Oct. 18, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
47:52
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
| Because we're going to medieval on these people. | ||
| Here's not 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. | ||
| I know you're trying to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
| MAGA Media. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Vann. | |
| Friday, 17th of October, Anno Domini 2025. | ||
| Harnwell here at the helm. | ||
| Very, very delighted to introduce our two guests to kick off the show today, Michel Yves Bolaray and Olivier Bonassier. | ||
| Excuse my French, if I handled that relatively well. | ||
| They've written a book, which I remember when that came out in Italy a couple of years ago. | ||
| I was absolutely fascinated with it. | ||
| The basic thesis of this book is that the secularist or materialist explanation for the universe, for all that is, for humanity, is insufficient. | ||
| And therefore, the hypothesis that the world has a creator, a God, creator, is by no means incoherent. | ||
| We're going to be exploring that theme as we go forward. | ||
| And I hope by this 25 minutes as we discuss this to furnish you with arguments that you might use with more skeptical friends and family. | ||
| It's not the point of the book isn't specifically evangelical. | ||
| And it's not even to suggest that religious faith, religious, Christian faith and science are compatible. | ||
| It goes a bit further than that and suggests the simple, rational, scientific, no-God explanation for the universe and for life, all life on earth, has gaps in it. | ||
| And the natural response to that is to hypothesize God. | ||
| Before I bring the guests on, let's just have a quick look at the book itself. | ||
| So you both have scientific backgrounds. | ||
| Welcome onto the show. | ||
| Michelle, your background is as a computer engineer. | ||
| And Olivier, you studied science and maths. | ||
| So your approach isn't primarily theological with this book. | ||
| I think it's trying to make an approach to the world of science that dismisses too quickly the possibility of God. | ||
| Why don't you say something in your own words as to why you have put this book together with the specific viewpoint you have chosen? | ||
| Yes, exactly as you said, Ben. | ||
| Materialism, which has been a dominant current view during the early 20th century, has become recently a belief which is almost irrational. | ||
| It's a belief which is extremely difficult to keep and hold. | ||
| And the recent discovery shows that the reasonable way is to believe that there is a creator God. | ||
| All these discoveries that the materialism is a difficult belief is known by the scientists and know all the difficulties, but it's not known by the general public. | ||
| And the goal of our book is to make known to the general public here and in Europe that materialism is a belief like any other, but it's a belief which has received so many shocks and has so many problems that it is probably today an irrational belief. | ||
| Would you mind just explaining the term? | ||
| I mentioned it in my introduction. | ||
| You mentioned it yourself just now. | ||
| Would you mind defining materialism for me? | ||
| Materialism is a belief that there is nothing else in our universe than matter, space, time, and energy. | ||
| And that's all. | ||
| Which means that if there is only matter in, which has come from materialism, if there is not that, there is, of course, no God, but there is no devil, there is no spirit, there is no angel, there is nothing. | ||
| It's just matter organized by chance and necessities and by the laws of nature. | ||
| This is the definition of materialism. | ||
| Well, Robert Wilson, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of cosmic radiation, the background radiation that ripples right across the universe following the Big Bang, has written the forward to your book. | ||
| And in that book, he says, although the general thesis that a higher mind could be at the origin of the universe does not provide a satisfying explanation for me, I can accept its coherence. | ||
| If the universe had a beginning, then we cannot avoid the question of creation. | ||
| So, Olivier, my question to you, following on from Robert Wilson wrote there, is that even though you have a Nobel laureate write the forward to your book, and he doesn't share your conclusion, do you think this suggests that a new frontier isn't belief versus science, but humility within science? | ||
| Yes, Robert Wilson is a very important Nobel Prize winner because he was with Arnold Penzias, one of the two we discovered, as you said, what we can call the proof of the Big Bang. | ||
| And he was the one who wrote the preface of our book in the beginning in France and in Italy. | ||
| Now he's one of the endorsements of the book. | ||
| And as you said, he said that he is not a believer, but he was an atheist and he became an agnostic. | ||
| And he said that his discoveries of the beginning of the universe we cannot avoid after this the question of the creation, as you said. | ||
| And it's very important because he recognized that the hypothesis of God is coherent. | ||
| But he said for myself, I'm not sure that it's the only way to explain the things. | ||
| So that's the case of many, many Nobel Prize winners that we are meeting today. | ||
| We were in Princeton and in Berkeley a few weeks ago to discuss those topics with them. | ||
| And many of them recognize that the hypothesis of God is coming back and that for the moment they have nothing to explain the beginning and the fine-tuning of the universe. | ||
| But they say perhaps one day we will find something. | ||
| So what we are saying with this book is that there is a great reversal in science, a great reversal, which means that for centuries science seems to be able to explain the world without the hypothesis of God. | ||
| But now things have changed. | ||
| Okay, so let's have a look at the two primary theses then about this book, about the origins of the universe, the Big Bang and the origins of life, all life, all DNA-based life on planet Earth. | ||
| Because we have to lean. | ||
| In fact, I think part of the genius of your book and the way you've put this up is you're actually using science itself and philosophy to suggest that there are gaps in science to do with the origins. | ||
| The arguments themselves, I think, that you're presenting are an updated version of what Aristotle was suggesting two and a half thousand years ago about the need of the prime mover, the unmoved mover. | ||
| Ho kinumenon kinei, that which being unmoved moves, excuse me. | ||
| That's how Aristotle framed it. | ||
| Would you just in your own words explain what this argument is about causality, the principle of causality, and what arises from that, which is determinism, the principle of determinism, and why they are absolutely essential to contemporary science. | ||
| And the fact that they can't resolve the origin either with regards to the Big Bang and the origins of the universe or the origin of life, why those are fundamental issues that need to be responded and cannot be responded to according to the science itself. | ||
| Well, even before Aristotle, there was another philosopher, a Greek philosopher, whose name is Parmenides. | ||
| And he used to say already, it was in Latin, ex nilo nihil, which in English is from nothing nothing can come. | ||
| So it's very important. | ||
| And today, 99% of the scientists and philosophers, they agree on the fact that from nothing, nothing can come. | ||
| So there is a consequence on this principle on which everybody agrees, is that the universe, if you want to be a materialist, the universe cannot have an absolute beginning, a beginning from nothing, because it will have the beginning from nothing. | ||
| There is a necessity for a cause. | ||
| So it's extremely interesting and important to know that all the materialists today believe or they have to believe that in one way or the other, our universe is eternal. | ||
| And surprisingly, during this last 100 years, several discoveries, several evidence came. | ||
| We count six or seven evidence showing that it is almost impossible that our universe could be eternal. | ||
| It is today highly, highly probable that our universe had a beginning. | ||
| And then, in that case, of course, we have the reason for a cause, a cause which would be different. | ||
| And this cause, of course, in philosophy, a cause which has a capacity to make the universe, we call it with a name, we can call it with a different name, but we call it with a name, which is God. | ||
| And this is a creator God. | ||
| So this question of the materialism, it's one of the aspects that it has making the materialism an irrational belief, because today, to believe that the universe is eternal, is a very difficult hypothesis to sustain today. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What you were saying just now, if I've understood this correctly, about the collapse of a number of hypotheses in the last century, this is principally we're talking about the collapse of the argument of the big crunch, right? | ||
| So you have the Big Bang sort of 14 billion years ago, and then the gravity of all the matter and energy inside the universe causes the universe to collapse in on itself and then have an infinite successions of Big Bangs and crunches. | ||
| That hypothesis was very convenient for scientists, for materialists, because it sort of allowed them to avoid. | ||
| I actually don't think it was a satisfactory explanation. | ||
| Because even if you had this infinite series of expansion and contraction, you still need to explain what sparked the Big Bang. | ||
| I think this goes back to Newton, right? | ||
| That you can't have any effect that doesn't have a prior cause. | ||
| This is part of the principle of causality. | ||
| But put that aside, put that aside. | ||
| In the 1990s, the scientists realized that the universe was expanding at an accelerating rate so great that actually the idea that it was going to implode in and of itself that gravitational force wasn't sufficient. | ||
| So it's not an infinite series of expansion and retraction. | ||
| It's a one-off. | ||
| From nothing, the Big Bang, all the matter, all the energy, all the time, space in the universe just emerged out of nothing. | ||
| That's what the scientists want us to believe. | ||
| And with the collapse of the Big Crunch theory, they really do need to come up with either an explanation for that, which they can't do because it breaks the principle of causality, or they need to read your book and be far more show far more integrity about what they don't know and accept the need for something outside of the system to have it having created the system in the first place. | ||
| Olivier. | ||
| Yes, what is true is that the discovery of the Big Bang was a very big problem for the materialist people. | ||
| And we have a chapter in our book saying that all the Russian scientists who discovered the Big Bang with Alexander Friedman, they were persecuted and killed in order to avoid this hypothesis of a beginning by the communist Marxist regime of Russia. | ||
| And also in Germany, it was the same. | ||
| And the reason is that the beginning is a problem, as Micheliev said, for the vision of the world of the materialists. | ||
| And after this, when it was not possible to inform the Big Bang, they invented the idea that perhaps after the Big Bang, you will have a Big Crunch and an infinite number of Big Bang and Bing Crunch in the past. | ||
| But in fact, as you said, it does not work for many reasons. | ||
| You mentioned Saul Perlmutter, who discovered in 1998 that after 9 billion years, the universe accelerates its expansion. | ||
| And we were with him in Berkeley a few weeks ago discussing all this. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons of the impossibility of the Big Bang and Big Crunch in the past. | ||
| But there is many others, because, for example, if you have an infinite number of big bang and big crunch, the entropy should be at a maximum, the black holes should be very numerous, the cosmological constant should dominate, and you should have a universe looking like a cigar and not homogeneous and isotropic as it is really. | ||
| So as you said, to summarize, the hypothesis of the big crunch and big bangs in an infinite number of big bung and big crunch in the past does not work. | ||
| So it's one of the problems of the materialists because there is no explanation of the beginning and there is no also good explanation of the fine-tuning. | ||
| Gentlemen, will you stand by just for 30 seconds, a minute, and I'll come back and we're going to dig on in this a little deeper. | ||
| Folks, I gave out the Birch Gold telephone number to text. | ||
| I'll do it again if you've now got your pen and paper at the ready. | ||
| You need to text Bannon, B-A-N-N-O-N to 989898. | ||
| That's Bannon to 989898. | ||
| And Philip Patrick at Birch Gold and his team are standing by waiting to give you advice and help you should you want to roll your existing IRA of 401k into an IRA in gold. | ||
| That's Bannon 989898. | ||
| On with the show. | ||
| Michelle, you were saying early on, and I want to dig in on this because I think there were two themes here in the book. | ||
| The first theme is that science doesn't have all the answers and that the more we understand about the universe, the more the lack of those answers becomes significant, which is sort of the reverse of what most people think. | ||
| Most people would think the more we know, the more the argument for God disappears. | ||
| And that's really not the case. | ||
| The more we know, the more science is discovering, especially on the astrophysics level, the more the sort of the gaps are becoming apparent. | ||
| That's, I think, the first part of your book, which I think would be very helpful if people had a wider appreciation of. | ||
| The second part of the book, and I think you put this very well, is the idea that if you just take the secularist materialist view of the universe on its own, that requires to some degree a religious type of faith to sustain. | ||
| Michel, could you just explain a little bit about that? | ||
| It's clear that the recent discoveries, which is since I would say since one century, are bringing, in fact, are bringing evidence. | ||
| We cannot say proof because absolute proof are just in field of knowledge like mathematics. | ||
| We don't have absolute proof in the real world. | ||
| But in the real world we have evidence and we have now many evidence that the world that cannot be explained without a creator God. | ||
| And let's take the main discoveries which are bringing that. | ||
| The first one is that our universe cannot be eternal. | ||
| Today the science has six or seven evidence that it is almost impossible for our universe to be eternal. | ||
| They have evidence coming from the physics, from the thermodynamics, from the expansion of universe, from quantum mechanics, from mathematics, etc. | ||
| So the cause if there is an absolute beginning, there is a problem, of course, and everybody understands that. | ||
| But that's not all. | ||
| There are many others. | ||
| The fine tuning of the universe is a fantastic discovery. | ||
| It's a discovery which is quite recent because it's dating from the nineteen sixties. | ||
| A discovery which means that all the numbers of the universe which are guiding the universe, ruling the universe, these numbers are so finely tuned that in some cases it's a fifteen decimal after the main number which cannot be changed. | ||
| If we change them just by one, our universe would not exist anymore. | ||
| And it's very important to know that several top scientists have changed their mind. | ||
| They were materialists and they have changed their mind discovering the fine tuning. | ||
| And for example, it has been the case with Fred Holl. | ||
| Fred Hull was a top scientist in the United States and the one who was mocking Georges Lemaire about the theory of the expansion and the Big Bong. | ||
| And he invented the word Big Bong, which then had a big success. | ||
| But when Fred Hull was confronted with the fine tuning of the universe, he decided himself that he would change his mind and from atheist he became a deist. | ||
| So it is a big change and this shows that the evidence that we have today that there is a creator God are not are not small evidence, they are not a small thing, they are very, very serious. | ||
| So the world has changed and this is why we call we name it in our book that there is a reversal of science. | ||
| For centuries science seems to say we don't need a God to explain our universe. | ||
| And the philosopher said if we don't need a God to explain the universe, there is a reason which is very simple and very obvious is that just God does not exist at all. | ||
| So this is what they say. | ||
| And now we are just in an opposite situation. | ||
| Look, in that ninety minutes, perhaps I could go back to ninety seconds, excuse me. | ||
| Perhaps I could go back to Olivia. | ||
| Could you just give me one minute and just say why you think that there are areas of science that require as big a leap of faith as that required in Christianity? | ||
| What I would like first to say that you said that there is a great lack of answers. | ||
| In fact, it's not exactly this. | ||
| Now, we have new questions, the question of the beginnings that we talk a lot, but also all the questions of the fine tunings and also many enigmas in history of humanity that we are pointing in the second part of our book. | ||
| And also in biology, for example, in biology, we discover that life is a miracle, in fact. | ||
| Even atheist people who discover the DNA, for example, Francis Crick, he said the apparition of life on Earth is a miracle. | ||
| And he was a pure atheist. | ||
| So how is it possible in the past we thought that coming from inner matter to living being was something very simple. | ||
| But at the end, we discovered that every living being on Earth depends on cells and cells are all coded by DNA. And DNA appears on Earth 3.8 billion years ago. | ||
| And it was already perfect. | ||
| The laws of the universe produce a marvel of technology that the density, just to imagine, the density of information in the DNA is 40 billion times more than what we can do in the best chips today on our century. | ||
| So the scholars, the scientists are absolutely astonished when they discover such technology that is absolutely essential to produce life with Earth. | ||
| Because as we said, all the bacteria, all the human beings, all the plants and all the animals need DNA. So the mystery is great. | ||
| We've run out of time now. | ||
| Very grateful for the two of you. | ||
| I know you're in demand all over the world to promote this book. | ||
| And I strongly recommend it, especially as we're coming up to Christmas. | ||
| I strongly recommend it as a Christmas stocking gift for perhaps your friends or family who haven't given Christianity a chance because they think that science has resolved all of the questions. | ||
| Olivier Bonissi and Michelle Yves Boloray, very quickly, where do people go to learn more about the book? | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you very much. | |
| Where do people go to learn more about the book? | ||
| The website first. | ||
| The website. | ||
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unidentified
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On the website, there is everything. | |
| Okay, and that website is God thescience the evidence. | ||
| God the science the evidence.com. | ||
| Many thanks for joining us folks. | ||
| We'll be back at 10 a.m. tomorrow. | ||
| And thanks to Wills and Real America's Voice and Vittorio for putting this show together. | ||
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| Friday, 17th of October, Anodomini, 2025. | ||
| Hanwell here at the helm. | ||
| Good evening. | ||
| There are few newspapers as sedate and anti-sensationalist as the Financial Times. | ||
| So when they published a recent article headlined, Did the Political Establishment Pave the Way for Trump and Farage, that caught my interest. | ||
| And it is quite a subversive argument that we're going to go through it now. | ||
| The theses inside this article are definitely worth the War Room posse consideration on this. | ||
| And the academic featured at the heart of this article, Lawrence Gunther, Dr. Gunther from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Toulouse, joins us tonight from Toulouse. | ||
| Dr. Gunther, thank you very much for joining us. | ||
| Your thesis, let me get this right. | ||
| Your thesis is effectively that it's the action or the lack of action on behalf of the political mainstream that actually created inadvertently the rise of these populist and nationalist movements right across the world. | ||
| Why don't you give us the, in your own words, what led you to concentrate on this specific branch of research? | ||
| Yes, so I became fascinated by the topics of what we call the rise of populism now during the rise of the AFD in Germany, like a few years ago, maybe eight years ago or so. | ||
| And I read an article about that topic that summarized what researchers had done so far. | ||
| And I noticed that the issue of representation was not at all considered. | ||
| So the question whether mainstream parties, the parties that existed until then, represented the political opinions of voters, in particular in Europe. | ||
| There was little research on that. | ||
| So I started this research and then I analyzed the attitudes and political positions of politicians and voters and found that the particular false theory of populism is quite correct. | ||
| In particular, that mainstream parties are on basically all cultural social topics much more liberal, much more left-wing than most voters. | ||
| And populists fill this, what I call the representation gap. | ||
| They often, like politicians from right-wing populist parties, often have attitudes that are relatively close to those of the average voter, a bit more right-winging, but relatively close. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Because this is it, this is the heart of it, this term which you've coined, representation gap. | ||
| Your analysis effectively shows that voters and mainstream politicians have long been broadly aligned on the economic issues such as tax spending, public ownership and what have you. | ||
| But on the socio-cultural issues such as immigration and criminal justice, there's a huge gap between the political parties and the various peoples around the world. | ||
| And that therefore Western publics, having long desired a greater emphasis on order control and cultural integration, Have noticed that the politicians themselves have tilted in the opposite direction, favoring what could be called inclusive and permissive approaches. | ||
| And that is, I think, a perfect synthesis here of this representation gap. | ||
| It seems to me, though, Dr. Gunther, that the best thing that the political mainstream could do if it finds the rise of what it calls the far right alarming is actually pivot to where the public is, especially on the issue of immigration. | ||
| But that's not what's happening, is it? | ||
| So I do agree that to win back voters, I think the optimal thing for mainstream parties to do is real political action on cultural issues, in particular regarding immigration. | ||
| That would mean limiting immigration and particularly asylum immigration. | ||
| I do think that for a long time there was no real action. | ||
| There were some attempts by mainstream parties, and here I'm talking mostly about Europe. | ||
| There were some attempts by mainstream parties to co-opt the rhetoric of populist writing parties, but usually without any action. | ||
| And if they tried action, then usually this action did not have any results, like the plans of the Tories to remigrate. | ||
| And in the end, it did not have any tangible results. | ||
| I do see that slowly on the European level there is a move towards more restrictive immigration policy, but this is happening very slowly and often it does not have results so far. | ||
| So that I think is the perfect analysis. | ||
| The response of the so-called Christian democratic centre-right has been to try to imitate in a certain extent the vocabulary and the rhetoric of what the mainstream calls far-right, but without the follow-through of the actual action. | ||
| That's why in our movement, in the economic nationalist sphere, we term these groups effectively performative. | ||
| Their discourse is a performance and doesn't really get to the heart of the issue which means so much to the voting public. | ||
| Dr. Gunther, what really interested me about your research and your argumentation is that it cuts across a lot of the narrative coming from the political mainstream that these what are called far-right political movements are somehow fascist, anti-democratic, and like you mentioned the AFD in Germany. | ||
| Basically, the AFD is almost a prescribed political party now. | ||
| The courts are constantly intervening with its candidates. | ||
| And not only in Germany. | ||
| The interesting thing about your research and the way you frame this is that in fact that analysis from the mainstream, you know, from the mainstream media, but also the political mainstream, would actually be incorrect. | ||
| What you're pointing out here is that these groups are responding to a democratic need which isn't being catered for by the mainstream political parties. | ||
| And that's not, that doesn't make these far-right groupings far from being anti-democratic, but part of an essential part of the democratic process. | ||
| So I think this is a very fascinating point. | ||
| And this, I think, reveals some struggle over democracy that we have underlying this discussion about concrete politics. | ||
| Because, you know, the thing is, I think most, probably the majority of voters would interpret my results the way you do. | ||
| But the interesting thing is, most researchers or politicians that I've talked to have a very different interpretation because their interpretation is well, if populist parties have the same attitudes as the average voter, what that means is that the average voter is a fascist. | ||
| Because these, like, I think many mainstream politicians and also many researchers and journalists are very convinced because of the positions of light-winged populists that they are fascists. | ||
| So everyone who's like that is then also a fascist. | ||
| And I think democracy is also defined in very different ways by people across a different spectrum nowadays. | ||
| So again, I do think that many voters would define a democracy like you or democratic behavior like you, if you represent a large part of the electorate, then this is a very democratic act because democracy is fundamentally about representation in the eyes of many people, but not in the eyes of all people. | ||
| In particular, politicians from liberal parties, mainstream parties that I've talked to, they really highlight liberal institutions as being democratic. | ||
| And they do not think that representing voters is that important within the democracy. | ||
| So they think, well, say right-wing populists try to push through some initiatives that judges don't like, then they're anti-democratic. | ||
| And if voters agree with that, then they also anti-democratic. | ||
| Hold on to that point, Dr. Gunther. | ||
| We're going to come back to that in just two short minutes. | ||
| Because that is, that I think, the confession there, what you said is really at the heart of what is wrong with what many of our viewers will think is wrong with the democratic, the inverted commas democratic mentality of the centre ground. | ||
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| That's a B-A-N-N-O-N to 989898. | ||
| Again, that's Bannon, B-A-N-N-O-N to 989898. | ||
| And I will give you that number once again if you want to get a pen and paper ready in about half an hour's time in the second part of the show. | ||
| Dr. Gunther, coming back to you, can you just repeat what you just said? | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Could you just repeat what you said about how speaking to centre-right and mainstream politicians, they don't actually feel as if it's their responsibility to respond to some of the democrats, | ||
| some of the desires of the electorate, if they can just dismiss those desires as being fascist and anti-democratic, such as the desire for greater controls on immigration? | ||
| Yeah, so I do think that there's a very strong tendency in mainstream parties to not seeing themselves as representatives, at least not in the first place, but rather as leaders. | ||
| So I have the impression these politicians think that they figured out the right policies on all kinds of topics, for instance, immigration, that are objectively good and that most voters, | ||
| if they disagree with these policies, and most voters do disagree, this is what my research shows, then it just means that the voters are either uninformed or stupid or some related concept, or they are deeply immoral, like fascists also. | ||
| In any case, I think politicians do not, mainstream politicians do not think it's their main responsibility to represent these attitudes, but to lead the way and educate voters that the policies that the politicians find good are correct. | ||
| There's also some hard data on that. | ||
| So in some of my papers, you know, I analyzed data where politicians are explicitly asked. | ||
| So say you have one opinion, your voters have a different opinion. | ||
| Now, what should a politician do? | ||
| And like more than 80% of parliamentarians say, well, a politician should follow his own judgments. | ||
| Now, interestingly, so among populist parties, even there, like a relatively large share has this opinion, but it's much less. | ||
| It's more like around a half. | ||
| If you ask voters, of course, they say, well, politicians should represent just the voters, should follow the voters. | ||
| And I think this is the struggle that we have. | ||
| What's the democracy? | ||
| Voters say, just represent me. | ||
| Politicians ought to be leaders. | ||
| As an academic who studies this, are you not what is your emotional reaction when you see this disparity between the expectations of what it is appropriate from the political class with respect to the peoples? | ||
| As someone whose job it is to pull over these statistics, to ask questions, to go and talk out and focus groups with voters and then talk, come back and talk to politicians, when you see them looking you in the eye and they say quite without any shame whatsoever, we don't really think it's our job as elected politicians to respond to the interests of our electorate. | ||
| What is your reaction from that? | ||
| And how does that differ from your colleagues, your professional colleagues? | ||
| Because there aren't that many people looking into what you're doing with this degree of resisting to make a value judgment on your findings. | ||
| Yeah, so I mean as you said, that's science. | ||
| So I try to be not emotional about these topics and I just Try to analyze things as they are. | ||
| So I was very, I don't remember my main reaction, my first reaction was just surprise because I never had much exposure to politicians before I wrote these papers. | ||
| And I always took it for granted, just talking to family and friends. | ||
| I took it for granted that it was the job of a politician to just represent opinions. | ||
| And I was very surprised that many people I talked to had a very different opinion. | ||
| I mean, you know, of course, in theory, there is some points that they have. | ||
| Of course, voters can have biases, voters are misinformed. | ||
| But this is not emotional, this is an intellectual point. | ||
| I do think my hunch, strong hunch, is that they are really wrong in the sense that they overestimate the misperceptions people have and that they also do not realize that they themselves have cognitive biases, they also have misperception. | ||
| There's some interesting research comparing how biased politicians and voters are. | ||
| And politicians tend to be even more biased, you know. | ||
| So if you take the decision away from voters, okay, you eliminate the biases of the voters, but you just replace it with your own biases. | ||
| And these, I think, are often larger. | ||
| It is fascinating because there is this expectation that most people working in this arena of social science is going to be basically communist. | ||
| So to find someone who's brave enough to look the research and the analysis in the face and come out and say it is exactly as it is, you know, I can't commend you enough. | ||
| And of course, the other thing is that comes out of what you're saying. | ||
| And to most people who follow this show, what you're saying is just absolutely obvious. | ||
| I mean, it is exactly the case as you're describing it. | ||
| The problem is the whole 99% of academia won't go near what you're saying and they certainly won't report on it neutrally. | ||
| They will say, basically, as you're saying, as the politicians are saying, if the people are fascist, then it's inappropriate to respond to them. | ||
| And that, of course, creates, as you were just highlighting just now, towards the end of your remarks, this paradox basically, that huge swathes of the political spectrum of the center ground, in order, | ||
| in Germany, I think this is the clearest example of this, in order to not respond to the democratic will with regards to the immigration crisis, by dismissing it as anti-democratic. | ||
| They themselves, using the state apparatus and the secret police and the intelligence services to clamp down on the AFD, both candidates, incumbents and also supporters, are themselves assuming the very anti-democratic paraphernalia that they set out trying to oppose. | ||
| That is, I think, the contradiction that really comes forward out of your research, Dr. Gunther. | ||
| And I hope more people spend time. | ||
| We'll put the links out to your stuff. | ||
| And I hope more people will take a look at it and circulate it. | ||
| So on social media, where can people go to get more on your research? | ||
| Yes, so the main would be Substack, where I post some articles, some analysis, and X, where I post not so often but you know you'll find me there if I have some sub-psych article I will post it on X and that's perfect and would you mind just reading reading out your your handle on X your profile | ||
| what is it Gunter Lawrence it is Gunther Lawrence that that's it perfect Dr. Lawrence thank you thank you very much for coming on the show and I wish you all the best with your research and do come And update us on your further analysis in due course. |
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