A (4:16)

To reimagine, I think, is the term that is in vogue nowadays.

B (4:20)

Reimagine. That's a wonderful sort of sanitizing word, isn't it? It's a sweet bit of casuistry that. Yeah, yeah, we just have to reimagine.

A (4:31)

That's right. That's right. It's so simple, you know, it's just a lack of imagination. Otherwise we'd be standing in utopia. I think you're exactly right. And I want to get into this issue of the critics of the west and their malevolence. And so I want you to bear with me because I want to set this up with a bit of a story, a very recent one. Last night I was giving a talk at a local Federalist Society chapter. And the talk was about the new challenges on public safety posed by the Bom Donny administration. And I kind of gave my spiel. And during the Q and A member of the crowd asked, what is it that would unite people who seem to have such disparate interests to put someone like Zorra Mamdani in power? And before I could answer the question, he elaborated. And he said, there are people who on paper just couldn't be more different from one another. And it got me thinking. Just the other day, Zora Mamdani gave a speech in which he cited to Muslim scripture in opposition to the enforcement of immigration law here in the United States. And, you know, not long after that, he and his political allies began to rally around the LGBTQ XYZ 1, 2, 3. Movement because a rainbow flag had been removed from a monument and by the National Park Service across from the Stonewall Inn. And that despite the fact that there's a well documented lack of tolerance in the Muslim world for many of the sexual preferences that are celebrated by the LGBTQ movement. And at almost the same time, there were people on the left celebrating a recently published essay in New York magazine that was lamenting the whitening of so many Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bed Stuy and Crown Heights. And in the essay, the author actually complains about being the only black parent at the local playground, which is something that you could never imagine being written in the opposite direction, of course. And yet so many of the very white people that she was complaining about are cut from the exact same political cloth that informed the essay. People like Zoram Mamdani's housing czar, Sia Weaver, who has, you know, unironically railed against white homeownership. And so the question I want to explore with you is, what is it that unites people who have almost nothing in common in so many ways and whose particular interests are so obviously in tension?

B (7:08)

I think what you mean, if I'm right, is what unites that particular movement? Sure. Right, yeah. Because, I mean, there's lots in a society that can unite us. There's a lot, for instance, in America that can unite Americans across any part or other lines. And that's stuff that's very important to hold onto in any way. And I mean, something I wrote about in the War on the west was that you've gotta be intensely suspicious of the sort of people who, for instance, want to actually take away all your unifyings stories, all your unifying history or your unifying documents and laws and much more, because those are people who are really talking as enemies of the society, not critics of it who want to improve it. And so that's one thing. But, yes, what you're asking really is what is it that's going on in that movement where I know Mamdani can, as he did in that speech, keep on talking about the founder of the religion he follows, Muhammad, and keep citing, you know, very carefully edited version of Havid's own life and history? And I mean, what would unite that with the sort of people who, you know, would get. Would believe that removal of one pride flag is a signal of the end of, you know, the sort of end of the Weimar Republic, beginning of Nazism sort of thing. And I think, again, this comes back to this thing that I mentioned. That really first of all got me aware of my own politics and a lot of this, which is simply people who will grab at anything to assail the society that they're in. There's nothing coherent about a movement that, for instance, reveres anyone talking about Muhammad uncritically and also reveres the progress Pride flag. I mean, there's nothing coherent there. And some 25 years I've heard people make attempts at explaining that, but there really isn't anything coherent in it unless you just recognize that they're just against the thing. They're against everything else. If Mamdani were an evangelical Christian who had stood up and kept on talking about, I mean, he kept on doing the peace be upon him stuff about the Prophet every time he said Muhammad's name or cited the Prophet, If a mayor of New York were an evangelical Christian who kept on saying, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, as he said, then these same people who lament the taking down of one pride flag would be infuriated. They would say, religion has no place like this in our politics. This is a pattern we've seen across the west in recent years. It's really a sort of fetishizing. I mean, it's a fetishizing of anything that is not seen to be ours historically. So if you believe that America, if you recognize that America was founded as a Christian nation or with the bases of Christianity there, the Judeo Christian tradition, including the tradition by then that had come up of the Enlightenment, if you recognize that that was at the heart of America's founding, then Islam is a sort of wonderfully exotic counterweight to it. And that isn't to say that Islam can't find a place within a society that's pluralistic. It's just that this is a very weird way to go about it. In the same way all social attitude surveys show that American attitudes towards sexual difference, including sexual minorities, has consistently become more and more tolerant in recent decades. There's an interesting potential reversal of that which we might get into in a bit in recent years, which I think is really the result of an overreach, an overswing by the so called LGBTQIA leaders. Because it's not really a community, it's sort of a sort of organized leadership. But at that very point that the tolerance has been reached, you get these people who become much, much more sort of strict about adhering to every single new shibboleth of that movement. And that again, it's not really trying to do what it's pretending to do, what it's really doing is using LGBT rights to sort of batter norms.

A (12:17)

Yeah.

B (12:19)

And so that's where those things that are otherwise irreconcilable and would fall apart under the weight of their own contradictions just have united for a very long time. They are able to portray themselves as opposed to the core culture, opposed to the founding culture, and therefore they meet as bedfellows. There doesn't have to be any real coherence in it. It's just to be opposed to.

A (12:54)

One wonders whether if they ever experience victory in their opposition, have they considered what will become of their bedfellows? Who interests are diametrically opposed to theirs in almost every way?

B (13:08)

No, but I mean, one of the things we have to realize is that much of this is magical thinking, which I think I described it in the Manners of Crowds. A lot of what is passing for criticism in these movements that we see is really a form of magical thinking, including magical utopian thinking. You mentioned one of Mayor Mamdani's colleagues who, as you say, has this atrocious track record. Home ownership is a problem. White homeownership, specifically white ownership. Ownership is particularly a problem. And the private property should be seized. Now, this, I mean, I'm rather sad that this is even going on still among officials. I wouldn't be surprised if it was happening at kindergarten. But I'm surprised and saddened that this has still be pushed back against when it's coming from public officials, because we know very well what results from the seizure of home ownership, as it happens. I'm just in the middle of reading the memoirs of Chairman Mao's Doctor, Personal Doctor, which is an absolutely remarkable book, came out some 30 or 40 years ago now. But, you know, it's an extraordinary book. And he describes in that at one point, I just got to, you know, what happens in the Great Leap Forward, as it was called in China. What happens when private home ownership stops, when properties are seized? Mao's own doctor has a family home, and because there are some spare rooms, his mother has her house taken from her, and she's allowed to be in the one room she lives in, and she's allowed to have the family members who are also in the house to stay in a room, and the other rooms are taken, and she has no recourse to that. And nobody cares about, for instance, her own sense of justice or any of her own appeal to fairness. The society is death to, for instance, what it's like for an elderly woman on her own with a sense of pride to suddenly have everything taken from her. But that's just one example in history of what it looks like to have the seizure of private property. And so it's not like we haven't seen that before. And what's disheartening about hearing people around Mamdani and sometimes he himself, in his past, before he tried to gloss it over a bit. What's disheartening about it is we know so clearly where this leads, what this means, that the people advocating for such things must either be very wicked and want a replay of these terrible experiments of socialism and, and more, or they are very, very ignorant and have literally read nothing about history and you have to deal on a case by case basis, which it is.

A (16:43)

Can I offer a potential third option, which is that they are incredibly hubristic and think that they are finally going to figure out the correct way to implement socialism without any of the downside and all of the upside.

B (16:57)

Again, what's disappointing is that, and I'm not sure I allow the third category is that we wouldn't give that excuse with other forms of totalitarian thinking.

A (17:11)

Correct. Real fascism hasn't been tried yet is not a sentence that you'll ever hear uttered.

B (17:16)

An unintelligent person, you're certainly not by an intelligent person, you might hear it in the furthest sort of swamps of the Internet. But you know, if, if there were people who were saying, yes, you know, look, you know, fascism wasn't. It wasn't real fascism that we were doing in, in Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy or Franco's Spain, you know, we didn't. Or we didn't get to go far enough. Right. And if you just give us one more go round, the merry go round, this time we'll get it right, then we would have no tolerance for that.

A (17:51)

Of course not.

B (17:51)

We'd say, come, what are you playing at? So I don't really want to allow your third category, much as I admire your effort to insert it into the list, because who can't know by now from the history of China in the 20th century or Russia in the 20th century or any number of other places? I mean, but for some reason with the left there's always this. With the far left there's always this permission that it hasn't been tried enough or it was done slightly wrong. And in the end with that, I'm afraid you always come back to the same thing, which is that the only explanation really for why it's still remotely permissible to say that on the radical left, whereas it wouldn't be on the radical right is that there is still a presumption in the unlearned lessons of the 20th century, there is still some kind of presumption that the fascists did everything for evil intent and the communists did what they were doing with good intent.

A (19:06)

It was out of benevolence.

B (19:09)

And this is a major ongoing historical misunderstanding. But it is one which has seeped very deep into our culture, at least since 1945. And actually long before then, when, as you know, as early as the immediate aftermath of the revolution in Petrograd, we had American journalists and others who were sending back these bulletins to America saying that effectively, we had arrived at the highest point of the human species.

A (19:44)

No, it's incredible. And you and I are sitting in New York City right now, and it's a city that I called home for a very long time. It's a city that you call home. And as you were talking, yes, it's true that we have all of these examples of how the far left's ideas have gone wrong throughout history, particularly in the middle of the 20th century. But we also have counterexamples of what happens when we do the opposite, when we do everything that they're opposed to, when we have a predictable and written rule of law that we adhere to, when we have relatively free markets, when we have, you know, relative personal freedom. You get this. You get what? We're in the middle of an incredible metropolis that's economically dynamic, that is culturally dynamic, that is amazing in so many ways, and yet there's this sort of, not just lack of appreciation for it, but this casual desire to, as we said earlier, reimagine the greatest achievement in Western civilization.

B (20:47)

That's the old thing of Kant's dove. You know, that the dove flying in free air may make the mistake of thinking that if it weren't for the wind, it would be able to fly faster. There is a misguided view of many people, including in cities like this one, countries like this one, in the west in general, that we're flying in free air. Somehow this wind is against us. And if it weren't for the wind, you know, it would be a lot better without realizing it's the wind that's keeping us up. And I think there's a lot of that. And I have to say that people on the right of the political spectrum do have to take their own share of blame for this, because it's necessary, clearly, in each generation to reiterate basic principles.

A (21:45)

Indeed.

B (21:46)

For instance, you mentioned all the freedoms we have and Freedom is a very complicated term to use. I say this having, as I think I mentioned once before publicly, a certain amount of PTSD, because some decades ago now, in the 2000s, I remember giving a talk in D.C. and in answer to a question, I used the word freedom as being one of the answers. And there happened afterwards to be a lunch which Robert Bork, among others, was at. I had the honor of knowing him a little. And I remember he said over lunch, you disappointed me, Douglas. And I said, oh, that must have hurt your feelings.

A (22:29)

I would have been so.

B (22:30)

Well, of course, I would say lightly, I was slightly. But, you know, I was all ears because I wanted to hear Justice Bork. I wanted to hear, what is it? And he said, quite rightly, and it's the sort of thing you never forget, is that he said, you know, you use the term freedom as if freedom is an unalloyed good, but you've got to remember that it has caveats in it. Now, bearing in mind that 20 year old lesson for me, I do actually think that, for instance, it's necessary for people on the right to stress, yes, the right believes in freedom, but it also believes in order. Yes. And you don't get freedom without order. Indeed, you know, there is an occasional thing on the most radical parts of the left that, you know, of course, that we've had this with, and it's not like this didn't come close to the mainstream in recent years, but we've had things like defund the police. You know, the problem is that we've got too high an incarceration rate and that if people weren't in prison, everyone would be freer and so on without really. And these are very extreme proposals.

A (23:42)

They're not very mainstream ones as well.

B (23:44)

Very mainstream. And it's not like it's just a specific thing of policing which can always be improved, or it's not a specific thing about incarceration or certain people who probably shouldn't be in prison or certain crimes that could be downgraded or upgraded or whatever. It's that, it's that policing itself is a problem, prison itself is the problem. And of course, if you didn't have policing or prisons, we wouldn't have freedom.

A (24:13)

Correct.

B (24:15)

You and I would not have the freedom to walk down the street in relative safety in New York. And I think actually the right has been pretty bad at, at stressing its own fundamentals in all of this. Same thing with, I think, very bad, particularly since 2008, in explaining the virtues of the free market. It's only since 2008, really, that we've had this upsurge of people saying, you know, was Marx right after all? And the answer is still no. Marx is still wrong. But why are they doing that? Because the global financial system almost collapsed. The banks had to be bailed out. We've had almost 20 years of stagnation and no real increase in wages. And people feel that. And so when people come along and say, there you go, the free market doesn't work, capitalism doesn't work, there are a lot of people who are going to choose or be attempted to this. This other thing. And I think that it's incumbent upon people on the right to explain their economic positions and other positions better than they currently do.

A (25:35)

I think that's exactly right. And as you were talking, I was thinking about two lessons that I learned back in law school my first year. And in our constitutional law class the very first day, our professor handed us an excerpt from the Odyssey. He said, go home and read this and then we'll talk about it during the next class. And it was the part of the story where Odysseus and his crew are sailing past the island of the siren song. And he wants to hear the song, right, because he's curious, but he also knows that it would deviate them from his courses. So he instructs his men to tie him to the mast and to fill their own ears with beeswax so that they don't hear the song and they can get home. And we came back and we talked about why on earth would a constitutional law professor give you this to read? And of course, it's an analogy, right? It's a metaphor for what order is supposed to do. Right. We have determined that there is a path to get us home, and we understand that there are all these potential deviations and we need restrictions, we need restraints on liberty in order to keep us on a course.

B (26:39)

Yes, I wrote something on exactly that passage. Actually, recently, after reading Daniel Mendelssohn's new, fantastic new translation of the Odyssey, which came out last year, I actually wrote an essay partly on this because that famous episode with the sirens where, of course, if you remember, among other things, Odysseus has to urge his men to tie him tighter to mast and to.

A (27:05)

Not listen to him no matter what he says.

B (27:07)

Yes. But one of the things that fascinated me about this was the siren song itself. It's not the case that the sirens are simply singing a very beautiful song. And it's not the case. They're. I don't Know like the Rhine maidens in the Ring of the Nibelung Wagner. It's a very specific song they sing and it's only eight or nine lines, but if you remember the main thrust of the song after the sort of throat clearing of, of calls to him and I think appeals about their own beauty, is that they say to Odysseus, we know what you went through at Troy. And I think there the poet is telling us something even deeper, which is that the thing that could pull Odysseus off his course is the perpetual human desire to be heard, understood, sympathized with, appreciated, and much more. It's a form of, it's an enormously, it's an even more tempting cry the Sirens have than I think we've realized. And I think there's a lesson in that as well, which is this, this desire to be understood completely is itself something that can bring you onto the rocks. But it's a very deep desire that, and you might say it's one of the ultimate forms of the feminine. And what's more, with the feminization of politics and much more, and we talk a much more feminine language in politics for good and ill. But then you have to know what if the masculine elements of politics, where they can go wrong. You have to know where the feminine elements can go wrong as well. And the Sirens give us a very good example of where one of the feminine qualities can go wrong, which is this thing that you can be completely ground, you can go completely aground because somebody is promising to hear you utterly. What do we see in many of the social movement? We hear things like, I hear you, your truth. You are seen. You hear that a lot.

A (29:47)

I do.

B (29:48)

I see you. You are seen. You are not. Now again, this has a good aspect to it, but it also has a very, very negative one. And the negative extreme which Odysseus almost experiences, that he certainly hears is, I think the poet is telling us, is an example of that feminine going very, very badly wrong.

A (30:13)

Yeah, no, I think that's a brilliant, it's a brilliant insight. And I'm sitting here listening to our own conversation. Well, here we are talking about Odysseus and it just made me want to ask you because you are someone who is incredibly learned, very deeply thoughtful in how you approach your work, and yet your work can be found not just in leather bound volumes, you know, in mahogany libraries, you know, in, in these beautiful environments. Right. But you, you, you write for publications like the New York Post, for example, and I've always found your Writing incredibly accessible, straightforward, which is not to say that you've ever dumbed anything down, but, but I think, you know, it'd be interesting for our audience to just hear a little bit about how you think about the way that you do your work at the audiences that you reach out to and the publications that you work with and, and sort of.

B (31:13)

Well, I mean, I, I think, I don't know if this works for all writers, but for me it's always been a great pleasure in my life to be promiscuous as a writer, to write as widely and for as wide an audience as I can. And I've always wanted to do that. And I suppose there's lots of reasons for that. But I remember at the very start of my career, a great friend of mine who's a journalist said to me, you should never say no if a tabloid asks you to write for them. Interesting. And the reason he said was, and I was starting out at this time, he said, you'll learn, if you, if you manage to do it, you will learn the skill of never being able to waste a word. Ah, now there's nothing. It's a, it's a really interesting thing for a writer because if I were writing for, if anyone were writing for certain publications, you might, you know, you might find yourself saying something like, you know, it is not to an inconsiderable extent to which we find ourselves in the position unpertaining to the blah, blah, blah.

A (32:26)

Right.

B (32:27)

And you're not saying anything correct.

A (32:29)

But it sounds good.

B (32:31)

Yeah, I mean, it reads horribly, but yeah, it can sound, it can make people sound clever. And actually, I think a much greater skill as a writer is to be able to write clearly. And that's what all of my heroes in the English speaking tradition have advocated most obviously, Orwell, in why I Ride. And that is to communicate an idea as clearly as possible. And that of course is the opposite of what a lot of academia has become, which is to take really quite banal or unimportant thoughts and make them sound incredibly complicated. I think much the hardest challenge that any of us have as writers is to take complicated ideas and try to distill them. And that's not just a duty, but a pleasure. So I regard writing from the most mass circulation things, publications and others, in a way to be the most important task and the most challenging and the most enjoyable. In a way. Yeah. You sometimes meet people, journalists and others who look down on.

A (33:50)

I get a lot of that now. I'll post a peace of mind from the Post and someone say, oh, it's the post, you know, which is ridiculous.

B (33:56)

What do they read? What do they think they think's better? What do they think's been more reliable as a new source?

A (34:02)

Right. I usually tell. Well, I've written for the Times, too, if that helps you. I know, yeah.

B (34:05)

I mean, it's fine. But I mean, you know, it's funny. There's a. There's a lot of snobbery in journalism.

A (34:14)

There is.

B (34:15)

And usually from the people who would least imagine that they're snobs, people who.

A (34:21)

Capitalize the people in their tweets and who, you know, say they are for the everyman.

B (34:27)

And by the way, that goes back to my friend John o'. Sullivan. Wrote a. Published a book of essays some years ago to which I wrote the foreword. And I mentioned there that one of the great things in John's career, which I admire in him and quite a number of other people is, you know, there's always that thing about writers where it's thought to be a really good thing. If you are described as being a champion of unpopular causes, it sort of gives you a sort of rebel like, sort of thing. You know, I champion really unpopular causes. Oh, good for you. I said in my foreword to this collection of John's essays that one of the things he's done his career is to have the bravery to defend popular causes. Right.

A (35:14)

Well, it's funny, I, you know, I think about the work that I do. I, you know, write mostly about criminal justice and policing from a position where I defend these institutions.

B (35:22)

Right.

A (35:23)

Which is nationally and, you know, globally very popular.

B (35:27)

Yes.

A (35:27)

But here in New York City, I'm very much in the minority going against the. I kind of have the pleasure of.

B (35:33)

Being on both sides honor or offending popular causes. It's an oddity, but it's.

A (35:38)

In a way, it satisfies that rebellious streak in me because I do get to, you know, watch people's hair, you know, get set ablaze by me saying something that's incredibly uncontroversial in the rest of the country.

B (35:50)

Well, my. My tip on that is when. When people's hair is being set ablaze by what you write, that's exactly the moment to turn away and do something else. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

A (36:01)

It's, you know, it's. It's. It is. It's a. It's a weird life that we live in in a lot of ways, but it's. It's incredibly fun and gratifying. So, you know, I want to take this back A little bit to, you know, the, the topic of the west more broadly. I mean, you call America home now and you know, as an American, I'd be tempted to, you know, think of America first every time I heard the phrase the West. But of course the west has a much deeper and longer tradition than America has ever existed. Right. We're only entering our 250th year and so Great Britain, I think is very much sort of at the center of that story, at least in more modern history. And you know, I can't help but notice that there has been this flurry of videos that have gotten lots of attention and commentary pieces that have gotten lots of attention that seem to be focused on this idea that Great Britain is losing itself. People are blaming all sorts of things, immigration, mass immigration is one of those things, but the sort of far left is another one of those. And I wonder if you could give us your sense of Britain's future as a sort of pillar of the West.

B (37:23)

I think it's in trouble. I think it's in deep trouble. And I think that's because Russians leaders, by which I don't just mean political leaders, but thought leaders, church leaders, institutional leaders, have really led the way in what the late Roger Scruton described as the culture of self abnegation. That is the thing I was starting off with, which is everything is good as long as it's not ours and anything that is ours is not good. So Britain has really led the way in this process that America has joined in on and Canada and Australia and others certainly have, which is to war on ourselves and our history and our cultural achievements and our traditions. I mean, it is at this stage impossible to think of any institution in the UK which has not been riddled by this culture of self abnegation. It affects everything from foreign policy. The British government is currently desperately trying to get rid of the Chagos Islands, which are ours and which are a very useful territorial foothold, and the American military base Diego Garcia, or one of them. The British government is desperately trying to get rid of these islands and it's not doing it to make money. It's not like selling all the family silver. It's actually paying the Mauritians to take them off our hands, at which point they'll become a satellite of the Chinese Communist Party's foothold in the region. So why is that? It's this sort of decolonizing mindset, the self abnegating mindset, which is affecting an issue of foreign policy, of statecraft. It goes from Everything to. Just earlier this month there was a. Sorry, there's a Department of Environment in the UK called Defra had commissioned a report which found that the. This is very hard to say with a straight face countryside was guilty of being racist.

A (39:49)

I saw this.

B (39:51)

The hills and the fields.

A (39:52)

That's right.

B (39:53)

Deeply, deeply racist. Now of course there's much that's absurd about this. Previously there have been non governmental reports saying this sort of thing. What are the problems that they perceive? They. There aren't enough ethnic minorities in certain parts of the countryside. It was claimed a couple of years ago by the BBC that a Muslim. There aren't enough Muslim women walking groups in the Peak District. I think you won't find enough Muslim men in the local pubs in the village.

A (40:26)

Do they drink much?

B (40:28)

It's hard to make an overhead on someone who's not drinking alcohol. But you know, all of this is of course completely preposterous. But my point is just simply find anything, anything in modern British public life that has not been found guilty in this sort of way. In fact, it all rather reminds me of. I don't know if you got Blackadder when you were growing up, but in one of the episodes of Blackadder with Rowan Atkinson, the 17 First World War, there's a great episode to do with the killing of the carrier pigeon, which we don't need to get into, in which Edmund Blackadder is. Is put on trial for the murder of the pigeon. And Stephen Fry playing the judge says before he's heard any evidence, he says, pass me the black cap, which is the cap you put on ordering somebody to be hung or hanged. And he says, pass me the black cap. I'm going to be needing that before any evidence is heard. And that's effectively the situation everything in Britain is in. All of our cultural and other institutions have ordered the black cap to be passed to them in order that they can pass sentence, really, before hearing any evidence in our own defense. As a country or as a culture, it's absolutely everywhere. The Church of England, which cannot fill the pews and which is shutting down some of our historic jewels of our parish churches, which cannot afford to keep some of these absolute gems of our civilization in good repair. The Church of England is in the process of trying to hand over, I think, £100 million as reparations for slavery which stopped 200 years ago in the UK.

A (42:25)

Right. We paid our in large part because of the efforts of.

B (42:29)

And of the British Navy which patrolled the high seas.

A (42:32)

Correct.

B (42:32)

In order to stamp out that vile trade. And, you know, but this is, I mean, this is madness, obviously, this is complete madness. But as I say, until Britain can turn that corner of saying, you know, no, we are not some kind of international staging post, we are not going to endlessly have ourselves, you know, put down dumb down like this. We have this thing, it's ours, we love it and we'd like to keep it until, until that was to happen. It's very hard to see how Britain can turn any corner on that. And it's not enough for parties and others in opposition to say that there's some tweak that needs to be done. It's a major rethink of what we're actually doing that needs to be in place.

A (43:26)

As I'm listening to you, you're telling a story that's basically about a self inflicted gunshot wound. And I think that's exactly right. That's a huge part of it. This is a bit of a deviation, but there's a show that did well for a period here called the Newsroom. I don't know if you remember, it was on hbo. It's about this CNN type journalist. And the opening episode got a lot of acclaim. And this one particular scene went viral to the extent things could go viral back then, sort of before Twitter. But you know, during the scene he's on a panel at some university and during the Q and A, a young girl asks, you know, well, what makes America so great? And you know, the panelists kind of go on, you know, one says, freedom. Someone else says, you know, whatever our history, I forget. And then he goes on this rant about why America is not actually great.

B (44:18)

I remember that.

A (44:19)

And everyone just, you know, applauds. Yeah, we're sharing this and you know, falling over themselves to say, yes, that's right, he's exactly right. America's not great. And there's one part of the speech where he says, you know, you're going to stand there with a straight face and say, America is star spangled awesome because we have freedom. Every other country's got freedom. You know, Britain's got freedom and Australia's got freedom. And I remember sharing that again a couple years ago, quote, tweeting a video of British police knocking on the door of a woman who was being placed under arrest for a social media post in which she expressed an opinion. I thought to myself, I said, you know, our founders were exactly right. The death of America, like the death of the west, is not going to come from an invading army. It's going to come from our own abrogation of our duty to maintain what makes us us.

B (45:08)

Absolutely. And that's why even, you know, sometimes people say, well, you know, isn't X argument alarmist? Or isn't Y argument alarms? Or, you know, I would say that even. Even if Even some arguments that are indeed alarming, warning people about what could happen are nevertheless necessary, because at the very least, we should always be aware of how vulnerable what we have is. We should keep our eyes open for tyranny. We should be alert to those things. It's very striking to me how it's the American government at the moment that is expressing the concern about free speech rights in the UK much more than the British government. It's the British government that's trampling on those rights and specifically the British police, who will say that they do so at the behest of the government, of course. But isn't that interesting that it's that American politicians are more worried about the state of freedom in the UK than British politicians? But that's because there's a sort of health and safety itis, I suppose, in the uk, among other things. And we have that thing that the worst thing to do is for somebody to be hurt emotionally, really, but with the caveat that only specific people's emotions have to be protected. Correct. I've yet to experience any major push by the British police or the British state to the British government to defend or protect my own feelings. I have my feelings trampled upon every day British government policy, and yet I'm still here. And. But as I say, the police never come to my door. So. Were you offended by what DEFRA has just done? Ms. Murray, we feel that your feelings might have been hurt when DEFRA said that the English countryside was racist. Would you like us to put in a report? Somehow it's always one direction.

A (47:12)

It's exactly right. If you don't wear the right colors, if you're not wearing the right jersey, as they say, you don't get to enjoy any of the benefits of the people in power. Which is actually really interesting because, you know, a lot of this is coming from the people in power, and yet they continue to insist and get away with using language that gives off the idea that they are the ones speaking truth to power as if they're not in the seat of power.

B (47:37)

Oh, well, that's something that George Walden and I explained very pithily some 20 or 30 years ago, that we have an elite of anti. Elite.

A (47:46)

Yeah, no, it is. It's very strange. So all right, well, you put your finger on something which is that the American government has actually been expressing quite a bit of dismay about the erosion of freedom, particularly to speech in Europe in particular, which I guess gets at the idea that to the extent that the US is heading in the same direction, it's less far along. What do you attribute that to?

B (48:14)

I mean, I think we, all the Western nations have a. All the Western democracies have similar challenges in the 21st century. And in the end, I mean, there are lots of challenges. Obviously one of the ones that's galvanized me most, in which I've written about most particularly in the strange death of Europe, is we are definitely struggling and we do have to be better at addressing what I think is a really the big question, which is population wise, those of us who are lucky enough to live in the Western liberal democracies are a minority globally. There's even the phrase now, which is never used sinisterly but is sinister, which is people now refer to people who are not white often as the global majority, which is very interesting. There's something threatening in that, isn't there?

A (49:10)

There is.

B (49:13)

But the rest, you know, people in the Wests and democracies are a minority and yet we are always everywhere, the countries that people in the world most want to come to. Now I've said for many years that that is telling us something because, you know, nobody tries to break into countries that are actually horrible and racist and, and xenophobic and bigoted and violent and rape cultures and everything else. So I mean, on its face, the accusations that we've all had to put up with in recent decades around our societies are obviously untrue. But nevertheless, we are going to have a problem in, we do have a problem in the era of mass communication and ease of movement, with knowing what our boundaries and borders can be. And this is, this is clearly something which is roiling every Western democracy. And I think we are woefully unprepared for this. As I've said for many years that there are two problems with the mass movement of people that we really haven't faced up to, which is that first of all, we all massively underestimate the number of people globally who want to come to countries like this one, like Britain. And the second thing is we massively overestimate our capability to integrate the people in question.

A (50:39)

I think that's exactly right.

B (50:41)

Those twin problems are going to be with us for the foreseeable. And all I've ever really wanted is to make sure that we face these questions head on because you just can't keep pushing them, but you can keep pushing them away. But at some point and, you know, it'll all become academic if we're not careful.

A (51:02)

I think that's right. I mean, one of the things that really troubles me about our society's unwillingness to have that conversation is that it leaves a vacuum for a really sort of ugly segment, particularly of the right to come in and point a finger and say, well, all of the things that we are complaining about with respect to the west and it's, you know, degradation, it's, it's slide back, whatever you want to call it, they're pointing the finger at mass immigration, they're pointing the finger at the global majority. And the use of terms like that and acknowledging that there is a sort of threatening undertone there to make an argument that it's these outsiders, these culturally identifiable groups that are really the root of our problems. It has nothing to do with our own unwillingness to defend a coherent set of principles. And, you know, we're seeing this now here in America with the rise of the, you know, kind of groiper. Right. Which, you know, is an interesting movement because you, you know, you can't quite put your finger on exactly how big it is.

B (52:09)

It seems to shadows all in the real world.

A (52:12)

Right.

B (52:12)

But it's big online.

A (52:13)

Yeah, it seems to cast a shadow that's much bigger than, than what it.

B (52:17)

Actually is because, I mean, there's a sort of understandable fear of what we started off by speaking about, which is, you know, the, the radical left not learning the lessons of the 20th century. There's, there's now, you know, you sort of see people on the radical right who clearly haven't learned their lessons in the 20th century. And yeah, that, that is big online, small in the real world, but could have the, the potential to have a real world effect of some point. Again, I'm, I'm sorry, I sometimes sound like a broken record in this, but again, I saw this coming. I said happen. You would have a return to. If you don't sort out your borders in a reasonable way, if you don't have a reasonable migration policy, if you don't have any decent integration policy, if you believe in the hyphenation of everyone, among other things, you will force other people into a form of what Rusty Reno would call the return of the strong gods. My prediction a long time ago was that the radical right would start to get obsessed with iq. And that's already happened. And we're sort of on to the.

A (53:41)

Next stage, although IQ doesn't seem to be enough to spare one if they are not deemed qualified members of. Of the society otherwise.

B (53:51)

Yeah, but what I mean is, is that, is that it would be used. I said it's the mad crowd. I said it would be used as the nastiest weapon to hit at minority groups. Right.

A (54:00)

You know, one of the other culturally identifiable groups that has drawn the ire of the toxic right we'll call it is the Jews, which again, you see this kind of same pattern where they are being blamed as a group for everything that's wrong, you know, in their lives, whether it's unemploy or offshoring jobs and the weather. Apparently this very small group controls quite a bit of our life outcomes. And it's like I watch this from a distance and I can't help but see a glaring similarity to the left sort of victim culture and the same arguments that they make about the man and the white man. And it's like a sort of Mad Libs where you can kind of just fill in the blank think. But, you know, anti Semitism is something that has been an issue that you've focused a lot on, particularly since October 7th. And you know, when that war broke out, I mean, literally within 24 hours, there was a march not a mile from here, essentially celebrating Hamas, which blew my mind and didn't surprise me because, you know, someone asked me the other day at the gym, actually, we're in the sauna, and there was a conversation in which this came up and it.

B (55:16)

Got all the way in the face to do geo.

A (55:17)

That's right, right. It got pretty intense and I was trying to mind my business, but, you know, someone eventually asked me, you know, well, you seem pretty quiet with you. And I said, well, listen, I don't know if you want to hear my opinion because you. My earliest memory of Palestine was 911 when I was watching the coverage on Fox News and Brit Hume was at the desk and they broke to a foreign correspondent who was on the Gaza Strip and people were dancing in the street. And I just remember thinking I was 15, 16 years old, 15, thinking to myself, I've never met any of these people. I literally had never even heard of that country.

B (55:50)

And you are only asked for sweets on the streets of Ramallah.

A (55:53)

You know, 3,000 people just died and they're celebrating. And I thought, well, you know, I guess that's all I need to know, right? That these are my enemies. And, and yet, you know, in recent years, I'VE seen this sort of segment of the right kind of making common cause with these people.

B (56:14)

Yeah, I mean, said everything I have to say about anti sempers for the time being in my most recent book in On Democracies and Death Culture.

A (56:21)

Which is incredible by the way.

B (56:22)

Very kind of you to say so, but I said a lot on democracies and death Culture about exactly this. And since that book came out, actually what you identify rightly as being a growing problem on this segment of the radical right in America, but I see it elsewhere as well. Well, it's many things, but I mean one is it's really a demonstration of very low level thinking by low intelligence people because unfortunately there is always a human propensity to see some patterns where they do not exist or exaggerate patterns where they do. And in my experience, I mean intelligent people can be very unintelligent, but unintelligent people can do one thing in particular, which is they want an explanation for complexity. And they see patterns where there are no patterns and they invent or perceive plots and conspiracies where there are none. And unfortunately, due to their tiny numbers, Jews are almost perfectly waiting there as a, as a group for these people to point to and say, you know, it's these people who are responsible. And you know, I've always said that I think that antisemitism is effectively a form of projection. People project their unhappinesses and their poor life choices, poor outcomes in their lives. They pour them onto the Jewish people, Jews individually or collectively, as being the reason for their unhappiness with things. But I mean that is, it's such a perennial. It seems to me that all you can do is try to keep it to the margins. You can never keep that out. It's. But everywhere it's an expression of deep personal unhappiness and lack of fulfillment and stupidity. I'm trying not to be too sweeping on this, but the minute that somebody gets focused on the Jews, you know that they're on a trail of paranoia about other things. I have a, I have this riff that I think I first heard from the late Martin Amos, but you can pretty much predict when someone's going to go anti Semitic and it's around the stages that they have paranoia and they see these patterns, they see these people, they start to. And it's very sad for them, but of course it's catastrophic for society if they get any, any kind of power or any kind of say. But it's very sad to see this to Say the least. It's very sad to see this re emerging. And I think part of it, maybe we're also seeing on the radical right, part of it is the bit I understand, which I hope to be able to address in part, is I do think that, that people have to realize that this thing we are struggling, it comes back to this thing about the big struggles we're facing. We are struggling to have a voice of the majority in the area in which all minorities are spoken about. And there seems to be on a part of the radical right, so far as I can see, a particular animus against the Jews because they see them being talked about so much. And there's a tiny, tiny kernel of truth here where for instance, when it comes to admission policies at universities, you can see some people on the radical right in America saying, well, these Jewish groups get upset when Jews aren't allowed into, you know, or over.

A (60:49)

Sure.

B (60:50)

Or they, they're issued to a quota system. But why aren't they annoyed when white people, for instance, who are not Jewish are similarly prejudiced against, in this. Well, you know, I, that's just. There are lots of ways to address that without deciding to go full blown anti Semite, you know. Yeah, but I think that's, there's things like that, that, that seem to be nibbling away at a bit of the online ride. But as I say, I mean, I think that should be contested. It can be had out in the open. And you know, I've done enough public debates and events in my life, often against very crazy and unpleasant people, to still believe that there's a virtue in tackling these things and not just trying to stamp them out or anything.

A (61:41)

I think that's one of the things that, that, that has always inspired me about, about you because I, you know, I find myself often lacking the patience just imagining myself having some of these conversations, particularly in a public setting. And I just find myself so grateful that there are people who are not just willing but who can have those conversations with a level of sophistication and patience so that the conversations can live on and, and be watched.

B (62:11)

Well, but I would just add one other thing, that it's becoming increasingly hard in America to do that. Even when I was starting out, we had a good culture of public events and debates in which you met your opponents and you usually shook hands. And we had that on in large town hall style events in cities like New York, events big and small. And we had them on universities as well. And actually the number of university students and others and school Students I speak to in America who don't have a debating society. And that's not. I don't mourn that because I love somehow the jostle of it. I was never one of those sort of student debater types, but I do think we are actually suffering badly in society of being unable to speak to each other and have things out in public. I wish dearly that that could come back.

A (63:17)

I think that's exactly right. I mean, I often do a lot of offense to the Federalist Society on law school campuses. And I was my Federalist Society chapter president when I was in law school. And they take the chapter presidents down to Washington D.C. for a two day conference and they sort of teach you how to organize these events. And they would just continuously be into our heads. We want debates. We want debates. You know, try not to do solo talks at, you know, at almost all costs, you know, please find a professor. If you're having trouble, let us know, we'll fly somebody else out. Right. And you know, I do a lot of them every year, you know, maybe 10 or so a year on campuses around the country. And when I first started doing them, every event that I did was a debate. And in the last three years, I can count on one hand how many.

B (64:05)

I've had, you know, some officer experience. Yeah.

A (64:09)

And I do think it's a shame. It's significantly less fun and interesting for me.

B (64:13)

Absolutely.

A (64:14)

So we've talked a lot about, you know, the troubles facing the West. My question to you that I want to close on is what is your advice to the other defenders of the West? What are we to do? How do we save ourselves?

B (64:28)

Gosh, well, a lot of things. One is to do it. I mean, I don't think that civilization, culture is about merely talking about it. I think it's doing it. I think that if you want to live in a vibrant, thriving culture, you've got to do culture. There's no good bemoaning illiteracy and being rather illiterate yourself. I have this sort of fundamental premise that the purpose of politics is to make culture possible. By which I mean culture in its proper full sense, or at least to make the conditions as. As good as possible. I think tactically there's lots of things. One is not to be beleaguered. One is to find good friends, good mentors, living and dead, preferably living. To orient yourself towards the sort of people who you like and admire and learn things from them. And not to be afraid of saying things that are unpopular but true. And yes, I suppose going back to something we said earlier, not to be afraid of saying things that are popular, but disdained by a tiny class of people whose good opinion you might not want anywhere.

A (66:13)

Well, thank you so much for a wonderful conversation, Douglas. For those of you who are watching, I hope you enjoyed it. Please do not forget to like, comment, subscribe, do all the things so that we can bring you more episodes of interesting conversations like this one. And if you haven't already, go out and buy this man's books. They are incredible, they are engrossing and you will learn something and come away. I think feeling like you too can be a defender of the west. And we need more people in this fight. So thank you and thank you.

B (66:42)

Thank you.