TRIGGERnometry - “Tucker Has Become an Enabler of Fascists” - Sir Niall Ferguson

00:00:00.720 I don't know if you heard, but actually Churchill was the chief villain of World War II.

00:00:04.880 Yeah. I don't understand why somebody who was once a highly effective conservative broadcaster

00:00:10.240 has decided to become at least an enabler of fascists.

00:00:15.360 We have spent at least 10 years now in the Western world living through an age where

00:00:19.840 everyone gets called a Nazi. Even my instinct is to go, Neil's going a bit far here.

00:00:24.960 Can you talk about the facts of what this guy claimed that made you say that?

00:00:30.480 If you're making arguments that the Nazis made, there may be a problem with your approach to World War II.

00:00:39.920 Sir Neil Ferguson, you've become that since we last spoke.

00:00:43.360 Such a pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome back.

00:00:45.360 It's a pleasure to be with you, Constantine. Lord Constantine, as you will one day be.

00:00:50.880 I'm afraid not. I doubt that very much. Lord Foster, that would be quite good.

00:00:54.960 Yeah, that would be good, especially with this voice.

00:00:56.720 Yes.

00:00:57.680 We'd inject some realism.

00:00:58.720 You'll fit right in in the House of Lords. It's the least exclusive club in London.

00:01:02.400 Oh, is it?

00:01:02.960 Being a knight is very Monty Python, and I'm of the generation for whom

00:01:07.760 the word sir immediately evokes the knights who say ni.

00:01:13.040 It's been a source of a great deal of mirth in the Ferguson family.

00:01:16.320 Well, I do. I said it half-mockingly, I have to say, but congratulations.

00:01:20.480 Everybody does. Americans are actually slightly more respectful.

00:01:22.960 But for British people, it's just the chance to make fun of you. 0.91

00:01:25.040 Americans are very earnest. We British are not so much.

00:01:27.200 I think they just wish they had titles, and it's title envy.

00:01:30.560 And culture.

00:01:31.360 Yeah. Whereas all they've got is Mr. President.

00:01:33.840 We've slagged off Americans. We've lost a lot of American audience.

00:01:36.640 Look, I am an American, so I'm conflicted about feudal, you know, feudal remnants.

00:01:42.160 You're a Ouija.

00:01:42.880 I'm, of course, first and foremost a Ouija.

00:01:46.720 Yeah.

00:01:47.120 Did you notice how he turned up a Scottish accent?

00:01:48.720 Yeah, he did. He turned it up a little bit, didn't he?

00:01:50.560 If you say it without a Scottish accent, people will think you're referring to people who clean

00:01:54.880 car windscreens. But I'm, of course, born in Glasgow, British Unionist, very anti-nationalist.

00:02:04.400 But I'm an American citizen. So the whole Sir Neil thing actually goes over better there.

00:02:11.440 Here it's an excuse for mockery.

00:02:13.920 Yeah.

00:02:14.560 Which is how I opened it.

00:02:15.280 I actually take it as an honor to all the people who helped me, my parents and my school and all

00:02:20.400 my teachers. And that's, that's the way to think about it. You're really, you're really just kind

00:02:24.400 of getting something for all they did for you, which is, you know.

00:02:29.280 It's great to have you back, Neil.

00:02:30.960 I'm looking forward to being triggered.

00:02:33.200 This is the most weird opening to a trigonometry change we've had for a long time.

00:02:37.200 We've got to mix it up.

00:02:37.760 Particularly one that I actually intend to be quite serious on some subjects.

00:02:41.440 Oh, no. I've come here under false pretenses.

00:02:43.680 Yes, you have.

00:02:44.400 Yeah, you're always expecting a comedy podcast. That's what I thought you were.

00:02:49.760 Many people have said that, not necessarily as a compliment.

00:02:52.160 Hidden adversity.

00:02:53.040 Yes. So, I don't know if you heard, but actually Churchill was the chief villain of World War II.

00:02:58.800 Yeah.

00:03:01.680 I mean, we continue with the comedy theme. But, you know, we started Trigonometry in 2018.

00:03:08.080 One of the reasons we love having you on the show is that we love having historians on the show

00:03:12.560 more broadly. And one of the reasons we love doing that is that we feel that history is important.

00:03:18.720 And the reason it's important is that, among other things, it's a way of knowing who we are.

00:03:23.920 It's a way of knowing how we arrived at the values that we've arrived at.

00:03:27.840 And it's a way of knowing who almost, I would say, who we're supposed to be in a way.

00:03:32.240 It's kind of like how you know what's up and what's down.

00:03:36.400 And so, in this history of our channel, one of the things we've done is we've talked to lots of people

00:03:41.120 in order to counter some of the false narratives that have been pushed about the history of this

00:03:47.840 country, the empire, colonialism, slavery, Churchill, and many other things. And as you know,

00:03:55.680 the direction of that, those attacks on history, has always been from the work left. Almost always.

00:04:01.760 There have been people like David Irving and others. But generally speaking, that has been

00:04:07.120 the direction of attack, the direction of travel. So I think this is why so many people felt very

00:04:13.120 strongly about the thing I referenced just a second ago, which is Tucker Carlson hosting an

00:04:18.240 amateur historian. Maybe that would be the right way to describing a podcast or whatever the right

00:04:22.320 term is, who basically said Churchill was the chief villain of World War II. He was a psychopath. 0.97

00:04:29.680 And he wanted World War II. Hitler didn't. Hitler made lots of peace offers. 0.99

00:04:34.400 The reason that millions of people died on the Eastern Front, civilians and prisoners of war is,

00:04:40.080 you know, the Germans hadn't planned properly, which ironically is one of the supposed strengths 1.00

00:04:44.080 planning. And lots of other things that we wanted to touch on you on, and also talk about why you

00:04:49.760 think this has happened, why Tucker is hosting this person, promoting him as the most important,

00:04:54.720 most honest, and best historian in America, which was an extraordinary claim. But first and foremost,

00:05:00.640 was Churchill the chief villain of World War II who wanted the war?

00:05:04.960 No, not surprisingly. I don't agree with that view. I was quite surprised by Tucker Carlson's decision

00:05:14.080 to devote so much space, time and praise to Daryl Cooper, of whom I had never previously heard. You see,

00:05:21.920 I had thought that the most popular historian of our generation was Yuval Noah Harari, who has sold

00:05:32.000 millions of books, such as Sapiens. So it came as a shock to learn that I'd been eclipsed by someone

00:05:40.720 else too. So I hastily tried to find books by Daryl Cooper that I could read and couldn't find any,

00:05:49.440 apart from one on Amazon, which seemed to be about Twitter. And then I realized,

00:05:54.960 looking more closely at the transcript of the conversation between Tucker Carlson and Daryl

00:05:59.520 Cooper, that he's not a historian. He's part of your world. He's a podcaster.

00:06:05.840 Now we're really getting insulted now, but anyway.

00:06:08.240 I mean, there's nothing wrong with podcasts. And some of my best friends do history podcasts.

00:06:15.840 But it's different from history as I had been brought up to think about it. Because for me,

00:06:22.960 a historian is somebody who goes into archives and libraries and pours over dusty documents and

00:06:29.440 tries to work out what happened, and then writes articles and books. And the books have

00:06:34.720 book notes which tell you where they got the evidence from. And I don't really think you're

00:06:40.080 a historian if you're not doing that. So that was the first surprise. And the second surprise was,

00:06:46.080 of course, that Daryl Cooper's views on Churchill and on many things appear to be those of the

00:06:53.360 National Socialists of the 1930s and 1940s. Now, there are lots of people who've beaten up on

00:06:59.840 Churchill in recent years. On the left, it's more or less standard to say that he was a racist and

00:07:08.240 that he was a colonialist and that he was responsible for famine in Bengal. There's a whole

00:07:14.800 charge sheet. And that's familiar. There's also a conservative critique. Because revisionism is not

00:07:22.480 just a left-wing activity. Historical revisionism goes on on the right too. And I remember John

00:07:27.360 Charmley writing books saying what a terrible Prime Minister Churchill had been because he had led

00:07:33.280 Britain to the position of weakness that it found itself in in 1945 and effectively handed the British

00:07:40.240 Empire to the United States. So I'm quite accustomed to critiques of Churchill from the left and the right.

00:07:47.840 Now, my position has been that of A.J.P. Taylor, who says of Churchill in his extraordinary English

00:07:55.200 history, that Churchill was the saviour of his nation. And Taylor was no conservative. And it was

00:08:03.200 one of his characteristic flourishes to make such a statement in a footnote. And I agree with that.

00:08:09.440 But I go further than Taylor because Churchill was, in fact, the saviour of Western civilization.

00:08:15.760 By fighting on, by leading the British people to keep fighting, even after the fall of France,

00:08:22.400 even after Dunkirk, at a time when plenty of people were open to the idea of some kind of

00:08:28.160 settlement with Hitler, Churchill performed one of the great historic services of all time.

00:08:34.320 So to have him described as the villain of the piece of World War II came as a surprise, especially

00:08:42.400 when it became clear in the course of the conversation between Tucker Carlson and Daryl Cooper,

00:08:46.960 that in truth, Hitler is the hero of World War II. Now, this is an unusual position to take,

00:08:54.480 to say the least. I mean, criticizing Churchill, that's common. We hear that a lot.

00:08:58.880 But when you hear somebody criticizing Churchill in the exact same terms the Nazis used

00:09:05.840 at the time during World War II, that's less common.

00:09:09.120 Neil, can I just pick up on this? Because you and I both know, I think all of us know watching this and

00:09:14.240 listening to this. We have spent at least 10 years now in the Western world living through an age where

00:09:19.840 everyone gets called a Nazi for, you know, eating meat and finding women attract, like whatever.

00:09:25.200 There's lots of things that everyone's a Nazi. So when you say this guy is expressing the opinions

00:09:31.760 of the National Socialists of the 1930s, even my instinct is to go, Neil's going a bit far here.

00:09:38.560 Why is he being woke and calling people names? But you're talking from a historical perspective.

00:09:44.400 So can you talk about the facts of what this guy claimed that made you say that?

00:09:50.720 Well, in the conversation, a number of claims are made about Churchill and about World War II.

00:09:58.880 And let me take one in particular, the claim that Churchill wanted the war, wanted it for personal

00:10:08.320 reasons, because he performed somewhat poorly in World War I, wanted it because he was a psychopath 0.97

00:10:16.960 and a drunk. Those are things that Daryl Cooper says. And wanted it also because he was under the 0.86

00:10:23.840 influence of Zionists. Financiers, we're told. Not named, but there is a recurrent allusion to the

00:10:32.960 idea that Churchill was a philo-semite and was incentivized to pursue a policy of war because he

00:10:44.480 was under the influence of unnamed Jewish financiers. So that's the clue that there's something a little 0.99

00:10:52.960 unusual about this brand of revisionism. Then there's another clue that Hitler sincerely wanted 0.94

00:11:02.240 peace and made peace offers to Britain that Churchill, because he was a drunk and a psychopath 0.92

00:11:08.160 and in league with the Zionists, spurned. What's interesting about this is that anybody who's actually 0.95

00:11:15.520 studied the peace offers that Hitler made in 1940 knows why Churchill rejected them, because they 0.78

00:11:23.120 would have implied the subordination of the British Empire to the National Socialist regime. They were not

00:11:28.880 sincere peace offers because Hitler, in conversations with people in Germany, referred to Britain as

00:11:35.440 Germany's hate-inspired antagonist. And we know that Hitler's objective was not to adhere to any kind of

00:11:43.600 compromise peace with Britain, but indeed to pursue his goals, not just of domination of the Eurasian

00:11:49.520 landmass, but of global domination, ultimately challenging the United States by building a massive

00:11:53.680 Atlantic fleet. This is all fairly familiar if you, I don't know, read any books about World War II,

00:12:00.720 or for that matter, written books about World War II. My book on that subject was called The War of the

00:12:05.360 World, History's Age of Hatred, and it discusses in considerable detail why it was that Hitler's 0.97

00:12:14.320 peace overtures were spurned and how right Churchill was to overrule those, such as Lord Halifax, who

00:12:21.760 thought that Britain's position was so weak there ought to be some kind of negotiation. Then there's a

00:12:27.520 third argument that's suspect. Cooper says, not only did Churchill spurn these peace overtures from

00:12:35.600 Hitler, he then launched a terror bombing campaign against German civilians and sent the Royal Air

00:12:43.840 Force to civilian targets with the view of killing as many German civilians as possible. Of course, all the 1.00

00:12:52.560 men by this time were in the armed forces and not in Germany because they'd occupied various other

00:12:58.560 countries. So it was only women and children and the elderly who were killed by the Royal Air Force,

00:13:04.640 and this was terrorism. This is another interesting argument because it's exactly what Joseph Goebbels

00:13:09.760 said at the time. It draws something of a veil, indeed a rather thick velvet curtain, over the fact

00:13:16.480 that at this very point the Germans were bombing British targets in what we used to call the Battle of

00:13:22.480 Britain. The principal objective of the Royal Air Force at that point was to stop the Germans, the 0.93

00:13:29.920 Luftwaffe, from inflicting fatal damage to Britain's war economy. There were bombing raids on German

00:13:36.800 targets, but they were industrial, economic, and military targets. The fact that civilians got killed

00:13:41.840 reflects the lack of precision of bombing at that point. There was extremely little accuracy in World

00:13:47.440 War II bombing. So if you're making arguments that the Nazis made, there may be a problem with your

00:13:55.920 approach to World War II, but it doesn't stop there. Because one of the more remarkable flourishes that

00:14:02.560 Cooper produces is the claim that the millions of Soviet prisoners of war who died in German captivity were the

00:14:12.560 victims of the victims of a slight mix-up, a little logistical snafu that was quite understandable under

00:14:19.040 the circumstances. You made the Soviet Union, you achieve enormous military victories, suddenly you have

00:14:26.000 all these prisoners, and I knew we forgot something. We didn't order food for the POWs. Oh my god.

00:14:34.480 What? And so we are told a story of how the very high numbers of Soviet prisoners who died in German

00:14:41.200 hands were just the victims of a little bit of a logistical mess-up. Now, this is the kind of thing

00:14:48.240 that would be said after the war by people who wanted to cover up the war crimes of the Wehrmacht of the

00:14:55.520 German regular army. And it was quite a concerted effort to say that, well, it wasn't really the regular

00:15:00.560 army that was involved, it was all done by the SS, or people died because of logistical problems.

00:15:07.040 So this is another Nazi argument. But in reality, and we know this, it's well documented, number one, 0.69

00:15:12.800 there were explicit orders to kill Soviet prisoners as part of Operation Barbarossa. And not only the so-called

00:15:22.400 political commissars, the members of the Soviet Communist Party, but it soon became clear that Jews could be killed, 0.89

00:15:29.280 killed Jewish civilians, could be killed if they fell into German hands. And there was a series of clear 0.58

00:15:35.040 instructions to commanders to carry out killing, murders of prisoners in violation of the Geneva

00:15:42.080 Conventions. And this is something that starts a terrible cycle of violence on the Eastern Front in

00:15:45.920 which prisoners are not taken by either side. Again, I spent quite a large part of my life writing about

00:15:53.360 this, teaching courses about it at Harvard and elsewhere. And it's a little depressing to me,

00:16:00.320 not to say infuriating, to have somebody get tremendous publicity for rehashing the arguments that the

00:16:10.080 Nazis made in the 1940s and after the war that we know to be false because book after book has documented

00:16:19.040 the reality. And that's, I think, the most fascinating part about this interview, because the interview

00:16:24.960 itself was not interesting. What's interesting is why it has suddenly risen to prominence. And I guess

00:16:32.400 the question to you is this, and push back if you disagree, I see Churchill as a symbol of the Western

00:16:38.080 project, of what is good about the West, of standing up to a crazed death cult. Do you think the fact that we

00:16:46.160 are now attacking him so publicly from both left and right, is that just a symptom of a lack of faith

00:16:53.760 and also a crisis at the heart of the Western project? One of the things about Western civilization

00:17:00.640 that I like and Churchill liked was that you got to criticize everybody, that even the heroes were

00:17:10.400 subject to criticism. Churchill talks about this as one of the features of our system, and it was one

00:17:17.920 reason that he took criticism, of which he had a great deal during his life, so easily. I also think,

00:17:25.360 if you go back a few generations, that it's kind of standard practice in Britain to have a go at the

00:17:31.920 heroes of the previous generation. Think of Lytton Strachey's eminent Victorians, which was one of the kind

00:17:36.880 of Urtexts of Bloomsbury. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for us to ask critical

00:17:43.520 questions about the heroes of previous generations. In fact, I think it's a good thing. I certainly

00:17:47.760 became a historian with a view to challenging the things that I had been taught. There's a sense in

00:17:54.320 which history is a constant argument about what happened, why it happened, and whether it was a good

00:18:00.080 or a bad thing. And I'm fine with that. But there are certain rules. You can't make historical claims

00:18:07.120 that are not based on good evidence. If you do, you'll be found out and your work will be discredited.

00:18:16.560 In the realm of podcasts, with all due respect, no such rules apply. There are no footnotes on a podcast,

00:18:23.760 there's no fact checking, there's no effort, in fact, to challenge somebody unless you or the

00:18:31.840 broadcaster does it. And what's notable about Tucker Carlson's conversation with Daryl Cooper is that

00:18:37.600 at no point does Carlson challenge any of the wild claims that Cooper makes. He just agrees with them

00:18:44.720 and sometimes amplifies them. Now, why pick on Churchill? I think it's partly in the American context

00:18:53.120 that the older generation of American conservatives have long idolized Churchill. And you'll never

00:18:59.840 really go wrong writing a book about Churchill in the United States and going on a speaking tour about

00:19:04.960 Churchill. You'll always get an audience. So part of this is the old, I'll call it, punk rock position

00:19:13.760 that if something's sacred, you should have a go at it and it's bound to get clicks. And it certainly works in

00:19:20.080 that way, sort of outrageous and provocative and daring and edgy to criticize somebody who's been

00:19:25.520 idolized by previous generations. There's another part, though, which is a little bit stranger and

00:19:33.520 recalls Carlson's interview with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. Now in that interview, you may

00:19:40.000 remember Putin engaged in an epic filibuster in where she told a pack of lies about Russian history and

00:19:47.920 Ukrainian history. And Tucker Carlson tried to get occasional words in, but mostly did a kind of

00:19:54.480 allergy nod. And so the problem here is that if people make outrageous historical claims, if you want

00:20:00.880 to have a discussion of history, it seems to me that the interviewer has some responsibility to do some

00:20:06.480 homework so that they can at least attempt to challenge the more outrageous falsehoods that

00:20:12.160 their guest utters. But this isn't the Carlson way. Tucker Carlson was a tremendously effective

00:20:18.800 broadcaster for whom I had a good deal of respect when he was in Fox News. And to give him his due,

00:20:24.640 some of his monologues in the crisis year of 2020 were extraordinarily powerful and impressive. And I had

00:20:31.040 high hopes that Tucker Carlson would be an influential and effective voice on the American conservative

00:20:38.480 side. My illusions have been completely shattered by the Putin interview and now by this interview,

00:20:44.640 because it seems as if Tucker is happy, is in fact eager to give platforms to people whose positions are

00:20:53.520 a tissue of lies and politically aligned with real fascism. And I use the term deliberately. The word fascist is

00:21:03.840 overused. People are always calling people fascists or Nazis, as you said. But it still has a meaning. And if your

00:21:11.040 positions are as Putin's have become, or as Daryl Cooper's appear to be, clearly analogous with the positions of Adolf Hitler and the 0.97

00:21:19.920 National Socialists, then you are a fascist. You are in fact a Nazi. And that's the thing about these two 0.98

00:21:26.960 interviews that I find troubling. I don't understand why somebody who was once a highly effective conservative

00:21:32.000 broadcaster has decided to become at least an enabler of fascists. Do you think part of it, because it's

00:21:40.240 a dangerous thing to intuit motive, but if we look at it in a broader perspective, do you think part of it is

00:21:46.640 we're sick of experts? We feel let down by institutions. We've been lied to again and

00:21:51.520 again. We look at universities and we go, you know, they're pumping out all of this stuff. Gender is a 1.00

00:21:56.560 social construct. And we go, well, we can't trust you on this. So why can we trust you on World War II?

00:22:02.080 If you're going to talk nonsense about something as basic as gender, which we all know, well, we all know what

00:22:08.640 the truth is, then why wouldn't you make up this stuff about Hitler, for want of a better word?

00:22:13.600 I think that's part of the attraction of forbidden fruits on the right. The left has played so fast

00:22:21.040 and loose with scholarly rules that it's almost as if the rule book has been thrown out the window,

00:22:28.640 and you might as well join in in this strange game of distortion.

00:22:36.080 But I'm not going to impute a motive. I don't know. It might just be that this is the way you get clicks.

00:22:44.000 You lose your gig on Fox News. You got to start over. You're basically in a similar position to you

00:22:49.280 guys. You just got a million subscribers. I don't know where Tucker is, but the pursuit of subscribers

00:22:54.640 can lead people to make perhaps errors of judgment. That might be it. Or it may be that what we're

00:22:59.600 seeing here is something slightly more ideological. I think on the right, in Europe and in the United

00:23:06.320 States, there's a pretty clear dilemma. And the dilemma is, do you remain true to conservatism as,

00:23:15.120 say, Bill Buckley defined it? And that is to say, as Churchill defined it? Something that's rooted in

00:23:23.440 the rule of law, the idea of a free society, not just of the free elections, but of a free civil

00:23:30.240 society and a free press. Do you remain committed to that? Or do you go to a dark side in which other

00:23:38.640 ideas get involved? Ideas of racial hierarchy, for example. Ideas in which might is more important

00:23:50.800 than right. And I think there are quite a number of people on both sides of the Atlantic who've decided

00:23:56.720 that the dark side is attractive. Maybe just because it's transgressive and edgy, or maybe because they

00:24:02.320 think it works better. And in a way, Ukraine is a pretty good test of this. And it's clear that

00:24:09.600 if you go to Moscow and you give Vladimir Putin an easy interview after he's invaded a sovereign

00:24:16.400 state, after he's allowed troops to commit heinous war crimes, you have crossed over to the dark side.

00:24:23.760 There's just no defending that. And I couldn't really believe my eyes when I watched that interview

00:24:30.320 happen because it seemed to me quite clear that Tucker Carlson had volunteered to be part

00:24:35.600 of the propaganda of Russia's fascist state. Now, I've just got back from Kyiv. I've stood

00:24:43.120 in the city centre looking at the long, long line of photographs of people killed by the Russians

00:24:51.520 since this war began. Tens of thousands, soldiers and civilians. I have met victims of Russian torture

00:25:01.200 have a conversation with a woman. A military medic was captured at Mariupol and raped and horribly

00:25:09.120 tortured by Russian troops. This doesn't make me sympathetic to apologists for what has become

00:25:15.200 a fascist regime in Moscow. And in the same way, I'm not at all sympathetic to people who want to use the

00:25:23.760 supposed revisionist history of World War II as part of this recasting of the right. I think if

00:25:32.160 conservatism is to have any meaning, it must be rooted in the ideals of Western civilization that I just

00:25:38.640 outlined, which Churchill, by the way, once very brilliantly summarized in one of his shortest speeches,

00:25:44.960 which I quote in the book Civilization. The minute you start making excuses for a dictator like Putin,

00:25:52.720 or for that matter, Hitler, you're on the wrong side. You've crossed over from conservatism in its

00:26:00.480 sense that Churchill understood it to something else, which is more or less equivalent to fascism.

00:26:06.400 Neil, I'm glad you've had a chance to address some of the historical claims. And I feel that

00:26:11.120 my own view, by the way, is, look, people like this Cooper guy are allowed to have their opinions.

00:26:16.160 They should be allowed to exist. The issue for me is whether that person should be put on the

00:26:20.960 biggest platform in America. And it's not about de-platforming a censorship, but it's a kind of

00:26:26.400 taste thing. You don't invite someone to your house and then feed them rotten fruit. And that's kind of

00:26:32.320 what a broadcaster's job is. You pick things that you think are valuable and you offer it to your

00:26:36.960 audience, right? But since we moved on to the current context, I think it's really interesting

00:26:42.960 and important to have this conversation because I think the thing you're saying is exactly right.

00:26:46.720 This represents a loss of direction, perhaps, or a loss of clarity of direction on the right,

00:26:54.160 about the right way to deal with some very real problems.

00:26:57.600 Well, it's a loss of principle, but it also is a strategic defeat. Let me illustrate the point

00:27:03.680 in another way.

00:27:04.080 Let me just say this though, Neil, before you do, because I think it's important. I don't

00:27:08.160 think it's just a loss of principle. I think the right is genuinely lost. And Tucker and his guest

00:27:14.240 allude to this in the conversation at the end when, and I wanted to ask you about the historical

00:27:18.800 veracity of this final claim. The guest says, well, the truth is that after Nuremberg, and it's an

00:27:26.320 interesting jumping off point for the claim he's about to make, after that it became illegal to

00:27:31.280 be right-wing in the West. Yeah. What's he talking about? Well, there is even the claim that if you

00:27:38.240 write the truth about World War II in Europe, you go to jail. Now, I still haven't been sentenced,

00:27:46.000 obviously, since I wrote what was a pretty critical account of the Allied role in World War II,

00:27:52.480 even has a chapter, Tainted Victory. And I got away with it. Somehow they didn't nick me.

00:27:59.760 So I can only assume that this is an allusion to the failed libel case that David Irving brought,

00:28:10.240 which is, again, a kind of complete misrepresentation. It is illegal in Germany to be a

00:28:16.560 Nazi. That is an understandable German position, given the impact the Nazis had on that country.

00:28:25.680 So, of course, if you think Nazism should be legal in Germany, that's a legitimate position. But that's 1.00

00:28:32.640 really what he's saying. It's certainly not illegal to write revisionist history in the United Kingdom,

00:28:38.720 or the United States, or indeed in most countries. But I said it was a kind of loss of principle,

00:28:45.280 because it seems to me that this is a very fundamental problem for the right that goes

00:28:51.040 back a very long way, recurrently throughout the history of conservatism. This goes right back to

00:28:57.040 the 19th century, to all the early critics of the French Revolution. There is this problem,

00:29:02.960 and that is, who are you getting into bed with? It was a problem that Bill Buckley was really

00:29:09.120 instrumental in solving for the American right, in that he broke with the John Birchers, with the

00:29:15.440 explicit racists and segregationists, and said, American conservatism cannot be an anti-civil rights

00:29:22.480 movement that is essentially aligned with the white supremacists, with the segregationists.

00:29:28.800 In Britain, the fork in the road was probably not Powell's rivers of blood speech, in which Powell said,

00:29:33.840 if we have not only large-scale immigration from the former colonies, but also intermarriage,

00:29:41.840 there will be terrible violence. And this was really the thing that led to the end of Powell's,

00:29:47.120 up until that point, brilliant career. And a generation of conservatives defined themselves,

00:29:52.000 including Margaret Thatcher, as not being Powellites. And Powell's ideas ended up being taken up by

00:29:57.680 organisations like the National Front. In the 1980s, when I was a student, that division was very

00:30:04.480 clear cut. Conservatives believed in free trade, in a free society, essentially classical liberalism

00:30:11.280 in the days of Thatcher, and the far right were skinheads in the National Front. So this is a

00:30:17.440 recurrent problem that conservatives have recurrently had to grapple with. And I think it's bad when,

00:30:24.640 as influential a figure as Tucker Carlson decides, I'm going all in with the racists and fascists.

00:30:31.920 Now, there is a racist dimension to the conversation he had with Daryl Cooper, though it's not at all

00:30:37.360 explicit. There's a theory of American history that's occasionally alluded to in their conversation,

00:30:44.800 which essentially is, well, everything after civil rights is a sort of descent into chaos. They don't

00:30:52.640 go into it in great detail, but it's obviously one of Cooper's other themes in podcasts and other

00:30:58.720 content that he's produced. And then we get to the English case. And in the later part of their

00:31:05.600 conversation, the conversation turns specifically to the country where we're having this conversation.

00:31:12.080 It's actually Carlson who says, surely the proof that Churchill was a terrible thing is that

00:31:18.560 everything that's happened since 1945 has been the descent of England into a kind of chaos in which

00:31:29.600 a society has been destroyed by large-scale immigration. And they kind of agree about that. 0.99

00:31:35.200 And then they conclude by saying, you know, if only they had someone like Viktor Orbán to sort this out

00:31:40.320 in the way that he sorted out Hungary. So you see where we've gone. We've sort of started with the

00:31:48.080 German arguments of the 1930s, 1940s, and we've ended up making an argument about the decline and fall

00:31:55.120 of Britain because of immigration. Neil, but let me do something Tucker didn't do, which is challenge

00:32:00.400 his guest as robustly as he can. The reason I said I don't think it's just a loss of principle, although I think

00:32:06.960 your point is valid, of course, is that there is a very real problem, which is one of the things they

00:32:14.400 talked about at the end of that interview, which is if you look at a place like the UK or Ireland,

00:32:18.960 which is the example they used to, and you say, well, look, let's look at the government's own

00:32:23.600 statistics. By 2066, British people are going to be, white British people are going to be the minority

00:32:28.880 in their own country. By 2070, Irish people are projected to be the minority in their own country.

00:32:34.560 What is the sane conservative answer to the fact that we've had two decades of mass immigration 0.69

00:32:43.600 on an unprecedented scale? You see the protests we've seen about the war in Israel on the streets,

00:32:49.440 many of them tainted by vile antisemitism, and there is a kind of sense that there's levels of

00:32:55.840 mass immigration combined with immigration from hostile cultures, frankly, just saying it out loud, 0.80

00:33:01.120 right? What's the answer to all of those criticisms? Because a lot of people would say,

00:33:06.640 well, you know, I'm not a Nazi this, and I'm not interested in those unprincipled things,

00:33:11.680 but this is a real problem, and I keep voting for governments, including conservative governments,

00:33:16.400 that do nothing about this, in fact, make the problem worse. So what are sensible conservatives

00:33:20.880 to think about this? Well, this is the central question, and this is why I say the principle really

00:33:26.240 matters, and if you choose the dark side, the consequences will be dire. First, let me put my

00:33:32.400 cards on the table. I'm married to an African. We have two children. You know, we're contributing

00:33:38.640 to turning the population of the United Kingdom slightly browner over time. So it'd be very odd for me 0.69

00:33:47.520 to say it's dreadful that there are more brown people in London than there used to be when I was 1.00

00:33:52.880 a kid. That would be insane hypocrisy. And it would be very odd for me to be opposed to asylum seekers 0.98

00:33:59.600 when Ayaan, my wife, was once an asylum seeker, and it was by applying for asylum that she was the get

00:34:04.560 out of enraged marriage and what was the oppressive Islamic culture she'd grown up in. I'm an immigrant, 1.00

00:34:11.680 too. I emigrated from the United Kingdom to the United States, and I'm a naturalised American. I'm a dual

00:34:16.800 citizen. So how could we possibly have a power-light view of immigration? That's the personal.

00:34:24.880 But let me take you back to War of the World. War of the World is not just a history of World War II.

00:34:30.000 It's only to begin 1939, end in 1945. It's actually a general theory about hatred that takes the story

00:34:36.560 right back to the late 19th century and the great migrations of that era. History has been

00:34:44.320 characterised by large-scale waves of migration. You are no more able to stop those, by and large,

00:34:52.000 than King Canute was able to stop the tide coming in. But we have to understand what happens when

00:34:59.360 there is a large increase in immigration to a society. When, for example, the foreign-born share

00:35:05.360 of the population rises above 10 percent, gets to 14 percent, which it was in the United States in

00:35:10.560 the late 19th century. And it was, of course, a characteristic feature of Central and Eastern

00:35:15.680 Europe in the late 19th century that there had been very large-scale migration, including of Jews,

00:35:22.080 but not only of Jews, of Slavs, from the relatively poor hinterland of the Russian Empire, westwards to

00:35:30.320 prosperous Central Europe. In the 19th century, there was a disastrous backlash against large-scale

00:35:39.360 immigration. It was disastrous because it went from observing the social problems that nearly 0.92

00:35:46.400 always arise when there's large-scale migration, housing shortages, the cultural differences between

00:35:51.840 the incomers and the natives, to a theory of racial difference. And this theory of racial difference,

00:35:58.560 which really was first pioneered in the United States, a sort of biological theory of why

00:36:06.000 black Americans should be second-class citizens, this theory crossed the Atlantic and was adopted

00:36:12.160 by the far right all over Europe, including by Hitler. So what happened in the early 20th century was 0.88

00:36:21.600 that the reaction to mass migration produced a theory of racial hierarchy that culminated

00:36:28.480 in the notion in Hitler's mind that the Jews were, quote, the racial tuberculosis of Europe, 0.94

00:36:34.400 and the Aryan folk would only be safe if they were annihilated. So that's the background to my 1.00

00:36:43.600 warning, that if you start to believe this stuff, if you start to say, you know what, there might be

00:36:49.520 something to this. There might be something to this idea of racial hierarchy. If you start saying,

00:36:54.560 you know what, it's not just that these people have a different culture and they're poorer than us and

00:36:58.560 they do things differently from us, but they're fundamentally incompatible with our society,

00:37:03.680 then you have to understand that the path to genocide is the path you're choosing.

00:37:11.680 That's the lesson of history. That's what the book says. The book says the most shocking thing about

00:37:16.880 the 20th century is that the Holocaust arose from the society, Germany, where the level of intermarriage

00:37:24.240 between Jews and non-Jews was highest in the world, the highest in the world. And we haven't fully 0.98

00:37:30.320 understood why the great migrations of the late 19th century and early 20th century culminated

00:37:37.280 in a genocidal regime in, of all places, Germany, which also was the place with the highest level of 0.97

00:37:42.240 education and the best universities in the world. Despite my career writing about this issue,

00:37:47.680 I don't think we've got very far down the road of understanding the German catastrophe

00:37:52.400 and seeing its relevance for us. On the contrary, we are in the midst, I think, of making the early

00:38:00.160 steps that were taken in the late 19th century by the early racial theorists down that primrose path

00:38:06.320 to hell again. And the only role a serious historian can play, I think, is to say, please understand,

00:38:12.880 this is how it begins.

00:38:14.000 Do you think part of the problem is as well, Neil, in that I saw it in Venezuela where

00:38:21.120 when things are going awry, when culture doesn't function as it should, when society doesn't work,

00:38:29.200 there becomes, and I think it's something deep rooted within us, if I'm being honest,

00:38:36.000 a craving for authoritarianism, for an authoritarian, for the strong man. That's why

00:38:41.840 Tucker eulogizes Putin. It's the strong man who is going to come in and save us, who is going to come

00:38:48.160 in and save the West. Is that part of it? Just as these people, they can't all have been terrible,

00:38:54.080 bad people, wanted Hitler to come in and save Germany. Well, first of all, I've never really

00:38:59.520 understood this, because I have a kind of morbid fear of authority figures. It's probably why I

00:39:03.840 became an academic, to make sure... It's a boarding school background.

00:39:06.240 I never went to a boarding school, but I always had a horror of authority, and I never really

00:39:12.480 understood why anybody would want to cede their personal rights to a dictator. But you're right,

00:39:20.480 there seems to be, at least in some cultures, Russia's certainly, something of a habit of

00:39:26.000 preferring autocracy to democracy. Now, let me make two important points here. The first is

00:39:34.080 that if you are a true conservative in the sense of Churchill, or a classical liberal in the sense of

00:39:41.280 Mill, you believe, as I believe, that the ideas and institutions of a free society, including the rule

00:39:49.200 of law and representative government, are open source technology that anybody can access no

00:39:57.040 matter what colour their skin, no matter what religion they have been brought up in. It's open

00:40:01.920 access as an operating system, and it works for everybody. This is important because it's why the

00:40:09.360 racial theories were wrong. Remember, we can now see that the racial theories of 100 years ago were just

00:40:15.200 wrong. There was no peculiarity of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants that made them more successful 0.97

00:40:22.240 economically than anybody else. History has shown that that's not the case, that what made Britain

00:40:28.800 and North America successful were the ideas and institutions. Those ideas and institutions can be

00:40:34.480 enjoyed and adopted and embraced by anybody. That's a very important first point. Second point,

00:40:42.080 there are two threats to that free society. One that we spent this conversation discussing,

00:40:48.960 which is the threat from the right. But there's another threat, and that's the threat from the left.

00:40:53.680 Because the left says, you see, this free society is a scam. It only really benefits the plutocrats,

00:41:01.760 the elite, the capitalist class, the kulak, the bourgeoisie. They're the problem. Not the Jews. That's the 1.00

00:41:08.960 other guys. It's the elite. It's the upper class. It's the capitalist class. And the left's argument,

00:41:16.000 which also, of course, gathered its momentum in the late 19th century and came to power in the early

00:41:21.600 20th century wars, if we can only get rid of those exploitative parasitic classes that Marx and Engels 0.98

00:41:28.080 identified, then we can have utopia. So two utopian visions, one of racial purity and the other of class 0.75

00:41:34.160 purity. That's essentially the dominant story of the 20th century. And the free society is in the

00:41:41.440 middle, fighting against both. Now, the interesting thing about Chuck was that he was as much an

00:41:45.440 anti-Bolshevik and anti-Stalinist as he was an anti-Nazi and an anti-Hitlerist. And in his view,

00:41:54.320 fighting with Stalin on your side against Hitler, which, of course, Britain did after Hitler invaded the 0.53

00:42:00.640 Soviet Union was a pact with the devil. You were literally supping with Satan. And as soon as the 0.91

00:42:06.000 war was over and Germany was defeated, Churchill said, now we have to prepare for Cold War

00:42:11.120 with the Soviet Union, because that's a totalitarian regime too. It was the lesser evil strategically 0.75

00:42:17.200 in 1941, 2, 3, 4, 5. But as soon as Hitler's dead, you have to recognize that it's an evil too. And 0.91

00:42:23.040 you must prepare to defend Western civilization against that enemy. This is what's so good about

00:42:27.920 Churchill. He's consistent. And he makes the choice between evils because it's more or less forced

00:42:34.000 upon him by Hitler. This is the way I think about the problem. We are, as a species, multicolored.

00:42:43.040 And there's all kinds of variants within Homo sapiens, but no speciation. We've stayed the same

00:42:48.880 species all the way. And that is why it is perfectly possible for a Scotsman and a Somali to have two 0.89

00:42:54.000 beautiful boys. And God bless them. And God bless all the children who are produced by mixed unions 1.00

00:43:00.560 in Britain, in the United States, all over the world. They're the future. And it's a beautiful

00:43:05.600 future. They look better on the whole than people of pure race, with no disrespect to my white children 0.92

00:43:12.960 by my first marriage, who are also very beautiful. But this is the future. We can't avoid this future

00:43:20.320 unless we want to go extinct as a species. Why? Because population collapse is a reality for a

00:43:26.240 whole bunch of ethnic subgroups. East Asians, collapsing population, total fertility rate well 1.00

00:43:34.640 below replacement, actually below unity. And the population of people who are of white descent, 0.89

00:43:40.800 people like me from almost entirely Scottish lineage, that population is falling. Now, falling

00:43:46.800 population is not something that we should take lightly. If you look beyond 2100, the human

00:43:53.040 population is likely to collapse back down towards 2 billion with much greater speed than people

00:43:58.960 realise. This is something that Elon Musk talks about and people think he's crazy. It's absolutely

00:44:03.680 right. And we should look much more closely than we tend to at what is causing the collapse of fertility

00:44:11.040 all across the world. The only place it hasn't happened, though it may happen, is sub-Saharan Africa. And

00:44:16.240 that's where human population between now and the end of the century is going to grow.

00:44:21.120 So, what's the plan? I'm interested to hear. Are we going to stop Africans coming to Europe, 1.00

00:44:26.960 and for that matter to North America? We're just going to build some enormous wall and keep them in 1.00

00:44:31.280 sub-Saharan Africa? Is that the plan? If that's your plan, if you want to just keep the societies of 1.00

00:44:39.280 what you could call the North as they are, stop any further shift from white to brown in the average

00:44:46.080 complexion, the average pigmentation, you have got to explain to me how that's going to work

00:44:50.800 economically. There are a great many elderly voters in this country who want two incompatible things.

00:44:55.680 They want to have no immigration and no inflation. Guess what? If you don't have any immigration,

00:45:00.560 if you hadn't had no immigration in the last 10 or 20 years, there would be much higher inflation

00:45:04.800 today than there is because the population labor force would simply be much smaller. So this is,

00:45:10.640 from an economic point of view, relatively straightforward. From a historic point of

00:45:14.400 view, relatively straightforward. There will be mass migration, there will be miscegenation,

00:45:18.640 there will be more brown people. The question is, what are we going to do about it? Keeping 1.00

00:45:24.240 the Africans out of the rest of the world is a doomed enterprise. The only question that interests me is, 1.00

00:45:31.200 how do you make the assimilation process as successful for every African as it has been for 0.96

00:45:37.040 my wife? That must be possible. It doesn't seem impossible that we could sell the benefits of

00:45:42.880 Western civilization to all immigrants. It doesn't seem impossible that we could say to Muslims, look,

00:45:48.560 in this country, church and state are separate and you can't use Islam as a political movement. I think 1.00

00:45:55.120 we can say those things, but we haven't really said them. So the issue for me is not,

00:45:59.760 can we stop immigration and be like Hungary? Have you been to Hungary? Do you think Hungary has a 0.87

00:46:04.560 future? It doesn't have a future. It's aging out as a society. The question is, what do we do to make

00:46:12.000 assimilation work so that the multiracial societies that we've already created, that we can't uncreate,

00:46:17.920 are harmonious and productive and committed to the ideals of freedom?

00:46:22.640 And I think your point is incredibly valid. But what we need for that to happen is for politicians

00:46:33.120 to actually be honest, to actually speak to us honestly, and also to speak to those communities

00:46:39.440 honestly. But they don't do that. We don't do that. Instead, what we do is we talk about things like

00:46:44.960 Islamophobia and the hate speech laws in Scotland and suppressing when people voice quite reasonable

00:46:53.840 criticisms and concerns that they have over the way society is going. That is unsustainable because

00:46:59.840 to go back to Germany, Germany in the 1930s, as I know it, and please correct me if I'm wrong,

00:47:04.960 had pretty stringent hate speech laws. And that didn't stop what Germany became. 0.78

00:47:09.440 Right. Well, of course, the problem in Germany was a lot more profound than limits on the freedom of

00:47:17.200 speech. But I take your point. I mean, I think there has been dishonesty on both the left and the right.

00:47:24.560 Conservatives have made it seem as if they could stop immigration when they really couldn't. And

00:47:29.600 indeed, they presided over a dramatic increase in net migration. And that is, I think, a very large

00:47:35.760 part of the reason why the Conservative Party fared so badly on July the 4th in general election. But

00:47:40.000 the left has had its own version of this, which is that a multicultural society is possible in which

00:47:45.600 everybody can hold completely inconsistent beliefs. And it's all right for Islamists to propagate a 1.00

00:47:52.960 theory of society that is incompatible with the norms of a free society. So both sets of politicians have

00:48:01.040 been, I think, mendacious. There is, I think, a new generation of politicians who are themselves the

00:48:09.680 product of the great migration. Think of someone like Kemi Badenoch, who can't really deal with this 0.69

00:48:16.720 hypocrisy anymore, because it makes no sense of their lives. So I think the hope is that there are

00:48:24.000 a new generation of politicians who are themselves of African descent, or of South Asian descent,

00:48:30.960 who can make the kind of arguments that I'm making. And they make them better than I can. My wife makes 1.00

00:48:35.040 these arguments better than I can, because I'm just a dead white male. What do I know?

00:48:39.680 Well, so Neil, just to flesh that out then, I want to get very clear, and I don't want to put any

00:48:44.000 words in your mouth. So I just want to get exactly right what you're saying. Your argument is that

00:48:50.240 the sensible right, the sensible conservative position should be that mass immigration is 0.93

00:48:58.480 inevitable. Judging the dynamics of what's happening to Western populations and what's happening to

00:49:04.400 non-Western populations, it's likely to increase. It's going to need to increase if we're going to 1.00

00:49:10.880 maintain the standards of living that we have. Can I qualify that? Of course. I don't think it

00:49:15.600 necessarily increases, but it needs to be in a relatively steady state. One of the problems

00:49:22.320 has been the sudden surge that we've seen in the UK. History shows that a big and unanticipated

00:49:28.160 surge in immigration is not generally very popular. It needs to be legal. That's very important that

00:49:34.160 people do not believe, as many Americans do, and an increasing number of British people, that people

00:49:40.080 are becoming residents of their country illegally and getting away with it. So I think it's not so 0.99

00:49:46.640 much that immigration increases. I don't think that's necessarily true. It may even be possible 0.98

00:49:50.560 for it to come down some for the heights of the last few years in the US and the UK. It needs to be

00:49:57.360 managed so that it's legitimate. And that means, instead of an open southern border in the United States,

00:50:03.040 you have a return to a system of large-scale legal immigration of the sort that I and Ayaan went

00:50:09.920 through. And if you don't have that, if you do what the Democrats have done, which is simply open the

00:50:14.720 border and tolerate large-scale illegal migration, it will not be legitimate. And that is, of course,

00:50:21.440 why the election in the United States is going to be close. Because if there's one issue that truly

00:50:26.880 alienates a really large number of American voters, it is the issue of illegal immigration. And I don't

00:50:32.720 at all blame them for feeling angry about that. I think it's a legitimate thing for a citizen to see

00:50:38.720 the border of their country, not defend it, and for citizenship effectively to be handed out,

00:50:44.080 or at least the right to vote to be handed out to people who have arrived illegally. Of course, 0.97

00:50:47.680 that's outrageous and wrong. So here I think there's a need for truth on both sides of the political

00:50:54.000 divide. Well, that's what I'm trying to flesh out. And the reason I'm doing this with you is not

00:50:57.840 that I'm trying to pin you to the wall. But rather, there has to be an articulated, credible

00:51:04.880 right of center position that the center right will see as legitimate. And I agree with you about

00:51:10.560 legal immigration. As you know, I myself am an immigrant to this country. There's nothing that

00:51:14.960 pisses me off more than seeing people come into this country illegally. I think it's wrong. It shouldn't 0.99

00:51:19.840 happen. So immigration may stay at similar levels or come down over time. But ultimately,

00:51:25.760 what you're saying is, we are not integrating people in the way that we should be. And that's

00:51:31.840 the problem. And I suppose the only question that a reasonable person might then ask is,

00:51:36.160 well, as a historian, is it possible to integrate this number of people coming in in such a short

00:51:44.080 period of time? And when the institutions and systems and structures and culture that are supposed

00:51:51.360 to integrate them, refuse to even acknowledge their own existence? We don't even say there's 0.99

00:51:57.280 such a thing as British society into which you must integrate. We say this is a multicultural place to

00:52:01.920 which you bring your own ideas and just go and live the way you want.

00:52:04.320 Part A, is it possible? Do we have any historical experience of this? Yes, of course. I mean,

00:52:09.280 in the 19th century, there were a great many Americans who said, we can't possibly let

00:52:14.000 all these Irish come to America. It'll be a disaster. And we can't possibly let all these 1.00

00:52:19.680 Poles. And we can't have these East European Jews coming to America. And that whole debate,

00:52:24.960 of course, was nonsensical because precisely those groups quickly assimilated into American society.

00:52:30.960 And pretty quickly, the second, third generations were fully established and indeed were sending people

00:52:36.240 to the American Congress. So I remember a debate I had with Samuel Huntington, the great Harvard

00:52:41.760 political scientist, about his book, Who Are We?, in which he argued that Mexicans are never going

00:52:46.000 to be integrated into the United States. This is different. And I remember saying to him,

00:52:50.880 what possible basis can you have for making that argument? It's just the argument that was made

00:52:55.440 about the Irish and the Poles and the East European Jews. And it's going to be just as wrong with the 0.82

00:53:00.160 Mexicans. And it is just as wrong. You know, fast forward however many years it is since that book 1.00

00:53:04.720 was published 20 years. And you'll never find more coherent opponents of illegal immigration than

00:53:12.800 legally naturalized Mexican Americans. Because it's their livelihood that's being undercut more

00:53:19.280 than anybody else's. So I think there's plenty of evidence that a society can manage that kind of

00:53:24.880 immigration. May I just, sorry.

00:53:25.840 But let me just, let me just finish the point. One quick thing on that.

00:53:28.160 But you have to have, this is part B of your question, you have to have a commitment to

00:53:32.880 assimilation. There needs to be a set of things that the newcomers sign up for. The United States 1.00

00:53:39.200 has been very good at that because it's been doing it all along. Yes.

00:53:43.280 We're newer to this game, but I don't see any reason why we can't be good at it.

00:53:47.280 You don't? Here's the reason. And again, I'm just testing out your argument. You know,

00:53:51.120 isn't America unique? It's a continent. Largely at those points that you're talking about,

00:53:59.600 barely populated, frankly. Still is barely populated, frankly. And it's a place,

00:54:05.760 the Native Americans is a separate issue, but to which people came all together at different points,

00:54:11.760 but together. And the African Americans are a different case.

00:54:14.400 Yes, of course, to form a new society. The issue in Europe surely 0.63

00:54:20.560 is different where you have people coming and what some people argue, replacing the existing

00:54:27.520 population. In some ways, the British might be said to be the Native Americans in this kind of

00:54:33.200 comparable scenario. Isn't that entirely different? And isn't that why the tensions are different?

00:54:38.800 Well, this is, of course, a kind of absurd argument. It's not like there are bands of asylum seekers 0.95

00:54:45.040 hunting down the tribes of North London natives. I know what you mean. And it's a terrible analogy,

00:54:53.440 and you shouldn't go there because it doesn't make any sense. And as for replacement, what is actually

00:55:00.560 happening is that migration is providing employees for large parts of the economy that would not

00:55:08.800 otherwise be able to find them. I don't know how you would run the National Health Service right

00:55:14.160 now with that immigration. I mean, just run the counterfactual in your mind. Let's imagine

00:55:18.480 a counterfactual in which the Blair government, instead of being quite liberal in this issue,

00:55:22.880 had decided, in fact, to close the border. And let's run the counterfactual of British history since 1997

00:55:29.760 with zero net migration. Now, unless you imagine that there would have been a magical jump upwards in

00:55:36.400 the fertility rate of the indigenous population, Britain would be a very different place. And 1.00

00:55:41.440 economically, it would be significantly poorer. So I think from an economics point of view, it's absurd to

00:55:47.760 talk about replacement. There is a genuine shortage of young people in any population which has a fertility

00:55:56.640 rate below two. And those shortages would have been far more of a problem had there not been immigration.

00:56:03.360 That's clear. I mean, even if you look at the recent history of the United States, it's obvious

00:56:08.000 that a very large surge of immigration, most of it illegal, was one of the reasons inflation didn't

00:56:12.800 go higher in the period after the pandemic. So the economics here is quite straightforward. And

00:56:17.040 replacement is one of these buzzwords of the transgressive right that has absolutely no validity.

00:56:22.720 That's not what's going on here. And remember, historically, as I said, mass migration is the 0.98

00:56:29.200 name of the game. And what's interesting is that mostly this is a relatively peaceful process.

00:56:34.720 Sam Huntington's other great idea late in his life was the clash of civilizations. But the argument I tried

00:56:40.240 to make in the book Civilization is that civilizations don't clash. They're much more likely to fuse.

00:56:45.200 It's the fusion that actually makes, often, for the creativity. I don't know how English history would

00:56:53.680 have gone if the Anglo-Saxons had just kind of been on their own the whole time. Like the Normans just 0.82

00:56:59.440 don't show up. They never make contact with the Scots because the mountains along the Scottish-English

00:57:04.480 border are just too high. It's just the Anglo-Saxons. So let's run the experiment of only Anglo-Saxons. 0.98

00:57:10.080 It's a parallel world. Maybe there's some infinitely different universe where it exists,

00:57:15.360 but it's a different world. English history without the non-English, Norman Davis made this

00:57:20.320 point brilliantly long ago, is a different story because the various immigrants have made enormous 1.00

00:57:27.280 contributions at every turn, not forgetting the royals who were consistently non-Anglo-Saxon from 1066 onwards.

00:57:35.120 Neil, so I think one of the things that people are worried about when it comes to mass immigration,

00:57:41.120 it's what people talk to me about. It's not Islam, it's radical Islam. And they look at these terrorist

00:57:48.080 attacks and they look at, you know, the fact that far more of them are thwarted because the police

00:57:54.400 and the government pull so many resources into stopping these extremists.

00:57:59.200 And there's people who accurately go, well, look, if we actually had an immigration system that was

00:58:08.000 limited, we would be able to screen people far more effectively and we'd be able to reduce attacks

00:58:14.640 because we can't continue to live in a society where we're continually under threat from extremists.

00:58:20.640 I agree with that view. I think it's a major problem that goes back all the way 23 years to 9-11,

00:58:28.960 that in our dealings with Islamic extremists or radical Islam or Islamists, we have tended to focus

00:58:37.440 only on those engaged in violence, engaged in terrorism. And we have tended not to scrutinize those

00:58:44.960 who use radical proselytization that is the necessary precursor of violence.

00:58:51.680 Dawah, that radicalization that precedes jihad. I'm merely quoting my wife here because she is the

00:58:58.640 expert on this as a former Muslim. Ayaan's argument has long been that there is a clear problem if we

00:59:04.880 don't focus on radical preaching but only on acts of terrorism. Being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood 1.00

00:59:12.000 should be as disqualifying for immigration to the United Kingdom as being a member of the Communist

00:59:17.280 Party was disqualifying for immigrants to the United States during the Cold War. That's as simply as I

00:59:23.440 can put it. And this is why you have to manage immigration and you cannot do it with an open door 0.65

00:59:30.880 because you have to make sure that you are not importing people who are committed ideologically to

00:59:37.200 the destruction of your way of life. And for the same reason that Americans kept communists out

00:59:42.560 of the United States, we need to keep Islamists out of the United Kingdom. And we need to make it clear 1.00

00:59:49.520 that the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood are not going to be tolerated and it's not enough to say

00:59:55.840 as long as you don't commit violent acts, that's not good enough. Because radical proselytization and

01:00:01.600 extremist preaching is the prelude to acts of violence. To me, this is quite clear cut. Future

01:00:07.680 generations will wonder, if we have a return to the kind of terrorism that we've seen in the recent

01:00:13.440 past, why we weren't tougher on these people. And they will conclude, perhaps rightly, that organizations

01:00:20.560 like the Muslim Brotherhood were extremely effective at duping the elites of Britain into thinking that they 1.00

01:00:27.040 were somehow willing to co-exist peacefully with a free society, which they're not.

01:00:33.120 Duping or do you think what it denotes is a lack of backbone amongst our leaders and a concern and

01:00:39.520 a worry of being called racist?

01:00:41.760 Have you read Michel Welbeck's Soumission?

01:00:45.280 Yes.

01:00:45.760 It turns out to be about Britain, not France. That was the one thing he got wrong.

01:00:52.400 Yeah. So I think Welbeck's vision in that very funny book is that the French elite, the Parisian

01:01:01.040 sophisticates, submit to, in effect, a Muslim Brotherhood government out of fear of the far

01:01:08.880 right. And they do it gladly. And I worry that we might just make that mistake here. Because if you

01:01:17.440 allow the demonization of the right to be your preoccupation, so that you care more about

01:01:26.480 combating Islamophobia than combating Islamism, then you are halfway to submission. You're halfway 0.81

01:01:32.800 to Welbeck's dystopia.

01:01:34.480 Well, it would seem the reframe here is quite obvious. I mean, Islamic extremists, Islamists, 0.96

01:01:40.000 are quite clearly, by every single definition that we have, the far right. All their views align.

01:01:45.600 Yeah, they're very gender critical.

01:01:47.680 This is what I'm going to say. This gets us to the great paradox that the most

01:01:53.520 bizarre unholy alliance of our time has been between the Islamists and the woke. 0.92

01:01:58.800 And it's puzzled me for 10 years that on campuses in particular, but this is no more generally true,

01:02:04.480 that these two groups make common cults so readily, since they seem to believe in diametrically

01:02:10.160 opposite things, certainly as far as social order should be concerned. But yeah, I mean,

01:02:15.920 I think we need to recognize who are the enemies of a free society. And the thing about a free society

01:02:23.680 is that you have enemies to the left of you and enemies to the right of you. That's the problem.

01:02:28.160 Churchill understood that. I think a lot of people today forget it, because they prefer to have just

01:02:33.520 one enemy. It simplifies life. It's all the left. No, no, it's all the right. But you know what,

01:02:38.800 perhaps because I'm from Glasgow, perhaps because I'm a Ouija, I think having fights with people on

01:02:43.280 both sides is kind of the real, that's a real pub fight. That's when you're really enjoying yourself.

01:02:49.200 It's what happens to us, because we're trying to find out what the sensible position is on things,

01:02:53.840 and that inevitably means you either get attacked from the left or the right, depending on what weak it is.

01:02:58.160 It's a good sign. If you're not getting attacked from both sides, you're not getting it right. We feel that way.

01:03:03.040 And look, I'm glad I was able to put some of the arguments that we hear on these issues a lot.

01:03:08.960 Because, you know, this is what a lot of people are thinking in the privacy of their own home,

01:03:14.000 and it's good to air that with someone who is as informed as you are. Perhaps we ought to wrap the

01:03:19.680 main section of the interview up by talking about integration. You know, I always say

01:03:24.400 that that's what an immigrant's duty is, to come and integrate into the society into which they come.

01:03:30.240 I think that's true, and I think it's important. And then I suppose the question is how? I guess you learn

01:03:35.760 the language, you learn the history and try to understand what this country is about and make yourself

01:03:42.160 more like that. But what is the successful model for integrating populations from different cultures

01:03:48.080 and backgrounds? How do we do the thing you're saying, which is we have multi-ethnic societies,

01:03:53.360 we do have high levels of immigration, we may, for economic and other reasons, continue to do that,

01:03:57.600 demographic reasons? How do we have these great cohesive societies as we move into the rest of

01:04:02.640 the century? Well, you partly answered the question yourself. What's interesting to me as a naturalized

01:04:09.680 American is how that worked, and particularly the citizenship ceremony when you have a Pledge of

01:04:15.520 Allegiance? And it is actually quite a moving ceremony. I was in Oakland, California, surrounded

01:04:20.640 by people from all over the world, but the largest group were Chinese. But from everywhere, I was next 1.00

01:04:25.600 to a guy from Eritrea, and we were put through a secular rite, a ritual, confirming that we were American

01:04:34.160 citizens. And I think there has to be, on the side of the country that is importing people, that kind of a 0.99

01:04:43.280 thing. You have to communicate to the newcomers that they are becoming part of a different social 1.00

01:04:50.960 order. They're citizens of something that has a history that they must respect. If we don't do that,

01:04:57.440 if we say, you know what? You need to learn English. Don't worry about that. You don't need to, in fact,

01:05:02.000 adapt at all to that which was the message of multiculturalism for decades. That is the recipe for 0.92

01:05:09.600 disaster. That actually is the disease of which it pretends to be the cure, because that's the

01:05:14.800 kind of argument that creates ghettos, that creates alienated second and third generation

01:05:22.800 people who haven't been successfully integrated into the labor market and the society. I mean,

01:05:27.280 look at parts of Sweden today, and you see where multiculturalism has led, and it's let down everybody. 0.98

01:05:33.760 It's let down the native-born population. It's let down the immigrants. 1.00

01:05:38.080 The United States shows how to do this pretty well. And I think one of the odder things about

01:05:44.000 the great debate in the United States about immigration is how often we lose sight of the

01:05:48.880 facts that the problems of illegal immigration and uncontrolled immigration, the success of the

01:05:54.480 United States was based on managing immigration successfully and conveying to newcomers what it was

01:06:01.600 to be an American. We could continue this conversation for hours, but unfortunately our

01:06:08.960 time is up. I have to go and fight with other people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you're a Ouija, 0.93

01:06:13.920 it's 12 o'clock, so it's time to get on the whiskey. But our final question is always the same. What's

01:06:19.520 the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

01:06:23.840 Before Neil answers that final question when the interview is over, make sure you head on over to

01:06:28.240 locals by clicking the link in the description to see this. The fact that people like Tucker,

01:06:33.280 who are clearly influential in American politics, are indulging this, how does this affect the

01:06:38.560 electoral dimension of this? Because I don't think the mainstream American public

01:06:43.040 is on board with these ideas. Let's put it that way.

01:06:46.240 Can you see us lurching in Europe far more to that kind of hard right position,

01:06:53.040 for want of a better term? What odds would you give to a Taiwan conflict erupting in the next decade?

01:07:00.080 Well, we talked about it already. The crisis of collapsing population that's already unfolding in,

01:07:06.720 say, South Korea, that seems like the future for many Western societies on our present trajectory.

01:07:14.160 And the thing that we're not talking about is the thing that may lie behind that,

01:07:18.080 which is the strange alienation of young men and young women from one another. One of the most

01:07:25.440 striking things about the US election, and I think it's true in the UK too, is we see extraordinary

01:07:30.960 divergence in the political preferences of young men and young women. Nowhere has this gone further

01:07:36.240 than in South Korea. And I don't think it's coincidental that South Korea has about the lowest fertility

01:07:40.960 rate on the planet. So we're not talking enough about the breakdown in relations between young

01:07:46.880 men and young women around the world and what that may lead to for our species. So, you know,

01:07:53.600 my message is love one another. Head on over to locals to see the rest of the questions,

01:07:58.800 including answers to your questions. If you want to lose this election, go right down the Tucker Carlson

01:08:06.720 path. And you more or less ensure that the Kamala Harris wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin wins Michigan.

01:08:12.400 That's why it's so baffling, that Carlson.

TRIGGERnometry - September 18, 2024

“Tucker Has Become an Enabler of Fascists” - Sir Niall Ferguson

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