Winston Marshall joins me in Cambridge at the end of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference, where we discuss why the West is in crisis, and what can be done to turn things around. We also discuss the role of the media, and the role that it plays in promoting a conservative vision of the future.
00:10:18.000Right, and then we can figure out what it is, which is what we're trying to do.
00:10:20.000But that, by the way, I think is really crucial, because I think that there has been a concerted effort since the end of the Second World War to crush our culture.
00:12:16.000And even within that, there's been an attack on British national identity, which is another thing I'd like to get into with.
00:12:27.000So there has been this onslaught on culture, which we could perhaps talk about, but what, so there's this relief at ARC at the conference,
00:12:36.000where it's like, oh, it's not, we need not be ashamed about these things.
00:12:40.000But also, it doesn't go into the, because I do see an emerging reaction to this attack on our culture that is negative.
00:12:47.000And there is a, some people are calling it sort of the post-modernist riot or the woke riot.
00:12:54.000There's a fraction which has got some elements to it that are not so pretty, I think.
00:12:59.000So what ARC is to me is a positive contention with that, the failure of the post-war consensus.
00:13:13.000So let's unpack some of that. So let me see if I get your diagnosis right, first of all.
00:13:20.000So, as you pointed out, after the horrors of World War II, there was a consensus around the world that we should never forget, that was one phrase, and never again.
00:13:32.000The problem with never forget is that you can't remember what you don't understand.
00:13:38.000And so, you could say, well, we obviously don't want to replicate the horrors of the Holocaust, but that, to manage that successfully means that we've mapped the causal chain that led to the Holocaust and that we did that accurately so that we're solving the proper problem.
00:13:56.000And your contention, as far as I can understand it at the moment, is that we reflexively identified something like nationalism as the core of the problem, maybe for the war as such, but also for the exacerbation of ethnic identity that produced the Holocaust.
00:14:34.000So, at the end of last year, I was speaking at Oxford University for a Roger Scruton lecture.
00:14:39.000And the topic was, what is English and British identity?
00:14:42.000And it was a room full of students, presumably all conservative, and I was discussing that topic, what it is to be British, what it is to be English, the differences and what have you in the history.
00:14:53.000And then at the end, I asked the room, what do you think?
00:14:57.000Every single student in the room gave a different answer as to what it is to be English, which ranged from ethnicity, i.e. it was an ethno-nationalist argument, all the way to there's no such thing as Englishness and Britishness.
00:15:14.000Now, to add colour to that, our mutual friend Constantine Kissin has just gone viral on Twitter a week or two ago because there was an argument he had with Fraser Nelson where he argued that Rishi Sunak, our former Prime Minister,
00:15:27.000might indeed be British, but that he, as a brown Hindu, was not English.
00:15:33.000Now, that erupted where he was smeared by left-wingers, you know, the classic types, saying that he was arguing for ethno-nationalism, which he was absolutely not.
00:15:45.000But even within the right, there was no consensus on what that is.
00:15:48.000Now, I'll just tie it back to my thesis about open society.
00:15:52.000In 1944, there was a writer called Hans Koen, who, it was similar to Karl Popper, that there's a, they're thinking about how do we separate the good and the bad here about what a national identity is.
00:16:09.000And he didn't coin the phrase, civic nationalism, but his thesis basically was what would become civic nationalism, which is civic nationalism, good, is...
00:16:21.000Can you believe that Good Friday and Easter are just around the corner?
00:16:24.000These are the most important holidays in Christianity, and Lent is our time to prepare our hearts.
00:16:29.000Lent is traditionally a time where Christians grow closer to God through prayer, fasting, and giving to others.
00:22:48.000And it's not true in a very profound way.
00:22:52.000If you are married, your sexuality is not inhibited.
00:23:00.000It's integrated into a higher order structure that's contractual, long-term and social.
00:23:08.000We know it's not inhibited partly because in the 60 years after the sexual revolution,
00:23:14.000the people who are having most sex are married religious couples.
00:23:20.000So no one would have saw that coming, but that happens to be the case.
00:23:24.000It isn't that sex is inhibited or that you're subject to the patriarchal oppression of marriage as a contractual obligation.
00:23:34.000It's that sexuality finds its place in a higher order game.
00:23:38.000Well, if you're in a marriage, who you are compared to who your wife is starts to become extremely blurry, right?
00:23:50.000Part of your identity is husband, maybe 30% of it.
00:23:54.000And then the integrity of your psyche, which might be the balance of your emotional function, is actually dependent not on something that's going on in your head, but on the integrity of the relationship, right?
00:24:08.000If the relationship is well negotiated, then you're not overwhelmed by existential angst and you have some hope.
00:24:50.000And when you lose all that, which it, now that is something you'd lose if this open society idea is taken to its limit.
00:24:58.000Because all of those social arrangements become part of the fascist patriarchy and have to be dispensed with, but that leaves people with nothing.
00:25:06.000Well, so that's exactly what happened.
00:25:08.000And they deliberately got rid of any relationship with the nation, with the country, even though these are ancient things.
00:25:15.000Like the English people are an ancient people.
00:26:22.000Suppressed across time to the point now that if you even have an England flag draped across your front door, you're besmirched and belittled as far-right and racist.
00:26:32.000Right, so the glory of the World War II victory for Great Britain was eclipsed by the shame of the colonial enterprise.
00:26:47.000Now, I think identity works the same way at all the levels we described, but to the degree that there is a national identity, I think the technical definition of a national identity is shared participation in the same stories.
00:27:03.000So, one of the things I've figured out, and we're trying to promote this view, let's say, at Ark, because we want to get the story right, well, the first thing you need to know is that the story is everything.
00:27:15.000And there's a technical reason for that.
00:27:18.000So, and this is why I think we're at the end of the Enlightenment.
00:27:22.000The Enlightenment folks believe that you can orient yourself in the world as a consequence of the facts.
00:27:27.000But the problem with that is that there's an infinite number of facts and combinations of facts.
00:27:33.000And so, you drown in the landscape of unmediated facts.
00:27:41.000And that's what a value, that's what a value, a system of values does.
00:27:47.000A system of values prioritizes the attentional significance of the facts.
00:27:52.000So, if you go to a movie, and you watch the protagonist, you map what he attends to, what he gives attentional priority to, and that enables you to duplicate his emotions in your own body.
00:28:06.000And then you evaluate the consequence of that value structure as it plays itself out across time.
00:28:12.000And the reason we find that gripping is because there isn't anything more important to us than how to determine how to prioritize the facts.
00:28:21.000So, a story is a description of the way someone prioritizes their facts.
00:28:34.000But even independent of that, it leaves you with another conclusion, which is that you and I share an identity only insofar as we participate in the same story.
00:32:34.000Now, it can degenerate in the direction of power.
00:32:36.000But it was obvious that Marx was wrong because capitalism ended up being so productive because it didn't free up genuine productive resources,
00:32:45.000and it was a voluntary game, that the impoverished pulled themselves out of poverty, even though the distinction between rich and poor remained.
00:32:59.000But the irony is that Karl Popper actually spoke more about totalitarian Marxism in his open societies, his famous open societies, than he did about Nazism.
00:33:10.000Of course, he was criticizing Nazism as a refugee in New Zealand, a Jewish refugee from Austria.
00:33:15.000But the irony of that is that it's the famous tolerance paradox, which is actually buried in a footnote in that book, where he writes,
00:33:29.000we should consider it criminal, those who, he doesn't use the word, inspire intolerance, but that essentially inspire intolerance.
00:33:39.000So, even though he wrote against both Marxist and fascist totalitarianism, buried within there was the seed for a new type of totalitarianism that's, I think, emerged.
00:33:50.000Yeah, well, the paradox of what you do about whether you tolerate intolerance, that's a terrible paradox.
00:33:57.000It's a place where, what would you say, the axioms of a tolerant society start to devour themselves.
00:34:03.000All right, so let's return to that in a moment.
00:34:05.000So, what happened to the postmodernists is they took that narrative of oppression by power and they made it multidimensional, right?
00:34:13.000So, in fact, they even deprioritized the economic because if you're white and poor, say, in the US, you don't get any attention from the postmodern neo-Marxists.
00:34:23.000But they're playing the same, they have the same assumption.
00:34:27.000Their assumption is that the orienting dimension of the world is power, right?
00:34:33.000And Foucault, of course, is famous for this because Foucault denied the very existence of the goodwill that would enable genuine transformative dialogue.
00:34:42.000His sense was, you have your poor power orientation and I have mine.
00:34:47.000And our dialogue is nothing but a zero-sum game between competing ethos.
00:34:53.000There was no neutral or transcendent territory between us that we could appeal to and move forward to a higher mode of resolution.
00:35:03.000That was all delusion or maybe justification of our own power claims.
00:35:08.000Now, it seems to me, and this is something that I've been working out and I tried to clarify this to some degree at ARC, that there's something that the West has got canonically correct that makes a hash of relativistic claims or multicultural claims.
00:35:30.000Because we could ask ourselves what's the essence of civilization, which is what we are asking if we ask what's the core of our identity or the core of our story.
00:35:39.000Or if we're asking how we could have unity without the pathology of nationalism or of patriarchy, let's say.
00:35:46.000Is there a principle that could unite us?
00:36:05.000So, it seems to me that the proper story for free societies, so free and voluntary societies, is not the story of power, but the story of voluntary self-sacrifice.
00:36:18.000And that's antithetical to the claim of power.
00:36:23.000You know, so, let's see, is this a good way of explaining it?
00:36:30.000One of the things we've noticed, my family and I, as I've become more notorious, let's say, or more well-known, is that people approach me for a lot of different reasons.
00:36:42.000And some of those reasons aren't so good.
00:36:46.000One of the ways we've determined how to distinguish between people who are after their own ends and people who are interested in a productive partnership is that they come with an offer and not a request.
00:37:01.000The point is, is that the basis of a genuine social interaction is something like an offering, right?
00:37:10.000So, if you and I want to establish a relationship, it's a good idea for me to bring something to the table and give it to you.
00:37:17.000From what I understand, this is how warring tribes in the default tribal condition of humanity started to trade.
00:37:26.000So, what seems to happen, human beings have been around for about 350,000 years, and we didn't seem to get our act together until about 20,000 years ago.
00:37:35.000You might ask what the hell we were doing for the 330,000 years before that, and one answer is tearing down anyone who had any modicum of success whatsoever and fighting endless tribal battles.
00:37:47.000And so, then you might ask, how the hell do you get out of that, because that's kind of a self-sustaining dead end.
00:37:54.000So, imagine a tribal group here and a tribal group here, and this group is watching this group and vice versa, and this group sees that this group has some cool stuff that they maybe would like to have and vice versa.
00:38:06.000Then imagine there's a no man's land of disputed territory between them.
00:38:11.000Sometimes, a tribe will get the bright idea of taking some of their valuable stuff and leaving it in the no man's zone, just abandoning it, and then retreating.
00:38:22.000Then the other tribe will come in and take the stuff.
00:38:25.000Now, they could just take the stuff and leave.
00:38:28.000But now and then, the other tribe figures out, well, if they left some cool stuff, then maybe there would be more valuables forthcoming.
00:38:38.000But the interesting thing about that initiation, that process, is there's a sacrificial offering at the beginning.
00:38:46.000And I do think it's that act of giving something up voluntarily that actually defines, well, I think it defines the psyche with integrity, but even more importantly, it defines society.
00:39:07.000I think we establish psychological integrity by having each of our internecine drives give something up in relationship to an emergent totality.
00:39:19.000That's what happens when you mature, right?
00:39:21.000You start sequencing your whims in a way that allows each of them to attain their end, but in some order over some time period in relationship to some goal.
00:39:32.000Some of that goal would be the establishment of genuine social interactions.
00:39:50.000Because once you understand that voluntary sacrifice is the basis of civilization and community, the next question that emerges is, well, what's the highest possible form of sacrifice?
00:40:05.000And that's actually the quest, you might say, that the biblical stories arrange themselves around.
00:40:14.000Because you establish the principle of sacrifice actually with Adam and Eve right at the end of that story, but certainly with Cain and Abel.
00:40:20.000There's two patterns of sacrifice established there.
00:40:23.000The pattern of Abel and the pattern of Cain.
00:40:25.000But then that's fleshed out as all the stories progress.
00:40:28.000And in principle, that culminates in the, well, what we construe as the ultimate sacrifice, which is something like a total sacrifice, right?
00:40:36.000So then you might ask yourself, is it true that a totalizing sacrifice is the basis of social abundance?
00:40:47.000This is why Christ is the miraculous provider of the water that eternally replenishes and the fish that multiply and the bread that doesn't end.
00:40:58.000The idea is that if you establish the right pattern of sacrificial identity, you produce a society that is endlessly abundant.
00:41:11.000And it's based on the idea of sacrifice.
00:41:13.000And it seems to me, I think what's revolutionary about our time is that I think we can, I think we can now understand that like explicitly instead of it being buried in our stories.
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00:42:40.000With regard to the national identity, forgive me for going there, and what I'm reading from what you're saying, but maybe I've got this wrong, is that there's a correct interplay, a correct sacrifice that the nation should have for the individual and the individual should have had for the nation.
00:42:58.000There's a certain amount of the individual should give to the nation and the nation in return.
00:43:03.000Well, that would be something like, you see that also in the biblical stories, say in the story of Abraham with the establishment of the idea of covenant.
00:44:09.000It stacks the developmental instinct, which might be that search for expansive adventure that would take a child away from his home and then turn him into a teenager and then a man that that willingness to venture into the world.
00:44:25.000It hypothesizes that that's a divine instinct and that its full manifestation will produce the proper social ordering.
00:44:35.000So it unites the instinct for individual development with the social, the pattern of social interaction that produces permanent abundance.
00:45:03.000So there's just on that, because you've added problem, I think, for the British and the English, if we're going to use biblical terms, is that covenant, you use that.
00:45:11.000Now, the Israel, the Israelites are going in and out of, if you read through the Old Testament, they're in and out of covenant.
00:45:20.000Even after Moses brings them to the promised land, then you have, I guess you have Joshua, but then the book of Judges, they break their covenant.
00:45:55.000That has been tied in with one of the, it's not quite taboo, but it actually was taboo to even say you're a Christian until the last five years or so.
00:46:04.000When I started the music industry, I was told, whatever you do, don't tell anyone you're Christian, even though I wasn't at the time.
00:46:09.000And that might have changed, but we are so lost.
00:46:13.000We have so broken our covenant as a nation with who we were, who founded us, that I guess it's the period of judges.
00:46:21.000So not only have we, how can we work out what the correct relationship is with the nation where we can't even identify what the nation is?
00:46:30.000Well, we have exactly the same conundrum in Canada.
00:46:32.000I mean, it's so interesting watching Canada's response to Trump's proclamation that our nation should become the 51st state.
00:46:41.000Because one of the consequences of that is that the same Justin Trudeau who announced formally that Canada had no national identity, that we were a post-national state, and that we had no unifying history, nothing but a legacy of oppression and racism, is now flying the flag.
00:47:03.000You know, even though he has stated in no uncertain terms that there is no unifying force behind the Canadian project.
00:47:12.000But there is no difference between that and the kind of fragmentation that makes you desperate psychologically and unbelievably weak as a nation.
00:47:31.000And so, you said, for example, that we threw out the nation and even intermediary patriarchal structures after World War II because we were afraid of the proclivity of those arrangements to degenerate into, say, fascism or communism.
00:47:45.000And fair enough, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
00:48:25.000I mean, America gave more explicit voice to the principles that English common law, for example, and English identity, for that matter, had already established.
00:48:35.000The Canadian take on the American War of Independence was always Englishmen fighting for their rights.
00:48:42.000You know, the Americans think about it really as a revolution in quality, but Canadians think of it as, no, it's a return to the Americans of the rights of the British that they were denied.
00:48:58.000Now, the thing about Britain that makes it maybe somewhat different than the U.S., or one of the ways, is that that identity that unites the many and that is oriented towards God is more implicit.
00:49:12.000It's more coded in English common law rather than being part of a bill of rights.
00:49:17.000It's coded in the manner in which the monarchy evolved across time and in the relationship between the monarchy and parliament.
00:49:25.000But still, the question is what's at its core.
00:49:27.000And this is where I think we can talk about the union between Christianity and the transcendent reality that puts the nation in its proper place.
00:49:44.000It shouldn't be the nation uber always.
00:49:46.000The nation shouldn't be worshipped like God.
00:49:54.000And then you might ask, well, what's God?
00:49:55.000Well, the Christian idea is that God is Christ for all intents and purposes.
00:50:01.000Well, Christ is at minimum, this you could speak psychologically or politically, Christ is at minimum the principle of maximal voluntary self-sacrifice.
00:50:12.000And that should be the superordinate end.
00:50:16.000So what that would mean, for example, is that the true king serves the poor, right?
00:50:21.000Because that would be how power would manifest itself sacrificially.
00:50:27.000That's part of the Christian drama is that the king of kings was in service to the lowest of all.
00:50:36.000And you see that echoed in the Old Testament stories continually, too, where lowly people, so to speak, are given their due regard as made in the image of God, right?
00:50:50.000And that seems to me to be an appropriate principle of sovereignty.
00:50:55.000You could replace it with the classic vision, like the Roman vision, which would be if I can crush you, then you're weak enough so that I should.
00:51:53.000So then we must prioritize those minorities.
00:51:57.000We must prioritize those minorities over the majority, which is part of the motivation to kind of kill that common culture that we had, I think.
00:52:04.000Which is also why, I don't know if you saw the ordo amoris argument come up between, there's a sort of English, I guess I would say open society ideologue called Rory Stewart against J.D. Vance.
00:52:18.000And they're arguing about the correct order of love.
00:52:21.000And the open society types want to prefer the other over the-
00:52:45.000And they go all the way that they even prioritize animals and the environments and not just all sentient beings, but all living life and rocks, you know.
00:54:20.000This is something very interesting to know, because it's germane to the point that you just made,
00:54:23.000is that every perception has a center and a periphery, and the perception itself is defined by the center.
00:54:31.000And so, like, the center for the perception of this glass would be the union of function and matter that makes this a drinking vessel.
00:54:40.000Now, if I crack this and there was a piece taken out of it, it would still be a glass, but now it's kind of a monstrous kind of glass, right?
00:56:00.000Now then the question is, well, how best to localize it without ignoring the periphery?
00:56:05.000And it seems to me that's something like a circle of responsibility, which is the argument Vance made.
00:56:09.000It's like, well, I can't take care of all women, but I could take care of my wife.
00:56:13.000And I could establish the pattern of taking care in my relationship with her, and that would propagate through my children.
00:56:20.000It would be example for the community.
00:56:22.000And I can't take care of all children, but I could take care of mine.
00:56:26.000And if I can do, take care of my wife, and I can take care of my children, and then maybe I can take care of some other people in my community.
00:56:32.000You can expand your domain of concern as your expertise grows, but you can't flatten out the bloody hierarchy and say you owe the same amount to everyone.
00:56:44.000Well, it's actually worse, because they say that you owe the same amount as everyone, but they actually even prioritize the other.
00:57:27.000Religious hypocrites, scribes—those are the academics, by the way—and lawyers, and they're still lawyers.
00:57:36.000So the religious hypocrites, they're the virtue signalers.
00:57:40.000They're the ones who use God's name in vain, right, by attributing to themselves divine motivation when they're only pursuing their own selfish ends.
00:57:49.000Okay, so Christ tells the Pharisees, you put yourself forward as mouthpieces of the prophets, he says.
00:57:57.000If you would have been around during the time of the prophets, you would have been part of the force that opposed and persecuted them.
00:58:05.000And then he says, the only reason that you portray yourself as ethically virtuous is so that you can have—so that you're recognized in the street and you can have the best seats in the synagogue.
00:58:15.000And so these are people who are pursuing reputational status, because that would be that second offering to Abraham, right, that your name will become renowned among your peers.
00:58:27.000They're gaming the reputational system by claiming divine virtue without making any of the sacrifices.
00:58:42.000There's no—I've got no skin in the game.
00:58:45.000I'm just saying that my transcendent moral orientation trumps any of your concerns.
00:58:50.000What could be more important than saving the planet?
00:58:53.000And then I have a pathway to moral virtue that's very straightforward, which is, well, obviously I'm a planetary savior because I prioritize the planet over your children, for example, right?
00:59:04.000So that proclivity to accrue unearned moral virtue is a cardinal sin.
00:59:24.000It's like, we're concerned about the planet.
00:59:26.000And so, obviously, you're a repugnant character if you stand against that.
00:59:30.000A more extreme version is what Helen Joyce would describe what's happening psychologically to the parents who are letting their children transition.
00:59:37.000Because how could they possibly admit to what they've done?
00:59:41.000They've essentially butchered their own children to this ideology.
00:59:45.000For their own moral self-aggrandizement.
00:59:48.000Or for prioritizing this other, these vulnerable.
01:00:43.000And you're right that they'll never admit to that, because if you saw yourself in the mirror and you were that person, you would never recover from that.
01:01:16.000And this is part of the same worldview of the open society ideology, is that we've got to stop the Holocaust happening again.
01:01:24.000And this, in terms of damage done by psychologists, I think is the foundation that's led to hate speech and led to hurty words being criminalized in Britain.
01:02:06.000I mean, if you have, like, the top part of the sandwich is protection of children, and the bottom part of the sandwich is protection of children, and the middle is the most authoritarian legislation I've ever seen anywhere.
01:03:01.000So, I mean, now that's coming out where, you know, someone got a non-crime hate incident for hanging soiled jeans in their back garden, or a young girl was booked for calling another girl retarded in school, or saying that another one smelled like fish.
01:03:21.000But the other side of that is what Schellenberger calls a censorship industrial complex, which has been turbocharged as a fight against the populist movement, which is a movement, I think, in spirit, against the open society's ideology.
01:03:34.000I'm banging on the open society's ideology, but I think it's the most helpful way for me to understand the populist movement, which I'm interested in hearing your critique about populism.
01:03:44.000Well, I think that there are forms of embodied wisdom that are relatively resistant to propositional derangement.
01:03:59.000If you're smart and you worship your own intelligence, which is highly likely if you're smart, you end up with this Luciferian temptation.
01:04:07.000Picture this. You open your browsing history, print it out, sign your name at the bottom, and nail it to your front door for all your neighbors to see.
01:04:15.400While you're at it, why not display it on a billboard along a major highway?
01:04:19.280Sounds absurd, right? Yet that's essentially what most of us do every day online.
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01:08:48.560So I get to have all the reputational status of the oppressed and all the advantages of the elite, right?
01:08:55.180And that's the position that the, increasingly, that the university educated hold in our society.
01:09:00.740Illustrating the perversion of this open society, Julie, that I've been trying to explore with you.
01:09:06.280That says it better than any example you could give.
01:09:09.820Yeah, well, there's always a shadow side to moral proclamations, right?
01:09:14.380It's like, well, the postmodernists did point that out to some degree.
01:09:18.000But it's one of the things you really have to ask yourself is who pays the price for your moral proclamations?
01:09:26.060And if the answer isn't you, then you don't have any right to the proclamation.
01:09:31.160I mean, one of the things that we're all trying to work through this in ARC, too, you know, because ARC is not a conservative right-wing movement.
01:10:33.440One of the things that struck me to the bone watching the political discourse over the last 15 years is that the radical left would sacrifice the poor to their planet-saving pretensions in a heartbeat.
01:10:51.460And that's very surprising because you might think that the core of the ethical left is service to the poor.
01:11:00.140But now you see with net zero energy policy, and I know the conservatives are also guilty of that, is that if push comes to shove, and it's my pretensions to be a planetary savior versus you being able to heat your house when you're 70, it's like we'll see you later.
01:11:19.220Yeah, it's important to note that the conservatives, particularly in this country, but I think across the West, have been part of that net zero program.
01:11:26.900I once went on LBC, which is a radio show, and there was an MP from each party, including the Tories, and it was off topic.
01:11:34.680They suddenly went into net zero, and everyone agreed.
01:11:38.780I'd say for ARC, there were, the classic left was represented.
01:11:44.680You had Morris Glassman of the Lord Labour Pier.
01:11:47.900You had Eric Weinstein, who he'd call himself a progressive.
01:11:50.260So it's not all the left, which is, I think, something that those who didn't go to ARC might assume it's some right-wing convention.
01:11:57.780And I actually think that was one of the beautiful things, is there are people who identify the same problems.
01:12:02.340We might have different solutions to them.
01:12:04.500And I thought that that was a sort of wonderful thing, that you got right, and maybe there's more room for those people there.
01:12:12.580But also, in terms of this right-left-wing thing and the way it's coded in low definition, I think one way of understanding ARC was a bit like Hayek's definition.
01:12:23.900Have you read his essay, Why I'm Not a Conservative?
01:12:26.780He has a paradigm where you have the sort of conservative-progressive line, and then you have the liberals, who are kind of like a thermometer, who will align because they're more principled rather than temperament.
01:12:39.860They'll align with whichever side is less authoritarian or closer to their own principles.
01:12:47.840So, at the moment, the liberals, and you've said this quite a few times, the classical liberal types, are aligning with the conservatives because it's the progressives and the left who have gone completely authoritarian.
01:12:58.440And I would lump in the open society ideologues in that bucket.
01:13:02.200And that seems to me what the new paradigm is, the new dichotomy.
01:13:09.300My sense is, I just talked to James Orr about this in his new podcast, that the conservatives, see, it seems to me that the classic liberal project is viable when certain preconditions are met.
01:13:28.160And I think the conservatives stand for the maintenance of those preconditions.
01:13:31.940Now, it's complicated because the preconditions for liberalism are probably not well propositionalized.
01:13:39.100So, you could imagine the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, it's sort of as if they did this.
01:13:47.000If marriage is the standard and functional families exist and the nation is Christian, then everybody can be an autonomous individual.
01:13:58.480And then you can lay out the structure of autonomous individuality and you can engage on the liberal project.
01:14:05.600But if that understructure falls apart, then that system of classic liberalism can't maintain its integrity because there's nothing that's – like every system depends on some axiomatic presuppositions to maintain its validity.
01:14:20.460And the conservatives, technically, I think the conservatives stand for the maintenance of those axioms.
01:14:25.900It's hard for conservatives to propositionalize what they stand for, though, because those axioms usually aren't explicit.
01:14:33.180It's like the working class identity, British identity.
01:17:13.820And he's only gone down in popularity.
01:17:15.480He won because the right was split, as you say, between reform.
01:17:20.020UK and Nigel Farage is just sort of seen as our populist.
01:17:23.240And I think he would say to some, I think he's even said it on my show, to some extent he's a populist.
01:17:28.600And Kemi Badnock, who's got this impossible job where half the party have not learned the right lessons from the election.
01:17:37.520They think they lost because they went too far right.
01:17:41.900And then they gave seats away to the Dems.
01:17:44.120And then the other part of the, well, it seems obvious to me they lost because they lost their votes to reform who was on the right of them.
01:17:50.500So she's got this very difficult task to take a whole organization, which is itself split.
01:17:58.840It's not entirely clear to me that she has the authority even within it, because it's CCHQ.
01:18:03.520And she's got four and a half years to take them to an election where every time she says anything in parliament,
01:18:12.400Sir Keir Starmer can say, you had 14 years, why don't you do anything?
01:18:16.060And likewise, she gets outflanked on her right.
01:18:19.880So it's kind of a very difficult situation.
01:18:25.260Reform UK have, I guess, their problems are that they, I mean, they're storming up the polls, which is encouraging for them.
01:18:34.040Their problem is, can they get together enough people, you know, to get 300 or 400 candidates for the next election?
01:18:39.860Yeah, and qualified and useful candidates.
01:18:42.000Qualified, exactly, which is extremely difficult.
01:18:43.720I mean, actually, technically, the Conservatives have the same problem,
01:18:45.700because I would say there's very little talent in their ranks in parliament at the moment.
01:18:49.640So it's not entirely clear to me what will happen.
01:18:54.960And so anyone who has any predictions, it was so much, it's four years away, the next election.
01:19:07.980Will Kemi, can she make it to the election?
01:19:10.420Well, there'll be some kind of deal, because at least the Conservatives at the moment have the advantage of being able to fight.
01:19:19.820But, like, the fact, you see, this happened in Canada, right, because Reform UK was named after the Reform Party in Canada.
01:19:27.900And what happened 30 years ago, something like that, the right split in Canada, there were a variety of reasons for that.
01:19:35.520Part of it was that the Conservatives were no longer arguably sufficiently libertarian or socially conservative.
01:19:45.300And so there was a fracture in the ranks, and Preston Manning pulled the Conservatives back to the Conservative side.
01:19:53.120That took a number of years, and then the Conservatives reunited.
01:19:56.480But it was a salutary operation, all things considered.
01:20:00.220And I think now in Canada, we have at least some leaders on the Conservative side who have some spine.
01:20:07.540And that was a consequence of this war.
01:20:10.120Now, you can imagine that because Badnock faces Farage as ferocious opposition and vice versa, they could use that opportunity to really hash things out.
01:20:23.400So Farage is a little more daring at the moment on the net zero side than Badnock.
01:20:28.080He hasn't come out and said that the whole bloody climate apocalypse narrative is a dehumanizing and parasitical scam, which it is, but he's at least making overtures in that direction.
01:20:47.460Now, Badnock, when I interviewed her, she pointed out that she was leery about the rampage towards net zero, especially on the economic side, right from the beginning.
01:21:39.320So, for example, Kamala Harris, some people have really called her as being dumb.
01:21:43.120And if you listen to what she said through the election, you'd be like, maybe she's an idiot.
01:21:46.320But it might be that she wasn't actually that dumb.
01:21:50.400It was that she wasn't bright enough in that she had so many different factions and trying to keep this whole operation going that she was censoring herself from losing the wrong people.
01:22:01.300Whether it was the woke side of her party or the more conservative side of her party, she couldn't quite have the dialogue to pull it all together.
01:22:11.420If Badnock plays this game that you're describing, she risks losing people.
01:22:17.700She could lose the right wing of her party.
01:22:38.960The first is that the Democrats are so clueless when it comes to the alternative media that they might as well be living in 1970.
01:22:46.760We invited, by we I mean a group of major podcasters in the U.S., we've invited Democrats to speak with us.
01:22:56.820We've offered formal invitations repeatedly for eight years, and we mediated those invitations through one of the Democrats' central political messengers, and they got the invite.
01:23:12.740And we couldn't find one who would do it, not one.
01:23:17.300Now, Dean Phillips talked to me after he got slaughtered in his presidential campaign because he got betrayed so badly by his Democrat peers.
01:23:26.340And I've talked to RFK and Gabbard who are, you know, heretical Democrats.
01:23:31.740But the thing about the Democrats that is very much worth understanding is all the people who have a voice left or got killed.
01:23:42.080But with their anti-pluralist, which, by the way, is they accuse the populists of being anti-pluralist.
01:23:46.780But if you look at Trump's coalition, it's a pluralist coalition.
01:24:05.320And maybe this is a reflection of that totalitarian proclivity.
01:24:10.280The reason Harris didn't go on podcasts, apart from the fact that the Democrats are completely clueless about the alternative media, and, like I said, live in 1970, is that a Democrat won't say anything that hasn't been workshopped.
01:24:24.920And the reason for that is they don't want to offend anyone.
01:24:28.280Well, if you're not going to offend anyone, you're going to say the most anodyne things, which, of course, Harris always sounds like she's talking to retarded kindergarten children.
01:24:39.680And you might say, well, that's the level at which she's capable of conducting discourse, and that might be true.
01:24:46.300But there is this additional element of the absolute inability of the Democrats to say anything that would, say, offend their most sensitive progressive junior staffer.
01:24:57.820And that's not happening just in the Democrat Party.
01:25:00.340That's been happening in the progressive movement.
01:25:03.960Definitely all American liberals have this censoring, which, again, fits into my idea that hurty words, they think hurty words end up in genocide.
01:25:12.600And I would say that the opposition to that, what's happened in return, is Trump doesn't give a damn.
01:25:20.860And you have a kind of response to the virtue signaling left, is the vice signaling right, where, you know, what's the most popular comedy show in the world?
01:25:30.680Where they find the meekest, these literally disabled people, and they will humiliate them on stage.
01:25:37.760And everyone's going to have equal opportunities, humiliation, but it's very much a total antithesis of that that's happened at the cultural level.
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01:27:01.360It's amazing to watch this in the theater community and in the motion picture community in the U.S.
01:27:37.140Tyler Sheridan, who did Landman and Yellowstone.
01:27:41.580And Top Gun went through the roof because there's no ideology.
01:27:44.660Well, Tom Cruise is not woke in the least, and he's about the only star left who can pull his weight at the box office.
01:27:51.980But there are, like I can see, there's been a number of, I've made contact with a number of Hollywood stars who are still private in their interest in what I'm doing.
01:28:04.360Yeah, but there's enough of them now so that I can see that that's going to change dramatically.
01:28:09.800And so I don't know what that'll mean for a Democratic reformulation.
01:28:15.220I've been talking to a friend of mine, the same guy who does the messaging for the Democrats.
01:28:19.940And he's, I told him after the election that if he could go and find some Democrats that he thought had some leadership potential,
01:28:27.760that this podcast circuit that the people I've been in communication with, we'd be happy to talk to them.
01:28:34.460Because all of us are, what would you say, sophisticated enough to understand that it would be real useful for the Trump team to have some opposition that wasn't insane.
01:28:46.960But my friend's response to that after a couple of months was that he couldn't find a single Democrat he thought had the chops or the moral force to manage a podcast interview.
01:29:00.600They're all so concerned with the soundbite and not offending anyone that it would just be a disaster.
01:29:21.800It would have been a very interesting thing to see.
01:29:24.020But I don't know, how do you feel about what's going on in the entertainment industry?
01:29:28.880Like you, I have a lot of messages from people that I probably would never have spoken to because they're so famous who will privately say, you know, I read that book by Andy.
01:30:00.360Now, when he blew up onto the storm in 2023 with his amazing song, Rich Man, North of Richmond, if you look at the attacks he got, it was all ad hominem.
01:30:11.000This guy should have been, he was the counterculture.
01:31:37.420So what you're seeing with those attacks is that they're not no longer ignoring, they're attacking because that's maybe the last gasps of this era, of this period.
01:31:48.320Where there'll be, I hope anyway, I pray, that we'll break on through and get to the other side where it's like you can talk normally again.
01:31:55.480I think we're probably there in certain, like I mentioned, Kill Tony or, you know, the podcast circuit.
01:32:43.420And we can talk about how Trump observed that and catalyzed it as well, or at least put the finishing touches on it.
01:32:50.160And I'd like to talk to you more about the UK and about France and Germany, about Europe in general, and what you think the implications are of the emergence of this mega populism in the US.
01:33:03.620We can talk a little bit more about populism, too, because we didn't get a chance to flesh out the advantages of a populist political movement and the disadvantages.
01:33:53.740Whether it was net zero or talking about our culture, as we've described a little bit in this conversation.
01:34:01.920And I think that's something that people like Douglas Murray are so good.
01:34:04.720It's like articulating what's in the zeitgeist but not yet been said.
01:34:09.020And so listeners should go to the ARC YouTube and watch all this.
01:34:12.220Yeah, well, I think one of the things we're doing, the conservatives in Canada have told me that, and some of them in the US as well,
01:34:20.840have told me that the role I've played culturally for them is to establish a beachhead in relationship to difficult topics.
01:34:30.640So I can criticize climate apocalypse mongering, for example, and go substantially farther in that criticism than they would be willing to go.
01:34:42.200But by moving the beachhead 200 yards up the beach, let's say, they can come up 50 yards, and that's fine.
01:34:51.540And I think ARC, I think that's actually the role of ARC, is to push the envelope and to do that intelligently and carefully and positively.
01:35:01.740And in the right direction, because the envelope's getting pushed in another direction.
01:35:05.620So I hinted at this earlier in the conversation.
01:35:07.800But one response to the open society, those who observe the open society ideology, is that they say,
01:35:16.340oh, look, all of the philosophers behind them are Jews.
01:35:20.260And they go, oh, George Soros, open society, Jew, he's the one doing it.
01:35:24.200So then you have this new emergent anti-Semitism, I see it coming on the right, because they're taking the wrong lessons from what's going on.
01:35:32.280Even though they might have observed correctly about the open society ideology, that they're making the wrong decisions there, I think.
01:35:40.220Yes, well, the opposite of one falsehood can be another falsehood.
01:36:03.580And when it comes to Andrew Tate, you've done a great job in your work in identifying the positive masculinity, lest it be hijacked by those types.
01:36:13.480And that, I think, is the responsibility arc, is to identify the positive things we have to articulate, lest it be hijacked by those more nefarious actors.
01:36:24.500That's another thing we could talk about, too.
01:36:26.280I'd like to talk with you about the dynamic between the cluster B psychopaths and the political, because that can happen on the left and the right.
01:36:38.500So we'll leave that for the Daily Wire side.
01:36:40.300Thank you very much for talking to me today, and to all of you who are watching and listening on the YouTube side, your time and attention is much appreciated.
01:36:48.060And to the film crew here in, well, we're in Cambridge, as I've got a speaking engagement here later.
01:36:54.280And so thank you for the opportunity on that front.
01:36:58.300And, well, we'll talk to you another half an hour on the Daily Wire side.
01:37:02.280Thanks, everybody, for your time and attention.