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May 30, 2018 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:05:30
Tommy

Andrew Joyce and Richard Spencer discuss their ambivalence about Tommy Robinson's recent arrest for breaking contempt of court laws in Great Britain. 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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All right.
Andrew, Tommy Robinson, what are we going to make of this latest episode?
I would say that the two of us, I can tell, are rather ambivalent about what just happened to Tommy Robinson.
He was, of course, arrested outside of a London courthouse.
Apparently pled guilty to obstructing this trial.
But I think that both of us are rather ambivalent about it.
And I would say that on both an emotional and an intellectual level, both of us are probably in the same place in the sense that we get the outrage.
but there are other deeper questions to it.
It's not as simple as many people are making it on Twitter, you know, believe it or not.
But let me first just lay down the emotional response to this, which I see almost universally, with a few exceptions on social media.
And that is that...
There's no more free speech in Britain.
Which isn't exactly wrong.
And that Tommy Robinson was doing journalism.
He was trying to report on this case that had a gag order on it about Muslim rape gangs.
And that a malicious and hypocritical establishment is cracking down on him.
They found that this was their opportunity, their moment to pounce.
They did.
And they want to put him in jail for 13 months where he will likely be killed.
Let's try to...
That is the narrative, at least from a wide swath of the alt-right, the alt-light, mainstream conservatives, the Drudge Report, Alex Jones, etc.
Let's dive into this a little bit.
And I actually want...
To ask you some questions about this, because this gets into arcane, well, I shouldn't say arcane, just indigenous legal norms of the English system that are a little bit surprising for outsiders.
So, first off, what kind of gag order was issued around this case?
And what does that actually entail?
There are some similarities in the American system.
Most of our listeners are from North America, by no means all, in which a prosecutor and a defendant and a judge would not want a jury prejudice.
So that if something is just absolutely sensational, they will move to hold the trial in a different region or something like this.
What is going on with the gag order?
Because I think from the start, this thing strikes me and probably most other people as a bit odd.
And it just seems unfair.
One looks at it and one thinks that the government is trying to suppress...
Yeah, I think this question of fairness and how fair the whole episode was or is comes down to how we form our perspective of what actually happened.
And there's a lot of layers to what happened and there's a lot of pretext to what happened.
To answer the first question, the gag order is fairly straightforward.
What it basically did was it produced an injunction against press or media reporting of what was going on in the courtroom in relation to Tommy Robinson, and this is what the judge herself explained, not necessarily because of anything that was said.
To Tommy Robinson or the specifics of what he was alleged to have done in order to be arrested, but rather to protect the ongoing grooming case, which was still active at that time.
For reasons which have never been adequately explained, this grooming case has been shrouded in a media taboo.
If the government and the British establishment wish to present themselves as being open and fair about these grooming cases, these prolific cases, then they're really going the wrong way about it by shrouding them in secrecy like this in such a way that it would attract someone like Tommy Robinson to come and provoke court officials.
The legal system and provoke the media into devoting some attention to these neglected cases and these shrouded cases.
Right in the origins of this, what we're really coming back to is the fact that these grooming, scandal, legal cases are mired in media inattention, legal obscurity.
and a general kind of keeping away from the public.
And that builds tension.
And the tension is certainly there in England in particular.
Is this normal?
I mean, are other cases given this gag order, or is it done on a case-by-case basis, or is this normal for when a trial is ongoing that reports are not made?
In sensitive cases, and they normally are rape cases, gag orders are certainly more common.
In some drug dealing cases where witness protection may be an issue and the protection of certain evidence or the reliability of certain evidence, gag orders certainly have been put in place.
Celebrities who've been accused of crimes have been successful in the past in securing gag orders against the press, and the press have challenged that, and sometimes they've been successful in discovering the identity of the celebrity who's going on trial for a particular offence.
In many cases, the media has been unsuccessful.
The terms of it are normally decided on a case-by-case basis, and it can vary according to the desires of the judge.
In that particular case.
The problem, really, though, is that it seems to be almost systematic when it comes to these Muslim grooming scandals.
That's not to say that the press hasn't reported on many of them.
It just seems that there seems to be a slightly higher number of instances in which these gag orders have been imposed in these cases.
Now, it's my understanding, based on the names of the defendants in this particular case, That the majority of them had already been imprisoned and were still in prison for similar offences that they were accused of in this particular trial.
So why it would be controversial to let the public know that convicted rapists are standing trial again for another set of charges kind of baffles me.
And I can fully understand why someone like Tommy Robinson would want to go and be provocative in such an atmosphere and poke at that and prod at that and see what happens.
But in terms of what actually happened that day, there are kind of three different angles that you can come at to try and get at the truth.
As far as it can be established.
Now, you mentioned there the kind of emotional social media narrative, which is that Tommy Robinson was kind of innocently standing outside.
He kind of wanted to break this media taboo on the grooming gangs.
He's kind of the brave working class hero.
He's arrested and imprisoned arbitrarily, and the media is gagged in a kind of vindictive measure.
To just hush up this scandal against free speech in Britain.
So that's the kind of narrative that spread like wildfire.
Then there's also, if you want it, you can investigate the available footage.
Now, I looked on the day for footage recorded from different individuals, longer footage, but all I could find was a very short Piece of footage from Tommy Robinson's own cell phone from his perspective.
There's a kind of preamble, a conversation between him and some of his colleagues.
It's a little bit kind of jokey.
It's a little bit, this is what I'm doing.
I'm standing outside court.
There's a rape trial going on inside.
And Tommy Robinson actually sounds like he's being very careful about his use of language.
But someone beside him can clearly be heard saying these people should be taken out and hanged.
I think he says if they're guilty, they should be taken out in hand.
But that's what he says, and there's a bit of laughing.
And at that point, it seems like Tommy Robinson is approached by a female police officer who says something to the effect, I'm just going to introduce you here to my colleague, and then Tommy Robinson says, am I under arrest?
And then this particular police officer does proceed then to arrest Tommy Robinson.
Is that, again, what you said earlier about fairness, is that fair?
Of course it's not.
It's not fair to be arrested for such an innocuous exchange of opinions outside of a courtroom.
And with statements which are kind of, they're hyperbolic.
They're not meant, seriously, we're not talking about someone who's standing outside the courtroom calling for an organized posse.
Right.
To lynch the defendants.
Well, if they're guilty, in my opinion, they should be hanged.
To arrest Tommy Robinson in those circumstances for breach of the peace is a gross injustice, in my opinion.
And it was performed, if not with some degree of calculation, then out of absolutely appalling ignorant overzealousness.
And it's almost inexcusable.
Tommy Robinson was then, of course, taken inside.
Whenever you look up Leeds Crown Court's schedule for that day, you can see that he was pretty much brought before the judge instantly.
The gagging order was put in place.
Before it was put in place, the media rushed to get the story out.
So whenever I first heard about it happening, I googled.
And there were dozens of hits, but when you clicked on them, by that point the gag order had been imposed and it said, "Sorry, this link is unavailable." So it was kind of that quick.
Everything happened that quickly.
So you can see, based on the footage, why the emotional reaction would really spread like wildfire.
But there is a kind of a third way of looking at the entire scenario, and that's by looking at some of the context to all of this.
One of the contexts is that Tommy Robinson had a suspended sentence hanging over him, and the suspended sentence was for contempt of court, and that was for the last time these defendants, or one of the last occasions on which these defendants went on trial for these offenses.
Tommy Robinson...
Filmed inside of the courtroom or attempted to film the defendants within the court precincts.
That is illegal in the United Kingdom.
Under the 1925 Criminal Justice Act, it's illegal to attempt to record, film, or even try to depict a likeness of a defendant in an ongoing trial.
It's not like Right.
But actually, it's slightly different than that.
In most federal courtrooms, cell phones are confiscated as you enter.
and so there there there is a i i do think there is a general decorum uh as it were of of not not making clandestine uh recordings um not you know turning a court into a a circus-like atmosphere i i was in federal court not too long about a year ago actually um and we could not take um recording equipment inside i.e and you know of course an iphone is a effectively a
better video camera than was uh than these massive things you you we had uh you know 20 years ago so um uh that that is not particularly unusual and you know You know, this is where I'm ambivalent about this whole thing.
Because, I mean, I have never made a secret of my criticism of Tommy Robinson's ideology.
And we'll get more into this later, this anti-jihad group of people and so on.
That being said, I mean, I recognize that the system is against him.
And so one can rightfully ask, should you play by the rules if the system hates you this much?
The system is unfair.
The system wants to crack down on you.
Shouldn't you thus act like a real dissident and in a way push the system to its limits and so on?
Almost in an Alinsky-like fashion.
I think that's a legitimate...
That being said, on the other hand, as you tweeted out on the day it happened, it's smarter to fight another day sometimes.
It's one thing to just go right full frontal, go right into the belly of the beast or just attack your opponent.
you know you've got a couple of soldiers together and you just do a rampage you know bull rush of the other opposing army there's something about that I mean, he was putting himself in major jeopardy by simply doing this, and was his potential gains of...
Snapping photos or just documenting this on a little camera or maybe a GoPro or something.
Were those gains worth that risk?
And I guess one could ask then an additional question.
Was he attempting to make a scene to the degree that he would be arrested and there would be this big blow up?
And then an additional question after that.
Is, in a way, the outrage good or bad?
Are we kind of going along with this, even though there's not a lot to it?
Or actually, is supporting Tommy Robinson, because Tommy Robinson is brave, there's no question about it, but is getting excited about this Tommy, in a way, kind of sacrificing himself, are we...
Are we kind of following a red herring?
These are all important questions, and I'm somewhat ambivalent about each of those, actually.
I am, too.
On the first point, this business of you see a kind of oppressive structure or oppressive sets of laws.
You disagree with them.
And you want to protest them by willfully breaking them.
If that was the case, and part of me thinks that Tommy Robinson did not want to get arrested that day.
I didn't see it in the footage, but people told me that he could be heard saying, you know, I'm outside the court precincts, aren't I?
He was constantly trying to reassure himself with the police that he wasn't entering into what would be considered court precincts and recording.
In other words, he was mindful of his suspended sentence.
He said something to the effect of, I need a solicitor because I'm on a suspended sentence.
He said that after his arrest.
That leads me to believe that he was not doing this as a publicity stunt.
Yeah, I don't think he was.
I don't think he was.
I think he kind of fell into a trap more than anything.
But to come back to this issue of, okay, say he...
To come back to the offense that he got the suspended sentence for, which was a quite deliberate contempt of court.
I mean, he basically has previous for wanting to stick two fingers up to the establishment and say, look, I'm going to go, I know this is illegal, I'm going to go and film these defendants in court anyway, because I believe that that's why...
I can sympathise with wanting to get the faces of these people out there and bring more publicity to the ongoing trial.
The contempt of court legislation is regarded as pretty much a pillar of British justice.
Whether it's being used in the service of justice or not, that's how it's seen and that's how it's perceived.
So to attack something like that and to attack the principle of our courts will offer anonymity in certain cases and there will be no filming in our courts.
That's really difficult and you're already setting yourself an uphill struggle to try and win over public opinion to your cause based on something like that.
There are other laws you can push at.
I can think of something like the hate speech laws or the malicious communications act which have been brought in.
The business of Count Dankula, the Scottish guy who got a criminal conviction for his dog saluting and things like this.
These are cases which Which normies will take notice of and say, you know what, that was excessive.
And they do have a certain degree of propaganda value.
But to kind of go in and try to undermine contempt of court legislation, it's perhaps not tactically sensible.
And in some respects, Tommy Robinson was lucky to get a suspended sentence in that case.
Given how severely some people who've criticized Jews or put Facebook posts about blacks in Britain have been treated, where it's immediate prison sentences of up to four years in one case, a guy got for Facebook posts.
That guy was Lawrence Burns.
So Tommy Robinson was given the benefit of the doubt, even for quite flagrantly breaking that law, and was given a suspended sentence and told to behave himself.
And he was perhaps careless or he was perhaps a bit naive in expecting that he could go to this courtroom and that they wouldn't be gunning for him.
Or, you know, keeping a close eye on him with a view to arresting him at the slightest hint that there may be anything untoward in his behaviour.
And him simply having a discussion with this guy where the words were exchanged to the effect that the defendants have found guilty should be hanged.
It seemed to have been all the pretext that was required by these particular police officers to place them under arrest and trigger that suspended sentence.
So there's a naivety there.
All of us at various times in our lives have been guilty of naivety.
You know, someone could point at Charlottesville and say that there was naivety there in terms of expectations of how law enforcement would behave themselves.
So we find it difficult.
To condemn Tommy Robinson, if not for any other reason than for his naivety, we certainly can't stand by as people innocent of the same thing.
But there's still the ambivalence that just runs right the way through this.
I think the second question or sort of proposition that you put forward there was, was there a chance that he kind of did this deliberately for publicity?
I think we can probably agree that he didn't.
And then your final comment on this whole episode was something to the effect of Well, is the outrage good or bad?
I mean, you know, it's...
And these are all questions.
It's funny just how ambivalent we are in this podcast.
Usually we have strong, up-down opinions, but I actually am rather ambivalent this time.
And I certainly don't want to throw brave people, even if they have an incorrect ideology, Count Dankula has a terrible, stupid ideology, but I'm not going to throw him under the bus.
It's not the right time.
If a year from now, he does some rally where he expounds on his libertarian communism or whatever the hell it is, then I'll be like, look, this is stupid.
But right now, it just seems wrong to throw Tommy under the bus.
He is a brave guy.
I think his gut is in the right place.
And we say, oh, is his head in the right place?
Well, look, Tommy is not an intellectual.
He's not...
I think that's expecting just too much of Tommy, of who he is.
I mean, he is a guy at the pub, basically.
And he does seem on a gut level to understand The demographic implications, the identitarian implications, the racial implications.
But whether this was the right battle to fight, it should be reasonably questioned.
And that doesn't mean that we don't have a kind of moral support for him.
It's like, we're with you, you're a fighter.
One can offer good faith criticism of him.
I think it is interesting to ask.
There is so much outrage.
Breitbart actually took down an article on him, by the way.
But he has the Drudge Report.
The Breitbart crowd is on his side.
The alt-right is on his side.
I would say most of the alt-right is like, this is an outrage.
Libertarians, too.
One could say that just this kind of awareness of the issue, awareness of the double standards of the system, and so on, I do think it is reasonable to say that they would not do this to other people.
Or maybe they would.
I don't know.
Is there something good about this outrage?
I'm ambivalent about that.
I think it is obviously...
One needs points, fissures that people get excited about.
One can see a fissure and a point of salience and say, all right, let's focus on this.
But I have to be honest.
I'm getting a little...
I am getting a little bit tired of this...
Just endless focus on not just the anti-jihad movement, but really the free speech issue itself.
And I think we should discuss this.
I don't need to revisit my interaction with Sargon of Akkad, but...
First off, there is never going to be free speech, truly free speech, in any kind of community.
And politics is a community.
I mean, politics is about power, no question.
But it is also, it is a polis.
It is about being together.
It's what politics is about.
In this kind of situation, there are always going to be limits.
There are social norms that one does not cross.
One has to be a truly autistic libertarian to say that, oh, we have this videotape of child pornography, but someone found it, so he didn't actually engage in the non-aggression principle.
He's just...
I'm sorry.
You can make that argument on the basis of the non-aggression principle, but I'm sorry.
That is just awful and wrong, and no serious person or non-autist is going to follow you down that path.
There are limits in that way.
And let's also be honest.
A government that has sovereignty over a territory...
is going to look, skeptically to say the least, on people who are engaging in free speech that might undermine its ability to maintain power and also its legitimacy.
This is why the government attacks us.
And that includes you and me and Tommy Robinson, is that we are questioning a lot of its sources of legitimacy, which are liberalism and multi-culti, raceless, globo-gayplex.
And so basically, there's never going to be truly free speech in a community.
And we need to recognize that.
And the ironic thing about this recent free speech rally is that I don't know.
liberalism or what have you.
But it was funny that they were talking about speech they don't like.
And secondly, it seems like the free speech debate is always about something else.
What we care about is this major demographic question, this major spiritual question and cultural question.
We are trying to talk about it.
We are ultimately trying to change the social and political order.
And we are getting pushback.
But it's not like people in government are like, I'm an abstract anti-liberalist.
I don't approve of free speech in itself.
It's a bad concept.
No, they don't want our speech.
They don't want.
And I'll just say it.
Because I have the stones to say it.
If I were in charge, would I be saying, oh, let's just hash it out.
Let's have totally open debate about every conceivable issue under the sun.
Let's bring out the transgendered feminist and just get in an endless debate with them and allow them to go to schools.
We need to expose our children to this debate.
Of course not.
Obviously, if we were in charge, we would not be autistic libertarians.
And if you believe that some speech is good, then you almost, I mean, maybe not quite logically, but almost inherently believe that some speech can be really bad and evil.
If a book can change your life for the better, change the world for the better, then a bad book can do the same.
And we just simply need to be real about this.
And I guess there's something to be said for the argument that that's too intellectual.
Your average normie likes things in black and white and so on.
But I don't know.
I'm kind of tired of pretending that we're actually liberals or something like this.
And that all we're doing is fighting for liberalism.
We just want rights and free speech and stuff.
I mean, no.
That's part of the problem.
That is the intellectual legitimacy of the current system.
And the current system is destroying our civilization and race.
Yeah, I think...
We kind of preambled all of that with the discussion of we're coming at this from the perspective of we're ambivalent about the outrage that's been shown and certainly one of the reasons and one of the biggest reasons for our ambivalence about this outrage is that we feel that it's been mispackaged as a kind of straightforward free speech issue where Tommy Robinson wanted to speak about the Muslims And he was shut up and he was gagged.
And that's what we're all outraged about and everything else.
And to a certain extent, it is too simplistic.
It ignores some of the legal pretext to what happened.
It ignores some of the more nuanced circumstances surrounding multiculturalism in Britain and the West.
It's just too easy in a lot of ways.
And it's one of those things where people like Alex Jones and Stefan Molyneux, to just package it that way makes it really sellable, they think.
But anyone who really objectively and carefully looks at the situation will see that to sell Tommy Robinson's free speech to the general public When he's been kind of thoroughly demonized among them for the best part of 10 years or more now, it's just not going to happen.
You're not going to sell it on that basis, especially given, as I said, the pretext here of the contempt of court conviction and everything that was going on around it.
I think that there are different ways of trying to tease out some of the things that happened, but going down the free speech route, which, as you say, What frustrated me seeing a lot of the simplistic packaging along those lines, it echoes a lot of what you said there.
I felt that it was dishonest and ideologically dishonest and it's hard for me to sell something I don't believe in and then to see others kind of...
Convincing themselves of it or convincing themselves that this was somehow still good propaganda was even more frustrating, which led to even more ambivalence, which in some moments I was almost like anti-Tommy Robinson, and then I was kind of more ambivalent again, and then I was like, well, he was kind of a victim in this issue.
And then I started questioning sort of the broader reasons outside of the kind of simplistic packaging and free speech as to why I would be ambivalent about the outrage that was going on.
And I came up with two more reasons for my ambivalence.
The first was that we seem to really be getting sucked into a pattern of bad news addiction.
Where it's like, this is what we're trying to fuel our movement with, is the number of grievances we can accumulate and the number of horrific things that happen to white women.
And these are all good propagandistic devices, and they're all legitimate grievances and really legitimate reasons for rage and frustration.
But I'm not sure that we're digesting it in a healthy way.
Turning it into something really productive or whether we're in fact starting to fuel a kind of endless appetite for the same.
So when I saw this kind of mass movement towards glutting ourselves on the misfortune of Tommy Robinson, and everyone's willing to praise how brave he is, but I came back and I said to myself, Tommy Robinson was with other people there.
Why was he the one holding the phone?
Why was he the one doing all of the recording?
It's like we kind of cheer these kind of solo heroes who kind of march off to prison.
You know, Jez Turner was another one, and Alison Chabot, and Lawrence Burns, and these people.
But systems don't really get changed by solo individuals kind of crashing and burning like this.
Normally there's a more systematic or group effort where Yeah.
You know, people just keep, you know, in decent numbers, keep throwing themselves at the system deliberately and systematically and with some semblance of coordination.
But there's this kind of like just random crashing and burning and the misfortune and the kind of endless.
I would just like to see us start to pull back a little bit from that and try and avoid slipping down into resentment and despair because Whenever I kind of peek over the edge of this, that's what I'm starting to see.
So I would like us to pull back a little from this.
And then the other reason for my ambivalence, and it's related to what I've just said there, is I think that we've still got a little bit of a hangover from Charlottesville.
I think we still have a little bit of weariness and wearisomeness about legal entanglements.
And we're starting to think, or certainly I am, and I think that you feel the same way as I do, is rather than kind of getting hopelessly caught up in an endless stream of arrests and legal oppression, shouldn't we start thinking about how we can more intelligently approach some of these situations where we avoid senseless or low-value arrests and perhaps start strategically thinking?
How we can engage with the legal system as it faces us, as it confronts and oppresses us.
So those are my reasons whenever I kind of interrogate my own thinking on this matter as to why I was ambivalent.
And that's not even taking into account where we stand in terms of what is or what should be the relationship between the alt-right and this counter-jihad movement, which is...
Kind of a whole separate issue altogether.
This is more specifically related to the Tommy Robinson arrest.
No, I agree with everything you're saying.
I mean, I've pulled back from activism and I have certainly...
I mean, the college tour thing was, you know, it really set...
I'm not talking about the idea of it.
I think the idea of it remains good, and we had some great events in there.
But the precedent that was being set by basically the government, these university officials and their police forces, allowing just enough violence to make it a dangerous event, but then not too much violence where they look bad.
It's just, this is where we are.
We were getting away with something.
Something was working until it doesn't work anymore.
And going to Texas A&M or Auburn, everything is safe.
You know, there's some fisticuffs outside, but everything's safe and there's a lot of energy in the air.
And, you know, I'm able to speak.
I answer questions for an hour with the students.
And this is unequivocally a positive thing.
And that's why the colleges started preventing it, first legally, and then preventing it pragmatically, you could say, by just making it an unsafe environment, an overly intense environment.
It's not just a controversial speaker.
We are going to allow a riot to take place.
Anyway, this is where we are, and we need to...
I don't like all the hindsight talk about Charlottesville and so on.
I mean, there were people who were making these warnings, but many of these people who are now, in hindsight, were supporting the 2017 activism.
And so while it was going on, and then because they are just on the sidelines, they're in the audience, they can be like, oh, see, it was all wrong in the beginning.
We need to do things until they stop working, but we also need to go with the trend.
And so it's a difficult balance to strike.
And I don't quite know the answer.
I think we can obviously have conferences and events like that, but what can we do in terms of a public gathering?
This is in question now.
And here I'm not talking about Tommy Robinson.
I'm more talking about the alt-right in the United States and so on.
What can we do?
And, you know, this is what I'm struggling with, to be honest.
But, yeah, anyway, we can talk.
But before we, you know, tie a bow in this, I think we should talk a little bit about the anti-jihad movement.
Because Tommy is associated with that.
Far, far more than he's associated with the alt-right.
I mean, he's probably labeled alt-right hero in the press or something.
I don't doubt that.
But he came to prominence and so on as creating this group called the English Defense League.
Was that name modeled on the Anti-Deflamation League?
No, I believe it was modeled on the Jewish Defense League.
The Jewish Defense League.
Okay, so a similar organization.
And it was interesting because it was all based on this tremendous demographic change and cultural change that was occurring in Britain.
And so it caught that energy, that racial angst, you could say.
And it also caught some of the energy of football hooligans and things like that.
But then it was translated into, we are against Islam.
Just look at the Quran.
Look at these terrible verses that I can cite from the Quran.
There's this global jihad that's coming in.
And it just kind of misses the point.
I mean, those people raping young women are doing it because...
They're disgusting freaks.
They're not reading the Quran and then doing that.
It's as if to assume that if they had only read the Bible or something else, they wouldn't be criminals.
They are who they are.
I probably know more about Islam than the vast majority of these criminal Muslims.
Islam, it's getting at it...
It's misunderstanding the problem and then turning it into this, again, turning it into a speech debate about, you know, what do we think about the Koran?
Look at this thing that Muhammad said.
Oh, my God.
And it's just always a misunderstanding.
And the other fact of it, not so much Tommy.
Tommy has been an avid Israel supporter, but I was always highly critical of the anti-jihad movement.
Because with a few exceptions, like Sergei Trifkovich or something, this movement, which was going after Islam, was kind of like the, I don't know what to say, the ugly stepchild of the neoconservatives and the American war machine and foreign policy.
So, you know, George W. Bush can go up there and say, ah, Islam's a religion of peace, we don't have any problem with Muslims, we're just overthrowing these bad regimes or whatever.
But then the anti-jihad movement can come in, and in the underbelly of the internet, they can just start talking about how evil Islam is, and they can trot out your based Arab or based African who's given up Islam and embraced Christianity or secular humanism or whatever.
And they can just basically indoctrinate...
Prepare the ground for American foreign policy in the Middle East by ginning up outrage and focusing their efforts entirely in the negative.
Anti-Islam is anti.
It's just endless discussion about how bad the Quran is, and then they throw in some stuff here and there about how Christianity is actually the foundation of human rights, liberalism, and pluralism, in fact.
I don't know what to say.
It always just struck me as just fundamentally wrong.
And I got it.
I get why people are against Islam.
I, too, am against Islam.
I think, you know, for in a way different reasons.
I think Islam is an extremely powerful faith.
It is able to, in a way, ennoble these otherwise, you know, shit people.
And it kind of makes them better than they...
I have, in a way, the opposite take on Islam from the anti-Jihab movement.
It is a great religion in the sense that it improves the stock of people.
And gives them a right and a wrong, and it gives them a goal, and it gives them energy and vitality and a willingness to sacrifice.
So it makes them better, in a way, more heroic.
That is why it is bad.
And so, in a way, what we should be doing is totally demoralizing Islam.
If we could turn Islam into what Christianity is now, that would be great.
All of these people who are now energized by it would just go back to smoking hookah and just being lazy idiots.
So that is why Islam is a problem.
It's not that it's inherently immoral or that it has these bad verses or whatever.
Again, any of these people, if they ever read the Old Testament, you can find...
All of that stuff.
But it is basically a black flag.
It's a black flag raised against Europe and against other things.
But it's certainly raised against Europe.
And so we should go about demoralizing Muslims.
And we should recognize this thing for what it is.
That is basically my take.
But all of this talk about how Islam doesn't support human rights or whatever, it's totally missing the point.
Islam is powerful precisely because it doesn't support human rights.
That's why it is a motivating force.
It's not going to be secular and liberal.
It is actually going to energize these people.
And anyway, the anti-Islam movement is like that.
And I would mention this as the end of my rant.
I've been very discouraged by the fact that people who call themselves identitarian or who...
You know, want to kind of orbit the identitarian sphere are also orbiting Tommy Robinson.
And so it's like, oh, you know, and I'm thinking here in particular generation identity and Martin Zellner and so on and the kind of, you know...
These, you know, girls that circle them, they're like, oh, Tommy Robinson, he's one of us.
See, we identitarians, we're just ethno-pluralist patriots who are defending our little place on the map, our little plot, our nation.
And we're also linking up with Tommy Robinson, who's also an identitarian, and we're going to work.
This stuff is just, we're just going back into all of this, just like 2000s era nonsense.
Tommy Robinson, I don't know what he actually believes.
I've never met him.
He's a neocon.
I mean, it's just like the opposite.
To get excited by him in itself, again, I get it.
Look, I'll defend him now because he's under attack.
It's like, all right, we've got your back, God.
But to get excited about him and what he represents is just so wrong.
It's just such a betrayal of what the alt-right or identitarianism actually is that I find it extremely frustrating.
I think what we're looking at here is just an issue that has its origins in blurred lines.
And that's in much of Western Europe really kicking off in the 1960s and gaining in intensity by the early 2000s was a really growing dissatisfaction with multiculturalism.
The British National Party, just to stick with the British context, was certainly Starting to enjoy unprecedented success.
And then almost out of nowhere emerged the English Defence League, which kind of was this street-based, sort of almost single-issue focus.
You know, as you say, it was producing the Koran and the verses and everything.
And it seemed to kind of focus a lot of frustrations about multiculturalism, because don't forget that Muslims...
Immigration to Europe has been one of the most visibly catastrophic aspects of multiculturalism, both in the form of Islamist terrorism and in the quite radical demographic change.
But it kind of was able to narrow in and focus in a lot of these frustrations in a single direction, which was against Muslims, against the Islamic religion.
And by packaging itself in this kind of, oh, we're just against the religion.
We're not against these people for their genetic background.
We're not going to talk about the IQ of Pakistanis or the rate of inbreeding within these communities, the rates of mental illness and psychosis and attending behaviors and a tendency towards criminality that would be linked to that.
We're not going to talk about any of those things.
It's all about what's in the Koran.
I agree with a lot of what you said about Islam as a religion.
I think there have been periods in the past where Islam has been an energizing force and has been militarily on the march because of that and it's been expansionist.
The only qualifier I would put there is that it kind of in the end resulted in a kind of Sociocultural retardation where these Muslim societies kind of went into their own little cocoons and just stagnated.
I read the statistics some time ago, the number of books published within, I think it was something like 25 Muslim countries in the space of like 50 years didn't equivalent the number of books published in Spain in one year.
It was something that astonishing and that it was so energy-sapping in the end, certainly approaching modernity.
One of the things which did energize these Islamic countries in the end, two things.
One was Western foreign adventurism in the Middle East, but also, I suppose, Russia and Afghanistan.
In the late 1970s, concluding in the 80s.
But also, I think we cannot divest the modern Islamic problem from the fact that its main engine is basically multiculturalism and the fact that we've imported Islam en masse.
into the West.
If Islam stayed in those lands where it has been historically predominant, it wouldn't be an issue.
It would have carried on in its quasi-retarded state.
Those societies would have remained relatively technologically and culturally primitive, certainly scientifically.
And we could more or less...
But the fact is that in post-modernity, foreign policy and domestic policy, there's no real differentiation between the two anymore.
I've said it previously that your foreign policy with Pakistan changes radically whenever you have whole cities full of Pakistanis within your own borders.
It just changes.
Fundamentally, because you have a whole different set of concerns.
And that's why multiculturalism destroyed the foreign policy that we saw historically.
It doesn't exist anymore.
And that's what we're dealing with.
And that was another contributing factor as to why we have this issue of blurred lines.
So the EDL and the whole counter-jihad movement is able to kind of hijack tensions about multiculturalism and focus them on a specific area.
And it kind of produced this whole clash of civilizations narrative, which you alluded to.
The alt-right, of course, definitely has a more nuanced take on the whole idea of a clash of civilizations.
But you will find some drift from alt-riders to counter-jihadist activism, because they can kind of get on board with an anti-Islamic program to the extent that it will involve objecting to We
reject any kind of civic or quasi-cultural visions or versions of nationalism, which are essentially what counter jihad.
You know, this idea that Britain should be defined as a Christian country, not white Christian.
Not white British or anything else, but just Christian.
So, you know, as long as we can have six million normally Christian Somalis, then that's fine because they're Christian and somehow adherence to the, or quasi-adherence to the Christian faith.
That qualifies them as suitable for citizenship within Britain.
And then even more importantly, as you said, you know, Tommy Robinson is essentially a neocon.
The alt-right questions key aspects of counter-jihad ideology, the most important being foreign policy.
We would tend to oppose outright any kind of military adventurism in the Middle East, and attached to that, we certainly oppose any kind of extravagant support for the state of Israel.
I oppose the American foreign policy that is attempting to bring democracy and just allow people to die to transform these societies into secular liberalism.
However, foreign adventurism.
I wish that the West, the white race, were so badass that we would actually take part in foreign adventurism.
That actually sounds awesome.
Intergalactic adventurism is probably what will be next.
I am in full support of that.
I do think we need to define terms.
I am not in support of engaging in war for Israel's benefit.
I am not in support of engaging in war for the cause of humanitarianism or anything like that.
But I think we would be untrue to ourselves if we...
Yeah, I think we should say this.
I'm just so over the kind of my being a libertarian and talking like this.
I just, I don't know.
It's like a weight has been lifted.
I think we need to just get away from pretending that we're not who we are.
Yeah, let's have a real war for oil.
You know, we want your oil and we're just going to come and take it.
Right.
Without any of the kind of "let's spread democracy" crap, let's just throw all that in the dustbin.
But yeah, I get what you're coming from.
But we object to the kind of flavour and nuance and hypocrisy of counter-jihad foreign policy and its pretensions and posturing.
And for its part, we have to say that counter-jihad would strain to condemn us.
Racism and Nazis or whatever kind of keywords they want to throw at us.
I know that Tommy Robinson threw everyone at Charlottesville under the bus and said, if these Nazis were walking through my town, I would be out protesting against them too.
And they do that.
In some cases, they do it because the counter-jihad individual in question is Jewish.
And in other instances, it's because I think they genuinely believe this will give them a bit of a pass with the media and some of their peers.
And certainly Tommy Robinson, by steering clear of the Jewish issue and the race question, has got media time in the UK.
Piers Morgan's had him on for interviews.
And he does get interviews.
He does get airtime that someone like Jez Turner or yourself just wouldn't do.
I think that for a while...
In the United States, the media tried to see if you would soften up and be a kind of media figure like Tommy Robinson, someone that could be kind of pulled out to be booed at occasionally.
But it didn't seem to work.
So in the end, they kind of readjusted tactics and then Charlottesville happened.
We've kind of reassumed that place.
The media has decided that we really aren't able to be incorporated within their kind of superstructure.
And having said that, you can see that, yes, Tommy Robinson is against the establishment.
He's very clearly in opposition to it.
They are opposed to him.
But at the same time, the media and politics does seem to leave some space for that within the bounds of discussion.
I'm not going to say acceptable discussion, but discussion.
There are corners and places where the things that Tommy Robinson wants to say can be said.
And there are signs that that is passable.
For example, he's never been convicted of hate speech, to my knowledge.
Whereas people who have said things of a racial nature or who have said things about a clash of civilizations with Jews, Jewish influence.
have been given very stiff sentences in prison, Jez Turner being just the latest.
So, Talk about Jez Turner real quick.
I have actually met him two times or so when I was allowed in the United Kingdom.
I've met Jez too and stayed in touch with him.
I've watched this whole episode on Ravel where he gave a speech and in that speech he urged, literally word for word, what he said was we should take back control from Jews or, you know, our country's under Jewish control and we need to take it back.
And this was complained about by Jews who were kind of observing this whole thing and reported it to police.
And the police passed it on to the prosecution service, the crime prosecution service, who said that hate crimes can only be perpetrated really against an individual.
So he was talking about Jews, so that's kind of vague, and you cannot present yourself individually as a Jewish person as a victim of that particular hate crime.
We cannot convict him of...
Of racially abusing you, for example.
So a very senior prosecutor reviewed the case and decided that there would be no prosecution.
At that point, the campaign against anti-Semitism, run by a guy called Gideon Folter, stepped in and demanded to be able to meet with the director of prosecutions.
So the highest prosecutor in Britain, basically.
And these Jews who lack all influence.
We're able to obtain this meeting and they were able to persuade this individual to pass the case to yet another senior prosecutor and on this occasion the decision was taken to prosecute Jez Turner.
So Jez Turner found himself then going on trial despite the first senior prosecutor saying that there really was no legal grounds for such a trial to take place.
Jez Turner was asked Did he still believe the things that he expressed in the speech?
He said that yes, I do.
I think that Jews are quite harmful to British society.
He was completely unapologetic and he was pretty much summarily convicted of hate speech and sentenced to one year in prison.
So, you know, that's a roughly equivalent term to what Tommy Robinson will serve.
And they've started those sentences at roughly the same time.
But all the free speech discussion is focusing on Tommy Robinson, whose conviction is really all about contempt of court.
Whereas the real free speech issue in terms of being able to stand up and give a speech and talk about things that some people don't like to hear, Jez Turner's just kind of been forgotten about already.
So, again, We really need to start thinking about these things more intensively and we need to probably discuss them more with each other rather than kind of just following waves of emotion.
We could probably do with a bit more direction than that if we're to get the best out of our misfortunes and if we really want to avoid them rather than kind of Got ourselves on them as we sometimes seem to be doing.
Good question.
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