Ep 145 | How to END Marxist Attempts to Destroy America | Douglas Murray | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

The left wants us to believe that our free speech is violence, while their violence is free speech.

In the words of John Cleese, if you can't control your own emotions, you're forced to control other people's behavior.

That's why the touchiest, most oversensitive, easily upset must not set the standards for the rest of us.

In the most recent example is,

I think, the example of Elon Musk and the purchase of Twitter.

They went crazy.

Last week, business as usual, Kathy Griffin called Elon Musk a media thirst white supremacist.

Joy Reed implied that Musk is nostalgic for apartheid.

A Twitter executive called him misogynistic.

One of the belligerent hosts at The View claimed Musk was only there to protect the free speech of straight white men.

You know, an MSNBC host

thinking if

he brings and opens the platform up to other people,

you know, you're just going to be a white supremacist.

That's all that's going to happen.

It's just flooding through of white supremacists.

That is crazy talk.

Time magazine called free speech a tech bro obsession, which has become a paramount concern of the technomoral universe, whatever the hell that is.

Today's guest is up to this challenge.

He's been publishing books since he was 19, serves as an associate editor at Spectator magazine, and he has a new book out, The War on the West.

How to prevail in the age of unreason.

He describes the Western anti-Westernism that is assaulting the very foundations of our society, all throughout the West.

This one, you are going to enjoy.

Somebody who says what they mean and mean what they say.

Welcome today, Douglas Murray.

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Douglas, welcome.

Good pleasure.

Great pleasure.

Good to have you actually in studio.

Thank you for flying across the ocean.

It's a great pleasure.

I'm thrilled to see you in person.

Last time I know we had to do this virtually.

Yeah, yeah.

Your book, The War on the West, it couldn't come at a better time.

And I think we're pretty much on the same page on what's happening.

Let me start with the news of the week, which is Roe versus Wade here in America.

Big.

This is a huge cultural shift.

Sure.

The Supreme Court is basically saying states have to decide.

We can't decide this.

It's not in the Constitution.

So legislatures get to decide.

People are making this into, you know, a war on women, et cetera.

I personally think just from the response, it was leaked, which has never happened.

Unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

Kind of the tactic that the left likes to use.

And then these spontaneous groups started appearing,

all shouting nothing about rights, women's rights, but

pack the court,

which is, you know, once that happens in a society, you know, you lose it.

I think this is the beginning of a war on the streets with the left.

How do you read this?

Well, I hope not, obviously.

I mean,

one of the things, the observations I'd make is that it does accentuate something which has been growing in America in particular in recent years, which is a total divide over the nature of institutions.

I think this is deadly for a country, I have to say.

The point of institutions is that they are something that you agree upon, right?

That people agree on the results of elections, agree on Supreme Court decisions.

They might differ, but they recognize the authority of the Supreme Court.

There was a time you might say that about almost every institution in American public life, as in any other Western country.

And now I just think that

almost nobody seems to have trust in the institutions.

And you can pick and choose on occasion.

But essentially, you know, there's just

it's very hard to think of an institution in American public public life

which everyone agrees upon.

Oh, I don't

think there is anymore.

I've seen a huge, I mean, a huge change even in me.

I never thought I would question the Justice Department or the FBI.

I don't trust them at all.

That's a really interesting development that I see on the American right.

I mean, obviously, I was born in Britain and I live in America now.

But

in Britain, if you said, you know,

you don't have trust in, say, MI5, MI6, GCHQ,

any of the departments of government, the courts, the election processes, parliament, etc.

If you went through all of that, then you would say, well,

that's not a conservative.

Right.

You know, a conservative must have faith in some of these institutions.

And I think actually the truth is, is there is very good reason in America for people on the right, as on the left, to have be deeply suspicious of your institutions.

Because they've politicized themselves, it seems to me, just one after another.

You know, the minute you have intelligence officials speaking out on political matters, bang, of course you're going to lose trust in the mindset.

That is the interesting thing about the Supreme Court decision,

because it says it cannot make political decisions.

It's not a legislative body.

If it's not included in the Constitution, it can't talk about it.

Don't you think there is back?

Don't you think there are other things that might unravel as a result of that?

Like?

Well, I mean, there are other decisions that the Supreme Court, all the courts in this country, have made that you might say would be in the hands of the people.

Yeah, I would say Obamacare is one of them.

Right.

I mean, that's one of the things that strikes me is that,

actually,

although everyone's going to be obsessed about the specific thing of Roe v.

Wade,

the fact that the court has said it's not in our jurisdiction

opens up a whole news.

So, what the left is planning on doing, I guess, is to

at least get rid of the filibuster to pass

a nationwide abortion policy, which the Supreme Court says can be done.

But it would fall into what's called the Commerce Clause,

which, if you know anything about that at all, that was an FDR switch

that took, then put the federal government in all of our lives where it wasn't before that.

And there is speculation that a few of the justices would like a second bite at that apple.

We seemingly are reverting back to more of federalism, according to the court.

That is a good thing.

That's a healthy thing, I think.

But what about the way in which I mean specific justices are now going to be...

I mean, I would fear for some of the justices.

You mean safety?

I would, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

If they're not the most protected people in Washington, they should be.

I mean, some of them are going to be among the most hated people to a significant chunk of the country.

It's funny because we've left this place to where

you can respect Ginsburg.

You know, when Ginsburg died, I didn't agree with a thing she said,

but I thought it was a real loss for the country.

You know, I thought she was a great person.

I don't like her.

I didn't like her as a justice, but I didn't wish her ill or dead or anything like that.

We're not traveling down that path now.

No, no.

No,

I do think America is traveling down a very precarious path now.

Has been for some time, but this

thing of not having anything you agree on.

I've commented on this on a number of occasions, but not having anything that you agree on is a big problem as a country.

We talked about that, but it's different.

We talked about that last time, two years ago.

I don't even know how long it was.

But it's got so much worse.

So much worse.

I mean, I think that

the abortion thing

may

actually be,

in the end, the thing that breaks us up.

You think the country could break?

Not because of abortion per se, the way it is, but because

I think you're going to see extremists on the left,

you know, where they're talking about aborting babies 30 days after birth, you know.

They're already talking about that in California, that they're using tax dollars to fly people in for an abortion industry.

I think that's going to not sit well with a lot of people in California and elsewhere.

And if they push

for

packing the Supreme Court, if they look like they're going to get away with that, if they look like they're going to get rid of the filibuster, I think the lines are drawn.

Mightn't the country just sort of continue going the way it is, where people move to the places where it's more in line with their values?

And you just see this red-blue divide just existing.

I would hope, but I don't.

You think that's a positive?

Well,

better than war.

Sure.

Better than war.

But it feels to me like the

few years before, I think, the Civil War.

You know, Abraham Lincoln was said to, you know, he didn't care about the slaves.

He cared deeply about slavery.

I mean, you know, John Quincy Adams,

you know,

taught him how to destroy slavery when he was in Congress.

And John Quincy Adams had been fighting it his whole life.

So he cared.

But when he first took office in his first Nagalo address, he said, I can't do anything.

The president doesn't have the power to do it.

But once the South went off the deep end, then that changed things.

And

I don't know.

I just think there's a lot of people

right now on the right who are like, look,

I don't want war.

I don't want fight with a neighbor.

I just want, I'm tired of this.

I just want this done.

But if the left continues the onslaught of

taking on our children and calling us terrorists if we say

back up from our children.

If you start destroying the institutions more than they already are and you just change all the rules, I don't know people are going to sit around.

I wish there was a way to build them back up.

I mean, that would be the obvious conservative solution, would be to try to build up the institutions again.

But I think

that's what the court did.

The court is correcting a mistake.

And they made a very, I don't know if you read the case, but they made a very cogent argument that this is not about politics.

This isn't even about abortion.

This is about our role.

And we shouldn't be in politics.

Yeah.

Well,

as I say,

all I feel is, you know, strap yourself in.

This is going to be a hell of a ride.

Oh, yeah, it is.

I mean, we've been through very long years in the last few years, and I think they're going to get longer and noisier for sure.

So

let's talk a little bit about the war because I think

there, you know, I've been trying to say to people lately

things have changed and you're not at a shooting war, thank God, but we are at war for the survival of the West.

Yes.

I think so.

I think very clearly.

And there's no greater demonstration of that than what I describe as a war on Western history.

You know, the countries, societies, cultures hold together around the stories that they tell.

And sometimes those stories are slightly exaggerated, and sometimes they're not.

Often they're absolutely a fair representation of what has happened.

But you have to have a shared story.

You can't have totally different narratives about how you got to where you are.

And in America, even worse than any other country in the West, and this is a solely Western problem, and you don't see this anywhere else in the world, in America in particular, there is a deep, deep war going on over the nature of your past.

And

it's terrifying to watch because if you don't agree on that,

there's nothing left you can agree on at the moment.

What are you going to rally around in 2022 if you don't agree on anything that happened right up till now?

And obviously, you know, we all saw this in recent years.

There was the

summer of 2020 and the pulling down of statues.

But then the, you know, two things I noticed.

One was that that was just a sort of hardcore version of something that had already been happening, the rewriting of American history for the 1619 project and other things.

That had been going on for quite a long time, suddenly sped up, suddenly went right to the heart of everything in America.

You know,

people said, well, they're just coming for the southern generals.

And then it was like the founding fathers in no time at all.

Then it was, you know, that CNN reporter

said before the Mount Rushmore speech of Donald Trump said, he's going to be standing, the president's going to be standing in front of slave owners on stolen land.

You know, you think, wow, if you think that, you know,

what do you have?

What do you have?

And

by this stage,

something else has happened, which is the preemptive cleansing of American history.

You know, this isn't just about mob sort of attacks on statues in weird wacko places like Portland.

It's, you know, it's the statue of Thomas Jefferson being wheeled,

pulled down, crated up, and wheeled out the back door of the city-state chamber in New York.

And one of the council members saying, Thomas Jefferson doesn't represent our values.

And, you know,

when you have the New York council

taking Thomas Jefferson down, you don't need the mob anymore.

They're doing that for the mob.

And we've, of course, we've seen that with statues of Abraham Lincoln.

We've seen statues of Lincoln pulled down by mobs in this country.

But we've also seen them taken away by officials, by the local authorities in Boston,

Trying to get ahead of the mob or what exactly?

Agreeing on the new rewriting of Lincoln that the mob is doing?

See, I think this is the thing that conservatives have seen that have caused us not to believe anymore.

Because

we thought our institutions

were safe havens, were solid.

But it's been eaten by termites.

So there were no stopgates.

None.

None.

It was just, it had already been rotted from the inside out.

Yeah, and

what disturbs me about this as well is that, I mean,

that could happen organically in a way.

But this is pushed.

I mean, there is a deliberate push.

to change the American story.

You know, I was recently reading Paul Johnson's History of the American People, and I'm going to misquote this, but the opening line of this book is something like, the history of the American people people is the greatest story in human history.

Something like that.

And this book was published in 2000.

I mean, I don't need to tell you what book, what mainstream book would start

with that claim today?

None.

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the whole story of America

has been rewritten from a story of heroism to one of sin, from one of amazing accomplishment accomplishment by extraordinary people to horrible things done by unforgivably bad people.

And that's how you get to the stage we're at at the moment where,

I mean, why would you agree on anything

if a significant part of the country has been taught to believe that there's nothing good about the country?

So here's the

part that bothers me.

I can have a conversation with anyone if you're honest about your search for truth.

If I'm not willing to change my mind, if you make a great case on something, then I'm not really being honest.

You know what I mean?

I cannot come up with a good reason

for these things to be happening.

I can see people are being, you know, I don't even know, hypnotized, baptized, whatever it is

into this cult.

I can see that.

But the people who started it and the people who are really running it, they know exactly what they're doing.

I mean, I give an example in the War on the West of, look at the tactic that's been used on all of our heroes.

Whether it's the Founding Fathers of America, whether it's Winston Churchill in the UK, whether it's all the thinkers of the Enlightenment,

there's one tactic that's been used on all of them, which is

you are guilty of living in history

and not having the values that we have in 2022.

As I like to say,

the shorthand for this is they're guilty of being dead white men.

The cardinal sins of not just being white and male, but also dead, it appears, because of course none of the critics think that's going to happen to them.

But this sort of derisive, these are just dead white men.

Well, they're dead white men who brought brought you everything you've got, so you could have a bit of down gratitude to start with.

But put that aside for a moment.

All these figures have been attacked in exactly the same way.

Winston Churchill held Victorian attitudes about certain subjects.

Surprise, surprise.

He was born in Victorian England.

Maybe he should have had progressive 2020s attitudes about a range of things and gay marriage.

But amazingly enough, he didn't.

So the same thing is done against Jefferson, same thing is done against Lincoln, same thing is done against all the philosophers of the Enlightenment, who every single one of them has now been torn down, actually, literally, in a number of their cases.

Voltaire's statues pulled down in Paris, David Hume's name taken off the buildings named after him in Scotland.

These people who brought us the ideas of reason and rationalism now stand condemned, all for the same things.

They lived at a time when slavery went on,

they lived at a time when colonialism went on.

And the best for the people who come after them is they said something racist once.

So

these are the three tools used against everyone in our past.

And I say at one point in the war in the West, okay, let's look at who this is not done to.

Let's look at the figures that they skip over.

Yep.

So

I had great joy

in going through the private and public writings of Karl Marx.

Karl Marx, by the standards of today and by the standards of his own day, was unbelievably racist.

He repeatedly uses the N-word in his private correspondence to Engels, usually hyphenated with Jew, because, of course, he's also very anti-Semitic.

He has horrible views on slavery, horrible views on colonialism.

By the standards that the left has applied to every single one of our heroes, Karl Marx should be toast.

Correct.

Right.

Why not?

Why isn't he?

I do believe that one of the reasons is that, and this isn't the only explanation for what's going on, but it's one of them.

There are people who want to make sure that we are robbed of everything in our past except that strain so that they can say,

here is Marxism.

That's what's left standing.

There is no other explanation as to why they have skipped over Karl Marx.

And since The War in the West came out and the serializations and things, and a number of people wrote about this because they didn't know about Marx's racism.

I mean,

one person wrote, saying, What Marx said and what Douglas says in his book, I can't repeat in this paper.

It's quite true.

It's horrible, horrible stuff.

Since that came out, some of the Marxists have come out and attacked me on this, and they've said things like, well, there's two arguments they've been using.

One is

that's unfair.

He was a man of his time.

Yes.

Well,

like everyone else.

Right.

Like Thomas Jefferson.

Like Winston Churchill.

Like Winston Churchill, man of his time.

The second thing they say is, well, we look to him for his views on economics, not for his personal views.

That's, I mean, this is the excuse with Margaret Sanger.

Right.

You know, Margaret Sanger, a horrible racist.

Right.

But.

I mean, she was right about women and women's reproductive rights.

So it seems to me

that a group of the people who are the anti-Westernists of our day, and I can't stress this enough,

this is Western anti-Westernism.

You know, there's Middle Eastern anti-Westernism, there's Chinese anti-Westernism, but the most crucial and serious one is Western anti-Westernism.

It's, as you say, the termites eating out the whole structure around us.

And one of those strands is definitely people who want to say at the end of all this,

only one Australian thought left standing.

Some of the people I quote in the book, prominent figures, actually say things like: the Enlightenment is the problem, you know, reason is the problem,

rationalism is the problem.

The same thing, and again, this is not fringe stuff.

Randy Weingarten of the American Teaching Union,

testing is the problem.

You know, it's gone all the way through.

Everything is a problem, except for a few things that they want to leave standing.

And I think this has to be called out and identified because

we are being fed a total crock on this, a total lie.

And they don't have the right to do this.

A crippling lie.

I mean, just the lie

that you can't make it, that you shouldn't take risks,

that everybody gets a trophy, all of that stuff that started long ago, that's going to cripple the free market.

Oh, for sure.

But no one will take risks.

Well, they don't mind that, by the way.

There's a bit in here I write about the 1619 project, a bit on

capitalism.

Now, I don't know, there wasn't enough attention paid to this, but part of the critique of the 1619 project was a critique of capitalism itself.

Now, again,

what do you think the accusations that they make against capitalism are?

They are, unsurprisingly, that capitalism is derived from slavery, colonialism, and much more.

And the claim that they make is that, as a result, capitalism itself is, from its origins, a racist thing.

Okay, so

this is what the 1619 project's genius, a sociologist called Matthew Desmond, said.

The headline of his piece was: In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.

And his argument was that, for instance, everything like

tracking, recording, and analyzing, precise quantification, many of these techniques we now take for granted were developed by and for large plantations.

He says, he says, this is a 1619 project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning project of the New York Times.

He says that systems that were consisting of things that were tracked, recorded, and analyzed tie everyone sitting at their desk in modern America doing their work directly to the plantations.

And he says at one point,

there's a direct line from the slaveholders' spreadsheets into Microsoft Excel.

Well, here's the thing.

Unbelievable.

Here's the thing.

First of all, the man is wildly ignorant.

The plantation system had nothing to do with capitalism.

The plantation system was a feudal system.

A child could tell this ignoramus this.

A child could look at these two systems and recognize there is no similarity.

So why do they do it?

Why is part of the hit job of the 1619 project to commission a drive-by shooting by an ignoramus against Western capitalism, intending to draw a line from the slave plantations to Western capitalism?

To destroy it.

Because they want to destroy Western capitalism, like everything else.

And the ill intent of these people can just never be

stressed enough.

You can never underestimate them.

They decide on their conclusions and then they work backwards.

This idiot actually, at one point,

the only source he can find is one scholar who wrote a book that says the opposite of what he says she says.

And

my fear is that

most people don't have time for this crap.

Like, we're trying to get on with our lives.

People are trying to build their families.

They're trying to pay the mortgage.

They're trying to put food on the table and much more.

And when somebody comes at them, let alone like prominent figures and

let alone prominent politicians who are meant to be safeguarding your legacy as a country, when they come at you and say, you know, when you sit down and

do your work, you're actually basically part of the same thing as the plantations.

I know most people don't

know what to say.

I didn't know that.

It's likely to be an or you turn off or something.

When somebody says, you know, Thomas Jefferson was just a slave owner, like, most people, like, I don't know, I was told there was more to him than that.

But they'll turn off, or they'll.

I don't need to tell you, Glenn, people need to be armed to know how to fight back against this.

They need to know what the arguments are.

They need to know the specifics.

But more importantly, they need to see this underlying trend that is going on.

You know, no other culture is doing this to itself.

Nobody else.

You know, like

every other culture on earth wants to think well of itself.

And I believe that

most people in America do.

Most people in the West do.

But we've been kind of submerged under this just slurry that has come flooding across everything that we were told, that we knew and that we loved.

They've just polluted the whole darn thing.

And I think we have to be able to take it back.

We have to say, you won't do that to our heroes.

You know, it's a very common thing in cultural revolutions for this to happen.

When I was going around the states just before the election of 2020, I was visiting, I don't know, about 10 states or so.

I was in Portland after they'd torn all the stuff down there and saw the riots.

I saw what remained of the center of Seattle, which had been a beautiful city, I remember,

only 15 years earlier when I was there.

When I saw these things, I thought, you know,

there is a risk that the American public square is going to become completely empty.

You know, there's going to be no one left.

And I I think that's roughly very nearly where we are.

But this is what cultural revolutionaries have done throughout history.

You know, from the ancient world onwards, you go into the temples of your enemies, you tear down their statues, you urinate on their altars,

you destroy the whole sanctuary and say,

your gods are dead.

We've got new ones for you.

That's what they're hoping to do to America and the wider West.

They're very well advanced on it.

And

the glimmer of hope is that I believe that if the majority regain their voice, these people don't stand a chance.

I would agree with that.

I think that Elon Musk was a really

exciting moment.

You know, between him and DeSantis in Florida, these are guys that

have grown their strength out of weakness.

Yes.

And they are

moving in ways.

And Musk is interesting because he's...

Not your typical conservative piece.

Yeah, he's not a libertarian Silicon Valley guy.

I mean, how he's become like a leader of the far right, I don't know.

MSNBC, by the way, yesterday did a hit job on him.

One day,

one of their idiot presenters said

Elon Musk, not not only is he going to unleash the far right, but they also described him as not especially intelligent.

I mean, have some darn humility.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

I mean, you don't have to say you agree with the guy, but acknowledge that it's pretty impressive.

The only thing that I see with this is,

would you agree with me that we're dealing with people who will are the kind of, if I can't have you, no one will.

They're the burn it down kind of.

So

they will do everything to destroy Elon Musk or

anyone.

I guarantee you, if Trump doesn't run and DeSantis runs,

they will say DeSantis is far worse than Donald Trump.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, they have to.

They will use any tactic and they will destroy.

If Elon Musk, and I think they know this, if Elon Musk stands

and really kind of just laughs them off,

it is the beginning of the end.

I think we've seen a little bit of that, haven't we?

Because for the first time in the last year or so, people have started to survive the mob.

I mean, the most obvious example is Joe Rogan.

You might say Dave Chappelle as well.

It's interesting that comedians have been such a target, but of course they are because they say things that everyone wants to say.

Right.

But no, I think that there are people now who are surviving the takeout attempts.

and starting to wear it as a badge of honor well yeah and no and and i mean i was speaking actually to joe rogan about this the other day and he said um he said it helped that the people trying to take me down were cnn yeah because nobody trusts them

and

and but still my my worry is that these sort of prominent figures this very successful uh figures can survive it but but the whole thing can't turn around until all of us can till the bottom you know that the person doing a normal job is able to survive saying something that is true.

Until that's possible,

it's not enough.

It's not enough that

very successful authors like J.K.

Rowling successfully survive the mob, or that these figures I just mentioned do.

It's got to go all the way down the economy.

It's got to be at every level.

It has to be the student that can say, sorry,

man is a man.

Yeah, yeah.

Woman's a woman.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

I agree.

And I found that

before the lockdowns and everything started in recent years, when I was doing public events with various other people and sometimes just going to things

and watching, I would often ask the young people in the audiences who are not by any means conservative, I'd ask them, you know, what brought you out this evening?

And there are always two answers or variants of two answers.

The first was, I want to,

I'm fed off just watching YouTube videos on my own sort of thing.

I want to be with people who are thinking about the same things, which is different from an ideological movement, other than it's an ideological movement of people who are interested.

But the second thing you very often heard was, I want to be near people who are saying something I'd like to say at some point.

Now, this is very important for this country.

Wow.

It's very important for this country.

And I think we probably both know this in our personal lives.

If there's something that's on the sort of, you know, the edge of your brain, you're thinking,

I know, I mean, I can see that it's true, but

I don't want to be the first one to be.

I don't want to be the first one.

And if somebody else jumps in with their boots, you know, into it, you immediately think, oh, okay, that's easier.

And sometimes, as you know, the disappointing thing is it's got to be you that's the first one to jump.

I don't need to tell you.

But I think that we all know in our lives that that is actually the case.

That's why people listen to the people who are attacked.

It's not just that they're attacked, they're listening because the people who are being attacked are saying the things other people would like to say.

You know,

whenever I refer to things like the the Lear Thomas thing, I say, well, I mean, it's it's possible you can be a guy and whenever you get in the water you c feel kind of feminine.

Like a mermaid of some kind.

I don't really.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure it holds biologically or anything like that.

And I know that whenever I say that, a number of people are going to think,

I can say something like that.

And it's the same with the arguments I make in this book.

I want people to realise that, for instance, it's perfectly permissible to defend...

your culture and your civilization and your country.

It's perfectly possible that when somebody comes at you you saying you're totally rotten, there's nothing good that you've done, you can say, hang on a minute, let me tell you some things.

I mean, you know, I mention in the book and the second, because

I jump over some of the really, you know, hot-button ones that we've had in recent times, you know, the issues of slavery, colonialism, and racism.

And, you know, one of the things I say is,

you know, the remarkable thing about the West is not that we had slavery.

Every civilization in history has slavery.

They all did.

The remarkable thing about the West is that we got rid of it.

You know, there are 40 million slaves in the world today estimated.

I've met some on my travels.

And I think there's 70 countries that don't have any anti-slavery laws.

It is unbelievable across Africa and across the Middle East.

And there are places like the Gulf states, which basically slavery.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, you can't pretend the Filipino workers are anything but chattel, really.

Their lives don't mean anything to the locals.

So 40 million slaves in the world today is more slaves than there were in the 19th century.

Okay, so

clearly this is a problem that it's a thing that humans have done and civilizations have done.

Again, why would we be destroying ourselves in America over something we settled two centuries ago?

Right.

Why would we be tearing ourselves about this now?

Other than

if we fall into the story first that it was only us,

and I don't think that one in a million Americans know, for instance, that some people say maybe up to 12 million slaves were taken across the Atlantic in the transatlantic slave trade.

18 million were taken east to the Arab countries from Africa in the same time.

Why don't we know about this?

Because they were castrated.

There were no more generations of them.

And when you go to the 12 million,

America took two.

Right.

The rest went to South America.

Brazil was still slave trading until the 1880s.

Yeah.

You know, the Royal Navy.

The Native Americans had slaves again until 1873 or something like that.

Right.

And I mean, in this,

we've got to start to work out this ledger accurately.

Right.

You know, does our civilization uniquely owe?

people for things that happened two centuries ago.

I'd say not.

I'd say not.

I'd say the debt is paid.

It's paid down.

It was paid in blood.

It was paid in blood.

In America, in Britain, the Royal Navy, after slavery was abolished in the United Kingdom, policed the high seas at significant costs of treasure and blood, boarding ships on their way to Brazil and storming the holds and freeing slaves.

So when somebody comes at you and says

and says, as we have had in America in particular in recent years, you know, this is your original sin, for instance.

I want to say, okay, what's the original sin of the other countries?

What's their, what they must have them.

Oh, is it just us?

I don't know how we can make this argument when so many of us have Apple products made in China,

which is a horrific, horrific nation on human rights.

Sure.

I mean,

you know, it's

one of the great rules I try to follow.

It's something an editor once said to me.

Every people's in history have done things that you look back on and you think, what the hell were they thinking?

Right.

Right.

Well, but some of them are still doing it.

Some of them are still doing it.

And

here's the sort of follow-on thing is assume there are things we do in our own day which our successors are going to see as being nuts.

Try to work out what they are now.

Don't just spend your time judging the 18th century or something.

Watch out what it is now.

I would have thought what you've just referred to is one of them.

I do.

They will say, how in America in the 2020s did they become obsessed again

about slavery 300 years earlier, rewrite their whole story, and miss the fact that there were concentration camps in China going on in their own day, slavery going on around the world in their own day?

Why were they uninterested?

They are going to look at us, historians in 100 years, will look at us as insane,

just psychotic, split personality people.

And you know, and here's one reason why

we have fallen, and I have a chapter in the book on what I say is, you know, one of the answers, one of the deep answers to this.

We have fallen into an era based in resentment,

based in resentment.

The deepest thing of the time.

The left injected it.

I think parts of the right have now got it as well.

But it is a world

because I think I agree with you.

Because you can have a worldview based entirely on what you haven't got,

what other people have got at your expense.

And by the way, this crosses all races, all cultures, all classes, all socioeconomic structures.

We all know people who don't have very much at all in terms of money, who are the most grateful and kind and

charitable people you could come across.

And I'm sure we've all met people as well who seem very wealthy, who are just run through with bitterness and resentment,

things that people did to them, things that they should have got and they didn't.

So this is nothing to do with class.

It's a human instinct, resentment.

And the problem with resentment once it brews is that there is no end to it because you go searching for it.

Nietzsche says at one point, there is a type of person

who

tears at wounds long since healed and then cries about the pain that they suffer.

Recognize the type?

Yeah.

Recognize the type all over America today.

I've been having this row in the last few days since the War in the West came out about the reparations thing.

A number of people who've been coming at me on social media, of course, I don't say coming, I don't care.

I mean,

it's interesting to me.

It doesn't bother me.

But

people saying, you know,

we're coming for our checks.

We're coming for the money because of what happened to us.

I said, who is us?

Who is us?

You talk about people you never knew and you demand money on their behalf.

I want my stuff.

I want my stuff is the cry of

resentful people across history.

I'm owed stuff.

Now, the thing is, is that, and again, this is what Nietzsche says, is that these people have to have one answer that you can say back at them.

which nobody wants to hear.

The answer you can say back at them is,

there is a person who's kept you back.

There is a person who's destroyed your life.

You.

You.

You are the one.

The problem is that nobody wants to hear that.

That used to be the thing that brought people here.

You know,

the rest of the world, you were kept down by guilds and everything else.

And you could come here and

there wasn't streets paved with gold.

But if you had a dream, you could at least pursue it.

And this is also why the American heroes being pulled down matters so much.

It's not just about the past, it's about who we emulate.

You know,

one of the reasons why Americans emulated Abraham Lincoln was not just what he achieved as president, it was how he got there.

Yes.

You know,

he was born essentially in the Iron Age.

You know, he had nothing.

Nothing.

He probably had one year of formal education.

The rest, Abraham Lincoln, taught himself.

Yeah, he taught himself.

His mom and his father fought him on it the whole time.

It is, you know, the great American story in one person.

Comes from nothing and gets to the highest place in the land.

And so this is why

Abraham is

kind and charitable and healing.

In the end,

he was killed by Booth because Booth was...

crazy about

with malice toward none, charity towards all.

No.

You gotta be mad and come down and get us because then we'll kick your butt again.

So this is the thing.

He's not just a great president or something like that.

He's a great role model and a kind of martyr of America.

That's why you can't take him out.

Otherwise you take out America.

That's what they know.

That's what the cultural revolutionaries know.

But my point is

that everybody in their life could have the opportunity to be resentful.

And America has always distinguished herself as a country by having the opposite attitude.

You know, as I say, I come from a country where the sort of class structure thing is less than it used to be, but it still exists.

And as you say, in Europe and other countries in the West, there is something which

is uncommon compared to America, which is a sort of feeling of sometimes, you know, if that person has something, you know, they've got it through some ill means.

And America, and I sense it myself as a fairly recent arrival, and I've always sensed this.

People see somebody with something good and they say, I'd love to have that.

Good on that guy.

That is the opposite of a resentful person or a resentful nation.

And the true deep opposite of resentment, as I say in one of the chapters in The War on the West, is gratitude.

Now, gratitude.

Gratitude is what seems to be completely missing from our lives now.

You know, like, I walk around the cities of America and I think, this is amazing.

Like,

every building here is amazing, let alone the ones that that go up and up and up.

Who came up with that?

You know, you can look at cities like that, or you can look at them with the scowl and the resentment, and

well, that was probably built on the back of labor that wasn't given enough.

And

you can do that on everything.

You can do it on absolutely everything.

Or

you can say, how amazing that we have this.

And one of the things that has happened in American life in particular in in the west in in as a whole in recent years has been this total loss of a sense of proportion as to what we are now versus what the rest of the world is now never mind what we've been in history you know what we are now why is it that america is still the number one destination of choice for migrants across the world

Why?

Now, if you ask the people of resentment who spent recent years tearing at America, saying it's a racist country and so on, I mean, you know,

you didn't see Jews trying to break into Nazi Austria.

Nope.

You know?

The footfall tells us something.

And the footfall, the other countries people want to come to, all of the data shows it.

After America, the other countries include Britain, include Canada.

They're the Western countries, the Western democracies.

So.

Why is that the case?

And I would suggest that we should remind ourselves of a very simple truth.

They want to come here now because we have something good.

Here's the follow-on.

If we have something good now, it must be because we've done something good in the past.

Correct.

It's not an accident.

I'm very fond of this quote of Branch Rickey who said at one point, he said, luck is the residue of design.

We're not just lucky in America.

The luck comes from what men and women have done before us.

And if they had made bad choices,

maybe we'd be Venezuela.

Maybe we'd be Sudan.

There's a reason it's America.

There's a reason people want to come.

You go across the border to Baja, California in Mexico.

The poverty and the lifestyle is unbelievable.

Well, you're on the same coastline, the same land, everything.

The only difference is the belief of the people and the belief of the government.

That's the only thing that's different.

And

we are seeing in America in particular an attempt to pull down all of the things that make that prosperity and the ladders possible.

You know,

it's a very important thing for people to realize that when we've seen the row about, for instance, CRT in American schools in the last couple of years, I go into a bit of that, but when we look at that, what does that result in in real terms?

That whole project results in a claim that, for instance, timeliness is a white quality.

Correct.

That accuracy in maths is a white quality.

That showing your workings is a white quality.

That scientific accuracy is a white quality.

And on and on.

And then that testing is a white thing.

Isn't this, though, what you would do if you were preparing people to be slaves?

Well, to be totally subjugated and demoralized, for sure.

For sure.

I mean, you know, you see it in the specifics.

Why, again, why would,

apart from this insane war on whiteness, which has come up in recent years, which is just, and we might get onto it, but it is the most insane tactical misstep that the radical left could have made, in my view.

That warring on white people and saying that white people specifically and uniquely across history have something to pay for Is

that a big misstep?

Why?

Because white people are the majority.

Now, if I say...

White people are just

white speaking

have taken it on the head over and over and over.

For sure, for sure.

But again,

when...

Look, let me just finish one other point and come back to that.

When you see people, again, like American Teaching Union heads saying that standardized testing is the problem, what are they doing other than removing the ladders that exist for people of all ethnic backgrounds to get up?

They think that they're kind of leveling the board somehow.

They're not.

They're removing the ladders.

You know,

what is your best chance if you're a young black

boy or girl in America hoping to get out of the situation you've been born into if you've been born into a deprived background?

It is to work hard at school.

It is to pass your tests.

It's to get out.

Claim that tests are the problem.

Get rid of them.

You will just make sure everyone is stuck where they are.

It's an absolute disgrace, and it happens on the specific levels as well of taking out, you know,

the programs

for students of

distinction that's happened in New York and elsewhere.

But just to get back to this point about the war on whiteness, the insane thing about this is, and it's mainly, I have to say, white people who are doing it.

I mean,

it's like Robin D'Angelo, the biggest race huckster of our day, apart from Ibrahim X.

Kendi.

Robin D'Angelo, of course, herself is white.

And she says in her disgusting book,

there's no good form of being white and you can't get out of it.

Now, I say, do that with any other group.

Say there's no good form of being black and you can never not be black if you're born black.

I mean, we just all just be, that's just disgusting racism right there.

Well, it is with Robin DiAngelo.

She's a racist.

Ibrahim X.

Kendi says in his book, How to Be an Anti-Racist, which I say you should just lose the word anti- and you've got the accurate title.

That book says, the answer to past inequalities is present-day inequalities.

The answer to past prejudice is present prejudice.

So here's the thing.

Imagine if we took any minority group in modern-day America, any minority group,

Asians, Hispanic, anyone, or smaller groups, and said,

we've got a message for you.

We've got a set of books, a set of claims, all the major papers, the major networks networks and others, are going to start making the following case against you.

They're going to say there's nothing good about you.

They're going to say you've never had anything good about you.

They're going to say you're born guilty.

They're going to say that you can't get out of your guilt.

You can never atone for it.

They're going to say that you have no ancestors to be respected.

They're going to say that you have no history.

This is what they're going to do and much, much more.

They're going to pathologize you.

They're going to say that you have rage.

They're going to say you have fragility.

They're going to taunt you for your tears.

Now,

imagine any minority that you did that to.

Do you think you could persuade them?

Do you think they would say, we love the sound of that.

We're going to go for that.

Sure, whatever you want.

So, no.

I don't think any minority group would go along for that.

But that is the ride that they are inviting the majority in America, Britain, and the rest of the West to go along with.

But that would...

It's like an insane overreach.

Right, but that would come also

along with the white guilt.

Well, I do have a lot.

I mean, you know, the insidious thing is you've never...

You confess your privilege.

What?

You've had no privilege because...

Because you're white?

These people...

Personally, I've had enough.

I've had enough.

Yeah, me too.

They can't guess my privilege, and I owe them nothing for any privileges or downsides I've had in my life.

I don't owe them an explanation, and I'm not going to give them one.

Most of my ancestors were far from privileged, very far from privileged,

tilled small amounts of not very fertile land, just about made it through winters,

and in the 20th century were called on twice to give their lives for a far-off war that they didn't know much about.

That was the story of most of our ancestors, of people who were white.

They weren't privileged.

And so we've just got to say, we're not having that.

When you try to pathologize us and say we suffer from white rage or white fragility or anything else, say, absolutely not having it.

And there's a standoff that's now necessary, I'm afraid.

And it can be done politely, but it will have to be done along these lines.

You show no respect for me, I'm showing no respect for you.

You don't respect anything about my past, why should I respect yours?

You don't respect my ancestors, why should I respect yours?

You don't respect my culture, why should I respect yours?

Doesn't that deepen the divide?

My suggestion is that a standoff like that could help solve it because it says, Don't you make me lesser than

I'm not going to make you lesser than.

You know, I don't think I'm better than anyone else because of the color of my skin.

It's a ridiculous idea.

I'm like, you'd have to be crazy to think that.

It's like saying I'm better than you because I'm a man.

I'm 5'10.

But

somebody else isn't better than me because of their skin color either.

It's a totally unimportant thing.

But if it's unimportant, you cannot weaponize it against one group.

And I think that people have to be told to step back from this.

We have to make the race hucksters like D'Angelo and Kendi, we have to make them be held to account for what they've done.

These people have re-racialized American society.

When they come along talking of reparations now for things done centuries ago,

they are dividing American society anew.

What do they think the reparations would look like in the 21st century?

I mean, how would you even,

okay, I'm white, but my family didn't come over until 1880.

Right.

So do I have to pay the reparations?

And how do we work it out among people who are descended from slaves and slavers?

Yeah.

I mean, don't let's forget that the people

who were responsible for the origin of the slave trade were black Africans selling their brothers and sisters.

As Voltaire says, the only thing worse than what the Europeans did to the Africans was what the Africans did to their brother Africans.

So are we going to work out who's descended from who?

Are we going to set up a great big DNA database

in a country that isn't wild about the idea of even showing your basic voter ID when you go to the polls?

I don't know how that one's going to work.

So these people don't really mean it.

I don't think they really mean it.

I think they want to tear at wounds, reopen them, and claim victimhood.

And we have to say,

not, hmm, that's an interesting discussion, or I wonder how we could do that, but no, no we've paid we've paid it's settled move on

somebody said to me today

if if if a car if a if a car crashed into you and you could never get hold of your insurance company or any others

anyone else's you know wouldn't you feel that you were owed I said sure if that happened to me But if it happened to one of my ancestors centuries ago, I'd kind of think, well, I'm going to get on with my life.

You know?

Yeah.

I think those are, that's one of those things that what you just said,

no,

is one of those things that you were talking about at the beginning that I thought,

I can say that.

I can say that.

Yeah.

Hearing you so clear on that, you know, I think there's a lot of people that don't,

I mean, we do a lot of heavy lifting,

you more probably than me, but we do a lot of mental heavy lifting.

I want to say it's a pleasure.

Yeah, pardon me?

It's a pleasure.

Yeah, but it's we are thinking of things because we have the time, this is what we do, that the average person doesn't.

That's right.

And I think the average person doesn't know exactly.

There's no model.

out there.

You know, the model was Donald Trump.

That wasn't necessarily a good model, you know.

And

there's no real

model of people getting along, people having friendly discussions that disagree with each other, and nobody that can just clearly stand up.

I mean, that's the thing I love.

Churchill is

one of my favorite people in history.

And

he just didn't seem to care.

He knew what was right for Europe and for England, and he said it.

And, you know, if you read about Churchill from the Indian perspective, he's a monster.

Yeah, yeah.

And they accuse him of things that he didn't do.

Yeah, but he also did some things that, you know, he wasn't proud of even at the end of his life.

But that makes him human.

Sure.

That makes him human in that age.

You know, and was he getting better or was he worse by the end of his life?

But, you know, there's people,

people need more examples

and to be able to see people in their office stand up and say,

no,

I'm not going to that.

I'm not going to the seminar where I have to confess my whiteness.

That's right.

Absolutely.

You can say no.

And should.

Do you know that great speech of Churchill's on the death of Chamberlain?

I'm not sure.

On the death of Neville Chamberlain,

who's obviously his main adversary.

Winston Churchill gave one of the greatest speeches ever given.

In 1940, Chamberlain had obviously only very recently had to leave office and died very shortly afterwards of cancer.

And Churchill gave the most remarkable speech.

I urge people to look it up.

And it's a very, very generous speech, like you say about Lincoln, an extraordinarily magnanimous man.

And he says, among other things, he says, what was the mistake of Neville Chamberlain to have fallen?

for the lies of a wicked man.

But he also says he has an extraordinary passage in the and and I'll try to do it off way out, but he says, um

he says, uh um

he talks about history and how it will view any man

and he says at one point he says history with her flickering lamp stumbles along the trails of the past and illuminates with pale echoes the former days.

He says, what is the worth of all this?

He says, the only guide to a man is his conscience.

The only shield to his memory is the rectitude and the sincerity of his actions.

And as he says, he says, we have to hold on to those things

because our hopes, he says, are so often marked.

In one phase, men seem to have been right, and in another, they seem to have been wrong.

He says, but if you hold on to these things, He says, however the fates may play, you march always in the ranks of honor.

Now,

that was one of the key insights that Churchill had was

you will hold on to the rectitude and the sincerity of your actions and the fates will play with you and they will knock you and they will buffet you and sometimes the whole world will be against you.

But hold on to them and you march always in the ranks of honor.

I talked to a guy who studied, he wrote the book The Pendulum.

I don't know if you've ever read it,

but it says the 80-year swing from me to we.

Oh, yeah.

And he tracked it all the way back, and it's fascinating.

And I called him up, and he said, I've been waiting for you to call me.

And he said, I've been watching you for a while.

He said, you know, you're not going to win.

And I was like, what?

And he said, no, no, no.

He said, there's lots of people like you out there.

I think you're one of them.

That we are marching

at a time

against

the main feeling and movement,

and it will be recognized later

as the right thing.

But these people

all throughout history that are

marching

to

the drum of honor and integrity.

Yes.

That's

it's possible.

I mean, I never really think of winning or losing because I just think you do what you think is right.

Yeah,

exactly.

Well,

maybe it'll come right in my own time.

Maybe it won't.

I don't.

I mean, I hope.

I know what I hope, but I don't rely on it.

And

that friction of marching against the crowd is, in my experience, a perfectly pleasant one.

I don't mind it.

I think it sharpens you.

Yeah.

Opposition in all things.

It's in the middle of the morning.

Who would want to be going along with lockstep with everything you were told?

No.

And I hope that young people in particular watching realize this, that

they're being offered today a really banal list of things,

a really banal list of things.

They're being told that the meaning of life is

to be found in social activism and

seeking social justice and confessing their privilege and if they're white kind of shrinking themselves and kind of, you know, hoping they get through life without anyone noticing

and then dying and hoping that they didn't harm anyone.

This is not a heroic narrative.

This is a slave narrative.

I mean, this is a subservient narrative, and it's being offered to everybody.

And it's being offered to the people

who it's said can then present themselves as victims, and the people who it's alleged benefit from privilege.

They are all being invited to follow a slave narrative.

A specifically subservient form of life where you cringe your way through.

That's why they attack people like Elon Musk, by the way.

This is a guy who's simultaneously trying to work out how we have cars without fossil fuels and is also trying to work out how to get to Mars.

That sounds like a pretty full agenda.

They attack these people.

They don't want people who actually dream big.

They don't want people who do things big.

They don't want that.

They want the era to admire weak people.

Was it Hank or Harry Reardon?

Reardon Steele from Atlas Shrugged?

Did you?

Oh, yes, yes, remember?

I've been in a long time, that's why I can't remember his name.

I think I have a right.

But that was his main crime.

Right.

You're doing it on your own.

You can't do it.

Right.

You cannot do it on your own.

And you can't do it for your purposes.

And we have to remind, particularly, as I say, particularly younger people, that this is a lie and that they are being offered a bad life.

And they, I think they know it.

I'm sure.

I'm sure they can sense it, but they have to be reminded of it.

So what is a good life in this?

It is to dream bigger.

It is to think bigger.

It is not to be a slave with slave mentality and subservient mentality.

It is whatever your racial background, to realize that if you're born in the West, you've been given already the biggest head start you could have in life.

Don't throw it away.

Don't piss it away.

Make sure you make something of yourself.

You've been given the best opportunity you can be given from the start.

So don't waste it.

Do something amazing.

How are we perceived overseas?

Are we the disease?

Most people see it, see America as I mean

America used to be a net importer of bad ideas and now it's a net exporter.

See, countries like France, no less a figure than the French president, has said we cannot allow this American cultural movement of you know all the BLM and CRT stuff.

We can't allow it to come into France.

I've seen that happening over in England but it's not taking root.

Well no I describe in the War on the West the way in which this is taking root in Britain that it's come from America.

You know the BLM movement when it kicked off in the US immediately it was replayed in the UK.

It doesn't fit.

I mean like among other things as I point out at the time we have unarmed police officers.

Right.

We don't have

even the specifics.

These very ugly attempts to sort of import it wholesale.

I think English-speaking countries are particularly vulnerable to the American political exports and cultural exports.

Other countries realize they've got to cut themselves off from it.

And sadly, people in countries like Britain are also realizing that, that you can't import, you mustn't import, you must keep this away.

You must keep the cultural revolution out of your country.

We'll see if that works.

As for the rest of the world,

well, I mean, one of the chapters in the War on the West, I give the example of what the rest of the world is doing whilst America is doing this.

We spoke a bit earlier about China, but what a shot in our own feet we keep on doing.

You know,

take those early moments of the Biden administration when Secretary Blinken meets his opposite numbers and is berated by them for daring to question what the Chinese government is doing.

And then look at that amazing cell phone of America, the United Nations, in March of last year.

The new ambassador, the American ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas Greenfield, gives a speech on International Racism Awareness Day at the UN, which is one of those very productive sessions.

Of course, racism was, I think, ended after that day.

And

the American representative gives a speech saying that America is a racist society.

She identifies

the killing of George Floyd.

She identifies the spa massacre that had nothing to do with race race as another example of racism.

She says that America has had this from the foundations, that the foundations were founded in sin.

She does all of this and then remembers at the end of the speech to say, oh, and there's other forms of racism in the world, like the treatment of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and also the Uyghurs in China.

Who's the next person up at the UN but the Chinese ambassador who says

America has no right to lecture the Chinese people.

And the representative says, the Chinese representative representative says, America has done something unique today.

Their representative has come to the United Nations and confessed their guilt.

So they have no right to tell the Chinese people anything.

That's how the rest of the world views America.

They view it as idiotic, self-punching, self-destructive, self-owning.

self-destroying.

And this is convenient for some of the rest of the world, you know?

It's very convenient for

our opponents, our competitors, that we would spend this period in history doing this.

Tell me about Russia and

your view of.

I mean, this just doesn't seem right.

It doesn't sit right with me.

This whole

seems to me like we are pushing for war.

And

I worry

and I care for the

Ukrainian people,

but I

and maybe I'm just like the people were in the 1930s with Hitler.

You know,

let's hold on here.

I don't want him in there.

I don't want him crossing that border.

But let's not get into a global war.

Let's also, I mean,

I agree.

I mean, that's what has to be averted at all costs.

And there is obviously a very big policy divide in America at the moment about this, of people who see this as an opportunity to further weaken the Kremlin, which is, in general, a desirable thing.

I think the weaker the Kremlin, the better.

But

on the other hand, care for what you wish for, because we don't know what comes next.

We don't know what comes next.

The guy also has, we think, cancer.

He's not long for the world.

Do you think?

I mean, he looks ill.

Yeah.

That's for sure.

And he's had, I think they said said

56

what they think are radiation treatments, and now he's going under the knife.

That means strange wobble he did the other day somewhere.

I mean, yeah, he's certainly finding it harder to hide whatever it is he does have.

But, you know, it's

Russian history, even more than the history of most nations, is a reminder that everything can always be worse.

You know,

what comes next isn't necessarily an improvement.

I mean, I don't know what would happen if there was actually a power struggle in Moscow because, you know, remember the Americans had a plan once of how to, if there was a coup in Pakistan, how to get the nukes out.

Does anyone have a plan for how to secure the nuclear sites if Russia falls apart?

I don't know.

But one thing I would say, though, is we do have to be very careful not to be distracted from the much more important 21st century challenger, which is China.

I see no scenario in which the Russian economy overtakes the American economy in our lifetimes.

It's like saying that the Greek economy might become the number one world economy.

But there is, of course, as you know.

Yeah.

China, that's another story.

I'm concerned that we would take our eye off the ball and get, we're at war on the streets here, then at war in Europe with Russia.

You know, Japan is about to collapse on itself economically.

What would stop China from just taking Taiwan?

And then it's over.

There's just, then they've got it all.

Well, this, you know,

I'm sure you've thought, like I have in recent years quite often, is this the moment when people kind of realize what we have is quite good here and change tack?

And I wondered that at the beginning of the coronavirus here.

I sort of wondered if we would, you know, sort of jog us.

I wondered that at the beginning of the Ukraine invasion.

But so maybe it's a forlorn hope, but maybe it isn't.

That you know, the way I say it to people is I say, you know, if you if you thought that you didn't like the period of American hegemony, you know, wait till you get the Chinese one.

I mean, wait till you see, you know, the footage from Shanghai of the residents screaming, wait until you see that that would be your future for the rest of time.

If you're concerned about what I would describe as last

stage human rights acquisitions, like last, last, last bits of human rights acquisitions, not equal rights under the law or anything like that, but like the last little bits of it.

If you think that those

last bits not going precisely your way are the worst thing ever, wait till the Chinese Communist Party has dominance.

They will be fascinated to hear your human rights complaints.

Really interested.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is a pleasure talking to you.

Well, likewise.

Thank you for your book.

Thank you for standing at the the gate and

ringing the bell.

Well, as I say, it's a pleasure, but I also think it's a duty.

Optimistic,

pessimistic, neutral.

It depends what subject.

Survival of the Americas, of America, and survival of the West.

Long-term optimistic, short-term pessimistic, long-term optimistic, because, as I said, I don't believe you can in the end subjugate a majority.

And the one thing I would add to that is: let's not think that there's going to be any one person who leads us out of this.

The job is up to us,

every single one of us.

It's, you know, who is it that, you know, they're these academics

cooking up this stupid CRT rubbish in recent years, coming up with this theory that reminds you of the old joke about the French, you know, this works in practice, but can we make it work in theory?

They work at this theory and it's intersectionality and it's such BS as anyone who looks at it knows.

But they're working at this theory and then they like try to roll it out on the American public and its first meeting with the American public as a whole, parents, it's a disaster.

Disaster.

Like, you're telling my kid that because of their skin color, they're less than another kid?

Well, that was working well as a theory when they were working away in Berkeley.

But when that theory met American moms,

different stories.

So as I say, short term, there's going to be

a lot of trouble.

Long term, there's no way we can't win.

No way.

Gosh, from your mouth to God's ears.

Thank you.

Appreciate it, Douglas.

It's a pleasure.

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