Ezra Levant critiques Canada’s "post-national" identity under Trudeau, who quadrupled immigration while ignoring core values like openness and democracy, citing 900,000 student visas and pro-Hamas marches by newcomers. At the National Conservatism Conference, he aligns with figures like Nigel Farage (UK’s Reform UK) and Marine Le Pen (France’s National Rally), who gained 40%+ support opposing mass immigration and "Islamification." Mark Krikorian warns of weaponized asylum policies, with Biden’s border yielding 400,000+ child crossings, many exploited by cartels. Levant and Braverman urge conservatives to abandon liberalism’s GDP obsession, prioritizing sovereignty, assimilation, and community—like Hungary’s Orban—while Canada’s silence risks irreversible cultural fragmentation. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, after the results of the British and French elections, what should national conservatives do?
Well, wouldn't you know it?
I'm at a conference about that very question.
And this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Oh, hi, everybody.
I'm in Washington, D.C. for a meeting called the National Conservatism Conference.
Now, what does that mean, national conservatism?
I think it might actually be the reverse, conservative nationalism.
Nationalism has had a negative connotation for, I think, two generations, partly because Hitler called his socialists the national socialists, which in German is shortened to Nazi.
The C part is a socialist part, but the NA part was national.
And I think that after the Second World War, there was a desire to destroy nationalism, at least in the West, thinking that that is what had caused so many wars.
And so international institutions were built to blur over the lines of nations.
In some ways, it was a great success.
Think of the European Union and the trade amongst those countries.
The theory was if France and Germany did an enormous amount of economic intercourse, perhaps they wouldn't go to war again.
And if they can overcome the differences that borders give them, if they can be unified in some way, maybe they won't go to war ever again.
It was a utopian idea.
And in some ways, it worked because really, how different at their core are French and German people?
They're both Europeans.
They're both Christian people.
Of course, there are many differences amongst them too.
But should those two nations naturally be at war with each other?
Think, for example, of the United Kingdom.
Great Britain and England and Scotland were at war with each other for generations, but now they're a United Kingdom and it's unthinkable that they would go to war against each other.
So maybe that utopian vision could hold, except for by destroying the idea of nationalism and borders amongst those countries, the European Union and the United Nations and progressive NGOs and the World Economic Forum and all these other groups that sprung up to displace and minimize nationalism.
They also erased the border around the European Union.
And they allowed in millions, indeed tens of millions of people into the European nation who are not close cousins like French and Germans might be, but have very different worldviews, different religions, different cultures, different ideas about democracy, usually no ideas about democracy.
Turkish Immigration Contradictions00:03:04
For example, there are millions of Turkish people in Europe, especially in Germany, who have not assimilated.
They've been there for, frankly, two generations, and they still fly their Turkish flags.
One of the most astonishing things for me to see was Turkish politicians flying to Germany for campaign rallies in Germany, where Turkish candidates duke it out for the Turkish vote in Germany to vote back in Turkey.
It's just astonishing.
Anyway, I'm talking a lot about nationalism and the absence of it.
And we have that same issue in North America and Canada in particular.
Do you remember when Justin Trudeau was first elected, he talked about Canada being a post-national country where we're really no more than a hotel room when he said there's no core identity.
Remember that?
Because at its best, Canadian identity is additive.
I'm a proud Montrealer, I'm a proud Quebecer, I'm a proud Canadian.
I see no contradiction between any of those elements, and we all have layers of identity that we add to, and our communities are more resilient because of all those multiple layers.
But when it comes down to, if you can't identify what a Canadian is by surface attributes, like skin color or language or religion or ethnicity or background or story, then how do we define the Canadian identity?
How does a newcomer figure out, well, what do I need to do to become a Canadian and to feel like a Canadian?
And it's not about hockey and poutine, although that helps.
Tim Hortons is probably at the top of the line there.
It's about our shared values.
Those values of openness, compassion, search for justice, respect, a desire to be there for each other, desire to work hard.
These are values that get their concrete articulation in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but get their expression in the communities we live in every single day.
That would shock the late father, Pierre Trudeau, who spoke at length about the French identity.
In fact, by official bilingualism and so much of Canadian historical iconography is about the French nation and the English nation who fought at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, but then had a kind of working relationship hammered out.
If you read our Constitution, you'll see the way that the French people and the British people came to harmony.
National Sovereignty Threatened00:10:17
And we put aside our wars with Quebec, and we've had two and a half centuries of peace.
There may be disagreements, but certainly not war.
But the idea that there is no Canadian nation, that as Trudeau would say, we're just a place with no core idea, is not only offensive to Quebec nationalism and the Anglo-national history, not to mention Aboriginal people.
It's an excuse to open the door to mass immigration that has no connection whatsoever to Canadian culture, French, English, or otherwise.
And I think it's reached a crisis in Canada under Justin Trudeau, who has literally quadrupled immigration in the last two years.
And when you look around Europe, you see where that crisis will lead if we don't fix it now.
This is a very long introduction to my point: that what we saw in the United Kingdom on July 4th and what we saw in France on July 7th was a clash between the nationalist vision in the UK, as manifested by Nigel Farage and his reform UK, that wants to strengthen the British military, strengthen British pride in their culture and history, stop mass immigration, increase prosperity,
versus the Keir Starmer, Labor, and further left that wants an Islamification of the UK, mass immigration, and believe that London is an international city, not a great national capital of the UK.
Same thing in France.
On July 7th, the number one party in the vote, just under 40%, was Maureen Le Pen's national rally.
Yet it only came in third place in number of seats with leftist and far-leftist parties gaming the political system, literally withdrawing hundreds of candidates to sort of game the system.
It was a very stark choice.
And the number one choice in terms of popular vote was for Maureen Le Pen's French nationalism.
But what won through that jiggery pokery was an antifa Islamist hard leftism, including actual communists and actual antifa leaders getting elected.
It's an astonishing choice.
And the stakes in France and the UK could not be higher.
I always say that Europe is a time machine where we can see our future in Canada five years from now.
Five years of eroding and diluting our national culture.
Five years of mass immigration.
Five years of political parties being a uni party where no one dares to speak about these things.
In France, they've broken the Uniparty and Maureen Le Pen is a voice against immigration.
Nigel Farage has finally broken that silence in the UK and he got five seats, but over 4 million votes as his thanks for it.
In Canada, I see Pierre Polyev slowly mustering the courage to talk about immigration, but very, very carefully.
He's not willing to come out against mass immigration.
He says he'll reduce the numbers, but he won't give you the actual number.
And he doesn't dare talk about the element in the room, namely Islamist immigration.
We've seen these hate marches on our streets for the last nine months, and they're overwhelmingly populated either by people who are not yet citizens or who have recently been naturalized and have brought with them ancient hatred to our country that hasn't seen them before.
That's what I'm doing here in Washington.
This is an American conference, and there are plenty of Americans here talking about American nationalism.
But there's also a lot of Europeans here.
My old friend John O'Sullivan, who's now with the Danube Institute in Hungary.
Hungary is held up as an example here at the National Conservative Conference, a country that maintains its borders, has a pro-fertility agenda, i.e. trying to build up population by having babies, not importing people from the third world.
They have a rebuilding their old architectural styles.
They are anti-war.
What Hungary is doing under Victor Orban is a fascinating thing, and it's often held up as a role model.
Over the course of the next 48 hours, I'm going to try and learn more about what national conservatism is.
I haven't seen many other Canadians here.
In fact, I've seen none.
I don't know if this is compatible with Canada's situation.
I've got to think there are lessons here that we can learn and apply back home.
So anyways, that's just an explanation of where I am.
There's 900 people at this conference, including lots of little lobby groups and NGOs and activist groups.
There's a lot of scholars here and thinkers and academics and writers.
I'm going to try and buttonhole a few of them to talk.
I want to see if those ideas of Maureen Le Pen and Nigel Farage and other and Victor Orban in Europe, if they can be imported to America, is Donald Trump himself a kind of conservative nationalist?
I think he is.
I think his number one campaign platform in 2016, Build the Wall, was an essential statement of nationalism, which is why it failed, I think.
The whole establishment was against him.
Anyways, stay with me as we try and learn about this political creature called national conservatism.
Well, national conservatism, which is the name of this conference, is a phrase that really we don't hear a lot in Canada.
And if you're wondering what it means, well, let me tell you some of the panel discussions they have, which sort of gives you an idea.
Breaking the China addiction.
That's a symbol that they're not globalists, are they?
An immediate end to the border crisis, obviously a conversation about immigration.
Corporations and conservatives.
And listening to some of the speeches today, there's a big difference between Wall Street big business and national conservatives who are not on a globalist corporatist agenda.
Lawfare, the criminalization of politics.
India and the West, as in their pro-India, I think.
Big tech.
They're hostile to big tech.
So it's sort of an amalgamation of ideas, some of which are libertarian, some of which are conservative, some of which are nationalist, and some of them which, frankly, are a little bit status, but it's a worldview.
The crisis of meaning and morality, a little bit philosophical.
Islam, Israel, and the West.
Working class conservatism.
I think that's a big part of national conservatives because he's a little bit different.
I sat through one of the panel discussions on immigration, and I got to tell you, it was one of the most interesting things I've ever heard.
And these are by serious people, think tankers and people who worked under the Trump administration, who, if Trump is re-elected this November, quite likely would be part of his immigration team.
Let me start by showing you a sort of a sampling of the comments made in that panel discussion on immigration.
I don't even think you could have a discussion like this in Canada.
People would be too afraid.
Take a look.
From the Rio Grande to the Mediterranean, from the English Channel to the River Jordan, from Poland to South Africa, the existential threat to national sovereignty is the same.
Asylum.
Not abuse of asylum, but asylum policy itself.
In a 2019 statement on the border emergency, President Trump said, a nation without borders is not a nation at all.
And what asylum does is not lead to open borders.
This, I think, is a mistake in our terminology.
There's still somebody at the border.
What it does is it takes away the ability of democratic governments to control who enters and lives in their own countries.
Since the end of the Cold War, the forces opposed to the very idea of the nation have made increasing use of the post-World War II asylum regime to subvert the ability of self-governing peoples to control who enters and remains in their own countries.
The current system, usually referred to just as refugee system, but in our law and U.S. law, this is different from the refugees and asylum, was established in 1951 with the Convention relating to the status of refugees.
Only applied to people in Europe, and it only applied to people who had been displaced before the Convention was ratified or signed.
In other words, people displaced by World War II and the Red Army's subjugation of Eastern Europe.
That framework was then universalized in 1967 in what is called the protocol relating to the status of refugees, which is exactly the same.
It's just applied everywhere in the world and applied prospectively in the future.
And there are two aspects to this, one of which is not problematic.
The other is I think the fundamental existential threat to national sovereignty.
First one is refugee resettlement.
This is a sovereign act where a person who is in a camp or something overseas is brought into a country of resettlement.
It could be a good idea, a bad idea, it could be done well, it could be done poorly, but it is a sovereign act of the nation involved.
The other part, and this is the problematic part, is asylum.
Asylum is for an alien who is already in the country, usually illegally.
and then seeks refugee status as a way of avoiding deportation.
Record High Immigrants00:03:15
It represents a surrender of sovereignty, a pledge to permit foreigners to decide who's going to live in your country, rather than the citizens of that country.
It reframes immigration as a right rather than a privilege, a claim that an illegal immigrant can make against a country, regardless of what the laws of that country set as far as levels and characteristics of immigration.
In March of this year, the foreign-born or immigrant population in the United States, both legal and illegal, hit record highs.
51.6 million people in the United States are foreign-born.
That is more than 15% of the population of this country, higher than at any time in our nation's history.
Many consider these immigrants to be nothing more than workers, but more than half of the immigrants who have arrived since 2022 are not employed.
And of the approximately 2.5 million recent arrivals who are not employed, only about 8% say they are actively looking for work.
Immigrants now make up over a fifth of the residents in California, in New Jersey, in New York, in Texas, in Florida, our most populous states.
But less populous states are also seeing unprecedented immigration growth.
The immigrant population is growing by 40% in Delaware, North and South Dakota, and West Virginia.
An experiment is a test to discover if something works.
The numbers I just described are a national experiment.
And the American people, they're the guinea pigs.
We know this is an experiment, a test for which we don't know the outcome, because this level of immigration is new and different in at least three fundamental ways.
First, the scale.
The amount of immigration we are experiencing is unlike anything our country has experienced before.
The United States is now home to more international migrants than any other country in the world, and more than the next four countries on the list combined.
And in fact, no country in modern or ancient history has experienced numbers like these.
Second, the speed.
9 million aliens entered the country in all of the 1990s.
Now, 10 million have entered during just the first three years of the Biden administration, with 58% of that increase coming from illegal immigration.
This growth is far greater than even our government predictions would expect.
Federal census data from 2020 predicted that the foreign-born population of the United States would not hit 15% until 2034.
Yet it is 24, 2024, and we have already surpassed that prediction.
Third, this wave of immigration is unprecedented in its diversity.
Previous waves of immigration tended to come from particular parts of the world that made absorption and assimilation easier.
But now immigrants come from every corner of the globe, speak every language and dialect, worship every kind of God, and reflect every culture that exists on the planet.
Unprecedented Immigration Wave00:15:16
And all of this matters because immigration can only be sustained when it is assimilated.
It's not a new idea.
Our founders discussed and agreed unanimously, nearly unanimously, on this point.
As Jefferson put it, immigrants, quote, should distribute themselves sparsely among the native population for quicker amalgamation.
You know, I took a plane trip last week to vote for President Trump, and something happened when I was boarding the plane.
I was first on the captain comes out to the galley.
He says, Hey, I thought that was you.
I appreciate the service of the country.
I hope you come back.
He goes, but I got a question for you.
He goes, Why are you always pissed off?
I see on TV you're upset.
I see you're talking in front of Congress, you're upset.
I said, I'm pissed off.
So I want to talk about the border and why I'm pissed off and why the border isn't just a crisis of the day.
We've had crises on the board before.
We had a surge in 1450.
We had thousands coming across back when I was a border choice in the 1980s.
But this one is different.
This border crisis is the biggest national security vulnerability this country has seen ever.
I've worked for six presidents.
I say this all the time.
I'll keep drilling this down.
I've worked for six presidents starting with Ronald Reagan.
He became border choice.
Every president I worked for took steps to secure the border because they clearly understood you can't have strong national security if you don't have border security.
You need to know who's coming in, what's coming in, why it's coming in, where it's coming in.
We need to do that.
No one did better than President Trump.
I'm a Trump guy, not ashamed of it.
Trump was unprecedented in his success on the southern border.
Illegal immigration was down 83 to 90 percent.
Illegal immigration was at a 45-year low.
No one had that kind of success.
And he did that by himself because Congress certainly wasn't helping him.
He had the Republicans, never Trumpers.
They weren't helping the first two years.
We had the House, the Senate, and the White House.
And he still had unprecedented success because he was out-of-the-box thinker.
He put him some great executive orders.
So every president took steps to secure the border.
Even Clinton Obama took steps to secure the border.
But you got to think about the current president.
President Joe Biden is the first president in the history of this nation who came into office and unsecured a border on purpose.
Signing over 90 seconds of border is abolishing everything we've created under the Trump administration.
I wrote an op-ed six months before the election for Fox.
I said, if Joe Biden becomes president, we lose the border.
And man, did the left come out of Holman?
There's Holman again, the fearmonger, trying to scare people.
Well, I just said, look, Joe Biden is running on enditive detention.
I'm going to have an amnesty.
We're going to fix DACA.
We're going to give free health care, illegal aliens.
I mean, you offer some type of promises to the whole world, they're going to come.
It didn't take a border expert to understand that.
So he unsecured a border on purpose, which has caused the biggest national security crisis I've ever seen.
Now, I've been called all kinds of names.
I don't give a shit what people think about me.
I never have and never will.
Over 400,000 children have crossed the border under Joe Biden, and they can't find 100,000 of them.
Based on my 34 years, I'm telling you right now, many of these children are in forced labor.
Many of these children are living with predators.
Many of these children are going to appear in pornographic movies.
Many of these women are forced into prostitution because the cartels control them.
If they don't do what they tell them to do, they'll kill their family back in their homeland.
That's what this administration has done.
So there's the secret.
That's why Tom Holman pissed off because we had this lockdown.
And I tell you what, Washington Post can do all the stories they want me about.
Tom Holman's report people is really good at.
They ain't seen shit yet.
I apologize, but I probably shouldn't say the S word.
I want to tell him to stop saying it.
I just never seen before numbers, right?
And lately, the press has done, oh, Trump's, Trump's going to do a historic deportation operation.
What a terrible thing to say.
What a racist thing to say.
Notice that.
On the hands of a historic immigration crisis, where millions of people have entered the country illegally or been released into the United States by this administration illegally.
Here's what you need to know.
If you look at the immigration court data, EOI, over the last decade, nearly nine out of 10 people who came to asylum at the southern border will never get relieved from U.S. courts because they simply don't qualify or they don't show up in court.
Asylum is about escaping fear and persecution from your home government because of race, religion, political affiliation, or participation in a specific social group.
These people are coming up with a better life.
I get that, but it ain't asylum.
So nine out of ten, it's actually, I think it's 86.7 last time I looked, but nearly nine out of 10 will get an order removal.
We have to remove them.
What's the option?
Don't execute the final order from the judge?
Because if that's the answer, then what the hell are we doing?
Shut down immigration court.
Take the barbershop the border.
If we're not going to enforce the law and have consequences for violating our law, what the hell are we doing?
So when people say it's ridiculous to have historic, you've got to have a historic deportation operation.
I mean, here was some historic illegal immigration where nine out of ten will get order removal.
And I kind of disagree, agree with you a little bit.
I still think, Tom Holman, we need to prioritize gastro security threats because we know they're here by the thousands.
So we do have to prioritize some people, but I agree with you in one factor.
No one's off the table in the next administration.
If you're here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.
I didn't drive here 120 miles an hour today because I don't want to get ticked.
I don't want to have my taxes because I don't want to go to jail.
It's not okay to enter this country legally.
It's not okay.
When I became the ice director, first testimony I did means that I take hate for two weeks on the left.
Tom Holman said during testimony, if you're in the country illegally, you need to be looking over your shoulder.
You're damn right.
That's the way it's supposed to be.
It's not okay to enter this country legally.
It's a crime.
If you can't get poor to come back, it's a felony.
It's not okay to enter this country illegally.
There's right way and wrong way to be a part of the greatest nation on earth.
And what no one's talking about, why they're letting millions of illegal aliens in there release them illegally, in my opinion, into the United States, there are millions of people standing in line, taking their tests, doing their backgrounds, paying the fees to be part of the greatest nation on earth.
Interesting people, I buttonholded Mark Krikorian, who's been in the trenches on the immigration issue for decades.
Here's my conversation with him.
All right, I'm here with Mark Krikorian, who gave an amazing speech about asylum.
First of all, identify yourself to our viewers who might not be familiar with you.
You've been fighting this immigration for a long time.
Yeah, I'm Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
We're a little think tank in D.C. We're what I call a boutique think tank.
We just do immigration, unlike the department store think tanks that do everything.
And I've been doing this for almost 30 years now.
And, you know, it seems like at least on the right, The issue was moving in the right direction because there was for a long time really strong opposition among the business and libertarian folks basically wanting unlimited immigration.
And they're still there, but they don't, they're not driving the bus anymore.
They benefit from lower wages, higher property prices.
It's, you know, cheaper tech workers, whatever.
But I think there's a pushback.
What do you make of what happened in the UK with Nigel Farage and his reform party and in France with Maureen Le Pen?
Both of those were really immigration-focused campaigns, weren't they?
Yeah, and absolutely.
And I think people are misreading it.
I mean, the left won in the sense that, you know, they're going to have governing power.
But when you look at the share of the vote, it clearly, the electorate has moved right significantly on immigration, both in France and in the UK.
So it's kind of those two things can happen at the same time.
But I think in the short term, it's bad news.
I mean, the Labor government, the woman in charge of immigration, the Home Secretary, she's actually tweeted a picture of herself out with a holding a piece of paper saying, refugees welcome.
So yeah, Britain and France are in for some bad times, but clearly the public mood is shifting.
And it seems like in the longer term, I'm not British or French, but I would be optimistic if I were, at least in the long term.
Especially in the UK, Farage has normalized talking about this subject before.
Really, it was a cartel.
Now, you talked about asylum as a legal concept.
That was fascinating.
I've never heard of that before, your critique of it.
Can you explain for our viewers why is the concept of asylum an outdated Cold War idea?
You talked about Soviet ballerinas.
Those of us who are over 40 might remember that great movie where the Russian guy comes over and says, I defect.
And the whole that was Yako Shmirnoff.
He launches a whole career on.
Williams also had a movie like that.
Remember Moscow on the Hudson, where he defected in Macy's, and he was a musician in a Russian circus band.
But again, it was obscure and rare back then.
It was very rare because you couldn't, it was hard to get out of the Soviet Union.
And the third world was mostly still colonies of various countries.
And so, and the populations were smaller, and it was hard to get here.
What asylum is now is it's turned into the main way of illegally immigrating to Europe or to the United States, or frankly, Israel, Australia, even South Africa is facing this.
And in South Africa, the government just recently issued a report saying that they're going to withdraw from the Refugee Convention and then re-sign up for it, but with exceptions and reservations that aren't in there.
Wow, if South Africa can do that, theoretically, anyone could do that.
I mean, again, maybe they're breaking the taboo first.
Has any country withdrawn from the Human Rights Convention before them?
No, this is the Refugee Convention, and no one's withdrawn from it yet, except that it's a treaty.
And every treaty, by definition, has a clause saying that here's the way you withdraw from it.
You know, you give notice, six months, whatever it is.
Anybody can do it.
It's just that you have to want to do it.
I suggested it to the first Trump administration.
It never got anywhere.
I assume Jared Kushner or something squashed the idea.
But I can very much see the administration, a future Trump administration, withdrawing from it.
Now, you then have to change your law.
That in itself doesn't solve the problem, but it's the first, it's the essential first step.
I got one last question for you.
I appreciate your time.
In Canada, we're not as far gone as France and the UK, but we're further gone than America, I think, although some of the stats you were talking about were astonishing.
Is there such a thing as re-migration or mass deportation might sound a little harsh, but I look across Canada right now.
There's 900,000 student visas.
That's more than there are Canadian nationals in university.
I see the pro-Hamas street marches.
Most of them speak with a thick foreign accent.
They're new on the ground.
How do you normalize sending these folks back home, especially if they came here claiming they were in danger back home, but they obviously aren't?
The easiest one, obviously, is people who are themselves illegal.
In other words, they're not in illegal status.
But what you have to know about immigration, whether it's legal or illegal, is that there's always churn.
There's always people leaving, even in normal circumstances.
And so the solution, I mean, it's kind of simplistic, but it's real, is that you reduce the number of new people coming in and you increase the number of people leaving.
And most of that doesn't even have to be forced removal where you take someone in custody and deport them.
Some of that you have to do.
There's no question about it.
But even during the 1950s, we had something unfortunately called Operation Wetback, which was a normal term back then to deport illegal immigrants, Mexican illegal immigrants.
Most of the illegal immigrants who left left on their own because they started the operation and the other illegal immigrants got the message that the party was over and that they would be wise to wrap up their affairs, pack up the car and go home on their own before they got arrested.
And so the issue is, I call it attrition.
You squeeze the illegal population and even legal people with student visas or whatever, you tighten up the requirements, you enforce the requirements, and you not only physically remove some people, but you persuade an even larger number of people that it's time to go back.
And that's not a perfect solution.
It's not going to solve everything, but you can, in fact, reverse the trend and get people to leave, even if you don't take them all into custody.
Last question.
What do you think about the term net zero immigration?
We've heard about net zero carbon.
What do you think of net zero immigration?
It's something people, we've even written about it years ago.
Zero net migration is the kind of stock term for that.
It's not a bad idea.
The thing is, I mean, it's a goal to shoot for, but you can never really know how many people are leaving because at least in our United States, and I'm pretty sure Canada is the same thing, it's not like you need an exit visa.
So you really don't know for sure how many people are leaving and how many people are just going for a junior year abroad in Italy or whatever it is.
You know what I mean?
But yes, that would be, in fact, I would say more broadly, the goal should be what I call demographic conservatism, which is to say countries, their populations, whether it's ethnic, religious, however the makeup is, it's always going to change.
The ancient Greeks said you can never step in the same river twice because the water is moving.
You know, your country changes.
Changes, Slow and Gradual00:03:20
Changes, though, should be slow and gradual.
One of the speakers quoted Thomas Jefferson saying, you know, immigrants should spread themselves out thinly across our population so they're quickly amalgamated.
Well, that's, is change should be slow.
Immigration should be low so that when immigrants come, they don't have that big an effect on the society.
So that even if you screw up and let in people, you shouldn't.
If we had one Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, well, that would be bad, but it would be one person.
If you have 20,000 Somalis in one city, well, then you've made significant changes there that you can't really, that are hard to undo.
So anyway, the point is, yes, zero net migration is a sensible way to think about the issue.
I'm just not sure you could fix that into law because you don't have a legal yardstick for how many people are leaving.
You see what I mean?
Very interesting stuff.
We'll have to talk to you more often, especially about Canada's immigration crisis.
Great to talk to you today.
Good luck to you guys.
I tell you, they're having that conversation in the UK now because of Naja Farage.
They're having that conversation in France because of Maureen Le Pen.
I don't know.
Pierre Polyev is gently dipping his toe in the water, barely talking about immigration.
Of course, Donald Trump talks about it a lot.
I think Canada needs to start having that conversation.
And you know what?
Nothing happens to you if you talk about it.
If you don't allow people to cancel you, who doesn't talk about immigration in Canada?
You can literally see its effects with your eyes every day.
It is, there's a lot of Europeans who are here.
The last National Conservatism Conference was actually in Brussels, Belgium.
And one of the speakers who regularly attends is Suella Braberman, who's a British UK Conservative Party MP who was until recently the Home Secretary.
She was a very senior position.
That would be, I'm not sure what the equivalent would be in Canada.
Maybe Department of Homeland Security, I think is some overlap.
Anyway, she was fired by the last Conservative Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, for talking about immigration and multiculturalism that failed, talking about extremist elements.
Anyway, she gave a speech today that was remarkable not only for taking a strong stand against mass immigration, but saying that the Conservative Party of which she was a part for so many years was a disaster and didn't deserve to win because it treated voters with great disrespect.
Here's a sample of her speech.
Her speech was about half an hour long.
I would call it the keynote speech so far.
Very interesting stuff.
And she didn't quite come out and say she's running for the leadership of the Conservative Party, but I get the feeling she is and she'll announce it soon.
Here, take a listen.
Lots of my colleagues are solemnly muttering about how much they respect the result.
But having mouthed these words, what does their solution turn out to be?
Liberal Conservatism's Crisis00:07:30
Liberal conservatism hasn't been trying enough.
We need to head even further and faster to the center.
If the Tory party has a future, it's by being conservative.
My strategy is simple.
I don't want to put Nigel Farage, leader of a rival party, in a comfortable place.
I want to put him in an uncomfortable place.
I want the Tories to credibly offer conservative policies which make the existence of a rival right-wing party moot.
And not just moot, but which makes their continued existence seem visibly harmful to conservative goals being achieved.
But the only way, the only way that we're doing that is by talking credibly, credibly to reformed voters.
And we haven't even started to respect them.
Never mind, seriously address why they no longer vote for us.
We satisfy ourselves by insulting them, denigrating the party, trying to throw mud, makes us feel better.
But the reality is, we're pushing more and more of our own people away.
It's why, if we are serious about continuing to exist, let alone win elections, we need credibility.
Not just the veneer, the veneer of right-wingery to win the base, only for the liberal reality to emerge under the pressure of scrutiny and challenge.
That's what we've just tried.
A cosplaying right-wingery, only for the reality to be socialism light.
The voters see through it because they're not idiots.
Now, you can take from the example of Britain whatever lessons you think are applicable to your own countries.
I take from everything that I have heard and read about the US and so many other Western countries this painful truth.
We are at a moment of crisis.
The chickens have come home to roost, and all the things that we conservatives have warned about for half a century and failed to stop are now upon us.
The palpable sense of discontent, a crisis of meaning, the dissolution of the ties and bonds of loyalty and society which formerly bound us into a cohesive organic unit.
The loss of faith in politics, the descent of formerly stable polities into states we once upon a time would have sneered at as being banana republics.
Even in our countries, things worse than stopping you speak in Brussels happen.
Political dissidents are persecuted by lawfare, with all the loss of faith that brings in its wake for democratic politics and elections.
Now, the efforts made to delegitimise us seemingly have, in the US of all places, gone beyond the merely rhetorical that we're used to seeing in the UK.
It should not be a custodial matter to contemplate public service.
Yet, I know American politicians who've had to tell their children, if I'm arrested, it won't be because I've done something wrong.
What has brought us to this place?
The answer is liberalism.
It's a creed now so self-righteous and so intolerant that anyone evil enough to disagree with it risks actual imprisonment.
Yet liberals haven't been winning elections.
The people have voted for conservatives.
But the problem is, they are the ones who've delivered liberalism.
These ideas are not the irresistible truths that liberal ideologues insinuate them to be.
They're highly contested ideas that we're free to dispute.
And dispute them, we should.
They're fundamentally wrong.
Arising as they do from the false assumption that custom and tradition, for example, the common law, may be dispensed with in favour of solidistic first principles rationalism articulated by educated individuals at any given moment in time.
In practice, liberal conformity and uniformity leads to the cult of the self.
Wealth is valued for its own sake.
And where has that got us as a society?
Cultural disorientation and the loss of home and belonging, that's where.
The solution is conservatism.
The conservatism of Roger Scruton, emphasising community, family, place, attachment, love.
I'm so proud to speak to you because national conservatives know that the preservation of a national culture is precious precisely because it unites.
The most fundamental insight you offer, so well articulated by so many of the speakers I've heard at successive events, is that liberalism, both economic and social, has led us to a point of societal disintegration.
My own Conservative Party, far from contesting liberal ideas, has embraced them wholeheartedly and offered no opposition.
Where Thatcherism was national renewal, it was a reaction devoutly to be wished for.
When it was degraded into being simple liberal economics, where the objective of personal material wealth was elevated above all else by Conservatives, it forgets what prosperity is really for.
The slavish elevation of wealth as the purpose of life is fruitless and has allowed conservatives to be caricatured as venal, selfish, and infamously nasty.
We need to rediscover the why in politics and that's not answered just with money.
The Conservative surrender to social liberalism, the cult of self, of self-esteem, of self-realization, of self-absorption, is causing our societies to fracture.
We must be unashamedly the champions of family, the party of duty, of love of country, service to our people, respect for all, community, traditional culture specific to our nation, the party of home.
We must fight to protect our national culture, which is precious because it unifies us and allows us to be at home in our own country.
That culture is contained in our customs, in our religion, in our traditions, in our common law, in our architecture, in our music, our arts, our educational institutions, our sporting traditions, and our constitution.
These things, sadly, have not mattered to far too many of us who call ourselves conservatives.
And as we emerge from this catastrophe in the United Kingdom, every conservative policy must be evaluated by how well it serves those fundamental objectives.
So philosophically then and politically, the choice is clear.
Protecting Our National Culture00:02:25
Do we keep doing what got us into this mess or do we change?
Do we start listening and start responding?
Are we going to be brave and tell the truth?
Or will we be timid and continue the charade?
You should be listened to.
Your message is right.
And it has been a pleasure, as ever, to be here and learn so much from you again.
Onwards.
Well, I emailed Suella Braverman and I actually bumped into her in the hallway, but she was busy.
So I said, can I email you for an interview?
She sent out a very friendly staffer who said, it's a polite no.
And I was thinking, why is that?
And I have a theory.
And I think it's because Rebel News is associated in the United Kingdom with Tommy Robinson.
And in fact, we just hosted him recently on his Canadian tour.
And Tommy Robinson absolutely terrifies the British Conservative mainstream because he is absolutely universally loathed by the media.
And anyone who associates with Tommy Robinson will be loathed in turn.
And it's just a fact.
I think that's why Nigel Farage keeps Tommy Robinson at arm's length.
I think that's why the Conservatives certainly do.
And that's my secret theory about why Suella Braverman declined a one-on-one interview with me.
It doesn't hurt my feelings.
Politicians have to be politicians.
Rebel News is who we are.
Tommy Robinson is not a staffer with us, but he's an alumnus and we think he has very interesting things to say.
I understand the limits of a conservative political leader in the UK.
It's a difficult battle.
And the worst enemy there, as we saw in this last election, has indeed been the media.
Well, this conference is on for the rest of today and for tomorrow as well.
So I'll try and have more interesting reports.
You know, I generally don't go to conferences like this.
At my age, I feel like I've heard all the speeches and met all the politicians that I want to.
But this felt a little bit different.
Stop Tearing Down Statues00:01:35
I have not heard this quality of conversation about immigration before.
And I think Canada is late to the battle.
Donald Trump, Naja Farage, Maureen Le Pen, I think we're the people in the world that aren't having a proper conversation.
So I feel like I learned a bit there.
It was nice to see 900 Americans who believe in nationalism and articulating it a little bit differently than the other parties, certainly than the Republicans or the British Conservatives.
I've seen about five Canadians down here just sprinkled amongst the 900, but mainly they're America or British interested people.
They're not really here from a Canadian point of view.
Anyway, I'm going to try and think about it some more tonight and tomorrow.
And I'm looking forward to, I don't know, perhaps analyzing our political system through the lens of national conservatism.
What that means for me is what I think it means for most people here.
Getting back to our Canadian identity, our Canadian symbols.
Stop tearing down the statues.
Rebuild our Canadian military with pride and purpose.
Shut down mass immigration.
Get away from woke critical race theory.
Understand that just because the GDP numbers go up doesn't mean that the well-being of individuals goes up.
There's quality of life issues, not just quantity of life.
I think that's the national conservative ideology.
On behalf of Rebel News from here in Washington, D.C., to you at home, good night and keep fighting for freedom.