Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Ideology Behind Our Social Conflict

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Sept. 15, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

01:14:03

The Ideology Behind Our Social Conflict

This is an interview I did with Ralph Schoelhammer, subscribe to him here: https://youtu.be/og9p90x8lt8

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	Hello and welcome.
	Hello and welcome to the newest episode of the Brussels Signal Horizon podcast.
	Today I have the great pleasure to speak to Carl Benjamin, also known as Sargon of Akkad, for those who follow him on Twitter and other social media, which I highly recommend.
	Now, one of the reasons why I'm particularly excited about talking to Carl, because first of all, we know each other personally, which I think will make it even more friendly, Banta.
	And second of all, I think that many of his writings and commentary is very much in line and has been quite prescient about the things that are going on in the UK.
	But I think that's relevant for the broader West as such.
	Now, I want to begin with a very specific question.
	Carl, there's a very big event going to take place in the UK on September 13th.
	Maybe you can tell us a little bit about this.
	Yeah, so for many years now, Tommy Robinson has been hosting rallies in London, free speech rallies.
	And recently, in the last year or two, the political pressure has been ramping up and it's become increasingly apparent that the fractured nature of the British public is allowing the state to just go ahead and do whatever it likes at any point, with very little in the way of organized political pressure and resistance.
	And so he has named these the Unite the Kingdom rallies, which I think is actually a really superb name.
	And there is a wealth of people from around the country and often not even of a kind of singular political persuasion either, who want to show that they have a unified voice against what the, I guess we can just say globalist establishment is currently doing.
	And these have been growing in scope and they've turned into a kind of almost kind of like a festival of sort of a pride, British pride.
	And they've been really wonderful.
	And they've really brought a bunch of people over to the patriot side who were a bit nervous because Tommy, of course, has a checkered past.
	And it was always assumed that all he led was a rabble of football hooligans.
	However, actually, the demographics who have been attending these rallies, while they are mostly sort of native English and British people, they're not just football hooligans.
	They are, in fact, the concerned families of the country, disproportionately working class, but many middle class as well.
	And so you had GB News presenters attending the previous one that we did in Trafalgar Square, which was enormous.
	Somewhere between 50 and 100,000 people attended.
	And we got nothing but glowing coverage from GB News afterwards because they pointed out, well, these aren't jobs.
	These are people with their families.
	These are mums, dads, their children, grandparents, who are all terribly worried about the direction of the country.
	And so these have gone superbly.
	Everyone has been incredibly well behaved.
	And they've been really key in, I think, galvanizing a sense of collective will and identity.
	Because especially after COVID, I think a lot of people felt atomic and isolated and alone.
	And not sure if even there were many people in the country who agreed with them.
	And one thing that these protests are doing is showing everyone that actually a huge number of people agree with them.
	And actually, it's probably the majority of the country who agree that the country is heading in the wrong direction and seems to be, well, I don't want to just lazily say creating a two-tier system, but the evidence is overwhelming and we see it all the time.
	So it seems that, yes, the country is getting away from us.
	And actually, we are the people of the country and we deserve to have the state serve our interests and not some other interests.
	So, maybe describe a little bit to us what is going wrong in the UK.
	I mean, if one opens up social media, the news, there is, I think, a British comedian, Graham Lanahan, if I pronounce his name correctly, was now detained after arriving in Britain for a couple of years.
	You posted them on your ex account, a couple of very, I would say, not particularly offensive tweets.
	I think some were about transual topics, but nothing out of the extraordinary.
	And there was, I believe, a New York Post headline about the numbers of people that are being interrogated or arrested for their social media posts or even for retweets.
	So, even accidentally hitting retweets on something that maybe Carl Benjamin has been saying could get you a visit by the police.
	Maybe this podcast will get you, Carl.
	I hope not a visit from the police.
	So, what has been going on in the UK?
	There are, and I don't say this lightly, but there seem to be tyrannical tendencies within the current British political establishment that they try to impose them on the British or English people.
	A fair summary, frankly, a fair analysis from the outside.
	It very much feels that way from the inside.
	So, it's been something that has been percolating to the surface in the past few years, but it's the tendency to feel this way has been there for much longer: that the state has treated the minority communities with far more grace than they do the native British communities, and in particular the English community.
	And this has become more and more apparent with every scandal that happens.
	I'm trying to think of a fair way of putting it that isn't hyperbolic, but it seems quite evident that the British state really considers the native British population as a kind of body to be extracted from in order to redistribute money to foreign peoples who arrive in our country.
	And they do this believing that what they're doing is upholding the liberal value of universal human rights.
	And so, this is written to our laws, it is the ideology that is produced in all of the institutions.
	And so, at every point, we get some kind of intercession by either the police, the state itself, or the legal system in favor of the foreign over the native, the domestic.
	The most recent example, which it really incensed me as well as many other people, was the Epping Bell Hotel incident.
	So, the British state has decided that if you can break into our country, then you are entitled to be put up in a, I believe, the Bell Hotel is four-star, but it might be a three-star hotel, indefinitely at taxpayer expense, be given everything for free, such as healthcare, clothes, medicine, you know, anything you might need.
	And then they'll give you £40 a week just as spending money for some reason to just live in Britain indefinitely.
	And two of the men, and it is somewhere between 75 and 90% adult men, by the way, who break into the country.
	Two of the men at the Bell Hotel had sexually assaulted young girls in Epping.
	And so, people were protesting, saying, No, we're not really very happy about this situation.
	And we would rather it if, in fact, a bunch of predatory men from overseas weren't stationed within sight of a school.
	And so, the local council, after all of these protests, put an injunction to the High Court and said, Look, can we get these people moved?
	This will end up closing down the hotel because there's just enough business for it, apparently.
	And the Home Office, Yvette Cooper, part of the UK government, decided to intervene and request that this was overturned.
	And so, Justice Bean and a couple of other of the Lord Justices, these Justice Bean was a member of the Fabian, he was the chair of the Fabian Society, and obviously connected to the Labour Party in various ways, decided to uphold it.
	And the government appealed on the grounds that the rights claims were not equal, that the migrants, in fact, had a greater rights claim than the people of Epping not to have their children molested, because the people of Epping were arguing in the frame of the improper use of the hotel because the hotel wasn't actually being used as a hotel, as you couldn't book a room there.
	It was being used essentially kind of barracks for the government and their illegal immigrants.
	So the government argued they weren't equal and the rights of the immigrants were superior to the rights of the people of Epping on quite a narrow legalistic basis, which the court upheld.
	Now, that in isolation might seem, well, okay, fair enough.
	A human rights claim against a sort of property claim, a sort of local property claim, might seem like it is a fair argument, but there are much greater arguments around the context of this.
	And so the idea that you can just take this in isolation and pretend that it is not part of a pattern of behavior.
	Once again, the laws come down on the side of illegal migrants, frankly, illegal criminals who shouldn't be here.
	It just shows the pattern of behavior that the state has just committed come hell or high water.
	And so there have been more protests.
	People have been the protests are getting more violent, actually, which I'm obviously not in favor of, but the protests have increased.
	Many more people are getting arrested, and the tension is rising because ultimately, what the government is asking the people of Epping and the rest of the country to put up with is simply intolerable.
	And I think everyone's really, really tired of being the second-class citizen in their own native land.
	I mean, if you allow me to embed this in a broader European story, because I was writing about the Epping Hotel case in my column for an Austrian newspaper, I also mentioned it on the show.
	And I'm very glad that the way you just described it is also how I described it.
	But I have to admit, I had to go over my sources again and again and again because I said this is unbelievable.
	This cannot be true.
	You have an actual English court saying, not implicitly, but more or less explicitly, that there are different rights claims.
	And somebody who just recently crossed into England has a higher claim than somebody who has been there for maybe generations.
	But we see this in other places as well.
	I mean, if you look at the welfare state in Germany, by now, 52% of the recipients of the so-called citizens' allowance do not hold a German passport, which basically makes it a non-citizens' allowance, if I'm quite honest.
	And the same in Austria, where in large cities, it's 60% of non-Austrian passport holders.
	So do you think this is a broader malaise?
	That is, maybe in some areas, you know, that there are, it expresses itself differently in the UK, in Germany, in Austria, in France.
	But overall, do you think these are all symptoms of the same issue?
	Well, I mean, is this even different?
	It may be technically not exactly the same because of the different legal systems and benefit systems.
	But the underlying principle is clearly the same.
	And it is that, frankly, the European states are trying to uphold a particularly idealized vision of what a human right is.
	And at bottom, I think when you drill down right to what it is they think that they're doing, I think that they think that what that every person on earth should be entitled to what is essentially the same minimum level standard of living.
	And this ought to be paid for by the people of the country.
	And it's not surprising that this is actually ruining us.
	This is actually, in the case of Britain, it's driving us into a massive financial hole.
	We've got a new budget coming up very soon, in fact.
	I think it might even be overdue at this point.
	Because, frankly, everyone knows that the government is going to be forced to raise taxes because we are essentially operating international welfare states.
	We are operating international healthcare systems.
	And this is not tenable.
	We just are not rich enough to sustain these things.
	And so I think that this sort of boondoggle liberal utopian dream is going to end up collapsing in on itself out of sheer frustration, because for some reason, our states can't accept the limited nature of what they are and that they are national states and they should be therefore committed to looking after the people of the nation, and foreign peoples are therefore really not entitled to anything from a nation state.
	Actually um, and i've i've been thinking this quite a lot, because what would actually be a reasonable settlement here?
	Because I mean it, it is just preposterous on the face of it that someone from another country can claim benefits.
	I mean, for example, in the Uk we, we in London 48 of the social housing, so government funded housing in London is occupied at the moment by people born overseas.
	How so we are allowed?
	Precisely right, that's the question.
	How exactly is that possible?
	How is it?
	If you're not born in this country, you have access to the money that comes from people in this country and it's funneled back to them through the state.
	But not only that.
	If it was like half of the social housing in Hull or something, I might understand it.
	You know, if it was a relatively poorer area of the country in the north or something.
	I would understand it, but this is the capital city.
	I mean, it costs a fortune to live in London, an absolute fortune, and most people just can't afford to live in London actually, to be honest.
	So the fact that the social housing if you know, if we have to have such a thing is being given to people born overseas, it just makes you honestly it's insane, it's incensing, it's genuinely insensing.
	But the the, the very nature of the state itself has clearly gotten away from the people and that's part of the the, the underlying, uh animus under the United Kingdom protests, sorry, this is our country, this is our state, you're our prime minister, not theirs.
	And as far as we're concerned, if you know, as far as i'm personally concerned anyway, but i'm sure a lot of people share this sentiment if you are born overseas, that should mean you should never have access to to benefits.
	In my country, that means you don't get to use the NHS for free.
	You should have to pay for it as if it was a private service.
	And if you do not like that, you have a country to which you can return.
	You have somewhere that is operating In your collective interests as a member of a national of that country, uh, I personally would favor a return to a kind of metic system like they had in ancient Athens, uh, that foreigners could come here and work and pay taxes and buy property, uh, yeah, but they just shouldn't be politically enfranchised and they shouldn't have access to anything provided for them by the state.
	That I think that would be a perfectly fair and reasonable settlement, and if they don't like it, they have countries of their own that they can live in, and I don't think that's in any way outrageous, and yet to the liberal order, that's essentially a kind of heresy.
	Uh, I'm I'm I'm apparently a very far-right person for thinking for demanding what I think is actually a very reasonable compromise on this.
	No, I agree.
	I mean, I recently got an email from somebody who listens to the Austrian content, the German-speaking content producer, and he says, Oh my god, I hope I hope you're not traveling along the same lines of radicalization as Carl Benjamin.
	I was thinking, Well, actually, I hope I'm traveling in the same direction.
	But I don't feel very radical, that's the thing.
	Like, I know there are people way to my right on all of these things, and I don't, I'm not there, I don't agree with those things, but I understand why they're there, though, because it's very clear that the it's it's always an unspoken assumption, or it was, and it is on almost every non-Western country that the state is designed for the people is to serve the people that is in it, right?
	For example, we've got a subscriber who is out in Thailand, he's British, he's out in Thailand teaching English, and he tells us regularly how the Thai state is quite restrictive if you were a foreigner living in the country.
	For example, you have to learn Thai, you have to have a certain amount of wealth before they'll let you move there.
	And if you're not working and therefore you can't sustain yourself or your family, then you have to leave.
	And that's perfectly reasonable because the alternative would be to become a burden on the Thai people.
	And the Thai state, being acting in the interest of the Thai people, which again sounds crazy to a European, will not permit it.
	They just won't have it.
	You know, they're not cruel or punitive or anything.
	They just have rules and they just uphold them.
	And there is absolutely nothing wrong with us doing the same.
	There's nothing bigoted or prejudiced or cruel or callous or in some way unkind.
	It's just exactly what one would expect to have a successful, stable, and prosperous country.
	That's all we're asking for.
	What do you think drives this?
	I saw recently, by the way, for the viewers and listeners, Carl's podcast, or actually your media endeavor, Lotus Eaters.
	I think there's a significant chance that you might have Elon Musk on in the future.
	So I just want to say a bunch of people have asked him to come on.
	I haven't actually been contacted by him yet, but anytime, because I mean, the reason I'm back on Twitter is because Elon Musk bought it and reinstated my account.
	So I would like to thank him personally because he has done a huge amount for me personally and my career online.
	So I would love to have him on, even if it was just a Zoom chat, just to say thank you so much.
	And he recently tweeted that in his belief, one part why the elites are particularly so fond of mass migration is because it's supporting new voters.
	So that's his theory.
	Do you think that's what it is, or do you think there is actually a true ideological, philosophical again?
	It might be wrong, but that's the underlying motivation for so many of these people who take the side or who push for even more migration than it's already taking place.
	Or this idea of universal human rights, right?
	That we simply it's almost a crime to distinguish between the English or the Germans or the Austrians and somebody that just came into these countries five minutes ago.
	Yeah, no, I believe that it is genuinely something they hold as a true and sincere conviction.
	I understand why people think that this is actually cruel people being vindictive towards the host populations.
	I do understand because that is how it manifests.
	So it's very easy to look at it and say, well, you wouldn't make this decision unless you wanted to hurt us and therefore.
	But actually, if you look at the people we're talking about, if you actually like identify an individual person and look into their background, you realize they've been committed to this for many, many years.
	And the British government is actually a really great, they're full of great examples of this.
	I mean, so you've got one of the home office ministers, Jess Phillips, she's been a radical feminist for her entire career.
	If you look at Yvette Cooper, she put up a picture of the founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain in her office.
	I think it was Eve Cooper, Mike Roma Reese, one of the two.
	You see a long-standing pattern.
	I mean, like Lord Bean, who made the judgment against Epping, he was chair of the Fabian Society.
	And you don't become the chair of the Fabian Society unless you have deep ideological commitments to Fabianism.
	For anyone who doesn't know, basically Fabianism is one branch that sprang off in the beginning of the 20th century, late 19th century, after the failures of socialism.
	Frankly, it was fascism, Lenin's vanguardism, and in Britain, Fabianism, which is socialism by incremental means.
	And I am not joking when I say that their logo used to be a wolf in sheep's clothing.
	It genuinely was.
	Look it up.
	So the fact that he was, you know, and they all have been part of the Fabian Society at some point, like Siddique Khan was the chair of the Fabian Society in this country, but they were mayor of London, right?
	So it's not something that they don't have deep ideological roots in.
	I mean, Lord Hermer, who is the current Attorney General, again, if you just look into his history, he has been a radical socialist for a very long time.
	Keir Starmer himself was a radical socialist in his student days, became a lawyer and then spent his time going.
	I mean, he went to, say, places like Jamaica to abolish the death penalty for free.
	He didn't get any money to do this.
	He went over to Jamaica, found child murderers on death row, and said, Oh, look at these poor child murderers.
	Look at this terrible punishment that they're going to get.
	And he campaigned to abolish the death penalty and he was successful.
	And so, I mean, that takes a deep moral commitment to evil.
	I mean, what I consider evil.
	You know, I think child murderers should be hanged, obviously.
	But that's because I'm normal.
	But the point is, you've got to have a deep ideological commitment to this moral position to spend your entire life doing these things.
	And so I, and if you look at the institutions as well, they're constantly replicating the same ideological stances because of the closed culture that they get to operate within.
	Because frankly, there's very little accountability and there's very little in the way of public access.
	A good counterexample on this is actually America, because they actually get to vote for their judges and their police chiefs and things like that.
	But we actually don't.
	And so if you have a kind of agreed upon institutional ideology, well, it's understandable that not only does everyone in the institution who raises through the ranks have to kind of follow this ideology, well, the whole thing will end up filled with these people.
	And they won't understand why people disagree with them.
	Because why would they?
	Everyone is basically on the same hymn sheet and has been since university days for these people.
	So yeah, no, I really believe they truly sincerely think that they're doing the right thing.
	And I really truly believe that they actually view what they call the far right, which is just kind of the native people of the country who feel attached to their country.
	You mean the woke right car, right?
	Yeah, the woke right.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Which is just, I mean, most mums and dads woke right at this point because they truly believe that they have a collective claim to their own ancestral land.
	I genuinely believe, because this is so antithetical to liberalism itself, they can't understand them and they view them as essentially proto-Nazis, I think is the way that they look at them.
	I mean, one Labour MP about the flagging campaign, the reason I have an England flag behind me is because I wanted to show solidarity with all of the people across England who have been putting up the St. George's Cross.
	Because this is, again, it's a widespread feeling of dispossession that people have.
	And so stamping the St. George's Cross, saying, no, this is our country.
	That's what this is about.
	And one Labour MP the other day just came out and just called everyone doing it extremists.
	It's like, no, they're not extremists.
	They're just normal people who come from a non-liberal perspective that actually the English people have the primary claim to England in the same way that we think the Scottish people have the primary claim to Scotland.
	The Palestinians have the primary claim to Palestine.
	Like these are, these are all group claims that are conceded in every other context until it comes to a Western European country, because we are the liberal countries.
	I mean, there's a reason that the UN doesn't consider anyone other than the Sami indigenous to Europe.
	The Sami are not indigenous to Europe, instantly.
	They come from Asia.
	But the Europeans are not indigenous to Europe as far as the UN is concerned, which is just remarkable.
	But what they mean is the Europeans are the liberal peoples.
	They're the peoples outside of time and space and society.
	They exist in any place and any time.
	And therefore, they can't form this collective rights claim.
	But everyone else in the world can.
	And that's actually normal.
	And we're actually the weird ones when it comes to this.
	I mean, the raise the flag campaign, I think, was a wonderful idea.
	This leads up to my next question.
	There was a wonderful little video somebody posted of people then painting the St. George's Cross on trash and on discarded couches in front of the house because they said, whenever you put the St. George's Cross somewhere, somebody will show up and try to take it away.
	So it was, I think it was very British, very English humor.
	It was very funny.
	But there was something else underlying it, which is, I understand when you talk about Sadiq Khan and Kirstan, but that makes complete sense to me.
	Even when we use this term, which I think is helpful in this case, when we talk about the elites that have subscribed to this ideology.
	But I always wonder what happens if on the local level, somebody raises an English flag or puts an English flag somewhere, and then comes some regular guy who works for the city along and wants to take it away or tear it down.
	I mean, the same person who probably just a month ago put up a progress flag.
	So this regular civil servant, public worker, why are they going along with it?
	This is what I miss, by the way, not just in England or the UK, but all over Europe, that so many there's not more resistance within the system, within, let's say, the lower levels of the system.
	Why do you think that is?
	They've got mortgages to pay.
	They have bills.
	They've got families to support.
	Having a principled objection is great, but not making your mortgage payments so you become homeless and your children go hungry, that's terrible.
	And so, and I think another thing to remember is a lot of the areas in which the flags are being taken down are very diverse.
	And I mean, there are a bunch of videos coming out of London where you could see legacy Londoners putting up the flags and the sort of new Londoners taking them down and just shrugging.
	I mean, it's not even that they were being political about it.
	It's just to them, it was just a symbol with no meaning.
	And they were just told to take it down.
	So they went and took it down.
	And they didn't really want to get into the politics of it because it's not really their business because they aren't connected to the flag in the same way that a native English person is.
	So I think those are the reasons, frankly.
	And I think that if anyone's entertaining any ideas of the arms of the state showing any kind of loyalty and patriotism to the people themselves, please disabuse yourselves of these notions now.
	They will do as they are told and in the way that the people who pay them tell them to act.
	That's what they will do.
	Do not think that there's going to be a breakaway of the army or the police or someone like that who go on a principled strike in defense of their own nation or something.
	They are ideologically told this is you are bad people.
	They are propagandized into thinking that you are the far right.
	They are propagandized in thinking that the sort of globalist liberalism of the institutions is the right thing to do.
	And we see really great examples of this in Britain when the police on the ground try to explain to a normal person what they've done wrong.
	Now, a lot of the times when you mentioned earlier the sort of 12,000 people a year who are arrested for speech crimes on Twitter and you get various other forms of speech crimes in Britain.
	And as someone who deals with this professionally, obviously we've got a much broader and deeper understanding of these things and we have the proper vocabulary to explain what it is we really mean.
	But the average person doesn't and it's not, there's no reason they should do.
	But the average person also includes the average policeman and watching them stumble through their sort of crash course on intersectionality to try and explain why it's wrong that they're putting up the England flag or whatever it is and that this is somehow a form of racism and that it's a hate crime or something like this is actually genuinely kind of comical.
	And you can see that it can't go on forever.
	I think it is basically when the confidence is completely lost in the superiors that things will actually change.
	I don't think these people will defect.
	I think they'll just stop doing their jobs properly when confidence is fully lost in the system.
	But I think, and honestly, I think that time is actually approaching, but it's not here yet.
	So I wouldn't expect any changes quite yet.
	I mean, this is something that Mark Stein once said, that the UK is becoming a country where everything is policed except crime.
	And he was pointing towards exactly this, that many of the true criminal offenses are no longer investigated.
	But if somebody posts something on social media, the police is going to be all over it.
	But as you said, is this then, and I just want to, I know you said this before, but I just, from my own understanding, maybe want to hear it again.
	So that do the members of the police, you know, the average copper, I guess would be the right term, mean, do they go along with it, as you just said, because they have mortgages to pay, they have families to feed, which I understand, or do you think that they also believe it?
	Like, is this ideological indoctrination within state or state adjacent institutions already so strong that even these members believe it?
	Or do they just do it because they feel they have no choice?
	I mean, I know this is, I know you kind of look into the heads of every single, this is both.
	It's both.
	From what I've seen of the police interacting with the public, and there are many, many videos of it, they have been instructed by, and I think it's worth remembering that the people who are in the rank and file of the police forces are not there because they are philosophers.
	They're there because they're people who volunteer to try and keep the streets safe.
	But they're being told from people who have not only moral authority and actual political authority and economic authority, but also intellectual authority over them.
	Look, we have a professor from this university, Cardiff University, whatever, and he's going to teach you what a hate crime is.
	He's going to teach you about transgenderism.
	He's going to teach you about diversity.
	And so there's no reason, like students in a classroom, that they wouldn't have an explicit trust in that person and assume that what they're saying is 100% correct.
	And that there's no real argument against what's being said, because it's got the institutional voice behind it.
	And so there's no reason that they wouldn't come away from that thinking, right, to be a good person is to follow this agenda.
	And therefore, oh, I see someone being transphobic here.
	I mean, there are examples of people posting stickers in the windows that are transphobic, saying, you know, they're only men and women, not anything else.
	And the police have knocked on the door.
	And we've got the videos of these people being like, what?
	And the police are like, you're going to have to take that down.
	That's offensive.
	And they think they're doing the right thing because they've been told by the institutional forces that they're doing the right thing.
	So they've got all of the advantages to make these people think that they're in the right.
	And not only that, though, there's also a kind of arrogance that comes along with excessive amounts of liberalism.
	The liberal conceit is that the liberal is smarter than everyone else.
	And if you are, say, 130 IQ professor, maybe you are smarter than everyone else.
	If you are a pretty average police officer who has been told by the 130 IQ professors, if you understand the basics of intersectionality, then you are smarter than the public.
	And then you go and interface with the public and they don't know anything about sexuality.
	They haven't even been through the training course you've been through.
	I've seen them coming away with a clearly smug, self-satisfied, oh, we are actually superior to these people attitude.
	But the thing is, the people that they're arguing with have a legitimate moral case against the intersectional propaganda.
	It's just that they themselves are not trained sufficiently to be able to articulate it properly.
	Honestly, I mean, I've personally had a couple of interviews with police talking about this sort of thing.
	And one regarding Jess Phillips, where I went to Birmingham police station and was interviewed about what I tweeted at her.
	And one thing that became very clear is they knew that they were out of their depth because I knew what this subject was about.
	And so they started asking me and I just started explaining things to them.
	And I could see the kind of misting over their eyes.
	They're like, all right, this is a bit above my pay grade.
	And so they just end up letting me go with no charges or anything like that because I don't think I've done anything wrong.
	And I could explain why I don't think I've done anything wrong.
	But the average person can't do that.
	And the average person is and shouldn't be expected to do that either.
	Really, they shouldn't have to deal with this.
	But this is the world we're in.
	It's becoming really rather Soviet.
	I completely understand that.
	I completely agree.
	But if I'm sure that, again, many of our viewers are familiar with the, I don't know if it was a Monty Python sketch where you have the two SS soldiers talking to each other and the one guy says to the other, is it possible that we are the baddies, that we are actually not the good guys in this?
	And if we look at what has not been revealed with the grooming gangs, that this has been going on much longer than originally thought, that the dimensions are probably much higher than was originally thought.
	I read through some of the court documents and I'm sure that you did as well, and also what the newspapers were reporting.
	I mean, these were absolutely horrific crimes.
	This was not just, I mean, even the word grooming, I have to admit, even the word rape almost seems too mild for the things that happen.
	I mean, we talk about girls that being branded, that have been penetrated with, you know, with objects.
	I think torture gangs would probably be more appropriate.
	But we also know that in some places, police did turn a blind eye.
	In some places, if I'm informed correctly, immediately tell me if I'm wrong here, that in some places members of the police even participated in these crimes.
	And this is, and this is, we're talking about something that is both so unspeakably, but also so obviously evil.
	There is not a lot of room for interpretation.
	But I still have a sense as a forward as I'm in the UK Lee and maybe something is moving that I have not yet picked up.
	Maybe you can enlighten us on this a little bit, that there's not a stronger also, maybe not a protest movement, but a realization that these kind of policies that you just eloquently described and that kind of ideology really has horrible, horrible consequences for a very large number, in this case, mostly young girls, for a very large number of people.
	Yes.
	So one thing that modern hate crime legislation creates is an awareness of group dynamics because it protects on certain characteristics, which creates a quote-unquote community.
	Now, a community, by the actual definition of a community, is a time and place of people who are resident in an area.
	But you'll notice that we hear about the gay community or the Muslim community.
	And what they are using that word to mean is every instance of a homosexual, every instance of a Muslim.
	And so really what they mean is kind of the gay race, the Muslim race, as in every time and place when someone falls into this category, they're an instance of that thing.
	So it's not a community.
	And the word community is actually being used to kind of conceal the actual sort of racialized nature of what we are talking about here.
	And so when you have this legal code instantiated in your courts and in the minds of the people in charge, you end up creating hierarchies of importance.
	You are now dealing with groups against groups.
	And one thing that intersectional philosophy holds is that racism, sexism, xenophobia, any of the phobias and isms, they've long said that they're power plus prejudice.
	So if the group doesn't have power, as in the operational strength to be able to enforce its will, then it is in every case under a form of oppression.
	Now, that isn't true, obviously, otherwise every aristocracy throughout human history has been oppressed by the peasants, which is obviously not true.
	But it also means that the nature of what the state and the people running it are concerned about becomes transmogrified into something else.
	Because a normal liberal person would say, well, liberalism is really about protecting the individual from the state.
	So why is any of this happening?
	If a police officer is part of a rape gang and they rape a child, actually the traditional classical liberal sort of formulation would say, well, we know who we're supposed to protect in this regard.
	But when you add this kind of layer of intersectional enlightenment to what's happening, you realize that what they're doing is trying to protect minority groups from the oppression of the majority group.
	And so the state actually finds itself not as the oppressive force, but actually it can position itself as the liberatory force.
	The state is here as the defender of the minorities against the callous opinions of the majority.
	And so you'll notice that all hate crime legislation is really about preventing the negative characterization of minority groups.
	You're not allowed to say that Muslims are prone to terrorism.
	You're not allowed to say that Muslims are prone to rape gangs.
	You're not allowed to say that X is X and Y is Y and whatever it is, you know, because many minority groups have negative characteristics that are associated with them, unfortunately.
	And I'm not trying to make a judgment on that, but that just is the case.
	Many don't, but that's, you know, nobody really cares.
	And so the hate crime legislation, the whole worldview allows the people using state power to frame themselves as the defenders of the oppressed minority, the marginalized minority communities against the majority community, which ironically means that it is the majority that is marginalized by the very state that liberalism was supposed to protect it from.
	And all of this is being done.
	for liberalism.
	And so this is all very a liberal philosophy working through its own internal logic.
	And so the state will arrest Graham Linehan for his transphobic tweets.
	And this is very liberal, even though in a past era of liberalism, this would have been like the Americans who are operating on like a 1.0 version of liberalism are looking at this in horror.
	Like, why are they arresting him for a tweet?
	Well, if you work through it, Graham Linehan was negatively characterizing the trans community.
	And the state is here to protect the trans community from the negative attitudes of society, because in the negative attitudes of society come prejudice, bullying, discrimination.
	You know, people in society, the average person might object to the man in the dress walking into the women's toilets to follow your young girl into there or something.
	And therefore, that's discrimination, that's a form of oppression, that's a form of prejudice and hate.
	And so the state finds itself as the defender of these people against evil comedians who tweet about these things.
	And that's how we got here.
	Do you think it would be fair to say that, because I completely share your view on this, also your view on the fact that communities do exist?
	I recently, before we started this conversation, looked up your Twitter feed and somebody tweeted at you that I'm paraphrasing slightly, but that forests don't exist only trees, which is a very odd thing to say because we can then go into greater detail.
	But of course, communities are a real thing, just as it is true that human beings are both individualistic, but we're also social and have a tendency towards, I wouldn't call it collectivism, but towards socialization, whatever you want to call it.
	And what I find so interesting in many of the debates, also the conversation that we are having is I do believe that communities have, if not an obligation, then at least maybe not a legal obligation, but a moral obligation to police its members.
	So when I hear, again, the same is true in Austria, in Germany, and other places, when I hear about the Muslim community and also from representatives of that community, they claim to speak for the Muslim community.
	But I also have to say, okay, if that community exists, then you also have a responsibility to police people that, for example, do things as they happened in Rotherham, right, with the grooming gangs.
	But there is a sense that they don't want to do this.
	And then it becomes, or it moves from being that famous few bad apples to, yes, there are a few bad apples, but the broader community is tolerating or encouraging it.
	There's a Mia Raja.
	I don't know if you know him.
	He was, I think, he was also involved in the political.
	I'm aware of him, actually.
	I'm aware of him.
	Yeah.
	He was also involved in uncovering these grooming gangs.
	One thing that stuck with me that he said at an interview, and I probably completely mispronounced his name, and I apologize immediately, that he said, very often it was that family members knew.
	So you had a father of five who sits at the dinner table, each with his children and his wife, and then he goes out and rapes a 12-year-old girl.
	That is not just this one guy who commits the crime.
	I think there's a broader thing at issue here.
	And we tend not to see this because I hear connected to your theory of liberalism.
	Because, well, but at the end, it's just that one guy.
	No, no, no.
	It is this one guy that comes out of a milieu that is not even discouraging that kind of behavior.
	Do you think that's fair to say, or am I going too far?
	No, I think you're completely accurately characterizing the problem.
	Yeah, the person I was arguing with is very much the sort of Margaret Thatcher view, there's no such thing as society.
	Actually, there is.
	And what they're expressing there is there is no forest, there are any trees, is the most extreme liberal perspective on it.
	That it is purely material, purely individualistic, and that the idealistic and metaphysical level of human existence no longer exists.
	So, you can see how a person like that really does see just foreigners as just interchangeable with ourselves, as if there's no difference between us and people anywhere else, because there are only people, there are no cultures, and therefore people are just random widgets that can be just swapped in and out.
	And this is the problem with the most extreme version of liberalism.
	But you're absolutely correct because everyone is well aware that there is such a thing as a society, there is such a thing as a group.
	And in fact, it seems that there's no such thing as morality without the group.
	Because, I mean, what does it mean to be moral if you're alone, Robinson Crusoe style, on a desert island?
	You can't be immoral to someone else.
	There's no one else to be immoral to, because all morality is actually in the connection that we have with other people.
	That's the thing that is the morality.
	And so, to say there's no social morality and there's no group that has moral responsibility, that's not true.
	All of society is a series of groups that is where the moral content of human life lies.
	And we have all sorts of customs and unspoken rules and habits and expectations of one another.
	And that's one of the reasons that multiculturalism is so bad.
	Because when you introduce a bunch of people who either don't care about your rules or don't understand them, they won't follow them.
	And this puts everyone on edge.
	This is like, oh, right, okay, the moral norms I was expecting from other people no longer obtain.
	Well, what does that mean?
	Actually, it means everyone sort of turtles up and they are reluctant to go out and they find they believe the world is more dangerous, even if it's not.
	They are worried about and they become unsure about the world around them.
	But moving to a point about sort of, I guess you could say, collective guilt, because I think that's really what we're coming to here.
	It seems to be inescapable, frankly, because there are so many examples of what you described.
	The nature of the gangs themselves necessarily requires an extended network of people to be implicit and sorry, complicit with them.
	Because what they would do, it'd be a gang of young men, like five or six young men, or sometimes more, and not necessarily young either, actually, who would groom these English girls into being dependent and addicted and abused by them.
	And then they would traffic them around the country to other Muslim areas and prostitute them.
	So we know there are definitely thousands of rapists just wandering around free at the moment and will probably never see justice.
	But like you said, we know that the families also knew because we've got, like, there was a Daily Mail article in 2017 that detailed how the Muslim wives basically viewed the girls as kind of unworthy because they operate in honor culture in which the honor of the tribe and the family of the clan is upheld by behaviors.
	And these girls didn't behave in a way that these foreign cultures found honorable.
	And therefore, well, they're basically just prostitutes.
	And so they're basically not worthy of consideration.
	And so they had no problem with what they were doing.
	And I mean, there are so many terrible examples on how widespread this is.
	Like there was one instant, I think it was in 2013 in Oldham, where a 12-year-old girl had been kidnapped by some Muslims, raped, was drunk, and went to a police station.
	And the police said, no, come back with an adult when you're sober.
	And on her way home, she got raped twice more by Muslims in this community.
	And it's like, right, the odds of that happening are just so low that you must admit that this is a community problem.
	The view on the vulnerable woman who is dishonored is a real problem in this culture.
	But moreover, when I was first looking into this, you find various reports and they give case studies.
	And one of the things that they reveal is how familial these gangs are.
	So, for example, like there'd be cases of the man who'd groomed and essentially got into his power, some young girl, and he would phone up his brother, his cousin, his friends, and say, right, come round so you can do what I'm doing.
	And that just I'm reading that, I was just like, there is not one person in my phone that I could ring to say, come on, do this with me.
	Right.
	And if I told anyone that I was doing something, I said, but I'm going to the police.
	You know, stay where you are.
	I'm calling the cops.
	And so you see it's a toastly, toastly alien way of approaching human relations.
	But what this has done, and it's one of the things that's very difficult for people to admit, is that it has brought a collective burden of guilt on this particular community.
	And everyone can feel it.
	And I mean, for example, when Polls, the Muslim community is the least popular community in Britain, or the sorry, it's the second least popular, just above the gypsies, who are also very unpopular for kind of not nearly to the same extent, but kind of similar reasons, actually.
	There's a kind of collective burden that they carry because they're just a nuisance everywhere they go.
	And this is something that the Muslim community is very sensitive to because they're such an honor-based community.
	But it's something that the liberal state is completely blind to because there are any trees, there's no forest.
	And so you can, in your liberal sort of myopic liberal view, can say, well, we have the three individuals or five individuals who are responsible for the actual trafficking.
	And therefore, what's your problem?
	You're just being a bigot.
	It's like, but no, I know that there are dozens, if not hundreds of other people who are complicit in this crime.
	And you're just letting them go.
	And if that's the case, then obviously that colours a normal person's view of that entire community.
	Because why is that community, as you said, not policing its own?
	Why is that community willing to tolerate this kind of behavior from within it?
	And the fact that it's 64 different towns and cities in Britain, I think Rupert Lowe's independent rape ganglions inquiry is found now, I think it was 84 or 64.
	It's very prolific is basically the answer.
	And if it's such a common feature of this culture, wherever it goes, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that this is not an aberration in the community and actually is a moral aspect of the community that is replicated wherever it goes.
	And so it's very difficult to persuade people they should be sympathetic to it, especially as the community itself has shown very little contrition.
	It's just really terrible for what has happened and it's still happening.
	And it's one of those sort of pre-theoretical, pre-political loyalties that is being attacked in the nature of the community and sort of the little platoon, as Edmund Burke would put it.
	And the British state has become completely blind to this, completely blind to it.
	And I think that's really the problem because no catharsis can be expelled through the proper punishment of the people who have been involved.
	Rupert Lowe got himself kicked out of reform by saying, Well, obviously, we have to deport the rapists.
	I mean, many of those rapists, by the way, they get like five years in prison, serve two and a half years, and then they're back on the streets, right?
	So they meet their victims in real life, which is deeply traumatic to the victims, obviously.
	And so Rupert Lowe got himself kicked out of reform by saying, Well, look, I actually think that those people need to be deported, but also the family members who knew about it need to be deported because they should have gone to the authorities like anyone else.
	But the problem is the loyalty of those communities is to their own rather than to justice.
	And that's a way of life that's just not compatible with this country.
	So I actually completely concur with what he said.
	I think that anyone who knew about it and did nothing should be deported because you are complicit with it.
	One of the things, and this dart tells nicely with this conversation that I very much enjoy about your commentary and your writing, is that although I would consider you, as I would myself, by the way, although I consider you to be on the right, I think you're not blind.
	On the contrary, you're actually a very good observer of some of the things that actually do go wrong on the right.
	For example, libertarianism or this overemphasis on economic forces.
	And that brought you a little bit into hot water because you did something that I personally find very admirable.
	You said, well, even capitalism, or the critics of capitalism, are worth reading.
	For example, Marx.
	And this was something also that somebody wrote to me and said, oh, you cannot become like Karl Benjamin because he said that there's actually interesting stuff in Karl Marx, which I think is true.
	I mean, you mentioned this also that the idea that, well, ideas have an impact or that your surroundings influence your thinking.
	I mean, that seems like something at least worthwhile of inquiry.
	So maybe you can flesh out for us a little bit, if you will, your idea of liberalism, how you define it, because I think you have a somewhat different approach in others, and you don't have to go there.
	I'm just asking because I know that many of you as the listeners would be mad if I don't go there.
	More than happy.
	More than happy.
	You had quite the expat with James Lindsay on this topic as well.
	So this is a heated debate that you're having with quite a lot of people.
	Well, I think it went better for me than it did for him because I think I'm right and he's wrong.
	That's the problem.
	So Karl Marx is the specter of liberalism because Karl Marx is a very disappointed liberal.
	That's his problem.
	The liberals promised what is essentially communism.
	If you look at what liberals actually were advertising with liberalism originally, was to say, well, actually, we should have liberty and equality.
	In our hypothetical state of nature thought experiment, these two conditions are harmonized into the same position.
	As in, you are a Robinson Crusoe.
	And this is the term that Marx uses actually on an island, and that's your intrinsic nature.
	And so Marx was like, yeah, so what we want, and John Locke, Rousseau, they would argue that we want to preserve as many of the freedoms in the state and the equality of the state of nature in society as possible.
	Now, John Locke was very inconsistent on this.
	In the second treatise, he just basically gives up equality as it's obviously ridiculous.
	You can't have a kind of absolute equality and liberty in society.
	And someone like Robert Nozick is very, very thorough on this in Anarchy State Utopia and the State.
	It's very, very, very thorough on this.
	And it's self-evident.
	I mean, any amount of equality destroys liberty.
	Any amount of liberty destroys equality because people are different and they get different results out of the actions they take.
	It's very, very straightforward.
	But the presupposition of that is that there are social structures and that there is property that can create the inequality.
	And it's Rousseau himself who admits in the discourse on inequality, from whence does inequality arise?
	Well, it's the man who first staked out some an area of ground and said, This is mine and no one else can have it.
	And Rousseau laments, he says, all of the wars in history, all of the suffering that man has gone through, all of the maladies that inflict him in the modern era, like gout and all of these excessive problems of consumption, these all stem from him staking out that piece of property because that's the root of inequality.
	And to be honest, he's right.
	The fact that we own things is the root of inequality.
	And if you are the ideal liberal and you'll say, no, look, we're going to have liberty and equality, and this is how it's going to be.
	Again, think of the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal.
	Okay, well, where has that gone?
	Well, it goes to communism, frankly, because even Rousseau has to admit, because Rousseau's solution is, well, everyone can be a small holding farmer, and everyone gets the state will assign them a plot of land for them to work.
	And so there we go.
	We've solved the inequality problem.
	We've solved the liberty problem.
	He's got a very complex formulation for what liberty means in that equation as well.
	But the thing is, they're dancing around the truth of the matter from the liberal perspective.
	If you want equality, you do have to abolish property.
	And Marx and Engels and various other communists have just argued that, look, you promised a return to equality, and that means getting back to what we had in the state of nature.
	And you admit that you left the state of nature to secure property in the first place.
	Because, of course, in the state of nature, you don't have property.
	This is one of the main concerns.
	This is the entire justification of Locke's thesis: yeah, no, it's to secure our property and estates.
	It's like, yeah, well, that's not equality then.
	And you've just let equality go.
	And so Marx is just the vengeful avenging angel of the liberal dream to say, no, you promised this and we're going to have it.
	And so, okay, I mean, I'm not in favor of any of this, obviously.
	I'm very, you know, traditionally minded and I believe in virtue ethics.
	So if I worked hard to get the property I have, no one else has got a right to it.
	And I'm not in favor of equality in any way, shape, or form.
	And I'm not even really that in favor of what they call liberty because for them, liberty is liberty from society itself.
	Whereas I think that liberty is actually required, found in society.
	And any kind of equality is at best a kind of moral equality about regard and consideration and not anything you could measure.
	You know, equality would be a fundamentally metaphysical and unmeasurable characteristic.
	So suggesting it could be about pay or something like that or property ownership, that's ridiculous.
	So I don't agree with anything that liberalism has proposed at this point.
	But you can't divorce Karl Marx from John Locke or Thomas Hobbes.
	This is a continuum of liberal thinking.
	And it arrives at a place where, well, frankly, someone like James Lindsay, all he can do is demonize and stigmatize Karl Marx, because otherwise he would have to accept and recognize his critique.
	Because from the liberal's own standards, the critique is correct.
	Now, like I said, I'm not a liberal, so I don't care about his critique.
	Karl Marx doesn't haunt my thoughts.
	So I can just read Karl Marx fairly dispassionately, like I was reading Thomas Aquinas or something because I'm an atheist.
	I don't care about his opinion on Christianity or like I could read Muhammad, you know, like in the Quran.
	I don't care.
	I'm not, I don't think he's the seal of the prophets or anything because I'm not religious in any way.
	So it doesn't, it doesn't worry me.
	But Karl Marx haunts the liberal because they worry that he might be right.
	They worry that actually they might have to find themselves agreeing with him because he's just following up the premises they've laid out themselves.
	And so, but the thing is, well, like Karl Marx, his contribution to philosophy is not just in the realm of liberalism or economics.
	For example, in the German ideology, he makes The superb observation that in his day, the sort of Hegelian German philosophy was obsessed with ideas that implanted themselves that transmogrified us and therefore reformatted the world around us.
	And Karl Marx points out that actually the sort of sensualist tradition, going back to what's the chap with the statue?
	There's John Locke and there's the French chap with the statue.
	I can't remember his name offhand, but he's got a thought experiment.
	If a statue came to life, how would it know about the world?
	So if its nose became real, it would smell.
	If it could hear, if its ears became really here, it could see.
	So basically, it was very well understood by the ideologues in the French Revolution, actually, around the turn of the late 18th, 19th century.
	That actually, yes, all of our information about the world is sensory.
	It all comes to our senses.
	And you have the sort of human view of complex ideas that end up building together.
	And, you know, really, it doesn't, what they actually thought about the metaphysics of the ideas is not really important.
	The important part is that Marx just nails this down in the German ideology saying, look, it's obvious our ideas are drawn from the world around us.
	And as soon as you look at any of liberal theorizing like that, you realize that's obviously true.
	So, for example, Thomas Hobbes was like, no, we need an absolute sovereign.
	Why?
	Because I lived through a civil war and the civil war was hell.
	So I'm telling you now, you know, get anything to prevent the civil war would be better than going through a civil war.
	Well, that's ideas directly drawn from reality.
	And you've got the same with John Locke.
	John Locke, if you think about John Locke's philosophy, it's so evidently drawn from a time where there is a giant open and fertile frontier to explore.
	John Locke was also a colonial administrator for a company in London for, I think it was Virginia.
	I can't remember which one it was, one of the 13 colonies.
	And so obviously he got a lot of information, a lot of inspiration from the English experience in the wilderness of America that was, you know, basically a virgin wilderness.
	And he was like, okay, well, what does an Englishman do in the virgin wilderness of Australia?
	Well, of America.
	Well, he's a very reasonable chap.
	And, you know, like as an Englishman, I actually agree with most of what John Locke says, but not for the, not just for the reasons, but like, not in the presuppositions that he makes to get there.
	But then, you know, if you look at Rousseau, for example, okay, does France have an untapped frontier?
	No, France is actually quite a compact country and a very old country, and there's a great deal of settlement.
	So what's the issue?
	Well, the issue is the Anchon regime, the very highly stratified nature of French society.
	And so his philosophy is very clearly directed against that.
	And I mean, you read any of his works, when he's dedicating his works to the city fathers of Geneva, it is the most supine and groveling introduction that he writes to his books.
	And I can't help but feel that someone with the ego of Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have hated writing those, right?
	I think that really, really burned him to have to write it.
	And so no wonder he was trying to abolish the social classes in his own countries.
	Like this, this is so obviously a part of his philosophy.
	And then when you get to Marx and Engels, well, this is during the Industrial Revolution.
	Of course, you need to worry about the nature of the aggregation of capital and the creation of a class of people who will never have access to property.
	If the bourgeois revolutionaries of the French Revolution said, no, look, everyone's going to be a small holding landowner.
	And you look at the cities and you've got a very few number of wealthy industrialists and millions of dispossessed proletarians who are forced to essentially slave away in the factories for whatever wages they can accrue, you're going to look at the promises that were made by the bourgeois revolutionaries and say, well, you haven't fulfilled these, have you?
	And in fact, no, you've created a kind of hell on earth, in fact.
	And this is why this whole thing has to change.
	These are all ideas of their own time.
	And so Marx is right in that particular regard, for example.
	There are a few other trivial things, but you can see that the liberal view of the ideas being in the abstract and eternal is obviously not true.
	And this is why they're afraid of Karl Marx ultimately.
	His critiques of capitalism, I mean, weren't proven to be wrong, actually, because capitalism was actually a lot more flexible than he thought it would be.
	He thought it was going to be quite rigid and eventually it would just be a very, very tiny number of people.
	But actually, capitalism was flexible and allowed for a large and quite well-off middle class.
	So those people could buy some property and whatnot.
	But the thing I got in trouble for, really, it wasn't really just that.
	It was really the fact that from a traditional perspective, and just from a perspective of a philosophical perspective, a fairly dispassionate analysis, it can be that capitalism becomes an inhibition to property ownership, which is kind of what Marx was saying, in fact.
	Because if you look now, if capitalism and as a sort of as the economic outgrowth of liberalism views individual people as just interchangeable widgets who have no metaphysical substance and no claim to anything collectively, then yes, you can just bring in millions of people into a country and think that that's going to improve the GDP.
	What that does, though, is, for example, massively increases property prices.
	It massively increases competition in the market.
	And so capitalism at its most extreme form becomes a way of inhibiting the ability to own property for the average person in your country.
	And so you've got to ask, are you for the ideology of capitalism or are you for the concrete reality of property ownership?
	And I am for the concrete reality of property ownership.
	And therefore, an untrammeled and unlimited market is not actually always favorable to the outcome.
	And so then I'm prepared to not abolish property or anything, any ridiculous thing like that, but to just put limits on what capitalism is allowed to trade because the market is so amoral, it'll trade anything.
	And actually, I think there are some things that maybe don't need to be traded.
	Do you think it would be fair to say there's a world full of supposed or past national socialists?
	But maybe what would be needed would be a form of nationalist or national capitalism, right?
	Exactly what you just said, that on the one hand accepts the organizing forces of or the organizing power of market forces, but of course also takes into account things that we started our conversation with, right?
	Is that, as Roger Scutener said, the need for nations, the need for community, the need to be anchored somewhere, grounded somewhere.
	And do you think this gets you sometimes into hot water?
	Because that last point that he also just mentioned, that liberals, for lack of a better expression, don't see this or are not willing to accept this.
	Sometimes they seem like being autistic when it comes to this topic.
	Yeah, it's very much a commitment to the ideology rather than a sensible compromise on what is actually good.
	Yeah, I think, I mean, if there was such a thing as a national capitalist, I would be relatively okay with that label.
	I'm not, you know, as long as the capitalism is there to serve the nation and not the other way around, I'm fine with that.
	I mean, any economic system can become exploitative and extractive.
	And we, I mean, I don't like the term capitalism because it implies a kind of commitment to the capital itself, the money itself, that I think isn't entirely healthy or appropriate.
	But yeah, like, I mean, property ownership implies the existence of markets to some degree.
	So if I own the property, I'm free to dispose of it as I want, and therefore I should be able to sell it to whoever I want to sell it to, right?
	Price, I want to sell it.
	So, I don't feel the need to get ideological about it.
	I don't need to feel the need to create a systemic worldview out of that.
	That's just a function of property ownership, or else I don't actually own it.
	Someone else owns it.
	But yes, maybe one way.
	Sorry.
	That's okay.
	Maybe one way to rephrase it would be that as political thinkers and also as active politicians, we have to ask the question: what the GDP is for, right?
	Not just look at the numbers.
	What is it for?
	Is it houses?
	Is it tanks?
	Is it steel?
	Is it finance products?
	What is it?
	And I think we no longer ask that question.
	We say, oh, the number is going up.
	It's plus 2%.
	It must be great.
	But we no longer say, is it great?
	Where do these 2% come from?
	And as you just said before, is 2% growth also connected to a tighter housing market, to deteriorating social conditions, to a loss of culture and whatever else there might be.
	I mean, there are so many things.
	The loss of industry in the West is the most baffling thing in the world.
	I mean, Germany, I think, has got the most industry left in Europe, hasn't it?
	And wise, frankly.
	I mean, it is just from the position of a sovereign state.
	Why would you want to become industrially reliant on anyone else?
	Even if they were like your closest allies, it still wouldn't make any sense.
	You would think every nation state that had its own future in mind would be committed to maintaining its own industrial base, even if that meant tariffing incoming goods from other markets.
	Like, I don't see why we allow cheap Chinese steel to destroy our own domestic steel industry.
	It's like, well, okay, but it'll allow this to be 7% cheaper or something.
	It's like, then pay 7% more because actually, there are other strategic advantages the nation state would want to maintain.
	And I mean, I don't know whether you guys have been paying attention to what's going on in Ukraine, but actually, history hasn't ended yet.
	We're still in it.
	And it would be nice to be in a relatively more secure place than we are.
	I mean, like, I don't think Putin is going to roll through Europe or anything.
	You know, I think that Russia's obviously had a much harder time with Ukraine than I think they expected to have.
	And well done to the Ukrainians for fighting so hard.
	But it's a tragedy.
	It's an absolute tragedy.
	And if we had a more robust sense of our own nations, then we would be able to put up some kind of effective resistance if we wanted.
	But at the moment, I mean, the British Army is about 75,000 men, which is pretty much the lowest it's been since Britain was formed as a nation, as a state.
	So, I mean, there's very little we can do.
	The Americans have spent a huge, and we've spent a huge amount of money on this too.
	And so we generally, we are incredibly weak.
	We don't have any industrial base.
	And we wonder why things aren't really secure or really improving and why people don't feel that their own countries have dignity anymore.
	Because one of the things that talking about the end of history, I'm very fascinated by Francis Fukuyama's thesis on this.
	And I've read it many, many times now because he makes some really good points.
	He just assumes things that aren't true.
	Like he assumes that human nature is a constant that can never be changed.
	Now, I'm not saying there isn't some kind of fundamental primordial human nature, but the actual material substance of humans does change.
	It does change from era to era.
	For example, we're well aware of the testosterone decline in men, for example.
	Like this is a real thing that's happening as a product of industrial society.
	So the substance of human beings is changeable.
	And he assumes that science will be a forever compounding effect and therefore things will always get better.
	Well, he's assuming that people are actually smart enough to do the science.
	But I don't know whether you've looked at the educational attainment in schools over time, and it's going down and the IQs are going down.
	And so he assumes that people will be able to do the science when it comes to it in, say, 300 years or however long he's thinking the future.
	But one of the good things about his analysis is the fact that he thinks in terms that are not strictly materialist when it comes to liberalism.
	And so he uses a kind of Hegelian account of liberalism to say, no, there is an idealistic, non-material account to liberalism that is based in the platonic view of the soul, the tripartite soul, the appetitive part, the rational part, but also the spirited part.
	And this is what liberalism, liberalism can satisfy all of this.
	Well, it turns out he's wrong on that too, because the appetitive part and the rational part are individualistic parts, right?
	The individual is concerned only with those things in himself, really.
	But the spirited part is that part that demands recognition and respect.
	Well, that's a social aspect of a person.
	That is not individualistic.
	That is specifically tied to other people's regard of you, which is precisely how he describes it through his Hegelian reading.
	And this means that this spirited part of us is fundamentally connected with that group that we identify with.
	And this is where the sort of group right and dignity comes into it.
	So if we have weak countries that can't defend themselves and that do not take care of their citizens first, that spirited part of ourselves becomes detached from the state.
	We don't feel represented in it.
	We don't feel seen in it.
	We don't feel like it belongs to us.
	We don't possess it.
	And therefore, we're not going to fight for it.
	Therefore, we're not going to self-sacrifice.
	We're not going to have high trust societies where people want to pay their taxes on time because they feel that it's going something worthy.
	They feel taken advantage of.
	And especially if you have other groups that are benefiting out of this arrangement and not you, you can, this is what the far right is.
	It's those people who are attached through the spirited part of themselves to the wider community who feel that they are being let down and they don't want to sign up for the police.
	They don't want to sign up for the military.
	They're not interested in supporting the government in its time of need.
	They are not going to get involved in the government's squabbles overseas with the things that it needs to do because they feel the government is not upholding fundamentally the strength and dignity of their own country.
	And they're right.
	They're absolutely right about this.
	This is why all of this actually matters.
	And yet I think our governments are staffed by people who are so intransigently liberal.
	This to them just seems like Nazism.
	They just can't understand how anyone could think anything like this and not be a Nazi, even though millions of people think this and they're not Nazis.
	So I don't know what the result is, the way this resolves with the liberals.
	But I mean, I think actually it just resolves in Europe going far right.
	I think that's what the AFD is in Germany.
	I think that's what reform is in Britain.
	I think that's what Trump was in the United States.
	And I think if you look at their rhetoric, when you look at it through this lens, you suddenly realize, oh, this is exactly what it is.
	Like, Trump, I'm going to make America great again.
	I'm going to make America respected again.
	We're going to be number one again.
	Everyone's going to be impressed with us.
	He gave a talk today where he's like, oh, everyone's saying how great America is.
	You can feel the spirited, thymotic area of the human soul speaking through Donald Trump, and it just won over a huge amount of the Americans.
	Farage is currently in the lead here.
	The AFD is currently in the lead in Germany.
	Le Pen's party, even though she's barred from standing, is currently in the lead in France.
	Like Maloney's already won in Italy.
	And in Auburn, you've got Hungary.
	And all of these people are just speaking to the spirited part of the human soul.
	Those people who are like, look, I want my country to be treated with some goddamn respect.
	I think that's the entire problem.
	I think that's a wonderful, wonderful way to end this conversation.
	I kept you precisely twice as long as I promised you I would.
	I apologize.
	But as you can see, I sneakily shifted to a topic you're very passionate about towards the end, so I could keep you for a little bit longer than anticipated.
	Well, Carl Benjamin, thank you so much for coming on.
	I hope we can do this again in the future.
	We can, of course.
	And whenever you're in England, do come on the podcast of the Load Seaters.
	It's always a pleasure.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Thank you so much, Carl.

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