Christian Nationalism Revolution Is Coming To Britain ft. Charlie Downes | Across The Pond
Special guest Charlie Downes joins Tate and Connor for a deep dive into the rising wave of Christian political energy in Britain — and why many are calling it the start of a Christian Nationalism revolution in the United Kingdom. They discuss why the right wing globally needs to embrace its Christian roots, why abandoning them has weakened the conservative movement in the UK and the US, and what a renewed Christian identity could mean for the future of the country. The trio also tackle the increasingly aggressive push from the abortion lobby in Britain, why the pro-life movement found success in America but not Britain, the disturbing normalization of euthanasia ads in public spaces, and the broader moral and cultural crisis facing the West. BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO SUPPORT THE SHOW - https://castbrew.com/ Become A Member And Protect Our Work at http://www.timcast.com Host(s): Tate Brown @realTateBrown (everywhere) Connor Tomlinson @Con_Tomlinson (everywhere) Guest: Charlie Downes @cfdownes_ (X) My Second Channel - https://www.youtube.com/timcastnews Podcast Channel - https://www.youtube.com/TimcastIRL
Ultimately, it's because you've abandoned Christianity.
You're not giving people a sense of belonging in which to have and raise children in.
They're not staying in the country.
And so all those people that you're relying on to do this right-wing revival, they don't have the principles and they don't have the personnel to do it.
Liberal democracy undermines the integrity of the kingdom because it does not raise up leaders who embody the essence of the nation, but instead raises up the people who could lie most effectively to the public and who are prepared to take the most money from moneyed interests so they can run for office.
I am the campaign's director at Restore Britain, which is a British pressure group led by Rupert Lowe, MP, who is a former Reform UK MP, which is kind of our, you know, kind of populist insurgent right-wing party, which a lot of people are putting their faith in.
Rupert was unceremoniously booted out of the party earlier this year for the crime of challenging the position of the leader, Nigel Farage, and has since, well, essentially, become the de facto leader of the right in Britain, as far as I'm concerned.
He is commanding the discourse on a number of different issues.
And Restore Britain was set up essentially to institutionalize his influence.
So we're not a political party.
We are a pressure group, but we have an enormous membership and an enormous following online.
And this week we actually launched our podcast.
So I'd recommend all listeners to go and check that out on the Restore Britain YouTube channel.
I also have a show on GB News, which is kind of like our version of Fox News.
And I write the Daily Mail on issues of English identity, kind of Zuma politics, immigration, and so on.
So yeah, very pleased to be here tonight with you folks.
Corey Mills, whose girlfriend is being passed around Washington.
And I tweeted that being a heterosexual, married, monogamous white man in right-wing politics is simultaneously exhausting and a superpower because you're just un-blackmailable.
And Downs also fits this mold.
So there's a growing body of Catholic Zuma Waffen takes a group in UK Westminster.
We're getting kept out of every institution, but I think that's probably what we're going to end up talking about.
I mean, you know, anybody who has spent any time in Westminster or kind of media circles in Britain will know that they essentially do run off of blackmail.
It's a really gross sphere to work in, to be honest with you.
It's so infested by people who just have no control over their appetites in a lot of cases.
And so it's kind of no wonder that the British right is in such a bad state, given that it's people like that who, in a lot of ways, run the show.
And Connor, you're so right.
I saw that tweet of yours and I thought, yeah, I agree.
We got a plethora of stories really involving the abortion debate, which obviously the whole thing with Across the Pond is comparing and contrasting the political scene in the United States versus the United Kingdom.
What I think a lot of American listeners don't quite know or understand, maybe a lot of them don't understand, is that the abortion debate in Britain is not really as preeminent as it is stateside.
So I don't know.
Maybe you could give a quick sort of rundown of where the abortion debate is at on your side of the pond.
So we haven't had it be a central political issue since the 60s when abortion was implemented.
It has only resurfaced recently because during the COVID lockdowns, the Conservative government made the decision to provide abortification pills through the post without any medical consultations to women after a phone call.
And one high-profile case involved a woman who was significantly far along in her pregnancy.
I think it was about eight months.
And she called up claiming she was much earlier, took the pills and killed her own child at home.
And the response to this by the current feminist government, the Labour government in Britain is to forward two private members' bills that decriminalized abortion up till birth.
One kept the provision of non-sex selective abortions, so they banned that outright.
The other one wanted to remove all restrictions entirely.
And the one that got voted through on a Thursday afternoon when barely any MPs even knew about it and it barely even had time for a debate was the one to do with keeping sex selective abortion bans in place.
But pretty much every other abortion has been decriminalized now in the UK.
And this is why I think the issue is going to take center stage because alongside the Canada-made style euthanasia bill that's being forced through Parliament in a very similar fashion, we have instrumentalized human worth in the UK.
And you're starting to see some really creepy stuff around London.
Like we're already a blade runner, running man-style dystopia.
But there were adverts for euthanasia up in Westminster Tube Station for a very long time, sponsored by Global, which is the largest advertising conglomerate, which runs podcasts like the News Agents or LBC, one of the big like shit lib radio broadcasters in the UK.
Today, my wife took a photo and sent it to me, like tweeted out, and we can flash up on screen and post.
And there is this advert for egg harvesting in one of the major train stations in London.
And it's got typically, you know, majority white women on the board.
And it's posturing that egg harvesting is somehow some great use, some liberating, empowering use of one's autonomous choice.
And it has become really insidious with the abortion debate, with the euthanasia debate, where basically the human worth has been reduced down to whatever saves the state money and whatever maximizes the time at which you can either return to your desks to continue filling out spreadsheets for a corporation that wants to replace you with your cheaper foreign counterparts, or that you can basically sell off parts of your fertility in order to pay the rent.
And the reason I wanted to segue into this is because it opens up a whole Pandora's box with the fertility rate information that's been revealed this week, the abortion rate that's been revealed this week that shocked people.
And in the inverse, the hit pieces on young Christians in Westminster, like myself and Downs by name, that says, well, why would there possibly need to be Christianity in UK politics?
Haven't we talked past this whole silly religion stuff?
Pay no attention to the fact that Westminster is now a death cult.
Yeah, I mean, maybe you could drill down a little more on why specifically the, I guess, British right abandoned the abortion issue so quickly after it, you know, became law, because in the United States, it's been relitigated over and over again to the point where now the pro-life crowd got some major victories.
Obviously, Roe v. Wade being overturned.
And I mean, I would presume this would be due to the fact that America is still a very religious country relative to the rest of the developed world.
Obviously, the emphasis of Christianity in our government was there in varying degrees.
But when Republicans are in office, obviously they would sort of have the playball with the evangelical base.
And the evangelical base was demanding restrictions on abortion.
And that obviously came to fruition.
Is that kind of what's why you don't see this sort of pro-life insistence on the right in Britain is like lack of Christianity, lack of religiosity?
I'll throw it to Downs in a moment because he'll doubtless have thoughts on this.
But a little while ago, the Anglican church, and we're both Catholics, so, you know, oh, well, the Anglican Church used to be known as the Tory Party at prayer.
And I think it's no coincidence that as the Conservative Party has morphed into the accelerationist vehicle for gay race communism, whereas Tony Blair was, you know, he was a constitutional vandal and he intended to increase mass migration to, quote, rob the right's nose and diversity.
But he was a bit more subtle about it rather than, you know, the Boris Wave and flying trans pride flags from government buildings.
But as soon as the Conservative Party liberalized itself and it was pressuring the Anglican church to adopt gay marriage, it was one of the proudest achievements of David Cameron and Michael Gove's government in the 2010s.
As soon as that happened, the church became just another beam in the cathedral, you know, Jarvin's idea of the cathedral where it's just the amplifier of the progressive hegemony.
And so I think that the reason that our institutional church, which is basically wedded to the monarchy, wedded to government at this point, became just another megaphone for the current thing.
And that's why I think, one, Anglicanism is in complete freefall.
That's why Catholics now are numbering Anglicans two to one among Zoomers.
But I think that the lack of an organized Christian pushback and the connection between politics and the church means that there hasn't been a large Christian pro-life movement like there has been in the States.
Yeah, well, what I'm increasingly realizing is, for one thing, the sort of left-right dichotomy means less and less with every passing day, in my view, because I don't know, in my view, the only real binary or distinction that matters in politics now is just like true or false.
And that's like capital T, capital F.
This is not just some, you know, these are fundamental questions of truth.
And I think there's as much nonsense on the right as there is on the left.
Because what I've realized is those people who pass, a lot of those people who pass themselves off as being right wing are basically liberal at bottom.
And what I mean by liberal is something very specific.
What I mean by that is somebody who has the self or the individual as their moral center of gravity.
Because I think there's, you know, there's a lot of discourse, discourse about why the right has basically conceded every debate to the left when it comes to matters of culture over the last 50 or so years.
And my answer to that is that both the left and the right have had the individual or the self as their moral center of gravity.
And the left has just been the ones to take that to its logical conclusion.
They have been the ones to embrace abortion.
They have been the ones to push kind of, you know, woke sort of, you know, trans LGBT stuff in limitless self-expression.
And the right's answer to that, the right's version of a kind of self-centered culture is just to kind of endlessly bleat on about GDP and encourage people to pursue a kind of corporate career and sell them the idea that that's where they're going to find meaning and belonging.
And actually, on balance, I would say that to certainly for young people, the left's offering, when that is the kind of dichotomy, the left's offering is far more palatable, far more appealing.
And so there hasn't really been a right as such in this country in any kind of organized mainstream form for a very long time.
And that, I think, is why these cultural issues, issues that are kind of dismissed as being not as important as the economy and not as important as growth and that sort of thing, haven't really had a look in for a long time.
And actually, when you do raise them, even those people who do pass themselves off as being on the right are not interested in touching them because they are actually not, you know, they are individualists at the end of the day.
And this, I think, is the crucial thing, because there is this emerging faction of the right in Britain who, well, there's an article in Pimlico Journal, which is one of the outlets that has taken aim by name at myself and Connor.
There's an article in there called Why I Am a Zionist.
Now, this is a play on Zionist, obviously, but it's about Zia Youssef, who is the chairman.
No, what is he now?
He's the head of policy at Reform UK, this Muslim fella who nobody seems to know anything about.
And he represents what Pimlico Journal would describe as a kind of technocratic populism, right?
So this is a desire to, it's almost like a Lique Kuan Yu, sort of just looking at the metrics and seeking to increase the metrics as much as possible in a way that's far preferable to the kind of regime that we have now that just seeks to grow the GDP, whatever that even means.
I think this kind of faction is looking at more meaningful metrics.
But actually at the end of the day, they're not prepared to confront matters that can't really be spoken about in the quantitative language of kind of managerialism and science.
But it's actually those issues that are, in a lot of ways, the most pressing of our time.
Things like national identity and belonging, a feeling of meaning, a feeling of purpose, things like abortion, life issues, euthanasia, and so on.
And so there seems to be a very limited appetite for these kinds of things in Britain.
But I think that's only because there hasn't been a force, an organized force in the mainstream that has actually been putting the argument across in a compelling way for a very long time.
Because right now, Christianity in Britain on the political scene is kind of dominated by people like UKIP and sort of Nick Tencone.
And it seems very much like an American import.
It seems very sort of, it just bounces off most English people.
And so I think it is, you know, certainly the mission of Restore Britain to a certain extent and the mission of those of us of like mind in the kind of political scene to, in a way, like give Christianity a bit of a rebrand in Britain and make it palatable for the British people.
Because I don't think it has been for a long time.
It's like you say, Connor, the Anglican church, the Church of England, is just an arm of the state.
It's just a mouthpiece of power that, in my view, has been completely hollowed out of any real meaning or spiritual content, if indeed it was there at any time.
Yeah, I mean, the Anglican church in the UK, because we have here, we have like our mainline churches, which sort of the elite of our country up until about 50 years ago, the composition, they were primarily, they were attending these mainline churches.
And I guess that would be sort of the equivalent analog stateside to the Anglican church.
Obviously, the Anglican Church in the UK is an institution that is like wed to the government.
But either way, the thing that the Anglican Church and these mainline churches in the United States have in common is that they're both functionally boomer NGOs.
Like there's any spirituality that was left in these churches is gone.
It just died.
Yeah, like I said, they're fundamentally boomer NGOs.
And a point you're making, and it's so true, is again, the kind of state side, we've had this problem on the right where the most charitable interpretation of this would be they're just trying to win votes, but they step into the left's framework and then try to beat them at their own game.
And this just never works.
You're just, you're never actually going to beat the left when you're playing on their terms because they can just like give away free stuff and whatnot.
not fighting with you're not fighting on the same battlefield you're not fighting on the same footing the uk seems to have this problem on steroids where like at least in in the united states the right even though they were trying to like operate in the left's framework and beat them every once in a while they'd throw a bone to the conservatives that just has not been occurring in the uk whatsoever the conservative party like here the joke is oh the republican party is there to slow down the democrats In the UK, it seems like the conservatives were just junior partners in this sort of thing.
Like, Tony Blair's Labour Party had immigration running at like 200,000 a year.
The Conservatives put it to 1.2 million a year.
Bear in mind, America has legal migration for all 50 states at a million a year.
and we're the size of New York State so the Pimlico guys I want to be as charitable as possible because they do nip at our heels a lot But I think they have published some good work like the social housing stats.
So, you know, we love our anons.
Some are assuming good people.
But the bit that you're referencing, Charlie, I'll quote from.
He says, whilst a tiny fraction of the British population, these people are particularly prominent online, I personally estimate they make up 13% of British right-wing ex-users, but are responsible for 50% of the coal posted on the site.
With personalities such as Connor Thomas and Charlie Downs, hello, advocating for the re-centering of the right around political Christianity.
And when you say that they're liberals, what I think they are is they're advocating for what they believe to be a eugenic kind of liberalism, a kind of like ruthless Darwinian, we can just do things, twiddle the dials on economics, and if people fall through the cracks, fuck them, versus the dysgenic liberalism that is practiced by, I mean, Zach Polanski being the prime ambassador with his crooked teeth and frankly untrustworthiness, being a tit hypnotist and a homosexual in coalition with a bunch of juice-burging Muslims.
Just a coalition of like total carnival freaks that should not be allowed anywhere near power.
With that, I agree with them.
But the problem that I think they have, and this is why they don't take Christianity seriously, we can get onto the abortion stuff in a moment because there's like proper horrors happening here that they don't seem to have a moral opposition to, because it's just an expression of liberal free choice.
And anytime we speak out about it, we're accused of being illiberal.
It's like, yes, we are.
But the problem they have is they don't realize that all of their liberalism rests on a set of suppositions and givens that they can't guarantee.
Like, if you want to be a eugenic liberal, if you want to pursue science and material progress and you want to make it to the moon and create an Anglo-futurist colony with a Thatch Ruth space station, hey, how about it, man?
Like, the Faustianism is a part of the Anglo-Spirit as much as it is being a hobbit and being rooted and having your own little patch of land, which is how I feel.
The problem is, as you've said, who's truth?
Like, capital T truth.
Because the scientific revolution did not take root in Western Christendom by accident, right?
It took place in the universities, which were scholastic enterprises by originally Catholic scholars because they believed there was a universal truth.
They believed that you could understand God's creation via the logos.
And so you need to value truth in and of itself, objectively with a sort of, you need to believe there's a kind of moral maths written into the universe by a divine legislator so that science doesn't just become an instrument of ideology.
Because if you decouple it from Christianity, if you decouple it from eternal moral principles, then you just get the retarded dysgenic technocracy where you start playing like meat-lego mitson match to accommodate some crazy trans person's delusion about themselves.
And even though you might be momentarily frustrated by their incoherence and illogic, you don't actually have an ethic that prevents them from indulging in that delusion and using science to meet their own strange dysgenic ends.
So they need to understand that they act on a bunch of, a bit like Tom Holland's argument that wokeness is like a Christian abortion.
Basically, they need to understand that they rest on a set of Christian suppositions.
And if they can't guarantee the Christian suppositions, then their right-wing liberal project won't work.
Yeah, if I could just add to that as well, Connor.
I don't know if either of you saw Tucker Carlson's interview with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.
It was very interesting because a lot of Tucker's questions centered around, well, what is the moral framework that is being sort of implemented into Chat GPT?
And Altman did not have a very good answer for this.
He kind of floundered, he undernod, and he basically settled on it's kind of just the moral framework that was kind of that I received through osmosis in the environment that I grew up in, which is a terrible answer.
Because if you're creating a tool that is incredibly powerful and which, like, I use it, I think everybody uses it at this point.
You know, maybe I just speak for myself, I don't know.
But it's incredibly powerful and it's being used in many, many different sectors now for important work, including, by the way, the writing of MPs' speeches in Parliament in Britain, which is pretty funny.
But you need to have a good answer to that question.
You need to have a good answer to the question of what actually is the moral system that's being implemented into this, you know, this kind of so-called artificial intelligence.
And that a similar thing is happening, I think, with this faction of the British right, which is if you actually ask them and try and pin them down on what their moral framework actually is and what their moral paradigm that they're trying to bring into existence actually is, there is not a clear answer in my view.
It basically, and maybe this is me strawmanning, I don't know, but I can't see anything other than, well, I like England, I like Britain, it's nice here, my family is from here, and I would like to see it preserved.
And that's, you know, that's a fairly good answer.
But then you have to ask the question of why.
You have to ask, well, why is it worth preserving?
Why was it good?
Why is it no longer good?
And what is it that you're kind of striving towards in your political struggle?
Because I think a political or moral system that has merely the nation as its moral center of gravity is, in my view, incredibly dubious, morally dubious, because I think at one level, it's better than a moral system that explicitly has just the self as the moral center of gravity that permits just limitless kind of hedonism and pursuit of self-interest and that sort of thing, which I think is very much the culture we have in Britain now.
But a moral system that has the nation as its moral center of gravity and seeks to bring everything else into service of the nation, I think is very risky, actually, because you're not acknowledging the fact that the nation is only good when it serves truth, when it serves the good, and ultimately when it serves the will of God.
And again, when you start using religious language, people start getting very uncomfortable and weird and all the rest of it.
But unless we're prepared to have these conversations, I don't think we're going to win, right?
Because the enemies of our civilization in Britain themselves have a totalizing view of the world, whether that's Islam, whether that's kind of atheistic, nihilistic leftism, woke or whatever.
These are ideologies that have answers to every single question.
And I'm not necessarily saying that we need to have answers to every single question, but we at least need to do better than striving for basically finism, which is a good meme, but it's actually not, in my view, going to get us out of the kind of moral malaise that we find ourselves in.
And more to the point, a moral system that does have the nation as its moral center of gravity, not to sound like a kind of boomer, but actually that is going to permit pretty terrible things if you take it to its logical conclusion.
Because if something is regarded as being a threat to the nation, then kind of anything is permitted in eliminating that threat up to and including the indiscriminate murder of civilians.
And I think in a lot of ways, not to, you know, really sort of get into it, but this is what we're seeing right now in real time in Israel, as far as I'm concerned.
Zionism is a nationalist philosophy that has the nation or the race or whatever as its moral center of gravity.
Therefore, anything that is perceived as being a threat to that, well, anything is permissible up to and including the murder of children, which in my view is happening.
And I don't want that to ever happen in Britain.
I don't want us to ever have a government that thinks that sort of thing is okay because we hear a lot about how Britain is being destroyed and how Britain is collapsing right now.
But if we were to ever engage in that kind of thing as a people, then the soul of this country would be irreversibly blackened, in my view.
Well, it just seems to be this, there's an aversion.
There's like a skittishness among conservatives stateside and in Britain.
They're so afraid to directly link right-wing thought to Christianity.
I don't know why.
I don't know why there's this aversion.
I think it's perhaps people are insecure and they don't want to be perceived as like religious deocrats or something like that.
But that link is so real.
It's so intrinsic to right-wing thought because it's inherently hierarchical.
And that's something that people refuse to admit.
Because I think partially it's because we grow up in this system of this blank slate theory, of this individualism.
And that kind of, that's, that's a lot to let go because it feels wrong.
It feels wrong to tell someone they can't do something.
But that's fundamentally the framework that you have to present and to get us out of this mess is you have to be willing to tell people no.
You have to be willing to tell people, hey, you know, this is corrosive to your soul.
Therefore, it's going to be outlawed.
That feels wrong to people that grow up in this liberal system.
And perhaps we're seeing these cracks now among Gen Z because we've grown up in the system failing.
I think we're the first generation that's grown up in a fully failed system.
We don't know what the system looked like when it was at least like seemingly functioning to some degree.
Therefore, we're kind of looking around and shopping other ideologies.
Yeah, so I think the right in Britain and America needs to be comfortable linking the very real true link that there is between Christianity and right-wing thought.
Because if you're not presenting a framework, if you're not offering a framework to the public, there's nothing for them to buy into.
There's nothing for them to be grounded in.
Instead, when you're just taking kind of a liberal framework and then touching it up a little bit and maybe, you know, banning some few like woke things that bother people, that's not enough.
That's not going to last.
It's not something that's going to, you know, preserve people.
That's part of the reason Zoomers are so attracted to, in particular, Catholicism, because it provides something that's lasting.
It provides something that has a groundedness, a rootedness, a link to the past and a pathway to the future.
So yeah, that's what I would say is I just think, yeah, right-wingers, like, stand on business.
Like, it's inherently Christian.
It's inherently godly.
It's God-honoring.
And left-wing thought is inherently humanist.
It's inherently, in my opinion, satanic.
Our guest that we just finished rap, finished rapped, we just rapped filming with John Doyle.
Great video where he links leftism to Satanism.
I mean, there's some very disturbing links that are just true.
And it sounds kitschy.
It sounds like something you'd read in a pamphlet that's given to you by a schizophrenic person, but it's real.
It's real.
It's actually tangible.
They want to liberate you from every identity that was given to you by God and instead just turn you into the perfect consumer.
And it's, I don't know how else you would describe that besides satanic new boys.
Yeah, just adding something there, Tay, very quickly.
I think an idea that we need to be embracing on the right, which is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, is the concept of the withdrawal of license, right?
This distinction between license and liberty, I think is crucial for us because there is an idea that just, well, I mean, the whole liberal kind of the central principle of liberalism is that self-expression is everywhere and always a good thing.
But we need to be, you know, absolutely rejecting that at every turn.
And actually, sinful behavior, if you want to use the Christian language, has no rights and should not have any rights.
And therefore, the withdrawal of license, by which I mean the outlawing of abortion, the outlawing of gay marriage, all of these things which are fundamentally in conflict with the natural order, the eternal order, the eternal metaphysical principles that govern human civilizations, should not be permitted.
And this is the thing is the right right now in Britain is not prepared to have these conversations.
The sort of highest, the radical consciousness of the right in Britain in the mainstream right now basically extends to, you know, ending mass immigration and deregulating a bit.
And that's, and again, that's not a compelling, like grand meta-narrative to drive a political movement.
I think, and I think we do need to be thinking bigger.
I was going to add on that the original liberal was the serpent in the Garden of Eden because the promise of self-actualization is basically the devil's mantra of do as thou wilt or unshackling yourselves from the biological limits imposed upon you by Imago Day and the duties of the universal moral law to pursue your own hedonistic pursuits.
And this is why the original left and right dichotomy was between the hierarchy of the monarchy and tradition, but also the church.
And so left and right might well be antiquated in the current sort of boomer conception of politics in our country, Charlie, because the right is just another, the right is just a means by which the market can level everything down to lowest common denominator, universalist, blank slate, fungible consumer.
But actual right-wing politics, insofar as it should exist, should be hierarchical and based on tradition, whereas leftism is egalitarian, the great leveling blank slate.
As far as why there's a skittishness about forwarding Christian politics, I think you're seeing a little bit of this in the States, Tate, with the attempt to fold a billion Indians and also Jewish interest groups into the Republican Party.
It's very conspicuous that Mar-a-Lago just hosted a Hindu-Jewish joint advocacy group where Laura Trump spoke at it.
The Christian Americans aren't present.
Neither of those faiths built your civilization.
They built other countries, which I think their practitioners would probably be happier living there than trying to demographically and culturally terraform the United States.
In Britain, there's some of that going on as well.
I mean, there's a lot of Muslim groups in both the Labour Party and increasingly reform UK, but also never underestimate the extent to which the Conservative Party was captured.
And this is a really weird phenomenon that nobody talks about, by Scottish liberals who are obsessed with being led by minority politicians.
Like there are multiple.
There's Neil Ferguson, there's Fraser Nelson, there's Michael Gove, there's Andrew Roberts.
And for some reason, there's a kind of human skepticism about organized religion in total, despite them being ardent Arabists and loving Islam because they think the extent of Arab civilization is calligraphy and like squiggly buildings and minarets rather than cousin marriage and organized child rape.
But the other part of this is that for some reason, they astroturf minority politicians at all stages of their career, whether it's Rishi Sunak, Hindu, Kemi Badnock, atheist, Zia Youssef, Muslim question mark.
Like for some reason, there is a complete denial of the host majority being able to practice a politics of their own identity, even when that pre-political we, as Roger Scruton would say, is made incoherent by rapid demographic and cultural change.
And so you can't actually talk about policies and infrastructure.
Instead, you're re-litigating who is the moral and political constituency who has supremacy in the country.
But also there's this squeamishness about the ancestral foundational religion that built up our country.
Meanwhile, we're allowed to practice literally every other religion.
And I wanted to segue if I can off that point.
And I'm sure you guys will have something to say about what I said.
But Charlie, you read this.
Tate, you might not have.
There was a piece in Unheard, which is the counterpart to the spectator in the UK.
It's meant to be like the centre-left, like millennial-coded version of the spectator.
Written by Samuel Rubenstein.
Yeah, Unheard.
Who's it for?
Samuel Rubenstein, who wrote, Is Reform Going Too Christian?
And in it, he tries to take, he does the op thing we were talking about, Tate, before, of linking Vance to like Nick Fuentes.
This time, he links James Orr to JD Vance, because James Orr, friend of mine, is in Reform UK, was Vance's advisor.
And then he links Vonce to me.
And he, unironically, for a party with a gay chairman who is in favor of trans people in women's prisons and two Muslim spokespeople, he writes about reform being too Christian.
Strange things are afoot on the religious right, especially on the younger end.
The self-declared reactionary Catholic Zuma, Connor Tomlinson, who's close to Liz Truss and Ayan Hussy Ali and both almost 100,000 followers on X, questions whether those adhering to any faith other than Christian or belonging to any faith besides British should be allowed to hold public office.
Now, if I were to say, is Israel too Jewish or is the Labour Party too Muslim or is the Conservative Party too Jewish?
My career would be over.
I mean, it is already over in those respective parties.
But for some reason, we're allowed to just completely trash the integral ancestral religion of our nation.
And we're not allowed to say only Brits should be in British politics.
For some reason, we should be this sort of multicultural revolving door with no faith of our own, but every other nation gets to be blood and soil nationalists and theocrats.
Yeah, well, it stems back to the point you made regarding the serpent being the original liberal.
That's very valid because what did the serpent do?
The serpent just asked, I don't know, did God really say that?
And that's all liberalism really is, is taking anything that was assigned to you at birth that was God given to you.
And liberalism turns around and says, I don't know, did God really say that?
You should just ignore that voice in the back of your head telling you this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.
You should just double down on that.
And it just breeds misery.
And that stems into the modern day, into our political system where, you know, you might say, and you look at the, you know, makeup of Britain, it's primarily British.
And we're electing these politics.
They're pushing these politicians that aren't because they're saying, I don't know, is that really necessary?
They got to really make this country British.
It's a whole thing where in America, I think when we have these like Astroturf DEI candidates, these are typically pushed because they're convinced that if you like, for example, if you nominate like a black person for governor, that you're going to somehow win black votes.
I think it's just like misguided, misguided consulting versus in Britain, it seems like it's literally just out of like almost demonic self-hatred where it's like, it's like penance for being like a white Brit.
Like you're denying yourself political access as like trying to justify some sort of like wrong.
That's some sort of like cosmic ledger that needs to be, you know, leveled.
It's really, really bizarre because, I mean, yeah, that's, but that's, I mean, in the US, that exists to some degree, especially on the left, but on the right, it just seems like it's just like bad political strategy.
It's interesting you mentioned political strategy there, Tate, because this was a large feature of the articles that appeared in Unheard and Pimlico Journal, which was basically not to address the truth claims of Christianity, but instead just to look at whether or not they're popular enough to win an election, which in my view is a really, really superficial way to look at things because it's like, you know, I don't think any of us are saying that we want Reform UK to be like Bible bashing and campaigning on, you know,
making abortion illegal in all cases and having like a crucifix put up on the on Big Ben and all this sort of stuff.
Like but but this is the picture like the stereotype, the straw man that is presented in these in these outlets.
Like they seem to think that what Connor, you and I are advocating for is that kind is a kind of very American sort of evangelical preachy form of Christianity.
And hey, maybe we are preachy, I don't know.
But look, I mean, if we don't have a kind of sense of what is objectively right and wrong and objectively true and objectively beautiful, then we are relativists and our enemies are relativists.
And part of, you know, one of the fundamental problems in Britain today is relativism.
Because if you talk to a lot of people, and I've experienced this in my own life, perfectly ordinary people who have a nascent kind of Christian sort of moral sort of instincts, if you want.
You know, I've had members of my own family say they don't believe in objective right and wrong.
It's a very widespread belief, this.
I think there's a lot of reasons for that.
But until we have remoralized our people, again, I just don't think we're going to get out of the malaise that we're in.
Because Tate, you made a really good point there, which is that kind of left-wing liberalism seeks to deconstruct and strip a human being of all of their kind of natural or God-given identities.
And this is something that I have been speaking about and thinking about a great deal recently.
Because the question is, what are those identities?
And why do people, especially young people, have such a tough time finding a sense of identity and therefore go looking in other places like sexuality and race and gender and all these sorts of things to find a sense of identity.
And in my view, these identities stem from what are in the Bible called the covenants.
You know, you have the marriage as the first covenant between Adam and God.
You then have the household between Noah and God.
You then have the tribe, which is Abraham, the nation, which is Moses, the kingdom, which is David, and the church, which is Jesus, right?
And these covenants reflect the structure of all human civilizations in all times and places, in my view.
These are unchanging structures that humanity, left to its own devices, will always return to, right?
But the entire project of modern liberalism, the modern liberal moral paradigm that we suffer under, the express purpose of it is to escape all of those structures, is to regard those structures as being essentially prisons, oppressive power structures that are designed to keep you down.
This is especially the case, for example, in marriage, like the feminist view of marriage is that it is an oppressive patriarchal power structure whose sole purpose is to prevent women from living their truth and living, you know, living the life that they should be living, which in every case ends up being punching a clock in a corporate office, which is just such a, it's unbelievable that that lie has been so successful because one would think it would be self-evident that doing that is not as meaningful as raising a family.
But look, I mean, and this is the thing, like the right needs to be embracing these ideas, in my view.
We can't just be sort of having liberal assumptions about these things, having liberal assumptions about marriage and about what the household is and about what the nation itself actually is, if we want to win.
Because in every case, if we do not have these principles that are rooted in eternal truth, then our enemies are always going to be able to beat us.
Because inevitably, if we're not rooted in eternal truth, then we're rooted in relativism.
And our enemies are rooted in relativism.
And they're just going to take it to their logical conclusion where we're not prepared to do that.
And so people will see them as being the more authentic offering.
It's the right's answer to identity politics, because where the left says gay, black, you know, disabled, trans, Muslim, we say husband, father, Englishman, Christian, right?
And those are, first of all, not self-centered identities.
They are identities that require the presence of another human being to make any sense.
And they are an endless font of meaning.
They're never going to run out, right?
Whereas those other ones, those kind of individualistic, hedonistic identities, will eventually, worldly identities, even, we could call them.
They will eventually run out.
And the same is true of the Reich's version of that, which is basically to be like a banker or like some kind of executive earning a good salary.
Eventually that is going to run dry as a source of meaning.
But those, the identities that I listed are never going to run dry.
And that's why every single Englishman up until the last five minutes embraced those things as being sources of meaning and truth.
And I don't, again, I just can't wrap my head around why this is such a controversial idea.
Like these, this is what conservatism is supposed to be, right?
Like what are we trying to conserve if not marriage, if not the household, if not the integrity of the nation and the and indeed the kingdom?
Because that's something else we forget is Britain is not just a country.
Britain is not just a people.
Britain is not indeed just a democracy or an economy.
Britain is a kingdom.
And that has a very specific meaning.
A kingdom is a set of nations united under one ruler, which embodies the essence of that nation.
And we, you know, admittedly don't have that right now.
But historically, that is what we've been.
And in turn, again, what is a nation?
Well, a nation is a series of tribes united under one law in one land, which is what England, for example, is and has been continuously for a thousand years.
And in turn, what are tribes?
Well, tribes are a series of households united by blood and by lineage and by ancestry and by language and by religion in the same geographic kind of area.
And in turn, what is a household?
Well, a household is a man and a woman married before God, permanently with children and property.
And what is a marriage?
Well, as I just said, it's a man and woman united permanently before God.
And so what we have here is a comprehensive description of what human civilization is.
And in my view, that is our answer to the challenges of the relativistic, materialistic left.
And I think just appealing to you can just do things technocratic, basically finism, is a far less compelling offering.
Yeah, well, the idea that you can just press the fix everything switch and it's mass deportations and you return us to a homogenous civilization.
I mean, it will fix a lot of logistical problems.
It will fix a lot of problems about cultural belonging and crime.
But at root, you still need some kind of cultural or spiritual revival because the question is not just what are we conserving?
The question is also, what are we reproducing?
And this ties back to the abortion conversation.
I mean, currently, projections based on 2022, abortion levels, one in every three pregnancies in Britain ends in abortion.
So for every 100 live births, there are 48 abortions, which is just insane.
And I think this actually links up to, this is just one vector of demographic replacement, as well as migration, but also outward migration.
And a lot of the analysis about why there are so many young people leaving the UK, why we are the number one nation in the world for brain drain, for millionaires leaving, but also why the figures for people who left Britain got revised up last year from 17,000 to 257,000 people leaving to move abroad.
Part of the reason is that we aren't reproducing our civilization, not in terms of physical bodies, but also in terms of culture, in terms of those concentric circles of belonging, the Ordo Amoris that Vance ratioed Rory Stewart with.
The alternative to that is, as you've said, the varying flavors of liberalism, where if you don't have any relationships with the people around you, if you don't have any responsibilities to fulfill any moral obligations, if you don't have, as Peterson once compellingly said, that duty out in the future of the day at which you will be judged because you have to give the eulogy at your father's funeral and be the shoulder on which your female relatives can cry, if that's not a realistic prospect for you, the only relationship you have is with the state.
And so you end up getting the left-coded or the right-coded versions of liberalism, where the left-coded version of liberalism is like what John Gray wrote in New Statesman This Week, where he's literally like, I'm not a post-liberal.
In fact, Leviathan is the only thing that can stop the all-out war of all against all between ethnic and religious tribes in our country because he said folks like Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farrell getting close to power was unfathomable.
So literally, we can't deport all these people.
We're stuck here forever.
So we have to become a low-trust surveillance state to enforce one way of life on everyone.
And what the right-wing liberals don't understand in the same way as the left-wing liberals don't understand is that all those conceptions of liberal egalitarianism, you know, just doing things, a state that is kind of omnicompetent to keep the peace, rests on a shared set of cultural assumptions that you aren't reproducing because they're fundamentally Christian at root.
And all the people you've imported into your civilization who are having kids at much higher rates, like a third of all births now are to immigrant mothers, don't share those assumptions.
And so you won't get Leviathan.
You'll get like Liberia or Lebanon or Lahore sooner than you will this omnicompetent state.
So it's not just a failed enterprise.
Ultimately, it's because you've abandoned Christianity.
You're not giving people a sense of belonging in which to have and raise children in.
They're not staying in the country.
And so all those people that you're relying on to do this right-wing revival, they don't have the principles and they don't have the personnel to do it.
Well, this, I think, is what is so revealing about the name Reform UK.
Because what that says, first of all, is that you conceive of this country in the same way that the Blairites did, which is as the UK, which is a very recent name for this particular polity.
And what you're seeking to do is not overturn that order, which has been the source of so many of the ills that particularly young people suffer from in this country, whether that is demographic replacement and the prospect of the white British population becoming an ethnic minority in this country in less than 50 years, whether that is the cost of housing, whether that is the rate of tax, all of these sorts of things.
You're not seeking to tear down that order.
You're seeking to reform it.
You're seeking to reform the UK, as it were.
And that, I don't think, is what any of us actually want.
Like, none of us actually want this order.
None of us believe that this way of doing things is fundamentally right, but that our current leaders are just getting it wrong.
It's like real UK has never been tried, if you want.
But that kind of is what the reform, the people in their orbit, like Samuel Rubinstein, like Pimlico Journal, are kind of seeking to do.
Like they agree on the basic, on the fundamentals of this political project.
They just think that it's being executed badly.
And so that's why they are, I think, hostile to our ideas, which are basically to, if you want, restore Britain, which is why we called our organization that is that like Britain is a far thicker, older conception of this land, which is not as a kind of economic zone UK PLC, but actually, as I was saying before, as a kingdom, which is a far deeper thing in my view.
And so, you know, again, I just, I think it's likely that reform are going to win the 2029 election.
But until they are ready to confront these issues, I don't think that they are going to save the country.
Because again, the useful thing about the conceptual framework that I have laid out is that you can look at the problems that we face as a country, as a nation, as a kingdom, and you can almost plug them into that framework and understand what it is that they're attacking.
Because it's like, yes, everybody agrees that demographic replacement, mass immigration, legal and illegal, is the most pressing issue of our time because it is the most consequential, most tangible, most visible symptom, if you want, of the sickness that currently afflicts our society.
But what it is an attack on is the nation.
What mass immigration is an attack on is the nation.
But actually, there are attacks on all of the other covenant structures at the same time.
Marriage, for example, has been entirely undermined in this country by no-fault divorce, by gay marriage, by, frankly, the prevalence of pornography and contraception, which make a kind of product of the marital act, which should be fruitful and productive and rooted in love instead of essentially self-gratification.
The household, likewise, has been undermined because nobody can actually own their own property.
Everyone is a perpetual renter, whether that's from a landlord or from a bank.
And as I say, it's very difficult for people to raise children in this country that are actually their own children because the state makes such an effort to indoctrinate them using the public education system.
And again, the tribe, I think this is perhaps the most controversial, but the concept of racism, like the actual concept of racism and its analog anti-racism, tell you that the mere recognition of tribal identity, by which I mean in the modern sort of vernacular, ethnicity, essentially, merely to recognize that and to express any degree of preference for one's own tribe is evil.
It's like the greatest moral sin that one can commit under liberalism.
And I could go on.
I mean, like the kingdom, for example, well, it's liberal democracy.
Liberal democracy undermines the integrity of the kingdom because it does not raise up leaders who embody the essence of the nation, but instead raises up the people who could lie most effectively to the public and who are prepared to take the most money from moneyed interests so they can run for office.
And I realize this sounds like a really like cynical view of this country.
And I don't like to come down on Britain too much because I think this is still, despite everything, a great place to live.
And I'm never going to leave, Connor, as I know you agree.
But my goodness, like what a state we're in.
And once again, until, in my view, we are prepared to confront the totality of the sickness that afflicts this country, we're not going to rescue it from, you know, from hell, right?
And if we're just focusing on demographics, if we're just focusing on kick out all the immigrants and then everything will be fine, if that is our political project, then we are going to lose.
Yeah, well, if you haven't conceptualized your own framework, because what happens is people will point out like part of this, you know, this coalition that the left has built and they see how they're competing for, you know, they have would, in theory, have competing interests.
And people sit there and scratch their heads, like, what do they even have in common?
Like, what is a gay person?
Why is a gay person lining and linking arms with like a Muslim?
Like, why, why is that even happening?
And it's like, because if you haven't developed that actual Christian right-wing framework, you don't really understand what those people have in common, what goal those people have in common.
But Charlie, with the framework you've outlined, it makes perfect sense what they're trying to do.
It makes perfect sense why they actually would see more in common with each other than like, I don't know, this liberal system that, you know, these older folks are still trying to keep alive.
But that is the flag of what you are describing, Tate, which is a coalition of groups and individuals which stand opposed to marriage and to the household and to the tribe, the nation, the kingdom, and the church.
That is what they are uniting around.
And, you know, and I think that once, again, once you conceive of it in that way, there is no reason to permit that.
Like, and I had a debate at the Battle of Ideas, which is a very liberal, kind of quasi-communist event that happens in this country every year.
Tate, I was invited to debate a chap called Albi Amankona, who is a conservative, he calls himself, but he is also the head of the LGBT Tories and also the Tories, what is it, conservative?
He's just a gay black liberal.
Look, I don't dislike Albi as a person.
I had a very pleasant interaction with him.
But I said in that debate that, because it was a debate about free speech, and I'm personally very, yeah, I believe in free speech very strongly.
However, I caveat that by saying I'm not entirely convinced.
I'm skeptical of the idea that free speech is everywhere and always, or debate perhaps is everywhere and always a truth-seeking exercise, because I think that people believe things for all sorts of reasons.
I think people believe things for reasons of pride and for reasons of kind of, you know, it serves their interest.
Because like, you know, the people that subscribe to woke, you know, kind of gender ideology, if you want, as an example, like, I don't think they believe in that stuff because they believe it's true.
I think they believe in it because it serves their own lifestyle and their own appetites, frankly.
And so you're not going to argue those people out of that position because they weren't argued into it in the first place.
So the idea that limitless, like endless debate is everywhere and always the most effective way of, you know, locating, identifying the truth and getting further closer closer to the truth.
I don't think is necessarily true.
But in that debate, I made the case that the Progress Pride flag should be banned.
It should be illegal to fly the Progress Pride flag in state buildings and indeed in private buildings.
I do not believe, you know, in the privacy of your own home, I think that it's fine because I think that is, that would be an overreach to say that you can't fly in the privacy of your own home.
But think of the things that have been done in the name of that flag.
Seriously, think of the mutilation of misguided teenagers, Connor, as you have spoken about recently.
Think of, I mean, I would go as far as to say as, you know, even like the killing of Charlie Kirk, right, was done in the name of that flag.
The terrible, terrible, and like the covering up of the grooming gangs was done in the name of that flag.
Mass immigration has been done in the name of that flag.
But this is a flag that represents everything that stands against truth, everything that stands against beauty and order and goodness, like fundamental moral decency, right?
And so I don't see a reason that you should permit an ideology like that that is civilizational poison, civilizational acid to be kind of proliferated in your society.
There's no good argument.
And if your argument is, well, free speech, I will say, well, I just don't agree with that, you know?
Yeah, I feel like abortion really is the crown jewel of that ideology.
That's why when they're, at least in stateside, when there's any sort of threats to put some sort of restriction on abortion, nothing turns out the left quite like the Republicans proposing some sort of abortion restriction, because fundamentally abortion really is, like I said, the crown jewel of that ideology, because you are saying we have this system, liberal democracy, and a child, a gift from God is an impediment on your ability to participate in this system as effectively as possible.
Therefore, you must sacrifice your child on the altar of liberal democracy.
It is horroring.
It is horroring.
And that's why I think the pro-life movement, at least in the United States, that's why it's received perhaps the most vitriol from the left.
Out of all the things that, you know, the right wing in America is proposing, even immigration restriction, which, you know, is probably the second most sort of abrasive position that the right holds in the United States.
Abortion is what really turns out the left because I think they know fundamentally deep down inside that that kind of is the ultimate test.
That's probably the furthest you can push a human being.
I would say even more so than transgenderism.
I mean, and that's involving self-mutilation, these sorts of things.
Abortion is the furthest you can push a human being in service to liberal democracy.
You're literally telling a mother to kill her offspring in service to this world order.
And this is the thing, Tate, is there really is very limited mainstream public discourse about the topic of abortion in this country because I think a lot of people don't think about it a lot.
It's regarded as being a debate that's kind of done.
It's not something that we talk about in this country.
And I think that is largely because of what we were talking about before, which is that there's very little in the way of public appetite for conversations around deeper issues about what life is about, about what a human life is and is not, what is right and wrong, basically.
And I think that the unwillingness to confront those issues is largely born out of a culture that does have the self as its moral center of gravity.
Because what greater expression, as you say, Tay, what greater expression of a self-centered culture could there possibly be than a mother frankly murdering her own child in the name of her own comfort and her own, you know, her own career, for example.
And look, I think that we are so deep into this that, like you say, I've spoken to people in my own life who are not particularly political, but they are pro-choice because it is, it's held up as an article of faith in this kind of liberal moral paradigm.
But even in the most extreme cases, they're like kind of limit cases, like, for example, a situation where someone has been raped or something horrible like that, right?
I, for a long time, I did basically think, well, look, I'm against abortion in most cases, but if that was to happen to a member of my family, would I want them to keep that baby?
Well, probably not.
But actually, what I realize now is that that, you know, regardless of how noble that might sound, you still are operating from a moral framework that has the individual as its moral center of gravity.
And in my view, any moral paradigm that has that has that is fundamentally against the will of God because you are placing yourself into the position, into the station of God.
And I think that any civilization that embraces that en masse is ultimately destined for destruction.
And that is kind of, that's kind of where Britain is.
My political position has long been don't attribute intergenerational guilt to the unborn child that should lie with the predatory father.
And so sex offending father, don't kill the child.
You know, that should be a pretty good moral calculation.
But abortion has become this liberal sacrament because it is the, Mary Arringson's written about this before, it is the most visceral possible expression of individual autonomy to say that my adult appetites come at the expense of the sanctity of life for an innocent unborn human being.
And this was actually expressed in a very personal way with, so I'll keep the identity of this person anonymous, but someone who was a longtime friend of my wife, who found out what I did when they stumbled upon me in a video that was criticizing me as one of these far-right pronatalists saying that, you know, people who want to have kids should have more kids.
Maybe it might be a better solution.
Yeah, it would be a better solution than battery farming Africans so that he deaf of the universe to pay boomer pensions.
Heaven forbid.
And he came to me to basically interrogate me on all of my evil right-wing beliefs.
And one of the things that he felt strongly about was abortion, but it wasn't out of this principle because I just kept Socratically questioning whether or not he would feel uncomfortable what his standard for the sanctity of life was, how he can support human rights for full-blown human beings, but then arbitrarily argued that a baby is not a human being.
And it boiled down to two things.
One, he wanted to use abortion in his own personal circumstances, even though he would feel uncomfortable doing it, just in case he wasn't ready to be a father yet, or there was some genetic defect that was unforeseeable and would make his life inconvenient, therefore instrumentalizing the worth of another human being to what's convenient for him, his personal social.
Yeah, exactly, which is why we're battling over whether or not we're practicing dysgenic liberalism or eugenic liberalism with the right and left.
But then the other argument that he had was he just defaulted to NPC talking points because when I hit up against that moral brick wall, he just started saying, well, it's just a zygo and fetuses don't have consciousness.
And it was like these learned Reddit talking points.
And so what you have to realize is, going back to what you were saying, Charlie, debate is itself not always the instrument to realize these tools because lots of people aren't conscious and lots of people aren't engaging in good faith interlocution.
Instead, they're just trying to serve their own basist appetites.
And those basist appetites present a temptation that means that if they're not serving God, their wife, their community, their congregation, their country, instead they are serving something else.
And it's an entity that usually turns us against our own nature, which could, even if you want to take it as a metaphor, be described as demonic.
And so even though this will get us accused of illiberalism and being post-liberals and Christian nationalists, I just think we need to take these issues off the table.
And I'm not going to be subject, I'm not going to subject my moral positions to a popularity contest or sort of like a mean girl disapproval from the pages of even the good spirited anons of Pimlico Journal and concede this issue, I'm afraid.
I would encourage everybody to check out Restore Britain, which is the organization that I work for.
You can join if you are somebody who is concerned about the future of Britain as a member for £20 a year.
And I would encourage everybody to do so.
Check out our new podcast.
As I said, that's with myself, Lewis Brackpool, who is our Director of Investigations, a very, very good journalist in Britain, and Rupert Lowe, who is, as I said, our leader and a current member of parliament.
You can find my work on my ex page at CF Downs with an underscore at the end.
