March 31, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
07:33
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Is it fair to say, is yours the leading conservative party in the Netherlands? | |
| Yes, we are the largest party in terms of members. | |
| I founded Forum for Democracy three and a half years ago as a political party, and before that it was in existence for about two years as a think tank, an independent think tank. | |
| And we have been... | |
| Giving the Conservative message on a whole range of issues. | |
| And I really think that we're filling a gap in the Netherlands which isn't being filled by any other political party currently. | |
| So I would say we're the leading Conservative voice in our country. | |
| And what percentage of Parliament seats do you have? | |
| Well, you're going to laugh now because currently in Parliament we have only two seats. | |
| Which is the equivalent of 1.6%. | |
| So we are really, really, very small in the second chamber in Parliament. | |
| However, we are the largest party in the Senate. | |
| And the reason for that is that when I founded the party, it was very hard to break into the political spectrum. | |
| I got only two seats at the general elections in March 2017. So that's... | |
| Three years ago right now. | |
| But then two years later we had the Senate elections and we topped the polls in the nationwide election. | |
| So then we turned out the number one largest party. | |
| So we went from the smallest party to the single largest party in just a matter of two years. | |
| So it was a very exciting rollercoaster ride. | |
| And now we are also the largest party in terms of members. | |
| So we organize events across the country. | |
| Well, not right now because of Corona, of course, but normally during the season, we are always in the countryside trying to connect with our voter base and really build a grassroots structure that's not just a political party. | |
| I love the thing you just said about politician almost being a bad word because... | |
| Politicians over the past several decades, in my view, have lost contact with a very significant part of life and society. | |
| So we're trying to be a movement of ideas that I've set up for schools and summer universities and other places where people meet each other. | |
| We're publishing books, we're publishing short documentary videos, very much in PragerU style. | |
| To really make this into a movement that's changing the very fiber of society and making the long march through the institutions and not just being elected politicians. | |
| This is important. | |
| What do you think is going to be with the EU? Would you like to see the Netherlands leave the EU? Absolutely. | |
| I think the EU is an anti-democratic project. | |
| It's not just undemocratic, but it's from its very foundation, anti-democratic, designed to create a super bureaucracy where unaccountable, unelected managers, very much in the James Burnham style, if that means anything to your listeners, where the electorates in the several European countries cannot vote them out of office. | |
| And we will be stuck to this continental superstate forever if we don't pay very much attention to what we're trying to do right now with the corona crisis. | |
| Yeah, well, do you think the corona crisis is going to have an impact on the EU? Well, there are two options, really. | |
| What they seem to be trying to do right now is push through with several centralization measures. | |
| So they're trying to... | |
| To push through with Europe bonds, which really would mean that we in the north of Europe would be paying for the debt in the south. | |
| And that would be a terrible mistake. | |
| The other thing is that constantly they're trying to impose centralized immigration policies on us. | |
| So that means that some guy in Brussels is going to decide how many immigrants from which countries and which religious backgrounds we're going to have to accept in the Netherlands. | |
| If they push through with that, then there might be a strong backlash of people supporting what we have been supporting for a long time, which is an exit, like Brexit, just getting out of it altogether. | |
| So it's very much open, in my view. | |
| Either the EU is going to push through with this, with a backlash as a result, or the other option, which is what we've been seeing in Italy in the past couple of days. | |
| Where people feel so left alone by the European Union on the one hand and so strongly patriotic about the national measures being taken in response to the coronavirus that they start burning EU flags in public and on YouTube and on Instagram and all these things. | |
| So people have a sort of an anti-EU sentiment and a pro-national identity sentiment. | |
| Because of this coronavirus. | |
| Well, ultimately, isn't that what has happened? | |
| People realize, whoa, I have to take care of Italy. | |
| I have to take care of the Netherlands. | |
| I have to take care of Denmark. | |
| Isn't that happening? | |
| Yes. | |
| Yes. | |
| They realize, and this is also a point that we've been talking about just before the break, about globalization. | |
| And it's all very well to feel a citizen of the world when... | |
| When everything goes well and you can go on a holiday somewhere and all these things. | |
| But when the chips are down and you're really going to ask yourself, okay, how am I going to provide for the elderly? | |
| What am I going to do when I'm running out of money? | |
| Who's going to give me an emergency loan? | |
| All these things. | |
| Then people are going to look at the national state. | |
| So what we might see in the wake of this, and I think that would be a positive element, a positive side effect, is a... | |
| The reawakening of the nation-state. | |
| One more question on the economies. | |
| I don't see how we will not have a worldwide depression. | |
| Am I too pessimistic? | |
| Well, I would like to say that you are too pessimistic. | |
| I would like to be hopeful and say, I think there's still a way out of this. | |
| I don't see governments making the steps to moving out of the lockdown and supporting businesses again. | |
| So I am becoming more and more pessimistic every day. | |
| I really hope that we will soon have this sort of step by step, going back to normal approach and program. | |
| But I must admit that I'm likely to agree with you. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| Yes. | |
| On a pessimistic note, Dennis. | |
| In 15 seconds, tell people why you mention PragerU. | |
| Why I mention it? | |
| Yes. | |
| What it means to me. | |
| Yes, that's correct. | |
| Yes, that's correct. |
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