Ep. 789 skewers U.S. politics by reducing Warren to a "cigar store Indian" tax crusader, mocking Biden’s "exploding face" poll boost, and branding Beto O’Rourke’s Hitler comparison as delusional. It slams Schiff’s secret impeachment leaks as "deep state theater," equating GOP disruptions to performative Democratic protests while accusing media of glorifying partisan witnesses like Taylor. Psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple debunks utopian excuses—from prisoners blaming trauma to Brexit’s 37% majority—warning referendums mirror authoritarian plebiscites, and dismisses EU integration as a Yugoslavia-style powder keg, speculating France could elect a Muslim president. The episode pivots to Marvel vs. Scorsese, defending blockbusters as adaptive art before pitching Daily Wire merch and podcasts, framing all debates as battles between "heroic shadow governments" and self-rule’s chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
It's time to check in on the Democratic presidential field because laughter is the best medicine.
The field seems to have narrowed itself down to a cigar store Indian, a guy whose eye keeps exploding while his teeth fall out, the stuffed remains of a communist who unfortunately passed away of a heart attack, and of course the gay guy whom no one will vote for because we just don't want to see his husband on the cover of Vogue under the headline, America's New First Lady, so to speak.
The cigar girl, Chief Elizabeth Warren, has now announced that she will pay for the 800 gazillion in new spending she's proposing by taxing the wealthy until the wealthy leave the country so they not only can't be taxed, but they're no longer investing in American companies.
So now you're out of work and actually need government assistance.
But there is none because all the wealthy people are gone.
So Warren will then tax you to pay you for the fact that you're poor from being overtaxed.
The late Bernie Sanders was carried to New York and propped up in front of a crowd while Alexandria Occasional Cortex endorsed him.
The late Sanders will now have to face questions as to why he was endorsed by a member of Congress who continually says ignorant, nonsensical things like, I endorse Bernie Sanders.
Joe Biden has released a statement saying there was absolutely nothing wrong with his son Hunter interrupting a life of whoring and drug use to accept high-paying jobs he wasn't qualified for but was offered because his father held public office.
After a statement, Biden's eye exploded, his teeth fell out, and his standing in the polls rose 15 points because hard as it is to believe, he's the best candidate they've got.
On the positive side, the Democrats have come up with a new campaign slogan, impeach now, because my God, look at our terrible candidates.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped hip-sy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Here I am, still in Memphis, for one more day as the Clavenless weekend barrels toward us.
I'll be talking at the University of Memphis, I think it is tonight.
I'm probably too charitable, but I like to think that the editors of Vanity Fair sometimes wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, remembering how they once put Beto O'Rourke on the cover of their magazine.
O'Rourke, who somehow became a Democrat hero by losing to Senator Ted Cruz in Texas, has now revealed himself to be a desperate panderer who trails the field of socialist presidential hopefuls like an annoying younger brother who won't go home, but just keeps hanging around saying stupid things that embarrass you in front of your friends.
Beto was recently questioned about a really stupid thing he said by CNN's Wolf Blitzer.
You said the other day in an interview with Al Sharp that President Trump, perhaps inspired by Goebbels and the propagandists of the Third Reich, seemed to employ this tactic that the bigger the lie, the more obscene the injustice, the more dizzying the pace of this bizarre behavior, the less likely we're able to do something about it.
Is that not going too far to make a comparison between the president of the United States and the Nazis?
Find me a better analogy.
You can't find a better analogy than Hitler.
Some of you may remember Hitler.
The guy was an absolute riot in those YouTube videos from the movie Downfall.
But in real life, he caused the deaths of over 65 million people, some of them in a mass extermination campaign so evil, even the devil was impressed.
And in fact, if Trump were even a little tiny bit like Hitler, Beto wouldn't be saying Trump was like Hitler because Trump would be like Hitler.
And no one would be saying much of anything against him, not to mention the fact that Wolf Blitzer's chair would be empty.
There are no Hitlers in American presidential history, not a single one, not even close.
Beto can't find a better analogy because, well, for one thing, he's an idiot, but for another, he's a spoiled American who has never faced political evil in his whole spoiled American life, but is nonetheless looking to cast his absurd presidential bid in a heroic light it in no way deserves.
Now, there are, of course, individual heroes in America and everywhere and everywhere else, people who risk their lives for the good.
Pete Butjej served as a naval intelligence officer at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.
That's pretty heroic.
Too bad about the crappy policies.
But there are no political heroes in America because this is not a politically heroic moment.
We're not facing oppression.
We're not facing fascism.
We weren't facing those things under Obama either, as I said at the time.
We face incompetence.
We face government creep.
We face a mainstream press that has been corrupted by crony capitalism so that the media's corporate interests and the interests of big government align.
And as always, we face the slow collapse of our extraordinarily free republic under the weight of slavish human nature.
We're called upon to have enough courage to speak up, to have our videos restricted on YouTube, to get shadow banned on Twitter, to get blacklisted from Hollywood, to get our grades marked down by leftist professors, to lose sponsors, to offend China, maybe at the very worst, to lose our jobs by not towing the left-wing line.
That's not heroism.
That's basic civic responsibility in a democracy.
Heroism is when you risk your life against evil, which we don't have to do here because our government is incompetent, overbearing, overspending, and stupid, but evil it ain't.
You can tell it's not evil because when you say it's evil, you don't wake up dead like you do in China or Russia or North Korea or evil places like that.
All our political heroism is fake, and fake heroism causes real danger.
The idea that the opposition is evil makes you overreact to election losses.
It makes you break the rules of civil engagement.
It tempts you to engage in violence where debate is called for and to hate your fellow Americans instead of seeking to understand what they're trying to say.
I support President Trump's thus far impressively successful presidency, and most especially I support his shake-up of cultural business as usual.
Breaking Civil Engagement Rules00:02:39
And I'm appalled by Adam Schiff's McCarthyite attempts to unseat Trump by non-electoral means.
But Adam Schiff is the congressman of my district in California, and you don't see the cops bursting into the Daily Wire to shoot me down or carry me away when I criticize him.
He is a seriously schmucky dude, in my opinion, but he's not evil, and I'm not a hero for criticizing him.
The Democrats have lost their minds.
The press has lost its integrity.
Even some on the right have lost their sense of basic decency, all in the name of fake heroism.
Do not be a hero unless you absolutely have to be.
And God send that never happens here.
Let us talk about one of my favorite magazines and one of their best podcasts.
The Manhattan Institute has run City Journal, the magazine where I write and I'm a contributing editor.
And they have a wonderful podcast.
It really is a great podcast where you can learn more about policy, city policy, the culture.
It's called 10 Blocks.
It's a weekly podcast hosted by City Journal.
And I think my friend Brian Anderson usually does the interviews.
Maybe Paul Beston.
They're all my pals over there.
And they're just great.
They just do a great job.
Once a week, City Journal, it is City Journal editor Brian Anderson and his team welcome contributors and special guests to discuss critical issues.
And when they told me I was going to be doing this ad, I talked to them at City Journal and they said, please remember to tell people that 10 Blocks has some of our smartest writers on.
And they listed their great writers like Heather McDonald, you know, Steve Malanga, Kay Heimowitz.
And I said, you know, there's another smart writer who did a 10 blocks podcast.
Me!
They forgot to include me.
You can hear me on 10 Blocks as well.
What you do is you visit city-journal.org slash 10 blocks.
That's the number 10, 10 blocks, or tune in to 10 blocks on your favorite listening platform.
That's city-journal.org slash 10 blocks.
It's really good stuff.
It is stuff that works.
That's what they concentrate at City Journal and the Manhattan Institute.
Policies that work, ideas that work, and a really fresh look at the culture by very smart people.
We'll have one of those smart people on later on in the show, Theodore Dalrymple, a guy who's had a big effect on me, and I'm sure you'll enjoy that interview.
But listen to 10 blocks from Manhattan Institute and City Journal.
Okay, and also, while you're listening, the Clavenless Weekend is upon us.
There will be great gnashing of teeth and great sorrow and weeping.
And so you want to stave that off by listening to Another Kingdom.
The new episode is out today for those of you who are wise enough to subscribe tomorrow.
That's what I said.
Dramatic Sit-In on Capitol Hill00:14:38
It's Friday.
Today is Thursday.
Tomorrow is Friday.
So you will have one less day of Clavenless Weekend to contend with.
If you're not a subscriber, uh-uh, and you have to wait till Monday.
And let's face it, with the Claveless Weekend, the odds of you surviving till Monday, very, very doubtful.
You know, we're talking about this idea of false heroism.
And I really think it has caused the press not just to lose its mind, but to lose its allegiance to the principles of the American founding.
They are now not just enemies of the founding ideals.
They're now actually the opposite of the founding ideals.
They actually represent things that are the exact opposite of what our founders did because they've talked themselves into that.
They've talked themselves into the idea that this prosperous, free country is in crisis, that we're in a crisis because of Donald Trump, or we were in a crisis before because of George W. Bush, crisis of inequality, crisis of poverty.
So we've got to abandon all the ideas that made us as rich and safe and healthy and powerful as we now are, which is more than anybody ever in the history of the world has ever been.
So yesterday, let me show you how this works.
Yesterday, the Republicans put on a good old-fashioned piece of political theater, right?
They storm into what's called the SCIF, which is the secret chamber in the basement of the Capitol where Adam Schiff in the SCIF has been holding these McCarthyite impeachment hearings that we don't get to hear, but he then leaks out Democrat curated information to Democrat sources like the news media, and they send out the news as if this is somehow news instead of just an effort to control information by Adam Schiff.
That's the way it works, right?
So the Republicans get fed up and they storm the offices, right?
They storm the SCIF and they come barreling in and they say, we demand our rights to be here.
And it's theater.
It's a way of interrupting this Democrat flow of information to Democrats, for Democrats, to get in a Republican voice.
They have to do this to put it on.
But of course, it's theater, it's staged, it's all those things.
So back in the day, when I was a newspaper man, we had what we call two phone calls and write it up, right?
And the idea was that you found out the facts, what happened, here's what happened, folks.
And then you interviewed one side, and then you interviewed the other side.
And that's how you would get the news, right?
You would say, here's what happened.
Here's what one side thinks it means.
Here's what the other side thinks it means.
So let's do that.
I told you what happened.
They stormed the place.
Here is Steve Scalise talking for the Republicans.
What is Adam Schiff trying to hide?
I think that's a question so many people have.
So many of my colleagues have.
So many people in the press should have, is through those hidden closed doors over there, Adam Schiff is trying to impeach a president of the United States behind closed doors, literally trying to overturn the results of the 2016 election a year before Americans get to go to the polls to decide who's going to be the president.
And frankly, it should be the people of this country who decide who's going to be the president, not Nancy Pelosi and not Adam Schiff in secret behind closed doors.
Okay, that's the Republicans.
Here's Ted Liu for the Democrats.
They're in violation of House rules.
Their House parliament hearing has ruled that you just can't crash committees.
I can't just go to any random committee and sit in.
I can't walk in a Republican caucus and sit in.
So they're just trying to be disruptive because the facts are not on their side.
The law is not on their side.
Okay, so one side said it's not fair that they're holding these in secret.
The other one says they're just doing this for the facts.
Here's the New York Times.
That would be how I would report this when I was a reporter.
I would say, here's what happened.
Here are the two sides, what it means.
And now you know, now you make your choice, right?
I report, you decide.
Here's the New York Times, a former newspaper.
Republicans grind impeachment inquiry to a halt as evidence mounts against Trump, right?
So in other words, they're trying to stop, oh, that evidence is mounting against Donald Trump, so we're trying to stop it.
Did anybody say that that's why they're doing it?
Did a Republicans say that's why they're doing it?
That's what the Democrats would say the Republicans were trying to do.
That's the headline in the New York Times.
So you're just getting that one side of the story in the headline.
The story is written just like that.
In fact, let's take a look at the way the networks echoed that.
Tonight, chaos at the Capitol.
Rogue Republicans crash the impeachment inquiry, delaying a top defense official's testimony.
Democrats call in the sergeant-at-arms to break up the protest.
We're going to begin with a dramatic sideshow today at the impeachment inquiry.
As if on queue, following President Trump's orders yesterday for Republicans to get tougher on impeachment, a group of Republicans barged into a closed-door hearing today.
Drama playing out on the Hill, the confrontation that came just one day after what may have been the most damaging testimony yet against President Trump.
Tonight, even a leading Republican senator now saying the picture coming out is not a good one.
And just today, the Pentagon official overseeing Ukraine policy, Laura Cooper, there arriving to testify, but was stopped before she could even start.
There was a wild scene at the U.S. Capitol today, a day after a star witness in the impeachment inquiry contradicted President Trump's no quid pro quo claims over aid to Ukraine.
House Republicans did their best to steal back the headlines today.
So, right, they're stealing back the headlines because of this terrible information that came out that really looked bad.
People are saying, everybody's saying, oh, Republicans, Democrats saying it really looked bad, but they're not.
That's just not true, right?
I mean, we didn't hear the testimony, so we don't know.
We have no way of judging.
Lester Holt didn't hear it, Nora O'Donnell didn't hear it.
Nora O'Donnell's tanking CBS News, and she is genuinely awful.
I mean, that is genuinely one-sided news.
She's worse than that last guy they had, Ted Baxter.
What was his name?
Scott Pelley.
So now you go on Twitter, right?
And the Democrats, Democrat people, and forget about the politicians, the people are going, this is appalling.
This is, I've never seen, oh my God, they're breaking the laws.
They're breaking the rules.
These Republicans, this is the rule of law.
Shouldn't they be carted away?
I mean, this is typical, you know, political theater.
I'm not saying it's anything more than that, but it's political theater trying to get some headlines while the Democrats with the Democrat press are colluding to impeach the President of the United States in secret.
Okay, that's what's going on.
Let's go back just a little bit when the Democrats staged a sit-in in the House to protest the fact that they weren't taking a vote on gun control, that they weren't getting a vote in gun control.
We put together a network montage.
Nora O'Donnell wasn't network the leader then, but it's all the same characters, all the same suspects of how they reported that bit of also political theater.
Make no mistake, this was dramatic, like nothing we have ever seen before.
Truly one of the most dramatic demonstrations on the House floor in modern American history.
Good evening.
We have seen political standoffs of all kinds in Washington, but nothing like what is playing out right now in the chambers of the House of Representatives.
An old-fashioned sit-in led by a civil rights icon.
Democratic representatives literally occupying the House floor, refusing to budge until a gun control bill is brought up for debate.
The dramatic sit-in on Capitol Hill.
Some members of Congress suddenly staging a protest on the floor of the House, sitting down demanding action on gun control.
They are still sitting there tonight.
The longtime civil rights icon, Congressman John Lewis, saying this is about the right to vote on this.
Tonight, 18 of the 53 wounded in Orlando remain in the hospital, three in critical condition.
And as funerals continue for the 49 who were murdered, Democrats today seize the floor of the House of Representatives, demanding that the Republican majority allow a vote on gun control.
Unbelievable, right?
I mean, it's dramatic.
It's historic.
An icon, a civil rights icon.
Not even a human being, not even a human being was leading that protest.
An icon was leading that protest.
I mean, this is a guy, by the way, who was, in fact, a heroic civil rights leader, but became a political hack in the House and had all kinds of stories.
I remember Andrew Breitbart going up against him when he claimed that he had heard the N-word shouted at him by conservative protesters.
And Breitbart said, I'll give $100,000 to anyone who has a video or a tape of that happening.
And no one, no one stepped forward because the guy obviously wasn't telling the truth.
But he's an icon.
It's dramatic.
It's historic.
They're standing up for gun rights.
Scott Pelley, one of the worst of the worst, he came out, oh, the people are even as they're being buried, even as the victims are being buried, they will not vote to take away the Second Amendment.
What is wrong with these people?
That's the way that it's not news.
It's not news.
It's narrative.
And underlying that is an even bigger narrative.
And that's what I'm trying to get to.
And I'll talk about it for just a minute.
But while we're talking about these things, we should, of course, talk about guns.
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And of course, it's also part in the Constitution.
You have to know how to spell Clavin.
Not everybody knows that.
It's kind of buried.
You have to hold the Constitution up to the light, and then you can see through the paper that the, you know, KLA, V-A-N, no E, there shall be, I think Article 7 or something, there shall be no Ease in Clavin.
All right.
So the underlying narrative to the narrative that you just heard about this piece of political theater that the Republicans stage, they are toadies of Trump.
They are blocking information.
They are staging, barging in, they're staging chaos.
They're bringing on chaos, as opposed to the Democrats, when they do it, are heroic and historic and icons, right?
But underlying this is a bigger narrative, that something good is happening when your congressman hides away in a room and leaks out information on an important political process, a major political process, like impeachment.
And the New York Times just comes right out and says it.
Their headline today is, Trump's war on the deep state turns against him.
The impeachment inquiry is in some ways the culmination of a battle between the president and the government institutions he distrusted and disparaged.
Nameless, faceless, and voiceless.
As sad, it's almost like an unborn child, nameless, faceless, and voiceless.
The CIA officer who first triggered the greatest threat to President Trump's tenure in office seemed to be practically the embodiment of the deep state that the president has long accused of trying to take him down.
But over the last three weeks, the deep state has emerged from the shadows in the form of real live government officials past and present who have defied a White House attempt to block cooperation with House impeachment investigators and provided evidence that largely backs up the still anonymous whistleblower.
How do they know?
They weren't there.
You weren't there.
They don't know.
How do they know?
Except the Democrats tell them.
They know what the Democrats tell them, and they're Democrats, so that what the Democrats tell them must be true.
The parade of witnesses marching, they're marching to Capitol Hill culminated this week with the dramatic testimony of William B. Taylor Jr.
How did they know it's dramatic?
How do they know?
They were not there.
They only have Democrats talking to their fellow Democrats at the New York Times, a former newspaper they don't know.
It culminated this week with the dramatic testimony of William Taylor, a military officer and a diplomat who has served his country for 50 years, undaunted.
Oh my God, the tears, I'm tearing up at the heroism, undaunted by White House pressure.
He came forward to accuse the same president who sent him to Ukraine a few months ago of abusing.
See, this is the narrative.
The heroic deep state is on the march.
It's the opposite.
It's bizarro America.
It's the opposite of the America our founders wanted.
You know, the Romans used to have an institution called a dictatorship.
And when there was an emergency, they could declare a dictatorship.
Sullah did this, right?
They would declare a dictatorship.
And theoretically, for six months, a guy would be a dictator and take care of the emergency and then step down.
After six months, it had to be renewed or the guy had to step down.
Of course, in practice, it resulted in all kinds of purges and people being killed.
And that's essentially what the New York Times is calling for now.
They're calling for a dictatorship.
And Sullah, by the way, represented the elites against the popularities, against the people.
He was trying to keep the power of the optimates, the elites, over the populars.
And so is the New York Times.
That is what they're calling for.
They're basically in this false heroic mode, this false crisis mode, this false emergency mode that the Democrats are always in because they're always looking to call forth some kind of dictatorship.
It's always the climate is going to kill us.
Donald Trump is Hitler.
It's the worst of the worst.
It's always an emergency.
And it's always calling for more and more government to handle this emergency that will never, ever end.
It is all fake.
It's all phony heroism.
And really, we have to get used to the fact that in a democracy, political heroism is not called for that often.
You know, this is why you hear, let me end this, because I want to get to this interview.
This is why you hear this garbage, like what you heard on CNN from Cornell West, you know, the professor, the guy, the guy who's just got the gift of Gab, these words, these long words just flow off his tongue.
And this is what he says.
If impeachment fails, it's revolution time.
We've got fascism running afoot.
You've got disregard of rule of law.
You've got the balkanization of the populace.
You've got the devaluing and the scapegoating of the weak, especially the Mexicans and Muslims and poor and black and brown.
So the democracy is being imploded, as it were.
And you have to come up with ways of awakening, moral, spiritual, and political, that allow for the democracy to go to move forward.
Rely On Yourself In Emergencies00:03:03
This is why if things don't work the way the system is, we got to hit the streets.
We got to go to jail.
That's exactly what out now is all about.
Next Saturday, it's going to be like Puerto Rico.
It's going to be like Hong Kong.
The people have to speak with their feet if the electoral political system is too weak.
The Republicans are too cowardly.
The Democrats not moving fast enough.
And with Biden using the language that he uses, I mean, he just disqualifies himself.
Thank God, Brother Bernie and the others.
You just disqualify yourself and having any moral authority when it comes to this kind of crime against Jim.
We got to take to the streets if we can't impeach this guy, right?
Because it's an emergency.
Fascism is crying.
It's just nonsense.
However, there are such things as real.
This is going to be a God-King style segue into an ad, okay?
You just, I just, I'm going to show the God King how it's actually done.
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When seconds count, you have to know.
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
I do not know whether I will ever get tired of that joke.
But however, it is, we're going to go into this interview.
We're not going to break away.
All the more reason for you to feel deep, deep guilt if you haven't subscribed.
You've got to subscribe.
It's $10 a month, $100 for the year.
You get the Leftist Tears Tumblr if you subscribe for the year.
You get another Kingdom early so you don't have to go into the Clavenless weekend unprotected.
You get to be in the mailbag so all your problems can be solved.
That's a pretty good deal.
What is $9.99?
I keep the penny, so it's $10.
Other people, it's $9.99 or $99 for the year, but I keep the penny, so it's $10.
But anyway, we will go into the interview.
Prison Psychiatrist's Dilemma00:04:29
Theodore Dalrymple, I got to tell you, when I lived in England, I discovered Theodore Dalrimble.
He is one of the wittiest writers, just a guy of deep experience.
He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, as well as a contributing editor of City Journal, like me.
He's the author of many books.
Most recently, Admirable Evasions, How Psychology Undermines Morality.
He writes regularly for the Spectator National Review, and he is a psychiatrist who worked in prisons, as he will talk about in this interview.
Theodore Dalrimble, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Well, thank you for inviting me.
I have to tell you before we start that when I lived in England, I discovered you in the back pages of Oberon Waugh's review, Literary Review, and you were a big inspiration to me.
You had a lot to do with changing my perspective.
I thought you made a lot of sense.
Yes.
For the better, I hope.
Much better.
And yeah, just great insights and wit.
So let's start.
Before we talk about what's going on in Britain now, I just want to talk about where you came from.
You were a prison psychiatrist.
Can you explain to people how that affected the way you look at things?
Well, I don't think you could be a prison psychiatrist and be a utopian.
And I suppose it gave me an insight into human nature.
Not that I was terribly enamored of it in the first place, but I enjoyed it enormously, of course, because it was like going abroad every day.
And I worked, my prison was right next door to a general hospital, and the main difference between the hospital and the prison was that there was much more violence in the hospital.
Did it make you feel?
I mean, when you were writing about it, I got the feeling you felt that there was something going terribly, terribly wrong with the way people looked at evil and responsibility.
Yes, well, I felt that in the hospital.
I didn't need to go to the prison to know that.
And I came to the conclusion that my own profession, as well as sociologists and psychologists and criminologists, had actually contributed very greatly to the loss of a sense of responsibility.
Actually, it's curious.
It's more complex than that people just lose their sense of responsibility.
They lose their sense of responsibility when they're talking to other people.
So if they think they can get something out of you by claiming not to have responsibility, then they will not have responsibility.
They don't actually feel that they have no responsibility.
I mean, everyone, well, more or less everyone feels responsible for his own actions, but he can feel, but he knows that there are advantages to claiming not to be responsible for his actions.
And we encourage that, actually.
I mean, I can give you an example, for example.
Please.
An example.
A burglar came to me now to be caught.
He was caught many times burgling and to be caught by the British police burgling.
Either you have to burgle a lot or you have to be exceptionally incompetent as a burglar.
And he said to me, Doctor, do you think my burgling's got anything to do with my childhood?
So I said, nothing whatsoever.
And he was rather surprised by this.
And so he said, well, why do I do it?
And I said, well, because you're lazy and stupid and you want things that you're not prepared to pay for, to work for.
And he started laughing.
He didn't get angry because, in a sense, it was a relief to him that I was talking to him as a normal human being.
In fact, I was treating him as an equal in some kind of existential way.
But of course, it was true that many of these prisoners had had terrible lives.
That was true.
But it wasn't true that you go straight from having a bad childhood to breaking into people's houses without anything intervening.
Defending Marvel Comics00:13:32
Right, right.
Has this kind of attitude?
I mean, you talk about psychiatry contributing to this.
I mean, I guess giving people a sense that it was inevitable what they were going to become.
Has that gotten worse, do you think, over the intervening years?
Oh, I think it has.
And actually, if you listen to people on buses and so on, they'll start talking about their neurotransmitters as if they met their neurotransmitters walking down the street.
And when they talk about that, what they are, in fact, doing is trying to explain their dissatisfactions or even their bad behavior.
I mean, nobody ever feels it necessary to explain his good actions by finding some kind of explanation.
So I think, and I think it's actually quite a normal thing to do.
I think we all do it to some extent, but we get over it.
We realize that we're telling ourselves lies or we're rationalizing.
But some people don't.
They didn't never get past.
Let's talk about what's going on in Britain today.
Obviously, the big thing is Brexit.
You wrote a piece in City Journal basically saying that you didn't think they should have taken the Brexit vote in the first place.
Why is that?
Well, I don't think, well, I don't think you should decide a big, big constitutional question by just having one vote and taking 50% of the voters plus one, because what you end up doing is making a very big decision on the basis of perhaps 37% of the population.
So I don't think that's a very sensible way to go about it.
But what interests me most about this is that there was no objection to the referendum beforehand, because the people who called it thought that it was going to go the way they wanted.
So they were really like Napoleon III, who had plebiscites for the population to agree to what was already decided.
And that is the purpose of plebiscites or referenda in Europe.
The main difference between Britain and the rest of Europe was very neatly summarized in a cartoon in Le Figo shortly afterwards.
They had these two French peasants looking over the channel to England and saying, one was saying to the other, they do things completely differently over there.
They listen to the results of the referendum.
Well, in fact, everything that has happened since is an attempt to overthrow the result, to deny the result of the referendum.
So that now people say, well, we want a people's referendum, a second one, a people's referendum, as if the people hadn't had an opportunity in the previous referendum.
And of course, another thing they say is it's now so long ago that the people might have changed their minds.
It sounds to me like they might have changed, actually gotten stronger for Brexit just out of frustration with a politician.
Well, it might be.
I mean, I don't think anybody knows.
So I wouldn't like to put all of my money on one side or another if there were another referendum.
But what is quite interesting also is that the leader of one of the parties, the Liberal Democrats, has said that even if there were a second referendum and it went in favor of Brexit, she would take no notice of it.
Now, you might think, I would have thought that that would be the end of a political career in a democracy.
But nobody seemed to think that this was extraordinary at all.
Well, how do you feel about this?
Did the people make a mistake?
No, I don't think they made a mistake.
I mean, I could easily construct an argument in favour of remaining.
It would be easy to do so.
And therefore it can't, you know, the question like this can't be open and shut, it can't be good versus evil.
But I voted for Brexit because I thought that in the long run, what is being constructed in Europe is a kind of Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia without Tito to keep it together.
And in the long run, there is going to be a great deal of conflict, maybe not war, but there will be conflict.
And there's already conflict.
They can't really agree on anything because their interests aren't the same.
The interests of France and Germany are not the same.
And when you talk to people who are in favour of the Union, they say, well, it keeps the peace.
And I say to that, well, do you mean that if it were not for the European Union, Estonia would immediately attack Portugal or Greece would attack Belgium?
And so what they really mean is that it keeps the Germans in check.
That's what they mean when they say it keeps a peace because there's nobody else who's likely to attack anybody.
So I think that, and of course we know what the European bureaucracy is like.
Not that the British bureaucracy is a great deal better than the European bureaucracy, but at least there's some chance that we might get a certain degree of control back.
That's the thing I wonder.
I mean, isn't national sovereignty, is national sovereignty worth nothing?
Is it a passe?
Is that the idea?
Well, I think there is that feeling.
And of course, it is true that our national identities have been so diluted that it's very difficult now for people to say they feel this or that or the other thing.
And I think this has been a deliberate policy, actually.
I mean, the Labour government actually wanted to change the nature of the population.
It actually said so.
It's the old joke, if the people don't like the government, you change the people.
And they actually, I mean, it was a joke, but then it became a policy, like most jokes these days become a policy.
Do you think, is Europe in some sense over?
I mean, I was reading that book, The Strange Death of Europe.
And by the way, a very good writer who reminds me quite a lot of you, I think I wouldn't be surprised if you were one of his inspirations.
Does he have a point?
Is there some sense that Europe is finished?
Well, I suppose it depends what you mean by finished.
No country is, I mean, the history doesn't come to a full stop.
So, you know, there's going to be a future.
What the content of that future will be, no one knows.
And of course, there might be a reaction to all that has happened, and it might be a very nasty reaction.
It's perfectly conceivable.
So I don't know.
I mean, I have my French nephew staying with me who says that the alarm about problems in France is an overreaction.
And he says that because he has lots, he was a medical student, he's just qualified, and he has lots of colleagues and friends from every conceivable group in French society, which is, I mean, that is true.
He's not telling an untruth.
And it's true of me also.
But on the other hand, there's considerable, I think there's considerable ghettoization.
Now, it depends which you think is the more important, the ghettoization or the integration of substantial numbers of people.
Could you see a sort of Wilbeck submission thing playing out where France actually becomes a Muslim nation in some way?
Well, of course, unfortunately, Welbeck has been a very good prophet.
Yeah.
Because I don't know whether you remember, but he prophesied a kind of bombing in Asia, the bombing in Bali.
He wrote a novel in which something like that took place a year before it did actually take place.
And then he, the Gilet Jaune, he predicted that as well.
The Yellow Vest, his latest book, Seratonine, which incidentally is a brilliant title.
He's a very brilliant man.
The title itself is brilliant because, of course, Seratonin is in the folk idea, it's a neurotransmitter and is responsible for all our behavior, either too much of it or in the wrong place or too little of it or whatever.
So that, I mean, he's very, very acute.
But so, of course, in his previous book, Soumission, he predicted a Muslim president of France.
And indeed, recently there were articles about a possible Syrian French citizen, a billionaire, he's done very well, who might who might run for president.
And it's not 100% impossible that he would win because no one has much respect for anybody in the political sphere.
Thank you so much.
Your stuff in the Daily Wire is in the Daily Wire.
And your stuff in City Journal is absolutely terrific.
And it's always great to read you and great to talk to you.
Thank you for coming on.
Thank you very much.
Theodore Delramu, the author, he's the author of Admirable Evasions, How Psychology Undermines Morality.
And you can find him regularly in City Journal.
Just a terrific, witty, insightful writer who has really done such, he's had a really interesting life and he's learned a lot of stuff.
As a final reflection, I've had a little difficulty traveling, controlling the clock more difficultly than I have in the studio.
So I've run out of time and not been able to discuss this controversy over Marvel movies.
Martin Scorsese has got his new Netflix show, The Irishman, which is like a three-hour gangster epic with, I believe, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in it.
And he was giving an interview and he talked about the fact that Marvel comics are not really cinema.
He dissed them, basically.
And then Francis Ford Coppola, obviously the great director of The Godfather, came out and he said he finds them despicable.
He finds Marvel films despicable.
Here's Scorsese talking, I think, at one of the film festivals where he's promoting this Netflix show.
The value of a film that's like a theme park film, for example, the Marvel type pictures, where the theaters become amusement parks, that's a different experience.
And it's like, it's not even, I was saying earlier, it's not cinema, it's something else.
You know, whether you go for that or not, but it is something else and they shouldn't be, we shouldn't be invaded by it.
And so that's a big issue.
What he's complaining about is for him, cinema is a collective experience, an experience that takes place in a theater.
And he's now been relegated to television where the good work is being done, the kinds of things that he did that never really made money.
He's never been a very profitable filmmaker.
And I think that this is the way these things work, is that the market basically brings in these big, these big epic things like the Marvel Comics.
It's going to be weird to hear me defend Marvel Comics, but I am going to defend them because they've taken over the theater space because of the way the government, the government, because of the way that movies are run now, because of the way profits are made, and because of the fact that people love these films so much, they have taken over the theaters and work like he does has been relegated to TV.
And look, TV has now become, people have these home theaters.
They have these huge TVs.
I have a huge TV.
It's not that expensive anymore.
You have a dark room.
You can sit and have a glass of wine or whatever you want and watch the shows.
And he doesn't like that.
But the thing about these Marvel movies, I don't like them either.
I don't think they're cinema either in the sense that he's talking about cinema, but they do appeal to something.
I think they maybe are preparing people for a world in which we become a little bit more like these characters because of technology, because we start to have things implanted in our head that makes us smarter, implanted in our body, that makes us faster, more durable.
Maybe they're preparing the human imagination for that experience.
I don't know, but people do love them.
They have something to say.
And it's only over time that you find out what these things have to say.
I don't think they're art.
I don't even think the best of them is a work of art, where I do think Goodfellows is in fact a work of cinematic art.
But that's not the point.
Adapting Art in New Spaces00:02:10
You have to do, artists always have to go where they can.
When cameras were invented, basically painting was destroyed.
First, when they became impressionists, then they became modern artists now.
I don't think Michelangelo would look at a modern abstract painting and say that's painting, just the way Scorsese looks at these movies and says they're not cinema.
They're not cinema the way he practiced it.
Painting is not painting the way Michelangelo did it.
But technology changes everything.
He has got to adapt and create art in the new spaces.
I've done it.
I've had to create art in new spaces.
And you just, that's the way it works.
That's the way art moves and grows and lives and dies.
It's a living thing.
It is not a dead thing that stays the same.
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