“Tucker Has Become an Enabler of Fascists” - Sir Niall Ferguson
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 8 minutes
Words per Minute
165.62305
Summary
Sir Neil Ferguson returns to the Trigonometry studio to discuss his new role as a member of the House of Lords, and why he thinks Winston Churchill was the chief villain of World War II. Plus, a look back at the first episode of the show, and a look forward to the next one.
Transcript
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I don't know if you heard, but actually Churchill was the chief villain of World War II.
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Yeah. I don't understand why somebody who was once a highly effective conservative broadcaster
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has decided to become at least an enabler of fascists.
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We have spent at least 10 years now in the Western world living through an age where
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everyone gets called a Nazi. Even my instinct is to go, Neil's going a bit far here.
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Can you talk about the facts of what this guy claimed that made you say that?
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If you're making arguments that the Nazis made, there may be a problem with your approach to World War II.
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Sir Neil Ferguson, you've become that since we last spoke.
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Such a pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome back.
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It's a pleasure to be with you, Constantine. Lord Constantine, as you will one day be.
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I'm afraid not. I doubt that very much. Lord Foster, that would be quite good.
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Yeah, that would be good, especially with this voice.
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You'll fit right in in the House of Lords. It's the least exclusive club in London.
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Being a knight is very Monty Python, and I'm of the generation for whom
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the word sir immediately evokes the knights who say ni.
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It's been a source of a great deal of mirth in the Ferguson family.
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Well, I do. I said it half-mockingly, I have to say, but congratulations.
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Everybody does. Americans are actually slightly more respectful.
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But for British people, it's just the chance to make fun of you.
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Americans are very earnest. We British are not so much.
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I think they just wish they had titles, and it's title envy.
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Yeah. Whereas all they've got is Mr. President.
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We've slagged off Americans. We've lost a lot of American audience.
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Look, I am an American, so I'm conflicted about feudal, you know, feudal remnants.
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Did you notice how he turned up a Scottish accent?
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Yeah, he did. He turned it up a little bit, didn't he?
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If you say it without a Scottish accent, people will think you're referring to people who clean
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car windscreens. But I'm, of course, born in Glasgow, British Unionist, very anti-nationalist.
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But I'm an American citizen. So the whole Sir Neil thing actually goes over better there.
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I actually take it as an honor to all the people who helped me, my parents and my school and all
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my teachers. And that's, that's the way to think about it. You're really, you're really just kind
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of getting something for all they did for you, which is, you know.
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This is the most weird opening to a trigonometry change we've had for a long time.
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Particularly one that I actually intend to be quite serious on some subjects.
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Yeah, you're always expecting a comedy podcast. That's what I thought you were.
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Many people have said that, not necessarily as a compliment.
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Yes. So, I don't know if you heard, but actually Churchill was the chief villain of World War II.
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I mean, we continue with the comedy theme. But, you know, we started Trigonometry in 2018.
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One of the reasons we love having you on the show is that we love having historians on the show
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more broadly. And one of the reasons we love doing that is that we feel that history is important.
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And the reason it's important is that, among other things, it's a way of knowing who we are.
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It's a way of knowing how we arrived at the values that we've arrived at.
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And it's a way of knowing who almost, I would say, who we're supposed to be in a way.
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It's kind of like how you know what's up and what's down.
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And so, in this history of our channel, one of the things we've done is we've talked to lots of people
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in order to counter some of the false narratives that have been pushed about the history of this
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country, the empire, colonialism, slavery, Churchill, and many other things. And as you know,
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the direction of that, those attacks on history, has always been from the work left. Almost always.
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There have been people like David Irving and others. But generally speaking, that has been
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the direction of attack, the direction of travel. So I think this is why so many people felt very
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strongly about the thing I referenced just a second ago, which is Tucker Carlson hosting an
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amateur historian. Maybe that would be the right way to describing a podcast or whatever the right
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term is, who basically said Churchill was the chief villain of World War II. He was a psychopath.
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And he wanted World War II. Hitler didn't. Hitler made lots of peace offers.
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The reason that millions of people died on the Eastern Front, civilians and prisoners of war is,
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you know, the Germans hadn't planned properly, which ironically is one of the supposed strengths
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planning. And lots of other things that we wanted to touch on you on, and also talk about why you
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think this has happened, why Tucker is hosting this person, promoting him as the most important,
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most honest, and best historian in America, which was an extraordinary claim. But first and foremost,
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was Churchill the chief villain of World War II who wanted the war?
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No, not surprisingly. I don't agree with that view. I was quite surprised by Tucker Carlson's decision
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to devote so much space, time and praise to Daryl Cooper, of whom I had never previously heard. You see,
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I had thought that the most popular historian of our generation was Yuval Noah Harari, who has sold
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millions of books, such as Sapiens. So it came as a shock to learn that I'd been eclipsed by someone
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else too. So I hastily tried to find books by Daryl Cooper that I could read and couldn't find any,
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apart from one on Amazon, which seemed to be about Twitter. And then I realized,
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looking more closely at the transcript of the conversation between Tucker Carlson and Daryl
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Cooper, that he's not a historian. He's part of your world. He's a podcaster.
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Now we're really getting insulted now, but anyway.
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I mean, there's nothing wrong with podcasts. And some of my best friends do history podcasts.
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But it's different from history as I had been brought up to think about it. Because for me,
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a historian is somebody who goes into archives and libraries and pours over dusty documents and
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tries to work out what happened, and then writes articles and books. And the books have
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book notes which tell you where they got the evidence from. And I don't really think you're
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a historian if you're not doing that. So that was the first surprise. And the second surprise was,
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of course, that Daryl Cooper's views on Churchill and on many things appear to be those of the
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National Socialists of the 1930s and 1940s. Now, there are lots of people who've beaten up on
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Churchill in recent years. On the left, it's more or less standard to say that he was a racist and
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that he was a colonialist and that he was responsible for famine in Bengal. There's a whole
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charge sheet. And that's familiar. There's also a conservative critique. Because revisionism is not
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just a left-wing activity. Historical revisionism goes on on the right too. And I remember John
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Charmley writing books saying what a terrible Prime Minister Churchill had been because he had led
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Britain to the position of weakness that it found itself in in 1945 and effectively handed the British
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Empire to the United States. So I'm quite accustomed to critiques of Churchill from the left and the right.
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Now, my position has been that of A.J.P. Taylor, who says of Churchill in his extraordinary English
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history, that Churchill was the saviour of his nation. And Taylor was no conservative. And it was
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one of his characteristic flourishes to make such a statement in a footnote. And I agree with that.
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But I go further than Taylor because Churchill was, in fact, the saviour of Western civilization.
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By fighting on, by leading the British people to keep fighting, even after the fall of France,
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even after Dunkirk, at a time when plenty of people were open to the idea of some kind of
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settlement with Hitler, Churchill performed one of the great historic services of all time.
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So to have him described as the villain of the piece of World War II came as a surprise, especially
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when it became clear in the course of the conversation between Tucker Carlson and Daryl Cooper,
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that in truth, Hitler is the hero of World War II. Now, this is an unusual position to take,
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to say the least. I mean, criticizing Churchill, that's common. We hear that a lot.
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But when you hear somebody criticizing Churchill in the exact same terms the Nazis used
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at the time during World War II, that's less common.
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Neil, can I just pick up on this? Because you and I both know, I think all of us know watching this and
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listening to this. We have spent at least 10 years now in the Western world living through an age where
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everyone gets called a Nazi for, you know, eating meat and finding women attract, like whatever.
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There's lots of things that everyone's a Nazi. So when you say this guy is expressing the opinions
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of the National Socialists of the 1930s, even my instinct is to go, Neil's going a bit far here.
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Why is he being woke and calling people names? But you're talking from a historical perspective.
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So can you talk about the facts of what this guy claimed that made you say that?
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Well, in the conversation, a number of claims are made about Churchill and about World War II.
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And let me take one in particular, the claim that Churchill wanted the war, wanted it for personal
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reasons, because he performed somewhat poorly in World War I, wanted it because he was a psychopath
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and a drunk. Those are things that Daryl Cooper says. And wanted it also because he was under the
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influence of Zionists. Financiers, we're told. Not named, but there is a recurrent allusion to the
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idea that Churchill was a philo-semite and was incentivized to pursue a policy of war because he
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was under the influence of unnamed Jewish financiers. So that's the clue that there's something a little
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unusual about this brand of revisionism. Then there's another clue that Hitler sincerely wanted
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peace and made peace offers to Britain that Churchill, because he was a drunk and a psychopath
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and in league with the Zionists, spurned. What's interesting about this is that anybody who's actually
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studied the peace offers that Hitler made in 1940 knows why Churchill rejected them, because they
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would have implied the subordination of the British Empire to the National Socialist regime. They were not
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sincere peace offers because Hitler, in conversations with people in Germany, referred to Britain as
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Germany's hate-inspired antagonist. And we know that Hitler's objective was not to adhere to any kind of
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compromise peace with Britain, but indeed to pursue his goals, not just of domination of the Eurasian
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landmass, but of global domination, ultimately challenging the United States by building a massive
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Atlantic fleet. This is all fairly familiar if you, I don't know, read any books about World War II,
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or for that matter, written books about World War II. My book on that subject was called The War of the
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World, History's Age of Hatred, and it discusses in considerable detail why it was that Hitler's
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peace overtures were spurned and how right Churchill was to overrule those, such as Lord Halifax, who
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thought that Britain's position was so weak there ought to be some kind of negotiation. Then there's a
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third argument that's suspect. Cooper says, not only did Churchill spurn these peace overtures from
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Hitler, he then launched a terror bombing campaign against German civilians and sent the Royal Air
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Force to civilian targets with the view of killing as many German civilians as possible. Of course, all the
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men by this time were in the armed forces and not in Germany because they'd occupied various other
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countries. So it was only women and children and the elderly who were killed by the Royal Air Force,
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and this was terrorism. This is another interesting argument because it's exactly what Joseph Goebbels
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said at the time. It draws something of a veil, indeed a rather thick velvet curtain, over the fact
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that at this very point the Germans were bombing British targets in what we used to call the Battle of
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Britain. The principal objective of the Royal Air Force at that point was to stop the Germans, the
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Luftwaffe, from inflicting fatal damage to Britain's war economy. There were bombing raids on German
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targets, but they were industrial, economic, and military targets. The fact that civilians got killed
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reflects the lack of precision of bombing at that point. There was extremely little accuracy in World
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War II bombing. So if you're making arguments that the Nazis made, there may be a problem with your
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approach to World War II, but it doesn't stop there. Because one of the more remarkable flourishes that
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Cooper produces is the claim that the millions of Soviet prisoners of war who died in German captivity were the
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victims of the victims of a slight mix-up, a little logistical snafu that was quite understandable under
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the circumstances. You made the Soviet Union, you achieve enormous military victories, suddenly you have
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all these prisoners, and I knew we forgot something. We didn't order food for the POWs. Oh my god.
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What? And so we are told a story of how the very high numbers of Soviet prisoners who died in German
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hands were just the victims of a little bit of a logistical mess-up. Now, this is the kind of thing
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that would be said after the war by people who wanted to cover up the war crimes of the Wehrmacht of the
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German regular army. And it was quite a concerted effort to say that, well, it wasn't really the regular
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army that was involved, it was all done by the SS, or people died because of logistical problems.
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So this is another Nazi argument. But in reality, and we know this, it's well documented, number one,
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there were explicit orders to kill Soviet prisoners as part of Operation Barbarossa. And not only the so-called
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political commissars, the members of the Soviet Communist Party, but it soon became clear that Jews could be killed,
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killed Jewish civilians, could be killed if they fell into German hands. And there was a series of clear
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instructions to commanders to carry out killing, murders of prisoners in violation of the Geneva
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Conventions. And this is something that starts a terrible cycle of violence on the Eastern Front in
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which prisoners are not taken by either side. Again, I spent quite a large part of my life writing about
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this, teaching courses about it at Harvard and elsewhere. And it's a little depressing to me,
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not to say infuriating, to have somebody get tremendous publicity for rehashing the arguments that the
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Nazis made in the 1940s and after the war that we know to be false because book after book has documented
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the reality. And that's, I think, the most fascinating part about this interview, because the interview
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itself was not interesting. What's interesting is why it has suddenly risen to prominence. And I guess
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the question to you is this, and push back if you disagree, I see Churchill as a symbol of the Western
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project, of what is good about the West, of standing up to a crazed death cult. Do you think the fact that we
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are now attacking him so publicly from both left and right, is that just a symptom of a lack of faith
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and also a crisis at the heart of the Western project? One of the things about Western civilization
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that I like and Churchill liked was that you got to criticize everybody, that even the heroes were
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subject to criticism. Churchill talks about this as one of the features of our system, and it was one
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reason that he took criticism, of which he had a great deal during his life, so easily. I also think,
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if you go back a few generations, that it's kind of standard practice in Britain to have a go at the
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heroes of the previous generation. Think of Lytton Strachey's eminent Victorians, which was one of the kind
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of Urtexts of Bloomsbury. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for us to ask critical
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questions about the heroes of previous generations. In fact, I think it's a good thing. I certainly
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became a historian with a view to challenging the things that I had been taught. There's a sense in
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which history is a constant argument about what happened, why it happened, and whether it was a good
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or a bad thing. And I'm fine with that. But there are certain rules. You can't make historical claims
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that are not based on good evidence. If you do, you'll be found out and your work will be discredited.
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In the realm of podcasts, with all due respect, no such rules apply. There are no footnotes on a podcast,
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there's no fact checking, there's no effort, in fact, to challenge somebody unless you or the
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broadcaster does it. And what's notable about Tucker Carlson's conversation with Daryl Cooper is that
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at no point does Carlson challenge any of the wild claims that Cooper makes. He just agrees with them
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and sometimes amplifies them. Now, why pick on Churchill? I think it's partly in the American context
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that the older generation of American conservatives have long idolized Churchill. And you'll never
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really go wrong writing a book about Churchill in the United States and going on a speaking tour about
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Churchill. You'll always get an audience. So part of this is the old, I'll call it, punk rock position
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that if something's sacred, you should have a go at it and it's bound to get clicks. And it certainly works in
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that way, sort of outrageous and provocative and daring and edgy to criticize somebody who's been
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idolized by previous generations. There's another part, though, which is a little bit stranger and
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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
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Ukrainian history. And Tucker Carlson tried to get occasional words in, but mostly did a kind of
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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
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homework so that they can at least attempt to challenge the more outrageous falsehoods that
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their guest utters. But this isn't the Carlson way. Tucker Carlson was a tremendously effective
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broadcaster for whom I had a good deal of respect when he was in Fox News. And to give him his due,
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some of his monologues in the crisis year of 2020 were extraordinarily powerful and impressive. And I had
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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
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National Socialists, then you are a fascist. You are in fact a Nazi. And that's the thing about these two
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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
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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
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?
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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,
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and you might as well join in in this strange game of distortion.
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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
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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
00:27:04.080
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
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.
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
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,
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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,
00:36:34.400
and the Aryan folk would only be safe if they were annihilated. So that's the background to my
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
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
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,
00:38:14.000
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
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
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
00:41:28.080
identified, then we can have utopia. So two utopian visions, one of racial purity and the other of class
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
00:42:00.640
Soviet Union was a pact with the devil. You were literally supping with Satan. And as soon as the
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
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
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
00:42:54.000
beautiful boys. And God bless them. And God bless all the children who are produced by mixed unions
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
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
00:43:34.640
below replacement, actually below unity. And the population of people who are of white descent,
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,
00:44:26.960
and for that matter to North America? We're just going to build some enormous wall and keep them in
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
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
00:45:24.240
the Africans out of the rest of the world is a doomed enterprise. The only question that interests me is,
00:45:31.200
how do you make the assimilation process as successful for every African as it has been for
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
00:49:46.640
much that immigration increases. I don't think that's necessarily true. It may even be possible
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,
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
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
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
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
00:53:00.160
Mexicans. And it is just as wrong. You know, fast forward however many years it is since that book
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
00:53:25.840
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
01:00:45.760
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
01:01:34.480
Well, it would seem the reframe here is quite obvious. I mean, Islamic extremists, Islamists,
01:01:40.000
are quite clearly, by every single definition that we have, the far right. All their views align.
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.
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
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
01:04:43.280
thing. You have to communicate to the newcomers that they are becoming part of a different social
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
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.
01:05:33.760
It's let down the native-born population. It's let down the immigrants.
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,
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.