RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Uncomfortable Learning

Feb. 26, 2016 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

49:22

Uncomfortable Learning

John Derbyshire joins Richard to discuss getting banned at Williams College, as well as the topics to which the college did not want to subject its students: ethnicity, race, and identity. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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	John, welcome back to the podcast.
	It's been a while.
	How are you?
	I'm fine.
	Thank you, Richard.
	And thank you for inviting me back.
	Well, my pleasure.
	We haven't spoken for a couple years.
	Have you gotten into any controversy in the meantime?
	Nothing comes to mind.
	Well, I read something about your being expelled from a university and lots of social justice warrior hand-wringing and angst and probably screeching and hair-pulling.
	Yes, yes.
	Here's what happened in brief.
	I was invited by a student group at Williams College, which I'd never heard of it.
	Well, it's one of the best, actually.
	Friends later told me it's a very prestigious, very tony college and hard to get into.
	Yes.
	Up there in the top left-hand corner of Massachusetts.
	Yeah.
	And I had some exchanges with them, and they agreed that I was going to come and give them a talk on Monday this week, day before yesterday.
	Who is they?
	Because I was very curious.
	I did a little research before our conversation, but it seemed like there was a group called Uncomfortable Learning.
	Uncomfortable Learning, that was the group.
	Yeah, so it was a student group that invited you, which shows some balls on their part.
	Yes, it does.
	And in fact, one of the Uncomfortable Learning movers and shakers there, A young fellow named Zach Wood, who's black, or at any rate, mulatto, he is one who expressed disappointment most vigorously at the decision of the college president to disinvite me.
	Mr. Wood said, I totally disagree with Mr. Derbyshire, but I was looking forward to confronting him.
	Which plays into my long-standing and oft-stated impression, belief, understanding that all this stuff, all this social justice warrior shrieking and stamping and fainting is quintessentially, not entirely, but quintessentially a white thing.
	It's a white liberal thing.
	Blacks don't care that much.
	You may remember, back in 2010, I think it was, I went and spoke to the Black Law Students Association at the University of Pennsylvania, and they were very nice, a very nice reception.
	Nobody minded anything I said, and I was quite blunt with them.
	But it's the gentry white liberals who drive all this kind of thing.
	I don't say they don't have black allies, but...
	Far more blacks than white liberals are willing to talk about these things.
	I actually asked a black friend about this, and he said, well, we just kind of suspect that all white people think what you say anyway.
	I don't know if that's really true.
	Were that the case?
	Yeah, I think it's a case where the main energy, social justice energy that leads to censorship and shouting down and all that kind of stuff does come from white people who view blacks as these maybe kind of innocent creatures that they need to protect.
	And that's their moral charge.
	I think that's probably the dynamic at play.
	I forget how many pieces I've written now about race issues that end with me sort of metaphorically throwing up my hands and saying, what the hell is the matter with white people?
	We don't have a black problem.
	Well, you've written the same thing, Richard.
	We don't so much have a black problem in this zone as a white problem.
	Yeah, I think that is definitely the case.
	Before we get into some of these theoretical matters, let's dig a little more into the case at hand.
	So this is basically an organic student group.
	I was actually involved with some student groups of various kinds when I was a student a couple of months ago when I was in college.
	No, just kidding.
	Ten years ago or more.
	But yeah, so these are organic organizations.
	It's not too difficult to start one, but you have to be a self-starter of some sort and have a little gumption, and then you're officially recognized, and you kind of give a little report to the administration.
	Sometimes the administration will throw some money at you to rent a venue.
	Provide food or something like that.
	But there are tons of groups like this doing the chess club or theater club or the debate society or whatever.
	And so this is a totally student...
	I think that's a really fantastic thing.
	That seems to be exactly what college is about, or supposedly, at least.
	But then I read the president did one of these just...
	It was almost like his hypocrisy was so flagrant that I don't know how anyone could have actually even read his statement and not...
	Snickered.
	Because he goes in and says, you know, free speech is just the most wonderful thing.
	We love that stuff.
	No, I heard right after the president...
	I stopped hearing from the student group.
	They have not got in touch with me.
	I was having exchanges with them about what I was going to talk about and the arrangements and the time and so on.
	But I heard nothing after he made that announcement.
	They just shut up completely.
	Do you think there was a lot of fear involved, I guess, on their part?
	They thought they might get expelled.
	I mean, the president was effectively denouncing them.
	Yes, and I've made this point.
	Williams has a student newspaper, and one of the journalists on the newspaper emailed me about that.
	And it happened, it just so happened, that last week I gave a talk to some students at another university.
	And I had mentioned that to the guy that I was having the exchanges with, Williams, the student leader that I was having exchanges with.
	And so, this week, now it's a news item, and the student newspaper, Williams, is writing it up, and this reporter got in touch with me, and she said, I heard that you were going to give a talk to another...
	Student group last week.
	Did that happen?
	Where was that?
	She was very curious about that.
	And I emailed back to her and I said, I'm not going to tell you anything about my past college speaking engagements.
	I said, I wrote in the email, I said, I don't care about this stuff on my own behalf.
	I'm old and I'm independent.
	You know, I don't care.
	But for young people, this is dangerous.
	Yeah.
	And I cited the case of Jason Richwine, who I know slightly, and who's still struggling.
	You know, a young guy starting out in his career, and they come down on him the way they did.
	Imagine how college students feel with this kind of thing.
	Yes, it's real fear, and it's entirely justified fear.
	These social justice warriors are ruthless.
	They'll hunt you down and shoot you in the head.
	Yeah, I mean, maybe not literally, but they'll do it online, and the internet never forgets.
	So, yeah, I mean, it really is a tricky situation, because college is your four years of experimentation, as it were, when you are encouraged to try new things intellectually.
	And most people actually spend their four years trying new things in terms of...
	Intoxication, narcotics, and sex.
	That's probably the main draw of college, actually.
	That might have once been the case, Richard, but we are now a society under strong ideological control.
	That's not the case anymore.
	Well, I think there's a lot of stupidity and debauchery going on in colleges still.
	I agree.
	Things have changed.
	When I was a student, I was a student in the late 90s and the early 2000s as an undergraduate, and then in the early 2000s and mid-2000s, I guess, as a grad student.
	And I left in 2007.
	I was in a PhD program, and I left that.
	And I think things had changed over that seven-year period where I was in and out of universities.
	But I think it's probably...
	I agree.
	I imagine it has gotten more puritanical now.
	Fortunately, I had a...
	I had an early training in this kind of thing, in working with higher education and inner society under strong ideological control.
	I was actually a college teacher myself in communist China, academic year 1982 to 83. There's some nice photographs on my website of me teaching students there.
	And China at that time, Mao had only been dead for six years.
	It was still very strictly totalitarian.
	It's a bit better now.
	But at that time, it was quite strict.
	I was astonished.
	I got some stories from that year of teaching in a little provincial college in China under that kind of control.
	And this stuff is very familiar to me.
	I could almost be back there.
	Yeah.
	The commies barely hold a candle to the social justice warriors.
	Yeah.
	At least in a society like that, as China was in the early 1980s, you don't have that much to lose.
	Right.
	What typically happens to students who cross some ideological line...
	And I had a couple, I know a couple of friends of mine.
	What typically happened was that at graduation in China at that time, and still largely today, after you graduate from college, you are assigned a job.
	You were sent off to be a, this was a teacher training college, and you were sent off to be a teacher somewhere.
	And if you had...
	Crossed some ideological line, you were sent to a really cruddy posting, you know, some slate quarry or coal mine somewhere to teach the kids under these really awful industrial conditions.
	And on the other hand, if you kissed up to the leaders and informed on your fellow students and helped along ideologically, you got a nice soft spot in a fairly prosperous city.
	That was how it worked.
	Right.
	I think we should dive into this issue of totalitarianism, because that word, of course, is overused, and it's thrown around, and all that kind of stuff.
	And it's a kind of boogeyman of the 20th century.
	But we obviously don't live in a system that resembles the communist system, as you described.
	But that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a lot of the same...
	And in some ways, you could even say it's worse.
	Because we don't have a government that is, from a vertical, top-down way, is not oppressing thought criminals, so to speak.
	I've never been visited by a federal official, and I haven't even been screwed over by the IRS.
	Fingers crossed, knock on wood.
	But I get a tremendous amount of horizontal pressure, you can say, from people denouncing you, even to the point of some mild death threats.
	I don't take those very seriously, but they're there.
	People denouncing you, condemning you, making fun of you, informing on you, so to speak.
	So we have, in a way, in American society, it's a kind of horizontal system of control.
	Or horizontal totalitarianism, where the pressure is coming from society and non-governmental organizations, and it's not really coming from the government directly, per se.
	But in a way, as you're saying, it could be even worse.
	I think there are these cliches, I remember, in the Soviet Union.
	If you say something ideologically incorrect, you might get sent off to Siberia to instruct mathematics to coal miners or some kind of thing like that.
	Well, the fact is, in the United States, if you are labeled with racist or anti-Semite or...
	You know, Holocaust denier, all these kind of things, which are effectively thought crimes.
	You know, you can not have engaged in anything, any kind of physical violence or theft of property.
	It is a thought crime.
	It can be, in a way, worse.
	You're not sent to Siberia with a job.
	Your life is ruined.
	And it's almost more of a puritanical, you know, look at the witch, look at the witch, kind of thing.
	I think we do live in a kind of totalitarian society, and particularly with the internet.
	But it's just different.
	It's different than those 20th century totalitarian societies.
	And so we sometimes have a difficult time recognizing what's going on.
	Yeah, yeah.
	There's an expression that sticks in my mind from Wittfogel, the political scientist Carl Wittfogel.
	He spoke about a beggar's democracy, where...
	You can kind of say what you like, but you can't get anywhere with it.
	It can't get out.
	The internet is becoming kind of like that.
	It's a beggar's democracy.
	You can say anything you like on the internet, but it's never going to ascend into any kind of practical action or get you into any kind of job.
	And if it's the wrong thing, it'll keep you out of jobs.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's a beggar's democracy.
	That is a good metaphor, although I would suggest that with the internet, it is like that.
	There's so much out there now that no single person can keep up with it.
	I can't even keep up with my Twitter feed, not to mention all the things that are published every day.
	So we live in this world of just massive overload.
	It almost drives you mad.
	But that being said, Yeah.
	Well, well...
	Live in hope there, Richard.
	I can't believe I'm...
	I guess I am more optimistic than the author of We Are Doomed, yes.
	I think if you look at human history in the round, the kinds of liberties that we've enjoyed for the past century or so are very much the exception.
	I must sit down and do an actual head count at some time, but I...
	I think of all the human lives that have ever been lived, not counting just barbarians living in the forest, you know, but civilized life.
	I would think at least, surely at least 95% have been lived under despotic control, you know, in the great empires of China and Tsarist Russia and the Incas, you know.
	There's been very little liberty in human history.
	So it's not something one should really expect.
	It's very much an anomaly.
	Well, but aren't you kind of indulging in some current year-ism by saying something like that?
	Because, I mean, in a way, you can look at Tsarist Russia and say, oh, they weren't allowed to vote or something like that.
	But in terms of actual personal liberty, there was probably more of it.
	Well, it depends who you're talking about.
	Pushkin got sent off to the Caucasus.
	By Nicholas, because he wrote the wrong thing.
	And that was quite a well-placed, well-born person.
	If you were a serf in old Russia, forget it.
	Well, I know, but I think you are engaging in some current eurism where you're taking what we expect for a human life now and kind of saying, oh, that is the norm, and then projecting that backwards.
	Yes, a serf was bound to the land, but that was a totally different point of history, of technological development and so on.
	And in some ways, a serf could actually say whatever he wanted at the local pub.
	It depends on one's perspective, and I'm not...
	I'm not trying to glorify serfdom or glorify the past.
	I'm just saying that things are very different, and I think we shouldn't just glorify this post-American world as the end-all and be-all because we get to cast a ballot in a box every couple of years and so on.
	I mean, in some ways, we, I mean, as we're, you know, pointing out earlier, I mean, in some ways we have a shocking lack of freedom and liberty.
	I don't know, Richard.
	I don't care about the ballot box thing, but we are pretty much left alone by the authorities.
	That's what I was thinking of.
	Although, on your side, I will say this.
	If you look at the history of the Cossacks, I was reading about the Cossacks recently.
	They were largely Russian serfs who just got fed up with being serfs and just gone off into the wild spaces in the southwestern Ukraine and started their own communities.
	So there was a way out, which there isn't now, really.
	There are no more wild places.
	There's no way you can go.
	That is true.
	The frontier has closed.
	We're kind of in this big...
	I think that is definitely true.
	It's a bit like the Roman Empire, actually.
	You can't get out of it.
	They exiled Ovid.
	Where did they exile him to?
	It was the Black Sea, wasn't it?
	Oh, yeah, that is true, yes.
	Still under Roman authority.
	You're exiled, but they're still watching you.
	Yeah, if Barack Obama wants to send me to the Black Sea, I'm open for it.
	I've actually been there, but it's quite nice.
	Exactly.
	So it's all a matter of perspective, really.
	I guess.
	So what were you going to talk about at your speech?
	Were you going to give them the talk or something like that?
	The actual title was The National Question.
	Race, ethnicity, and identity in the 21st century.
	And Peter Bremelow kindly allowed me to post the whole thing over at vdare.com.
	So if you want to read what I wrote, it's there.
	Just give us kind of the gist of these horrible things that you were going to talk about.
	I'm curious just how you're thinking about nationality and identity and race and things these days.
	I started off with the national question.
	What is the national question?
	And I refer them to Samuel Huntington's book, Who Are We?
	And I said, that's the national question.
	Who are we?
	Well, we're Americans.
	What does that mean?
	And then I got into what is a nation?
	And how do you approach that?
	Kind of thing from a conservative point of view.
	And I told them, well, here's the unconservative point of view.
	The unconservative point of view is the proposition nation business.
	We are a proposition nation.
	And I tossed and gored that whole proposition nation idea and said, OK, so what is a nation?
	And then I moved on into ethnicity.
	And I gave them some academic references about ethnicity, Vandenberg and Walker-Connor, people like that, who I'm sure you're familiar with, and pointed out that, emphasized that ethnicity is, Vandenberg actually gives the definition as perceived kinship.
	So there can be a fictive element in In ethnicity, it's perceived kinship.
	And I gave them some quotes from the founders and the Declaration of Independence, you know, about how our British brethren and how they've ignored the appeals of consanguinity and said, you know, okay, but it wasn't just British in America at that time.
	were Dutch and French and Germans and, you know, blacks and Indians too.
	But they were developing an ethnicity and the nation came out of that ethnicity, which was partly fictive.
	And then I pointed out that my Sure.
	example of the Italians one of the Risorgimento leaders famously said we have made Italy, now we have to make Italians and so on so there's a fictive element there and then I got into uh 20th century history and what was driving the later 20th century history.
	I said there were basically two clusters of things driving it.
	One cluster was the World Wars together with the Cold War, and the other was the rise of the Third World, the colonists becoming independent and the demographic explosion of the Third World and so on.
	And then I talked about how these two things interacted.
	And then I came home to the United States and how they played out in the United States.
	For example, pointing out, for example, it's not a coincidence that the two great revolutionary things that happened in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement and the 1965 Immigration Act, happened in the very deepest depths of the Cold War.
	There was a Cold War influence on them.
	And I said, for example, Marxist-Leninist universalism.
	You know, the proletariat has no fatherland.
	That kind of universalism returned an echo from American elites.
	They wanted to have a universalism of our own, too.
	Well, in fact, not so much of our own, because half of them were Marxist-Leninist, but they wanted to promote a universalism.
	And that's why you've got things like the 1965 Act and the Civil Rights Movement.
	That was a style of, an attempted style of universalism, a riposte to Marxist-Leninist universalism.
	And then I said, no, there was a symmetry there.
	There's a pleasing symmetry, because just as Marxist-Leninist universalism had an echo over here, Ethno-nationalism had an echo over there.
	I pointed out that the official Soviet name for World War II was the Great Patriotic War.
	Actually, you don't need to filter it through Latin.
	Etyets is the Russian word for father.
	So it's the Great Fatherlandish War.
	And so on.
	And then when the Soviet Union fell and the Cold War ended, all these little ethno-nationalisms I think there are a great deal of ironies to what you're talking about.
	I mean, one of those is that, you know, part of Soviet policy was to, I wouldn't say...
	I actually...
	when a lot of these ethnicities did want their day in the sun, their own state.
	I think that's one of the great ironies of it.
	You know, what other...
	I have an extended quote from Professor Huntington along those lines, talking about the 1965 Immigration Act.
	What were the motives of the people promoting that?
	And I mentioned a number of possible motives, and then I said, well, I'm with Professor Huntington.
	He thought, and he wrote, that it was an attempt by our elites to move us from a national model to an imperial model.
	Because the leaders of nations attempt to unify their people, whereas the leaders of empires attempt to divide them so they can play them off against each other.
	And that was my interpretation.
	That was Huntington's interpretation, but I agree with it, of the motives behind the 1965 Act.
	Yeah, I think that's a very perceptive perspective on this.
	One thing that I was thinking about when you were mentioning these things is that America seems to have a concept of nation.
	It's different.
	It's funny, because when we say things like the United Nations and so on, these are really United States in the sense.
	We sometimes will say things like the Polish, Poland is a nation.
	Poland is a state.
	It's also a nation, but there's a difference between a government and a people.
	That's a very important thing.
	Americans have kind of a funny terminology that we mix up all the time.
	But what I was thinking is that obviously America is a state in that European sense.
	It's a government.
	It's an order, a system.
	And so there is a kind of nationality question.
	And then obviously there's always been a racial component to America.
	That's been there from the beginning.
	You know, in the sense, and not only slavery, slavery is in a way just one part of it.
	It was a part of the confrontation with Indians, to some degree confrontation with Spanish, Mexicans, and so on.
	There's always been this racial element.
	But you could say maybe today we seem to not have an ethnic component to American nationality, where We can say we all believe in freedom or something, and we're all paying taxes to this government,
	but we don't really have that sense that, oh, we're all Protestants, or oh, we're all English speakers, or we're all related to the British Isles, or someplace else, or so on.
	We seem to have this real lack of an ethnic...
	Kind of mythic.
	Because if you're saying, you know, ethnicity, as opposed to race, which you could think of as biology, and nationality, which is the government, you know, ethnicity is half fiction, half myth, half reality.
	And we seem to almost not have that anymore.
	There are echoes of it, of being English-speaking people, being connected to that world, being connected to Europe.
	But we seem to really...
	And I think that's a very sad thing.
	America really has become a proposition nation.
	Yeah.
	And I wonder, it's kind of hopeless to wonder, but I can't help wondering if the nation that we had in, say, 1960 could have worked that out.
	We can't.
	It's hopeless to try to work it out now because we've taken in too many people from too many places.
	But the nation as it existed in 1960 consisted mostly of people who'd been there in the first place, including blacks, and people who'd come in in the pre-World War I immigration surge who had...
	Almost entirely been European and mostly assimilated.
	You know, it was a population with a history of living together for decades.
	And in the case of blacks and legacy whites, for centuries.
	And I wonder if we couldn't just have worked that out and come to this point, ended up in 2016, with a fairly coherent ethnicity, with a fictive element.
	You know, nobody's going to say blacks and whites.
	Come on the same stock.
	But then, as Professor Vandenberg says, every ethnicity has some fictive element.
	It's a very normal thing.
	And I wonder if we could have, if we hadn't had the 1965 Immigration Act, if we could have settled our differences with blacks, with our black fellow citizens, who've been here longer than some of us.
	They've been here longer than I have.
	And come to some sort of fairly harmonious settlement.
	What do you think?
	Do you think a harmonious settlement is possible in a multiracial society?
	It's...
	I would probably say no.
	I think this is...
	This is one of those questions, and one thing that's hard about answering a question like this is that it's not mathematics, where you can isolate something, because there are a lot of different variables.
	And as you said, very rightly, there was almost a kind of universalism of the Cold War that was playing into a lot of this new Americanism.
	In the second half of the 20th century, we've got to be even more egalitarian than the Soviets or something like that.
	So it's hard to isolate these things.
	I think you can imagine an alternative universe in which exactly what you said happened.
	Because a lot of these ethnic rivalries between Europeans, as you say, they were smoothed over.
	And also, there's just so much intermarriage.
	Who is a real Irishman at this point?
	Everyone's been kind of mixed up.
	You could say for better or for worse.
	Maybe we've lost something because of all these European ethnicities were mixed up.
	And I'm sure we have lost something.
	Have we gained something?
	Maybe that's the real question.
	But I think in an alternative universe...
	Identity is possible.
	Yeah, I think it is possible.
	Modern Greeks would like to boast that they're descended from Aristotle and Pericles and so on.
	But in fact, Greece was massively invaded by Slavs in the Middle Ages.
	They're like 25-30% Slav.
	But if you say that to a Greek patriot, he'll punch you on the jaw.
	I'll remember that.
	But yeah, I mean, but I think in a way race throws this wrench into the machine where I don't, outside of doing something that I don't think anyone, well, I certainly don't want this and I think many other people don't, and that is a miscegenation with Africans where we become this, you know, a kind of ethnicity that you can actually see.
	There is a mulatto ethnicity.
	I think, again, this is real alternative universe speculation.
	I think...
	Once you throw in that other component of Americanism has to be this global force for good in so many people's minds, I think it basically became impossible.
	I think we were kind of destined to have this This fragmenting and rather unhappy society that we have today, where no one wants to talk about race, yet it seems to inform everything.
	Whites want to talk about it.
	We don't care about race.
	We don't see race.
	While they're choosing their school district and neighborhood specifically.
	On demographics.
	Revealed preference.
	I had a whole passage in my talk on revealed preference.
	Right.
	So I think it's almost kind of like, you know, with all of these different factors that were at play, I'm not sure we could have ever reached a happy reconciliation.
	And I think we're going to have to, because we're not going to ultimately gain anything by You know, being, you know, treating the blacks like, oh, you're just, you know, you are just the worst thing in the world.
	All you do is crime and all that kind of, like, we're going to have to reach some kind of understanding with Africans in the future.
	And that's going to be hard.
	But it's going to have to be an honest understanding.
	It can't be what we have today, which is we don't want to talk about this issue slash we want to, like, We snicker about this behind closed doors.
	We want to watch videos of blacks behaving badly on YouTube and laughing.
	We need to get over that kind of thing.
	We need to reach some kind of understanding.
	But again, I am, of course, more of the revolutionary type, but I think this will be a post-American understanding.
	I think the American idea was kind of...
	Maybe you could say ruin by its success.
	It's kind of run its course.
	I think we're going to have to, if we're going to reach an honest understanding where we can both go our own ways and both flourish, I think it will probably be in a post-American context.
	Yeah, but the trouble with that and the trouble with your separation is that it may not be possible for blacks to flourish.
	They don't have the collective ability.
	Where have they flourished?
	Well, when I say flourishing, I'm not talking about Silicon Valley is going to erupt in an African ethnostate.
	I mean, I think you could say Africa was flourishing, not according to our standards, but before white men came in and brought all this medicine and lots of other things that have proven ultimately dysgenic in that context.
	You know, an African society was flourishing on its own terms.
	You know, I think I remember, I think Stefan Molyneux, he's an interesting guy, kind of anarchist-libertarian, who seems to resonate with some things that you and I might say.
	He was mentioning, I think it's a very good metaphor, if you took a polar bear outside of the Arctic realm, and you set him down in, You know, a North American forest in Montana or something like that.
	He would die because every rabbit or every deer that he wanted to see would see him coming from a mile away.
	It's this big white spot.
	He's not evolved for that environment and climate.
	And so you can't say that that polar bear is stupid or dumb or backward or whatever.
	It's just not the right context for him.
	I think a European society is really a terrible context for Africans.
	Bringing Africans into our world, it's just going to inherently be unhappy.
	It's just inherently.
	And we should never have done it.
	And I condemn anyone involved with slavery, because they did not have...
	The foresight to see this.
	They were just thinking about profit margins.
	Let's use these niggers to make money.
	I think that was basically what their thought process was.
	That is a bad thing.
	We need to think about our great-great-great-grandchildren and the consequences of our actions.
	That was then and this is now, Richard.
	Here's a statistic I put into my talk.
	It's one of my favorite statistics.
	I inherited my grandfather's atlas from 1922, atlas of the British Empire and Commonwealth.
	And it has good statistical tables in it.
	So here's a fact.
	In 1922, the British Isles had over twice the population of British West Africa.
	It was then British West Africa.
	British Isles, twice the population of British West Africa.
	Today, British West Africa, which is now four countries, Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, and Sierra Leone, British West Africa has over three times the population of the British Isles.
	That's a tremendous demographic switch over just a human lifetime.
	In 1922, my father was a young adult.
	You've gone from the British Isles being Twice as populous as West Africa, to West Africa being three times as populous as the British Isles, which has more people now than they did in 1922.
	That's what's happening in the third world, and the consequence of it is despair.
	Look at those boatloads of Africans trying to get across the Mediterranean into Europe.
	They see no hope.
	They're young people.
	They see no hope in their own countries.
	It's revealed preference again.
	Their preference is to live in a white country.
	It's their only hope of a decent life.
	There's no decent life for most of them, unless you...
	Unless you're kin to the president or some powerful bureaucrat, there's no decent life for you in Sierra Leone.
	You've got to get out of there.
	You've got to go live in a white country.
	That's the world we're in now.
	And also because the world has become small in the sense of communications.
	There was at one point when an African tribesman would have no earthly idea of what was going on in London.
	But now they have a very skewed vision of reality.
	It would be interesting to actually think about what their perspective of the West is, looking at some television programs or, say, worldwide CNN or looking at pornography on the Internet, which is probably something that they've...
	One of the first things they do whenever they get an internet connection, I would imagine.
	So, you know, they have a skewed vision of it, but it is a vision nonetheless, and it is a vision of happy town, you know, of let's just go there and it's all going to be all right.
	It's all going to be better and a land of milk and honey kind of thing.
	There's also a big pull factor because of generous immigration policies in the West over the last 50 years.
	There are now big communities of these people in all Western countries, and they're writing home and they're calling home, saying, come on over, it's great here.
	So there's also, as well as a demographic push factor, there's also a pull factor.
	Yeah.
	I don't know the answer outside of we...
	I don't think, I think the answer is going to be, it's going to ultimately be a very, very hard one.
	And it will, but it's going to have to be about separation, or I think the ultimate outcome, a hundred years from now, is that we might still have, you could say, a white, Jewish, maybe Asian, you know, financial elite,
	but we would have these countries, if you were to call them that, that maybe have little hyper-ethnic groupings within them, but have no sense of a shared history or destiny, or basically just big marketplaces for low-IQ plebs, and playing with their smartphones and stuff like that.
	You can see some images of this kind of society and...
	I'm just thinking of this Judge Dredd movie that came out a few years ago.
	That seemed to be an image of a future American society, one of debased degeneracy and crime with basically a government that was charged with keeping law and order in the most brutal means you could imagine.
	So I think that is certainly one possibility.
	We are going to see that.
	We're going to experience that anti-civilization unless we make some of these big, radical, hard choices.
	And it's not going to be about just leave me alone or something or freedom and liberty kind of stuff.
	It's going to have to be about identity and it will ultimately have to be a very hard choice of saying we want our place.
	We want living space.
	Well, there are two big extended populations who do think like that.
	One of them is the East Europeans.
	Yes.
	I don't know if you followed the meeting of the Visegrad 4 last week.
	That's Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary.
	And they certainly think like that.
	And the president of the Czech Republic made a...
	I don't know if you saw his Christmas message.
	He said, he signed off his Christmas message.
	It was all about the immigrant invasion of Europe.
	He signed it off by saying, this is our country.
	It can't be for everybody.
	It's ours.
	So you've got one group of people there who see the light, although a bit ambivalently because they also want to plug into...
	Western Europe's economic structure.
	And that's sort of crippling them.
	And they want to plug into America as well.
	A lot of the Poland and Czech Republic are very...
	They're kind of living in the Cold War a little bit, in my opinion.
	And the other big group is the East Asians.
	Japanese are still...
	With all their economic troubles, they've still set their face against mass immigration.
	So are the South Koreans.
	The Chinese I worry about a bit, but so far they haven't been taking in big numbers of people.
	So there are people there, but we're not those people.
	Western Europe is not those people, and North America is not those people.
	Yes.
	I totally agree.
	Although I would flip it around and say, again, just to take the Hegelian perspective, it's not that I think exactly what you said is wrong.
	I think it's right.
	But it's not the whole truth.
	You could flip this around and say that because Americans and Western Europeans, you could say, have experienced this great trial.
	That our lands have been invaded.
	We've confronted the other.
	We've seen it.
	That we might be the ones to change it for the future.
	Oh, I know, I know.
	You're in the book of Job, aren't you?
	When thou hast tested me, O Lord, I shall be as galled.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	So, again, this is all speculation.
	It's not mathematics.
	There's not just one simple answer.
	But I think it's worthwhile to see it in that way, that there is a certain maybe innocence of living in Eastern Europe, of not experiencing...
	what we've experienced.
	Now, again, I obviously see the other argument to what I just said, so I'm I think we all agree that that is the solution.
	We're going to have to carve out living space, and it's going to have to be ours, and there's going to have to be a big fat wall with no door.
	And by golly, they're going to pay for it.
	We can pay for it, but let's just build the damn thing.
	But anyway, John, why don't we put a bookmark in the conversation?
	But this is exactly what I thought our podcast was going to be.
	We're going to start off on a very specific topic, and then we would dilate into something really big about the future.
	So this was a lot of fun.
	We should do it again.
	I hope so.
	Great.
	Thanks, John.

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