TRIGGERnometry - France Riots - Are We Next？ - Off The Fence

00:00:00.000 Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's Off the Fence with me, Constantin Kissin,

00:00:04.960 my trigonometry host, Francis Foster, Tom Slater from Spiked, and, of course, Winston

00:00:10.080 Marshall from The Winston Marshall Show.

00:00:12.340 Gentlemen, welcome back.

00:00:14.160 This week, again, the story is, of course, the French riots, which continue to erupt

00:00:20.620 across the country with more expected this weekend.

00:00:23.660 We will also talk about the midterms.

00:00:25.660 Francis and I are here in the U.S., so we can update you on what's going on.

00:00:29.460 With that, Tom, take us away on what's been happening in France in the last week.

00:00:33.800 Absolutely. So, of course, France descending into riots is hardly a new story.

00:00:38.760 But I think there is something obviously very darkly new about what we've seen raging on the streets of Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille, cities across France, spreading into other parts of Europe as well.

00:00:49.920 Something which is distinctly different in its scale, its intensity, and also its unfrenchness, if we're being perfectly honest, for reasons that we'll get into.

00:00:57.860 So far, there's been two and a half thousand arrests, at least, due to the destruction that

00:01:02.980 we saw over the weekend. Anywhere between hundreds of millions and potentially even a billion euros

00:01:07.940 worth of damage done in looting and arson across all of those French cities. You have the deputy

00:01:14.100 mayor of Paris saying that this was something we've never seen before. And I think that's very

00:01:18.440 true, not just in terms of the scale, but also the symbolism. I mean, if you just go through what

00:01:23.800 are some of the key moments of last weekend it's hard to ignore the subtext of what is going on

00:01:29.400 there everyone will remember those horrific scenes from limoges where the city hall there

00:01:34.500 which is this neo-renaissance masterpiece stood for 200 years survived two world wars as you can

00:01:41.840 see they're set ablaze its clock tower is now just a smoldering ruin you also saw in marseille

00:01:48.720 actually where the police lost control of the streets for hours on end at one point over the

00:01:54.300 weekend but what we're seeing here is protesters busting inside of the city hall and when they got

00:02:00.360 there many of them as we'll see drapes in palestine flags toppling the the bust of marianne the great

00:02:06.020 symbol of the french republic whilst chanting slogans again you can't really be you don't need

00:02:13.260 degree in semiotics to understand the symbolism there we also saw in Toulouse where there is this

00:02:19.580 huge monument to Joan of Arc we see there the writers have climbed on top of it put a veil

00:02:25.020 over her head and also tucked a Palestine flag underneath one of her arms and then just elsewhere

00:02:29.660 just scenes of absolute carnage and looting the one particular image that has done the rounds on

00:02:35.100 social media is this shopkeeper trying to defend his video game shop in Nice and getting a fly kick

00:02:42.380 to the back as we'll see in just one moment for his trouble um what we're seeing here is a sort of

00:02:49.820 confluencer coming together of various different malign forces and constituencies within france

00:02:55.420 so first and foremost there's the ultra-left faction the black bloc the anarchists it's

00:03:00.380 actually a 34 year old anarchist leftist who's been arrested on suspicion of burning down the

00:03:06.780 the town hall in Limoges. He seems to have been part of a family of sort of Basque separatist

00:03:11.340 arsonists so that's clearly a clear faction here. There's also the sort of adventurist

00:03:17.040 would-be radical young people and students who are sort of joining the carnage out of a mix of

00:03:22.700 just delight in the violence and the chaos but also repeating Islamist slogans as we've talked

00:03:27.980 about on the show before kind of taking on very anti-French sort of Islamic politics as a kind of

00:03:33.400 rebel posture. And of course, you've got the migrants, the kind of unintegrated sections of 1.00

00:03:38.460 the suburbs from the housing estates, who are doing the lion's share of the looting. And amongst 1.00

00:03:43.040 those as well, a pretty firm Islamist component as well, if anything, if the slogans and what

00:03:49.320 people have been shouting on the streets is anything to go by. So what we're seeing here

00:03:52.940 is young people have been brought up to hate France, migrants who have never really joined 0.98

00:03:57.380 France, and then a mix of Islamists and leftists who are quite willing to burn it all down and

00:04:02.860 certainly have the wherewithal to do so naturally the media and i think it's to a certain extent

00:04:08.660 important is focused on just like the broader economic and cultural context that's not unimportant

00:04:12.420 i mean france is a bit of an economic basket case has been for some time uh it's debt it's eye

00:04:18.260 watering it's at something like 119 percent of gdp politically it's been in complete deadlock

00:04:24.560 certainly since emmanuel macron called these snap elections back in 2022 and it's just basically been

00:04:30.000 ungovernable but i think if we were to focus purely on that we would miss the um miss the tinder for

00:04:35.900 the spark if you like um because even when society is going through quite tough times

00:04:40.600 and there's always a potential for disorder disorder and violence something that keeps a

00:04:45.220 check on that or stops it getting out of control is just that there's a kind of baseline there's

00:04:48.460 a sort of social civilizational ballast that everyone feels like they are bought into the

00:04:53.440 society that they are part of its future even if the present is not particularly good i think what

00:04:58.440 we've seen both in terms of the scale of the violence the symbolism the people who are doing it

00:05:02.720 is that that ballast is sort of rotten and we'd be lying to ourselves if we didn't see like echoes

00:05:08.320 of our own country in the midst of what's been going on there so we'll see what happens there

00:05:11.620 are more demonstrations quote-unquote call for this weekend maybe some opportune rain will douse

00:05:16.680 those down but um the the facts on the ground aren't changing and i don't think it'll be long

00:05:20.420 until something like this flares up again but i was wondering given winston has actually been the

00:05:24.660 only one of us who's been in france recently what he's been making of this since it's developed

00:05:28.720 from those kind of school protests slash riots to this kind of more full-blown and broader

00:05:33.440 base conflagration that we see yeah i'm extremely pessimistic about what's going on in france

00:05:40.380 i think that we're witnessing the birth pangs of what may very well likely or it's an opinion but

00:05:49.380 i i the way i put it together it seems like it might be a decades-long anarchy ahead of us

00:05:54.240 and i to explain that we perhaps i should explain why what happened last weekend is even worse than

00:06:02.320 what we talked about two weeks ago so numbers have gone up now last weekend was up to some

00:06:07.900 estimates 800 000 60 000 police and gendarmerie across the nation go you think about how many

00:06:14.060 60 000 police are to to deal with that's three arenas worth of police a thousand of the police

00:06:20.800 were injured someone was killed it is I've seen reports well over a billion in damages and these

00:06:27.560 horrifying images of small businesses losing the the poorest of Asian heritage girl who lost her

00:06:34.840 business she'd built up she's sort of in tears you showed the video there of the the man who had his

00:06:40.220 sort of is I don't know if it's a comic book uh store and he's kind of beaten and I'd also note

00:06:47.240 it is due to be another set of protests this weekend what's even more concerning about this

00:06:53.400 weekend is that the paris police prefecture have told citizens to arrange their own security

00:07:02.340 now as far as i'm concerned that is the french state abdicating in their primary

00:07:10.980 responsibility in the social contract if you cannot protect the citizens that's what what

00:07:20.940 why should any why should people pay into the state anymore why should you that is literally

00:07:26.520 the beginning of anarchy and in france the problem has been it's it's it's within borders

00:07:31.160 as we've discussed on other topics in britain it's been at the borders but it's a it's a similar

00:07:35.780 thing we're seeing uh around the country and just why i'm so pessimistic is if you look at

00:07:41.960 what is going on population rise so the french do not publish ethnic demographics um of for

00:07:50.920 their country but they do show who is who is foreign born under macron since 2017 he's let

00:07:56.300 in 2.7 million non-european migrants that's not including other european migrants there are

00:08:02.700 estimates of 900,000 illegals in France. In Britain, the estimates are between 1.2 and 2

00:08:08.000 million. I suspect in France, there's actually more than 900,000. Of the population, we do know

00:08:15.200 the foreign-born population is 14%. The Muslim population is at least 7%, but with some estimates

00:08:22.800 up to 10%. Again, hard to know because they don't record for kids, for minors. And so we don't fully

00:08:29.200 know and it's also the case that census data is not always accurate and i i also suspect muslim

00:08:33.840 communities don't participate in those kind of censuses like other communities might so

00:08:39.760 that will be said we've got in that would make it in western europe the highest

00:08:44.480 muslim proportion of any western european um nation and so uh as tom rightly points out you have

00:08:51.980 that side of the portion and we've seen videos of them stopping looting to pray towards mecca

00:08:58.640 and then get back up and get to it those are the images we've seen on on um on x and you have the

00:09:06.460 kind of indigenous antifa cosplay types you have the anarchist the hammer and sickle all of these

00:09:13.000 guys and then you've got the schooling right so obviously ostensibly this is about schooling it

00:09:17.060 doesn't explain why you would destroy small businesses but french schooling is a problem

00:09:22.180 And they've got the worst PISA scores. They are in the OECD.

00:09:29.040 It's the record. It looks like the state of schooling is bad, but they spend more than anyone else in Western Europe on schooling.

00:09:37.420 And they have the highest tax burden, I think not the highest, maybe second highest tax burden in Western Europe.

00:09:45.640 so this is all the protesters who are blaming capitalism actually this is the most socialist

00:09:52.200 or one of the most socialist make top two most socialist countries in western in western europe

00:09:57.540 so you've got this and then and this this again i've got data on the english side of this but in

00:10:03.820 england in britain uh 80 percent of teachers are left wing and 25 percent of teachers vote for the 0.92

00:10:10.940 Green Party and Green Party is far left so all of these kids all this Gen Z have been marinating in 0.92

00:10:16.800 this anti-French ideology coupled with a huge portion of uh uh migratory population uh just 0.94

00:10:26.820 just sorry I could keep throwing more and more explanations about why I'm so pessimistic there's

00:10:30.740 another important thing to point out so I've got a clip here of the BBC describing it Dean can you

00:10:35.200 play it for us please in paris and beyond half a million people had filled cities across france

00:10:42.100 to protest over the future of their country they were mostly peaceful but as we saw in the capital

00:10:49.360 in the wings were those who wanted to take advantage of the day go mostly peaceful that's

00:10:54.740 what i wanted you to see so mostly peaceful now marcos has blamed ai and uh he says it's ai 1.00

00:11:03.000 disinformation uh he says that president trump is stupid he said that this week president trump 1.00

00:11:08.480 is stupid for blaming islam and mass migration ursula von von der leyen the eu has blamed 1.00

00:11:14.380 russia and the disinformation so what you've got is a classic political class saying no not actually 1.00

00:11:19.960 able to articulate what the actual problem is and they're kind of going for uh other things 0.80

00:11:23.720 the far left under melanchol he has said yes it is the far left yes it is islam and it's a good

00:11:31.080 thing and France doesn't really exist and there is no French culture and so 0.93

00:11:35.120 you've kind of got them who kind of more explicit about what the problem is I

00:11:38.620 think Trump is much much closer to the truth and given this increasingly

00:11:45.240 divided it's also worth noting there is a kind of indigenous patriotic pushback

00:11:50.220 I think in Lyon they had a kind of small uprising and so it's not going

00:11:55.100 unnoticed and emmanuel patty the french world cup or the france world cup 98 winner went on

00:12:01.820 this absolutely beautiful rant about it but he completely lost his temper saying he's had enough

00:12:07.280 and he's saying it's not all immigrants but we can see if you come into this country and you don't 0.97

00:12:11.480 and you don't like this country bugger off it's actually it was in more um more harsh uh language 0.96

00:12:18.780 than i i just used there i think that france is unbelievably divided in a way that a lot of 0.98

00:12:25.740 more so than a lot of western europe but i think this is across europe we've been seeing similar

00:12:31.160 images in italy we're seeing images in belgium we're seeing small protests coming up in spain

00:12:38.940 there's a whole thing going on in albania but that's maybe another thing i'd also note that

00:12:42.200 France seems to be teetering on a fiscal crisis um all of this is why I'm so pessimistic about

00:12:50.640 the the the problem ahead of us and what might be done about it so before I I can elaborate more

00:12:59.200 but maybe I'll bring uh Constantine and Francis into it at this point well we've spent the last

00:13:04.480 few days here in the U.S. talking to people um and uh it's amazing they all walk in chipper and happy

00:13:10.980 and very american and smiling and they walk out of the room absolutely doomerish and depressed

00:13:16.100 after after asking us questions about what what we think is going on um the interesting thing for me

00:13:22.020 is i feel like despite the conversation we had on off the fence despite the media coverage i mean

00:13:28.660 you saw in that bbc report the thing that i was most struck by is actually not them saying it was

00:13:33.460 mostly peaceful because there is a defensible version of that claim in that factually that's

00:13:38.580 probably true right the the violent people are always a minority of a protest movement but what

00:13:45.280 it what what i found fascinating is in that report they said they're protesting about the future of

00:13:52.560 their country which is a catch-all phrase that means nothing that informs you about nothing and

00:13:59.040 we ultimately have no idea what it is that is causing all of this right and i feel like i still

00:14:06.180 I'm not certain that I can say it's this or that. Now, would we be accurate to say that,

00:14:13.980 as you describe it, Palestinianism, Winston, is a contributing factor? Well, it's very clear that 1.00

00:14:19.640 people who hate this country and who are from a foreign background, whether that's in the UK

00:14:28.480 or in France or elsewhere, I mean, the first thing I was struck by when I went to the

00:14:33.760 pro-Palestine marches in London and I also went to the pro-Israel marches in London and I did

00:14:39.240 both with a completely open mind at the time the thing that struck me and I remember saying it on

00:14:44.200 camera was and I think Douglas Murray's made a similar point there isn't a single British flag

00:14:50.660 or a single stricolor at a pro-Palestine protest while the pro-Israel protest it was Israeli and

00:14:57.880 British flags or Jewish symbolism and British flags intertwined throughout so there is a portion

00:15:03.360 of this movement that is people whose solidarity is with elsewhere and who have zero interest or

00:15:10.920 love for the country in which they live. But I also am struck by, Winston, I'll definitely let

00:15:16.860 you jump in. I'm keen to hear your opinion. But I was also struck by that clip from the French TV

00:15:23.020 show in which you've got this woke, wealthy, privileged white girl mocking people whose 0.93

00:15:31.720 shops have been looted and burned while having a a woman from an immigrant descended background 1.00

00:15:39.000 explaining to her that actually working hard and creating businesses and all of this is probably a 0.99

00:15:43.800 good thing and destroying those things is terrible so i think there's so much um like univariate

00:15:53.160 framing this thing has caused this and i feel like there's a lot going on i mean we talked about

00:15:59.320 uh economics i think economics is part of it we also you know uh ai and russia and all of this

00:16:05.000 stuff but i think it's true i think russia and china are demonstrably trying to amplify protest

00:16:11.480 movements in the west there's plenty of evidence of this i mean there's a whole uh warehouse in

00:16:16.040 st petersburg where all these guys get on on the on on the internet and try and manipulate

00:16:23.320 public opinion in western countries through social media i mean that is happening

00:16:27.480 foreign bots are influencing a lot of this right yeah but that's not the primary

00:16:32.200 no no no i'm not saying any of these of these things are the primary this is what i'm saying

00:16:36.200 is i think i am still in a position where i don't feel that i can say the primary cause of this is

00:16:43.080 xyz um and by the way one other point uh if you want to get really depressed and humorous about

00:16:49.240 all of this is the inquiry that francis and i have been on the entire time we've been uh in the us

00:16:55.880 is about the impact of ai and we've had people like andrew yang on who's the former democratic

00:17:02.120 candidate that episode will go out soon but hasn't yet and we talked about the potential for job

00:17:07.400 losses and job destruction etc and even if you accept um either that actually well look if you

00:17:14.920 look at previous technological transformations in history uh the impact of that is that you

00:17:20.840 have a disruption followed by new jobs being created and actually everything's great if you

00:17:25.080 you accept that version or if you accept the andre yang framing which is well actually that's

00:17:29.140 not happening and not going to happen and what this will do is take everyone's jobs so okay well

00:17:35.000 we've got to take the wealth that's created because it will be so much wealth created and

00:17:39.100 we've got to redistribute it to everybody through a ubi or whatever the freedom benefit whatever you

00:17:44.100 want to call it the problem is and this is something that european policymakers and leaders

00:17:50.740 don't seem to have realized because we are not engaging in the technological innovation

00:17:56.040 or creating the fundamentals that are necessary for it.

00:17:59.980 If you accept that part of this will involve a level of redistribution

00:18:04.120 from the wealth creators who are using technology to everyone else,

00:18:08.580 the problem is that all of that wealth is going to be created in two countries. 0.93

00:18:13.380 It's going to be created in America and it's going to be created in China

00:18:16.240 because that's where all these companies that are doing all of this are based and taxed.

00:18:20.740 But in Europe, we will still have all our jobs destroyed or taken for a period of time or the economy, the economic upheaval or whatever.

00:18:29.780 But we are not going to have the tax base of taxing your Claude's and Anthropics and OpenAI's and ChatGPT's, etc.

00:18:39.640 And what that means for this kind of protest and this kind of situation going forward, I think, is even more terrifying, if that's what you were looking for this fine evening.

00:18:50.740 so one of the things unless you want to respond to it Winnie and then because respond to it

00:18:58.040 there's just a couple of small details just a small detail no absolutely not let me talk sorry

00:19:02.240 so small details is just that it is the case that in some of these French rites there have

00:19:08.620 been people with the tricolour and there are some people singing the Marseillaise but it it is

00:19:15.320 uh overwhelmingly anti-western it is over you know there are it's not just palestine flags

00:19:22.660 there's algerian flags there's moroccan flags it is the a cab it is the uh hammer and sickle it's

00:19:28.720 the it's the deliberate talking of um french monuments that so there is an anti-french

00:19:35.600 overwhelming anti-french attitude to what about it it's just a small detail that because i know

00:19:41.480 any any lefties no actually actually we have loads of lefties listening and i think it's a

00:19:48.600 helpful correction um and um i think it's a it's a useful point for you to make because that's

00:19:55.080 exactly what i was saying what i was saying is there are clearly different factions and different

00:20:00.680 causes for each of these factions to be activated in this way so i imagine if you are a far leftist

00:20:06.920 agitator well you just see this as an opportunity to loo and riot and cause trouble if you're an

00:20:13.720 islamist you see this as an opportunity to raise the palestine flag in a in a profound way if you're 0.91

00:20:18.840 a student who's upset about the the uh the situation in schools then that's what you're 0.89

00:20:25.080 there for and often when these things come together it's this smorgasbord of frustration

00:20:31.240 or agendas which is why you get the report on the bbc that you get which says these people are

00:20:37.560 protesting about the future of the country as if that means anything there is that the only thing

00:20:42.280 i would add to that is that there's clearly a thread which connects at least a chunk of those

00:20:47.720 groups so when you whether you're talking about the students whether you're talking about the hard

00:20:51.320 leftists whether you're talking about the islamists or the unintegrated migrants one thing that is 0.85

00:20:54.920 clearly shared is a lack of affection for france is a lack of connection to france is uh no 0.99

00:21:01.240 sense in which it is something horrific to desecrate some of its great symbols and beautiful

00:21:07.840 accomplishments whether it's architectural what have you and they've ended up in that position

00:21:11.720 for slightly different reasons you know the propagandizing to the youth in the schools

00:21:15.720 whether it's the absolute failure and breakdown of any project of integration let alone assimilation

00:21:21.660 and of course on the left this kind of turn over the course of decades now away from class politics

00:21:27.680 to identity politics away from like this kind of aspiration to universalism which used to chime

00:21:31.800 quite well with the project of france to this project of sort of third worldism and we've

00:21:36.600 already talked a bit about melanchol but he's a perfect example of this this is someone who

00:21:40.520 after the charlie hebdo attack would be happy to go and give a barnstorming speech as he did 0.93

00:21:45.540 to memorialize his friend charb who was murdered in that horrific attack um castigating the islamic 0.72

00:21:52.800 zealots and saying that these are this is something which we must not put up with um he's

00:21:57.480 even criticized the veil we even used to criticize the concept of islamophobia you fast forward to 0.95

00:22:01.440 today and he is openly courting islamists he is openly courting these unsegregated these segregated

00:22:08.420 sections of society my colleague fraser myers at spike wrote it's great article kind of itemizing

00:22:12.840 all of that even he himself who is um ethnic french but was born in morocco and was part of

00:22:19.160 the people who are kind of expelled you know in the midst of um decolonization has started referring

00:22:24.620 to himself as a maghrebian which is not a song by edith piath it's um this idea that he's a man of

00:22:29.620 the maghreb um he's spoken as winston has alluded to of this idea that french society is just a kind

00:22:34.860 of creole it doesn't really exist and he's even indulged in a bit of what you could recall a sort 0.96

00:22:40.500 of lame anti-white student union politics talking about how all of france is white and ugly and 0.86

00:22:45.540 that the new france which is what we see burning everything down is actually where the future lies 0.98

00:22:50.660 certainly for the left so again it's to go that's a bit of a tangent about the left and john luke

00:22:54.960 melanchol but i say you can you can see how much there is a as much this is inchoate yes there's

00:22:59.140 economic factors social factors political ones people just joining in writing because it's they're

00:23:04.140 young and it's fun which is something that we can never totally discredit as a motivating factor

00:23:08.040 they share that hatred of rejection of france that that clip about their concern about the future of

00:23:13.960 their nation. A lot of them couldn't give a shit about the future of their nation. They don't much 0.99

00:23:16.860 like their nation. They don't really know what they want as an alternative all the time. But

00:23:20.700 that's something I think you can say is sort of shared, even if they've ended up in that position

00:23:26.380 for slightly different reasons. One of the things that we haven't yet spoken about, but I think is

00:23:30.480 very, very interesting, is the effect that this is going to have on French politics, but also

00:23:36.160 politics across Europe more generally. Because what it's actually going to do is it's going to

00:23:41.720 give credence to populists on the right because what they're going to say and they have a real

00:23:47.420 point in this is the elites that you currently have do not have the answers to the problems that

00:23:54.460 you are facing your elites are weak which we all know they are people on the left the right and

00:24:00.040 even the center will probably agree with that unless you're fed a diet of bbc news and channel

00:24:04.420 four, in which case you're the proverbial dodo with the political forces that are coming down

00:24:14.660 the pipeline. But we can see that our elites are no longer fit for purpose. That's where we are.

00:24:23.220 And to a certain extent, they're more fit for purpose in some countries and less fit for

00:24:27.700 purpose than in others. And what Winston said, and the thing that he pointed out about them

00:24:33.540 saying that effectively they won't be able to protect French businesses, French citizens,

00:24:39.240 French individuals, shows they've lost. They have given up. They have admitted publicly that they

00:24:47.420 are no longer able to do the most important thing, which is to keep citizens safe, which

00:24:53.940 leaves a vacuum. And as we've said, and as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum. So it's going to be

00:24:59.900 filled. And what that means is this, it leaves, personally for me, if nothing changes, and it

00:25:06.840 might, this leaves the way for Marine Le Pen to come in and to make a very simple but very effective

00:25:15.480 point. They cannot keep you safe. They cannot do what is necessary for France. Not only can they

00:25:22.840 not do what is necessary, not only can they not implement the correct policies, they can't even

00:25:29.400 be honest about what is actually happening they are literally philosophically metaphorically

00:25:37.800 bankrupt it is bankrupt the entire establishment and i think what you're seeing and maybe france

00:25:46.800 is the test case for this is the the collapse of the elite and actually it's a marine le pen

00:25:53.680 and populist government all the way from here maybe because if this spreads all the way through

00:26:00.100 if it spreads god forbid to our country and i really don't want this to happen then i think

00:26:05.560 we are going to see less faith in labor look i mean the conservatives are already there's less

00:26:11.300 faith in the conservatives and it's going to be more support for nigel farage and reform potentially

00:26:18.580 I'm so triggered by what you just said there I'm going to start by saying firstly it's already in

00:26:24.600 our country this idea that this is unique to France and its people in Britain in fact in

00:26:30.100 Americans as well kind of smirking and looking across sorry in America you had this in 2020 it's

00:26:35.340 the same exactly the same ideology that's by the BLM riots in which significant more damage was 0.50

00:26:40.460 done significantly more people were killed and it was absolutely heinous as for Britain we've had it 0.56

00:26:45.060 The same with the Palestine marches. 0.73

00:26:46.460 It's the same ideology behind that.

00:26:48.180 And but what's actually trigger me.

00:26:50.060 Sorry, Francis, what you've done is you've basically taken the New York Times, Wall Street Journal establishment line, which is, yeah, they're happening.

00:26:58.720 But the real the real headline here is that Marine Le Pen's going to win the next election.

00:27:04.340 Oh, no, Marine Le Pen's going to win.

00:27:06.400 I'm not saying that.

00:27:08.400 This isn't the bloody problem.

00:27:10.140 What's going on now?

00:27:12.020 Can you imagine it being worse than this?

00:27:14.240 I mean, really?

00:27:15.060 This is, we are, we're a total carnage and anarchy across.

00:27:19.400 When, hold on, hold on, hold on.

00:27:21.000 You're misrepresenting what Francis said.

00:27:23.220 He wasn't saying it in the way that the mainstream say,

00:27:26.500 which is the riots are a problem,

00:27:28.600 but the worst problem is that Marine Le Pen will get elected.

00:27:31.180 I think he's just saying what will happen as a result of this

00:27:34.900 is Marine Le Pen will be elected in France.

00:27:37.500 And by the way, in this respect, I am kind of,

00:27:40.960 I've said this for some time now, I'm kind of an accelerationist.

00:27:44.000 sadly you know i was on colman hughes podcast earlier this week and he asked me about he said

00:27:50.120 well you know how do you stop this sort of thing happening in britain and no one's asked me that

00:27:55.660 question before so i had to think about it and i just sat and thought about it for a few seconds

00:27:59.460 and then i went i don't think you can right and i don't want this to happen in britain but i

00:28:05.560 honestly don't think you can stop it from happening in britain for the very reasons that you so

00:28:09.380 beautifully laid out which is this is about anti-western hatred this is about people children

00:28:15.360 who've been taught for two generations now to hate their own society why wouldn't they be burning it

00:28:22.120 down at a time of economic and technological upheaval when the future is up in the air no

00:28:27.940 one knows what's going to happen and our economies have stagnated for 20 years it's the most logical

00:28:32.420 thing in the world and i would actually tragically say i suspect given where the country is at the

00:28:39.040 moment the only way you get a right-wing correction to all of this particularly on immigration and the

00:28:46.440 economy is if this kind of stuff happens now i am not remotely advocating for any violence or anyone

00:28:54.120 to go out in the streets and burn down our country obviously i just think the entire western world

00:29:00.340 other than perhaps portions of the american uh political elite and electorate is locked in this

00:29:07.160 thing because let's be honest about why these protests have exploded in this way let's just

00:29:10.820 be honest about this right francis is right and you're right when you say you know the fact that

00:29:16.760 they've told people you are responsible for your own safety by the way in a country where you're

00:29:22.780 not allowed to own firearms right the only force equalizer that people in the situation might have

00:29:28.140 that's an abandonment of their responsibility and it's terrifying and it will have the political

00:29:33.860 consequences that francis describes but what are they supposed to do let's say you are emmanuel

00:29:41.940 macron a terrible thought experiment no doubt and you have a bunch of people rioting in the streets 0.99

00:29:49.460 right significantly made up of ethnic minorities whatever you send them the police right there is 1.00

00:29:56.180 a confrontation the police who are defending themselves but also who are trying to restore 0.98

00:30:01.460 order, will inevitably bash someone over the head, break someone's this, hit someone here,

00:30:06.980 and there will probably be the occasional misuse of force because there always is in these

00:30:11.300 situations. And now you've given them a BLM George Floyd type of moment. It will be on camera,

00:30:18.120 someone will have been mistreated, they may have died, and now you've inflamed the riots even more

00:30:23.300 because, and this is important, right, your own public don't want you to deal with this. They're

00:30:28.780 so terrified of the use of force in this situation to put down this kind of rioting they were the

00:30:34.920 ones who are going to get triggered by the fact that having been forced into a position where

00:30:40.580 they're dealing with rioters the police have to use what will in some instances be excessive force

00:30:45.020 and your own public are the ones that are going to turn away from you so what are you supposed to

00:30:48.880 do so this is exactly why i was i said i was so pessimistic because even if it was not macon even

00:30:56.320 if you actually have a right-wing party who come in and try and deal with some of the problems i

00:31:02.980 don't think i think the problems are too deep and endemic for them to be properly sorted which is

00:31:08.120 why i do think we're going to see decades-long anarchy across western europe because i don't

00:31:13.360 think the public even have the appetite for what could put the drastic radical things that need to

00:31:19.560 be done to avoid serious civil conflict i i i don't i no one's explained that to me so i think

00:31:26.400 i think that the path to avoid that the peaceful path out of this is so narrow now i i can't quite

00:31:36.940 i always can't see it any anymore and also the election of the election of a le pen would also

00:31:42.700 no doubt spark a new round of rioting as well which is something that even before we had this

00:31:48.660 present spate of protests to riots to the full-blown sort of insurrection we saw over the

00:31:53.780 past weekend you had again our old friend jean melanchol kind of openly talking that there should

00:31:58.660 be some kind of uprising in the event of the fascists coming to power so this is something

00:32:03.420 that does depressingly feel baked in at this point finding a way out of that is very difficult i do

00:32:09.360 think it is worth underlying what francis was saying that was just the complete failure of

00:32:13.420 the political class and emmanuel macron is very significant in all of this because he was elected

00:32:17.340 in 2017 so a year after brexit a year after donald trump he the way in which he ascended to the

00:32:22.600 french presidency under his own party um and obviously saw off a le pen presidency was hailed

00:32:30.160 across the western world in the establishment classes as the hammer blows of populism he was

00:32:35.420 literally depicted on the front cover of the economist magazine walking on water so convinced

00:32:39.760 were they that he was going to essentially refashion the third way technocratic politics

00:32:43.960 for the 21st century that he was going to arrest that sense of French decline

00:32:48.040 and disintegration and France was going to be this wonderful sort of start-up nation

00:32:52.340 where everything was fine. Fast forward to today and he was at a Celine Dion concert the night

00:32:58.140 before everything kicked off and as soon as it did kick off he gave an insipid speech

00:33:01.180 and then buggered off to the gulf to pose on the international stage and again the

00:33:06.480 the haughtiness of Macron the fact that he's always presented himself as a bit of a princeling

00:33:10.020 taken to sort of lecturing unemployed young people in the streets saying you know I could go across

00:33:14.780 the road and get you a job right now makes him a perfect foil for all of this like an establishment

00:33:20.180 that has completely failed to the point as you say Winston that he's essentially suggesting that

00:33:25.640 people should handle their own security when we all know he's in the Elysee he's probably

00:33:29.940 absolutely fine and worse comes to worse he's got Brigitte to handle things if things get

00:33:33.940 physical so this is you know it is one of those things where it's so clear the establishment is

00:33:40.220 not just failed it's unraveled it's disappeared it can't command any authority on the streets

00:33:45.260 that cannot even support the organs of the state which is supposed to be there to maintain order

00:33:49.620 i don't know how you move back from that and he certainly well able to but well actually on that

00:33:54.360 note i think we should try and have a little bit of a conversation about what we think some of the

00:34:00.320 solutions are here because i am actually simultaneously as pessimistic as you guys but

00:34:06.180 also also i feel that the solutions to all of this are available right and i actually don't

00:34:11.720 think it's that complicated it's not easy but it is pretty simple um and the the things that i would

00:34:18.960 put on the table are you got to scrap all this net zero bollocks and make sure that you are

00:34:23.700 using that you basically look at where all the wealth creation of the future is going to happen

00:34:28.780 The wealth creation of the future is going to happen through AI and other innovative technology in that field.

00:34:35.240 So you have to make sure that you are competitive on that and you have to grow your economy, number one.

00:34:40.000 Number two, we have attracted the wrong kind of immigration for decades because of our generous welfare systems. 0.99

00:34:46.080 So we've got to scrap welfare for foreign nationals, and that will eliminate, self-eliminate, a lot of the unwanted immigration that we have, where people are festering in these enclaves, where they're not necessarily engaging with the full British experience of working with other people and getting to know other people and embedding themselves in the culture. 0.99

00:35:08.160 um and uh then you have to look at what's happening in our schools and this is this is the hard one 0.98

00:35:15.500 and this one is both not simple and not easy but i come back to what i said and you know we've got

00:35:20.420 an episode with katherine verbalsing coming out on this and we put a clip out last week our schools

00:35:25.600 have been indoctrinating all our children black brown white you know green pink everything with

00:35:32.260 the hatred of their own society its history and its values and until you change that that's really 0.75

00:35:39.140 not something that you can turn around because it's about what's in people's minds and it's

00:35:43.300 about in people's heads so that's why having uh these terrible events happen in my view is the

00:35:51.320 only way this will change because it's the only way the sort of bovine mass of the british and

00:35:56.780 the french public will finally go well no i actually can't have a situation where my president

00:36:01.780 or my prime minister is telling me

00:36:03.260 I've got to defend myself in a country

00:36:06.060 where I'm supposed to see off looters

00:36:08.540 with a cricket bat.

00:36:09.780 No, no.

00:36:11.020 I'm going to vote for someone

00:36:12.220 who's actually against this, right?

00:36:14.140 So how do we solve this?

00:36:15.820 If we were actually looking at how to solve this,

00:36:18.240 how do we solve this?

00:36:19.560 Okay, as a face and voice for the New York Times,

00:36:22.040 can I please make my point?

00:36:28.420 You're going to wait for us to laugh.

00:36:30.400 Okay, there you go.

00:36:31.780 i'm just glad i'm in america and winnie's all the way over the other over the pond because i think

00:36:38.180 he'd lynch me at this point but anyway yeah i i think part of it get on with it frankie

00:36:44.040 i'm gonna say something and you're gonna look at me like i'm a bit odd a lot of this comes

00:36:50.960 down to behavior here's the thing it comes down to behavior in schools and it's something that

00:36:57.120 I talked about in my book and nobody ever really talks about with education but the majority of

00:37:03.740 lessons in education simply don't happen as they should because there is a small cohort of about

00:37:11.940 three kids in every class which disrupt which stop the learning from happening and what happens

00:37:20.000 is because teachers and the educational establishment and the government are loathed

00:37:25.460 to deal with those kids, they become indulged. And they are actually treated far better than

00:37:32.000 the kids who turn up, work every day, and actually do the work. And that sends a very

00:37:37.580 powerful message to the rest of the children. And by the way, this happens in every single

00:37:42.720 state school up and down the country. And I bet it happens in France and right the way 0.98

00:37:46.800 through Europe, which is this. If you behave badly, if you are disruptive, nothing will

00:37:54.320 happened for you and in fact you will be indulged and this disruption means that children can't

00:38:00.820 learn they're not learning when in any lesson and they're not learning in history most most

00:38:07.200 pertinently of all which creates a vacuum which means that all of this stuff all of this nonsense

00:38:14.100 all of these slogans and the palestinianism is then allowed to fill the vacuum i think first 0.99

00:38:20.500 and foremost, I think Constantine is right. I think it comes down to education. I think we

00:38:25.960 need to revamp education. I think we actually need to tackle the unions. It is not acceptable

00:38:32.160 that the National Education Union, the biggest education union in the UK, by the way, by a

00:38:38.040 country mile, is saying things like reform are a far right political party. And not only that,

00:38:44.900 they recognize Palestine. We really need to have this conversation because if the biggest education

00:38:51.320 union in the country is saying that, just imagine what's going on with its members and with the

00:38:56.740 fringes of its members. So we really need to tackle education and this needs to be a priority

00:39:03.520 because if we don't, this will only get worse. And I think what happens is, first of all,

00:39:10.740 we need to be honest and actually have a honest conversation about it because our elites

00:39:16.940 unfortunately are unable to even do that and if you're not going to have the conversation at the

00:39:21.760 start and talk about every facet of the problem you really aren't going to be able to find a

00:39:26.720 solution at the end of it okay i'll go through some possible solutions because constant you want

00:39:35.720 to be positive but i'm also going to tell you the problems of those right one mass deportations 0.91

00:39:42.840 you need to get rid of all the illegal immigrants in britain it's between one and two million

00:39:47.720 and not only that i would say that you need to remove welfare as you suggested constantin 0.99

00:39:54.200 we have something like 1.9 million people taking 23 billion pounds of

00:39:59.640 welfare every year in britain if you get rid of that they'd be disincentivized i think that you

00:40:04.120 you could also offer people something to leave Trump tried that a little bit and I think you

00:40:11.100 could bring in more drastic measures like we know there are 40,000 jihadis on MI5 watch lists

00:40:16.560 I think there's I don't know how you would do it technically but I think there's a pretty good

00:40:20.000 argument to trial them and strip them of citizenship remove them the problem with this

00:40:25.860 is that even when Trump was trying to deport illegals and is trying to deport illegals in

00:40:32.780 america so it's morally right for him to deport them because they're criminals for breaking into

00:40:37.860 the country illegal even when he's doing that he has had political pushback from even some of

00:40:43.000 the kind of more centrist part of his supporters and so there's this kind of the way it's done

00:40:47.960 affects people and so the to do it politically is so unbelievably difficult even though it's

00:40:52.900 the morally right thing to do but he has succeeded but he has succeeded in that not entirely i mean

00:40:59.640 he's done a lot but if you think that between what is it 10 and 15 million illegals came in under

00:41:05.240 biden or so i forget the exact numbers i mean he's not it's what is it what's trump deported

00:41:11.300 dean look it up with venicei dean look it up with venicei how many illegal immigrants came in under

00:41:16.600 the last biden administration okay so then as for education for uh education for francis's point

00:41:24.400 francis you're absolutely correct that we could do something about education you could bring in

00:41:28.300 statutory curriculum and probably we actually do have a statutory curriculum but it's we don't

00:41:33.200 actually know if teachers are properly teaching it it's not well uh um overseen you could bring

00:41:40.140 that in but even that scenario and i think we've discussed this in a previous episode as i said

00:41:43.960 earlier 80 of british teachers are labor supporters 25 or sorry a left wing 25 are green i mean green

00:41:52.220 it's 24 percent green are far left i mean these guys are islamo-communist nut jobs and that

00:41:59.380 they're the ones teaching our children so even if you had a statutory uh uh change up how are you 0.85

00:42:04.520 going to get all of these teachers on side who are going to come against it also they like they're

00:42:08.560 always protesting these guys so you know that's going to be a fight in itself sorry to um you know

00:42:12.700 be negative then there's the demographic change right so it hungary so this is the really

00:42:19.260 pessimistic angle actually which we haven't mentioned is that in britain the i'm glad we're 0.95

00:42:24.660 solving problems here win the white indigenous population are having fewer and fewer babies 0.94

00:42:29.840 they're shagging less yeah and the the um uh immigrant heritage particularly muslim communities

00:42:35.780 are having more and maybe it's because they're more religious maybe there's other reasons they're

00:42:39.260 having more children and as demographic trends if they continue at this this rate it won't just be

00:42:45.120 Manchester, London and Birmingham, where the white British are a minority, albeit the biggest

00:42:50.160 minority, it'll be more and more of the country. Now, where have this has this been turned around 0.85

00:42:55.100 in Hungary, they were able to have some impact in turning around demographics, encouraging

00:43:01.660 Hungarians to have more children. And they did it all through incentives and but really ended up 0.64

00:43:06.700 being if the economy was working plus these incentives, it sort of went in in that direction.

00:43:11.220 the problem though with this is that how do you do that at one demographic how do you encourage

00:43:18.400 one demographic and not give other demographics the same option now that's the singapore did that

00:43:24.160 but singapore is not a liberal country and it's not authoritarian country in the tradition of

00:43:28.600 sort of european liberal enlightenment how do we how do we target that kind of of government

00:43:35.380 measures in a way that wouldn't be deemed unfair politically i don't think i mean maybe it could

00:43:40.100 be done maybe it can be done and uh the other thing is dealing with islamism and again singapore

00:43:46.340 have been able to do this they monitor every single mosque with without uh exception they

00:43:52.920 make sure that muslims are spread out so there are no enclaves around the country so but again 0.56

00:43:57.880 we're a liberal country like are we going to give up on liberalism to deal with this problem maybe

00:44:02.080 not but let me actually do something hopeful because maybe you have to let me add you some

00:44:05.800 hope i'm a christian i believe in prayer and i think that that's where hope is and i think we

00:44:12.060 should be praying about it and i think this is a christian project england and britain and without

00:44:17.940 god it can't be turned around so always have faith and that's that's where if you want me to be 0.98

00:44:22.060 hopeful that's where i'll be hopeful it's in jesus christ fuck me now i really am depressed 0.94

00:44:26.500 tom any thoughts on how uh what some of the steps might be for constructively getting 0.95

00:44:37.780 out of the situation we find ourselves in before we move on to the next story

00:44:40.840 yeah quickly i mean there's there's not that a lot that i disagree with um and i also agree

00:44:46.620 that many of these steps whether it's anything as seemingly small as getting rid of net zero

00:44:51.640 or anything as large as just getting the teachers

00:44:53.500 to stop propagandising to the youth.

00:44:56.040 It's going to generate this almighty pushback.

00:44:59.000 You're going to see this kind of counter-radicalisation

00:45:00.920 on the left and on the various kind of lumpen parts of society

00:45:04.980 who are willing to kick off at any one time.

00:45:07.180 I think that still can't be an argument not for doing it.

00:45:10.100 The project has to be to construct a stable,

00:45:13.360 sort of democratic majority in any nation's parliament

00:45:17.700 and a genuine mandate for these policies.

00:45:20.600 and then to pick a fight

00:45:22.500 with the sections of society, the institutions

00:45:24.700 the vested interests who do not

00:45:26.520 want it to happen. It's going to be

00:45:28.240 it could be a bit rough in certain circumstances

00:45:30.320 but providing it has the country

00:45:32.600 behind it, provided it has

00:45:34.580 that kind of silent majority, increasingly

00:45:36.460 not so silent as we've seen in many places

00:45:38.500 across Europe recently, that's a

00:45:40.560 sturdy enough basis on which to do it. It doesn't mean

00:45:42.440 it's going to be easy but none of these things are.

00:45:44.360 I do think that the one thing there is hope in

00:45:46.440 apart from

00:45:47.380 deliverance and faith is the

00:45:50.380 point about so much of this stuff common sense kind of never has been tried in the in such a

00:45:56.400 long time now we've had uh 10 years of emmanuel macron we've had a succession of uni party rulers

00:46:02.820 in this country who even when they were encouraged to pretend that they cared about the public's

00:46:06.900 concerns about migration or any other issue just said one thing and did another there is a lot of

00:46:12.100 sort of low hanging fruit in all of this which could at least get us closer towards a sane

00:46:17.420 settlement and if if some of that means sections of society who always want to kick off are going

00:46:22.540 to kick off that has to be confronted as well but these issues are too big to just either get into

00:46:28.620 a kind of council of despair and resignation which would be a absolute disaster certainly

00:46:33.740 electorally or to just assume that as you sometimes hear as a sort of meme on the right

00:46:37.540 that there is sort of no democratic way out of this um i think there it's clear that the stakes

00:46:42.240 are sufficiently high that people are persuadable people are willing to behave and vote in ways that

00:46:47.860 they previously wouldn't and therefore i think whilst before we do succumb to um despair or

00:46:54.000 drastic measures there's a hell of a lot to be done in convincing people this the sit the hour

00:46:58.700 is sufficiently late that um change actually has to take place this time so i don't think we should

00:47:04.120 lose faith in democracy yet well before we uh before we move on winston uh there is no according

00:47:10.440 to venice i know specific confirmed figure for the number of illegal immigrants who entered but

00:47:14.940 10.4 million recorded border encounters during the biden administration 12.4 million those

00:47:22.280 encounters plus estimated got away so you you were pretty much on the money although the number of

00:47:27.640 illegals specifically is not uh not confirmed there uh the one thing i would say is we we

00:47:32.460 touched on it briefly before we move on but the debt crisis is really a lot of the where this

00:47:40.460 could continue to go in the direction that tom you were talking about because french bond yields are

00:47:46.980 going up and up and up i mean if you are some i mean people france and i were talking about this

00:47:51.300 other day it's like most people don't understand what the bond market is all the bond market is

00:47:56.180 is people you've borrowed money from, right?

00:47:59.080 So the people that France borrows money from,

00:48:02.540 and it's already at 120% debt to GDP,

00:48:05.640 if you were one of them,

00:48:07.200 or if you were someone who was considering

00:48:08.940 lending money to France,

00:48:11.420 I don't think you'd be looking at it now going,

00:48:13.760 oh, this is, what a great opportunity here.

00:48:17.960 And so if that carries on,

00:48:20.980 if the same thing happens in our country

00:48:23.120 where yields are very, very high already as well,

00:48:26.180 you will probably very quickly get to a situation where the fiscal crisis that people have been

00:48:31.100 predicting happens you are then forced the government is then forced to cut spending

00:48:36.560 at which point this whole thing gets undone very quickly because it's one thing to sort of be a

00:48:44.700 centrist dad while everything is great or while you're you're sort of doing okay when your mortgage

00:48:50.840 interest rate goes to 17 percent uh you might feel a little bit more more inclined to go uh in either

00:48:57.340 direction and by the way some of them will go to the far left too but i just i think that your

00:49:02.780 point is exactly right the hour is late enough and there will be more things that happen that

00:49:08.220 will persuade people that the hour is very late indeed that you may get a correction through the

00:49:13.460 democratic process that should be very troubling to all of us but that's the best way out of this

00:49:19.440 as far as we can tell. Anywho, let's move on to the United States. Very briefly, we've talked

00:49:25.020 about France for most of this episode, but we want to cover a couple of other stories. One of them

00:49:30.000 is in the US, which is, of course, the midterms. The Democrats are looking like they're very likely

00:49:38.620 to have their Senate candidate win in Texas. This is James Tallarico. And according to

00:49:45.460 Calci, he is now 66% likely. Now, we don't know exactly whether this is something that will

00:49:53.300 happen, obviously, because it's a prediction thing, but also the impact on the broader

00:50:00.900 midterms as well. The Democrats look set to take the House. They may also take the Senate.

00:50:09.740 And if that happens, you know, thanks to Winston's and Trump's war in Iran, what you're likely to end up with is a situation that he spends the next two years effectively being unable to do anything other than through executive orders.

00:50:25.820 So it's a complete paralysis. It's a completely lame duck situation, which will not only tarnish Trump's legacy, which, you know, something probably he cares about more than the rest of us, but it will be something that paralyzes his power to do anything over the next two years to continue to implement the things that he was elected to do.

00:50:46.600 And, of course, you will likely see a massive snapback

00:50:49.800 in terms of the culture and all the stuff that we always talk about.

00:50:53.940 Winston, what do you make of the consequences

00:50:55.900 of the disastrous war you advocated? 0.86

00:51:01.400 How much are the Ayatollahs paying trigonomically

00:51:05.340 for this flagrant bias?

00:51:12.420 Unbelievable.

00:51:13.700 Unbelievable.

00:51:14.300 Unbelievable. You've got to make a defense here. I mean, do you really want to have an Iran argument?

00:51:21.360 I mean, we can have an Iran argument.

00:51:22.480 No, no. There's no argument to be had. The gas prices went up and Americans vote on gas prices

00:51:28.480 and they're going to, it's looking like very, very certainly they'll take the House and maybe also the Senate.

00:51:35.220 And by the way, this is something that Ted Cruz predicted when we interviewed him in March. 0.71

00:51:39.280 And Iran are massively military degraded. They've lost their missile shield.

00:51:44.300 defense system, and they are massively on the back foot. It's definitely the case that

00:51:50.380 America have mown the lawn and protected the world from Iran. There are negative consequences 1.00

00:51:57.500 as a result, but that's the fault of the Ayatollahs. That's the fault of Iran. But look, 1.00

00:52:03.800 we don't necessarily need to have that argument. You are right that that's having an impact on

00:52:08.300 the midterm i basically otherwise largely agree with your analysis i just don't love speculating

00:52:14.520 on polls because you just don't know and we've seen so many polls get it wrong and yes you know

00:52:22.580 people will be motivated to sort of punish trump and come out they might come out and punish him

00:52:26.800 if they feel like they're unhappy with it more than they're motivated to support him but you

00:52:30.660 never know he's got a pretty pretty strong core base it might be that he loses the house as we

00:52:36.820 discussed last week over ukraine his actions suggest to me that it is actually the midterms

00:52:43.340 he's motivated by uh not uh interest in the war or what might be beneficial for ukraine or the u.s

00:52:51.260 so uh i i say i my my feeling is that trump is worried about the midterms and i even think

00:52:59.720 the ilhan omar story that's coming out again it's an old story it might be the attempted october

00:53:06.160 surprise you know did she marry her brother and sort of this coming up trying to sort of degrade 0.61

00:53:12.240 the democrats kind of make them look silly i'd also note that the democrats they are they can

00:53:18.480 for the first time talk about economy but they've been going on culture stuff for so long but now 0.81

00:53:23.440 they can actually talk about the economy which they hadn't been they always always focus on

00:53:28.720 trans and race right uh you know racial uh whatever not you know woke stuff it seems now

00:53:34.080 that they can they can focus on this stuff they are still doing some of the woke stuff but this is

00:53:37.840 uh economy stuff but yeah that's i i'm not sure i don't know what's going to happen i think what's

00:53:42.780 going to be very interesting is the rise of the democratic socialists and what we can see now is

00:53:48.640 this is a real litmus test for them do they actually have genuine cut through with the

00:53:54.900 americans let's just call them maybe unfairly but let's just say the real americans the americans

00:54:00.060 outside of New York outside of LA outside of those big metropolises do they actually have

00:54:06.880 genuine cut through does economic populism whatever you may think about it talks about

00:54:12.620 the billionaires etc etc will ordinary Americans vote for this or will they think it's just a load

00:54:20.080 of nonsense that people in the cities bang on about but doesn't have relevance to them or will

00:54:26.700 they see it as socialism 2.0 and therefore fundamentally untrustworthy. I think that's

00:54:33.080 going to be the really interesting moment in this election. Is economic populism something that is

00:54:40.400 a potential vote winner or is it something that ordinary Americans are going to see through and

00:54:46.160 think no this isn't for me I want centrist normal mainstream politics? I think that's an interesting

00:54:54.840 point because anything could happen the economy is the issue now which is something which naturally

00:55:00.420 the left could potentially clean up on feed off those dissatisfactions and so everything is to

00:55:06.760 play for and there's various figures in the mix here i mean there was some of the kind of painfully

00:55:10.380 woke democratic candidates like almost comically so i think there was a governor's race somewhere

00:55:14.340 where the the would-be candidate in the primary thought that thanksgiving should be cancelled um

00:55:19.700 and that she even felt slightly uncomfortable with her the existence of a mixed race son like

00:55:23.560 those people didn't quite make the cut and the ones who did you kind of abdul al-sayeds in the

00:55:27.680 michigan senate race and whatever are dodgy figures for reasons that we can get into but

00:55:32.480 much smarter know that you need to play a certain a different tune if you want to get a hearing from

00:55:38.020 the public um that said in general it's a sort of achilles heel of this whole kind of democratic

00:55:42.680 socialist of america aligned section of the democratic party now is that during the time

00:55:47.200 sort of a bernie sanders challenge to hillary clinton it was kind of much more authentically

00:55:51.900 just kind of old-fashioned class politics he would even quite um explicitly call out identity

00:55:58.040 politics and say that i don't care if a ceo is you know hispanic or black or whatever fundamentally 0.87

00:56:02.320 there's an inequality that needs to be addressed this newer generation like aoc onwards are up to 0.95

00:56:08.020 their necks in this stuff they occasionally like to pretend that the wokes the wokeness you know 0.99

00:56:13.020 woke one as aoc famously referred to it was just a sort of blip people got a bit carried away

00:56:18.220 but they still hold all of those prejudices and they've also grafted onto it all of the kind of 0.96

00:56:23.120 palestinianism madness as well which is going to activate a section of society you know you could 0.79

00:56:29.240 cobble together a kind of mamdani style coalition and that's going to work in some places but it's

00:56:32.820 not going to work in many others so i guess it's how much has trump's um you know deeds and misdeeds

00:56:38.940 as it were degraded his level of support made that those kind of numbers of independents who

00:56:43.340 might occasionally swing towards him on certain economic or cultural issues or what have you

00:56:47.040 think twice but i do think that hopefully at least there's a bit of a ceiling on what those

00:56:51.340 dsa people can do because as much as they're trying to put up a better um more class-based

00:56:56.760 front these days underneath the surface you've got all manner of kind of islamo-leftist tendencies

00:57:02.060 which will come out one way or another well that is us for this week i have uh some trepidation

00:57:08.140 actually anticipating what we'll be talking about next week because i suspect france may be back on

00:57:12.940 the menu given that uh the the official estimates from french intelligence are there at least half

00:57:19.100 a million people will be on the streets of france this weekend uh hopefully that doesn't happen

00:57:24.600 hopefully the tensions uh simmer down but we will see and we will see you all next week on off the

00:57:30.640 fence oh by the way please can i just plug something please follow my articles on the

00:57:35.280 york times and the guardian thank you very much he's doing good work

00:57:43.520 and i occasionally uh write for the socialist workers party as well and you can follow me there

00:57:48.240 thank you so i love that piece you did about the ayatollah it was you know because

00:57:53.200 it gets a lot of negative a lot of negative press and i know i've been hard on him but

00:57:57.280 to see that perspective on him i thought francis you know you know it was interesting yeah yeah

00:58:01.920 quasi-erotic in places but still you know it was um yeah peace be upon him

00:58:07.260 see you guys

TRIGGERnometry - October 23, 2026

France Riots - Are We Next？ - Off The Fence

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