Raheem J. Kassam Discusses How Left Wing & Right Wing Political Extremism Would Play Out In America
Raheem Kassam is a British political commentator and author who has made a name for himself in the UK as a vocal supporter of conservative and nationalist causes. He is best known for his work as a chief advisor to Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), and for his commentary on politics and national security issues.
Kassam's political career began in earnest in 2009, when he became an advisor to Farage, the then-leader of UKIP. In this role, he helped Farage to shape the party's message and strategy, and played a key role in the campaign that led to the UK's vote to leave the European Union in 2016. After the referendum, Kassam continued to work with Farage, serving as his chief advisor until 2018.
In addition to his work with Farage, Kassam has also established himself as a prominent commentator on politics and national security issues. He has written for various publications including The Daily Caller, Breitbart News, and The National Interest, and has been a frequent guest on news programs and talk shows. Kassam is known for his strong views on immigration, national identity, and the need for Western nations to defend their values and cultures.
Kassam has also authored several books, including "No Go Zones: How Sharia Law Is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You" and "Enemy of the State: The Rise and Fall of Nigel Farage."
Despite his controversial views, Kassam has a loyal following and continues to be a prominent figure in the UK's political landscape. He has become a well-known face in the conservative and nationalistic spheres, and his work and ideas continue to be widely discussed and debated.
In summary, Raheem Kassam is a British political commentator and author known for his work as a chief advisor to Nigel Farage and his commentary on politics and national security issues. He has written several books and been a guest on various news programs and talk shows. Despite his controversial views, he continues to be a prominent figure in the UK's political landscape.
This one American Podcast Live with Raheem Jay Kassam.
Raheem, it's an honor and pleasure to have you back, dude.
How are you?
I'm well.
You know, I've noticed that since the last time I was on, there's all this new production value in all of this now.
And I can't help but think like maybe I was the spark there.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
You've been a serious inspiration.
You know, after I had Bannon on, I hit like a roadblock because it was sort of like, who the fuck am I supposed to have on now?
Right, right.
And so it was like, I started this podcast 18 months ago and I sort of like worked my way up in terms of like guest league.
And yeah, when I had Bannon, I was like, oh, now I can't have just like Joe Schmo on.
Of course, I've had other great names like you and I've had Stone on.
And next week I'm going to have Kyle Rittenhouse on, which I'm excited about.
But I thought, man, maybe I'm getting to a point now where I need to like ramp it up a little bit and try to increase the production quality.
So that's what I've been trying to do.
Well, the irony of all of that is, as Steve would say to you, you should absolutely have Joe Schmo on after Steve.
That's why I'm having you on.
Joe Schmo is higher in the pecking order than him.
Yeah, that's right.
And that's such a good point.
In fact, I even made like a meme where I took Rockwell's famous painting of freedom of speech, which famously sort of depicts Abraham Lincoln at a town hall meeting with a Carhartt kind of jacket on and just sort of standing up, speaking, expressing himself.
And I ran it through a reface app and I put Steve Bannon's face over it.
So it's the same exact painting.
It just looks like it was Steve Bannon that was painted instead of Abraham Lincoln.
And, you know, I think that lines up with Bannon's sort of M.O., like he dresses like a blue-collar man.
He wears the working class clothes and he speaks the working class language.
And it is true that in a populist movement, the working class, the people class is the real hero.
It's not really the, I don't know, the political elite, so to speak.
That's the real top G, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not Andrew Tate.
No, the real top G is the ordinary working class man and woman across the Western world.
That's a fact.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Unfortunately, it seems like everything is being done to shrink that entire sort of class of people.
But the more that you shrink the working class, I suppose the smaller the wealthy class becomes and the greater the sort of poor class becomes.
And so by shrinking the middle class, they're actually sort of empowering a populist movement, I think, because they're creating a greater number of people who are disenfranchised with the system.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I think that's right.
So what are we going to do today?
Well, what do you want to talk about, man?
I saw your clip with on the Jenna Ellis show about how nobody knows who the hell ran Joe Biden's campaign.
And I thought that was really fascinating because it hadn't occurred to me at all before.
It was such a good point.
And I didn't see the entire context.
I just saw the clip that you posted.
So who the hell did run Joe Biden's campaign?
So this is such a critical point.
And by the way, this is why I get paid the medium bucks because I notice things like this.
And I'm so embarrassed that it didn't stand out to me sooner.
But here's the thing.
You go back through all of recent American electoral history.
And with every victor, even with a lot of the losers, you know the people who ran their campaigns.
They go around and they do conferences and TED talks and go and run foreign campaigns for other foreign leaders around the world.
Specifically what stands out in my mind is the Obama campaign with Jim Messener, David Axelrod, because they, you know, Messina then went over to the United Kingdom and found work with David Cameron's Conservative Party, believe it or not.
But you know these names.
They are in fact household names, people who run campaigns for a living.
Rahm Emanuel, Dick Morris.
I'm just reading from a list in front of me here of very famous ones.
Yeah, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, David Plough, all of that.
You even know the losers from Hillary's campaign, Ben Rhodes and so on and so forth.
But we're now several years later after Joe Biden is supposed to have done something ridiculously extraordinary, which is the single most number of votes in American political history.
And guess what?
Nobody's giving TED talks.
Nobody's getting hired by foreign leaders to run their parties and their campaigns.
Nobody's on the front page of Time magazine being lauded as the great Svengali of this political era.
And as far as I'm concerned, that's the biggest tell that we have now.
We know all of the previous ones.
We've been over the data, we've seen the reports, we've gone through all the Zuckbucks and the spending and the machines and all of that.
But if you're looking for a contemporaneous tell, it's the silence.
It's the vacuum.
These jobs are incredibly hard to get.
The number of sheer number of people that pitch for those top campaign strategist jobs.
They are also extremely, extremely lucrative jobs.
And they're not lucrative jobs necessarily while you're doing them, but they're lucrative jobs in the long run.
People, as I say, they take that experience, they take the trophy, and then they tour the world.
They live for the rest of their lives on the basis that they got somebody elected to the highest office in the world.
And yet we have nobody from Biden World, Biden campaign, PAC, you name it, that is out there doing that.
So what is it?
You know, what does that raise?
Well, the obvious question is, who ran the campaign?
Who was in charge of the campaign?
Who was ticking off, you know, every day, here's where we need to be.
Here's what we need to do.
Here's what we need to say.
Here's what he should do.
Here's who writes the teleprompter.
Here's who gives him the briefings.
All of that stuff.
And it's crickets.
It's stone cold silence.
And that leads one to realize that it wasn't any one person.
It wasn't any one consulting group.
It wasn't any type of long-term strategic, political advice shop, either in DC or New York or wherever the heck they might be based nowadays, Delaware in a garage, perhaps.
It was the state apparatus.
It was the regime.
It was the prevailing powers that be that got Biden over the line.
And I'm sure you harbor as many suspicions, if not more, as I do, that he really did get over certain lines.
But isn't that all extremely interesting?
I think so.
And, you know, what immediately comes to mind is I've been carefully studying recently the masterclass that Karl Rove and Axel Rudd did together on masterclass.com.
So they did a great sort of class together, which was sort of magical because, of course, they're from opposite sides of the political spectrum and they work together with Masterclass.
No, they're not.
Okay.
No, they're not.
Okay.
Okay.
On the face, right?
They're from the face, they're from opposite sides of the political spectrum, regardless of whether they're part of the uniparty.
So, but, but, you know, they came together and they did this class about the history of campaigns and the work that they did.
And basically, it's like a campaigns for idiots type class where they're like, this is how you win a campaign.
And all the examples that they used, of course, were sort of through the 2008 election of Barack Obama.
But it sort of ends there.
And I know that their careers in terms of campaign management directly kind of end there, but it seems like we've crossed a threshold into a different era where there was a way, there was a real competition that was semi-fair and there was a way to do it in a way that was sophisticated and would achieve desired outcomes.
And then now we're like in this major sort of purgatory of elections or gray area where there's nobody around anymore that knows how to win anymore.
And there's nobody around anymore that's even sure how the last one was won anymore.
It's just, like I said, it's a major unknown.
Yeah.
So, and also the other thing to bear in mind here is: let's say there was somebody, right?
Let's say there was this genius pulling at the strings of the Biden campaign that really did get that many votes.
If they were to stand in front of an audience anywhere, the first question that they would necessarily be asked is, well, how did you do it given the fact that your candidate rarely left his house, his basement?
And when he did, had about eight to 12 people in the rally audiences.
There didn't seem to be any energy out there.
And somebody's not going to want to answer that question for obvious reasons.
So either way, you still end up in the same place.
And I realize that I'm kind of relitigating some of the things that we all got tired of over the last couple of years, especially for a long time on Trump's social feed.
But this is a new way of coming at it and a new way of thinking about it that I think you're going to want to tell your friends, your family, your neighbors, your co-workers about.
You're going to want to just ask them that question because there are so many people that I find out there right now who are skeptical on the fence but have yet been yet to be convinced.
This is convincing.
This is a thing where people will go, yeah, you know what?
Like, that's weird.
Yeah.
Well, people are very reluctant in the conservative space.
And I've been fortunate enough to develop friendships with some conservative influences over the time that I've been doing this podcast.
And so, in confidence, you know, they'll express to me disappointments that they may have had in Trump that they wouldn't really espouse on social media, just they don't want to lose followers or whatever.
And one of the criticisms that I've heard was actually from Jack Maxey when he was on my podcast.
He said it live.
He was basically like, look, he was president when all of this election stuff happened.
I'm trying to be careful how I use my words because I don't want this stream to get cut from YouTube.
But if it does, no, no bother.
But he's like, he was president the whole time that this happened.
It's, in my opinion, it's his fault that it happened.
So what are your thoughts regarding the criticism of Trump that he should have done more to prevent the questionable outcomes or the doubts that have come to be regarding our election integrity while he was in office?
Did he drop the ball?
Well, so this is probably the single largest problem that I have with Trump as a commander-in-chief, right, in that role.
The thing that I keep coming back to in my mind, I know a lot of people talk about, you know, personnel, personnel.
They're right to talk about it.
But again, we've flogged that horse now.
But it comes down to this.
He campaigned on running the country in the way he's run his businesses.
And I've seen firsthand, in person, live, the way he runs his businesses.
He is meticulous about them.
He walks around his properties.
And if the trim on the tablecloth is too long, he calls somebody over and says, fix that, somebody could trip over.
If the food is bad, he's the first to complain about it.
If the service is too slow, you know, he makes sure that people, you know, that the service staff understand, and he's very good at it, he's very charming about it, but that they understand, hey, you know, people are waiting.
We need to hustle this a little bit, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Detail-oriented man in all of those senses in and of his businesses.
But in office, it was like he delegated all of the detail out to people who, you know, promised to have his best interests at heart, but very rarely did.
And I still can't get over.
And we can talk about who he chose and if there are better people, sure.
I think, again, we've flogged that horse so many times that it's kind of self-evident.
But I think one of the things that Trump needs to be made aware of is that people really need him next time around, if there is a next time around, to bring his detail-oriented focus into those things, especially when it comes to things like election integrity.
You cannot hand it over to the RNC lawyers, right?
You can't hand it over to Harmee Dylan.
He certainly can't hand it over to Ronald McDaniel.
And you can't hand it over to Republicans in the House to deal with these things.
You as president, Mr. Trump, are going to have to look at these things yourself in agonizing detail.
And this goes down to where the money is going, how different counties, especially the major Sweden counties around the country, are managing their elections, who personnel-wise is in charge of those.
You have to look at all of those yourself, I'm afraid.
And hey, that's not the job of the commander-in-chief, you might scream.
Well, guess what?
It is now.
I should do that in a Biden way.
It is now.
So are you going to support Trump in the primary?
Have you decided?
It doesn't matter.
I am not an American citizen.
I will have no vote.
And I don't tend to make endorsements like that.
What we have done is immediately after the launch, his launch that I was at in Mar-a-Lago, we published an editorial on the national polls that said, yes, if what he talks about is how he intends to run and how he intends to govern, then yes, it all makes perfect sense.
The problem again is in the doing, and he will have to show competence on the campaign trail about the doing.
He will also have to stop talking about the success of the vaccines.
That is just taking an Uzi and aiming it at his own foot and holding down the trigger as long as he possibly can.
That's what he's doing with that every single time.
And every single time he does it, he loses people.
He loses swathes of people.
How do I know?
Because every time he does it, my phone doesn't stop dinging of people going, right?
You know, I was willing to put up with it for 430 times, you know, but the 431st time is too much for me.
I get it.
I understand that.
I have long said that this party needs a primary, a rough primary, because it trains everyone up and it hones everyone's arguments and it brings everybody to their A-game and keeps them on their toes.
And I look, there are some people who go, oh, you know, DeSantis is going to wipe the floor with him, especially on the vaccines.
Well, yeah, maybe on that issue, he'll have a slight advantage.
People do forget about early DeSantis during the pandemic as well.
And credit to DeSantis, he did a course correction way sooner than everyone else.
And he did more than a course correction, right?
He realized and he governed.
Like, actually, all these things were bad on the face of it.
And to address them is bad on the face of it.
But there are a lot more issues than just that.
It's a big one, don't get me wrong, but there are a lot of other issues than just that.
And Trump, people forget, they really forget that when he starts swinging, he rarely stops.
Right.
Right.
Well, everyone's seen the famous meme of the CNN logo over the wrestler where he just pounded, he was at like a WWE event, right?
And that's really how he is politically.
That's why it was so funny, I think.
But why do you suppose it is that he keeps pushing the vaccine success in terms of Operation Warp Speed and bragging about it, even though it's very obvious that his constituents have a lot of reservations to say the least about by the way?
If you see me looking this way and frowning, it's because the team I needed to lose this football match soccer match has just scored two goals in the space of a minute.
And I'm very angry about it.
Trump is very he's starved of gratitude.
He only ever really reads negative things about himself or sees negative things about himself.
In this instance, especially on Warp Speed, he did exactly what the apparatus, the regime told him to do.
And he thought and he internalized and has not managed to externalize that as a result of doing everything he was told were the right things, the morally correct things, the safe things to do, that he would end up getting the plaudits, the plaudits from CNN, the plaudits from the New York Times, the plausible.
And people watching this might say, oh, you know, why does he still think he needs all of that?
He's always thought he needs all of that.
He was a celebrity in New York all of his life.
He used to personally call up magazines pretending to be his own publicist to correct the record in his favor.
He would do things specifically, most things that he did publicly, charitably, all of that, specifically with the public relations element to him.
So he is, he has been and he remains unable to leap that hurdle in his brain of why didn't I get any thanks for this, right?
So there's that part of it.
The other part of it is it was basically the only time, and this was this should have been a red flag to him, but it was basically the only time in his administration that everything seemed to work, that everyone was sort of coming together, pulling in the same direction, whether it was the politicals, the pence is, all of that, but also the people, you know, at a departmental level, all sort of pulling in the same direction.
Now, again, you and I know, and the audience will know that that is a massive red flag.
But for a businessman like him, you know, it's, it's, I love it when a plan comes together.
It's, oh my gosh, like, you know, this, this works seamlessly.
Um, the other part of it is that we have to address and we have to talk about here is are his are his team, you know, the people around him actually even showing him the negative effects of this.
And does he want to see it?
Does he want to address the fact that there are a lot of, I mean, again, so many of us warned for so long about this experiment, the experimental nature of all of this, the side effects, the curious nature of the fact that these pharmaceutical giants were also buying up heart-focused companies at the same time.
But does he want to see that?
And, you know, whether he's not being shown or he doesn't want to see it himself, there's still something amiss there.
That's one of the main reasons why I so adamantly want Trump to come back to Twitter, because where he is now on True Social, he's not seeing any antagonism.
And that was honestly what was the most entertaining about Trump was seeing him quote tweet a lefty and just saying the most hilarious insult back, you know, that was quite fitting and relevant to whatever criticism they had.
And, you know, if he comes back to Twitter, I think he's going to see what his own constituents think in a much greater magnitude than he is on Truth Social.
And I've heard rumors from yesterday, I believe, that he was coming back.
Do you know anything about that?
I don't, actually, to be honest, I haven't, you know, I've been swamped this week with stuff on our side and I haven't made the relevant inquiries.
I should and I will, but I don't have anything unique to relay to you on that.
What I will say is I said for, you know, almost immediately after they banned him, I said, the biggest problem about this isn't that we don't get to hear from him.
It's that he doesn't get to hear from us.
That was the, you know, Twitter was the feedback mechanism that he would use to figure out, you know, like a populist, whether he was on the right side on an issue or not.
He would study it intently, the replies, the likes, the retweets, what people were saying in the quote tweets, all of that.
He was rightly obsessed with it as a mechanism by which to understand where people's hearts laid on any given issue.
So that was the bigger problem.
It's not that we couldn't hear from Trump.
It's that Trump couldn't hear from us.
So given the highly questionable, me specifically, right?
No, the audience.
I mean, people like you and I might get our views over to him and his team from time to time.
But what is the how, you know, how does the ordinary person communicate?
And, you know, maybe the ordinary person hasn't been used to communicating with their commander in chief for a very long time.
But don't forget, I mean, there's that famous picture.
I think it's of JFK, you know, knocking doors in West Virginia and talking face to face with voters.
That's what Trump was doing every day on a gargantuan scale on Twitter.
Yeah, absolutely.
So given the highly questionable status of our elections in the United States, how does this manifest or play out in 2024?
I mean, is it even possible for someone like Trump or any Republican for that matter to win an election in the hypothetical case that the elections are less than genuine?
I mean, that really depends on how much they're willing to bend the knee to the regime.
At this point in time, I am of the belief that the regime will do everything in its power to decide the outcome.
And, you know, it's not new.
That's not a new thing.
It was especially galling in 2020, certainly.
But you can go back decades and decades and find the prevailing establishment putting its shoulder to the wheel on elections in all manner of ways.
There are certainly enough books about the 2000 election.
And I know a lot of people think back to the 2000 election.
And what are the first two words you think of?
Hanging Chad.
Oh, hanging Chads.
Yeah, of course.
Hanging Chads.
But it wasn't the hanging Chads.
That's what people forget.
It wasn't the hanging Chads.
It was actually the way the machines were reading the votes back then that helped the Republicans.
And it was Republicans who had investments in the companies that provided the machines to the counties.
Look at Florida as an example of that and how that took place and the differential between black-dominated counties and white-dominated counties and how the machines were counting the votes.
This isn't new.
The only thing here that's new is it's corporate America has flipped almost in its total entirety to being left, globalist, you know, use whatever pejorative you want.
And therefore, Republicans no longer have either the institutional knowledge of how to do that anymore, how to cheat, because both sides have cheated in the past.
They've lost that institutional knowledge and they've lost the institutions themselves.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's one of the things that's been fascinating to me, just sort of perceiving what's been happening this past year, specifically with the private acquisition of Twitter, is considering the difference between a publicly traded company and a private company.
And what I mean to say is, if you look at the example of Steve Jobs' famous ousting from Apple in the 1980s by the board, you have this situation in which once a company goes public, everything changes, right?
And you have a suddenly you have a board of directors that's calling shots rather than a CEO.
And the board of directors is particularly sensitive to investors and therefore particularly sensitive to PR and press.
And we saw this with Apple.
We saw this with Facebook and what happened with Zuckerberg, where the platform was absolutely amazing until about 2012 and proceeded to sort of get worse.
And then by the time the Cambridge Analytica scandal happened in 2016, they basically just bent the knee to censorship and shut down any sort of right-wing political discourse on their platforms as a result of this PR nightmare.
And like you said, these companies that are publicly traded, they seem to be going more and more left-wing.
And I think that's an outcome of the leftists among us really having a monopoly over corporate press, the traditional legacy mainstream media outlets.
And that might be the strongest point of media, not so much the brainwashing of the people with lies, but the ability to seriously impact the decisions that major company board of directors make by manipulating the value of these companies or the perceived value and tanking the stock of Tesla or tanking the stock of Facebook when something goes wrong.
And so what do you think about that dynamic in terms of like how these, why these publicly traded companies are going more and more left and what that means down the road for company culture or just culture in general, as well as whether or not mainstream media will always sort of have that grip regardless of how irrelevant it becomes in the eyes of the American people.
And they just scored another goal.
So I'm fuming.
But I don't, I don't, I mean, this is really happening and I'm really angry about it.
But I don't necessarily think that it's, you know, this is the way it's going to be forever.
It only took 20 years really for the left.
There was a lot of legwork, prior legwork that went into it.
And your experts on Gramsci and all of that and Adorno will tell you about the long march through the institutions.
And it took them a lot of legwork, certainly decades of legwork from the 50s and 60s onwards to get to the situation.
But once they were at the door, it only took them about, you know, it was less than 20 years, let's face it.
But 20 years to get to a point where they could, you know, claim this gargantuan victory, electoral victory, which totally against the run of play, like that goal was.
And nobody would say we're goose.
And so I don't believe that these are the things that will be the way they are forever.
The question you asked, though, was why, right?
Why these companies, these corporates keep doing what they're doing?
Well, it's because the left tell them, right?
For a long time, we operated on the basis that, oh, well, if a company sees this man dressing up as a woman and gyrating in front of children, naturally they're going to put the kibosh on that, fire that individual, not have that on the premises.
Of course, it's only morally correct.
And then we're stunned when it doesn't happen because all the while the left are just whispering in their ears, no, that's fine.
No, that's normal.
And if you don't go along with this, you're a bigot and we're going to boycott your company.
We're going to show up outside your gates and we're going to harass your board members.
We're going to harass your customers and like all of that.
The left bothers to show up.
And the left bothers to show up because I was thinking about this a couple of days ago.
If you could stand in front of every single member of Congress, Democrat and Republican, and say to them, look, there are absolutely no consequences if you put your hand up right now.
But if there were no more elections and you retained your power and your access and there are no repercussions for you, how many of you would be willing to give up the core issues that you got elected on?
And almost every single Republican hand would go up and almost no Democrat hand would go up.
They are wedded to their ideology as part of who they are.
And Republicans on Capitol Hill are just simply not that.
They are only wedded mostly, again, mostly, to what gives them power and access and elevates them to a position above you.
I am afraid that the Republican Party is on the fast track to becoming the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom, of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
And that is not a Conservative party at all.
That's very interesting.
So obviously throughout history, by the way, feel free to push back on me if you think I'm not making any sense.
No, it makes sense to me.
My question then is, okay, so if the Uniparty is real and it becomes more and more apparent that the Uni Party is real, how does that manifest politically in terms of the dynamic in the United States?
And what I mean specifically is if you look at the way that the Third Reich came to power in the late 20s and early 30s, there was 30% unemployment rate.
There was a lot of desperation.
And you have this, a lot of people don't realize this, but when the Nazis came to power in 1933, only one in 40 Germans was a Nazi.
There were 80 million people in the country.
2 million of them were Nazis.
It's one in 40.
It was a major minority party, but none of the sort of establishment parties that were in place could get anything done because they were kind of gridlocked and they needed the consent of this sort of radicalized minor party in order to have anything happen.
And ultimately, that's how the Nazis were able to sort of wiggle their way into total power.
And so obviously our political system is different from the Weimar Republic in Germany at the time, but is this going to manifest in sort of like a radicalized populist third party in time that comes to power?
Or is it just going to fizzle and die like Rome?
Well, I don't like the premise because it supposes that any party, any third part or a third party that comes up in this vacuum of representation will be extremist.
And I don't think it has to be that way.
I hope you're right.
Sorry?
I just said I hope that you're right.
No, look, there's obviously a concern about that.
I mean, that's what history teaches us.
That's what we internalize as things that are to be avoided.
And if we can avoid the pitfalls of lending in our frustration to a tyrannical response in that extreme sense, then we would have done the right conservative thing by not repeating history's mistakes and marching like lemmings into that situation.
But at the same time, I have long believed that America not just should have, but deserves more than these two parties or one party, as I really genuinely think of it.
And I'll tell you why I think of it like that.
It's not just because of how these people vote or what drives them.
It's my interactions with these people on a day-to-day basis here outside this window on Capitol Hill.
In a phrase in England that I don't think will necessarily translate here, but the phrase goes that you can't put a fag paper between the two parties.
Well, a fag paper is a cigarette paper, a rolling paper, that are extremely thin.
You cannot squeeze a cigarette paper between a lot of the Democrats and a lot of the Republicans here on Capitol Hill.
So, yeah, again, I don't want people to think that I'm saying, yeah, third party Nazis.
I'm saying and avoid the tendencies because there will be.
That's the thing.
I mean, the question you're asking is well-founded because there will be tendencies towards lashing out in an extreme way.
For instance, I'll give you another example from back home.
We are now looking at a situation where the Labour Party is likely to win the next election.
The Labour Party, not that the Conservatives deserve to win the next election, the Labour Party has already said that one of its key planks of what it intends to do in the next parliament will be to abolish the House of Lords, which is the upper chamber of our bicameral system, and replace it with more of an elected Senate like in the United States.
Well, I think it's your 17th Amendment that took away the actual way that the frame is intended for your senators to be chosen and replaced it with a Democratic, a more democratic system like that.
Well, we're going to have basically just more politicians and more of their staffers, which means more lobbyists, which means more money.
That is not the solution to disenfranchisement.
That is the necessary path to further disenfranchisement.
The bicameral system can only work if the two chambers have divergent rationales and have divergent interests.
The point of the House of Lords.
the hereditary House of Lords, how it used to be, was it had the long-term national interest at heart because these people were made hereditary peers and they were in that chamber their entire lives.
They were landowners or the sons and daughters of landowners and the inheritors of that.
We don't have that anymore.
We don't have anybody whose interest lays beyond the next time they might not get elected.
And so people try to vest as much power as possible in themselves and as much money as possible in their wallets along that way.
So we're going to end up in that scenario in the United Kingdom.
It is constitutional vandalism like we haven't seen in decades and decades and decades.
Whereas the real pressure release valve, releasing real pressure from this buildup of power in certain people's pockets, whether it was in London or Brussels or Davos, was Brexit.
And now we know that when Labour get in and they replace the House of Lords, they are going to force through two votes, one in the Commons and one in the Lords or the Senate, as it will probably end up being called, and make Britain a member of the European Union again.
And at that point, all hell breaks loose because you have the largest democratic exercise that we ever went through in my country being overturned by a chamber that has just been created by the party that opposed the vote last time around.
I mean, can you imagine what the streets are going to look like in that scenario?
Wow, that's, I never put that together, but that's absolutely astonishing.
The question that's been on my mind is, in the hypothetical event of a more extremist United States, whether it's left-wing or right-wing, who is going to be the group or entity that everyone points the finger at?
So obviously the Nazis pointed their finger erroneously at the Jews.
The communists point their finger at the capitalists or the bourgeois or the property owners.
Anytime there's sort of like a radical extremist takeover, for better or for worse, for worse, there's an enemy that's identified and sort of eradicated, right?
And so in the event that there's a right-wing extremist movement that unfolds in the United States, who is going to be the enemy?
And in the event that there's a left-wing extremist movement that unfolds in the United States, who would then be the enemy?
Well, there is a left-wing extremist movement in charge of the United States right now, and you are the enemy.
You know, the working class, the lower class, as far as they are concerned, the unclubbable class, the people who wear denim unironically and without a sense of fashion about it, who do it because they are literally working people who do it for working reasons, right?
That's the people being eradicated.
Your dignity is being eroded.
Your finances are being eroded.
Even the inducement to having children is being eroded before your very eyes.
And they are chipping away and they are necessarily and knowingly chipping away at all of that.
The other, the contra to that is communists.
There's going to be helicopters in the air everywhere, dropping communists out of them like Pinochet.
And that part of the interview will necessarily be clipped and used against me in my future.
But I'm just saying.
You're not condoning it.
You're just saying that's how it plays out.
Yeah.
Well, that is their fever dream, is it not?
I mean, they're accusing us of doing that right now.
Whereas in reality, the reality of the situation in places like Washington, D.C., for instance, overwhelmingly liberal city, dominated by liberal voters.
I say liberal.
They're not really liberal.
Progressive.
They're not really progressive.
Communists.
They're communists.
My neighbors are communists.
And I should have a yard sign that says that.
The prevailing consensus here in DC is that as long as there's a nice new fusion, Japanese Mexican restaurant opening up on the corner or whatever, that things are necessarily getting better.
Meanwhile, murder rates spiking, you know, carjackings spiking.
The city is plowing money into repairing the roads.
But the amounts of money that is being spent to tarmac over a few potholes here, well, you know full well where a lot of that money is going.
The corruption here is endemic.
The black communities are murdering themselves en masse.
There is a citizen app, right, where you get notifications of the crime that's going on across the city, predominantly happening in black areas to black people, by black people.
And the black mayor and the woke city council not only don't care, the city council just this week changed.
They actually voted to override Mayor Muriel Bowser's veto, because even she had the sentence to veto this, of the criminal code of Washington, D.C., where they have now watered down the crimes of homicide, carjacking, felons carrying guns openly.
All of these things are now to be punished in a much less strict way, in a much more laissez-faire manner than has been the case while all of this crime has been going up anyway.
And these communists that live around me, they just shove, you know, it's not even good food, by the way.
I have to report to you.
I go to these places.
They're trash in comparison to other cities around the world where you can get actual good food.
And that tells you everything you need to know about Washington, D.C., by the way.
You are governed by dilettantes.
These are people who go to the Kennedy Center and see piss poor performances and go, oh, isn't that just wonderful?
You know, these things wouldn't pass for real culture in any serious city.
They don't work in New York.
They don't work in London.
They don't work in Vienna.
But Washington, D.C. has its head up its arse culturally, and therefore it has its head up its arse in every other way.
And this is where your national government is being led from.
So what do you think is going to happen?
The thing that gets me is I walk down the street and I'm not a big guy by any stretch of the imagination.
I don't pretend to be imposing at all.
And I don't fancy myself in a fight against a big guy who's been at the gym for all their lives.
But at the same time, I know that when I, I love when you look at me like, where's he going with this?
When I walk down the street, if I walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, predominantly in the middle of the day, Hillsfurs, all of that, I am the scariest person on the block.
And they look at me like that.
And I don't know whether it's because of how I walk or how I dress or how, you know, whatever it is, but I see these little, these little, you know, I don't even want to call them men.
They're dweebs.
You know, their bellies are bigger than their stature, their arms, all of this.
And they just sort of skulk around and they look at me and they go, you know, as if I am somehow an imposing figure.
And I just think to myself, gosh, if only lots of patriotic people, you know, actually, actual, you know, big strapping people would move to Washington, D.C. and kind of bully their way around this city.
You could take it back quite easily.
I don't mean literally physically.
I mean, I mean politically, because as weak as they are physically, they're weak mentally.
And you would find yourself, and I know it's a sacrifice.
It would be a massive sacrifice because trust me, nobody wants to live here right now.
It's just dire.
Like nobody sane wants to live here right now.
I don't want to live here right now.
But if lots of Americans, real red-blooded Americans move to Washington, D.C., you could change the culture very quickly.
And therefore, you could change the trajectory of the nation.
How is it that guys like that get laid?
I don't think they do.
I mean, I think the incel thing that they hurl around is actually projection.
It's either that or they're there, I don't mean to get into all of this, but it's the ones, it's the one, you know, they go for the ones that I wouldn't touch with yours.
You know what I mean?
Right.
We saw what happened at FTX.
Right.
Quite.
Right.
Quite.
Right.
Well.
So, and on that note.
Yeah, and on that note, right?
So what do you think about the current sort of censorship dynamic?
Obviously, with Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, it's not perfect, but there have been a lot of improvements, it seems.
No, I don't think that's true.
No, I don't think that's true.
Okay, well, I want to hear why on that.
But my question for you is: even if it were true, it's still an untenable position for free speech to be dependent on a fluke billionaire, you know, doing like a hostile takeover of a company to fix a free speech problem.
So, first, why don't you think that Twitter's improved?
And second, how do you think that we can fight censorship moving forward without relying on sort of rogue financiers?
So, I actually disagree with both of those premises.
So, the first one, I'll tell you, it improved slightly right after the takeover, when a lot of the shadow bans and all of that were being stripped out.
But then, when they changed the algorithm, and I believe they've changed the algorithm to where it's like, if enough verified accounts have blocked you, then you get suppressed now.
Well, I'm on a block list.
I'm on a massive left-wing block list.
I was talking to Laura Luma today.
I said, Laura, your account can now reach more people than mine, and you haven't even been on the platform for years because in that intervening period where she wasn't on the platform, I was getting blocked by all these leftists.
So, the algorithm just sees, you know, that I'm blocked by all of these both legacy and new blue checks, and it necessarily ranks me down.
And I can even, you know, pull the graph and screen grab the graph to show that right after Elon took over, there was a thing.
And then, as soon as that algorithm was put into place, there's been a decline in that.
So, I don't think it's improved in that regard.
And I am seriously reconsidering my, even though I was already verified, my $8 a month that I decided to spend in support of Elon's progress on that.
So, that's number one.
Number two, we've kind of always, Western civilization has kind of always stood on the shoulders of the people who are willing to take the risks.
So, I don't necessarily think that we can turn around and say, well, we can't rely on Sir Francis Drake to defeat the Spanish Armada.
And we can't rely on, you know, think of a million examples, right?
We can't rely on Henry Ford to build a car.
We can't rely on, you know, you can, and you do.
Those are, to come back to your Apple analogy, right?
The crazy ones, that famous Apple advertisement.
That's normal.
I mean, I say normal in the sense that it's historically normal.
I understand the question, if it comes from a power perspective, that you cannot allow such an important constitutional right to be held effectively in trust by somebody who may wake up tomorrow and decide to be a tyrant with those powers.
But at the same time, I'm a monarchist.
So what do I know?
So you consider yourself actually a monarchist.
So you believe in traditional sort of English, there should be a king, the king should call all the shots, that kind of thing.
Well, so, you know, just to just to elaborate on that a little bit for the audience who may have winced about it, because I understand that your experience with monarchies isn't very good.
But the idea that there should be somebody as the long-term steward of the nation, whether it is a chamber of the house, whether it is the executive branch.
Here's the funny thing about the executive branch.
It really doesn't have that much power.
The executive branch really is kind of, I wouldn't say a joke, but it's kind of laughed about in Washington, D.C. Like, oh, you know, the executive branch wants to do something.
The executive branch doesn't have the purse strings.
The executive branch doesn't have the oversight.
The executive branch doesn't have the ability to do what the legislative does in a massive fashion.
I mean, it's 101 when you go to study politics in college, is they show you the British system and they show you the American system.
And they ask, who do you think is more powerful, the prime minister in their respective countries, the prime minister or the president?
And everyone goes, oh, well, of course, the president.
And no, that's not actually the case.
The prime minister has far more power in and of that system, the parliamentary system, than the president has in the US system.
And so it doesn't necessarily have to be a monarch.
And it certainly doesn't necessarily have to be a lineage, right?
It doesn't have to be passed down through the same family.
But there has to be, in my Maybe I'm deadly wrong about this, but in my reading of Western philosophy, the countries that succeed are the countries that have people somewhere in their body politic whose interests are to the nation and not to themselves.
And neither of our countries have that right now.
Because the monarchy stopped being a monarchy, by the way, a long time ago.
We pretend we still have a monarchy.
We don't have a monarchy, actually.
We have a constitutional monarchy, which actually is pretty much nothing.
It has an advisory role, right?
But, you know, you don't have a House of Lords, you don't have a monarch.
You rely on these politicians who serve four or five-year terms to be the long-term stewards of the nation.
And we wonder why we have such a mess.
Well, it's interesting to me because it's a very sort of platonic and Christian-backed philosophy of monarchy, right?
It's the kingdom of heaven, not the democratic republic.
Like Christianity is inherently a monarchy, right?
There's the king, the king of the kingdom of heaven, right?
And that's Jesus.
And so the sort of American Christian argument is, yeah, Jesus is king of the world, but he's a perfect king.
So we aren't, we're going to excuse that.
But so far as we can allow men to run things, we need to have sort of this checks and balances republic system where no branch has any sort of authority over the other or any individual, right?
And so it's interesting because Christianity has been sort of the basis and justification for monarchies for millennia.
But at the same time, in the United States, we sort of have this sort of radical republicanism that's anti-monarchy from the evangelical.
I was having this conversation with DC Draino, you know, Rogano Hanley the other day.
And, you know, because he is of the belief, and I don't want to misrepresent his views, but I think he is of the belief that the monarchy is necessarily a tyrannical or despotic power that vests all the power in that one person who is in no way accountable to the public.
And that is just not how the monarchy has been, you know, the functioning monarchy has been in the United Kingdom for centuries.
Firstly, Parliament had plenty of leverage over the monarch.
We all know how Magna Carta came to be, or we should know how Magna Carta came to be.
And we all understand that, or we should understand, this is one of the things about Americans that really gets my goat up, that it wasn't the king that was exercising tyrannical powers over the colonies of the United States.
These were acts of parliament that were passed democratically by parliamentarians.
Now, it was genius.
It was a genius move to name the king in your founding documents and say this is where the tyranny establishes from, because it's always easier to put a face on evil if you're trying to sell an idea.
And they were very much trying to sell an idea at the time.
And I'm not saying that it was a wrong idea either, by the way.
But what I'm saying is you have to get the history correct that it was actually the parliament of the time that was executing those powers.
You know, the king was in favor of it for sure.
And the king was leading some of it.
But the idea that this was all coming from the desk of a tyrannical monarch and he was just going, you know what, we got to oppress those silly colonists over there.
There was far more checks and balances back then than would have allowed for that.
Well, and people forget too how cool King George was about it when he lost.
He's like, look, I did everything I could to win the war, but you guys won.
So good.
Congratulations.
He was such a team player.
But how much respect he had for the other side as well afterwards, just like, well, you know, fair enough.
And of course, people forget at the time there were far greater concerns.
You know, people didn't really know how much of America was habitable, how large the landmass would end up being, how much Western expansion would factor into it over the next coming century plus.
And you looked at the East and you looked at all the British interests overseas, India, so on and so forth.
And it made perfect sense not to represent and try and fight multiple colonial wars all over the world at the same time.
I don't know how we got into this conversation, but it's fascinating when you look into it because the British really didn't put their shoulder to the wheel in the America, in the American theater.
So where can people find you, follow you, and engage with you?
Well, yeah, I worry that after my pro-monarchy rant that none of your audience will want to.
But I'm on all of the social media platforms, regardless as to whether or not Elon's algorithm wants me to be seen at Raheem Kassam, Geta, Truth Social, Gab, Telegram, Facebook, you name it, Substack, just RaheemKassam.com.
We'll reroute you to my Substack.
And the podcast is back in flow now after several years of hiatus.
So that's all at the substack, RaheemKassam.com.
Well, it's been an honor and a pleasure to have you a second time on this podcast.
And I hope you'll come back and join us again, man.
