Sept. 6, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
47:48
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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This is the final scream of a dying regime. | |
| Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| You know, I got a free shot on all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
|
unidentified
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I know you've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | |
| It's going to happen. | ||
|
unidentified
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And where do people like that go to share the big line? | |
| Mega media. | ||
|
unidentified
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I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | |
| Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Friday, 5th of September, Anno Domini 2025. | ||
| Harnwell here at the helm on Steve Bannon's War Room. | ||
| Well, folks, you might have seen over recent press coverage right across the world in the UK, in Austria, in France, there are increasing numbers of anti-migrant, anti-invader protests breaking out. | ||
| Well, that's also the case in Spain, and specifically, I think in Madrid and Barcelona, have had a number of anti-migrant protests. | ||
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unidentified
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And recently, there was this specific case in just outside of Madrid, where a guy of Moroccan extraction raped a young girl, accused of raping a young girl. | |
| And that kicked off a particularly aggressive protest around the first reception center. | ||
| Now, with me, to break this down and to describe some of the local sentiment is someone I met about six months ago in Rome at a Forzanuva conference, Gonzalo Martín, who is vice president of Democratia Nacional, National Democracy. | ||
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unidentified
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Gonzalo, welcome onto the show. | |
| I hope I pronounced that reasonably satisfactorily. | ||
| Why don't you start off and explain just what has happened at this migrant center and then go on to say what the local reaction has been? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, in Spain we have many centers for immigrants, minors and uncompanioned, that they are usually in the outsides of the big cities in the proletarian neighborhoods. | |
| And in this case, in Ortaleta, it's a neighborhood of Madrid, not in the center, it's a little bit far away from the center. | ||
| And since many months, we were accusing the government of Madrid and the government of Spain to bring all these immigrants that they don't want to adapt and they don't want to integrate in Spain. | ||
| They're supposed to be minors, but we are not sure if they are minors because when they enter Spain, they break the passport and we never know the real age of them. | ||
| And when the doctors come to make some DNA test to verify if they are minors or not, sometimes it's difficult to know because there is a gap of two years and most part of times they are not even minors. | ||
| So in this case, these people with our money, with the money of our taxes, they are living from us and they have this kind of summer camp holidays in these centers. | ||
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unidentified
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In this case, it was in Madrid. | |
| And they are free during the day. | ||
| And of course, they are around the neighborhood stealing. | ||
| They are harassing people. | ||
| And in In this particular case, there was this migrant, 17 years old, raping a Spanish girl, 14 years old. | ||
| And this is not the first time something like this is happening. | ||
| It's happening more often than the journalists say, of course, because they don't want to make publicity out of this, but it's something that is happening continuously in all these immigrant centers because these people, as I said, they are coming the worst of those countries and they don't have any kind of respect for Spanish people and of course neither for the Spanish women. | ||
| So this has been used by the extreme left to accuse the neighbors of the neighborhood of Ortaleza of being racist because they were protesting, because they want to be living in the neighborhood like always a really relaxed neighborhood without problems where you can walk your dog, going with your family to the park, but nowadays it's impossible due to all these immigrants that they are harassing and attacking local people. | ||
| Not only young girls, also old people, stealing from them the necklace, bracelets, watches, everything. | ||
| So in this case, it became more popular, this incident, due to the fact that they're accusing two guys that they were with a mask of attacking another three immigrants after what happened to this Spanish girl. | ||
| But they don't never talk about all these times, all the problems that we are having with them and all the women that have been raped and harassed. | ||
| And they are, of course, never in public TV talking about this because they are afraid that people wake up and that there is a kind of riot against all this migrant policy from the Spanish government. | ||
| Okay, Gonzalo, let me ask you this, because frequently on the war room, one of the points that we make, that we repeatedly make, is that it's really the centre-right political party that is responsible historically for a lot of the huge influxes of migration. | ||
| What has been, and we often say, like, for example, in the Spanish context, really that the popular party isn't a centre-right political party whatsoever, and this is the same like the mainstream Republicans in America or the Tories in the UK. | ||
| They really sort of, it's just basically that these are vehicles and instruments that have been hijacked by globalist elites. | ||
| And as a consequence of that, over many decades, you've had the formation of new political parties, which the press will obviously term as being far-right, such as Democracia Nacional, such as Vox, obviously. | ||
| Tell me what the response has been, because you have the socialists on the left who are in control at the moment, and they're obviously panicking. | ||
| You know that they're panicking, because as we go on into the conversation discussing like this, the judiciary is clamping down on the popular protests, saying that they're sparking anti-immigrant sentiment, as if that sentiment didn't actually exist anyway. | ||
| Tell me, however, I want the audience to hear you, in your words, describe the real difference on the right of the political spectrum between the Popular Party and then between your party, Democracia Nacional and Vox as well, because both of you, both you and Vox, have been suppressed in your ability to organise protests. | ||
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unidentified
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But tell me, I really just want to drill down on the thing here about the the centre right. | |
| Tell me about the pop popular party and what its position has been in the face of these protests. | ||
| Well, the popular party, they are, of course, the region Spain is almost a federal state. | ||
| So we have like 17 states inside of this, what they call autonomous community, and Madrid is one of them. | ||
| So it's like an independent state inside of the Spanish state. | ||
| So the government of Madrid is right-wing with the popular party, and the general government of Spain is socialist. | ||
| So they have this war. | ||
| They use immigration to attack each other. | ||
| So what the socialist party is doing is now taking these minor, these immigrants, especially from Canary Island, and they distribute them in Spain through communities. | ||
| But of course, they always take more immigrants to the communities where the Socialist Party is not in power. | ||
| So in this case, they bring more to Madrid and, for example, to Catalonia, because in Catalonia are the socialists in Pavo. | ||
| So they use it as a weapon against them because of course they know that nobody wants to have the immigrants and nobody wants that these minors or that they are not even minors coming to the neighborhood and doing what they do. | ||
| Nobody wants them. | ||
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unidentified
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So the popular party, what they do is to say that they don't have enough money to provide to these immigrants a good life, that they will need more money from the central government, but of course they don't receive it because they are political rivals and they only use this speech against the central government about money, about the conditions of these centers for immigrants, and they don't talk about the root of the problem is immigration. | |
| And I want to give an important point about all this immigration history in Spain. | ||
| The socialist government was, the socialist party was in the Spanish, ruling Spain till 1996. | ||
| Since the Franco death, we had mostly only socialist governments till 1996. | ||
| In 1995, one year before the Popular Party ruled Spain, during eight years, consecutive eight years, in Spain we had half million immigrants. | ||
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unidentified
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In 2005, that the Popular Party was already in power for seven years, sorry, no, it was in power for 10 years, we had in Spain, we passed from half million immigrants to five million immigrants. | |
| And this was with the Popular Party. | ||
| So when right-wing people in Spain, they say, oh, the socialists are the ones bringing the immigrants, it's not true. | ||
| It's the Popular Party. | ||
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unidentified
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Because the Popular Party, as you said, they are part of the elite. | |
| And of course, there are many entrepreneurs that want to bring all this cheap labor hand to Spain. | ||
| Gonzalo, this point is so important to get a correct understanding of what is happening in Europe. | ||
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unidentified
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Because it's exactly the same situation, sort of 10 years later with Angela Merco in Germany. | |
| Again, you have someone supposedly of the center-right, but not remotely in reality. | ||
| Then you have the creation of parties to the right of the so-called inverted commerce, to the right of the Christian Democrat Union, for example, the alternative for Deutschland. | ||
| And the government there, especially the judiciary, are trying to suppress the ADF. | ||
| It is the same thing in Spain. | ||
| Important, folks, that here in continental Europe, it is really the center-right political party that is to blame for a lot of the invasion, the third world invasion that is overrunning us here. | ||
| Now, currently, correct me if I'm wrong, it's Isabel Ayuzo who's the president of the local regional government. | ||
| She's the popular party. | ||
| I've seen some of her responses to these protests and they seem to be pretty performative. | ||
| That is to say, they try she's trying with a few weak words say, oh look, well, perhaps this guy is maladapted, perhaps this guy, this rapist, needs to be returned with some thirty-seven others. | ||
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unidentified
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But if you're talking about thirty-seven people, as you're saying out of five million, and that was sort of sort of twenty years ago, that's not going to solve the problem. | |
| It's not even going to have any serious amelioration of the condition whatsoever. | ||
| It is total theater. | ||
| Are people in Spain? | ||
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unidentified
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Are people here by the Torre Pacheco, where these protests are flaring up? | |
| Are people, do they realize, do they accept that the Popular Party is simply part of the problem here? | ||
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unidentified
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And that's why they're looking towards you and towards Vox for a new alternative? | |
| Or do these words actually carry some weight? | ||
| Well, people are changing, of course, but they still is not the same the people voting for Popular Party in big cities that the people voting for Popular Party in the rural areas. | ||
| People in rural areas, sometimes they don't have, for example, a party like VOX that is much bigger than my party, Democraza Nacional, they don't have maybe enough candidates. | ||
| So as happened in the village of my father, not far away from Madrid in Toledo, you have only like the communist, the socialists, and the popular party running to elections. | ||
| There is not even the candidate of VOX. | ||
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unidentified
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So people in the countryside, they still have this mentality of the Spanish civil war that it was between communists and anti-Spanish against right-wing and patriotic and fascist in the Spanish civil war. | |
| So in Spain, many people in the rural areas are still thinking that is this the blues, so in this case the blue are the nationalists against the reds. | ||
| And it's not like this anymore, because the popular party is the same problem for Spain, it represents the same problem for Spain than the Socialist Party. | ||
| But in the rural areas, they usually have a little bit more radical speech and it's common to meet some of the candidates of the Popular Party in a bar with pictures of Franco, for example, and cheering viva Spaña or something like this, that in big cities they wouldn't do this. | ||
| So they still lying to people and they still making them believe that they are the good ones, but of course they are not. | ||
| And people are awaking, of course. | ||
| We, my party, Democracia Nacional, we are fighting for Spain and we are denouncing the situation with immigration since 1995 and our first slogan was the Spanish first. | ||
| And now Box that came later copy this slogan from us and many other things. | ||
| What I consider is good because what we want is people to wake up. | ||
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unidentified
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So I can say that more or less 20%, 15%, 20% of Spanish people are already tired of the Popular Party. | |
| They don't believe in them anymore and they will vote for Vox, for example. | ||
| And many of the people voting for Vox, they don't know us. | ||
| They heard about us or some slogans or some political campaigns that we did back then and now Vox is taking advantage of all the work we're doing during 30 years. | ||
| It's no problem about that because we are not here for the salary. | ||
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unidentified
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We are totally people that we are fighting for our country and we want the best. | |
| So in this case, Vox is the one who is taking advantage of all these years of work of many patriots. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| That yes, people are changing mentality in some places, especially where there are so many immigrants, and they listen what the popular party politicians are saying, saying that we need from now till 2050, 37 million immigrants in Spain, they said, for the pensions to be paid. | ||
| So people are saying, how can you say we need 37 million more of immigrants? | ||
| We have already like 12, 14 million immigrants in Spain, and we are becoming the minority. | ||
| So some people are seeing it. | ||
| In other cases, like my parents, they are from a big city, are from Madrid, they will vote for the Popular Party always because they live in a good area. | ||
| They don't suffer immigration like in other parts of Madrid, for example, and they still thinking that Vox maybe is too radical. | ||
| Let me let that 37 million figure seems to me an incredible number. | ||
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unidentified
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I think a million Syrians were taken in by Angela Merkel. | |
| Million and a half. | ||
| 10 years ago. | ||
| A million and a half. | ||
| And that fundamentally changed the political landscape in Germany. | ||
| That really created the AFD phenomenon. | ||
| That in itself, that's a million and a half. | ||
| And Germany is a lot larger country than Spain. | ||
| That 37, what is the population of Spain right now? | ||
| It's about like 65 million? | ||
| Less, less. | ||
| We are officially, I think, 48 million. | ||
| But you have to know, I will give some tips really, really fast about the Spanish situation. | ||
| As I said, in 1995, we had half a million immigrants and we were 39 million Spaniards. | ||
| And back then, already in 1995, we had already more deaths than people getting born in Spain. | ||
| So it means that we didn't recover from that. | ||
| From that time, we are having less and less children in Spain, from native Spanish people, and we have more people dying and talking about native Spanish people. | ||
| So all the growth of population in Spain in the last 30 years, if we were 39 million people in 1995 and now we are officially 48, all the growth is 100% from immigration. | ||
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unidentified
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So it's not only 9 million more people living in Spain. | |
| It's 9 million more than 1995 by taking into account that there are more people dying than getting born in Spain. | ||
| We were calculating more or less the real population, the real figures of the immigrant population in Spain. | ||
| And we can say that maybe from this 48 million people living in Spain, 14 are already immigrants. | ||
| Because we have also the problem that with the Spanish constitution in the hands, it's written in the Spanish constitution that all the people coming from countries that belongs that used to belong part of the Spanish Empire, so all America, some countries in Africa, the Philippines, when they come to Spain and they stay legally two years, after two years, they can already start the procedure to become Spanish, to have the Spanish nationality. | ||
| So after three years in Spain, they are already Spanish like me officially. | ||
| And these people disappear from statistics from everything. | ||
| So when they say that one Spanish guy was raping a woman, probably was not Spanish. | ||
| He has only the Spanish nationality. | ||
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unidentified
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So with this constitution we have in Spain, it's very difficult to know who is Spanish and who is not. | |
| The only statistic that you can find that is talking about the region of the immigrant of the people living in Spain, because in Spain it's forbidden to make statistics according to the race, it's totally forbidden. | ||
| The only statistic you can find on Google is that in Spain there are around nine million and a half people that were not born in Spain. | ||
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unidentified
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So nine million and a half were not born in Spain, it means that they are immigrants. | |
| But what happened with all the children they are having here in the last 30 years? | ||
| So this is why I'm saying that we are 14 million, we have 14 million of immigrants and we have also half million, more or less, I think it's even more, half million of illegal immigrants, that they are not part of statistics. | ||
| I'm going to drill down on that in just one moment. | ||
| Stand by if you wouldn't mind, Gonzalo, and we'll come back to this. | ||
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|
unidentified
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| Well, Gonzalo, we've got about three minutes left of this. | ||
| Just tell me, if you wouldn't mind, seeing we spoke about the collapse and degradation, degradation of the centre-right of the Popular Party. | ||
| Just give me two minutes, if you will, on the left, on the socialists. | ||
| I saw that Francisco Martin came out with the statement that it's unacceptable to criminalize vulnerable populations. | ||
| And this really just shows you the priorities of these people. | ||
| There's nobody apparently in the centre-right or centre-left that's worried about the vulnerable population, which are ordinary working-class Spaniards. | ||
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unidentified
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Just give me your tell me how is it going down on the ground with blue-collar workers, with working-class people in Spain, to hear this from their elites. | |
| And the fact that if you think it's bad already, if you think it's bad in Germany, just wait to see what will happen when they bring in 37 million people, which of course won't just remain in Spain. | ||
| They're going to travel all over the continent. | ||
| That will be fundamentally transformative. | ||
| But just first, give me your closing remarks. | ||
| Give me your reaction and tell me how this goes down with ordinary working-class Spaniards who are trying to make it to the end of the month. | ||
| So, yes, you are right. | ||
| I think in Spain it's happening a little bit what happened in France with Front National. | ||
| Many people, many workers, they saw that the leftists, the left-wing parties, they were giving priority always to foreigners and they saw how the conditions were going worse and worse. | ||
| The salaries were stenecked, and they were earning the same the last 20 years, like it's happening in Spain. | ||
| And there are many people waking up and they don't look anymore to the left. | ||
| People that they were in the family, they were all communists. | ||
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unidentified
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Now they are changing, and many of them they start to support, for example, Vox. | |
| That as I said, Vox is just taking advantage of the work of many years of people like us that we were saying that immigration is a problem. | ||
| So there are more and more, in the case, for example, of Democratic Nacional, when we were running to elections, we usually get more votes in the proletarian areas than the bourgeois areas. | ||
| So working class people that are the ones who are suffering the immigration, they are the ones who face all these problems and they know how they are and they know how it's not cool and multi-culti to have neighbors above living on your above of your apartment from Dominican Republic listening to music 24 hours, or Egyptis on your left, or some Arabs with praying, and people that are living with those immigrants. | ||
| They are working class people and of course they they see that they are totally abandoned by, by the left, because the leftists, they only care about the, the immigrants and in the case of my Party OF Democracy Nacional many, the most part of of of us. | ||
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unidentified
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I can say that we are working class people. | |
| We have really humble jobs and because we are the ones who live with the immigration Gonzalo 60 seconds on this and then we have to end 60 seconds when spaniards are seeing that these protests are being suppressed by judicial order under the accusation that they will just inflame anti-migrant sentiment. | ||
| Does that make people more enthusiastic towards supporting you or less enthusiastic? | ||
| Let's say that boomers, they were always afraid of the law and people that they are younger, they don't care anymore. | ||
| They are sometimes so tired of the situation that every time that there's a protest like this. | ||
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unidentified
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If you see what the journalists, when they are asking to people protesting, people that they are boomers or they are older they always say, i'm not racist. | |
| I'm not racist, i'm just here because we don't want to have them here in the neighborhood. | ||
| So the problem for them is that they don't want to have them in the neighborhood. | ||
| They want that they move the immigrant center to other neighborhoods. | ||
| But if you listen to the young people, these young people, they say, we don't want them in Spain, we want them to send them back to their country. | ||
| So people are so, so tired of this situation that, especially young people, they don't care anymore about being accused of being racist, fascist or whatever they say. | ||
| These people they will never integrate. | ||
| We don't want that they come to Spain, we don't want that they stay here. | ||
| We don't want that to provide everything for them that they will be so ungrateful for us in the future as they are doing. | ||
| We just want them to kick them out. | ||
| We want them that they come back to the country. | ||
| And many people they start to see it and it's less political and correct now. | ||
| Many people they are, they feel free to say it, maybe 20 years ago, if you would say yes to control immigration, you were considered a racist and really dangerous racist, Gonzalo. | ||
| We have to stop there sadly, we could go on just very, very quickly. | ||
| What's your social media? | ||
| Where can people get hold of you? | ||
|
unidentified
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And Democracy Nacional. | |
| You can follow us in the Telegram, in tip and Twitter, Democracy Nacional. | ||
| We have also a website, DemocratiaNacional.es and we are very active and we have really interesting programs. | ||
| Also, we have a radio program called Aquila Bo de Europa. | ||
| I invite you all to listen to us. | ||
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| Well, my next guest, Ed West, is a British journalist and commentator. | ||
| He's written for the Daily Telegraph, The Spectator. | ||
| And his most recent book is Small Men on the Wrong Side of History. | ||
| And the wrong side of history is the name of his sub stack. | ||
| And from that, there is a very important article that we'll be pushing out on our social media. | ||
| And that's, Ed, why we've got you on the show today to talk us through this, some of the points here, which you've, in a great genius fashion, you've tied together a number of themes here, really to do with the phenomenon that's rolling across the UK right now, across England specifically, about the raising of the flags. | ||
| Firstly, however, in your article, you just mention your own borough of Crouch End. | ||
| And you quite well described the phenomenon before you go on to say how these left-wing councils are ripping down the flag of St. George, the English flag, which is for American audience, it's just the white background with the red cross on the middle of it. | ||
| Before going on to that, you start off by saying what the situation is with the Palestinian flag. | ||
| Just why don't you say that in your own words to give a description of what your thesis is and then we'll take it from there? | ||
| Well, thanks very much for having me on. | ||
| That's very kind words. | ||
| I mentioned my own area, which is an area of a sort of upper-middle-class, liberal-leaning neighbourhoods in North London. | ||
| I think we had one of the highest remain votes in the referendum. | ||
| And like lots of parts of London, you see a lot of Palestinian flags, sometimes people's windows. | ||
| But in other parts of the country, you've seen the Palestinian flags on flagposts. | ||
| This started out in 2023 with the war. | ||
| And it has sort of two meanings. | ||
| In some ways, it sort of signifies a kind of middle-class left-wing solidarity with the Bretch of the Earth and against colonial injustice, whatever. | ||
| But in other parts of the country, it has a much more sort of territorial feel. | ||
| It signifies, I suppose, that this is a kind of predominantly Muslim area. | ||
| And some shopkeepers have even said that they feel they have to put up the Palestinian flag in their shops because otherwise they might be intimidated. | ||
| And so there are parts of the country where, you know, row after row of houses has the Palestinian flag. | ||
| And some people have come to see this as having a slight territorial feel to it. | ||
| And in two parts of the country in particular, it's been noted, Tower Hamlets is a borough in East London. | ||
| has a very large Bangladeshi Muslim population and the borough is run by a small party which is basically Bangladeshi led. | ||
| And they had Palestinian flags hanging up from lampposts all over the area. | ||
| And some of the residents have complained. | ||
| It has historically a very, it was originally the people have complained and said they find it intimidating. | ||
| The council refused to take down the flags and they said they were a symbol of international solidarity until the government forced them to do it. | ||
| It also happened in Birmingham. | ||
| Birmingham is the major British city with the largest Muslim population. | ||
| In fact, I think it's projected to become at some point Muslim majority. | ||
| And again, the council there refused to take down the Palestinian flags. | ||
| And they also said, in fact, both councils said that they couldn't take down the flags without police backup because there'd be tensions within the community, in other words, they'd be worried, they'd be fighting about it. | ||
| And both flags, so since this recent thing started, it started in Birmingham. | ||
| So just to stop you there, when it comes to the Palestinian flag, and you were mentioning Tower Hamnets, which has a 40% Muslim population there, and you mentioned the Bengali-dominated Aspire Party. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So when it comes to taking down from the public roundabouts and public buildings and all the rest of it, the Palestinian flag, you can't do that just by, you know, there are issues there. | ||
| No concerns about health and safety on the Palestinian flags, right? | ||
| That's the point I want to underline here. | ||
| No, the council's not saying no, you know, right, the issue that these things are a threat to public safety, literally health and safety dynamic there. | ||
| That's not being called into question right now. | ||
| That will be called into question, of course, as we proceed with our conversation here. | ||
| Now let's do that. | ||
| Let's talk about the operation Raise the Colours. | ||
| We had at the beginning of the show just a quick segment of what's going on across the UK. | ||
| Many people who's active on social media of the war in Posse will see some of these things being thrown up, for example, on YouTube, short clips of people just going out by themselves, not necessarily raising flags even, just painting the red cross on white walls, which of course the council will then come along in due course and paint over. | ||
| Tell us about Operation Raise the Colours first, and then we'll talk about this sudden out-of-nowhen concern for health and safety. | ||
| It just seems to start spontaneously just outside Birmingham, just south of Birmingham in an area on the fringe of the city. | ||
| People started literally just raising flags on lampposts and then it suddenly spread. | ||
| York has a big movement there. | ||
| Other cities like Southampton, I think Norwich has seen them. | ||
| And also in Tower Hamlets, in an area called the Isle of Dogs, there have been flags going up. | ||
| And bear in mind the background to this is there have been protests all over the summer about the placement of asylum seekers, stroke, illegal migrants, whatever you want to call them, in hotels across the country. | ||
| Because there are so many coming over, the government has basically bought up lots of hotels and just filled in with lots of sort of random guys. | ||
| And the Isle of Dogs is one such location where there have been protests by local residents about these guys. | ||
| And so the flag movement has kind of arisen out of this as a kind of civil protest. | ||
| And Yeah, and obviously, in this case, the councils are much keener to get rid of these flags. | ||
| It's become all of a sudden a health and safety issue, having people raise English and British flags up and down lamp posts and also in roundabouts as well. | ||
| Do you know, they've been painting them these councils which are bankrupt and have no money suddenly find the money out of nowhere to do the most essential work possible, not filly covering in potholes, but painting over the cross of St. George. | ||
| I'm going to ask you to get rid of your potholes. | ||
| If you want to get rid of a pothole, you can just paint an English flag on it and then they'll come and fix it, fill it in, no problem. | ||
| That's what they're concerned about. | ||
| I'm going to ask you about the next theme that you raise in your article, which is how the flag of St. George and the Union Jack, the Union flag, became co-opted by the far right, because there's an important dynamic there. | ||
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| So, Ed, just give us an analysis, especially for our largely American audience. | ||
| How did this happen? | ||
| Did this happen in a vacuum, or was it also the dynamic that the centre-left, the centre-right abandoned these flags because perhaps they were ashamed of Britain's history and heritage? | ||
| We have to understand the British kind of elites have always been much more uncomfortable with their flag, even compared to American or French elites. | ||
| You remember the American and the French flags came out of liberal revolutions, while the British flag doesn't have any kind of, you know, it's quite visceral. | ||
| It's literally a Christian symbol. | ||
| And the left have always been quite uncomfortable with it, especially since about the 1970s when they thought of it as being associated with the sort of far-right National Front and hooligans and Stuggs. | ||
| There was a kind of attempt to kind of claim it back as a sort of left-wing symbol. | ||
| And bear in mind, the flag has a different context. | ||
| So, you know, the Prime Minister will happily be seen with the British flag. | ||
| The English flag is a bit more, I suppose, proletarian is the way to describe it. | ||
| But people fly the English flag during football tournaments, for instance, and the Prime Minister will be seen with it. | ||
| But it depends on the context in any situation. | ||
| Once you see a kind of lots, you know, once you see people protesting about immigration or also carrying the English flag, then they start to get very uncomfortable indeed. | ||
| And remember, I mean, especially in England, a lot of this has a kind of class dimension as well. | ||
| There's this kind of fear of these kind of thugs, these working-class thugs who are running around the flag, and they're the kind of people we're scared of naturally. | ||
| So there is that kind of visceral discomfort with the, especially the English flag, but to a lesser extent the British flag. | ||
| Ed, let me ask you about that. | ||
| And of course, the other thing that perhaps Americans will be familiar with is the last night of the proms. | ||
| And that's probably the only other time you might see the English flag waving, of course, along with the Union Jack as well. | ||
| You mentioned a social media. | ||
| So they do wave the EU flag as well, the last night of the prompt now. | ||
| So that is a different. | ||
| You know, there are flags everywhere. | ||
| There's the Ukraine flag, the Pride flag, the EU flag. | ||
| They all have different kind of political and social economic contexts. | ||
| Of course, that's the point, right? | ||
| That they represent different things. | ||
| You mentioned something there that really is so important that people, especially Brits, they have a sort of visceral reaction normally against anything perceived as being extreme. | ||
| And the idea of the English flag, the flag of St. George, being used in conjunction with anti-immigrant protests will send a lot of people, it would have sent a lot of people into a mood of paranoia and somewhat fear. | ||
| Now, my question to you, because that's a really important point, I think that line has now been crossed. | ||
| I think now, and this is really thanks to social media, due to Instagram, YouTube, the messaging apps, that people can communicate en masse with other people in an unmediated form. | ||
| I think the anger of what is happening now with the reception centres, the migrant centres, the migrant-based crime in England has passed that level in which people actually care about what other people think about them, whether they're going on anti-migrant protests where the English flag is being waved. | ||
| They've transcended that sense of that very English sense of fear of being associated with anything extreme. | ||
| And they actually think what is happening right now by our mainstream elite is more extreme than the social disapproval that might have come before. | ||
| How does that thesis strike you? | ||
| I think there's definitely a bit of a respectability cascade, as it's called, about these issues. | ||
| They used to be, if only like thugs and fascists turn up at an event, no one else is going to turn up at the event. | ||
| So then therefore it's only going to be thugs and fascists. | ||
| There is definitely like the protests that have been ongoing this summer, it's obvious that the kind of makeup is very different. | ||
| Last year's, which were just rioting, basically. | ||
| The people who were involved in last year's disorders, if you looked at the cases, lots of them had repeated criminal records. | ||
| They were mostly drunk. | ||
| It was a kind of an underclass protest. | ||
| And that's obviously not the case now. | ||
| You have sort of pretty normal people turning up there. | ||
| There is a huge difference, isn't there, between what people's revealed and their stated preferences are on all these issues. | ||
| People out of sort of politeness or social status will say, I think, all these kind of social changes happening in the country are great. | ||
| And I'm totally in favor of diversity and everything. | ||
| But in their revealed preferences, where they choose to live, most obviously, they obviously don't agree with that. | ||
| And I don't think society, you know, a social system can't indefinitely survive if there is that great gap between what people say in public and what they actually believe and what they do. | ||
| I mean, the most obvious example is with communism, which is a kind of different system, obviously. | ||
| You know, people all had to repeat the mantra at school and work, but no one believed it. | ||
| And I think there is that. | ||
| But this is the important media. | ||
| This is the importance of social media. | ||
| Because you suddenly learn, probably for the first time, that you're not the only person thinking things. | ||
| Because when the elites had all the basic, when they owned the means of production, as it were, for the culture, and they used that very effectively, they could condition people to think, yeah, so everybody, half the country, would be sitting there cowering in their living rooms, thinking that they're the only person thinking it, and therefore they conform to what they expect and perceive to actually be the majority opinion. | ||
| Social media breaks that. | ||
| It smashes it. | ||
| Because you can now see someone saying something with a tweet or something on X, and that will get 10 million, 15 million, 20 million views. | ||
| And people know, actually, oh, wow, I didn't realize I was the only person who thought that. | ||
| There are others. | ||
| And that's how you, I think, for the first time, people have had the courage to come back and do these protests, which beforehand they wouldn't have done because they don't want to be associated with the thugs that you were mentioning before. | ||
| Because especially the Brits have an innate dislike of anything that is perceived as being extremist. | ||
| Look, we've got about two or three minutes left, and I just want to flag up a phrase that you used in your last paragraph of this article, which is absolutely brilliant. | ||
| I don't know if you coined it yourself. | ||
| Asymmetric multiculturalism. | ||
| But that is absolutely brilliant. | ||
| Could you just explain what that is? | ||
| That's Eric Hoffman, the esteemed academic and author that I've written about it, his thesis before. | ||
| But it's brilliant. | ||
| It's in his book, White Shift, and it's definitely worth reading. | ||
| Could you just give me two minutes on what the thesis is behind asymmetric multiculturalism? | ||
| It's basically that modern diverse states basically rest on rules where the majority and minority groups basically are treated in completely different ways. | ||
| And, you know, in Britain, this has become the two-tier justices, two-tier key kind of theme. | ||
| You know, minority identity has to be celebrated, majority nationalism has to be suppressed. | ||
| The prejudice within those different communities is treated in a very different way. | ||
| I mean, like a lot of these ideas, it was basically devised in the Soviet Union. | ||
| They had exactly the same system where Russian national identity was suppressed and the Soviets encouraged minority national identity as a kind of counterweight. | ||
| And that's basically what we've got. | ||
| The British state is terrified of majority nationalism and all its, you know, even our anti-extremism network is devised towards tracking supposedly nationalist sentiments amongst the young white guys, even though Islamic extremism is way more of a natural threat. | ||
| Because that is what a system does. | ||
| And that is what the system is, I suppose, most scared of, and probably with good reason. | ||
| But it cannot last indefinitely. | ||
| You cannot treat two communities in a different way forever. | ||
| It just doesn't work as an idea or a principle. | ||
| You can't if the community that you're pouring scorn is actually still just about the numerical majority. | ||
| Final word to you, Ed West. | ||
| Do you think these protests are going to diminish with the passage of time or will they start to increase? | ||
| Well, you have to take into account the British weather. | ||
| So every single revolution Britain has ever had has been stopped by the rain. | ||
| So, no, I think, I mean, in the long term, the discontent and, you know, as you say, the role of social media, you know, it's ironic that in 2011, Western commentators were saying about how social media was going to lead to big change in the Arab world. | ||
| And I think it's probably having quite a big effect in Europe right now, which no one probably foresaw in the same kind of way. | ||
| You know, I think in the short term of the winter, things will die down, but the kind of basic problems are there and ultimately getting worse. | ||
| Ed West, I think I've been following you on Substack. | ||
| You've got some great writing there. | ||
| Where do people go on social media? | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| It's absolutely fantastic. | ||
| I love reading your output. | ||
| Where do people go on social media and Substack to keep up with your analysis? | ||
| My Substack address is just edwest.co.uk and my Twitter is just EdWest. | ||
| I mean, I think I'm on Blue Sky, but I stopped using it after about a week. | ||
| So, you know, but yeah, go to Twitter. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Ed West, very, very grateful. | ||
| Hope you'll come back on the show at some point in the future to keep us abreast with your writings. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks, Ed. | ||
| Thanks very much indeed. | ||
| That's all we've got time for now. | ||
| The war will be back at 10 a.m. tomorrow. |
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