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Sept. 24, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
50:21
The Post-Woke Left: An Examination

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So there is a kind of new left emerging, what Charlie Downs has called a post-woke left.
Now that doesn't mean that this isn't woke.
It just means it's assumed all of the rightness and legitimacy of the woke movement, but realizes that movement has failed.
What it intended to do hasn't been accomplished.
And so they need to figure out something new.
The situation has changed.
Politics in Britain in particular have shifted.
And the right is in the ascendancy.
And so they are scrambling to find purchase.
And to this end, you have the assent, if one can really call it that, of the Green Party under the leadership of Zach Polanski.
And he has started a podcast called Bold Politics, in which he's going to invite left-wingers on to explain their view of how things ought to be and the kind of wider through line on leftist politics.
Because I've watched all of the episodes that have been released on YouTube so far.
At the time of recording, there are three with Ash Sarkar, Zoe Gardner, and a guy called Jimmy the Giant.
And so I watched all of these podcasts and I realized that actually, if you know what you're listening for, there is a coherent voice that is being spoken through all of these people.
They do basically all occupy the same fundamental position on basically every issue.
And I'm going to extract clips and quotes from them to show you their worldview, exactly what they believe, why they believe it, and why they are all on the same team, why what they believe all meshes together.
So before we begin, let's let Zach explain his politics and his podcast to us.
You bored of hearing about Nigel Farage?
Me too.
I am so sick of hearing about so-called right-wing populism.
Why does no one understand what populism means?
It means the 99% versus the 1%.
Those lot are literally the 1%.
So it's time for a podcast that stands out for the 99%.
Welcome to Bold Politics.
I'm Zach Polanski.
So as you can see, this new definition of populism is done purely on economic lines.
Now, most people actually don't really identify themselves along economic lines.
Most people don't really identify the kind of person, the group to which they belong, based on their income.
That's kind of a thing that's ancillary and changes over the course of a person's life if they work hard and are successful.
But as far as this new left is concerned, that's not the case.
And populism is in fact speaking for those people who are not billionaires.
And that's what it comes down to.
Like add up the value of everything you own and minus your debts.
Could you live on that for the rest of your life?
Right?
If not, you're part of the big we, right?
You're part of the movement.
You're the 99%.
If you can live off it for the rest of your life, we're coming for you.
Well, that's a bit sinister, but I can't help but notice that that creates a we, the 99%, that has major differences of opinion within itself that probably won't be able to form a coalition of any substantive duration or at all in any particular direction.
But okay, fine.
You can see how the post-woke left is going to pivot away from identity politics, which is a battle they've engaged in for the last decade and have lost quite successfully, because they realize that this is actually an unwinnable proposition.
They've made the right, they've made normal people actually care about identity.
And they've realized that this is a sleeping giant that they've actually awoken.
And they're definitely not going to be able to defeat Gammonzilla on those terms.
Now, that's not to say that they've abandoned woke or decided that they're not woke or put the woke away or anything like this.
They are still woke.
They've just realized that actually wokeism as a strategy is a losing one and they're not going to get to their destination.
And this is what the pivot towards economics is.
This is the essentially last remaining avenue of the left to try and advance their agenda.
So let's let them explain to us exactly what their agenda is.
Let's let them lay out precisely what it is they want for the future.
I want to be part of essentially a movement that advances the cause of communism in this country.
On the other, the freedom to write whatever it is I want and to say whatever it is I happen to think.
I mean, that's the height of bourgeois individualism.
And so these two things are quite contradictory.
I really want to write and I want to say the things that feel honest, but I also want this cause to be successful.
Okay, so nothing too surprising there.
The I'm a literal communist goes on the Green Party leaders podcast and says, I want to advance the cause of communism.
And he just nods along because this is completely normal and expected in these circles.
Yes, they are communists.
I'm not even using that pejoratively.
That is just a completely accurate description of the kind of political environment in which they swim.
And I think it's fair to say they want open borders.
And in fact, they'll say it themselves.
Throne is so do you just want open borders then?
Is everyone allowed in this country?
Now I have my answer that's pre-prepared, but I'm just wondering what your answer is.
I won't do my best, Nick Ferrari impression.
Well, I mean, what I fundamentally believe is that you shouldn't lose your rights, whether that's as a human being, as a worker, in any way, just because you crossed an international border.
That's what I believe.
I think, you know, nations can continue to exist, they can continue to have borders without those borders being spaces of death and of pain and of people losing their rights.
And that's what I care about.
So I think, yeah, I mean, you know, you can characterize it as open borders because I do believe that migration fundamentally, if it's managed well, is self-regulating.
You don't have to have a cap on the numbers.
So you can allow anybody who is seeking to come to the UK to come here if you do have systems to manage that well.
I think that there's endless evidence to support the fact that open borders or borders that do not prevent people from crossing them work excellently well.
I think we can take them at their word on this.
I think they genuinely are for open borders.
And notice that the way that she framed it was based on the idea of human rights.
Outside of Britain or outside of the West, there are no human rights.
You lose your human rights.
Therefore, that means that the world outside of the West is essentially a kind of raging wilderness of hell and suffering and pain that we actually need to rescue these people from.
So not only is it fine for us to have open borders, it's morally necessary, it's morally important that we pull people across from those terrible benighted lands so they can have their human rights in our country.
So there can't be any limit to it.
Why would there be any limit to it?
If anything, it would seem cruel and crazy to try and impose a limit on it because those people are being horribly oppressed over there and the only way that they can be safe is by bringing them over here.
Now, one might suggest that this is actually a mandate for imperialism.
Actually, if I have all the human rights in the world in Britain and I go to some strange country in Africa or Asia or South America or wherever, and I don't have access to, say, the NHS, then aren't I being denied a human right?
Don't we have an obligation to go over there and make sure they provide me with healthcare when I'm in that country?
I'm pretty sure that this means that we get to go and invade them.
You can see how the globalist mind encapsulates all of humanity in all places and all times and gives itself license to do crazy things.
Anyway, moving on, let's talk about questions of character.
How do bad people come about?
Now, the left's view is purely material.
It's an entirely materialistic analysis.
So people are not made bad by their beliefs or by the thing, the habits that they nurture or by the decisions that they make.
People are made bad by society.
So if you see more crime rising, it's because we've created places where that can foster.
And when you go around this thing of like whack-a-mole in all these bits of data, they go, okay, maybe that one was wrong, but this one's right.
But you're never replacing that core underlying sort of belief system that individuals and bad people, bad actors are the root of all problems.
You need to replace it with a sort of more material lens understanding of how these social problems manifest.
And once they've got that, you can then start looking at the world in a different way.
When you really understand how inequality affects like every layer of society, people's behaviors, outcomes, poverty, etc.
Then you can kind of like go through the world and start looking at it differently.
You stop looking at like, oh, these people make these decisions.
It's actually, oh, okay, look at the fucking surrounding they're in.
Look at how underfunded their schools are.
Look at like the crime rates being coming out of that.
Like once you see it like that, it's a whole different thing.
So basically, wealthy areas of the world are good areas of the world.
Wealthy areas of the world produce good people.
Poor areas of the world are bad areas of the world.
And poor areas of the world produce bad people.
In the mind of the leftist, there is no distinction between morality and material conditions.
And therefore, you can't, in their view, be a poor person who was through strong moral education raised to be a good person.
If you are not a bad person, then that is entirely coincidental to the place in which you live.
The most important thing to remember, though, is that individual agency does not matter.
So the choice that a person made to kidnap a young girl or molest a young girl when staying in a migrant hotel and they've had all of their material needs paid for can't really be explained.
It can't be explained why any of the migrants that were paying huge sums of money to live here do bad things and yet they do them anyway.
And of course, it can't be explained why rich people do bad things either because they've had the best of everything.
Look at their material conditions.
What possible reason could they have for being venal or cruel or perverse or any other kind of vice that they might have?
And the thing is, they never even try to explain it.
They never try to give you an explanation for poor people who are not bad or rich people who are bad.
And this is what it fundamentally boils down to, is they believe that people are essentially, at the same time, products of their environment, but they don't belong to those environments.
And so even though you are 100% deterministically shaped by the environment in which you live, you've got no personal agency and no control over the things you end up doing.
You also are not from that place.
You don't belong to that place.
You aren't connected to that place.
And you are, in fact, some sort of free-roaming radical agent, which is why we need to pull you into our country to save you from the dilapidated conditions that were making you bad in the first place.
Now, I fundamentally believe that individual people do not belong to the state of, you know, where they happen to have been born and so on and should have individual freedom.
But at the same time, if we manage an immigration system that instead of aggressively recruiting in one area and then like pushing people away to the extent of it being deadly in another where they're crossing the border, instead embrace the arrival of those people and aim to train them and of course our local population into the areas of the economy that we need, then we can reduce our reliance on people who have been trained elsewhere.
And specifically, we should do that strategically in areas where those people are desperately needed in their economy.
And what you can see from that is that they view people as fundamentally universal and interchangeable.
People not coming from any one particular place, not belonging to any one kind of particular culture, are therefore just abstract, universal, individual, atomic entities.
And they can be used as if our society, our civilization, is basically a game of SimCity.
And we have systems that we are trying to upkeep.
And therefore, we can just train them just as if they're robots to replace other things at various other points in the system.
Because the modern post-works left's entire view, and this is inherited very strongly from their sort of 20th century leftist roots, is entirely systemic.
They have no running commentary on what an individual is or the kind of life an individual should lead.
All they can do is speak in purely abstract, systemic ways about aggregate incentives and outcomes.
So their understanding, typically on the right, is everything is a product of culture and individual decisions and bad people making bad choices, because that's kind of the attitude of generally at the root of right-wing politics.
On the left, we understand what we try and explain is that, and this is what the facts will say, it's not just like what we think.
It's like structures, systems, inequality, housing, job opportunities, they are what create these problematic cultures.
Poverty creates bad cultures.
So you might be thinking, well, hang on a second.
My grandparents were very, very poor, but very, very strict.
And we had a good culture and I'm very proud of it.
And I carry it with me to this day.
And Jimmy there would say, no, they were bad people.
And they were bad because they were poor.
But when we make you rich through this socialist revolution or whatever it is they're going to do, you're going to finally become a good person.
Very interesting.
I'm surprised that this isn't winning over more people.
Anyway, let's take a look at specifically some of their views and tease out any incoherence in the message that's coming out of the post-woke left.
Let's first look at migration.
How do you think they feel about migration?
People go, yeah, but what about people who are just seeking a better life or just seeking to migrate?
Now, my opinion, I'm pretty sure you share this, is actually anyone who wants to come to this country for a better life and is contributing to our system, et cetera, should be welcomed here.
Is there a problem, though, that we are being divided between people who really need to come here and everyone else?
Now, it shouldn't come as a surprise that they're basically in favor of literally everyone on earth coming here if they want to, assuming that they're going to contribute to the system.
Remember, the system has a kind of sacred nature to these people.
And therefore, if they are net contributors to the system, then any limits and there's no limit to the number of people who can come.
And this is a major problem to the post-woke left because their entire worldview hinges on the need for migrants to keep the system running long after they're gone.
I think that the other thing that is starting, just starting to see a few people start talking about more, is the real risk to us and to our welfare state of a shrinking and aging population.
Absolutely.
People want to think that pensioners are going to be taken care of, that we're going to run a care service and NHS service for all of the vulnerable people in our society.
Understanding that without migration, that can't happen.
We can't have a welfare state and very low immigration in this country.
It doesn't work just on the facts, on the demographics.
That's a very bad situation to be in, a shrinking population.
Widen the discussion of why immigration is good is not just because some people are doctors and nurses and so on and they are and it's brilliant.
It's also just because we literally need people and that is good.
And, you know, young men of working age coming here is good as long as we give them opportunities to get into good work that's well compensated and so on.
But yeah, that danger of what a shrinking and stagnating and aging population actually means needs to be hammered home.
This caveat of migration is always good as long as they come here to work is one of the core Achilles heels that the right needs to exploit out of the post-work left.
They know that actually the system does rely on people working for it, as Zoe just admitted.
And so to have us paying, say, a billion pounds a month to more than a million foreign migrants who have arrived here in recent years.
And then in addition to this, the amount that we're spending on social housing and however much it goes on and on and on.
And honestly, I don't think the true scale of the amount of money that we are spending on migration is even evident yet.
This becomes a major problem for the post-work left's narrative on migration because it seems that migration is actually making us poorer.
Everyone can see it, which is why everyone is thinking it.
And this is a real problem for them because, of course, the more that they've been cramming people into our country, the more overcrowded it feels.
And this is one of those things that they just have no answer to, because as many people as they want to bring in may well be accounted for in their databases as much as they like, but we still only have a limited amount of space on which to share it with them.
The country only is people.
You know, like keeping people out, healthcare is provided by people.
Houses are built by people.
The entire country only is people.
So actually a growing population is a very good thing.
And people who have segregated rights just because they cross the border is a very bad thing for all parts of society.
This is actually very interesting because one of their primary critiques of capitalism is that it is predicated on endless growth on a finite planet.
Well, we are a finite country and yet still she believes in endless growth to support our welfare states and our pension system and the NHS.
And so they have to kind of admit by the critique they give of capitalism, this isn't going to last forever.
And yet here we are with her arguing, no, we can have infinite migration, we can have infinite growth, because the people, the nation, the country, is just the people and not the landmass on which it sits, which is obviously not true.
There is a connection between the people and the land.
They have talked themselves into a position where they are convinced that the only reason this country functions at all is because of migrants.
For example, they will argue that the NHS is basically propped up entirely by migrants.
They're convinced, for example, that the NHS is staffed almost exclusively by migrants.
And so as Zach says, if you use the NHS, you're more likely to be treated by a migrant.
So the things I often talk about is that if you use the National Health Service for a person who treats or cares for you, it's so much more likely to be a migrant.
And the fact that so many migrants are paying more into social security or welfare than taking out.
Well, even in London, that's not true.
But in the rest of the country, that's especially not true.
As it stands at the moment, about three quarters of people working in the NHS are native British people, and 25% are ethnically not British.
But this has no impact on the narrative.
They need to believe that this is the case.
And who knows, maybe the areas of London that these two work in make it seem like ethnic minorities and immigrants are far more overrepresented in the National Health Service than they would be otherwise.
But it seems to be part of the common narrative, doesn't it, on the NHS?
Well, without migrants, the NHS collapses.
Well, no, because the migrant population of the country is actually roughly proportionate to the number of migrants working in the NHS.
Because actually, as the population grows, the number of people working in the NHS has to grow alongside with it.
This pyramid scheme, as with all pyramid schemes, just grows in proportion to the amount of demand that is placed upon it.
And we are seeing now that it's just going to continue to grow if you keep packing people in the country.
So you need migrants.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You need migrants to support the NHS.
Why?
Because we brought in so many migrants for the NHS.
Importing millions of foreign workers obviously leads to a bit of a contradiction when they try to appeal to the good of the country and the people in it.
Because of course, the people in the country would like to live and work here, be able to afford houses, be able to get jobs.
And if you are just importing lots of pre-trained migrant workers from overseas, and the quality of those people is dubious at best, then you are obviously infringing on the options and opportunities that the native-born British workers have.
And this is a contradiction to which they have no good answer.
They concede, oh, yeah, no, we should do something for the native British population, but we were too busy importing migrants and hinging our entire narrative around the good of migrants.
And the only, frankly, the only good things about Britain come from immigration.
Immigration is making us richer.
And therefore, we need these people.
So where do the British workers fit into this?
About brain drain, because there is that thing about training British workers as well, right?
And if we're bringing some of the best talent away from countries like Wartorn, how do we get that balance right between making sure we're protecting and nurturing countries that need their best talent, but also filling the gap that we have to?
And the answer is, of course, they don't really.
Actually, if you look at the framing up until this point, the native British are old, they're stagnating, they're kind of a burden that has to be carried.
They have a kind of reverse white man's burden, the brown man's burden, we could call it, in which the noble savage from across the seas has come here to look after us in our dotage because we for some reason refuse to have kids and actually prop up the system that we created.
And so this noble savage has come over and shouldered us on his back and is carrying us to the care home.
And I'm sure it'll all be completely hunky-dory along the way.
But the left's view on migration has become so pathological at this point that they can't even imagine a view of patriotism without a connection to migrants.
For example, in this particular clip, Jimmy explains how the only good thing, his view of patriotism, is predicated on foreigners coming over here and having something to do with us.
But I do think on the left, it is important that we like, you know, celebrate the things that are good about Britain.
Like I celebrate multiculturalism.
I thought that era, I love grime music.
I grew up in that era.
And that's firmly a sort of product of multicultural London British.
It's a beautiful story of how grime sort of connected these two communities from like the garage era, acid house, young sort of white British meeting with like inner city, like black British, and then that created its own thing that's completely unique to Britain.
And it's like, that's a beautiful thing.
That to me is patriotism because I'm celebrating that.
So yeah, I am definitely patriotic, but it doesn't mean you can't criticize the past.
Anyway, let's move on to their views on rich people because you can imagine how much they like rich people.
If society is made bad because it's poor, and if the rich are rich, then it stands to reason that the rich must have stolen all of this money from the poor.
And therefore, if people are in poor areas of the country, say the northeast, which is still like 90 plus percent English, and yet they don't have very much money, that can't be because immigrants have done anything for them or to them.
That has to be that the rich have stolen all of their wealth instead.
But you have not been the most impacted by immigration.
We have.
And that's also another reason why we're doing better than you, frankly, because that immigration is helping us to do well.
So much more immigration comes into the South and comes into London in particular.
I think it's 40% of all foreign-born nationals who live in the UK live in London.
So these are places where people's grievances, which are legitimate because they have been left out, left behind, and they have had a total lack of investment in their towns and so on, are places where they're being told the only sort of language people have to express that grievance at the moment is foreigners bad.
And in fact, they're places where they have very, very few foreigners and the problems come from somewhere else.
They come from the rich.
This is an absolutely fascinating argument because in one breath, they'll say wealth inequality is the source of poverty.
Wealth inequality is the source of immorality.
And then say, London's great because we have taken so many foreigners, but London is the place in the country with the largest amount of wealth inequality.
London has more wealth inequality than anywhere else in the country.
And therefore, essentially what Zoe is arguing here is that London has a kind of slave class of foreign labor that has been brought in to do jobs that I assume that would have otherwise been done by native British people.
And this is making quote-unquote them richer than the rest of the country.
So if only we had immigrant slave plantations in the rest of the country, we could be as rich as the Londoners, which might well be true.
But actually, I don't really want to live in a country of immigrant slave plantations.
I would actually rather live in just a normal country, like the rest of the country actually is, without that.
Because it's not like crime is exactly under control in London at the moment.
The amount of crimes that go unreported and uninvestigated and unsolved is through the roof.
London has a massive problem with knife crime at the moment.
If this is genuinely a consequence of being made bad because society is poor, well, London is the richest area of the country, and yet it has a massive problem with crime in certain areas.
So they have to go, well, it's just inequality then.
Then why would we want to make the rest of the country like London?
Surely us being not so wealthy overall, but not so polarized, is better morally for the rest of us than what you guys are doing.
Their answer would be, well, billionaires have bought up the country.
They own all the real estate in the country.
And therefore, your rents are going up, your house prices are going up.
And that means that you can't get on the property ladder.
That means you're just going to have to pay huge amounts of wealth to Scrooge McDuck forever while you labor away like our immigrant slaves.
And the thing is, that's just not really true.
In the UK, 90% of real estate is residential real estate.
Only 10% is commercial real estate.
So 10% is where businesses actually are owned and operated from.
And of the residential real estate, 76% of that is owned by the people who occupy it.
So owned by homeowners.
And then only 18% is privately rented.
And 6% is socially rented.
And in the privately rented sector, private buy-to-let is 98% of that, with 2% of that being institutional.
So the sort of mega-conglomerate companies that create billionaires.
BlackRock, Vanguard, all those sorts of types, they actually don't own vast swathes of our housing market.
Actually, most people in this country own their home and live in their home.
And the people who are renting, well, that's mostly private individuals who are not billionaires, part of the 99%.
So complaining that the billionaires have bought up our country is not really true.
And then if you actually look at who does own vast swathes of the country, especially our infrastructure, our necessary infrastructure, like trains or water, well, a lot of the time it's foreign companies that are government owned.
So their whole perspective on billionaires is very, very simplistic.
They are, as far as they're concerned, evil Scrooge McDucks who are just hoarding all of the wealth of the country and turning, well, in this case, they're foreign workers into slaves.
But for the rest of us, they're just impoverishing the rest of the country by sucking up all the wealth.
I just don't really see any evidence of that.
I'm not saying that it couldn't happen.
And it's definitely on the cards that international conglomerate corporations would like to buy up vast swathes of our country.
That's obviously true.
And honestly, we should be protectionist about this.
We shouldn't have foreign companies, foreign billionaires, foreign businesses able to just buy land in this country.
There should be certain requirements and one being headquartered in the country, or at least having a regional headquarters in the country or something like that, having some connection here than just remaining overseas.
But as it stands, it's just not true that it is foreign billionaires that have pumped up the rent.
It is not true that it is billionaires that are preventing you from getting on the property ladder.
It's demand.
And the demand is coming from the skyrocketing immigration that these people want to bring into the country and are completely in favor of because they need a slave class of servants.
Speaking of billionaires, though, there is another contradiction in their view of wealth and billionaires that I find very, very interesting.
If poverty is making people bad, and therefore bringing people out of poverty makes people good, why are billionaires not the best people in society since they are the richest people in society?
Why is the best person on earth not measured by his wealth if the worst people are measured by their poverty?
And the answer is, of course, that's not what causes goodness or badness.
Goodness or badness are products of character.
They are products of the culture in which you live.
They are the consequence of the kind of moral upbringing you have had and the way that you personally control yourself and think about the people around you.
But the post-woke left have absolutely no conception of the actual moral character and behavior of a person contributing to whether they deserve what they get.
The billionaires, as far as they can tell, are purely motivated by financial interest, which I find to be a very interesting perspective.
Because if you're a billionaire, why are you concerned about money?
Don't you have all of the money in the world anyway?
I mean, that's literally the post-woke left view.
So why would they be concerned about money?
Like, wouldn't they have other human concerns?
Wouldn't they have, in fact, dare I say, non-material concerns?
And so when they go to engage with the Unite the Kingdom rally and Elon Musk having a video link in and telling everyone that he's on their side and he supports them and he hopes we get our country back and he hopes that we win against the dark forces of the left, they can't understand why he's doing it.
And they can't understand why people would think he's on their side because they don't understand the world in anything other than material interests.
And for some reason, they think that Elon Musk's material interests are diametrically opposed to the material interests of the average British person.
Because if there's working class people there walking and they're watching Elon Musk, a multi-billionaire, tell them what they need to be doing in their country, classed as patriotism.
And pardon me, even the most empathic part of me goes, I don't understand how someone doesn't look at him and go, he is totally uninterested in my material conditions, my country.
It's so hard to understand because I remember being like pretty into Elon Musk.
I was like, yeah, this guy is because they they give you different concerns.
They give you the concerns over free speech, wokeism, and immigration.
They're the big problems.
And they also sell you like this, I guess, like inevitability of capitalism.
But yeah, it's so strange because I remember thinking he was like a liberator, which is insane.
Because like, what would it be of his interest to give a shit about Britain?
I don't know.
Has he, I'm sure he's been to Britain, but he knows fuck all about Britain.
But it is so weird that disconnect of like, this is literally the wealthiest, most influential man on earth.
And somehow he cares about the little people.
And it's, it's insane how they keep that in the brain, but I've done it.
I used to think like that.
And it is just weird in reflection.
The post-woke left will one day probably realize that billionaires are actually human beings.
And human beings are many different things.
Material interests are one aspect of a human being.
But I think that once they've been so thoroughly satisfied to the point that you've become a billionaire, that actually other interests become something that you're concerned about.
We call these ideal interests in opposition to the purely material interests.
And if you have an idealistic view of Britain, its people, its history, and its culture, and you say, are maybe, I think Elon's something like three-quarters English genetically, his ancestry is from England.
You can see why someone might have a sentimental connection to this country, despite the fact they might not have any material interest in the country.
And therefore, they've got a sentimental connection to the people of the country.
In fact, that sentimental connection is kind of the same as the left's connection to foreigners.
Now, one thing that the post-woke left are convinced of is that the right is wrong about everything.
Literally everything.
Because they're sort of always trying to solve a question, which is why is Britain getting shitter?
But their analysis is from the complete wrong perspective.
They think everything is to do with cultural decisions of individuals, of groups, rather than material elements of inequality, housing, jobs, etc.
Now, this isn't true, obviously, but they have decided that the right is looking at the same problem.
It just has the wrong answer.
And the only answer is, of course, wealth inequality.
It is those evil billionaires that have done this to you.
And therefore, it isn't the fact that millions of people have been brought here.
It isn't the fact that this is depressing your wages, as they admit.
It isn't the fact that this is driving up house prices or making the streets less safe because you bring in a bunch of poor people from foreign countries.
If poverty equals poor morals, well, then why would they have morals as good as ours?
But don't think about all of these things.
It's the evil billionaires.
You were a stupid right-winger who's xenophobic and I hate you.
And even if you were able to deport all of those foreigners who are making your country worse, things will never get better.
Things can only ever get better through a communist revolution.
They're trying to find solutions in the wrong place.
And ultimately, at some point, when you've deported all the migrants, when you've stopped the boats, when you've done this, you're going to be like, well, what have we not done?
Shit's not got better.
The problem that they have, though, is that the post-woke left is the product of loss.
It is the product of defeat.
They're aware that the right is winning.
They looked at the Unite the Kingdom rally and were horrified that somewhere between half a million to a million people came out in the street for Tommy Robinson and they could only get something like 5,000 people out in counter-protest or to protest against Donald Trump.
They realize that they are actually a very small, marginal movement and nobody really supports them.
And so they look to post-woke left thinkers like Diane Abbott for inspiration on how to characterize the United Kingdom march, how to deal with the fact actually the country is a lot more nativist than we might want to think.
And what can be done about it?
Diane Abbott's written a article today in The Guardian that essentially says, like, we need to talk about the fact that that march was racist and there's racists in the crowd.
And if we justify too much of this around inequality and austerity, what we are doing is normalizing or justifying racism.
Now, I'm asking you a really hard question there because if you ask me the question back, I'm hearing Diane's words and I'm reflecting on them myself.
Calling people racist.
That's what they do about it.
And like I said at the beginning, when I say post-woke, that doesn't mean not woke.
That doesn't mean they don't agree with everything the woke have ever said.
In fact, they do agree with it all, and it's just been folded into their basic axiomatic assumptions about reality.
Yes, the right is racist.
Yes, all of these things are racist.
We just don't have to point it all out anymore.
But when a giant gathering of nativists appear, this isn't the English working class that are against the system.
This is a racist rally, and we don't like racists.
So it's not just that the racists are winning, as far as they're concerned, but it's also that the left itself is kind of gross and pathetic.
And this is what Ash Sarkar is spending a lot of her time dedicated to trying to purge.
She's desperately trying to make the left stop being woke victim weirdos and desperately trying to make them kind of normal.
I think because of the many defeats that the left has experienced, getting people's attention feels like an adequate compensation for social change, or at least the next best thing.
So people get so into, I feel really unsafe, I feel really unsafe.
And, you know, the CIA PSYOP manual would literally say behave this way in a meeting.
And we created a politics which made it okay and acceptable for people to behave that way.
And sometimes we have to say, I'm really sorry you feel that way.
But that's not the purpose of this space.
We're here to enact a strategy.
And the reason that they are going through this process is because they know they're losing the argument.
They know that they've lost the argument on culture.
Nobody wants to live in a hyper-puritanical left-wing culture.
They know they're losing the argument on immigration.
No one wants their countries flooded with immigrants.
And so they don't really know what to do.
There's a former reform MP whose name I don't want to say because I don't want to make him any more famous, but I saw that he messaged the Prime Minister on social media to say this is demonstrating that we've won the argument.
Are we losing the argument on migration and how do we get it back?
You know what I think is really heartening?
Now, don't get me wrong, we're going through a really, really bad time on this issue specifically.
But what's quite incredible, given the absolute onslaught and pilon and unanimity of the media voice and the political voice almost against migration, is how resilient the British public's fundamental decency on this issue actually is.
There is a small hardcore of people who are horrific racists.
I never want to engage with them.
They are not the majority.
The majority of people do not want people to be coming over on boats.
That includes me.
Hi.
We want this to be managed well.
The majority of people realize we need immigration.
They may not realize to what extent we need it, but they realize that we need it and that it's overall beneficial.
But they just want to see it managed well.
The majority of people do not hate people just because they're Muslims or just because they were born somewhere else.
They just want to know that it's being managed well.
Unfortunately, in a circumstance where it's being managed so disgracefully poorly, I mean, the boats being the most visible part of that, but essentially it's the entire system that's managed very poorly.
People then react against it and people are in opposition to it.
You dig down a little bit, you know, the polls that say, oh, people overwhelmingly say they want less migration.
Who do they mean by migration?
They mean the small boats.
Actually, if you ask them, do they want fewer students?
Do they want fewer doctors?
Do they want fewer farm workers, construction workers, hospitality workers, all of the actual large groups that make up migration, they don't.
So people are much more decent on this than we give them credit for.
Unfortunately, there is a very racist messaging that is cutting through at the moment that is being funded by the newspaper owners and the billionaires who are funding the Reform Party and a whole lot of far-right influencers as well who are being funded to produce this messaging.
And that is very difficult to fight back against, but that's the only option we have that isn't, as I said before, completely despicable.
After making the big ask in 2017 to 2019 with gay race communism, they realized that the British public actually don't want this.
They actually don't want to just redistribute land, wealth and power to foreigners and fringe weirdos.
And so they have to start beginning from square one.
We've got to look at the little victory that can be had in front of us and slowly but surely work forward towards that.
The revolution is actually out of reach and probably not coming.
Between 2017 and 2019, I thought the job of the left was to make sure that the 2019 manifesto was as socialist and as radical as possible.
So we wanted the four-day week in there.
We wanted some kind of universal basic income.
We wanted to abolish private schools.
And Boris Johnson's manifesto, by contrast, was get Brexit done on the back of a fag packet.
And that was it.
Like that was it.
And he won.
So there's a temptation to go for the proximate objective or, you know, the proximate opponent.
So this would have been opponents within the Labour Party.
But this is what James Butler calls the father-dougal problem.
This cow is close but really small and this one's far away and massive.
Go for the cow that's far away and massive.
And I think that's something for the Greens to think about as well is a healthy internal democratic culture is one thing, but it can suck you into looking inwards too much.
And then there's the last thing.
I made a real mistake around the Brexit time, which is when it reached this impasse, didn't feel like there was leadership coming from the top and everyone had to say what they thought should happen.
I said, oh, second referendum, because I was in London surrounded by people like me and everyone was a Remainer.
So that put me not just on the losing side of 48%, but on the side which was much more liberal and technocratic rather than populist.
And it was populism from which Corbynism drew its strength.
So the thing I was advocating for was taking us away from where we were strongest.
And so to do this, they need to begin to build a power base.
Now, building a power base means bringing people together who agree on things.
And the problem that the post-woke left have is they don't really agree on all that much.
You've probably seen the struggles in the your party space between being socially conservative Muslims and being radical, open borders woke leftists.
And then you have the issues with transgenderism and Turfs normal people who believe that women are adult, human females, and various other sort of minor salami slice issues, and they realize that they're struggling to just keep this coalition together long enough to begin building the power base.
When we understand about the sort of trans thing like that's a really important topic and like we understand it, we get why it's not this thing that the right make it out to be.
They're just normal people that deserve rights.
But if we sort of say to people, um you, if you have any of these anti-trans opinions or something which which they might be able to be reasoned out of, they might be able to come around on them.
They might realize that they're being misinformed.
But sometimes I worry that if we're so principled on this in the sense, let me let me just think out one at word, uh, if we, if we find ourselves in a position where we go fuck you for your bigoted opinions, then this is what Ash Sark has been sort of saying lately, we risk losing people that might come around to our arguments.
Yeah, I get what i'm saying, like i'm.
I hate talking about this because I feel like i'm giving legitimacy to the anti-trans argument, which i'm not, and I never think you should move your principles.
I think it should be uh, you should be not like purity testing people, I don't know.
Yeah, so there's a few things.
One, the first thing i'm going to say, might be even reinforcing what you're going to say, but it's still something I strongly believe that, for me, left-wing politics is about solidarity and compassion.
It's about human rights, and trans people have to be included in that, and that's non-negotiable.
I do think there's a difference between someone who makes their whole entire life about being transphobic and to make trans people's lives hell.
Uh who, by the way, I think we shouldn't abandon in terms of if you're talking about society, but as a political party or as a movement, I think it's not a political party's job to convince every single person who disagrees with them that they are welcome in their political party.
Political parties, by their nature, are saying, these are the things we stand for, and if you don't stand for those things, that's fine, but this is not the party for you, and I think there is truth to what you're saying and it's something i'm thinking about a lot, which is uh women, particularly women, who are worried about violence against women and girls, who are worried about the gender kind of pay gap, who are worried about getting a gynecology appointment, all these things that you know, actual material things that we should be worried about um, but I think what you're pointing to is right is there's a nuance in terms of how do you grow the coalition,
making sure that I really like the phrase rather than calling people out, you call people in yeah, yeah.
So it's kind of that's not acceptable what you've just said.
Let's talk about why it's not acceptable, but yeah, that's.
I think that's the key thing.
And it's really hard because yeah, people could easily take what i'm saying out of context, but it's like it's don't just say fuck off and don't like.
There can be a feeling sometimes of like um, if we really hardline on people, it's like yeah, because we stand on our principles and we're solid, but it's it has to come across like look, we think you completely misunderstand this topic.
We want you to come in and talk to us about it so we can explain what we think about it and why it's important to Us.
They know that there are problems, but who knows right, hope springs eternal.
Maybe these are the best and brightest minds who can iron out the contradictions In this new post-woke left coalition that's coming about and can really solidify, put down some foundations upon which they can build.
But until then, the dream of leftism seems to be quite far over the horizon, quite a long way away.
But you've got to keep your hopes up.
I mean, you never know what's going to happen tomorrow.
But we've seen it in Chile, we've seen it with Yanis Varoufakis, we've seen it with Jeremy Corbyn.
Does this just mean we can never have a left-wing prime minister?
No, never say never.
I mean, I think this is part of the history of the left, which is everything seems impossible until it happens.
My mum was an anti-apartheid activist, and she told me that she did all of those sit-ins and she got arrested all those times, and she, you know, telling people to boycott Barclays.
And she never thought she'd see a free South Africa.
And then she did.
You know, I'm sure that Lenin was looking at Imperial Russia, going, oh, this seems uphill.
But they did it.
So absolutely never say never, but be strategic and clear-eyed about what's in your way.
So we're coming to the end now.
And I just wanted to talk about why the post-woke left is not going to win.
And it's because they cannot extend the same kind of moral charity to their own people that they extend to foreigners.
And this isn't just refugees.
This is all types of migrants.
We want to be close to what's familiar to us.
We want to, you know, the food, the customs, the traditions, the people that we know and love, that's what we want to stay near.
It's actually a tiny, tiny proportion, even of people who are migrants at all, which is a very small proportion of people, who ever go on a very long journey to far away from where they come from.
And until they can bring themselves to understand why, when they say, well, migrants will go to places with people like them because they appreciate being around people who are similar, until they can apply that perspective to their own people, they'll never understand why we don't want immigration, why we don't want our countries flooded with an infinite number of foreigners.
Because actually, it does to us what you think the migrants are running from.
Until they can understand the sentimental bonds that bind the country together, that give it the social tapestry that it is, in which we actually do belong, and in actually we feel like we have a proper place, they'll never understand why we have the positions that we have.
But moreover, they won't be able to win.
It's that that Elon Musk is speaking to.
It's that that Tommy Robinson is speaking to.
It's that that we are trying to protect and repair.
And it's that that's under attack from mass migration.
And until they can get that into their heads, they're not going anywhere.
If someone sat you down, and I'm sure many on the left would be very happy to do this, and this is where the right are kind of lying to them, where they're saying they don't even want to, you know, talk to you about this sort of stuff.
They're scared to have this conversation.
It's not true.
But if you sat them down, talk them through it and explain it like an adult, they'll probably go, yeah, actually, that's a really interesting point.
And the thing is, as well, they say, oh, well, we are happy to talk to people who don't agree with us.
We're completely happy to debate with the right.
But I haven't seen any of those debates, have you?
And much like the old left, they actually are not really very interested in having a dialogue with people outside of their own spaces, which honestly, I think is good.
I think that actually we probably shouldn't be debating with these people.
Not only do they not want to, but they don't know how to.
They don't know how.
I mean, not even a debate, a discourse.
Because at the moment, I think they're on a losing path.
I think they're on the journey to siloing themselves at the sort of 13% that the Green Party are on.
Maybe that'll go up to like 15% or something.
But I don't think that's ever going to come anywhere near a workable majority.
And so actually, never interrupt your opponent when they're making a mistake.
Folks, this is the last week that Islander 4 will be on sale.
So get it while you can.
I don't even know how many copies are left.
So if you can get it, but get it so you don't have to get it when it's on eBay later for £400.
It is an amazing magazine.
I don't know if I can show you the inside properly.
It is an amazing and beautiful magazine packed with fascinating essays from the cutting edge of right-wing thought.
Me and a bunch of other people who are my friends and I think have done great work.
So that's currently on sale now.
Link will be in the description, but it's only going to be on sale until the end of this week.
So get it while you can.
World that we live in that is governed by a capitalist economic system.
You need work to put food on the table for your family and you need that to survive, to have a house, you know.
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