What Is Western Civilization & How To Save It | With Raheem J. Kassam
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Our Editor-in-Chief is a guy called Raheem Kassam. He’s a political communications and news veteran, who insists that National Pulse reporting always cites sources, documentation, or other evidence, and never relies on “anonymous” claims, like much of the corporate news media.
Raheem previously co-founded the War Room podcast, as well as having served as senior advisor to Brexit leader Nigel Farage, and editor of Breitbart News’s London bureau.
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You being a certain way can rub off on people in that regard.
And I've got this weird thing now that I started to do.
And I it wasn't never, it was never a um conscious thing.
I never read it anywhere.
I don't know what happened.
Um when I'm in public now, when I'm at a supermarket, when I'm you know walking down the street, I will sort of walk around, making sure that in a way I'm smiling.
And I'm not saying like I'm walking around the city like this, you know, like a psychopath.
Um not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
Mr. Gorbachev teared down this wall.
A date which will live in infamy.
I still have a dream.
Good night and good luck.
Good night and good luck.
It's one American Podcast Live with Roheem Kassam.
It is an honor and a pleasure to have you on today, sir.
How are you?
I'm very well considering the news cycle this week and how busy things have been.
Um, but we we try and stay fit and healthy and and able to deal with all of this stuff, I think, because we are so much fewer in number than the establishment side.
And so we kind of do, you know, the job of 10 men each in the in the news at the moment.
Um, and weeks like this can be especially taxing.
But uh, how are you?
I'm doing well.
Thank you for asking.
Uh, like I said, it's an honor and a pleasure to have you on.
I think I first came across you when I actually when I watched American Dharma.
Um, and and it was just cool to see you see you there.
And then obviously I've followed you for some time on on Twitter and your work, but you've you've got a very uh eclectic resume and very impressive work that you've done.
So I figured it would be an interesting conversation to have with you.
Yeah, like I say, it's it's it's the work of 10 people at any given time.
And and this has sort of been my life since since my early 20s, uh, you know, working in British politics, and and it hasn't improved over here.
So I'm looking for anywhere in the world I can go where I can do the job of just five people.
That would be great.
So tell me how this uh how this all started for you.
Like, where was your head at when you graduated from primary school?
You never did for real?
No, I did.
Um so primary takes you till 11, and then you have secondary, and then secondary in the in the final two years of your secondary schooling in the UK, you you kind of get to choose, I guess what you would call um majors, and and so I really wanted to be an actor.
I really wanted to that's what I love to do.
Like Alec Baldwin.
What's that?
Like Alec Baldwin.
Like Alec Baldwin.
Um exactly like Alec Baldwin.
But um, yeah, and and that's what I enjoyed doing.
And and for whatever reason, you know, well, I know what the reason is.
You know, my parents were were dead set on on my brother and I going to university.
You know, he was four years older than me, he had already done it, and so I felt compelled to do it as well.
I don't recommend it to anybody.
Um, but I felt compelled for their sake.
You know, they were immigrants into the United Kingdom, they had worked their whole lives to send us to higher education, and so I thought, okay, well, I'm just gonna choose a subject that I'm interested in, not necessarily a subject that I want to go into for for work.
Um, and that subject was politics.
And I did that for three years at the University of Westminster.
And I think I might have attended some somewhere like six lectures and five seminars over the course of the entire three years.
Um, so little did I I have you know patience for that um uh that that environment.
Um but it but there was something else that happened at Westminster uh that got my attention, and that was I I started to spot radical Islamists recruiting on campus.
And so right after university, uh, well, I had a I had like a day job at the time, but but I really wanted to do something about this problem.
And so we set up this pressure group in the UK and we started to lobby members of parliament and the media and and teach them about uh Islamic extremism and and how it was recruiting on British um university campuses, and that is basically how I got accidentally started in politics.
And and you can't really be uh, at least for me, I could never really be just involved in one part of politics, like like that particular side of it, and then I did some foreign policy stuff at a think tank in London.
Everything was interrelated and everything was connected, and so you know, here I am some years later doing doing something that you know I never dreamed of doing uh when I left uh when I left school.
So when you wanted to be an actor, what type of acting were you interested in?
Were you primarily theater or film?
I would have done both.
I mean, I loved the stage, the physical stage.
I loved acting in in uh plays and musicals that we would put on at school.
I did Ayolanthi, Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat.
You know, I did that, I did that as Elvis.
Um, I just loved it.
And I went, I grew up in a part of London that is well known for having great acting schools.
It is where a lot of the soap opera actors come from.
Um, but I didn't want to do that.
But um, yeah, it just that that never materialized.
I mean, until and until, of course, you know, I was in all of these movies by accident that you, you know, the plot against the president, and then the the other one, I forget even the name of it now, um, The Brink, uh, and so on and so forth.
And you know, honestly, having that camera follow me around during all of those times, I started to think again, maybe I could, maybe I could still do this.
So who knows?
Yeah.
So how did how did you make the transition from UK politics to sort of US politics?
Ah, also one of the things that I didn't study, was supposed to be studying at university was American politics.
And I I was just watching as my lecturer was talking to me to us about all of this, and I realized I knew way more than he did just by reading the newspapers and being aware of uh uh my surroundings and having family in the United States and being sort of interested at that level also.
Um I first started getting really interested in it when uh the the it was Obama was a big deal everywhere, right?
Obama was a big deal all around the world, and of course, when he was elected, it was all all the front pages of all the newspapers everywhere in the world.
And I remember the run-up to that campaign, just trying to wrap my head around, you know.
I had I had, you know, obviously uh vague ideas about American politics and you know who was on the left and who was on the right and and and what they each stood for and so forth.
But that was really the moment where I thought, hmm, there's there's quite a lot more to this than I than I had originally envisaged.
And it was only a few years later that a friend of mine, he was actually the operations director for the Conservative Party in Britain, but he was an American uh who would who they had brought in to do this job.
Uh well, he went over and became the operations director for the John Huntsman for President campaign.
And while I didn't know much about Huntsman or that campaign, he called me up one day and just said, look, we've got we've got space on the campaign, we've got a place for you to stay.
We'll pay for you to come over here.
Uh we obviously can't pay for you to work here, but like, why don't you just spend the summer over here learning the ropes, uh, you know, walking around the office, seeing what we do, uh, and so on and so forth.
And that was really where I sunk my teeth into it and started to learn all the characters, started to network a lot more in Republican circles, and um and started to attend a lot of the conferences, you know, over here that um uh that's really kind of I thought back then were really excellent.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of them now have gone have gone to absolute ruin.
There's a lot of uh interesting change that seems to be happening in conservatism in the United States.
Uh it seems like there's sort of the going out of establishment republicanism that we saw, you know, from 2000 to 2008 or 2000 to 2016, really, uh, in this sort of new movement, this populist movement that seems to be on the rise.
Um what what do you think in terms of the change that we have seen and will continue to see in the next 10 years?
Yeah, I've got a lot of I've got a lot of critiques for for our own side on this, and I blame myself for most of the uh most of the pitfalls here.
You know, uh we we operated, you know, the populist nationalist uh movement that really came came to the fore just before uh Brexit and Trump, and we were operating that on a shoestring everything, right?
A shoestring budget, a shoestring staff, um, people who who liked what we believed in, but we didn't quite have a sort of wide intellectual underpinning that you could just point somebody to a couple of books and say, you know, this is what we believe, and here's why we believe it, and so on and so forth.
It was it was really coming together in a way that I I love the conspiracy theories on the left.
Like this is all big money funded secretly by this person and that person, and they they believe in this, and it's nonsense, right?
We were we were very, very, very lucky the way we went about things in an extremely and explicitly grassroots way.
We started this movement with seven members.
Seven.
Yeah.
And so you know, I think we we are now starting to live um the problems that come off the back of that.
There's always a time lag when it comes to this stuff.
Um we're starting to realize that actually, okay, um, Brexit and Trump were big moments in the moment, don't get me wrong.
I mean, I still remember effectively wetting myself the night of Brexit, right?
Like just un I could not believe how those results were coming in.
Um, but they really were just the start of it.
And and I think myself and a lot of other people, we we kind of harbored this hope that actually they would toss us the keys, you know, to Western civilization over and go, well, fair play, you won.
It's all it's all up to you guys now.
And of course, that never that never was the case.
And you can track that, you can track that denialism, that rejectionism from the political apparatus right through to the you know, Mar-Lago affidavit uh uh that came out this week.
Uh, because it's all it all it all hinges around the same thing.
It's the delegitimization of a of an entire philosophy, the delegitimization of an entire movement.
And so, you know, we need numbers.
Uh we need um we need more intellectual guidance, quite frankly.
It can't, it can't just be left to two or three or four people to provide that that intellectual underpinning.
Um, we need more conversations on our side.
We need to stop trying to fit ourselves into conservative ink and start forcing conservative ink to mold themselves around us.
And that is happening to an extent, but I see some backsliding going on there as well.
And then the other thing we need to get to grips with is that we we actually failed in a lot of ways um from 2016 onwards to uh populate the apparatus of government with people who thought either thought like we thought or were willing to do the jobs that that we were giving them.
And that went right up to to chief of staff of the president of the United States.
I don't think to my view, there was never a chief of staff uh to Donald Trump who was willing to implement his agenda 100%.
And so there, so I know a lot of people are very excited and they see more people and they you know I I I get very excited about these things too, but I always temper and check myself um because so much of it so much of what we should have achieved has by now has not yet been achieved.
We've heard the term Western civilization sort of come up more and more in the political sphere.
It's obviously been something that comes up quite a bit in you know, philosophy classes at university.
When you say Western civilization, what do you mean?
What a great question.
Uh, I mean, I I think effectively uh I think of it in two ways, right?
So I think of it is is a systemic civilization, that is things like the rule of law, uh, you know, in right down to you know, our court system, trial before your your own peers, so on and so forth.
Uh, the political system, the democratic political system are not one of those types of people who who thinks of of this country or even my country as a democracy, uh, but we have a democratic system of elections, and and we are losing those, by the way, on both sides of the pond.
Um, so there's there's the systemic part of Western civilization, and then there's more sort of the the aesthetic part of Western civilization is is what it's the question, where do we want to live and why?
You know, what do we want our our neighborhoods to look like?
What do we want our children to be learning in schools?
What do we want our buildings to portray about us in the here and now to a civilization two, three, four, five hundred years later?
And and that latter question, I think is the one that we always struggle to um we struggle to actually project it to the other side.
We strike we could win a lot more people over by talking about aesthetic Western civilization, and and we rarely ever do that.
Is why, by the way, I'm so excited about a lot of these Instagram accounts and so forth that are popping up now, things like um, do you know Carnivore Aurelius?
Uh but I'll check it out.
I like Marcus Aurelius, so Carnival Aurelius sounds even more badass.
Yeah, you know, he's just he's one of these, he's one of these ball tanners, you know, sun your sun your tan your testicles and that.
But there's also for as much as that is lighthearted and humorous and tongue-in-cheek, um, there's also a lot of seriousness behind it.
It's what are you eating?
Do you know what's going in your into your system?
You know, we have this um on the national pulse, we're membership funded, and part of the membership benefits is we have a private Discord chat channel where I'm in there a lot of the day, just chatting to the members, seeing what's going on in their neighborhoods, what are their concerns?
And sometimes it gets lighthearted.
And the other day we were talking about hot pockets, and I've never had a hot pocket.
Have you had a hot pocket?
Yeah, too many.
Yeah.
I've never had a hot pocket.
I've never looked at a hot pocket.
I don't know what a hot pocket is.
So I looked up what a hot pocket is.
Now, ostensibly a hot pocket is is pastry with with some sort of filling in it.
But it's got about 50 wildly unnatural ingredients, preservatives.
So you can tell when you eat it.
Yeah.
And and you know, the I I saw Jim Gaffigan, the comedian, he had a whole whole thing about hot pockets and why you immediately feel sick after eating a hot pocket.
Well, I can tell you why.
It's the xanthem gum and the high fructose corn syrup and the colorings and all of that stuff that isn't supposed to be in your body.
And so I think a lot of a lot of Western civilization to answer that question also has to come back down uh to us to to being inward uh about those sorts of things, and also about our spirituality.
Um I used to be somebody who was uh called myself an atheist.
I was very flippant about religion.
Um I would I would be uh you know, more on the sort of Bill Maher religious kind of sneering side of it almost.
And in the last couple of years, to well, probably more than that, you know, three or four years, um, I have found myself to be just incredibly humbled by an experience that I never thought would happen to me.
Um and it's not it's not sort of like one thing happened, and I was like, oh my god, there's a god.
Um but it was just a series of sort of events and life and getting older and wiser and and taking note of the world around me and then also taking note of myself, who I am, why I am that way, and you know, a lot of people nowadays will head off to therapy.
I've got a better idea for you.
Pick up the holy Bible.
Yeah, I've um I've had many different chapters in my life in terms of how I felt about religion.
I uh grew up Lutheran and read the Bible when I was a teenager and joined what basically amounted to sort of almost a Christian cult.
It was just a really hardcore evangelical understanding of the Bible.
It was it was a great experience for me.
And then I went to college and left that church and was sort of in like an agnostic state.
I I never went through a period in my life where I didn't believe in God, but I went through a period of my life where I was very unsure about the nature of God, uh, whether this was an entity that was you know, actively involved or sort of uh like Churchill was quoted in the movie, um, the darkest hour, uh, busy elsewhere, right?
Uh uh, you know, my father was like God, busy elsewhere.
And um, you know, I've come I've come back around, and I think um what a lot of the antagonism toward religion is not is is mistaken as by those who are antagonistic as an antagonism toward God, but really it's an antagonism toward dogmatism.
And the dogmatism can be very off-putting or alienating, uh, that's associated with religion, but the actual you know, philosophical notion of a creator and you know, an objective good versus evil is incredibly important and not necessarily dogmatic.
And it's too bad that where mankind has come in and sort of um obscured religion or or or twisted it or distorted it.
It's it's it's alienated people from the good that it has to offer.
And and I'm I'm I'm in the same boat as someone who's 31 years old with a uh almost two-year-old daughter now.
I've sort of started coming back around to all right, I need this this this faith that spirituality needs to be reintegrated into my life.
Yeah, and I think I think you're right as well.
It's an antagonism towards ourselves, right?
It's an antagonism towards how we have have have taken the word of God and and and used it or not used it or ignored it or twisted it, or you know, like you say, become uh, you know, extremely dogmatic about it, or or whatever, but it but that's that's us, right?
That's not that's not that's not the spiritual battle.
And that's that's actually the thing where it sounds so obvious, especially to people of faith.
But that's actually, I think the biggest thing about uh about atheism is that atheists, um, and I can speak for for myself when I was one, uh, we don't realize that.
Like that that that doesn't spring to mind.
Everything is lumped into one category, and that category is God and religion, and that's it.
You know, we don't necessarily separate where man has uh bastardized uh the word of God.
I've um been a fan of Gavin McKinnon for some time since the basically since the first time that I saw him on I Joe Rogan's podcast, these since deleted episodes, and uh which you can still find at archive.org, by the way, for the for the sake of the audience.
Um but he talks a lot about Western civilization, and the left sort of jumps to the argument that the position of favoritism toward or for Western civilization is inherently racist.
But I think I think that the mistake there is that you can have a superior culture without making the claim that uh the people that participate in that culture are inherently genetically superior, right?
So it's not really so much an argument that you know, white European, Anglo-Saxon, Caucasian men are inherently superior to all other cultures.
It's just this notion like, hey, this this philosophical approach that the things that are associated with Western civilization are superior culturally, but it has nothing to do with necessarily the genetics of the people that tend to ascribe to that culture, right?
Sure.
So I'm curious as to how we can reinvigorate or have sort of a cultural, a Western cultural renaissance without alienating those who on the surface see that as a racist argument when it's really not.
Yeah, I mean, I struggle with this as well.
I'm not sure that it's it's it's our job to decide whether there is a a Western cultural renaissance.
I uh, you know, again, to bring it back to the the whole religion thing, I don't know where we are, right?
And I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily I know we have to try, but I wouldn't necessarily presume to know where we are in in the grand scheme of things.
A lot of it feels extremely unrelentingly, irreversibly declinist.
So I don't know about a a sort of re-reassertion of those core core values and core principles.
Um on the other hand, we've we've you know, human over the course of Western civilization in recent human history, we have sort of been here before as well, where it feels like you're dropping off the edge of a precipice, but then there is a then there is an uptick.
I just don't see where the uptick is right now.
So many things are going wrong all concurrently.
You know, I'm working on a piece for my substack at the moment called Nothing Works Anymore.
And if you think about it, it doesn't, right?
Nothing works though.
So I got this idea because my Apple devices absolutely suck nowadays.
I don't know if you've noticed this.
I've noticed.
Yeah, they just know.
Ever since Steve died.
Right, right.
They're just not what they were supposed to be.
You were supposed to be able to turn this product on and it wouldn't interfere with your life.
It would let you, the creator, go about creating whatever you were using this device for.
And the devices were supposed to sink seamlessly, and that for a brief, brief period of time, it just worked, right?
Your MacBook and your iPhone and your Apple TV and your speakers and all of those things were just uh uh an ecosystem that worked.
And then along came Mr. Supply Chain Management, uh, you know, Tim Apple, and he and he squeezed everything.
He squeezed everything, um, so that everything feels a little cheaper, everything's works a little slower.
And when you when you have that sort of concatenation of you know, the layering of these small problems that you're introducing to every single device, well, then they start amounting to really big problems.
And you have the same thing with the airlines at the moment, and I know everybody knows what I'm talking about here, and I know the airlines are trying to pretend like this isn't really a thing and it's weather and you know, whatever it is.
No, no, no.
This is not this is not what's happening at all.
And and I've been doing my research about this.
It doesn't work because the people who are in charge of these Organizations have become so detached from what they are supposed to provide, and they've become so underwritten by uh their own oligarch mates in government that they don't really care if you're four, five, six hours.
They don't care if you're four, five, six days delayed.
They don't care if you're a pilot and you're being asked to pick up 2x the number of flights that you were doing just two years ago.
They hadn't planned for a mass retirement uh that came off and during the pandemic, and now they're struggling, you know, and I I really hope I am wrong about this.
But in that in that industry, I foresee a massive disaster soon.
I I I foresee an air disaster coming because people are talking about how the maintenance is slower, cheaper, the people aren't as expert in it as the people, you know, five, 10 years ago were they're struggling to fill these positions.
So, you know, to come back to your question, I'm not sure that we are deserving of this renaissance at the moment.
Nothing works anymore.
And and I think humanity is we are developing a sort of, oh, I don't know how to even describe it.
I should have, I should have thought about this more before trying to get into it.
But it's it's it's kind of a spiritual callousness to one another, right?
And we've had we've had personal and neighborly and nation state callousnesses for a long time.
And now it's at a very microscopic level that people, it's, you know, everyone's got shifty eyes about each other, right?
You're always sort of looking somebody up and down, you go, what's your game?
Should I be worried about you?
Am I supposed to be nervous about you?
Yeah, when I walk through the airport, I'm like leftist, leftist, conservative, leftist, like in my head, and I don't even want to think like that.
But actually, hope leftist she's wearing a hat.
And we've been, you know, this this this labeling has been, you know, we're now we now have internalized this and we do it, we do it automatically.
And of course, that was what the conditioning was all about anyway.
Uh, but even those of us who are aware of it are doing it now.
Um if there can be a renaissance, I think it comes from uh precisely the things that I was talking about.
I think it comes from spirituality, healthier eating, uh being being being far more comfortable in your own skin, right?
Being able to sit in silence by yourself without feeling scared, afraid, alone, FOMO'd, whatever it is, right?
Damaging thoughts, etc.
Um, it almost sounds kind of you know hippie dippy, you know, new age, but but I truly believe that one of our biggest problems right now is we we can't we don't know ourselves and we don't see ourselves enough.
We don't spend enough time with ourselves.
Uh and so it's very hard to to fix the problems that we all obviously all have as as as as wild sinners um if if we're not looking for them.
That's true.
And and you know, one of the things, one of the thought cycles that I sort of get stuck in is just the constant comparison of the fall of Rome with what we're seeing here in the United States or just the West in general.
And you know, it's easy to fall into uh a sense of inevitable sort of doom when you think about that.
And when you look at Rome, for example, after sort of the fall of their republic or their democracy, whatever you want to call it, when when the Caesars took over, there were periods where they had great leaders, Marcus Aurelius, namely, and things seemed to be getting better.
But the ultimate trend over several hundred years was was an inevitable collapse and just increased corruption.
And so my concern with the United States in particular is that we may have periods that feel like or seem like renaissance.
For example, the the first three years of Trump's presidency, namely, where things seemed to be getting better, but the system was inherently still a problem.
So even though we had some great things happening, it was inevitable that we would have this continued sort of increase in corruption on a macro level at scale.
And so I'm concerned that even if we do accomplish progress or strides in terms of justice or economic strength, or or we have these movements that that improve things for a short period of time that ultimately were not in addressing the fundamental problems that are leading to leading to an inevitable decline uh over the course of you know centuries.
Yeah, it's the it's the it's Lord Byron, right?
There is, I'm gonna read it here because I I think about this so often I like to get it exactly right.
There is the moral of all human tales, tis but the same rehearsal of The past, first freedom and then glory.
When that fails, wealth, vice, corruption, barbarism at last, and history with all her volumes vast, hath but one page.
And that is that is that's it.
Um you said something else there uh a second ago that piqued my interest also.
Let's just what was your final point there?
My final point was basically I guess how we can get past this, even though it seems like things are getting better and we have good leadership or good, right?
How can we get past this macro decline?
So here's the problem with what you just said.
You said that the this that the um apparatus remained the same, even though things ostensibly seem to get no, the apparatus didn't remain the same.
The apparatus got worse, right?
The apparatus got got way worse in those three years.
Uh, you know, take it uh at a at a microscopic level, you know, a a sub-branch of the US government, uh, the DOJ, the FBI, um, the NIAID, you know, right down to those tiny little you know levels on a grand on a grand universal scale, um, got way worse, really, really fast.
It was like it was even out of their control.
They they became demonically possessed about this man and what he stood for, about the people that supported him, about the ideas that undergirded their lifestyles.
Um, and I really do think that that yes, we can we can guffo and scoff about, you know, trust the science, follow the science.
Of course we know that they are talking nonsense.
By God, they want us to eat wind turbines now.
Okay, so we know they're not trusting the science uh throughout these things.
But we have to we have to get more specific about what is motivating them, therefore.
And I don't think, well, some of us do, I don't think Twitter is the world, uh, and I don't think our Twitter is the world.
Um, you know, again, it is a it is a side show to a side show in that sense, but I don't think we're projecting outward uh loudly enough um the the spirit of oppression that runs so deep within the current oligarchy.
People are necessarily turned on to the idea that they may be being controlled in some way.
You know, the the um approval ratings for corporate media in the United States, I think are in single digits now and have and have been so for quite some time.
People are not dead to the to the these facts, they're not unquestioning about the major events that take place in in your country, whether it's contemporaneously or historically, but they do go sort of dead in the eyes when you try to talk to them like uh about certain things that that that we don't end up relating to their day-to-day lives.
So let's start talking to them about what's in their food and in their kids' food.
Let's start talking to them about those sorts of things.
What's in the tap water for crying out loud?
Um, and unless perhaps, of course, it's it's nerdy and wonky and people should know about it, you know, but but there are lots of things that are nerdy and wonky that people don't know about, things like Russia gay and so on and so forth.
That's where I find the greatest problem for us waking people up is when we start to get necessarily partisan and necessarily political about things.
Bring it back to the most basic level.
Who they are, what makes them, what do they encounter every day in their lives?
Yeah, well, and I think too that one of the differences that we we see now, particularly in the United States versus say 50 or 60 or 100 years ago, is there was a much, at least it seems to me, and I could be totally misguided on this, but it seems to me that there was much more cultural consensus a hundred years ago than there is today.
There was a very clear sort of American culture of you know, individualism, liberty, bootstrapping, entrepreneurialism, entrepreneurialism, and less controversy around some of those values.
And today it seems that there are so many different schools of thought and philosophies and sentiments among the people as to what is good and what is evil that it's very hard for us as a culture to get on the same page as to what our values are and therefore what trajectory we want the country to go.
And so like, how is it that today when it's when the the disparity between the left and right is is greater and greater, whereas you know, 30 or 40 years ago, at least the Democrats and Republicans agreed that they wanted you know America to be as great as possible.
Today that's not even necessarily the case.
How is it that we can get back on the same page of in terms of our basic cultural values?
Because it seems like if we don't have cultural consensus, then how could we have political consensus in any way, shape, or form?
Well, look, I'll say something controversial that may one day in a lot of trouble and be taken out of out of context.
But bear in mind when I say this, I am a particularly well-integrated and assimilated brown man from a Muslim first generation immigrant family from the UK.
My parents grew up in East Africa, their parents grew up in India.
So all those caveats aside, let me say this.
You cannot find common ground because you are no longer one people, right?
You you you have all of these different factors that now bear down on the United States philosophically, people bring like let's take Elan Omar as an example, okay?
Elan Omar, and I'm doing that thing, you see, where I make it boringly political.
Um they she comes from a family, and they call her a refugee uh who came from Somalia, right?
They call her a refugee.
Her family were the governing party, the Marxist Islamist government in Somalia who were overthrown and then fled.
Now, technically that makes her a refugee, but she wasn't fleeing oppression, or rather, her family weren't fleeing oppression.
They were fleeing justice.
They were fleeing their own people holding them to account for the dictatorship that they had established.
And you so you have people like the Omar family, and what do they do?
Do they come to America and see America and go, okay, this is pretty cool.
They all seem to agree.
They're not oppressing each other.
Let's be part of this.
No, they go, hey, how can we oppress them?
You know, how can we bring Marxism to America?
That's that's the thought process.
And it may be a passive thought process, but it's the thought process.
So you have that sort of uh immigration uh you know, wedge that's bearing in on America at the moment, and it's worsening, it's not getting better, it's worsening as a as a phenomenon.
Um, you also have a massive philosophical wedge uh being driven through America intentionally by, for instance, the Chinese communist party.
Uh TikTok, I think is one of the most salient weapons of war uh that that we've seen in in modern times.
Uh it is you you are effectively able to control the thought processes of the public of your opponent, your geopolitical opponent, uh, without firing a single shot, without you know, dropping planes worth of uh leaflets from the sky and saying, hey, you know, communism is better, join with us, blah, blah, blah.
No, it goes straight into your mind now or into your kids' minds now.
And that's that's uh there as well.
So I don't think you can necessarily hope for a unified America and a unified Americanism right now.
Uh I think first you have to try and identify, and that's what populism is all about, right?
Is we have to identify the things that the majority finds um acceptable, desirable, and and worth pursuit, right?
And and we're not there yet.
We're not there yet.
I mean, you know, as much as I am gleeful about Dobbs, the country is genuinely split on that on that question.
Uh at least, at least even the most reliable public polling, not the trash polling, but the Rasmussen polling and the ones that we do like, um, even they show that.
So we are we are well away from being, and by the way, I mean uh the we shouldn't aspire to be a kind of you know monolithic one party state thought apparatus anyway.
Um there should always be diversity of thought.
Uh, but right now is you you you don't have diversity of thought, you have you sort of have just antagonism of thought everywhere for everything.
Right.
Right.
Well, it seems to me, and correct me if you if you disagree, but it seems to me that if you look at the history of populism, where it's really successfully taken hold in different societies, uh, has often been in instances of extreme sort of desperation, right?
Like incredibly high unemployment rates or incredibly high economic strife.
It seems like extreme challenge among a people sort of drives people together in in catalyzes a consensus, a populist consensus.
And, you know, I I I ascribe to this populist movement and this populist notion in the United States.
However, I don't anticipate that enough Americans will get on the same page with populism until there is a much greater degree of desperation among our people.
What do you think?
Yeah, it comes right back to the oligarchy, right?
I think if you can if you can show people, it's like what's what's that movie?
Um They Live.
I haven't seen they live.
It's the one where he he removes the glasses or he puts the glasses on and he can see all the advertising as it what it really means.
Oh, that's that sounds awesome.
I haven't heard of that.
Yeah, it's it's it's a better YouTube clip than it is an actual full movie.
Um, but it's like that, right?
If you can if you can, and you know, I I I know um what's his name?
Uh Andrew Tate always talks about the Matrix, right?
The Matrix.
Um, but it's it's it, you know, we're talking about one and the same thing here.
Um I think this is I try and remind myself, especially when I'm being combative as I usually am with leftists on social media.
Every so often I'll just go out of my way to be really nice to one of them and just see how it lands.
And actually, it's increasingly landing a lot better and going over a lot better.
Because I think, for instance, one of the stories we we we are gonna have up in the in the uh over the course of this weekend on on the national pulse is uh this a lot of people don't know in the United States that this is going on.
The British government has now started to uh give 140 the equivalent of 141,000 um as compensation to the vaccine damaged in Britain.
Whoa.
And that has not got any attention over here, has it?
Not yet.
But they are they are they are changing the narrative on the vaccines here since Fauci resigned.
Yeah, they are, they really are.
Now suddenly it's Trump's vaccine again, right?
Right, right.
Which is which is scary because it it seems to imply that they know there's something wrong.
Of course, I mean they they knew something was wrong from the second they they envisaged it.
You know, they knew something was gonna be wrong from that from that very moment.
It doesn't even bear conspiracy theory to recognize that, right?
Like this is the country where you have one week, you know, hey, if you have these symptoms, take Kumera, whatever it is, and then like three weeks later, did you take Humera, whatever?
You may be inclined entitled to a class action lawsuit, call this number now.
You know, this is this is this is your big pharmaceutical industry.
This is what they do.
Um, they they pump you full of shit and then and then pump you full of more shit.
And so I don't think anyway, come back.
I want to I want to come back to the to the point you raised.
These are the things this oligarchy, the Fauci stuff, these are the things that we can get get more people supporting us on.
There we there was a a house a couple of blocks down from me here on Capitol Hill that until extremely recently had a uh yard sign in the front that just said thank you, Dr. Fauci, with little hearts and everything, you know, all over the place.
And a Ukraine flag.
It came down a couple of months ago.
And I I you know, I really kind of want to knock on the door and be like, hey, um, how can you took that down?
Because I mean, he was still there at the time.
You see, but I think people are like, hmm, hmm, maybe we don't actually like this guy that much.
Maybe we did have a little too too much trust in it.
And listen, uh, we all have our crosses to bear in that regard.
I was a proponent of originally the 14 days to slow the spread, and I massively regret that now.
But hey, I thought, oh, look, this is the Trump administration, Mike Pence is in charge of it.
What's the worst that can happen here?
Well, silly me, right?
Um, the fact that they mandated it should have been a red flag because it was something that everyone would have done voluntarily.
That's my thought in retrospect.
But you also have to you also have to acknowledge that for somebody like me who's from a pretty socialist country, that that didn't seem all that strange.
You know, I guess I should have known in the moment that for America that was strange.
Um, but but but mandated forcible government, you know, intervention is pretty commonplace across most of the world.
That is typically what has set America apart, right?
Uh over its Short history.
And um, you know, as what did George Bush say?
You fool me once it can't get fooled again.
You know, so we won't be we won't be getting fooled again.
I don't know.
I think we'd fall right for it again if there was another crisis that scared enough people.
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
I think that's I think they were edging closer and closer to that with the monkeypox stuff, and they realized nobody's buying it.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I certainly wasn't scared of monkeypox, but I consider myself very special.
I am so far removed from getting monkeypox that I wasn't worried about it either.
But I know there were a lot of people out there that were like, oh my god, is this gonna be airborne?
You know?
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
So, what do you think is gonna happen over the next 10 years?
Just in terms of questions, you're like, so uh no, that's not what I mean.
I'm just uh but like well, how does this how does this play out?
These these problems that we're facing in terms of cultural that we've been discussing over the course of the hour, how is this gonna play out over to over the next 10 years?
So, one of the things that I have been doing more of recently is making Instagram reels.
Sure.
And they appear to be going pretty well.
Have you noticed, by the way, that throughout this interview I've sort of sprinkled in little plugs for my own stuff?
You just love it.
It's so cool that you don't even know.
Um it's like advertisements in like 1966 sitcoms, you know.
It's like, oh, by the way, the cereal's great.
My Instagram is great.
Have you ever had a monster drink by the way?
You know, they're very bad for you.
Now that is trash, you should not be drinking that.
I know, I know, but I'm not gonna lie about who I am.
So well, but you should change who you are.
I know.
I will tomorrow.
Here's me, right?
So this is chai with chaga mushrooms in it.
And and I call it Chiga.
Very, very creative.
Um, and it was so funny because the other day when Tucker was doing his um bit about the liberals wailing about Fauci resigning.
He said, you know, somewhere in Whole Foods, somebody is crying over the chaga mushrooms, you know, and I text him and I was like, hey, I like chaga.
And he's just replied, well, it looks good, but I don't know about it.
Um I love chagra, I swear by it.
It's a it's a wonderful anti-inflammatory, and you can you're from the UK, you can get away with weird tea interests.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
Niche tea.
Um so um what are we talking about?
The next 10 years?
Yeah, yeah.
What are we gonna look like in 2032?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Um, Jared Kushner thinks that we're gonna live forever.
Um, and and he wants us.
Did you see this?
I didn't see this, but I I'm I I typically don't feel good about living forever.
No, I typically don't feel good about Jared Kushner.
Um, so he goes on an interview and he says, Look, we are the generation, and if not our generation, the next that are going to going to live forever.
Excuse me.
I firstly, not sure uh that that is even remotely scientifically true.
Um there is there is obviously uh there's gonna be like, oh, you could upload your brain to this and that and the other, but yeah, you don't know if that's you, you don't know if it's a copy of you, you don't know how long that will last, you don't know how long it takes to degrade, you don't know how long the earth is gonna last, you don't know how long our galaxy is gonna last.
Like, you know, it's just these people are obsessed with living forever, they are petrified of death, and they're petrified of death because they know spiritually they are in very much the wrong place.
Um of them don't know that, some of them are just sort of going along with it, especially a lot of the celebrities.
Uh don't get me started on what I think is an increasing amount of you know satanic imagery in a lot of uh a lot of Hollywood stuff.
Uh and uh but again, I don't think they're necessarily well read on that.
Some some satanic producer or or or video creator is saying, hey, here's what we're gonna do, and you're gonna dress as Baffomet, and it's gonna be super cool, and you're gonna sit on this tiled floor and whatever.
But um, yeah, I don't know.
I I think we're so we're so uh ingratiated now in our little petty battles amongst ourselves that we're not really focused on the big picture of where we as humanity are going.
And I don't think we're necessarily focused on how how you know uh how much humanity will divide over the next sort of couple of hundred years as well.
I I don't think there is going to be this Star Trek one world government type thing.
I think lots of countries are gonna go their very own different ways, and lots of people are gonna go their very own different ways.
And and we may end up being the aliens that we encounter, you know, in in 10,000 years out there somewhere, you know.
The Chinese may be a totally different civilization by then.
Um I got no idea.
Yeah.
Well, do you think that the um the globalist threat that is so commonly referred to is overrated?
Because you what you just mentioned was really interesting to me that you know, this this idea that we're gonna go very different ways and not have this one world government.
Do you think that we've exaggerated the the influence of organizations like the WEF and people like Klaus Schwab?
No, I mean, don't get me wrong.
They are they are evil.
I mean, they do they do want to get there.
They do want to strip us all of our agency and our individuality, and they want to destroy nations.
We should treat them very, very extremely seriously.
Um, they mean it when they say it, and they are willing to do.
We've seen over the last couple of years, they are willing to do whatever it takes to get there.
Um, I'm just saying I think the natural to trajectory of of humanity is to reject things like that, and I believe that that will win out.
My op the optimistic side of me for what little there is left anymore, has to believe um that Orwell was wrong, and that the the you know the future of uh human civilization is not a boot stomping on a face forever, right?
Yeah, no, I I'm with you on that, and I agree, and and that sort of brings me to my next question, which is it's very easy, especially the more studied in history one is to sort of develop this overbearing uh cynicism or or skepticism, not skepticism, but cynicism and lack of optimism about this this outcome.
It seems like oh, every every every civilization has this inevitable decline, and then something else is is born out of it, either better or worse.
And I I just I'm I'm inclined to that from just sort of an intellectual side.
But on the other, on the other hand, it's like, well, if you don't believe that things can get better, then things certainly never will.
So how do we almost like I don't want to use the term dogmatic, but like just out of a sense of morality, just refuse to accept that things are doomed to just entropy and decay in an effort to fight the good fight to the last man for humankind.
I think that's a bigger question than than I'm I'm prepared to have a firm answer to.
I I can answer, you know, how I go about that every single day, and and that is extremely small steps of self-improvement wherever you can do it.
Uh extremely small uh acts of kindness in your own community where where people need help and and where you can you know show them um by example how how you are trying and they then and hope for you know uh Bannon once taught me something really important, uh and it was it was a political point, um, but it was but it also applies to just about everything else.
Uh he said people people for the most part when they're looking for who they should vote for, they think about how their neighbors are gonna vote and what their front yard looks like.
You know, is it a well-groomed front yard?
Do they have two cars in the driveway?
They vote Republican.
I should probably vote Republican then.
Um and I think I think those sorts of those, I'm not saying, you know, having two cars in your driveway is gonna lead your next door neighbor to behave better.
Um, but at least you being a certain way can rub off on people in that regard.
And I've got this weird thing now that I started to do, and I it wasn't never, it was never a um conscious thing.
I never read it anywhere.
I don't know what happened.
Um when I'm in public now, when I'm at a supermarket, when I'm you know walking down the street, I will sort of walk around making sure that in a way I'm smiling.
And I'm not saying like I'm walking around the city like this, you know, like a psycho.
Um but I will make sure that I'm not frowning, not furrowing my brow.
I'm not like putting out you don't want resting bitch face.
Right, but I'm sort of like, you know, yeah.
Um I used to do that in college because I thought it would help with girls.
Yeah, well, mate, if that has it.
I mean, married, happily married, so they must have worked, right?
It's the smile.
Yeah.
Why don't we just smile in silence like that for 10 minutes and see if people still watch?
I don't know if I can do it, man.
That's awesome.
But I started doing that, and I've noticed it having a really good effect.
Like even people who were kind of angry and menacing in the supermarket aisles, they saw my silly smirk on my face and they sort of you know there's levity that is being being passed across there um and I think a lot of those things are gonna are gonna you know uh answer your question which is how we how we get back to a a common purpose a common morale um and and and common common morality yeah well I really appreciate your I
appreciate your emphasis on sort of self-improvement because all groups are made of individuals and therefore all societies are really ultimately made of individuals.
No society or nation can achieve greatness without individuals doing great things.
And so I believe from an intellectual, philosophical, moral point of view that it all begins with self-improvement, sort of in the Jordan Peterson sense, you know, make your own bed and then save the world.
But, and perhaps this is, this is vanity or ego or just the impatience of youth.
But, but it's it's sort of not satisfying it's like all right you know I can improve myself and I should and I and I will endeavor to do so but it I want to I want to have more of an impact than just being a better person.
Like I I want to I want to get involved and be a be a voice or be an influencer and and make it rain in terms of justice and morality and improvement.
So like, is there a way or is it just vanity, but is there a way for individuals to fucking change the world, man?
You know, like, I don't know.
I just like to think that, and you've been a person that's done this.
You have improved or changed or impacted the world greater than just an average person trying to become a better person because you've established yourself as an influential voice and people follow you and they look to you for guidance and leadership in terms of these spaces.
And I'm a fan of you and I support you.
kudos to you for that.
So what more can we do other than just brushing our teeth twice a day and making our bed um so I will say this I have only had success in changing the world for the better by accident.
I when I write things down on my whiteboard and say this is what I'm gonna do and this is how I'm gonna do it it always goes wrong.
It always goes wrong.
When I write a speech and try and deliver it in front of an audience it goes wrong.
The best speeches I give and by the way anybody watching this who wants me to come and speak to whatever group that they do I love doing these things and I only really have one thing that I ask for on the day and that's a bottle of gin on my dinner table and I say that I won't get up to speak until half that bottle of gin is drunk.
Because then you will get an unfiltered then you will get you know you will get some levity you will get some real you'll get a little bit of everything.
But no I mean look the the times where we make the difference I I don't think are in our control.
And I realize over the course of this interview I'm starting to sound a little bit more and more kind of um you know dogmatic religiously about this stuff but I I can only speak to my experiences and my experiences are that every time I have tried to steer something in a certain way you know the wheel will jerk back and then compensate in the other direction.
Like God laughs at those who plan sort of thing.
Right, right.
And it's actually once you sort of just lean into the to the things that are going on and try and accept them and process them that you will realize and actually those are the ways that things get done um and so I wouldn't necessarily say that you should fix your sights on improving you know on changing the world I think this is where a lot of us get lost I've been lost there for certain I think people like Greta Thunberg for instance are wildly lost there.
They don't see any purpose in and of themselves so they think they have to derive purpose through something something grander right it's okay to do okay things it's okay to do good things and it's also okay to do great things but you aren't necessarily the the arbiter of when any of those things happen and when any of your best traits kick in all you can do is hone those best traits and work on yourself and and when you are called to action you won't even know it.
You'll just spring into action do you think at any point in the Brexit process and and when I when Nigel and I were running around the United Kingdom you know doing doing ridiculous hour days and I went sort of bald here in my beard out of stress alone there was never a point in that process where I was like I'm being called to this you know I was just doing it.
I was just doing it and things were just happening and it was only sort of in the um you know in the epilogue of it all in the post game analysis, um, that I realized that these were just ridiculous events that were wildly out of my control, and I was just doing what I was supposed to do in those moments.
So nobody sets out to get the medal of honor, they just you know, you know, arrive at the opportunity and live up to it, sort of thing.
Yeah, yeah.
I think that's it.
And I uh, you know, I'm how old do you say you were 31, 32?
31, yeah.
Yeah, I'm 36 years old, so there's not uh there's not a huge gap between us.
And and I think one of the most important things I've learned in my 30s, and one of the things that I I really thought I would never learn in my 20s because in my 20s I thought I knew everything.
Uh and one of the things that I've learned in my 30s is I know basically nothing, basically nothing.
Um where we try and convince ourselves that we can't be surprised in life, that's that's just us shutting down.
That's putting the blinders on.
Actually, we should be surprised most days we're alive by something, hot pockets, anything, right?
We should be surprised.
Um, and we should be willing to take that experience in and grow from it.
And um, that is something that I think I failed at a lot, and and I'm I'm I'm just now coming to terms with.
But there are those among us, and perhaps this is just sort of like an anecdotal phenomena, but there are those among us who seem to achieve greatness time and time again, namely Elon Musk, whether you love him or you hate him.
He does PayPal, changes the financial institutions.
He does Tesla totally changes the the auto manufacturing market, then he does SpaceX and Reelance or I mean this is these are totally different sort of industries, and I know that he's a genius with different capabilities than the average human being, but there are examples of people who repeatedly achieve greatness over and over again, and it seems that there is some sort of a method rather than just sort of you know the happenstance that leads to that.
Um I don't know.
I mean, he had a lot of failures, right?
Sure.
Um, Steve Jobs.
Everybody thinks of Steve Jobs as a um of a wild success.
I mean, he was humiliated by his own board.
Um, cast asunder from the company that he created by the guy who sold fizzy drinks, sodas, the PepsiCo guy.
Um he was crying on the phone with his own colleagues when this was all you know, actual humiliation.
Um, but Steve Jobs will go down as one of the greatest men in from this time period.
I I I think and I hope I think he he deserves that, um, despite what Tim Apple is doing to his company.
Um and I think Musk has the same thing.
I think he's experienced a lot.
I mean, did you see his hairline once upon a time?
That could not be counted as a success.
Um and then, and then it's it's it's the thing of adversity, isn't it?
Uh instead of instead of fearing failure and rejecting adversity, we're supposed to lean into it and we're supposed to take our lumps and our beatings and and those are the things that prepare us for for the great victories.
You will get there when you're ready for it.
You will get there when you're ready for it, but you have to ask yourself if you've prepared yourself to be ready for it yet.
And most of us haven't.
Um I got I got some, you know, successes on the back of other people's work.
I mean, you know, Nigel was the one who did, you know, 90% of the Brexit work, and the rest of us all combined in the United Kingdom could maybe share in that 10%, you know, 0.001% for each of the rest of us who were active in that process.
Um, but I don't think I don't, I wouldn't even have described because you since you raised that, I wouldn't have even described my own uh political career as a success yet.
Um, do I think that do I think that you know every day I I want to prepare myself for something that's massive and has to be done?
Of course, of course.
Um, but I don't know.
I don't know that there has been this rip roaring success in our lifetimes yet that there needs to be.
And I talk about our lifetimes, right?
We're in our 30s, so there are there are people who will remember the Reagan years and think, no, but we had loads of successes during that, and Thatcher too.
And sure, I get that, I understand.
And not belittling those Experiences and those achievements at all.
I'm just saying for our age range, there hasn't been that yet.
So, where can people find you, follow you, and your work?
At the pub.
I have a substack, just Raheemkasam.substack.com, uh, the nationalpulse.com.
If you enjoy this and you want to be a part of what we do, we actually have a site where people can become members.
It's called fundrealnews.com because that's what you will be doing.
We it's it's five dollars a month is our is our basic level subscription.
And and you get to talk to myself and my colleagues uh day in and day out.
And in fact, right after doing this with you, I'm gonna jump into the uh into the Discord and see what they all said about my performance because they are my greatest supporters and my harshest critics.
So um those are those, and I'm on all the social media and my Instagram's on fire, you know.
Um and uh and I encourage everybody to make sure that they share your work because I think you're a great interviewer and um I think you're going places.
I hope so.
Well, it was an honor and a pleasure to have you on One American Podcast.
I hope after some more time passes, you'll you'll come and join us again and and let us know what's going on.
Uh but until then, farewell and thank you so much.
