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- [00:04]
A
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 will end up purposeful. College is a scam, everybody. You gotta stop sending your kids to college. You should get married as young as possible and have as many kids as possible. Go start a Turning Point USA College chapter. Go start a Turning Point USA 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 Preserve Gold. But the 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, Dr. Orr, who is a contributing editor for Heritage and culture at JB News. Dr. James Orr, everybody.
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B
Good to be with you, Charlie.
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A
Dr. Orr, 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 going on here?
- [01:38]
B
Well, I got to say, first off, I was saying to Andrew earlier, it's a. 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, you know, lot, lots of, lots of students at Cambridge are, 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. We're working very hard on it. And I just felt both envious but also excited because I thought we can bottle some, some Kurt juice 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, 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, you have 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 not so much what the politics of left and right is. I think that's the sort of the politics, the philosophy of what I call the long 20th century, 1914 to 2016. I think the long 20th century ended in 2016, and the politics of left and right ended in 2016. 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.
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A
So what do you mean by that, the long 20th century?
- [03:27]
B
Well, so historians like to talk about this, that, you know, periodizing in history is always very, very, very difficult. And, you know, it turns out that human development doesn't always obey neat, neat time periods. But of course, we know what we mean by the 20th century. But I think there are these sort of history doesn't quite obey the. Those neat kind of neat, even divisions. And so historians will sometimes talk about the long 19th century that sort of began roughly in 1815 and probably ended in 1914. Right. 1815, Congress of Vienna. And then really you've got this extraordinary period of peace in Europe. And then 1914 is really the point at which that peace explodes. And so I think also we can talk about the long 20th century persisting in some ways beyond the 2000-2016, 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 flourishing.
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A
Was that Brexit plus Trump? Is that why you think 2016 was the year that began the 21st century?
- [04:31]
B
I think that's right. I think it's always easy to conflate the two phenomena. They are 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 pro nation national conservative movements all across Europe. You're seeing it with Vox in Spain, you're seeing it with Chega in Portugal. You're seeing it with AfD in Germany. You're seeing it with the Rasson Blame Nationale in France, the Fratelli dell Italia in Austria. You're seeing it in Italy, I'm sorry, and in Austria as well. All over Europe, Fides in Hungary and going at different speeds. And one of the challenges, conservatives are always trying to conserve what is our own. And so it's actually very difficult to form. One of the communists used to have a com intern. It's very difficult to have a con intern because Marx could say, workers of the world unite. The progressives can say, wokesters of the world unite. It's a fundamentally transnational ideology that. 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 are trying to catalyze that. And the National Conservatism movement, which I'm proudly the chair of in the UK is helping to do that. And so, yeah, that's a big challenge.
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A
So what do you think led towards that national Conservatism moment? And let's go a step back and also take a moment to introduce yourself. You teach the Western canon at Cambridge, correct?
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B
I wouldn't say I'm not allowed to teach the Western canon. It would be sort of too big. To give you an example, I teach a program in moral philosophy from Plato through to Nietzsche, that includes Aristotle, that includes Augustine, including us, Kant, Hume. So as much of the kind of classic Western philosophers as I can fit in. And then I also teach MPhil program. But broadly speaking, yes, I teach Western philosophers without, 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 listen to these ancient, ancient thinkers on their own terms and not trying to force ideological kind of masks onto them. But yes, I see myself very much 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. A little bit crude, but those are the kind of the three P's 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 be kind of inert in that always having that sort of sense of looking forward, testing, always probing, searching for new things, being open to novelty, open to change, but kind of anchored. Anchored in the great Western tradition.
- [07:39]
A
So with that backdrop, post World War II, 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 Fukuyama was what, 1880s, if I'm not mistaken?
- [08:13]
B
92.
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A
Okay, 1992, 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 Fukuyama in 1992 to now, what you say, 2016 to now, where you go from this kind of hubristic, prideful, kind of exaltation of liberalism to a completely different moment we're in now?
- [08:48]
B
Yeah, well, that book, the End of History by Francis Fukuyama, it's a fascinating kind of moment of sort of. Kind of hubris, you might say, a kind of misplaced optimism. But if you read the very 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 everything is. We've hit the sunlit uplands of a 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 if we think of Plato's like three level soul, you've got the noose at the top, the mind, and you've got the thumas, which is courage. That's just a sort of sense of the kind of the spirit that animates us. And then you've got the epithumia, which is kind of the base appetites. And Plato says you've got to have all three of these in check. And what Fukuyama says is that there's a real danger that with this kind of. In the sunlit uplands of the kind of globalized utopia, we're going to suppress the thumos. But that thumos is not going anywhere. 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 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 the suppression of that 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, of the blank slate doctrines of human nature. 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.
- [10:48]
A
But what went wrong with the liberal project?
- [10:50]
B
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 slate. This is a view of the tabula rasa 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 philosophers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant never had any children. Anyone who's had, anyone who'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 a physical bond 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. And it's not natural to love what is closest to us. I was in France, I think last month up in the mountains, this beautiful chateau addressing some must have been 50 or 60, I suppose, conservative right wing students from all across, I think probably 25 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. That would be a crazy, inhuman thing to do. It's a totally natural thing to think that your mom 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 mom 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 this at the beginning of 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 polis ta politica? He 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 procreate. There'll be a family, a household, an oikos, but that won't be enough. That will be enough for daily needs, but it won't be enough for sort of, you know, 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 polis for self defense and so on. A city state, as it were, a country, a nation. And that Aristotle thinks, okay, that's pretty small in 5th 4th century BC Greece. But that was the functioning, that was the way in which Aristotle, that was his kind of optimal size for human beings to flourish, to, as it were, fulfill their proper ends as human beings. And I think that's still the basic way of thinking about things. I think it's really what you see in Aquinas. I think it's what you see in the Bible as well. Wow.
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A
There's so much there to think about.
- [15:02]
C
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 Allen'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 practice, 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 in his own words.
- [15:35]
A
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 Alan and the ministry@AlanJackson.com 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, Dr. Orr, it's not what it used to be. How did that happen? World War II. The west won. Right? And now we look in 2025, Europe is an unrecognizable continent in more ways than one.
- [16:52]
B
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 2009, 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, the French had what they call the Trente Glorieuse, the 30 glorious years. In Germany you have, at least in West Germany you have the Wischap Wunder. You're at this economic miracle, this extraordinary explosion of economic flourishing and national self confidence in West Germany. And I suppose, you know, 1989 has got to feature somehow in the story of Europe's decline or Europe's sort of, you know, once 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. I think after, you know, 1989 into the 1990s, the fall of 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? There's a fascinating moment in 2004 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. Like where do we, 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 we? They said, well, our Hellenic inheritance, Greece and Rome, the Classical inheritance. Yes, the Enlightenment inheritance as well. No mention of the Hebraic 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 II is right towards the end of his life, 2004, and got involved and some 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 Potemkin parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg. The parliament is in both places. Wait for this. For a hundred million. A hundred million euros a year, the European Parliament moves from Brussels to Strasbourg. I think it's every fortnight back and forth.
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A
How long's a fortnight?
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B
Sorry, you don't have fortnights over here for. It's 14 days, two weeks.
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A
We do. I just turned around.
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B
Yeah, fortnight Tuesday. And it just, just sort of think of that. They can't, could have, couldn't resolve something as basic as that.
- [20:18]
A
But they move back and forth.
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B
They move back and forth. Yeah, just so the Belgians are, you know, the kind of Franco German pact 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 where you go, 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 2016, just ahead of the Brexit vote. 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, I think about 70, 80 colleagues. And I used to ask them, who's our MEP? 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 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 1992 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 2016 Brexit would be the first brick in the wall, that it would catalyze a kind of domino effect. It was probably wishful thinking. Because particularly in the euro denominator, in the euro nations, 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 Euro 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, really, for the first 20 years of its being part of the euro, effectively nothing at all. Greece and Spain, youth unemployment was through the roof, effectively. You've got the Spanish currency, the Greek currency effectively being shackled to the German Deutsche 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, ideologically, within the elite forming classes in Oxford, in Cambridge and London, certainly in Britain, 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, 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 could 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.
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A
What explains the hyper secularization of Europe post World War II? 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?
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B
It varies quite a bit from country to country, but it is shockingly low, certainly relative to the United States. So in Italy, it's now very, very low. I think it's certainly well below 5%. I mean, religious adherence is just a very difficult thing to measure. Is actually going to church, does it count as sort of being a Christian or being a churchgoer in Britain? 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, to the transcendent. I suppose Also in the 60s you're seeing the emergence of competing systems of meaning, competing accounts of what it is to have significance, competing sets of answers to life's deepest questions. We see that a lot of that imported 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 60s. If you think back, you know, to the high noon of the New Atheists in 2005, 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 new atheist, 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, from Britain this morning, you know, I think between 18 to 35 year olds, belief in God has tripled over the last five years. Bible purchases has gone up by 87% over four years. Now, it's from a pretty low bait, low base, but something is happening out there. You know, it's still, you know, it's quite, you know, it's still quite small, but the numbers among, among Gen Z, or Gen Z as you call them.
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A
You call them Gen Z.
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B
Well, because Zed is how you pronounce the letter in English. And I know you Americans have a different way of putting.
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A
No, I'm 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.
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B
Great to have you. Great to have you.
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A
Quite, quite the ambush. So not by you, but by Cambridge. But we survived it.
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B
More than survived it.
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A
Yeah, we, we, I think we, we triumphed, some could say. And you, you were so sweet and so kind throughout that entire process. So the United Kingdom or Britain or England, whatever word we want to, want to give, give, give, it voted for Brexit in 2016. Where British politics today, what is the status of British politics?
- [26:53]
B
Yeah, well, it's, it's, it's a great question. You know, in 2016 we have this extraordinary expression of the Democratic will in 17.46 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 voters of the United Kingdom. It's a very just, you know, 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 Scruton, one of my favorite philosophers likes to put it, that sense of we, we the people. What is it that makes are we? And I, what was going on in Brexit was, was this kind of inchoate kind of cry that we are losing that sense of who we are. That every time, for the last 40, 50 years, every time the British people have had an opportunity to express a view on mass demographic change and transition, it has said no or go much slower. And every time its leaders have effectively ignored that clearly expressed will. And I think 2016 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 27 people in Britain have arrived in the last five years. One in 60 arrived in the last 18 months. In the first 25 years of this century. Gross immigration, talking 12 to 15 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 different kinds, different kind of categories of migrants coming in. And you've at last got an administration that's willing to do something about it.
- [29:26]
A
But praise God for that.
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B
Indeed. And that has had, but that has had a profoundly kind of traumatic shock on us Brits. 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 2024, we saw the Loveless landslide. So we see the Starmer government getting an astonishing 175 odd seats majority in Parliament, which is an enormous, enormous majority. One of the biggest in living memory on only 20% of the vote, 20% of the people eligible to vote, something like 34% of the vote share. It was, you know, the sofa won. 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're just over a year in. Back in the first of May of this year, we had the local elections which are a pretty good proxy, bit like the midterms and not a bad proxy for what the country's mood is. And I think labor gets, goes from 34% to 20%. The Conservative Party goes down to 15%. Extinction level, almost an unprecedented low. And for the first time in 100 years, a new party emerges, a third party to rival the duopoly that's had Britain in its grip since 1920, 1923. And that is Nigel Farage's Reform UK, which surged through to win 677 local seats, which if you extrapolate that out is 30% of the electorate. That's an extra. They were at 14% a year ago. And that, 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 1670s, 1680s and really kind of bedding down in their modern form in the 1830s. 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 2029, the last point that Keir Starmer can call it. But my sense is that Nigel Farage is, is on track to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
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A
That deserves some applause. So let's examine that deeper and more thoroughly. Some people in the audience will hear, wait, wait, hold on. The Conservative Party, don't we like them? Explain 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.
- [32:19]
B
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 as to, you know, what is it to be a Conservative, you know, is it to be, you know, Reaganite? Is it to be a fusionist? Is it to be a Trumpist? Is it to be a kind of compassionate Bushite Conservative, whatever it might be? So, I mean, and you know, to some extent we, 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 2010 to 2024, and, you know, all, all of the good things that it delivered, it delivered by accident. You know, it granted the referendum on Brexit in 2015, not expect in the, in its manifesto. It didn't expect to win in 2015. It thought there would be another coalition and that the referendum would be scrapped by their coalition partners. But they, they won, almost not expecting to. They granted, reluctantly, the referendum. They campaigned against Brexit. 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'd voted against Brexit, a Prime minister who'd 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 to be conservative in 2016, 2017 was quite straightforward. It's just you've got one job. 17.4 million Brits have asked us to do this one thing, and right now, that's all that we want you to do. And they couldn't do it. Couldn't do it, couldn't do it. Finally, the May government falls in the summer of 2019 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 is never was inconceivable, quite just, just unthinkable. And that 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, and spending goes through the roof and we've got very, very serious economic problems, headaches to worry about. So being Conservative, 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 Larry Arn, he passed through a mutual friend of, 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. GK Chesterton 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 to be.
- [35:26]
A
Towards what you have to aim your destination.
- [35:28]
B
You've got to have a telos, 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.
- [35:37]
A
They sound like a Republican party that we know of.
- [35:39]
B
It might sound familiar and the British Conservative Party is the most successful election winning machine in the history of politics anywhere in the world. But I think that may now be coming to an end.
- [35:53]
A
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 hear Charlie in his own words tell you about why Refi. I want to tell you guys about yrefi.com that is yrefy.com why refi is incredible. Private student loan debt in America totals about $300 billion. Why refi 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 yrefi.com that is whyrefi.com do you have a co borrower? Why Refi can get them released from the loan. You can skip a payment up to 12 times without penalty. It may not be available in all 50 states. Go to yrefi.com that is yre fy.com let's face it, if you have distress or default to student loans, it can be overwhelming because of privacy. Loan debt. So many people feel stuck. Go to yrefi.com that is yrefy.com Private student loan debt relief. Why refi.com so, so then. So that defines the Conservative Party reform, which is Nigel Farage'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?
- [37:22]
B
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 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. I would say tens of thousands of people coming onto the. To the Calais beaches and paying people, traffickers, 3, €4,000 a pop to take the pretty dangerous journey in dinghies across the. Across the Channel. And so there's an immediate. 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, Calais is a pretty nice. Pretty nice place to be, 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 Labour Party didn't know what to do with them. 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 who we can and can't admit it.
- [39:01]
A
Wasn't Brexit supposed to fix that?
- [39:03]
B
Well, this is something that is worth clarifying here. So there are two courts that. There's two European courts. There'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 1940s, 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. The Allied prosecutors found it very difficult to argue. Jackson, the US prosecutor, and David Maxwell Fife 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 in order to ensure that this never happens again. And that's different from The European Union. The European Union 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 its jurisdiction, we effectively, you know, our courts are required to effectively grant the rescission of deportation orders by the British government on the grounds that deportation on origin country would breach the deportees human rights. I mean so you're getting, you know, I heard a story that is happening last week 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 likely to be victims of political persecution. It's quite extraordinary. You have, you know, people joining terrorist organizations because that will mean that they're going to be politically persecuted, politically when they go back to their origin countries or Article 8 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 going to, you're not going to win that. You're not going to 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.
- [41:33]
A
The. Is Nigel thinking about ending that jurisdiction and what is he running on in regards to immigration?
- [41:39]
B
So one of the key questions is do we get out of this court? How do we get out of the court? In 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 Strasbourg Court. That means rescinding Tony Blair's 1998 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.
- [42:16]
A
Contrast that. Can you build into that for a second? Because I don't want to just zip by that.
- [42:20]
B
Let's just think about this. So there's very two, there's a very different, you might say there's the kind of. The jurisprudence of the English speaking peoples 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 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, that are basically agnostic and kind of not attentive to the concrete particularities of human interrelations. And so, you know, one of the great sort of gifts to the English speaking peoples is this idea of a kind of bottom up common law approach. We see this in Blackstone, we see it in Cook, we see it in all the great jurists that we, the English speaking peoples have inherited. Whereas the European idea is to think in these sort of rights based ways, which is 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, 1861, and we have 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? Peter murdered Lucy or Peter breached Lucy's right to life. And I think, you know, the kind of the common law bottom up way of thinking is just, it's more accurate he murdered her or maybe it was manslaughter, 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.
- [44:28]
A
It's intentionally confusing.
- [44:29]
B
Exactly. Right, exactly.
- [44:30]
A
It's a feature, not a bug.
- [44:32]
B
I think it has turned out to be a feature, not a bug. And part of 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 R, 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 disagree about the fundamental question, so we don't have any more wars of religion. Like this is the basic idea of kind of Treaty of Westphalia, 1648. And so we've got to be agnostic about the underlying capital R, right? Because if we're not agnostic about it, then we'll start killing each other. It'll be a kind of, you know, Hobbesian war, war of war against all. So what we say is we, everybody, every individual has a right to determine what is right. And then it becomes impossible for any judicial process of discerning what is absolute. Because 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 claims, conflicting demands.
- [45:43]
A
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 but will replace core European identity and culture? Get even metaphysical if you have to. Here it is confusing to me and to the audience. What is it? I mean, Paris, Brussels, London, these are unrecognizable cities. And it's being done voluntarily. Why? Who's voting for this? What is their argument?
- [46:18]
B
So increasingly they're not voting for it. So we are seeing this is the key driver for populist movements all across continental Europe. And, 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. You see this in France. It's, it's, it's, it's present in Britain. There's a sense that we wronged 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 absolutely terrible. I think they had Namibia, but they would, they were, you know, maybe the problem of the 20th century is they feel they missed.
- [47:08]
A
Namibia is actually a great country. Windhoek is an underrated city now.
- [47:12]
C
It is.
- [47:12]
B
But, you know, they didn't actually have much of, didn't have to curve it. They felt they lost out in the 19th century, they were terrible in scramble for Africa. So 20th century now is our turn in our own backyard. I don't know, that's speculative. But I remember in 2015, after Merkel announced she opened up the gates. Wirschafendas, we can do this. And she was making policy that's one of the most consequential policies in the history, in the history of Europe in living memory. 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 gives a. You know, begs. Begs her to. Begs her to help. And you can. She's almost changing her mind in real time. And in 2015, she opens up the gates of Europe effectively. She says 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, indignies, thousands dying, thousands drowning 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. 80 is on, 70 years on. This is how we atone for our sins. And I think. So there's a kind of. There's a specifically 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 would be the first answer.
- [48:43]
A
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.
- [48:57]
B
I think that's a very subtle point. I mean, it's a. I don't know if you. It's not as simple as inviting a bunch of. That's not what they're consciously thinking.
- [49:04]
A
No, but it's what it's.
- [49:06]
B
But yeah, it's. It's a kind of atonement for. We're kind of atoning by finding new victims and finding victims that instead of we have kind of inflicting.
- [49:16]
A
Yes.
- [49:17]
B
Inflicting suffering on them. Now we can sort of. Somehow we can over time, we can sort of break. We can. We can atone, we can seek kind of kind of secular redemption.
- [49:25]
A
But you had a second one that I interrupted.
- [49:27]
B
You know, thank you so very, very, very astute point. Thank you, Charlie. That second point is. Is just the raw economics. So the idea is, you know, the dogma in 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 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. We're not having kids, we're aborting hundreds of thousands of them. And there's a demographic collapse, all kinds of demographic collapse. Winter all across Europe already. It's already here. It's here in Britain. It's certainly happening in Britain. And so the dependency ratio of taxpayers to dependents, whether it's the out of work, which is very high, I think it's 9 million in Britain. So we basically have 27 million taxpayers, 9 million out of work, 6 million public sector workers, 13 million pensioners. So that ratio, and that ratio is going to get a lot worse.
- [50:33]
A
Pensioners or retirees?
- [50:34]
B
Sorry, that's right, pensioners are retirees. And so. 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 can kind of import people who can contribute somewhat to our national economy. In fact, it turns out their net drains on, on our national economy. But that's been one of the myths. I think the other myth is to go back to liberalism. So the third answer would be this kind of the liberal myth of the blank slate. And the way I was thinking, I love this. The way I was thinking about this the other day was in the context of the transgenderism debate. And the view seems to be, you know, it's the similar kind of metaphysical myth that is, that has kind of bewitched the liberal mind as with transgenderism. So the, you know, with transgenderism, you know, the problem, 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 there'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 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, the model I have for this is the book of Roof and that very short book in the Old Testament. And that's, I think, a perfect model. What does Ruth do? She's a Moabite, she's not an Israelite. What does she do? Her husband dies. She says to look where you go. I will go where you lodge. I will lodge, Boaz.
- [52:29]
A
Right?
- [52:30]
B
Your people will be my people and your God will be my God. And she shows humility. She integrates herself. She works the fields, she's loyal. 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 Moabitess. And we just have. We can't even have that conversation. We're not even, you know, we have no idea what it is. You're not allowed to say, what is it to be an Israelite? You're not allowed to say, what is it to be an Englishman. You know, there was somebody the other day who just said, you know, the concept of Englishness and English identity is evil. One of Tony Blair's speechwriters, John Rentals, he deleted the tweet. But now that's interesting. There's been a vibe shift. A year ago, he wouldn't have deleted it, but. So things. Things are changing fast. But there is this strange myth that sort of bewitches us 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 Heathrow, get your piece of paper, and this magic dust will descend upon you and infuse all of Shakespeare and Chaucer. 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 doesn't work.
- [53:59]
A
National identity is more than paperwork. It's more than just having documentation. And I look at Mamdani, okay, yeah, he's got his paperwork. That guy's not an American. He's just not. Nothing about him is 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 what it means to be an American, period. It's at odds. Actually, he's an Islamist Marxist.
- [54:24]
B
Yeah, 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, the concept, certainly the concept of the secular public square. Oh, it's incomprehensible or the distinction between the secular and the sacred. This is not something that is, that comes naturally at all to Islamic theology. And actually you can understand in many ways I think Islamic political theology is more consistent, more predictable, more kind of comprehensible than Christian political theology. You know, when Augustine comes along and says, well, yes, God is in charge of everything, but there are some parts where he's just going to 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 secular. The idea of the secular starts to emerge with Augustine. It's not meant to be a kind of godless zone, but that's really effectively what it becomes after the 18th century. And you know, for Islam, 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 its monotheism. It's particularly, it's very, very aggressive and strong commitment to Tawid, to the doctrine of oneness and to the power of God makes it very hard for this kind of Augustinian idea to, 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. I've just come back from Hungary. I mean they are very self consciously a Christian Nation founded by St Stephen and there's crosses everywhere. It's in their constitution. That's not a problem. England, England is our monarch, is also the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. We are technically constitutionally, if any of you watch the coronation or the funeral of her late Majesty, that is, you know, the ceremonial kind of pedigree is a Christian one. But within Islam 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 Ummah, which is the covering, rather the covering rather than the dar al 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. So let's, so I mean one Stat. Just to close the loop on that, Charlie.
- [57:14]
A
So. Right.
- [57:14]
B
For example, you know, There are roughly 6% of Muslims in Britain.04.0.5% of them are in the armed forces. Are in the armed forces. So much. There were more British Muslims who went to fight for ISIS than there are in the British armed force.
- [57:34]
A
I'm surprised only 6%, because I go to London, it feels like a lot more than 6%. Well, that's because they're concentrated.
- [57:40]
B
They're very dense. So had we had a successful strategy of assimilation, integration, if such a.
- [57:44]
A
That's a great point. Yep.
- [57:45]
B
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?
- [58:08]
A
You have nothing to integrate towards to become a Muslim. That's right.
- [58:12]
B
The majority population. Majority population in Luton. It's coming close to. Or is he even there?
- [58:18]
A
Muhammad is the number one birth name in the biggest cities all across.
- [58:21]
B
Yeah. And I think that, you know, that's indicative. It's a little bit complicated that. That stat. Because Muhammad is way more common just as a first name among, say, you know, from 100 Muslims, you're gonna have way more. Way more Muhammad, whereas your first names are much more evenly. More. More evenly distributed in. In. In the West, I think. But it's still. It's. It's. It's. It is an index of sorts. Yeah.
- [58:46]
C
We're honored to be partnering with Alan Jackson Ministries, and today I want to point you to their podcast. It's called Culture and Christianity.
- [58:53]
B
The.
- [58:53]
C
The Alan Jackson Podcast. What makes it unique is Pastor Alan'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. His guests have incredible expertise and powerful testimonies. They've been great friends. And now you can hear from Charlie in his own words.
- [59:19]
A
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 Alan and the ministry@alanjackson.com 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.
- [60:01]
B
I think that's actually Islam 101 and.
- [60:05]
A
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'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, that Allah is over all 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.
- [61:03]
B
Well, so I think the reason for that is because Muslims certainly in, in Britain tend to vote in, in blocks and tend to vote as households rather than as individuals. And this is, it's, it's just the way it is. They tend to be, you know, rooted more in kinship and tribe and, and ethnicity than is common has been common in England. I mean in England we know 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 13th, 12th, 13th century onwards were constantly moving around, always moving around. We were not very familial, we weren't very sort of clan based at all. Whereas our sort of new arrivals, the new English as it were, 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 what it's like 80, 85% of Muslims will vote labor roughly. And so effectively that's why you see a lot of, lot of mayoralties, a lot of local MPs. Will the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan seems to be like he's going to be running our metropolis for the foreseeable future.
- [62:18]
A
Isn't that interesting that 80 to 85% of American Muslims, so Democrat, 80 to 85% 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 or Conservative. That's their disposit. Like you're importing future voters of a certain political party.
- [62:36]
B
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 Labour Party is taking it. 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. That is something that's new. And so you're starting to see some cracks in this strange coalition between, you know, Rainbow and Crescent and Star.
- [63:28]
A
So I want you to build that out because we're running tight on time. But so what is. Say that again. Rainbow, Crescent and Star.
- [63:35]
B
So think of, think of Rainbow as a kind of metonymy for progressivism and the Crescent for Islam and the Star for socialism. Good old fashioned old left socialism. And 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 natcon speech last July. You know, the jokes on us Conservatives when we laugh at gays 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 for. 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 gonna, we're gonna 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 starting to see those cracks appearing. I think, you know, maybe there are parts of 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 over 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, for the, for the oppressor, whether it's Israel or whether it's the British establishment.
- [65:13]
A
I have two, two final things I want to talk about, the first of which is broad. And then I want to talk about J.D. vance at the end, the 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 is different and unique?
- [65:31]
B
Well, in a, 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 on another, you know, for the most part, there's a sense now, particularly given the scale and speed of demographic change and churn in my corner of England, southeast of England, there's a sense of coming home. You know, I can, you know, I got 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, 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, 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?
- [66:40]
A
I do. And look, we're a very confusing country because we're, we're very, we have 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 crimes?
- [66:59]
B
30 a day, arrested 30 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. 15 years ago, something was introduced called a non crime hate incident.
- [67:20]
A
How about that for Orwellian, I was going to say.
- [67:24]
B
So the idea behind a non crime hate incident 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 the last government did manage to reverse it, introduced it, but it managed to reverse some of the worst of that. But it's still there. And so we have these extraordinarily kind of pernicious statutes on the books which effectively weaponize, 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 17% drop over the last year in sign ups to the police force 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 checking your thoughts. As one friend of mine who was arrested a few years ago was told by policemen on his they're arrested for wrong speak, wrong speak and wrong think in the case of these poor women or Adam Smith o', Connor, that your vice president, the case that your vice president so eloquently drew attention to in his brilliant Munich speech back in February. Adam Smith o', Connor, whose child was aborted. And he, he would pray outside the abortion clinic where his son was aborted and pray silently in his head. And because he'd breached the buffer zones that had been imposed in the course of the last government under the ostensibly conservative government, he was arrested for breaching those zones and for being intimidating. There's no protest, no speech, not holding a sign, praying silently.
- [69:36]
A
And do you believe that there is a reckoning that will come on the culture of free speech in Britain?
- [69:43]
B
So I think there'll be a reckoning on everything. I mean, part of the free speech, it's when you start talking about free speech, a society 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 we, when there was a first person plural, we didn't have to worry about it. Why? Because basically 98% of the population, broadly speaking, shared a common universe of norms and conventions and manners that had 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, unprecedented experiment in mass demographic reconfiguration, let's 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 speech makes no sense at all.
- [70:47]
A
Well, especially Muslims are not going to be the ones arguing for free speech. The opposite.
- [70:54]
B
Correct, Correct. Absolutely right.
- [70:57]
A
They're not going to be your big fighters.
- [70:58]
B
No, I mean, because the central idea within Islam is Islam, so submit is submission.
- [71:04]
A
And also they don't want you to be able to criticize Muhammad or all that.
- [71:08]
B
You know, the idea of free speech comes through in Athens with this idea of parrhesia, isonomia, isagorea in the Athenian assembly in the 5th century BC. But you also see it come through in the Christian tradition in the second century ad, when these early Christian apologists are being arrested and they go to the emperor and they say, look, surely, oh, Emperor, you don't want me to bow the knee or burn my pinch of incense or worship you 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 kind of freely decide what I should worship. So you see this in Tertullian, the first Latin Church Father, he's the first person to come up with the phrase freedom of religion. Libitas religionis. 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 it's freedom of religion. We should have freedom to worship, freedom to meet on Sundays. And that took 300 years for them to win that right. But then the free 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.
- [72:21]
A
Last question, a piece just came out that showed you that, that said that you were JD's mentor, JD Vance's mentor, our wonderful Vice President United States, and maybe the next President United States. Tell us about that.
- [72:35]
B
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 2016, when a Texan friend of mine pressed hillbilly elegy into my hands two weeks before the election, saying Trump is going to win and this is why. And I remember reading that book and my mutual friend of ours, Rod Dreher was raving about it and did an interview with JD and the book rocketed up through the charts. So he caught my eye then. And, and just, it's just a great, great sort of privilege and source of pride to be able to call him a friend. And we've, you know, got, got to know each other over the years and you know, that mentor line is just media mischief really. I.
- [73:24]
A
So what do you see in him as a statesman?
- [73:27]
B
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 he's, he'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.
- [73:45]
A
We got a, we got problems.
- [73:45]
B
He's just got kind of, you know, raw cognitive processing power and, but he doesn't show it, to 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 saying something like, wait a minute, the US only gets X percent? I think it was 4% of trade through the Suez Canal. The Europeans are getting several factors more. Why are we burying the brunt of this? I just thought, first of all, what did that little revelation say? One, he really drilled down. He wasn't getting policy advice, he just worked that out. Two, he's working it out with the interests of the American people first and foremost in his mind a 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 idea to the 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 re nationalizing the water companies and that seems crazy. I thought you was a Thatcherite. But actually, if you're thinking that it may be the case that if you're really putting national interest first, maybe you want to go easy on trade, maybe you want to put some tariffs on. And it's very hard for the pre2016, the long 20th century 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. You might think he's a limousine liberal. You might have predicted him to be a limousine liberal from the 1990s onwards. And he's whacking all these tariffs on and he's doing things which are, you know, in its foreign policy, neither isolationist nor idealist. He's just being. He's being a realist. He's assessing the world as it is and not as the liberal mind would like it to be.
- [76:10]
A
Well, Dr. Orr, I think I'll use the first person plural. We really enjoyed our chat here today. God bless you, Dr. Orr. Thank you so much.
- [76:25]
B
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