Why Is Europe Choosing To Replace Itself?

00:00:03 Speaker 1: My name is Charlie Kirk. I run the largest pro American student organization in the country, fighting for the future of our republic. My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth. If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're gonna end up miserable. But if the most important thing is doing good, you'll end up purposeful. College is a scam, everybody. You got to stop sending your kids to college. You should get married as young as possible and have as many kids as possible. Go start at turning point, you would say, college chapter. Go start aturning point, you say high school chapter. Go find out how your church can get involved. Sign up and become an activist. I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade, most important decision I ever made in my life, and I encourage you to do the same. Here I am Lord, Use me. Buckle up, everybody, Here we go. The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserved Gold, leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company. I recommend to my family, friends and viewers. I could say the only conservative professor at Cambridge University, doctor Orr, who is a contributing editor for Heritaane Culture at gb News, Doctor James or everybody here to be with you, Charlie, doctor or great to see you. First. I want to just you know, you sat through the presentation, You've been around all of this as a as a brit as a professor. What is your take on this whole thing we have gone on here? 00:01:37 Speaker 2: Well, I got to say, first off, I was saying to Andrew earlier, it's pretty overwhelming for a brit like me to see the scale of your success and of your ambition, what you've achieved. There's that, you know, lots of lots of students at Cambridge claim they want to change the world, that they can go into jobs that are going to change the world. And I thought to myself this morning, you really could say that you are changing the world. As America goes, so goes the world, and that's what you're doing. You're doing extraordinary things in transforming America, recalling it to its founding ideals, promoting people of caliber and character and courage, particularly among the young. This is a huge problem for us on the right in Britain and we're working very hard on it. And I just felt both envious but also excited because I thought we can we can bottle some courtjuice and take it over to Britain, and we need to work out what the DNA is, and we need to try to replicate it as best we can. It's hard to do that, particularly if you're a movement that's focusing on national pride and national distinctiveness and sovereignty and so on. You can't just copy and paste everything that you're doing. Of course, with a very different constitutional setup, very different electoral dynamics, very different challenges in many ways. But I think philosophically we're very much there. We're very much on the same page. That is to say, we want to work out what the not so much what the politic of left and right is. I think that's the sort of the politics, the philosophy of the what I call the Long twentieth century nineteen fourteen to twenty sixteen. I think the Long twentieth century ended in twenty sixteen, and the politics of left and right ended in twenty sixteen, and we're now talking about the politics of national preference, the politics of national interest. This is still still kind of shocking to the liberal ear, but this is the direction of travel for the new Right on both sides of the Atlantic. 00:03:24 Speaker 1: So what do you mean by that the long twentieth century. 00:03:27 Speaker 2: Well, so historians like to talk about this that you know, we periodizing in history is always very very very difficult, and you know, it turns out that that human development doesn't always obey neat neat time periods. But of course we know what we mean by the twentieth century. But I think there are these sort of history doesn't quite obey those neat kind of neat neat even divisions. And so historians will sometimes talk about the long nineteenth century that sort of began roughly in eighteen fifteen and probably ended in nineteen fourteen, right, eighteen fifteen Congress of Vienna, and then really you've got this extraordinary period of peace in Europe, and then nineteen fourteen is really the point at which that piece explodes. And so I think also we can talk about the long twentieth century persisting in some ways beyond twenty to twenty sixteen as a fundamental watershed moment in how we think about national flourishing, how we think about politics, how we think about the organizing axes and horizons of national flourishing, of mutual flourish. 00:04:25 Speaker 1: Was that Brexit plus Trump? Is that why you think twenty sixteen was the year that began the twenty first century. 00:04:31 Speaker 2: I think that's right. I think it's always easy to conflate the two phenomena. They had distinct phenomena in lots of ways, but there's lots of overlaps too, and I think that it really marks a moment of change in the West. And it's very convenient point. It's not just Brexit and Trump, it's also the rise of pronation national conservative movements all across Europe. You're seeing it with Vaux in Spain, You're seeing it with Jager in Portugal, You're seeing with AfD in Germany. You're seeing it with the Hassean blemm Nacnale in France, the Fertlli del Italia in Australia, seeing it in Italy, I'm sorry, and in Austria as well, all over Europe. For deaths in Hungary and going at different speeds. And you know, one of the challenges Conservatives are always trying to conserve what is our own and so it's actually very difficult to form. What of the Communists used to have a comm Intern. It's very difficult to have a con intern because you know, Marx could say workers of the World unite, the progressives can say Wokesters of the world unite. Right, it's a fundamentally transnational ideology. That's that's very very powerful. This is a movement something that moves in lockstep before conserving our own nations. It's much harder to have that sense of international solidarity. But you know, I think various movements have tried to catalyze that, in the National Conservatism movement, which I'm proudly that the chair of in the UK is helping to do that, and and so yeah, that's that's a big challenge. 00:05:49 Speaker 1: So so what do you think led towards that national conservatism moment? And let's go a step back and also take a moment introduce yourself. You you teach the Western care at Cambridge. Correct. 00:06:03 Speaker 2: I wouldn't say I'm not allowed to teach the Western canon, so it would be sort of too big. But to give you an example, I teach a program in moral philosophy from Plato through to Nietzsche, that includes Aristotle, that includes August and inclusive Quinas cant Hume. So as much of the kind of classic Western philosophers as I can fit in and then and then I also teach an Enfild program. But probably speaking, yes, I teach Western philosophers without the but not through the prism and not through the lens of kind of critical theory. I try not to politicize my teaching in any way. Of course, that itself is a political act these days. Just trying to be neutral, trying to try to listen to these ancient, ancient thinkers on their own terms and not trying to force ideological kind of masks onto them. But but yes, I see myself very much, you know, as trying to pass on what is best in the Western tradition. I think really universities have only three primary purposes. That is, to pursue the truth, to preserve the truth, and to pass on the truth. And then those are the kind of you know, there's a little bit crude, but those are the kind of the three piece. Those are the sort of three That's the way I sort of think about what I'm doing. So partly it is preserving the best of what has been said and thought in the West, but it's also not wanting to kind of you know, be kind of inert in that always having that sort of sense of looking forward, testing, always you know, probing, searching for new things, being open to novelty, open to change, but kind of anchored, anchored in the great in the great Western tradition. 00:07:38 Speaker 1: So with that, with that backdrop, post World War two, there was somewhat of a new world order that was established, the neoliberal world order, and it was one that was based on free trade, that was based on both American dominance but also kind of NATO expansionism, international cooperation, some could call it globalism, and liberalism seemed to be an inevitability. The famous book End of History by Francis Fukiyama is what lateeen eighties of that mistake ninety two, okay, nineteen ninety two, where he basically said, this is it. We've reached it. Like all the ideas that have been tried have led us to this moment. Classical liberalism, whatever you want to call it, liberalism is the best it's going to get. And congratulations, humanity. History is over. What happened from Fukiyama in nineteen ninety two to now what you say twenty sixteen to now where you go from this kind of hubristic prideful, you know, kind of exaltation of liberalism to a completely different moment right now. 00:08:47 Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, that book The End of History by Francis Fukuyama is it's a fascinating kind of moment of sort of kind of hubris, you might say it kind of misplaced optimism. But if you read the ververy end of that book, the actual full title of the book is The End of History and the Last Man. And he has this fascinating kind of final chapter or two of that book where he says, look, actually, this sort of sense of this end of history dispensation where where everything is we've hit the SunNet uplands of the kind of liberal utopia and peace and prosperity for all that in the end is not going to satisfy man's instinct. And this is particularly this is what he calls the thumos. This is this is if we think of Plato's like three level three leveled soul. You've got the noose at the top of the mind. Then you've got the thumos, which is courage. That's just the sort of sense of that the kind of bit the spirit that animates us. And then you've got the epithumia, which is kind of the base appetites, and Plato says you gonna have all three of these in check. And what Fukuyama says is that there's a real danger that with this kind of the in the sun lit uplands of the kind of globalized utopia, we're going to suppress the thumos. But that thumos is not going anyway, it's not going away. It will come back. And so he's very he's not he's not quite as naive as that, And I think what's happened, you know, that question might think of the quest for thumos as the search for identity. In fact, Fukuyama wrote a very interesting book on identity where he sort of starts to conceive that the kind of sort of Berkeley liberalism was never really going to deliver the goods. And so I think, you know, the suppression of that sense of sense of self, sense of rootedness, sense of home, sense of distinctiveness and what we are and what we love that was never going to be sort of erased by the liberal doctrines of a book and of a blank slate, doctrines of human nature. We're rooted, we're rooted human beings. We're related to what's around us. We're conservative about what we love most about what's closest to us, and that's never going to go away. And we got to face up to reality as it is given to us and not as we would like it to be. 00:10:47 Speaker 1: But what went wrong with the liberal project? 00:10:50 Speaker 2: Well, I think the fundamental problem with the liberal project is that it's grounded on fundamentally mistaken assumptions about what it is to be human. The basic idea is that human beings are born into the world with completely independent, completely blank, completely blank slate. This is lots of view of the table erasa or the white page, and we're completely free of all unchosen obligations, and there can be no obligations that we don't ourselves choose. And this is just a complete fantasy. I don't think it's an accident that the great liberal philosos like John Locke and Emmanuel Kant never had any children. Anyone who's had anyone's had a child will understand that the radical nature of dependency, that most basic bond we're born into the world with, that most literally with a physical bond we're attached to as a physical bond to our to our mothers, and so that was always going to be a problem. That we're not blank slates. We are connected. We flourish most when we're connected to what is closest to us. That and it's not natural to love what is closest to us. I was in France. I think last month up in the mountains is beautiful shadow dressing. Some must have been fifty or sixty. I suppose conservative right wing students from all across I think probably you know, twenty five different nations. And I opened. I wasn't quite sure what I was going to say to them, that the organizers hadn't been very clear. So I found myself beginning the session by saying, who here has got the best mum in the world? And every hand went up, and they looked around and they started laughing at each other, and I said, notice what you're not doing right now. You're not arguing with each other. You're not discussing what are the proper optimality criteria of being a mother. You're not there would be a crazy, you know, inhuman thing to do. It's a totally natural thing to think that your mum is the best mum in the world. And then I said, who here lives in the best country in the world. And everybody's hands went up. And my point was, I don't owe you an argument for why my country is the best country in the world any more than I owe you an argument for why my mum is the best mum in the world. Somebody who asks for an argument has had what the philosopher Bernard Williams calls one thought too many. That the person who has one thought too many is like the guy the utilitarian. He walks up to the river and he sees two women drowning, his wife and a strange woman, and stops to ask, what if that strange woman might win the Nobel Prize in Public economics? That person has had one thought too many. It is a totally natural disposition of every human to love what is closest to their own. Aquinas sees this. Aristotle sees it is at the beginning one of the greatest works of politics ever written. Book one, page one of Aristotle's Politics, he says, how do we think about how we get on? How do we think about the life of the police? Politica says, well, you know, we're born into the world and we're dependent upon each other male female, Men and women will bond, then they will have, then they will pro create. There'll be a family, a household, and oycosts, but that won't be enough. That will be enough for daily needs, but it won't be enough for sort of you know, non date more than daily needs. So you'll have a village and the village will come together, but that won't be enough either. You will need to grow into a polus for self defense and so on, a city state as it were, a country, a nation, and that Aristotle thinks, okay, that's for pretty small in the fifth fourth century BC Greece. But but that was the functioning, that was the way in which Aristotle that was that was this kind of optimal size for human beings to flourish too as it worked get fulfill their their their proper ends as human beings. And I think that's still the basic way of thinking about things. I think it's it's really what you see in Aquitas. I think it's what you see in the Bible as well. 00:14:55 Speaker 1: Wow, that's there's so much thereat out to to think about. 00:15:01 Speaker 3: We're honored to be partnering with Alan Jackson Ministries and today I want to point you to their podcast. It's called Culture in Christianity, the Alan Jackson Podcast. What makes it unique is Pastor Allan's biblical perspective. He takes the truth from the Bible and applies it to issues we're facing today, gender confusion, abortion, immigration, Doge Trump, and the White House issues in the church. He doesn't just discuss the problems in every episode, he gives practical things we can do to make a difference. 00:15:28 Speaker 2: His guests have. 00:15:29 Speaker 3: Incredible expertise and powerful testimonies. They've been great friends and now you can hear from Charlie in his own words. 00:15:35 Speaker 1: Each episode will make you recognize the power of your faith and how God can use your life to impact our world today. The Culture in Christianity podcast is informative and encouraging. You could find it on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes. Alan Jackson Ministries is working hard to bring biblical truth back into our culture. You can find out more about Pastor Allen and the ministry at Alan Jackson Forward slash Charlie. So let's go. Let's let's pull one of those threads, which is that all the French young people at that chateau will raise their hand. Who lives in the greatest nation? Why does Europe not vote or believe that vocally in any of their politics. Let's now center our conversation around Continental Europe, and then we'll make our way to your home, if I may say so. Continental Europe is a husk of its former self. It's an open air museum. It's sad, it's depressing. There are pockets obviously of joy and of history. But I think you would agree, doctor, or it's not what it used to be. How did that happen? World War Two? The West one? Right? And now we look in twenty twenty five, Europe is an unrecognizable continent in more ways than one. 00:16:52 Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, and we would it would take a very, very kind of long, long conversation to really get to the bottom of it. I mean, one book i'd really recommend on this is actually by an American, Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. This is actually goes way back. It's two thousand and nine, which is a long time considering what's happened in the intervening period. But I think Caldwell really sort of it's an incredibly prescient book, and he starts to see the kind of the sort of conditions of the unraveling kind of kicking in. And you're right. You know, after the Second World War that the French had what they call the tont Glorias, the thirty glorious years in Germany. You have, at least in West Germany, you have the vis chap under. You know, this economic miracle, this extraordinary explosion of economic flourishing and national self confidence in West Germany. And I suppose, you know, nineteen eighty nine has got to feature somehow in the story of Europe's decline or Europe's sort of wants that, you know, the great bugbear of the Soviet Union and that great enemy of freedom everywhere had been dissolved. Then I think there was a sense of, well, you know, before that, there was a sense of what are we for? We know what we're for. We're for freedom, and this is something that is pretty uncomplicated, and it's going to stitch us together as a kind of as the West. It was easy to think about the West, and it was easy to think about the rest. And I think after the nineteen eighty nine into the nineteen nineties before the Wall that the fall of the Wall in a way sort of starts to mark the beginning of the kind of questioning what are we about? What is our story? What are we for? As a fascinating moment in two thousand and four, when the European Union is trying to work out a constitution. In the end it fails because it can't agree on anything really, and there's a huge debate about what goes in the preamble of the constitution. Where how do we set out right at the beginning of constitution we the European Union? Who are we? What makes us we? What makes us a wei? They said, well, our Hellenic inheritance, Greece and Rome, the classical inheritance, yes, the Enlightenment inheritance as well. No mention of the Hybreic or the Christian inheritance. This was seen to be something that was, you know, low status, not something that wanted to be admitted. John Paul the Second is right towards the end of his life two thousand and four and got involved in Italian politicians got involved. There's a huge fight about it, and in the end the decision was, no, we're not going to have any recognition of the fact that the European Union is in any way at all the successor to what it really was a successor to, namely Christendom and the Holy Roman Empire, and that which stitched Europe together as a sort of self conscious collective entity that was gone. And I don't want to overstate that too much, but I think that it was an indicator, an index into the way in which the Europeans were beginning to run out of a sense of who are we, what are we for, where do we come from? And then, of course, with the emergence of a kind of technocratic, democratically unaccountable potent in parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg, the parliament is in both places. Wait for this, for one hundred million, one hundred million years a year, the European Parliament moves from Brussels to Strasbourg. I think it's every fortnight back and forth. 00:20:06 Speaker 1: How long is a fortnite? 00:20:07 Speaker 2: Sorry too, you didn't have fortnits over here? For it's fourteen days, two weeks. 00:20:10 Speaker 1: We do, or just trying to fortnite? 00:20:12 Speaker 2: So two and it just just to think of that they can't kind of couldn't resolve something as basic as that. 00:20:17 Speaker 1: But they moved back and forth. 00:20:19 Speaker 2: They moved back and forth. Yeah, just so the Belgian's hat, you know, the kind of Franco German packed is happy. And then the sort of you know, the idea of there being a European union beyond the Franco German alliance. So that's that's what you ge. That's when you go to Brussels. So all these crazy things, crazy sort of features of the kind of European settlement, and there's a kind of democratic deficit, you might say. I used to play this parlor game when I was I'm now at Cambridge. I was at Oxford in twenty sixteen, just ahead of the Brexit vote, and one of the parlor games I would play with my I was the only out of the closet Brexiteer as far as I know, in the whole of this college among I don't know, think about seventy eighty colleagues. And I used to ask them who's our who's our member of the European Parliament, like which who represents us? Who represents Oxford and the surrounding areas in Brussels, Strasbourg, And no one could answer. No, one. No one knew, not even the professors of politics, and there was no reason for them to know, because it's a fake. It was a fake. It was and is a fake parliament with very little powers, very very little few veto powers, very few powers of it to initiate legislation. Nobody voted for them, nobody, nobody had any reason to know who they were. And so that has been a huge problem. That kind of the sort of the European Union project has been, you know, from nineteen ninety two onwards, where it really became a self consciously political union and not just an economic and trade one. That's really been it's been a disaster. And I hoped that in twenty sixteen Brexit would be the first brick in the wall, that it would it would catalyze a kind of domino effect that was probably wishful thinking, becase is particularly in the euro he're in the euro nations. You know, it's one thing for Britain with its own pound, its own currency, to break away, it would be much more dramatic, there'd be much more dramatic consequences of if a euro country split away. But the Europe has been a disaster for the countries who have been members of it. I mean Italy, for example, has scarcely had any GDP growth. I think it started to pick up recently, but really, for the first twenty years of its being part of the euro effectively nothing at all. Greece and Spain youth unemployment was through the roof effectively, you know, you've got you know, the Spanish currencies of Greek currency effectively being shackled to the German deutsch Mark. And so the Germans weren't complaining because the currencies was artificially depreciated, their exports more attractive, and so it was all this kind of elaborate ponzi scheme which at some point is going to unravel. And then somehow, you know, ideologically within the elite forming classes in Oxford and Cambridge, in London, certainly in Britain, you know, the idea is that to be European was to be part of the European Union. Those two are absolutely part and parcel, and I never understood this. You know, you can hate FIFA and love football, as I've often said, you know, or soccer, I should say, you can hate FIFA, like the Worldwide Organization for Soccer, and you can, and you can love soccer. In fact, you can hate. I hate FIFA because because I love football, I don't like what FIFA is doing to international football. I don't like the corruption. I want the game to be a richer game. And I think it's the same with the European Union, and it's had this sort of deadly effect on our sense of what it is to be European. 00:23:34 Speaker 1: What explains the hyper secularization of Europe post World War Two? Why did we see such a dramatic drop off of church rates? Is it as simple as they saw tragedy and suffering and nihilism took the void. What because Europe has had depressingly low church rates and they just keep on finding new lows every decade. Where what percentage of people in Europe do you think regularly attend church? 00:24:00 Speaker 2: It varies quite a bit from country to country, but it is shockingly low relative to certainly relative to the United States. So you know, in Italy it's it's now very, very very low. I think it's it's certainly well below five percent. I mean, you know, religious adherence is just a very difficult thing to measure, you know, is actually going to church? 00:24:19 Speaker 1: Does it? 00:24:19 Speaker 2: Does it does it accounts as sort of being a Christian or being being a church go you know in Britain, you know what what caused it? I mean, it may be the opposite, I think. I think I'm more tempted to the analysis that actually it's prosperity and flourishing, particularly material flourishing and prosperity that tends to catalyze a sort of collapse in the sense of any need for meaning or any any any orientation to the transcendent. And I suppose also in the sixties you're seeing the emergence of competing systems of meaning, competing accounts of what it is to have significance, competing sets of answers to livesteep as questions. We see that a lot of that important from California and elsewhere. And I suppose the sort of something, you know, there's something fashionable about religious skepticism that was certainly true in the sixties. If you think back, you know, to the high noon of the New Atheists in two thousand and five, you know, there was something very, very sort of elite. There was something very a lot of cachet in being in being an atheist. And I'm tempted to think that theists in New Atheism was just a politically correct way to be skeptical of Islam. I think that the timing works quite well there. But I think if you look in the last few years, I mean, I just saw some data out from Britain this morning. You know, I think between eighteen to thirty five year olds, belief in God has tripled over the last five years. Bible purchases has gone up by eighty seven percent over four years. Now. It's from a pretty low low base, but something is happening out there. You know, it's still you know, it's quite it's still quite small. But the numbers among among gen z or gen z as you call them, that some cam gen z well, because z is how you pronounced the letter in English, and I know you Americans have a different way of putting it. 00:26:10 Speaker 1: But no, it's just it's interesting. So let's now, let's now take our attention to your country, which I had the opportunity to visit, and you hosted us wonderfully in Cambridge. Right, great to have quite quite the ambush so not by you, but by Cambridge. But we survived. 00:26:29 Speaker 2: It, more than survived it. 00:26:31 Speaker 1: Yeah, we we I think we we triumphed, some could say, and you were so sweet and so kind throughout that entire process. So the United Kingdom or Britain or England, whatever were we want to want to give, give to give it voted for Brexit in twenty sixteen. Where are British politics today? What is the status of British politics? 00:26:53 Speaker 2: Yeah, well it's it's it's a great question, you know, in twenty sixteen, and we have this extraordinary expression of democratic will in seventeen point four to six million people voting for the principle that laws affecting the United Kingdom should be made in the United Kingdom and should be accountable to the people and the voters of the United Kingdom. It's a very just you know, because seemingly an entirely uncontroversial principle. But it was the biggest vote of we've had in the history in British voting history. And another key driver there was the sense of we're losing our sense, we're losing what it is to use the first person plural, as Roger Scrutin, one of my favorite philosophers, likes to put it, that sense of we, we the people, What is it that makes a wei and I think what was going on in Brexit was this kind of inco eight, kind of cry that we are losing that sense of who we are. That every time, for the last forty to fifty years, every time the British people have had an opportunity to express a view on mass demographic change and transition, it is said no or go much slower, And every time its leaders have effectively ignored those that clearly expressed will. And I think twenty sixteen was a moment where suddenly it looked as if we might have the opportunity to finally regain control of our laws and regain control of our borders. At the same time, what actually happened in the last five years. One in what have we had is one in twenty seven people in Britain have arrived in the last five years. One in sixty arrived in the last eighteen months in the first twenty five years of this century, gross migration, gross immigration talking twelve to fifteen million people. That's roughly four to five times as many people who arrived on our shores in the first thousand years of our history. It's difficult to overstate. And I know you've had you know, You've had enormous influxes too under the Biden administration, but you're a much bigger You've got a much bigger territory, and you've got a different kinds of different kind of categories of migrants coming in, and you've at last got an administration that's willing to do something about it. 00:29:25 Speaker 1: But this praise God for that. 00:29:27 Speaker 2: And indeed and that has had but that has had a profoundly kind of traumatic shock on us sprits, and it's had a kind of tectonic effect on the landscape of British politics. So what's happening in British politics? Well, quick update. Last year July twenty twenty four, we saw the Loveless Landslide. So we see the Starmer government getting an astonishing one hundred and seventy five odd seats of majority in Parliament, which is an enormous, enormous majority and one of the biggest in living memory, on only twenty percent of the vote twenty percent of the people eligible to vote, something like thirty four percent of the vote share. It was you know, the sofa one, I mean the couch won that election. It was a very low, very low turnout. Nobody it was an apathetic election. Nobody seemed to care. Fast forward now, you know, we were just over a year in. Back in the first of May of this year, we had the local elections whe which are a pretty good proxy. It's a bit like the midterms and not a bad proxy for what the country's mood in is. And I think you know, Labor gets goes from thirty four percent to twenty percent, The Conservative Party goes down to fifteen percent, extinction level, almost an unprecedented low. And for the first time in one hundred years, a new party emerges, a third party to rival the duopoly that's had britten in its grip since nineteen twenty nineteen twenty three, and that is Nigel Farage's Reform UK, which surged through to win six hundred seventy seven local seats, which if you extrapolate that out, is thirty percent of the electorate. That's an They were at fourteen percent a year ago. And that's going up and up and up. And what you're seeing for the first time in the history of British politics since there have been political parties, let's say the Tories are emerging like the sixteen seventies, sixteen eighties and really kind of bedding down in their modern form in the eighteen thirties. For the first time in the history of British politics, there is another right wing party emerging, another Conservative Party. That is. It looks as if, in my view, we'll have to see what happens next May with some more proxy elections, then there'll be a general election in twenty twenty nine. The last point that Kirstarma can call it. But my sense is that Nigel Farage is on track to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. 00:31:52 Speaker 1: That deserves some applause. So let's examine that deeper and more thoroughly. Some people in the audience will hear the Conservative Party, don't we like them? Explain what a concert what it means to be part of the Conservative Party. That's not exactly you know, Let's say the equivalent that we would have here in the United States of what we consider to be a conservative. 00:32:18 Speaker 2: Yes, that's right, I mean, but even here, I suppose in the States there are lots and lots of fascinating debates within the GOP, within the Republican Party. Is to you, what is it to be a conservative? You know, is it to be Reagan night. Is it to be a fusionist, is it to be a Trumpist, Is it to be a kind of compassionate bush Eite conservative, whatever it might be. So, I mean, and you know, to some extent we mirror some of those those debates, those debates about freedom, economic freedom, How to rank that in the order of what it is we want to conserve. But roughly speaking, you know, the Conservative Party was in power from twenty ten to twenty twenty four, and you know, all all of the good things that it delivered, it delivered by accident. 00:33:00 Speaker 1: You know. 00:33:00 Speaker 2: It granted the referendum on Brexit in twenty fifteen, not expected. In its manifesto, it didn't expect to win in twenty fifteen. It thought there would be another coalition, that the referendum would be scrapped by their coalition partners. But they won, almost unexpected, not expecting to. They granted reluctantly the referendum, They campaigned against Brexit, that that was the official government position. Then they lost. The government fell. A new government came in, headed up incredibly by Theresa May, a prime minister who voted against Brexit. A prime minister dude voted against Brexit. Was tasked by sort of the internal party political dynamics of the Conservative Party to deliver Brexit, and sure enough it was a complete catastrophe. That's when I cut up my membership card, you know, to be Conservative in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen. Was was quite straightforward. It's just you've got one job. Seventeen point four million Brits have asked us to do this one thing and right now all that we want you to do, and they couldn't do it. It couldn't do it, couldn't do it. Finally, that May government falls in twenty that summer of twenty nineteen, after a spectacular defeat at the European elections. Those European elections are good for something, it turns out, because in the space of six weeks Nigel Farage sets up the Brexit Party and goes from zero to winning a national election in the United Kingdom that has never inconceivable, quite just unthinkable, And that's spelt the end of the May Party and Boris Johnson takes over and finally managed to get Brexit over the line. Then the plague strikes and COVID and lockdown and so on and so forth, spending goes through the roof, and you know, we've got very very serious economic economic problems headaches to it to worry about. So being conservative has been it's been very very hard to kind of keep a track on what it means to be conservative. I suppose for Brits, the British Conservative Party is just to be conservative, is just to be a pragmatist, just to be pragmatic. But as you know, I remember harry On because he passed through a mutual friend of mine and Charlie's came through. He said that the trouble with pragmatism, James is it doesn't work. And it's true. You know, you got it, you can't. 00:35:13 Speaker 1: G K. 00:35:13 Speaker 2: Hsson says, you know, the pragmatist's chief end is to be something more than a pragmatist. If all your prizing is efficiency, then it doesn't. Then what is efficiency? Efficiency towards what It's got. 00:35:25 Speaker 1: To be aim. You have to aim your destination. 00:35:27 Speaker 2: She's got to have a tellos, you've got to have a horizon. And I think for years and years and years, the Conservatives horizon was just to win. We just need to win, and they were very good at winning. They're the most successful. 00:35:36 Speaker 1: Elect sound like a Republican party that we know of. 00:35:40 Speaker 2: But I and the Conservative British Conservative Party is the most success successful election winning machine in the history of politics anywhere in the world. But you know, I think that is that may now be coming to an end. 00:35:53 Speaker 4: This is Lane Schoenberger, chief investment Officer and founding partner of y Refi. It has been an honor and a privilege to partner with Turning Point and for Charlie to endorse us. His endorsement means the world to us and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Turning Point for years to come. Now Here, Charlie, in his own words, tell you about why Refi. 00:36:12 Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you guys about why refight dot com. That is why are e f y dot com. Y refi is incredible private student loan debt in America told us about three hundred billion dollars. Y refy is refinancing distress or defaulted private student loans. You can finally take control of your student loan situation with a plan that works for your monthly budget. Go to yrefight dot com. That is why refight dot com. Do you have a co borrower why reef I can get them released from the loan. You can skip a payment up to twelve times without penalty. It may not be available at all fifty states. Go to yrefight dot com. That is why are e f y dot com. Let's face it, if you have distress or default the student loans, it can be overwhelming because of privacuit loan debt, so many people feel stuck. Go to y refight dot com. That is y R e f y dot com private student loan debt relief yrefight dot com. So so then so that defines the Conservative Party Reform, which is Nigel Faraja's party is growing. How and you've mentioned this, how does mass immigration, specifically mass Islamic immigration playing into how people are thinking about this election and the United Kingdom? 00:37:22 Speaker 2: Yeah, well it's a great question. I mean, you know, it's very hard to know. With so many people coming in, it's very hard to know, like who they are, what do they believe, what do they what do they think? Let alone working out strategies of integration or or assimilation. So what's happening now? I mean, so we've got illegal immigration, so roughly you know, tens of that. I would say tens of thousands of people coming onto the to the Calais beaches and paying people traffickers three four thousand euros a pop to take the pretty dangerous journey to in Dinghies across the across the channel. And so there's an Now that those numbers are tiny relative to the levels of legal migration, which are huge, but somehow it concentrates the concentrates the mind, this fact that you know, these people are coming over. We don't know nothing about them. Most of them are young men of fighting age, very few women, very few children. Very hard to believe that they are actually refugees fleeing persecution and warfare. I mean, France is not a great country right now. You know, you might not like it very much, but you know, is it in the grip of civil war and widespread urban conflict. I mean, yeah, only in August really and you know, actually Calle is a pretty nice, pretty nice place to be. But that's but that's what's going on. And so the government doesn't know what to do with these people. The Tories didn't know what to do with them, The Labor Party didn't know what to do with them. We are we are wedded and kind of enmeshed in all of these complex webs of international obligations, treaty obligations. There's a foreign court in Strasbourg that has jurisdiction over we can and can't admit, Well. 00:39:01 Speaker 1: It wasn't Brexit supposed to fix there. 00:39:03 Speaker 2: Well, it is something that is worth clarifying here. So there are two courts. There's two European courts. It's European Court of Justice in Luxembourg and then there's the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. And we did not leave the European Court of Human Rights. That is a separate jurisdiction which emerges after the Nuremberg trials in the late nineteen forties, where there was a sense that in order to kind of ensure that this could never happen again, that the Nazi war criminals were never able to say what laws did we break? And actually it was very hard, you know, the Allied prosecutors found it very difficult to argue. Jackson, the US prosecutor, and David Maxwell fIF found it very difficult to say, well, you know, it's not clear what laws you have broken. I mean, technically it's not clear that the Holocaust, for example, was against the law. The Nazis were scrupulous legislators, so there was this sense we have to have this convention we had in order to ensure that this never happens again. And that's different from the European un The European uion doesn't come along till later. And we still remain under the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court. And for as long as we are under that that it's jurisdiction, we effectively, you know, our courts are required, you know, to effectively grant the recision of deportation orders by the British government on the grounds that deportation to the on Orangin country would breach the deportees human rights. I mean, so you're getting you know, I had a story that is happening last week of of people of people facing deportation going to their embassies, protesting outside the embassies, claiming that they would have caught the eye of officials within the embassy, and then claiming that it would be too dangerous for them to go back. They'd be likely to be political prisoners or they like to believe to be victims of political persecution. Is quite extraordinary. You have, you know, people joining terrorist organizations because that will mean that they're going to be political, you know, persecuted politically when they go back to their owge in countries or Article Article eight right to a family life, which is incredibly open basket human right. You can say, no, I just I just feel I'm going to be you know, I'm gay, and and and Syria is not going to like that. Okay, fine, you're you're not You're not going back and you're not gonna You're not gonna win that. You're not gonna win that. The government is not. No government's going to win that case against the human rights legal industrial complex because Britain very much, you know, is it's no longer the rule of law, it's the rule of lawyers. 00:41:33 Speaker 1: The is Nigel thinking about ending that jurisdiction and what is he running on in regards to immigration. 00:41:39 Speaker 2: So one of the key questions is do we get out of this court? How do we get out of the court. You know, my view, if you want to really get Brexit done, you just this is you have to finish the job. You have to. We have to remove ourselves from the jurisdiction of the Strasburg Court. That means rescinding Tony Blair's nineteen ninety eight Human Rights Act, but the political appetite to repeal a human rights act and effectively this sort of new constitution of kind of rights based regime, very kind of continental in spirit, very different from the common law approach that England has always has always had. 00:42:15 Speaker 1: Contrast that can you build into that for a second, I don't want to just buy that. 00:42:19 Speaker 2: Let's just think about this. So there's very too, there's a very different you might say, there's the kind of the jurisprudence of the English speaking peoples, the kind of a common law, the idea that we we discern the principles of justice, of natural justice from the bottom up on a case by case basis, and we work it out through concrete quarrels between particular neighbors, between contractual disputes, or in the case of the criminal law. The European model, this is a little bit crude, but broadly, I think broadly kind of plausible. The European model is just to kind of imagine what you know, to come up with codes, abstract codes that are going to just apply universally no matter what, but are basically agnostic and kind of not attentive to the concrete particularities of human and interrelations. And so you know that one of the great sort of guests of the English speaking peoples is is this idea of a kind of bottom up common law approach. We see this in We see this in Blackstone, we see it in cook we see it in all the great jurists that we, the English speaker speaking peoples have inherited. Whereas the European idea is to think in these sort of rights based ways, which has been kind of a metaphor drawn from kind of the world of property. So, I mean, one way of thinking about this is, you know, we have an Offenses against the Person Act eighteen sixty one, and we have were these words, these lovely earthy saxon words like murder and manslaughter, grievous bodily harm, actual bodily harm. And I sometimes joke with my students, you know, which do you think is the more kind of morally accurate way. What's the kind of right moral grammar in these two scenarios is Peter murdered Lucy or Peter breached lucy right to life? And I think you know the kind of the common law bottom up way of thinking is just what is more accurate that he murdered her, or maybe it was manslaughter of diminished responsibility, whatever it might be. Whereas a rights based view is a much more kind of artificial liberal, kind of construct of this sort of floating ethereal blank slate with all these kind of strings and these different rights coming off it, and it's very difficult, it turns out to reconcile all these different rights. 00:44:27 Speaker 1: It's intentionally confusing, exactly right, exactly, it's a feature, not a bove. 00:44:32 Speaker 2: It has turned out to be a feature, not a bug. And part of the you know, part of what is what they're attempting in the rights based regime is to say, well, if we all signed up to one common shared view of what is right, capital are singular right, then secularism can't work, because the point of secularism is to try and create this slightly fake, neutral public square where everybody's allowed to kind of dis agree about the fundamental question. So they do, we don't have any more wars of religion like this is the basic idea of kind Treaty of West Balia sixteen forty eight. And so we've got to be agnostic about the underlying capital are right, because if we're not agnostic about it, then we'll start killing each other. It'll be a kind of you know, Hobbes and war of war against all. So what we say is everybody, every individual has a right to determine what is right. And then it becomes impossible for any judicial process of discerning what is absolutely because what is it? What is a judicial What is a judge supposed to do to discern the right to discern objective natural justice? And it's impossible to do that when you've got these competing, conflicting, conflicting claims, conflicting demands. 00:45:41 Speaker 1: So that's so helpful. The question that a lot of people have is why is Europe continually importing people that not only wish them harm but will replace core European identity and culture? What get either metaphysical? If you have to hear it is confusing to me and to the audience. Why what is it? I mean, Paris, Brussels, London, these are unrecognizable cities and it's being done voluntarily. Why who's once who's voting for this? What is their argument? 00:46:18 Speaker 2: So increasingly they're not voting for it, So we are seeing that this is this the key driver for populist movements all across continental Europe and now in Britain. I think is a sort of is an kind of emerging resistance to all of this. But it is taking a long time. And it's a good question. Why has it taken so long? Yes, you know, I think the first, you know, shooting from the hip, the first answer might be guilt, a sense of kind of post colonial a post colonial need for atonement. And you see this in France. It's it's, it's it's present in Britain. There's a sense that we wrong the world. You know, we invaded the world. Now we need to invite the world. That that's that's the kind of that's the idea, and you see this. You know, there's even this sort of guilt dynamics with Germany, even though Germany were useless imperialists. I mean, they were absolute terrible. I think they had a Namibia, but they were that you know, maybe the problem of the twentieth centuries. They feel they missed. 00:47:07 Speaker 1: Alibia is actually a great country and it went an underrated city. 00:47:11 Speaker 2: Now it is, but you know, it didn't actually have much of it didn't have it. They felt they lost out on the nineteenth They were terrible straggle for Africa. So twentieth century, now it's our turn in our own backyard. I didn't know the speculative, but I remember in twenty fifteen after Merkel announced, you have opened up the gates, vishaffend us, we can do this, and she was making policy that's a part one of the most consequential policies in the history, in the history of Europe, and in living memory. It's it's almost done in real time on a TV program where a I think it's a young Palestinian or Syrian child sort of emotes or it gives it, you know, begs begs her to begs her to help, and you can she's almost changing her mind in real time. Twenty fifteen, she opens up the gates of Europe. Effectually she says to yeah, the German borders are open, which of course means Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece. And suddenly you have this domino effect and you know, tens of thousands coming across in dignies, a thousands dying, thousands drowning from from these very risky voyages voyages, and so the trains would be rolling into Munich and there would be big signs in German saying simply atonement, atonement eight, you know, eighty years on, seventy seventy years on, this is how we atone for our sins. And I think so there's a kind of there's a specific German version of that, there's a British version of that, there's a French version of that that explains those first waves. So that'd be the first answer. 00:48:42 Speaker 1: And can I just interject before My view is that when you don't have Christianity, you don't know how to deal with guilt, and so you come up with these strange counterfeit ways. Because in Christianity, we go to the Cross, we go to Jesus. In secularism, you invite a bunch of Muslims. 00:48:57 Speaker 2: I think that's a very sobtle point. I mean, so I don't know if you it's it's not as simple as inviting a bunch of that. That's not what they're consciously thinking. No, it's but it's what it's. But yeah, it's it's a kind of atonement for we're we're kind of atoning by finding new victims and finding victims that instead of we're kind of inflicting, inflicting suffering on them. Now we can sort of somehow we can over time we can sort of brick we can we can a tourne we can see kind of kind of secular redemption. 00:49:25 Speaker 1: But you're a second one that I interrupted you. 00:49:27 Speaker 2: So no, no, thank you, so very very very stute point, thank you, Charlie. That second point is it's just the ror economics. So the idea is, you know, the dogma and the Treasury, the finance Department in Britain is, you know, we've got to just keep the Ponzi scheme going. We've got to just keep the GDP you know line, the line has to keep going up. The pie has to keep getting bigger, even if it means that the slices of the pie keep getting smaller. And this is a dogma in finance ministries all across Europe. So it's just this, it's just this Ponzi scheme were we're not having kids, we're aborting hundreds of thousands of them. And there's a demographic collapse all kinds of it's a demographic collapse or winter all across Europe. Already it's already here, it's here in Britain. It's it's it's certainly happening in Britain. And so the dependency ratio of taxpayers to dependence, whether it's the out of work, which is which is which is, which is very high, it's I think it's nine million. In Britain. I basically have twenty seven million taxpayers, nine million out of work, six million public sector workers, thirteen million pensioners. So that ratio, and that ratio is going to get a lot worse. 00:50:32 Speaker 1: Pensioners are retirees. 00:50:34 Speaker 2: Sorry, that's right, pensions are retirees. And so that and those sort of dependency ratios of taxpayers to non taxpayers is going to get worse and worse and worse. So the idea is if we can just you know, we we can kind of import people who can contribute somewhat to our national economy. In fact, it turns out their net drains on our national economy. But that's been one of the myths. I think. The other myth is to go back to liberalism to the third answer would be this kind of the liberal of the blank slate. And the way I've the way I was thinking about this the other day is in the context of the transgenderism debate, and the view seems to be in it. It's the similar kind of metaphysical myth that that has kind of bewitched the liberal mind as with transgenderism. So, you know, with transgenderism, you know, the problem is, Look, if anyone can become a woman, what is a woman? What is it to be a woman? If subjective self declaration of any human being is we've lost our definitional distinctions. And I think that's the same problem with what we might call transnationalism. If anyone can become an Englishman, what is an Englishman? If anyone can become an American, what is an American? We've got this such sort of definitional vagueness that we sort of it becomes impossible to go back to that phrase, ever, to use the first person plural, ever to be able to say we the people. We're not an idea, We're not a proposition, we're not a project. We're a people with a home, with a history, with a heritage. And that doesn't mean that we can't welcome people in. I mean that the model I have for this is the Book of Ruth and that very short short book in the Old Testament, and that's I think a perfect model. You know, what does Ruth do? She's a Moabite, she's not an Israelite. But what does she do? Her husband dies, she says, to where you go, I will go where you lodge, I will lodge boas your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. And she's she shows humility, she integrates herself, she works the fields, she's loyal and the and the interesting thing I noticed this, even to the end of the book, she doesn't become Ruth the Israelite. She's still so her identity is still there. So she's incorporated into the people of Israel, but she's still a Moabite, a moabit test And we just have we we can't even have that conversation. We're not even you know, we have no idea. What did it know? You're not allowed to say what is it to be in Israel? You're not allowed to say what is it to be an Englishman? You know, there's somebody the other day who just said, you know, the concept of englishness and English identity is evil. One of Tony Ble's speechwriters, John Rentol's, he deleted the tweet, but that's interesting. There's been a vibe shift a year ago, he wouldn't have deleted it. But so things are changing fast. But there is this strange myth that sort of bewitches us, that that that there's nothing that there is to be to be British, to be English, to be Welsh, to be Scottish. You can just you know, pass through the gates of the hethrow, get your piece of paper, and this magic dust will descend upon you and infuse all of Shakespeare and a Saucer, and that kind of will ensure that your pulse quickens when you see a spitfire in the sky, you know. And it turns out that magic dust isn't doesn't work. 00:53:58 Speaker 1: National identity is more than paperwork. It's more than just having documentation. And I look at mom, Dannie. Okay, yeah, he's got his paperwork. Like, guy's not an American. He's just not nothing about him as American. I'm sure he's got his paper I'm not doubting it. Like I'm sure he's got all of his documents, but nothing he says or believes is anything close to what it means to be an American. Period's at odds. Actually, well, this is an Islamist Marxist. 00:54:24 Speaker 2: This takes us quite nicely onto onto Islam, because you know, one of the challenges that Islam has always had is to incorporate into itself, into its political theology, the concept of the nation state, MM, the concept certainly the concept of the secular public square. Of course, it's it's incomprehension or the or the distinction between the secular and the sacred. This is not something that is that comes naturally a tool to Islamic theology. And actually you can understand in many ways, I think Islamic political theology is more consistent, more predictable, and more kind of comprehensible than Christian political theology. Know, when Augustine comes along and says, well, yes, you know, God is in charge of everything, but there are some parts where he's just gonna let us be neutral, and he's going to let these earthly authorities take control. And the Church has the worries about the eternal, and the earthly authorities worry about the earth, the kind of the temporal, and that's the kind of the beginning of the seculum. The idea of the secular starts to emerge with Augustin. It's not meant to be a kind of godless zone. But that's really effectively what it what it becomes after after the eighteenth century. And you know, for Islam, if you're if you're a monotheist, that's a very strange idea. Why should there be any corner of creation that is somehow even kind of provisionally neutral and godless. Islam can't cope with this thought, and it's monotheism. It's particularly it's very very aggressive and strong commitment to to to tawied, to to the doctrine of wonderers and the power, to the power of God makes it very hard for this kind of Augustinian idea to emerge. And so the nation state is fundamentally a kind of secular construct. Now it's one that Christianity has been able to baptize, right, so I would just come back from from Hungary. I mean, they are very self consciously a Christian nation founded by Saint Stephen, and there's crosses everywhere. It's in their constitution. That's not a problem. England, England is you know, oar monarch is also the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. We are technically, you know constitution. If any of you watch the coronation or the funeral of her late majesty. You know that is you know, the ceremonial kind of pedigree is a Christian one. But within Islam, it's it's it's much harder for Islam to form it. It's much harder to convince a loyal Muslim to have a political loyalty to a nation rather than the uma, rather the covering, rather than the Islam. And so Islam is a much more a much more cosmopolitan and rootless universal identity, and it finds it very difficult to work with the particular and with with kind of sort of secular national boundaries. I mean, one start just to close the loop on the right. For example, you know, there are six roughly six percent of Muslims in Britain, zero zero point five percent of them are are in the armed force. Are in the armed forces so much that there were more British Muslims who went to fight for Isis than there are in the British arm Force. 00:57:34 Speaker 1: I'm surprised that only six percent, because I go to London, it feels like a lot more than six percent. Well that's because they're. 00:57:38 Speaker 2: Very concentrated and they're very dense. So had we had a successful strategy of assimilation integration. If such a that's a point, then there might have been a much a much more diffuse diaspora. But but that's not how it works. And you get these certain tipping points where effectively, you know, kind of effectively chain migration that creates these demographic silos, and that that increases that effectively means integration becomes impossible. What is it to integrate into the city of Birmingham today? What is it to integrate into the city of Bradford? 00:58:07 Speaker 1: You have nothing to integrate to it to become a Muslim? That's right? 00:58:11 Speaker 2: The majority population, majority population in Luton or not? Is it coming close to or is he even there? 00:58:18 Speaker 1: Muhammad is the number one birth name in the biggest cities al across. 00:58:20 Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that, you know, that's indicative. It's a little bit complicated that that that stat because Muhammad is way more common just as a first name among say, you know, from one hundred Muslims, you're gonna have way more, way more Mohammads, whereas your first name is a much more evenly, more more evenly distributed in the West, I think, but it's still it's it's it's it is an index of swords. 00:58:43 Speaker 3: Yeah, we're honored to be partnering with Alan Jackson Ministries and today I want to point you to their podcast. It's called Culture in Christianity, the Alan Jackson Podcast. What makes it unique is Pastor Allan's biblical perspective. He takes the truth from the Bible in a play issues we're facing today, gender confusion, abortion, immigration, Doge Trump, and the White House issues in the church. He doesn't just discuss the problems in every episode, he gives practical things we can do to make a difference. His guests have incredible expertise and powerful testimonies. They've been great friends and now you can hear from Charlie and his own words. 00:59:19 Speaker 1: Each episode will make you recognize the power of your faith and how God can use your life to impact our world today. The Culture and Christianity podcast is informative and encouraging. You could find it on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes. Alan Jackson Ministries is working hard to bring Biblical truth back into our culture. You can find out more about Pastor Allen and the ministry at Alan Jackson dot com forward slash Charlie. So let's build on this Islam topic a little bit. What you're saying is that Islamists have no concept of separation between mosque and state. 01:00:01 Speaker 2: I think that's actually islam one I won. 01:00:04 Speaker 1: And I think that's important. And that's why when I say Islam is not compatible with Western civilization, I'm not inherently even attacking Islam. I do in other comments I say, but not in that one, that that's that's a that's a separate topic for another time. But that one they get mad. They say, oh, no, we can coexist outside of the state, but Islam is a all encompassing there that that a law is overall right, that you submit in all that you do. And talk about how when the Islamists go into Western countries, we know that they don't assimilate, but they actively then try to run for political office and then try to get involved in government. The rates of Islamic participation in government far exceeds rates of Christian participation in government. In the West. We are on the precipice of having a Muslim mayor in Minneapolis, New York, Calgary, and London. By the end of this calendar year. 01:01:03 Speaker 2: Well, so I think the reason for that is because Muslims, certainly in Britain, tend to vote in blocks and tend to vote as households rather than as individuals. And this is it's just the way it is. They tend to be, you know, rooted more in kinship and tribe and ethnicity than is common has been common in England. I mean in England. 01:01:31 Speaker 1: We know. 01:01:32 Speaker 2: This is a wonderful book by Alan McFarlane, colleague of mine in Cambridge, called The Origins of English Individualism that shows that the English people from the thirteenth twelve thirteenth century onwards were constantly moving around, always moving around. We were not very familiar, We weren't very sort of clan based at all. Whereas are sort of new arrivals, the new English as it were, I do not take that approach at all. And so you've got you've got very very high rates of kind of electoral electoral blocks. And that means, you know, it's like eighty eighty five percent of Muslims will vote labor roughly and so effectively. That's why you see a lot of a lot of you know, mayoralties, a lot of local MPs. Will the Mayor of London's at Econa seems to be like he's going to be running on Metropolis for the foreseeable future. 01:02:17 Speaker 1: Isn't that interesting that eighty five percent of American Muslims so Democrat eight and eighty five percent of UK Muslims vote Labor, which is interchangeable parts. That goes to show that it's not an outreach problem on behalf of the Republican Party. You're conservative, that's their disposition, like you're importing future voters, Yeah, of a certain political party. 01:02:36 Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's true. What interestingly we saw last summer was five MPs were elected to the House of Commons on explicitly pro Gaza tickets. That is to say, they were elected they were in Labor strongholds, but their promise to voters they were going to stand as independent MPs, and their promise was we're going to take Gaza more seriously even than the Abor Party is taking it. And so for the first time in the history of British politics, we saw five members of Parliament returned to the House of Commons who were explicitly loyal to a foreign entity that doesn't even exist, but not to Britain, and you know that is something that's new and that and so you're starting to see some cracks in this strange coalition between you know, Rainbow and crescent and stuff. 01:03:27 Speaker 1: So I want you to build that out because we're running tight on time. But so what is it to say that against rainbow? So the precrescent and the stars. 01:03:34 Speaker 2: So think of think of rainbow as a kind of metonomy for progressivism, and the crescent for Islam, and the star for socialism, good old fashioned old left socialism and these. This is that, this is really this messy coalition that holds the left all across the Western political landscape, and up until now they've operated in lockstep. I said this in my neck On speech last July. You know the jokes on us conservatives when we laugh at Gaze for Gaza, The joke's on us. Why because in fact it's a completely within within their worldview. It's a completely consistent and coherent position. It's not it's not funny, it's frightening. What it means is what they're saying, what that movement and movements like it are saying, is that we hate the West more than we hate each other. And we're going to We're going to destroy the West before we turn on each other. A gaze for Gaza. You know, Rainbow and crescent will be together until we've got rid of the cross. And so you know, in Britain you're studying to see those cracks appearing. I think, you know, maybe they're parts of the America where you're starting to see. But then you know, Trump miraculously gets dearborn and he gets very you know, he wins the Muslims, does very well among the Muslims. So it's more complicated with you here. But I mean that coalition is very fragile, and you know, for now it's held together by this sort of common sort of collective hatred for the for the oppressor, whether it's Israel or whether it's the British establishment. 01:05:13 Speaker 1: I have two final things I want to talk about, the first of which is broad and then I want to talk about jd Vance at the end. First of which is when you come to America, what is it that you appreciate about this country that you want that you want Americans to know as an outsider, that you see that it's different and unique. 01:05:30 Speaker 2: Well, in a strange way, coming to America is like coming to a new world, a strange and unfamiliar world where you know, you can't speak English properly and you have all these funny habits. But another you know, for the most part, there's a sense now, particularly given the scale and speed of the demographic change and churn in my corner of England, to the southeast of England, there's a sense of coming home, you know. I can you know, land in particularly somewhere like Phoenix a couple of nights ago, and I sort of I'm surrounded by not quite my people, but I'm surrounded by the English speaking I'm among the English speaking peoples. I'm in the anglosphere. I'm you know, I'm in the world of the anglosphere. And that's something which now has almost as a kind of nostalgia. There's a sense of there's a sense of home, weird homecoming that because I can see glimpses of the old world in the new glimpses of the old world that are no longer, that are beginning to fade in the old world. I don't know if I'm putting this very clearly, but do you understand what I mean? 01:06:40 Speaker 1: I do? And look, we're a very confusing country because we're very we had contradiction, but one of them is free speech. Free speech was a British birthright. If how many people are arrested on a daily basis in Britain for speech crime. 01:06:58 Speaker 2: Thirty a day, arrested thirty offenses, so we you know what we now have in England is this sort of kind of complex shopping list of different offenses and indeed non offenses. Fifteen years ago something was introduced called a non crime hate incident. 01:07:20 Speaker 1: How about that for or I was going to say, so. 01:07:24 Speaker 2: The idea behind a non crime hate incidents is if you've been you haven't committed a crime, but somebody has got upset at something you've said, or you're sailing a bit too close to the wind on discrimination, we'll take your name and we'll record it and we'll keep it. Now that the last government did manage to reverse it, introduced it, but it managed to reverse some of the worst of that, but it's it's still there. And so we have these extraordinarily kind of pernicious statutes on the books which effectively weaponizes allow the police to spend their whole time policing tweets, not streets, and what you're seeing in the police force is a sort of massive mass demoralization. I saw three days ago there's a seventeen percent drop over the last year and sign ups to the police force. It's because it's a pretty thankless job. Now. It used to be the case that a policeman, to become a policeman was one of the great kind of professions you could get into if you were you know, civic minded, pretty bright, but you know, not an egghead like me, you could go into the police force. Theresa May brings in a requirement for a degree requirement. You've now got to go to some Mickey Mouse university to get a Mickey Mouse degree to be eligible to become a British Bobby. And guess what, you know, they just want to sit around policing tweets and checking TikTok and and checking your thoughts. As one friend of mine who was arrested a few years ago, was told by policeman on his. 01:08:50 Speaker 1: Way, they're arrested for wrong speak. 01:08:52 Speaker 2: Wrong speak and wrong think in the case of these poor women. Or Adam Smith O'Connor that your vice president of the case that you're presidents so eloquently drew attention to in his brilliant Munich speech back in February. Adam Smith O'Connor, who whose child was aborted and he would pray outside the abortion clinic where his son was aborted, at pray silently in his head. And because he breached the buffer zones that have been imposed by in the course of the last government, under the consert extensibly conservative government, he was arrested for breaching those zones and for being intimidating. There's a no protest, no speech, not holding a sign, praying silently. 01:09:35 Speaker 1: And do you believe that there is a reckoning that will come on the culture of free speech in Britain? 01:09:42 Speaker 2: So I think there'll be a reckoning on everything. I mean the part of the free speech. You know, it's when you start talking about free speech a societies talking about free speech, worrying about free speech, that there's probably no more free speech. We never worried about free speech when there was a WII, when there was a first person plural, we didn't have to worry about it. Why because basically ninety eight percent of the population broadly speaking, shared a common universe of norms and conventions and manners that are built up over sedimented over centuries, and so we knew what the acceptable parameters and limits of speech were. But once you go through this extraordinary experience, unprecedented experiment in mass demographic reconfiguration, let's just just put it euphemistically, then all the norms have gone, all the norms are dissolved, and you've got to learn to cope with and get along with, exist alongside people for whom free speeches makes no sense at all. 01:10:47 Speaker 1: Well, especially Muslims are not going to be the ones arguing for free speech. 01:10:52 Speaker 2: The opposite, correct, correct, absolutely. 01:10:56 Speaker 1: Right, They're not going to be your big fight. 01:10:58 Speaker 2: No, I mean, because the central idea within it alarm is alarm. 01:11:01 Speaker 1: So submit is submission. And also they don't want you to be able to criticize Muhammad or all that. 01:11:08 Speaker 2: You know, the idea of free speech that comes through in Athens with this idea of paisiaa isogoria in the Athenian Assembly in the fifth century BC. But if you also see it come through in the Christian tradition the second century AD, when these early Christian apologists are get being arrested and they go to the emperor and they say, look, surely you o Emperor, you don't want me to bow the knee or burn my pinch of incense or worship few if you wouldn't want me to do that, if you knew that my belief was being coerced, Surely it's a good thing for me to try to freely decide what I should worship. So you see this in Titalian, the first Latin church father. He's the first person to come up with the phrase freedom of religion libertas religionness. There's actually freedom of speech is downstream of freedom of religion as a Western value. I mean, yes, it's there in Athens, but really emerges in the kind of that tussle between the early Christians and the Roman authorities and his freedom of really we should have freedom to worship, freedom to meet on Sundays, and that took three hundred years for them to win that riot. But then the freedom of speech and freedom of expression and freedom of association is a kind of secular kind of counterpart to that and downstream of it. 01:12:20 Speaker 1: Last question, you a piece just came out that showed you that has said that you were JD's mentor JD Vance's mentor our wonderful Vice President United States and maybe the next president of the United States tell us about that. 01:12:34 Speaker 2: First of all, that's ridiculous. If anything, he has mentored me far more than I've mentored him. I've learned so much from him. I've been learning from him since twenty sixteen, when a Texan friend of mine pressed He'll Billy Elergy into my hands two weeks before the elections, saying Trump is going to win and this is why. And I remember reading that book, and my mutual friend of ours, Rodre, was graving about it and and did an interview with with with JD and and and the book, you know, rocketed up through the charts. So he caught my eye then, and just it's just a great, great sort of privilege and sort of pride to it to be able to call him a friend. And we we've got to know each other over the years. And you know that mental line, it's just media mischief, really. 01:13:23 Speaker 1: I so, what do you see in him as a statesman? 01:13:26 Speaker 2: So I see somebody who is sort of wise and mature beyond his beyond his years. I think he's got a kind of a sense of calm, a sense of I think's he's just highly intelligent. You don't get that many just really high IQ politicians anymore, certainly not in Britain. I don't know about America. But now he's just got kind of raw cognitive processing power, and but he doesn't show it too it doesn't show it too much, but it's there, and that helps a great deal. Like he can he can size up, he can size up a problem, he can size up in this. You know, the most interesting thing about that leaked signal chat do you remember from a few months ago? I thought the most interesting bit was JD's saying something like, wait a minute, the US only gets x percent. I think it's four percent of trade through the Sewers canal. The Europeans are getting, you know, several factors more, why are we bearing the brunt of this? And I just thought, of course, I mean, first of all, that what did that little revelation say. One he really drilled out he wasn't getting policy advised. He just worked that out. Two, he's working it out with the interests of the American people first and foremost in his mind. I was very striking little detail that. And we just don't have politicians like that. We don't have politicians whose reflex is to refract every public policy question, whether it's foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy, cultural policy, through the prism of the national interest, of national preference. This is just a strange, you know, idea to liberal mind, but it's the politics of the future. It's the politics of home, it's the politics of belonging, it's the politics of nationhood, of the first person plural, and it's what defines the new Right, and it's why the old Right gets confused when some slightly left leaning economic policies sometimes pop up. Nigel's sort of talking about maybe, you know, renationalizing the water companies, and it seems crazy. I thought you were was a Thatcher, right, But actually, if you'd think it may be the case that if you're really putting the natural interest first, maybe you want to go easy on trade, maybe you want to put some tariffs on. And you know, it's very hard for the pre twenty sixteen, the long twentieth century kind of political ideology to understand this. But once you've got the national preference in mind, you can understand JD's decisions, you can understand the Vice president's way of thinking about the world, you can understand the president's way of thinking about the world. He's not, you know, you might think he's a limousine liberal. You might have predicted him to be a limousine liberal from nineteen nineties onwards. And he's whacking all these tariffs on and he's doing things which are you know, he's been and it's foreign policy neither isolationist nor idealist. He's being a realist. He's he's assessing the world as it is and not as the liberal mind would like it to be. 01:16:10 Speaker 1: Well, doctor, where I think i'll use the first person plural. We really enjoyed our chat here today. God bless you, doctor, or thank you so much. 01:16:25 Speaker 4: For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to Charliekirk dot com.