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July 9, 2016 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:05:46
Banned in the UK

Matthew Tait joins Richard to discuss the Dallas shooting, the Brexit result, Richard’s recent UK ban, and the past and future of British nationalism. 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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If you think about the Kennedy assassination, which took place within a mile of where this assassination took place, that Kennedy assassination, it divided the country later, but at the very moment, it brought the country together.
It was a, where were you when Kennedy was assassinated?
This is a very different one, because this assassination, which resembled the Kennedy assassination in remarkable ways, you know, just the location, the use of rifles, which were apparently used, you know, picking off public authority figures.
I mean, it was like the Kennedy assassination for the 21st century.
But I guess what it's different, it's like with the assassination of a head of state.
Everyone wants to come together and talk about it.
You know, wow, this reminds us who we are as Americans.
Or, I never thought this would happen here.
How could they do this to such an energetic, handsome, young leader?
So on.
Now, people don't want to talk about it.
Because it is precisely because it is so painful.
Because to talk about it, you've got to talk about race and the reality of this fragmenting society that we live in.
You can't get away from the fact that this wasn't just a madman.
He didn't do it to impress Jodie Foster.
They did it for ideological, political reasons, and these political reasons are precisely racial nationalism.
And these, this is exactly the thing that we don't want to ever talk about in America and, and, and around the world.
Like this, this is something it, it kind of, it haunts us like a nightmare.
And yet this is the exact thing that defined this event.
But Matthew Tate, welcome.
You've never been on the podcast before that I am remiss for not inviting you earlier.
But thanks for being on.
Well, it's a pleasure.
Thanks for inviting me on.
I'm looking forward to coming to the conference in November.
So having the chance to speak to you is very, very welcome.
It's my pleasure.
Why don't...
Let's talk a little bit about what happened in Dallas.
This is definitely not what we planned to talk about today, but sometimes the best-made plans get changed when an event like what happened last night occurred.
Just speaking as a non-American, as an outsider, how are you thinking about the Dallas event?
And maybe also, how are some normies in...
Well, to be honest, with the news being so fresh, I haven't really seen that much of it.
I have some assumptions and I've done some basic reading about what's gone on.
But my impression is from the Normie press in the UK is that it's being reported along the narrative.
So the narrative is police brutality against blacks.
Blacks feel victimized.
Blacks have legitimate gripe, therefore organize themselves to defend themselves in a sort of Martin Luther-esque capacity, fighting for their own justice.
Are you referring to the Protestant reformer or the black civil rights activist?
Yes, of course, the latter.
Did I say Martin Luther?
Well, Martin Luther King has usurped Martin Luther in our collective consciousness as an interesting slip in a way.
It is interesting, yeah.
But you know what I mean.
Certainly the way it's being reported over here is exactly along the narrative without any kind of an insight into the realities of it.
And I'm assuming that these, I think the two men have been shot by police recently and it's triggered a whole fresh round of protests all across the country.
And I assume that these two young men are, Well, yeah.
I mean, look, these things are very ambiguous.
You know, every event, well, almost every event where a police officer will shoot someone is ambiguous.
There are some that certainly are cut and dry.
You know, there's a video that's being passed around of these two people in the car.
And I don't know if you've seen this one, but it's a very surreal video because it happens after the man had been shot.
And he is literally lying in his car, dying, while his girlfriend is rather calmly...
Making a selfie video of the event.
So we don't know what happened before that.
The other one involving Alton someone is, again, this guy was a huge thug.
That doesn't mean that he deserves to die, of course.
But, you know, let's be honest.
I mean, if you put yourself in the shoes of a police officer, you put yourself in his...
Think about his experience with people like Alton and others.
They are in a terribly difficult situation.
And I'm sure there's some ambiguity in these cases, but, you know, it is what it is.
And also police violence against blacks, it really, it is not, there is no, it is predictable as to their arrest.
So it's not, this whole idea that the police are out hunting blacks, which is a meme that goes around, just really does not make sense.
I mean, police violence is proportional to the arrest of blacks and blacks engaging.
Yeah, I have seen some statistics on this, and the stats that I saw, I think, indicated actually that if you're being arrested by the police for committing a violent crime or an alleged violent crime, the police are much less likely to shoot you if you're black than if you're white.
Have you seen that?
I've actually not seen that statistic.
I'm going to go look that up.
I would say this.
Whether that statistic is true or not, I think that statistic is going to be true in the foreseeable future.
Because these events, which in themselves are You could say unimportant.
There are 30,000 or so people die in automobile accidents every year in America.
That's a pretty shocking number of deaths, to be honest.
Thousands every weekend.
Yet none of them are reported.
None of them capture the imagination.
They're just treated as accidents.
But these, a few incidents of police brutality, especially when you could...
I would easily predict that...
And there are going to be serious, you know, how do you say, diversity training and, you know, racial sensitivity training going on in police departments from here on out to the point that police officers are going to be afraid to do anything to blacks.
They're going to be afraid to use force rightly.
Yeah, they're going to think, is it really worth it?
Because no matter what happens, they're going to be the ones in the firing line.
They're going to be damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Exactly.
And I think they'll be afraid to use force rightly when they should be using force.
And I think a lot of police officers will no doubt die because they are afraid to use force when force is necessary.
So it's just a big shit show.
I mean, there's no other way.
All of this stuff is bad.
And as I was saying before, Just comparing what happened in Dallas with the Kennedy assassination, it's interesting how when you listen to these politicians, they all want to be Robert F. Kennedy and hold hands and have group prayers and sing Kumbaya.
We've all been wounded last night.
Okay, I get it.
You know, these things are shocking.
We all need a little chicken soup once in a while.
But what's so important about these events is that no one really wants to discuss the nature of them.
It's like this wasn't a madman.
This wasn't just some crime.
This was an ideological, political, and racially nationalist act.
And it was meant to be perceived that way.
It was certainly intended in those terms explicitly, I'm going to kill white cops.
I'm going to kill...
White people who are symbols of authority, symbols of oppression in their minds.
And this is what it is about.
It's not like an outer space meteor hit the planet and we all need to ask why and hold hands and pray to the gods.
No, we know exactly why this happened.
It's a racially, ideologically, nationalistically motivated political crime.
And yet we just can't talk about it.
We can't talk about it on those terms.
Conservatives might want to call them racist or something.
But we don't really want to get at the heart of the matter, which is that this country is breaking apart.
And it's maybe already broken apart, and we're just seeing the symptoms of it all.
Have you ever tried to have a conversation with somebody about race?
But they actually have mixed-race children or their daughter has married someone of a different race and they have mixed-race grandchildren.
If you have the experience, certainly in my experience, they're beyond reason.
The very existence of their family and everything they care about is now skewed.
They have to sort of tackle things from the point of view of defending their own position.
So accepting reality becomes something which is bad for them, so they make every resistance to dealing with it.
And I think that that's a microcosm of what you have in multicultural societies, where to talk about the fundamental causes of Dallas is really to admit that there is a huge gulf, a fundamental rift in the entire society which just cannot be fixed in any easy way.
It's such an ugly truth to face that nobody has the guts to do it.
Hmm.
I've not talked with anyone with multiracial children like that.
I certainly have talked to black people about my ideas and things.
I've actually had some long conversations.
Recently, there was a black female journalist who I talked to for about an hour, and she wrote a story that was actually fairly accurate.
But I, you know, look, everyone talks...
In a different way to a different audience.
That's natural and it's good.
It's not being autistic.
You recognize who the other person is and you always try to find common ground with them.
You know, a person of color, a black person or someone else.
I'll talk, you know, I'll talk in a different way.
I'll try to find common ground of like, you have an identity.
This is what you care about.
Well, I care about the same things.
We actually have some common ground here.
This is where we disagree.
This is where we can coexist.
But, you know, I try to be very diplomatic.
But, I mean, have you ever talked to someone who has, let's say, a mixed-race child or grandchild or family member?
It must be just extremely...
You can just see it in their face when you're talking to them.
I used to know a guy who was a member of UKIP in the local area, and I used to bump into him on the campaign trail at election times.
Very nice guy, very sound on a lot of different things.
But then when you made the point to him that a nation has a racial element, and that racial...
Homogeneity is important for any number of different societal ends.
He wouldn't have any of it.
And I could not work out why a very rational guy who's very sensible on every other matter just could not and just seemed like he would put up a brick wall to that one point.
And then I found out that his daughter was married to a Nigerian man and that he had a couple of mixed-race grandchildren.
And after that, it all made sense.
And that pattern has been repeated when I've had conversations with people about And it's a microcosm for the nation itself.
To talk about race, why it's so painful is because you're admitting that...
Modern America doesn't work.
Or modern Britain.
I mean, look, we're all, all of these nations, we're basically all in the same boat now.
You know, maybe at Central Europe, you can start to reach, you know, let's say east of Germany, you could start to reach nations that really are racially defined and even ethnically defined nations.
But really, in terms of Britain and Western Europe, we're really in the same boat.
And so to talk about race, you're basically saying that this doesn't work.
And as humans, I mean, we are a herd animal.
At some very deep level.
And so we want to be part of the herd.
You don't want to hear that the herd is poison.
You want to hear that, oh, the herd's good.
You're part of something that's good.
It's just a natural tendency for all humans.
And so to say that, no, this is not going to end well.
This is going to end in tears, and it might end in blood.
And I don't see any other outcome, to be honest.
Maybe it would end in a whimper, not a bang, that we just go off into the sunset as a bunch of morons watching virtual reality and updating their Facebook accounts.
That's one rather terrifying option.
The idiocracy option.
But I think that a lot of signs point that we're not going to end up like that.
We're going to end up in some really painful, divisive, and lacrimose and bloody situation.
And to say that to someone, it's just painful.
It's just not something they want to hear.
And I think that there's obviously political correctness, there's cultural Marxism, there's so on.
I get it.
But there's another kind of deeper way of people don't want to hear that they're part, they're living a lie, that they're part of something that is, you know, they're part of a herd that's about to run off a cliff.
Yeah, well, it's something that's been said any number of times, that people prefer the comfortable lie to the difficult truth.
And I suppose the deeper point to that is that in regards to things like Dallas, being able to talk about that in any meaningful way...
Means questioning the entire narrative.
And when you start questioning the entire narrative, you really are being that person that no one really wants to engage with.
You're bringing that message that really inevitably leads to the acceptance that we are a herd hitting off a cliff.
And nobody wants to accept that.
So it's incredibly difficult even to get people to think analytically about a very, very complicated issue that's led to something like Dallas.
Absolutely.
Well, let's shift gears a little bit, and let's talk about Britain.
I've already done about three podcasts on Brexit, but I'm eager to do more because this is a major event, and I think there are many different...
Angles that we can take on it.
And it's an ongoing event as well.
I don't think we fully know what it means yet.
No, exactly.
But let's go back a little bit, because you have a personal history in British nationalism.
When we first met, it was 2010, in the winter 2010.
And you were the bright, young star of the BNP.
I think we met at a Rump American Renaissance meeting.
The American Renaissance conference had been canceled.
So tell us a little bit just about your own personal history, and then we can kind of get into where the right is going.
The future of UKIP, or if there is a future of UKIP, I don't know.
But why don't you talk just a little bit about your own personal story?
Yeah, sure.
I joined the BNP when I was 18 years old.
That was back in 2004.
And the BNP really started to crop up and be talked about since about 2003.
And the party was growing really, really well.
We were winning councillors all over the country.
We became the official opposition in a borough in the eastern part of Greater London.
And obviously the BNP's success culminated in the election of two members of the European Parliament.
Everyone, I think, knows about that.
I've been involved in...
Nick Griffin and...
Who was the other person?
Yeah, Nick Griffin and Andrew Bronze.
Andrew Bronze, right.
Yeah.
And I was involved very heavily.
I threw myself into it very enthusiastically.
And I campaigned locally.
I campaigned for candidates in other areas as well.
I've stood for election multiple times myself at local and national level.
Interestingly, I was the election agent for Timothy Raitt, who was the BNP candidate in the constituency of Maidenhead, which is just outside of London on the western side.
And the reason that's interesting is because the member of parliament there is Theresa May, who people are now starting to hear about, I think, outside this country, because she's probably going to be our next prime minister.
And I did get to meet her, and she had to shake my hand while I was wearing a BNP rosette, and the look on her face will remain with me forever, because she really didn't like it.
I really didn't like it at all.
She was not a fan of the BNP, and actually she's got quite a history of interfering and trying to prevent the BNP through sort of Machiavellian tactics.
That's very interesting.
She is a bit of a Machiavelle.
The fact that she has benefited from Brexit, even though she opposed Brexit, she supported David Cameron and things like that, is pretty fascinating.
And it demonstrates that there's something going on there.
She might look like a school marm, but there's something more to her.
Oh, yes.
What were some of the things she did?
Well, she's been a member of parliament for a long time.
She doesn't have any children, so she's very much committed her entire life to her political career.
So the fact that she's ambitious enough to want to even stand to become the leader of the Conservative Party and therefore the next prime minister isn't really of any great surprise.
But in, I think, 2003, 2004, at the beginning of the time when the BNP was starting to do well, particularly in the north of England, in Burnley particularly, Which is one of these towns which has had a huge influx of Muslim immigrants from Pakistan, particularly.
These are sort of old mill towns where they needed help in industry some time back.
The BNP started to do very well, and Theresa May was actively campaigning to have conservative candidates standing in areas where the BNP was standing.
And these are in areas where the Conservative Party would normally not even bother to stand.
Because it was such a Labour stronghold, such a working class area, that the Conservatives just didn't really have any presence.
But what she campaigned to do was to put up paper candidates or to run campaigns there specifically to split the right-wing vote and just to try to keep BNP councillors out.
I'd be pretty confident that her manoeuvring did actually prevent some BNP candidates from being elected because there were some very, very close-run races where we lost out.
And after she was doing that, it got back to Nick Griffin, and I understand that Nick Griffin asked Timothy Wright to stand in Maidenhead, which is an area that the BNP wouldn't normally tend to stand in because it's a wealthy commuter belt area of the royal borough.
And we stood a candidate there.
The candidate didn't do particularly well, unfortunately, but it was a very, very small campaign, and really it was more of a moral victory because we got the word out and we recruited a lot of people and we made her...
Very uncomfortable for a period of time.
Now, the thing I really wanted to get for this interview was a quote which I'm sure came from her.
But I can't find it and I can't confirm what it was or even if I'm even mistaken.
But I believe that she at some point said that the world would be a better place without BNP members in it.
Or something that was very sort of...
Kind of passive-aggressive, if you like, or certainly one of those kinds of things where, you know, if you'd said the world would be a better place if, insert, you know, minority interest group here wasn't in the world anymore, it would be headline news that this person was effectively beginning the process of dehumanizing this group and setting people against them.
So it was particularly nasty.
I can't quite confirm exactly what she said or whether I'm even mistaken, but I'm reasonably confident that something came from her like that.
And certainly when we stood there, she was one of these people who pretty much went through the basic motions of getting every single leader of every faith group together to unify against hate and to denounce the vile hate candidate and all this kind of stuff.
So she certainly has a record of trying to prevent nationalists from getting any kind of political influence.
She certainly hasn't got a very good reputation and is not well-liked amongst anyone who...
Right.
Well, the dark secret of the Tories and the Conservatives of the past 30 years is that they want to basically steal the thunder of the, quote, far right, end quote.
You know, there's this famous speech that Margaret Thatcher gave where she said we're being swamped or we're being swarmed.
Swamped.
Swamped.
She used a very vivid language.
And that was directed against the National Front.
You know, certainly some of the Tories at least wanted to kind of ride the wave of nationalist feelings, which were behind the Brexit vote, no doubt.
But we're going to end up with Theresa May.
I will mention that I'll release a little bit of news on this podcast.
I've been waiting to see...
How best to release this news.
But I actually received a personal correspondence from Theresa May just the other day.
It came in this manila envelope that I still have.
It's here in my office.
It says something like, on her...
My Majesty's Britannic Service or something.
And when I got an envelope like that, I was like, wow, it reminded me of a James Bond film.
Or I thought maybe I was being invited to meet the Queen.
Yeah, maybe you're being invited to the garden party.
Which would be, I expected.
Yeah, of course.
Certainly deserved, Richard.
But no, it was a letter in which...
I was informed that I was banned from the United Kingdom, and it was sent to me from the Home Secretary, Theresa May, signed by her.
So it's a pretty...
I have to say, it's been really shocking for me because, as I've mentioned to you before, the first time I was in England...
Maybe not the first time, but a very memorable time was when I was in high school or middle school.
I was probably like 12 or 13 years old with my grandparents and my mom.
We did all the touristy stuff and we saw a couple of...
West End, like, theater productions.
And then we went on a car trip around Northern England.
We went to some places where King Arthur, like the historical King Arthur might have been.
I mean, really, really fun stuff.
You know, I have a memory.
Still have the photos.
And I've been to, you know, England many times since then, and London, and some other places, Scotland.
And just the idea that I can never return is just...
Pretty shocking and very sad, to be honest.
I can only enter England through the internet, apparently, for the rest of my life, unless there is a dramatic change in politics.
So it's a pretty shocking turn of events.
Yeah, I don't know what to say, Richard.
I mean, I'm shocked to hear that news.
I mean, things are bad in many ways over here, but...
We tend to be a bit less authoritarian with this kind of stuff than, say, countries like Germany and other places with very, very strict political laws.
So I am very, very shocked at that.
It really is absolutely appalling.
Yeah, it is appalling.
I was thinking...
Just putting yourself in the mindset of someone like Theresa May.
For one thing, my name is Richard Spencer, which is about as English as you can get.
And when they were describing why they banned me, they were listing all these things.
And I actually expected to read some offhand, thoughtless...
Comment I made on Twitter or something like that.
You know, blah, blah, blah.
These damn immigrants or something.
But no, they actually quoted from public speeches that I've given.
And one of them at the Traditional Britain Group a few years ago.
And so all of these speeches that I gave, they would quote these paragraphs where I was being, you know, hyper-romantic and bombastic about how, you know, in the ashes of the old world we'll build anew, you know, all this kind of heady stuff.
And I don't know how anyone could conceivably find that.
To be inciting violence or the equivalent of violence or whatever they think it is.
So I do kind of wonder...
Do they blush a little bit when they do this?
Or no?
Are they actually immensely self-satisfied?
Do they think they're actually accomplishing something?
Do they think that it's bad, but it must be done?
I don't know the answer to that question.
What do you think is going through their minds when a white person like Theresa May is banning a...
An Englishman abroad.
My name is Richard Spencer, after all.
They're banning someone for speaking, literally for ideas, because they don't actually even accuse me of doing anything violent or untoward or illegal.
It's pure ideas.
What is going through their mind when they do that?
Well, I can only guess, but I'd say if we had a Labour government, particularly a sort of Tony Blair, Blairite government, I'd say any Home Secretary would probably rub their hands with glee at the idea of banning Richard Spencer.
In fact, I'm sure they'd rub their hands with glee if they could ban everybody with any kind of waspish-sounding name from ever coming into the country.
If your name isn't Mohammed, they don't want you, Richard.
But we've got a conservative or so-called conservative government, and Theresa May being Home Secretary is supposed to be a relatively right-wing traditional conservative.
The only thing I can really think is that these people are like office bureaucrats.
They're filling out paperwork.
I doubt they had any emotional feeling at all about this.
And I would say that they're probably having to balance the scales here because they're probably having to ban any number of different people called Mohammed from entering the country and plenty of other non-WASPI foreigners.
For every person, they have to ban from coming into the country for being an Islamic radical or for training in Syria or God knows what else they might be getting up to to trigger the warnings in the home office.
For every one of those, they probably have to pick on someone like you.
And then they get to go around to the lobby groups, the minority lobby groups, I'd say particularly the Muslim lobby groups, which are growing very strongly in this country.
They can say, we ban Richard Spencer.
Yeah, that's another unintended consequence, or intended consequence, I guess.
I think to keep the peace in a country where there is such huge rifts, such a divided country, we inevitably suffer injustices like this, because there is always this need to show all of these minority groups who must be kept in check to save the peace, that they are not being victimized, they are not being picked upon.
And the government have these really solid examples of other groups, of nationalistic groups, of people who advocate for the interests of European descended peoples, and be able to say, look, we're being even-handed here.
We're not just picking on you.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, enough about me.
Let's talk a little bit more about British nationalism and the future of it.
So talk about the fall of the BNP.
I think we can probably pronounce its death at this point.
It still exists, but it is not really going anywhere, and it's heavily demoralized.
So what do you think was a turning point in this?
A lot of people point to the Question Time performance by Nick Griffin, which was in 2009, was it?
Or 2010.
But that might have just been a symptom of a deeper decay.
What do you think set off the decline and things like that?
Well, it's a very complicated subject, but I did hear your podcast with Adrian Davis, and I know you made that point about question time, and I do think that is very much the key turning point, if there is one.
I think at that point, Nick Griffin went from being a guy who is kept away from the media, he's not given a chance, he's unfairly treated, he's got something to say, to being the guy who had his chance and blew it.
And I think in people's mind, there was a lot of hope and it was all seen as potential and a growing party and suddenly we burst into the mainstream.
And in a way, you could say the BNP was destroyed by its own success.
But I suppose more fundamentally, it was about the level of talent of Nick Griffin and the people around him, and I suppose all of us really in the BNP.
The level of talent that the BNP could attract was never particularly high, and it had a way of alienating and driving away people and also ruining lives of people that came into it because of the very unfriendly circumstances in this country and in others that you know very well about.
But the BNP is certainly a spent force and is no longer relevant to politics in this country.
I don't think there's any point in expecting it to ever achieve anything ever again, really.
So it's a very sad situation.
I suppose a lot of us want to pick a side, and therefore we've taken more of an interest in UKIP, and I think Farage has warmed on people, if you like.
And he's a very talented person.
He's very talented.
He's made some errors.
Announcing that he lost the Brexit vote, that was bizarre.
I don't know why he did that.
Yeah, I've never seen anyone do that before.
That was strange.
But he survived it.
So he's made some mistakes.
But even though I'm critical of Nigel Farage, he is a very compelling person.
To talk with Nigel Farage.
He has something to say.
He has a perspective.
Clearly charismatic and funny person.
So he definitely has that going for him.
It is this interesting thing where you have this...
There's probably a real direct correlation, just this decline of the BNP and then the rise of UKIP.
Do you think that a lot of the same voters were just switching parties?
Even though the BNP was probably going after more of a working class type voter, and that the UKIP was not going afterward, at least theoretically.
I mean, that was a kind of neo-Thatcherite, neoliberal.
Capitalism first type thing.
But I would just presume that a lot of the BNP working class voters were switching allegiances to this Thatcherite party.
So do you think that's where it was, where being anti-EU was a kind of metaphor for being nationalistic, as opposed to being directly nationalistic?
Yeah, I think in many ways the fact that UKIP's primary objective is not anything to do with immigration or anything that's loosely related to race was, I think the way we described it in the BNP and the way we used to talk about things was it was a reputational shield.
And other political parties in Europe have this as well.
So if you look, for example, at the Flemish Nationalist Party, which is now called the Vlaams Belang.
The thing they're primarily known for in Belgium isn't their policies on immigration.
It's that they are separatists.
They want a separate state for the Flemings.
And there are any number of parties in Europe who have done very, very well who have done so with this reputational shield.
They have another subject which they really hammer on much more than they do immigration.
But immigration is their secondary area of interest.
I think UKIP did benefit from that in some ways, although it's very strange if you look back to the time when I joined the BNP, UKIP already had many different members of the European Parliament elected, and they already did well in the Euro elections, which happened every five years.
Ironically.
Yeah, ironically, as you say.
And now they're all out of a job.
They voted themselves out of a job.
That's actually worth talking about, actually, the whole what's the future there.
In regards to the BNP, in election after election, at local level and at national level, the BNP used to get a lot more votes than UKIP.
I remember seeing a stat that our guys did, and it showed that UKIP was having to pay this enormous amount of money for every vote that they won.
And the BNP was spending this minuscule amount of money for the votes they got.
The UKIP voters of today certainly are far higher than the BNP voters of five, ten years ago.
So this isn't simply a case of BNP voters switching, although I'm sure that BNP voters of the past, no longer with a BNP candidate to vote for, will almost certainly be voting for the UKIP candidates.
It's really something that's far more significant because people are really starting to drop the main political parties.
The base of support that UKIP has is far larger than what the BNP had, even at its height.
Right.
But there is this strange self-liquidating aspect to UKIP where, you know, Nigel Farage, it really was a 20-year anniversary.
I think wasn't UKIP founded in 1997 or 1998 or something like that.
I thought it might have been older than that.
I think it might be early 90s.
Oh, early 90s.
Okay.
Well, there was another party I think called the Referendum Party that existed.
Anyway, this is all technical history.
But anyway, he's been on this crusade, and he won.
Effectively.
And he voted himself out of Parliament.
And he voted himself out of the European Parliament, which is, you know, again, ironically, one of the few places where the people who were associated with the Flemish bloc...
Philippe Claes?
Well, Philippe Claes, but Philippe de Winter.
And others, they've had more success in the European Parliament, even though they speak out against the EU constantly.
But UKIP has voted themselves effectively out of a job.
What happens?
Because, I mean, Nigel Farage resigned, and who was his rival who tweeted a smiley face with sunglasses when that happened?
Douglas Carswell.
Yeah, he's a very strange man.
And he explicitly said that, you know, he was offended by the...
The anti-refugee poster that the UKIP used, that this isn't about immigration, even though the voters, for the voter, it was 100% about immigration.
But for the leaders, oh, it wasn't at all about immigration.
It's about all these arcane regulations, Brussels issues, and so on.
And then also you have even the Tories who, you know, there was a shakeup there.
And you get someone who might, in the person of Trump, Theresa May, who might conceivably be worse than David Cameron, if that's possible.
And it's just this kind of terrible, but in a way very predictable aspect of, you could say, metaphorical nationalism, where these so-called conservative or libertarian leaders will use nationalist energies and use...
The nationalist voting bloc, but for their own ends.
Daniel Hannon is another one, this journalist and writer, just saying some of the most appalling things.
We want to get our way from Europe.
That's the old world.
We want to link up with India and South Asia for our great English-speaking capitalist brothers.
It's just terrible nonsense.
Yeah, it's agony to listen to, it really is.
I guess I should probably write an article about this.
There seems to be this almost self-liquidating aspect to certain nationalisms, where if we don't talk about the real thing, the real dope, and we just talk about getting out of the EU, we end up getting out of the EU and not really changing anything.
Well, you can see many positive things in the Brexit vote, and I certainly voted for...
To leave.
And I think this is a great opportunity, but I think you've said it quite well, really, that this is an opportunity to take back control of what we're doing.
And it gives hope to people who thought that you just could not do anything about the direction that we were going in towards complete globalism and consumer capitalism.
But really, it's an option to take back the controls on a vehicle that's careening towards a cliff.
And our next leader could either decide to wrest controls and steer us further away from the inevitable doom, or they could decide to just go full throttle and carry on towards it.
And I think Theresa May would be one of those people who will just pedal to the metal, as you say.
That is quite terrible.
What do you think?
I mean, I know we don't quite know, but...
Do you think UKIP will be destroyed by its success?
Or all this energy is going to flow into the Tories?
To be honest, I've had this kind of conversation with some people and I even considered joining the Conservative Party because I think the fact that UKIP have grown to the point that they have where they're really able to be quite an effective pressure group on the Conservative Party.
I think really what will inevitably happen and what will have to happen is that the Conservatives will have to take back some of that support from UKIP.
And the only way they can do that is to have someone come along and say, at least say things about stopping immigration.
But of course we know the history there.
Margaret Thatcher said kind of that she was going to stop immigration and therefore everyone left the National Front vote and voted for her and then nothing was ever done about it.
However, what we could potentially see, I think, is someone who is rather more a rebel come up through the Conservative Party.
And I think actually that Andrea Leedsom, who is the only person now who can stop Theresa May from becoming the next Prime Minister, is in with a fighting chance.
And she is very much an outsider.
She's got the support of a number of different members of Parliament who I do actually think a lot of.
There's a local member of parliament to me called Steve Baker who almost no one's ever heard of.
But Steve Baker, he's very keen on monetary reform.
He hosted the first debate in parliament on the subject of money being created as debt and the entire fiat money system.
And he brought that into parliament for the first time to be debated in over 100 years.
And he's a guy I think is immensely genuine and would be a great leader of the future.
He is one of her key supporters and that to me really symbolizes something good.
Leedsen was firmly in favor of Brexit.
She's got a number of other very politically incorrect opinions on things like fox hunting, gay marriage.
I think that although about two-thirds of the conservative MPs backed Theresa May, And only one third backed Andrea Leedsom.
I think that the Tory membership are far more conservative, as is always the case, than the representatives.
And what happens now at this next stage of the leadership contest is it goes to a vote of the members.
And I think that the members will be much more favorable towards Andrea Leedsom than the MPs are.
Although Andrea Leadsom certainly is still a conservative in all the bad ways in many respects, I certainly think there is some hope there.
And I think that she will ride the tide that has been created by UKIP as a pressure group and from the Leave EU campaign.
I honestly don't think that UKIP is going to really ever get to a position where it's going to take control of the government.
I think that's because of the people who are in UKIP.
I think Adrian said this.
Even UKIP, being far more respectable than the BNP ever was, if you want to use that word, it just doesn't seem to have that talent base.
Douglas Carswell, I thought, was one of the better people in UKIP.
He's gone on to show he's completely unable to get on with others and that his motivations seem to be at completely odds with the entire basis of UKIP, aside from leaving the EU.
Honestly, I think that UKIP is really made up of its MEPs.
It had a large number of MEPs, more than any other party in the European Parliament from our last elections.
In fact, UKIP, actually, for the first time in the history of Britain, they won a national-level election.
It was the first time that a party that wasn't the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, or the old Liberal Party, that doesn't exist anymore, won a national-level election.
So it was really quite radical back a couple of years ago.
Now they've voted themselves out of business, and all of these people are going to have to go and find jobs or something.
So who knows what's going to happen?
But I honestly don't think that UKIP are going to survive this particularly well.
I think the only way they could have survived this is if Nigel Farage remained his leader.
Really, UKIP is made up of its MEPs and Nigel Farage particularly.
So quite frankly, I don't have a great deal of hope for UKIP.
Why did Nigel...
Well, I think that he's been involved for so long.
He's had a very long career in politics.
He's burned himself out, I think.
He's very much a one-man force.
He's been receiving a greater amount of death threats, and he has to be followed around by...
Probably more security than the Prime Minister does.
There's a lot of very, very violently-minded left-wing types, liberals, violent liberals who absolutely hate him.
And the environment in this country is a bit like with Donald Trump, where these people feel that it's a legitimate thing to try and attack someone like that.
You saw actually he was an English guy, comes all the way from England to try to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally.
And I completely think that if Nigel Farage was ready to get into the Westminster Parliament and UKIP was to grow further, I really think that he would be in danger of these kind of lone wolf attacks.
From people who have been whipped into this sort of moral frenzy that the idea that UKIP are going to get into government is going to be the end of the world and the sky is going to fall in.
All of this kind of rhetoric has come from the very top.
Even David Cameron has been talking about how if we vote to leave the EU, it's going to be like World War III.
The sky is going to fall in.
All of us are going to starve to death.
This was how the campaign was fought over here.
Nigel Farage is seen as the harbinger of doom.
I don't think he wants that anymore.
Yeah, I completely understand that.
That's in a way sad that people don't want to be involved in politics like that.
It's also just the personal scrutiny that a politician can undergo.
I mean, just some little mistake you make in life.
What have you, some indiscretion or sexual affair or something like that.
The idea of all these things being broadcast is pretty terrifying.
Everyone's made mistakes.
It's a very dirty business.
I've read a few articles on this, but why did Boris Johnson pull out?
I thought he was poised to take advantage of the situation.
And he seemed wildly ambitious.
Yeah, I have no doubt that Boris Johnson is very ambitious, and as Adrian said in your interview, I have no doubt that he has the utmost confidence that he believes that the right thing for the country is for him to be Prime Minister.
I honestly don't know quite why he didn't stand.
I think if he had stood, he'd have done very, very well.
And being one of the key faces of the Brexit vote, I think he would have done particularly well when it comes to this second stage.
I think if it was Boris versus Theresa May, I think Boris would be very much the favourite to win.
Honestly, I have no idea why.
There must be something else.
When you can't explain something, there must be some other factor in that.
Because it's not like he lost his ambition.
I've heard things about this Grove person who was his...
Or his patron and then kind of turned on him and so on.
But I imagine there's some skeleton in his closet.
Yeah, I'd imagine he's exactly the kind of guy who would have skeletons in his closet.
Right.
Maybe literally skeletons.
Yeah, maybe.
You never know.
He went to Eton, so he's part of the elite.
Right, yes.
Getting blowjobs from dead pigs or something.
Oh yeah, I'm sure.
I'm glad I didn't go to Eden.
Well, the club with the pigs ceremony, I believe, wasn't Eden.
It was actually, I think it was the Bullington Club, which is an Oxford drinking club.
But Boris Johnson was in that as well.
In fact, you've probably seen the famous photograph, David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and George Osborne, the Chancellor, all dressed up in their fancy clothes going to a Bullington Club dinner.
Yes.
Looking excessively smug.
Oh, yes.
Incredibly self-satisfied.
Yeah, kind of makes you want to punch them in the face.
Maybe a little bit more.
So, what's going on in...
In Britain, in terms of, you could say, the alt-right.
Because I think that is, you know, if politicians are going to just continually betray us.
And I think Brexit has clearly been betrayed.
I mean, you know, who knows?
Maybe this will launch something that I'm not seeing.
but it just looks like it's just this really predictable, coxervative betrayal of nationalist voters, where they vote for one thing and their leaders give them something else, maybe even the exact opposite.
But what's going on in terms of the alternative right, you could say, in Britain in terms of groups and things like that?
Well, I think that going back to the times when I first came over to Amren and we first met, back in those days, everyone wanted to hear about what was going on in this country with the BNP and nationalist politics in Europe because there was just nothing going on in America.
I think we're far behind you guys.
I think you've got a much stronger sort of an intellectual output over there.
You've got many, many more excellent writers.
You've got the proliferation of websites and podcasts.
I really think that we will probably be able to ride on the coattails of that because we share the same language.
I do bump into people who I would never have expected to be listening to podcasts, say, on TRS or the Radix podcasts.
Or tuning in to Jared Taylor on YouTube.
And it is starting to spread, but there isn't really anything much springing up over here, I don't think, at the moment.
We're very much plugging into what's going on over in the States.
It's an interesting phenomenon that when you don't have a political outlet, it does inspire...
Perhaps greater intellectual activity.
And in America, we haven't really had a political outlet.
I think it's, you know, there are certainly people who think that we can play ball with Republicans or something, but I think those people are a bit delusional.
But in this interesting case, the Trump movement has really inspired a lot of.
So it maybe kind of contradicts my earlier thing.
I guess what I was thinking is that when you don't have any kind of political outlet, it might inspire you to engage in that all-important intellectual and cultural discourse and building of a cultural space, as you called it.
And in some sense, when you have a political outlet, you're a little too political.
And, you know, you're thinking about winning elections or how you're going to, you know, talk to the person in Nebraska or some English village.
And, you know, you're not going to send that person a Radix article.
They would probably be confused and, you know, things like that.
You want to speak to them where they are.
I mean, that's what a politician does.
And that's fine, and that's good in its own sphere, but there are obvious limits to that.
You can't always just speak to where people are.
You have to speak to different people, and you have to kind of speak to where you hope they will be.
And I think that is something that in America we have done, I think, maybe because we've benefited from being in the wilderness.
But that's changed.
We have.
Go ahead.
We had all of our eggs in one basket, and that basket was the BNP.
And nothing is more addictive than succeeding.
And when you can have a tangible, real victory, like someone you know becomes an elected representative of some kind in a local area or in a national area, you really do feel as though you're on top of the world.
And we're always chasing the next success.
But in the end, these things are transitory and another election comes along and there's a bit of a dip in support and you lose it.
And because all of our eggs were in that one basket, there was a huge, huge dip in morale.
And I think a lot of those people have come along, they've become political campaigners, they've got disillusioned and burned themselves out and been disappointed and let down.
And they've gone back to get on with their normal lives to a certain degree.
And I think that what you've benefited from over there in a way is...
Is not having all your eggs in one basket and being forced to create an alternative space, an alternative cultural phenomena, which is far more advanced over there than it is over here.
But I think we can benefit from it.
I think it is incredibly important to give people a way of being involved in what we're doing without having to give them a load of leaflets to give to people or just force them to stand in an election.
I think we've always set the hurdle too high.
The barrier to entry for our movement was always quite high.
You had to be very bold and very fearless and have nothing to lose or be very independent, economically particularly, to be involved.
Whereas to be involved in the alt-right, in the capacity in which it's been born in America more recently, it just means you have to have a really cool...
Sounding alias and be on the right forums and start creating your own YouTube channel and speaking or making up your own music or doing karaoke to other stuff and having fun.
And having fun and creating cultural content and all of these different things that have sprung out of it is I think a far more living, breathing, organic thing than just trying constantly to win an election.
So, I'm really, really favourable about the things that are going on over there, and I just hope that it does spark things over here.
And I am starting to see people who are doing musical things and cultural things, and we have these things, Legion Martial Arts camps, where we go off and we do martial arts things, and we do survival techniques, and we just get back to nature and form bodily bonds and stuff.
I think that's the way that we're going to do this.
I think if we allow ourselves to get...
Drawn down into the mundane all the time.
I don't think that that's where we're going to find victory.
But I think you can ride the coattails of a phenomenon like Donald Trump, and I think there's a huge opportunity to recruit people.
But I don't think their vote is particularly important.
Obviously, I hope they vote for Trump, and I hope that Trump is the next president.
That would be a great thing.
But I think really the important thing here is to capitalize on the opportunity to recruit people into our new culture, our new...
Sub-society, this alternative society that is going to be the body of people from which something political can come.
Whereas what we've always been trying to do over in Britain here is to put the cart before the horse, is to try and take control of a government when actually the people aren't really ready for it.
What we're doing, I think, over with your right is to create a community from which political change can come.
Well, I totally agree.
However, for me to ever visit England again, we will need some people in government.
Yes, that's true.
I'll work on that one.
Thanks.
Don't tweet too much.
Maybe I shouldn't leave the country.
I might not be let back in.
Well, you know, this is another thing.
Maybe we should just end on this prospect, which is that...
None of us have experienced something like the Soviet Union.
None of us have experienced the life that was discussed in George Orwell's 1984.
The world we've lived in has been one of soft power.
And it has been very soft.
You know, Theresa May has not thrown me in jail.
Victor Orban put me in jail for a weekend, but that was an interesting experience.
I'm glad it happened, but I never feared for my life.
We've lived in a soft totalitarianism, you could say.
But I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't start to get hard at some point, because these things are cracking up.
And Dallas was an extreme example of this.
You know, this isn't going to end well, as we talked about before.
And maybe in order to perpetuate liberalism, the liberal elites are going to have to start to get hard.
And they're not just going to, you know, not allow in an American citizen.
Because, you know, a foreign...
A foreign citizen has effectively no rights to enter a country.
I get that.
But they actually might start taking away the rights of citizens who are law-abiding but think dangerous thoughts.
I don't want to depress you or scare you.
It's not my intention.
I'm just being realistic about what might happen.
Yeah, I can't rule that out completely.
I think actually what the elites have shown is that their ability to use soft Soft, persuasive measures is incredibly effective.
And I think what the Soviet Union shows is that if you use hard measures, you make people aware of what's going on.
And if there's a member of the Stasi in a black suit on the street corner with a gun, you know you're being oppressed.
So this could go several ways.
But if it does get sufficiently hard, it could be that they overplay their hand and people begin to become much more aware of what's going on.
So let's just hope that that's the way it happens and that they do decide to become harder and harder on people, people like us with dissenting opinions.
Hopefully that we can take.
Yeah, I agree.
I think that is absolutely the best outlook.
Which is that it makes things more clear.
And even the Soviet Union wasn't the Soviet Union after a while.
Stalinism burnt itself out.
You can't perpetuate something like that.
The latter Soviet Union, not saying it was an ideal society by any stretch of the imagination, but they weren't just, you know.
Shooting newspaper editors left and right and things like that.
There's a tremendous amount of surveillance, to be sure.
But it was not the Stalinist caricature that some people thought of.
As you say, you're absolutely correct that a kind of Americanism has been more effective.
Soft totalitarianism has been more effective than hard.
But it's almost by the nature of the game, they're going to have to become harder.
In their totalitarianism and in a way that is good for us because it makes things clear.
It's not just about, oh, how could you hold that opinion?
That's so crazy kind of thing.
It's more like, why are they arresting bloggers?
I think that will kind of give maybe a few light bulbs will go off in people's minds when that starts happening.
I'm thinking of, isn't there a sort of a cultural trope that you see in a lot of horror films where...
You know, the figure of horror in the movie is someone like, on Nightmare on Elm Street, is it Freddy Krueger?
Yes.
And he comes after you in your sleep and you can't do anything about it, but you have to bring him into the real world before you can kill him.
And, you know, if there's a ghost...
You have to sort of corporealize it.
You have to crystallize the enemy so that you can attack him.
And if our enemies are going to crystallize themselves and corporealize themselves in front of us as an enemy, as you say, that could be the clarifying moment that could lead to something new.
This is a brilliant analysis, Matthew.
This is like a real Radix-type perspective on things.
I totally agree.
I think that's how you defeat Freddy, is you bring him into the real world.
You confront him.
But it is also interesting where a ghost is worse than a real person.
You can kill a person, but you can't really kill Freddy because he's in your mind.
But once they're out of our minds and it becomes clearer, then we can deal with them.
It's a nightmare on Elm Street.
Well, let's put a bookmark in it on that note.
Thank you, Matthew.
You should definitely come back on.
I can't believe you haven't been on before, so I'll definitely have you on soon.
Yeah, great.
Well, it's been an absolute pleasure.
I'd love to come on and speak some more, so thanks very much for having me.
Thanks, and if I don't see you before then, I will definitely see you in Washington, D.C. in November.
This is going to be a great event, so I really look forward to that.
Yeah, I can't wait to come.
It's the only trip I've got.
Booked abroad at the moment and it still seems a long way away.
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