Ezra Levant and Dr. James Lindsay dissect the "Woke Right", a paradoxical fusion of leftist critical theory—rooted in Marxism’s "oppressor-victim" framing—with right-wing identity politics, from Hamas-supporting Columbia students ($105K/year tuition) to Zorin Mamdani’s DSA-aligned strategy. Lindsay traces its origins to Nazi Germany’s 1937 Shareholder Act and China’s "one country, two systems," warning that stakeholder capitalism, pushed by Klaus Schwab’s WEF, mirrors soft totalitarianism. They critique MAGA splinters like Tucker Carlson for undermining Trump while blaming foreign agents—Russia, Qatar—and Soros’ mass migration schemes for destabilizing Western economies. The debate reveals how both sides weaponize identity, eroding universal values in favor of tribal narratives, with America’s propositional citizenship model standing as a fragile counterbalance to radical exclusionism. [Automatically generated summary]
In fact, sometimes I struggle to keep up with what he's saying.
He's very deep and philosophical and very well read.
I'm going to put a bunch of questions to him about the state of conservatism, including what he calls the woke right.
How can that be?
I thought woke, by definition, was left.
It's a great talk, and I hope you enjoy it.
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Tonight, what's the woke right?
A feature interview with Dr. James Lindsay.
It's September 1st, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
You know, they say in litigation, never ask a question that you don't already know the answer to, but that's not a good way to learn.
To learn, you want to ask questions you don't know the answer to.
The reason they say that in litigation is you don't want to be surprised with an answer that's contrary to your case.
When you're actually litigating, you're not really seeking the truth, you're seeking truths that make your clients' point of view.
So, one of my guests, I guess my point is: a lot of the interviews we do are with people we sort of know where they're coming from, and we want to pull things out of them that help strengthen our point of view.
We believe in freedom, we're conservatives, we believe in justice and prosperity.
There's a lot of things we believe in.
But what happens when you're not in a position to worry about getting an answer that surprises you?
I think those are some of the most interesting interviews.
They're more authentic interviews, they're less sort of stenography and more searching for truth.
And that's what we're going to do today.
One of the guests I love talking to, and they always turn into hour-long interviews, is Dr. James Lindsay from New Discourses.
And it's because he deals with raw ideas, sometimes abstract, but very applicable to the world we live in.
He really helped me understand communism, not just as an insult or a put-down, but as a way of thinking, as a kind of cult-like religion.
Through him and through others, like Shee Van Fleet, who fled from Maoist communism, I've really come to understand how that is one of the largest evils in the world.
And I know sometimes to call someone a communist sounds cartoonish.
Anyhow, Dr. James Lindsay has been very useful for me to understand the phenomenon of woke that really only started using that name, I don't know, probably less than a decade ago.
What does woke mean?
To me, it meant applying Marxism to things other than just economic discussions.
In classical Marxism, you have the working class and they call it the proletariat, and then you have the capitalists who oppress them.
To me, wokeism was applying that same class structure to race, to sex, to transgenderism.
So what does woke right mean?
What is the woke right?
Isn't that a contradiction in terms?
To me, wokeness is all about Marxism.
How can you be woke and right at the same time?
I'm confused by this, but I want to understand it because there is a bit of a battle amongst a lot of the people I admire and follow online for their views.
And joining us now to help talk about the world we live in and answer some of these questions.
And we'll see where the conversation goes is Dr. James Lindsay, who joins us now from Tennessee.
Dr. James, welcome back.
Thanks very much for taking the time.
Yeah, thank you, Ezra.
It's always good to see you.
You know, that was a bit of a rambling introduction there, but I really do look to you for philosophical guidance.
I mean, I propagate ideas myself, but they're generally not abstract and they're generally sort of practical politics.
I look to you to help me sort out the ideas.
Before we get going with the woke right, can you give me, I guess, your one-sentence definition of what the work word woke itself means?
Did I sort of do it earlier?
No, I think you did actually a good job.
If you want to clarify that, of course, Marx had this idea called class consciousness that was kind of the basis of being Marxist.
So that Marxist analysis means coming from a position of having awakened to a class identity that supersedes your individual identity and using that to try to overthrow the society.
That evolved in the late 20th century or middle of the 20th century to something called critical consciousness, borrowing from critical theory.
So I often say, and I know it's very technical and I don't mean to be abstract because you gave a great definition.
I would just say what you said is fine, but the technical terminology is being woke means having adopted a critical consciousness.
We use woke to distinguish from previous iterations of Marxism, though I think there are still, I think Marxism, when Karl Marx wrote it, was woke.
I think when the fascists reacted to the communists in the middle of the 1920s and 1930s, what they were doing was what we would call woke right.
It was a woke reaction to woke left, but in the 20th century modernist context.
And then what we're having now is that the woke on the left took up, or what we've been calling woke, took up postmodernism.
They took up identity politics, relocated the Marxist analysis through identity categories rather than through economic analysis.
And what we're having for woke right, very simply, is just a reaction to that, takes on the same ideas and points them back in the other direction.
Let's get into that in a moment, but I just want to give an example.
I think the conflict between Gaza and Israel, a lot of it is projected through that lens of critical theory or woke, as in all Israelis are oppressors and all Hamas or Gaza supporters are oppressed.
Woke Left vs Woke Right00:11:34
So in that framework, you can do anything to liberate yourself from oppressors.
Every oppressor is, by definition, a bad guy, even if they're a visible minority, even if they're poor, even if they actually have thousands of years of roots in the Holy Land, they're oppressors, full stop.
So anything is justified to get them out.
And it destroys individualism and it permits atrocities, I think, like what happened on October 7th.
So I think a lot of the Western support, I think the Muslim or Arab support for Hamas is tribal and there's some emotional reasons and religious reasons there.
But I think the educated white Westerners who I see in these, you know, I went to the Columbia for the encampment.
They're not motivated by Islam.
They're not motivated by historic grievances.
They say, oh, Israel's the oppressor.
I know how to handle that because I do that with environmentalism.
I do that with, you know, any other debate.
I just think who's the oppressor, who's the oppressed.
I know whose side I'm on.
I think that's what's going on with white support for Hamas.
Would you agree?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
There's a saying.
It's attributed to David Horowitz, who, you know, recently passed, who wrote Radical Son.
But David Horowitz picked this up while he was a member of Students for Democratic Society, which was a communist organization.
And the saying is, the issue is never the issue.
The issue is always the revolution.
So, you know, these white Hamas niks at Columbia or whatever else are seeing, like you said, the resistance, as they call it, against the oppressor, which is part of the global revolution.
In communism, they call it revolution.
And in Arabic, they call it intifada.
And so the idea is that there's going to be this revolution or shaking off of the oppressive power structure.
There's this kind of snarky thing.
I don't know that it's fully fair, but there's this kind of thing I see running around on social media lately, which is, you know, name one Palestinian invention, right?
And the answer that's often given quite seriously by a kind of wide array, a surprisingly wide array of people, but certainly by communists.
I mean, people who have hammers and sickles in their bios on X, for example, is they invented resistance.
And so resistance in this case is the idea that you were just describing, that because they are oppressed, anything is justified, whether it's kind of post-colonial violence, which is kind of the setting in which it usually takes place, whether it's, you know, terrorism, going back to Marx's endorsement of revolutionary terrorism in his The Civil War in France, which analyzed why the Paris Commune was successful.
He said, oh, the missing ingredient that allowed them to take power was terrorism.
That's what we've been missing so far.
And then Lenin, writing in What is to be done in 1902 explains, well, why did the Paris Commune fail?
Well, they didn't kill enough people.
That's why they weren't serious enough with their terrorism.
And so this is the essential idea.
You are right.
The support for this that we're seeing is that it's tapped into this.
It doesn't matter if it's, you know, trans.
It doesn't matter if it's BLM.
It doesn't matter if it's actually something economic, like Mamdani keeps saying in New York.
And it doesn't matter if it's supporting the so-called Palestinian or Hamas cause against Israel.
The issue is never the issue.
The issue is always the revolution.
The idea is to take up whatever cause and use it.
This is in the Communist Manifesto, by the way, at the very end, right before workers of the world unite, like two sentences or three sentences above that.
Karl Marx says that it is the position of the communists to always take the side of any revolutionary party in any country.
So the Hamas represents a revolutionary party against the concept of Israel.
So the communists take that side by default.
We'll come back to woke right a little later because you've raised so many interesting things here.
I want to talk just for one minute about what I saw in Colombia.
I went down there and I actually wandered around.
I was not allowed into the inner sanctum of the encampment.
They sort of blocked people who they could fairly quickly identify were critics.
There were some foreign students there, but it was mainly Americans.
There were a lot of trans students there, which I found very noteworthy.
I got to say, I was surprised by how many Asian women were there.
I didn't see a single Asian men, but Asian women, college students, I saw them not just at Columbia, but at another university in New York that had an encampment.
And I was thinking, okay, Columbia is a very expensive school to go to.
I looked it up and at the time, I'm just going off the top of my head.
In Canadian money, it's about $100,000 a year.
That's like no one is, I guess if you're going on a full scholarship, you could be from a poor background.
But it's basically a rich kid's school.
And I was boggled.
Why are all these rich white kids?
trans kids, Asian Americans, why are they supporting Hamas?
And I think maybe it's a way of saying, no, I'm not an oppressor class.
I may be an Asian American woman who can afford to go to Columbia.
I'm the top of the power pyramid, but no, no, no, I'm going to show you that I'm not an evil rich person luxuriating in the middle of Manhattan at university.
I'm actually with the oppressed.
So throw me in with their lot.
I'm going to go drink a $10 fancy coffee and go to my $2 million condo, but I want you to know that I'm one of the good guys.
That's my theory.
It's a way of dealing with the contradictions of being a left-winger who's super rich and powerful in the wealthiest city in the world.
That's my theory.
How would you explain what I saw?
Rich white kids, rich Asian kids, trans kids supporting Hamas.
Why would they do it?
Besides what I just said, that the issue is never the issue.
The issue is always the revolution once you become radicalized on the left.
It's a matter of, I think, a lot of what you said, but I want to kind of add a little color to this.
But I think, I mean, I'm going to blow it by telling you that I'm telling you a joke, but I'm going to start with a joke, actually, that I thought of while you were talking.
You know, you said quite a few words there, and you said that the school in Canadian money is about $100,000 a year.
And by the time, I was going to say, by the time you finish talking, actually, it's about $105,000 a year because of the inflation that you have.
And so that's my joke.
Ha ha, real funny.
Sorry, Canada, about your lot.
But the deal is that for propaganda to work, you have to, propaganda is like, it means propagate, right?
It comes from the Latin for the word propagate, propagare.
And so the idea is it's like you're throwing seeds, right?
So you're out in your garden, you're throwing seeds.
And if your seeds, this is very biblical, fall on stone, they're not going to sprout.
They're not going to grow.
They have to fall.
If they fall on sand, they might or might not sprout.
They might not do well.
If they fall on soil, fertile soil, though, that's when you're going to have something grow.
And that's kind of the parable here.
And so what you have is, I think you've described part of the fertile soil.
You have these, and I think there are evidence, there are data showing this now.
So there's solid evidence showing that downwardly mobile elites, so often the next generation of wealthy people who are unable to replicate the success of their parents are drawn to this kind of mentality because it gives them the ability to look virtuous, as you said.
And I think there might be other reasons that have to do with, you know, the status loss of downward mobility.
But you have this fertile soil there in A, the fact that you have these, like you said, very wealthy people frequently, communism tends to be a rich man's game who are trying to virtue signal that they're on the side of the poor, that they're kind of atoning for their guilt through the socialist liturgy in a sense.
But on the other hand, you also have this fact that for a lot of people, this lands because there is a lot of economic challenge.
And we hear this thesis very often.
I know my friend Constantin Kisson says this pretty frequently on trigonometry, which is that people will not support a society that's not working for people like them, right?
And so that's, in my opinion, the soil.
But on the same time, people are propagating this.
Like you said, you know, a lot of them are East Asian women and they hate to be this prosaic, but I have to ask at this point, it's a legitimate question.
How many of them are Chinese nationals doing it on purpose?
And the reason I ask is not because I have a suspicion of Chinese Asian Asian young women at colleges.
It's because we've arrested a bunch of them.
So we know that this is a thing that's happening.
That we have actually CCP agents that are getting caught in these protests, stoking these protests.
So they're the propagators looking as though they're just part of the movement.
And so I think that what you have is this mixed bag that's raising the popularity of this for a wider demographic.
Primarily, the explanation you gave is good, but then there are legitimately challenging and worsening conditions in many regards that are making these kinds of revolutionary and radical thoughts attractive.
And then you have a dedicated, well-funded, international, even, and malicious in some cases propaganda program to draw more and more people into this.
And in fact, I think this is actually at the global scale remarkably coordinated with the so-called red-green access or red-green alliance between the Islam and the radical Islam and the communists to the point where I think that it's not everybody says it's a perfect storm as though it's a perfect storm of conditions that happened to arise,
but it's more like a perfect opportunity that is being seized by bad actors to take advantage of fertile soil of an unbelievably large body of downwardly mobile, you know, upper-middle class to upper class, second generation or third generation people that's being fed a steady drumbeat narrative that's literally pushing them into this.
Once they get across the line and become a radical, though, the issue is never the issue.
The issue is always the revolution.
So anything, whether it's trans, whether it's Hamas, whether it's trans and Hamas at the same time, even after Hamas said when we take over, we're going to kill all of them, which I believe they said the other day, there will be none of this in our Palestine or whatever they wanted to call it.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
Once you cross the radical line far enough, it's just we're protesting the evil, oppressive power structure that's everywhere, always, all at once.
And whichever tool, whether it's, again, trans, race, Hamas, whatever, whatever it is, we're going to use that tool.
Right.
Wow.
You know what?
I want to just touch on the Chinese, the Asian American woman.
I guess I went, I mean, I'm a little bit older than you.
To me, Asian students were diligent.
Their parents checked on their homework.
The idea of them smoking pot or committing petty crimes was unthinkable.
They all were expected to become doctors, lawyers, or accountants.
It was sort of like the Jews a generation ago, I think.
And that's how I thought of it.
And that's what was confusing me.
But I remember now there's 600,000 Chinese nationals in America in university.
By the way, it's proportionately much worse in Canada.
Leaning Into Problems00:15:00
There's over 100,000.
We're about a tenth your size.
So it would be about double that in Canada.
And I never thought of it.
Maybe, you know, because I don't see South Asian kids.
And I've only been a few of these encampments, but it may be that, you know, some of these Chinese apps, these news apps, or, you know, there's a lot of social media platforms run by China that expats in Canada and the United States use.
Maybe they're encouraging people to go to these.
I'll put that aside because I don't know for sure.
But let me talk about Zorin Mendani just for a second.
Because I've been trying to think, how can he be stopped?
Because I think he really is a communist.
I actually don't think he's particularly an Islamist.
I think he just sees that as a way to appeal to Muslims and other minorities in New York by sort of saying, I am an other.
I want to throw off the white man.
I don't think he's like, I don't think he's a diligent and religious five-time a day praying Muslim.
But I think he's using that.
And so I think that's why some of the attacks against him aren't working.
For example, there was a video of a woman eating rice on the New York City subway with her hands.
And I don't know if you saw that.
And it caused a bit of puffle people saying, what are you doing?
Use a fork.
You're on a subway.
Be behaved.
So, ma'am, Danny went on the subway and recreated that and was eating with his hands on the subway.
He was running to the controversy.
He went back to Africa recently and he said, I know my critics are going to mention it.
So let me lean into it.
Like he was doing, he's sort of scamming his way into a low-rent apartment.
Some of his opponents mentioned that and he leans into it.
And the reason I think that's so smart is because he understands he's not trying to appeal so much to conservative white dudes.
He's appealing to anyone who wants to throw off the system.
He's appealing to people who, if they could get a subsidized apartment, they would.
They hate the system because they can't afford it.
Maybe they feel that there's some racism around.
So he's leaning into every criticism saying, yeah, that's me.
Yeah, I'm foreign.
Yeah, I'm African-American.
Yeah, I'm Muslim.
Yes, I take advantage of subsidized housing.
Like, I think he is embracing the perpetual revolution you talk about.
And so people pointing that out aren't hurting him.
They're helping him by clarifying for voters in New York what he stands for.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm wrong on that.
Maybe he has to win liberal white women to win the mayorship.
But I think he's totally leaning into being a communist because he knows that's a winner these days.
I mean, especially in places like New York City, I think that they learned a lesson from your country, from Mark Carney, very likely.
Mark Carney, you know, was able to pull off this unbelievable, you know, reversal of the lead Pier Polyev had, which is one of the largest political leads at that scale of an election that I think's ever, you know, been overturned.
And he did it by leaning into, you know, Trump is the problem or the anti-Trump, right?
And so by doing everything in the world that would irk Trump, he can appeal to these New Yorkers, a lot of, especially the Democrat New Yorkers, who are not the ones who gave in and voted for Trump in the last election.
And then meanwhile, on the other side, of course, you have two or three candidates, I guess three candidates opposing him that are all over the map.
How this character is to be defeated when he's playing the game basically perfectly, I have absolutely no idea for short of some kind of a genuine scandal that is not the kind of scandal that appeals to conservatives, but that would shock the conscience of these New York Democrats.
And I think you're right.
I think you're actually right, especially pointing out the Muslim thing.
They're able to lean on the, you know, the Trump is xenophobic.
He did the Muslim ban way back in 2017, blah, blah, blah.
And so I think it's, I think you're onto something that he's leaning into these controversies.
And when people try to raise them as the controversies that might hurt him, that it actually helps him.
The only caveat to that is when he leans into explicitly communist stuff.
I don't find there is a very large contingent of outright socialists and the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, which is a communist front organization, is behind him, if I'm not mistaken, although I might be mistaken.
I don't know if Mamdani is actually affiliated with that or just strongly supported by them.
It is not common to find.
I even find that Democrats, if I wear one of my shirts that says anti-communist on it, even what I refer to as visible Democrats, often support the message on my shirt.
So I think that him leaning into the identity categories, leaning into the controversies, leaning into everything that upsets conservatives helps him, except the communist thing.
Him saying seize the means of production really scared a lot of people.
And I think it scared a lot of people in New York.
When you get into too many of the specific policies, people don't understand that that's communism and it doesn't work as well.
But his affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America and his outright seize the means of production, communism, I don't think is helping him.
And I think that that's the more profitable angle to go after than his, you know, putative race, religion, et cetera.
Mark Andreessen, who's a tech startup guy in San Francisco, and he's a bit of an amateur philosopher.
I think he's interesting.
He's sort of a freedom-oriented guy who's come around to Trump.
I mean, a lot of San Francisco is hard-left, and he's part of this wave of sort of tech billionaires that has had a bit of an awakening.
He, I think, gave a very good explanation for why so many young people are hard-left.
And you say communism and some of those ideas scare people, and I think you may be right.
But I see, and again, it could be just a Potemkin village, it could be AstroTurf, but I see a revival in actually named communist parties in Canada.
And now, again, someone could be paid to put up the posters.
These people could be paid to come, but the Communist Party, using that name, leaning right into it, is having a bit of a revival.
Now, I have no idea.
They could, I mean, Canada, there's a lot of foreign governments playing around in our politics, China, Iran, just to name a couple.
But I think, and here's what Andreessen said: he said, What is a young person's experience with capitalism these days?
Housing prices so high you can never buy in.
You know, wages so low you can't get ahead.
If you can't plausibly see yourself as a winner in capitalism, why would you protect it?
You don't have a stake in it.
You cannot mimic the lingo of property rights conservatism of the 80s and 90s because it's not working for you.
And you have an enormous amount of debt from your useless university degree that cannot be purged through bankruptcy.
So, when you think about money and cash and savings and investments, and it's all bad, and it's all the system.
You can't buy a house, you can't get a down payment, and you've got this monstrous debt you'll never be rid of.
Andreessen says it's not surprising that people do not support communism and that young people are siding with kooks like Bernie Sanders.
No, I think he's, I mean, that's what I was saying earlier about the soil and the seeds.
I think that the soil is, in fact, very, very fertile to grow these kind of revolutionary ideas, particularly in cities where the property costs are, I mean, they're high everywhere, but they're astronomically higher proportionally.
The competition for jobs is much more significant.
And so he's not wrong that this is a fundamental structural issue that we have based on a lot of huge economic shifts that we've undertaken, at least since the 1990s, that have created this gigantic problem.
And like I said, that creates the fertile soil in which these messages are very resonant.
Of course, what's hard to teach people and hard to get through to them when they're so angry at what they're dealing with in their day-to-day life now is that it's very easy to pick up the wrong solution to these problems and put yourself in a far worse situation in a few years.
And I've had this fight with people, you know, countless times.
I don't care that there's some possibility, they say, that things will be worse in five years if I can get relief from my problem that I have now.
And, you know, this kind of short-term thinking or even utopian thinking, maybe it'll work this time, is the danger because they are facing real struggles.
And those struggles don't actually demand that I keep hearing we need compassion.
No, we don't need compassion.
We need solutions for these problems.
We actually have to deal with these crises of immigration that are screwing up all of our markets, including our housing markets and our job markets.
We actually have to do the hard work of dealing with all of the different problems that have driven these prices up.
You know, the various regulations on building housing, all the different things that have come into play where the market can't actually correct.
But it's hard to get people to understand is that they're not suffering capitalism.
They are suffering a public-private partnership, which is in a huge diversion from capitalism, that has worked to enrich a small number of people who are pushing something on us called a stakeholder economy, which is just the new socialism.
And so this is all specialist terminology.
It's very new.
They're probably not familiar with a lot of it.
And they don't understand that it's the deviations from allowing the market to solve a lot of these problems and the deviations from responsible governance of a liberal society, whether it's through immigration problems or whatever else, that have caused these problems.
But if we don't start solving these problems, people ask me all the time, well, not to circle to the woke right, but we see this radical thing happening on both left and right, especially with young people.
And they're like, well, how do we fix it?
And the number one answer is you have to cut off the fuel source.
Or if you want to use the metaphor of the field, you have to make that soil less fertile.
And the only way you can do that is by doing what President Trump is allegedly trying to do, and in some cases, having great successes, and in other cases, not having as many successes or doing scary things.
But you have to solve the problems.
And if we solve the problems, you take that revolutionary urge away.
And that revolutionary urge makes people susceptible to the propaganda that leads them on predetermined courses that are gigantic multi-level marketing scams in socioeconomic and political that will eventually screw them over far worse.
But they feel like in the short term, it's going to make something better.
And so they buy in.
And how you communicate to people that almost everything that they're perceiving is not wrong, but misinterpreted for them deliberately to lead them in directions that will make their situation worse.
I mean, this is what I've dedicated my life to, basically.
And I might as well just, you know, go outside and bang my face against a brick wall as easy as it is to convince people of these things.
You know, you use the word stakeholder capitalism.
That is the catchphrase of the World Economic Forum.
They talk about that all the time.
And of course.
As a matter of fact, Ezra, if you read the book called Stakeholder Capitalism by Klaus Schwab and you flip to the, I forget if it's in the front or the back, but it was a bio of Professor Klaus Schwab.
It says in the bio that the World Economic Forum was created specifically to push the stakeholder capitalist model.
Wow.
Wow.
Of course, Mark Carney, our new prime minister, was a director of the World Economic Forum, and that's really all he did, stakeholder capitalism.
Bank of Canada, Bank of England, the G-Fance, the Global Financial Alliance for Net Zero.
That was not shareholder activism.
That was stakeholder activism basically riveting itself to businesses and getting them to like injecting politics into massive companies.
And it's Trump that's ended that, by the way.
Trump, with his war on DEI, has caused a lot of these big banks to back away.
The battle's not over, but Trump has joined the fight.
Let me briefly explain this stakeholder thing because people need to know.
This is very important.
Stakeholder is a new buzzword.
I mean, new 1971 or whatever.
But it's this buzzword.
What does it mean, right?
What is a stakeholder?
Well, everybody's a stakeholder.
Why is everybody a stakeholder?
Because if the company's doing something out there, maybe they're polluting the environment, maybe they're making a bad product, maybe they're making a product that everybody benefits from, a good product, whatever.
You have a stake in what that company does.
So everybody's a stakeholder.
So the name for that in old communism, or just the old name for this, is a people's economy.
It is a bunch of experts, which in Russian is pronounced Soviet, that is going to make decisions on behalf of the people because all the stakeholders, unlike the shareholders, all the stakeholders, which is everybody, cannot vote.
So they need expert representatives who are unelected, who understand the situation and what all the stakeholders actually need, who are going to govern things for you.
So it's the people's economy is one way to phrase it, or people's capitalism, which is obviously, you know, as soon as you say it that way, it's communist.
But this isn't where stakeholderism came from.
The first legal implementation of the stakeholder economy was not recent.
It was not Klaus Schwab.
It was not 1971 with the World Economic Forum.
It was not actually Soviet Union with the Soviets, which is exactly the model that it's using.
It was in 1937 under something called the Nazi Shareholder Act, which made the Nazi Party the primary stakeholder, replacing shareholder primacy in order for Hitler to make his war economy.
You can look this up.
I'm not exaggerating.
I'm not even interpreting.
It is taken as the world's first stakeholder economy was installed by the Nazis in order to justify the war machine.
In other words, to get the corporations of Germany fully in line with the Nazi Party.
And their first responsibility as a corporation under this act was to the folk.
Nazi Shareholder Act00:15:37
In other words, the people.
The stakeholder economy is the people's economy, is the folk's economy, if you want to put it kind of in the German, half German.
And so what you actually have here is a soft totalitarian model that they figured out how to retool all of these awful things, whether it's the Soviet model or whether it's the Nazi Shareholder Act stakeholder model, and kind of mishmash this together, which they've been testing out in the People's Republic of China, which explicitly says that they've adopted both of those models to make their two-pronged economy under the Deng Xiaoping thought, one country, two systems.
Well, there's your two systems, by the way.
It's the Soviet system mixed with the Nazi system and it's from the 1937 Nazi Shareholder Act.
So people need to understand this stakeholder word is very friendly, makes it think that, you know, these people care about me.
It's in this nice managerial BS language that nobody understands.
So it seems safe, but it's actually just a reinvention of the Nazi and Soviet economy in new words.
I tell you, if I can convince you, I'd love to invite you to come with us to the World Economic Forum, their annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, every January.
We've been going for, oh, I think about four years now.
And although we don't have access to the inner sanctum, they would never approve.
They don't even respond to our requests.
We can interact with the muckety mucks on the street.
In fact, we bumped into Larry Fink himself last time and the head of State Street.
And we haven't been able to capture Klaus Schwab.
He's more reclusive.
But let me tell you one quick anecdote from those trips.
You would think you're in Europe.
You know, distances are short.
You're near Germany, you're near Switzerland's a small country.
There is only one protest every time at the World Economic Forum.
You would think it would be many protests.
And it is an environmentalist group, and they come in every year for one day, and they bust themselves in from Germany and they stay in clusters nearby.
Like we see them.
And then they come and they don't criticize capitalism, really.
They demand more sort of stakeholder environmentalism.
Like they're not saying a single word that contradicts what Klaus Schwab is doing there.
It's this fake protest bought and paid for luxury bus, luxury accommodations.
There are no other protests.
There's no Antifa there.
There's no Greenpeace there.
Oh, and I can assure you, there was not a single Hamas flag in the whole place.
It was just this one carefully curated protest.
And the year before, Greta was there.
She's busy with Hamas now.
So what you're saying, it really sinks because the left, you would think they would find this gathering of oligarchs unacceptable.
Not at all.
They want to encourage the oligarchs to keep up their good work.
You got to come with us.
I think you get a real kick out of it.
I think you would be like a kid in the candy store, just all these different people.
We might have to do that.
I'm not putting you on the spot, but I just want you to think about it.
Hey, let's talk for one more minute about immigration and then let's finally go to the woke right.
Trump claims that 1.5 million people have left the United States, most of them sort of self-deported, which I never thought was a thing, but I think it is actually happening.
And we know that thousands of them, the Haitians, they're coming into Canada.
They're going to Montreal.
Wouldn't you rather live in Montreal than in Port-au-Prince, Haiti?
There have been hundreds of thousands of forced deportations.
They've started with the baddest dudes that they've sent to El Salvador.
And I think you will soon see, if this keeps up, if you take another million people out of the country, if you actually stop all incoming illegals at the border, which I believe they've done, and if you get a few million people a year, that is enough to change the rental market.
That is enough to change the wage market.
I see, especially in certain industries where it's all foreign workers, meat packing for some reason, mainly foreign workers.
In Canada, we see the same thing.
They're in all the retail.
They're in all the fast food drive-thrus.
If you were to send home a couple million foreigners from America every year, a million from Canada every year, you would have cheaper housing.
You would have higher wages for Canadians.
And you would have a market decrease in crime, especially in the States where Trump is now taking over big city crime control.
And you would have this better future under a capitalist American economy.
And maybe you could convince young people that there is a path for them to get married, have a family, and make a go of it, maybe even on one income.
I don't know.
I think that Trump has actually, he's only been in office for a little over six months.
I think he has made real changes that would allow people to feel better about life.
They would stop their enchantment with the communist left.
If Trump keeps doing what he's doing, crime, housing, inflation, I think he's going to make America actually, I don't want to, like, it's his slogan, but I think he will make America great again.
I mean, that's the idea, and it's actually working.
You know, people who have a kind of broader view of how these immigration trends work understand that if you don't have to get ICE out to grab everybody in the country to deport them, all you have to do actually to get most people to leave is to make it not a free ride.
And a lot of them will leave.
They are here under false pretenses, sometimes for a better life and sometimes not.
But if it's uncomfortable, if they know that they are subject to, if they get caught, ICE will actually arrest them and take them out of the country or deport them and put them possibly in some horrifying prison like Alligator Alcatraz in the meantime.
Then a lot of them will just not take the risk and they'll leave.
If you make it, you know, harder for them to be able to say, get, I don't know, commercial driving licenses, and it's difficult for them to get jobs, then they will leave.
And the whole point is to get most of the people to leave under their own power who have come in.
And like you said, all of the downstream effects that you're talking about, we should be chasing very vigorously all of the ones who are actively perpetrating crimes.
I think that both Canada and the UK need to learn from this.
And of course, your governments aren't interested in doing that.
In fact, they're interested in the opposite.
The people who are committing crimes need to be taken away.
They need to be actually deported.
And in the cases where, you know, they maybe have some kind of naturalization, possibly considered denaturalization.
And this problem can start to solve itself, once your country starts looking very seriously that we're not going to tolerate this illegal immigration problem.
Once you start looking at it very seriously, a lot of them will leave under their own power.
So you don't have to go find out how to round up 20 or 30 or 40 million, as it turns out to be in the United States.
Nobody quite knows how many, because millions of them, you round up tens of thousands and millions of them leave on their own because the conditions and the fear just isn't worth it.
The idea is to do that as much as possible.
And like you said, the downstream effects are that capitalism actually gets to re-emerge in a healthier way.
We actually have a market that is within the confines of our national law, as opposed to something that's gone completely lawless.
And it actually starts working for citizens again.
And then they start to have that hope.
The American dream, whether you're American or not, the concept that you are upwardly mobile if you work hard is what repels revolutions into statist tyrannies or stakeholder models or whatever else.
The stakeholder model that we've already adopted is the problem.
It's not capitalism, though.
It's stakeholder capitalism, which is actually a Soviet fake capitalism.
And if we could focus our energy on fighting the actual problem, people would see things would start to get better very quickly.
And I agree.
Trump is taking some very strong steps and has done remarkably in six months in that regard.
You know, there are some industrial unions in Canada.
Most of the unionization is in the public sector, but there are some the auto workers union, for example.
And those workers do so well these days.
They've got a cabin, they've got a boat, they've got Marx would say they have false consciousness.
They think they're the ruling class.
They're just the proletariat.
But no, if you've got a good life and you're making enough money that you can have, you know, like I say, a boat, a cabin, et cetera, you're not going to feel particularly revolutionary.
I bet there's not a lot of factory workers for Zoran.
So that's the prime critique of the critical theorists, by the way.
Marcuse wrote through the 1960s repeated complaints about this.
Max Horkheimer gave interviews through the 1960s giving repeated complaints about this, where the problem was that capitalism had stabilized the worker and allows him to build a good life.
Now, you know, Marcuse is like, and it is a good life, but it's not an ideal life, right?
And so the critical theory was developed specifically to fix that so-called problem that people were able to build better lives.
So they found ways to complain and say, well, capitalism doesn't work for everybody.
It doesn't work for this race.
It doesn't work for that sexuality.
It doesn't work for women, blah, blah, blah.
And encourage all those identity factors who were, you know, in their opinion, marginal to the successful system that we actually were operating here in our free countries.
You know, I want to tell you one more Davos anecdote.
We're staying in the Swiss Alps, and it's pretty much 100% Swiss up there in Davos, not so much in Zurich and Geneva.
So it's the kind of place where they have sort of trust.
I don't know what they, like you open the fridge door, you can take the groceries and you just leave money.
Like on someone's house, they have a little business and they're not there.
It's like a garage sale.
It would be like a garage sale or a yard sale, but no one's there.
It's such a high trust society that you leave the money and you take the product and everyone trusts everyone.
And in all the restaurants and shops there, all the workers, the cashier, the cooks, they're all Swiss.
Now, it's expensive to live in Switzerland.
It's expensive to live in Davos.
But holy cow, what a quality of life.
There's no crime in Davos.
And I think of Toronto.
You know, New York City's about, what, 37% foreign-born.
Toronto's in the 40%.
There's a nearby city called Brampton.
It's about 60% foreign-born.
A lot of these people come from low-trust societies.
The food banks don't work anymore because international students or foreign workers just go there for free groceries.
You cannot have a food bank without a high-trust society because people say, oh, what a bunch of idiots.
I'll just come and do my grocery shopping here.
And so I think what would happen in Toronto if a million foreigners were to leave?
Well, housing prices would fall.
So yes, the boomers and other people who own houses, I suppose they would be hurt that way.
But suddenly everything would be better.
It would be more like living in Davos, Switzerland than living in Karachi.
I think immigration is such a crisis.
And I think it's the ultimate way that George Soros planned to defeat the free West.
And I say Soros because his central focus for two decades has been mass migration to the West.
Do you think that's correct?
His main nonprofit is called the Open Society Foundation.
And he has this really crackpot vision of the open society that when you actually read what it is, you know, people try to trace it back to Karl Popper, who obviously wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies, and who was George Soros' mentor.
So there is a connection between Popper and Soros.
But when you read Soros, it's very, very obvious.
Read The Alchemy of Finance.
It takes no effort.
By the end of the first or second chapter, you're completely convinced this guy's a Marxist in denial.
He says that he's not a Marxist, and the only reason he doesn't like Marxism is because it has too closed-ended of a solution.
It has to end in communism.
But he loves everything else, the dialectic, the vision, the whole idea.
So yeah, he wants national borders to be meaningless.
And so one of the ways to erase national borders is to make them so porous that they are meaningless.
And so this has been for 20, 30 years, one of his biggest projects.
He also says in the Alchemy of Finance that he takes, and I quote, a certain malicious pleasure in short-selling an institutional favorite.
Well, the Western democracies were geopolitical institutional favorites.
So if you can undermine them, you can short sell them.
And he takes a certain, in fact, he says that it's actually like a God complex that he has.
He actually admits that in the book, that he sees himself as a kind of God.
And the only thing that keeps him attached to not believing he is a god is his failures in the market because it's so unpredictable.
But if you can short sell institutional favorites like the United States, Canada, the UK, et cetera, then he's going to take a certain malicious pleasure in that.
This is what he delights in.
It aligns with his crackpot Marxist internationalist theory of a so-called open society, though the conclusion doesn't have to be communist in his view.
It can dialectically go wherever the winds blow it.
But the key to that is to utterly dissolve the idea of national borders and thus national sovereignty.
You know, I'll have to tell you another time about the day where George Soros sued me personally.
But we'll save that story for another day.
I'll have to do a show on it, maybe.
Donald Trump is doing a lot of the things that we've been talking about here.
Immigration, the most important.
He's doing a lot of things that symbolically scratch itches for conservatives.
In fact, if you look through his executive orders, they're so creative.
Taking on the universities itself was something that people said, oh, you can't do that.
Look at him go to war against Harvard of all.
Like, he started with the toughest.
You know, the fact that he's resolved six international conflicts is sort of a bonus that I don't even think people were thinking about.
And that's not the most important thing for an American president to do, but it is sort of awesome.
And if I were an American pundit, I would be saying amen every day.
I'm a Canadian pundit, so instead I'm railing against Mark Carney, mass immigration.
You know, every problem in Canada under Trudeau is the same or worse.
If I was a Brit, I would be in panic by the thousand illegal migrants at a time coming over from France in dinghies and the rape gangs that are in the, so there's so much to talk about and to fight about in Canada, including the fact that the Conservatives didn't win an election.
In the UK, there's so much to talk about and fight about.
But in America, you know, if you're a right-wing or if you're a critic of Soros, if you're a critic of the World Economic Forum, holy smokes, your dreams are coming true and you're being entertained by Donald Trump, who is an inherent entertainer.
Pundits' Resentment Revealed00:11:07
So Will Chamberlain made a tweet the other day, and I had him on to talk about it.
He said, one of the reasons you see sort of a craziness amongst some pundits on the right is that Trump has taken away their fodder.
And he was referring to Candace Owens, and I think a little bit to Tucker Carlson.
And I know there was a certain part of the right-wing commentariat who it felt like they were lusting for Trump's attack on Iran to go out awry.
They were actually sort of hoping, it felt like for Iran to launch a major war against America instead of just staying completely silent while Trump used the B-2 bombers on them.
And I had Will on to talk about it, and I saw that you made a comment that maybe Will himself, in fact, Will said that you've called him woke, right?
And I didn't understand.
That's what I thought.
We've got to have James on to figure this out.
Do me a favor, answer two parts of the question.
The first is: is there something going on with pundits, including my former hero, Tucker Carlson, who I looked up to for so many years as a role model?
I think he's gone way over the edge.
I think he's, I just don't understand what's going on there.
And Candace Owens, I think she's anti-Semitic.
And I don't want to throw that term around lightly.
Like the stuff she says about Jews being demonic, it's just, it doesn't even feel like political commentary anymore.
My first question is: what the heck is going on with them and a dozen copycats to them?
And then I'll ask you to figure out this Will Chamberlain thing.
But first of all, help me diagnose what's going on with Tucker and Candace.
Well, I mean, not to drag Will into it prematurely, but I have a more cynical interpretation of what's happening than he does.
I perceive that there is a radical splinter movement that has been embedded within MAGA, probably all along, actually.
We used to call it the alt-right.
Then there was the so-called very fine people hoax around the Charlottesville event in August of 2017.
Is that right?
The date?
Yes.
And they went underground, but they didn't go away.
What they did was they put on happy faces and they joined the movement and became more and more prominent within a broad pro-American MA thing that grew and it rapidly strengthened under the Biden years.
And then I feel like last summer they started to emerge from their cocoon and to try to run a radical splinter movement.
And I think Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and most of these other, sometimes Trump calls them panicans, are all part of this.
And you'll notice the pattern.
What they did in the advance, say, of the Iran strike was that they came out saying this is going to cause World War III.
Trump is terrible.
This is it.
They turned on Trump quite vocally.
And then when it worked, they turned around and claimed that they were the ones who made it work.
That, in fact, Trump is great, but it's also that he's great that he listened to them and their wise counsel as influencers and pundits.
And I think this is all a game.
I have an extraordinarily cynical interpretation of this.
I think it is a deliberate strategy to undermine MA from within because they could not, and I don't mean these same people, whether it's World Economic Forum, George Soros, Democrats, if there's a deep state, if it's foreign adversaries like Russia, China, Qatar, Iran, et cetera, they could not undermine MAGA from without for the last 2016 to 2024.
They could not take it down from the outside.
They had to end up taking it down from the inside.
And what better issue to do than Israel and Jews to split people, to scare off Jews and people who care about them, people who are recent nose-holding voters for Republicans for the first time, who could have been converted into lifelong conservatives away from this communist lurch the Democrats have taken.
And now they're terrified that what's going on here?
Are these people Nazis?
Are some of them Nazis?
Are they at least working with or sympathetic to Nazi ideas?
Why are they laundering Hitler?
Why are they saying Churchill was the bad guy of World War II and that maybe Hitler was the good guy, as Tucker Carlson's guest said the other day?
People are freaking out about this.
And my interpretation of it is there is a splinter cell that is operating as though it's the other hand of the other side that's aiming to take down MA from within.
And I don't know why and cannot start to guess why certain influencers and pundits like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and so on are participating in this.
But I think with at least a certain list of them, it is beyond question.
I mean, there's a short list of reasons why people do this.
They have some kind of resentment that they're trying to enact.
We know that Tucker Carlson is a paleoconservative who is not particularly happy, that MAGA took the thrust of radical energy in the mid-2010s.
So maybe he has a political motive that he wanted a more radical, older conservative model to resurge, and it didn't.
So he's got to take down MAG.
Maybe there's personal animus under the surface between him and Trump that he keeps hidden.
Maybe it's the more ugly and prosaic nature of these things, money, blackmail, or whatever.
And then there's also the possibility with influencers of audience capture.
We know there's a foreign bot problem.
I know you talked to Will about that as well.
A foreign bot problem on Twitter that's amplifying some of these worst possible ideas.
A lot of people don't realize it, but a lot of the so-called Nazi content on Twitter is heavily pushed by the Russians.
This is a game that they are playing.
It is traceable to Russian cells that are trying to amplify the likes, amplify the retweets, fill the comments with negativity when it goes the wrong way to slowly lead these poor influencers who are obsessed in many cases with their statistics.
What are my numbers showing?
Am I growing?
Am I getting a bigger audience?
Am I getting more likes?
Am I getting more retweets?
Am I getting more shares on my video?
They're obsessed with these metrics.
You can screw that person's head up so easily without giving them a dime inorganically.
Like they make money off of their ex getting more engagement.
They make money off their YouTube, getting more engagement.
But you don't have to show up with a checkbook and, you know, a snarling face and say, you know, say this stuff and we'll give you $10 million, like in the tenant media scandal.
You don't have to do any of that.
You can actually fry these people's brains just by playing in the dopamine circuit of their social media experience if they're not aware that that's happening.
And we know that that kind of thing is happening.
It's very clear the bot activity if you hit certain keywords or whatever.
So why these influencers and pundits and so on are participating, I think is multifaceted.
I think there are many reasons that apply in different amounts of different people.
It's also their own business that has not been broken in many stories.
So we don't know.
It's absolutely, it's actually ambiguous to us.
And so the best we can do is speculate and guess, which we always have to do, you know, with circumspection and caution.
We can't be accusing people of, you know, oh, Tucker's doing this because he's blackmailed.
That we don't have proof of that.
If we did, it would be a different story.
You know, so we don't know why they're doing it, but I'm utterly convinced by the level of coordination, the strategic rollout, the kind of timing, the ability.
I have an ability to predict some of the things that they do, like their new push.
They said, you know, they started saying, what is an American is going to be the most important question.
What is an American?
What is an American?
Then boom, the next week they roll out Heritage American as the answer to this question that they've ginned up out of the immigration argument.
So I think it's coordinated.
I don't think that this was an unplanned organic evolution.
And so I think that this is a radical splinter movement that is significantly coordinated, that stretches back not a year, but 10 years, and that we're well behind the playbook of what they're running, that it's extremely well funded, that there is a lot of money and there's a lot of foreign support.
My interpretation of what's happening there is extremely cynical, unfortunately.
I don't think it's organic at all.
You know, I think what you've just said there is the most persuasive explanation I've heard.
You know, Rebel News, we like being quite conservative.
In some ways, we're quite radical.
You know, we're Canadian, though.
We were very interested in the U.S., but at least four of our alumni have gone crazy in that direction.
And I think it's worth noting that all four of them were single women.
And I remember talking with them as I could feel things vibrating.
And when you say dopamine, there's something about social media and how it acts, interacts with, I think, the female mind slightly different than the male mind.
I mean, women, I think, are more social than men.
The validation, you know, young women on Twitter, the more radical they get, the more loving notes they get from men, including, I know this sounds ridiculous, but everyday marriage proposals.
Now, these young female influencers know that they're not going to marry this guy, but maybe it's a dream.
Well, maybe I'll find someone out there who's sort of a man.
But it's a good feeling.
It's a lot of likes.
I remember talking to one young woman, I won't say who, who would get hundreds of thousands of views on her videos.
And she really thought that the alt-right was the core of her audience.
I said, no, they're not real.
And I think, and the thing is, and we had one person on our team, I won't, maybe it's giving it away.
She came from a reality show background.
And there you've got every episode has to be more dramatic than the last one.
What's your move this episode?
Okay, how do you trump that?
Social media magnifies a lot of these things.
And there's one more thing that I didn't contemplate until I think it might have been Will who said it.
The payment doesn't have to be from the official ambassador from Qatar.
It can be just like there are bots, you know, giving you likes and views.
If you have some sort of a super chat function or a tip or donation function, you can be getting lots of $50,000 and $100 gifts from people with inscrutable online names.
And so you don't even have to know that you're being funded by Qatar.
I mean, there are some cases.
I found it very odd that Qatar registered that someone registered under the Foreign Agent Registration Act to spend $200,000 to lobby to get the, I think it was the Iranian to get the Qatar EPM on Tucker show.
I mean, that it's normally not that brazen, but I think a lot of it is just what you said.
It's psychological, it's feeling a momentum, it's sort of safe in numbers.
And if Candace and Tucker can do it, and they're such big battleships, then everyone in a canoe says, I'll follow along in their wake.
I think it's a lot of that.
I just don't get it with Tucker because surely money's not important to him.
Surely he's got enough.
Maybe it's this sort of vengeance against the Murdochs who I think were considered Zionists or something.
I don't know.
Energy's Left Turn00:05:35
It makes me sad because I don't think anti-Semitism, I think in a way, by definition, it's a kind of wokeness because you're judging all Jews as the oppressors and it's this sort of mystic cosmic enemy.
It's a real leftist thing to say, oh, I have a problem in my life.
It's got to be the Jews.
It would be like going through an Aurorshack inkblot test.
The Jews, the Jews, the Jews.
Like it's become an obsession for a lot of these pundits and even some comedians.
They just won't stop talking about the Jews in Gaza.
And I'm not saying don't talk about it, but that is not the core issue for Republicans or Americans or Trump supporters.
Okay, I'm done my rant.
That was a beautiful rant.
But yeah, I mean, this does interface.
The thing is, like you said with some of your former alumna, that they've gone crazy, right?
Well, what kind of crazy have they gone?
And this is where that woke right label came in, in my opinion.
They've gone woke.
How did they go woke?
They saw all the left woke and they absorbed its assumptions.
They absorbed its tactics and they said those worked for the left.
The assumptions are probably true because their political warfare worked for them.
Therefore, there must be something to it.
Let's take that on.
Maybe identity politics is the right way to believe it.
Maybe there is actually a consortium of people and maybe it is run by some kind of shadowy identity group.
Of course, there are differences between the way the left and right observe these things.
But the fact is that they have absorbed these assumptions.
Like there is no possibility of objectivity or neutrality.
And maybe those things aren't actually desirable at all.
Maybe all knowledge is actually local.
So rather than, you know, having indigenous peoples who have their special knowledges that are being disfavored by this, by the alleged capitalist system, now we have heritage, you know, nationalists, heritage Americans, heritage Canadians, heritage English, whatever, whose ways of knowing are ultimately located in their people group.
And those are being, you know, disfavored by this, whatever we want to call it, global American empire or whatever other names, you know, neocon regime, post-war liberal consensus, whatever names that they give at different times in different places that's keeping them.
And I'm trying to stay out of the impolite names that they give this stuff.
But this system is keeping the true indigenous of, say, the United States, which would be the heritage Americans who founded the country rather than the Native Americans.
And it's keeping not just that, but their ways of living, being, and knowing out of the discussion because they're deemed things like racist and xenophobic and so on.
But my definition for woke right has always just been that it's people on the right who've adopted critical consciousness to advance their, you know, their idealistic vision of society.
And it's absorbing the left, the energy of the left, same energy opposite direction is what I was trying to get to.
They absorb the energy of the left, the woke energy, and say, well, they must be on to something because they've been so effective at getting power.
And it's, you know, caused us to be alienated from our experience in life.
And so we have to transcend our alienation through collective identity and throw it back at them.
That's my whole idea of woke right.
And this also explains, unfortunately, and I don't think he's very woke right.
It's a scale, just like your niece who comes home from school and says some goofy stuff about trans isn't necessarily a hardened communist out in the street with her fist up.
You can be a little woke.
Well, at the same time, you can be a little woke right.
And this is why I think that the term woke right applies to Will Chamberlain, although barely, lightly, is because he's adopted this idea.
He's a member, an important member of the national conservative movement, which is to, if you actually read Yoram Hazzoni's book, Yoram Hazzoni is the director of the National Conservative Movement.
Yoram Hazzoni wrote a book called The Virtue of Nationalism in 2018.
And if you read it, he actually says that epistemologically, your, I know it's a fancy word, but your understanding of the world is located in your people group, which is a nation, and that there should be the ability for nations to be sovereign,
but not just in terms of deciding their own affairs, where he kind of gives what amounts to a libertarian position among nations instead of individuals, where each nation can't interfere with the others and he doesn't have great solutions for how an aggressor nation is going to be dealt with by smaller nations.
But also that he has this underlying idea that truth is located in your people, which is a kind of postmodern traditionalism as an answer to postmodern egalitarianism on the other side.
So it's the same energy, opposite direction.
And so I don't think Will Chamberlain is very woke.
I don't think he's not anti-Semitic at all, as far as I can tell.
It's a big mistake people make to think, well, all these Jew haters, that's the woke right.
Well, yeah, they are, but it's a broader term than that.
And it's not a sloppy term or an imprecise term.
It's having adopted certain epistemological and metaphysical commitments and then having adopted also those views to give permission structures to use tactics that are, you know, in parallel or the reverse operation of what the woke left has been doing to us, like, you know, canceling people, as in yours truly.
Well, I think that you and Will should have a debate.
I wouldn't be intellectually powerful enough to moderate anything like that.
Historicity and Liberty00:15:31
A lot of this is, to be very candid, a little bit above my head.
But I'd like to see the two of you talk about it.
Let me throw one last thing at you.
I know I've kept you for more than an hour.
I'm very grateful to you for your time.
I always like talking to you, Ezra.
Don't worry about it.
Thank you very much.
I've been traveling to Ireland a bit.
I had never been there until about a year ago.
And I see a very authentic grassroots organic uprising.
I mean, they are powerless.
There's no political party supporting them, no media supporting them.
These are the most grassroots people you've ever seen, but they've been able to achieve some amazing things.
They have very large protests, tens of thousands.
Ireland, remember, is only 5 million people.
And there's something about being Irish.
Like it is an ethnicity.
It does trace back hundreds, thousands of years.
And there are some people who are saying, look, I can become Irish.
I'm Nigerian, but I want to become Irish.
I'm Pakistani.
I'm a Pakistani Muslim Imam, but I can become Irish.
And of course, in some ways you can, but there is an essential Irishness, and it's a real thing.
And I know there's probably 50 countries in the world that have, even within their constitutions, a state religion or a state ethnicity.
Greece does.
Armenia does.
Even England has the Church of England.
And I don't know how to reconcile that because I really think Ireland should be Irish and Italy should be Italian.
I know de Gaulle said it is possible for some alien to come to France and adopt things and be, I mean, de Gaulle himself said you can become French, but he very quickly said it has to be in a small enough number that you can be absorbed by France.
I don't know how do you answer that?
Because I don't want to see Ireland just become some homogenized migrant farm like Toronto has become.
How do you allow Ireland to be Irish and England to be English?
They're putting up their English flags now and there's a real flag battle, which I think is very fascinating because a flag is you're trying to concentrate, distill your very essence.
That flag speaks to what I am.
Well, what does it mean?
What does the St. George Cross mean?
Give me a hand on these ones because I want to be sympathetic to these Indigenous Irish, Indigenous Brits, and everyone around the world who I sort of think should have a right to a place that's theirs.
How do you square that?
Because I don't want to be woke right.
No, no.
Of course, the challenge, and maybe it's true actually for Canadians to a degree as well, which gives you the same difficulty that I have as an American, is that at least the American nation is 100% not that.
So Americans do not have, I mean, you can say that it was, you know, its backbone was Anglo-Protestant or whatever, as, you know, Samuel Huntington has said in his book, Who Are We? arguing fairly persuasively that that was the backbone core of the American colonies.
But the entire idea behind America always has been that it's not an ethnic identity.
And in fact, it is a, you're not supposed to call it a propositional nation anymore, but it's a nation based on the idea that if you are willing to work hard and believe in the dream of self-governance, believe in the principle of self-governance, then you can believe in the dream that prosperity or the blessings of liberty will flow from adopting this stance of liberty, which does require under self-governance to adopt to a certain set of standards.
And success within that country is actually going to follow things.
As it turns out, if you're competing against the Protestant work ethic and you're not adopting something akin to the Protestant work ethic, you're going to get shellacked because very few people work harder than that.
So there are these other elements, but there is no ethnic American, certainly, at the very least, as the left just taught the world almost catastrophically.
We certainly at least had the African population of America and the, if you just simplify it to the Anglo-Protestant, which leaves out the early Catholics, it leaves out the Jews, it leaves out the diversity among Protestants who don't agree with each other, Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and so on.
It's a different, what I'm just saying is that it's a hard thing to look at a country like Ireland, as you described correctly, and not impose that American e pluribus unum diversity, lack of ethnicity in our makeup view.
So, you know, the question is: you know, do certain people groups have a, like you said, kind of this long historicity, and this is usually how it gets characterized.
The Irish are, you can characterize the Irish as a historical people, or you can characterize them as an ethnic people, which is a very big and important distinction, right?
And so, if we look at the Irish, for example, just to use the Irish, the Irish are better, by the way, than the English because England is not an independent country, but Ireland is.
So, it makes things a little easier to discuss.
England is part of the United Kingdom, which is its own sovereign and independent country.
It's a little bit different.
But the Irish are a historically continuous people.
So, when somebody like de Gaulle is talking about the idea that you can absorb, as he phrased it, the alien, at least in small numbers, and that the alien can become French.
And in particular, what will become French is their children who are completely raised in that immersive environment.
And then their children's children, no matter what they look like, will be more or less indistinguishably French after some period of time.
What you can say is that the historical contingency matters, and it can be the basis.
The problem is that it doesn't transform that this European idea doesn't transpose very well onto the United States because we've had a different constitutional makeup from the beginning.
And so it does matter.
So the question is: does that people group have an inherent right to be in the location from which they emerged?
And, you know, short of brutal military conquest, the answer might be yes, right?
And even in the case of brutal military conquest, as we see with Israel, we said no.
In 1948, we said, or seven, we said no, the Jews do have a right to their ancestral homeland, and we're going to help see through to that.
And we've already talked about the challenges that that's generated ever since, largely through Soviet manipulation, by the way.
We can't just say that it's religious.
The Soviets helped create the Palestine Liberation Organization through the PFLP, the popular front for the liberation of Palestine, preceding it.
And so it's a hard question.
The question is: how do you go about this?
Does that historicity matter?
And do the customs and cultural aspects of a people group matter?
And I think the answer to that actually contra many of my critics online is yes, they do matter.
Of course, the American experiment is different.
But does that mean that you want to lean into an ethnic conception, which when you go a little further becomes what the Germans called a folk community or a people's community, Folksgemenschaft?
And we know where that went with the Nazis.
That can actually turn quite ugly.
And the rhetoric is out there luring people who are beginning to think that way further and further into that radicalization, which, if it can't be opposed because it's just, you know, a step further along a path that you're already walking, then you have a real problem on your hands when you actually have stepped into people starting to go through their DNA to try to find out who's legitimately Irish and who's not, where this historicity definition is actually a stronger, a stronger way to look at it.
Who's essentially characterizing what it means to be Irish?
Now, again, I have to qualify this because people are going to clip this now and they're going to take it out of context and they're going to say, see, James accepts the idea of a heritage American, which I don't.
And the reason that I don't is because while that might be fine for the 50 countries out there that have been ethnically constituted all along, and it might be fine as a sovereign nation for Ireland to decide to do, or the Brits to try to figure out how they're going to take the English and the Scots and the Welsh and everything else and figure all that out ethnically, what a mess.
America never had that.
America was fundamentally a different nation from the beginning.
I can't speak for Canada.
I don't know your history as well.
But America never had that.
So, this idea of a heritage American, by the way, which I qualify for the highest grade of, I had an ancestor who was a captain in the Revolutionary Army, who later in his descent, his line gave birth to Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, who I'm directly related to.
So, I'm sons of the Revolution, I'm sons of the Confederacy, I'm first families of Virginia.
I'm as heritage American as it comes, and I reject this concept that there's some specialness to being an American.
What ultimately I think, and this is maybe getting a little bit difficult, there's a legal definition of citizenship that is the legal definition of whether or not you are a member of your country.
And then there is a socio-spiritual, and that's a fancier term.
It's like the combination, it's like seeing social elements or cultural elements as a kind of spirit, right?
And this, I think, is there is a socio-spiritual element to what does it mean to be, say, an American.
And the answer to the question of what it means to be an American is not some particular ethnicity, some particular background, but rather a commitment to the tradition, to the fundamental belief that if we have self-governance and greater liberty, that prosperity can flow.
And this becomes a covenant that we have to uphold, a tradition to talk about it in Burkean language, that we have to uphold in the faith that the blessings of liberty will come from accepting this proposition and taking our responsibility within it.
And so, what that means is America is a propositional nation, and the proposition is if you adopt self-governance and work hard and provide value to your society, you can expect a chance, you will open the door to the blessings of liberty.
And the prosperity that that generates when everybody does that will actually raise all ships and make a rich and prosperous and successful and abundant nation, which I think the last 250 years have actually proved out remarkably well as a clear and reasonable basis for this faith.
And so, believing in that faith and putting that faith first in your day-to-day socio-political activities is what it means to be an American.
That doesn't mean you're American if you believe that and don't have American citizenship.
As much as I love it, when the Chinese try to take over Hong Kong and the Hong Kong respond by waving American flags, expressing the idea of America, or when you have this, you know, changeover of the president in South Korea last year, and the South Koreans took to the street and waved American flags to express their love of freedom.
Those are citizens of Hong Kong and citizens of South Korea.
They're not Americans, but they express that belief.
They believe in that dream.
They believe in those values.
And I think it's perfectly acceptable for America to be a nation that distinguishes itself by, you know what?
Our historicity is in a long, unbroken chain of people who believe in this.
It is not in a particular people group.
We were a bunch of people groups who came over for various reasons, mostly religious liberty.
And so we're a different kind of thing.
And that idea, I think, is great for other countries.
It's not fully appropriate.
I don't have a problem with Ireland being Irish because it's Ireland.
It's not America.
I don't care.
It's their country.
And they can run that experiment if they want.
But America, while I'm fine with this idea where it has historicity, it doesn't have historicity here.
And I don't think we need to try to force it to have historicity here.
And again, like I said, I don't want to impose America on Canada.
I know how your people hate that.
So I don't know how much of that Canadians have absorbed, but I think it's something worth thinking about.
So what I say to people in these situations like in England or in Ireland or so on is that I think it's important for you to think about that, right?
Australia is an example of another group of people who are, they don't have that historicity.
They were a penal colony.
Almost all of the parts of Australia that are populated are away from the major shipping lanes because it was a penal colony.
They didn't want people being able to get on a boat and get away.
And so it had a different mix, a different beginning point.
This historicity there is actually different.
So a country like Ireland or a non-independent country like England that has this historicity has to deal with it.
And that they have to find ways, I think, to deal with it that avoid stepping too far into the ethnic designation, that avoid stepping too far down that road.
The ethnic designation is actually fine as long as it stays within boundaries that understand, as we put it in America, that it is a form of arbitrary designation.
It says nothing actually about your character, whether you're a good man or a bad man.
It says nothing about your intrinsic talents.
As much as we want to attribute it to ethnos, it is usually other things.
It's usually character, it's training, it's discipline, it's diligence.
And if you step down that road too far and start thinking in terms of a folks community, and that folk community is defined ethnically, I just warn people about taking that road because we've tried that experiment before.
It didn't go well.
And if it ends up turning a lot of the world or America against you later, because you've taken that road and made serious errors, then you've done it to yourselves.
And so my statement isn't that's wrong.
My statement is be careful with that kind of thinking.
Root it in your historicity.
Deal with the fact of the realities of being able to absorb cultural values and assimilation.
And point out that you cannot absorb a tenth of your population in a short period of time from a radically different population.
Deal with the fact that some populations, whether they're Islamist, whether they're communist, whatever it happens to be, that are radical in that way, have no intention, not just do they have no intention of assimilating, they are actively hostile and want to take over your country.
And you have to deal with them as they actually are.
And we can't have this Nambi-Pamby, you know, light touch or actually, you know, culturally relativist view that ultimately this, the woke left view, that has led us down this disastrous road so far in the same way that we don't want to walk down the other road.
So again, my message is: if you want to do that for your country, if it's historical to your country, that's fine and reasonable.
But you need to do it responsibly.
You need to do it thoughtfully.
And you really need to study the errors of the 1920s and 1930s and not repeat them under this duress you're under, which I sympathize with.
Cultural Identity Matters00:03:06
You know, you said a lot of things there.
I agree with some of them, but I feel like I'm more of an ethnic nationalist than you.
And I think of Ireland.
I mean, it's had a million foreigners put into that country in the last 20 years.
They've gone from 4 million to 5 million people, and it's caused enormous stress.
If those million migrants were Irish Americans, there's about 30 million people in America who trace their lineage to Ireland.
If you had taken a million Boston Irish and put them in Ireland, you'd have some growth pains as infrastructure caught up.
But that would be a fit in every way.
It is the ethnicity that no, it's the culture, it's the culture.
When you import a million, 20%, well, 25% increase of Muslims into a country that is not Muslim with vastly different organization in their own historical contingency, you have a completely different story.
But if you were to take, let's say, people who had come from, you know, Lebanon and they were raised in Boston in an Irish-American community for 40 years for four or five generations, and they're just as Irish as the next guy in the Boston sense and ship them over.
It wouldn't matter that their skin is brown, and it wouldn't matter that their ancestors came from Lebanon.
It wouldn't matter a bit.
It's the culture that matters.
And I do believe that the Irish should be able to preserve their culture.
And I do believe that Islamism is a hostile cultural imperial movement that needs to be resisted.
The Nazis, of course, are an extreme example.
I'm not comparing the situation to that's the end of a long road that starts with the ethnic identity.
But I reject the claim.
I know too many people across this great nation in the United States and in your nation and in others that are, I'm arguing with a man right now on and off on Twitter whose last name is Wong, and he's clearly South Asian with the Union Jack flying behind him on his bio.
I'm sure he's as British as he thinks he is, but he didn't come.
His people are not English in the sense that they have a long history of being there.
It's the culture.
I've known too many Americans from every background who are as American as apple pie.
And I've met so many Canadians when I come to your country of different backgrounds who are as Canadian as your favorite Canook or your best hoser.
And it's just what it is.
I think it's much more cultural.
But the thing is, is cultures don't change overnight either.
There is a long cultural memory.
They are going home.
And the less assimilation that there is, the less absorption there will be.
And the thing that Charles de Gaulle was referring to is resisted.
That's the multicultural experiment that has been encouraged that is the disaster of all of our countries.
But it's not the ethnicity.
It is, unless you mean by ethnicity, a culture that's tied to a genetic background.
But I mean it in the strict genetic sense.
Shades of Nationalism00:01:58
You know, there's so much to talk about.
And I have much to learn about the taxonomy here, about what the different shades of nationalism are.
I know there's civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism.
And then there's a phrase that I've heard, foundational black Americans.
Those are blacks that came over to help build the country as slaves, frankly, which is a different ethnicity than maybe a newcomer.
There's so many shades here, and it's a difficult thing.
And you're right.
In America, it's different.
America is not an ancient civilization like the Celts.
It's exceptional.
What can I say?
We'll have to put a pin in it for today.
I've kept you 40 minutes longer than I promised I would.
I learned so much from you, and I'm not done learning.
I'm not fully resolved in all my thinking.
And if I were, I think that would mean I would have a closed mind.
I really appreciated you helping tackle some of these issues.
And we'll talk again.
It's great to have you back.
We used to have you back a little more frequently.
Let's not let so much time pass in the future.
What's the best way for people to follow you?
Newdiscourses.com.
Is that the best gateway to the stuff you're working on?
Yeah, that's right.
And the podcast I published there is called the New Discourses Podcast, which you can find on any of your favorite podcast platforms.
I think we're on all of them, actually.
And I'm at Conceptual James on all the social medias except for Facebook, which has still permanently banned me from making a joke about Canada, actually.
Well, we forgive you for the jokes about Canada.
No, I'm on your side with this joke.
It was about the MAID program.
They didn't like that job.
Well, great to talk with you.
And I'm going to be thinking about our conversation for a while.
And maybe I'll recalibrate some of my own thinking.
But it's great to hear from you.
Thanks very much.
Thanks, Ezra.
All right.
There he is.
Dr. James Lindsay.
You can follow him at newdiscourses.com.
Well, that's our show for today.
Lots to think about.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.