How Homeschooling Can Save The West From Identity Politics With Calvin Robinson | OAP #55
Calvin Robinson is a former video games journalist and current British conservative political commentator, policy advisor and campaigner who is a senior fellow at Policy Exchange. Robinson is owner of the video games site God is a Geek.[1] He is a regular contributor to The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail.[2]
As a commentator, Robinson has contributed to talkRADIO and GB News.
He previously worked for Turning Point UK.
EPISODE LINKS:
Calvin's Twitter: https://twitter.com/calvinrobinson
Chase's Twitter: https://twitter.com/realchasegeiser
But there's this emphasis, obviously, in the United States, in terms of our Constitution on the freedom of religion, right?
And so bearing that in mind, do you think that the founding fathers, though many of them would have had a consensus that things like community involvement and your pursuit of your relationship with God are important, that it was important that that not be explicit in the text because this is supposed to be something that's sort of accessible to all faiths or lack of faith.
And the sort of the difference between a compromise and a deal in the sense that a compromise is when both parties lose and a deal is when both parties win.
That's sort of kind of the famous Ayn Rand.
And I'm sure you're not a big fan of Ayn Rand just because of her atheism, but she got some things right.
But, you know, it's interesting.
I heard you mention sort of like a subtle antagonism to selfishness.
I tweeted something earlier today where I sort of put out the thought that political systems and governments can't make individuals within a society more or less moral.
It seems that the human nature is sort of fixed in that what the political systems do is they manifest how human nature plays out differently.
So for example, if you were in Soviet Union, people are just as greedy in the Soviet Union as they are in the United States.
But in a communist society, that manifests much differently than in a capitalist society.
And so I wonder what you think about selfishness, because the term sort of has a negative connotation in that it implies that someone will sacrifice someone else for their own good.
But when I think of selfishness, I think of it in the sense like, hey, I want to make as much money as possible.
So I'm going to find a way to manufacture cars in the least expensive way possible.
And therefore, you know, more people can afford to buy a car.
So in that sense, Henry Ford's selfishness was actually a good thing because capitalism sort of manipulated it.
So obviously I'm always fighting against socialism and against communism.
This idea that we always need to be looking out for the wider community doesn't make sense.
But so we do have to have an element of selfishness, but it has to be focused on God and focused on the family because the family is fundamental to the conservative way of life, in my opinion, which is why the far left are always trying to break down the family in their first approach, because once they own your child's thoughts, they own the future.
So we do have to be selfish to a degree, but within limits.
Everything is within limits, though, isn't it, really?
Because I don't know what it's like in the United Kingdom, but in the United States, obviously you're aware there's a tremendous amount of distrust in the system.
And I don't know where to land on election fraud.
I have mixed feelings about it.
There's a lot of foolish people on both sides of that argument, so it's really hard to know who to believe.
But traditionally, the beautiful thing about the United States, and I guess a republic in general, is that if you're unhappy with something, you can push for the next election cycle.
But if there's no faith in that process, then how do you fix something?
How do you fix a political problem if there's no political process?
I'm struggling with this myself because I believe in democracy.
I promote democracy all the time.
But I'm getting to a point now where I'm questioning, does it even work or does it even exist anymore?
So in this country, in the United Kingdom, for example, we had the referendum on leaving the European Union and we won that referendum with a majority.
But since then, I've seen a decline of democracy in our country.
So the losers didn't consent.
The losers refused to consent for a big amount of time.
They used every system in their power to avoid taking us out of the European Union.
You know, our government, our parliamentarians, our politicians were all fighting against the democratic vote of the people.
And I think that's very, very scary.
But since then, we've seen a pattern.
So we've seen it in general elections.
You guys have seen it too with Trump in that the losers on both both of those elections, actually.
When Trump won, the loser said no, he didn't win.
When Trump lost, the loser said, no, he didn't lose.
We're no longer conceding.
And without concession, we cannot have a functioning democracy.
We have technology to win inside and fight to win the next time around.
Yeah, I don't know what the solution is going to be.
I've been working on a video that I'm going to publish later today, just sort of a solo video talking about the idea of zeitgeist.
And this is something that I learned about from one of my professors when I was in school, sort of informally, and sort of, he was sort of a mentor.
And he was writing a book about, you know, what a zeitgeist means, what the spirit of the times is, right?
And we sort of, at the time, we looked at the difference in, you know, album art on, you know, album covers for music before and after the Great Recession, right?
So if you remember the early 2000s, it was all about, you know, being very flashy, escalades, you know, just making as much money as possible.
And then you sort of see like the whole hipster movement became popular after the crash because it was okay to spend a lot of money on clothes still as long as you were, as long as you spent the money to look poor, right?
You know, and it was, I don't know if it was like an empathy thing or a guilt thing, but it's just funny how it's funny how these real socioeconomic, political things, even natural disasters, pandemics, these real things, tangible things, create new zeitgeists, spirit of time, tones, right, in a society.
And that zeitgeist changes the way people react.
And then the reaction, you know, funnels right back into what's going to happen politically, right?
So it's sort of like this cycle.
And, you know, the zeitgeist now, if you look at like shows and movies that are popular, particularly in the United States, like Handmaid's Tale, Joker, there's this like reoccurring theme of hopelessness and taking justice into your own hands, right?
And there's like an antagonism to tradition, specifically in Handmaid's Tale.
It's sort of like the dogmatists, the traditional people are the antagonists and they exploit the vulnerable women, but they underestimate the power of the women, right?
And then in the end, they have, you know, not spoiler alert, in the end, they just take matters into their own hands and they kill the antagonist from the whole series just without any sort of trial, right?
And you see this in like a lot of shows.
And I'm wondering, like, okay, so if this zeitgeist is real of just like hopelessness and I'm taking things into my own hands, like, how does that manifest politically?
And it seems to me that we're in sort of like a pre-totalitarian state.
You guys have in your constitution that protection to bear the right to bear arms, which I think is fantastic.
It's something we don't have.
And we are seeing totalitarianism creeping on us from, you know, it started with an authoritarian response to COVID and it's becoming more than that.
So up in Scotland, for example, we're seeing that the government want to hold on to these emergency COVID powers and get rid of them with COVID so they can use lockdowns, they can close schools, they can use these powers for anything that they see fit.
We're seeing the same in Australia and in England, they're even proposing extending them further.
And what I predict is we'll see these measures used for the environment.
In Canada, they're talking already about using, facing this climate emergency, this emergency that's been going on for much longer than I've been alive to fight this so-called emergency with these COVID powers.
So the governments have become used to having these powers.
And as we know, tyranny never comes in through oppression.
It always comes in through good intention.
And once governments have powers, they never want to give them back.
And we're seeing this and we're seeing it play out in real time.
And it just seems to me like people haven't learned from history.
But how do we fight it?
How do we, if democracy isn't working, you know, what's to say that they're not going to, well, in this country, they did actually cancel elections.
It was for the mayor of London and for local elections, not a government, not a national election.
But still, they could do the same.
They could postpone indefinitely elections due to whatever emergence they're going to permit.
So how do we fight back?
And I think, you know, you guys have a natural protection.
Yeah, well, and the thing that's, you know, I've got a couple of close friends.
We've been talking about the Second Amendment here in the United States.
And, you know, I'm obviously a supporter of the Second Amendment.
I own several firearms.
But the Second Amendment is useless if you don't use it.
So it could be like a subconscious deterrent for potential tyrants to be like, oh, they're armed.
I know they're armed.
But if you have weak character or if the tyranny is so gradual that you never reach that point of emotional response where you think, I'm going to grab my gun and take care of this, then the tyranny can still take hold.
I mean, we've seen in the United States, just in the last two years, what I thought, I never thought in my life I would see where people were getting in trouble for going to church, people are closing their businesses, and there's sort of just this like complicity, this compliance, rather.
And I'm worried that the culture problem is so deep-seated that even though we have the rights, we won't exercise them.
I thought that the West, I thought the US and the UK in particular, were countries that fought for freedom and really cared about civil liberties.
I honestly thought that was in our DNA, but I've been so disappointed and surprised to find out that it isn't because people are so willing to give up their liberties.
And yeah, they'll say it's because it's an emergency or it's because it's urgent and it's just for now.
But even then, you should never give your liberties away, even if it's just supposedly temporarily, because you never get them back.
They're yours.
And I just, I despair, in all honesty, because I see, you know, we've got vaccine passports coming out already in this country.
And we're seeing that they're already proposing merging them into digital IDs.
We've got the digital currencies being proposed where the Bank of England wants to dictate where they want control of your money, essentially.
They want to say what money can be spent on.
So they'll start off with benefits.
They'll start off with people on welfare.
Say, you can only spend your money in certain places.
But of course, once they've got that control, they could say, well, you can only spend your money on things that are good for the climate or things that are, you know, don't have a lot of sugar in them.
It's for your own good.
Of course, it's always for our own good.
But all of these tyrannies are creeping in right now under our noses.
But no one gives a damn because it's all because of COVID.
And we've got to do this to get out of this blooming pandemic.
You know, it's fascinating because I've been a fan of Huxley and Orwell, you know, ever since I was in high school.
And for a long time, I admired Brave New World and 1984 with equal reverence.
But I think that Brave New World is proving to be the better work because it seems to me that the real path to tyranny is not necessarily through violent dominance, as has been historically the case anymore.
It is through sort of the anesthesia of the masses, rather, the opiate of the masses type thing, where you just, you get people comfortable enough that they start to prioritize safety over their rights.
And then you just convince them that you're the solution to the safety.
It seems to me that this is, we're going to hand it over rather than have it taken from us.
But it's about how do we open people's eyes to this and how do we show them that it's not for their own safety and they're not safer by giving away their liberties.
How do we expose this problem and say, you know, well, essentially wake up the sheep.
And I think one of the ways is, you know, through your podcast and things like this, you know, having conversations that people are exposed to, just getting people thinking again.
But like you said, people are compliant and complicit in all of this.
So there's an element of people wanting to protect themselves.
If they've gone along with it for so long, it almost you want to double down in order to see that you've done the right thing.
People don't want to be seen to have done the wrong thing.
And I think that's what is happening even up to the level of government.
You know, we had lockdowns early last year when we didn't know much about the virus.
But since we figured out that lockdowns don't actually do much to curb the virus, we continue to have them.
And even this winter, our government in the UK is talking about having another lockdown.
I don't think that's because they think lockdowns work.
I think it's because at this point they're doubling down.
They made a decision.
People have lost their lives.
People are dying because of undiagnosed cancer from not being able to see their doctors, from hospitals only treating people with COVID.
We've had serious deaths due to government decisions.
But at this point, they cannot admit that they were wrong because that would make them culpable.
So to avoid accountability, they're doubling down.
And we're seeing that all the way from government all the way down to personal responsibility.
People who have sneered at other people for not wearing masks, people who have had an opinion or something to say that they've realized at some point might be authoritarian, but they can never admit it to themselves because they would realize they've been complicit.
That's why it breeds conspiracies because if there was truly a pandemic that was really, really a killer pandemic, people would not want to leave their homes because they'd see people dying.
And what we have is a virus.
It's a bad virus, but the vast majority of people will not be seriously affected by this virus.
The vast majority of people will not die from this virus.
And governments all across the world have overreacted.
I don't buy into a lot of these conspiracy theories just because I know a lot of politicians and I know how shit they are essentially.
I know these are normal people who are trying their best and making mistakes.
I don't, you know, I honestly think Klaus Schwab is probably demonic, but I don't think he has, I don't think there is an evil scheme that our politicians have signed up to because they're not that clever.
Well, I mean, there might be people like him in the WF that do have an idea of, I mean, I'm reading the great research at the moment, that do have an idea of how they want to shape the world and they might be influencing and manipulating events and people.
But I really don't think that our governments are all signed up to it.
I don't think it's all a massive conspiracy.
I think it's just human nature, people making rubbish decisions and backing them up.
Well, and the amount of intelligence and leadership skill and determination required to do something like a global conspiracy on that level is if they had that level of competence, then a lot of our other problems would be solved too, right?
Like we wouldn't have potholes in the road, maybe, or maybe we'd already have figured out renewable energy.
I mean, you're talking about like on the conspiracy side, you have this like notion that our politicians are evil geniuses, but then in reality, all their policies really play out kind of stupid.
But what we also have to be careful of is not undermining them or not to underestimating them rather, because they are going to, while I don't think this came into play because of conspiracy, they are going to use this to their advantage wherever they can.
So I used to work in tech and then eventually I became a school teacher.
I was teaching when the first lockdown hit and I was writing all the time I was teaching about how much left-wing indoctrination is taking place in our schools, just because I thought, you know, parents need to know what's going on here.
It's infested with identity politics because well-meaning, well-intentioned left-wing teachers live and work in a groupthink environment and they don't even see it as indoctrination.
They see it as they're doing their best to help fix problems in the world.
And they are indoctrinating our young kids with horrible left-wing ideologies.
And so I was writing about that.
I started getting us to speak about it.
And, you know, I stopped writing for the broadsheets and the tabloids and appearing on radio and TV.
And eventually that's now become my proper gig.
So I'm now accommodate rather than teach.
But I like to think I still have a bit of an emphasis on education because it is, you know, it's the most important thing.
Passing on knowledge is how we curate and maintain our culture.
And it's something that conservatives need to take more of an interest in because it's the, you know, as I mentioned earlier, the long march through institutions, this is how the left have taken over because we've taken a step back and let them get on with it.
Well, it seems like on the racism note, it seems like the definition of racism has really shifted too.
And maybe I'm wrong about this.
So please enlighten me with what you think.
But when I grew up, I was raised that racism was when a person believes that one race is either inherently inferior or superior to another.
Typically associated with things like intelligence, whatever, right?
Things that are valued by society.
Now it seems like racism is anything that's like a stereotype.
You know, so like if you use a stereotype sort of insensitively, like without any sort of sensitivity, then you're all of a sudden you're a racist.
It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Like, you mean like Hitler racist?
Because like there's a there's a huge like spectrum here, right?
You know, I'm sorry that I, you know, just assumed you like rap music because you're, you know, from the city and of color, you know, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're racist, right?
So the dictionary definition of the term racism means prejudice or discrimination against someone based on their race.
So it means talking them down or like you say, thinking they're inferior because of their race.
And that's inappropriate.
We would all agree that's inappropriate.
What we have now is professors and academics saying, no, that's not what racism is.
Racism is a power dynamic between white people and non-white people because white people are in a position of power.
So black people can never be racist.
And it's like, wait a minute, that's not, that's not how you're redefining a word to win an argument.
That's not clever.
But that's what they've done.
And that's why they have things like microaggressions, which is what you just described, you know, having a stereotype and that being perceived as racist.
But it undervalues real racism because racism does exist.
It still does.
And it's still illegal, but we need to squash.
You know, I've experienced it firsthand.
But what people are calling racism today isn't racism.
And we can't fight racism unless we agree on what it actually means.
Well, and one of the things that I've struggled with just to be vulnerable and sincere is the more that I get unjustly accused of being bigoted or racist or prejudiced, the closer I get to actually being racist.
You know what I mean?
It catalyzes such hate and resentment that you start to feel that way, right?
And it's like an us versus them type thing, you know, not like on an intellectual conscious level, but like on a sort of primitive psychological level, it starts to get nasty, right?
And so it seems to me that by addressing a problem incorrectly or unfairly, they're actually creating the problem.
And maybe that's what they want because if they create the problem, then they can say, see, you know?
But what they want to do is divide us based on our immutable characteristics.
And, you know, I've been told that I need to have a certain opinion because I'm black or mixed race or brown or whatever they want to label me as.
But my whole point is if we want to get to a point of diversity and inclusion and equality, these words that they throw around without actually having any meaning, if we want to get to a point of that, surely it shouldn't matter what color your skin is.
You should have the diversity of thought and opinion.
I have smallly conservative views.
That should be acceptable.
I shouldn't have to have left-wing liberal views just because my skin color is brown.
Because to me, that is the racism.
That is prescribing a politics and an opinion on someone based on how they look.
That's very old-fashioned racist thinking.
But the hardcore left, the hard left, have taken the mentality of the far right and they don't even realize it.
And man, I don't, it's such a complicated issue with so much nuance.
But one of the things that's most unnerving to me about the whole identity politics issue is that no one's really talking about it explicitly.
I mean, a few people are, but it totally undermines the idea of the individual.
And I don't know if you're pro or anti-individualism, right?
And I don't mean it from the selfish sense from earlier because I just know that you mentioned, but like the idea that who I am is based off of what groups I fall into seems to be a very cheapening of who I am, right?
And that's kind of why I said, that's kind of what this podcast is about in a sense.
I said, I am one American.
And obviously identifying as American is identity politics in and of itself.
But this podcast is sort of an attempt to explore what that means.
And it's sort of a self-actualization exercise for me, just that I'm doing it.
And I guess the point that I'm trying to make is I don't think that it's a good thing when you ask someone, you know, what's the first thing you think of about yourself?
And then their response is their race or their religion.
It's like, I'm like, no, I'm Chase.
I'm not white.
I'm Chase, you know?
And so I don't know.
It just seems, it seems like this has implications down the line as we cheapen and cheapen individuals where the attention all gets on what's good for the mob or what's good for the collectivists.
And maybe I'm just being obscure, but I don't know.
But I don't identify first and foremost as black or biracial or mixed race or whatever label they want to use on me because it's unimportant.
My skin color is actually unimportant to me.
I'm not proud of it, but I'm not ashamed of it either.
It just is.
It's part of me, just like my hair is brown and my eyes are brown.
Now, they see it differently.
And I think it's a form of control because they think the left, I'm talking about when I say they, if they put us in these boxes, they can control us.
And it used to be all about class, but they've lost the class war for a whole host of reasons.
But now if they shove us into an identity box based on our unmutable characteristics, say black people there, the trans people there, the gay people there, the women there, and then they can say, women should vote this way.
You know, to me, and I don't want to just bring up Ayn Rand over and over again.
And I'm not like an Ayn Rand disciple, but I love several of her books.
Okay, so The Fountainhead fundamentally changed my life when I read it in high school because of the emphasis on the individual.
And I know that Howard Wourke was not a perfect character or a perfect hero.
And there were some flaws there, I think, in the way that she executed that.
But the idea that, hey, listen, you need to live your life with integrity to your own values, not by selling out to what is expected of you.
Right.
And other people read the book and they thought, oh, he's such a selfish asshole.
And he kind of was.
But it's not really about being selfish and sacrificing others for yourself.
Like I said earlier, it's really about living according to your own values and not compromising those values.
And it seems to me, like, what I don't understand is I felt so empowered by that book and by that character that I don't understand why anyone would give up voluntarily their individuality for the sake of an identity, you know, like a group identity.
I would say because you are a true liberal, in the term, you know, classical liberal in that you believe that every individual has the right to live their lives according to their values and how they see fit, as long as they're not harming other people.
That's perfect.
That's fine.
But that's where my train of thought was going.
I think when it comes to not seeing that, when it comes to putting people into these collectives, it's because it comes from a sense of wanting to belong as well.
So it's not always about, so I talked about control and power, but from the other end of the, why they get people onto their control, why they get people into their control is because people want to belong.
People want to be part of a group.
And we've lost our groups.
So essentially, in the West, Christianity used to be our group.
The West used to be, you know, America was, I don't know, it's not a Christian country, but essentially it was a Christian country.
Great Britain is a Christian country.
And they have core moral values that we know, they're very explicit.
We know what they are.
We can subscribe to them.
And we were all part of, while we were individuals, we were part of a collective that we all belonged to because we chose to belong to it.
And without that, we've looked to fill the void in other ways, which is why we see people joining Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter and all these extremist hardcore left groups that offer a moral code and they offer that us versus them mentality.
They offer a place to belong, a collective.
People need that in their lives.
And I think without religion, people reach out to what's closest to them.
Well, I think that Nietzsche sort of saw it coming when he wrote about that, because we saw in the 20th century a dramatic replacement of sort of faith in a metaphysical truth to reliance on very real states.
There's sort of a state worship that happened all over the place with World War II and everything with all the tyrants.
So I just, I don't see culturally, I don't see, I don't see faith in religion ever reaching the point that they had maybe 100 years ago when they seem to have peaked, just because I think that people are more skeptical, just generally.
And for some reason, though I don't agree with the sentiment, the more scientific people become, the farther from any sort of spirituality they seem to get a lot of times, right?
Why do you think nobody talks about Christian values?
Why do you think nobody talks about the consanguinity?
And I may be pronouncing that wrong, the consanguinity issue in the Middle East, particularly in Islam.
Are you familiar?
What's sorry?
I could be pronouncing it wrong.
It's consanguinity, which is cousin marriage.
I'm serious.
I'm not trying to be controversial or put you on the spot or make you uncomfortable.
If you look up the real studies that have been done, as of 2003, in Middle Eastern regions, it was as high as 45% of people who were married or married to their first or second cousin.
A lot of Pakistani families have this issue, and we see it in schools, but we never talk about it.
We daren't talk about it.
But you see the defects that the young children have, the younger Pakistani Muslim children have because they are, because of intermarriage and the amount of incest going on in those communities.
If none of our people in power are willing to have the conversation and anytime we bring it up as civilians, we're classed as bigots and xenophobes and racists.
How do we get to the point where we can even measure if it's a thing?
I appreciate you being patient and having conversations about some very touchy things.
I didn't mean to put you on the spot with anything, but if we're not going to talk about something important, you know, controversial, then what are we talking about?
