world.

00:02:04.000 And that's what you're doing.

00:02:06.000 You'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.

00:02:16.000 This is a huge problem for us on the right in Britain.

00:02:20.000 We're working very hard on it.

00:02:21.000 And I just felt both envious, but also excited because I thought we can bottle some Kirk juice and take it over to Britain.

00:02:31.000 And we need to work out what the DNA is and we need to try to replicate it as best we can.

00:02:35.000 It'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.

00:02:44.000 You can't just copy and paste everything that you're doing.

00:02:46.000 Of course, we have a very different constitutional setup, very different electoral dynamics, very different challenges in many ways.

00:02:52.000 But I think philosophically, we're very much there.

00:02:55.000 We're very much on the same page.

00:02:56.000 That is to say, we want to work out not so much what the politics of left and right is.

00:03:01.000 I think that's the sort of the politics, the philosophy of what I call the long 20th century, 1914 to 2016.

00:03:07.000 I think the long 20th century ended in 2016, and the politics of left and right ended in 2016.

00:03:12.000 And we're now talking about the politics of national preference, the politics of national interest.

00:03:18.000 This 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.

00:03:24.000 So what do you mean by that, the long 20th century?

00:03:27.000 Well, so historians like to talk about this, that, you know, periodizing in history is always very, very, very difficult.

00:03:33.000 And, you know, it turns out that human development doesn't always obey neat time periods.

00:03:40.000 But of course, we know what we mean by the 20th century.

00:03:43.000 But I think there are these sort of, history doesn't quite obey those neat, kind of neat, even divisions.

00:03:49.000 And so historians will sometimes talk about the long 19th century that sort of began roughly in 1815 and probably ended in 1914, right?

00:03:57.000 1815 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.

00:04:07.000 And 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.

00:04:25.000 Was that Brexit plus Trump?

00:04:27.000 Is that why you think 2016 was the year that began the 21st century?

00:04:31.000 I think that's right.

00:04:32.000 I think it's always easy to conflate the two phenomena.

00:04:34.000 They are distinct phenomena in lots of ways, but there's lots of overlaps too.

00:04:38.000 And I think that it really marks a moment of change in the West.

00:04:42.000 And it's a very convenient point.

00:04:44.000 It's not just Brexit and Trump, it's also the rise of pro-nation, national conservative movements all across Europe.

00:04:49.000 You're seeing it with Volks in Spain. 0.72

00:04:51.000 You're seeing it with Chager in Portugal.

00:04:53.000 You're seeing it with AFD in Germany.

00:04:56.000 You're seeing it with the Rassemble Mont Nationale in France, the Fratelli dell'Italia in Austria.

00:05:02.000 You're seeing it in Italy, I'm sorry, and in Austria as well, all over Europe, Vides in Hungary, and going at different speeds.

00:05:09.000 And one of the challenges is that conservatives are always trying to conserve what is our own.

00:05:13.000 And so it's actually very difficult to form, what did the communists used to have, a commintern.

00:05:18.000 It's very difficult to have a con intern because Marx could say, workers of the world unite.

00:05:24.000 The progressives can say wokesters of the world unite, right? 0.89

00:05:27.000 It's a fundamentally transnational ideology that's very, very powerful.

00:05:31.000 This is a movement, something that moves in lockstep.

00:05:33.000 If we're conserving our own nations, it's much harder to have that sense of international solidarity.

00:05:38.000 But I think various movements are trying to catalyze that.

00:05:40.000 And the National Conservatism Movement, which I'm proudly the chair of in the UK, is helping to do that.

00:05:46.000 And so, yeah, that's a big challenge.

00:05:49.000 So what do you think led towards that national conservatism moment?

00:05:54.000 And let's go a step back and also take a moment to introduce yourself.

00:05:58.000 You teach the Western canon at Cambridge, correct?

00:06:03.000 I wouldn't say I'm not allowed to teach the Western canon.

00:06:06.000 It would be sort of too big.

00:06:08.000 To give you an example, I teach a program in moral philosophy from Plato through to Nietzsche.

00:06:14.000 That includes Aristotle, it includes Augustine, including Aquinas, Kant, Hume.

00:06:19.000 So as much of the kind of classic Western philosophers as I can fit in.

00:06:24.000 And then I also teach an MFIL program.

00:06:27.000 But broadly speaking, yes, I teach Western philosophers without the, but not through the prism and not through the lens of kind of critical theory.

00:06:35.000 I try not to politicize my teaching in any way.

00:06:38.000 Of 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.

00:06:53.000 But yes, I see myself very much as trying to pass on what is best in the Western tradition.

00:06:59.000 I think really universities have only three primary purposes.

00:07:03.000 That is to pursue the truth, to preserve the truth, and to pass on the truth.

00:07:09.000 And then those are the kind of, you know, it's a little bit crude, but those are the kind of the three P's. 0.96

00:07:13.000 Those are the sort of three, that's the way I sort of think about what I'm doing.

00:07:16.000 So 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.

00:07:38.000 So with that backdrop, post-World War II, there was somewhat of a new world order that was established, the neoliberal world order.

00:07:48.000 And it was one that was based on free trade, that was based on both American dominance, but also kind of NATO expansionism, international cooperation.

00:08:02.000 Some could call it globalism.

00:08:04.000 And liberalism seemed to be an inevitability.

00:08:08.000 The famous book, End of History by Francis Fukuyama was, what, 1880s, if I'm not mistaken?

00:08:12.000 1992.

00:08:13.000 Okay, 1992.

00:08:14.000 Where he basically said, this is it.

00:08:17.000 We've reached it.

00:08:18.000 Like, all the ideas that have been tried have led us to this moment.

00:08:22.000 Classical liberalism, whatever you want to call it, liberalism is the best it's going to get.

00:08:27.000 And congratulations, humanity, history is over.

00:08:31.000 What 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.

00:08:47.000 Yeah.

00:08:48.000 Well, 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.

00:08:59.000 But 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.

00:09:05.000 And 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.

00:09:23.000 And this is particularly, this is what he calls the thumos. 0.89

00:09:27.000 This 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.

00:09:43.000 And Plato says you've got to have all three of these in check.

00:09:46.000 And 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. 1.00

00:09:55.000 But that thumos is not going anyway.

00:09:56.000 It's not going away.

00:09:57.000 It will come back.

00:09:59.000 And so he's not quite as naive as that.

00:10:03.000 And I think what's happened, you know, that you might think of the quest for thumb as the search for identity.

00:10:08.000 In 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.

00:10:17.000 And 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.

00:10:34.000 We're rooted human beings.

00:10:36.000 We're related to what's around us.

00:10:38.000 We're conservative about what we love most, about what's closest to us.

00:10:41.000 And that's never going to go away.

00:10:43.000 And we've got to face up to reality as it is given to us and not as we would like it to be.

00:10:48.000 But what went wrong with the liberal project?

00:10:50.000 Well, 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.

00:10:58.000 The basic idea is that human beings are born into the world with completely independent, completely blank, completely blank slate.

00:11:07.000 This is the blocks of view of the tabular rasa or the white page.

00:11:10.000 And we're completely free of all unchosen obligations.

00:11:14.000 And there can be no obligations that we don't ourselves choose.

00:11:18.000 And this is just a complete fantasy.

00:11:21.000 I don't think it's an accident that the great liberal philosophers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant never had any children.

00:11:28.000 Anyone who's had a child will understand the radical nature of dependency.

00:11:33.000 That most basic bond.

00:11:34.000 We're born into the world with that most, literally, with a physical bond.

00:11:38.000 We're attached to a physical bond to our mothers.

00:11:41.000 And so that was always going to be a problem.

00:11:44.000 That we're not blank slates.

00:11:46.000 We are connected.

00:11:47.000 We flourish most when we're connected to what is closest to us.

00:11:52.000 And it's not natural to love what is closest to us.

00:11:55.000 I 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.

00:12:09.000 And I opened, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to say to them.

00:12:11.000 The organizers hadn't been very clear.

00:12:13.000 So I found myself beginning the session by saying, Who here has got the best mum in the world?

00:12:22.000 And every hand went up.

00:12:26.000 And they looked around and they started laughing at each other.

00:12:29.000 And I said, Notice what you're not doing right now.

00:12:32.000 You're not arguing with each other.

00:12:35.000 You're not discussing what are the proper optimality criteria of being a mother.

00:12:42.000 You're not.

00:12:43.000 That would be a crazy, you know, inhuman thing to do.

00:12:48.000 It's a totally natural thing to think that your mum is the best mum in the world.

00:12:53.000 And then I said, who here lives in the best country in the world?

00:12:58.000 And everybody's hands went up.

00:13:00.000 And 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.

00:13:11.000 Somebody who asks for an argument has had what the philosopher Bernard Williams calls one thought too many.

00:13:19.000 The 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?

00:13:35.000 That person has had one thought too many.

00:13:37.000 It is a totally natural disposition of every human to love what is closest to their own.

00:13:43.000 Aquinas sees this.

00:13:45.000 Aristotle sees this at the beginning of one of the greatest works of politics ever written, book one, page one of Aristotle's Politics.

00:13:52.000 He says, How do we think about how we get on?

00:13:55.000 How do we think about the life of the polis, ta politica?

00:13:59.000 He says, well, you know, we're born into the world and we're dependent upon each other.

00:14:03.000 Male, female, men and women will bond.

00:14:05.000 Then they will have, then they will procreate.

00:14:08.000 There'll be a family, a household, an oikos, but that won't be enough. 1.00

00:14:12.000 That will be enough for daily needs.

00:14:14.000 But it won't be enough first of, you know, non-daily, more than daily needs.

00:14:17.000 So you'll have a village, and the village will come together, but that won't be enough either.

00:14:21.000 You will need to grow into a polis for self-defense and so on, a city-state, as it were, a country, a nation.

00:14:29.000 And 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.

00:14:48.000 And I think that's still the basic way of thinking about things.

00:14:51.000 I think it's really what you see in Aquinas.

00:14:53.000 I think it's what you see in the Bible as well.

00:14:55.000 Wow, there's so much there to think about.

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00:16:04.000 So 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.

00:16:15.000 Why does Europe not vote or believe that vocally in any of their politics?

00:16:22.000 Let's now center our conversation around continental Europe and then we'll make our way to your home.

00:16:27.000 If I may say so, continental Europe is a husk of its former self.

00:16:31.000 It's an open-air museum.

00:16:33.000 It's sad.

00:16:34.000 It's depressing.

00:16:35.000 There are pockets, obviously, of joy and of history, but I think you would agree, Doctor, or it's not what it used to be.

00:16:41.000 How did that happen?

00:16:42.000 World War II, the West won, right? 0.98

00:16:46.000 And now we look in 2025, Europe is an unrecognizable continent in more ways than one.

00:16:52.000 Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.

00:16:53.000 And it would take a very, very kind of long, long conversation to really get to the bottom of it.

00:16:59.000 I mean, one book I'd really recommend on this is actually by an American, Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.

00:17:05.000 This actually goes way back.

00:17:07.000 It's 2009, which is a long time considering what's happened in the intervening period.

00:17:11.000 But I think Caldwell really sort of, it's an incredibly prescient book.

00:17:15.000 And he starts to see the sort of conditions of the unraveling kind of kicking in.

00:17:21.000 And you're right.

00:17:22.000 You know, after the Second World War, the French had what they call the trend glorieuse, the 30 glorious years.

00:17:28.000 In 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.

00:17:40.000 And 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? 0.66

00:17:59.000 We know what we're for.

00:18:01.000 We're for freedom.

00:18:02.000 And this is something that is pretty uncomplicated and it's going to stitch us together as a kind of, as the West.

00:18:09.000 It was easy to think about the West and it was easy to think about the rest.

00:18:12.000 And 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?

00:18:22.000 What is our story?

00:18:23.000 What are we for?

00:18:24.000 There's a fascinating moment in 2004 when the European Union is trying to work out a constitution.

00:18:31.000 In the end, it fails because it can't agree on anything really.

00:18:34.000 And there's a huge debate about what goes in the preamble of the Constitution.

00:18:39.000 How do we set out?

00:18:40.000 Right at the beginning of the Constitution, we, the European Union, who are we?

00:18:44.000 What makes us we?

00:18:44.000 What makes us a we?

00:18:46.000 They said, well, our Hellenic inheritance, Greece and Rome, the classical inheritance, yes.

00:18:51.000 The Enlightenment inheritance as well.

00:18:54.000 No mention of the Hebraic or the Christian inheritance.

00:18:57.000 This was seen to be something that was low status, not something that wanted to be admitted.

00:19:03.000 John Paul II, as is right towards the end of his life, 2004, and got involved, and some Italian politicians got involved.

00:19:10.000 There's a huge fight about it.

00:19:11.000 And 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.

00:19:28.000 That was gone.

00:19:29.000 And 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?

00:19:42.000 What are we for?

00:19:43.000 Where do we come from?

00:19:45.000 And 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.

00:19:55.000 Wait for this.

00:19:56.000 For 100 million Euros a year, the European Parliament moves from Brussels to Strasbourg.

00:20:03.000 I think it's every fortnight.

00:20:05.000 Back and forth.

00:20:06.000 How long is a fortnight?

00:20:07.000 Sorry, you don't have fortnights over here?

00:20:09.000 It's 14 days, two weeks.

00:20:10.000 We do.

00:20:11.000 I just turned around.

00:20:11.000 Yeah, fortnight.

00:20:13.000 And just think of that.

00:20:14.000 They can't kind of couldn't resolve something as basic as that.

00:20:18.000 But they move back and forth.

00:20:19.000 They 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.

00:20:29.000 That's when you go to Brussels.

00:20:30.000 So all these crazy things, crazy sort of features of the kind of European settlement. 0.99

00:20:36.000 And there's a kind of democratic deficit, you might say.

00:20:39.000 I used to play this parlor game when I'm now at Cambridge.

00:20:42.000 I was at Oxford in 2016, just ahead of the Brexit vote.

00:20:45.000 And 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.

00:20:56.000 And I used to ask them, who's our MEP?

00:21:01.000 Who's our member of the European Parliament?

00:21:04.000 Like, which, who represents us?

00:21:06.000 Who represents Oxford and the surrounding areas in Brussels, Strasbourg?

00:21:12.000 And no one could answer.

00:21:16.000 No one knew.

00:21:17.000 Not even the professors of politics.

00:21:20.000 And 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.

00:21:31.000 Nobody voted for them.

00:21:33.000 Nobody had any reason to know who they were.

00:21:35.000 And so that has been a huge problem.

00:21:38.000 That 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.

00:21:48.000 That's really been, it's been a disaster.

00:21:50.000 And I hoped that in 2016, Brexit would be the first brick in the wall, that it would catalyse a kind of domino effect.

00:21:58.000 That 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.

00:22:09.000 It would be much more dramatic, there'd be much more dramatic consequences if a Euro country split away.

00:22:17.000 But the Euro has been a disaster for the countries who have been members of it.

00:22:21.000 I mean, Italy, for example, has scarcely had any GDP growth.

00:22:24.000 I think it started to pick up recently.

00:22:25.000 Really, for the first 20 years of its being part of the Euro, effectively nothing at all.

00:22:31.000 Greece and Spain, youth unemployment was through the roof.

00:22:34.000 Effectively, you've got the Spanish currency, the Greek currency, effectively being shackled to the German Deutschmark.

00:22:41.000 And so the Germans weren't complaining because the currency was artificially depreciated, so their exports were more attractive.

00:22:47.000 And so it was all this kind of elaborate Ponzi scheme, which at some point is going to unravel.

00:22:52.000 And 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.

00:23:03.000 Those two are absolutely part and parcel.

00:23:05.000 And I never understood this.

00:23:07.000 You can hate FIFA and love football, as I've often said, or soccer, I should say.

00:23:13.000 You can hate FIFA, like the worldwide organization for soccer, and you can love soccer.

00:23:17.000 In fact, you can hate, I hate FIFA because I love football.

00:23:20.000 I don't like what FIFA is doing to international football.

00:23:23.000 I don't like the corruption.

00:23:24.000 I want the game to be a richer game.

00:23:25.000 And I think it's the same with the European Union.

00:23:29.000 And it's had this sort of deadly effect on our sense of what it is to be European.

00:23:34.000 What explains the hyper-secularization of Europe post-World War II?

00:23:39.000 Why did we see such a dramatic drop-off of church rates?

00:23:42.000 Is it as simple as they saw tragedy and suffering and nihilism took the void?

00:23:48.000 Because Europe has had depressingly low church rates and they just keep on finding new lows every decade.

00:23:56.000 What percentage of people in Europe do you think regularly attend church?

00:24:00.000 It varies quite a bit from country to country, but it is shockingly low relative to, certainly relative to the United States.

00:24:07.000 So, you know, in Italy, it's now very, very, very low.

00:24:10.000 I think it's certainly well below 5%.

00:24:14.000 I mean, you know, religious adherence is just a very difficult thing to measure.

00:24:17.000 You know, is actually going to church, does it count as sort of being a Christian or being a churchgoer?

00:24:25.000 You know, in Britain, you know, what caused it? 0.86

00:24:27.000 I mean, it may be the opposite, I think.

00:24:29.000 I 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.

00:24:44.000 And 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.

00:24:58.000 We see a lot of that imported from California and elsewhere.

00:25:04.000 And I suppose the sort of something, you know, there's something fashionable about religious skepticism that was certainly true in the 60s.

00:25:12.000 If 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.

00:25:19.000 There was something very, a lot of cachet in being an atheist.

00:25:23.000 You know, I'm tempted to think that new atheism was just a politically correct way to be skeptical of Islam. 0.94

00:25:30.000 I think that the timing works quite well there.

00:25:32.000 But 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.

00:25:46.000 Bible purchases has gone up by 87% over four years.

00:25:50.000 Now, it's from a pretty low base, but something is happening out there.

00:25:57.000 It'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.

00:26:07.000 And I know you Americans have a different way of putting it.

00:26:10.000 No, it's interesting.

00:26:13.000 So let's now take our attention to your country, which I had the opportunity to visit, and you hosted us wonderfully in Cambridge.

00:26:22.000 Great to have you.

00:26:24.000 Quite the ambush.

00:26:25.000 So not by you, but by Cambridge.

00:26:28.000 But we survived it.

00:26:29.000 More than survived it.

00:26:31.000 Yeah, I think we triumphed, some could say.

00:26:34.000 And you were so sweet and so kind throughout that entire process.

00:26:38.000 So the United Kingdom or Britain or England, whatever word we want to give it, voted for Brexit in 2016.

00:26:48.000 Where are British politics today?

00:26:51.000 What is the status of British politics?

00:26:53.000 Yeah, well, it's a great question.

00:26:56.000 You 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.

00:27:15.000 It's a very just, you know, seemingly an entirely uncontroversial principle.

00:27:20.000 But it was the biggest vote we've had in the history in British voting history.

00:27:28.000 And 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.

00:27:42.000 What is it that makes a we?

00:27:45.000 And what was going on in Brexit was a kind of inchoate kind of cry that we are losing that sense of who we are.

00:27:53.000 That 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.

00:28:07.000 And every time, its leaders have effectively ignored that clearly expressed will.

00:28:14.000 And 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.

00:28:26.000 What actually happened?

00:28:27.000 In the last five years, one in what have we had?

00:28:32.000 Is one in 27 people in Britain have arrived in the last five years.

00:28:43.000 One in 60 arrived in the last 18 months.

00:28:48.000 In the first 25 years of this century, gross immigration, you're talking 12 to 15 million people.

00:28:56.000 That's roughly four to five times as many people who arrived on our shores in the first thousand years of our history.

00:29:06.000 It'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. 0.99

00:29:26.000 Praise God for that.

00:29:27.000 And indeed.

00:29:28.000 And 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.

00:29:40.000 So what's happening in British politics?

00:29:41.000 Well, quick update.

00:29:43.000 Last year, July 2024, we saw the loveless landslide.

00:29:47.000 So 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.

00:30:02.000 Something like 34% of the vote share.

00:30:05.000 It was, you know, the sofa won.

00:30:07.000 I mean, the couch won that election.

00:30:09.000 It was a very low, very low turnout.

00:30:11.000 Nobody, it was an apathetic election.

00:30:13.000 Nobody seemed to care.

00:30:15.000 Fast forward now, you know, we're just over a year in.

00:30:19.000 Back in the first of May of this year, we had the local elections, which are a pretty good proxy.

00:30:23.000 It's a bit like the midterms, and not a bad proxy for what the country's mood is.

00:30:29.000 And I think Labour gets goes from 34% to 20%.

00:30:35.000 The Conservative Party goes down to 15%, extinction level, almost an unprecedented low.

00:30:42.000 And 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.

00:31:06.000 That's they were at 14% a year ago, and that's going up and up and up.

00:31:12.000 And 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.

00:31:25.000 Well, 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.

00:31:37.000 We'll have some more proxy elections.

00:31:40.000 Then there'll be a general election in 2029, the last point that Kier Starmer can call it.

00:31:45.000 But my sense is that Nigel Farage is on track to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

00:31:52.000 That deserves some applause.

00:31:54.000 So let's examine that deeper and more thoroughly.

00:31:58.000 Some people in the audience will hear, wait, wait, hold on.

00:32:00.000 The Conservative Party, don't we like them?

00:32:02.000 Explain what it means to be part of the Conservative Party.

00:32:07.000 That'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.

00:32:18.000 Yes, that's right.

00:32:19.000 I 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?

00:32:28.000 You know, is it to be a Reaganite?

00:32:30.000 Is it to be a fusionist?

00:32:31.000 Is it to be a Trumpist?

00:32:33.000 Is it to be a kind of compassionate Bushite conservative, whatever it might be?

00:32:37.000 So, 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.

00:32:48.000 But roughly speaking, the Conservative Party was in power from 2010 to 2024.

00:32:54.000 And all of the good things that it delivered, it delivered by accident.

00:33:00.000 It granted the referendum on Brexit in 2015, not expecting in its manifesto.

00:33:05.000 It didn't expect to win in 2015.

00:33:07.000 It thought there would be another coalition and that the referendum would be scrapped by their coalition partners, but they won almost not expecting to.

00:33:15.000 They granted reluctantly the referendum.

00:33:17.000 They campaigned against Brexit.

00:33:19.000 That was the official government position.

00:33:21.000 Then they lost.

00:33:22.000 The government fell.

00:33:23.000 A new government came in, headed up incredibly by Theresa May, a prime minister who'd voted against Brexit.

00:33:30.000 A prime minister who'd voted against Brexit was tasked by sort of the internal party political dynamics of the Conservative Party to deliver Brexit.

00:33:41.000 And sure enough, it was a complete catastrophe.

00:33:43.000 That's when I cut up my membership card.

00:33:47.000 To be conservative in 2016, 2017 was quite straightforward.

00:33:50.000 It's just, you've got one job.

00:33:52.000 17.4 million Brits have asked us to do this one thing.

00:33:58.000 And right now, that's all that we want you to do.

00:34:00.000 And they couldn't do it.

00:34:01.000 Couldn't do it, couldn't do it.

00:34:02.000 Finally, the May government falls in the summer of 2019 after a spectacular defeat at the European elections.

00:34:09.000 Those European elections are good for something, it turns out.

00:34:12.000 Because 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.

00:34:22.000 That is never, it was inconceivable, just unthinkable.

00:34:26.000 And that spelt the end of the May Party and Boris Johnson takes over and finally managed to get Brexit over the line.

00:34:33.000 Then the plague strikes and COVID and lockdown and so on and so forth.

00:34:36.000 Spending goes through the roof and we've got very, very serious economic problems, headaches to worry about.

00:34:44.000 So being conservative has been, it's been very, very hard to kind of keep a track on what it means to be conservative.

00:34:50.000 I suppose for Brits, the British Conservative Party is just to be conservative is just to be a pragmatist, just to be pragmatic.

00:34:58.000 But as, you know, I remember Larry Arnke, he passed through, a mutual friend of mine and Charlie's came through.

00:35:05.000 He said that the trouble with pragmatism, James, is it doesn't work.

00:35:10.000 And it's true. 0.56

00:35:11.000 You've got it.

00:35:12.000 You can't.

00:35:13.000 GK Chesterton says the pragmatist's chief end is to be something more than a pragmatist.

00:35:18.000 If all you're prizing is efficiency, then it doesn't, then what is efficiency?

00:35:23.000 Efficiency.

00:35:24.000 Towards what?

00:35:25.000 It's got to be a problem.

00:35:26.000 You have to aim your destination.

00:35:27.000 You've got to have a telos.

00:35:28.000 You've got to have a horizon.

00:35:30.000 And I think for years and years and years, the Conservatives' horizon was just to win.

00:35:33.000 We just need to win.

00:35:34.000 And they were very good at winning.

00:35:35.000 They're the most successful.

00:35:36.000 Does that sound like a Republican Party that we know of?

00:35:40.000 And the Conservative, British Conservative Party is the most successful election-winning machine in the history of politics, anywhere in the world.

00:35:48.000 But, you know, I think that may now be coming to an end.

00:35:52.000 This is Lane Schoenberger, Chief Investment Officer and founding partner of YReFi.

00:35:57.000 It has been an honor and a privilege to partner with Turning Point and for Charlie to endorse us.

00:36:03.000 His endorsement means the world to us, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Turning Point for years to come.

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00:37:01.000 So then, so that defines the Conservative Party.

00:37:05.000 Reform, which is Nigel Farage's party, is growing.

00:37:09.000 How, 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?

00:37:22.000 Well, it's a great question.

00:37:22.000 Yeah.

00:37:24.000 I mean, you know, it's very hard to know with so many people coming in.

00:37:28.000 It's very hard to know who they are.

00:37:30.000 What do they believe?

00:37:31.000 What do they think?

00:37:33.000 Let alone working out strategies of integration or assimilation.

00:37:38.000 So what's happening now, I mean, so we've got illegal immigration.

00:37:42.000 So 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.

00:37:58.000 And so there's an immediate, now, those numbers are tiny relative to the levels of legal migration, which are huge.

00:38:06.000 But somehow it concentrates the mind, this fact that these people are coming over.

00:38:13.000 We don't know nothing about them.

00:38:14.000 Most of them are young men of fighting age, very few women, very few children.

00:38:18.000 Very hard to believe that they are actually refugees fleeing persecution and warfare.

00:38:24.000 I mean, France is not a great country right now.

00:38:27.000 You might not like it very much, but is it in the grip of civil war and widespread urban conflict?

00:38:33.000 I mean, yeah, only in August, really.

00:38:36.000 And, you know, actually, Calais is a pretty nice place to be.

00:38:41.000 But that's what's going on.

00:38:42.000 And so the government doesn't know what to do with these people.

00:38:44.000 The Tories didn't know what to do with them.

00:38:46.000 The Labour Party didn't know what to do with them.

00:38:48.000 We are wedded and kind of enmeshed in all of these complex webs of international obligations, treaty obligations.

00:38:56.000 There's a foreign court in Strasbourg that has jurisdiction over who we can and can't admit.

00:39:01.000 Wasn't Brexit supposed to fix that?

00:39:03.000 Well, is there something that is worth clarifying here?

00:39:06.000 So there are two courts.

00:39:07.000 There's two European courts.

00:39:08.000 There's the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

00:39:10.000 And then there's the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

00:39:14.000 And we did not leave the European Court of Human Rights.

00:39:16.000 That 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?

00:39:32.000 And actually, it was very hard.

00:39:33.000 The Allied prosecutors found it very difficult to argue.

00:39:37.000 Jackson, the US prosecutor, and David Maxwell Fife found it very difficult to say, well, it's not clear what laws you have broken.

00:39:44.000 I mean, technically, it's not clear that the Holocaust, for example, was against the law.

00:39:49.000 The Nazis were scrupulous legislators. 0.93

00:39:52.000 So there was this sense we have to have this convention in order to ensure that this never happens again.

00:39:58.000 And that's different from the European Union.

00:40:00.000 The European Union doesn't come along till later.

00:40:02.000 And we still remain under the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court.

00:40:05.000 And 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.

00:40:28.000 I 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.

00:40:47.000 They'd be likely to be political prisoners, or they'd like to be victims of political persecution.

00:40:51.000 It's quite extraordinary.

00:40:52.000 You 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.

00:41:01.000 Or Article 8, Right to a Family Life, which is incredibly open basket human right.

00:41:07.000 You can say, no, I just feel I'm going to be, you know, I'm gay.

00:41:11.000 And Syria's not going to like that.

00:41:15.000 Okay, fine.

00:41:17.000 You're not going back.

00:41:18.000 And you're not going to win that.

00:41:21.000 You're not going to win that.

00:41:23.000 No 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.

00:41:31.000 It's the rule of lawyers.

00:41:33.000 Is Nigel thinking about ending that jurisdiction?

00:41:36.000 And what is he running on in regards to immigration?

00:41:39.000 So one of the key questions is: do we get out of this court?

00:41:43.000 How do we get out of the court?

00:41:45.000 In my view, if you want to really get Brexit done, you have to finish the job.

00:41:51.000 We have to remove ourselves from the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court.

00:41:54.000 That means rescinding Tony Blair's 1998 Human Rights Act.

00:42:00.000 But 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.

00:42:15.000 Contrast that.

00:42:16.000 Can you build into that for a second?

00:42:18.000 I don't want to just sit by that.

00:42:19.000 Let's just think about this.

00:42:20.000 So 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.

00:42:34.000 And we work it out through concrete quarrels between particular neighbors, between contractual disputes, or in the case of the criminal law.

00:42:41.000 The European model, this is a little bit crude, but broadly, I think, broadly kind of plausible.

00:42:45.000 The 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.

00:43:01.000 And 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.

00:43:10.000 We 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.

00:43:18.000 Whereas 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.

00:43:26.000 So, I mean, one way of thinking about this is we have an Offenses Against the Person Act, 1861.

00:43:32.000 And we have these words, these lovely earthy Saxon words like murder and manslaughter, grievous bodily harm, actual bodily harm.

00:43:45.000 And I sometimes joke with my students, you know, which do you think is the more kind of morally accurate way?

00:43:50.000 What's the kind of right moral grammar in these two scenarios?

00:43:54.000 Peter murdered Lucy or Peter breached Lucy's right to life.

00:44:03.000 And I think, you know, kind of the common law bottom-up way of thinking is just what is more accurate.

00:44:07.000 He murdered her, or maybe it was manslaughter, diminished responsibility, whatever it might be.

00:44:12.000 Whereas 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.

00:44:24.000 And it's very difficult, it turns out, to reconcile all these different rights.

00:44:27.000 It's intentionally confusing.

00:44:29.000 Exactly.

00:44:29.000 Exactly right.

00:44:30.000 It's a feature, not a bug.

00:44:32.000 I think it has turned out to be a feature, not a bug.

00:44:35.000 And 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.

00:44:52.000 Because 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.

00:45:04.000 Like this is the basic idea of kind of Treaty of West Valia, 1648.

00:45:08.000 And so we've got to be agnostic about the underlying capital R right.

00:45:12.000 Because if we're not agnostic about it, then we'll start killing each other.

00:45:15.000 It'll be a kind of, you know, hobbesium, war of war against all. 0.99

00:45:18.000 So what we say is every individual has a right to determine what is right.

00:45:22.000 And 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.

00:45:35.000 And it's impossible to do that when you've got these competing, conflicting, conflicting claims, conflicting demands.

00:45:41.000 So that's so helpful.

00:45:44.000 The 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?

00:45:59.000 Get even metaphysical if you have to here.

00:46:02.000 It is confusing to me and to the audience.

00:46:05.000 What is it?

00:46:06.000 I mean, Paris, Brussels, London, these are unrecognizable cities, and it's being done voluntarily.

00:46:14.000 Why?

00:46:15.000 Who's voting for this?

00:46:16.000 What is their argument?

00:46:18.000 So increasingly, they're not voting for it.

00:46:20.000 So 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.

00:46:30.000 But it is taking a long time, and it's a good question.

00:46:32.000 Why has it taken so long?

00:46:34.000 I 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.

00:46:43.000 I mean, you see this in France, it's present in Britain.

00:46:47.000 There's a sense that we wronged the world, we invaded the world, now we need to invite the world.

00:46:54.000 That's the idea.

00:46:54.000 And you see this, there's even this sort of guilt dynamics with Germany, even though Germany were useless imperialists.

00:47:01.000 I mean, they were absolutely terrible.

00:47:02.000 I think they had Namibia, but maybe the problem of the 20th century is they feel they missed.

00:47:07.000 Namibia is actually a great country.

00:47:08.000 And is it an underrated city?

00:47:11.000 Now it is, but they didn't actually have much of it.

00:47:13.000 They didn't have to take care of it.

00:47:14.000 They felt they lost out in the 19th century.

00:47:15.000 They were terrible.

00:47:16.000 They were scrambled for Africa. 0.62

00:47:17.000 So 20th century, now it's our turn in our own backyard.

00:47:19.000 I don't know, that's speculative.

00:47:21.000 But I remember in 2015, after Merkel announced she would have opened up the gates, Wir Schaffen das.

00:47:28.000 We can do this.

00:47:30.000 And she was making policy.

00:47:32.000 That's one of the most consequential policies in the history of Europe in living memory.

00:47:39.000 It'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.

00:47:53.000 And she's almost changing her mind in real time.

00:47:55.000 And in 2015, she opens up the gates of Europe.

00:47:58.000 Effectively, 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.

00:48:17.000 And so the trains would be rolling into Munich, and there would be big signs in German saying simply atonement.

00:48:27.000 Atonement.

00:48:28.000 80 years on, 70 years on.

00:48:32.000 This is how we atone for our sins.

00:48:35.000 And I think there's a specific German version of that.

00:48:38.000 There's a British version of that.

00:48:39.000 There's a French version of that that explains those first ways.

00:48:41.000 So that would be the first answer.

00:48:42.000 And can I just interject before my view is that when you don't have Christianity, you don't know how to deal with guilt.

00:48:48.000 And so you come up with these strange counterfeit ways.

00:48:51.000 Because in Christianity, we go to the cross, we go to Jesus.

00:48:54.000 In secularism, you invite a bunch of Muslims.

00:48:57.000 I think that's a very subtle point.

00:48:59.000 I 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.

00:49:04.000 No, 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.

00:49:25.000 But you had a second one that I interrupted you.

00:49:27.000 So no no thank you.

00:49:27.000 It's a very very very astute point.

00:49:29.000 Thank you Charlie.

00:49:30.000 That second point is it's just the raw economics.

00:49:32.000 So the idea is you know the dogma in the Treasury, the finance department in Britain is we've got to just keep the Ponzi scheme going.

00:49:40.000 We've got to just keep the GDP.

00:49:44.000 The pie has to keep getting bigger.

00:49:46.000 Even if it means that the slices of the pie keep getting smaller.

00:49:50.000 And this is a dogma in finance ministries all across Europe.

00:49:54.000 So it's just this Ponzi scheme.

00:49:56.000 We're not having kids.

00:49:57.000 We're aborting hundreds of thousands of them.

00:50:00.000 And there's a demographic collapse, all kinds of demographic collapse winter all across Europe already.

00:50:06.000 It's already here.

00:50:07.000 It's here in Britain.

00:50:09.000 It's certainly happening in Britain.

00:50:10.000 And 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.

00:50:22.000 So we basically have 27 million taxpayers, 9 million out of work, 6 million public sector workers, 13 million pensioners.

00:50:29.000 So that ratio, and that ratio is going to get a lot worse.

00:50:32.000 Pensioners are retirees. 0.57

00:50:34.000 Sorry, that's right.

00:50:34.000 Pensioners are retirees.

00:50:36.000 And so those sort of dependency ratios of taxpayers to non-taxpayers is going to get worse and worse and worse.

00:50:42.000 So the idea is if we can just, you know, we can kind of import people who can contribute somewhat to our national economy.

00:50:50.000 In fact, it turns out they're net drains on our national economy.

00:50:53.000 But that's been one of the myths.

00:50:55.000 I 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.

00:51:01.000 And the way I've thinking about this the other day is in the context of the transgenderism debate.

00:51:07.000 And 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. 0.86

00:51:15.000 So with transgenderism, the problem is, look, if anyone can become a woman, what is a woman? 0.99

00:51:25.000 What is it to be a woman? 1.00

00:51:26.000 If subjective self-declaration of any human being is, we've lost our definitional distinctions.

00:51:33.000 And I think there's the same problem with what we might call transnationalism.

00:51:37.000 If anyone can become an Englishman, what is an Englishman?

00:51:40.000 If anyone can become an American, what is an American? 0.78

00:51:46.000 We'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.

00:52:04.000 And that doesn't mean that we can't welcome people in.

00:52:06.000 I mean, the model I have for this is the book of Ruth.

00:52:10.000 That very short book in the Old Testament.

00:52:12.000 And that's, I think, a perfect model.

00:52:15.000 What does Ruth do? 0.94

00:52:16.000 She's a Moabite. 1.00

00:52:17.000 She's not an Israelite. 0.61

00:52:18.000 But what does she do? 1.00

00:52:20.000 Her husband dies.

00:52:21.000 She says to her, look, where you go, I will go.

00:52:26.000 Where you lodge, I will lodge.

00:52:28.000 Boaz, right?

00:52:30.000 Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.

00:52:35.000 And she shows humility, she integrates herself, she works the fields, she's loyal.

00:52:43.000 And the interesting thing, I noticed this, even to the end of the book, she doesn't become Ruth the Israelite.

00:52:50.000 She's still Ruth.

00:52:51.000 So her identity is still there.

00:52:53.000 So she's incorporated into the people of Israel, but she's still a Moabite, a Moabites. 1.00

00:52:59.000 And we can't even have that conversation.

00:53:01.000 We're not even, you know, we have no idea what it is.

00:53:04.000 You're not allowed to say what is it to be an Israelite.

00:53:07.000 You're not allowed to say what is it to be an Englishman.

00:53:11.000 You know, there was somebody the other day who just said, you know, the concept of Englishness and English identity is evil.

00:53:17.000 One of Tony Blair's speechwriters, John Reynolds, he deleted the tweet.

00:53:21.000 But now that's interesting.

00:53:23.000 There's been a vibe shift.

00:53:24.000 A year ago, he wouldn't have deleted it.

00:53:25.000 But so things are changing fast.

00:53:28.000 But 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.

00:53:37.000 You 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.

00:53:58.000 National identity is more than paperwork.

00:54:01.000 It's more than just having documentation.

00:54:01.000 Yeah.

00:54:05.000 And I look at Mamdani, okay, yeah, he's got his paperwork.

00:54:08.000 That guy's not an American. 0.96

00:54:09.000 He's just not.

00:54:10.000 Nothing about him is American. 0.92

00:54:12.000 Sure, he's got his paperwork.

00:54:12.000 I'm not doubting it.

00:54:13.000 Like, I'm sure he's got all of his documents.

00:54:15.000 But nothing he says or believes is anything close to what it means to be an American.

00:54:21.000 It's at odds, actually.

00:54:22.000 He's an Islamist Marxist. 0.52

00:54:24.000 Yeah, 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.

00:54:41.000 Oh, of course, it's incomprehensible.

00:54:43.000 Or the distinction between the secular and the sacred.

00:54:45.000 This is not something that comes naturally at all to Islamic theology.

00:54:49.000 And 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.

00:55:00.000 When 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.

00:55:15.000 And the church has the worries about the eternal, and the earthly authorities worry about the temporal.

00:55:22.000 And that's the kind of the beginning of the seculum.

00:55:23.000 The idea of the secular starts to emerge with Augustine.

00:55:26.000 It's not meant to be a kind of godless zone, but that's really effectively what it becomes after the 18th century.

00:55:33.000 And for Islam, if you're a monotheist, that's a very strange idea.

00:55:37.000 Why should there be any corner of creation that is somehow even kind of provisionally neutral and godless?

00:55:46.000 Islam can't cope with this thought. 1.00

00:55:48.000 And 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.

00:56:04.000 And so the nation-state is fundamentally a kind of secular construct.

00:56:07.000 Now, it's one that Christianity has been able to baptize, right? 0.98

00:56:11.000 I've just come back from Hungary.

00:56:13.000 I mean, they are very self-consciously a Christian nation, founded by St. Stephen, and there's kind of crosses everywhere.

00:56:20.000 It's in their constitution.

00:56:21.000 That's not a problem.

00:56:22.000 England.

00:56:23.000 England is, you know, our monarch is also the supreme governor of the church of England.

00:56:28.000 We are technically, you know, constitutionally.

00:56:30.000 If 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.

00:56:38.000 But within Islam, it's much harder for Islam to form it.

00:56:42.000 It's much harder to convince a loyal Muslim to have a political loyalty to a nation rather than the ummah. 1.00

00:56:51.000 That is to say, the covering rather than the Daral Islam.

00:56:55.000 And so Islam is a much more, a much more cosmopolitan and rootless, universal identity. 1.00

00:57:04.000 And it finds it very difficult to work with the particular and with kind of sort of secular national boundaries.

00:57:10.000 Let's talk about it.

00:57:11.000 So, I mean, one little stat, just to close the loop on that, Charlie, for example, you know, there are roughly 6% of Muslims in Britain.

00:57:19.000 0.5% of them are in the armed forces.

00:57:26.000 So much, there were more British Muslims who went to fight for ISIS than there are in the British armed forces. 0.53

00:57:34.000 I'm surprised it's only 6% because I go to London, it feels like a lot more than 6%.

00:57:37.000 Well, that's because they're very concentrated and they're very dense.

00:57:40.000 So 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.

00:57:49.000 But that's not how it works.

00:57:50.000 And 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.

00:58:02.000 What is it to integrate into the city of Birmingham today?

00:58:06.000 What is it to integrate into the city of Bradford?

00:58:08.000 You have nothing to integrate towards.

00:58:09.000 To become a Muslim.

00:58:10.000 That's right.

00:58:11.000 The majority population in Luton is coming close to or is even there.

00:58:18.000 Muhammad is the number one birth name in the biggest cities all across Europe.

00:58:21.000 Yeah, and I think that's indicative.

00:58:22.000 It'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.

00:58:40.000 But it's still, it is an index of swords, yeah.

00:58:45.000 We're honored to be partnering with Alan Jackson Ministries.

00:58:48.000 And today, I want to point you to their podcast.

00:58:50.000 It's called Culture in Christianity, the Alan Jackson Podcast.

00:58:54.000 What makes it unique is Pastor Alan's biblical perspective.

00:58:58.000 He 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.

00:59:06.000 He doesn't just discuss the problems.

00:59:08.000 In every episode, he gives practical things we can do to make a difference.

00:59:12.000 His guests have incredible expertise and powerful testimonies.

00:59:15.000 They've been great friends.

00:59:17.000 And now you can hear from Charlie in his own words.

00:59:19.000 Each episode will make you recognize the power of your faith and how God can use your life to impact our world today.

00:59:25.000 The Culture and Christianity podcast is informative and encouraging.

00:59:29.000 You could find it on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:59:32.000 Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes.

00:59:34.000 Alan Jackson Ministries is working hard to bring biblical truth back into our culture.

00:59:39.000 You can find out more about Pastor Alan and the ministry at alanjackson.com forward slash Charlie.

00:59:48.000 So let's build on this Islam topic a little bit.

00:59:53.000 What you're saying is that Islamists have no concept of separation between mosque and state.

01:00:01.000 I think that's actually Islam 101.

01:00:04.000 And I think that's important.

01:00:05.000 And that's why when I say Islam is not compatible with Western civilization, I'm not inherently even attacking Islam.

01:00:13.000 I do in other comments, I say, but not in that one.

01:00:18.000 That's a separate topic for another time.

01:00:19.000 But that one, they get mad.

01:00:21.000 They say, oh, no, we can coexist outside of the state, but Islam is an all-encompassing. 1.00

01:00:28.000 That Allah is over all, right? 1.00

01:00:31.000 That you submit in all that you do.

01:00:34.000 And 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. 0.78

01:00:46.000 The rates of Islamic participation in government far exceeds rates of Christian participation in government in the West.

01:00:54.000 We are on the precipice of having a Muslim mayor in Minneapolis, New York, Calgary, and London by the end of this calendar year.

01:01:03.000 Well, 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. 0.94

01:01:16.000 And this is, it's just the way it is.

01:01:19.000 They tend to be rooted more in kinship and tribe and ethnicity than has been common in England.

01:01:30.000 I 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.

01:01:44.000 We were not very familial.

01:01:46.000 We weren't very sort of clan-based at all.

01:01:48.000 Whereas our sort of new arrivals, the new English, as it were, do not take that approach at all.

01:01:55.000 And so you've got very, very high rates of kind of electoral blocks.

01:02:00.000 And that means, you know, what is like 80, 85% of Muslims will vote Labor, roughly.

01:02:06.000 And 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.

01:02:17.000 Isn't that interesting that 80 to 85% of American Muslims vote Democrat, 80 to 85% of UK Muslims vote Labor, which is interchangeable parts.

01:02:26.000 That goes to show that it's not an outreach problem on behalf of the Republican Party or Conservative.

01:02:30.000 That's their disposition.

01:02:32.000 Like, you're importing future voters of a certain political party.

01:02:36.000 Yeah, I think that's true.

01:02:38.000 Interestingly, we saw last summer was five MPs were elected to the House of Commons on explicitly pro-Gaza tickets.

01:02:48.000 That 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.

01:03:01.000 And 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.

01:03:17.000 And that is something that's new.

01:03:19.000 And so, you're starting to see some cracks in this strange coalition between rainbow and crescent and star.

01:03:27.000 So, I want you to build that out because we're running tight on time.

01:03:31.000 Say that again, rainbow, crescent and star.

01:03:35.000 So, 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.

01:03:47.000 And this is really this messy coalition that holds the left all across the Western political landscape.

01:03:55.000 And up until now, they've operated in lockstep.

01:03:58.000 I said this in my NATCON speech last July.

01:04:01.000 You know, the jokes on us conservatives when we laugh at gaze for Gaza. 0.97

01:04:09.000 The jokes on us.

01:04:10.000 Why?

01:04:11.000 Because in fact, it's a completely, within their worldview, it's a completely consistent and coherent position.

01:04:19.000 It's not funny, it's frightening.

01:04:22.000 What 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.

01:04:31.000 And we're going to destroy the West before we turn on each other. 0.51

01:04:36.000 A gays for Gaza. 0.94

01:04:37.000 Rainbow and Crescent will be together until we've got rid of the cross. 1.00

01:04:42.000 And so, you know, in Britain, you're starting to see those cracks appearing.

01:04:46.000 I 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.

01:04:58.000 So it's more complicated with you over here.

01:05:00.000 But I mean, that coalition is very fragile.

01:05:03.000 And, 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.

01:05:13.000 I have two final things I want to talk about.

01:05:15.000 The first of which is broad, and then I want to talk about JD Vance at the end.

01:05:19.000 The 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?

01:05:30.000 Well, 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.

01:05:44.000 But 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.

01:06:00.000 I 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.

01:06:14.000 I'm in the Anglosphere.

01:06:17.000 I'm, you know, I'm in the world of the Anglosphere.

01:06:21.000 And that's something which now has almost a kind of nostalgia.

01:06:25.000 There's a sense of, there's a sense of weird homecoming.

01:06:30.000 Because 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.

01:06:36.000 I don't know if I'm putting this very clearly, but do you understand what I mean?

01:06:40.000 I do.

01:06:41.000 And look, we're a very confusing country because we have contradiction.

01:06:47.000 But one of them is free speech.

01:06:50.000 Free speech was a British birthright.

01:06:54.000 How many people are arrested on a daily basis in Britain for speech crimes?

01:06:58.000 30.

01:06:59.000 A day.

01:07:01.000 Arrested.

01:07:02.000 30 offences.

01:07:03.000 So what we now have in England is this sort of kind of complex shopping list of different offenses and indeed non-offences.

01:07:12.000 15 years ago, something was introduced called a non-crime hate incident.

01:07:20.000 How about that for Orwellian?

01:07:22.000 I was going to say.

01:07:24.000 So 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.

01:07:41.000 Now, 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.

01:07:49.000 And 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.

01:08:01.000 And what you're seeing in the police force is a sort of massive, mass demoralization.

01:08:06.000 I saw three days ago, there's a 17% drop over the last year in sign-ups to the police force.

01:08:12.000 Because it's a pretty thankless job now.

01:08:14.000 It 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.

01:08:25.000 You could go into the police force.

01:08:26.000 Theresa May brings in a requirement for a degree requirement. 0.99

01:08:30.000 You've now got to go to some Mickey Mouse university to get a Mickey Mouse degree to be eligible to become a British bobby.

01:08:37.000 And guess what?

01:08:38.000 They 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.

01:08:50.000 They're arrested for wrong speak.

01:08:52.000 Wrong speak and wrong think.

01:08:55.000 In 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.

01:09:19.000 And 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.

01:09:30.000 There's no protest, no speech, not holding a sign, praying silently.

01:09:35.000 And do you believe that there is a reckoning that will come on the culture of free speech in Britain?

01:09:42.000 So I think there'll be a reckoning on everything.

01:09:45.000 I 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.

01:09:58.000 We never worried about free speech when there was a we, when there was a first person plural.

01:10:05.000 We didn't have to worry about it.

01:10:06.000 Because 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.

01:10:06.000 Why?

01:10:19.000 And so we knew what the acceptable parameters and limits of speech were.

01:10:26.000 But 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.

01:10:38.000 All the norms are dissolved.

01:10:39.000 And you've got to learn to cope with and get along with, exist alongside people for whom free speech makes no sense at all.

01:10:47.000 Well, especially Muslims are not going to be the ones arguing for free speech. 1.00

01:10:52.000 The opposite.

01:10:54.000 Correct.

01:10:55.000 Absolutely right.

01:10:57.000 They're not going to be your big fighters.

01:10:58.000 No, I mean, because the central idea within Islam is Islam.

01:11:01.000 So is submission.

01:11:03.000 And also, they don't want you to be able to criticize Muhammad or all that.

01:11:08.000 You know, the idea of free speech comes through in Athens with this idea of parésia, isonomia, isogoria in the Athenian assembly in the fifth century BC.

01:11:17.000 But 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.

01:11:32.000 If 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.

01:11:42.000 So you see this in Titullian, the first Latin church father.

01:11:46.000 He's the first person to come up with the phrase freedom of religion, libertas religionis.

01:11:50.000 It's actually freedom of speech is downstream of freedom of religion as a Western value.

01:11:55.000 I mean, yes, it's there in Athens, but really emerges in the kind of that tussle between the early Christians and the Roman authorities.

01:12:03.000 And it's freedom of religion.

01:12:04.000 We should have freedom to worship, freedom to meet on Sundays.

01:12:08.000 And that took 300 years for them to win that right.

01:12:11.000 But 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.

01:12:20.000 Last question.

01:12:21.000 A 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.

01:12:33.000 Tell us about that.

01:12:34.000 First of all, that's ridiculous.

01:12:39.000 If anything, he has mentored me far more than I've mentored him.

01:12:44.000 I've learned so much from him.

01:12:46.000 I'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.

01:12:57.000 And 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.

01:13:08.000 So 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.

01:13:16.000 And we've got to know each other over the years.

01:13:20.000 And that mentor line, it's just media mischief, really.

01:13:24.000 So what do you see in him as a statesman?

01:13:26.000 So I see somebody who is sort of wise and mature beyond his years.

01:13:32.000 I think he's got a kind of a sense of calm, a sense of, I think he's just highly intelligent.

01:13:38.000 You don't get that many just really high IQ politicians anymore.

01:13:42.000 Certainly not in Britain.

01:13:42.000 I don't know about America.

01:13:44.000 But now we got problems.

01:13:45.000 He's just got kind of raw cognitive processing power.

01:13:50.000 But he doesn't show it too.

01:13:51.000 He doesn't show it too much, but it's there.

01:13:54.000 And that helps a great deal.

01:13:55.000 Like he can size up.

01:13:57.000 He can size up a problem.

01:13:58.000 He can size up in this.

01:13:59.000 You know, the most interesting thing about that leak signal chat, do you remember from a few months ago?

01:14:04.000 I 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.

01:14:16.000 The Europeans are getting, you know, several factors more.

01:14:20.000 Why are we bearing the brunt of this?

01:14:23.000 And I just thought, I mean, first of all, what did that little revelation say?

01:14:28.000 One, he really drilled down.

01:14:30.000 He wasn't getting policy advice.

01:14:31.000 He just worked that out.

01:14:32.000 Two, he's working it out with the interests of the American people first and foremost in his mind.

01:14:38.000 A very striking little detail that.

01:14:41.000 And we just don't have politicians like that.

01:14:42.000 We 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.

01:14:57.000 This is just a strange idea to the liberal mind.

01:15:01.000 But it's the politics of the future.

01:15:02.000 It's the politics of home.

01:15:03.000 It's the politics of belonging.

01:15:05.000 It's the politics of nationhood, of the first person plural.

01:15:08.000 And it's what defines the new right.

01:15:11.000 And it's why the old right gets confused when some slightly left-leaning economic policies sometimes pop up.

01:15:18.000 Nigel's sort of talking about maybe renationalizing the water companies.

01:15:23.000 And that seems crazy.

01:15:24.000 I thought you were a Thatcherite.

01:15:25.000 But actually, it may be the case that if you're really putting national interest first, maybe you want to go easy on trade.

01:15:31.000 Maybe you want to put some tariffs on.

01:15:34.000 And it's very hard for the pre-2016, the long 20th century kind of political ideology to understand this.

01:15:40.000 But once you've got the national preference in mind, you can understand JD's decisions.

01:15:45.000 You can understand the vice president's way of thinking about the world.

01:15:47.000 You can understand the president's way of thinking about the world.

01:15:50.000 He's not, you know, you might think he's a limousine liberal.

01:15:53.000 You might have predicted him to be a limousine liberal from the 1990s onwards.

01:15:55.000 And he's whacking all these tariffs on, and he's doing things which are, you know, it's foreign policy neither isolationist nor idealist.

01:16:03.000 He's just being a realist.

01:16:05.000 He's assessing the world as it is and not as the liberal mind would like it to be.

01:16:10.000 Well, Dr. Orr, I think I'll use the first person plural.

01:16:13.000 We really enjoyed our chat here today.

01:16:15.000 God bless you, Dr. Orr.

01:16:17.000 Thank you so much.

The Charlie Kirk Show - January 11, 2026

Why Is Europe Choosing To Replace Itself?

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