Bret Weinstein Talks with Carl Benjamin About Nick Fuentes
Bret Weinstein and British free-speech activist, Carl Benjamin discuss Nick Fuentes and generational divides. Topics include: the crisis facing young men, cultural continuity, and responsibilities needed to build a better future. Find Carl Benjaminon X at https://x.com/Sargon_of_Akkad and at https://lotuseaters.com. ***** This episode is sponsored by: Timeline: Timeline accelerate the clearing of damaged mitochondria to improve strength and endurance: Go to http://www.timeline.com/d...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast Inside Rail.
I have the distinct pleasure of sitting today with Carl Benjamin.
It is early afternoon for me.
It is middle of the evening for him because he's in England.
In any case, this is a podcast.
Well, not this particular podcast, but I've wanted to do a podcast with Carl for a very long time, and I will say a little bit more about that.
But in the meantime, let me just say, Carl, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thank you so much.
I've been long anticipating doing a podcast with you as well.
As we were saying just before we started, I've been following your work for a very long time, and I very much appreciated your work during COVID.
Because honestly, it was quite brave to go so far out of the consensus.
And I'm nothing of an expert on that particular subject in any way, shape, or form.
So it was nice to see someone who was prepared to just take the knocks and say, no, I really do think that this is the case, actually.
Well, thank you for saying that.
I will say I did not at the time know whether or not I would ever find my way back to the acceptable circles.
I'm not sure I'm all the way back there yet.
But nonetheless, I will also say, though, I became aware of your work in 2017, it would have been, when Evergreen was actually in the midst of melting down, if I remember correctly.
And you, in your other persona, Sargon of Akkad, released an analysis of the meltdown at Evergreen that I thought was incisive.
You were also very early to that story.
So at the point that I had no idea what anyone was going to make of it, you showed up and I took quite a bit of solace in hearing that somebody across the pond could see exactly what was going on and just call it out without hedging.
So it's long overdue, but thank you for that.
It was my pleasure, honestly.
Well, in the years since then, speaking of taking knocks, you have taken a tremendous number.
You have been derided in all sorts of terms and you have also been impeded.
You've been thrown off of, I'm trying to remember the history.
It's so long ago now, but were you thrown off of Twitter?
I was in 2017 and in 2022, Elon brought me back.
So I'm very, very pleased.
And I also recall there was some interesting situation.
Was it Patreon threw you off for being a viewer?
I'm from Patreon as well.
Yeah.
So, but you were thrown off, if I'm remembering the story correctly, for things you said somewhere that had nothing to do with Patreon.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
At the time, I was a liberal and very much like what is happening now with the sort of Nick Fuentes fans, I was being attacked by a bunch of what are essentially just Twitter Nazis.
And to be honest with you, this is the first time it had really happened.
So I was a bit stressed.
I was under quite a lot of pressure.
And I was on someone else's stream and I'd shouted at some of them in the chat in a very unflattering way.
And the champs at Patreon took exception to that.
And they were like, nope.
Which is strange because it wasn't on their platform.
But they just didn't like it.
And that was that.
Yeah.
So you have faced the onslaught of various types of coercion and control.
In any case, what I wanted to talk to you about today is Nick Fuentes.
You're probably not aware, but I've been trying to get people to have a different discussion about Nick Fuentes.
My feeling is it is very easy to fall into the trap of seeing clips of him saying truly inflammatory things, things which I find despicable, and to imagine that that tells you who he is and what he's about.
And I know that that's not accurate because somehow a couple of years ago, I did something on Twitter.
I did what I always do, which is go looking into quadrants where I'm not usually expected to show up to hear what the conversations amongst other people sound like.
And I somehow triggered something in the algorithm that caused me to be thrown into what I call Nazi Twitter, where you had people openly discussing a complete revision of the collective understanding of Hitler, the Holocaust, World War II, etc.
And I was spooked by it.
I did a podcast where I tried to alert people that this is happening, and you're probably not seeing it if the algorithm doesn't think you'll like it.
But it's happening, and it's not a tiny number of people, and you need to know it's there.
But in that episode, something caused me to start seeing Nick Fuentes show up, and I found him fascinating because he is charismatic, he's insightful, and he obviously was saying great many things that are unspeakable in polite society, many of which are grotesque,
but some of which are simply things that need to be said and are not being discussed anywhere.
So I have deeply mixed feelings about what I see there, but I know that it's a mistake to simply see the inflammatory clips and assume that that's what's going on.
It really isn't.
And so you put out a piece, maybe it was yesterday or the day before, in which you analyzed the Nick Fuentes phenomenon, which is to say not just who is this person and why is he saying these things, but why is it resonating so broadly amongst Zoomers?
And I thought your piece was excellent.
So I wanted to have you on to articulate your position and for you and me to talk about what we agree about, maybe what we disagree about.
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So before we begin, I think it's worth pointing out that I know the area of Twitter you're talking about.
Excuse me.
I've had a dreadful cough for the past month or so.
I know the area of Twitter you're talking about.
And I just want to be clear about what my position on all of this is.
I personally have got no interest or desire for any kind of Holocaust revisionism, any kind of Holocaust denial.
I've absolutely got no sympathy with Nazi Germany or anything like that.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm an Englishman.
My side with the British during World War II, my ideology is pretty, I mean, I don't really consider myself to hold an ideology.
I just tried to make sure that I'm being driven literally in a sensible manner, as in through the sense datum and through reasonable analysis of what I see.
So I'm not in any way sympathetic to the ideology they're constructing in that area of Twitter.
But like you, I think it's important to understand what is happening and why.
And what I've found, I've finished a degree and a master's degree in philosophy.
And a lot of people ask me, why did you do philosophy?
And honestly, the ability to untangle layers is the real reason.
Because you'll notice that people treat Nick Fuentes in the ideological layer.
And in the ideological layer, the things he says are so offensive to the standard ideology of almost everyone in the West, on the left or the right, conservative or liberal.
It's understood that, of course, we're the good guys in World War II.
The bad guys were defeated and we all lived happily ever after.
And so when Nick Fuentes says things like, Hitler is cool, he is attacking on the ideological layer, all of the sacred cows of the post-World War II consensus.
He is turning the entire thing on his head and saying, well, this is the problem is that basically the West doesn't think Hitler is cool.
And this is heresy.
This is just an outright heresy to this ideological level of belief.
But then if you actually think about what you're looking at, well, Nick Fuentes, and just to be clear, I haven't got any personal beef with the man.
I don't personally dislike him even.
Like you, I've seen the clips going around and I agree with your assessment.
He's lucid.
He's funny.
He's sharp-witted.
And he's a very clear communicator, very good communicator.
So you can see why to An audience of dispossessed young men, you can see why he would be a very appealing figure.
But if you actually look at him, he's not terribly physically impressive.
He is not a titanic speaker like Adolf Hitler or anything like this.
What he is, is a young man with a microphone who is prepared to transgress boundaries in order to make a point, in order to make himself heard.
And so the ideological layer is the layer everyone engages with him on.
But I've noticed that, I mean, I don't know about yourself.
I'm a father.
I've got a few other content creator friends who are also fathers.
And we couldn't help but watch his interview with Piers Morgan through the lens of parents listening to rebellious children.
And the rebellious children were really attacking the established worldview of the parents.
Because I think what was really underlying it is the message that actually the old worldview of the Piers Morgan types just doesn't work for the world in which these young men live.
And I think the most important part of the whole thing was actually when Nick Fuente says, yes, I'm a racist.
And I think that a lot of people failed to understand what that really means and why that is something that actually resonates with a lot of people.
Now, Piers Morgan in particular grew up in an England that was 95 plus percent white English.
So everywhere you went, it was just English people all over the place.
And you would have to go and look for those small areas of England, not even cities, just in parts of cities that had a significant density of non-English people in them.
And so when you have that kind of background stability, obviously being a racist seems like a horrible and malicious thing that is irrational, is completely irrational to say, well, hang on a second.
Why would you be mean to the chap who runs the Chinese restaurant or something like that?
He's not doing anything wrong.
What would be the reason other than your own personal hatred?
Which obviously is completely true and makes sense.
But I think a lot of the Zuma men now are living in countries that are actually highly diversified.
They don't have, and America was very much the same in this sort of era, like much, much higher percentage white American of European descent.
And it makes a lot more sense when that kind of background assumption obtains.
But when it doesn't, and you're thrown into a world where you've got lots of different competing groups that are all expected to occupy the same space, then I think Fuentes is probably more correct than not when he says, well, everyone is racist.
Because what he means is all of these different groups are demonstrating an in-group preference towards themselves.
And as the young white men, well, they're looking around and saying, well, okay, well, do we have an in-group that we can have a preference for?
Because everyone else seems to be getting ahead on this understanding.
And if we're denied that, that makes us vulnerable in the world that the Piers Morgans of the world have created.
And so I think this is a genuine shift that is not going to go away, whether we like it or not.
Well, I resonate with a lot of what you said.
I want to go back and just put my own perspective on the table here in a couple of places.
I do have a beef with Nick Fuentes.
What that beef is depends a little bit on what is motivating him, which I don't think I fully understand yet.
My beef with him is that many of the things that he says are even if he himself is being ironic or transgressing for its own purpose, the tropes that he is playing with are so dangerous that I think he has a responsibility to stay away from them.
And even if I embrace his instinct to transgress, there are certain places that you mustn't go because of fundamental defects of humanity and what may obtain if he legitimizes those perspectives, even if it's not his intent.
So my beef with him is that, that he has a responsibility.
On the other hand, he's 27 years old, and I remember being that age.
And I have two kids, boys, one 21, 119.
And I know I recognize in them the tendency to transgress.
And so what I'm hoping is that he is being ironic and that he actually can be brought to an understanding of the dangers of some of the territories in which he is playing.
But I don't know.
That remains to be seen.
As for the issue of racism, I suspect you and I will land in about the same place.
I still am a liberal.
I absolutely believe in a formally colorblind West.
I don't think we should be policing what people say and think.
We should be persuading, correcting them when they say things that are wrong.
But the maddening situation that Gen Z finds itself in, especially Gen Z straight white males, is that they have had their hands tied behind their backs, right?
You people have a position of privilege and you must be constrained.
And everybody else has been freed to engage in all kinds of things, including rampant racism of exactly the sort that boiled over at Evergreen.
And so we have a double standard.
The double standard is we are going to enable your racism if you come from some group that we consider downtrodden.
And we are going to prosecute every offense, no matter how minor, or even if it's just imagined, if you happen to come from a group that is privileged.
And so Gen Z, straight white males, are facing demonization for their privilege as they are experiencing no privilege at all.
In fact, the opposite, right?
They have been constrained.
Others have been liberated.
And they're being told that their situation is so good that their disadvantage is necessary to level a playing field that's already slanted against them.
Is that fair from your perspective?
Yeah, no, I think that's perfectly fair.
And I think a large part of the position of the Zoomers at this point is I think a lot of them feel betrayed, frankly, by the promises liberals have made and then the actions and world that they've brought about.
There was no colorblind meritocracy for them.
For them, there was a very color-conscious and how to put it, hierarchical world in which they were born.
And they were specifically and deliberately put at the bottom of it through no fault of their own.
And in many ways, I consider myself to be a post-liberal at this point because I've done too much philosophical work on liberalism to be able to adhere to it.
But I think I'm most interested in fairness now.
I think I'm most interested in, rather than any kind of abstract set of ideologies, is what people feel to be fair.
And I think that we can all agree that the young men of today are not being treated fairly.
They are the product of the sort of feminist civilization that we were calling attention to back in the 2000s.
Well, we're now more than a decade on from that civilization and its works.
And well, what do we have?
We have a very large cohort of very radical young men who have decided that this civilization is there to destroy them or to harm them or to treat them as a servant class.
And they'd rather tear it down.
And so the question is, well, what do we do from this point onwards?
Because in many ways, they have a really legitimate point, which is against people of our age and older.
And that's, why did you let them do this to us?
You, the older generations, have a responsibility in a kind of Burkean sense on the great chain of being to make sure that the world that you're bringing into existence for younger people to grow up in is a good and fair one.
And we didn't.
And I don't think, I mean, that's our fault, obviously, but it wasn't, it's only in hindsight this becomes exceedingly obvious, because at the time, I think everyone was very blindsided by the highly sophisticated ideological weapons of social justice.
And people didn't really know how to actually combat it.
It's taken us a long time to play catch-up.
But that doesn't change the failure on our part.
And it doesn't solve any of the wounds that the Zoomers currently carry.
And so it really, I think, is actually forcing the question of what is it that they are owed by society, actually?
What are the young men of the West actually owed in comparison to all of the minority groups that have been privileged above them?
And the answers can get quite reactionary, actually, whether you like them or not.
There is a kind of logical implication in a lot of it that suggests actually these men should have been incorporated into the power structures, into the hierarchies, not just for themselves either, but actually for everyone else.
Jordan Peterson makes this point quite regularly, or used to before he fell ill, obviously, that the kind of men that women want to marry are not men who earn less than they do.
And so, great point.
Well, why do women make up the majority of people in universities?
Why are women being fast-tracked into the upper echelons of businesses then?
This is it might be immediately gratifying, but in the long run, when polled, even women will say, well, I'd rather have the man earned more money than me.
And so I could eventually have children and take care of them while he provides.
And I don't want to say, right, okay, so we need some sort of hard right-wing world or anything.
But there is a kind of natural order here that the feminist paradigm attacked that the Zoomers are really just making actually quite a reasonable request is, could we just live naturally, please?
Now, I think they're not articulating this very well.
But I think in their defense, people probably wouldn't have listened if it wasn't for some reactionary and very transgressive figurehead grabbing the attention.
If they were asking very politely, and they may well have been asking very politely for a long time, nobody listened.
Well, I'm going to correct one thing that you said.
Go ahead.
You said we.
Fair.
Fair.
Right.
And the fact is I believe that you can kind of divide, you've got the transgressive for its own sake stuff.
Let's put that aside.
And then you've got the critique of the way Western civilization is being run, which I think is incisive.
But it comes in two parts.
There's the, what have you done to us, in which there are many devastating points to be made that are now being made because somebody has decided to just pay the price of saying them and let the chips fall where they may.
And then there's the question of what to be done about it, where I don't find them incisive.
And in fact, in your piece, you call this out specifically.
But with respect to the question of we, I feel no responsibility whatsoever for what has happened to these people because I fought it, as did you.
And my feeling is this is the point where the people who fucked this up need to step aside, right?
There now needs to be a conversation between those of us who did stand up for the rights of straight white men and have been demonized for it and for many other imagined crimes, right?
That's the conversation that needs to happen.
Those of us who understood this was a mistake and opposed it need to now have a conversation with those who are tearing up the system because they have no investment in it.
That isn't their fault.
They were betrayed.
It's not just that they feel it.
They were betrayed by this system and they've had enough of it, understandably.
And, you know, I also hear in what you're saying, you know, your issue is fairness.
Yeah, mine too.
In fact, I think you are not talking about the West unless you are talking about a level playing field.
And a level playing field does not mean one in which we count the number of people of various skin colors in various professions and go around equalizing things.
When you make an appeal to living naturally, that's the point.
You have to formally have the right to get somewhere based on merit.
And then whether you choose you want to go in that direction or not is up to you.
And your final point, I think, is excellent and it's devastating.
Civilization liberates individuals.
Western civilization does so.
It is the strongest argument in favor of it.
But it cannot liberate individuals in a way that destroys the system that protects them to be free.
And to the extent that we have run a radical experiment by taking all of the logic out of the male-female dynamic, what we've done is we've created a self-defeating civilization.
And that is not an argument against the, I'm speaking purely for myself here.
That is not an argument against women being welcomed at all layers of civilization.
However, I want to make a point that I first arrived at in the realm of science.
Science used to be a boys' club.
That is galling.
If you're a woman and you have an interest in doing science, it's galling not to be allowed in.
However, at the point that women arrive in the land of science, they do not, we are not benefited if the rules of how science is done are rewritten in a feminine mode.
Because what makes science work is holding each other's feet to the fire.
So the point is, if you want to do science, you've got to do it by the rules that work, which happen to be more boy-like than girl-like, right?
Reflexive support has no place in a science lab.
You can want your fellows to succeed.
And the way that you make them more powerful is to call them out when they're making logical errors so that they get stronger.
That male mode has to be democratized.
And everybody in science has to play by those rules in order for science to work at all.
And so I would say the larger dynamic is the same one.
We can't feminize civilization because a feminized civilization is not going to survive.
Civilization has to function.
Everybody should be free to aspire to whatever roles they want, but the rules that govern that role have to be ones that are sensible from the point of view of the civilization continuing, defending itself, achieving the objectives that we've agreed on.
And I see exactly the opposite unfolding.
So I don't know how many of us there are that have stood up for those principles or similar ones, but I think we need to come forward now and say, actually, their gripe is correct.
And those of us who wouldn't have allowed this to happen are probably the ones who should be doing the talking.
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I agree with you.
I think the way that I look at these things these days is through the lens of justice.
I'm not trying to critique what you've just said, but I can't help but hear a couple of liberal words, ideological words in there.
And it's only because of my sort of having spent so much time in the weeds with liberalism that I think there are other ways of framing things that allow us to avoid some of the traps that liberalism falls into.
So like I said, meritocracy is one of those words where I instinctively agree with the word, right?
I instinctively agree with the concept.
But then you get the left playing strange games with the term.
Same with freedom, frankly, inequality.
Like in isolation, obviously everyone wants to be free and equal to the people around them.
Obviously, this is not a conversation you need to have, but these terms can be treated as if they have a kind of divine sanction.
And therefore, they become the thing that comes before all of the actual real world considerations when you look and go, okay, well, is this actually good?
And it's like, well, no, but we are free, but we are equal, but we are meritorious.
We are this, we are that.
It's like, okay, but if it isn't good, how useful is it actually to have these things?
And maybe we're doing more harm than we ought to be doing.
And so I try to look at it through the lens of justice, just as Aristotle describes it, just people getting what they are due, people getting what they actually deserve.
And so, yeah, if you have a woman who works very hard in science, she gets her degree, she gets her master's, gets a PhD, she works in a lab, she just makes some discoveries.
There's no justification to take that away from her.
There's no justification whatsoever.
She's done the work.
She deserves the credit.
And I don't think anyone can disagree with this.
But like you were saying, that's not really what's been happening, is it?
It's actually that the structures themselves are there is a concerted and deliberate attempt to remold the world to incentivize women to go into these fields.
And like you said, the sort of feminization of almost all of these institutions now that have a purpose and they work in the way that they work because there is an internal goal to the institution.
And actually, the ideological framework that's being imposed on the institution actually presupposes the internal goal, but sets the actual agenda in a different direction.
Now, this institution that was for science is actually really for producing equality.
It's actually really for producing female professors or whatever it is.
It's not really about what it's actually meant to be about.
And I think that's the kind of danger with the path that we've ended up at.
And the problem is the ideological language of liberalism was used to facilitate that because these individual sort of keywords are picked out and used as the bludgeon against well-meaning people who were not thinking in these terms.
They were the people who were like, obviously we want a free and equal meritocracy.
Why would I ever say no to that?
But actually, there's a lot in there that's more destructive than you would think.
And we're living in the ruins of that now.
And there are also, there are other ways to look at this.
We have a habit of essentially reducing a person's life to the now.
And we reduce this life to the now and say, okay, what's happening in this moment?
Which is useful when you're making a day-to-day decision.
But for most people, actually, it's more useful for them to have a long-term plan.
And our entire civilization is geared against this.
Do not plan for the future.
Do not save money.
Do not worry about the student debt you may have incurred.
Do not worry about any of these things.
Worry about where you are now.
And that's actually very short-sighted.
And one of the things that I think we are seeing as a recurring pattern now is millennial women who are growing older and they're being told by their bodies, by the way, you should have a baby.
And lots of them are feeling, oh, yeah, no, you're right.
I should have a baby.
Why can't I find a man?
The time is running out.
I can't find a man.
I'm not prepared to marry down.
I'm not prepared to settle.
I'm not prepared to give up my job, my career, which is a very impressive job and career because I was the beneficiary of the way that the world was restructured.
What do I do?
And I think in the next 10 to 15 years, we're going to see a kind of trend of very unhappy millennial women who are very bitter about the fact that they didn't get everything they thought they were going to get.
And I think, I mean, you'll probably see TikToks of them saying, why am I doing this?
Why am I a scientist?
Why am I a CO?
Why am I here?
And this loss of purpose and meaning will be kind of devastating.
I think it's genuinely going to be quite devastating to a lot of people.
And so I think because we have essentially disconnected people from what I guess could be called the narrative of a human life into these categories of I am a scientist, I am a mother, I am a race car driver, whatever.
Like you're taking these things out of the natural flow and ebb of what a human life is.
Begins and it grows and then eventually it comes to a conclusion.
It's a story.
Everything really about a human life is a story.
And I think a lot of people are going to get the endings that they don't want.
Oh, I think you're exactly right about this.
And this is a huge and very difficult topic to navigate.
But I would say overwhelmingly, and this didn't start with the millennials, but overwhelmingly, the story of civilization and this kind of broken sort of liberalism that has taken over has lured multiple generations now into massive self-harm.
Right?
Things have been championed that when you actually do them result in the life that you might have led being degraded.
And this is creating a lot of bitterness.
Now, this is a difficult one for me.
I don't like saying this at all, but I nonetheless, it's ever clearer to me.
I see signs of life amongst young men.
I see them beginning to recognize what they lost and trying to find their way back.
I'm not sure back is where they want to go, but trying to find their way back because it was better.
And I do not see this amongst young women.
I see a lot of doubling down on these notions that turn out to have been devastating.
And there's a sense that those notions are entitled to be right, that these ideas are so beautiful that surely if we just put our foot on the accelerator, sooner or later we will get to that utopian place.
And I'm frustrated that women are not recognizing the predicament that has been created.
I'm not looking for fault finding.
What I want is for people to stand up for themselves.
And to the extent that they've been sold a bill of goods that has led them into self-harm, I would like them to reject it, return to sender and figure out what I suspect are not going to be old rules.
They're going to have some traditional aspects to them.
They're going to have some novel aspects to them.
But to essentially renegotiate the agreement between the sexes in light of the fact that, you know, the notions that followed from the sexual revolution turned out to be a disaster.
I think you're exactly right.
And I like the framing you've got here because there's time only works in one direction.
It only flows forward.
And the world is so markedly different now.
I think you're absolutely right.
I think it will be essentially a renegotiation that happens between millions of young men and young women as they try and work out what actually they want from one another.
And I really take your point as well, that the vitality of our civilization is currently with those young right-wing Zoomers who are angry.
Like they are on a crusade and they've finally found purpose in the crusade.
Everyone else, exactly as you say, I don't see any vitality in them.
I see essentially a civilization that has basically given up and has decided, no, okay, we're just going to carry on drifting on as we do until we run out of petrol and then we just are just lost at sea or something.
And it's these young men who are actually like, okay, no, we would like things to be different in a way that we think would be more wholesome.
Now, like you say, for the Nick Fuentes crowd, like I said, I don't dislike them, but then they're not the world's greatest diplomats for this way of looking at the world.
But I think we just have to accept that this is the hand that's been dealt.
They've not been well served.
They're not self-authoring.
They didn't come out of nothing.
They didn't will themselves into existence or anything.
They are what we've made of them.
And they are wielding the only weapons that they have, but they're wielding them effectively.
I mean, they've commanded the discourse, which is why Nick Fuentes ended up on Piers Morgan's show, which is why everyone has been talking about it ever since.
There's a reason that this is happening.
And the young men stand to gain something.
Like they actually realize there's something we can gain out of this.
And I think really, if they knew how to properly communicate it, I think what they're asking for is they want a position of honor and dignity in society.
I really think that's what they're asking for.
I think they do want to be.
I think they look back on like the sort of 50s housewife and husband with envy and say, no, I would like to be a provider for my wife and family.
I think that's what honestly most of them are just asking for, which is not unreasonable, actually.
They're not asking for palaces.
They're not asking for a kingdom.
They're asking for a house and a home and a wife and children and a job that they can pay, they can work at and pay the bills with.
And this is all really reasonable.
And so it's a crusade with a goal that actually is in sight.
It's possible to attain.
And within living memory, people have had it.
So you can't tell them that This is ridiculous or, you know, it's not lunacy for them to ask for the dignity of essentially the fathers and the men and the fathers in society to be returned.
And how can you fault it?
Oh, I don't.
I don't.
I think what I hear in your portrayal is there is a desire to come in from the cold, right?
These people literally were born into a world demonizing them for things they had nothing to do with.
And that feels terrible.
It's also a strategic mistake on behalf of those who usurped this power in the sense that they've given the Zoomers ever less to lose, right?
What they've got is a crappy deal.
And so civilization, the older generations, are more or less naively depending on them to remain well-behaved, you know, getting scraps from the table.
And here's a novel thought, though.
I'm sure they're not thinking of it this way.
I don't think this is conscious, but I wonder if the stuff that rightly spooks people like you and me, the rhetoric about, you know, lionizing genocidal dictators, for example, is really part and parcel of a negotiation.
If they are actually wielding a credible threat to return the world to absolute madness, if they are not given a reasonable deal.
And, you know, I don't like the style of it one bit because those tropes are so dangerous and the things that they threaten to call forth are so deeply ingrained in humans.
However, I don't disagree that they have a right to threaten to walk out on a civilization that has betrayed them in this way.
I think that's if I were in their shoes, I would feel that too.
Yeah, I think you're exactly right on that.
And what's interesting is the negotiation that they're having with us over this, right?
Because all their lives, they've been told as straight white men that they are not allowed to be proud of being straight white men, nor are they allowed to have a kind of collective sense of being straight white men.
There's nothing noble about being a straight white man, especially a young one.
Now, in all other periods of history, this is just the opposite of how things are, actually.
Go back as far back in history as you like, and the young straight white men are the heroes of every story, every single story.
And they are the ones who take the burden and the dangers on their own shoulders.
They go through hell.
Many of them die.
But at the end, they get the reward of whatever they're being promised.
And they earn it.
And we are saying to them, there is no way for you to fulfill this tios.
There's nothing there for you.
What you will be is a low testosterone beta male.
And maybe one day a woman will take pity on you and marry you.
Maybe probably won't have children with you.
And you'll be generally poorly thought of by everyone around you.
And, okay, that's not a very appealing offer.
And then if in the next breath, they say, right, but don't you like Adolf Hitler?
Because Adolf Hitler wanted exactly what you wanted.
And he looked and he was powerful.
He was rhetorically impressive.
He, I mean, say whatever you like, but the Nazis knew what they were doing when they hired Hugo Boss to do their uniforms.
They understood the importance of aesthetics.
They understood the importance of presence.
They understood the importance of looking the part.
And so honestly, like you've essentially created a kind of perfect villain for these Zuma men saying, no, no, listen, right?
If you don't allow us in the traditional English-speaking mold to be heroic, because we've got plenty of English-speaking heroes who embody masculine glory, we've got just a huge long history of it.
They'll say, fine, we'll take the villain who embodies masculine glory and we will be unapologetic about that.
And that I think when Nick Fuentes says Hitler was cool, well, yeah, that's how he became the leader of Germany.
He was cool.
He was bold.
He was a war hero.
He dressed snappily.
All of the soldiers marching by, you know, goose-stepping.
I'm not for it, but I can see why it was impressive to people, right?
And it's the same with any kind of mass organization like that, where you've got a camaraderie and you've got a confidence that this that is being denied in our own civilization.
And then you say, look, you see these really macho, really confident, really stylish-looking guys.
They're the bad guys.
You're not allowed to like them because we don't like them.
It's like, well, they hate you for holding them down.
Of course, you've just put a target on, you know, if you want to fight us, well, you guys, you like that guy over there.
And that means that we react in all kinds of ways.
Because, I mean, at the moment, like, Chuck Schumer was denouncing him in the Senate or something, wasn't he?
And you've got Piers Morgan and everyone, everyone's saying, it's like, Nick Fuentes is a 27-year-old.
Can he even grow a beard?
Like, does he even need to shave his face?
But he has a microphone and a podcast and a bunch of other young men who aren't really much of a physical threat to anything.
Like, I don't genuinely think they're going to overthrow society or like lead a coup on the government or anything.
Like, I've never seen one that looks impressive to me as a man, you know, as a father, as an adult.
And yet they're being treated on the ideological level as a mortal peril to the current regime.
And it's like, okay, well, I mean, if, you know, if that were my son, I'd be like, just go to your room.
I'd just tell him off.
I should go to your room.
I'm sick of this now.
But they feel they can't do that.
And so they've put themselves essentially in a bind where they've given him the way of attacking them and they've legitimized the power in doing so.
They've said, no, we will essentially imbue you with power by reacting to this thing.
So of course they're just, and for them, this is hilarious as well.
You can see how much fun they're having with it.
And to be honest with you, it's kind of funny.
You know, I hate to say it.
And like I agree with you completely about like the reality of what happened in World War II.
Horrific.
Absolutely on every side, frankly.
You know, wherever you go.
I mean, I remember in school despising history.
And it was only as an adult that I genuinely nurtured a love of history because in school, it was World War I and World War II.
That was excessively focused on.
And it was dreary.
It was horrific.
You know, it was just dead people, terrible poems, mass graves, and industrial killing.
And it was like, oh, my God, you know, that is, that is awful.
But if that was even further out of time for, you know, for me, I was, for me, at least I was like, God, I'm glad that's all over.
You know, that ended a long time before I was in school.
And now we're like 30 years on with Nick Fuentes from that.
Well, the question is kind of like, when does the Nazi regime pass into history?
It's just a historic event.
And I guess we're finding out now it's about 85 years or so, right?
That seems to be, you know, the living memory essentially is kind of worn off at this point.
And so, to the Zoomers now, this is just something it might have happened a thousand years ago, as far as they're concerned.
And I like your, as much as I fear that it will be clipped in order to make you look like a crazy person.
I like your point about the things that are obviously true that you can't say about Hitler that the Zoomers are now realizing, oh, you can say them.
Obviously, he inspired a nation.
That wasn't by accident.
There was an awful lot there that allowed that to happen.
And if you think about it, back in 2017 or 2018, I put out a piece in which I said, basically, you people are making a terrible mistake demonizing straight white men because what you're going to do is back them against the wall together and you're going to create exactly the thing that you're accusing them of that they're not guilty of.
And if I think back to the history since 2015, I think about the images of, you know, statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson being torn down.
The point is, okay, you all managed civilization in such a way that we demonized the flawed but heroic characters that gave us our world.
And now people are finding other characters who, in some sense, you didn't bother to degrade because they were off limits.
What did you expect to happen?
That's such a great point.
They're tearing down the statues of people like George Washington.
I mean, from an American perspective, how much more iconic a masculine hero could you get than George Washington?
I've actually just finished reading a book about George Washington.
And in his own day, just considered an incredibly noble man.
I mean, it's likely that the presidency only exists because of the character of George Washington.
And everyone knew that he would move in to fulfill it.
And obviously, as the blueprint of the ideal president.
And so if you deny young men that man as a hero, well, you can't tear down statues of a man you never put statues up to.
You can't do that.
There's nothing to despoil with Adolf Hitler.
He is the secular Satan.
And if they have decided that your regime, your entire order, is itself evil, well, then it's easy to invert into thinking, well, maybe that guy was good, actually.
And that's how we've arrived here.
Especially in light of the jaw-dropping level of lying that has overtaken our official sanctioned narrative of civilization.
So, you know, you create a completely fictional universe and you try to feed it to people.
And when they don't take it, you threaten them and coerce them.
And what you're doing is inviting them to go find villains in history because the alternative is, you know, it's tromploy utopian nonsense.
So I don't know, you know, I can almost as a quick aside there as well.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
If they're going to tell lies about the genuinely sort of wholesome heroes that we actually have in the West, well, everything they've heard about anything has been a lie.
Well, what have they been told about Adolf Hitler?
What have they been told about the Nazis?
Why would they not assume you're lying about that too?
If we can't even have our heroes and that, you know, they definitely don't need to have those villains.
Well, you've reduced them all to the same plane now.
They're all the same.
They're all evil, oppressive, straight white men.
You're not drawing a moral distinction between Nelson and the Nazis.
You're not drawing distinctions like that anymore.
And so it becomes very easy to say, well, then they're all basically the same.
I'm going to choose the one that you're most offended by.
I'm going to choose the one with the coolest drip.
I'm going to choose the one who most unapologetically spoke in terms that actually everyone around me is speaking in just for their own races, for their own ethnicities, for their own groups.
I'm going to choose the one who speaks like that for us.
And so you end up with the Hitler fan club on Twitter making Piers Morgan look like an idiot.
It's like, okay, God, you know, and like you say, everyone in the sort of dissident spaces online was saying, look, man, this is going to come about whether you like it or not, because you're giving it no outlet, giving it nowhere to go.
And what more, what do you expect these people to do?
Well, it actually beautifully makes your point from earlier where you were talking about your hesitancy about meritocracy.
Because on the one hand, it's obviously, you know, meritocracy in any meaningful sense is a desirable, it's the best way to run civilization because it puts the best people doing all the jobs and civilization benefits from it.
But your point is, hey, not so fast because you'd never believe what people will, you know, smuggle in under that banner.
And is it not true that we can look at what these maniacs have done to history as a test of what they think merit looks like, right?
If you're tearing down statues of George Washington, then you're telling us something about your idea of merit.
I'm not saying George Washington wasn't flawed, but I agree with your analysis 100%.
This was a noble, insightful, admirable, attractive guy who frankly, you know, I mean, obviously, this was a slaveholder.
On the other hand, this was somebody who understood slavery was wrong.
This is somebody who I was shocked to discover, I didn't know that there were any Jews in the colonies.
This is somebody who defended them, right?
This is a person with a human with excellent character, and we're tearing down statues, claiming that he was, you know, somehow undignified, beneath contempt, whatever it is that we're pretending.
You're telling us that when you say merit, you mean something totally different.
And I think the Zoomers are, or at least the ones who are paying attention to Nick Fuentes, they aren't in a position to take over civilization by force.
But because of the way Western civilization works, they are in a position to upend it.
We're talking about a generation that can vote the political order out of existence and replace it with something else.
And you can hear the tropes they're playing with.
That's a pretty frightening thing to imagine.
So at some level, I think this is nature's wake-up call, right?
If you don't like the rhetoric of Nick Fuentes, then you better figure out why it is that it's resonating because that's coming for you whether you like it or not.
And also, if you think the rhetoric of Nick Fuentes is bad, how bad do you think the guy who comes after Nick Fuentes is going to be?
Because Nick Fuentes, for all his flaws, he does moderate himself when he's actually cornered on these things.
It's very easy to say, well, and I actually believe quite a lot when he says, well, when I'm on my live stream and I'm riffing to my audience and I'm doing this for a couple of hours and it's just me talking, I'll say things that are bombastic and over-exaggerated that I don't really mean because it's funny and it's transgressive and it entertains the audience.
I am a political entertainer.
I actually do think there's quite lots of that because whenever he has a proper sit-down serious conversation with people, he usually does actually moderate himself a lot more.
And I think that if you were to, in the abstract, ask him, just write down the things you truly believe, I suspect that's a lot closer to what he actually would truly write down there.
It's just in the relational perspective of I'm being attacked by Piers Morgan, or I have a bunch of radical feminists who are going at me.
I'm going to channel the spirit of Hitler just to fight back against the kind of psychic war I'm in.
I don't think that's, I don't think he's an unmitigated evil, right?
I think that he's radical, but I think that he's not just an evil Nazi, right?
But I think the guys who come after who realize that they'll see Nick Fuentes now, they're probably going to be 14, 15 years old now, watching Nick Fuentes, having a reasonable conversation with Tucker Carlson, trying to have what he thinks is a reasonable conversation with Piers Morgan and seeing all the gotchas and seeing them, you know, snipping at him and seeing the clips and seeing the media attacks.
Like, right, okay, look, even when he's trying to moderate and he's saying, yeah, no, I agree with, you know, I went too far there, or, you know, maybe we could just ask for a bit of consideration here or there.
And they didn't get it.
They got demonized as the worst things in the world.
And the collective zeitgeist of the mainstream sort of system was just stamp these down as far as we can.
We will stamp these down as much as we can.
So don't expect any mercy.
Don't expect any quarter.
When they've finally taken Nick Fuentes off the internet and the next guy comes up and he's even more radical.
And he's like, no, no, guys, this isn't even a joke anymore, right?
This isn't memeing.
We're on now, right?
This is on now.
We're going to, we're going to, I don't know what they're going to do.
You know, God only knows.
And it gets to the point where you were saying, it's like, look, there is genuinely dark forces that could be unleashed from all of this.
And so to save ourselves from unleashing it, what would be very sensible is if men of our age were actually to make the more civilized demand on behalf of these young men and say, actually, they deserve a place of honor in our civilization.
Yeah.
That's what they're asking for.
And that's what avoids all of this.
All of this goes away if we just recognize that young men do deserve a place of honor in our civilization.
And I don't know, I'm not saying I have a prescription for that.
I'm not saying that other people who aren't straight white men can't have anything or anything like that.
I'm not saying any of those things.
I'm just saying there should be something that they can call their own if there are things that everyone else gets to call their own.
Yes.
And without that recognition, without that recognition, resentment will continue to build.
The level playing field requires it, right?
If you actually believe in a level playing field, then you have to understand if you're going to enable everybody else's racism, then you got to put up with it.
And these people do.
I don't care that you don't like their color, right?
If racism is off the table, it's off the table for everybody.
If it's on the table, then so be it.
But you can't tie their hands behind their backs.
They didn't do this.
This is not their responsibility.
Now, the question is, people like you and me have a metaphorical gun to our heads.
If we Do what you just said, which frankly, I think is the only rational thing.
If you are interested in preserving Western civilization and you don't want this to be, well, let's see what the guy after Nick Fuentes sounds like, then the right thing to do is to recognize the legitimacy of the grievance that these people have,
to recognize that it can be harnessed for good or evil, and that the right thing to do is to recognize the legitimacy of their claim and to figure out how to produce a world that does welcome them.
If you don't do that, then they're in charge of what happens next.
And when we say something along those lines, you and I will become demons in the eyes of the mainstream.
And that is, that is possible.
But like we said at the beginning, I honestly feel like I have an obligation to tell what I think is the truth.
I've got two sons as well.
I've got two daughters too.
And for all of their good, it strikes me that living in a world that is artificially unbalanced is not good, especially one that seems to be sitting on a time bomb.
Not only am I worried for the actual, you know, the futures of my actual children, but I, you know, there's, there's a part of me that thinks, well, I'm, I'm quite successful.
Maybe I can insulate them from the excesses of the world or something like that.
You know, my kids will be fine.
Okay, maybe if my kids are fine, that's fine.
But what about everyone else's children?
Most people aren't in the same position as I am.
And we're still, we're not solving any of the problems.
And so I honestly feel compelled to say, well, you know, as unpopular as it might make me, I think if we have to look at the world that we're in as a kind of joined up whole, right?
We've got this, we've got this habit of trying to atomize everything and try and compartmentalize things and break them down and say, right, okay, well, we've sorted this part out.
We can just ignore this part because that part is racist or whatever.
And it's like, okay, you can say that, but like the whole thing is a real connected whole.
Everything is connected to everything else in every conceivable manner.
And there's no escaping it.
We all live in it together.
And actually, it would be better if we actually give each other regard.
And you saw this from social justice activism.
We want to feel seen.
We want representation.
It's like, yeah, because regard, recognition is really the kind of core that drives all political action, right?
It's like someone saying, well, I deserve something because of whatever reason, because I am that I am.
And it's like, okay, well, that's, that's fine.
And I'm happy to actually concede on some of those points, right, that are being made from the left or that have been made from whatever group.
Yeah, I agree that you should be entitled to something that is yours.
But the question is, how much is yours?
And the question is at whose expense?
And how much do they have to give to you at their expense?
And what do you give in return?
Because actually, every relationship is reciprocal.
So what are you going to do?
What are you going to give?
And suddenly, I think when you point out that the relationship has to be reciprocal, a lot of demands just stop, actually.
A lot of people stop making demands.
They realize, oh, I don't make a sacrifice, actually.
The way that things were naturally, I was quite happy with actually.
I don't want to make a specific sacrifice.
I thought I was getting something for free.
And when you take the freebie off the table, you realize that people are not quite as hardline as they seemed.
Does that make sense?
Oh, 100%.
A lot of this has to do with the racket that has taken over civilization.
And basically, lots of people are being drained of well-being that is flowing to somebody else, and they are kept in line with propaganda and threats.
And that process, you know, if you're, if you don't have self-respect, maybe you just put up with it because you can't see an alternative, but it's galling and it eventually, you know, you can stave off the disaster by ratcheting up the threats, but it.
it's a worse disaster that's coming when you do that.
And, you know, to your point about insulating your own kids, A, I just don't see how you can.
I'm, you know, I'm looking at the world that my kids are maturing into.
And frankly, Heather and I are both concerned about how you find a mate who is up to the challenge in this day and age.
That's a big stumbling block that is the result of lots of stupid dynamics that have been sold as if they were sophisticated.
But even if you could, as you point out, we have an obligation not only to other people's children, and I feel that obligation profoundly, but to civilization itself.
We have something that functions.
It actually has beaten every alternative with respect to actually producing human dignity and the liberation of people to discover what's worthy of them.
It has been far from perfect, obviously.
But the fact that we have a prototype of something, the West, and that that thing is simply better than the chaos that exists under any other regime means we have an obligation to preserve that, not only for other people's kids who, you know, we can conceptualize, but just so that there is a future.
And, you know, it's very easy to fall back into the patterns that made history into like a never-ending series of abattoirs.
And if we've got something that's an alternative to that, we are obligated to protect it.
And it is, you know, I think it's on its last legs at this point.
We've done so much.
We've borrowed, you know, to use your phrase from your piece, you know, we've, we've mortgaged their future and we had no right to do it.
That was a, that was a nasty trick we pulled on them.
Now I'm using the term we, even though I wouldn't have done it.
But we collectively, but I, I mean, I completely agree with you.
Like one of the things that compels me to do the job that I do, because I mean, I could make videos about anything I wanted.
I can make videos about movie analysis or philosophical breakdowns or something like that.
But I feel compelled to talk about these hard political issues because frankly, I just don't see someone else doing the job that I want to see done.
Because I don't want my children coming of age in 10 years' time or whatever.
And then saying, well, why did you just let the world go like this, Dad?
And at least I'll be able to point at my body of work and say, well, look, son, I did my best.
I'm sorry that the world is as it is.
It didn't used to be when I was a boy.
And I did my best to spread awareness and make people think actually it could be a different way.
So at least they can be angry, but at least they won't be angry that I did nothing and just coasted on the good fortune that we had.
But I'd like to talk about the way that you're characterizing Western civilization there, because it's correct, but I think it's incomplete.
So I think you're absolutely right.
Because what I think you're describing is a kind of rational, instrumental level as in what Western civilization is good for.
And that's obviously, obviously correct, which is why everyone's trying to move here, right?
It's obviously we have the correct political settlement in the way that we deal with our political life.
And it's been hard fought for for the last thousand years, actually.
It's been a really, really tough slog from the Anglo-Saxons against the Normans to the people against the king and parliament and against the king, to the American revolutionaries against the king, to what we have now.
And it's been a long, difficult road, but I think you can characterize it as upwards.
And I think the fact that, you know, everyone materially is doing better than in previous eras.
Even though things are getting worse now, we're still relatively comfortable, which is why, because I mean, people don't understand just how much rioting and how many revolts happened in history.
Revolts happened all the time over what seemed to be trivial things to us.
I mean, look at, what is it, 2% stamp tax or something that caused the American Revolution, right?
To us, I mean, I get taxed an unbelievable amount, you know, and I'm still not revolting.
So we have a genuine luxury and privilege in the position we're in.
And so you're obviously correct about the technique of Western civilization.
But there is more than that that I think is what the Zoomers feel that they've had kind of like burned away.
And I think that this is the thing that is the soulful aspect of these things that I think will be captured in 100 years' time when future philosophers read the books from 100 years before us and realize that these people lived in a world that was much more sentimental and far less rules oriented and far less rational, but more loving for it.
Because I think I did a video about this a while ago.
I think really what people are looking for is just a place that they can feel like they belong.
I think this is what nostalgia is about.
I think the reason that everyone feels this longing for a home that no longer exists.
I mean, you can't go back to when you were a child, but you knew where you were, you knew where you belonged, and you knew that tomorrow would be like today, and everything would be predictable and reliable.
And you had people around you who you knew loved you.
And that, I think, is really what everyone actually wants.
I think that's what every parent is trying to create for their children.
I think that's what all of the stuff that, you know, we as parents, we get up every day and you do a lot of jobs you don't want to do.
You change bums.
You make breakfast at like six in the morning.
You're tired.
You know, you get you go to work.
What you're doing, you do that for your children because you know that they're going to have that longing for home.
You know that they're going to love the world that they live in.
They'll genuinely have a deep and abiding love for their own civilization.
And it won't be about rules.
It won't be about rationality.
It will be in the heart.
And what I worry about is that this excessive rationalization of our world actually severs that connection.
And this is one of the things that really bothers me about the transgender children thing.
Now, of course, every aspect of it is really bad.
But it's to stigma.
What they do is they stigmatize the wholesome aspect of being a child by introducing this rational element.
It's like, oh, do you think that you're a girl?
Do you think that you're a boy?
It's like, well, hang on a second.
You don't understand what you're doing there, right?
You're destroying the possibility of future nostalgia.
That's what you're doing there.
You're destroying the possibility of an abiding love of their own innocence in childhood.
And this is what's so devastatingly bad about the destruction of innocence is that you sever these people from the kind of psychic connection they had to their own past and make it so they can never love in the way that people who didn't have that severed can love.
And it's and they never talk about it in these terms.
And so they rationalize about, oh, but what about the, you know, it will reduce the suicide rate or something.
And it's like, okay, well, I'm not even sure I believe you on that, but there are other things that you're doing that are terrible.
And I can't give you a chart.
I can't enumerate them.
There's no measuring this, but it's real.
And I think it's honestly what we should be gearing our civilization towards.
Because, I mean, I heard a story the other day.
My wife went to Japan with my oldest daughter.
And they came back.
And basically, there was this one story, not they didn't tell it, but they gave me stories that reminded me of this story of some three-year-old kid who gets on the train or on the bus and goes to school or their preschool or whatever it is on their own.
And you just think, how many things had to happen to make that possible?
You know, how many different people in their lives, they had to feel that deep sense of place and belonging and love so that it's safe for a three-year-old to be able to navigate a city on their own.
And this is one of those things where I think that we don't understand what school shootings are.
School shootings and just random mass shootings generally are an attack on society itself.
They're not, you know, if you had a problem with a particular kid at school, you go and target that kid at school.
But when it's just randomly targeting, what that is, is saying, I feel like I don't belong here.
I feel like the connection I'm supposed to have with this place has been severed and I'll never get it.
And I'm angry about this.
I'm vengeful about this.
You've wounded me and I want to hurt you in return.
And so I, like I said, I don't even know what to do with this series of thoughts I have, but I can't shake them out of my mind.
Well, I think you're onto something really important.
That there is to the extent that what I'm calling the West has a fatal flaw, it is that I believe the West rightly seeks to liberate the individual, but that it doesn't necessarily know philosophically why it's doing that and what the risks of it are.
And the situation you're describing in Japan involves a love for your fellow man that is manifest as a love of the structures that you share that enable you to let your three-year-old get on a bus and think that's a reasonable thing to do.
And I mean, you know, the world that I don't know how old you are.
How old are you?
46.
46.
All right.
I'm 56.
The world I grew up in was a lot closer to that.
You know, I certainly rode my bike to school, disappeared, you know, and tried to be home for dinner, that kind of thing.
It was safer because it was collectively built to be safer.
And we've gotten away from this as we've become obsessed with our own individual rights, advantages, opportunities.
And so anyway, there is no, and, you know, ironically enough, this is what you find as The core political message in Nick Fuentes take on civilization is America First, where he's talking about something like this.
And of course, the terminology, America First, is, you know, it's fraught with historical baggage.
So it's not obviously the right term, but the idea that we ought to be governing for our collective well-being is not wrong at all.
And you can tell in the way we allow our children to be parasitized by corporate interests or cajoled into embracing some ideological revolution over gender.
You know, this is us failing to protect our children from predators.
It's unforgivable and couldn't be a bigger mistake with respect to keeping civilization running.
You know, you can't do that for many generations and expect to have anything but smoldering ashes left at the end, right?
If you don't protect children from those who do not have their interests at heart, then your civilization isn't even defensible.
Like at any time.
I remember, I think I was probably about six or seven years old when I first started riding my bike to school on my own.
And I think about that now.
It's like, there's no way I would do that.
And I think the problem is, I guess, what we call the kind of social contract society, where we have a society that's governed by a series of rules.
And as long as everyone plays by the rules, then the society functions.
But you get the kind of, what was the girl who was stabbed in the neck on the train the other day, Erina?
I know the case, I've forgotten her name.
Well, that's a case of why the social contract society is actually not actually as good as you might want it to be.
Because the rules are only the rules and they work as long as the person is being rational and follows them.
But this guy just out of nowhere stabs her in the neck and kills her.
She couldn't have predicted this.
You wouldn't have thought about this.
How could you have possibly known this was going to happen?
But you can feel that it's kind of always a possibility because you don't understand the people around you.
You don't have any connection with them.
You don't know anything about them.
And you just assume, well, I'm going to follow the rules.
They're not doing anything obvious now.
So I assume they're going to follow the rules.
And you end up with this genuinely just barbaric, barbaric episode that really sticks in my mind because of just how out of place and time everyone is.
Because I live in a village outside of a large town, but even the large town that I lived in the southwest of England, I'd walk through this town and I would, like, before we had mass immigration, this was, I would walk through this town and I would bump into friends, co-workers, family members, and they just, you know, they'll shout me out and say, oh, Carl, how are you doing, man?
What are you doing on Friday?
Should we go out for a beer?
Yeah, I'd love to, mate.
And it gives the civilization a feeling of familiarity, predictability.
You know the people around you.
Even if you don't know those people, someone you know will know that person.
And so the web of connections that binds us all together lays heavily on the land.
And it makes the place feel familiar and secure.
Well, if you bring in millions of people who are from elsewhere, then essentially what you do is you attack that web of that psychic web that lays across the land.
You break it up.
And so now you need the rules.
Oh, okay.
Well, we're going to have to have a series of rules to at least allow this to function on a day-to-day basis, let alone when one of them's like, I'm going to go mad.
I mean, there was some guy from Africa who at the local bus stop in the middle of Swindon tried to kidnap a 17-year-old girl.
And it's just like, that has never happened.
I've lived in Swindon for 27 years, 28 years.
My family is from here.
I've never heard of anything like that happening.
And yet here we are with a stranger who has been planted in our civilization that we don't think in the way that needs to be thought about to protect ourselves from this.
And obviously that girl on the train didn't either.
And so it's like, okay, well, we're doing some serious damage to something that you think is intangible, but is, I think, what actually makes a place worth living in.
Like this, this kind of nostalgic love of the place.
And when all the people hold this, the place becomes the kind of place where a kid can ride their bike to school at six years old.
And everyone knows it'll always be fine.
Everyone around would help if there was a problem.
Everyone around would, and it's just the fact that we're stealing this from our children is a really horrific thing.
And I don't know what we can do to get it back.
Well, at the very least, we can recognize what did it.
And, you know, I would say there are two major contributors.
One, I would call it, and I'm definitely speaking from an American perspective here, but I would say there is a stinginess on the right, at least in the U.S., where there's a story about, you know, the titans of industry.
And the answer is, well, they are the job creators.
And they are.
But that's not all they are, right?
They're also the rent seekers.
And so, you know, it may be that the story is complicated in each case, but the idea that somebody is sucking up so much of the well-being that it leaves people in greater austerity than they should have.
That's one thing.
The other thing that's contributing to it is the mind-numbing insanity of the utopian left.
Right.
And so I don't think you're exactly right that everybody has to play by the rules for this to work.
Because there will never be a large civilization in which everybody plays by the rules.
But the people who don't play by the rules have to quickly get found and they have to get punished.
And if they are not reformable, they have to be left locked up.
And so, you know, somebody can always have a screw loose and pull out a knife and there's no way to stop that.
But that person doesn't tend to have started there.
And to the extent that that person finds themselves on the street because some, you know, insane district attorney decided that they were incapable of committing a crime because they grew up in circumstances that would, of course, produce that effect.
Right.
I don't, it's not that I don't understand that circumstances produce effects, but to have a civilization, people who break the rules, especially violently, have to come out way behind for it.
That will reduce the problem a lot.
And for the ones that are just simply unfixable, that's it.
And, you know, I remember the madness of defund the police, right?
Defund the police is you telling us you would like to uninvent civilization.
Because as soon as you take the police out of the equation so that somebody who is violent against others is going to get away with it, you are deciding on all of our future.
So we didn't get here from nothing.
We got here from some cruelty on one side and some, at best, insane delusion on the other.
And the first thing to do is to recognize both of these things and correct them.
I am all for people living very well when they create wealth for civilization.
I think that's the right thing.
We should reward them.
They should live better than people who don't create any wealth.
However, rent seeking degrades what the wealth creation creates.
And we have to get serious about that problem.
We're not going to fix it perfectly, but we can do vastly better than we're doing.
We cannot allow people to be parasitized by their economic betters because they have no means of resistance.
That's not acceptable.
And we can't allow people to deploy their crazy utopian notions at scale and then not even take the data on how it worked out, because I think we now have a pretty good guess at how it works out.
You know, in your country, you're watching monsters protected by your government when they are acting in a predatory way towards little girls.
Like in what universe does anybody participate in any part of that system and sleep one wink at night, right?
They should be racked with guilt every night.
I don't care what level of the system you're in.
If you're part of that, you're actually participating in predation on young girls.
Like, what the hell?
Yes.
I mean, you're exactly right.
This is just a reckoning is coming on that particular subject.
But I think that you're exactly right to frame this in terms that aren't traditionally liberal, actually.
Because, of course, the traditional liberals say, well, I'm for the free market.
It's like, okay, but why are we for the free market?
What do we hope to get out of the free market?
And I think the answer would normally be property ownership, right?
Because that's actually the good that we're aiming at.
I personally own my own business.
I own my house.
I want everyone else to, if not own their own business, work at a business where the person who does own it is within reach, where they can walk into the next room and say, excuse me, boss, you know, I've got a problem here or something like that, right?
I think that that's a much more healthy way for people to actually live, if not themselves, because not everyone wants to be a business owner, but being a big cog in a small machine is way better than being a small cog in a big machine.
And so property ownership is, I think, the thing that we're actually aiming at for the good of life.
People should own their own property.
And so that's great.
And the question is, well, how do we get there?
Now, historically, free markets are a really good way of making that happen.
And they were very, very productive, very, very successful.
But I think we've arrived now at a point where, like you were saying, there is a potential for excessive rent seeking within the free market and also other ways of deforming the free market.
For example, I hate to keep bringing back to immigration, but this is genuinely the number one issue in Britain at the moment is just the sheer amount of immigration.
And it's not that the immigrants are bad people.
They're not, for the most part, they're absolutely not.
It's just the nature of what is being done is very, very alien and mechanical because it's the big businesses that want mass immigration the most.
Because of course, that's labor for them.
That's cheap labor that depresses the wage that they have to pay those unskilled workers because of the vastly increased supply.
And this has a series of knock-on effects.
Well, of course, it raises the price of housing because these immigrants have to live somewhere.
And so now what you've done by using the free market, you've pushed property ownership out of the bounds of young people today.
This is one of the reasons why the Fuentes crowd are so angry.
If they had their own businesses, their own houses to manage, their own little fiefdoms to manage in the world as normal, like I did, like, you know, my dad did, they would have no energy for political radicalism.
But they don't have those things.
And so, yeah, they spend a lot of time on the internet thinking, why don't I have these things?
And so what the free market, the ideological sort of term the free market has done has concealed the decreasing amount of property ownership in the good that it was designed and set up to accomplish.
It's actually concealed the fact that it's inhibiting it at this point.
I love this point that on the one hand, you're welcoming these people in to make cheap labor and it is the externality is in the housing market.
And of course, people are suffering from it egregiously.
I would also point out, though, I think we dance around this immigration point because it's been booby-trapped.
My feeling is this.
I'm not pro-immigration.
I'm not anti-immigration.
What I want is for people who are not corrupt, who are well informed about the issue, to figure out what the best level of immigration is and to set up a process that works.
I don't want to see any illegals.
I want to see people who come in legally.
I want to see the number.
Maybe it's a high number.
Maybe it's a low number.
I don't know.
But I'd like to see the right number.
I'd like us to at least aspire to it.
And then most important of all, and I see this in both England and the U.S., somewhere along the line, we apparently decided it was impolite to ask people who wished to come to our countries whether they liked us and aspired to be a part of our civilization.
And my feeling is, whatever the number is that we should be allowing in, I don't want any who don't aspire to be American.
I want people who like it, who want to make the place better and want to participate in it because they see it as good.
We should not be letting people in who want to destroy it.
Obviously, I can't imagine that anyone has to say that out loud, but apparently it has to be said out loud because it's not obvious to a lot of people.
So, yeah, and the point is, you know, is what I just said anti-immigrant?
No, it's anti-people who hate us.
And I have a right to be anti-people who hate us.
It's obvious that I shouldn't be defending, should it?
No, it's, you shouldn't have to defend that position.
It's a matter of what you said there is completely reasonable because again, like that's, I really appreciate the way you framed that because very often the term pro-immigrant anti-immigrant again itself turns into this instrumentalization of, okay.
for what reason?
And the answer is always the economy.
It's like, well, okay, I appreciate the economy, but I'm not here to serve it, actually.
And I'm not here to raise it above our civilization.
It's a product of our civilization.
And if our civilization is not thriving, then I'm not prepared to sacrifice the civilization to prop up the economy when instead we obviously need to come some other dispensation about the way that life has to be led.
I don't think our civilization should be about chasing numbers.
It should be about living well.
And I'll get in trouble for citing him, but Tucker Carlson made a great point about Japan.
Japan's economy is not growing, but they have a lovely quality of life.
Live well in their own civilization.
And that's a good point.
You don't have to be chasing endless growth unless you're someone who is interested only in the profit margin.
And even then, okay, well, that's a good enough reason to not have my civilization in hockey to that person, actually.
I don't really want that person calling the shots.
And so, when it comes to who should we allow in, who shouldn't we allow in, who should come and live with us, who shouldn't come and live with us?
Well, we are actually at liberty to be a lot more discerning if we want to be.
There's nothing wrong with that.
And in fact, it's kind of strange that we have this just wild, wildly open-border policy, which most other countries just don't have.
Like, we've got a subscriber to Lotuses.com who is an English teacher in Thailand.
And he regularly sends us updates from Thailand to let us know he's English.
And it's like how difficult it is to get citizenship there.
And whether you'll ever actually get full citizenship or anything like that, you can work there, you can buy property, you can earn your money and pay taxes and stuff.
But they have a very high bar to this, and they're entitled to have it if they want.
Now, I'm not saying we need to have a high bar like that or anything like that, but to be discerning about the motives of the people is perfectly reasonable.
And I think we should probably thank her for her service in this.
But Ilhan Omar is throwing into sharp contrast a person and community whose motives are actually extractive, who are not, in fact, interested in becoming Americans, the well-being of America.
Living in America permanently, it seems actually, with the scale of the remittances back to Somalia or anything to judge by.
Like this, this is clearly an exploitative relationship that's happened because of America's open border policy.
And there's no reason that should be tolerated.
Same with the grooming gang situation in Britain.
Sorry, I think, I mean, the problem with there are lots of problems with the grooming gang situation, but one of the main problems is that it's widespread in the community and it's tolerated in the community.
The wives know about it.
And we've got interviews with wives of convicted grooming gang members who will defend their husbands saying, well, the girls deserved it and things like this.
And the number of men who have been a part of these trafficking networks is in the tens and thousands.
It's just only the ringleaders get arrested.
So large segments of this community are part of it.
It's like, okay, well, we could be discerning about this and actually point out that this is not a community that is actually one that's very friendly to our way of life.
It doesn't mean we have to just draw a hard line and say, right, every immigrant out, obviously, because I mean, we've got lots of immigrants here who are actually lovely and who have, you know, like every town in England has got an old Chinese restaurant, right?
That is run by an old Chinese family and have never caused a problem in the entire time they've been here.
Nobody would want to kick them out.
Nobody would want to say, right, you can't be part of our community or anything like that.
But there are manifest injustices that have been caused by certain communities that we just have to be able to talk about.
We have to be able to hold to account.
And unfortunately, that, I mean, Rupert Lowe got kicked out of the Reform Party for saying, look, everyone who knew about this should be deported.
And if that means whole communities have to go, then whole communities have to go because they all bear the stain of the sin.
And that's true.
You know, it's not necessarily like liberal individualism, but it is a real felt reality that people have to endure.
And it's one of those questions whose time is rapidly approaching in Britain because people are just people are angry, very angry.
They're angry, but at some level, and it's not just anger.
I am shocked.
We are clearly like frogs being boiled slowly because things that are beyond unthinkable are now regular parts of the news cycle.
Right?
Like the idea that the medical establishment and the academic establishment are participating in a process that mutilates children for money due to gender madness.
It really is hard to avoid mangela-like parallels when we are.
It's not unforgivable.
It is exactly the sort of thing that you think is so far beyond the possible that you don't need to worry about it until it arrives and it's happening all the time and people are being thrown off of social media for talking about it and people are the whole idea that civilization is not only doing this,
but it is immunizing it from proper scrutiny is it's hard to even think about how to describe a world that upside down.
And the grooming gang phenomenon is exactly the same thing.
Like, how is it that such a pattern is allowed to happen, let alone that it should be controversial as to whether or not you have a right to even notice the basic pattern, where it's coming from?
Of course, anybody who knew about this and didn't act to stop it shouldn't be in your country.
These are not extreme positions, but they're painted as extreme positions because something unholy has taken over the job of deciding what we're allowed to think.
And in my country, there are so many people who go to jail over merely having a conversation like this.
I think I'll be okay with you because I'm cautious and discreet about the language that I use.
A lot of what I'm saying is kind of has heavy implications and overtones rather than me saying the things explicitly.
But that's because I'm lucky enough to have the education and the skills to be able to do that.
A lot of people who don't have the education and skills are saying basically exactly the same thing as me, just in a much more blunt way.
And the government sends them to jail for saying such things.
And it's a horrific state of injustice.
This is the law in this country.
The law is designed to prevent the negative characterization of communities that engage in mass rape.
And it's like, okay.
And we can't in polite society be honest about this.
And this is one of the reasons that I'm something of a pariah, right?
Because I'm prepared to actually say these things.
And I'm not trying to be offensive.
I'm not trying to attack anyone.
But an honest accounting of what has happened and what the establishment and the powers that we have allowed to happen for decades, I think an accurate summary of it is what I've just described.
And I don't think I'm being hyperbolic in the slightest.
No, I think you're being very careful.
And it's crazy to me that you have to be so careful.
I do think we, Even if it is hard to make the case in concrete terms, the first and second amendments to the American Constitution seem to be the last bulwark against absolute tyranny and madness.
And I do consider it absolute tyranny for people to be thrown in jail for tweeting in response to obvious and egregious patterns of behavior.
You have to be able to talk about these things, frankly.
You have to be able to say wrong things and over-the-top things.
That's part of how we figure out what's actually right and appropriate.
So anyway, I worry for you all that you don't have a constitution that protects you in this regard.
I know that ours is absolutely galling to those who wish to tyrannize us and that they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to whittle it away and potentially to torch it if they can only figure out an excuse that we will buy.
But for the moment, we still have those rights.
What do you think is going to become of England in light of the absurd rules you have to abide by?
So I think there's something of an ethnic consciousness that is arising in the English.
I don't think they're formally aware that that's what they're doing, but the current political environment is splitting into two camps where you have England split into two main blocks.
The bloc that is doing quite well for themselves, vote for the Liberal Democrats, and they're going to be the opposition party, it looks like, after the next parliament.
And the block that is not doing very well will be voting for Nigel Farage.
Now, none of this is couched in these ethnic terms, but when you look at a map of England and you see the future seat projections, it's hard not to see it that way because the inner cities that have been diversified through mass immigration, they all vote for the Green Party or the Labour Party.
It'll be mostly the Green Party next time because the Labour Party is heading for a historic wipeout.
And so outside of these sort of islands of green, it's just yellow or blue, whether it's Liberal Democrat or Reform.
And so the whole thing, it takes on a rather ethnic character.
And it feels like it is the English saying, we've had enough of the politics of the 20th century.
The old parties can die, and we want some real change here.
Or if you're in the yellow, the much smaller area in the southwest that's quite wealthy and not very diversified, you don't want any change because your life is going great.
But unfortunately for you, two-thirds of the country are not happy with how things are going and they've had it up to here, you know.
And so we're going to probably get Nigel Farage if everything carries on.
And it's possible that Nigel Farage does something useful.
I mean, if nothing else, breaking the old consensus in politics is as good a thing as any.
Because, of course, for anyone who isn't aware, the 20th century was dominated by the Conservative Party and the Labour Party.
This was essentially the only parties that would ever form governments.
And breaking that, and it's very much like Republicans and Democrats in the United States, for anyone who doesn't know.
But breaking the stranglehold they had on the political system is as much a useful thing as anything that Nigel Farage will do.
Now, Nigel Farage, he's not very radical.
He's center-right.
He's not an insane lunatic or anything.
They're trying to pay him as Hitler.
He's not Hitler.
He's he's just honestly, he's he's not entirely dissimilar to Piers Morgan in a lot of his political positions, to be honest.
He's really not.
But he is a patriot and he does want Britain to do well and be independent of the European Union, which is why he led the Brexit campaign.
And he probably will try and restore Britain to a point in time in the past where he felt that things were working as they ought to be working.
And that'll be a noble goal.
And if he can roll back a bunch of these laws, because a lot of the laws that are used to tyrannize us aren't that old.
Constitutional innovations into Britain's sort of living constitution that came within my lifetime from about 1997 onwards to about the sort of 2010s.
They're really not that old.
And they could just be repealed like that.
Because the advantage of having a written constitution like you have is you have solid protections against your government.
However, it also means you're kind of locked into place in a series of issues that you can't actually maneuver quickly on.
And it would take what is essentially an insurmountable percentage of the population to vote in a particular direction to get an amendment and to get change.
Well, we are in a different position where we don't have the same constitutional protections, but actually the parliament is literally sovereign and is able to change the laws in any way it sees fit.
Now, most of the time, you don't have a radical party come in and make radical changes because we had a much more genteel political environment.
The other fellow, he might have lost, but he's not your enemy.
He still has a legitimate claim.
And so you don't want to just trample all over him because one day you're probably going to lose as yourself and he'll just trample all over you.
Well, this is what the Labour Party, which is our Democrats, did in the 90s.
They decided the other fellow doesn't have a legitimate claim.
We're going to institute a series of very radical laws.
It's the sort of laws that the Democrats would love to institute in your country, actually, to criminalize negatively characterizing certain groups, speaking in certain ways, installing a series of kind of extra-legal bodies that would also manage the civilization according to the rule of experts.
And the fact that these were put in by parliament means they can just be removed by parliament.
And so what it looks like is that Nigel Farage will actually try what is that the meme of it going around is called the Great Repeal Bill, which is basically just undo everything from about 1997 onwards.
And that would be a good start.
That'd be a very good start.
And if he can get that done, that would be great.
I'm not saying I'm very optimistic.
I'm not saying he's going to do it, but he has made noises in this direction.
We're still, what, three, four years out, three years?
No, four years out, nearly three years out from the next election.
So a lot of things could change in that time.
So this could be a political analysis and, you know, ages very poorly.
But the problem with Britain is that things happen very slowly here.
Just to get the majority of the population away from voting Labour and the Conservatives was a huge milestone, a huge, huge milestone.
And the fact that Farage might do something to turn the ship of state, superb, fantastic.
We just have to endure until that point, basically.
But I'm actually moderately optimistic for the way things are.
I'm a bit nervous for America, actually.
I'm genuinely worried about the Democrats.
They're starting to claw, find their feet again.
They're starting to claw back a few wins.
And, you know, I don't, I really, I don't like the Republican Party, but I like Republicans a lot.
And especially the kind of like those sort of original constitutional types who really, really adhere to the true founding values of America.
That's what I think a real American should actually think and the way they should behave.
And I think that there's a kind of timeless truth in it.
And so I'm sorry you guys are saddled with the Republican Party to embody those values, basically.
And I think that one day you guys need to go through the sort of process we've gone through, which is basically junking the old party and starting afresh, you know, starting something that we feel more adequately represents what we actually want.
But I'm genuinely worried about the future of America because it seems that there are so many people in America who would rather live in the European Union.
And I don't know whether you've noticed, but the European Union is not a healthy organization.
It's a very dysfunctional political organization because it's very artificial and makes a series of promises and then tyrannizes you with these promises in the most hypocritical of ways.
Whenever you see Ursula von der Leyen complaining about democracy in like Hungary or in America or wherever, she was never elected to anything.
That's an unelected position.
She is lecturing you from, you know, it's, it's honestly, it's vile, absolutely vile to see it.
But they have the opinion that they are morally superior to the Americans.
And I just don't agree.
I just don't agree with that at all.
And they live in this kind of, sorry, I know I'm going on, but this is, it's, it really annoys me how they talk about free speech.
I mean, it's just the European Union does not have free speech.
Britain does not have free speech.
There is just no concept of it at all.
And they don't have a tradition of it.
They don't respect it as a value.
And so when JD Vance came over and lectured them on it, no wonder one or two of them cried because they realized we're going to have to accept a different value system that's much closer to the sort of old English value system.
You know, it's something that there's quite alien to these people.
So anyway, I'll stop talking about it.
Like I'm worried that America goes down, frankly.
I'm genuinely worried about it.
You are right to be worried.
And unfortunately, I think the Democratic Party, which is the party that I am a member of, but I think it is so unforgivably corrupt and anti-American that it must be replaced.
The good of the nation requires it.
And the Republican Party is despicable in its own right.
It's just absolutely awful.
Donald Trump managed to bring the Democratic Party to its knees and to decapitate the Republican Party.
So in some sense, it had the promise of the replacement of these two ancient corrupt parties.
But the way he has governed has perplexed many of us.
It's like he is under some kind of control, which is, of course, also fueling the Groypers, their suspicion that actually our democracy is a fiction, which, you know, our democracy is a fiction at one level or another, because at the very least, corruption overrides the will of the governed again and again.
But there are legitimate questions about why it is that governance fails to do the bidding of the people.
For one thing, it is painfully obvious to me that a party that simply committed itself to doing what was in the interest of the public as well as it could figure out what that was would be unstoppable.
It would be unbelievably popular.
And the fact that neither party embraces this approach is because they have a higher calling.
They are servicing their actual constituents, which has nothing to do with the public.
The public is an inconvenience to them.
So, anyway, yeah, you're not wrong to be worried about us.
No, you're totally right in that.
And I've got a great example that proves your point, in fact.
Rupert Lowe was a member of parliament for reform.
Nigel Farage kind of a bit slightly backstabbed him and kicked him out because he said that entire communities need to be deported if they are complicit in the rape gangs.
That was too far for Nigel Farage because, like I said, he's not a radical.
He's quite soft on many issues, actually.
But Rupert Lowe started a party.
He's a constituent for he's the MP for a constituency called Great Yarmouth, which is an old English seaside town.
And, you know, in the Victorian era, because it was on the seaside and, you know, planes didn't exist, it was thriving.
And then come the middle of the 20th century with air travel becoming something, you know, the sort of middle to late 20th century, it declined like all of the English seaside towns have, because you can just go to Spain or something like that in a couple of hours, right?
And so these seaside towns have kind of not limped along.
They're not doing that badly, but there's a decline there.
There's an element of decline in them.
But these people are good, hardworking, patriotic people.
And they look at the way that the country's going and say, no, we're going to vote for the right-wing party because we know who we are.
We know what we want.
And so Rupert Lowe sits as the independent MP for Great Yarmouth.
And he decided, you know what?
I'm going to start the Great Yarmouth First Party because I actually, I mean, and he's genuinely the best MP we've got.
He donates his entire salary to a local charity every month, you know, just to help people out in the constituency.
And he started the Great Yarmouth First Party.
And the first I heard of it was on the day it was released.
It started polling at 44% in that constituency, miles above any of the other parties that run about 13, 14, 19%.
And then there's his new Great Yarmouth First Party.
It's 44%.
Because you're exactly right.
People would love to have political representation that actually was working in their interests.
And Rupert Lowe has a really solid track record of working in their interests.
So they can look at him and say, oh, right, great.
He is actually our man.
And it's very small scale.
It's just one constituency out of 650.
You know, it's not very big.
It's not very powerful.
But it probably will end up returning Great Yarmouth First politicians for the foreseeable future.
And so, okay, that's interesting because why can't the constituency next to it have that party first?
Why can't where I live, Swindon North?
You know, why can't that, well, Purton technically, but like Swindon North, why can't we have Swindon North first?
And so suddenly you're outside of the era of the great parties now.
Now you're into local alliances that are agreed to vote on a certain subject in a certain way.
And so actually you can turn politics.
There is a mechanism here to turn politics to something that actually serves us rather than some great national party with various mega interests that are coming in the top.
And so like I said, I realize that Britain, things are bad at the moment, right?
But I can see the shoots of spring, you know, pushing up through the snow.
And I'm kind of optimistic about the future.
It's just going to be a long struggle to get there.
Well, I hope you're right.
I do too.
I'm an optimist at heart, though, I have to say.
I've always been a natural optimist.
So maybe I'm wrong.
I appreciate your optimism.
No, I mean, the problem is the West is looking awfully rickety.
And with it back on its heels on both sides of the pond, the future looks pretty bleak, frankly.
So anyway, if you see England as potentially turning the corner, that's excellent news to me.
Things are going to get worse before they get better, but the potential to get better is there.
But one thing I guess we could finish on this is this has always, I think, been the issue.
And you made a point earlier that rights claims create distance between people.
And I think that's a great point that's not sufficiently explored.
The rights claim, if you're just making a claim against the central government for rights, then what you're not doing is talking to the people around you.
What you're not doing is engaging with the people, negotiating with them, asking them what do you want and what do I get in return.
You're not going through the actual steps that make society what it is.
And so it's a constant process of atomization.
And what it also does is it means you don't develop good character because in that negotiation with your neighbor, you're not making rights claims.
I mean, you are in a sense, but you're also making a friendship.
You're also forming a bond.
You're also beginning to care.
And this modulates the kind of person you become.
And so going back to the example of George Washington, the thing that jumps out is his tremendously good character.
He was a trustworthy and predictable man.
Everyone knew the kind of man that he was.
And he was a great model.
And honestly, if you guys didn't have George Washington, you probably wouldn't have the Republic that you have, right?
I agree.
He refused to be king.
He was a hero.
They would have made him king and he refused it.
Exactly.
It would be something else entirely.
And this speaks to the importance of character in just daily life.
Like you have great examples like Washington, but everyone also knows someone in their own life who is of good character, who they didn't realize everyone was relying on because they were of good character.
And this is one of those points that Jordan Peterson makes, but I don't think people give sufficient weight to it.
It's like, look, this is what being the rock on which other people rely on is.
It's being that man of good character.
And the more of us who, and character isn't something you just switch on and off, you develop it over a long period of time.
It is genuinely going back to Aristotle is your habit.
It is the habit of a lifetime.
And the quicker and the more consistently you develop these good habits and you be a good man and you be the kind of person you would be proud of meeting, the better things become.
This is like you can't just make rights claims against the government and expect your life to get better, but you can start exercising your own will to become a man of good character.
And you set an example for others around you.
You start making other people realize they can be good men of good character too.
And suddenly the civilization starts knitting itself back together.
Regardless of what the government does, you will always have that bedrock of good men of good men and women of good character to fall back on.
And that's where I think saving the West really is.
That's what it really is, I think, us being good people.
I know that sounds unsexy in a lot of ways, but I really think it's that simple, but also that hard.
Now, I think this is really good.
It also, if you think about what rights claims are in that story, they are cryptically citizens weaponizing the government against each other, right?
In other words, to the extent that the point is, well, I'm entitled to be doing better than I am.
So what I'm going to do is target some other group and I'm going to leverage my political capital to get taxes raised that will pay for the thing that I want.
It's antithetical to the West and especially to the American ethos.
Really, the idea of the American founders was to get government as corralled as possible, right?
At the point that the government is the thing that you need, there's been a failure, right?
More or less, what you want is some basic agreement on what the rights of a person are and therefore, by extension, what the rights of a community are.
And then the process you're talking about, where you and your neighbors reach an agreement by whatever mechanism in which you treat each other some way.
And as long as you're not, you know, over the bounds of the law, the government shouldn't be involved.
But instead, I think our affection for each other has failed.
We are strangers to each other.
And therefore, it is very tempting to use the government to extract something from others in order to better you.
And, you know, that's the road to hell.
We really have to avoid the pull of that inclination.
No, you're totally right.
And it all just comes down to giving the other guy his due.
What does he deserve, actually?
And if he gives you your due, how are you even in an argument now?
You know, you'll come to a, it'll be very easy to find a reasonable settlement between yourselves.
And you didn't have to invoke a lawsuit.
You didn't have to call the police.
You just have to be considerate of one another.
And I realize this, this doesn't sound very exciting.
Like this sounds like, you know, the sort of thing your grandmother would have told you.
But that's because it's true.
Like it's genuinely how the thing works.
And it's the only way to make a good civilization.
I really believe it.
All right.
That is a beautiful note to end on.
I resonate with it wholeheartedly.
Carl Benjamin, it has been a real pleasure talking to you.
And I will make sure that a link to your piece on Nick Fuentes is in the description to this video.
And anyway, I hope this is the first of many conversations.
So do I. I've been waiting many years for this conversation, actually, because I appreciate all of the sort of intellectual dark web types.
I've always respected all of them.
But I've always noticed that you're the one who's prepared to ask the hard questions, right?
And not look for the easy answers.
And I'm not trying to slight anyone when I say that because it's natural that you feel comfortable in a particular set of answers.
But it was always you who I paid most attention to because you were the one who was most prepared to do the difficult intellectual work.
And I've always really respected that.
So thank you so much for having me.
Thank you.
That was a very high compliment and I will cherish it.